City of Chino - The Preserve Specific
Plan EIR
and Resource Management Plan
2003 OUTSTANDING PLANNING AWARD WINNER
Inland Empire American Planning Association Chapter
This project consists of a Specific Plan; EIR; Supplemental
Water Supply, Biological Resources and Transportation Analysis;
and a Resource Management Plan.
The Preserve Specific Plan is a response to unprecedented
pressures for change in a pivotal location in western San
Bernardino County. A roughly 50 square mile area encompassed
by the Route 60, Route 71, Route 91 and Interstate 15 freeways
is surrounded by burgeoning development in every direction.
Now land in the center of this area is moving quickly into
the forefront of development.
Encompassing over 5400 acres of land
long devoted primarily to dairy farming, this unincorporated
territory will soon
be annexed to the City of Chino. An even larger area very
similar in character to the north and east was recently annexed
to the adjacent City of Ontario—and was the subject
of a complex legal suit on environmental issues. Chino leaders
saw the need to think carefully about what development here
could entail.
Early City Council visioning workshops led to hiring a consultant
team to assist the staff in the planning process, which then
started in earnest on both environmental and planning tracks.
It involved substantial collaborative effort by staff, consultants
and Lewis Operating Company, owner of several hundred centrally
located acres.
Public and private interests soon came together on the desire
for this to be a real place with a distinct identity. The
lynchpin of the Plan is the racetrack-shaped Community Core
that constitutes a totally new downtown and a rich mixture
of commercial, multi-family residential and institutional
uses.
About half of the total acreage is devoted
to some form of permanent open space, largely due to the
eventual flooding
potential created by raising nearby Prado Dam on the Santa
Ana River. However, open space in many forms is an important
theme of the Plan, such as the network of “Paseos” that
run through its neighborhoods.
Overall project management was by the
environmental consultant, and that discipline played a
major role in shaping the Plan.
Environmental factors shaped the basic nature of the Plan
significantly. Environmental challenges caused more detailed
analysis of water, transportation and biology. This led to
development of a focused Resource Management Plan and partial
re-circulation of the EIR. The result is that the Plan and
integrated environmental documents provide thorough management
direction for the open space/habitat resources as well as
the area to be developed—a rare balance in implementation
focus.
The Plan is transit friendly (a transit route and development
standards accommodate transit), manages the conflict between
a major arterial highway that traverses the Community Core,
and integrates well with the adjacent Chino Airport. The
Plan was broadly supported by development, property owner
and environmental interests and enthusiastically adopted
by the Council. A new chapter in the Inland Empire has begun.
