Editorial: Gut-check time on county growth plan
Published: Tuesday, Sep. 20, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 12A
Sacramento County supervisors will be at a crossroads today. Will they stand up for their constituents and move forward with growth guidelines that will lessen traffic and air pollution and protect taxpayers?
Or will they kowtow to their developer benefactors and put the county on a path for more costly suburban sprawl?
After seven years of intense debate, it's decision time on the growth management strategy that will be incorporated into the county's 2030 general plan.
The staff recommendation is the least that supervisors should do:
• The county's urban growth boundaries would stay as is, except for adding a small area known as West of Watt.
An early draft had called for extending the urban growth area to include 12,000 acres along Jackson Highway in the south and 8,000 acres along Grant Line Road near Rancho Cordova. Opening up that much land to development was plainly ridiculous with the housing crash, and it's to their credit that most involved recognized that.
• Developers could apply to expand the growth boundaries, but to win approval, their projects would have to follow "smart growth" criteria.
The criteria are supposed to make sure that subdivisions and other projects can be efficiently served with infrastructure and municipal services, would balance jobs and housing and would help the county comply with state laws to lower carbon emissions (AB 32) and to encourage mass transit (SB 375).
While it would be better to stick with the original staff recommendation that listed more detailed "smart growth" measures, county planners say the current proposed framework is a "reasonable compromise" – a "flexible but credible" approach that balances competing interests and that addresses most concerns raised by the public, environmentalists and developers.
Some environmental groups don't see it as much of a compromise, however. They want to require that infill development targets be reached before allowing any new growth areas. They're right to worry that the smart growth criteria will be weakened or circumvented, resulting in more sprawl and fringe development.
Even with the flexibility they've already wrested, some development interests want many of the proposed requirements to be guidelines instead. That's a terrible idea.
Supervisors have already been too accommodating to developers' wishes. Any further concessions would be unacceptable.
As planners point out, their proposal only works if the county adopts "robust" smart growth rules and resolutely requires development projects to meet them.
Anything less would be folly for the county.
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