What does Sonoma value: wine tasting or open space?

Tasting rooms would be permitted by the Specific Plan for the Sonoma Developmental Center, said Teri Shore during the comment period of the Planning Commission on Thursday, September 15. Teri is the retired director of Greenbelt Alliance who has fought hard for Urban Growth Boundaries throughout her career.

Tasting rooms? Yup. She responded to my query by sending me a table from the Specific Plan showing “permitted uses” for the undeveloped lands at SDC, including lands designated Parks, Buffer Open Space, and Preserved Open Space.

Tasting rooms, by which we may assume wine, is only one of 14 agriculture uses listed in Table 4-3 including Agricultural Crop Production and Cultivation (translation, grapes?), Agricultural Processing (meaning vineyards?) Farm Retail Sales (tasting rooms again?), Indoor Crop Cultivation, Timberland Conversion (Minor), and Wholesale Nursery. Some other interesting uses include Commercial Horse Facilities, Horse Boarding and Veterinary Clinic (you may remember the proposal offered up some time ago for a large horse operation at SDC), and, just for fun, Commercial Cannabis Uses.

There are dozens more uses permitted for various sections of the property, many of them categorized “Flex Zones.”

What does all this mean? It sounds like a lot of activities are suddenly permissible in available open space on the property which we had been told will be protected (read, undeveloped) open space, managed by state and county parks.

It means access roads as well, and parking lots, right? Fences, and buildings housing horses and wine tasting and, in short, commercial development that would be permissible on this “protected open space.”

If you ask me, this table creates a loophole you could drive a truck through.

I asked Brian Oh of Permit Sonoma for some explanation of all this. He passed my query onto Policy Manager Bradley Dunn, who has replied that “There was a clerical error in Table 4.3 that will remove several of the permitted uses incorrectly listed there including tasting rooms.”

He attached a revised version. And guess what? Tasting rooms are still permitted.

Table 4.3 is four pages long. How many other clerical errors has the planning department missed?

The point is, almost everything on the list will permit development of one kind or another in the “protected open space,” belying the promises made by the State.

These permitted uses are not examined in the Draft Environmental Impact Report, Teri tells me, which makes the DEIR incomplete or even, Teri says, in valid.

But there are other problems with the Specific Plan, which has been loudly decried by almost everyone who has bothered to comment. The proposed development of 1000 houses, retail stores, a hotel and a convention center does not take into account climate changes likely to occur when the project is completed in twenty years.

But according to the recently approved Climate Resilient Lands Strategy prepared by the Department of Ag and Open Space, the climate of the Valley will be 5-6 degrees warmer (Fahrenheit) by 2060.

Fire risk, particularly the risk of fires spreading from the eastern Mayacamas Mountains, is already too familiar to the residents of the Valley.

Then there’s “the change in precipitation patterns “ which will have “major effects in this ecoregion.” Think, flooding. Like the flooding of the Petaluma River that has occurred. Might flooding include Sonoma Creek, which runs through the property, or run off from Sonoma Mountain to the West, Mayacamas to the East?

And then there’s health, “as the most serious impacts of a heat wave are often associated with high temperatures at night” especially for lower income residents without air conditioning.

“I don’t think the word climate appears anywhere,” said Shore in a phone conversation. “It’s not really considered.”

If climate is not considered for the development of the SDC, we had better throw out the entire planning process and start over.

We need a plan for SDC that will envision a project for a survivable future, not one based on the habitual patterns of a progressively uninhabitable planet.

Permit Sonoma could start with some of the suggestions in the County’s Climate Resilient Lands Strategy.

More on that next time.