OakEl Dorado Hills Citizens Alliance News, November 22, 2009

EDCTC Citizens Advisory Committee:  Deadlock and Civic War

Thanks to John Knight and to BOS for a meeting in EDH

11/23/2009:  This is a slightly updated copy of news whose mailing was attempted last night. Edits were two minor text cleanups.


EDCTC Citizens Advisory Committee:  Deadlock and Civic War

Cause and effect can be befuddling in this county.  This was evident at the indecisive conclusion of the County Transportation Commission's series of meetings of the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) to consider how to provide fair representation to everyone in the County, including El Dorado Hills. The Placerville power base has been saying "No change at all! El Dorado Hills is not entitled to fair representation. Domination by Placerville is what's right, because Placerville is the only [incorporated] city on the west slope".

For notes on the CAC's last meeting see How did it end?, a report by John Raslear, Chairman of the Four Seasons Civic League.

Road funding

From the beginning EDCTC's Placerville representatives made it explicitly clear that the top issues in question are money and power.

The pie charts to the left represent actual data on distribution of funds from 2 authoritative EDCTC sources and from one Sacramento Bee article on distribution of economic stimulus funding for road work.

There were two small bits of good news from the CAC's final meeting last week.

 -- The Committee concluded that fairness should be improved in representation on the EDCTC board, not only for El Dorado Hills but for all areas of the County.

--  The Committee concluded that incorporated cities should be represented on the EDCTC board.

The bad news is that the Committee produced no recommendation on exactly what to do to increase fairness of representation, and Placerville representatives remain adamant that EDH cannot have representation because we [a 56.4% majority of voters] chose not to incorporate as a city in 2005.


The Citizens Alliance has always been guided by the notion that in political affairs the route to success is cooperation, not combat. We will maintain that preference. However, the EDCTC/CAC experience demonstrated that this EDCTC/CAC process brought EDH has under consistent attack by Placerville leadership, and that such attacks have continued throughout the CAC process. This was our civic Pearl Harbor and "turning the other cheek" will not resolve the problem. It appears that we in the three civic leagues of El Dorado Hills need to cooperate with each other in order to fight Placerville.

In this case the necessary action must come through legislation to change state law. We are grateful for having good representation for this through Alyson Huber and her staff. On the table at this time for discussion in the EDH Citizens Alliance, the Four Seasons Civic League, and the Bass Lake Action Committee is discussion of recommendations that the CAC failed to produce.

Today's draft from the Citizens Alliance is this proposal for EDCTC membership (constitution of the board):
Citizen members would be appointed by the Board of Supervisors. There are possible variations in details, depending on whether particular Citizen Members are appointed by the full board or by a subset of the board.

Thanks to John Knight and to BOS for a meeting in EDH

Citizens Alliance thanks go to District 1 County Supervisor John Knight for his incentive and to the County Board of Supervisors as a whole for the October 6th special meeting of the BOS in El Dorado Hills. To our knowledge this is the first BOS meeting in EDH since the County Charter was amended more than a decade ago to eliminate the requirement for one BOS meeting in EDH annually.

The October 5th evening meeting at the CSD Pavilion involved two transportation issues and focused mainly on plans for the future Silva Valley interchange. The largest part of the meeting was devoted to a presentation by Jim Ware, Director of the El Dorado County Department of Transportation.

The Citizens Alliance encourages establishment of County government presence in El Dorado Hills in lieu of a city government. Cities in our region typically conduct regular meetings twice monthly during evening hours, making the meetings accessible to citizens whose ability to attend is constrained by work schedules. The geographically nearest example is the City of Folsom, whose regular meetings at its Community Center occur twice monthly at 6:30 p.m. We encourage the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors to provide similar service to our actual city, the largest in El Dorado County.


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