A group of San Benito County residents wants growth decisions
placed in the hands of the people
By KATE WOODS
Pinnacle Staff Writer
Current controls on growth and development in San Benito County
could be changed only by a vote of the people if the backers of a
new ballot measure are successful.
Current controls on growth and development in San Benito County could be changed only by a vote of the people if the backers of a new ballot measure are successful.
Proponents say they are gathering signatures so that San Benito County’s current growth regulations – including a 1 percent cap, a dark skies ordinance and a ban on ridge-top development – will remain in place should the responsible-growth majority on the Board of Supervisors change in the future.
“On any given Tuesday the board could throw out the 1 percent growth cap by a two-thirds vote,” said Mandy Rose, who endorses the plan in her capacity as the regional representative of the Sierra Club.
The measure that proponents want on the ballot also would change the way land is subdivided in the county for development. Five-acre parcels – deemed the biggest threat to agriculture by the American Farmland Trust – would be banned in favor of 20-acre parcels to preserve land for farming. In the rural South County, where the minimum parcel size that can be subdivided for home construction is now 40 acres, the size increases to 160 acres.
“When it gets chopped up, you know what happens,” said Margaret Cheney, one of the backers of the initiative. “I’ve noticed especially in the South County that the rangeland gets so overgrazed. It’s sad because it doesn’t do the cattle or the land any good. This will provide more acreage per ranch.”
Proponents also believe bigger parcels will prevent the kind of poor planning that resulted in Willow Springs, a hilly, rugged outback of 119 40-acre parcels off Panoche Road across from the CDF station, currently with about a dozen homes and a dozen illegal trailers on them. There is only one dirt road that leads to the parcels, many of which have no access to basic utilities such as PG&E. At night the churning drone of gas-powered generators fills the air.
“It’s going to keep the integrity of the parcels because they will be big enough for viable agricultural use,” said Rose.
Many proponents of the measure have been in the county long enough to remember when it was truly rural. They are seeking protections they say will allow the county to grow responsibly around Hollister, while still protecting agriculture and grazing lands, the county’s No. 1 industry.
“We remember how the county was,” said initiative co-author Janet Brians, a local historian. “Now I look at the Bolsa from our homestead and see a steady stream of headlights during the commuter rush hours.”
The initiative would be the latest example of “ballot box zoning” that originated in California 30 years ago and has spread to other areas of the country. Over the past 20 years, voter initiatives have become so common in the Bay Area and some parts of Southern California that they have become the state’s primary source of land-use policy.
The San Benito County Growth Control Initiative would direct developers to cluster their projects on the peripheral of city limits instead of sprinkling ranchettes throughout the county.
Proponents of the initiative need 1,000 signatures from registered voters to put it on a future ballot and plan to start circulating petitions this weekend. Volunteers will go door-to-door in San Juan Bautista, Ridgemark and South County. In Aromas, they plan to set up a table at the local market. In Hollister, supporters will have petitions in front of Target, Nob Hill, Albertson’s and Safeway.
The initiative proposes changing the minimum size of new parcels from five to 20 acres in the Agricultural Productive zones north of Hollister and in the San Juan Valley, where the richest soils exist and the threat to agriculture is the greatest. There are a few areas in the Spring Grove region east of Hollister already divided into five-acre tracts, however, where a few of the smaller parcels will be allowed.
Only one house can be built on each parcel, with the few exceptions of farm workers’ housing or a second “granny unit” to house a relative or a senior.
“It provides a balance between responsible county planning and private-property rights,” said Brians. “It doesn’t change existing valid parcels.”
That means if a 40-acre parcel currently exists in the agricultural rangeland region of South County and the minimum parcel size changes to 160 acres, the parcel is still valid. All future parcels, however, will not be divided smaller than 160 acres.
“If you have a legal parcel at the time the initiative passes, it’s not going to change,” said Mandy Rose. “If you have a non-conforming parcel, like three acres, your three acres are still a legal parcel, and you can build a house on it.”
Landowners who don’t intend to build can trade in or sell their extra development credits, or easements, to developers who want to build closer to Hollister. The result, say initiative backers, will keep new growth clustered near the cities and the services that come with them, such as police, fire stations and schools, while allowing rural farmers and ranchers to share financially in development.
“As if there’s not enough open space already,” said CPA Bob Bianchi, a member of the San Benito County Business Council, when he learned about the measure. “I’m not pro- or anti-growth. I come from a pro-business standpoint and pro-infrastructure. Whenever you put a restriction on growth it will be just as devastating as if we had unbridled growth.”
The aim of the initiative is to preserve the rural character and heritage of San Benito County even as Santa Clara County becomes more industrialized. Still, Bianchi believes such measures will cause the county to stagnate.
“Let the free market take care of itself,” he said. “Some of these no-growthers want to put a wall around our county. The housing on the outside will go right up to the edge of the wall, and here we are sitting in this huge, big-park setting with a bunch of old people in it.”
