8 years of general plan contention
Simple process suddenly got very
complicated

Monterey County Herald
Posted on May 7, 2007

By LARRY PARSONS

The Y2K scare passed long before Monterey County's GPU uproar.
The worldwide fear of how billions of computer chips would weather the change of millennia on Dec. 31, 1999, seems like ancient history now.

But by 2000, the county's still-boiling battle royal over a new general plan was already out of its infancy, as county staff members were readying the first draft of the rural growth blueprint.

While the Y2K crisis passed with nary a blown microchip, the general plan update — known as GPU in county government parlance — has created a longer, still-unfolding legacy. It's a history marked by towers of paperwork, heated rhetoric, legal and political fire fights, and a polarized community gunning for a June 5 plebiscite on county growth.

In 2005, one exasperated county official likened the divisive general plan process to being "pecked to death by ducks."

Six years earlier, a crack team of county administrators and planners predicted they would produce a world-class blueprint for future growth within 18 months.

That, of course, didn't happen.

But what did?

Monterey County officials, as early as 1998, knew they needed a new road map — the general plan — to set the basic rules for development in rural areas.

The 1982 plan had been changed more than 70 times, creating confusion, debate and often, litigation, whenever a major land-use project for unincorporated land came before the county Board of Supervisors.

"The county was at a crossroads," said Jared Ikeda, a former member of the general plan team now working as a private consultant on Marin County's new general plan. Virtually every project in hot-spot areas like Carmel Valley, North County or the Toro corridor devolved into red-faced arguments over water supplies, traffic congestion and affordable housing. With the Silicon Valley dot-com boom still blooming, the county seemed poised for even more growth pressure.

"It was the appropriate time," Ikeda said. "There had been a lot of random growth."

County supervisors were frustrated.

They wanted a new general plan that would give them "a clear framework for what was allowed and what was not allowed, so they were not constantly caught in the middle," said Jim Colangelo, a former assistant county administrator and now city manager of Pacific Grove.

New executive

Soon supervisors hired Sally Reed, a former top administrator in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, as the county's top executive. Reed knew producing a new general plan was a top priority.

She didn't want a simple update of the patchwork 1982 plan. Reed wanted the county to produce a new general plan that would be "a model for the state of California." And she shifted the job of writing it from the planning department and put together a special general plan team in her office.

Team members went on the road, holding a series of meetings throughout the county where they heard complaints from residents about a raft of growth-related problems.

"We just got blasted from the public," said Annette Chaplin, who managed the general plan team for four years. "The anti-development sentiment was very strong."

Anti-growth feelings were especially strong in Carmel Valley and North County, while residents of the southern Salinas Valley were angry about low levels of county services. "At that point, the belief was we had to use the plan to solve the problems," Chaplin said.

She said a weak reprise of the 1982 plan would give the county the same framework it already had — a launching pad "for a fight on every issue."

In the early days, the general plan team didn't hear from a broad cross-section of the public. Those early meetings bristled with people who were fed up with development, with traffic congestion on country roads and with their wells going dry.

Those on the other side of the looming debate — except for a few land-use lawyers who monitored the early developments — were largely absent from those initial meetings.

As a result, the firestorm that erupted after the first draft of the new general plan — GPU1 — came out in early 2002 caught even its authors by surprise.


Battle lines drawn

The factions quickly solidified.

Environmentalists and rural community activists liked the tight-growth policies in GPU1. Farmers, business people, rural property owners, developers and others saw the document as the possible ruin of property rights and the county's future development.

GPU1 called for rural growth near existing urban areas and tight — very tight — restrictions on rural development outside designated growth areas. It forbade any new rural subdivisions with lots smaller than 40 acres beyond the growth areas.

Colangelo said GPU1 was based on the belief that cities are in a better position to allow development than counties, especially a county as far-flung as Monterey County. Cities more easily provide services needed by residents of new homes and operators of new stores and factories, he said.

But that argument fell by the wayside in what degenerated into "an environmental-vs.-business community" faceoff, he said.

Reed couldn't believe how deeply the divisions ran.

"I learned the hard way that, in many ways, this is two counties. The Salinas Valley with its ag areas is still looking to grow, while the Peninsula has very, very strong views on how to protect the beauty of the area," Reed said. "Compromise is tough in this community."

Compromise, consensus, agreement are things that aren't part of the general plan history.

Former county Supervisor Judy Pennycook worked on both the 1982 general plan as a community activist and on the new general plan as a supervisor. She hoped a new plan would be finished by the time she left office in 2002.

But the community had become so divided that the second draft plan — GPU2 — released in the spring of
2003 failed to satisfy anyone. In frustration, supervisors that summer appointed representatives of virtually every interest group in the debate to an advisory group. Their task: work out compromises on hot-button issues among themselves.

"There has been so much factioning and fractioning that it's taken its toll on the process," Pennycook said. "Is there a happy medium? I don't know if there is anymore."

The group, named the Refinement Group, failed to agree on anything, including how to reach agreement.

"Both sides seemed unwilling to give a little," Reed said.

By then, both sides already embarked on writing their own versions of the general plan.

A coalition of business, real estate, labor, agriculture and housing advocates retained the name, the Refinement Group. They produced a plan that very much affected the GPU4 plan eventually approved by supervisors in January.

Slow-growth advocates held their own meetings throughout the county and drafted a restrictive-growth plan that morphed into the general plan initiative, or GPI.

In March 2004, Gary Patton, then executive director of the slow-growth group LandWatch, predicted the general plan battle was headed for an election.

Two months later, his prediction came true.

In a critical showdown, the supervisors, on a 3-2 vote, with former Supervisor Edith Johnsen joining a majority aligned with the increasingly vocal business-and-agricultural alliance, scrapped the third draft plan, GPU3.

The agricultural community had lobbied hard against GPU3, Johnsen said. "They put a lot of pressure on the board," she said. Johnsen said she voted to change directions because the votes weren't there to pass GPU3. "Something was wrong with the product," she said.

"It was pure power politics," Chaplin said.

The supervisors went on to dissolve the general plan team, which had come under increasingly personal attacks for having alleged environmental biases, and ordered the county planning department to revise the
1982 plan.

The original vision of creating a bold, new general plan that would be a model for the state became a laborious rewrite job.

That process, which was virtually boycotted by many GPI supporters, finally ended in January, when supervisors voted 4-1 to approve GPU4.


Battles ahead

The past, they say, is prelude to the future. And the turbulent history of the county's general plan battle doesn't presage peace suddenly breaking out once the returns are counted from the June 5 election showdown between GPU4 and the GPI.

Litigation over GPU4 already is pending. There promises to be a lot more work for the lawyers after the election.

"Whatever the outcome there will probably be more litigation, unless people come together," Reed said.

Johnsen said, "This is not the end of the eight-year process."

Pennycook said the general plan battle, in some form, will continue. "I figure another six years," she said.


Larry Parsons can be reached at 646-4379 or lparsons@montereyherald.com.