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Still a long road ahead for county general plan update
By Sarah Lunsford Enterprise Correspondent | Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2015
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It’s already been a long and winding road for the Calaveras County General Plan Update, and if the Thursday meeting of the county’s planning commission is any indicator, the document that will oversee all growth and planning decisions for Calaveras still has a ways to go.
“We’re here to talk about the vision and guiding principles that were discussed at the joint planning and board of supervisors meeting last week,” said Fawn McLaughlin, planning commission chairwoman.
In discussing and forming the vision statement, commissioners will take into consideration the vision statement and guiding principles of the previous administrative draft of the document that was put in place in 2008 after a number of meetings were held between the board of supervisors, planning commission and the public in the years before. The commission is also considering draft options presented to it by the Calaveras Planning Coalition and Commissioner Kelly Wooster.
The county’s general plan update has been a decade in the making. The latest draft was released in December.
“This is unique in that we are going to be holding a very long discussion on a lot of issues over the next several months as we iron out the draft of the general plan,” Peter Maurer, Calaveras County planning director, told commissioners at the outset of the meeting.
That long discussion will take place one step at a time. The first step is the commission putting a vision statement and guiding principles in place, then the commissioners will move on to the discussion of objective and implementation measures, and from there, it will move through the document reviewing the various plan elements and soliciting public comment.
According to the California Office of Planning & Research (COPR), “A general plan is required to address the specified provisions of each of the seven mandated elements listed in (Government Code Section) 65302 – land use, circulation, housing, conservation, open space, noise and safety – to the extent that the provisions are locally relevant.”
Additional elements can be added to those basic seven should the local government and its community choose to do so. In Calaveras there is an additional element addressing public facilities and services, and some members of the community have advocated adding a water element.
The state’s thoughts on the visioning process are explained by the COPR as one “which bring(s) community members together to identify key community values and goals. The resulting vision statement should provide the broad goals to be achieved by the general plan.”
The 2008 vision statement and guidelines for that draft of the general plan was just that, a culmination of community input and untold hours to mold it into place, but, there was no direct reference to personal property rights in that vision statement, which was raised as a concern by Commissioners David Tunno and Lisa Muetterties, both of whom favored the wording of the vision statement presented by Commissioner Kelly Wooster.
“I sat down with the 2008 vision statement and guiding principles and started to try and tweak it and came to the conclusion that I couldn’t do it,” said Wooster.
“As a starting point, I would rather start with his (Commissioner Wooster’s draft) and pick up some pieces by somebody else than start with the ’08 version,” said Tunno.
Tunno pointed to the language in the 2008 draft vision statement, and its lack of strong language supporting private property rights as one reason he wanted to start the discussion with Wooster’s draft.
“I like what Wooster’s done,” said Muetterties. “I think there’s some tweaking that I would do. I was not and have not been too excited about the 2008 vision statement.”
Muetterties pointed to the same concerns as Tunno with a lack of strong language protecting private property rights in the 2008 draft as a reason she wanted to start with Wooster’s draft. She also pointed to the age of the 2008 draft vision statement as a reason to rethink using it as a foundation of a revamped vision statement.
“This vision statement is getting to be over 8.5 years old, so it’s not even current to what’s happening to us now and it’s taken us 10 years to get where we’re at with this general plan,” she said. “I’d like to make sure that when we finally wrap it up that we’re current, not eight, 10, 20 years old with it.”
Members of the public were concerned that the efforts of the community to put together the 2008 vision statement be honored.
“I think the 2008 vision statement is extraordinary,” said Lew Mayhew of Wallace as he addressed the commission. “It is truly the product of meeting with people and hours of sifting through everyones’ ideas and winnowing them down. … I would hope that you would look at your task given to you by the supervisors as to use discretion in the extent to which you change this document.”
“I think they’re sound,” Mayhew continued. “They reflect the color and the character of all the public participation and deserve to be a front piece to the general plan.”
“I, too, would encourage discretion as you rewrite what the community’s voice is because it did come from the community,” said Marti Crane of Rancho Calaveras.
The 2008 draft vision statement and Wooster’s draft aren’t the only ones being considered as a foundation for the current draft vision statement; suggestions from the Calaveras Planning Coalition are also in the mix.
“What we’re doing today is making the 2008 statement current and what we (CPC) tried to do is to change as few words as we could in the 2008 document to get to where we need to go so that we include property rights and respect the 2008 visions,” said Tom Infusino, facilitator of the Calaveras Planning Coalition.
“Out of everyone here, I was probably more engaged in the general plan update and the community planning process and I have a pretty good memory of the, I could say hundreds, but I bet you thousands of people who were actively engaged in crafting the vision statement that was prepared by Mintier-Harnish,” said Chairwoman McLaughlin. “I can’t ignore their voice, which is captured in this vision statement and guiding principles (referring to the 2008 draft).” McLaughlin went on to express her appreciation for the Calaveras Planning Coalition’s recommendations as far as including property rights in the vision statement.
Even with their different perspectives on the foundation that will underpin the new draft vision statement, commissioners agreed to meet again to discuss the issue in two weeks instead of one in order to have the time to fully review all the drafts that were presented to them because one of the drafts was presented to commissioners at the beginning of the meeting.
“I do believe what we need is some time to find out where the commonalities are between these (drafts) and look for the areas where we can agree on given some wordsmithing and some tweaking,” said McLaughlin.
The Calaveras County Planning Commission will have its next meeting on Thursday, July 23. At that time, commission members will continue to discuss vision statement and guiding principles of the general plan update, the noise element of the draft update along with objectives and implementation measures for the plan.
