Holding the line

Metaphorically speaking, the Greenline is the third rail of Butte County politics.

“Everybody loves the Greenline,” said Jane Dolan, the former longtime Butte County supervisor commonly credited with leading the effort to codify the line.

But hers was a nuanced statement. Dolan went on to say that a boundary protecting agricultural land from urban development may be universally championed, but the question for those who claim to support it is whether they support the demarcation as it currently stands.

“Which Greenline do you support?” she asked, rhetorically.

So far, 30 years after Dolan and two of her colleagues on the Butte County Board of Supervisors voted to establish the boundary, the line has held. Farmlands to the west of Chico remain planted in orchards and row crops, not paved over with cul-de-sacs like the ones that swallowed up the fertile fields of cities such as Stockton and San Jose.

“We have some of the most productive ag land in the world, so that’s what it should be,” said Dolan, who regularly walks areas along its border.

Today, the Greenline is the same line that was put into place on July 21, 1982.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of that vote, perhaps it goes without saying that Dolan, undoubtedly the boundary’s biggest defender, wants it to stay that way. After all, it is a significant part of her legacy as a public servant. Mitigating urban sprawl was the platform that launched her 32-year career representing District 2, one of two Chico districts and arguably the richest in terms of agricultural value.

Dolan first ran for a seat on the five-member Board of Supervisors in response to seeing Butte County’s “anything-goes” development in unincorporated farmlands just outside of Chico. Back then, in the early ’70s, while on the city’s Planning Commission, she became increasingly frustrated by the construction of subdivisions without proper infrastructure, traffic circulation and county services, among other things. She encouraged the Board of Supervisors to work with the commission to protect the agricultural heritage of the region.

But the supervisors, she said, had no interest in cooperating with the city.

Dolan lost her initial bid for the 2nd District seat in 1974, but she unseated Bernie Richter, a former high-school civics teacher, four years later. Richter made the mistake of saying he favored ag-land protections and then turning around and supporting a rezone that led to the construction of a west-side subdivision called Big Chico Creek Estates in an area of prime ag land along West Sacramento Avenue.

On the panel, Dolan, just 29 when she took her seat in January 1979, was viewed as an interloper. She was on the losing end of so many 4-1 votes that her softball team issued her a three-digit jersey—421. The running joke aside, her early years on the panel were rough. She endured the poor decorum of her colleagues, some of whom referred to her as “supervisorette.”

“I sort of rattled the good-old-boy system, frankly,” she said.

Even the local daily paper, the Chico Enterprise-Record, referred to her as a co-ed. “They called me a girl,” she recalled.

Dolan made a concerted effort to publicize the goings-on of the board. She recalled when one of her colleagues, District 5 Supervisor Bob Lemke, asked her why she would do so. “Because we’re public officials and people should know and be able to participate,” she responded.

In that setting, getting the three needed votes for the proposed zoning restriction wouldn’t come easy or quickly. But the tide began to turn when Len Fulton, a writer and publisher, was appointed to the panel by then-first-time Gov. Jerry Brown after the death of Lemke in 1981. Dolan called the late Fulton a remarkable person—“smart, caring and diligent.”

The two didn’t agree on everything, but Fulton supported the idea of the Greenline, giving the proposal a second voice of support from the dais.

About four years after Dolan earned a spot on the board, including 18 months of public hearings and compromises on the matter, the Greenline went to a vote of the full board. By this time, the boundary was backed by an “unlikely alliance” of environmentalists, farmers and even some developers, the latter of whom wanted to know where they could build.

For her part, while Dolan’s political-party affiliation was well known because of her relationship with her now-husband, Bob Mulholland, then a very active state Democratic Party adviser, she pointed out that the Board of Supervisors is a nonpartisan body and that the board should operate as such.

Dolan’s name is practically synonymous with the Greenline, but she noted that many people were involved in the effort to establish it. “I think I was a voice, but it came about because of a lot of coalitions,” she said during a recent sit-down interview.

The proposal passed during a split vote. Hilda Wheeler, the other Chico supervisor, was the swing vote. Al Saraceni and Bertha Moseley, supervisors for District 1 and District 4, respectively, dissented. To this day, Dolan thinks Wheeler supported the Greenline only because it was an election year and the plan had become a pivotal campaign issue.

Fast-forward 30 years. Dolan believes the boundary is more important than ever and that support for it, regardless of political leanings, is solid. (She pointed out that farm-land conservation was a campaign point during District 1 Supervisor Bill Connelly’s recent successful bid for re-election.)

But Dolan is no longer on the Board of Supervisors. She lost her seat to Larry Wahl, a conservative former Chico city councilman, in 2010. Weeks later, a local land owner addressed the City Council and Planning Commission during a joint general plan update meeting, asking that the city annex his south-Chico property so he could develop it. The panels eventually agreed to include the site, the Estes Road region, as an “area of study” (see Tom Gascoyne’s story, page 20). So far, however, the properties there remain outside of the Greenline, and thus undeveloped.

Contacted by telephone this week, Wahl said he currently has no plans of changing the Greenline. His thoughts in general on the subject were relatively supportive: “[The Greenline] is a nice delineation between urban and ag,” he said. “It seems to have done what it was designed to do.”

Wahl did say that there are places along the Greenline in Supervisor Steve Lambert’s southern Butte County District 4 where the boundary is “oddly structured.”

He said none of his constituents has contacted him with complaints about the boundary. “If somebody brings something forward, I will listen to anything,” he added.

An admitted workaholic, Dolan has moved on from her political life. She keeps busy with her real-estate-appraisal business and serving as executive director of the Sacramento River Conservation Area Forum. And in December, Gov. Brown appointed her to the Central Valley Flood Protection Board.

Still, she is not completely without worry when it comes to keeping the Greenline sacrosanct. Her hope is that her former colleague and ally, Chico’s District 3 Supervisor Maureen Kirk, now the panel’s lone progressive, will be able to staunch any attempts to change it. She called Kirk amazing, but also said her job is certainly more complicated these days.

“I feel like Maureen is alone, and it’s very difficult to be alone,” she said, speaking from experience.

Even still, Dolan said she’s fairly confident the Greenline will remain untouched. Ag-land preservation continues to be a priority for the community, and then there’s that third-rail effect.

“No one is going to say, ‘Let’s change the Greenline,’” Dolan said.

And if anyone does, they are in for some serious pushback.

“They’re not going to do it in secret, and not going to do it easily,” she said.