From: Fred Allebach
To: Fred Allebach
Subject: [EXTERNAL] fyi a public comment on the South Santa Rosa Specific Plan Date: Sunday, December 14, 2025 8:36:24 AM
532 words, 2-3 minutes
Fred Allebach
12/14/25
South Santa Rosa Specific Plan public comment
My hope is that, given that the South Santa Rosa Specific Plan area (SSRSP) is…
-a Santa Rosa (SR) and Plan Bay Area Equity Priority Area -mapped as Santa Rosa top 25% below poverty
-has the lowest Measure of America Human Development Index score in Sonoma County (SoCo)
-a current-LAFCO-mapped disadvantaged unincorporated area
-a food desert
-a SoCo Environmental Justice Community area with high asthma and heart disease scores -has a concentration of former EPA Superfund
sites
-has high Cal EnviroScreen 2.0 air and groundwater pollutant scores -is adjacent
to the high-socio-econ disparity Sheppard and Roseland Census Tracts, and the disadvantaged community South Park neighborhood
-and has 17 or 18 parcels with mobile home park land use designations, and four mobile home parks subject to the SR rent control ordinance -among other scores, layers, and facts of a similar nature
… that SR and SoCo Planning staff who direct the SSRSP consultant Dyett and Bhatia, will have the vision to look beyond business as usual to ensure there are alternatives that squarely address and mitigate these above-noted negative social and environmental conditions, and
that the city and county decision makers will work in conjunction with their planning staff to seriously address these issues.
As I understand it, the SSRSP is mainly an infrastructure-based plan that seeks to set land use conditions that will guide and make way for future development.
In this planning scenario,
developers will key in on the SSRSP area for the cheaper land prices and future profit potential that derives from the above-noted negative social and environmental conditions.
I don’t believe anyone thinks that business interests, through a putative invisible hand, will solve the above-noted negative socio-econ-environmental conditions. This leaves it on local jurisdictions to make rectifying these wrongs and disparities their and our business and not just talk and words.
If local government takes great pains to identify social and environment maladies, it is reasonable to expect this same government will address them in a productive way. The tacit remedy can’t default to the very same invisible hand that created these issues in the first place. It’s not good enough to identify shocking disparities and then leave them be through remedies that imply no action.
The US and the world are now at a crossroads when an old order is changing. Masses of people have not realized hoped-for material gains but rather are in serious decline. Now is a great time to change the channel and envision and plan for the world we’d like to see where social and environmental injustice are not taken for granted as emergent properties of how we do business.
We can do way better as SoCo polities and residents and that is our call at the crossroads of history. I’d like to see the SSRSP be in the vanguard of a new type of planning that puts old- order business as usual in the rear-view mirror. The shocking socio-econ-environmental stats for the SSRSP area should be a call to action and this call should be seen in Plan Alternatives.
Answering this call to action is how we productively address current trends to fascist authoritarianism.
"We don't know where we're going but we have to stick together in case somebody gets there." Ken Kesey