Voters to decide in November whether to accept Santa Clara
County initiative
The fate of a land-use initiative that seeks to save half of the
undeveloped lands and hillsides in Santa Clara County has been
placed in the hands of voters come Nov. 7. But the battle already
being waged by opposing sides of the issue is sure to give San
Benito residents an unpleasant sense of deja vu.
Voters to decide in November whether to accept Santa Clara County initiative
The fate of a land-use initiative that seeks to save half of the undeveloped lands and hillsides in Santa Clara County has been placed in the hands of voters come Nov. 7. But the battle already being waged by opposing sides of the issue is sure to give San Benito residents an unpleasant sense of deja vu.
Like San Benito’s unsuccessful slow-growth Measure G of 2004, the Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative would increase new parcel sizes on hillsides, large scale agricultural operations and ranchlands, ultimately decreasing the amount of new homes being built in these areas from some 40 homes to 20 a year. Of the county’s 836,000 acres of privately owned rural properties, the initiative would affect 400,000 acres – mostly the sprawling hills and ranches to the south of San Jose, throughout the Mount Hamilton area and outside Morgan Hill and Gilroy city limits, up to the San Benito County line.
And as resulted in San Benito’s slow growth battle, both sides anticipate a buildup to a war of words between now and Election Day. The issue is expected to pit ranch and rural property owners and developers on one side against environmentalists and county residents advocating slow growth. The former will call it a “land-grab,” the latter will dub it a last chance to rein in sprawl.
“We’re trying to create a balance between the rural and urban areas, preserve ag and ranch land and wildlife habitat,” said Peter Drekmeier, campaign coordinator for the San Jose-based conservation group PLAN – People for Land and Nature – which conceived the initiative and raised $300,000 just to obtain the 36,000 signatures necessary to compel the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors to take action on the initiative during a public hearing held Tuesday.
“Already our opposition is using a lot of scare tactics and information that’s not correct,” he added.
Presented with 58,633 validated signatures supporting the Land Conservation Initiative, county supervisors voted to place the measure on the ballot. They had three choices: to adopt the initiative outright; put it on the ballot; or order a report on the impacts of the initiative.
But opponents say they were blindsided by the grass-roots campaign. One of those opposing the concept is Supervisor Don Gage, whose 800-square mile district lies within the South Valley area.
“It’s going to be devastating,” Gage said. “They never consulted the farmers. They never consulted the Farm Bureau, and they are devaluing their property. If the farmer wants their children to have a house, they can’t pass down their land to build a second home.”
Proponents say they did consult with stakeholders, and in fact, modified the initiative after hearing farmer/rancher input and made it less stringent.
“The agricultural lands affected are the ag preserves around Gilroy, those large tracts of farm parcels with prime soil, which are very productive,” Drekmeier said. “The initiative aims to keep it as ag by making it more permanent. Right now [parcel size] can be weakened by a vote of the Board of Supervisors on any given Tuesday.”
Shades of Measure G
If all this sounds familiar to San Benito residents, then they shouldn’t be surprised to learn the same scholar who authored the highly divisive Measure G, retired professor Robert Girard of Stanford Law School, penned Santa Clara’s initiative with input from PLAN and other greenbelt bigwigs including legislative advocate Brian Schmidt of the Committee for Green Foothills.
Opponents to Measure G also accused the backers of that initiative of excluding affected property owners from the process. But the debut of Santa Clara’s Land Conservation Initiative should come as no shock to its foes. PLAN, a coalition of several regional environmental groups, formed several years ago with the exclusive goal of creating and placing a slow growth initiative in motion.
San Benito currently allows landowners to sell parcels as small as five acres of land on the outside of Hollister’s “sphere of influence,” which is mostly where small row crop farms exist. Ranchland in the unincorporated county areas can be sold in parcels no smaller than 40 acres. Measure G sought to change the new parcel sizes to 20 acres for the ag land and 160-acre parcels for the ranch land. Only one home can be built on each parcel.
“San Benito is horrible for land regulations,” said Schmidt of the Committee for Green Foothills. “You guys are going to lose a lot of farm land in the next 20 years.”
Backers of the LCI point to Alameda County, which has a much tougher minimum parcel size restriction – 320 acres – in ranchlands. They said they wanted to make the Santa Clara initiative on par with Alameda’s, but after meeting with ranchers and farmers they took it down to 160 acres.
“There’s still plenty of ranching going on in Alameda,” Schmidt added. “Some people are saying we will affect the ability to finance ag land and that’s wrong. Medium scale ag, we don’t touch it, for large scale we don’t change the rules. When they consider financing farm land, you aren’t going to get a bank loan based on how many 20-acre subdivisions you want to make of it.”
Santa Clara’s LCI calls for 40-acre parcels for “large scale ag land” (currently 20 acres) and 160-acre parcels for ranch land (currently 40 acres). But medium-scale ag land is left alone and so is much of the flatlands within the southern Highway 101 corridor. The initiative will affect only new parcels to be sold, and existing parcels smaller than what the new rules allow will stay the same.
