Sacramento County board revives plan for housing, college campus

Sacramento County supervisors, on a 4-1 vote Wednesday, gave new life to a controversial plan to build a four-year college and housing on more than 2,000 acres of undeveloped land east of Rancho Cordova.

The vote on the Cordova Hills project overturned an earlier planning department decision. Planners had asked the supervisors to uphold their rejection of the project based on its location outside the urban policy area.

Despite the supervisors' vote, developers are a long way from turning thousands of rolling acres of eastern Sacramento County into housing and the new home of the University of Sacramento, run by the Legionaries of Christ.

"All that we did today is allow an application to be filed," said Paul Hahn, who heads the county's municipal service agency.

The project faces further hurdles once specific building plans and environmental studies are completed.

Nonetheless, local environmentalists considered Wednesday's action significant.

"The land for which Cordova Hills has been proposed is at the heart of the remaining irreplaceable vernal pools and grasslands within Sac County," the Environmental Council of Sacramento wrote to supporters. "This area contains numerous threatened and endangered species."

A majority of the supervisors, however, decided that the prospect of a University of Sacramento would be too great an asset to rule out at this stage.

They voted to accept the application calling for a change to the general plan. Supervisor Roger Dickinson voted to reject the application.

The project site – east of Rancho Cordova's city limits and north of Jackson Road – is within the county's urban services boundary. But it is outside the area slated for urban development in the near future.

The project would include a 7,000-student campus and 1,000- plus acres of housing. It calls for several hundred acres of mixed-use development and retail outlets. The property's primary owner is Conway LLC., and the development is being led by Ron Alvarado.

The Legionaries of Christ have been holding college classes in a downtown office building since January 2005. Sacramento County officials had tried to get the school to relocate to Mather Field. But the school announced last year that it preferred the Cordova Hills site.

Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan said Wednesday's decision just clears the way for more planning.

"The Cordova Hills proposal offers a unique opportunity to bring another four-year university to the Sacramento region," MacGlashan wrote in an e-mail to The Bee.

"The Board's action today just allows them to make an application, which must still go through a rigorous land-use planning process, environmental review and public hearings."

But Dickinson said the project shouldn't jump ahead of other potential growth sites just because the developers promise to include a college.

"Allowing this proposal to move ahead at this time completely undercuts the general plan update process," Dickinson said.

"It would allow a potentially major expansion of the urban area, far beyond the requirements of the university, which is cited as the justification."

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