We’ve been spending the week looking at the proposal by the Baker Ranch LLC to change a 30 acre site adjacent to the Sports Park from commercial to residential. To date we’ve examined the owners’ claims that the change will reduce traffic congestion and the use of water and electricity, discussed the possible impact of the 4,700+ new homes already approved, and waxed philosophical about the Baker Ranch’s attempt to get out of a multi-part deal they made with the City. Today we’ll look at the best uses of the land, regardless of the Baker Ranch claims and regardless of their deal.
BEST USE OF THE LAND
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Implicit in the Baker Ranch proposal is the idea that the City needs more residential homes. There is no data to support this contention, either as a function of density, size, or tax base. And there certainly is no justification for any conclusions until the 4,700+ homes already approved have been brought online.
The other side of the Baker Ranch assumption is that commercial space is not needed. This is the same argument that Brookfield and Trumark made last year when they sought to change their sites from commercial to residential. At that time, the City staff, the Planning Commission, and the City Council asked the developers to conduct a study that would take into account the improved economic conditions as well as the impact of the 4,500 new homes approved at that time. Everyone reasoned that the new demands of 13,000 new residents (all of whom are going to be squeezed into a relatively small area less than one mile East and West of the 241 freeway) could well mean a dramatic increase in the need for commercial space in the near future. For reasons known only to the developers, they agreed and then refused to go ahead with the study, and then spent $100,000 to elect new members to the Council who voted to throw out the previous agreement and let the developers go ahead. One can only assume the rationale for doing this was the fear that the required study would reveal that it was not in the best interests of the City to change the General Plan and that an independent study would conclude that the improved economy and the massive input of people would increase the demand for commercial space. Indeed, the $100,000 the developers spent on the campaign was far more than the $25,000 they would have spent on the study, and the extra time it took to manipulate the Council was far in excess of the time it would have taken to do the study.
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If an independent study of the economy and the increase in the population was needed when there were 4,500 homes in the hopper, the need is even more critical now that Brookfield and Trumark are adding their 250 homes to the 4,500, giving us 4,700+. IOW, if the staff and the Commission believed that the independent study was called for in the past, why wasn’t this being recommended in the case of the Baker Ranch request? Instead the staff and the Commission were uncharacteristically quiet.
Is it because members of the Planning Commission have their eyes on the upcoming City Council race, and Baker Ranch has been generous in the past filling the campaign coffers of City Council candidates Richard Dixon, Marcia Rudolph, Helen Wilson, Peter Herzog, and Mark Tettemer, all of whom benefited from Baker Ranch contributions.
In 2013 the combination of greedy developers using their money to buy Council seats for their hand-picked candidates, and a city already burdened with traffic problems being inundated with more homes while their kids are shuttled to distant schools to make room for the new kids in town, gave birth to the “Save Lake Forest” movement that collected thousands of signatures to stop the Brookfield/Trumark projects. Because of the limited time (30 days) and the inexperience with the referendum process (this was the first time it ever happened in Lake Forest), the movement came up a few hundred signatures short. If there is now new pertinent information, and Baker Ranch LLC moves forward with this ill-conceived plan, and the Commission and the Council roll over and play dead, we may see a rebirth of the “Save Lake Forest” movement, and this time the target may not merely be the developer agreement, but more appropriately a recall of the City Council itself.
Next time we'll summarize and conclude for now.
