On Monday evening, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors will revisit the highly contentious issue of guiding principles in the (on and on and) ongoing general plan update.
Back on June 6, as you may recall, the board voted 4-1 to swap out the existing list of 12 guiding principles, which had been developed through a long and robust public process, with a new set of 11 principles that had been written behind closed doors.
The new versions were put forth by 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, who worked for almost three years as executive director of the private property rights group HumCPR before being elected.
Her reworded principles featured weaker language about planned growth and environmental protections while suggesting the county should “honor landowners’ right” to live where they please and “incentivize” production on resource lands.
The board majority — Fennell and 1st District Supervisor Rex Bohn in particular — argued that the original principles seemed to have been written by a staff that had an agenda, but 3rd District Supervisor Mark Lovelace urged both his fellow supervisors and the public to review the documented public input and key findings developed through a series of 27 public meetings held all over the county. (
of a 2004 staff report, if you’d care to do just that.)
Following public outcry over the sudden and dramatic switch, the board agreed to hold one more meeting before finalizing the principles. That meeting will happen Monday from 6 – 9 p.m. in the supervisors’ chambers at the Humboldt County Courthouse.
If you’re looking for more background information or want to submit a comment, the county has a website devoted to the general plan update. And if you’d like to contact your supervisor, click here.
This article appears in Water’s for Fighting.
^What he said ^ (arrows point to Ryan Burns’ article). Oh, and thank you for providing that pdf file.
Thank you again Ryan!!
Every other “community media” source in this county failed to share the outrage over 2 supervisor’s autocratic negation of the public’s Guiding Principles carved out of 27 public meetings!
Does anyone care that this is a violation of the Guiding Principles that the supervisors left intact? (At least the Grand Jury might take note).
Chief among them: “Support a broad public participation program at all levels of the decision making process including study, workshops, hearings and revisions”.
Can somebody explain why the guiding principles were changed without public input, and now the public is being asked *if* we believe revisions should be made, rather than having asked us whether or not to revise them before rewriting them? And that is only after the public expressed outrage over their actions. The supervisors pulled the carpet of democracy out from under our feet. It is as hypocritical and self-interested an act of local politics can be. It’s a privately funded, pro-development ploy that will manifest as urbanized rural areas in years to come. That means higher basic cost of living for everybody, even greater loss of natural resources (especially existing rural residents) and a more rapid loss of our natural landscape. The people who are ultimately responsible for the GPU coup are multi-millionaire real estate investors from out of the area. Reshaping OUR backyard is just another business deal to them.