Why build a gas station just to tear it down? Part 1

A Public Records Act Request has revealed the shocking information that Stanislaus County planners and leaders know the proposed gas station and storage (PLN2019-0079) to be built next to the Vizcaya neighborhood would be torn down to make way for the expansion of the Hammett Road interchange. In this email exchange dated December 7, 2018 between former Stanislaus County Deputy Director, Miguel Galvez, to Stanislaus County Planner, Kristin Doud and copied to Stanislaus County Planning Director, Angela Freitas, Galvez writes, 

"The Grover family is interested in developing their property by the Hammett Road overcrossing. They would like to develop a service station on the 9.6 ac. parcel (APN 003-014-007), it would be temporary until the property is taken for the development of the new interchange."

NOT ONCE has this information that the development will be demolished for the new interchange been shared at ANY of the county meetings held about the gas station project in Salida! WHY would Stanislaus County proceed with a project that not only would have a gas station, but a mini-storage, and other restaurants when all of it will be torn down for a freeway interchange? Would the business owners and corporations know in advance that their business investments on this land could be short-lived? At the Hammett Road Interchange meeting held at Salida Library Community Room on July 31, 2012, one of the hired consultants of the study said at 7:16 in the recorded meeting, 

"The problem is, any development, any significant development around the Hammett Road Interchange causes the Hammett interchange to fail in it's ability to service traffic, so it would need to be improved. The plan that we have done in here tonight, is the least impact way of making a long term interchange improvement to accommodate any development that occurs at the interchange."

At 5:44 in the recording after a discussion on whether the land could be developed or not, a man says, "The land should be acquired at fair market value." In the December 7, 2018 Galvez-Doud email, they discuss the zoning. A-2 is the zoning code for General Agriculture.

A second development project debuted in early 2020 known as "Lark Landing PLN2019-0131" which includes another gas station, car wash, convenience market, offices, fast food and TWO hotels on the land in front (west) of the Vizcaya neighborhood. This project is currently on hold, but again, if you look at the layout of the Hammett Road interchange, this land would also be taken for that along with the new Pirrone Rd. alignment. 

The only reason I can think of as to WHY Stanislaus County would follow through with these doomed projects is to insure the landowners receive a higher "fair market value" for their land by the state. A General Plan rezone is part of these development applications and built-out commercial land would cost the state more than if it were undeveloped or remained agriculture. 

A Conflicted MAC Part 2

On April 6, 2021, I wrote "A Conflicted MAC" about how Salida Municipal Advisory Council board members had voted AGAINST our community by supporting the gas station planned within 500 ft of the Vizcaya neighborhood. To briefly recap that post, Salida MAC Chair, Leng Nou is employed by Stanislaus County and Stanislaus County stands to gain a drainage basin at a 200% discount off the price if the project is approved. And new Salida MAC board member, Bob Elliott, became employed as of March 1, 2021 at the very same real estate company handling the transaction of the land. Both voted in favor of the project at the March 2021 Salida MAC meeting. Their votes benefit their employers and are the opposite of what the majority of the community has expressed at that meeting and past ones.

With the passing of new Salida MAC board member, Debbie Nutt, her vacancy was filled by the appointment of Tom Burns to the Salida MAC council. Tom Burns has served on the Salida MAC board previously and also served on the Salida Fire Protection District board.

Patrick and Tom Burns at April 27, 2021 Salida MAC meeting.

It will be interesting to see how Tom votes on the gas station re-vote slated for the Tuesday, June 22, 2021 in-person Salida MAC meeting. Tom also brings a conflict-of-interest with him to the table: his son, Patrick, is Chief Engineer of Salida Fire. Patrick has said at a previous Salida MAC meeting that the gas station project is worth the equivalent of 5,000 homes in tax revenue to Salida Fire Dept. Incidentally, Patrick mentions in the recording that the Salida Fire Dept has been in the red, but I have heard they are now back in the black. This is difficult to verify since the fire board has canceled their last two meetings. Anyhow, I point this out because putting the Fire Dept in the black is not a justification for voting in favor of all development. Development needs to be conducive to nearby neighborhoods.

