Supervisors want to sprawl to the Sacramento River? That’s crazy | Opinion
In 2002, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors got out of the growth business for the thousands of acres of lands surrounding the Sacramento International Airport in the Natomas basin. It wisely decided to empower the city of Sacramento to plan for any urban expansion and for the county to manage what was to stay as farmland.
Now, nearly a quarter century later, supervisors are on the verge of abandoning this long-standing commitment. Key votes in the coming months, starting Monday, will decide the fate of a vast new community of 25,000 residents just east of a bucolic stretch of the Garden Highway bordered by interstates 5 and 80.
Known as Upper Westside, this project, more than any, reveals how the county threatens the balance between growth and environmental preservation in Natomas. It feels like we are heading towards a historic conflict, particularly with state and federal wildlife agencies.
It comes down to this: Are we going to develop as close as possible to the Sacramento River in this part of the county? Or are we going to honor more than 20 years of planning and previous agreements to give the river and its wildlife some breathing room as Sacramento booms a mile away?
“This is about growth and whether growth is appropriate in this geographic region, and whether growth is appropriate in the county, and we’re making the pitch that it is,” said Nick Avdis, a Sacramento attorney and local landowner who has worked for years on this project.
For former Sacramento mayor and Natomas activist Heather Fargo, this is about protecting a plan she helped to create a generation ago to leave the river alone and focus growth in the heart of the basin.
“That one-mile buffer is critical,” she said. “The project is almost wholly within it. It’s just kind of absurd.”
Upper Westside — three times the size of downtown
Downtown Sacramento, including the under-construction Railyards, is about 500 acres. Upper Westside is 2,066 acres, or four times the size. It would be the home of roughly 25,000 people in 9,356 proposed housing units.
Upper Westside is bordered by a now-undeveloped stretch of Garden Highway to the west (not far north of the Virgin Sturgeon restaurant, as a common frame of reference), I-80 to the south, Gateway West and existing Sacramento developments to the east.
It is yet another development designed largely for upper-income Californians, not the poor or middle class. The draft land use plan has, for example, three times the land for big homes on an acre than it has for high-density apartments and condominiums.
This project’s upside, without question, is its proximity to Sacramento’s existing downtown, closer than just about any other development supervisors have approved in a long time. Its fatal downsides are how it crowds the river more than any development ever has in Natomas, and how the county is breaking an agreement to leave the future of this land up to the city.
The county — an about-face on growth
Advanced by a motion from then-supervisor Roger Dickinson, Sacramento County on Dec. 10, 2002 voted to never consider a Natomas project like Upper Westside ever again.
“The city, rather than the county, is the appropriate agent for planning new growth in Natomas and can better provide municipal services,” supervisors said unanimously. “The county is the appropriate agent for preserving open space, agricultural and rural land uses.”
Signed also by the city, the agreement technically lives to this day, because neither party has voted to rescind it. Nonetheless, a county website characterizes this commitment as “withdrawn.” The county agreed to process the development application by Upper Westside landowners, setting up a showdown among the basin’s governments.
When Fargo was mayor and signed the deal in 2002, she thought the fights over Natomas growth were over and what wasn’t already slated for development would stay farmland.
“I assumed we were done,” she said. But Dickinson left the board and was later replaced by the current supervisor, Phil Serna, who has supported the county to start again accepting development applications.
A deal is not a deal
The stunning growth in Natomas over the past generation simply didn’t just happen. It was the result of agreements born from litigation by local, state and federal jurisdictions. They carefully balanced the needs of wildlife that depend on this river corridor and a growing community.
The so-called Natomas Habitat Conservation Plan of 2003 gave a way for Sacramento and Sutter County to grow in its portions of the basin. Developers now pay an escalating fee to buy farmland in the basin to preserve as habitat. And all lands within a mile of the Sacramento River in Sutter and Sacramento were to stay undeveloped as a wildlife corridor for hawks, snakes and all the native inhabitants.
A river’s ecosystem is not confined to the banks of its waters. This unique band of aquatic and terrestrial life that meanders through this region cannot be replicated elsewhere.
Wildlife officials have been allowing Sacramento to boom around the airport because this mile of land from the river has remained to date protected. Of particular concern is a threatened bird, the Sainson’s Hawk. “The greatest impact of urban development on the Swainson’s Hawk in the Natomas Basin would occur if significant portions of the (one-mile) Swainson’s Hawk Zone were developed,” wrote Morgan Kilgour, regional manager of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Developing in the heart of this river zone is exactly what Sacramento County now proposes to do.
Roughly 70% of this new community would be within a mile of the river.
In the existing Natomas habitat plan for Sacramento, “nowhere does it say that those lands (including Upper Westside) are permanently expected to be in agriculture,” Avdis said.
A county jam job
Within days of the release of this project’s final environmental impact report earlier this month, Upper Westside was placed on an agenda this Monday before the Sacramento County Planning Commission, staff asking the commission to bless necessary amendments to the general plan. The agenda packet on this one item is more than 11,000 pages.
How can any commission member or citizen possibly review a fraction of this in the allotted time?
County Planning Director Todd Smith said that the county is well within its legally required limits for completing the environmental analysis prior to a board decision, which he expects by late summer.
“I know how the system works,” said Brandon Castillo, a local public affairs consultant who lives along Garden Highway and opposes the project. “This is an orchestrated strategy to keep people in the dark until this thing was dialed.”
In my 34 years in Sacramento, I’ve never seen a project that challenges the letter and spirit of established ways of managing growth more than this one. In this part of the world, we have left the Sacramento River alone as a unique respite from the suburbia and industrial parks swirling around it. Now any sense of balance is all at risk.
Upper Westside is the most pivotal project in the region to watch on so many levels. Much more to come.
This story was originally published August 1, 2025 at 4:04 PM with the headline "Supervisors want to sprawl to the Sacramento River? That’s crazy | Opinion."