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4-21-06
When the homeowners in the Pomo Lake development in Lower Lake first noticed a bulldozer was scraping the native manzanita off a local hillside, something told them this was no simple home site clearing. The scale didn‚t make sense, but for what other purpose than home site prep would you want to clear land on a parcel within a planned development that was restricted to residential use by the CC&R‚s?
So they asked the new Napa-based landowner what he was planning to do with the now ten-acre swath of land he had cleared on his forty acre parcel, and were stunned when told the site was about to become a vineyard. Since the parcel was covered by the CC&R‚s and was zoned „RL‰, (rural lands) and not „ag‰, the neighbors thought this kind of land use wasn‚t allowed, and their first thoughts were of what impact there would be on the local aquifer they were all dependant on. Nearby Snows Lake Vineyard had been a mega disaster for the county planning department, spawning two lawsuits and deep resentment among the neighbors who found that their wells and springs had suddenly gone dry, so their fears were well founded.
As it was water was not easy to find in the area, with even shallow wells having to go 150 feet deep or more just to get a meager flow. With the proposed vineyard on a 15-30% slope uphill from the neighbors, an ag well serving ten acres of vineyard could use a year‚s worth of one home‚s water in just a single morning of frost protection, which would be absolutely necessary at this unsheltered 2,000 foot elevation. It‚s likely that either people or grapes could occupy this land, but not both when it came to water needs.
All this was brought to the attention of the planning department, who realized that all the clearing done after the first 10,000 square feet of native vegetation was removed required a permit, which had been applied for but not yet approved. So all but less than a quarter-acre of the ten acres cleared had been done illegally, which should have meant the whole project was to be red tagged and halted. But this didn‚t happen, and since there is no penalty in Lake County for violating the grading ordinance, the owner paid no price for his bulldozer inflicted mayhem. In fact, now that the county had taken notice and decided to require a CEQA review, the official word from the landowner was that he was simply doing the clearing to determine the parcel‚s development potential. Nowhere to be found on the CEQA documents was the term "vineyard", so the conclusion was that no impact on water, air quality, traffic or housing density would occur. Once the owner had passed the CEQA hurdle it was "anything goes", as the county would not require a second CEQA review even if a vineyard was planted.
Ordinarily shifty developers wouldn‚t be able to pull off such an obvious scam, but on this occasion the landowner had an ally in the planning department, in the form of associate planner Ms. Carolyn Ruttan. A relative newcomer to the department, Ms. Ruttan is also the owner of a seven acre vineyard and three acre olive orchard. When queried about the impact a vineyard might have on the local water table, Ms. Ruttan blithely dismissed the possibility, stating that perhaps the owner would dry farm and not frost protect the hypothetical vines, a method of farming not practiced locally since before prohibition. Ms. Ruttan went on to state that maybe a vineyard wouldn‚t even be planted, the owner could just as well plop down some kind of orchard trees. The problem with this theory (which demonstrates that Ms. Ruttan owns a vineyard but is no farmer), is that the soil type in that area is suited only to grapes, and no one is putting orchards these days, let alone ones on hillsides with 30% slopes. So if the zoning only allows one home-per-forty acres, and you can‚t farm anything but grapes on that soil, why clear so much land if thereŒs no vineyard planned?
Well, as far as the planning department was concerned, who cares? That was the attitude right up until the last minute before the permit was to be rubber-stamped, when the neighbors made a formal request to protest the permit approval. When the homeowners asked for a brief continuance to get other neighbors the county had not notified up to speed, they were denied, and it became even more clear that Ms. Ruttan was pushing this project ahead at full-throttle regardless of it‚s glaring flaws.
But when the day for the hearing came things didn‚t go well for the applicant, or the planning department. Community Development Department director Mary Jane Fagalde chaired the meeting, which had to be moved at the last minute to a different venue that could hold the overflow crowd. Thorough yet concise presentations by several of the homeowners outlined their major concerns and had the county staff and applicant on the defensive right from the get-go. Ms. Ruttan‚s credibility was immediately diminished by the revelation that her CEQA report stated that the nearest home to the clearing was 800 feet away, when in fact it was a scant 350 feet. Ruttan first stated that 3.6 acres had been cleared, then conceded it was ten acres in one section of the parcel, not what youŒd expect size and shape-wise in a site evaluation project. Then she made the absurd statement that the clearing had no effect on erosion of the 30% slopes, because „there won‚t be one drop of runoff‰ due to the soil type, in spite of record rainfall!
For her part the applicant remained adamant that she didn‚t have any firm plans for the site, in spite of the fact her husband had told several neighbors a vineyard was planned, and had even described how much and what kind of pesticides he‚d be using. Also revealed was the fact that the applicant‚s husband was a vineyard manager in Napa county, which of course made the claim this wasn‚t about a vineyard even more preposterous. By now the whole „we‚re just having a look-see‰ story had been completely trashed, and Fagalde and Ruttan had come to realize that if they approved the permit these decidedly unhappy neighbors (including one prominent local attorney) were going to take this fight to a much higher, more public and potentially litigious level. The applicant also seemed to finally come to grips with the fact that her gambit hadn‚t panned out, and the county had no choice but to demand a new CEQA review with a vineyard stated as the purpose of the project. This should effectively kill the project, and it seems doubtful the applicant will waste any more money on another CEQA review.
Other questions still remain though, like why does the county have a loophole in the CEQA process you could drive a truck through, and why did the county staff and applicant try so hard to keep the identity of the contractor who bulldozed the parcel secret? Any local contractor knows the rules, so either they broke them knowingly or they were lied to about the permits, which is possible but seems a bit unlikely. With Fagalde and Ruttan having many connections in the ag biz it‚s hard to say if something was going on behind the scenes besides the usual planning department dopiness, but after years of making every mistake in the book regarding vineyard developments, you‚d think they wouldn‚t have been so willfully ignorant in this case.
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