Patrick is a Salida resident and I have always thought it admirable that he doesn't cast a vote in the community poll vote the MAC conducts because as a Salida resident, he has the right to vote. I assume he doesn't because of the conflict-of-interest. But will his father do the same?

The purpose of the MAC is to represent the community, and not their employers or their family members' employers. This is stated in Government Code section 31010: "...a municipal advisory council may represent the community to any state, county, city, special district or school district, agency or commission, or any other organization on any matter concerning the community."

A large number of Salida residents support the Vizcaya neighborhood and have signed the online petition and circulated paper petitions. It's not hard to see why if you put yourself in their shoes; would YOU want a gas station built within 500 ft of YOUR neighborhood? Please support Vizcaya and sign the petition here.

Summary of the Vizcaya posts

 I didn't realize just how many times I've addressed the issue of development around Vizcaya until I looked back at past posts. Vizcaya residents especially need to read these posts so they know the history and issues involving the land around their neighborhood.

GROVER FAMILY - Our former Stanislaus County District 3 Supervisor, Jeff Grover, was one of the three votes which passed the Salida Community Plan in 2007. JEFF GROVER WOULD HAVE BEEN CONFLICTED FROM VOTING ON THE PLAN IF HIS COUSIN, MARK GROVER (owner of Grover Landscaping) HAD SIGNED A DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT. It's NOT a "drafting error" that they just suddenly noticed after 14 years when Mark Grover wants to sell his land for development. The land has NOT SOLD yet as you can see by this out-of-boundary water service agreement that Mark and Lorraine Grover have requested on the Modesto City Council agenda for TODAY, Tuesday, April 13, 2021.

Read:

When the past comes back to haunt you

STANISLAUS COUNTY - A Stanislaus County employee even truthfully stated at a past meeting when asked, that he "Wouldn't have bought a house there" meaning in Vizcaya and knowing what development would be put in by the homes. The county machine is churning like a steamroller towards Vizcaya. A county employee on the Salida Municipal Advisory Council voted in favor of the project despite three meetings where Salida residents were unanimously opposed. Why does the county want this project so much? Besides being a large tax

Current Vizcaya drainage basin in 2021

generator, the county will get a new drainage basin for Vizcaya at "75% off" the land price. The highly questionable and extreme lengths the county seems to be going to in order to push this project through include allowing the votes of a county employee and a new MAC member who became a real estate agent on March 1, 2021 FOR THE VERY SAME COMPANY HANDLING THE SALE OF THE LAND and he DID NOT DISCLOSE THIS NEW JOB publicly at the MAC meeting nor conflict himself out of voting.  The county machine is also doing a very poor job of notifying Vizcaya residents of what is transpiring including planning to adopt a Negative CEQA document on the project when it was only announced at the March 2021 Salida MAC meeting that hydrogen fueling tanks have been added to the project. There is no mention of the hydrogen tanks in the Salida Gas Station Project.

Read:

"I wouldn't have bought a house there" in Salida's Vizcaya neighborhood

A Conflicted MAC

The due diligence of transparency, taxes, and development

Salida residents, and especially those in Vizcaya, need to SPEAK UP! You need to write to planning@stancounty.com and contact all five county supervisors. You need to attend meetings when you can, even if it's virtual on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Call them on the mat for these things. 

Sign the petition to support Vizcaya and share the link. Time is running out.

A Conflicted MAC

At the Tuesday, March 23, 2021 vote conducted at the Salida Municipal Advisory Council meeting regarding the Salida Gas Station Project bordering the Vizcaya neighborhood; MAC members were conflicted and in more ways than one.

A straw-poll vote of those attending the meeting, Salida MAC member, John Martin, made a motion to not approve the gas station and Vice-chair Brad Johnson seconded the motion. 

