Developer Promises A Better Way

June 3, 2005
By JAMES BURGER, staff writer
Bakersfield Californian
Section: A; Page: a1

Keith Gardiner has been talking about adding a city with more people than Shafter to northwest Bakersfield for two years. He calls it Rosedale Ranch.

The project, and an evaluation of how it could impact the environment, goes before the Bakersfield Planning Commission on Thursday.

Planner Marc Gauthier said Rosedale Ranch is the right kind of development for Bakersfield.

But it faces Bakersfield's classic growth problems -- it consumes more than 1,600 acres of farmland, increases traffic on already burdened city streets and may contribute to air pollution.

Rosedale Ranch could bring around 15,000 to 18,000 new people into Bakersfield's extreme northwest corner.

Gardiner said he can build the community right -- make it a unique place with a singular plan and vision to it.

"I'm not a developer. I'm a farmer," he said. "We just happen to farm a piece of ground that we feel passionate about. When it changes we want to make sure it changes right."

Gardiner has a firm idea about what good change -- good development -- looks like.

He's hoping it's enough to sway the commission on Thursday, and later the Bakersfield City Council, to give him the chance to build his vision.

"I'd like to have a lake community because it's hotter than hell in Bakersfield," he said.

Gardiner plans for walking trails, tree-lined streets, lofts and apartments over downstairs shops and stores. He'd like to put a park within a quarter mile of every house.

Other things in the plan:

• 6,500 homes.
• One middle school and three elementary schools.
• 17 to 18 acres of lakes.
• A 230-acre regional business park with light manufacturing and warehouse businesses.
• 13,000 jobs.
• A 150-acre town center -- with shopping and groceries.

The light industrial -- located right across 7th Standard Road from Shafter's International Trade and Transportation Center -- is critical to turning the Rosedale Ranch project from sprawl to a small, self-supporting city.

If there are jobs in the community, Gardiner reasons, people won't have to drive all the way into the core of Bakersfield to work -- clogging city streets and air in the process.

"I don't like sprawl. I wouldn't do the project if I thought it was sprawl," he said.

Gauthier says the Rosedale Ranch plan promises to deliver a better community than Bakersfield's close-packed tracts of single-family homes hidden behind block walls.

"We are doing the same old thing all across town," he said. "This could be different. This is a kind of sprawl, but it's the right kind of sprawl."

The critical tool Gardiner has that others don't is a huge amount of land -- land enough to fit all the pieces of a city inside and still make the deal profitable, Gauthier said.

Gardiner would be building almost three square miles of community.

Even the Sierra Club sees the benefit of that -- if the development is done the way Gardiner is promising.

Club spokesman Gordon Nipp has led a crusade against Bakersfield's expanding growth, saying it contributes to traffic congestion, air pollution and ag land conversion.

He likes Gardiner's plan to put jobs near homes and offset the impacts of air pollution.

"They are trying to be progressive, at least from what I can see," he said. "It's just that there are a number of community issues that need to be addressed."

Those issues are air quality, traffic and the elimination of agricultural land.

Gardiner is promising to pay to clean up enough old farm engines and polluting cars to offset the new pollution from his homes and businesses.

"If that really is true -- if they don't mess around with the numbers -- we are certainly in support of that," Nipp said.

The jobs at Rosedale Ranch will help alleviate some -- but not all -- of the traffic impacts.

Miles away, where there are already choke points in Bakersfield's traffic system, things will get worse, Gauthier said.

And Rosedale Ranch takes farm land out of production.

Gardiner, who has been farming the land for years, said it's the economics of farming -- not development -- that is taking land out of production.

Farmers can make more selling their land than they can working it.

"Farmers don't get pension plans. They don't retire at 55 and get 100 percent of their annual salaries," he said. "If farming is so great, why is every farmer that has a developer knocking at their door scrambling to sign?"

Bakersfield is growing, Gauthier said, and that means farm land is going to disappear.