Morgan Hill
– A regional land-use agency has offered an olive branch to
developers and cities, removing a deadline for land preservation
from a proposed anti-sprawl policy.
Morgan Hill – A regional land-use agency has offered an olive branch to developers and cities, removing a deadline for land preservation from a proposed anti-sprawl policy.
The Local Agency Formation Commission’s decision goes against what environmentalists have been pushing for, quicker preservation of land when cities grow.
But at the end of the day, attorneys say it’s unclear if the land-use agency has the legal right to impose environmental mitigation at all.
“State law provides that cities and counties would be the lead agencies to impose (state-mandated environmental) mitigation,” said Anne Mudge, a land-use attorney for the Coyote Housing Group. “That doesn’t preclude LAFCO from drafting policies to say it would like to see mitigation take place,” but it could mean LAFCO lacks authority to enforce what cities do with their land once it’s annexed.
LAFCO attorney Kathy Kretchmer defended the proposed policy, saying one of the agency’s essential purposes is preservation of agricultural lands as cities grow.
But Assistant San Jose City Attorney Vera Todorov questioned LAFCO’s power to enforce such policies. LAFCO’s Sacramento County counsel, Todorov said, emphasized such agricultural mitigation should be “advisory.”
Supervisor Don Gage, a LAFCO commissioner and member of the two-person agricultural-mitigation subcommittee, said he’d ask the agency’s staff to clarify the matter before an April 11 vote.
“No matter what, we’ve got to have an answer to that question,” Gage said.
LAFCO is one of many agencies with power over city and county land and issues of annexation. A LAFCO oversees all 58 California counties. The agencies were established by California’s legislature in 1963 to reduce urban sprawl. In Santa Clara County, five appointed commissioners serve on LAFCO’s governing board.
Since April 2006, the governing board has endeavored to strengthen its state mandate to protect open space, focussing on generations-old farm land surrounding Gilroy, Morgan Hill and south San Jose. The commissioners asked LAFCO’s staff to draft a policy, resulting in a proposal for cities to preserve agricultural land as they expand their borders. Preservation would occur on a one-to-one-acre basis, meaning one acre of land preserved for every acre developed. Approval of land annexations from LAFCO would hinge on that environmental protection.
“The ultimate goal is to protect open lands to limit urban sprawl,” Gage said. “There has to be some protection (of open land) before it’s all gobbled up.”
But landowners, developers and city officials from Morgan Hill and Gilroy fear LAFCO’s proposal could chill growth. The critics say financial institutions may be unwilling to loan money for projects such as housing, malls and office buildings until they know the lands involved have been annexed into the cities where the developments are proposed. But those annexations might not happen unless developers pay mitigation fees up front using loans.
Partly in response to that “Catch-22” argument, LAFCO’s staff this week unveiled a revised draft of its policy that removes the deadline for mitigation to occur in the development process. The agency previously proposed a three-year deadline for developers to pay mitigation fees or buy agricultural lands themselves to be annexed and preserved.
Property owners at the Morgan Hill meeting seemed to welcome the added flexibility while environmentalists said the revised policy was soft.
Kerry Williams, president of the Coyote Housing Group, thinks LAFCO has made progress in crafting a balanced proposal that allows feasible development. But Williams said more flexibility is called for to allow large-scale, high-density growth while preserving open areas.
“One of the main concerns we’ve had is that (LAFCO’s) policies aren’t so rigid as to preclude creative approaches that still achieve the goals of mitigation, such as the greenbelt strategy in Coyote Valley,” Williams said.
Before San Jose can bring 25,000 homes and 50,000 jobs west of U.S. 101 just north of Morgan Hill, the city needs LAFCO’s approval to annex roughly 2,000 acres from its Coyote Valley urban reserve. San Jose planners want to buffer this growth with a 3,500-acre greenbelt north of Morgan Hill that would not be annexed. LAFCO’s proposed policy could force developers to purchase chunks of the proposed greenbelt, driving up costs for a long-term project already requiring $1.5 billion worth of infrastructure in its first phase.
LAFCO’s agricultural mitigation policy subcommittee, consisting of Supervisor Gage and commissioner Susan Vicklund Wilson, will report back to the full LAFCO board Feb. 14. On April 14, the commission hopes to conduct a final vote on the policy.
