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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

April 7, 2002

At a Crossroads

Is Vacaville's vision out-of-control sprawl or smart growth?

By Natalie DuMont

At the age of 7, I wrote my first letter to the editor of The Reporter, saying that it was a very sad sight to see beautiful trees being cut down for strip-mall development. Now, at the age of 26, I write again.

While I view some aspects of the way our community has grown as negative, I also view many positives. More activities for youth have come to our town, such as movie theaters, a bowling alley and arcade, an ice-skating rink, and parks and sports fields.

The city has revitalized Andrews Park and sponsors many community events such as the CreekWalk concert series and Know Your City Week.

The city has purchased hillsides as open space for recreational and scenic enjoyment, with benefits for watershed protection, and habitat preservation. The downtown has become more vibrant with successful businesses and a new town center planned.

The city of Vacaville is drafting a Vision 2025 report that centers around two questions: Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

I would add a third: How should we grow? There is no doubt that more growth will come to Vacaville. The question is how? I hope it won't be through more sprawl.

By sprawl I mean expansive developments that pave over agricultural land and open space, contribute to car-dependency rather than public transportation access, and require new and costly infrastructure and community services.

Some may not agree that Vacaville is threatened by sprawl, but more than 4,000 acres beyond the current city limits are at stake in Vacaville's draft vision statement for the year 2025. This is above and beyond the planned development of approximately 2,500 acres within the current city limits, including lower Lagoon Valley and North Village.

Together, these developments could cover over 6,500 acres of agricultural land and scenic valleys that make Vacaville unique.

Development of these areas, in my view, is sprawl.

I'd like to share reasons why I believe Vacaville should not succumb to more sprawl pressure. First, our community just passed a school bond after two previous attempts failed. While we are trying to relieve our overburdened schools, the proposed sprawl would put us right back where we started. Either our taxes would have to go up to pay for more school bonds, or our schools once again would be overcrowded and underfunded.

Second, we would face traffic congestion even worse than what is already projected. Thousands of additional cars would pile into our already overcrowded roads and freeways, adding more time to dismal commutes.

In addition, several proposed roadway expansions would pave the way for even more sprawl, such as the proposed expansion and extension of Vaca Valley Parkway to four lanes cutting through the hills, and the proposed widening of Pleasants Valley Road to four lanes.

Third, the development of 4,000 acres outside the current city would build over our heritage of high-quality agricultural lands. Wiping out our farmland east of Leisure Town Road and around Pleasants Valley Road would sacrifice our potential for local agriculture in these areas at a time when our society is re-examining our dependence on the global economy and reaffirming the values of local production.

If we pave over our farmlands, we can't work toward solutions to make farming more viable and preserve our agricultural heritage.

Fourth, Vacaville does not have enough jobs. The city currently provides less than one job per household. That means most workers need to commute outside of Vacaville to their jobs. Instead of helping correct this imbalance, the sprawl plan makes it worse by adding an estimated 10,000 new housing units and 25,000 new people, in addition to 5,000 new housing units and over 13,000 additional people already planned within the existing city.

If this is built out without enough jobs to bring the city's jobs-housing ratio into balance, it will make Vacaville even more of a bedroom community for a commuter population.

So how else can Vacaville grow?

There is a better way. By investing within our existing city, we can promote attractive, compact development within Vacaville instead of sprawling outward. We can promote more and higher-paying jobs, so that people who currently live in our community have more opportunities to work in our community.

At the same time, we can promote housing that is attractive and affordable for our teachers, firefighters, military personnel, hospital workers, child-care providers, and others essential to our community, so that people who currently work in our community can afford to live in our community.

We can promote pedestrian and bike-friendly designs and public transit oriented designs in our existing and new neighborhoods, so that we have opportunities to get around town and get to and from Vacaville through means other than our cars.

We can revitalize Vacaville's downtown and underutilized areas with attractive mixes of housing, stores and jobs close to one another, so that we have options other than driving our cars to do errands and to get to and from work or school.

These smart growth solutions are cost efficient and land efficient. They avoid the traffic nightmares that more sprawl would cause. And by reducing commute times, they increase the time families have to spend together.

They would assist our population in need of higher paying jobs as well as our population in need of housing that is affordable. They would help us to accommodate our growing population in a way that revitalizes our existing town. They would enable us to support the capacity and quality of our schools. They would preserve our agricultural lands and open space. They would make our community an even better place to live.

Vacaville can grow in the smart growth fashion I've described. Our community can be empowered to invest in our Vacaville of today and plan wisely for our future.

• The author,a native of Vacaville, is the Solano-Napa field representative of the Bay Area's Greenbelt Alliance.

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