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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

June 5, 2005

Battle over expanding Sonoma County greenbelts is about to begin

- Kelly Brown, Greenbelt Alliance

"You can't just get out your crayon and make the separators bigger. The people who own the land have to be left with something they can do on it."

- Bob Anderson, United Winegrowers

Let the battle begin.

Local activists are girding themselves for a fight over the future of the county's landscape - including the greenbelts separating Sonoma County's cities.

In the fall, the county Planning Commission will hold hearings on the general plan, the county's blueprint for growth.

In a 2004 report staking out its position, the Greenbelt Alliance wrote that "the current separators will not be sufficient to preserve Sonoma County's rural character in the face of the county's projected population growth."

Kelly Brown, the Sonoma/Marin field representative for the organization, believes that the separators should be expanded sixfold to include all the priority greenbelts identified by the Agriculture Preservation and Open Space District.

"There is a real opportunity now, as we create a new general plan, to protect the property along the 101 corridor that will be under the most intense development pressures," says Brown.

Looking at a map, it's easy to understand the organization's concerns: The eight separators identified in the county's general plan total only about 18,150 acres. The model that Brown prefers - the Open Space District's acquisition plan - identifies 111,500 acres as "priority greenbelts."

The Open Space District plan is not intended as a model for county zoning laws. It's a priority plan for acquisitions near urban areas - of which the district has already laid claim to about 13,000 acres. Given rising land prices, the complexities of buying the small parcels that are often available in greenbelts, and the district's other priorities, it's unrealistic to expect it to purchase all the property identified in the plan.

That's why Brown's organization believes that rezoning the land as community separators is important to protect it from development.

Bob Anderson, executive director of United Winegrowers, disagrees. "If people want to plunk down the money and buy the property in the separators, then fine," says Anderson. "But I've sat through too many hearings where it's 'At no expense to me, can I have this?'."

So far, the citizens' advisory committee that drafted the proposed revisions to the general plan appears to agree with Anderson. The group has recommended that the issue be studied further, rather than written into the new general plan.

It's easy to understand the committee's reluctance: If the separators are expanded in size and number, hundreds of land owners will be affected.

But recent high-profile projects in rural areas are providing fuel for those who believe that the separators need to be expanded, and the development within them restricted.

The Valley of the Moon Alliance grew out of the fights over proposed resorts in the Kenwood area. The citizens' group recently completed a study of potential "event facilities" (wineries with tasting rooms and space to hold events) in the Sonoma Valley. According to its calculations, there is the potential for 362 new facilities along Arnold Drive and highways 12, 116 and 121.

It is difficult to imagine this kind of expansion - especially since the group has no way of evaluating whether landowners are actually interested in building a winery. But, as the study points out, even if only 20 percent of the wineries were built, there would be 75 new facilities in Sonoma Valley, bringing the total to 113.

If you think Highway 12 is a nightmare now, take a Sunday drive on Highway 29 in Napa Valley to see what happens to traffic when wineries proliferate.

There are those who believe the concerns are overblown.

"On paper, anything is possible," said the United Winegrowers' Anderson in response to the report. "We've been through as big a boom as any industry can experience, and we don't see wineries cheek to jowl."

Anderson argues that the general plan isn't the place to ban or limit agricultural facilities. "I still have a hard time in wine country with the premise that people shouldn't build wineries," he says.

Brown, with the Greenbelt Alliance, admits that it won't be easy to limit wineries but says "We'd like the county to take up this issue and engage in it."

While acknowledging the concerns over wineries, activists might better spend their time pushing the supervisors to expand the greenbelts in areas facing the most critical growth threats, and by working with city councils.

A moderate expansion of the separators to include more land around Santa Rosa and Windsor and along Highway 12 in the Sonoma Valley seems reasonable. Asking the Cloverdale City Council to place an urban growth boundary measure on the ballot also makes sense (Cloverdale is the only city without a boundary).

But more than anything, organizations concerned about sprawl need to promote dense urban developments. By allowing more people to live within the cities, there is less pressure to build in the country. And the support of environmental groups can give city councils the gumption they need to approve controversial projects.

Environmental activists aren't the only ones who need to speak up: Anyone worried about the county's future should be voicing their support for dense urban housing projects.

City residents should feel the pain themselves before requiring their country neighbors to sacrifice their lifestyle.

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