Inaction Alert! You can save Santa Clara County open space - by doing nothing!

(CGF sent this "Inaction" Alert out to folks on our email alert list that are likely residents of the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority districts. -Brian)

Dear Friend,

The Committee for Green Foothills is sending out the easiest environmental Alert in its 47-year history. By doing nothing, you can help save millions of dollars for the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority (OSA) for land protection, and fix a mistake made by the California Supreme Court. All you have to do is to NOT request a refund of past parcel assessments that the Court said had to be made available. You are not required to apply for refunds - you can do nothing. Please help the environment more easily than you've ever had a chance to before!

What's Happening

In 2002, voters in the Open Space Authority district, which covers most of Santa Clara County from the city of Santa Clara eastwards, voted to enact a parcel assessment of about $20 annually to help fund the purchase and protection of local natural open spaces. Unfortunately, the California Supreme Court last year mistakenly applied a law that said the will of the majority is not enough, but that a two-thirds' vote in favor was required.

Following the decision, the OSA agreed to send a letter out to anyone who owned land in the district from 2002 to 2007 and paid the assessment, allowing them to apply for a refund if they wished. The letter has just been sent out.

Why This Is Important

The Supreme Court has cut off this voter-approved funding source for protecting local open spaces that funded most of the OSA's work, so the money collected to date remains the last major additional funding until the OSA can go back to voters for a super-majority approval. Most of this money, $57 million accrued so far, could still help preserve thousands of acres of land from sprawl and provide more public recreation for everyone - if people let the money stay instead of applying for refunds.

What You Can Do

Nothing!
If you owned land in the part of Santa Clara County where the OSA operates between 2002 and 2007 (OSA district map attached), you will receive a letter telling you how to apply for a refund. All you have to do is ignore the letter.

Please let us know how you did nothing - was it hard? Tell us your trials and tribulations, and how you accomplished doing nothing, and please let us know if you give us permission and we may publish your adventure on our website.

Okay, if you do want to do something - please forward this to your neighbors and friends who own residences in the OSA district, and tell them THEY CAN ALSO help protect their environment by doing nothing.

For more information, go to the OSA website to see all the good it does with the voter-approved funding: http://www.openspaceauthority.org/

Thanks! Your voice (and inaction) does make a difference!

- The Folks at Green Foothills
________________________________________________

UPDATE: Already received this reply: "I will put this on my to do list."

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Sprawl effect from San Jose planning scenarios

San Jose has the following scenarios in its proposed General Plan for future growth:

Scenario K - 339,530 new jobs and 158,970 new dwelling units (1.0 J/ER) (Jobs:Employed Resident ratio)

Scenario E - 360,550 new jobs and 135,650 new dwelling units (1.1 J/ER)

Scenario C - 346,550 new jobs and 88,650 new dwelling units (1.2 J/ER)

Scenario J - 526,000 new jobs and 88,650 new dwelling units (1.5 J/ER)

Generally accepted figure is that residences will have an average 1.7 people who are employed full time (or the equivalent of full time when multiple people employed part time are counted). Scenario J has a massive imbalance of housing and jobs. The 88,650 residences will provide housing for 151,000 employees and their families, while the 526,000 new employees will actually need 309,000 residences. The outcome then is that 158,000 residences will have to be built, somewhere, to accommodate these people. Most likely they'll be built in Central Valley, and those employees will be commuting. How this fits the City's claim to be planning for compact development is less than clear.

-Brian

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CGF comments to San Jose City Council Meeting today

(I would have made the comments below to today's City Council meeting on its General Plan, but the mayor cut the time in half. I summarized instead. -Brian)

(UPDATE: The City Council protected Almaden Valley and mid-Coyote Valley, but not north Coyote Valley. So not too bad, but there's more to do.)

I want to address the suggestions in the supplemental documents for this item. The second Supplemental, from June 15, contains landowner suggestions to develop Almaden Valley and Coyote Valley Urban Reserves, and I think Councilmember Liccardo addressed this.

Developers have proposed in the June 3d Supplemental memo, suggesting that Scenario K be modified to add 10,000 residences to the proposed 50,000 jobs in North Coyote Valley. This is a bad idea, maybe the most environmentally destructive one in the packet. I would describe it as a "zombie idea," the walking dead version of the Coyote Valley Specific Plan that we thought we had been put down to rest in peace over a year ago. The proposal is really a stalking horse to get residential development and downplay jobs. All the reasons for not doing this became clear during the collapse of the Coyote Valley proposal and it shouldn't be revived now.

