Fight heats up over cities’ right to develop county farmland
Morgan Hill – Three weeks after one of the fiercest land-use battles in county history, environmentalists and pro-growth forces are gearing up for another round of fighting, this time over the right of cities to gobble up farmland outside their borders and convert it into homes and malls.
At the center of the fight is a draft farmland preservation policy crafted by the Local Agency Formation Commission, a regional body with veto power over cities’ ability to annex county land.
Developers, property owners and city officials in Gilroy and Morgan Hill are railing against the fine print in the policy, while some environmentalists say it does not go far enough.
Similar to the Agricultural Mitigation Policy already in place in Gilroy, the LAFCO version would require the preservation of one acre of farmland for every acre brought inside city borders and developed. But unlike the Gilroy policy, the LAFCO draft sets hard deadlines for mitigation – such as purchasing farmland elsewhere – and makes the status of previous preservation mandates a key consideration in new annexation requests.
The latest draft of the LAFCO policy is less stringent than the original, but it continues to inspire complaints from South Valley officials and pro-development interests. On Monday, all but four of the 30 people who attended a LAFCO presentation on the policy at City Hall voted against it in an informal straw poll.
“It seems like a freight train coming toward us,” said Gilroy Economic Development Director Larry Cope, a key proponent of a proposed 1.5 million-square-foot mall on county farmland just east of Gilroy’s borders.
Public officials in Gilroy and Morgan Hill say LAFCO is over-reaching its state-endowed powers.
“LAFCOs do not have the authority to impose any conditions or specify application requirements that have the effect of directly regulating land use density or intensity, property development, or subdivision requirements,” Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy wrote to the agency earlier this month, citing the California statutes that spell out LAFCO powers. In the same letter, Kennedy criticized the agency for failing to adequately consult South County stakeholders in advance of a Dec. 13 public hearing on the policy, after which the commission of five appointed members could vote on final approval.
The agency, which began work on its policy in April, has held a series of workshops in San Jose for public officials and delayed the public hearing on the matter to allow for Monday night’s outreach meeting.
At the same time, the agency is being pulled in the opposite direction by environmental groups, whose leaders have demanded a tougher stance on the timeline for mitigation and have called the preservation ratio (one acre of farmland for every acre developed) woefully inadequate.
Environmentalists were not happy to see the agency effectively double the deadline for mitigation from two to four years, or its decision to allow new annexation applications when earlier preservation mandates have not been met. But even the softened version of the policy is better than Gilroy’s for environmentalists like Carolyn Tognetti. She and other members of Save Open Space Gilroy claim the city’s policy has allowed developers to narrowly escape preservation requirements for hundreds of acres slated for development along Hecker Pass Highway and Santa Teresa Boulevard.
“I thank LAFCO for strengthening their policies,” Tognetti said Monday night. “Our organization wrote a letter after the first policy that was extremely weak. We had two major developments occur since our policy has been in place. There have been 354 acres that have not been mitigated.”
LAFCO Analyst Dunia Noel said the agency is seeking to balance the concerns of environmentalists with those of city officials, developers and land owners.
“We have agricultural mitigation polices currently in place,” she said. “What’s new about this draft set of policies is that it’s more specific. That’s in order to provide a more transparent process so that the public and the cities and the applicants know what LAFCO’s ag mitigation policies are up front, rather than at the tail end of the process.
“Our legal counsel feels we have the authority to have these more specific policies,” Noel added.
County attorneys who represent LAFCO will issue a legal opinion Dec. 6 in response to the challenges raised by opponents of the LAFCO policy.
The saga developing between LAFCO and South County comes weeks after county voters narrowly defeated Measure A, a land use initiative that would have limited development on hillsides and ranchlands.
Serdar Tumgoren, Senior Staff Writer, covers City Hall for the Dispatch. Reach him at 847-7109 or st*******@gi************.com.
