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and Wildlife Service to use helicopters to dump 1.5 tons of controversial multi- species anticoagulant rat poison pellets onto the Southeast Farallon Island.
Revising Our Local Coastal Plan for the New Era:
California’s statewide Coastal Plan first emerged in large part from the obvious need to preserve our public access to walk and picnic on Sonoma County beaches, beginning at the time that the Sea Ranch development was originally proposed. The local iteration of the State Coastal Plan here is called the Sonoma County Local Coastal Plan (LCP).
Find out how you can directly participate in the rewriting of
Significant changes in content from a prior earlier draft of the LCP document have now been proposed by the County, and the latest iteration of the LCP is currently being circulated for public review and comment.
this plan, at http://LocalCoastalPlan.org
At the heart of our LCP lies the public mandate for the continued protection of Environmentally-Sensitive Habitat Areas, or ESHA, within our Coastal Zone. Protecting ESHA has many implications, from consideration of where and how any new development or land conversion can occur, to determining how public access will be handled, while ensuring that natural areas and wildlife habitat are not compromised.
Watch Out for Exemptions and the Local “Revolving Door”:
As one reviews the current draft of the LCP, one clear crosscutting issue that must be highlighted is that for almost every single provision throughout the modified LCP there would be granted to Permit Sonoma planning staff a very wide margin of discretion in terms of interpretation and implementation.
This staff discretion to waive or alter the parameters of the LCP at will applies to virtually every facet of the document, from preserving ESHA to maintaining appropriate height limits for buildings between Highway One and the ocean to potential expansion of commercial enterprises and even to potential future growth.
Limited fresh water sources have kept jenner small and pristine
Parts of the updated LCP seem to imply that if more water supply and/or wastewater treatment capacity could be added, new expansion of existing town boundaries could then occur, creating a slippery slope for future growth.
This kind of institutionalization of regulatory “wiggle room” in the updated LCP is of particular concern because a new cottage industry has sprung up here in which former Sonoma County employees are aggressively marketing their expensive consulting services and insider personal connections to advise newly-arriving profiteers in circumventing the rules everyone else here locally has long had to live by.
Instead of being overly flexible for those with the money to retain hired gun consultants, the updated LCP needs strong predictability, firm rules and solid growth limits, and should not arbitrarily provide special interests with paid backdoor access to our County planners and decisionmakers.
This applies in particular to consideration of an influx of new event centers and the related inappropriate siting of the wrong kinds of development in the wrong locations, but really, it also extends to virtually every aspect of the LCP.
In other words, the Local Coastal Plan needs to say what it means
and then consistently stick to it.
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