Who rules the land?
Waterways protection vs. Personal property
By GUY KOVNER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Sunday, August 13, 2006
A thin, green, grassy line snaking across his 400-acre dairy ranch west of Santa Rosa fills third-generation dairyman Doug Beretta with a sense of unease.
Barely dipping into the flat hayfield along Llano Road, the unnamed channel, typically dry for half the year, is one of countless seasonal streams that Sonoma County planners say need a new level of protection.
For Beretta, 42, a lean man with a vise-grip handshake, the proposed safeguards are a threat to his way of life on the land, amid the dust, manure and the slow ways of 300 Holstein and Jersey milk cows.
"Why are they telling us how to run our property and put more restrictions on us?" Beretta said. For nearly 60 years, his family has worked the ranch, maintaining a haven for deer, rabbits, coyotes and geese on the plain less than a mile from the edge of fast-growing southwest Santa Rosa.
"It gets right back to property rights," Beretta said. "We pay taxes on it."
Ranchers such as Beretta and other landowners have packed a theater at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts for an unlikely midsummer attraction: a series of public hearings over a plan to slap new restrictions on more than 80,000 acres of land along Sonoma County's waterways.
To some, it's a vital step toward defending the streams that flow from verdant hills and across valleys, supporting fish and wildlife, cooling the air, holding back floods and ultimately delivering drinkable water to a growing populace.
"We would be crazy to go forward without protecting these areas," said Caitlin Cornwall, a biologist and assistant director of the Sonoma Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental education and research group.
The waterways are under siege as the county becomes more urban, environmentalists and regulators say.
The entire Russian River watershed -- the river and its tributaries -- is impaired by sediment attributed to development, dams and loss of stream bank vegetation, among other factors, according to the North Coast Water Quality Control Board.
"We have to bring it back to health," said John Short, senior engineer for the state board.
But after 40 years of increasing land use regulation, taking Sonoma County from Wild West laissez-faire to a 400-page land use rule book, some say environmentalism has gone too far.
"This is where they've stepped over the line," said Keith Woods, chief executive officer of the North Coast Builders Exchange. "We've been heading in this direction for years. We've now hit the tipping point."
At stake is a proposal, included in an update of the county's general plan, to create 100-foot setbacks from all year-round and seasonal streams and a 200-foot setback from the river.
Homes, barns, vineyards, pastures and fences already in the setbacks would be permitted. Most new development would be prohibited or limited.
"Any existing use is allowed to continue," said Jennifer Barrett, county deputy planning director. It's a flexible plan, with room for exceptions and adjustments to the setbacks, officials say.
Property owners are not mollified.
By the hundreds, they flocked to 14 hours of public hearings that concluded Tuesday before the county Planning Commission and will resume next year when the Board of Supervisors takes up General Plan 2020.
It was the largest outpouring of public sentiment on land use since a hearing on Santa Rosa's 1985 wastewater spills into the Russian River drew a crowd of 1,800, also to the arts center.
"They're getting the reaction they deserve," Woods said. "The masses don't like this."
Beretta, who works the family dairy with his father, Bob Beretta, said the setbacks from two seasonal creeks and a county flood control channel will cover about 30 percent of his land. He irrigates his pasture with Santa Rosa's treated wastewater and is converting to organic milk production.
"There are just so many unknowns," Beretta said. "We have ties to this property people don't understand."
About 20 miles north in the Alexander Valley, grape grower Al Cadd watches coyotes and opossums run along the seasonal creek through his 65-acre ranch on the Russian River. His home and barn would fall within the proposed setbacks.
Cadd, an Alexander Valley native, fears his future will be "dictated by the whims" of county planners, he said. His grapevines are 200 feet from the river, but they meander naturally and will likely move closer in coming years.
Rural residents on small streamside parcels may find their entire property engulfed in a setback, limiting and possibly preventing an addition to the house or an amenity like a swimming pool.
The Sonoma County Farm Bureau contends the setbacks are "a direct threat to property rights and constitute a 'taking' without compensation where no public benefit has been legally established."
