Sebastopol’s Northeast Area Plan comes up for possible approval by the City Council on May 20 at the Community Center.

As public affairs go, this local matter may seem lightweight in comparison with the intense contest between Obama and Clinton, the continuing drama of which has understandably commanded our attention for months now.

But our collective stake in the future of our community should compel us to break away briefly from the national political debate and take one last hard look at the Northeast Plan. We should let our elected representatives on the City Council know how we feel before they take final action in our name.

The Plan is not itself a construction project and does not cause any particular building activity to take place immediately, as its supporters are quick to point out.

Nonetheless, the Plan does contemplate – and likely guarantee –  the destruction and redevelopment over the next 20 years of the historic warehouse section in the northeast area of Sebastopol.

With the eventual construction of the buildings and improvements envisioned by the Plan, we will absorb into a relatively small floodplain area three and four-story buildings containing 300 new housing units and retail space equaling nine Safeways, plus a new city street and various parking and public space facilities. The word “absorb” may have literal application here, given the potential for liquefaction in an earthquake.

The traffic impacts will be monumental. The Plan brings over 8,000 new daily car trips to Sebastopol, and will confer permanent gridlock on downtown. Drivers will inevitably resort to racing down neighborhood side streets to beat the traffic.

Adoption of the Plan will result in “unmitigatable significant traffic impacts” according to the EIR. “Unmitigatable” is one of those neologisms that bring up a red squiggly line on spell check. I guess that’s preferable to the red squiggly lines that will be deposited on the pavement by the endangered species of Sebastopol’s pedestrians and bicyclists.

This may not be the best time to find irony in the Plan’s history, or to question its central assumptions, but it may well be the last time. Once it is approved, as seems likely from public comments by Council members, the Plan will, I’m afraid, mark the beginning of the end for the Sebastopol that most of us have known and loved during our lives here, and that most of us would like to preserve.

I use the word “preserve” not in a reactionary or NIMBY sense, and not in the home canning sense, either –  though I would point out that the Plan is the fruit of a process that began in 2003 when the Barlow Company, Sebastopol’s last great fruit processor, announced it was going out of business.

Barlow’s fateful announcement prompted the town to get into the business of finding a “vision” for the Northeast Area soon to be vacated by Barlow.

The resultant Plan process has taken on a life of its own, and a long rich life it has been, five years and counting, and a half million dollars spent. Unfortunately, with so much time, talent, and treasure having already been invested, institutional resistance has naturally hardened against criticism, let alone against the radical – but rational –  notion of discarding the Plan altogether and considering better alternatives.

I hate to say it, but I think hubris pervades the Plan and will carry the day when the Council votes. This is no knock on the many people, some of whom are individually brilliant, who have worked so diligently on the Plan, or on the public servants on the Council who are sincere and well-intentioned in their actions.