The Los Alamos Planning Advisory Committee has launched a series of 10 community meetings designed to help develop an update of the town's general plan.

Monday night, only the second official gathering of the LAPAC occurred at the Los Alamos Senior Center. The next meeting is set for

7 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Senior Center.

Santa Barbara County Planning Department officials gave an overview of the community and its general plan document, which was created in 1994.

The county staff presentation included statistics on the 606 acres that make up the Los Alamos general plan area. The town, with a population of 1,372 as of the 2000 census, is populated mostly by young families, with only 6 percent of residents actually working in Los Alamos. The rest commute an average of 30 minutes to surrounding urban areas.

Many of the dozen community members who attended the meeting raised concerns about the pending Los Alamos Commons housing project, the biggest and most controversial of the 17 development proposals currently in the county process for the town.

The Commons project would build 196 new homes, 55,750 square feet of commercial space and 50,000 square feet of self storage on agriculturally zoned land just to the northwest of Los Alamos' current urban boundary.

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“Discussing whether or not to expand that boundary to annex the property will probably take some time,” predicted Steven Petersen, the county planning representative to the LAPAC.

A provision in the 1994 general plan says the urban boundary of the town's general plan cannot be expanded unless it occurs as part of an update.

“Kicking off the community plan update process, staff will just provide information to LAPAC and the public about what's the current status of the community? What's the population? What's the growth situation? We're setting the stage for the talk,” said Petersen.

Glenn Wallace can be reached at 688-5522, Ext. 6007 or gwallace@santamariatimes.com

Nov. 10, 2006