Officials look to rewrite growth ordinance to tighten up
loophole
Gilroy – Officials are planning to shore up a major “loophole” in the city’s smart growth policy, but one councilman is calling the effort misguided and unnecessary.
The proposed rewrite of the Residential Development Ordinance aims to prevent developers of large housing projects from obtaining permits for hundreds of units without passing through a housing contest.
The RDO competition, as it is commonly known, forms the heart of Gilroy’s growth control efforts. It allows city leaders to limit the number of homes constructed over a 10-year period, and seeks to promote affordable housing and other desirable development by offering permits outside the competition process. But city leaders fear that one so-called exemption threatens to allow hundreds of units to escape the RDO process, potentially straining fire, water and other public services.
Current regulations allow developers who provide detailed plans for large projects to obtain extra units to round out a project, as long as they obtain their initial housing allotments through the RDO process. The exemption is intended to encourage projects with a high level of pre-planning.
The builders of Glen Loma Ranch, a 1,700-unit mini-city headed for southwest Gilroy, obtained 250 of their units through the exemption after six years of planning. Now, Giacalone-McDermott Management LLC, the developers behind a 200-unit project headed for south Gilroy, also hope to capitalize on the exemption.
A project representative could not be reached for comment, but City Planner Cydney Casper said the developers are discussing the option in the event they obtain a slice of the 191 housing permits to be doled out in a fall RDO competition.
City Administrator Jay Baksa fears that developers may invoke the exemption to slip entire projects past the RDO process. Such aggressive interpretations could allow hundreds of homes the city never planned for.
“It was our job to bring this up to council and say ‘Maybe you want to reword it a little bit,’ because everything from now on is going to come through a specific plan,” Baksa said, referring to the detailed pre-planning now required for all new neighborhoods. “And if that interpretation continues, you’ve got a hell of a loophole.”
Councilman Craig Gartman has tried to put the brakes on such worries. He said a strict application of the law in its current form, rather than a rewrite, would easily solve the problem. He said that scrubbing the exemption from the books – one option discussed last week during informal council policy talks – would eliminate advantages built into the law.
“I pointed out and read this ordinance to the council stating that this does not exempt them from the RDO competition,” Gartman said. “What it does do is allow a developer a little flexibility in the number of units to be built in a specific year, with council approval.”
Baksa said that eliminating the exemption would not tie the hands of developers, since similar flexibility is written into standard agreements between City Hall and development groups.
But such agreements allow less wiggle room than the RDO policy, according to James Suner, a developer behind a dozen local projects.
“We should stop focusing on rewriting policy and start focusing on implementing it,” he said. “There are all kinds of positive things we could focus on, and we seem to be going around and around in circles on the RDO.”
On Monday, city council members voted to eliminate a regulation that freed nonprofit groups from the RDO process. The exemption was created four years ago as part of a bankruptcy bailout for a nonprofit theme park. On the same night this week, council created a new exemption that allows schools to redevelop property without passing through the RDO competition.
