Recently on California 4 Never's Facebook page there was an insightful post. We quote it here, having bolded some of the key points:

"OK, so the immediate threat of an initiative on the ballot has subsided. But California Forever just didn't get the lesson. Now the planning process moves into the normal way that things are done: behind the scenes negotiation with staff and elected officials in smoke-filled rooms behind closed doors. (OK, they got rid of the smoke, perhaps in favor of Starbucks and baguettes). They still do not understand that they are violating the CORE philosophy of Solano County: DEVELOPMENT DOES NOT OCCUR ON UNINCORPORATED COUNTY LAND. "What is urban SHALL be municipal." And I learned the power of the word SHALL from Mayor and former English teacher Harry Price - it's more powerful than will. They do not understand the fundamental objections that doomed the project to failure: that the scale of the project and the distance from existing infrastructure made it fundamentally impractical. This project should not move into a behind-the-scenes secret deal-making process with the County - it should be dead. This development highlights the fundamental problem with land use planning in all jurisdictions in our county, in California, and in the United States - it is not really driven by proper planning principles or by the citizens - it is driven by the developers for their own benefit. California Forever viewed themselves, if you believe them, as doing something different - as reinventing and modeling a new approach to community building. But, strip away the facade and it was the sprawl development that diminishes the quality of life of communities. Why did they pick Solano County and not somewhere in the middle of the Central Valley for their self-contained utopia? - because it wasn't self contained. They needed us because we are commutable to the Bay Area. This plan was and remains urban sprawl. This plan was and remains just a way for the hyper uber mega rich investors to get richer. The venue has changed, but the plan has not. But now that the County is consulted and perhaps presumably onboard, the CF strategy shifts to co-opting them and providing them with an incentive to diminish the identification of the impacts. But the impacts remain. And despite the change of process and venue, the violation of our fundamental principles remains."

We are inclined to agree, because the characterization of sprawl as being away from existing cities and for the primary benefit of developers applies to so much of California's urbanized, unincorporated territory. Over time, that territory has become the home of 5,000,000 Californians, along with a whole lot of businesses. Their unincorporated communities do not have Mayors and City Councils to deal with local issues. Problems have occurred because governance for those places wasn't addressed.

So, our concern is not about development itself, it is about development projects that overlook the newly-developed area's governance. Not thinking about governance means the development will default to an inadequate municipal government run by the county's Board of Supervisors.  Supervisors often OK developments on unpopulated, unincorporated land where constituents will not live until after the approving Supervisors' terms of office have ended. Long after such projects have been in place, have remained unincorporated, and have perhaps deteriorated,  the entire Board of Supervisors is routinely called upon to cast votes that that impact those unincorporated communities - which are typically represented by just one Supervisor. Finally, our state's population has grown to such a level that many Supervisors now have hundreds of thousands of constituents, which makes it hard for constituent voices to be heard. Consider this example:

In Sacramento County, each Supervisor has around 315,000 constiuents. The District 3 Supervisor says he has      about as many unincorporated area constituents (267,000) as the entire population of the City of Chula Vista in San Diego County, which is the 15th largest of California's 483 cities.  District 3 also includes parts of two cities: Sacramento and Rancho Cordova. The District 3 Supervisor's attention is thus scattered all over the place. By contrast, the District 1 Supervisor has a little bit more  unincorporated area constituents (16,000) than the entire population of Trinity County, California's 5th smallest county. The overwhelming amount of constituents in District 1 live in the City of Sacramento, the residents of which have that Supervisor's profound and enduring attention.

County governments were never envisioned to function as municipal governments. As the years go by, the unincorporated communities that have resulted from county-approved sprawl developments have become places that look and feel distinctly urban. When first built, the new infrastructure of those places was easily ignored by the Supervisors. As time went by, though, that infrastructure deteriorated because county Supervisors typically failed to attend to needed maintenance and did not respond when constituents in unincorporated communities demanded action. Compounding the problem, the state delivers its urban programs - along with implementing grant money and subventions - through cities, not counties. Unincorporated areas are treated as though they are distinctly rural, even when farms and foerests have long-since been paved over. County budgets, which have to prioritize areawide responsibilities, usually do not allocate sufficient resources for their municipal responsibilities to their unincorporated, urbanized communities and the state does not help them the way the state helps city budgets.  Rarely is a new city created in California with an intended governance solution in mind, as was the case with the City of Mountain House. 5,000,000 Californians are now stuck with living in a distinctly urban place with a dysfunctional municipal government. That's a structural government problem. It is unfair and undemocratic; a source of difficulty that cries out for change.