EDITORIAL: Placer’s Turning Point?: County to Seek a 50-Year Growth Plan
By The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Jan. 27–Placer County may just pull this off. It is seeking a new way of planning, growing and preserving never before seen in this region.
County supervisors, in a unanimous fashion that few observers were predicting (certainly not us), agreed to a tentative map that shows where future growth will occur and where it may not. The map becomes a starting point for negotiations with state and federal wildlife officials to craft a final deal, known as a conservation plan. In short, if the map preserves enough vernal pools, oak woodlands and scenic open spaces, the agencies will essentially pre- approve development within the growth zone. Environmental compliance would no longer be a piecemeal process. It would largely be settled for a half-century. But is it truly possible? One can only hope.
In watching the politics unfold in recent weeks, several powerful forces were grinding against each other like tectonic plates. There were the builders who would love a streamlined approval process but couldn’t draw a map that showed growth would ever stop. There were property rights advocates such as Supervisor Bruce Kranz, who questioned government’s role in open-space preservation. There were preservation advocates such as Supervisor Robert Weygandt, who championed an active role of government in sketching Placer’s future. There were big landowners such as the Tsakopoulos family, who wanted more of its holdings in the growth zone. There were small landowners in the oak woodlands who felt likewise. Yet there were large and important institutions, from the Placer County Water Agency to the Sacramento Area Council of Governments to the city of Lincoln, urging the board to try to succeed.
The board’s tentative growth and preservation map is almost certainly not the final one. To keep the process going, the board may have drawn a bigger growth zone around Lincoln and south of Roseville, for two examples, than the wildlife agencies can likely swallow. That’s OK. What this process needed was a unanimous board and a sound starting point for the environmental analysis.
Now, the process needs three things to happen. The two supervisors who were picked to take the lead, Weygandt and Kirk Uhler, must work well as a team. The wildlife agencies, most notably the Army Corps of Engineers (it has jurisdiction over wetlands and vernal pools), must commit to a streamlined approval process based on a sound growth and preservation map. And the many players must be prepared for a compromise that works. This is a huge challenge. But for Placer County to try is a testament to its leaders and their courage to change.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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