BEC tackles general plan

“It’s kind of hard balancing advocacy and being polite,” Butte Environmental Council advocacy consultant Nani Teves said half to herself, taking a moment before addressing a small group of concerned citizens and a pair of Butte County representatives.

Teves and other speakers kept their passions largely subdued and the discourse congenial at a public information forum on proposed changes to the Butte County General Plan, new zoning ordinances and their environmental impacts. The event was hosted by the BEC on Tuesday (June 26) at the GRUB Cooperative on Dayton Road.

It started with an informational session on the Butte County General Plan 2030 by two county representatives: Tim Snellings, director of development services, and Dan Breedon, principal planner. Snellings explained the new general plan was adopted in October 2010, the first change in several decades. Work on a new plan began as early as 2006, and since its adoption it has undergone several changes with more proposed in the General Plan Amendment.

Snellings said the Butte County General Plan 2030 is the result of hundreds of meetings and public input, as are the related Final Draft Zoning Ordinance and Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Report (DSEIR). All three documents are in the last stages of review before being adopted by the county board of directors.

Snellings and Breedon focused largely on the more positive aspects of the general plan, including a focus on sustainability and developing wind and solar power, and streamlined resource mitigation through coordinating with the Butte Habitat Conservation Plan.

“Speaking as a planner,” Breedon said, “we’re taking a huge step into the 21st century in protecting our creeks and rivers and wetlands.”

Several audience members expressed concern with plans to rezone some agricultural lands and forested foothill communities to low-population residential areas, not only taking away agricultural land but spreading the population wider, hypothetically creating more cars and pollution as there are no existing services in these areas.

“The amendment process isn’t being used correctly if it’s not just for corrections and community concerns,” Nani rebutted while presenting a brief outline of BEC’s complaints. “You mentioned many of the good changes that have been made in the last two years, but there are also many that are landowner and developer driven rather than policy driven. There have been some good efforts in the last two years but there’s also some that reduce agriculture, farmland and resource-conservation areas.”

A hot topic for the night was a proposed change to the Greenline, an imaginary boundary set up 30 years ago to protect agricultural lands from urban sprawl.

The new zoning map converts 150 acres in the Bell Muir area of the Greenline to low residential areas, allowing these areas to be parceled into smaller lots primed for development.

“The Bell Muir area is unique, and the original plan even mentions that its Greenline status should be looked at in the future,” Breedon said. “There have been and will likely continue to be many, many challenges to the Greenline and they all failed, except in this one small, unique area.”

BEC members and others also expressed concern over two particularly large developments already considered done deals—Paradise Summit and Tuscan Ridge. The overall thrust was not about particular developments as much as setting dangerous precedents for future developers.

“Of course we realize this development won’t start right away, but we just don’t want to leave ourselves open to overdevelopment in the future,” BEC Executive Director Robyn DiFalco said. “If everything were built to its full potential as it’s currently zoned, that would be far more development than we’d like to see in 20 years.

“We don’t want to end up looking like Tracy or San Jose at any point.”