Californians for Property Rights

Californians for Property Rights and Citizens for Responsible Open Space have filed a complaint against the San Mateo County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFC0) seeking a validation action.

Please read the article in the Half Moon Bay Review (scroll down to “Last Minute Lawsuit” on the HMB Review article).

The following article is from the San Franciso Examiner We originally posted a link to it, but it seems to have disappeared from the archives. So we are posting it here:

Open spaces fight continues
By Ethan Fletcher Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004

In the continuation of a long-simmering battle over the jurisdiction of 140,000 square miles of coast-side land, two groups have filed suit against a San Mateo County land governance agency.

Californians for Property Rights and Citizens for Responsible Open Space filed a complaint Nov. 5 in San Mateo County Superior Court seeking to invalidate the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District’s annexation of 140,000 acres of San Mateo County coast-side.

Named as the primary defendant in the suit is the Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, the government agency that approved the annexation of the Peninsula land ranging from Pacifica south to the Santa Cruz County border and from Skyline Boulevard west to the ocean.

According to the plaintiffs’ attorney, Mark Watson, the suit asks the court to either validate more signatures or restart the entire process by which the Open Space District seeks to annex the land.

Either option would allow effected residents to vote on the annexation, which Watson said is his clients’ main goal.

Terry Gossett, the head of Californians for Property Rights and a Moss Beach resident, said that all they wanted was a chance to determine their own destiny.

“This is not about the open space or no open space, we just want a chance to put it to a vote of the affected people,” Gossett said. “It’s a fundamental concept of the United States of America. ... People should have a chance to vote, and we were denied that.”

The Open Space District, which has amassed some 50,000 acres of land on the bay side of the Peninsula, has been working to annex the coastal land for more than six years, and LAFCO officially granted the approval in September. The district’s stated goal is to preserve a regional greenbelt of open space land in the Peninsula and South Bay, and it plans to acquire around 12,000 acres of coast-side space on the next 15 years to protect against development.

Opposition to that plan has centered around property owner concerns and on claims that the region’s approximately 16,000 residents never had a chance to vote for or against the annexation.

LAFCO’s initial approval of the annexation last April was delayed when opposition groups attempted to gather protest signatures from 25 percent of the affected area’s registered voters, which would automatically force a vote on the annexation. That effort fell short when some 35 percent of the collected signatures were invalidated by the county’s election office, prompting a lawsuit by coast-side activist and annexation opponent Oscar Braun, which was recently dropped.