Referendum on Rancho San Juan Is Going To Happen!

On December 14, 2004, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted by a 3-2 margin (with Supervisors Potter and Calcagno voting “no”) to approve the Rancho San Juan Specific Plan and the proposed “Butterfly Village” subdivision. More water overdraft, more traffic impacts, and massive growth on agricultural land would be the result. Most of the housing provided would be luxury homes situated around a new golf course. The approval would actually make the current affordable housing crisis worse than it is now!

In order to approve the Rancho San Juan development, the Board had to modify the General Plan, which puts planning backwards. Projects are supposed to be tested against the General Plan, and approved only if they’re consistent. In this case, the Board of Supervisors modified the General Plan to conform to the project. In other words, instead of requiring the developers to follow the local General Plan, which the courts have called the “Constitution of Local Land Use,” the Board of Supervisors changed the Constitution to permit the development to go ahead. This is the opposite of how it’s supposed to be!

Luckily, the voters in California can have the last word, when their elected officials make the wrong decision. The referendum process lets the voters decide whether specific decisions made by their local officials were right or wrong. If a referendum is qualified for the ballot, the governing board has either to rescind its previous action or put the matter up for a vote. But getting the right to vote isn’t automatic. And it isn't easy!

To qualify a referendum in this case, Rancho San Juan opponents had to gather about 8,900 valid signatures of registered voters. That’s hard enough to accomplish, but they had to do it during the Christmas holidays, and in only 30-days! They did it! Reportedly, people were so anxious to stop Rancho San Juan that they asked to sign the petition twice!

On January 12th, fewer than thirty days after the Board's action to approve the development, the Rancho San Juan Opposition Coalition (with lots of help from LandWatch) turned in over 16,000 signatures to the County’s Elections Official. This should be more than enough to qualify the referendum challenging Rancho San Juan. After the Elections Official counts the signatures, and makes sure that there really are enough valid signatures to qualify the referendum, the Board of Supervisors will have to decide whether to rescind their action on Rancho San Juan, or let the voters decide. If there is an election, it’s not yet clear when it would be. It could be a “special election” set this year, or the election could be scheduled for a “regular” election day, in June 2006.

Whatever happens with the referendum (and with the legal challenge that has been mounted against Rancho San Juan), there is a lot more news to come in this interesting saga, and LandWatch will keep you advised. The “bottom line,” right now, is that democracy is alive and well in Monterey County. When County Supervisors decided to change the community’s General Plan to accommodate a developer, instead of requiring the developer to abide by the community General Plan, our community stepped right up and said, “NO WAY! We’ll vote on that, thanks.”

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posted 01.18.05