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Editors note: Graham Womack is a freelance journalist based in Sacramento. BenitoLink hired him to bring an independent perspective to this controversial initiative.
Update: A previous version of this article accurately reported campaign contributions the No on A campaign had filed with the county. New information, as shown below, reveals that the dollar amount was significantly underreported.
Seth Adams didn’t want to answer the question. Adams is land conservation director for Save Mount Diablo, a venerable, Walnut Creek-based organization that has thrown its weight behind Measure A. The measure would, according to its text, amend the San Benito County General Plan “to require voter approval before re-designating agricultural, rural, or rangelands, and remove commercial regional designation from four Highway 101 nodes.”
The question, which came during a 30-minute phone interview for this article, was whether Adams was aware that Andy Hsia-Coron, whose group Protect San Benito County is sponsoring the measure, lives very close to one of the proposed nodes, which is in Aromas. Adams replied that he had no comment on where supporters of the measure live.
There is a pitched battle that has formed in San Benito County around Measure A—the Empower Voters to Make Land Use Decisions Initiative—with strong opinions on both sides. It’s unclear whether the measure’s backers understand that one of the sites where a long-planned development would be blocked by the measure is, almost literally, in Hsia-Corons back yard.
As of this writing, the Measure A campaign has raised more than $166,000—with 94% of that money coming from groups such as Save Mount Diablo, as well as individuals in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area.
The initiative’s opposition reported that it had raised much less—$61,000—again mostly from outside San Benito County—which is per capita the third-poorest county in California.
However, the Hollister Free Lance has reported that six large contributions to the No on Measure A campaign were misreported. “The six contributions amount to a total of $189,000, almost $153,000 more than was reported for the entire campaign until now,” according to Free Lance reporter Josué Monroy. “In fact, they don’t appear filed under the No on A campaign at all. Instead, they are filed under the now-defunct No on Q campaign led by the same group in 2022.”
Why Save Mount Diablo is backing Measure A
To Adams, there’s a fairly simple reason why Save Mount Diablo is assisting Protect San Benito. His organization works to preserve the 200-mile-long Diablo Range, Adams said, and San Benito County has the largest portion of the range. His organization also gave financial support to Measure Q, the failed 2022 initiative very similar to 2024’s Measure A.
“It’s kind of a no-brainer that we’d get involved in San Benito,” Adams told BenitoLink.
Save Mount Diablo has contributed $40,000, as of the most recent campaign filings in September. The group has also sent out a glossy mailer that includes links to a series of short videos on its website, in which Adams touts Measure A.
The videos and the mailer claim that San Benito County has lost 43% of its farmland since the mid-1980s, and that the measure is needed to protect agriculture. Near the end of our call, Adams decried the pace of development locally, saying that San Benito County “could lose all of its farmland in a generation or two if they don’t slow things down and treat it as the treasure it really is.”
Some local leaders and ag industry representatives challenge the claims Save Mount Diablo has put forward. Brittany Brown, executive director of the San Benito County Farm Bureau, said the claim that the county has lost 43% of its agricultural land is inaccurate.
In a Sept. 19 email to BenitoLink, Leslie Austin of the San Benito County Democratic Central Committee sent documents showing that while the amount of farmland in the county had dropped from about 91,319 acres in 1984 to 52,038 in 2020, this was “primarily due to changes in land classification, such as shifts in irrigation status, rather than actual development.”
Overall, the county’s agricultural land—which is mostly pasture or rangeland—decreased from 687,499 acres in 1984 to 669,679 in 2020, representing just a 2.6% loss.
Lynn Overtree, executive director of the San Benito Agricultural Land Trust, said her organization is not taking a position on the measure. “We recognize it as a complicated decision for people to make on an individual level.”
Overtree referred BenitoLink to Brown and San Benito Cattlemen president Matt Manning, whose groups each oppose Measure A. Overtree also provided a letter that San Benito County Farm Bureau board president Donald Wirz wrote for his group, which is also opposing Measure A.
