Oakdale gets it right: Trees, trails and parks

By Michael R. Shea

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OAKDALE - A front porch swing catches a lift of breeze and gently sways beyond a white picket fence. A meandering sidewalk, 10 feet off the road, works through bright green grass. The sidewalk connects to a bike path, nature trail and a country river.

It's not old-timey nostalgia or a Hollywood ideal. It's a 320-home mass production subdivision called Burchell Hill.

It is smart growth.

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Photo Gallery: A look at smart growth in the valley

Armed with a strong community vision and a few founding documents, Oakdale has thought "smart" since the mid-1990s. The philosophy helped the self-proclaimed "Cowboy Capital" take top honors in The Modesto Bee's survey of all 60 cities in the San Joaquin Valley.

Oakdale, known for its chocolate festival and annual rodeo, quietly embraced smart growth policies to produce vibrant, attractive neighborhoods with a mix of affordable homes while charging adequate development fees. Other policies protect Oakdale's beloved historic clock tower.

The city also scored highly in areas that may be less visible but still support smart growth concepts, with strong policies regarding jobs, streets, water and sewers. And Oakdale's west end is protected by an agricultural buffer, a rare greenbelt formally acknowledged by Riverbank.

Such forward thinking vaults Oakdale to the top of The Bee's survey of ideals. But the policies have been in place long enough to produce real results.

Drive through Oakdale and you'll see soulless markers of 1970s and '80s drab development common in the valley -- tall subdivision walls, garage-dominated houses, wide treeless streets. But keep moving into the city's newer neighborhoods and things seem to get older, with streets cast in shade trees, garages and alleys hidden behind homes, and walking paths and parks.

The change started in 1993.

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Regular people helped draw up a new general plan, identifying development spheres outside the city limit for possible expansion. Leaders vowed to annex only entire spheres to avoid disconnected, patchwork growth. Developers were told they had to ask permission to start a specific plan process, which entails mapping a big swath of land, sometimes hundreds of acres.

"The biggest challenge to smart growth is the production home builder," said city manager Steve Hallam, who spent seven years as the city's planning chief. "It's hard to get them to pause and realize we don't want our subdivision to look like their other subdivision in Modesto, Riverbank, Turlock or Patterson."

Community weighs in

In 1995, then-Mayor Pat Kuhn started calling town hall meetings. She showed photos from throughout the valley -- the Merced County Courthouse, open fields, huge big-box parking lots and the like. Residents were asked to grade elements from positive to negative 10.

"The very, very highest rated slides were historical buildings, so that made it very easy when we wanted to save the bank building, the First National Bank. We could say the community had voted on it," Kuhn said. "Walking trails and historical buildings were most popular. Sign blight, wide streets and neon signs over the road were simply hated."

The city drafted expectations for home builders. Not guidelines, Hallam quickly points out, but expectations. Building themes, setbacks, street designs and all other accoutrements of a modern urban area are mandatory. Builders essentially self-regulate with checklists.

Unanticipated positive consequences popped up when building slowed on the city's edges. Developers began to look inward, at vacant land within the city.