Sunday, February 2, 2003
--Tom Hutchings has been part of just about every major land planning initiative in Sacramento County for the past three decades, from the development of communities like Antelope and Laguna to the creation of a 1993 general plan that sought to set permanent limts to growth. The county's planning director since 1990, the 54-year-old Hutchings retired last week. His next plan, for a change, is unclear. Here are excerpts of a recent conversation with The Bee editorial board's Mark Paul and Tom Philp.
Tell us about your beginnings. In 1973 I actually was hired as a student intern, part time. I'd go to school in the morning and write EIRs (environmental impact reports) in the afternoon. In those days, an EIR was eight to 12 pages long. There were two of us assigned. I'd write my half of an EIR in an afternoon. Basically, doing an EIR a day. Those are essentially now equivalent today to initial studies. The environmental review process certainly has evolved since then! Why don't you give us an assessment of the state of planning in the county, the challenges of the job. I think, in a broad sense, it's a challenge of dealing with change. The region is changing. The county's role in the region is changing. One of our challenges as a region is figuring out how as a region we're going to solve regional problems. Because we don't have the structure to do that. We have a structure that is designed to facilitate local decision-making by local jurisdictions. We don't have anything set up to say how are we as a region going to deal with regional issues. Could you give us a tour of some of the county challenges? Let's start in Natomas. What's driving Natomas is a couple of things. One is location. It's proximate to the core of the region. It has reasonably good transportation access. The airport's out there. All these economic drivers that would cause development to be attracted to the region are there. And yet it's got constraints. We've dealt with the basin-wide flooding issue, but there are internal flooding limitations. Significant portions have to be kept open. There are endangered species issues and constraints for the local agencies that have to be reconciled. And then there are the jurisdictional issues. We got three jurisdictions that are making decisions out there, at least historically in a somewhat independent manner. Sutter County, Sacramento County and the city of Sacramento? Right. And each one having its own motivations. I think the exciting part of this whole Joint Vision is that the city and county have recognized that they have some common interests that would be served by working together. The Joint Vision. That's the process of all sides figuring out where future development, agriculture and open space in Natomas will go. Sacramento supervisors recently decided to stay in this process, but delete a draft of a map that showed what might go where. The map discussion is an interesting one. One of the constant debates in the planning fields is doing maps and drawing lines. I can't count on both hands the number of projects that have run into problems when somebody sat down and drew a line and said here's the boundary between X and Y. Some people are in when they want to be out. Some people are out when they want to be in, and all of that. Ultimately it gets down to boundaries. But what we tried to emphasize with the board is that it's more important at this stage in the discussion to decide whether or not to continue talking with the city than it is to worry about each of the specific details [that is] going to get resolved. Let's talk about a different map, the one that shows the urban services boundary as it was created in the county's 1993 general plan. It puts off limits to growth the area south of Folsom on Highway 50 and the land in Elk Grove south of the proposed Lent Ranch Mall. What is your comfort with this boundary as a planning device? I think it was a huge success of the '93 general plan. Prior to the adoption of the urban service boundary ... we had routine requests of somebody coming in to apply for a request to change the general plan on land from agriculture to urban. And so we were in a reactive kind of mode. We were being driven by who put together the deals and could figure out a way to get the services there, and work through the regulatory and permitting process to get the projects approved. The big value of the urban services boundary was to say, wait a minute, that's not the right way to look comprehensively at managing growthin the region. We got to get ahead of this thing. Is this a permanent line? That's one of the policy debates that had to be answered. We, the staff, proposed the urban services boundary as a permanent boundary for urbanization. It's not permanent in the sense that there are procedures in place to amend it. It can be moved under some very rigorous standards. The east county, the area south of Highway 50, how do you assess our ability to come to closure on the future of this area? We spent a lot of time with landowners out there in the East County Open Space Study. And that was a very difficult and trying conversation. Because their perspective - and I'm not trying to judge anybody for this, it's a very reasonable and logical perspective - they saw potential for development in some long-term future. And that wasn't consistent with the county's adopted policies. Many of the landowners out there love the lifestyle that they have out there. If there is a way for them to continue to do that and pay less of a financial burden, they are motivated to do that. We've tried to create some assistance, some mechanisms, that will help them do that. Is this something that your successor will need to solve in a one-, two- or three-year time horizon? I don't think there is necessarily a permanent solution on the table right now. We can do a lot of things to make