SCPG Meets 08.06.24 to Vote on Jonel Way Subdivision, Solar Panels on the Reservoir and Starbucks Signage

The Sweetwater Community Planning Group will be meeting today and the Agenda appears below.

I noticed that they changed the meeting location from the fire station to the Bonita-Library Community Room. That's a little odd because these meetings are nearly always at the fire station unless something BIG is going on.

The second thing I noticed is that the time of the meeting was changed from 7pm to 6pm, making it hard for working people to even get home after driving in rush hour . . . much less eat dinner!

After this piqued my curiosity, I looked closely at the agenda. There are three ACTION items which mean that they can be voted on tonight. The ones that are of particular interest to the Sunnyside community are the first two action items. The first being the review and vote on the development zipping along on Jonel Way.

Mr. Santoya—the owner and builder—originally wanted 19 additional houses on the twenty acre parcel. That did not go far. He currently wants to build seven new residences in addition to the two he built and merged together for his own 7000SF abode. That's nine houses total.

Here is the Jonel property and the home already built. Since Mr. Santoya has never shown his face at a SCPG meeting, I looked him up on the internet to see what he looked like.

But if you look at the new ADU laws passed by the County and State not so long ago, each dwelling would be allowed to add one ADU and one Junior ADU (smaller and attached to the house).

"ADU stands for Accessory Dwelling Unit, which is a secondary dwelling unit that provides independent living space for one or more people on a property with a primary residence. ADUs can be detached, attached, or created by repurposing existing space within the primary residence, such as a garage or master bedroom. They must have a full kitchen and bathroom to be considered an ADU." (AI Overview) 

So do the math. The current build could be nine houses with two ADUs each for a total of 27 residences. That could mean anywhere from 27 to 54 to even 108 more cars traveling down Jonel Way to Proctor Valley Road to San Miguel Road daily. More speed, more noise, more pollution . . . you get the idea. We really need to pay attention to what goes on in these meetings.

The second item is to review and vote on a letter in opposition to Sweetwater Authority's idea of floating solar panels on our drinking water and destroying the beautiful ambiance of the Sweetwater Reservoir. SWA is supposed to be the guardian of this panoramic vision but instead they have dollar signs in their eyes. To read more about what is going on there, go to www.savesweetwaterreservoir.com . Voting "yes" to an opposition letter is the first step of many steps needed.

Besides the PFAS from the plastic leaching into the drinking water and all the other things that would tell a normal person that maybe this is not a good idea, then there's the geese. Two hundred or more migratory geese fly into that area twice a year. Currently they just hang out on the ground. But if Sweetwater Authortiy builds them a huge sector of roosting bars to sit on and do what geese do all day, it's going to be quite a sight!

Healdsburg, California built a huge solar farm but I believe it's smaller than what SWA has in store for their ratepayers. They didn't anticipate the geese and the mess they make.

'Meanwhile, one of the ongoing challenges that the utility has faced is the fact that geese have been drawn to the panels.

“This has been one of the learning processes that we have,” Crowley said during the tour.

He said that while the geese have done their nesting on berms surrounding the floating solar panels, “what we didn’t expect is they really love just hanging out on the panels. It creates this basically protected island for them.”

One of the things that the utility is trying to figure out is whether it is cost effective “to go through and clean the panels on a frequent basis or just take that loss in production,” Crowley said.'

Click on 'Geese Flock to the Solar Panels' to read the entire article.

Should be an interesting SCPG meeting. Looking forward to seeing you there!

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