It’s Time to speak out about the current General Plan Fiasco!
The elected and appointed officials of our little local government are merrily leading the city towards certain calamity. Like the proverbial Pied Piper of old they are playing us a cheery tune all the while enticing Wildomar’s unsuspecting citizens to dive off a cliff into a roaring sea of financial, environmental and legal disaster.
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How can that be?
Find out what's happening in Lake Elsinore-Wildomarwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Concerned citizens filed a lawsuit alleging that the Wildomar city council had failed to legally adopt any General Plan – the essential foundational document which states the city’s general goals and directions and guides it land use and development. This lawsuit maintains city officials simply decided to use the County of Riverside GP without taking the legally required steps to adopt a General Plan.
They also failed to meet the legal deadline for preparing and adopting a Wildomar specific General Plan within the 30 months after incorporation, and added to that they similarly failed to request an extension of time from the State of California to develop a General Plan for Wildomar as required by law.
You see this is Wildomar where our so-called leaders feel free to circumvent the law whenever they want!
Why, you may ask, is this such a big deal?
Well because every time over the last 5 to 6 years that the city has approved any development project, they have formally stated that the project is consistent with a non-existent General Plan. If you have no General Plan, your projects have no consistency with it, and if you have no consistency it calls into question every project that has been approved. Additionally, having a General Plan is essential to the future of our city - we've got to have one that is truly adequate to our specific needs.
Now let’s spring forward to the present.
Faced with a pressing lawsuit, the city has hastily set about cobbling together a General Plan or what they would like citizens and the court to believe is a real General Plan. This mockery of a GP is woefully incomplete, uses outdated studies and data, and in my opinion is legally inadequate in its present draft form.
More disturbing, however, is that rather than supporting what Wildomar’s citizens set forth in their Visioning Statement in 2009, it actually pulls out the safety net of controls over future development. Instead it provides for a high speed project approval process that will allow developers to destroy our vision of what Wildomar should be – aided and abetted by our present, overly development driven council and their hired staff.
If ever there was a time to stand up and speak out for Wildomar’s future, it is now! Don’t believe the lies about not making changes to Land Use Designations and the slick sales pitch the council and their staffs are putting out.
I understand that many people in Wildomar don't want to endure having to attend city meetings, but there are other ways to make your concerns and desires about our future known to council members. Comments can be made in writing and via e-mail. If you have specific objections to any part of the purposed General Plan when the final draft is released for review, there will be a 45-day comment period in which you can submit your concerns.
Now is the time to demand that the city stop pushing this terribly flawed General Plan through the approval process, amend it to include what the majority of people really want, and give Wildomar a fighting chance for a good future.