“I do not question the good intent of the Yes campaign,” Wirz wrote, “and I share in their unmitigated frustration at the short sighted, poorly executed, and flat-out greedy development that has occurred in San Benito County in my lifetime. However, Measure A is not the answer.”
The measure has drawn in a varied group of local supporters, from environmentalists to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to local residents concerned about housing development.
Protecting the environment for wildlife
Save Mount Diablo isn’t the only big-name out-of-town supporter of the measure. Patty Quillin, who lives in Santa Cruz and is married to Netflix founder Reed Hastings, gave $49,000 on Sept. 6. San Francisco-based Wildlife Conservation Network co-founder Charles Knowles gave $49,000 on Aug. 13. Shepard Harris, a retired San Francisco-based financial advisor, gave $10,000 on Aug. 29.
Neither Quillin, Knowles or Harris responded to phone messages seeking comment.
Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, told BenitoLink that his people stewarded the lands in the region from Monterey to Half Moon Bay. “Our people would keep the trees and the shrubs out with regular and frequent low-intensity burns,” he said. “So that kept the landscape wide open. That type of stewardship of lands created just really incredible topsoil… So whenever the colonizers got here, there’s areas that would have six, eight, 10 feet of topsoil.”
Lopez’s group is supporting Measure A. “We have a number of threats to very important cultural sites in our territory and the [San Benito County Board of Supervisors] had no respect or appreciation for our sites,” Lopez said.
Another Native American group has a different view. Kanyon Sayers-Roods, Tribal Chairwoman of the Indigenous Ohlone-Coastanoan people of Indian Canyon Nation, wrote a letter opposing Measure A, “recognizing both the intention behind its proposed environmental protections and its unintended consequences on Indigenous communities and marginalized populations.”
Sayers-Roods added: “We do not oppose environmental protection, but we believe it can and should coexist with economic development that benefits all residents, including Indigenous communities.”
Jessica Wohlander, environmental associate for the Palo Alto-based Green Foothills, told BenitoLink that her organization hasn’t given money in support of the measure, but as its first full-time employee in San Benito County, she is donating a portion of her hours each week.
“We believe that it’s important for the community to have a voice in what happens to that community, and so we appreciated that aspect of it,” Wohlander said. “We also believe that there’s an opportunity to balance the need to protect quality of life and the environment with the need for growth and development and that you can have both.”
Wohlander said the four commercial nodes along Highway 101 that Measure A would remove from the General Plan are in a critical wildlife corridor that connects the Diablo Range with the Gabilan Range and the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“Removing those four commercial nodes would … go a really long way in allowing wildlife to move between these essential areas,” Wohlander said, noting that species in the area include mountain lions, bobcats and American badgers.
Valerie Egland, president of the Reach San Benito Parks Foundation and a former member of the San Benito County Planning Commission, says protections for wildlife are already in place.
Speaking in favor of a planned development at Highways 101 and 129, Egland praised a wildlife corridor included in the project’s proposal.
“My family and I have lived all of our lives here, so we understand quite well how wildlife moves through,” Egland said. “They have a huge area, and that specific spot is quite like a funnel. I was happy to see that it would be a wildlife corridor.”
In a comment posted on BenitoLink, she said that in her view, Measure A is not needed. “US, State, & County laws currently do a fine job of protecting SBC farmland, housing & economy.“
Economic consequences
Opponents uniformly voice concerns about the economic damages the initiative would inflict on the county, including local governments’ ability to serve the local citizenry—in particular by blocking the long-planned development of the four commercial nodes, at Highway 101 and Betabel Road; Highways 101 and 129; Highway 101 and Livestock 101; and Highway 101 and San Juan Road.
A fiscal impact analysis submitted by San Benito County Auditor Joe Paul Gonzalez projected that the initiative would soon cause the county to lose more than $750,000 per year in revenues “composed of property taxes, sales taxes paid predominantly by out-of-county travelers, business license taxes, franchise fees and other revenues.”
