Last week's meeting?

[John D.]

Just wondering what happened at the meeting and what is next on the
sub-committee's agenda?

Thanks,

John

[Jim]

The review/comparison of the CFAC and MOR/MBIA reports were presented
to OLC. Following discussion, a motion was passed to submit the report
to BCC along with an acceptance on the part of OLC to accept the
responsibility as requested by BCC to study and recommend policies
which could "provide further protection for agricultural lands and
activities". And, of course, this task was immediately passed on to
our committee for study, feedback and possible recommendation to OLC
to ultimately be passed on to BCC. Obviously this will be a time
consuming task but one which we can perhaps tackle policy by policy
and tool by tool, reporting back to OLC on a monthly basis.

Because we have little time between OLC meetings due to the lateness
of the April meeting, how about if we tackle two low hanging fruits
(tools) for this month. Since the Cornerstone concept was discussed
in some length at the March OLC meeting with comments offered by
several persons, this might be a good place to start. I will paste a
summary of these comments as part of a separate discussion topic
entitled CORNERSTONES along with some of my thoughts on the issue.
Perhaps another tool which might be relatively easily addressed is the
proposal in the MOR/MBIA report that suggests that ZONING only be used
as a protective tool for the preservation of agricultural land. I
will start a second topic under that title as well for the feedback of
the rest of the committee. It will probably facilitate our discussions
when we add our comments to discrete topics that we hit the REPLY
option so that each topic can be discussed individually thus focusing
our discussion issue by issue.

[Jim]

A clarification: if we want to continue on the same topic, we do not
select NEW POST but rather go with REPLY at the bottom of the last
message of the discussion. But of courses you knew that anyway so FYI
is really just a reminder to myself.

[Carolyn]

Jim thanks for summarizing the OLC's recent discussions and suggesting
possible next steps. As planned from last meeting, the agenda for the
meeting on Thursday will include a presentation by Jon on grassland
conservation that will also have implications in the discussion of
conserving agricultural lands. As part of that presentation, he will
also briefly discuss the importance of conducting a cumulative effects
analysis as a foundation for assessing potential impacts and setting
land use priorities and objectives. I believe this will highlight
another tool that can be used by the county to balance resource
protection including agriculture with development and that will have
additional implications for the discussion of cornerstones and
zoning. My hope is that the discussions resulting from the
presentation will flow naturally into a discussion of additional
tools. So I guess I would suggest we table further discussions for
this month until after Thursday's meeting and reengage after the
results of that discussion. Let me know if anyone is concerned with
that suggestion.

Carolyn

On May 9, 12:30 pm, Jim <hjcus...@aol.com> wrote:

[Jim]

Sounds like a good plan, Carolyn. If time permits, however, perhaps we
could also address two possible tools at the OLC meeting this
Thursday, Cornerstones and Zoning. If everyone has time perhaps you
could look at and comment on these two under the individual discussion
headings I posted some time ago.