Sandy Rose, also of the Business Council, owns with her family the Topo Ranch near Bitterwater in South County and appreciates any efforts to reign in sprawl.
“I’ll speak on my own behalf, but the 1 percent growth cap, I’d like to see it stay in place indefinitely, at least until the infrastructure problems are resolved,” she said. “I’d hate to see any subdivision in the county at all, period.”
Rose said she’s frustrated that longtime county residents are paying for new development through road improvements and other infrastructure projects.
“I’m extremely upset at what’s been allowed to happen, mainly by out-of-town developers,” she said.
It’s that kind of attitude on which supporters of the initiative are counting. Supporters say San Benito County has shouldered more than its share of new housing in the state over the last 10 years, especially in providing the bedrooms for Silicon Valley. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, San Benito County was California’s fastest growing in the 1990s, when it grew by nearly 50 percent, powered by Hollister’s nearly 80 percent boom.
“We simply have grown too fast,” said Brians. “We need a stable economy, not a bedroom economy. Right now it looks sweet down in South County. We have all this green space there. But developers see mega-mansions they can put down there.”
Developers might be somewhat appeased to know that the new initiative will give the Board of Supervisors more wiggle room within the current growth cap. The 1 percent cap on market-rate housing would stay in place, while supervisors could approve up to 1 percent more in affordable, low and very-low income housing.
But anything beyond the 2 percent must go to a vote of the people, as does any single development of 100 houses or more, as current ordinances state. The down side to that, some say, is that a developer with enough money could buy an election and his or her project.
Cities are not bound by the county initiative, which means that LAFCO still could approve Hollister and San Juan Bautista annexation requests.
Because the current growth cap can be overturned by a majority vote of the five county supervisors, Mandy Rose calls it “On Any Given Tuesday” – Tuesday being the day of the week supervisors meet. In fact, it was a developer who unwittingly spurred responsible growth activists into creating the initiative.
About four years ago, then-planning commissioner Pat Loe said she met with a developer vying to create the River Ranch subdivision along Highway 25 in the San Juan Bolsa near Shore Road. According to Loe, she warned the builder that his 6,000-home development would be a very hard sell to the community, to which she said the developer replied, “I don’t need community support. I only need three votes” – meaning, the votes of three supervisors.
The remark irked Loe, who repeated the discussion to others.
“I certainly wasn’t quiet about it,” said Loe, who was sworn in as a new supervisor Tuesday.
Some who learned about the statement were disturbed enough to hatch the idea for the people’s initiative.
“That was the catalyst,” said Mandy Rose. “We said, ‘It was time.'”
Over the past six months Brians, Rose, Cheney, Birgit Winans, Richard Saxe, Mark Levine, Janie Martin, Gordon Machado and others have worked quietly-but-diligently on the proposal, meeting once a week to hone its wording. They secured the services of retired Stanford University law professor Robert Gerard, an expert in planning issues who, along with the initiative’s proponents, wrote the 24-page ordinance with the county’s current growth cap in mind. Gerard has worked on 22 other growth-control initiatives for counties throughout the state, 20 of which have passed and been upheld. His recent successes include initiatives for Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda counties.
In most cases, the ordinance takes policies already in place and makes them more permanent. The county already has in place, for instance, a policy of not allowing building on slopes of 30 degrees or more. Likewise, building is not allowed on ridgelines or in wetlands or any other place that will adversely impact a view-shed.
Supervisor Richard Scagliotti said he has not read the fine print in the peoples’ initiative, but he said he saw the writing on the stucco wall.
“I’ve said this in the past when we did the growth-control ordinances,” said Scagliotti. “If the county doesn’t take responsibility for growth, the people are going to take that away from them. We’ve done an adequate job so far, but from their standpoint it’s not enough. I realize they aren’t concerned with the current Board of Supervisors, but with future boards and with the amount of money developers can use to seat their representatives.”
As a farmer, Brians believes the new initiative would benefit those who make a living off the land – aside from building houses on it.
“Five-acre parcels are the biggest waste of land,” she said. “You can’t do anything with that.”
Allowing farmers to sell the development rights on their land would help them financially.
Backers of the initiative have a goal of gathering 5,000 signatures – 4,000 more than they need – to place it before supervisors, the first step toward getting it on the ballot.
Once it is before the board, supervisors will decide whether to call for a special election this year, place it on the March 2004 ballot or vote it in themselves, as the San Juan Bautista City Council recently did with a citizens’ grassroots growth cap.
Rose said the group is hopeful that the current board, including newcomers Reb Monaco of rural District 4 and Loe of downtown Hollister’s District 3, will see the merit in the proposed growth controls.
“When you say ‘growth control,’ people get defensive,” said Rose. “But this is not about shutting the door on housing. It merely designates where the housing should go. There are hundreds of acres available around the city where the services are. Remember, sprawl costs us all.”
