Opinion
Encouraged by Dale Neiman, Clearlake's ordinarily astute city administrator, the commissioners concluded that this smoke-and-mirrors project would miraculously solve the city's fiscal dilemmas and provide badly needed infrastructure.
To achieve those goals they are apparently willing to disregard the many "significant and unavoidable" environmental impacts detailed in the environmental impact report, sacrifice an amazing pristine site that could become a treasure to the city second only to the lake itself, distort their own general plan, skate on the thin ice of California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) legal violations, and encumber Clearlake with a a viper's nest of future problems.
Let's have a little reality check.
This unimaginative, badly designed project takes hardly any advantage of the special qualities of the site, which lies just outside the Cache Creek Wilderness and borders the creek itself for more than a mile, but relies instead on a second-rate, money-losing nine-hole golf course to sell jammed-together houses on minimally-sized lots.
This is a pattern of development that was obsolescent a decade ago. Even during the heady days of our recent real estate bubble, a subdivision like this would attract few of the affluent buyers whose theoretically plump and open wallets are being advertised as one of the benefits Provinsalia would bring to a demographically challenged city.
To make this subdivision even less attractive to potential buyers, the lots would be burdened with the excessive costs of sprawl. Extending infrastructure to a site remote from public services would require substantial new water treatment facilities, a sewer upgrade estimated to cost a minimum of $13 million and a completely new access road for which no budget has yet been provided, quite aside from the streets, gas lines, electric lines, recreational facilities and other infrastructure on the project site itself.
Some of these costs would be reflected in the purchase price of the lots, and others carried as permanent maintenance district fees assessed on residents. Collectively, these charges would put Provinsalia at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to residential properties elsewhere in Clearlake and in other parts of Lake County.
To make matters worse, the parlous state of the American economy has led to an extraordinarily tight credit market and a wave of foreclosures that is not expected to crest any time soon. Many of Provinsalia's potential customers – affluent retirees from the Bay Area – currently own houses that have decreased drastically in value, with no purchasers in sight. The few who still intend to relocate to our community can find a plethora of attractive homes available at fire sale prices in Hidden Valley and elsewhere in the county, leaving them with no incentive whatsoever to pay a large premium for a less desirable property in Provinsalia.
The conclusion seems obvious to anyone whose judgment has not been clouded by a haze of imaginary dollar signs: Provinsalia will never be built, and the project site will become the latest example of Lake County's many paper subdivisions.
As long as regulations preventing grading, tree-cutting and other on-site environmental degradation are properly enforced, this end result would ordinarily be of little consequence. The temporary maps would lapse after a few years, the developers would figure out some way to write off their losses and the whole episode would become a footnote to Clearlake's history.
But in this case project approvals have been structured in a way that would result in long-term distortion of the city’s general plan, its “constitution” governing growth: even if this project is abandoned, any deviation from the tiresome design outlined in the 70-page specific plan would require a subsequent general plan amendment and full CEQA review.
Not even such a minor alteration as the repeatedly suggested alternative design replacing the golf course with a more natural rural landscape incorporating hiking, biking, and equestrian trails would be possible without amending the general plan, much less anything like the innovative "eco-destination" suggested in Debi Sally's LakeCoNews letter of Dec. 10 (http://lakeconews.com/content/view/6599/770/).
Clearlake residents whose sanity remains unclouded should act now to keep this planning albatross from being hung around the neck of a city that has more than enough problems already. Please contact Mayor Chuck Leonard and Councilors Judy Thein, Joyce Overton, Curt Giambruno, and Roy Simon and urge them to reject this misguided and ultimately destructive project.
Victoria Brandon is chair of the Sierra Club Lake Group.
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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
While most of my time was spent in built-up tourista areas, I did get to do a fair amount of driving around and got to see some of the poorer and more rural areas as well, and was surprised by what I observed everywhere I went.
Of course there were the loud-mouth drunk American tourists to keep one's national pride in check, but the thing that was truly humbling as a gringo was what the locals were doing.
Probably the most obvious example was the condition of the roads; even in the most humble neighborhoods the pavement was better than almost ANY street in Lakeport, and nowhere were the roadways as crude as they are in the city of Clearlake.
The reason was apparent everywhere I went, as road construction/repair was taking place all over the place. Mexico has obviously decided that good roads mean safe travels and good jobs for lots of people, and they are investing heavily in this aspect of their infrastructure.
It was also obvious that the building boom bust had not yet affected Mexico, as all sorts of structures were being erected – homes, businesses and government buildings, too. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, and there were no signs of some of our social problems, which had even more impact on me than it did on my last visit many years ago when it was not too uncommon to see children working.
There were no homeless people panhandling or stumbling around drunk in the parks, unlike my hometown of San Francisco, where the crazies, drunks and druggies roam the streets in annoying and sometimes frightening groups with barely any attempts to redirect their behavior.
Then there was the garbage issue, or to be more precise, the lack of it. Poor neighborhood, tourist zone or rural highways were all the same, they were trash-free.
I'm not sure if this is because an army of workers are employed to pick up roadside refuse or if people just don't throw so much stuff out the window of their cars, but whatever the reason for it the lack of misplaced garbage it made me think of the litter-choked ditches and roadsides around here, and how even when they are picked up a week later they're a mess again in some places, I have a hard time just keeping up with my trash problem generated by the one-third of a mile of county road that bisects my property.
Not only were the roadsides trash-free, but everywhere I saw a public garbage can in Mexico it was divided into two sides, organic and non-organic halves. Apparently Mexicans are more concerned with recycling than Americans, and are making the effort to sort all the trash they can into groups that can help keep landfills from getting used and again, keep people employed while preserving natural resources.
So I kept wondering, why can't we do some of these things? Are Americans too dumb or lazy to sort garbage? It does take a couple of seconds to read the signs that tell you what goes where, plus a bit of eye-hand coordination to get it there, can that be beyond us?
Haven't we been playing games by postponing road repairs for too long, and now the problem is so big it seems almost hopeless to try to get caught up?
Should we settle for roads that are unacceptable in third world countries, and continue to spend the nation's wealth on B-2 bombers and wars in far-off places that never threatened us?
If Mexico can keep crazy people off the streets and stop lazy people and drunks from annoying the rest of the citizenry then why can't we?
This isn't how you show leadership, it's time to pull our heads out of the sand folks, unless we want to become another Britain in our lifetimes.
Philip Murphy lives in Finley.
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- Written by: Philip Murphy
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