— from Joe Symons —
Riffing off Shakespeare, I lament to write or not to write, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in men’s eyes to stop soapboxing about the vulnerable future of these beautiful islands or to (cue the soundtrack to Star Trek and quickly flip the script) Go Boldly where No Man has Gone Before.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the impact of humans on these islands in the last four to five decades. The population has quadrupled. Even a cursory study of the development potential built into the existing density map will reveal that the population of the islands could quadruple or more again; this population forecast does not include visitors.
Color me selfish. I like the islands the way they are. I liked them the way they were. I like small, rural, slow, simple, friendly, peaceful, quiet, generous, caring.
More than anything, the issue for those who feel this way, and prefer to keep these qualities vibrant long into the future, is to make a determination of how big (in numbers of people, both residents and visitors) we want to get before we say we are full.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the impact of humans on these islands in the last four to five decades.[/perfectpullquote]
Let’s take this down to a family. You may be a parent. You may have determined that you only wanted one child; you had the child, and you are not planning on adopting or having more children. Your family, so to speak, is full. No one can or would force you to have more children. No one would say: “hey, your child’s bedroom is now empty. You should take in a homeless person or a person who needs a long term rental or you could make money advertising that room on airbnb.” It’s OK to be full. Maybe to even have some extra space. Your child or others may come to visit.
Expand that to a community: does a community have the same right, authority, need, want, etc. to make the determination of full? What if it doesn’t look full to others. “Hey! You could build a house there!” But, like your one child personal policy, you say: “But I don’t want to build a house there. I like the open space. I like the trees. I like the silence. I like the freedom. More people will mean more problems. Always has. This issue of humans messing things up is not likely to change overnight; we’ve got thousands of years of history to learn—or not—from. I’m choosing to keep it small.”
Or, really, We are choosing to keep it small.
What muddies the conversation are cultural mindsets that almost mandate that this choice should not be discussed much less exercised. Had the county’s first comp plan density map been drawn differently, such that we were within a few remaining undeveloped parcels of being “full”, no one would get very exercised about this. We would have “naturally” maxxed out. There might be conversations about upzoning, and they would be difficult indeed.
But the first Comp Plan’s density map was not done with any consideration of its future implication. It was, let’s be courteous here, immature, unwise, lacking in forethought. Many things are. Then we have to fix them. And sometimes, indeed often, the fix creates another set of problems, and the merry go round goes faster until the main bearing breaks.
I prefer to design something solid and “full” in the first place, so I can mitigate or really eliminate “fixing” and get on with living. With celebrating. With sharing. With caring. With helping. With raising the maturity bar. With making “life” easier for my children and grandchildren and my community’s children and elderly and more.
Clearly as a society we are not doing that now. We are in fix mode and we haven’t really begun to seriously fix the truly game changing problems.
We could, however, attempt to prevent further problems here in SJC. We’re small enough to actually be able to engage in a level of conversation that could break the enchantment.
If we chose to find time and money, we could hire an independent credible third party planning wonk team whose sole job would be to simulate various “growth” / future scenarios, e.g., scenarios from very slow growth to reach a certain limited small maximum size all the way to a scenario with an unregulated growth rate leading to a very large (current density map) maximum. For each scenario, a 5 year “status” profile would be created that would show impact in many areas (financial, housing, environmental, taxes, jobs, demographics, etc.) and illustrate these unfolding scenarios in such a way that a distracted and overburdened citizen could grok pretty easily what the likely pathways and outcomes were relative to vision statements, GMA, carrying capacity, and their own dreams as well as practical and financial viability going forward.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]We’re small enough to actually be able to engage in a level of conversation that could break the enchantment.[/perfectpullquote]
This is basically what I asked the county to do 16 years ago. doebay.net/forthcoming.html
The suggestion was unanimously supported by the Planning Commission who recommended it have the highest priority of county government. www.doebay.net/
I don’t see how we can go forward on a comprehensive plan update with any intelligence or integrity without this information being created and widely distributed before we do the update.
I know what it will take to encourage San Juan County decision-makers to push the pause button and insist that this kind of information be generated by someone with no stake in the outcome.
It will take you. And your neighbor. And your relative or guest. And your friends.
A letter. A phone call. A tangible sign that you actually do care, that you believe enough in yourself and in your vision for your (and your family’s and your community’s) future that you will break the “I’m too busy but I’m sure someone else will do it” enchantment excuse and do it now.
KeepSanJuansWild.org will get you started. It’s a democracy. Use it. Make it work for you.
A few observations:
I too like the islands the way they are. I like small, rural, slow, simple, friendly, peaceful, quiet, generous, caring.
Growth has been very slow in the past decade. No guarantee of the future, but no indication that we’re hurtling toward full build-out.
A third-party consultant could do projections, I suppose, but I’m not sure how that would work, particularly in the demographic and economic development areas. (Our record with consultants has hardly been encouraging.) Will we be relying on seasonal jobs or looking for folks who can “telecommute” or have other ways of generating living wages/income? Is any of that within our control under the GMA that insists that we take “our share” of the state’s population growth, regardless of our druthers–and somehow “put” half of them in the UGA’s?
Even if a consultant could predict the future in all the relevant variables, the bottom line is that the islands have a large number of unbuilt parcels that belong to people who have the expectation of building homes on them. The notion that it would have been easy to upzone so drastically in the original Comp Plan that we’d be “almost full” soon ignores the fact that one doesn’t wave a magic wand to upzone. The community either commits to purchase the parcels deemed “too much” or upzone them at great personal pain to the owners. For the ten years I’ve been here, I’ve heard lots of stories from the old folk who had their multi-parcel holdings intended for their kids reduced to one or two parcels in the original Comp Plan through (IIRC) upzoning.
As I understand it, the County is now beginning to do a carrying capacity analysis, with some estimate of full buildout, water, etc. One part of that analysis needs to be how much land can we take out of development and still retain a tax base sufficient to provide the public services we want. We have a remarkable record of preserving land through easements and outright purchases. It comes at a cost, however.
Lots of work to do. Lots of conflicting ideas.
I lean toward the rural; I think wild is long gone.
Regarding your 3rd paragraph, I believe when you use the term “upzone” you actually mean “downzone”.
The bottom line is that the original 1978 comprehensive plan density zones were done without wisdom or foresight. The 1998 Comp Plan process under GMA was guided by the BOCC requirement that “conversations about density were not on the table”; the successful challenges to the GMA-guided CP demonstrated the weakness of the county’s position, in which about a million dollars of taxpayer money was spent foolishly trying to uphold a joke. The county lost over and over, ultimately taking its ADU (guest house) policy up to, and losing at, the Court of Appeals. It was only then that the county chose to settle with the Plaintiffs, surely fearful that it would lose at the State Supreme Court level.
We need to have a wise thoughtful comprehensive thorough all cards on the table conversation about where we are going “density” wise, which is a code word for “population” and that conversation has to include the impact of visitors. The current process for “updating” the CP does not allow for this to occur.
In short, no matter which way we choose to go forward, either the Business As Usual way in which the market alone drives what happens here, or the “planned” way, in which we create a functional viable plan that is enforceable, it will cost us. In the first case, the costs will be “expenditures” like higher taxes for infrastructure and services; in the second case the costs will be “investments” in achieving what we want.
In the first case we lose the quiet rural qualities we came and stay here for. In the second we preserve them.
See KeepSanJuansWild.org and if you really want to know how we got to where we are today, see doebay.net/appeal
More than anything, if you want to have the future be more or less like it is today, you will have to contact your County Council and insist on doing the update process right, which really means crafting a wise and long term enforceable plan. That won’t happen without your voice.