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Friday October 27, 2006

Kol Shofar, expansion opponents gearing up for Round 2

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Not much about the Tuesday, Oct. 24 Tiburon Town Council meeting was alarming — except its adjournment at the obscene hour of 1:15 a.m.

As planned, Congregation Kol Shofar made its pitch for an expansion plan, neighboring groups weighed in why they opposed the idea, and then members of the public had their say — 67 members of the public, each of whom was allotted three minutes.

“In general, it was quite a civil meeting. There was nothing we heard that we haven’t heard before. We want to build this facility in order to serve our community. The other side worries about noise and traffic and lights and that the remodeled facility will attract more people,” summed up Ron Brown, Kol Shofar’s immediate past president and a member of its building committee.

“These are the terms of the debate and basically have been the terms for the last three years.”

Calls to members of the Tiburon Neighborhood Coalition, a 200-family group opposing Kol Shofar’s expansion, were not returned as of press time, nor was an email to the coalition’s lawyer, Marci Hamilton, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

The meeting will reconvene at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15, when the council is tentatively scheduled to deliberate and offer a ruling. Town Council meetings are held at 1505 Tiburon Blvd. and are open to the public.

Both sides have hinted at legal action if the decision does not go their way.

Brown was slightly surprised by one development at the meeting: When queried by Tiburon’s Vice Mayor Tom Gram what alternative proposals the opponents had formulated, opposition leaders admitted they didn’t have any.

As a result, they have pledged to come up with a Kol Shofar expansion plan that would be acceptable to them and deliver it to the council by next week.

With building opponents for the past few years essentially adopting the old Groucho Marx line “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Brown hopes a codified statement of what would be acceptable to them will alter the terms of the debate.

“Instead of the debate being in terms of ‘I’m for it’ or ‘I’m against it,’ this would be ‘this is our position’ and ‘this is their position,’” he said.

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