Voters Draw the Line on New Developments

For years, Bay Area environmentalists have fought a mostly losing effort to keep farmlands and open space from giving way to housing tracts and shopping malls as the region’s population spiraled.

But now, local voters have handed environmentalists a victory that they hope will spark a grass-roots movement across California. In elections this month, five communities passed initiatives--the first of their kind in the state--to lock in growth boundaries for their communities for as long as 20 years.

Although the measures differ in detail, each has the same goal: To take the power to approve developments on outlying lands out of the hands of elected city councils.

“The idea was to promote an alternative to sprawl, to encourage developments around existing urban areas,” said Michael McCauley, spokesman for the San Francisco-based Greenbelt Alliance, an environmental group that was active in each of the campaigns.

McCauley and other Greenbelt members say that activists in Chico, Arcata and even Ventura County have called their offices since the election, eager to learn how they can push similar initiatives.

“Communities were very concerned with maintaining their individual character,” said Donna Oldfield, a planning consultant who worked in several of the growth-boundary campaigns. “They didn’t want to just grow into one undifferentiated, urbanized area.”

Oldfield says she generally supports the idea of citizen-imposed boundaries, but warns that they could choke off all growth if they are drawn too tightly around existing neighborhoods.

“I like to remind people that a city is not a Faberge egg,” she said. “The danger is that you will create cities that are just a little too precious, a little too elitist.”

Those who campaigned for the limits vehemently deny that they intend to halt growth. They insist that they merely want to make it more logical, and cite Los Angeles and San Jose as examples of cities whose cores deteriorated as housing tracts and shopping centers mushroomed on their peripheries.

In Sonoma County, the initiatives passed with ease in Santa Rosa, Healdsburg and Sebastopol and in Alameda County, in the East Bay city of Pleasanton.

Another boundary measure squeaked by in Sonoma County’s Rohnert Park. That measure locks growth boundaries in place for just four years, and allows the City Council to expand them to accommodate new businesses that could boost the city’s economy.

Now, Sonoma County’s other sizable communities--Petaluma, Windsor and Cotati--are expected to place boundary initiatives on their next ballots.

“We definitely see the momentum for these measures growing within the Bay Area,” McCauley said. “People are motivated because we are seeing so much growth in a region of such scenic beauty.”

For Anne Seeley, the fight to set boundaries in legislative concrete was highly personal. Seeley, who headed Santa Rosa’s pro-boundary campaign, said she is determined to keep her community a small one surrounded by farmland. She started fighting to control growth more than a decade ago when the city fathers contemplated building a high-rise office building.

“I never cared about environmental issues until I learned 11 years ago that a 15-story high rise was proposed for downtown Santa Rosa,” Seeley said. Her fight to block the building led her to help form Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa, a group that for more than a decade has tried to slow the city’s growth and its annexation of surrounding farmland.

A citizens’ initiative to impose long-term municipal boundaries seemed a logical step for the group, Seeley said.

“In conjunction with some other things that are happening, this guarantees that our county will remain an agricultural county,” Seeley said.

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John Bucher, for one, begs to differ. A Healdsburg dairy farmer and president of Sonoma County’s Farm Bureau, Bucher says passage of the long-term boundary limits disgusts him.

Supporters are not being honest, he said, when they say the boundaries are intended to protect agricultural land.

“I think they are flat-out lying,” Bucher said. “They did a real disservice to the public.” In fact, Bucher said, most of the 2,200 farmers whom the bureau represents viewed the initiatives as overkill in a county that has already taken strong steps to protect farms.

“We’ve got a really strong general plan that the Farm Bureau was instrumental in getting approved back in the mid-’80s,” Bucher said. “At the time, we were one of two counties in California that incorporated an agricultural element in their general plan.”

Bucher believes the boundaries will eventually push developers into unincorporated areas of the county and could ultimately lead to new communities in the heart of agricultural land.

“The irony is that only the people who live in the cities could vote for these measures, but the impact is on the farmers,” he said.

Noting that no city paired the setting of boundaries with an increase in residential density, Bucher argues that supporters essentially were aiming to cap population growth.

“The real agenda here is no growth,” he said.

It was no accident, supporters and opponents said, that four of the five communities that approved the measures are in Sonoma County.

Sonoma, with its bucolic apple orchards and vineyards, is the region’s fastest-growing county. The Assn. of Bay Area Governments forecasts that its population will grow from 432,000 to 565,900 within 20 years.

Even though some Sonoma County cities have become bedroom communities for Marin County and San Francisco, farming remains a key component of the economy. In 1995, farming was a $3-billion industry, with more than half the county’s total acreage devoted to agriculture.

“People who have been brought up here, or who have moved here from somewhere else--like Los Angeles or San Jose--voted for these measures because they don’t want Sonoma turning into what they left,” said Howard Levy, a leader of the pro-boundary campaign in Sebastopol.

“I favored the boundary measure because I wanted to stop land speculation on the periphery and increase investment inside the town,” Levy said.

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Overall, supporters say the boundaries will protect farmland and simultaneously revive commercial and residential areas because developers will be forced to build on the pockets of available land that lie inside the lines.

But urban planner John Landis, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, said the idea of freezing boundaries is not the panacea promised by supporters.

“The only model we have is Oregon, where 20 years ago the state mandated that every major city has to have an urban growth boundary,” Landis said. In Oregon, he said, the boundaries have slowed--but not stopped--urban areas expanding into agricultural lands. And boundaries alone, Landis said, will not guarantee that developers will turn their attention to available lots within the boundaries. They may simply choose to go to a community where no such restrictions exist.

Portland drew its boundaries far enough from the city’s core to allow for substantial residential and commercial development, Landis said. At the same time, incentives were offered to developers to build downtown while farmers received subsidies to keep their land in production.

But now Portland’s boundaries are facing their first real test, Landis said. The city has reached its limits and the battle has shifted to whether, where and how much to extend them, he said.