Yuba County General Plan report draws fire

It appears the environmental impact report for Yuba County's General Plan update won't be any less contentious than the plan itself has been.

Though it won't be released until next month, several residents who attended a county Board of Supervisors discussion this week on the draft EIR said as with the 2030 update, there is too much to absorb and not enough time for those affected to offer thoughts.

"We don't think a lot of the idealistic and ideological stuff in here is harmless," said Janet Marchant, a Dobbins resident who's involved in creating a community plan for the Dobbins/Oregon House area. She and others have disagreed with the plan's mandate to limit new development in the foothills.

She and others criticized both the plan and the EIR's emphasis on environmentalism over economic development, with one speaker saying that calculus should be reversed for an economically downtrodden area like Yuba County.

At the meeting Tuesday, supervisors studied alternatives to the plan for growth, as required by the EIR.

Each alternative examined how many new homes, residents and jobs would be added to the county under each scenario, including one in which the plan wasn't adopted and the county continued to use the general plan adopted in 1996.

Some supervisors, though, pointed out every scenario made projections of job growth far exceeding anything the county has ever experienced before.

"Why spend money evaluating things that are never going to happen?" said Supervisor Roger Abe, noting even the most conservative scenario projected 16,000 new jobs in the county by 2030. County Community Services and Development Director Kevin Mallen said he would acknowledge the projections were lofty, when the county never grew close to what was projected in the last general plan. He noted further between 1990 and 2008, the county had a net loss of 900 jobs.

"During the next 20 years, there has to be an upswing," he said. "If there isn't, we're all in trouble."

Mallen explained that the plan and the EIR had to examine the most extreme possibility for county development in the next two decades in order to accurately determine what the environmental effects would be.

To make it more accurate, said Supervisor John Nicoletti, the EIR should include potential job and population growth from Beale Air Force Base, home to several missions likely to grow.

The draft EIR will be released for public comment next month and heard by the County Planning Commission on Dec. 15. County supervisors will have a hearing on both the draft general plan and EIR in February, and aren't set to formally adopt them until next spring.

Those critical of the general plan process said the county couldn't go wrong by going slow, despite the looming end of the contract the county has with a consulting firm to create the plan.

"I can't believe there's no money to budget for changes in the draft General Plan," Nick Spaulding, of Oregon House, told supervisors. "It's not ready. We're not ready."