For over a year, our City Council has claimed it supports the desires of San Juan Capistrano's citizens to keep our city "the jewel of South County" by preserving the rural, small village character that drew so many of us here in the first place.  The outrage that followed the building of all the fast food restaurants, know as "fast food row", was responded to by our Council members as the work of past Councils that did not have the same viewpoint as our present Council.  The tremendous opposition to over-development of the remaining buildable land by developers intent on spreading the "concrete jungle" of the maximum number of homes on the minimum amount of land was temporarily allayed by a building moratorium to allow an update of the City's General Plan. During this process, the Council made numerous statements about there being no support for using open space as a golf course for Whispering Hills, of keeping sacrosanct the ban on any building, grading or roads over our precious ridgelines, and various other statements addressing citizens concerns. Many of these concerns stem from the potential of destroying what so many of us believe is the major differentiator of SJC and what sets our community apart from the rest of the cities in South County.

Now the real test of the Council's guts and convictions is upon them. The Planning Commission has, beyond all comprehension, advocated the building of yet another fast food burger shop in a city that already has more fast food places per capita than probably 95% of this nation's cities. The City Council is the final vote to approve or not. This time the outcome does not rest with past Councils, but will squarely sit on the shoulders of our present Council members. Will they stand by their stated convictions of saying enough is enough? We will find out very shortly.

An even greater test, and far more dangerous to maintaining our community as proudly different from the rest of Southern California, is the pending update of our General Plan. Many of us have taken the time in our busy schedules to attend various public forums, workshops and hearings to express our views about the future of our City. Cries of NIMBY ("Not In My Back Yard") have been leveled against those who have stood up to developers from outside our city that want to force us to look like other communities with their "clone home" developments. The fact is that many of us have chosen to live and raise our families here for the very reason that San Juan is different. Neither progress nor individual rights are compromised by a city daring to stand by its citizens' desires to maintain a certain quality of life and city character.

It is, therefore, an ominous sign that based on a single letter from a non-voting, non-resident developer named Dennis Gage; our city's Planning Director has reversed completely the land use recommendation from the original draft of the General Plan Update from 40% homes to over 60% homes. Does it seem strange to anyone else that the voice of one non-resident developer would wield more clout than the objections of hundreds of voting residents? Not to mention that the Whispering Hills project has suddenly gone from land zoned as one unit per five acres (Growth Management under the current General Plan) to a Planned Community of one unit per acre. In Mr. Tomlinson's November 1998 declaration filed with the court defending the City's moratorium, he states that Gage's Concorde Development would need to get a zone change processed by the City to receive a Planned Community designation. Apparently, Gage has convinced Mr. Tomlinson to grant that zone change and just include it in the General Plan update. This change would make moot Mr. Tomlinson's own statement that "without a zone change, the Concorde Project could be approved for only 71 residential units…"

And is it not also of dubious value that the General Plan Update has areas within the proposed Whispering Hills project cited as having archaeological value (that most of us thought would stay as true open space), as now being "open space recreational" (instead of "natural open space") that opens the door to using the open space as an expensive golf course? You have to give the developers credit when they purposely set out to use issues such as this to divide the community's opposition to the broader issue of over-development and the slow erosion of the unique character of our city.

And why does the General Plan update ignore the comments of our citizens that advocated permanently adding zoning categories that were less dense than 1 unit per acre (or at least removing or drastically changing the "clustering" concept that allows developers to build one house on top of another even in so-called low density zoning areas)? Such a change in zoning would have a positive impact on the already problematic traffic, let alone the protection against yet another sea of clone homes eroding our city's character.

Paid for by Citizens for Mark Nielsen * 27126-B Paseo Espada Suite 725 * SJC CA 92675 * 949325.0130