CGF: Take Action: Ask Santa Clara County for fair and open process

Ask Santa Clara County for fair and open process
Posted October 18, 2004 / Updated September 12, 2010

• What's happening
• Why this is important
• What CGF is doing UPDATED
• What you can do

Read our October 13, 2004 letter to the County

Read our November 11, 2004 Public Records Act Request

Committee for Green Foothills has identified some serious flaws in the planning process for Santa Clara County. The policies regarding draft documents allow secret negotiations and influence by developers and other project applicants, and close the door to citizen involvement.

Please take a minute to join us in asking the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission to ensure that the process for land use planning remains fair and open to the public.

What's happening
In the course of a request for an environmental document that the County was developing, CGF discovered that the County had shared working drafts of this document with the project applicant (in this case, Stanford University) while denying CGF and others access to that same document. We have since found that this is common policy in Santa Clara County.

Why this is important
By giving project applicants time and space to review documents before they are made public, the County's secret draft review procedures give applicants significantly more time to review and influence the environmental review process -- without the counterbalance of involvement by environmental watchdogs like CGF, or the community at large.

This clearly opens the door to secret negotiations and influence by applicants, and shuts the public out of a process that should be open and transparent. It is also almost certainly a violation of the Public Records Act.

What CGF is doing UPDATED
Committee for Green Foothills is committed to ensuring that the land use planning process is fair and open to the public, especially so that it allows the public to learn about, and become involved in, issues that might pose environmental concerns.

We have asked the County Supervisors and Planning Commission to change their policies by either making administrative drafts available to everyone upon request, or by keeping all preliminary drafts confidential to the extent allowed under the Public Records Act. You can read our letter here.

As part of our effort to open up the County's process and ensure fair access to everyone, we have also submitted a formal request for documents as per the Public Records Act. You can read that letter of November 11, 2004 here.

What you can do

1. Write to the Supervisors.
Please take a minute to write to the Board of Supervisors and the County Planning Commission and ask them to change the County's policy of providing drafts and negotiating privately with applicants. Ask them to follow one of the recommendations of the Committee for Green Foothills (made in our October 13 letter) or to find another solution to this problem.

      Members of the Board of Supervisors
      and County Planning Commission
      Santa Clara County
      70 West Hedding St., 10th Floor
      San Jose, CA 95110

Please ask the Clerk to distribute your letter to all members of the Board or Commission:

Clerk to the Board of Supervisors: fax (408) 298-8460, email phyllis.perez@bos.co.santa-clara.ca.us
Clerk to the Planning Commission: fax (408) 288-9198, email
planning.commission@pln.sccgov.org

Please fax or email your letter as soon as possible. As always, please let us know you've written so we can track our effectiveness on this issue: alerts@GreenFoothills.org or fax (650) 968-8431.

2. Support Committee for Green Foothills.
Become a CGF member or make a donation.


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