Will Sacramento sue to stop a horrible Natomas housing project? What to know | Opinion

Sacramento County supervisors approved the Upper Westside project, a proposed 25,000-resident community in the Natomas Basin, despite opposition from the city of Sacramento. Opponents have 30 days to challenge the decision and its environmental analysis in court.

This could be a historic decision for the Sacramento City Council and Mayor Kevin McCarty. Challenging a county-approved development in court would be a rare action for the city, if it has ever happened. Such a challenge would come as the city and county are trying to find common ground on their most vexing issue, the management of the thousands of unsheltered homeless in both jurisdictions.

But there are reasons why the city must defend itself. Upper Westside is surrounded on three sides by the city. The county should have never considered building there but did. Now the ball is in the city’s court.

Here are key takeaways:

• The Upper Westside project would build a 25,000-resident community next to the Sacramento River along Garden Highway, breaking a 2002 agreement in which the county designated the city of Sacramento as the lead planner for the Natomas Basin.
• Most of the project site sits within a mile of the Sacramento River. This violates a 20-year-old no-growth buffer agreed to by the city, Sutter County and state and federal wildlife agencies to protect a wildlife corridor, according to opinion analysis from The Sacramento Bee.
• The Natomas Basin is home to 22 protected species, and the conservancy tasked with preserving habitat warned supervisors in an April letter that advancing urbanization is “likely to serve as the death knell” for the 2003 habitat conservation plan, Conservancy Chair Chandra Chilmakuri wrote.
• Supervisor Phil Serna, who championed the project, launched a county-led master plan for Natomas in 2012 and proposed Upper Westside in 2019, promising environmental protections “qualitatively, even quantitatively” superior to the city’s plan. That is an outcome critics say did not materialize.
• Developers will pay a small fraction of the total construction costs for four new schools, with no firm plan to pay for the rest. Natomas Unified Superintendent Robyn Castillo estimated that the potential funding gap could reach as high as $750 million. Negotiations between the district and the project for greater contributions from Upper Westside have gone nowhere.
• The project was opposed by the city of Sacramento and by both candidates running to succeed Serna — public health advocate Flojaune Cofer and Sacramento City Councilmember Eric Guerra, who voted against the project earlier in city council deliberations. Yet supervisors approved the project anyway.
• The Natomas Basin Conservancy is required to buy and preserve one acre for every two developed, but the county’s shift toward pro-development policies has made it difficult to acquire the remaining 4,000 acres needed to fulfill its habitat preservation obligations.
• Former Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo, a Natomas resident, said the developments “fly in the face of every plan that’s been approved in the county of Sacramento for the last 25 years,” criticizing Serna’s leadership on growth.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.