A hot potato — or should I say a hot sugar beet — is headed back to the Delta Protection Commission, which is scheduled on March 27 to reconsider a proposal for the first housing development within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's "primary zone" in 15 years.

The hearing comes at a time when concern about Central Valley flood safety and the overall health of the Delta is at an all-time high, a setting that must have project proponents feeling like a smelt swimming too close to a State Water Project pump.

A little more than a year ago, the 15-member commission of local elected officials, state appointees and special district representatives overturned Yolo County's approval of the Old Sugar Mill specific plan in the small riverfront town of Clarksburg, roughly 10 miles south of Sacramento. The matter was widely viewed as a test of how serious the state is about the Delta and flood safety. Although some commissioners spoke highly of the project, the final vote was 12-1 to send it back to Yolo County.

Project developer Carvalho-Stanich Properties returned to the county and reworked the plan. The primary changes in the specific plan are a reduction in housing units from 162 to 123, a 15-foot expansion of a buffer between houses and agricultural land, and an agreement to raise the living areas of residential units 8 to 11 feet above grade. As before, the plan designates more than half of the 105-acre site (a former sugar beet mill) to commercial, industrial, office and hospitality uses.

"Staff believes that the revised project fully addresses the concerns raised by the Delta Protection Commission in its remand to the county," says a Yolo County Planning and Public Works Department report to the Board of Supervisors. (Scroll down to Item 7.01 here.)

Not so, says Greg Loarie, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has led opposition to the sugar mill project.

"We're disappointed. We don't view the revisions as responding to the Delta Protection Commission concerns," Loarie said. Another 15 to 25 feet of buffer still leaves the buffer about 200 feet short of the 500-foot minimum the commission recommends. And raising houses a few feet higher does not address the basic concern about building residences in a location with questionable flood protection, he said.

The Delta Protection Commission staff agrees with Loarie. The staff report for the March 27 meetings says that the project changes fail to satisfy the Commission's earlier concerns.

Still, the revisions were enough for the Board of Supervisors, which approved the project on March 11. The project automatically returns to the Delta Protection Commission for a decision that may receive even more scrutiny than last year's.

- Paul Shigley