County and Farmers: The Rest of the Story November 2006

by Don Huntington, with Katherine Kutsuris
Images by R. Byrne

The County is working to help preserve and even to advance the cause of our local farmers. It’s a big job and one that requires a lot of hard work and care.

Katherine Kutsuris grew up in this county and really does want to make things happen to ensure that farming in East County remains viable and healthy. She’s a fan of our East County U-Picks. She has personally experienced the effects of bureaucratic intransigence. Katherine said that years ago she would buy incredible fresh fruit pies from a stand called Harris Pies in the Ag Core. Harris Pies was a small building with a robust business, but the proprietor had to close years ago when driven out of business by zoning regulations that he couldn’t comply with.

Katherine is determined to find a way to take advantage of the agriculture grown here and to head off disasters such as the one that happened to Harris Pies, to the extent that she can. She wants to find a way to make this work so that the county can support farming in this area in every way possible.

Trying to Do the Right Thing
Katherine is responsible for overseeing zoning and approvals for the county. This is a big job and her department conducts public hearings for about 500 projects every year.

The County has taken some lumps from farmers over the perception that county processes are impeding rather than supporting family farms in the area. Katherine admits that some of the criticism has been justified. Some county ordinances and regulations are outdated and no longer match what the farmers want to do. “We have been slow to understand the situation in East County from the farmers’ viewpoint,” Katherine says.

The election of Mary Piepho to the Board of Supervisors was a big step in the right direction. As a resident of East County, she is helping the county to understand the problems and assisting them in finding solutions. Mary has been effective in grabbing the attention of county representatives and making them concentrate on what the farming community is saying. “Mary questions everything,” Katherine says. “Every time I send her an email she sends two back to me.”

Katherine gives a lot of credit to the farmers, many of whom are actively working with county representatives to revise regulations and to work through other problems with permits as they come up.

“The fact is that land use constrains property rights,” Katherine said. “Conflicts arise. Neighbors become angry with each other over the use of buildings and properties. Commercial interests vie with private interests. Since this is America, everyone has to be treated equally. We provide a forum to give issues a public hearing during which people can say what they like and don’t like about the issue in focus.”

Administrating public hearings is a valuable service that the county provides. One of the local farmers was trying to get permission to move 131,000 cubic yards of material out of a 14 acre field down to a maximum depth of eight feet. He was going to replace it. Katherine points out that the task figured out to as many as 26,000 truck trips down an unimproved lane.

It made sense for a project of that kind to undergo review involving a public hearing. For example, neighbors were understandably concerned about the traffic and the noise. The county needed to ensure that the roadway system could handle the volume, that any damage to the roads would be repaired, and that — most importantly — the land would be restored.

A Gordian Knot of Regulations
In the county’s defense, this is a big job. Besides county standards, they are charged with enforcing standards that are set by the state and by special districts. For example, the Contra Costa Fire District requires public buildings to have fire sprinklers. That’s a commendable standard. However, when Farmer MacDonald decides to erect a fruit stand on the road in front of his house, the county can’t give him permits to do so because his plans don’t include a fire sprinkler system that, he says, will cost him $30,000.

Of course, the farmer is outraged and might dash off fiery letters to the editors of the local media. So the county makes the representatives look like bad guys. But they didn’t write the standards.

Katherine said that one person told her recently that not giving a permit to a farmer to erect a fruit stand because he couldn’t install $30,000 worth of fire sprinklers made the county inspectors look like idiots.

“You could save a lot of grief for everyone,” the guy told her, “if you would simply forbid inspectors from ever withholding a permit for any reason that made them look like fools.”

Katherine said that the man doesn’t understand that it isn’t her duty or the duty of inspectors to deal with these matters in the loose fashion that the gentleman suggested. She can’t instruct inspectors to give building permits on the basis of their personal judgment — to tell them, in effect. “Feel free to set aside the actual code and just do whatever you feel is right!” That attitude creates situations in which one property owner is treated differently from another. That is just not acceptable. It removes a layer of protection from inspectors against suspicions of favoritism and corruption.

The codes that are in place for such things as development in the Ag Core are there for a reason. People building an event center in the area must show the county plans and diagrams. They must provide answers to such questions as, How will the increased traffic be dealt with? Will parking be adequate for the expected visitors? What impact will the increased car traffic, pedestrian traffic, and noise have on neighbors?

