By Frank Landis, CNPS-San Diego Conservation Committee Chair
I’m writing this on November 18, after listening to the Board of Supervisors approve Otay Ranch Village 13 by a 4-1 margin, with Fletcher voting against. Sierra Club is already promising to sue, and they have a very good record against the County. Indeed, that record was part of their testimony, that they’re getting tired of suing the County, and winning, having the County pay their fees, and doing it over again. Supervisor Jacob asked them if there were situations under which they would not sue, and the general answer was that it was entirely possible, if the County followed its own General Plan and did something reasonable about climate change.
CNPS will be considering our options going forward on this case. This project, among other things, plans to bulldoze 1,200-odd Nuttall’s scrub oaks (Quercus dumosa, list 1B) across six acres. They originally misidentified the oaks (in the DEIR, the oaks were stated to look like dumosa, but they were too far inland for the Jepson Manual description, so they were misidentified). When I pointed out that there are Nuttall’s Scrub Oaks east of the site, they changed it to “they’re dumosa, but it’s a small number, so it’s not significant.”Today, they claimed they would mitigate the 1,200 oaks in a yet-to-be-written revegetation plan, so there was no significant impact. Sigh.
So why did this pass, aside from the fact that it’s the last big project that Cox and Jacob have been working on off and onsince the 1990s? That’s likely one big reason, that and Gaspar leaving the board and toeing the party line. Come the end of January, the number of Republicans on the board is going from 4 to 2, and everyone expects the County to take a political left turn. This project, along with a bunch of other joyless lame duckery, is the usual post-election: finishing up long-term projects and making controversial decisions the outgoing politicians can no longer be punished for.
The County, for instance, is also looking at radically downscaling protections for wetlands in its Resource Protection Ordinance (RPO) and rewriting the Grading Ordinance to make it easier to grade. This apparently will be heard by the Board in December.
This week, I still have one hearing, on Rancho Lilac, which SANDAG decided to hear on the 20th with little advance warning. Thanks to those who put in comments. Hopefully, that will be enough for SANDAG to simply follow the staff advice on Rancho Lilac, rather than listen to the screams of outraged trail riders who are...well, actually, who are asking that property purchased for biological mitigation be turned at County expense into more trails for them. Cheeky, that.
On the City of San Diego side, there’s what happened with the Parks Master Plan Update, which went down 5-4 last week, with outgoing Councilmember Kersey casting the deciding vote and Cate fighting it because it would take money out of his district. These two were the deciding votes, but the dynamic in the environmental community is rather different.
There are multiple layers of problems with the Update, but not what you might expect. None of the environmental groups I’ve talked with are very concerned about the central environmental justice issue driving the Update, which is that the poorer neighborhoods desperately need more and better parks, but have no money, while the newer outlying suburbs have better parks and often unspent funds. Pooling and shifting funds to give poorer people better parks (and to help the local canyons) is not controversial. What got us upset was that City Planning made the update primarily about adding amenities to parks, and they pretty much ignored the MSCP until their verbal pitch to the Council, by which point it was too late. We environmentalists don’t want to see MSCP lands paved for bike commuter paths or more recreational amenities. Conserved means conserved.
The Parks Master Plan Update will get done under Mayor Gloria, I have no doubt. Our challenge is to get the planners working on it to realize that they made a serious mistake treating parks solely as amenity sources for city residents and the MSCP solely as a constraint and CEQA issue. I have some hope that, by meeting with the planners, we can get it through to them that meeting the MSCP is one of their core goals, not an inconvenient constraint. I can hope, anyway.
Looking forward to 2021, might I hope the politics get a little more sane. Yeah, that. I expect San Diego politics to get moderately grim in the next year. It’s not just the pandemic, budget shortfalls, and dealing with all the crises left behind by the departing Trump administration, it’s that having a majority of democrats running the City and County of San Diego does not automatically mean that politics will take a hard left turn and go progressive, with conservation taken seriously.
This isn’t doomsaying, just a reminder of how politics worksright now. There are two big wings to the local democratic party: the progressives, with whom we tend to make common cause, and the more moderate business-and-labor types. Both sides profess to care about things like environmental justice and the housing crisis, but unfortunately, they diverge sharply on issues about whether more developments are good (bringing jobs and housing) or bad (killing plants and animals, making climate change harder to mitigate). What has happened is that the big businesses that previously supported Republicans will support pro-business democrats, while the environmental community will continue to work with the progressives and try to stay organized. This is how politics has worked in the City of San Diego for the last two years. In general, we can expect more lip service to be paid to CNPS issues at a minimum, andhopefully we’ll see more genuine action.
In the longer term, we will hopefully see the County work on their Climate Action Plan (CAP) and continue working on the North County MSCP. At today’s meeting, in response to a question from Supervisor Jacob, Planning said they could get a new CAP done by the end of 2022, and the NC MSCP will be done by a consultant, probably ICF. So, we (hopefully) have that to look forward to.
On the City of San Diego level, I expect to see a real battle shape up between City Planning and the local neighborhood planning boards. It is likely that the centralizing started by Mayor Faulconer will continue under Mayor Gloria. What this means for us is that things like the Parks Master Plan are more likely to get a coat of lipstick and get sent back to the City Council, rather than getting the major rewrite it needs. Getting more than superficial upgrades is a major task for this spring.
One of the big problems in both City and County planning is that their thinking has become remarkably siloed. What I mean by that is the notion that parks are amenities for people, houses are for living, greenhouse gases have to be mitigated elsewhere, and bikes need to be accommodated on less dangerous paths through parks, because San Diego streets are too dangerous for them, and so forth. Functions are not to be combined, and problem areas are to be ignored if they cannot be solved this way. When I try to point out to them that parks play a role in the MSCP, in greenhouse gas sequestration, and are generally in canyons that flood frequently so that they make lousy transit corridors, I get this blank look of incomprehension. To put it politely, the management culture in the City and County don’t seem to encourage lateral thinking. Instead, they want everything neat, and inconvenient issues ignored as much as possible.
With the County, at least, we have some possibility of majorchange, with three new supervisors coming on board. I’mconcerned about the City, because we have too many complex issues to deal with them so simplistically. This is where the conflict between neighborhoods and the planners becomes so troubling. The local planning groups I know tend to be lateral thinkers, no matter what their political stripe, but they also want their neighborhoods to stay as they are. I’m concerned that City Hall’s effort to silence them will yield more problems than solutions. And as usual, I hope I’m too pessimistic and that things turn out better.
Politics aside, stay safe. December 2020 is going to be a memorable month, probably in multiple ways.