At its board meeting last Thursday, Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) staff released a draft housing needs plan that allocates over half the housing to the unincorporated portions of Humboldt County over the wishes of many of the participants in the January meeting intended to inform the draft. The draft was released in hardcopy form at the meeting, rather than several days before so the Board and public could review it and has yet to be posted on the HCAOG website, although we have posted it here.

The plan allocates 2,505 housing units, 52.8% of Humboldt County’s state-mandated housing share, to the unincorporated county, a quantity of development which could cause continued sprawl impacts, such as conversion of agricultural and timberlands to residential development, increased traffic, and reduced access to infrastructure such as sidewalks and municipal sewage disposal.

In the draft plan, the methodology for establishing housing targets for each jurisdiction (the seven cities and the County) is not mathematically explicit, claiming that allocation is “based on assessment of the economic conditions within the county during the planning period compared to the prior decade, previous share allocations, and on a determination that adequate sites and public facilities were available throughout the county during the 2000s and will continue to be available during the planning period.”

The plan does not specify how these factors were weighed or combined to come up with the draft allocation numbers, and the description of the methodology refers to no table illustrating any such mathematical method. A table at the beginning of the appendix seems to demonstrate that the allocation is based on the previous plan.  We presume this to be the 2003 Regional Housing Needs Plan which is also inexplicit on the methodology.

This fallback to the old, inexplicit methodology comes after a process in which city and county planners and the public met in January, and were led to believe that alternative methodologies would be considered that weigh jobs, population and previous growth rates to various extents. Two of these alternative methodologies remain posted on the HCAOG website, one of them fairly close to a Healthy-Humboldt-recommended alternative.

The Board had few comments or questions last Thursday, so in the next 60 days, it will be interesting to see how they handle this issue that so radically impacts the future of our county.