Last week, with a $4.5 million budget deficit and no development activity, the Petaluma City Council took the drastic step of eliminating its entire planning department.
From Paul Shigley's Blog: "Elimination of a planning department would be a remarkable turn of events anywhere in California, but the fact that this is occurring in Petaluma is downright shocking.
As just about every planning student knows, Petaluma was the first city in California where voters approved a growth control initiative. That was in 1972, and land use planning has been a local priority ever since. Petaluma voters have rejected proposals to alter the 1972 limitations, and they approved an urban growth boundary in 1998. More recently, the city has focused on downtown redevelopment, and those efforts are so successful that travel writers are now visiting."
FULL STORY: Petaluma Eliminates Its Planning Department
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