In spirit, they have attempted to act like investment bankers, but they have ended up putting on public display, their lack of ability and poor personal standards! If the only purpose of the Planning Department is to take away any standards that protect Encinitas citizens or that hold them accountable, they are proving that they are not up the the job. Close up the Planning Department!

They are not consultants because the entire process used invalid methods from beginning to end. I think that Planning must have thought they were buying a way out from always looking dishonest or unaware of their own rules when citizens find out about the special favors they grand developers, but what citizens PAID for was a set of flawed surveys and an elementary school clock image with clip art placed over the 12 clock numbers, to represent 12 of the elements in the Updated General Plan.

I’m sorry to disappoint those who are so proud of that image, but I am sorry to tell you that other cities also have this image when vendor MIG sells THEM their tool kits.

When time and money are wasted in this outrageous manner, it is not only the time and money wasted, but the loss of how it COULD have been gainfully used for the benefit of Encinitas citizens, not for Daniel Iocofano to purchase a 3rd expensive home!

"The city also is doing some of the work in-house, saving about $200,000 by having a city environmental planner do the environmental impact report, Murphy said."

Find a competent environmental firm to tell you what Encinitas citizens and business owners are saying. This proposed plan as is, would be devastating to our environment! It is not to save money that they are doing this in-house, but to rubber stamp this garbage the way that they pass through developers plans with no concern for the environment, local residents, nor future impacts.

This is completely unacceptable on every level!

Instead of Planning Department managers doing their jobs and standing by the current zoning in our General Plan, they break their own rules and give special favors to developers. As citizens have discovered the selective application and bending of rules for developers, these special favors boomerang to make planners appear inept and unable to follow their own rules.

So instead of looking at themselves to seek improvement and consistency in their decisions-making process to PROTECT our community, their approach has been to dramatically loosen rules so that almost ANYTHING is acceptable. For a department that is so incapable of conducting valid citizen participation methods that are not abusive to the participans, or applying professional judgment in making ridiculous concessions for builders, why do we need this Planning Department in the first place?

If this plan passes, the planners will be able to throw their hands up in the air and say that there is nothing that can be done because projects are zoned for RR 50! It appears that the real intention of the plan is for members of a department to avoid any responsibility or demonstrate any standards for the work that they approve.

If the resulting plan would have been an honest reflection of what Encinitas residents communicated, maybe it would have been worth it to pay $2 million to MIG—and who knows how much more for advertising and other expenses. However the resulting end product could have been done for free by getting a bunch of people who wanted to take away the protections of community members and individual property owners at the expense of big development, and lower the professional standards for Encinitas planners, so that they would be held to even lower levels of accountability than they are now.

I say that if this plan passes, that the City Planning Department should dismantled and that planning functions should be contracted out to a vender since there is no evidence of professional expertise, accountability, or a desire to serve the majority of Encinitas residents or businesses in this piece of work!

Why not stop spending money on the most expensive consultants, and instead, hire planners who have the prefered professional credentials of the field like a Master’s in Urban Development. Over half of the people in Encinitas planning appear to lack minimum credentials for the profession!

They seem to hire people who need money and will go along with anthing to keep a job instead of professionals with appropriate higher degrees! People who have the ability to get into graduate programs and who complete the work seem to have higher standards than those who fall into a great opportunity to have a well-paying job with benefits with only a BA or a BS–assuming they are willing to do what they are told and not try to improve themselves by getting actual credentials that the industry respects!

Hiring good people who can do the work without consultants would be my preference!

He started off at the first community meeting stating that we lived in Eden and also that people in our 5 communitites wanted to keep our communities the way that they are. Enough said. Throw out this piece of garbage and give us back our money!

This is like a second round of the Cardiff Specific Plan! What a fraud.