Amador County – More than 110 people attended the first General Plan Update meeting of 2011, with a nearly capacity supervisors chamber. The first meeting of the year of the Joint Panel of Amador County’s Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission was also the panel’s 13th meeting on the topic overall.

The Joint Panel began meeting in 2008, and last met in 2009, then staff went to work preparing the Preliminary Draft General Plan, which County Planner Susan Grijalva and her staff brought back Wednesday for more preliminary work. She said the changes that would come from changing words and the like was not enough to cause the re-circulating of the Environmental Impact Report for comment.

She said the meeting was intended to confirm that the preliminary drafts of the general plan document, glossary and implementation plan “contain the direction previously given to staff” in the dozen previous meetings, and to “identify any item that, if incorporated into the document later in the process, would be of such significance so as to substantially change the project description, thereby necessitating recirculation of the Draft Environmental Impact Report.” She said word changes “aren’t significant enough in the scope of environmental analysis” and that discussion should be held until the Draft General Plan and EIR are released.

Supervisor Chairman John Plasse read a list of minutes from the 10-member Joint Panel’s last 12 meetings, and said: “Who says we’re not transparent?” Grijalva said there were 27 General Plan Advisory Committee meetings held over 2 years, along with workshops in the community. The dozen Joint Panel meetings were held over 2-and-a-half years, and “correspondence was received during all phases.”

Several people spoke during “public matters not on the agenda,” and started to address the General Plan Update, but were asked to refrain from doing so until later. A public speaker’s sign-in sheet was indicated by Grijalva, who also asked that anyone reading from prepared statements could submit their document to Planner Cara Augustin, so that it could more easily be placed into the record of the proceedings.

Eight documents of correspondence were packaged for the Panel, and Grijalva started the meeting by bringing up four areas of concern that staff had found things in the final land use map which needed the panel’s further direction. She said staff had identified “four areas that don’t appear to be consistent with policies that we’ve applied to the rest of the General Plan.”

The meeting, attended by more than 100 people, included many in red signifying membership of the Mother Lode Tea Party Patriots, many of whom signed up for the public comment period. The meeting was scheduled to be continued to today if needed.

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.