New MAC board member, Bob Elliott, who was sworn into office in January 2021, voted against the motion saying, "I'm going to vote nay because I just think there's some information that the public has that may not be totally correct and that's the basis of some of the comments." Mr. Elliott never specifies what the "some information" is. When he joined the Salida MAC in January he gave a brief introduction of himself saying his occupation was "sales for a software company." Mr. Elliott does not announce his new job as of March 1st is in real estate for the very same company handling the sale of the land for the gas station. 

Salida MAC Chair, Leng Nou, also voted nay, "...only because there was strong opposition we heard at previous community meetings, and whether it's because of noticing, I don't know but I know that we have community members here tonight with five no's as opposed to a roomful before."

Now why Salida MAC can vote "yes" on the CSA tax annexation with a majority of ten people in favor and she votes "no" with a majority of five voting against and many more than that at all the previous meetings is questionable. There weren't any Salida residents who attended the meeting that voted for the project in the straw poll vote. And as to the low turnout of residents at the meeting, there were several issues that impeded attendance like no meeting notice was sent to the Salida MAC e-mail list, two different agendas circulated and the one posted on Facebook did not contain a hyperlink to the meeting, and the county switched platforms from Zoom to Microsoft Teams. 

Considering that Bob Elliott is now employed with the real estate company handling the land sale for the Salida Gas Station, that should have conflicted him out of the vote. Should Leng Nou also have been conflicted out of voting because she is an employee of Stanislaus County? 

John Martin points out that the county really seems to be pitching for this project because they will get "75% off" the land price for a drainage basin. Stanislaus County Public Works Director, Dave Leamon tries to explain his stance, but it does sound like a pitch in his comments about the basin.

Salida MAC is an advisory board and so is the Stanislaus County Planning Commission. Our county supervisor is the only one who has a binding vote on this issue. The Salida MAC vote unfortunately split, and if occupational bias was involved, this advisory vote should be reviewed by county counsel. Salida MAC board members are elected to represent the community and not their employers. 

Please support our Salida neighbors in the Vizcaya community and sign the petition here.

A taxing annexation for Salida

If Stanislaus County succeeds in annexing our homes into taxing districts, tax increases are never going to end. Every so often, they will want to raise taxes as they have already been doing to the people in those taxing districts.

As if 2020 hasn't been a bad enough year already, the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors is moving forward with plans to annex all of Salida into taxing districts. They call it a community service "assessment" (CSA) but that's just another word for "tax", and this is why it's subject to a Prop 218 vote. Following are the politics behind this tax and my thoughts on why I am against it.

The first tax to be voted on is known as CSA 4 and applies only to the Bristol Glen (aka Amberwood) neighborhood for their storm drain maintenance. For the CSA 4 tax to apply to all of Salida, Stanislaus LAFCO will have to approve Salida being annexed into Bristol Glen's taxing district and then registered homeowners will vote. The second taxing district that the rest of Salida will be annexed into is CSA 10 which covers park maintenance and the landscaping around the current CSA neighborhoods.

Following are my comments regarding the proposed tax annexation at the August 11, 2020 Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors meeting:

"I would like to request that agenda item C-1 be pulled and the following points are taken into consideration. To quote from page 2:

"In November, staff led a second meeting with the community and explained the rate increase process, benefits and costs, and why the increase was needed for CSA 10. County staff performed an informal poll of those that attended using comment cards. Based on 19 comment cards submitted, 10 were for the increase and 9 were against the increase. However, the most notable of responses, both verbally and written, for that meeting was a request that all of Salida pay for their "fair share" of the storm drain maintenance costs before considering raising the rate for CSA 10."

