Latest effort to calibrate growth policies goes before planning
commissioners tonight
n By Serdar Tumgoren Staff Writer
Gilroy – A proposal to limit the size of housing projects that can slip past Gilroy’s growth-control measure will go before planning commissioners tonight.
Current zoning laws allow projects of up to 12 units to skip past the city’s formal competition for housing allotments, held every 10 years, and to obtain building permits in a more timely way by invoking the Small Project Exemption. Small projects are one of several housing types that city leaders exempted from the competition in hopes of encouraging affordable housing and smart growth.
Currently, council can use its discretion to award small project exemptions to developments with more than 12 units when the new homes would flesh out a larger subdivision. The regulation lets council decide which projects exceeding the 12-unit cap should qualify for the exemption and sets no limit on the size of such exceptions.
The new ordinance would leave far less room for council interpretation.
“(Council members) want a stricter definition of it because they wanted to have some sort of guidelines for allowing developments larger than 12 units to go through that exemption,” City Planner Melissa Durkin said. “You have to have some type of cut-off for that exemption so you know what projects should be directed to the (housing) competition, whether it’s 10 units, 15 units. Otherwise, people would come in with 50 or 100 units for exemption.”
The latest draft of the SPE is less strict than originally proposed but falls short of calls by the development community to free all “in-fill” projects from the housing competition. Such developments meet the city’s smart growth goals because they are targeted for areas surrounded by existing roads, sewer mains and water lines. They tend to be smaller than projects on the city’s outskirts.
But city planners balked at eliminating the cap for in-fill projects looking to bypass the housing competition. Instead, planners settled on a recommendation to exempt projects as large as 18 units, as long as they are surrounded by existing city infrastructure. The goal of the revision is to ensure that new developments have a similar number of units as other projects in a neighborhood.
The proposal to amend the small project exemption grew out of city council policy discussions at the beginning of the year. Council members will take up the matter once planning commissioners have voted on the SPE amendment.
The planning commission will review the proposal tonight at 6pm in City Hall, 7351 Rosanna St.
Growth Item
– Planning Commission regular meeting
– The Housing Advisory Committee will review options for lengthening resale restriction agreements, which govern how much time must pass before homeowners can sell an affordable unit at market rates.
– Mini-Policy Summit – City council will meet informally to discuss a range of policy issues, many of them related to development and growth policies.
– Sprinkler Ordinance – City council will hold a public study session to discuss a proposed ordinance that would mandate installation of sprinkler systems in all new homes.
