GENERAL PLAN UPDATE ADOPTED AFTER 13 YEARS

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly version Share this


Follow-up motion could ‘undo the whole plan’ Supervisor says

By Billie Jo Jannen
For East County Magazine

 

August 4, 2011 (San Diego)--After 13 years of debate and the expenditure of about $18 million, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a comprehensive update of the county’s general plan at its Aug. 3 meeting – then promptly took another vote that could take it all back and cost county taxpayers millions more.

 

The general plan update project was originally dubbed GP2020 in 1998, when the ambitious process was first started in response to a series of state mandates regarding fire safety, air and water quality and protections accorded to agricultural assets and habitat. However, it quickly became apparent that the 20-year plan was too plagued by contention to be completed by the 2000 deadline set for adoption.

 

The greatest bone of contention has been a goal to contain sprawl development by raising housing density – upzoning -- in places closer in to populated areas and lowering it – downzoning -- in rural lands where transportation, groundwater and other land use constraints already make permitting for small-lot development an arduous, and sometimes futile, process.

 

The project was quietly renamed the GPU as wrangling continued over density goals that developers and some landowners view as an erosion of property values. Those same provisions have proven popular with thousands of rural residents, who feel that protection of open space and groundwater make their properties more valuable and their communities more desirable. Despite vigorous opposition from pro-development groups, the plan has been endorsed by 23 of the county’s 26 community advisory groups, according to a county staff report.

 

District 2 Supervisor Dianne Jacob made the motion to approve items 1 through 7 and 10 through 17 of the staff recommendations and registered protest on an eleventh-hour addition that allows “leapfrog” development under certain conditions.

 

In making the motion, Jacob remarked on the time and money spent on the project, which included over 500 public meetings: “It’s not a perfect plan … but it’s time to move forward and put it to rest.”

 

District 1 Supervisor Greg Cox asked that the motion be amended to hold the first of the adjustment periods -- slated to take place every two years after adoption -- within the first year, and Jacob amended her motion accordingly.

 

The motion was approved, 4-1. District 5 Supervisor Bill Horn, an outspoken opponent of the update, voted against it.

 

The excluded items 8 and 9 were for properties owned by Jacob and Horn and were voted on in two separate motions so that the owners could recuse themselves. Jacob’s Jamul property was downzoned on a 3-1 vote, with Horn voting “no,” and Horn’s was upzoned with no dissenting votes.

 

Horn remarked wryly, “Now I can have a high-rise condo instead of avocado trees. Thank you.”

 

Once the update was formally adopted, however, District 4 Supervisor Ron Roberts made a motion to revisit all the property-specific requests that had been tendered, but not adopted, over the course of last year’s hearings on the update, a move that Jacob and District 3’s Pam Slater-Price spoke against vigorously.

 

“This is just a backdoor way to undo the general plan update,” Jacob said. “In my opinion, the taxpayers should not be paying for this review.”

 

The motion, which Roberts conditioned on its not interfering with rezoning of Forest Conservation Initiative Lands, and with avoiding conflict with the land use guiding principles adopted by the board, was approved 3-2, with Jacob and Slater-Price dissenting.

 

Major changes to the project, at this point, would likely result in much of the plan having to be redone and the EIR recirculated for public review at a probable cost of $3 million, Jacob said.

 

Horn opined that the property request review could take three to four days and said, “I’d be glad to have a marathon session … if necessary.”

 

The old general plan in rural areas was an indiscriminate blanket of 4-, 8- and 10-acre zoning, meaning that by-right construction would generally need to comply with those underlying lot sizes. However, as time passed and other constraints were added to requirements for projects, the net density of final maps became sparser. Constraints include groundwater availability, fire regulations, steep slopes, negative impacts to surface waters and destruction of rare habitat.

 

These layers of added constraint mean that the number of homes a developer can build on a given property often ends up being far fewer than the underlying general plan lot size would allow. As a result, Jacob said, many of the property-specific requests were for densities that the owner could never have achieved under the old plan – and that the numbers often quoted for downzoned properties vastly overstate the land’s legal capacity:

 

“We’ve actually upzoned over three times what we’ve downzoned,” Jacob said, explaining that, with constraints factored in, upzoned lands total 27,000 acres and downzoned lands total less than 11,000 acres.

 

“Our existing general plan is so out-of-date, it gives people a false idea of what they could do with those properties,” she said. “The end effect of the workshop is that the public ends up paying for a general plan amendment for a private property owner.”

 

The Aug. 2 action adopted the project EIR, project goals and policies and a variety of ordinance changes that support the project. According to chief planner Devon Muto, the new general plan is one-third the size of the old general plan and now complies with a variety of state laws that were not in place at the time the old one was adopted. The new plan shifts an estimated 20 percent of expected future development to western unincorporated communities with established infrastructure, such as roads, fire protection and sewer services.

 

The property request workshop is scheduled for Nov. 9.

 

The plan becomes law 30 days from adoption, barring a lawsuit and injunction. As of Aug. 4, no lawsuits against the general plan update had appeared in local court listings.
 


Error message

Support community news in the public interest! As nonprofit news, we rely on donations from the public to fund our reporting -- not special interests. Please donate to sustain East County Magazine's local reporting and/or wildfire alerts at https://www.eastcountymedia.org/donate to help us keep people safe and informed across our region.