The County of Fresno recently posted to its website a new timeline for completing the update of the General Plan and Zoning Ordinance.  According to this latest post, the process will take an additional twelve months.  The County gave no reason for the change.

 The new timeline moves the completion date from November 2022 to November 2023.  More specifically, it anticipates that a revised General Plan/Zoning Ordinance and draft EIR will be available for public review by May 2023 and that the Board of Supervisors will adopt a new 2022-2042 General Plan sometime next fall.

 This is not the first time the County has extended the process to update the General Plan and Zoning Ordinance.  The review process began in 2006.  In 2008, the Board of Supervisors entered into a consultant agreement which called for plan adoption in early 2010.   That didn’t happen.  No word from the County as to why.  Then in 2015, the County entered into a new agreement with consultants to complete plan adoption by the spring of 2017.  That didn’t happen either.  Again, no explanation from the County.  Three years later, in April 2020, the County amended the 2015 agreement, adding a new timeline that anticipated plan adoption by June 2021.  The County gave no reason as to why that target date was missed.  Then in the winter of 2021, the County added to its website another timeline indicating plan adoption by November of this year.

 The new 2023 timeline is notable for its lack of specificity, and that’s not helpful to county residents wanting to effectively participate in the review process.  For example, the new timeline indicates that five community meetings will be held sometime within a six-month period — December 2022 through May 2023, and even that 6-month window is not determinative, as the County timeline states, “Timelines are approximate and subject to change.”