San Andreas, CA…This morning at the Calaveras county board of supervisors meeting the supervisors voted 5-0 to adopt a new general plan for Calaveras county. It has been since 2006 or 13 years since Calaveras county has had a functional general plan process. In the last 13 years there have been millions spent on consulting fees planning fees community meetings community plans etc. In addition to the direct costs there have also been the indirect costs of lost opportunity lost wages and stagnant economies.

Is the new general plan perfect? Of course not, it need adjustments and will never make everybody happy. It is an imperfect document written by imperfect people in an imperfect process but after 13 years we now actually have a general plan and a normal general plan update process can commence.

Most people probably have not cared or even known that Calaveras county was in the midst of a general plan update process that was broken at times seemingly beyond repair.

One of the biggest victims of this broken general plan update process has been Copperopolis and what was formerly Copperopolis Town Square. Many people may not know that to this day The Square at Copper Valley is not connected to the sewer system. It is on a holding tank like a giant RV. For 13 years sewage has had to be pumped from holding tanks and trucked to the CCWD treatment facility.

Why had one of the largest developments in the county been a giant RV? Well for the project and even the infrastructure to work it needed the adjacent, infill homes to be built. The effluent flow from these homes was needed so the effluent would not turn to solids within the long sewer line before it reached the processing facility near what was formally know as Saddle Creek Resort.

Because of the structural deficit of the general plan all efforts for infill development around the square either failed primarily because of lawsuits that succeeded and because of future lawsuits that were almost certainly to be victorious because of a structural problem of a lack of a general plan.

At this point the majority of the people in Calaveras county want to maintain open spaces, rural lifestyles etc that help not only maintain our quality of life but also maintain the attractiveness is of the county as a tourism destination.

The problem with the delayed update of the general plan was that it eliminated all projects even projects within existing community footprints and the economic benefits and also affordable housing benefits that these infill developments would have created. Several project we heard that the land owners actually gave up even trying to build anything in Calaveras County. Some of these were projects that largely met all the requirements of infill development withing existing community centers.

we applaud the Calaveras county board of supervisors for passing the plan today while it is in perfect and will not meet everyone’s needs the fact the Calaveras county has any general plan in any form is significantly better than what has been in place for the last 13 years.

In some circles the general plan update process had become such a delayed morass of a process that some believed it would never be completed.

Now at least the normal process and normal order of looking at projects, approving projects and denying projects can move forward on their merits and not have even the good one die premature deaths because of a structural legal deficit.