This Tuesday there is a Board of Supervisors (BOS) meeting at the El Dorado County offices and we need to make a strong request for greater transparency from Supervisors pertaining to engagements with HomeCA/Native Directions (NDI). The community deserves complete understanding of communications of our elected county officials with HomeCA/NDI.
Every BOS meeting has a “public comment” section, which is at 1 pm for the meeting this Tuesday. While a few of us are confirmed to be present and make this request of the board, the more people that show up personally, and on zoom, to demonstrate support, the larger the impact of this request. Your support can make a big difference on Tuesday. Your presence in the room emphasizes how important this is to the community, and these are elected officials. Please support us if you can.
Recently we became aware of HomeCA/NDI engagements with Supervisor Hidahl and Supervisor Laine, and those meetings have not been transparent to our constituents. We have been working through Supervisor Lori Parlin, since these proposed developments are in her district, and she has been very transparent with all her engagements on this topic. Her website (link) has public postings of all communications, providing the community with complete transparency. Unfortunately, engagements with Hidahl and Laine have not been made public, and in fact Supervisor Parlin wasn’t even aware of those discussions. We need to make a strong public request for transparency from all the county supervisors to ensure the community understands what each Supervisor is communicating regarding these proposed developments.
Our request will be a simple one – please make all Supervisor engagements with HomeCA/NDI public and transparent, and please coordinate with Supervisor Parlin so she can ensure her district knows exactly how the county, and each Supervisor, stands on these proposed facilities. Each commenter has 2-3 minutes, but all we are asking for is a concise statement aligning to this request. As we have discovered, these proposed commercial facilities in Rescue and Shingle Springs are just the first developments that HomeCA is working on, and we expect more developments throughout El Dorado County to be proposed. We have all seen that HomeCA is not transparent with their proposals and scrutiny is necessary to understand the full facts of their intentions. It is critical we set a precedent of transparency from our elected officials so the community can make informed judgements before construction begins, or it is too late.
Please join us in attending and commenting during this public comment period at 1 pm. You can also make a comment via Zoom if you can’t attend in person. Sometimes there is a delay in the public comment timing, but they do strive to allow public comment right at the published time. Here is the link to the meeting details for physical location and Zoom meeting details.
Your comment can be a simple as “I request your complete transparency on this issue. Please ensure your engagements are documented on Supervisor Parlin’s website.” Of course, if you want to emphasize our request for an independent environmental impact study, that would be very helpful as well. Just remember you will be limited to 2-3 minutes.
If you will be attending and have any questions on what to say/present, feel free to reach out to us here. Thanks for your continued support!
Rescue Deer Valley! 