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Health & Fitness

Dixon's Housing Element to Be Updated

Attend Tuesday’s City Council Meeting to Share Your Opinion on Housing Update

Dixon’s next Housing Element is due by October 2014. This topic will be discussed at Tuesday’s council meeting. You will have an opportunity to share your thoughts on whether a committee should be formed.

Basically, the Housing Element is one of every city’s General Plan requirements. Your first thought may be “So what, this doesn’t affect me.” But it can affect how you live.  Consider that in an earlier housing element, city officials declared “single family” housing non-conforming in our Old Town area. Unfortunately, homeowners in Old Town were not notified of this change. When some went to refinance, they found their homes were considered a “non-conforming use”, and financing was difficult, if not impossible to obtain.  Hopefully this will be corrected and the area down-zoned in the Housing Update.

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The latest revision of the General Plan states that Dixon’s plan is to promote compact development of housing within ½ mile of the railroad transit station. Homeowners with single family housing (ranging from the train station to nearly Lincoln Street to about South Seventh) have not had an opportunity for city sponsored public discussion of the re-designation of their area as compact housing. If you think your zoning is “single family, low density”, pay very close attention to this matter. In fact, it would be great if you attended the council meeting and asked for a committee to discuss the issue.

An issue that should generate a substantial amount of discussion in Dixon is Priority Development Areas (PDA’s) which are locally identified areas near transit. About a year ago, city officials identified the local train station (Chamber of Commerce rents for $1/month) as a major transit project even though there is no public transportation going into or out of it. The council approved making the Old Town area of Dixon a PDA with little public discussion. It appears that the reason was to obtain funds for local transportation projects. The city is proposing putting apartment buildings next to the train station. I don’t know about you, but I see no reason for low income children to have live next to the train station. Dixon is a better community than this. The city equally committed to making this PDA area a significant open space with walkable communities, providing parks and green spaces, etc. The city needs to tell us how our money will be appropriately applied to bring Dixon development into compliance with the PDA designation.

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Considering “downtown” as a transit center needs to be revisited. A few years ago a parking lot was built there. Buses only picked people up for about two months before Solano County moved the pick-up site to the Park-N-Ride lot near the freeway by Pitt School Road. Almost all Park-N-Ride lots are built near the freeway. (I recently attended a meeting at UC Davis where Dr. Dan Sperling talked about transportation for the future. When I asked about the future of trains, he replied that this is old technology and the use is insignificant.)

These are just a few issues. Please attend the meeting and support a committee of local residents to make decisions about our future. If you cannot attend, e-mail one of the councilmen and say you support local citizens having input into updating the Housing element.

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