Denial of Most Santa Clarita Valley Housing Tracts Predicted

Jo Anne Darcy, a Santa Clarita city councilwoman and aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, says the county will reject “more than half” of 43 proposals to build 38,000 houses, apartments and condominiums in the unincorporated areas of the Santa Clarita Valley.

Darcy made the remark late Tuesday while the Santa Clarita City Council discussed how the developments might affect the young city. Council members have expressed concern that such development would eventually overburden the city’s infrastructure, particularly roads.

The 43 proposals all require amendments to the valley’s general plan, which guides development in the area. The county is updating the general plan and will hold the first hearings on it in January.

If the 43 are allowed under the new plan, developers would be able to build 38,000 units on land zoned for 7,000 dwellings.

Council members expressed shock Tuesday after a consultant, hired to analyze the proposed projects, explained the potential growth outside the city boundaries. Alan Fishman of Tierra Planning & Design said most of the projects would overburden public services and provide few benefits to the valley.

Councilman Howard P. (Buck) McKeon asked how such growth could be allowed. “How do you provide police and fire protection to all those areas?” he said.

Then Darcy, apparently trying to calm her colleagues, said the county would deny more than just a “small percentage” of the developments. “They’ll cut it more than half,” she said of the list of proposed projects. Darcy did not say which projects might be affected.

However, Darcy later said that she did not know how the county’s Regional Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors will assess the projects in the end.

County policy allows up to 270,000 residents in the Santa Clarita Valley by the year 2010. County Planning Director James E. Hartl has said the county will have to reject some of the 43 projects to stay under that ceiling of 270,000 residents.

But the county also has the authority to raise that ceiling, and Hartl and other planning officials have declined to say definitively whether the county will keep the ceiling or whether it will scale down or reject the proposed developments. The population ceiling will be addressed when the county revises the valley’s general plan.

Estimates of the valley’s population vary, but it hovers around 130,000, according to county and Santa Clarita officials. The 43 projects would add another 114,000 residents to the valley, Fishman said.

The projects represent only a portion of the potential growth in the valley, Fishman said. The county has already approved more than 13,000 housing units that have yet to be built. Those developments would bring about 41,000 residents into the valley, he said.

Fishman said the City Council should not endorse any of the 43 projects until their potential impact on roads and the environment is studied in greater detail.