On Aug. 3, the San
Diego County Board of Supervisors adopted a new general plan restricting
new development
in the county.
What the county
supervisors do not know about land-use planning is a trillion times
greater than what they do know. There are thousands of pages incorporated
into the general plan update, and certainly no single person could read
them all in a timely manner; however, the supervisors seem unaware of the
number of documents.
During the
hearing, Supervisor Pam Slater-Price mentioned that she is pleased that
there are only 273 pages in
the new general plan that she is voting for; however the county's own
website lists over 370 attachments, with most attachments having multiple
pages.
Land Use in San Diego County Tied Down & Immobilized
It would be
physically impossible for the supervisors to read all the hundreds of
documents and still be able to respond to all their other
responsibilities. So unfortunately, they become captives of the
bureaucracy, much like regulatory agencies become captives of the
industries they regulate.
Supervisors are
not bad people, not uneducated, unintelligent or irrational, but they have
no choice but to rely upon a handful of planners substituting their
knowledge for the "collective wisdom" of hundreds of thousands of county
residents. This collective wisdom is commonly known as the "free market,"
but unfortunately in this case, we ended up with $18 million worth of
"planned chaos."
Contrary to staff
claims, the new general plan guarantees even more housing shortages,
thereby requiring even more subsidies for so-called "affordable" housing.
It also guarantees more traffic congestion by concentrating development
rather than dispersing it to where homebuyers want to live, and promotes
even more incredibly wasteful mass transit, which residents absolutely
refuse to use.
More people ride
bikes and walk to work than ride mass transit. The past morass of
regulations has resulted in a mind-boggling doubling up of households,
which according to SANDAG has been the equivalent of adding four cities
the size of
Poway to the region. This translates to
lower living standards with greater traffic generated and 41,000
households on the county's rental-assistance waiting list.
Supervisor Ron
Roberts is clueless that in shifting riders to mass transit, if it could
be done as he hopes, the buses and trolleys he loves generate greater
carbon emissions than autos, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
If we simply look
at the county's own consultant's report that stipulates "only" 7,500
dwelling units will be eliminated and multiply that by the average home
price in
San Diego of $330,000, it comes
to almost $2.5 billion worth of lost jobs. Since new homes cost more than
$330,000, it's really a lot more in lost jobs and economic growth.
Does anyone think
Dianne Jacob, Ron Roberts, Greg Cox or Pam Slater-Price cares? Think
again!