"There is a recognition of property rights," countered Greg Carr, county comprehensive planning manager. "It isn't a taking. The Board of Supervisors won't go for that."
Denying a homeowner a permit for a pool is not a taking, said Pete Parkinson, county planning director. "That doesn't mean it's not going to rub some people the wrong way."
Critics say the stream setbacks are the latest invention of an environmental movement that for years has forced the few to sacrifice for the many.
"A creeping anti-property-rights agenda," Woods called it.
Bill Kortum of Petaluma, a former county supervisor whose name is synonymous with environmentalism in Sonoma County, said it's part of life in a democracy. "We'd all like to be free," he said. "But everything comes apart unless you have some guidelines."
Moreover, the public firmly supports preservation, Kortum said, citing voter approval of the original Coastal Commission, a county sales tax to finance open space acquisition and urban growth boundaries for cities.
Petaluma made history in 1972 as the first city to limit residential construction and defended the measure all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Land use controls arrived as the once sleepy, rural county entered a development boom era. With fewer than 150,000 residents spread over a million acres in 1960, the county experienced 30 percent to 46 percent growth in each of the ensuing three decades, swelling to 388,000 people by 1990. There are now nearly 480,000 residents.
George Kovatch, who came to Sonoma County as planning director in 1967, found that development was virtually unimpeded in the unincorporated area. Most land was zoned either "agriculture," allowing businesses, apartments and subdivisions as well as farming, or "unclassified," which allowed commercial and industrial uses.
"It meant anything goes," Kovatch said.
The county's first general plan, adopted in 1978, overhauled zoning and blanketed the countryside with minimum lot sizes of five, 10, 20 acres and larger.
Kovatch, who left county planning in 1977 and still lives in Santa Rosa, said that step "changed the course of history." Urban-density development of the county's scenic rural landscape was virtually halted.
Woods, hired as the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce president in 1987, said he appreciated the steps Sonoma County took to control growth. "Nobody with an IQ above room temperature wants massive sprawl like San Jose or L.A.," he said.
In truth, the line between property owner and environmentalist is often blurred.
In Alexander Valley, where wine grapes have been grown for 150 years, residents banded together in 1972 to lobby for agriculture-only zoning. "We didn't want to be overrun by subdivisions," Cadd said. "Without those regulations we'd have been smothered."
But the tension over property rights persists. In 2000, county voters rejected an environmentalist-backed ballot measure, the Rural Heritage Initiative, to freeze rural land use for 30 years.
Beretta said the general plan stream constraints feel like the Rural Heritage Initiative deja vu. He's not alone.
"See, that's ridiculous," Kovatch said. "Why do you need a 100-foot setback from something that just has water in it two weeks a year?"
Because the streams are ailing, and people will be, too, if nothing is done, answers Cornwall with the ecology center. The sediment that's impacting county waterways comes largely from the farms, homes and roads that have increasingly reached into the hills, disturbing the soil, she said.
Impairment of waterways is "the price we pay for urbanization and development," said Short, the state water regulator.
Undisturbed streams foster wildlife, protect endangered species, help control floods, filter water and recharge the aquifer, Cornwall said. Some 600,000 North Bay residents drink water pumped from beneath the Russian River.
"If we want it to stay that way we need to let streams do their job," Cornwall said.
There is considerable debate, even among stream protection advocates, over whether a standard 100-foot setback makes sense. County planners say the setback can be cut in half if the landowner can show that no harm would be done.
Cornwall said 100 feet may not be enough in some cases.
Napa County has a sliding scale of stream setbacks from 35 to 150 feet, depending on the slope of the land. A move to increase the setbacks prompted an intense political battle and was rejected by Napa voters in 2004.
The Water Quality Control Board sees stream setbacks as an important step toward restoring waterway health, Short said. His agency will be turning its attention to to the Russian River watershed's woes this year, and local action could avoid "heavy-handed" enforcement by state and federal agencies.
"If things are already moving in this direction, that would help," he said.
Protecting streams and clean water supplies is a national issue, Cornwall said. "We need to treasure the stuff," she said.
You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or gkovner@pressdemocrat.com.
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