11/5/2009 12:40:00 PM Voters turn down Dewey-Humboldt's first General Plan - again
By Doug Cook Special to the Tribune
For the second time in as many years, Dewey-Humboldt voters Tuesday rejected the town's inaugural General Plan by a fairly wide margin, with 60 percent voting it down.
Of the 863 votes cast in the unofficial count from the Yavapai County Elections Department, 518 voters went against Proposition 402, with just 345 voters, or 40 percent, favoring it.
The plan provides a roadmap that will help the municipality manage its future land use, among other growth-related concerns, and offers a statement for town planning and preservation. It also states goals and objectives related to improving town roads and circulation; cost of development; open space and trails; environmental planning; and water resources.
Mayor Len Marinaccio said the plan, which will remain in effect despite the vote, might need some retooling of its language to make it easier to understand. He added that some residents, for example, had concerns about where proposed recreational trails would go in town.
The Town Council does not have to rewrite the document, although it could do that so residents feel more comfortable with the plan. Marinaccio said the council could start the plan from scratch, attach a major amendment to it, or do nothing at all.
"Council's going to take some time and get some feedback from the community to get some real answers, but there were some difficulties with the amount of time the public had to review the plan," he said. "At the very least, council should look at a major amendment based on feedback from the community."
Town Manager William Emerson said he was surprised that only 38 percent of D-H's registered voters participated in Tuesday's election, which was one of the lowest turnouts in the town's five-year history.
"This is the most protective and sustainable General Plan for a rural low-density residential community that I've ever seen in Arizona," he said. "There was a lot of misinformation spread about town by people who didn't understand the plan. And that happened last time. It's just a shame."
On May 19, council adopted the final draft of the current General Plan, nearly six months before a ballot with color maps went out to voters this fall.
A year ago, voters rejected the 2008 General Plan, which the council favored in June 2008 in a 6-1 vote with only then-Councilman and current Mayor Marinaccio dissenting.
Results from a citizen phone survey revealed that most voters disapproved of the first draft because they did not fully understand the document.
To combat that ignorance, the town's Planning and Zoning Commission, Town Planner Dava Hoffman, Emerson, town staffers and Town Council members, among others, labored to make the document easier to read while educating residents about it at community meetings earlier this year. The town also reached out to residents through its newsletter to better explain the document.
In February, then-Mayor Earl Goodwin said he liked the revised General Plan because of the way the town packaged it.
"There have been some changes in it that weren't in the first plan, but they're mostly in the manner of presenting on the maps the things that were contained in the plan the first time," he said.
One of the biggest obstacles the town faced from the public the first time around was an apparent misconception among some landowners that the plan would seek to change the zoning on their property, which it does not.
Earlier this year, Emerson described the plan's land-use element as "a plan for future development."
"If somebody wants to come in and change their zoning it has to match the General Plan land-use element," he said in February. "But if people want to continue to use their land with the existing zoning, that's fine."
Later on, Marinaccio said he came to like the revised General Plan. His main concern was ensuring that each of the plan's sections matched up.
"We want to make sure that the things that we are saying in one section, such as with zoning and with a trails system, agree with how we have it written in another section," he said in late February.
