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Health & Fitness

Monday, Monday! Important Turning Point For New General Plan Process This Monday!

Monday's City Council Subcommittee meeting might be the public's last chance at transparency of the 'Draft' General Plan process.

 

The Premise of the ‘Draft’ General Plan for Encinitas is simple;

'walk-ability over financial viability’.

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Encinitas City Staff has called it,"A plan for moving on from cars."

The City Staff and consultants want you to believe you told them that you wanted the City’s powerful commercial corridor sales tax generating income stream that underwrites our public safety programs, to be constrained to the point that folks stop coming to Encinitas; hence, Encinitas will become more ‘walk-able’; please don’t laugh, read the plan and you’ll see it’s true.

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Seriously.

Let the healing of the body politic begin this Monday.

On September 14th, 2011, the Encinitas City Council voted unanimously to redirect control of the staff-driven multi-million dollar ‘Draft’ General Plan’ Process.

Unanimously.

Right before the actual vote, Mrs. Teresa Barth, Encinitas Councilwoman and new Encinitas Councilwoman Kristin Gaspar were appointed to a Subcommittee to work out a way to create a new citizen committee to both read and vet the ‘Draft’ General Plan and for this new process to be facilitated by someone beside Planning Staff; like the Planning Commission and Traffic Commission.

Mrs. Gaspar made a motion for the ‘process’ to take a ‘time-out’, and asked for there to be a new committee created to ‘read’ the actual document and for there to be a new facilitator. (Maybe some folks from New Encinitas could be on the committee, too?)

To refresh the public’s memory of what happened and ‘who’ said ‘what’ to ‘whom’, I have reproduced the end of the meeting verbatim below.

Encinitas Councilwoman Teresa Barth’s Testimony on September 14th on the General Plan 2035 Process.

“I want to thank Councilwoman Gaspar for her proposal to enhance the whole public outreach-I know this might be difficult for staff, it is a lot of extra work, but this IS what we are all about-this IS the General Plan, after all, everything else doesn’t matter if this isn’t done right-so, we have to get this right! I think we can take the extra time and its better to get more input than less!”

“If Maggie was here she would remind us that democracy is not a spectator sport-you have to participate-you have to get into the game and that’s what we are asking of our community from the commercial property owners to the residents-everyone has to participate for this to be a good General Plan.”

“I appreciate the recommendation of Mrs. Gaspar to have more community input on this project.”

Just before the unanimous vote to approve Mrs. Gaspar’s motion to amend the process there was a question by Mayor Jim Bond to the Staff Planning and new General Plan Department Head Patrick Murphy;

Bond; “I’m still not quite clear on the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) process; its a little like the chicken and the egg; which comes first?”

Patrick Murphy explains to Mayor Bond that the Staff needs to have approval of the density and intensity (targeted location of 2200 homes along the two commercial corridors) before they can proceed.”

Murphy: “If the issue is density and intensity and the location of that density and intensity is not on the table-then we can move on with the EIR. “I’m not sure its not on the table-it seems like from public comment that (the location of the 2200 units) is very much on the table; whether there will be mixed use on El Camino Real (and Encinitas Boulevard) or whether the density should be spread throughout the Community or whether we need it to be 40 to 50 units per acre.”

Question: “Right now, I’m not sure whether we have got a project (an approved General Plan to base the EIR on) to analyze. I thought we had a project to analyze, but...”

Answer: Mayor Bond responds, ”You do NOT have a project (to analyze and kick-start the EIR) in case you are wondering. With that, I will call for the vote on Mrs. Gaspar’s motion.”

City Clerk Deborah Cervone, ”Let the record show that the vote was unanimous with Councilwoman Houlihan absent.

This meeting was 7 weeks ago and this Monday’s Subcommittee Meeting is important to the residents of Encinitas to follow the lead of Mrs. Barth and Mrs. Gaspar and support them in their desire to “do this the right way”.

Let them know you are behind them, please.

The General Plan Advisory Committee met for two hours plus on October 3rd, 2011. Not once did Staff ask the residents, ”So, hey, who among you have read the ‘Draft’ General Plan 2035 we posted on the website?” “Let’s see hands, did we get it right? Can you recognize all your hard work in this 1000 page document?”

Nope.

Some have suggested that a new committee would be a redundancy; yet the GPAC was never tasked with reading the finished product. Why?

Nothing short of a line-by-line reading will be acceptable in our opinion.

For the GPAC might recognize it for what it is; a reinvention, not an ‘Update’ based on a premise that there will be no cars in 2035 and therefore it promotes ‘walk-ability over financial viability.”

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