Tulare County’s Agricultural Advisory Committee on Nov. 19 debated how to update the county’s Rural Valley Lands Plan (RVLP), asking staff to return with a recommendation that compares three options — light maintenance of the RVLP checklist, a full general-plan amendment requiring updates to multiple elements (and an environmental impact report), or adopting the checklist by ordinance so it can be updated administratively.

Assistant director Aaron Vock told the committee the subcommittee’s work produced questions and preliminary analysis and that staff is prepared to “take the reins” and produce a recommendation on next steps, including timelines and likely costs. He said some changes could be handled by keeping the checklist statutory and administratively updatable, while broader policy changes would require general-plan amendments to ensure horizontal and vertical consistency and to defend the changes against legal challenge.

The committee focused on three technical constraints that make many parcels poor candidates for RVLP-driven changes: Williamson Act enrollment, Prime Farmland designation and, foremost, availability of water. Members emphasized that parcels lacking reliable surface water or groundwater supplies will score low in any checklist-based evaluation and thus be unlikely to qualify for land-use changes. Staff said a more sophisticated GIS and soils analysis (USDA-sourced data) will be necessary to justify changes.

Members also raised procedural and legal tradeoffs. Keeping RVLP policy language in the general plan gives it stronger protection but makes revisions lengthy and costly. Moving the checklist to ordinance format could allow annual or periodic updates, but several members warned ordinances can be implemented inconsistently across administrations and may be more susceptible to legal or political erosion. Several speakers cited past litigation — including a challenge by the Sierra Club — as a reason to plan for robust CEQA analysis; staff recommended an Environmental Impact Report in either pathway to reduce risk of successful legal challenge.

A county supervisor told the committee that recent assessor outreach about water access had prompted many calls from landowners and underscored how rapidly the local picture can change. Several members urged the committee to coordinate with the assessor, GSAs and remote-sensing data providers before finalizing scoring criteria so the county can better quantify acreage leaving production.

Because the meeting lacked a quorum the committee took no formal vote. The chair asked staff to prepare a written recommendation that compares: (1) light maintenance of the RVLP checklist, (2) a full general-plan amendment with necessary EIR and updated background reports, (3) enacting a statutory checklist via ordinance, and (4) a hybrid approach that preserves core policies in the general plan with a separately maintainable checklist. Staff indicated a return report and an interim subcommittee meeting could appear at the next advisory meeting.