Citizens for Orderly Growth in Scotts Valley (CFOG) is a recently organized, “educational and collaborative” advocacy group that has every intention of becoming a grassroots force to be reckoned with in the face of “uncontrolled growth” in Scotts Valley, according to its organizers .
Alarmed by recent approvals of several housing projects and even more so by massive housing projects on the drawing boards for Scotts Valley, CFOG organizers Angela Franklin and Dave Weaver are doing their homework, collecting documents, doing some outreach via social media, and looking for inconsistencies in the planning processes that seem to be allowing these “mega-projects” to move forward.
Franklin, a software systems engineer and 17-year resident of Scotts Valley, serves as a voting member on the newly appointed board of directors of the Santa Margarita Ground Water Agency (SMGWA), as a representative of private well owners. Franklin believes there is a disconnect between what is presented at the SMGWA board meetings and what she has heard and read about water supply from the Scotts Valley Water District.
“We’ve heard from the Scotts Valley Water District that our infrastructure can handle the growth. Our problem is, maybe the city’s infrastructure can handle it, but maybe the aquifer cannot,” Franklin said. Franklin explains her understanding of the long-term, state required planning for the sustainability of the Santa Margarita aquifer, and is concerned about a few basic inconsistencies in the assumptions underlying this planning process.
“We know the aquifer is about 200 feet below the 1980 levels of water supply. And we’ve heard from John Ricker from the county water department that one of the primary goals of the sustainability plan is to recharge the aquifer back up to previous levels. Yet we are planning for some 700 new homes in Scotts Valley in the near future, and the message from the Water District is that our infrastructure can handle it. So, are we talking about trying to sustain a depleted aquifer at low levels- or should we be talking about slowing down growth and recharging a depleted aquifer?” Franklin said.
With three “mega-projects” in preliminary planning stages: the Town Center Project with an estimated 250-300 units of housing, the “Avisa Tech” site, in which the owners are seeking a zoning change to allow at least 84-100 units, and the proposed redevelopment of the Valley Gardens Golf Course into a subdivision of about 190 homes, CFOG organizers are convinced the time is now to start asking some fundamental questions about water supply, traffic impacts and preserving the quality of life in Scotts Valley that most current residents moved here to enjoy.
Dave Weaver, who leads a local nonprofit of equine therapy for people with special needs and “co-founder” of CFOG, shares Franklin’s concern with, “what looks like a preemptive conclusion” of the Scotts Valley Water District that the Santa Margarita aquifer can handle the proposed growth.
“We don’t have a sufficient number of data points for the ground water modelling that the Santa Margarita agency needs to have, which is why they are asking well owners to help them with monitoring data, and yet here we have our water district saying the proposed growth is okay,” Weaver said. “How can they say the growth is okay before the aquifer has even been studied?” Weaver said.
Traffic is the second most important and more obvious impact the CFOG organizers are concerned about. Both Franklin and Weaver said they have tried hard to fully understand how traffic engineers come up with the conclusions they do. Especially with regard to the impacts on the Granite Creek/ Scotts Valley Drive intersection and the onramp to Highway 17 when the Marriot Extended Stay Hotel and 40 new homes were approved on the former Borland site on Santa’s Village Road.
“That intersection is a disaster. It doesn’t take an EIR to come to the conclusion that more development is going to make a bad situation worse,” Franklin said. Franklin also serves on the Scotts Valley’s General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC) providing citizen input in drafting a new General Plan for Scotts Valley. The current General Plan was adopted 24 years ago, and a new effort to update the out-of-date General Plan was “kick started” last year by Acting Community Development Director Taylor Bateman, and is expected to be completed in 2019. The General Plan is essentially a long-range policy document, often referred to as the “constitution for development” in a city, and is generally updated every 10 to 15 years.
“I know the General Plan and the GPAC are supposed to be coordinating all the various elements of growth- including water, traffic and natural resources, but my experience is they really don’t, and too often fall back on project-by-project review, ” Franklin said. “We know some growth is needed to keep the city economically healthy, but we’re not O.K. with the attitude that ‘Let’s just build until there is no more land or resources left’”, Franklin said.
Both Franklin and Weaver recognize the housing affordability crisis is real, preventing children of multi-generational families in Scotts Valley from being able to afford a house in Scotts Valley. They believe, however, with the relentless demand for housing from Silicon Valley, that it’s impossible to “build our way out” of the housing crises without destroying the small town character that brought people to Scotts Valley to begin with.
“CFOG is growing as an organization, and we’re just getting started with building a collaborative and educational organization that we hope will serve as a conduit for what many, many people are talking about in Scotts Valley in terms of growth. We fully intend to have boots on the ground in Planning Commission and City Council meetings to raise these questions,” Weaver said. CFOG can be contacted by email at [email protected] and maintains a Facebook page.
