Cities must be sustainable in the fiscal sense, as well as the environmental sense, said Ontario City Manager Greg Devereaux.

Drawing on his experiences in developing the plan for the addition of 8,200 acres of former dairy lands to city, Devereaux said developing solutions to providing services well and effectively forever was the key.

The former dairy area, south of the current city and west of Interstate 15, is currently expected to have over 31,000 homes and 101,000 residents when it is built out. Devereaux said his personal prediction would be that the additional population would be “far more” than that.

When the city first drew up its plans for the area, in the mid-1990s, the need was for executive housing. The city had been very successful in adding jobs, in both the warehouse areas east and south of Ontario International Airport and in the office areas north of Interstate 10. It also had made great progress on sales tax revenues, especially with the Ontario Mills project.

But, he said, to continue to attract the small and medium sized businesses that would provide the backbone for continued economic growth, the city would have to provide neighborhoods where these companies owners and senior executives would want to live.

That led to a land use plan where only about 6 percent of the space was devoted to commercial uses and another 6 percent to industrial uses. Devereaux, new to the city manager’s post when the plan was being analyzed, said his staff found that such a breakdown would provide only about 50% of the funds that would be needed to support the basic city services for the area.

The options staff presented to the city council were to re-do the land use plan, cut services to existing neighborhoods to spread them over the larger city, or to create a community facilities district within the new neighborhoods to pay for the services. The council chose the last suggestion. Unlike most CFDs, this one will not go away after a specific set of infrastructure projects is paid for. It will continue in order to fund the city services.

Devereaux said the philosophy he brought to the city was different from that used by most other cities. Most city staffs, he said, will tell you their mission is to provide services to city residents. He said he tells his staff their mission is to create and enhance property values throughout the city. Clearly, he said, you do that by providing services. But, taking a different view of the mission should lead to longer-term solutions to questions of how to fund those services, to insure that neighborhoods don’t decline.

The first neighborhood in Ontario’s part of the dairy preserve should begin construction early next year and begin selling houses in early 2007. Chino and the Eastvale section of Riverside County already have developments going in their sections of the former dairy areas.

The first house to go up in Ontario will require roughly $150 million in city costs to support that house. Of course, that money will be spread over a great many more houses eventually, but that dollar amount does give you an idea of how big a planning task this area represents.

As the planning process went ahead, Devereaux said it became clear that it would have to be a partnership with developers. The city encouraged the developers to work as a group and they did so.