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San Juan Bautista City Manager Don Reynolds proposed a resolution to disband the city’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) Committee at the Aug. 20 City Council meeting, saying that a majority of the council had agreed to its dissolution.
This was met with confusion from the council, opposition from the chairman of the Planning Commission, pleas from members of the UGB Committee to be allowed to continue their work, and uniform disagreement from members of the public who attended the meeting.
Following the discussion, the City Council unanimously voted to extend the committee’s mandate through November.
At the center of a 70-minute debate was a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the city and San Benito County Board of Supervisors that the committee has been drafting.
The MOU designates unincorporated areas outside San Juan Bautista’s sphere of influence as holding three levels of interest depending on their proximity to the city. The finished MOU would assert the city’s right to have input at varying levels into any proposed development in those areas.
Reynolds said the City Council had considered the MOU at meetings on June 18 and July 16 without taking action and that there was a tacit agreement that the committee’s work was done.
“In speaking with members of the City Council,” he said, “some felt that perhaps the MOU wasn’t necessary, and we could say that the work is done with the committee, and the staff could negotiate any agreement that may be necessary.”
Mayor Scott Freels said that he was confused by Reynolds’ assertion.
“The way you made it sound is that we’ve already decided,” he said. “A majority has already decided to end the Urban Growth Boundary [Committee]. But that didn’t ever happen. And that’s why I’m questioning why we have this resolution in front of us.”
Freels questioned the legality of the memorandum and said he thought the committee had completed its work, drafting an sphere of influence and urban growth boundary, and that he did not see why it needed to continue since the City Council had approved both.
“I’ve been dealing with this for so long,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Why should this take so long to get done?’”
Unfinished business
Councilmember Jackie Morris-Lopez questioned why city staff should take over the committee’s unfinished work, since Reynolds said his staff already lacked “the bandwidth to do things.”
Morris-Lopez questioned whether the planning process would be taken over by the EMC Planning Group, a Monterey-based land use consultant that has worked in the area.
“Are we going to hand it off to EMC or another consultant which incurs more fees?” she asked. “I don’t consider [EMC President] Michael Groves a friend of the city—there was quite enthusiastic work to develop South San Juan across the highway.”
Councilmember Leslie Jordan said the committee should continue its work because San Juan needed assurances from the county on paper, saying the city could weigh in on developments near its limits.
“There are properties within Hollister that are county property,” she said. “The county, without having a conversation, said they were going to build a six-story building on one of them. We expect a conversation before they put something around our little plot of land.”
Planning Commissioners David Medeiros and Jose Aranda, as well as the Urban Growth Boundary Committee members behind the MOU, Chris Martorana and Dan DeVries (also a planning commissioner), spoke in favor of the UGB Committee during public comment.
Martorana said that the MOU had obviously created a lot of angst among city officials, but he thought the feedback from the July 16 City Council meeting had been useful. He said there had not been another UBG Committee meeting since then for the members to discuss it, and that having successfully drafted the sphere of influence, the UGB and a planning area, he felt the MOU tied all the work together.
“I think we have a good foundational document,” he said. “And it was unanimously agreed upon as a foundational document. It is fundamental to this process that all of these things work together and are mutually supporting, and it is critical that this moves forward.”
Martorana said he considered the MOU the “most important thing I have worked on in my time here.”
DeVries defended the MOU, saying he thought it was reasonable to get an agreement with the county on land use outside the city. He said that while there had not been any issues with the county before on the matter, with changes to the Board of Supervisors’ lineup imminent with the Nov. 5 election, it made sense to formalize the relationship.
“You could say they are already doing that,” he said. “Well then, great. They should have no problem putting that writing. I think what started as a really simple concept became convoluted somewhere along the line.”
DeVries suggested that any decision about the UGB Committee be put off until the end of November, allowing the members to have three more meetings to draft something the City Council would approve, saying, “I think we could move this ball forward in a really efficient way.”
Nine San Juan residents also spoke during public comment and supported allowing the committee to finish its work. Jim Leibold said that, while he was not in favor of “long drawn out committees,” he thought that if the committee was not doing what it was doing, then development decisions could be made by the county or state with no input from the city.
“Everyone’s seen the growth [in Hollister] with no respect for the people who have lived there generationally,” he said. “Do you want to see three or four thousand permits issued surrounding San Juan? Do you want the developers to dictate what is going on?”
The council proposed to move forward by submitting the city’s sphere of influence to the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission and giving the UGB Committee until the end of November to complete its work. The measure passed in a 5-0 vote.
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