General Plan Update Should Come Under Grand Jury Scrutiny

By Nick Baptista / The Valley Springs News/ July 27, 2011

The 2010-11 Calaveras County grand jury report released a month ago cited “publicity in (T)he Valley Springs News” as helping prompt the oversight panel composed of ordinary county citizens to investigate what was happening with the Jenny Lind Fire Protection District.

We have another suggestion for the newly impaneled 2011-2012 grand jury: Take a look at what’s going on, or not going on with the county’s General Plan update.

State law makes a general plan the foundation and central feature of the local planning process. Each county and city is required to prepare, adopt, and maintain a general plan to govern the physical development of all the land area under its jurisdiction.

The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 4, 2006, voted to follow a two-year schedule to complete an update of the General Plan. The two-year timeframe was decided on by a majority of the board four years and eight months ago. Not only is the General Plan update incomplete, it has not even reached a draft stage for release to the public.

Whenever county officials are questioned about the matter, they say the draft will be released within a matter of a few weeks or months. Those questions and the now stale responses have been going on for more than 2 ½ years and still there is no General Plan update.

Three of the supervisors on the board back in December of 2006 remain in office today and they don’t seem too concerned that they, their staff, nor constituents can meet a deadline. Those supervisors are Merita Callaway, Tom Tryon and Steve Wilensky. Callaway was the lone supervisor to vote against the two-year timetable. She thought it could be done within 2 ½ years.

Budget figures to complete the General Plan update were set at $1,350,000. Sources at the county level tell me the expenditure to date has been approximately $1.2 million. That leaves $150,000 for the rest of the process. That’s like spending about nine-tenths of a construction loan to build a new house and all you have to show for it is the framing.

We were told nearly five years ago the county’s existing General Plan was out of compliance. The existing plan reportedly was in such dire legal straits the board imposed a moratorium on submitting any new development proposals to the county for consideration.

The moratorium ordinance at the time said the review of proposed projects requesting general plan and zoning amendments “is contrary to the public welfare because decisions on those projects would be without benefit of a comprehensive General Plan, thereby threatening the viability and long-range success of these planning efforts as well as the orderly growth and development with the county.”

It should come to nobody’s surprise that the consultants back in 2006 who said the county needed a full-blown General Plan update, Mintier & Associates, now Mintier Harnish- got the million-dollar-plus contract for the update.

If the need were so urgent, why has it taken the county and Mintier so long to complete the process? That question along with an accurate accounting of expenditures on the General Plan update and an estimate of how much more money it will cost taxpayers to complete the entire process fall within the realm of the grand jury’s duties.

Nick Baptista is the editor and co-owner of The Valley Springs News