Cambria CSD panel on buildout reduction to be named

Cambria services district directors will meet in a special meeting at 10 a.m. Friday, April 8, at the Veterans Memorial Building, 1000 Main St. (moved from the original location of the district offices on Tamsen Drive).

The Cambria Community Services District Board of Directors is to appoint members of a citizens committee — possibly including an ex officio member from county planning — to advise the board on the district’s Buildout Reduction Program (BRP) and help find ways to finance it.

In the BRP, the conservancy acquires lots through donation or purchase in two areas of Cambria, mostly in and around Fern Canyon. Development rights are removed from the parcels, which then are donated as open space to the CSD.

Impetus for the current actions is the link between the BRP and the district’s efforts to get a regular permit for the Sustainable Water Facility (formerly called the Emergency Water Supply project). District officials and consultants are preparing a detailed report on the project’s impact on the environment, which includes the potential for increased growth.

CSD officials say that retiring lots from development helps reduce that growth potential.

“The main purpose for reducing build out potential in Cambria is to maintain a balance between potential growth and the sustained availability of resources and public service,” General Manager Jerry Gruber has said.

The district used to have a BRP committee, which advised the district board on how best to make the program work.

Then in 2012, the board decided to stop accepting donated lots from the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County, to a large extent because of the long-term cost involved to maintain those lots. So the advisory committee was disbanded.

At a March 24 meeting, the district Board of Directors re-established the committee.

That was the same meeting at which the board authorized a new contractual relationship with the Land Conservancy, and accepted 52 more lots under the rejuvenated program.

The conservancy will donate money for five years toward maintaining the newly transferred lots.

But CSD responsibility also continues for the 162 lots the district already had accepted from the conservancy, starting in 1984, and for other lots retired from development through transfers of positions on the district’s water wait list.

Another 623 lots have been voluntarily merged through the district’s voluntary merger program.

At Friday’s meeting, the board members also could discuss how often the BRP committee members should meet, what their responsibilities will be, the scope of their investigation, with whom they should collaborate and related topics.

Committee members are likely to be tasked with finding creative ways to implement the BRP, which includes finding grants and other funding sources to acquire and maintain lots in the future. Those creative means could include a special tax or an open-space impact fee, according to the staff report for the April 8 meeting.

The committee’s meetings will be open to the public, and agendas will be released to the public in advance.

This story was originally published April 6, 2016 at 9:58 AM with the headline "Cambria CSD panel on buildout reduction to be named."