2/24/15
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors completed straw voting on the last remaining policies as part of the continuing General Plan Update process Monday, with the final items addressing issues relating to water resources and open space.
While completing the policy review portion of the process, the board still has to review several other sections of the General Plan, including the draft environmental impact statement and land use maps. The board is currently scheduled to finish the General Plan Update in late 2016.
The board began Monday’s meeting by revisiting the previously discussed topic of community separation.
The topic is defined in the draft General Plan as “open space areas between urban development areas that separate and preserve unique identities of the county’s cities and communities.”
The board straw voted on a set of policies, standards and a goal relating to community separation, with one of the standards identifying where the community separation areas are located. Two areas made the list after the vote — the McKay Tract Community Forest and forested hillside area in the McKinleyville Community Plan, which separates McKinleyville from the Fieldbrook-Glendale area. Many attendees, along with 3rd District Supervisor Mark Lovelace, wanted the open space area between Eureka and Arcata to also be included.
“While I appreciate that there is language that will help to implement that portion of the McKinleyville Community Plan, it’s not adding anything additional in other places where I have heard concerns from the community,” Lovelace said. “I think there is a lot more included in that concept than the two pieces that we’re talking about here.”
Fifth District Supervisor Ryan Sundberg said that excluding that area from the list will not cause it to be “zoned in such a way where you can’t tell when you go from one place to another.”
“We do not have this massive building and growth in Humboldt County. I think we lost people in the last census,” Sundberg said. “... It’s not a problem. We’re trying to fix problems that aren’t problems. I think that’s the fundamental difference between the two sides of this debate.”
Tina Christensen of the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights said that several structures in the area between Eureka and Arcata have a substandard water supply, and that the designation would hinder development to fix that issue.
“If there is a house on it, that house has a right to be there,” she said.
Sundberg said the designation of an area does not stop development.
“Community separator zones makes it so you have to conform to certain criteria, which makes it harder and more expensive. It doesn’t stop it though,” he said.
Others like Northcoast Environmental Center Executive Director Dan Ehresman said that he supports 2nd District Supervisor and board Chairwoman Estelle Fennell’s idea of allowing community members to weigh in on the topic at the upcoming land use mapping meetings.
“It is an incremental conversion of our open space land between our communities that I think is the problem,” Ehresman said. “I think it’s only fair to allow those community members to weigh in on that again.”
The board straw voted 4-1 — with Lovelace dissenting — to approve the standard with only the McKay Community Forest and McKinleyville forested hill being included on the community separation area list. Sundberg said that he is open to discussing whether there are more community separators that should be added.
“I don’t see this as being locked in, where we can’t change it at the end,” he said.
Community members will be able to address community separators at the upcoming mapping meetings starting in April.
The board also straw voted unanimously to approve a Water Resources Element implementation measure that calls for the board to “(p)repare an ordinance to provide enforcement capabilities for unpermitted development within critical watershed areas if the development impacts water resources” and “(w) ork with the State Departments of Water Resources and Fish and Game to address illegal water diversions and over-subscribed water right allocations.”
The original language, as recommended by the county planning commission, called for the ordinance to “provide increased enforcement capabilities,” but some supervisors had concerns that the word increased would call for more staffing and thus exceed the county’s financial capabilities.
Blue Lake resident Kent Sawatzky said he was “dismayed” at the recommendation, stating that the county has repeatedly expressed its concern over unpermitted development and its impacts on watersheds.
“Now we’re not willing to put any teeth into water at all,” he said.
Sundberg disagreed, stating that the change allows staff to determine what is feasible and what is not.
“I don’t think it’s taking teeth out of anything,” he said. “We’ve provided that latitude with the changes here.”