Let's begin with that quote "fair share". In 2013, I asked Matt Machado (former Director of Stanislaus County Public Works) how the storm drain maintenance in Salida was funded in neighborhoods like mine which are not covered by a CSA and his reply was "the gas tax". And here we are, seven years later and in the intervening time, we've had SB-1 and Measure L which are nice hefty increases to gas tax revenue. As was brought up at the Salida MAC meeting and also in the intervening time, the County decided to raid the CSA to pay for storm drain maintenance in my neighborhood as well as others not in CSA Districts, and this you spin as we are not paying our "fair share"??? That section of the agenda item should be stricken because it is nothing more than a biased opinion to further an agenda. If you don't wish to strike it, you can just as easily add my negative comment from the nine that were opposed so it's a more balanced and fair government document. (The Board of Supervisors adopted neither suggestion and the comment still stands in the document. They approved the tax unanimously to proceed onto the annexation process.)

My County Supervisor once told me that I was smart for not buying a Mello Roos home. (Mello Roos homes in Salida also have CSA taxes). I replied that it isn't because I'm smart, I did it on purpose because I didn't want the added taxes. When the people in CSA and Mello Roos homes purchase those homes, they agree to pay those taxes. They know what they are getting into. When we bought our home 27 years ago, the real estate agent did not say, "Well, you don't have these additional taxes on your home, but just wait, you will in 27 years."

Personally, the amount you want to tax us with isn't a big deal to me. I'm against this tax in principle. The principle being that we DO pay more than our fair share and we did not sign up for this. Another principle is that I think your timing is horrendous because other than the Great Recession, you're going to push a tax during the second biggest economic downturn of the 21st century. While the amount may not be a big deal to me, you are imposing this tax on low-income areas of Salida - the same sections of Salida you use for DUC (Disadvantaged Unincorporated Community) status in grants so that tax may be a big deal to a lot of other people in Salida." (NOTE: Salida as a whole is not a DUC, but the county obtained the storm drain grant for the Historic neighborhoods by grouping them as a DUC.)

I can't combat this tax alone so if you wish to help, e-mail me.

Urban Limit Lines; the politics of invisible lines in the sand

Board members of the Municipal Advisory Councils (MACs) in Salida and Wood Colony, along with members of other local boards like Salida Sanitary District, etc. received letters from the City of Modesto dated June 9, 2020 requesting feedback about their proposed Urban Limit Lines (ULL). So far, the correspondence and social media postings in response to the letter have been a resounding "leave us alone" from Salida and Wood Colony residents.

First, just what is an Urban Limit Line? That's an invisible line in the sand (or in our case, prime agricultural soil called Hanford Sandy Loam) that would prevent the City of Modesto from land-grabbing upon the communities of Salida and Wood Colony. As most local area 

Modesto Bee map 
https://www.modbee.com/article237666634.html

residents know, Salida and Wood Colony have been fighting proposed annexations by Modesto for quite some time now.  Typically, a ULL would be met with open arms by our unincorporated communities for the protection they offer, so why is this one not?

Because the ULL does NOT match up to our communities' boundaries which means that Modesto would still have the opportunity to develop and sprawl into Salida and Wood Colony. 

Politicians in Modesto didn't just wake up one day and decide to implement the ULL, nor did they wake up and decide to go after Salida and Wood Colony once again - they are doing this for two reasons: former Modesto City Councilman, Denny Jackman and landowners in Salida and Wood Colony. 

Denny Jackman is perhaps the most well-known farmland preservationist in our county. He co-authored with former Modesto mayor, Garrad Marsh, Measure E - a county-wide residential ULL that was passed by voters in 2007. Denny then tried to repeat the success with a City of Modesto ULL initiative in 2015 known as Measure I. The Modesto Chamber of Commerce and local unions poured money into an anti-Measure I campaign and the initiative was narrowly defeated.

Denny is not one to give up so easily. To put it bluntly, he is threatening Modesto with another ULL ballot initiative if they did not implement a ULL on their own. The June 9 letter even says this but much more diplomatically: "Mr. Jackman informed the City Council that he intended to proceed with another attempt to impose the same limitations as he had pursued in 2015." But this new ULL is not exactly the same as the one in 2015. The ULL sacrifices much more of Wood Colony. Salida's lines are pretty much the same as 2015 but they do not follow Salida's Community Plan (SCP) boundaries. Why? On both counts: landowners.

