This spring marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Deep Roots, Green Future, our 50-year vision for our region’s coast, forests, creeks, bay, hillsides, farmland, and urban areas. We are pleased to say that we’ve already made real progress towards the goals set out in Deep Roots, Green Future.
One of our five goals for hillsides was to preserve habitat, especially rare and fragile serpentine soils. Last year we defeated a proposal to build 75 luxury homes on the 2,150-acre Young Ranch property located in San Jose and surrounding areas in Santa Clara County. This beautiful hillside property contains signigifant amounts of serpentine grasslands, with numerous endangered wildflower species and the endangereed Bay chekerspot butterfly. In short, the County Planning Commission listened to our Legislative Advocate Julie Hutcheson, and voted against the proposal, setting a great precedent for our local ridgelines.
In addition to saving this particular space, we were concerned that this project ran afoul of county and city environmental and urban development policies. For the county approving this project would have set aside the long-standing policies that have helped create the quality of life we enjoy. For San Jose it would have meant defying the voter approved greenline and ignoring the city’s general plan. Allowing this project on Young Ranch would have spurred other landowners on the ridgeline to seek the same exceptions and led to further detrimental planning decisions regionally.
Despite this victory, another proposal to develop the Young Ranch property was released recently. Julie is keeping an eye out in order to protect important habitat and the policies that safeguard all of our region’s hillsides.
We are working on other goals from Deep Roots, Green Future. In Half Moon Bay, we are advocating alongside community members to protect the remaining prime farmland and open space as the city moves forward with its general plan and Local Coastal Program. In Santa Clara we are celebrating a success from just months ago when the city adopted its first development impact fee for parks. We are leaders in the fight against the Cargill Saltworks proposal in the Redwood City baylands.
Be it 50 years ago or 50 years from now, the strength of Committee for Green Foothills is that we are local, vocal, and effective. Our work as defenders of local nature only happens because of wonderful people like you. Thank you for making what we do possible.
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