Once controversial Rancho Cañada Village returns with a more modest proposal.

The plans for Rancho Cañada Village date back more than a decade, although a shovel has yet to break ground. But sometime in the next year, there’s a fighting chance that might change, as a new draft environmental impact report for the project is due to be released in a few months.

The proposed Carmel Valley development – which was to have 281 units on 81 acres at Rancho Cañada Golf Club – created an outcry back in 2008 with the release of its draft environmental impact report. More than 50 public comments on the DEIR poured in from residents, and among the concerns raised were traffic impacts, flood risks and health risks to students at nearby Carmel Middle School.

Even Carmel Development Company’s Alan Williams, who’s developing Rancho Cañada with Clint Eastwood, rejected the DEIR, calling it inaccurate.

After weighing the concerns raised by the public, Williams submitted a revised proposal to the county last November, and it’s heavily scaled back from the original vision: Instead of 281 units there will only be 130, and instead of Carmel Development Company building homes, Williams says they will be selling 6,000-square-foot lots for about $400,000 each.

“People didn’t like cookie cutter houses, and they didn’t create local jobs,” Williams says. “It will be more of a community than a mixed-housing tract.”

The original proposal also called for thousands of cubic yards of fill to be imported in order to lift the development above the 100-year flood line, but Williams says he reworked the plan to only use the dirt onsite. Williams plans to dig out the fairways of Rancho Cañada’s west golf course, which is the site of the proposed village, and turn them into bayous.

To mitigate flood risk, he plans to build a fire road that will connect to Rio Road to the west. As it crosses off the property, it will become a bridge over a pond that will act as a dam to protect properties to the west.

“That’s major to everybody living in those condos down there,” Williams says, referring to past years when Rio Road has flooded. “We’re trying to be a good neighbor.”

Williams says the west golf course is irrigated with about 180 acre-feet of water annually, and the project will only require about 60 acre-feet. He plans to return 60 acre-feet into the Carmel River and hopes to sell the other more than 60 acre-feet. There will also be 40 acres set aside for habitat, and a trail will connect the property to the west and east.

Trails are one of the features that Margaret Robbins, a longtime Carmel Valley Association board member and critic of the original proposal, likes about the new project.

“I think it’s a much better project,” she says. “The number of units is much lower, they’re not building in a floodplain, and they’re not hauling in dirt.”

But Robbins is reserving judgment until the new DEIR is released.