The developers of the Laetitia Reserve are begging the cluster question
By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
On September 10, the County Planning Commission is going to permit or deny the Laetitia Reserve, an “agricultural cluster” project thatproposes to scatter 101 homes across the Laetitia Vineyards.
On August 11, Laetitia developer Vic Montgomery told the Tribune he was disappointed with the fact that County planners are recommending denial of his project. “I think this is a hangover from Santa Margarita Ranch,” he said. The reporter clarified that what Montgomery meant by that was that “following controversy over the Santa Margarita project, he thinks the county is now more hesitant about approving agricultural clusters.” Santa Margarita was “narrowly approved by the Board of Supervisors in 2008, but construction was delayed because of years of legal wrangling and environmental study.”
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and recall the exact ingredients for a Santa Margarita hangover, from whence the County may now have derived some newfound hesitancy over the approval of another development project like that one.
The County’s Land Use Ordinance requires that any approved agricultural cluster "result in the continuation, enhancement and long-term preservation of agricultural operations... avoid and buffer all prime agricultural soils on the site... minimize, to the maximum extent feasible, the need for construction of new roads... avoid environmentally sensitive habitat areas... cluster proposed residential structures to the maximum extent feasible...," etc.
With Santa Margarita Ranch in 2008, as with the Laetitia Ag Cluster now, County planning staff could not make legal findings for conditions of approval for the proposed subdivision because it promised to do the opposite of all those things. Failing to meet just one of those requirements should result in the denial of a permit. But in 2008, the board majority – Supervisors Katcho Achadjian, Harry Ovitt and Jerry Lenthall -- wanted Santa Margarita approved, so they called on the developers to write their own conditions of approval for their own project. Nice of them.
Achadjian, Ovitt and Lenthall felt the need for speed as the end of 2008 approached, getting the job done by the end of the year because the newly elected board majority -- widely considered to be inclined to uphold the County's General Plan and the California Environmental Quality Act rather than ignore them – would be seated the following month. The 2008 lame-duck Board majority convened all the continued meetings necessary to complete the paperwork and shove Santa Margarita through before Christmas. No one who witnessed those meetings and knew what was going on could miss the obvious analogy: Ovitt, Achadjian and Lenthall were looking to finish the job and leave before the cops arrived.
The approval of the Santa Margarita Ranch ag cluster subdivision was an abuse of power that demonstrated extraordinary contempt for the constituents our elected officials were elected to represent. For no project in living memory has a pro-development majority on the SLO County Board of Supervisors made it so nakedly obvious that they were acting solely at the behest, and for the benefit, of a project applicant. Never have our elected officials shown themselves to be so eager to pervert and discard the planning process and ignore their citizens, the counsel of planning experts and resource agencies, and the clear directives of our area planning standards, local ordinances and state law. The approval of Santa Margarita Ranch was an historic act of civic irresponsibility.
And because of it, per Mr. Montgomery, the County may be “more hesitant” to approve another agricultural cluster project that has a massive number of environmental impacts, disregards the General Plan and interprets the Ag Cluster Ordinance to mean “scatter your development all over the place, in clusters.”
That, in a nutshell, is the Santa Margarita hangover.
The Santa Margarita Ranch proposal had a record-setting eleven Class 1 -- significant and unavoidable -- environmental impacts. Laetitia has fifteen. In both cases, project proponents energetically insisted that this was not really the case and tried to claim that most of these identified impacts should be discarded. (Keeping a project’s most damaging environmental impacts out of the administrative record helps to insulate it from future legal challenge.)
To approve the Santa Margarita project, the County broke all the rules. Mr. Montgomery now mourns a claimed “change in philosophy” that no longer guarantees a free ride on greased skids in which the County will bend, fold, spindle and mutilate CEQA and the General Plan in order to issue a permit.
We’ll all find out shortly if that is actually the case. But if the County is indeed hesitant to break the rules again and approve another wildly destructive, inappropriate ag “cluster”-in-name-only, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Perhaps Mr. Montgomery would like to rethink the comparison he has invited.