The City Council delivered a pleasant surprise Thursday night,
voting 4-3 to opt out of the Santa Clara Valley Habitat
Conservation Plan.
The City Council delivered a pleasant surprise Thursday night, voting 4-3 to opt out of the Santa Clara Valley Habitat Conservation Plan.
Originally billed as a one-stop-shopping instrument to streamline the development process while ensuring environmental protections were in place, the HCP spiraled out of bureaucratic control into a 2,000-page behemoth. Thursday the Council put the sword into the dragon.
The HCP concept is not necessarily a bad one. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a guidebook in place that a city and a developer could use to clear all environmental hurdles? It would indeed.
But that’s not really why then-County Supervisor Don Gage verbally committed Gilroy and Morgan Hill to the process back about 10 years ago. The real reason is that that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service threatened to shut down the completion of the U.S. 101 widening project due to the discovery of the endangered bay checkerspot butterfly near the freeway construction area.
It all seemed to make sense at the time … then years of meetings later involving multiple governmental agencies and $6 million poured into the process, there’s a plan that hardly anyone would endeavor to read – 2,000 pages – and fewer are able to understand. Gilroy has contributed $460,000 or so to the planning process. The HCP ramifications are unknown, the costs are uncertain and the potential for over-regulatory nonsense immense.
Seriously, who could vote for a 2,000-page plan that hardly anyone understands? Kudos to Mayor Al Pinheiro and Councilmen Perry Woodward, Bob Dillon and Dion Bracco for a welcome display of common sense.
What happens next? Hopefully the San Jose City Council and the Morgan Hill City Council will vote to opt out of the plan and send the same message. There’s no reason to add such a voluminous layer of land-use bureaucracy on top of what’s already in place.
The consultants who were paid handsomely to put this together have failed miserably as have the environmental bureaucrats who incessantly piled more and more into an overzealous leading document. It’s perhaps worse than the U.S. tax code at this point.
What’s been accomplished by the HCP planning process is nothing – except, of course, a waste of taxpayer funds.
Getting out now is the best thing Gilroy’s City Council could have done. Morgan Hill and San Jose should do the same and force common sense back into the planning process.
