By David Bolling
Six and-a-half years after the Sonoma Developmental Center was cleared of all residents, after the 945-acre property was formally closed, after the State Department of General Services – which oversees disposition of the property – and the County of Sonoma, which is responsible for developing a plan for the disposal of the 180-acre core campus – agreed on a specific plan for that purpose, and after a commercial developer, chosen by the state to develop the property, revealed plans for at least 990 homes and a population of 2,400 people clustered along two-lane Arnold Drive, and one year after Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Bradford DeMeo adamantly rejected the plan produced by the County’s planning agency, Permit Sonoma, and the hired consulting firm Dyett & Bhatia, as totally inadequate – after all that, SDC appears to be back where the process began.
On June 20, Permit Sonoma is scheduled to issue a formal notice, what is called a Notice of Preparation (NOP), for a new Environmental Impact Report to assess a project not yet formally defined but expected to be similar in scope to what Judge DeMeo rejected. When the NOP is issued, the public will have 30 days to submit comments. The scope of work the NOP will address is described in a 30-page scoping document available online from Permit Sonoma. The projected timeline anticipates that a Public Review Draft EIR would be completed within 32 weeks, with a total project timeline of nine months. The target date for a final project description is June 16, 2026.
Critics of the County’s previous plan have expressed frustration with Permit Sonoma’s decision to rehire Dyett & Bhatia, after their first attempt at a Specific Plan and accompanying EIR was judged such an abject failure in Superior Court. The original Dyett & Bhatia EIR, for example, stated that the County’s specific Plan “would not induce substantial population growth,” and that the planned development “would not expose people or structures, either directly or indirectly, to a significant risk of loss, injury or death involving wildland fires.”
How those conclusions square with the creation of an entire community of at least 2,400 people, located on a rural property, straddling a single two-lane road, bordered by a forest that has not yet burned in recorded history and is visibly saturated with deadfall, tall grasses and dead standing trees, is at best troubling to local residents, a group of whom hired an internationally-prominent consultant on wildfire evacuations to provide expert analysis of how 990 new homes would affect evacuation from a wildland fire in the Sonoma Valley. The conclusion was that evacuations could take as much as an extra four hours or more were SDC built out per the County’s original plan.
Permit Sonoma’s choice of Dyett & Bhatia was made without putting the project out to bid, a decision that troubled several Valley residents, including Laurie Pile, who told the Board of Supervisors that rehiring the firm, “would be like taking your car back to the same mechanic who failed to fix it the first time, while expecting a different result.”
Permit Sonoma filed a “single or sole source waiver request” to be exempted from putting the project out to bid, in which Planning Director Tennis Wick explained that, “D&B prepared the initial Specific Plan and EIR and has extensive familiarity with the project, project site, the legal landscape surrounding the project, and have established an effective working relationship with project stakeholders and County staff.” Wick added that a number of new subcontractor specialists would be involved in the study who were not party to the first study.
Another issue troubling local critics of the evolving Specific Plan redux is the assumption that the current developer candidate – operating under the name Eldridge Renewal LLC – is presumptively the developer of choice the second time around. Would it not be wiser and fairer to decide who should execute the new plan, critics have asked, only after that plan has been accepted by the Superior Court that rejected the first one.
According to a February 5, 2025 letter to Permit Sonoma from Eldridge Renewal spokesman Rob Toste, “Our team designed the proposed project to be largely consistent with the 2022 SDC Specific Plan, and we do not have any reason to expect the County’s overall vision for the SDC to change substantially in the revised Plan. To that end, our application materials reference the analysis from the prior Environmental Impact Report (EIR) adopted for the 2022 SDC Specific Plan because it provides substantial evidence supporting a County determination that the project’s impacts are likely consistent with, and not substantially more severe than, the previous EIR’s conclusions. The revised EIR, of course, will fully analyze the impacts of the revisions, if any, to the Specific Plan, as well as the project-specific impacts of the proposed project.” That statement does not sound like a developer willing to concede the major shortcomings of the original, discredited plan.
Public comment on the new EIR preparation has to be submitted within the 30-day window expected to be announced June 20. For details go to scaledownsdc.org, or permitsonoma.org.
Meanwhile, all state funding for maintenance and security at SDC is set to evaporate by June 30, and state authorities insist there is no money appropriated for an extension. Sonoma County authorities say roughly the same thing, but insist they are in ongoing discussions with the Department of General Services to craft a funding solution.
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