When it comes to the rulebooks, development projects are
receiving more permission to rezone
Gilroy – The city’s rule books for managing growth are filling up with footnotes that afford special status to certain developers and projects. At the same time, creative efforts to redraw zoning boundaries and delays in plugging up other regulations, considered loopholes by some officials, may allow projects big and small to avoid playing by a new set of rules.
City leaders defend the continuous retooling of zoning regulations as necessary to manage development in a growing city. Those efforts to manage growth, they predicted at the beginning of the year, will translate into 1,000 more homes than planned for in 2003, when officials set a cap of 3,450 new homes for a 10-year construction cycle.
The prediction came long before the most recent end-run around the city’s growth cap. In July, council members eliminated a regulation that freed nonprofit groups from the city’s competition for home construction permits, only to replace it with a so-called “exemption” for the Gilroy Unified School District.
Officials justified the move, which allows the cash-strapped school district to receive up to 100 construction permits outside a competitive process governed by the Residential Development Ordinance, on grounds that the city must help schools keep pace with growth in enrollment.
The school district is not the only developer to receive an exemption from the RDO process. Officials awarded 250 units outside the RDO process to the developers of Glen Loma Ranch, a 1,700-unit development that will sprout in southwest Gilroy in the next decade, based on an exemption for projects that undergo a high level of planning.
City officials are now looking to scrub that rule off the books, though changes likely will not arrive soon enough to prevent the exemption from being used by developers of a 236-unit development headed for south Gilroy. Though they have not formally invoked the exemption, the developers have discussed it with city staff as one way to obtain 45 housing units or more outside of the RDO process.
Officials also have made sure that new restrictions on small projects, typically about 12 units or less, will not apply to the roughly dozen housing proposals already submitted to the city.
Some developers are simply trying to bend the rules to fit their designs, as in the case of Tony Sudol, a former councilman who is pushing to include the defunct Indian Motorcycle plant on 10th Street in an area officially zoned as the city’s downtown. If successful, Sudol can obtain permits for the roughly 200-unit project by drawing down on a pool of 1,700 building permits set aside for downtown. If not, he will have to wait until the next major RDO competition in 2013.
Though the project already has support among some council members, Sudol’s strategy raises the issue of proper planning for the effects of new schoolchildren and increased traffic along the 10th Street corridor, already congested with cars headed to the city’s eastern shopping centers. The downtown study that produced the construction cap of 1,700 homes never contemplated the effects of converting the Indian Motorcycle plant into housing.
Many environmentalists and residents question the wisdom of constructing so many homes the city never planned for, and several councilmen – most notably Craig Gartman and Roland Velasco – have gone as far as calling the city’s growth cap a meaningless number.
Though he stands by that assessment, Gartman defended the exemptions he and other councilmen have approved.
“What we need to understand is that the world is a very dynamic place, full of constant change, and we need to somehow – and the RDO is one of the ways – try to put some controls on these changes,” he said. “We want to be able to have some flexibility to maneuver, to bring projects we think are really good projects into the community, and we need to have some measures to make sure some projects don’t get out of control. It’s a very delicate balance … The biggest thing here is, we need to make sure we hold on to the reins, but we don’t hold on too tight.”
Mayor Al Pinheiro acknowledged there have been exceptions, but said that exceptions are not necessarily a bad thing.
“I remember as a young man some kind of industry was trying to come to Gilroy and the city fathers at that time decided against it and there were a bunch of jobs lost,” he recalled. “Well, that was their decision, and a lot of people opposed it. Sometimes, with opportunities, if you don’t take them at the time, you will lose them forever.”
