(Media Release)

PLACERVILLE, CALIFORNIA – El Dorado County Auditor-Controller Joe Harn informed the Board of Supervisors last week he will decline the invitation to participate in closed-door development agreement negotiations regarding the General Plan amendment proposed by Parker Development Company for the Central El Dorado Hills Specific Plan.

“Back in 2017 and 2018 I did participate in (development agreement) negotiations for this drastic change to our voter approved General Plan, but I did so based on the condition that the El Dorado Hills Community Services District have a seat at the table,” Harn states in a news release. “The meeting invitations that I have received in 2022 exclude the CSD.”

Harn also maintains in his statement that he and the Board of Supervisors are “not on the same page … regarding large west county housing projects.”

“In 2019 I appealed the county’s approval of a Serrano Associates’ subdivision on Bass Lake Road because road improvements were, and are still, needed and because a 30-year-old (development agreement) park construction requirement was not being enforced,” he notes. “The board ignored my appeal. Now, it is 2022, and a park that was promised to the public in 1989 has still not been built. I am not opposed to residential development but I differ from the board in that I believe that developers need to pay for all the needed infrastructure up front.”

The “final straw,” as the auditor calls it in his news release, was when Harn said he emailed the CAO stating that the infrastructure requirements in the draft development agreement are too loose and don’t assure that required developer infrastructure would actually be constructed. “Shortly after I sent the email Supervisor John Hidahl called me stating that stricter infrastructure requirements were not necessary and he attempted to lobby me for the Parker Development preferred language,” Harn shares. “At that point I reached the conclusion I would be negotiating against both the developer and Supervisor Hidahl.”