With gasoline pushing $4 a gallon, with climate change becoming increasingly clear, with farmlands needed for food security, with our wildlands necessary to support beleaguered wildlife populations, with homeowners "underwater" financially, the city of Elk Grove is proposing – drum roll, please – more urban sprawl.

Elk Grove has applied to expand its urban footprint southward by an additional 8,000 acres, or 12 square miles, a nearly 30 percent increase.

Hearings are scheduled on the proposal by the Sacramento Local Agency Formation Commission, a little-known agency with an oversized importance. LAFCO is charged with discouraging urban sprawl, assuring that growth is orderly, and preserving open space and prime agricultural lands.

The commission determines future urban boundaries by setting "sphere of influence" lines, and annexation timelines and boundaries. Spheres of influence identify areas deemed necessary and appropriate for future growth. Its determinations are the first steps to urbanization, and it signals farmers to stop investing in their land and serves as a warning to rural neighbors that a wave of sprawl will eventually overtake them.

Elk Grove bases its 2008 sphere of influence expansion application on its outdated 2003 general plan, prepared by an ambitious new city in the midst of a growth surge. Only later did the city pause to evaluate the actual need for expansion. The December 2010 Elk Grove market study, an analysis prepared by independent consultants, undercuts the contention that the city needs more land to accommodate growth. The study makes clear that expected growth could be largely, if not entirely, met on vacant and underused land within the city's boundaries, minimizing economic and environmental costs.

At this point we have to hope that LAFCO will do its job with the professionalism that has been its hallmark in the past. LAFCO's draft environmental impact report on Elk Grove's expansion request is, unfortunately, a disappointing, half-hearted analysis that misses or avoids many key issues – not the kind of clear decision-making tool that this organization's board of directors deserves.

The document fails, for example, to mention the Cosumnes River Preserve – despite proposing to allow development at the edge of the preserve – or to consider potential impacts on the preserve and its programs. It understates the scale of the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and downplays potential impacts to the refuge. It provides no analysis of the increased flood risk to Delta communities that would result from another large increment of sprawl upstream. It assumes that floodplain boundaries are static, despite all that we now know about how climate change will impact precipitation patterns.

The document ignores the severe groundwater overdraft already affecting the Elk Grove area and is silent on the enormous inherent conflict between the proposed expansion and the Water Forum Agreement, the foundation for water management in the region. And it fails to consider the impact on the ability of Sacramento area governments to complete the long overdue South Sacramento habitat conservation plan. In short, it punts on the type of big-picture, long-range issues that LAFCO was created to address.

For the citizens of Elk Grove, the stakes are high. Costs to date – for an inadequate environmental document and for an after-the-fact market study – are but a tiny down-payment on the major expense of extending roads and utilities farther south, and mitigating for environmental impacts. And for Elk Grove citizens hoping for a rebound in property values, the expansion goes in the wrong direction, fueling expectations of more land for more sprawl. Elk Grove is throwing its underwater homeowners an anchor, not a buoy.

The proposed expansion includes or abuts important farmland and wildlife habitat areas. Urbanization would have a major negative impact on the Cosumnes River Preserve and the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, undercutting substantial amounts of public investment in these natural resources and eliminating important habitats for wildlife. It would exacerbate the flood risk in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. And it would, for the first time, breach Sacramento County's "urban services boundary," a nearly 20-year-old delineation of rural and urban land, and the foundation for planning for urban infrastructure to manage water, wastewater and traffic.

LAFCO's action will signal whether our regional commitment to smarter growth patterns, to farmland protection and to wildlife habitats is real, or just lip service. The weak environmental report hints at a rubber stamp role for LAFCO. That, in light of this organization's important mission, would be tragic.

LAFCO should say "no" to Elk Grove. The old playbook doesn't have the right answers for the challenges we face today and tomorrow. LAFCO can help nudge the region to face the future with strategies that are relevant, not just recycled.

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Mike Eaton, former project director at the Cosumnes River Preserve, worked for conservation organizations for most of his career.

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