news story / By Ryan Burns

Social Compact

When it comes to implementing this model, Frisch emphasized the importance of collaborative, community-based decision-making in advance of specific project proposals, and he offered a particularly resonant case study — Truckee’s own Balloon Track property, a former rail yard and mill site now slated for a major mixed-use development. (See “On Different Tracks,” March 16, 2006). One distinction from Eureka’s Balloon Track: no big-box stores. (Debate over a K-Mart 20 years ago prompted Truckee voters to approve an ordinance prohibiting businesses larger than 40,000 square feet.) But Frisch said that an even bigger key to minimizing fruitless arguments was the collaborative work done ahead of time. Developers, planners, investors and community members held “visioning” sessions in which they addressed such esoteric concepts as the town’s “architectural vernacular” and “residential fabric.” The net result was a document called the Sierra Nevada Town Pattern Book, which provides developers with detailed guidelines for what to include in their project designs. This helped create a Balloon Track development that Frisch said will fit seamlessly with the existing downtown, thereby helping — not harming — the adjacent businesses.

The following night, as the Planning Commission met to address the rural lands section of the General Plan update, several commissioners held copies of the LGC’s Elected Official’s Checklist for Compact Development. Sure enough, the topic came to the fore. Commissioners debated whether to include a goal in the draft GPU calling for “an adequate supply of vacant land suitable for large lot rural residential development… .” Commissioner Ralph Faust opposed ratifying the goal after Supervising Planner Tom Hofweber ran down the numbers on our current rural land inventory: 167,000 acres with somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 home site possibilities. At the current rate of 40 new homes per year on rural lands, that’s more than a 50 year supply. “If we truly have [that many] parcels,” Faust said, “then we shouldn’t be encouraging any more; we ought to be looking at exactly the opposite.”

But Chairman Jeff Smith, in arguing to protect the county’s rural lifestyle, made a rather delicate point. “I don’t know how to say this …,” he began. Choosing his words carefully, he continued. “There’s people that want to be urban, and there’s people that want to be rural. And there’s some people that really ought to be rural.” This was met with appreciative laughter. “That’s just how it is,” Smith said. “And I think they ought to have that opportunity.”

The discussion will continue at the commission’s Nov. 12 meeting.

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