Environmental groups seek tougher development restrictions on
county land with ballot measure
Gilroy – A coalition of environmental groups backing tougher development restrictions on county land appears to have gathered nearly double the amount of support it needs to qualify an initiative for the November ballot.
Surrounded by a few reporters and television camera crews Monday, the People for Land and Nature, a group based in Palo Alto, submitted a petition with 62,000 signatures to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. Leaders of the initiative are confident they have the 36,040 valid signatures required to get the initiative on the ballot.
If certified, the 28-page initiative would ask county voters to approve a sweeping set of restrictions on development of county farms, ranches and hillsides.
Most noticeably, it would reduce the number of homes that property owners can build on hillsides and ranchlands. County regulations now limit development to one home for every 160 acres of land in both categories, unless a property owner is willing to cluster the homes in a particular area. In such cases, the county relies on a complex formula that allows as many as one house for every 20 acres on land with minimal inclines.
The PLAN initiative would raise that baseline to 40 acres for hillside property and would eliminate the sliding scale for ranchlands, allowing only one home to be built on every 160 acres.
“It’s really trying to strike a balance between our rural cities and towns and our urban areas, in saying that we don’t want sprawl development to continue to replace our farmlands, ranchlands and hillsides,” said Michele Beasley, the South Bay representative for the Greenbelt Alliance, a sponsor of the initiative.
But the effort and its backers overstate the threat of sprawl and, in the process, will end up hurting a way of life they seek to protect, according to Jenny Derry, the county’s farm bureau director.
“There have only been 700 houses built in all of Santa Clara County’s unincorporated lands in the last 10 years,” Derry said. “That’s 70 per year. I don’t think anyone would call that rampant growth.”
The initiative does not change the baseline requirement of one home per 40 acres on farmland, but it calls for all agriculture-related buildings, including worker housing, to lie as close as possible to a three-acre area set aside for buildings. It also caps the footprint of new buildings at 2 percent of the parcel’s size or 20,000 square feet, whichever is less.
“It will make it hard for farmers and ranchers to expand their facilities to keep up with the times,” Derry said. “Agriculture is a changing industry and we have to make it easier for them to adapt.”
Derry is a member of the Alliance for Housing and the Environment, a group of farmers, property owners and Realtors opposing efforts to restrict land use through the ballot. In recent days, the group has started holding public events to criticize the initiative.
In addition to straight-jacketing farmers, they claim the initiative would reduce property values and erode the tax base of a county facing a $160 million deficit.
“Property values are affected by many different things, including the scenic beauty of the area,” Beasley responded. “When you’re protecting an area from harmful development, that’s a good thing for property values. I think that argument can be seen from both sides.”
In addition to restrictions on residential and commercial development, the initiative includes a range of clauses that would also:
n place greater restrictions on development within 150 foot of county streams
n limit wood-cutting for firewood to 20 percent of trees on any parcel in a 10-year period
n ban hunting
But the most important change, Derry said, centers on the “philosophical question” of how to conduct land-use planning. She said the PLAN initiative would undo the work of countless city councils, planning commissions and citizen advisory groups that have crafted land-use plans in recent years.
“This is considered a very restrictive and stringent application of land use law and probably the most distressing part of it is that you will not be able to make a change without going back to the ballot,” Derry said. “It is a bit of a philosophical question, because if you believe land-use planning is best done out in the open – with a public process, an environmental impact report and public scrutiny. If you believe that’s a good way to create land-use policy, you would want things to stay as they are now.”
The public decision-making process inspires less faith in Brian Schmidt, the local representative for the Committee for Green Foothills, an environmental group that helped write the initiative.
“You could not have something that involves more public participation than what we’re doing right now,” Schmidt said. “Those smaller (government) meetings tend to be hijacked by people with a direct commercial interest in the property. They tend to be crawling with people looking at these broader plans and looking at how they can make money off of them.”
