Club sues to stop Faria development in San Ramon

On Dec. 27 the Sierra Club filed suit to overturn the San Ramon City Council's approval of the 830-unit Faria Preserve development. The East Bay Regional Parks District has also filed suit challenging the project.

In November the Council voted unanimously to approve this project just north of the city at the south end of Las Trampas Ridge, in an area designated as the Northwest Specific Plan. Councilmembers justified the vote on the grounds of providing affordable housing and controlling growth - laudable goals for a local government that has previously fallen short in both areas - but in fact the project approval violates the city's Save Our Hills initiative, Ordinance 197, adopted in 1990, and goes against the strongly expressed will of the community.

At the center of the dispute is the San Ramon General Plan. The plan is quite explicit in its strict adherence to Ordinance 197 - referencing it more than 25 times - but the city has decided to interpret the plan in a way that overrides the ordinance.

Ordinance 197 prohibits development on major and minor ridgelines, sets allowable building densities based on slope percentages, and prohibits development near creeks. It allows for certain exceptions subject to approval by the voters. The city, however, has approved Faria without the required vote.

The decision includes several other evasions of the General Plan. The plan requires that a developer on this scale must set aside an area of 15 - 20 acres for a school. Somehow, however, over the five years that the city has been considering Faria, the "school" has morphed into an "education facility", which could be a mere "outreach center" of undetermined nature, and the 15 - 20 acres has shrunk to less than 2-1/2. The General Plan goes to great lengths to define the need for a community park in that area and the minimum size required to meet the needs of the surrounding population - but then the approved project allows for a park only large enough to meet the needs just of the development.

The draft Environmental Impact Report indicated several air-quality issues that would be above allowable limits and could not be mitigated, but somehow, miraculously, in the final EIR those unmitigable issues were now deemed acceptable, even though no variables had changed. It's OK - air quality will be unhealthy less than 50% of the time!

Traffic? Clearly not a problem - based on data from 1992.

According to Ordinance 197, development densities are limited on steep slopes - but the city is allowing for the ridgelines to be graded before the slope percentages are measured.

In filing suit, the Sierra Club is looking to preserve these ridgelines, protect views, and prevent a riparian corridor from being filled in and artificially moved. Just as importantly, the Club is looking to protect the integrity and authority of a local ordinance meant to preserve San Ramon's natural resources for generations to come, and to protect the rights of the citizens by upholding their voter-approved General Plan.

The people of San Ramon deserve better than they are getting, and the Sierra Club is showing that it is willing to fight for them, to stand up and do what's right.

Michael Jones