Bill Hocker | Mar 27, 2019

NVR 3/28/19: American Canyon continues pursuit of annexation to create Highway 29 bypass

The City of American Canyon Staff report on the proposal

2018 LAFCO Report on the South County

American Canyon officials, in continuing to pursue their long term vision of urban development, want residents to believe they can relieve the congestion on Hwy 29 that they have already created by building more roads. In fact this road is being built to make future development possible. Unfortunately, publicly financed road improvements are seldom about alleviating congestion, but are portrayed as such to develop public support to get them approved. This project is a perfect example. To reduce congestion this project allows the construction of Watson Ranch (1250 units of housing, a hotel, school and commercial center), and opens up another 87 acres for the development of light industrial projects and housing tracts. How much congestion will actually be reduced when the tens of thousands of daily trips created by these projects are added to existing traffic conditions?

The reality is that publicly financed road improvements are almost always an effort to facilitate future development, not to relieve congestion. The developers, well connected to the government planning process, tout the relief of congestion and future tax revenues at the planning stage, but, after making their profits, leave taxpayers to deal with future infrastructure costs caused by the increased population and traffic. It is the vicious cycle of urbanization that falsely promotes future development as a remedy for the adverse impacts of previous development.

Traffic congestion will not be improved by more development.

Another issue mentioned in the article is the revenue sharing agreement that must be reached with the County. In Sept of 2018 the County decided that they needed a cut of future taxes that were generated by the development on county land that gets annexed to the municipalities. Fair enough. But it is worth mentioning again that the County now has a profit motive in the annexation of ag land for more profitable urban uses. The commitment to protect open space adjacent to the cities has become an even tougher decision to justify. Unfortunately, annexation of County land by municipalities needs only the consent of the BOS and does not fall under the limitations on General Plan amendments, Policy AG/LU-110 (Measures J and P), that require voter approval.

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