Click on right here for an entire record of our election suggestions.
Previously three a long time, the inhabitants of Brentwood elevated about nine-fold, from a metropolis of seven,500 folks in 1990 to 67,000 at present.
As town stored allowing extra housing development, it was falling in need of its general-plan targets for neighborhood and group parks to serve its residents. In the meantime, plans have been floated to show golf programs into developments, which might additional erode town’s open house.
Seeing this, a gaggle of residents proposed a easy measure: Defend open house by requiring metropolis voters’ approval for future growth of land at the moment designated within the common plan as parks, open areas or leisure amenities open to the general public.
The Metropolis Council voted unanimously to put the problem on the Nov. 8 poll. Measure Q would defend 175 parcels totaling 1,048 acres and stay in impact for 40 years. It’s a wise, easy concept that will assist protect town from the disproportionate affect builders held for thus a few years. Voters ought to again Measure Q.
The measure would defend 362 acres designated as parks within the metropolis’s common plan, 77 acres designated at everlasting open house, and 609 acres that covers three golf programs — Deer Ridge (now closed), Shadow Lakes and the Brentwood Golf Membership.
Underneath Measure Q, the Metropolis Council may allow solely growth on the protected land with out voter approval if essential to adjust to state or federal legislation or if the land is authorities owned and for use for a public function. Within the latter case, the council would, in flip, have to guard an equal or better quantity of open house elsewhere.
Measure Q is just like a residents’ initiative Martinez voters handed in 2018. However there’s an enormous political distinction: In Martinez, the initiative backers needed to gather signatures to qualify the measure for the poll, after which the Metropolis Council tried unsuccessfully to undermine it by inserting a sham, competing measure on the identical poll.
In sharp distinction, the Brentwood Metropolis Council members this 12 months embraced the concept and positioned it immediately on the poll, saving the residents from having to undergo the signature-gathering course of. It’s an indication of the monumental political shift over the previous two election cycles that has remodeled the Metropolis Council.
For years, previous members of the Brentwood Metropolis Council appeared to reside by the mantra, as one council candidate put it, “If we construct it, they’ll come.” The town stored allowing extra housing development with the hope that sufficient main employers would observe to rent these new residents. It hasn’t occurred, and it in all probability by no means will.
