Court Orders the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors to properly address safety and groundwater quality.

Court orders the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors to properly address fire safety and
groundwater quality.

Pursuant to a court ruling, the Board of Supervisors will revisit fire safety and groundwater quality
impacts of the 2015 Targeted General Plan Amendment and Zoning Ordinance Update.

In a writ of mandate issued on July 25, Judge Warren Stracener of the El Dorado County Superior Court
ordered the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors to properly highlight their disagreement with the
Board of Forestry regarding the inadequate attention to fire safety in the 2015 zoning ordinance update.
The judge also directed the Board of Supervisors to properly respond to a public comment raising
concerns over the groundwater quality impacts of home occupations discharging dangerous chemicals
into septic systems in groundwater-dependent rural areas.

The Board of Forestry’s 2014 letter was concerned about expanding development in the high and very
high fire hazard severity zones that dominate the County’s northern rangelands, southern rangelands,
and eastern forestlands. “The Board would like to express concern that fire safety is not addressed
adequately for the proposed increase in allowable densities.” “This proposed TGPA-ZOU exposes people
or structures to a significant risk of loss, injury, or death from wildland fires.” The County disagreed.
However, the County failed to meet its obligation to highlight this disagreement in the summary of the
environmental impact report where concerned people and decisionmakers would be more likely to see
it. Instead the disagreement was buried in a separate EIR volume containing responses to hundreds of
pages of comments. The judge’s decision ruled that, “The failure to include the information related to
the disagreement between the County and the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection …
amounts to a failure to proceed in a manner required by law,”

The County had also refused to respond to the water quality comment back in 2015, claiming that it did
not raise a “significant environmental point.” The court’s decision disagreed and concluded that the
County was “required to provide a good faith, reasoned analysis in response.”
In an attempt to respond to the writ, the County issued a draft addendum in September. However, that
addendum makes no effort to improve the general plan or the zoning ordinance to reduce the fire risk
or the potential for groundwater contamination. The Addendum will soon come before the Board of
Supervisors for review and approval.

What can you do to help? You can email the Planning Commission (charlene.tim@edcgov.us) and the
Board of Supervisors (edc.cob@edcgov.us) and tell them to monitor groundwater where rural
commercial development and home occupations are disposing of chemicals in septic systems, and to
limit rural commercial developments and home occupations to properties served by paved roads, public
water, and nearby fire stations. For more information you can go to the Rural Communities United
website as https://ruralcommunitiesunited.org