Planning Yorba Linda's future

A select group of citizens soon will begin revising the blueprint for future Yorba Linda development when they undertake a major update of the city’s General Plan.

Members of a proposed General Plan Advisory Committee haven’t yet been chosen, but Community Development Director Kurt Christiansen said at a recent Town Center Blue Ribbon Committee meeting that a two-year revision process should start in July.

The current 24-member blue-ribbon body is charged with making recommendations for the city’s downtown area, but a future General Plan group will work on a comprehensive guide for long-term development throughout the city’s nearly 20 square miles.

State law requires every city to have a General Plan that addresses land use, circulation, housing, natural resource conservation, open space preservation, noise and public safety.

The first General Plan for the Yorba Linda region was prepared in 1962 by the county Planning Department, which then had jurisdiction over the unincorporated area.

The city’s first General Plan was developed in 1971, after the 1967 cityhood vote. Now called the “historic General Plan,” the document was said to be one of a few in the state to be put before voters when it was approved 2,317 to 1,902 in a heated 1972 election.

Early elections were always about how fast and how dense the city should grow, and the ’72 ballot also resulted in the first unanimous slow-growth, low-density City Council.

The historic General Plan set the city’s course as a suburban, low-density community and established the current overall density goal of 2.8 dwelling units per acre, including streets, easements and open space directly serving the residents of the base acre.

Today’s General Plan is an inch-thick document adopted by the council in 1993, based on input from a steering committee chaired by Mike Duvall before his council tenure.

Several of the plan’s provisions are now moot, since so much development has occurred in the intervening years, sometimes under exceptions to the plan’s guidelines.

The plan supplies density definitions, including the following residential designations: up to 1.0 unit per acre for low density, up to 1.8 for medium low density, up to 3.0 for medium density, up to 4.0 for medium high density and up to 10.0 for high density.

An exception is made for 141.6 acres in Town Center, where “bonus densities” of up to 15 units per acre could be allowed for developers who follow specified guidelines.

Obviously, the future members of the General Plan Advisory Committee--and certainly whoever is on the council after the 2008 election--will be the major players in deciding the city’s growth patterns during the final years of major building activity and the continued in-fill development on vacant and underutilized land throughout the city.

A FINAL NOTE

I had a brief chat with Tim Naftali, the newly appointed director who is now guiding the transformation of the privately funded Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace into a full-fledged member of the federal presidential library system.

Naftali says plans are ready for a new archive building to be located on the west parking lot along Eureka Avenue--he’s just awaiting a Congressional appropriation of funds.

The director also notes that the library will continue to support community events and that the facility and East Room replica still will be available for private social gatherings, including high school proms, under Nixon Foundation sponsorship.