9/14/12

The video of Monday’s contentious general plan update meeting of the county board of supervisors is now available for viewing (here). If you have the time it’s well worth your while.

The original report on the meeting mentioned a handful of reasons offered by the board’s new conservative majority — Ryan Sundberg, Rex Bohn and Virginia Bass — for throwing the switch to derail the general plan update process, now in its 13th year. But as the full video reveals, over the course of the meeting this trio of supervisors suggested a wide variety of excuses for undoing much of the work that’s been done so far. Here are the ones we caught. (The relevant debate starts around the 84-minute mark.)

1. It’s too confusing
“I guess the more I look at this the more confused I get. … It’s super-overwhelming to me, I know, to try to go through this thing and understand it. The more I read it, it seems like, the more backwards I get. So [Bohn and I] met with [Interim Planning and Building Department Director] Martha [Spencer] to ask, is there a way we can bring this thing down to something digestible … basically take the [1984] framework plan, is what we talked about, and then making it up to state code[emphasis added].”

—Ryan Sundberg

“I wished I had the knowledge that, I mean, that Mark [Lovelace] had. He’s got to work on this for 12 years. I’d like to have some of that knowledge so maybe I’d have a little bit of understanding.”

—Rex Bohn

2. Though nearly complete, the updated plan might somehow cost more money than scrapping it and starting over
“I don’t know if we can afford the plan that’s here. I think we can afford a Yugo and I think we’re building a Cadillac sometimes with all the extra addendums and everything else when we just need to worry about the state and federal mandates.”

—Rex Bohn

3. Private property rights and values need more protection
“I made promises to people that I would protect their property rights and their property values, and I’ve got to stand by that. And if somebody up here can say that property rights and property values are gonna be held in whole when this gets through, I’ll vote for the whole thing right now and we can walk away from here, but I don’t think anybody can do that.”

—Rex Bohn

“Getting all this paper and documents at one time and trying to digest it and know what’s in it and be able to look somebody in the eyes at the end of this and say, ‘This is not going to affect your property rights. This is doing what we want it to do’ — I just don’t know how I can get there with this.”

—Ryan Sundberg

4. [?]
“We gotta start a new plan in a year anyway.”

—Rex Bohn

5. Someone might sue the county for reasons unknown
“I’m worried that at the end of this it’s gonna be sued, [though we’ll] probably get sued anyways.”

—Ryan Sundberg

“I don’t want to make it the lawyers’ full-employment plan.”

—Rex Bohn

6. The update and its supporting documents have too many pages
“This just is so big. I had a conversation with [former county supervisor] Jill [Duffy] this morning and asked, ‘How did this thing get this big?’ … Is there a way to pare it down to make it more understandable for me, for the general public, for people who are going to come in and get permits?”

—Ryan Sundberg

7. Despite holding more than 200 public meetings, the county didn’t give people in rural areas enough opportunity to comment
“The one thing I got out of so many meetings, there’s always somebody to get up and says, ‘You haven’t come at the citizens advisory committees.’ That pops up, and I’m just grabbing it ‘cause it’s in my notes in about three places. We heard from Mattole and Honeydew. They didn’t feel like they were included. … I don’t know what we did in Willow Creek, Orleans and the outside areas.”

—Rex Bohn

8. Virginia Bass’s vague sense of unease at fate’s unpredictability
“What my uncomfortableness at this point, especially when you, you know, we’re looking at the document, we have asked for so much information … but what I don’t have in there, and I have never really asked or we haven’t really been able to get to the bottom of, which really rises to my radar today is, again, the unintended consequences and my needing to have a level of confidence in moving forward.”

—Virginia Bass

9. No big government
“The level of governance — how much more bureaucracy are we throwing in on top of this?

—Rex Bohn

Members of staff, along with Supervisors Mark Lovelace and Clif Clendenen, attempted to address this dizzying barrage of complaints. Lovelace said breaking the plan up and addressing its individual elements piece by piece, as Sundberg suggested, would be impractical since the elements are all interrelated. Spencer added that breaking the process up would only make it longer and more complex, since each piece would require a separate environmental impact report. Addressing concerns over litigation, she said breaking the plan up would be far worse. “Your board is always subject to more litigation the more environmental documents we do.”

Read the Rest of This Article