Years in the making, a legal settlement of our 2003 lawsuit over the County’s General Plan Update has been finalized, with significant benefits for good planning.

Overall, the 2003 Update of the Riverside County General Plan was a missed opportunity to put in place a “smart growth” pattern of development – despite support for transit-supportive “community centers” from both EHL and the Building Industry Association. However, the Update did adopt a visionary “Certainty System” to shift from the project-by-project planning of the past to a comprehensive approach embodied in regular update cycles.

The mutually agreed upon settlement improves the current Certainty System in two ways. First, it ensures that a stakeholders committee and decision-making bodies will comprehensively evaluate all amendments to the general plan proposed in the future. Currently, even though major land use changes requested by landowners are considered during a single update cycle, these are evaluated one-by-one over the course of many months, without a “big picture” overview. Such an improved process is critical for better decision-making.

Secondly, the previous 5-year cycle is now 8-years, consistent with State housing and SB 375 (greenhouse gas) planning cycles. Given that there is enormous excess housing capacity within the current General Plan, a longer cycle can also help prevent worsening this oversupply, which would otherwise lead to a more inefficient pattern of development, out of synch with infrastructure and service capacity.

In addition, the settlement eliminates an antiquated “Rural Village Overlay Study Area” in the Aguanga area (east of Temecula) that anticipated thousands of acres of urban development remote from water supplies and roads, and in the heart of the County’s Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan.

All these improvements independently came before the General Plan Advisory Committee, a stakeholder group, where they were also endorsed.

EHL appreciates the cooperative settlement process that took many years of negotiation. EHL was represented in the litigation by Ray Johnson of Johnson & Sedlack and by Michael Fitts, EHL Staff Attorney.