Why the business community should support the Land Conservation Initiative

Below is a presentation I made to a Chamber of Commerce policy committee, explaining why we thought businesses should support the Land Conservation Initiative in Santa Clara County.

-Brian
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The Land Conservation Initiative protects working rural landscapes from conversion into suburban low-density, monster mansions with lawns. Where that conversion has already happened or is inevitable, the Initiative does not seek to stop it – we focus instead on the truly rural areas that are unprotected. The Initiative applies to about half of the land in the County – land outside of city jurisdictions that is not either extensively developed or already protected by other means.

From a business perspective, there are two main reasons for supporting the Initiative. First it supports the quality of life that attract people to the SouthBay where people expect to quickly leave developed areas and travel through a rural landscape. If they wanted Los-Angeles/Orange County style sprawl, that’s where Silicon Valley would have actually grown. Our quality of life outcompetes the sprawl of Southern California, and that’s good for business.

Second, the Initiative respects private property rights. Subject to the most basic health and safety requirements, anyone who owns an undeveloped parcel will be able to put a home on it, and the Initiative allows CountySupervisors to set a minimum house size of 10,000 square feet. All existing legal uses like quarries are “grandfathered” in to stay legal. While some landowners will not be able to subdivide land as much they would like, in the real world people have to accept some constraints. Anyone who bought undeveloped land a few years ago or more will still realize enormous profits from simply sitting on that investment.

The Initiative does three things. First and possibly the most important, it locks in with voter protection some current County provisions that limit sprawl. For example, the current General Plan prohibits development where there is inadequate firefighter access. The Initiative locks in those protections and prevents loopholes that could result in raging wildfires and harm to neighbors.

Second, the Initiative tightens up some existing rules that promote low-density suburbs where they don’t belong. Some hillsides areas outside of city limits can now be subdivided 20-acre lots, something that contradicts a working rural landscape. We double the minimum size to 40 acres. Cattle ranching areas we set at 160 acres. Compared to AlamedaCounty’s 320 acre minimum parcel size, our provisions are moderate.

Third, the Initiative add some specificity to the County General Plan to prevent abuse of the permitted uses in rural areas and to protect special environmental resources. For example, we’re protecting water quality by requiring development nearby streams in the rural areas of the County only happen where it doesn’t harm the environment.

I’d like to suggest a decision tree for how you could weigh whether to endorse. First, decide whether personal property interests trump the rights everyone else has. If you want a “Houston” situation of no zoning and no land use controls, then don’t endorse us.

Second, decide what overall trend you want to see for the area. SouthBay has traveled a different path than Los Angeles and OrangeCounty in terms of not converting every available area to suburban sprawl. If you support that different path, then you would tentatively favor our proposal.

Finally, you might consider whether we did an adequate job in what we aim to do. We think we have, while our opponents make mainly vague, allegations that probably refer to minor provisions of the Initiative without saying which ones. I can answer the allegations one by one, but there are two general responses. First, the Initiative allows all existing legal uses – they are grandfathered in. No one is stopped or prohibited from doing anything they’re doing already, so at worst, we are only stopping the expansion of something Initiative opponents claim would otherwise happen. Second, it would be hard for us the Initiative proponents to claim there is no imaginable way that something inadvertent will happen, but this General Plan revision like other General Plan revisions in the past has to keep the big picture in mind, and minor theoretical negatives have to be weighed against the bigger picture of protecting the quality of life, and the quality of business life, in Santa Clara County.