So what would be better? We suggest modifying Scenario K to remove the proposed 50,000 jobs from North Coyote Valley, based on the assumption that the Coyote Valley Research Park permits will expire without being used in 2011, as now appears highly likely. A certain number of the 50 thousand jobs could occur elsewhere, but mostly this scenario could be made much more politically realistic by somewhat reducing the total number of jobs and housing while keeping an appropriate balance. There is no need to expand the city outward and destroy this environmentally crucial area.

All the environmental and economic reasons for not developing urban reserves also apply to CV

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Poaching risk for state park shutdowns

The state budget emergency has led the governor to suggest closing most of California's state parks. Henry Coe Park, here in Santa Clara County, is one of the ones at risk, and Supervisor Yeager has proposed a temporary county takeover to keep it open.

One reason to do this is the increased problem of poaching in California. Wildlife is both more plentiful in parks and less wary of hunters, so the parks are targets for poachers. Full staffing by rangers, and the presence of witnesses in the form of park visitors, would be the best way to keep poaching limited.

-Brian

(Also worth adding is the problem of marijuana growers using public lands, an illegal, environmentally destructive, and potentially violent risk that could increase in closed parks.)

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Rescuing "sustainability" from the vaccuum of meaninglessness

(Below is a piece I submitted to the KQED Perspectives program about the Stanford Sustainable Development Study. Unfortunately they thought the focus was too narrow for the broader Bay Area, but I still think it's worth getting the word out. -Brian)


Everyone talks about "environmental sustainability," but do we know what it really means? Claims of sustainability may amount to little more than greenwashing, with no more content or definition to them than being "Earth-Friendly".

This problem has happened in Santa Clara County, with an unfulfilled promise made by Stanford University. In return for massive development rights, the university promised a Sustainable Development Study to consider the sustainability of future buildout on its core campus land. Stanford recently turned in its Study and the County approved it.

The problem? Stanford refused to study the effect of buildout for more than twenty-five years into the future. But sustainability, if it means anything at all, can't ignore the effects beyond a single generation. Climate change, for example, would drop considerably as a priority if, like Stanford, we refused to consider development and consequences for more than twenty-five years. Stanford might not want to consider long-term sprawl effects, but is a short time frame sustainable?

These aren’t questions about an academic exercise but about the essential meaning of sustainability. Here's how little importance Stanford placed on sustainability – they refused to even define "sustainability" in their Sustainable Development Study. Good definitions exist – just ask former Stanford professor and Obama science advisor John Holdren – but here the long-term timeframe of sustainability definitions lost out to the desire to leave the door open for expanding development.

Being "Earth-Friendly" may now mean almost anything, but we can still rescue sustainability. For example, Stanford did accept that it would do another Sustainable Development Study for its next major permit. Next time, Stanford's famed academic rigor could be applied to the Study itself, with sustainability defined, with measurement criteria included, with performance analyses developed, and with defensible conclusions about the long-term sustainability of its land use. The next Study can still do it right.

If the concept of sustainability is itself going to be sustained, we must give it meaning, and we can't start too soon.

With a Perspective, I’m Brian Schmidt.

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The great news keeps rolling in, and we can take some of the credit

Last week we could celebrate the purchase of 966-acre Rancho San Vicente, an important link in a chain of protected land extending immediately south of San Jose. Environmental opposition to sprawl in Coyote Valley was crucial for stopping the sprawl proposal that the developers originally tried at San Vicente:

Tom deRegt, a partner in New Cities Development Group, said his firm
decided to sell the Rancho San Vicente land for the same price it
paid in 1998. Back then, he said, the driving force was Cisco Systems' plans for
a new campus at Coyote Valley on Highway 101.
"We felt the jobs created by Cisco would push the need for more housing, and that there would be a demand for executive housing," deRegt said. "Obviously things changed since then."

CGF and other organizations fought the Cisco project long enough for economic conditions to derail it, and then did so again with an even bigger proposal for Coyote Valley that stopped at an earlier stage. If either project had succeeded, the the speculative sprawl potential would have made San Vicente impossible to purchase.

And yesterday, San Jose's General Plan Task Force supported staff recommendations to not plan for development in Almaden Valley and Mid-Coyote Valley, and to keep Evergreen's industrial areas zoned industrial, all of which are supported by CGF:

A special panel charged with charting San
Jose's long-term growth has put the city one step closer to keeping its
undeveloped southern fringes — most prominently Coyote
Valley — off-limits to new housing tracts.

