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An all-purpose approach to land-use designations in Calaveras County will not work, a Board of Supervisors majority agreed in a Tuesday study session on the county’s General Plan update. Supervisors conducted their first review of a draft land-use map that, in its final form, will be included in the planning document. That document will guide development through 2035 in the county. Supervisors Tom Tryon, Gary Tofanelli and Steve Wilensky agreed land use designations for areas like Valley Springs and Copperopolis — where “the horse is already out of the barn,” they said, in terms of approved residential growth — ought to differ from the eastern Highway 4 corridor and the sparsely populated and heavily forested Blue Mountain region. “I worry that we’re trying to be too formulaic,” Wilensky said. “I think there’s use for (different) concepts and I’d hate to see them mutually exclusive.” “I don’t think one size is going to fit all here,” Tofanelli said. “The west end of the county has been allowed to develop where a lot of people have spent their life savings” on land they hope to develop in the future. Supervisor Merita Callaway, meanwhile, expressed some skepticism about not reining in some of the west-end growth. “Are you suggesting if the horse is already out of the barn, we should let it gallop around everywhere?” she asked. Supervisor Darren Spellman was not present for Tuesday’s meeting. Tryon dominated the discussion, first seeking assurance that further development of “rural ranchettes” on 5-, 10- and 20-acre parcels will not be expanded. Planning Director Rebecca Willis said very few additional designations of that type are included, while “calling a spade a spade” in recognizing ones that already exist. Tryon followed up with criticism regarding a plan to implement “clustering” on lands designated for “resource production,” such as agriculture, mining and forestry. Though an advocate of the general concept of clustering, a planning method that allows multiple homes to be packed together densely on a large land parcel, Tryon said as laid out on Tuesday, the concept appears destined to exacerbate “rural sprawl.” A presentation by Willis showed an example of a 320-acre ranch. Under current code, it could be divided into eight 40-acre parcels. Using clustering, it could be split into eight five-acre lots with a remaining 280-acre working ranch. The goal of the concept is to preserve agricultural land while making farming more economically viable and reducing impact on county services. A skeptical Tryon said the owner of the 280-acre remainder is likely to want to split again, further taxing county roads and infrastructure without bringing in additional revenue. “They’ll say I want to take my 280-acre parcel and do (further) clustering,” Tryon said. “You can say, ‘We’ll put some kind of zoning on your 280 acres (to prevent that).’ But it’s very hard to maintain that. To me, the answer quite frankly is a larger minimum parcel size.” Current county code calls for parcels of 40 acres or less to be connected to public water and sewer systems. Tryon suggested that limit be upped to 100 acres. He also advocated for large parcels to be prescribed around existing community centers so that those areas can grow outward without quickly bumping into rural ranchette-style development. “You can’t do fives or 10s or 20s,” he said, referring to minimum-acreage parcel sizes under certain land use designations. “They’re not big enough to pay for the community centers to expand. Expansion is going to come. The big question is how we’re going to accommodate it.” “If the point of this is to get the development on infrastructure in community centers and have the remainder as open space for agriculture,” he added, “you’re not going to do a lot for agriculture on 5s, 10s and 20s.” Tryon pointed to an agenda item earlier in the day, in which the board approved more than $2 million in bridge improvements on remote Hawver Road to improve emergency access to a neighborhood often cut off by flooding. “The simple reality is if we’re going to do the rural sprawl, we’re going to have to subsidize it,” he said. “Now it’s the public treasury that pays and will continue to pay if we don’t develop the infrastructure.” He added that residential development rarely pays its own way, as evidenced by a boom in the last decade that left the county hundreds of millions of dollars deficient in roads and other infrastructure improvements. Copperopolis has growth to as many as 40,000 residents already on the books, he said. He also pointed to estimates Willis made in an earlier General Plan study session, that the current General Plan would allow for growth to 200,000 to 400,000 people, with woefully inadequate infrastructure to serve the population. “You’d better make Highway 4 a four-lane highway, and Highways 12 and 26, too, while you’re at it,” Tryon said. “We need to be realistic in how many parcels we think we’re going to create and how many parcels we think are going to be built on.” A second draft of the land use map is expected to be released next month. |