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Ag preserve central to city’s future
Published 5/12/98
By Jason Z. Cohen
Daily Bulletin
Ontario stands to gain a great deal more than land when it annexes 8,200
acres to its south.
The Agricultural Preserve, the unincorporated area largely containing dairy
farms, promises to be the city’s population center once developed, offering
the type of high-end housing Ontario lacks.
“How the ag preserve builds out will to a great degree determine the future
of Ontario,” City Manager Gregory Devereaux said. “It’s our opportunity to
bring better balance to the city, especially in terms of housing, recreational
opportunities and open space.”
Although some, such as local economist John Husing, see the dairy preserve as
Ontario’s golden opportunity, others see it as a pristine expanse of open
space that shouldn’t be built up.
Still others believe the preserve’s lack of an existing framework for
development is a significant barrier to construction.
One thing is for sure: if Ontario annexes the preserve as expected, it will
add an area a third of its existing size to its borders.
Within those new borders, city leaders want to see between 80,000 and 101,000
new residents, a golf course, a major park and a college campus.
A former Ontario mayor, Howard Snider, said the city has an important and
difficult task ahead.
“If it’s done properly and slowly, being careful that you don’t overdo
it and flood the market, that (area) down there will stand on its own,” Snider
said.
Councilman Gary Ovitt wants to make sure the city carefully controls the
growth of the dairy preserve.
“It’s a way of expanding through a controlled growth process so we don’t
impact south Ontario in a negative way,” Ovitt said.
Ovitt’s colleague, Councilman Alan Wapner, said the city hopes to entice
the University of California or California State University to build a new
campus in the preserve.
Failing that, a second campus for Chaffey College would be an attractive
alternative, he said.
“It’s expensive to develop these things on your own,” Wapner said. “We
have a big hole in the ag preserve, and that hole is for a major college or
university.”
For Devereaux, the dairy preserve represents a chance to refresh the city’s
housing stock, to which relatively little has been added in recent years.
“Ontario, being an older city, so much of the city has been built in eras
gone by,” Devereaux said. “Rebuilding those kinds of areas or keeping them
vital is a very difficult task.”
Difficult, perhaps, but definitely essential, said Husing. A city must keep
its older neighborhoods vibrant or risk having them slide from owner-occupied
homes to absentee landlords.
Devereaux said he believes the dairy preserve will develop rapidly compared
to neighboring cities.
“Even allowing for (economic) cycles, presuming that none of them is too
deep or too long, the ag preserve will build out much quicker,” Devereaux
said.
Bob Ellingwood, who was mayor in the early 1980s, said he opposes annexation
because of what must be added to the area by the city.
“There is missing about $1 billion in infrastructure,” Ellingwood
said.
“Ontario is already too big. Anybody that thinks bigger is better doesn’t
understand.”
No water agency serves the area, and there is practically no flood control,
storm drains or water and sewer lines, Ellingwood said.
“If you don’t put the onus on the land, then it means the people in north
Ontario are going to subsidize the dairymen in terms of paying for the
infrastructure,” Ellingwood said.
One obstacle to Ontario’s development of the preserve is a legal challenge
filed by environmental groups claiming the city’s environmental impact report
for the development is inadequate.
Recently, the Sierra Club joined the lawsuit, said Otto Kroutil, the city’s
director of development.
“We’re anticipating some progress in that case sometime this summer,”
Kroutil said.
“The heart of the lawsuit is not the adequacy or inadequacy of the EIR but
a fundamental question of whether or not any kind of development should take
place in the ag preserve.”
Kroutil said the city is more interested in seeing the area develop properly
than the county would be.
“The dairies are going to leave here in the next few years whether we want
them to or not, and there will be a tremendous amount of development in the
preserve,” Kroutil said.
“Cities have a much better handle on development than counties do.” |