The initiative affects only certain lands that are outside city limits, in the unincorporated rural county. Any lands annexed by cities, such as Gilroy and Morgan Hill, would be outside the realm of the initiative. It will not affect as-yet undeveloped mid-Coyote Valley because proponents expect that area to be annexed into San Jose when the Coyote Valley Specific Plan for a new 18,000-home city is approved.
More than anything, the new initiative seeks to preserve hillsides and viewsheds. It would limit new parcel sizes on hillsides to, generally, 160 acres, but provides a sliding scale of allowable housing depending on the severity of the slope. The text of the initiative reads: “If the average slope of a parcel is less than 10% the minimum acres per dwelling unit shall be 40 acres. If the average slope exceeds 45% the minimum areas shall be 160 acres up to an average slope of 50%. No clustering shall be permitted on parcels with an average slope of more than 50%.”
“These houses on hillsides are mansions, with very few people, large environmental impacts, with road and infrastructure that costs more than taxes generate,” Drekmeier said. “They ruin views, cause a lot of driving and pollution, soil erosion, and affect water quality. So our feeling is that housing really belongs in the urban areas, not in these remote rural locations.”
City mouse, country mouse
The opinions of opponents might be summed up in the words of Tim Chiala, director of farm operations for George Chiala Farms of Morgan Hill and a board member of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau.
“I hate the fact that all of these city folks want to save us dumb country folks,” Chiala was quoted in this week’s Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.
During the public hearing held this week in San Jose when the county supervisors grappled with the initiative, Gage was appalled that his fellow leaders voted down his move to complete a financial impact study before placing the LCI on the ballot.
“This is the most significant land-use issue this county has ever faced, and not to have a report done is unbelievable,” Gage said. “They (proponents) said they met with the Farm Bureau – I’m seeing a lot of these little fibs – and then they have the gall to stand up and say they didn’t want the report because they didn’t want opponents to take it out of context.”
Drekmeier said PLAN did meet with Farm Bureau Director Jenny Derry, but that was several years ago at the beginning of the process. Derry said she met with professor Girard five years ago for half an hour, when he floated the idea by her, but that she was never asked to contribute to the crafting of an initiative.
She said the best way to put forth a land-use initiative is with the input of all stakeholders, through numerous public hearings and workshops.
“Had they made a concerted effort to include us, even if we all disagreed, it would have been great,” Derry said. “We found out two days before they collected signatures, and at that point it had been written and done. The most dismal thing about this initiative is there is no way to improve it. It’s very dire for property owners.”
Gage says he sees a lot of “lose ends” with the initiative, starting with the housing mandates from the state, which essentially is an order to counties and cities to build a certain number of dwellings. Jurisdictions risk losing government transportation and grant funding if they don’t comply.
“We don’t build more than 100 homes a year [in unincorporated Santa Clara], so then why do they want this ordinance?” Gage asked.
Proponents say their initiative calls for more affordable housing than what the county mandates, but that it be clustered near areas of urban services, near cities.
Gage also envisions a nightmare of lawsuits resulting from the new rules.
“We’re going to have to hire a load of planners to change it,” he said. “There’s going to be a large cost to this, a lot of lawsuits, because the property owners are going to see it as a taking of their property. And the county will be responsible. They’re not going to come all together, either. They’ll come individually.”
But in the end, Gage voted with three other supervisors to place the initiative on the November ballot. Legally, he said, they had little choice. The board passed the motion on a 4-1 vote, with only Supervisor Pete McHugh dissenting.
Different than San Benito
Opponents to the initiative are putting together their own coalition. Derry said the Farm Bureau is joining forces with the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors, the Cattlemen’s Association and a group called the Hillside Property Owners to wage a campaign against the ordinance.
“We have a huge battle in front of us to inform people,” Derry admitted.
While San Benito’s Measure G lost in a landslide, many on both sides of Santa Clara’s Land Conservation Initiative – including opponents – believe this new push at growth control has a much better chance of passing in November.
“The chances of it happening are very good,” Gage said. “It’s different over here [than in San Benito]. We’re the fourth or fifth largest county of the state’s 58, and it’s very liberal.”
“It has a much better chance (of passing) because we have such an urban population that has no immediate ties with agriculture,” Derry added. “In San Benito, people are much closer with their agricultural roots.”
It’s perhaps the one point proponents of the Land Conservation Initiative agree on.
“What they’re complaining about is they would not be able to do as much development as they’d like to,” Schmidt said. “But living in a county with hundreds of thousands of people, you can’t do that without stepping on other peoples’ property rights.”
Facts about the Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative
– Affects 400,000 acres of undeveloped hillsides and ranchlands
– Estimated to reduce the annual number of new market value homes in the county from 100 to 80
– Will reduce the number of trophy homes on hillsides throughout Highway 101 southern corridor
– Will keep new parcels of ranchland at a 160-acre minimum
– Will discourage development of Mount Hamilton range if Rep. Richard Pombo succeeds in his effort to route a new highway through the wilderness, connecting Central Valley with Bay Area
– Does not affect properties within city limits
– Will not affect plans for a new city in mid-Coyote Valley
– Full text can be read at http://www.openspace2006.org/pdf/FinalInitiativeText.pdf
