Advocacy group continues fight against housing project along American River in Rancho Cordova
RANCHO CORDOVA – A neighborhood in Rancho Cordova is continuing to fight against homes being built along the American River.
The Preserve the American River group held a Family Fall Festival Sunday afternoon to educate neighbors on the proposal.
"There's a proposed development here of 40 acres. Twenty of those acres is in the designated floodway," Mark Berry, steering committee for Preserve the American River, said.
As CBS13 previously reported, Trumark Homes wants to build nearly $30 million homes overlooking the American River in Rancho Cordova and build more than 400 units sloping up from the river.
"The proposal is to build a retaining wall about six feet high, about 15-20 feet from the river bluff edge and build the designated floodway up," Berry said.
Vince LaPena was a guest speaker at the event Sunday and said no one is against housing, but they'd like to see the city do it without filling the 20-acre floodplain.
"This whole area is a cultural landscape and it's used for obtaining traditional food, fibers for making baskets, making medicines, and of course there's plants and animals that live here that are important," LaPena said.
The developer submitted the proposal under Senate Bill 330 in 2023, nearly doubling its original request for 245 units in 2022.
"The city has said that objective standards were not filled, one of them being that they can't fill in the floodway and the developer has come back and said they don't believe that's an objective standard," Berry said.
Berry and LaPena said the housing project would destroy sacred Indian land and important wildlife habitat, and restrict access to a big part of the American River Parkway.
"The native people, we're still here. We still need these places to be able to protect and preserve our cultural heritage," LaPena said.
"Trumark submitted an application to the city for a development project under Senate Bill 330, also known as the Housing Crisis Act of 2019," the city of Rancho Cordova said in a statement. "Throughout the Consistency Process, which is where this application is in the process, the city applies objective standards and requires the applicant to answer questions about the project. It's very important to the city that this is a transparent process, and we're proactively keeping the community apprised by providing information about the project and any activity occurring on the property."