Alamar Ranch Again

I've mentioned previously the controversy about Alamar Ranch, a residential treatment school that is trying to set up operations in a rural part of Boise County. Some of the neighbors don't want it there.

Last night, my wife, my daughter, and I attended the second Boise County Planning & Zoning Commission hearing about this. The neighbors hired an attorney to represent their interests. I am sure that he thought he was being slick and effective at manipulation.* I find it hard to believe the Commission was stupid enough to be taken in by his tactics--but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit. They did finally vote 3-3 (one commissioner recused himself) on the request for a Conditional Use Permit--which means that Alamar Ranch now has to appeal to the County Board of Commissioners.

There were some genuine concerns that opponents of Alamar Ranch expressed--problems about traffic, fire protection, dark skies, and the possible impact on the local school district if any of the troubled teens demanded the public school district create an IEP (as federal law requires). Alamar Ranch responded to each of these concerns in a manner that I would consider appropriate.

The local fire district wanted there to be enough water to supply 1500 gallons per minute for two hours. Fine: Alamar Ranch agreed to build a 200,000 gallon lake. They also wanted a second emergency access road into the property, because the bridge that currently provides access was under water in 1996. Fine: Alamar Ranch isn't exactly sure where the second access road is going to be, but they were prepared to make that part of the Conditional Use Permit--getting this second access road completed and available for emergency vehicles.

Dark skies: they agreed first to use full cutoff light fixtures outside, and at the meeting last night, they agreed to conform to the International Dark Sky Association Simple Guidelines for Lighting Ordinances--something that no other development in Boise County has to do. (I suggested during a break to one of the Planning & Zoning Commissioners that this would be a good thing to require for all other new developments in the county--and he thought that this was a good idea.)

The school district IEP issue: Alamar Ranch explained that because they were going to be doing all the schooling, none of their clients would be making requests on the district, and agreed to put in writing that they would pay any costs that the district incurred because of their clients. They also agreed to kick in $500 per employee pupil that ended up in the district. (Remember that schools are largely funded by property taxes, so this is in addition to what the district will get from employees buying homes in Boise County.)

The opponents claimed that Alamar Ranch would create traffic problems. Alamar Ranch pointed out that if the 135 acres they own were subdivided, it would have about 60 homes on it--and that would cause even more traffic. (Remember that the clients who will be there won't have cars, and can't leave the property.)

The real issue is fear of crime. The neighbors are convinced that these troubled teens (whom Alamar will not accept if they have felony convictions, sex crime histories, or histories of violence) will run away, break into their homes, rape their women, steal their cars, and kill the locals. I'm not exaggerating--that's essentially what the lawyer who represented them at the hearing last night said was going to happen--not might happen, but would.

Now, if this were an open campus, with the troubled teens free to come and go as they please, I guess I could understand a bit of the fear. Teen boys under the best of conditions have some antisocial tendencies, and troubled teen boys are likely to be even more more so. This isn't an open campus, however. It's a very controlled setting precisely because these are troubled teens. Boise County has experience with similar facilities; Project Patch, in Garden Valley, does something similar. One of the Planning & Zoning Commissioners said that they were neighbors, and it was many years before he was even aware that Project Patch was there, and what they did. He also made the point that he was more impressed with the behavior of the kids from Project Patch than of the local kids.

I am not surprised that the Planning & Zoning Commission tied on this. The opponents of Alamar Ranch definitely outnumber the supporters, and I noticed that the farther away the Commissioners were from this part of Boise County, the more willing they were to support Alamar Ranch's Conditional Use Permit. This is the downside of democracy; the prejudices of the neighbors take precedence over property rights. As much as I find Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc. (1985) offensive for how the courts decided to simply overturn majority rule, I understand the temptation. Much like the case in Cleburne, this is prejudice with little factual basis behind it.

The only consolation is that some of the statements made by the Planning & Zoning Commissioners who voted against the CUP strike me as providing a valid basis under Idaho law for overturning their decision. As the county attorney reminded the commissioners before their vote, "You are operating as a quasi-judicial body, not a quasi-legislative body." In short, he was reminding them that they needed to make their decision based on the facts of the case, not based on what a majority wants.

As an example, one of the commissioners who voted against claimed that there was no way for Boise County to monitor compliance by Alamar Ranch with the Conditional Use Permit stipulations. "We don't even have a way to make sure our existing CUPs are complied with." But the county attorney had carefully explained to the commissioners a few minutes before that there was no need to have the county's prosecutor involved; if the Planning & Zoning Commission became aware of a violation of the conditions (for example, if one of the upset neighbors found such evidence), the Commission could revoke the CUP the following week by just a simple vote. So the commissioner would appear to have been just looking for an excuse to vote against, and came up with a factually incorrect reason to do so.

*The attorney quoted the "I know when I see it" line about pornography, and attributed it to Justice Story. I knew that was wrong. It's actually from Justice Stewart Potter in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964):

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

UPDATE: My daughter's remarks were, as usual, a bit more concise.