General Plan Development

I attended the General Plan community meeting on January 29th. It reminded me of a Hatfield/McCoy reunion. All the usual suspects were in attendance with all the usual agendas. Build, don’t build. We’ve heard it over and over. It’s time to move past the rhetoric and get down to the brass tacks of the issue. Will Pacifica be an economically viable city in 10 years? Yes or no. It’s that simple. All this talk is nothing more than that, talk.


We were presented with 8 commercial areas with 3 options each. I would like to suggest that we were missing one very obvious option, a no change option. That gives us 32 options for 8 commercial zones. How do we determine which option for which zone.. The number one parameter should be the economic return on that option.

Let’s look at the quarry, probably the biggest bone of contention in this city. The three options present scenarios from full build out to limited development. If we include the no change option (and we know how that is working already), then do a highest and best economic study for each option to determine the financial consequences, good or bad for Pacifica, we’ll have a starting point.

If this town wants no development in the quarry, how is that lost revenue made up elsewhere? Larger development of the Sharp Park sites? More aggressive rezoning of other sites? Each option for each site has important economic impacts that we need to understand will interact with each other either producing negative or positive income streams. If at the end of the exercise the revenue generated from our economic zones won’t support Pacifica, we are partaking is an exercise in futility.


There will always be differing opinions on what is best for Pacifica. This general plan must wrestle with those differences in a rational, objective way. Taxing, borrowing, and scrambling for funds does not have to be our fate. We can insist that a viable, self supporting general plan is the result.


This article was presented as a Pacifica Tribune letter-to-the-editor, titled "Reunion" 02/07/2011.


Submitted by Jim Wagner