Supervisors tweak principles, and send LCP changes back to subcommittee

It will be another couple of months before the county Board of Supervisors begins to consider proposed changes to the county’s Local Coastal Plan.

Today, the County Board of Supervisors took another look the principles they plan to use to evaluate changes to the LCP. They made some minor word changes and asked the subcommittee that developed the principles to use them as an organizing structure for the proposed changes.  I’ll post the revised version as soon as I get a copy.

The subcommittee is expected to report back to the Board in July and the Board will take up the LCP revisions in late July or in August.

The Examiner ran an article today on Coastside skepticism about the Board’s approach to the LCP. My favorite quote:

The webmaster of "Coastsider," Barry Parr, called the proposed principles "vague enough to encompass pretty much anything" the supervisors might ultimately decide to do.

"The supervisors appear to be defining property rights here exclusively as the right to develop," Parr said. "A wider vision would include the property rights of the community affected by a neighboring property owner’s development plans."

Meanwhile, the San Mateo County Association of Realtors says its number-one concern is keeping houses cheap. George Mozingo, government affairs director of SAMCAR is quoted in the story as saying,  "SAMCAR’s priority is to expand affordable housing opportunities. Everybody can’t live in a million-plus home and the coastside community needs more housing for its workforce."

In its letter to the Board of Supervisors, their number-one priority appeared to be building more houses, regardless of price. SAMCAR said that it opposes designating the old Caltrans freeway bypass in Montara as open space because "being adjacent to the new tunnel, these properties would be ideal sites [for homes] given their proximity to transit."