These questions are not easy to answer. But they are important! Ignoring them and permitting property owners to do whatever they want without checking for how their actions might affect roads and neighboring properties will lead to chaos.

Katherine pointed out that if a farmer installs a drive-through coffee stand in front of his property he is, thereby, in violation of codes associated with the Ag Core. The county is then faced with three possibilities: make him take down his coffee stand, revise the codes to permit drive-through coffee stands in the Ag Core, or permit a situation of non-enforcement to continue.

Katherine says that none of these alternatives is a good one, from their point of view. They certainly don’t want to come onto the farmer’s property with a bulldozer. On the other hand, they don’t want to permit drive-through coffee stands in the Ag Core. “Starbucks would love us, probably,” Katherine said, “if we did this but the farmers would be enraged.”

Not enforcing the code would also put the county in an uncomfortable position. “What if eight more of these things popped up in the Ag Core all around East County?” Katherine asked. “Are we going to get out the bulldozers for them? How could we do that without being tremendously unfair?”

Changing for the Better
Katherine says that the right way to fix these problems — the only way to fix these problems that the county can really live with — is to change the ordinances. That’s a big challenge. Some of the changes are obvious. “We will be working with the Fire District to see if fruit stands can be exempted from some of the costly requirements like having fire sprinklers,” Katherine said. “But other changes are much more difficult to make.”

Then she adds, “There are a lot of situations out there dealing with codes that need to be changed or at least tweaked. Carefully!”

One of the issues that the county is looking at is working through how to permit farmers to market value-added products. This can be as simple as selling holiday baskets filled with local products, or as complicated as building a commercial kitchen where fruits can be processed for sale as jams, jellies, canned fruit, and pastries.

A challenge for this is the requirements for meeting the health standards for commercial food service at an affordable price-point. “This is on our agenda,” Katherine said. “We’re focusing at this point on fruit stands but plan to address the commercial foods issues soon.”

Another change the county is making is to increase the allowable size of fruit stands. Nobody remembers why fruit stands were limited to 120 square feet. It was probably because building permits weren’t required for that size building. This restriction is unenforceable in today’s market.

Another problem has arisen because of a 70-year-old rule limiting fruit stands to selling only what is grown on the farmer’s own property. This was created to keep the local marketplace in the hands of local farmers, who don’t want people from Watsonville, for example, selling their products in our Ag Core.

This regulation is also unenforceable, however. In order to attract customers, farmers need to sell fruits and vegetables from sources other than those grown on their property. There must be a carefully written exception for local farms that will keep out things that would harm farmers, like opening a Jamba Juice, that would do nothing to support local farming and would take land out of production.

Working Together for Change
The right way to make these changes is to involve the appropriate agencies as well as the farming community in the decision-making process. “We are doing that,” Katherine said. They have cross-agency meetings during which representatives from the Health Department, Building Department, and Fire District meet each quarter to examine how proposed changes to make things easier for farmers will work out for each agency.

“We’re also meeting with farmers,” Katherine said, “and giving them the opportunity to tell us which regulations they think should be changed and what the changes should be.” Katherine said that the County’s Agricultural Task Force has been an important resource in doing this.

Consensus building is a difficult but important process. The County Ag Commissioner, Ed Meyer, and Tom Powers, who chairs the Task Force, have been driving forces behind this effort.

There is a lot of good work going on, Katherine said. “Contrary to some people’s beliefs, all of the winery permits except one that is currently in hearings, have been approved.” And then she added, “We’re now looking back at those projects to find improvements that can be made in order to smooth the permitting process for farmers making application in the future.”

Katherine said that the county is making good progress. She’s recently hired Donna Allen to work with the Ag Taskforce. Donna has come out of decades of work where she was responsible for the department’s Permit Counter where property owners go to obtain building permits. Now Donna’s number one task is to work with the Ag Task Force in revising our fruit stand regulations. There will be other things for her to focus on after that.

Katherine’s goal is to make this work and pull the cost down to the lowest amount. She wants to bring down the regulations to a usable level.

“This isn’t easy,” Katherine says. But she loves her job! “Every now and then you get an opportunity to do something really good. You have to grab on to it. This is one of them.”

“We’re on our way. We’re not there yet, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

Katherine said to call her. “I’m available at 925-335-1210. This is what I’m here for.” °