Tehachapi News

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It was open season on the experts as the Kern County Planning Department offered up its researchers and baseline data for scrutiny at a workshop on the goals and objectives of the Greater Tehachapi Area Specific Plan.
“We have to be aware of why and where we're growing,” Mary Beth Garrison of Supervisor Don Maben's office told the packed meeting room at the Stallion Springs Community Center in her welcoming remarks.
The studies are “snapshots” of current conditions in the Greater Tehachapi area, upon which a Specific Plan will be based.
During the four-hour workshop, attendees listened to presentations, broke for an hour to visit informational tables set up in the gym and returned to the community room to hear summaries of the responses to questions aimed at the consultants.
Residents were able to fire questions at the consultants who did the actual studies in agriculture and urban compatibility, air quality, biological resources, cultural resources, finances, flooding, geotechnical environment, hydrology and water quality, noise, paleontological resources, public services, transportation and sewers. (To see the reports and maps, visit www.co.kern.ca.us/planning and click Planning Programs on the top left column, and it goes straight to the Tehachapi material).
County Supervising Planner Craig Murphy said the area specific plan is a more focused version of the Kern County General Plan and, he said, “It's very large” and involves multiple landowners.
Murphy said that many questions about the plan related to “designations and how land use will be carried forward.”
The result will be, he said, “99 percent taking existing designations and using them. We will learn certain designations are not appropriate to certain areas.”
The Specific Plan, he said, “ensures we have ways to address proposed changes - not no changes - over the next 20 years. We know things do change.”
He said the city of Tehachapi is “very involved in the process. They encourage us to be involved and vice versa.”
Susan Lamoureux, principal in RGP Planning and Development Services of Irvine and Greater Tehachapi Area Specific Plan project manager, said there are 175,000 acres in the Tehachapi planning area.
“The reports present baseline conditions,” she said as she offered highlights of the findings. “The specific plan must be in conformance with the Kern County General Plan. The existing conditions are the meat of the report.”
The baseline study on water, she said, shows “There are more than 3,000 acre feet of water available that haven't been exercised. People have water rights that are not being used. There is no existing water deficiency.”
Lamoureux said that “Groundwater quality is high and the majority of watersheds are undeveloped.”
She said that approximately 62 percent of the land in the Greater Tehachapi Area has agriculturally related General Plan map codes, or 108,994 acres. Of that, according to the study, 39 percent is predominately intensive or extensive agriculture.
The largest source of greenhouse gas the Greater Tehachapi Area, she said, is transportation.
Utility service, she said, varies by sub-areas, with less efficient delivery appearing in less populated areas.
“With lower density, it's more costly per person,” she said.
While the California condor appears in the southwest corridor of the Greater Tehachapi Area, she said, “There is not a lot of designated critical habitat.”
She said designated sensitive habitats constitute about 10 percent of the area.
Lamoureux said 519 cultural sites have been recorded in the area but “A great deal of Greater Tehachapi has never been surveyed.”
She noted that two major geotechnical conditions - the White Wolf Fault and the Garlock Fault - exist outside the boundaries of the area.
In regard to growth management of the unincorporated county area, as a finding of the Kern County of Government's Blueprint Visioning process, RGP's Jeremy Krout said, “Urban growth should be aggressively limited. Compact development is better focused in the city of Tehachapi.”
Krout said “conflicting ideas” have come out of the Blueprint Visioning regarding transportation, and holds no prospect of widening State Route 58, “but it is a regional road of significance.”
Relating questions from the one-on-one session at the tables in the gym, air quality expert Mary Jane Wilson, president of WZI, Inc. of Bakersfield, said that air quality is getting better and that “fireplaces don't have a significant impact [on air quality] at this time.”
Wilson said there is no mercury air monitor in Tehachapi.
She linked pollution to intermodal transportation “from the Port of Los Angeles to points east.”
Stephen Anderson, associate hydrogeologist for Leighton companies of Los Angeles, said that according to data from the water districts, “Everything is fine. You are very fortunate.” Anderson said, however, “You have to address the septic system. You have large clay layers that are preventing vertical migration.”
Financial analyst Stanley R. Hoffman, president of Stanley R. Hoffman Associates of Los Angeles, said that outside of the Mountain Meadows, Bear Valley Springs, Stallion Springs and Golden Hills community services districts, homeowners who desire additional services need to make decisions about establishing additional community services districts to fund services.
“You as homeowners have to decide,” Hoffman said. “You have to vote for it.”
He pointed out that sales taxes for funding new facilities are a bit thin, as sales tax from, for example, a WalMart in Tehachapi “goes to Tehachapi city use for their services…not yours.”
Unincorporated Old Towne, he said, has “additional potential.”
Hoffman said that new fire facilities are needed, “especially in the Golden Hills area,” with capital improvements of at least $1 million.
Kern County Planning Director Ted James assured the gathering “There is enough funding to move forward. A lot of government agencies are having challenges with their programs.”
Garrison said the next public planning session will be a “fun hands-on workshop” on Saturday, Aug. 23.
For comments and questions, Kern County Supervising Planner Craig Murphy is available at (661) 862-8600 and e-mail murphyc@co.kern.ca.us.