Adopted just last year, the new General Plan already is threatened by large-scale amendments and by litigation. In each case, EHL has sought to protect the plan.

While the General Plan Update did not achieve all our goals, it nevertheless makes huge advances in protecting the backcountry and focusing growth within towns. But immediately after adoption, on a deeply divided 3:2 vote, the Board of Supervisors ordered the processing of dozens of “property specific requests” by individual landowners to amend the plan. The Board voted to move forward even though these landowner requests, involving almost 13,000 acres, had all been previously denied due to conflicts with the underlying planning principles or worsened environmental impacts. To make matters worse, the Board voted to use up to $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars to fund a General Plan amendment to process these requests.

The proposed amendments would start to undo the progress made in the new General Plan. They would create residential sprawl outside of towns, impact farm and habitat land, and create unsafe dispersed development in high fire zones. They would also constitute special exceptions that are unfair to hundreds of other landowners. EHL strongly opposed the Board action, both on planning grounds and as a waste of public funds to solely benefit private interests. (See our op-ed in the U-T San Diego here.) We commend Supervisors Dianne Jacob and Pam Slater-Price for leading the ultimately unsuccessful fight against initiating the process.

Remarkably, the GPA was initiated only due to a last minute legislative maneuver that violated California’s Brown Act for open government by denying the public its right to testify. EHL will continue to oppose these amendments as they progress, but this action ominously demonstrates a disregard for the integrity of the General Plan by a majority of those in charge of it.

Litigation filed by Rancho Guejito, the 22,000-acre historic landholding northeast of Escondido, also threatens the new General Plan. To protect the new General Plan, EHL successfully “intervened” in the litigation on behalf of the County of San Diego and will now be a part of all court proceedings.