On Tuesday, August 28th, the Antioch City Council voted 3-1 to adopt the “Let Antioch Voters Decide: Sand Creek Area Protection Initiative”. After years of working on the Sand Creek area and a year of intense activity to write and qualify our initiative for the ballot, we have won! Now more than 1,400 acres of beautiful land, creek, and wildlife habitat west of Deer Valley Road have a robust layer of protection from sprawl development.
Thank you to the hundreds of volunteers and thousands of Antioch residents who collected signatures, spread the word, went to meetings, and signed on to help make this a reality. Also thank you to City staff for their work on this, and thank you to Mayor Sean Wright, Mayor Pro Tem Lamar Thorpe and Councilmember Monica Wilson for voting to adopt our initiative and demonstrating leadership on this issue. Please call or email to thank them!
Councilmember Lori Ogorchock voted against the community and our initiative. She fully supported the Richland development project and voiced support for development on the Zeka property, too (the most sensitive part of the Sand Creek area, west of Empire Mine Road). She is up for re-election in November.
Councilmember Tony Tiscarino was absent, was critical of the community’s initiative, and is also up for re-election in November.
We understand that a lot of people have questions about what's actually happened and what this means. We try to answer them below.
What about the Richland initiative adopted last month? Won't houses be built despite our initiative getting adopted?
In short, yes. The 1,177 unit 'The Ranch' project was approved when the Council adopted Richland's initiative last month, unless their initiative is legally challenged. But it's important to understand that Richland's initiative being adopted was in and of itself a major indirect victory for us. How could that be? To understand that, first know that the developers would never have done their initiative if we had not drafted, filed, and collected signatures for our own initiative. Recognizing they had made a major blunder in not taking us seriously and realizing they had to make some major changes, they basically copied our initiative with one major change: allow an improved version of their project.
They changed their project to reduce the number of units, provide a wide creek-corridor buffer around Sand Creek, leave the hills alone, and buffer Empire Mine Road (a popular walking corridor for residents) so their project doesn't lead to more development further west. So last month, an improved 'The Ranch' project was approved, and about 70 percent of the Sand Creek area west of Deer Valley Road had development restricted on it. That includes Zeka Ranch, which is more than 640 acres west of Empire Mine Road that is surrounded on three sides by East Bay Regional Park District land, the southern hills, and Sand Creek.
Many decision makers, residents, and key campaign supporters saw this as a good compromise that protects one of the most important areas west of Deer Valley Road — the area with hills, woodland, creek, and the highest biodiversity. We understand that many in the community wanted no houses built west of Deer Valley Road at all, and in many ways we would have preferred that too (the Sierra Club strongly supports compact, infill development near transit and services), but this compromise will serve the community far better than the even larger proposals and plans that loomed over the Sand Creek area.
If Richland's initiative was so good, does it really matter that ours was adopted?
Yes! Absolutely! Our initiative protects another approximately 200 acres of land west of Deer Valley Road that Richland's initiative did not. Under Richland's initiative, development could have happened there without a vote of Antioch residents. Now, with our Initiative adopted, no big project can happen there, along with the rest of the land west of Deer Valley Road (excluding 'The Ranch' footprint) without Antioch voters having their say at the ballot.
Perhaps even more importantly, no matter what we won with Richland's initiative getting adopted in July, Let Antioch Voters Decide was still our own initiative that we shed blood, sweat and tears for, and we wanted it to be implemented. We wanted to keep faith with the community that supported us and worked so hard to protect the beautiful Sand Creek area. Now that our initiative is adopted, we can say that our victory is complete!
When they adopted our initiative, the council mentioned amendments and changes. Is that OK?
Yes it is. Our initiative allows for minor changes to be made to it as long as it doesn't interfere with the intent of the initiative. This is a standard clause that is included in most and maybe even all initiatives like this, and the small administrative amendments to our initiative that will be made in the near future in no way reduce its high conservation impact.
So aside from ‘The Ranch,’ nothing will ever be built out there?
Not exactly. Our initiative states that an owner can build one unit of housing per 80 acres of land. That was necessary because you can't force a landowner not to do anything at all with their land. This of course is a tiny amount compared to the thousands of units of sprawl development that would otherwise be planned.
More importantly, our initiative says that any project proposing something more than one unit per 80 acres needs to be voted on by the people. So it's not that the land out there is absolutely protected; a big development could still happen, it's just that the public now has the decision-making power. It'll be up to Antioch residents to consider if sometime in the future they want another big subdivision in the Sand Creek area west of Deer Valley Road. Obviously we and many others don't think that kind of development out there is a good idea, but now Antioch voters can decide for themselves.
Because of our work, the newly protected land could one day join surrounding park and open space lands at Black Diamond Mines or Deer Hill Regional Preserve, or have a conservation easement put over it, but right now the land is in private hands and some level of development is possible. If it goes to a park agency, which seems like a great idea to us, then that's about as high a level of protection as we can get. Our initiative goes a long way to making big sprawl developments difficult on that land, but it's not a park yet. The public needs to pay attention to what's being proposed out there and stay involved to ensure the land and scenery we fought so hard for remains that way.
In addition, both ours and Richland's initiatives could be legally challenged. This is true of any initiative ever passed, and both were written to make them as defensible as possible. We don't think anyone would have a reliable case against them, but ultimately such things are up to the courts. The possibility of lawsuits, a future campaign to build a large project in the area, and the fact that the land is not yet part of a park are reasons that the public in Antioch and everywhere in the region needs to keep paying attention to what's happening in this beautiful area.