Last Tuesday's Humboldt County Supervisors Meeting was an intimate affair, but it helped to bring to light the contrasts in views over the General Plan Update (GPU).

Dr. Anne Lindsay, public health officer in the County department of public health, presented some background and findings from Health Impact Assessment. This was a study conducted to compare the draft alternatives of the GPU. The gist of the results is that the environmentally preferable Plan Alternative A provides substantial benefits to public health while Plan B has some negative impacts and Plan C has substantial negative impacts.

Since Alternative A is the most restrictive on ex-urban sprawl, any study that supports its adoption freaks out the land-speculating realtors and developers, of course, so their representatives showed up to try to discount the HIA and get the Supes to give health less consideration than their desire to build sprawling developments in an unplanned manner for short-term profit.

Some of their testimony was interesting:

After pontificating on the discredited mantra that anyone is trying to exclude people from rural areas, Ben Sheperd of McKinleyville tried to demonstrate that type II diabetes is affect by median income in different areas rather than density. Never mind that it isn’t density alone, but a combination of planning strategies that make a neighborhood more walkable, and more importantly, disease rates can be affected by more than one factor.

Sprawl is certainly no recipe for increasing median income. When folks send their money out of county for more fuel and more cars, we end up more poor. And the cost of expanding infrastructure out into former agriculture and timber lands doesn’t help on the that front either.

Bob Higgons of the Humboldt County Association of Realtors complained that the Health Department was pushing for Plan A, and that the building industry was already heavily regulated and didn’t need more regulation.

Julie Williams from the Humboldt County Association of Homebuilders ramped up the "social engineering" mantra, trying to say that somehow someone would regulate when people drive where and for how long. She even went so far as to say Alternative A calls for demolishing neighborhoods to make way for parks.

Kudos to the supes for standing up to these shenanigans. After referring back to discussion of these issues over the McKinleyville Community Plan several years ago, 5^th District Supervisor Jill Geist did a good job of setting the facts straight:

“No one is proposing to eliminate rural living…We are not tearing down houses to put in parks…We can grow by either design or default…All development is social engineering.”

The supes seem to understand the importance of health in our land use planning. If we could get the builders and realtors to see past the dollar signs in their eyes, I think we could find ways to profitably develop in a way that serves broad concerns of our housing needs, economy and quality of life, of which health is an important component. If they can't come to the discussion in a more credible fashion, however, it makes it harder to take their concerns under consideration.