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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

September 22, 2004

East County development panel gets off to a peaceful beginning

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Representatives from Pittsburg, Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood and the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors sat down to start hashing out where they want to stop development from spreading deeper into the countryside.

In future meetings, they will also discuss the criteria by which the line will be reviewed for possible changes every five years.

The two-hour public meeting was surprisingly sedate despite the often bitter confrontations between advocates for growth and proponents of development restrictions that have plagued East County in recent years. Still, it was obvious that some of the cities and environmental groups are likely headed for confrontation.

Brentwood Mayor Brian Swisher, for example, presented his city's plan to move the urban limit line in four places over the next 10 years while representatives from the Greenbelt Alliance, Save Mt. Diablo and the Sierra Club all said the line should stay where it is.

Tuesday's gathering was essentially an organizational effort in which debate was not allowed. Participants simply mapped out the schedule and goals of future meetings and voiced their ideas about where the line should be drawn and how to work out a plan that all the cities and the county could endorse.

Oakley City Councilman Brad Nix and Supervisor Federal Glover both said any movement of the line and subsequent development should only be allowed after transportation and other infrastructure improvements are built. They also said development should be focused inside existing urban areas.

The task force is meeting because of a provision in Measure J, the reauthorization of Contra Costa's sales tax for transportation and transit projects that will appear on the November ballot.

Measure J requires that each city comply with either a new "countywide, mutually agreed-upon, voter-approved" urban limit line, or adopt one of its own. In exchange, cities would receive a share from both a $360 million street maintenance fund and a $100 million pot of money for alternative transportation projects.

The urban limit line isn't defined in the measure, but all regions of the county agreed to work out the details during negotiations to put the measure on the ballot. Each of the county's four subregions is working on a plan. Those plans will go before the board of supervisors, which will place them on a countywide ballot by November 2006.

If a city decides to ignore the line as drawn by its subregional task force, it must win support for its own urban limit line proposal in a citywide election in order to win its share of the street maintenance and alternative transportation money from the sales tax increase.

The task force's next meeting will be scheduled sometime in the next few weeks and Glover suggested a field trip to the areas that cities want to move inside the urban limit line.

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