Owners of horse boarding stables and riding schools in unincorporated Alameda County want the county to stop treating their businesses as something other than farming, and the county's Agricultural Advisory Committee has taken up their cause, The Independent reported Thursday.
What would change
County zoning for agricultural districts does not list boarding stables or riding academies among the uses allowed outright. Instead they go through a discretionary site development review that has to be repeated every five years, a process owners say drives up their costs.
Committee member Larry Gosselin has drafted an amendment that would classify those equine businesses as full agricultural uses and define terms including "personal work horse," "equestrian facility" and "riding academy."
He argues state law already treats the activity as agriculture, and wrote that the county now sends boarding and riding instruction through discretionary review while grazing, breeding and training the same animals are permitted without it.
"The horse industry has been overregulated in Alameda County, as if it was an urban business in a rural environment," Gosselin said, according to the paper.
At its meeting last month, the committee voted unanimously to let Gosselin speak for it before the Board of Supervisors.
