Why the general plan is important

By Buzz Eggleston | Posted: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:15 am

Suppose you could take a map of Calaveras County, scrape it clean of 160-plus years of human meddling, and start with a fresh landscape. It would be a blank canvas for you to paint a new, perfect community to suit yourself.

Well, you can’t do that.

Decades of construction, of roads, bridges and water works, mines, homes, patios, pools and gardens, barns and corrals and stores, firehouses and restaurants, and of all the other handiworks of humankind, are fixed in place and they are not going away.

Fixed in place too are all your neighbors, many of whom have a different idea of what constitutes a perfect community and don’t necessarily agree with your idea. And your future neighbors, too, want to have a say, people who bought parcels here in the belief that someday they’ll build their dream home or, in the case of developers, their dream subdivision and shopping mecca, shooting range, motorcycle repair emporium, whatever.

Also just as fixed in place are decades of horribly bad decisions by public officials, of missed opportunities, of good intentions gone awry. We who live here today, and those who come after us, will still pay for those mistakes long after those who made – or profited by – them have turned to dust.

Take the old jail. Built in 1963, it’s an asbestos-ridden bunker, too small and too dangerously designed to meet our needs after a half-century of service. So we’ve built a new, state-of-the-art jail to replace it, committing tens of millions of dollars of borrowed money, and we won’t even get to use all of it because we can’t afford to staff it.

Dennis Downum, the former county sheriff, once said that the county should have imposed a facilities fee on new construction way back when. A one-time levy designed to offset the impact of a new house or other building on public infrastructure – roads, water lines and such – would have paid for the new jail without us having to borrow money. There was never such a levy.

Or take the land-use map drafted as part of the Planning Department’s efforts to prepare a new general plan, the one put on display at last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting. It shows the tiny Ebbetts Pass community of Arnold, population fewer than 4,000, as potentially growing by another 3,923 houses and another 9,376 people in the next 20 years.

Not gonna happen. Some-time way back when, someone thought subdividing Arnold into a sprawl of parcels across the hilly and wooded landscape made sense. Politicians agreed. Few will actually ever build on those parcels – they’re remote, lacking utilities and access – but never mind. They are now forever enshrined on county planning maps, secure because rezoning them now would be what’s called a “taking,” which no government agency would dare do.

Or take the 2,600-home Oak Canyon Ranch, one of a number of unbuilt subdivisions near Copperopolis. It’s now bank owned, but the legal right to build it is still there. If a developer comes along and exercises that right all the rest of us will face the prospect of paying for new roads, probably a new school and a sheriff’s substation, to serve all those new residents. Where they will find water is another story.

We all have to live with what was built here in the past, and with what was approved but not yet built and may never be built. We all have to pay for bad planning and poor decisions by our public officials just as we benefit from their good planning and good decisions.

That’s why the process now underway at the county government center, the work to draw up a new county general plan, is so important, and it’s why it is even more important that all of us pay close attention to that work while it remains in progress. Once the general plan is approved later this year, the work to implement it will begin in earnest.

And when’s the best time to begin paying attention?

“Right now,” said Rebecca Willis, the county’s planning director.

“The most important thing people can do right now is go on the general plan website, get on the general plan viewer, and look up your own property. Then go and see the current general plan to compare it with the current new draft we’re preparing,” she said.

While you’re there, take in the big picture. Then, if you have a comment, join the discussion.

To see the plan and to offer your comments, go to calaverasgov.us, click to the Planning Department page and find the “GeneralPlanUpdate.” To comment, email gpupdate@co.calavereas.ca.us.