Letter to Fillmore Gazette: September 5, 2006

September 5, 2006

Fillmore Gazette

408 Orchard Street   

Fillmore , CA   93015

Editor,

For many months, the Citizens for Responsible Growth have been working hard to get the City to adopt a reasonable number of homes for the North Fillmore Specific Plan other than the 900 or 700 in their plan. Right now there are so many development projects going on in town that the City has had to re-hire the retired City Manager as a consultant to keep up with the overwhelming amount of work.

These are some of the projects that are active on the City’s development activity list:

• Heritage Valley Parks – 126 homes(624 more coming)
• The Meadows – 110 town homes
• Parkview – 50 Sr. apartments
• Glen Stern – 8 apartments
• Rosewood – 37 homes

The majority of these 329 homes have already broken ground! We have repeatedly been told by the City that our growth rate is about 30 – 45 homes per year. Can our small town (2.5 square miles) absorb ten times more growth in the next year?

These are additional projects in the application phase:

• Heritage Valley Parks – 624 units
• Cabrillo – 29 units
• Olsen Project  - 77 units

That’s another 730 and does NOT include North Fillmore Specific Plan which is undetermined at this time. This is not the “slow, well-planned growth” promised in Vision 2020.

Over 1600 people signed the Referendum Petition to block this project (three times the number necessary to qualify the referendum).  This has been a successful endeavor but our work is not yet done. The next step will be to write an Initiative to put in place a more reasonable number of homes in North Fillmore.

The Citizens for Responsible Growth will be working on this Initiative in the near future. We will be meeting at Faith Community Church at Sespe and “D” Street on Sunday, September 10^th, at 2:00 p.m. If you can’t attend the meeting call 524-7313 or 524-2809 and let us know your vision for North Fillmore.

Gayle Washburn