Citing the cost of providing services to those far-flung areas, as well
as the environmental damage that development might bring, the Envision San Jose
2040 Task Force voted overwhelmingly late Tuesday to keep the city's so-called
"urban reserves" in Coyote Valley and Almaden Valley out of any future growth
discussions.

In addition, the panel unanimously urged that open space in Evergreen —
currently targeted for industrial uses — remain formally out of the mix for new
homes.
...

Tuesday's meeting brought out scores of green and open space advocates
who sought to reinforce those concerns and urge planners to focus on development
already inside the urban core.

"Let's fix what we have first," said Helen Chapman, a director of the
Committee for Green Foothills.

Of course they could have done more - in particular, they shouldn't continue to assume that development will come to North Coyote Valley, as the economic conditions haven't changed and the permits are about to expire. On the other hand, four years ago I really couldn't have imagined this - CGF was in the middle of a lawsuit to stop a stupid and dangerous soccer field complex in Alamden Valley farmland, and the plan to develop both North and Mid Coyote was on an express track. These changes are amazing.

-Brian

UPDATE: a short video showing San Vicente is here.

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CGF Letter on the San Jose General Plan Revision

(We sent this letter out last week regarding preserving farmlands and stopping sprawl in San Jose. -Brian)


May 21, 2009

San Jose City Council
Envision San Jose Task Force

Dear City Council and Task Force Members;

The Committee for Green Foothills urges you seize the opportunity presented to you both to preserve the farmlands adjacent to San Jose and also to plan for a balanced future of jobs and housing, not an imbalanced one forcing thousands of drivers to live elsewhere and commute to San Jose. Specifically, we ask you to do the following:

· Withdraw the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) from South Almaden Valley.

· Plan for no development in Mid-Coyote Valley.

· Withdraw the UGB from North Coyote Valley. This would "grandfather" existing development and existing permits, but the Coyote Valley Research Park permits would not be renewed if they expire without construction, as seems very likely. A less-valuable but still beneficial alternative would be to leave the UGB unchanged but not plan for any development in North Coyote Valley during the General Plan timeframe.

· Require the development of a Farmland Mitigation Program prior to the conversion of prime farmland to other uses anywhere in the City

· Develop a "Green Vision" planning option with reasonable job growth numbers below ABAG projections, and with housing numbers that do not exceed a 1:1 Jobs:Employed Resident ratio. These are feasible numbers that keep development within the City's existing footprint without exporting housing needs to other cities and counties.

We live in a time of crisis and opportunity. We could repeat the many mistakes of previous decades, expanding development outward instead of making it more vibrant, quite possibly at the expense of making existing areas less vibrant by sucking development away from the City and into Coyote Valley. We could condemn thousands of acres of farmland immediately abutting San Jose, spreading the sprawl that currently washes from San Francisco to San Jose and bringing it so close to Morgan Hill that the alleged Coyote Valley "Greenbelt" would convert into a new wave of sprawl that merges San Francisco through San Jose all the way to Gilroy. Or we – starting with your leadership - could choose a different future.

You have the opportunity to transform the growing Silicon Valley into the "Silicon Archipelago" whose shores begin at San Jose. Cities of economically vibrant, high-tech development would be surrounded by productive farmland and environmentally vibrant, natural open space. The San Jose/Alviso/Milpitas area, excepting development merging with Santa Clara, already qualifies with open space and Baylands on three sides. The wonderful news just this week about protection of 966-acre Rancho San Vicente adds to this legacy, a feat that was possible expressly because Coyote Valley development has been stopped so far.

San Jose has Tule elk grazing within City limits. It has one of the best wildflower displays in the state. It has the Everglades of the West being restored to the north, and verdant river and creek courses connecting natural areas. What is missing is a vision that commits to protecting these areas, along with the farmland that physically connects natural areas together and connects the present and future San Jose to its past.

Everyone without their heads in the sand knows that the future of the climate crisis will require different planning from the past, stopping outward-sprawling expansion and preserving nearby farmland that bring us nutritious food from nearby - not from another hemisphere. You have the opportunity to plan for this future that preserves what we have and will make San Jose, and the greater region, a much better place. Please do this, and leave aside the proposals that move in the wrong direction.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Brian A. Schmidt
Legislative Advocate, Santa Clara County

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