The potential net loss to the general fund at full buildout of planned and potential commercial projects was estimated at more than $14 million per year.
The county has already considered applications for two of the nodes: Betabel, which would consist of 108,425 square feet of buildings, including a 116-room motel, convenience store and gas station, and has been the subject of litigation; and the Ag Center at Highways 101 and 129, which would include a truck stop, vehicle charging station, cold storage building and convenience store.
There are no specific plans in the works to expand the already existing commercial development at Highway 101 and Livestock 101—which include a trailer sales lot and other businesses—but expansion is anticipated. Nor has a plan been set forth for Highway 101 and San Juan Road, though property owner Ben Bingaman recently told the county that Measure A could represent a regulatory taking of his property.
Egland has concerns about property rights as well, should Measure A pass.
“If you happen to live around one of those nodes… and you say, ‘I want to carve out a piece of my property and put up a lemonade stand so that my kids have an income,’ and then it has to go through all the planning and then the zone change,” Egland said in an interview for this story, “then it has to go through an election. That … is taking your rights.”
Egland and other Measure A opponents also point to harms caused by the initiative’s broad reach—for example, requiring an expensive election and voter approval before any vineyard operator might open a wine-tasting cellar.
Beyond individual damages to property owners, the initiative’s opponents say, Measure A’s halting development of the nodes will deny much-needed funding to the county’s coffers to pay for roads, fire protection, and other services.
“We have four highways that run through our county,” Tres Pinos resident and local Realtor Jason Noble told BenitoLink in 2022. “All of our surrounding neighboring counties have truck stops, gas stations, hotels, conveniences that you can pull on and pull off of. All of these vehicles are traveling through San Benito County, and we are doing nothing to stop them and shake them down for a cup of coffee, or a slice of pie, or a tank of fuel, and that’s not right.”
Concerns about housing
For others, reasons for supporting Measure A were broader and seemed to revolve around concerns about further housing development in San Benito County.
Julie Roybal, a retired Hollister resident who gave $100 in support of the measure on July 16, said San Benito is among the fastest-growing counties in the state and needed to be smart about allowing “any more housing developments, because we don’t have the infrastructure.”
Certainly, land development interests have had concerns about Measure A. The California Association of Realtors, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, gave $15,000 in opposition on Aug. 27. The National Association of Realtors, which is based in Chicago, gave $35,953.23 in opposition on Aug. 14. A spokesperson for NAR said via email that this represented an in-kind donation for polling.
Opponents point out that Measure A would apply only to agricultural, range and farmlands in unincorporated parts of the county—and even that’s no sure thing. “This measure does not prevent the City of Hollister or City of San Juan Bautista from annexing farmland into its boundaries,” Wirz wrote in his newsletter. “Once either city annexes, it can get around Measure A.”
Hollister Mayor Mia Casey, an opponent of Measure A, was blunter about what the measure can do, telling BenitoLink, “It will have no impact on the housing growth of Hollister.”
Asked her primary reason for opposing the measure, Casey said she knew that there’d been a lot of rhetoric going around related to how the measure could stop housing.
“It’s actually not a correct statement,” Casey said. “Because if you look in the measure, and look in the exemption section of the measure, it clearly says that it cannot conflict with the state laws, and that includes all of the hundreds of housing laws that are out there.”
Dan De Vries, a longtime San Benito County Planning Commissioner who also served on the San Juan Bautista City Council, traces a misinformation campaign to Andy Hsia-Coron’s fight against having a commercial node near his property. He spoke of Hsia-Coron’s ability to tap into people’s anxieties around topics like already-heavy traffic being increased by building additional housing.
“Andy knows these people hate it, so he fools everyone into thinking, including Big Enviro, that Measure A is going to somehow have something to do with that,” De Vries said. “It has nothing to do with housing.”
“This guy is exceptionally talented at telling people what they want to hear, including voters,” De Vries said.
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