Chance for Change in Planning Process : * New Commissioner Should Serve Public’s Interests

Redistricting has already had at least one significant effect on the political checkerboard in Orange County. Planning Commission Chairman Stephen A. Nordeck, who presided over a controversial period of growth, has lost his seat as a result of changes in the district of Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who appointed him.

The change presents a golden opportunity to reflect on the planning process in Orange County, and to insist on sound growth management strategies for the future. Public and private interests should be balanced in a way that makes this a better place to live and work for generations to come.

Nordeck, chairman for the past two years, completed his tenure with a significant accomplishment: the management plan that the Board of Supervisors approved for the Trabuco Canyon area after years of debate.

The chairman’s considerable skills as a facilitator between competing interests were widely praised in the end as helping make possible the kind of growth management that too often has eluded the county in the past. But in recent years, such a matching of private interests with concern for the environment too has often been impossible.

Indeed, we have previously referred to the planning process at the county level as akin to a series of synchronized green traffic lights, in which the Board of Supervisors is simply the final stop before the bulldozers start their engines.

If there is any doubt, consider that in the past couple of years it has become clear that several planning commissioners, Nordeck included, were routinely accepting golf rounds and other gifts from developers who brought proposals before the Planning Commission for review.

And the commission has been so willing to approve new development that on one occasion in the last couple of years it even overlooked the recommendation of its own consultants, who said that construction should not be allowed so close to a sensitive wildlife area.

Moreover, several commissioners became embroiled in political controversy over a dinner held last year in support of an Assembly candidate at Nordeck’s Trabuco Canyon restaurant. Nordeck was ultimately cleared by the Orange County district attorney of conflict-of-interest charges. But the overall perception was inescapably that of a Planning Commission that fraternized all too easily with developers.

The Board of Supervisors, as appointer of the Planning Commission, bears ultimate responsibility. If the final light on the road to development is always green, it is not realistic to expect that the others will flash a cautionary yellow.

But it is true also that the Planning Commission has a great deal of latitude on its own, and it is this latitude that ultimately will shape the future of undeveloped land falling within the county’s jurisdictional review.

The county must have a commission unquestionably committed to guarding the public’s interest. This will not always be possible from the vantage point of a developer’s golf cart, or if commissioners are even peripheral players in political campaigns.

Since the buck stops with the supervisors, Vasquez as chairman has the golden opportunity to send a strong signal in his choice of a replacement for Nordeck. He says he will make this appointment soon, probably this week.

That new commissioner, and those who follow as other seats come open on the Planning Commission, must serve only one constituency--the current and future citizens of Orange County.