Ballot Measure Seeks to Slow Development Near Silicon Valley

Voters in San Benito County will be given the opportunity to draw the line on sprawl from San Jose, which sits about 45 miles to the north.

Activists in the mostly rural county are trying to head off a wave of development driven by Silicon Valley residents seeking cheaper housing than in San Jose and surrounding cities of Santa Clara County that are among the most expensive zip codes in the U.S.

They’ve succeeded in putting a measure on the November ballot that would ban most new development on land zoned for farming and ranching in San Benito County without approval from voters, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Proponents of the measure say they’re trying to avoid what happened to Santa Clara County in the 1950s and 1960s, as urban and suburban sprawl devoured orchards and farmland.

From 2020 to 2023, population growth in San Benito County was the fastest growing of all of the 58 counties in California, according to the U.S. Census. The county grew by 5.6% while each of the nine Bay Area counties each lost between 1% and 7% of their populations at the same time.

However, while its land mass is similar in overall size to Santa Clara County, San Benito County’s population of slightly more than 68K is only about 3% of its neighbor to the north.

“There are forces in Silicon Valley looking to use our county for housing and dumping their garbage. It’s a rural county next to a huge metropolitan area, and we are paying the consequences of that,” Andy Hsia-Coron, a retired teacher who is one of the organizers of the initiative, told the newspaper.

The ballot measure, entitled the Empower Voters to Make Land Use Decisions Initiative, proposes to amend the San Benito County General Plan and its existing Land Use Diagram to require voter approval for any changes to areas currently zoned with agricultural, rangeland and rural designations.

The initiative cites five purposes for the requirement, including to “ensure land use decisions are made in the interests of San Benito County and not for developers and other special interests; [to] give voters greater control over land use decisions within the County; [to] protect the quality of life of residents in the County; [to] preserve the County’s agricultural, biological and cultural resources; and [to] reduce sprawl development in the County.”

Exceptions to the proposed requirement for voter approval include public facilities like libraries and schools, as well as housing needed to meet state-mandated housing quotas, which would be permitted to be built on farmland without a public vote, the report said.

Opponents say the measure will prevent landowners, including farmers and ranchers, from making improvements on their property.

“Land use measures of this type are pretty drastic,” Donald Wirz, president of the San Benito County Farm Bureau, told the Mercury News. “It makes it so that farmers and ranchers are stuck in terms of the improvements they can make on their land. It makes it more difficult to get bank loans and can limit property owners’ flexibility.”