Has anybody thought about how huge the San Luis Obispo Marketplace will be? How totally oversized it is for SLO?

A comparison to places we know illustrates.

Right now, there's a really large commercial project under construction downtown on Monterey at Osos - the Court Street project.

At three stories, it looks huge. But if the Marketplace's retail space were built on that site, and provided with the required elevators and stairs, the Court Street project would be 30 stories tall!

Then there are the parking lots. The Marketplace's 958,320 square feet of parking, about 22 acres, would cover most of downtown, basically from Santa Rosa to Nipomo, Monterey to Marsh!

The 16 acres of Marketplace roadways would cover another 10 or 12 blocks of downtown.

The environmental, traffic, air pollution, social, and economic impacts of such a huge project on such a small town are overwhelming, as the comparisons to our historic downtown's size and dimensions show.

And, all of this is to be built all at once! The Marketplace is just too much to absorb all at one time.

Clearly the Marketplace is too large for SLO, and voters would be wise to reject it.

Tucker Drake

San Luis Obispo