President’s Column
September 2004
The General Plan Update: What nobody seems to know and what should have been done that wasn’t.
I participated in the deliberative sessions last spring to help create sketch plans as concepts for updating the Humboldt County General Plan for the next twenty years. The plans ranged from no change to expansive growth to “city centered” growth. RRAS favors Sketch Plan Three’s (SP3) concept of concentrating growth within existing urban areas and utility districts that provide water and sewer. SP3 appears to have the best chance of preserving open space and working agricultural and forest lands near the edges of urban areas.
I attended most of the Board of Supervisor’s workshop on August 24 and listened to presentations by “Healthy Humboldt” “HELP” (Humboldt Economic and Land Plan), The Farm Bureau and the Humboldt Realtor’s Association and North Coast Builders. The presentations represented different points of view. There were even differing opinions among speakers in the same organizations.
As usual, the shared concerns were more interesting than the predictable differences. All of the presentations that I heard had strong and weak points and focused on the need to increase our affordable housing stock and preserve the viability of our agricultural land, timber land, and open space. What nobody seemed to know was the actual amount of buildable land available for housing. Richard Dorn’s presentation accurately described a recent survey that indicated only about half of the land zoned for housing is actually buildable. Some of the restrictions are due to policies and laws that Audubon and other conservation organizations have fought for. Other land is just too steep or unstable to build on.
One of the speakers with the Farm Bureau group emphasized the need to re-combine lots of record in rural areas to preserve farm, ranch and timberland integrity. He asserted that, although the law allows such action, the county has not proceeded with it.
The two most important things that I got out of this workshop were:
The amount of land for housing must be verified before any planning concept can be seriously considered.
Re-combining of rural lots of record should be part of the Updated General Plan.
To find out more about the General Plan Update process got to www.helphumboldtplan.org
A good environment for people is a good environment for birds.