Oakley City Council members sat among the audience on Tuesday for a special work session to discuss the city’s General Plan. The session was aimed at facilitating a dialogue between the public and city staff about the city’s future.

After weeks of absorbing public misgivings regarding city growth and development, the council scrapped discussion items for the regularly scheduled council meeting in order to dedicate time to educate the public about the General Plan, which serves as a blueprint to guide the city toward achieving its vision of being a well-balanced, sustainable community.

City staff and about 40 residents engaged in an open forum to discuss the state of Oakley and where it’s going. Residents were allowed to speak freely without time limitations and receive answers to their questions regarding land use, zoning and traffic. Following the two-hour meeting, Mayor Carol Rios said she was pleased with the participation and hopes more work sessions will be held in the future.

City Manager Bryan Montgomery moderated the session and explained that local growth is important, since development provides funding to improve city services such as police protection, parks and recreation. “You will see us (city staff) encouraging the new growth as long as it’s done right, because the new growth helps finance all of the improvements that help make the community better – or else we’ll need to go back to the existing residents and ask them for more taxes.”

All cities are required to create a General Plan, which designates intended land uses within the city. Following Oakley’s incorporation in 1999, the city inherited the county General Plan while council members and city staff, with input from the public, crafted a new city plan, which was adopted in 2002. The existing General Plan will serve as a road map through 2020, at which time the population is projected to reach 70,000.

The General Plan resurfaced as a discussion item in recent months as the council voted to rezone land to match the General Plan. Dozens of residents have spoken out against the rezoning of land from agricultural use to single-family housing in the proposed Rosewood and Cedarwood projects, and the council concedes it should have rezoned all the land back in 2002 to avoid confusion. The council is obligated to rezone the land to match the guidelines outlined in the General Plan, so the rezoning was a necessary formality to ensure compliance. In hindsight, Montgomery said the city should have handled all the rezoning earlier and that it was a mistake to put it off.

While certain plots of land have been rezoned, the housing density of the proposed lots is still negotiable until the council adopts a tentative map. While all in attendance, including the council, agreed that the lowest density is ideal, approval of maximum density for housing project helps create more homes, which translates to more impact fees for the city to use to fund service projects, such as improving roads and creating sidewalks, that will benefit the entire city.

“The issue is: we want to do what the citizens want,” Montgomery said. “But what citizens? If we’ve got 50 of you in the room that say ‘I don’t want that there,’ these five people (the council) have to make a decision not just because of what the 50 people want, but for the 35,000 people (living in Oakley). … You can’t forget that there are all these other people out there that matter.”

Some residents in the audience called for a new General Plan, but since the current plan is still in its infancy, the council discouraged the long, costly process to redo it. Rather than rewrite the plan, staff suggested reviewing the document and amending areas that could be improved – working with the existing document rather than starting over.

Vice Mayor Pat Anderson assured the public that the council and city staff will take all comments and feedback into account and urged the public to keep the dialogue going.

Montgomery seconded that: “Please call. Please e-mail. I actually think one of the worst opportunities for you to give the City Council input is at the City Council meeting. To sit down one-on-one and look them in the eye and say ‘This is what I feel’ is far more effective than coming in front of a large group, so please get in touch with them.”

Contact information for all City Council members is listed on the city Web site, www.oakleyinfo.com.

Click here to read about a follow up meeting held by Oakley Citizens for Responsible Growth.