Council charts new course for 2030 General Plan

“Paradigm shift.” That’s the term Chico Mayor Ann Schwab used during a marathon (six hours) joint City Council/Planning Commission afternoon workshop Tuesday (April 28) to describe what is happening with the city’s 2030 General Plan update.

She was right. The council, with the apparent backing of a majority of the Planning Commission, is making a dramatic break from the past, as was evident in the way it approached Tuesday’s discussion of key land-use and transportation policies.

How we grow and develop and how we get around town—these are fundamental issues any city faces, and the council’s position on them indicates it is prepared to move in new directions.

In this, the council is responding to the wishes of most of the people who participated in initial surveys and workshops to assess community priorities. As project consultants pointed out, there was widespread support for avoiding sprawl, emphasizing sustainability, creating “walkable” neighborhoods, decreasing auto dependency and fostering such transportation alternatives as bicycling and taking the bus.

These approaches are not without controversy, however, and Tuesday a number of speakers—along with Councilman Larry Wahl, who decried what he called “top-down planning”—warned that the council’s proposed policies were impractical in the marketplace and not what most people actually wanted.

At specific issue were seven key policy issues on which the Project Team, composed of city planning staffers and project consultants, was asking the council to provide guidance. They were: infill development, mixed-use development, ag-urban buffers, a concept called “complete streets,” a proposed inner-ring transit corridor, adjusting the “level of service” on city streets, and planned roadways to improve circulation.

With the possible exception of the ag-urban buffer zone, which was relatively noncontroversial, all these issues suggested major changes and were in many ways related to each other.

The emphasis on infill, for example, was significant because, to avoid sprawl, the plan’s preferred land-use alternative calls for building out undeveloped lots and redeveloping certain “opportunity areas” (by adding high-density residential units) along major transit corridors such as Mangrove and South Park avenues.

At the same time, the inner-ring transit corridor would be dependent on—and presumably foster—more high-density residential units along its route.

Another example: The “complete streets” concept—calling for streets to be designed not only for cars, but also for pedestrians, bicyclists and public transit—dovetails with the issue of level of service, or LOS.

Currently the LOS on Chico’s streets is based strictly on a driver’s need for speed. Whatever gets him or her across town as smoothly and fast as possible is ideal. But it’s hugely expensive to keep building wider roads—and not such a good deal for pedestrians, the environment and bicyclists.

Traffic consultant Jason Pack presented the council and commission with two alternatives. One, constraints-based traffic planning, bases the size and shape of roadways on a number of factors, beginning with how much money is available and including the need to accommodate other modes of travel. It could result in slower vehicle flows in some areas, but it also could save the city millions of dollars in construction costs that could be used for bike lanes, public transit and so forth.

The other alternative, the “cutting-edge” multi-modal planning, analyzes the LOS needed for each mode (cars, bikes, pedestrians) at each location. The council appeared to support a combination of the latter two approaches.

None of these proposed policies was without controversy. Builders don’t like the emphasis on higher densities, believing it will drive home buyers to places like Orland and Oroville, where they can buy houses with yards. And the business community—here represented by Jolene Francis, CEO of the Chico Chamber of Commerce—believes it’s important to keep traffic flowing smoothly.

But others argued that thousands of lots are already available for single-family homes, and the updated plan designates several new areas, such as Bell-Muir, for further low-density development. As for traffic, they argued that in the long term the plan will decrease car use by fostering alternatives, which is a much less expensive way to lessen congestion than building new roads.

It’s clear the council majority—every member except Wahl—has a vision of a new Chico, one that fosters alternatives to the automobile, creates compact growth, favors mixed uses, and generally tries to respond to the challenges posed by climate change and the decreasing availability of oil.

Council members, as well as planning commissioners, were generally supportive of the policies proposed by the Project Team and encouraged it to move forward in refining them.

This was the first of two general-plan policy workshops. The next, on May 13 from 2-7 p.m., will take up sustainability and economic-development policies. To see the planning staff’s report for Tuesday’s meeting, go to www.chicogeneralplan.com.