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general public for recreational, entertainment, or educational purposes to view or enjoy rural activities 1 including farming, ranching, historic cultural, harvest you own activities, or attractions. And you’re going to 2 have that read back to you to say, “See, we do that”. What else does that statute say? That statute then 3 goes on because this is a liability statute. They’re not trying to define for you for your purposes tonight what 4 agritourism means but, they’re trying to define it in order to say when you get liability protection. And if you 5 read on in the statute, which is in your packet in the notebook, it talks about inherent risks. And it defines 6 inherent risks and damages or hazards that are an interval part of an agritourism activity such as the 7 natural conditions of land, vegetation, and water, the behavior of wild or domestic animals, and the ordinary 8 dangers of structures or equipment ordinarily used in farming or ranching operations. In other words, within 9 this statute the legislature continues to pick up the concept that the activity has to be incidental to an 10 agricultural operation and incidental to what the agricultural activity requires. If there is no agricultural 11 activity that leads the way you don’t have agritourism, you have tourism. There’s nothing wrong with 12 tourism. But it’s not exempt from zoning. Let me speak to you once more about the North Iredale Case. I 13 mentioned it a moment ago and said I would come back to it. It’s instructive here as well. A farming 14 operation there required 100,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel per year. If they had added an industrial process 15 to produce the biodiesel fuel for their farm then maybe that would be incidental. However, they decided that 16 instead of producing 100,000 gallons they would produce 500,000 per year. And the courts said, “No, no. 17 That’s not related to the farm use. It’s not incidental to the farm use. You are now manufacturing bio diesel”. 18 I would submit to you that the concept here is really the same. If you build a facility that’s large enough to 19 accommodate your wedding planning business, if you build a facility that’s large enough to park a wedding 20 for 250 people, you build a full size service road, you give DOT figures for an event center in order to 21 determine your traffic counts then you’re really like the biodiesel farm. You’ve built a facility for a wedding 22 purpose. And you may incidentally stick some chestnuts in it from time to time. It’s the tail wagging the dog. 23 It’s not the way the statute is designed to work. It’s not the way it does work. There are other cases in the 24 packets that I won’t dwell on. The Balkum case and the Steadman case are both cases involving flowers. 25 And they were cases that looked at whether… Steadman, for example, looked at whether a driveway for 26 large trucks that was needed to take the plants in and out was for farming purposes. And the courts said, 27 “Well yeah, if that’s what you’ve got to have to take the plants in and out that road makes sense.” But if 28 your road doesn’t make sense but to accommodate your wedding guests then, again, it’s a different test. 29 And I think that all of these cases really help up see how the courts have looked at when activity is 30 essential or important to or incidental to the farming activity. All of these cases repeat the premise that the 31 non-farm use is never exempt from zoning. Another thing that I find interesting in the North Iredale case 32 that I simply want to point out to you that in that case the land owner had sought and received a re-zoning 33 and had gotten a conditional use permit and then claimed an exemption. The court admonished the land 34 over in the opinion that the new characterization offered by the landowner really undermined the exemption 35 claim. In other words, the court looked at what this land owner had done within the County and said, “Well, 36 you called this something else and now you’re doing the same thing and calling it a farming operation and 37 we’re not buying into that”. So as you begin to make your decision tonight the reason that I believe you 38 should find that it was an error for the Planning Supervisor to determine that the SUP or zoning compliance 39 permit were not required for this use is that the Planning Supervisor got it right twice. He looked at the 40 plans and he said, “This is a wedding venue. It’s been talked to me as a wedding venue. It was an honest 41 application with an honest reflection of what the property owner wanted to do on the property. And, based 42 upon the representations that were made, the determination was made that is what was needed was a 43 SUP.” That was correct. As the people who decide SUP’s and I actually put the definition of SUP in the 44 UDO section that I gave you. Because a SUP means that you have to make special findings to determine 45 that the use is appropriate in the particular location and in that case you found it was not. You found it did 46 not maintain or enhance the value of the contiguous properties. You found it was not in compliance with the 47 general plans for the psychical development for Orange County. You found that none of the 4 findings were 48 92