New Growth Areas for Chico

Hearing January 8, 2002

The umpteenth round of "lets break the Chico General Plan" was before the public Tuesday, January 8, 2002. How the public, all residents impacted by decisions made by the Chico City Council, is allowed to address the issue is important since the Council has clearly limited discussion in hearings on the issue in the past three months. Previous Councils have received extensive public input on urban expansion through large advisory groups, neighborhood meeting, and extensive hearings with an open floor for the public.

It's sort of a long story, but here is how it developed.

First a community works long and hard with all interests represented over three years to reach a visionary plan that was adopted unanimously by the Council in 1994. Property owners, developers, environmental groups, lawyers, planners, bankers, and elected officials spend thousands of hours to reach consensus that carefully balances all the issues at stake when you are planning to allow Chico's population to grow from 80,000 to 134,000. Housing patterns worked with retail centers, transit lines, roads, jobs, parks, and civic sites. When it was done, the plan was hailed by everyone as a model for responsible growth and livable neighborhoods. It won a 1995 Ahwahnee Design Award from the Local Government Commission and an award of merit by the California chapter of the American Planning Association.

Then the games began. The object has been to convince subsequent City Council's to destroy the old plan and go back to the shoddy development patters that blight every two-bit suburb. The winners are one interest group, the Building Industry Association's 75 members, who funded the campaigns of four Council members: Bertagna, Herbert, Keene, and Wahl. It is a lot easier to break the Plan if the people who are elected to defend the public good have stopped thinking or caring about how hard it was to create the Chico General Plan and how much it matters to protect it for the benefit of not just 75 people, but the whole community and the region.

Though the BIA members and Jim Mann, who serves the dual role as BIA manager and consultant for many BIA members, have the most to gain financially from City Council decisions, a larger ethic and vision needs to guide the Council's debate and conclusions regarding expanding Chico's land base. It is time that this minuscule minority of men, with deep financial interests in directing community expansion, cease to direct majority action by the Council. A community is so much more than houses and streets designed one way for one class of people.

A flourishing community requires cultivation just as produce on a farm does, but is doesn't require growth. Growth in a mature city can create in community what it creates in a mature human being: cancer. Growth is an increase in physical size while cultivation is an increase in quality and opportunity. BEC and its 800 members suggest that we need to cultivate our assets and not loosen Chico's belt to allow for a fatter belly. There are many other groups that also hold to this philosophy. Please read some thoughts in the sidebar from the American Farmland Trust on the need for smarter community planning. And don't forget to attend the meeting on January 8th!

Smart Growth Versus Sprawl in California:

How State and Local Public Policies Perpetuate Inefficient Development in the World's Most Productive Agricultural Valleys By American Farmland Trust Executive Summary excerpts

Local policies that most significantly promote sprawl include: failure to implement general land use plans; a preponderance of low-density zoning; subdivision standards that waste land; siting of schools and other public facilities at remote locations; and development fees that fail to reflect the public service cost differences between sprawl and smart growth.

Based on these findings, American Farmland Trust concludes that the state, regional and local policy bias in favor of sprawl in California is so systemic that only comprehensive policy reform can remove the obstacles to smart growth and lead to more efficient land use. Accompanying policy reform must be a fair test of consumer housing and commercial development preferences in the marketplace. AFT recommends the following initial steps toward meaningful policy reform:

  • Adopt local general plans that favor more efficient development and enforce them in the zoning and development permitting process. Build efficiency into zoning and subdivision standards by permitting greater flexibility in housing configuration, set backs and street widths.
  • Reinforce general plans by appropriately siting public facilities and making infrastructure investments that encourage efficient development patterns.
  • Remove artificial financial obstacles to smart growth by immediately reducing development fees on compact housing and eventually adjusting entire local fee structures to reflect higher costs of sprawl.
  • Study reforms of local government finance that could ameliorate the pressure on them to attract development - any development - as a "cash cow."
  • Study mechanisms for greater regional cooperation in land use policymaking to avoid competition that leads to sprawl. Study reforms of electricity and other utility rate structures that could take advantage of the cost savings of smart growth patterns.
  • Put smart growth to a fair market test with pilot projects that guarantee developers a reasonable rate of return if they build more efficient housing and commercial projects.

http://www.farmland.org/cfl/centvalleyexec.htm

This column originally appeared in January 2002 in the Chico Examiner.