For twenty years Save Mount Diablo and others have been defending the Tassajara Valley and hills, sensual grasslands stretching east of Danville’s Blackhawk and San Ramon’s Dougherty Valley, to the north of Dublin and Livermore.  Tassajara Valley is just east of the county Urban Limit Line and San Ramon’s Urban Growth Boundary.  It is an agricultural and open space buffer between preserved open spaces in every direction, linked by Camino Tassajara Road and Tassajara Creek, with headwaters to the north in Mt. Diablo State Park and Morgan Territory Regional Preserve.  It is beautiful and endangered species habitat.

County voters, including majorities in Danville and San Ramon, voted to place the Tassajara Valley outside of the urban growth boundaries in 2006.  The “New Farm” project is a cynical attempt to break the urban growth boundaries and its developers are in the middle of a three-pronged approach aimed at gaining approval.  If they’re successful, other parcels in the valley will follow and urban growth boundaries will be at risk throughout the county.  Growth management will be destroyed.

The developers are: 

-          seeking rezoning and subdivision of the “New Farm” parcels at the County level, despite the County Urban Limit Line, to allow 186, million dollar hobby farms and a cemetery.

-          attempting to get the area included in San Ramon’s Sphere of Influence (probably as insurance; if they can’t get either the county or San Ramon to go along with their plans, they’d move their efforts to the other jurisdiction.)

-          probably planning to try and get the valley moved inside San Ramon’s urban growth boundary in an election campaign in 2010—even though the voters voted just three years ago to exclude and protect it.