10 (188)You don't often get email from Learn why this is important
Date:3/2/2026 9:50:48 AM
From:"Andrew Winger"
To:"Public Comment" publiccomment@anaheim.net
Subject:[EXTERNAL] Please Put Resident Safety First – Festival Project
Warning: This email originated from outside the City of Anaheim. Do not click links or open attachme nts unle ss you recognize the
sender and are expecting the message.
Hello Mayor and City Council,
My name is Andrew Winger. I attended five of the six community meetings and have had the opportunity to speak with each of you.
None of this Festival project makes sense and I urge you to vote No.
We keep hearing that the City has to approve it because we “can’t block everything,” but that simply isn’t true. We live in a Very High Fire
Hazard Severity Zone. Our insurance policies are being canceled. That alone is a legitimate, real-world reason to stop adding housing in the most
dangerous locations.
This site is not required for the Housing Element. It can be replaced with a more suitable location — for example, the Kaiser property on
Lakeview in District 6 — which is far less fire-prone and far more appropriate.
We are being asked to trust the Know Your Way plan, yet there are no studies showing that it actually improves evacuation time. Every EIR still
shows roughly a three-hour evacuation. The plan also depends on perfectly controlling human behavior during a fire, when people are panicked
and trying to get to their families. That is not realistic.
Changing this site from commercial to residential makes evacuation worse. When there’s smoke in the air, people don’t go shopping — they go
home. We all know this. Please stop telling residents this has no impact. It does.
Parking is already short by at least 70 spaces per City code, using the applicant’s own optimistic study. Councilmembers from other districts have
seen how destructive parking shortages are to quality of life. You’ve lived it — so why allow the same mistake here?
You all talk about your families. Please imagine your family sitting in gridlock for three hours while a firestorm is approaching. That is not
hypothetical. It has already happened here, and it will happen again. Where is the empathy?
The 91 freeway improvements will help daily traffic, but they will not help evacuation traffic.
Every district in Anaheim has its own challenges. We should not use our votes to make each other’s problems worse.
If homelessness is already a crisis somewhere, we should not intensify it.
If parking is already broken, we should not repeat it.
And if evacuation is District 6’s known vulnerability, we should not add more risk.
Anaheim works best when we protect each other’s weaknesses, not when we worsen them.
Please make this a decision that puts the safety of residents first.
Respectfully,
Andrew Winger
Anaheim, CA 92807