Based on social media posts on NextDoor regarding this topic and a recent Wood Colony MAC meeting, it appears that Bill Lyons Jr. is affecting the boundaries in Wood Colony. He is the largest landowner there. For Salida, the main chunks of land cut out of our SCP boundaries is everything south of Kiernan and Joe Gallo's land north of Kiernan. Back during the Measure I initiative, (this was told to me by a Wood Colony friend) Denny ran into Dave Romano (who reps for Joe Gallo) and Dave told him they'd fight the initiative if the land wasn't removed from the ULL. That's why it's not a clean line north of Kiernan (west of Dale), even though all that land has been designated for Salida in the SCP with a Development Agreement signed by Mr. Romano. 

Back to the ULL and my thoughts: the Modesto City Council is in a rock and hard place trying to appease Denny and compromise with powerful families like Lyons and Gallo who want to sell their lands for commercial prices (much higher than ag prices). Additionally, while their lands are in areas designated for Salida and Wood Colony, the land cannot be developed unless City of Modesto agrees to supply water for new development. Historically for Salida, this has meant that Modesto will not supply the water unless they get to annex the land. (That's how Salida lost Costco and Kaiser from it's districts.)

I cannot see the residents of Salida and Wood Colony being on board for something that does not fully protect our communities from annexation. We can let the Modesto City Council know what we think of their invisible lines in the sand, but they don't have a history of listening to us since we are not constituents. However, their past votes have proven to be political campaign ammo and have killed re-election bids so I guess we'll see.

Indentity and transparency for 95368

On Monday, April 20, 2020, Stanislaus County opened it's first free COVID-19 testing site at the Salida Library. Three days later on April 23, I submitted an email request to the county asking for Salida's COVID-19 cases to be broken out of the county numbers just as Alameda County has done for unincorporated Castro Valley. I copied members of Salida MAC on my request and learned they had also requested the same information. (THANK YOU SALIDA MAC!) 

On Monday, April 27, I sent another e-mail request to the county asking for an update and sending a link to a Sacramento Bee article showing that Sacramento breaks their COVID-19 cases down by zip code.

The Modesto Bee Editorial Board joined the call for the breakdown in numbers by zip code in an opinion piece on April 28, which specifically mentioned Salida

"Reporting by ZIP code would greatly increase clarity, for example, in Salida — the county’s largest unincorporated community, and host of the county’s new drive-up testing clinic. With 14,658 people, Salida actually is larger than three of our cities: Waterford (population 8,823), Hughson (7,370) and Newman (11,119). ZIP code-level reporting would do the trick, as Salida has only one ZIP code."

Unfortunately, the county's solution to our request was to break the numbers out by supervisorial district which doesn't tell anything specifically about Salida. That same day, Salida MAC again made the case for the breakdown of Salida's numbers. 

On May 4, the Modesto Bee Op Ed Board announced that the county would soon break down the numbers by zip code. 

"Perhaps people in Modesto soon will know whether their neighborhoods have had COVID clusters. It will be nice seeing 10 different reports for the 10 ZIP codes in Modesto, rather than just one for the entire city.  

The same goes for one-ZIP-code Salida. The unincorporated town has 14,658 residents but no clue whether the coronavirus is active there, despite serving as the county’s only testing site before others were added Monday in Patterson and Keyes.  

On Sunday, Merced County became more transparent by reporting to email alert subscribers its cases in Delhi (population 11,735) and Winton (11,761), both unincorporated like Salida although both are smaller. Salida also has more people that three actual Stanislaus cities: Waterford (population 8,823), Hughson (7,370) and Newman (11,119), all of which have benefited from specific coronavirus reports."

FINALLY! Finally...on Thursday, May 7, 2020, eighteen days after placing the first COVID-19 testing site in Salida, Stanislaus County debuted the COVID-19 numbers by zip code. If the first link doesn't work, click this link and then "Neighborhoods" at the top of the page.

District 3 has 20 cases. Salida has 12 of those cases.