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| Patterson's critics misinterpret words of general plan advisers |
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| Written by Claude Delphia / PI Community Columnist | |
| Wednesday, 03 October 2007 | |
 Claude Delphia As some of you might know, I’ve been busy working on the Web site WS-PACE.org for the West Side-Patterson Alliance for Community and Environment to oppose developer Gerry Kamilos’ West Park plan for the former Crows Landing Naval airfield and keep it from moving forward. On top of that, I’m serving on Patterson’s Centennial Committee, which is planning a celebration in summer 2009. More about that in a future column. In addition, I’m serving on the Patterson General Plan Advisory Committee, which leads me into my comments in this column. General plan problems Having served on the Patterson planning commission a total of eight years in the 1980s, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on city planning. A friend, Kenneth Tyler, and I actively opposed the general plan that was adopted in 1992. We spent hundreds of hours writing opposition pieces for the newspaper and going on the record and speaking at meetings. At that time, our viewpoint — that large-scale proposed growth should be opposed — was in the minority, but we still spoke out, as we felt it was our obligation to do so. When the opportunity came up, I decided to start providing input by joining the current General Plan Advisory Committee, or, as it is known, GPAC. At this point, this committee, which consists of a lot of people with different interests, has finalized some general plan boundary and growth area recommendations to go to the planning commission and City Council. Because this is just an advisory committee, it has been very disturbing to see people all over the county, way out of Patterson, using this committee’s recommendations to criticize the town’s growth policy. Part of the problem resulted after the committee members decided to go with a 40-year plan instead of the more standard 20-year plan. Then, we got into a hassle as to whether we were going to grow at a certain rate per year or whether it was going to be a compounded figure. That led to an erroneous belief by others in the county that the city had already decided to grow to 150,000. Those mentioning this figure didn’t bother with the truth, which is that the figure was 40 years from 2008, nor did they mention that the figure came from an advisory committee, and the planning commission and council have made no decision on any figures, let alone 150,000 or more. For various reasons, the headline grabbers and gobblers (those who don’t read the details) fixated on the 40-year figure and acted as if it were already set in stone. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the five-member City Council makes the final decision. The GPAC’s decision about how to draw the city’s borders was difficult and at times contentious. For example, I didn’t like the 40-year plan working concept. Twenty years is all a community can reasonably plan for. In any case, future city councils can change the plan as many as four times a year, so it seems to me to be useless to spend all the time we did trying to plan something that may be thrown to the wolves by future council decisions. Kamilos already has used the GPAC’s figure to show that his 37,000 jobs are needed for Patterson’s future new houses. The developer will use every expansion to prove that his jobs will be needed to feed Patterson’s housing expansion 30 years from now. Of course, the real plan is for Patterson to provide jobs for its own housing expansion, past, present and future. Ideally, the jobs should come first, followed by additional houses. But that doesn’t seem to work, so most communities are always behind in the jobs-housing balance. Revising a general plan is not an exact science. Some of it is wishful thinking, and the GPAC was presented with plenty of la-la-land proposals. Unfortunately, not all but many land developers would like to see every piece of land they own or control turned into mega tracts of housing. They will continue to push expansion to include their particular area. However, the City Council, the final decider in this process, must balance all factors and decide what the best plan is for Patterson’s future. We are also somewhat at the mercy of the general plan consultants. We will see more of their take on the future planning this next week, when the GPAC proposals are presented to a joint planning commission and council meeting. West Side native Claude Delphia is an avid historian and a former member of the Patterson Planning Commission. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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