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The Corte Madera Town Council has approved a housing project for elders at the site of the Best Western Hotel.

The project at 56 Madera Blvd. will include 118 assisted-living apartments, 32 memory-care apartments, 118 parking spaces and amenities like a media room and a space for physical therapy.

The plans also call for a pool and garden; landscaped grounds with 350 new trees; and a revamped pond. The development will have two points of access but will be mainly enclosed with walls, fences and hedges.

O&I Development, which specializes in residential housing for seniors, filed the project application last August. The company made several changes to incorporate community comments over the last several months, and the Planning Commission approved the project on June 9.

Some Corte Madera residents asked the town to maintain access to the pond, but Carissa Savant, a vice president at O&I Development, said that would be a safety and liability issue for the complex.

Savant said company representatives have met with agencies to reduce the ecological impact from the project on the pond and surrounding areas, including potential harm to birds.

The project was submitted under California Senate Bill 330, which expedites certain housing plans. The project is eligible for a state housing density bonus that required the town to streamline the approval.

The project would account for 42% of the town’s housing allocation for above-moderate-income residents. The memory-care accommodations do not count toward the state housing mandate.

The Town Council held a hearing on the project at its meeting on July 7.

Corte Madera has a requirement for the number of affordable dwellings in developments. Originally the project had 17 affordable apartments in the application, but they were removed. Amy Lyle, community development director for the town, said the project’s status as a residential care facility means it does not have the same requirements as a standard housing development.

“Staff and the applicant team negotiated for a very long time over these issues and we even went to the state, to the Housing and Community Development Department, to really decipher if they could provide some technical guidance on this issue,” Lyle said. “In an effort to move the project forward, we negotiated to be able to apply a different fee to this project.”

In lieu of affordable dwellings, the developer agreed to pay a commercial linkage fee of nearly $2 million that will be allocated to the town’s affordable housing fund.

The council was largely supportive of the project, but some members expressed concerns over its potential effects on surrounding businesses. The site’s previous use as a hotel had been correlated to increased activity for nearby businesses.

“There will likely be a sales tax impact to surrounding commercial businesses, most notably the Town Center,” planner Martha Battaglia wrote in a staff report. “According to the Town’s sales tax consultant, HdL, it would be too speculative to determine if the impact to surrounding businesses would be positive or negative.

Vice Mayor Fred Casissa asked the town to do further research on the development’s impact to the financial health of the community.

“I believe in being proactive and not reactive,” Casissa said. “So I’d rather know now if we’re heading into something that we need to figure out how to deal with instead of waiting until it happens, and then we’re in the ‘oh my god’ moment.”

“I wish it was a hotel that we were approving for a lot of different reasons,” said Mayor Rosa Thomas, regarding the potential financial implications.

The council approved the project in a 4-0 vote, with Councilmember Eli Beckman absent.