Newsbriefs

Supes Stall, Voters May Approve GPU

Monterey County Weekly
Posted on December 15, 2005

By Raul Vasquez | Jessica Lyons

We’re going to try really, really hard to avoid the easy, Christmas-came-early-to-Monterey-County-voters joke. On Dec. 12, County Supervisor Dave Potter and a couple dozen community members submitted 15,793 signatures—gift wrapped, with big red bows—to qualify the “Community General Plan” initiative for the June 2006 ballot.

Later in the day, County Supervisors would spend about four hours deliberating the six-year-in-the-making county general plan.
Potter is the only member of the Board of Supervisors to endorse the general plan initiative, and he was the first to sign a petition about a month ago.

The initiative would concentrate growth in the cities and five designated “community areas,” increase affordable housing requirements, and require a countywide election to approve any new subdivision that’s not located in one of the designated areas.

As Potter pointed out at the Dec. 12 event, this is not a no-growth plan. Currently, 15,000 new homes have already been approved and an additional 49,000 new homes are in the pipeline. None of these will be affected by the general plan initiative.

Jane Parker, associate director of the ACTION Council of Monterey County who has said she will challenge Supervisor Jerry Smith when he’s up for reelection in three years, feels the fact that the signature gatherers were able to collect more than 15,000 signatures in a fraction of the time allowed (they had up to 180 days) shows that voters are fed up with a lack of leadership from the County Supervisors.

“For so long, land-use decisions have been made in an ad hoc way without really taking into consideration the future consequences of the decisions,” Parker says. “The public sees that. This initiative says there are places where we should grow and there are places where we shouldn’t. People have been trying for six years to participate in the public process and help the Board of Supervisors do their job, and approve a general plan, but the board doesn’t want to listen.” [JL]