Plans

Plans and Plans Build-Out

The plans of an area illustrate future intentions of land use including the anticipated needs for housing, recreation, transportation, commerce, and industry. They are generally prepared by or for governmental jurisdictions and are based on factors such as demographics, area economics, and environmental quality. The jurisdictions in the study area are shown in figure 13.

The summary of the region's plans for developable land is shown in figure 14. It was derived from generalized community land use plans, which are coordinated at the county and regional level by SANDAG and SCAG, from MCB Camp Pendleton, and from information on other federally owned lands and several large special projects. These were collated and reclassified into land cover categories. The sources include:

East Side Reservoir Project, "Plan," 1995.
MCB Camp Pendleton, "Draft: Possible Areas for New Facilities," 1995.
SANDAG, "Series 8 Planned Land Use," June 1994.
SCAG, "General Plans for Western Riverside County, Coachella Valley in Riverside County, and Orange County," January 1994.
U.S. Bureau of Land Management, "Public Lands." 1995.

The full implementation of the plans, or build-out, carries several assumptions, among them the continued demands of population growth, continued water supply, adherence to the plans, and the absence of compelling and intervening alternatives. Even though all of these assumptions can be questioned, the scenario based on local jurisdiction plans, called Plans Build-Out, is still the single most likely long-term future for the study area. It is this future scenario against which all other alternatives are compared.

In allocating change within the Plans Build-Out alternative, several constraints related to existing land use and land management policies were recognized and adopted. It was assumed that all existing "urban" land uses such as residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation would remain as they are, and that existing protection and management policies would be continued. In cases where the planned land use was less intensely developed than the 1990+ (existing) land use, the 1990+ category was maintained.

All lands in higher levels of protection, including bioreserves, National Forests, BLM lands, special districts, and state- and county-owned lands were considered un-developable. Military Impact areas were also considered un-developable. In the special case of Indian Reservations, which are not included in local and regional plans, it was assumed that they were developable at an overall rural residential density, while remaining subject to the full range of development and conservation alternatives. It was further assumed that land use allocation would be independent of property boundaries other than those already reflected in the plans and their zoning patterns. Plans Build-Out is based on the premise that if land is "unprotected" and developable, it will be altered (eventually) to its planned land use.

The changes in land cover between 1990+, figure 11, and Plans Build-Out, figure 15, are summarized on the bar chart of figure 16. More than 500,000ha of natural land cover may be altered by conversion to residential uses. Most of the changes are caused by rural residential development and its fire protection zones, horse grazing, avocado plantations, and other non-native vegetation conversion.