Page 12 - Sonoma County Gazette - June 2018

Sonoma County:
The Plan That Changed Everything
By Carol Benfell
The Sonoma County we know and love might never have been.
By the late 1960s, ranches and farms countywide were zoned and subdivided into 5-acre ranchettes.
Development surged as people streamed into the county on a newly improved Highway 101.
The Coast was a potential Malibu Beach with expensive homes dotting the shoreline and little or no public access.
A corridor of urban sprawl from Healdsburg to Petaluma was in the making, without consideration of environmental
impacts or scenic values.
One document stopped that in its tracks.
Forty years ago, Sonoma County Supervisors signed off on the first-ever County General Plan, a blueprint that would guide land use, development and environmental and scenic protection for the next 25 years.
The policies and land uses adopted in 1978 have made Sonoma County what it is today, with forests, coastal beaches, ranches and vineyards, and the beauty of a landscape that attracts people from around the world.
It was revolutionary, it was controversial, it was a political hot button -- and some who supported it paid a high personal price.
“It took a lot of courage. People took chances politically. People staked their careers on it,” said Walter Kieser, who
worked on the first General Plan. A recall election led by pro-
1978 General Plan
development forces ousted two supervisors in June 1976. Supervisors Bill Kortum and Chuck Hinkle were replaced by pro-growth conservatives Robert Theiller and Wayne Bass.
The new conservative majority
on the Board of Supervisors quickly replaced George Kovatch, the planning director, with a more conservative director. Twenty-four
of the 27 planners working on
the General Plan lost their jobs, including Kieser. “Their platform was eliminating the General Plan,” said Kieser, who went on to form his own consulting firm. “They were explicitly for the notion we should look like San Jose.”
Laid-off planners staged a public mock funeral of the draft General Plan at Kovatch’s house– complete with small wooden coffin and burial.
But the funeral was premature.
Six months later, in November 1976,
voters returned a pro-General Plan
majority to the Board of Supervisors
with the election of Brian Kahn, Helen Rudee and Eric Koenigshofer.
Three planners – Richard Retecki, Toby Ross, and Richard Lehtinen – coaxed the General Plan through two more years of rewriting and revisions until the Board approved it in January 1978.
“It was unique because of the environmental elements and a sensibility that the county could only handle so much growth. It’s the reason the character of this place remains true,” said Retecki, who went on to become Project Manager at the State Coastal Conservancy.
The process had taken seven years -- five years of information gathering, mapping and writing, two years of massive reviews and revisions, and seven different sketch plans, before the Sonoma County General Plan and its accompanying Environmental Resources Management summary and Land Use Plan were adopted.
In the process, every acre of Sonoma County had been mapped, photographed, and its important features identified. Census tracts were overlain with environmental landscape data to determine best uses. “We colored hundreds of maps and attended what seemed to be endless presentations. In the end, it was worth it” Retecki said.
County residents became involved.
A 35-member citizens’ General Plan Advisory Committee and a 17-member citizens’ Transportation Advisory committee met regularly to weigh in at every stage of the planning. Hundreds of community meetings gave people a chance to comment on the draft Plan.
12 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 6/18
GENERAL PLAN cont’d on page 13
Planners drew their inspiration from an innovative planning approach created by Ian McHarg, founder of the Regional Planning Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, “Design with Nature,” was the first to suggest integrating environmental resources into planning, and projecting the impact of development on the landscape.