Next meeting:
Thursday, March 15th, 7:00 p.m.
Speaker not yet confirmed
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BOS presentation, Tuesday March 6th, in 9 a.m. session of meeting in Placerville
The Citizens Alliance will offer a short verbal presentation to the
County Board of Supervisors, with additional notes submitted in writing
and available on our web site, at
http://www.edhca.net/bos_070306/index.html
The presentation lists four specific issues and will give maximum focus to
need for traffic patrol.
For emphasis it cites the deaths of one child, two 18-year-old drivers,
and one 19-year-old driver. At least three of these fatalities probably
would not have occurred if we had adequate traffic patrol, the fourth
was less certain but possibly could have been prevented.
The presentation also lists three general issues. One is
community-specific vision, values, and goals:
We continue to receive comments from citizens about growth being
unbalanced or excessive. To some the strongest concerns are whether
road system capacity and shchool system capacity are keeping pace with
population growth. For many others, possibly a strong majority, there
is strong concern about whether we can maintain a small town "subrural"
environment in some areas, or whether we can avoid runaway
high-intensity development in areas already built or committed to
substantial housing growth. Virtually everyone is concerned about
traffic.
An example of an excellent public outreach process
We have found an example of a county that performed an excellent
public outreach process to deterimine its residents' preferences for
vision, values, and goals. The County of Maui is about 90% as populous
as El Dorado County. In 2003 it performed 167 focus group sessions in a
project called
Focus Maui Nui,
assessing the desires of about 1,700 residents. Results have been
applied to its current process to update its General Plan, and these
are evident. Its list of planning goals is similar to what we think a
similar outreach process would find in El Dorado Hills. Some notes and
web pointers to Maui's documents are in our issue summary at
http://www.edhca.net/bos_070306/community_vision.html
General Plans with community specializations
The Maui General Plan also exemplifies a structured plan, with sections
nested below the county-wide plan to define details specific to
individual communities. We think this approach would be particularly
beneficial for El Dorado Hills when combined with results of a good
outreach process. Our summary notes are at
http://www.edhca.net/bos_070306/locally_focused_planning.html.