By Lauren McSherry
Around Palo Alto, Peter Drekmeier is known as a city councilman with a strong environmental agenda. Now, he’s taking on an ambitious countywide project to protect unincorporated lands from development.
“There’s a lot of pressure to sprawl out and develop those areas, especially with housing,” he said. “This is a way to draw the line.”
Drekmeier is spearheading a campaign for a ballot measure that would steer development away from the county’s rural pockets, particularly hillsides, ranches and farms.
The restrictions proposed under the Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative would limit subdivisions and increase minimum parcel sizes in unincorporated areas. The initiative also contains more stringent protections for scenic views, watersheds and wildlife corridors, he said.
Drekmeier was quick to point out that the initiative, which he has been working on for the past year, in no way encourages or restricts development in cities. Nonetheless, it appears to be a response to development trends in the area.
“Santa Clara County has undergone very rapid urbanization over the last several decades,” he said. “If we are going to grow, we should grow up, rather than out.”
The initiative encompasses 400,000 acres from Palo Alto south to Gilroy and east to the hills surrounding Mt. Hamilton. That area is equivalent to half the state of Rhode Island. It’s also four times the amount of land preserved by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District and the Peninsula Open Space Trust combined.
In early February, local environmentalists launched the campaign to put the initiative on the November ballot by starting to collect the 36,000 signatures needed by May. If successful, the measure will go on the November ballot and need majority approval from voters to go into effect.
Campaigners are also hoping to raise $1 million, which will be used for an intensive countywide campaign. In addition, Drekmeier is preparing for media campaigns from opponents.
“We expect opposition from developers, land speculators and some ranchers who aren’t focused on ranching but want to eventually sell their land,” he said.
His optimism is buoyed by preliminary polls, which show 70 percent of voters would support the initiative.
Santa Clara County is currently the “gap” between San Mateo County — which passed similar legislation in 1986 — and Alameda County, which followed with a measure in 2000, Drekmeier said. Environmentalists in Alameda County faced a significant opposition movement that spent $3.5 million dollars to their $1.7 million.
“These initiatives are expensive, but given that the environmentalists were outspent two-to-one, they were victorious,” he said. He predicts opposition will ramp up its efforts after Labor Day in the months leading up to the November election.
Although Drekmeier has been working on the initiative for a year, local environmental groups — including the local chapter of the Sierra Club and the Committee for Green Foothills — have spent about three years drafting the legislation. Drekmeier was brought in through the group People for Land and Nature to lead the campaign.
He does not expect the level of opposition faced in Alameda County because the last few years have been spent gathering input on the initiative and finding compromises. For example, restrictions on medium-scale agriculture have been eliminated from the initiative, with attention focused mainly on large-scale agriculture.
“It won’t do everything we originally envisioned, but we do feel it is a huge step forward,” he said.
Former state Sen. Byron Sher, who pioneered California legislation on environmental issues from clean water to landfills, added his support to the ballot initiative last month. The late Lois Crozier Hogle, a pioneer of the local environmental movement who died last December, was another supporter of the initiative, Drekmeier said.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Liz Kniss and all the individual members of the Palo Alto City Council have also endorsed it.
Land-use issues in the East Bay prompted work on the initiative. Highly visible housing developments have been slowly creeping up the foothills in east San Jose, and U.S. Congressman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, recently proposed building a highway linking the Central Valley to Silicon Valley by way of Mt. Hamilton. If Pombo’s proposal is approved, it will open up more land to development, Drekmeier said.
“There’s going to be a lot of pressure from the east side and the west side to develop the area,” he said.
Working on big-picture issues is nothing new for the Palo Alto councilman. He was a key organizer behind the international celebration of Earth Day in 1990 and has worked on statewide park and water bonds. In 1999 he formed the Stanford Open Space Alliance and succeeded in reaching a landmark agreement with the university preventing development in the foothills for 25 years.
This story originally appeared in the Palo Alto Weekly, the Voice’s sister paper.
