County planning a joke
Those who were sitting in the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting heard from a local man who has been severely abused by the county's planning department and who has still to get any relief. Chris Stone has been trying since January of 2007 to build a little over 200 homes - some houses, some apartments -- on 50 acres at the south end of Ukiah across from the Redwood Health Club. The land is already zoned for exactly his kind of project and the project, by all accounts is well-designed, uses advanced sewer discharge systems, anticipates solar use and carves out a retail space for perhaps a local store. It has the lower, mdidle and upper income homes all together and from what I can gather is exactly the kind of development local politicians say they need and want.
So what does the county planning department do? It stalls and ignores Mr. Stone, demands unnecessary studies and generally makes the man spend hundreds of thousands of dollars without any sign that his project will move forward. Mr. Stone produced the environmental studies - although the project should really get a negative declaration since it's a zoned use - and based them on not only what the county's rules currently demand but used more challenging assumptions than the county would have.
What does the county planning department do? It decides to demand new studies based on what it thinks it might have in the Ukiah Valley Area Plan at some future date. And everyone knows the UVAP is far from being ready to adopt.
So Mr. Stone very politely - for someone who could and probably should have been raging much sooner - went to the Board of Supervisors and complained. The county planning department pretended to be on top of the situation, and supervisors promised Mr. Stone that he would get action from the tippy top, the CEO himself.
Mr. Stone tried to schedule meetings with the CEO to no avail. So he went back to the supervisors in July and lo and behold the county administration suddenly scheduled a meeting and acted like they'd never seen him waiting hopefully in their anterooms.
How that July 17 meeting went is unknown as of now, but Mr. Stone has another gab session in August.
County Planning Director Ray Hall is retiring in days - as far as I'm concerned he should have been retired after the Vichy Springs development debacle in the early 1990s. The county now has an opportunity to recharge its planning department - and not with $177,000 a year consultants and not with anyone who has been working in the department under Hall's "leadership." The county needs a talented planner who it will allow to be creative, but demand be responsive and who will lead the county into the future. This county's reputation for micromanagement, anti-developer sentiment and political mayhem will make that person difficult to find.