In anticipation of next week’s Folsom Planning Commission meeting, local preservationists have positioned themselves between a proposed hotel expansion and the historically significant area they claim the project would tarnish.

With its plan to expand the Larkspur Landing Hotel, developer Alleghany Properties wants to erect a freestanding, four-story hotel on a sloping, heavily wooded 2.9-acre lot bordered by a former sluice diggings mining site on the east. The triangle-shaped parcel is filled with more than 130 oak trees. In overruling its planning commission’s approval of the hotel expansion in 2005, the city council identified 24 of these trees as landmark trees and directed its staff and the developer to try to preserve another 19.

Since then, the project has added 12 rooms and eliminated 17 proposed parking stalls, which the developer says will preserve five to 10 additional trees.

“The primary issue for the city council was tree preservation,” said David Miller, director of community development.

Miller said an exact figure probably wouldn’t be known until a construction-level grading plan is produced, which comes later in the planning process.

“What we do know is we can’t save as many trees as the city wants no matter what the wall is made of,” Miller acknowledged. “There’s just not a lot of room and you’re dealing with slopes.”

While tree removal ranks high on the list of concerns for the Folsom Heritage Preservation League, it isn’t the only one.

“Frankly, there’s so many things wrong with this project that it’s maybe the worst I’ve seen since 1980,” said league president Loretta Hettinger, who authored a lengthy letter outlining her group’s opposition to the project. “Physically, they’re overbuilding the site. They’re putting 10 pounds of potatoes in a 1-pound sack.”

The league is concerned about impacts to the Natoma Ground Sluice Diggings site that abuts the lot to the east and that preservationists see as a integral link to the city’s Chinese mining past.

They want more parking spaces so residents can access the area colloquially referred to as the Chinese diggings site, but removing parking spaces was the only way to save more trees, according to developer attorney Bob Holderness. Besides, he added, there are at least two other access points to the site — the parking lots of the Century 14 movie complex and Larkspur Hotel.

“We couldn’t save more trees without removing parking spaces,” he said.

The sloping topography, clusters of oaks and the fact that the project site has been reduced from about five acres in 1989 to 2.9 acres today have made finding a mutually appealing project difficult. Holderness believes his client has done that.

Planning staff have taken a neutral position on the project, though Miller noted the irony of weighing environmental impacts to the former mining site.

“From an environmental standpoint, the disruption occurred when the mining occurred,” he said.

Hettinger thinks some sort of development is possible on the site, but doesn’t support the hotel expansion in its current version.

“We’re in hard economic times, but we’re not in desperate straits like Vallejo,” she said. “So we don’t have to sell our souls.”