sure that that conversion to other uses doesn't happen in the short run. In the long run, I think what will be telling is how valuable is that land as open space to the region as a whole? From my perspective, it is a very, very unique area. The resources out there are just phenomenal. The land is beautiful. But it's not fair to ask those landowners to bare the full cost of maintaining it for everybody else's benefit. At some point, is it going to be valuable enough that we as a region, or we as a county, say we're going to invest more either in financial resources or other incentives to keep that land open? Or is the development pressure just so great that we have to let pieces of it go? We sense a broad civic desire to not have the entire county developed, yet, at the same time, the single-family house is the most popular dwelling structure. There is more political desire to build four houses to the acre than seven. But the less dense we develop, the more land that takes, and we start to have values colliding with one another. Why did building more housing units to the acre, such as seven to the acre, or RD-7, become politically unpopular? One of the challenges of RD-7 is that it is a single-family detached product that has been put on a setting, relatively large houses on small lots. When you do that, there are lots of conflicts that come up. One of is the aesthetics of the streetscape. The lots end up being narrow enough, by the time you put a garage on the front of the house, you don't have much of anything else. You have a streetscape of garages and driveways and it doesn't make an inviting neighborhood. So is this a bad density? No. Are we trying to put too much house on a lot? I think it's a matter of design. This is universally understood more now. It's not the density as much as it is the design. The problem with RD-7 is taking a product that works better on a large lot and squeezing it on something smaller. That gets to the issue of building townhomes and condos. Assuming that the state Legislature truly has removed legal disincentives to building these, are the region's builders ready, or are they accustomed to building just single-family homes? A couple of things that are happening that will move us into a more diverse housing style. One is the underlying demographics and economics are going to move us to needing to provide more variety in our housing style. You guys have reported on the popularity on some of the smaller in-fill projects that have happened in the region. That's a clear indicator that there's a great demand for those that aren't being met. How do you do those? Finding the sites. What I would like to see is one or two successful projects in the suburbs, kind of like how Metro Square was a catalyst in midtown. The general plan set a target for housing density, but we have not reached that target. The target in the general plan was an average of six per gross acre. What we've been getting has been varied, generally around four. There have been a couple of reasons for this. One is that the projection for six was pretty ambitious. I'm thinking of the Vineyard area in particular. We had actually developed proposed land-use plans for two specific areas that were closer to the six-per-acre targets. We met a great deal of community resistance. So the board made adjustments in response to citizen input. I guess it is fair to say we were disappointed with those changes. At the same time, if you think of it in a context of people who are living there, you have to be sensitive to the fact that they had legitimate concerns. On a personal note, when you are driving around, is there anything that you are particularly proud of, something that gnashes at your teeth? I take a little bit of irony in the Elk Grove incorporation a couple years ago. It's no surprise that the county has been getting a lot of negative comments, particularly from elected folks down there. I understand their desire to control their own destiny. I think they are all proud of their community. They like the way it is. That community was all planned by the county. I guess to the extent that they like it there, we haven't heard any thank you's. I think the thing that is the most frustrating for me, it's not a specific project, is that we need to do a better job of accommodating growth that better balances the sprawling effects of the way we have built over the last 20 or 30 years. One other thing that you haven't asked a question about, but I feel compelled to say it, and that is, we've talked in this interview about the role of electeds. I think it's fair to say that they have a hard job and don't get as much credit as they should. It is easy to chastise them because they have to make decisions. They're dealing with constituencies that have unrealistic expectations of their ability to solve those problems. And yet they show up, and they sit through hours and hours of hearings, and sometimes I wonder why any of them run for office. It doesn't sound like you have gotten frustrated with the electeds. I actually have more respect for them now than I had 20 years ago. There was a time, six or eight years into my career, and almost threw up my hands and said this is not worth it. I'm not accomplishing much. Yet I began to see how difficult the challenges are, and the fact that you can have some significant influence in how things turn out. One of the things about this area compared to other areas is the greater difficulty at developing a plan, a vision and sticking to it. One of the challenges we have in this region is how do you develop that sense of regional leadership? We are a very diverse region. How do you get diverse people to come together for a common vision? You have to have somebody to articulate what that is, and why it's important for anybody. I don't know who that person is or could be. But that would probably make a big difference.