State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil represents State Senate District 4 in the California Senate, which includes Rescue and Shingle Springs. The laws that govern these programs are written and approved in the Senate. It is Senator Alvarado-Gil’s peers that are creating the legal shields to allow developers to ignore county zoning and totally disrupt existing communities. We need to ask Senator Alvarado-Gil to work with the Dept of Health Care Services (DHCS) and Department of Social Services (DSS), who funded these projects in El Dorado County, to get these facilities moved to a more appropriate location, and more appropriate county.
The Senator’s office provide assistance by writing a letter of concern to the Department heads, relaying the concerns of this group that were raised in the January Board of Supervisor meeting.
Please send the Senator a note letting her know how this facility is wrong, and how it will affect you and our community. I have placed a copy of the letter we sent to the Senator below these contact links.
Website (includes a “contact me” form):
Copy of note that this effort, Rescue Deer Valley, sent to Senator Alvarado-Gil’s office:
RE: State funded planned commercial developments on residential parcels that are not appropriate for the area and significantly impact surrounding communities.
Based on publicly available information (summarized here), a non-profit developer is planning to build three commercial substance abuse disorder (SUD) centers in El Dorado County (EDC) – two in Rescue and one in Shingle Springs. We represent the neighbors of the facilities planned for Rescue. We are not against community-based SUDs, but there are three fundamental issues we have with these facilities and the grant program supporting them:
- Planned development in Rescue, CA puts this community at safety risks and is not supportable with the locations resources
- Facilities should be built in San Joaquin County which is where majority of patients will originate
- Change is required in the State (Dept of Health Care Services – DHCS) approach to ensure community impacts are adequately understood and addressed BEFORE these grants are given to developers
The State bill AB172 provides the DHCS the authority to allow these developments to bypass county special use zoning regulations, so developers can dangerously choose unsuitable areas to build facilities (here). The Rescue facilities are a perfect example. These parcels in Rescue cannot support facilities of this scale and purpose. Here are few of the reasons why:
- Road access only available through narrow, blind, one lane (portions) road that is already very dangerous to growing traffic (details)
- Rescue parcels do not have city services (water, sewer), so facilities of this type and scale will severely strain community resources and add risk of waste getting into the groundwater
- Rescue parcels utilize community easement roads not suitable for the traffic/use, are far away from emergency services and are at high fire risk (details)
It is clear that the significant burdens these types of developments would place on these rural residential parcels make it unsuitable for this project. If the DHCS or the developer had worked with the county, more appropriate locations could have been identified and purchased for this use.
The appropriate location for these facilities should be in San Joaquin County. The DHCS has stated these Rescue facilities will predominantly serve San Joaquin patients (here). NDI has years of experience servicing and supporting the Native American San Joaquin population through their male SUD facility – Three Rivers Lodge. San Joaquin County is a participating county for this Community Care Expansion program run by DHCS, while El Dorado County is not. NDI and the developer should work with San Joaquin County to partner on these facilities.
As news of this proposed development has spread, public outcry about the placement of these facilities is growing. We, the Rescue Deer Valley Road community, ask the Senator to help us resolve the three issues noted above. Please work with the DHCS to get these facility projects moved to an appropriate location in San Joaquin County, and going forward ensure that DHCS has appropriate measures in place to ensure community impacts are fully understood prior to under-taking development of “community-based” SUDs.
Rescue Deer Valley! 