Do you want Sacramento to look like Orange County? It could happen | Opinion
Descending in a jet that is about to land at Sacramento International Airport offers a reminder of why the state capital is a special place.
There is the downtown skyline, then a bucolic stretch of the Sacramento River, vast swaths of farmland, and then suddenly the runway.
The descent years from now may feel more like landing in suburban Orange County because Sacramento County has given the green light to consider thousands of acres of farmland for growth.
The Natomas Basin isn’t some barren, lifeless landscape. The 50,000-some acres of land surrounding this airport are home to 22 different protected species, some of them endangered. Recognizing this land’s importance to both the valley environment and the economy, an existing growth/habitat plan for the last two decades has sought to carefully balance both values.
Now Sacramento County politicians are endangering that plan by pursuing sprawl that would be bad for everyone but those seeking to profit from it.
Right now, all but 6% of the basin is unrestricted farmland that is not part of some development plan somewhere on the drawing boards, according to a conservancy looking to preserve habitat. Saying yes to all, it has warned public officials, would be the basin’s “death knell.”
In what could be the first major Natomas development approved by the county this century, it is expected to soon consider a proposal to build a 25,000-resident community next to the Sacramento River along Garden Highway. This project, known as Upper Westside, betrays an agreement the county made with the city of Sacramento back in 2002 to place the city as the lead planner for the basin.
This proposal before the supervisors was never supposed to happen. How we got here reveals the worst aspects of Sacramento regional planning and politics, where certain politicians can blow up the hard work of so many others
Mayor Joe Serna’s struggles in Natomas
In the 1990s, the drive to the airport from downtown felt like a trek through nowhere. Natomas, a deep flood basin, had inadequate flood protection that thwarted development.
As flood officials in that era began to plot how to better protect the basin, then-Mayor Joe Serna (who served from 1993 until he died in 1999) and his Sacramento City Council began to plan its future. In 1997, the city sought to comply with the federal Endangered Species Act with a Natomas habitat plan that spanned both Sutter and Sacramento counties, even though neither county government had signed onto this first plan.
Challenged by environmental groups, federal judge David Levi in 2000 agreed that the city could not plan for all of Natomas without some fellow governments. So the city started over. Sacramento County again did not work with the city on the plan. But Sutter County, representing the northern third of the basin, agreed to collaborate.
A new plan and a fatal flaw
Sutter, Sacramento and wildlife agencies in 2003 inked a 50-year deal to allow development in nearly a third of the basin while preserving more than half of it. Sacramento County, meanwhile, agreed in 2002 that the city should take the lead on any future urban expansion. A half-century plan that include endangered species coverage is a really big deal, particularly if it holds together. But this plan turned out to have a flaw — it trusted that Sacramento County politicians would always behave reasonably and keep their word.
On paper, it looked like the county had no ambitions for growth in the nation. Not only had it seemingly delegated those decisions to the city, but it had a general plan that prohibited development by designating more than 20,000 acres in the basin as farmland.
The habitat plan concluded that these protections provided “a reasonable basis for predicting the location and extent of future development.”
It turns out that was a dangerous assumption when it came to Sacramento County.
Under pressure from Natomas landowners who weren’t getting what they wanted out of the city, the county took those fateful first crucial steps in 2012 to begin converting that pro-farming general plan in Natomas into a pro-development one.
Now, just about every Natomas farmer wants to be a developer.
One development’s domino effect
When the county was out of the growth game back in 2003, the Natomas Basin Conservancy identified more than 15,000 acres of land committed to agriculture that it could possibly acquire. The conservancy is required to buy and preserve an acre for every two acres that are developed by either the city or Sutter County. It still has to preserve another 4,000 acres. But now that amount of land simply isn’t available because the county has opened the floodgates to growth.
So what is the future of that 2003 habitat conservation plan (HCP) by Sacramento and Sutter to grow in a balanced way?
“Advancing urbanization…..is likely to serve as the death knell for the HCPs, their implementation, and in some cases, the species that have been and are being mitigated through them,” said Chandra Chilmakuri, chair of the conservancy, in an April letter to county supervisors.
For its first development proposal to consider this century, Sacramento County could not have picked a worse location than Upper Westside to thumb its nose at the city.
Source: Sacramento County
In that 2003 plan, Sacramento agreed to preserve a mile of land along the Sacramento River for its wildlife, particularly the threatened Swainson’s Hawk. The majority of this project is within a mile of the river.
The county is ignoring its agreement with the city to stay out of growth in Natomas. It is ignoring the commitments of the city to protect the river. Will it ignore the clear warnings that growth by the county could blow up that historic growth/preservation that has guided the basin for more than 20 years?
Why did the county get itself into this awful position? There’s one explanation. More to come.