With the lone dissenter raising loud objections, the Santa Barbara City Council voted 4-1 this week to move the behemoth plan to update the city’s long-term vision for development into the environmental-review phase.

Councilman Dale Francisco said the 70-page report detailing the city staff’s policy preferences on how to update the General Plan are too Utopian, too large in scope and too biased against the automobile.

Francisco, who was elected last year largely with the help of local slow-growth advocates, began his comments at Tuesday’s meeting by reading aloud a passage from the report that describes automobiles as the main culprit in fossil-fuel consumption and global climate effects.

“Automobiles are pretty much responsible for everything bad,” he said. “Unfortunately, that’s the primary policy driver in this document. I know planners don’t like automobiles. Unfortunately, the people who live in cities do, and that’s not likely to change.

“A lot of the thinking behind this seems to me extremely dubious. A realistic General Plan for the next 20 years needs to take into account the fact that we will still be driving automobiles for most of our trips.”

The report, which has been approved by the Planning Commission, is part of a years-long process known as Plan Santa Barbara to update the General Plan, which is the guiding document city leaders look to when crafting specific ordinances on land use, housing, transportation, environmental stewardship, city services and the like. Officials hope to have it done by 2010. The $1 million Environmental Impact Report will be conducted by a consultant company called Amec.

The rest of the council seemed pleased with the overall report, though most members suggested tweaks. None seemed to share Francisco’s concerns about automobiles. (Councilmen Das Williams and Roger Horton had to leave the meeting early, so did not cast votes.)

“To respond to Mr. Francisco’s interpretation of ‘cars equal evil,’ I do think that’s an extreme interpretation,” Councilwoman Helene Schneider said. “Why not look to a place around the core area of the city where people can have the choice to not only move by automobile but … to go on a bus or walk or bike?”

Mayor Marty Blum agreed.

“I think the automobile has to be an option,” she said. “It’s not that we want to get everybody out of their cars. … I can either take a bicycle or walk or go to a bus or drive, and that’s a really wonderful choice for me. Getting in the car doesn’t make me an evil person, but I like to have that choice.”

However, Blum took exception to a line in the report implying that growth is necessary to propel a steady economy.

“I think we need to make sure we have a healthy economy, but I don’t think it necessarily has to do with growth,” she said.

City Councilman Grant House said he wants to see more in the document that addresses the “arc of life, or the passage from being an infant to being a very old person.”

By way of example, House said he wants to see the plan delve more into things such as day care centers, educational options, vocational training programs and senior facilities.

The plan, he said, needs to “really begin to look at the city as a place for somebody to live out a life.”

Councilwoman Iya Falcone said she would like to see more attention paid to the issue of density.

“This is one of the big bugaboos that has come up all over the place,” she said.

Specifically, she said an analysis should assess whether the plan is calling for higher density overall, or whether it is simply refocusing high densities along transit corridors.

“If it’s a net zero, people don’t have a problem,” she said. “If it’s a net positive, then quantifying what that positive is and where that goes and how it goes, I think, is your basic fundamental tenant here.”

As for Francisco, he also criticized the city staff’s call for transit-oriented development, or the idea that urban areas should increase densities near transit centers and in downtowns with the aim of minimizing car use. (The staff’s term for this is “Mobility Oriented Development Area,” or MODA.)

“You can do that in Paris, you can do it in New York. You can do it places where the population density is so great that you can afford to have a mass transit system that will take you literally anywhere,” he said. “That’s not economically feasible in a place like Santa Barbara.”

Francisco cited numerous specific policy ideas in the report that he found dubious. They included a goal to replace the majority of parking lots with car-share facilities, a line in the report that links land-use planning to health issues such as obesity and diabetes, and the need for local agriculture production, “as if we’re going to be cut off from the rest of the world,” he said.

“The idea that we’re going to have to be growing our own food, that just sounds bizarre to me,” he said. “Part of this to me just sounds like science fiction.”

Last week, the council gave residents the chance to comment on the report. In general, it raised the ire of slow-growth advocates, but seemed to please advocates of higher downtown density and affordable housing.

Write to rkuznia@noozhawk.com.