Planning Commission to Consider New Growth-Slowing General Plan : Santa Clarita: The proposal says public services must accompany development in the county’s fastest-growing region.

Los Angeles County planning commissioners will consider a new general plan for the Santa Clarita Valley today that planners say they hope will restore a balance between development and public services in the region.

The plan is expected to alter the pace and appearance of development in the valley--the fastest-growing region of the county for the last four years.

“I think the pace of development got to be so great that development and infrastructure got out of kilter,” said John Edwards, administrator of the county Department of Regional Planning.

Among other things, the new plan would sharply reduce the number of new housing units allowed in the region. Developers collectively have proposed 38,000 new units for the area, enough to house the residents of a city the size of Inglewood. The plan would allow just 12,000 units to be built over the next 20 years.

Development policies in the plan state that public services--from roads to fire stations to libraries--must be built hand-in-hand with new development. The policies also say developers should “fund the entire cost” of those services and improvements.

The proposed general plan, which provides broad guidelines for growth in the Santa Clarita Valley through 2010, still must be approved by the Regional Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.

The policies were not included in a draft of the plan in January, but were added last month to strengthen the county’s hand in managing growth, Edwards said.

The Santa Clarita City Council and civic groups have repeatedly complained that the county let developers build thousands of houses in the 1980s without regard to roads, libraries or other public services.

The policies, although new to the Santa Clarita Valley general plan, are already contained in the general plan written for the county as a whole, Edwards said. But adding the policies to the valley plan is significant because it places extra emphasis on the county’s goals, he said.

Mike Kotch, a member of the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment, called the policies a welcome surprise. “I was impressed,” he said. SCOPE, a citizens’ group, has lobbied for such policies in the past.

“That’s pretty different for the county to say anything like that,” said Pat Saletore, a member of Parents Lobby, a group concerned with school overcrowding. “That’s radical. But that’s so radical, it sounds impossible.”

But Saletore said it was unclear whether the policies would force developers to help school districts build new schools to accommodate spiraling enrollments. “How are they defining infrastructure?” she asked. If schools are not included in that definition, she said, the policies do not address all of the community’s needs.

Edwards agreed that it is unclear whether schools would be considered part of the infrastructure under the policies. In recent years, the Board of Supervisors has said California law makes education a state responsibility and prohibits the county from weighing the needs of school districts when considering development proposals.