Schools, EBMUD Still Dispute County Plan for Castro Valley Growth

It's not on the published government agenda.

But a dispute over Alameda County's proposed new controls over school district and water district properties in Castro Valley is expected to turn up again at tonight's meeting of the Castro Valley Municipal Advisory Council, which makes recommendations to the county board of supervisors.

The council meets at 6 p.m. in the Castro Valley Library.

At a county Planning Commission meeting on Sept. 19, the advisory council was asked to continue working on the Draft Castro Valley General Plan, which has been protested by the local school district, water district and churches because it includes new restrictions on land use.

The new restrictions call for public hearings to be held before these entities can sell their land.

The General Plan is the town's blueprint for future growth. It determines what kinds of activities are allowed where — whether houses or retail stores, for example, will be allowed on a given piece of property. The plan gets updated every 10 or so years.

MAC members Marc Crawford and Cheryl Miraglia said the idea for extending the "public facilities" zoning designation came to them from county planning staff and was presented to them as a new trend.

At the June 6 meeting of the Planning Commission, Miraglia said she later did research of her own and found the idea isn't a "new trend" and has been implemented in Contra Costa County and elsewhere.

The proposed new designation in Castro Valley calls for hearings that MAC members said are intended to give the public an extra opportunity for input on decisions that affect them.

Planning Commissioner Mike Jacobs at the commission's June 6 meeting said the Castro Valley Unified School District board and the East Bay Municipal Utility District board are both elected bodies, so the districts already are held accountable to the public.

The school and water districts say the restrictions will in effect deter buyers from making bids on property encumbered by a county public hearing process. Even if the school doesn't sell any land, it needs high-value property to use as collateral for school bond measures.

EBMUD contends the new zoning designation is a means of preventing  it from selling property it owns in Castro Valley to housing developers. If voters had passed Measure Q in 2006, the EBMUD land would have passed into county hands and would have been turned into a park.

The MAC agenda for tonight, published here, says the only item up for discussion is the San Lorenzo Creek Watershed Task Force Revised Recommendations Report, to be presented by assistant deputy director Elizabeth McElligott, along with the following, for which no detail is offered:

• Chair's Report
• Staff Announcements, Comments and Reports
• Council Announcements, Comments and Reports

Two superintendents, Jim Negri of CVUSD and Dennis Byas of , and Frank Mellon of EBMUD — and their legal counsels — spoke against the proposed General Plan at the Planning Commission meeting on Sept. 19.

Negri said he plans to speak during the open forum tonight at the Castro Valley MAC meeting. Mellon said he will be in the audience in case there is discussion of the Draft Castro Valley General Plan.

Tonight's meeting is the local advisory council's first since the county Planning Commission met on Sept 19.