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To members of the Planning Commission, My name is Lisandro, I own a home in French Park and have lived in town my entire life. I support the conversion of a portion of the tower from office to residential. I usually do not attend meetings or write correspondence in support because it takes too much time, much like normal residents in Santa Ana, even if they support projects. With that said, I am also pretty lazy. Anyway, after listening to the meeting on Monday and learning of the 10-15 people that are opposed to this conversion I wanted to point a few things out: Number One: Santa Ana already has the tallest residential towers in Orange County. Two buildings, each almost 300-feet tall, with 349-units at 9 and 15 Macarthur Place. Residential towers are not new for us. People in those towers love them. Number Two: There’s plenty of examples of mixed-use towers. It’s a common practice in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, so on and so forth. People like this stuff, whether or not they are hip and cool. Number Three: The office tower is already approved. Taking out a portion of office and replacing it with residential will create less traffic. This is a fact and a standard known across the traffic engineering and planning profession. You and I are not traffic engineers, and neither are most of my neighbors. So why are people still complaining about traffic when this modification actually reduces the amount of cars that will be on the road once its built? Number Four: Finally, if there is one area where it is appropriate to build a tall tower its midtown. Historically, this part of Santa Ana has been home to the tallest buildings in the City and for a time, in Orange County. The first real high-rise in OC was built across the street from this site, the Crocker Citizens Bank tower in the late 50s. It was followed by United California Bank, First National Bank, and the Security Bank Building, all right next door to this site. This was once OC’s financial center until Irvine incentivized taller buildings by the airport and now all the financial jobs have left this area and moved to Irvine. In summary, they provide more parking than is required and they are reducing the amount of traffic that would occur otherwise. Finally, by adding residential there will be more folks walking in this area after 5 pm. When was the last time you walked down this block of Sycamore Street at 7 pm on a Monday? I walk by here all the time in the evenings and it is dead. It needs help and this does that. This will be a much-needed improvement and give this town another landmark. It’s easy to say no to everything, change is hard I get it but Santa Ana isn’t Tustin, we are a big city. Let’s vote yes on this and hope Harrah can finally clean up the City’s largest sandox. Have a goodnight and stay healthy.