County will continue battle for right to preserve farmland

Stanislaus County will ask an appellate court to restore a controversial farmland preservation requirement, county leaders decided Tuesday on a relatively rare 3-2 vote.

The appeal sets up another court battle between the county and home builders, who won in court in June after arguing that the rule unfairly penalizes them.

The county's agricultural element, requiring that developers preserve an equal amount of farmland when building new homes, was declared unconstitutional by a Stanislaus County judge in June. The government failed to show a "reasonable relationship" between its mitigation rule and the adverse impacts of home construction, Superior Court Judge William A. Mayhew ruled.

"We think we have strong grounds for appeal," County Counsel John Doering said after Tuesday's closed-door, split-decision vote.

Supervisors Jim DeMartini and Jeff Grover voted to appeal, affirming their earlier support for the farmland preservation rule, and Supervisors Dick Monteith and Bill O'Brien dissented, as they had before. Supervisor Vito Chiesa, voting on the issue for the first time since taking office in December, broke the tie, as did his predecessor, the late Tom Mayfield, when the agricultural element was adopted in December 2007.

"It's another method of protecting our No. 1 industry and No. 1 creator of jobs," said Chiesa, a former county Farm Bureau president, after the closed session. "This is one I feel strongly about. (Agriculture) is the only reason Stanislaus County is doing as well as it is."

Builders say they'll keep fighting

Steve Madison, executive director of the Building Industry Association of Central California, said his organization will fight to keep the rule outlawed.

"We're surprised that the county leaders didn't choose to use their time more productively in crafting a new policy that would work, instead of using taxpayers' resources to appeal a decision that benefits a handful of ag landowners in the county," Madison said.

Although Stockton won in court when builders there challenged a similar farmland preservation ordinance, Madison said its rules differ from those in Stanislaus County.

Stockton allows payments in lieu of putting farmland elsewhere into a no-build easement and relies on soil classifications, neither of which is true in Stanislaus County, Madison said. Also, Stockton produced a study and involved stakeholders early in the process while Stanislaus County did not bring in builders until late in the game, he said.

The supervisors' majority thinks it should be up to builders to challenge an actual case where land is set aside to compensate for farmland conversion to urban use, Doering said.

"We believe one-to-one is inherently reasonable; if you're giving up one acre of farmland, you're going to get one protected in perpetuity," Doering said.

Separately, the BIA is waiting to hear from the state Fair Political Practices Commission about a complaint the group filed a year ago charging that DeMartini, Grover and Mayfield should not have been able to vote on the ag preservation policy because they own farmland. The BIA argues that the farmland preservation measure directly benefits those supervisors, which represents a conflict of interest that should bar them from voting.

Bee staff writer Garth Stapley can be reached at gstapley@modbee.com or 578-2390.