Deborah Brasket/Looking Forward | Posted: Friday, September 26, 2008 12:00 am
Last week, the Santa Maria City Council approved a plan for development at Mahoney Ranch South, next to Tanglewood, in a remote rural area on Black Road.
At a hearing on Sept. 16, SB CAN and the Santa Maria Community Coalition pointed out that the final environmental impact report (EIR) was grossly inadequate, and inconsistent with several city General Plan goals. A summary of our concerns follows:
This plan is a prime example of leapfrog development and urban sprawl. It locates a residential development of 1,430 residential units, for potentially 5,000 people, in a rural, isolated area on prime agricultural land at the furthermost boundary of the city, miles away from the nearest public services and facilities.
Development should always be built closer to the core of the population, in order to maintain a compact, vibrant, energy-efficient city.
This plan advocates the urbanization of a rural, agricultural area by removing 318 acres of prime, unique farmland and grazing land from agricultural production. Yet, no appropriate measures and mitigations were incorporated into the plan that would compensate for this loss or discourage further conversions of agricultural lands to urban use.
Since the city of Santa Maria is surrounded by prime agricultural lands, it must adopt agricultural mitigation requirements and permanent farmland easements to mitigate any loss of agricultural lands that are developed.
This plan, if developed, will necessitate many thousands of round-trip commutes daily, increasing greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution to a level the EIR recognizes cannot be mitigated. Yet, the EIR fails to adequately address these impacts, completely ignoring issues of greenhouse-gas emissions and global climate change.
To push through this project now, in such a remote area, promoting urban sprawl and increased traffic, is irresponsible.
Santa Maria is short on jobs and long on housing. We need to stop developing housing until we have enough high-wage jobs to support our current population, let alone new growth.
We are in the midst of a huge housing slump, and the city of Santa Maria is one of the worst-hit areas, with hundreds of homes foreclosing or being threatened with foreclosure.
Santa Maria should not be content to be a bedroom community for its sister cities.
The remote location of this project greatly increases the cost of providing regular municipal services. Distance and time factors place added burdens on police, fire and emergency service responders, stretching the city coverage areas with increased calls for service.
While the plan calls for building an on-site fire station, it does not mitigate increased police and public transportation services. The developer fees generated by this project will never be enough to offset needs for these services, nor can they be used to hire additional staff to provide increased services.
We realize this project has been in the works since Mahoney Ranch was annexed into the city in 1994. But given the changes in our economy, in the failing housing market, climate change, rising fuel costs, and the need to preserve prime agricultural lands, City Council members had an obligation to look at this project with fresh eyes, and weigh this proposal against contemporary realities.
Instead, they chose to ignore these issues.
There was no discussion about how building such a large development so far from public facilities would impact the city. There was no discussion about the loss of agricultural land, greenhouse-gas emissions, or the jobs/housing balance. All of these fundamental and far-reaching issues were completely ignored.
But the impacts of this development, if it goes forward, will be felt for generations.
Deborah Brasket is executive director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN). She can be reached at 722-5094, or Deborah@sbcan.org. Looking Forward runs every Friday, providing a progressive viewpoint on local issues.
September 26, 2008