Specific plans

The largest development project ever approved in Amador County might also become the first project in the county to be decided by voters in a referendum.

With 1,334 housing units, 300 time-share units, a golf course resort and a commercial area, Gold Rush Ranch would approximately double the size of the City of Sutter Creek. Project opponents say the project is simply too big, and they fear Gold Rush Ranch could mark the start of extensive suburban-style development in an area that has been relatively slow to grow.

The City of Sacramento has approved a specific plan for the 29-acre Docks site along the Sacramento River, across Interstate 5 from downtown.

A charming anecdote from the childhood of the future Queen Victoria can be found in Lytton Strachey’s classic biography. When still a young noblewoman of five or six, she is introduced to the aging King George IV. “Give me your paw,” says the fat, dissolute monarch to the future Empress of India, who duly complies. At that moment, the biographer writes memorably, “Two ages touched hands.”

Two ages also touch hands, in a metaphorical way, in the specific plan for Loma Vista in Clovis.

The city of Dublin in Alameda County bears little resemblance to the English countryside of the late 1800s. The scene is not sylvan, to put it mildly. Instead of a landscape of mills, farms and contented cows, we see one of the Bay Area’s fastest growing cities, proliferating with enormous apartment blocks and office buildings. Although there are easily accessible, undeveloped hills rising just beyond the west and east sides of Dublin, it’s doubtable that Constable, the painter of lowing herds and hayricks, would have memorialized the town on canvas.

What Dublin and the English countryside of 100 years ago have in common, however, are carefully planned villages that attempt to combine city living, including factory work and shopping, with the healthfulness of open space and farms.