Item 02 - N40 SP Amendments - Staff Report Exh.6-8
LOS GATOS SPECIAL GENERAL PLAN COMMITTEE 11/17/2016
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A P P E A R A N C E S:
Los Gatos General Plan
Committee Members:
Matthew Hudes, Chair
Marico Sayoc, Vice Chair
Barbara Spector, Mayor
Jeffrey Barnett, Public Rep.
Charles Erekson, Planning
Commissioner
Melanie Hanssen, Planning
Commissioner
Todd Jarvis, Business Rep.
Town Manager: Laurel Prevetti
Community Development
Director:
Joel Paulson
Town Attorney: Robert Schultz
Transcribed by: Vicki L. Blandin
(510) 337-1558
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P R O C E E D I N G S:
CHAIR HUDES: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to
the General Plan Committee and our meeting to consider the
North 40 Specific Plan Amendments.
We are really here to answer two questions:
Should the Specific Plan be amended, and if so, then how?
We started our work last time, but before I get to that I’d
like welcome and congratulate our new mayor, Mayor Sayoc…
VICE CHAIR SAYOC: Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: …and our newly reelected Council
Member, Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Last time we questioned quite a few
things, and we answered a few things as well. We covered
the suggestions of the Town Council on the Residential,
Commercial, Open Space, Parking, and Height, and we stopped
there.
Tonight we will cover Other and General items, as
well as items that are open from the last meeting, as well
as any concerns that the public may have that they would
like to add to consideration.
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Hopefully, we will conclude with enough
information for Staff to prepare recommendations in the
form of a report for the Planning Commission and for the
Council. Since we did not take formal votes on each item
considered, I assume that the opinions and the consensus of
this Committee will be reflected in the Staff Reports for
the Planning Commission and Council, and they’ll be
summarized. Also, there’s a reminder that there are
verbatim minutes that will be available. I believe there
will be an action item in the future as well, and that
there is a video available online, and there’s a link to
that video in the attachment, the addendum to tonight’s
meeting in the Staff Report of the Item 1 addendum. On the
second page, part way down, there’s a link to the video for
those who would like to watch us again.
We will go through the meeting tonight by doing
Verbal Communications, and then I’ll open the public
hearing on Agenda Item 1, and open the hearing in the sense
of taking any communications. So we’ll do Verbal
Communications on items that are not on the agenda, and
then we’ll have questions for Staff and hopefully an update
on the status of the Phase 1 application and the legal
matter surrounding that, and then we’ll take public comment
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on the North 40 Specific Plan, so there will be an option
again to provide additional comment on that.
Then we will begin our work of discussion of the
remaining portion of the Town Council suggestions, and that
is the section entitled General/Other, and I think there’s
quite a bit of meat there. In the hope that we get through
all of this tonight, I want to start with that fresh area,
and then we’ll come back to a discussion of any open items
from the last meeting and a discussion of any suggestions
from General Plan Committee members or the public.
So that’s the plan for us to get through this
tonight. I think it should be really quite great
information and discussion.
With that, I’m going to open for Verbal
Communications, that is, communications on any topic not on
tonight’s agenda. Do we have anyone who wishes to speak on
that?
Okay, none heard, so we’ll move on to the public
hearing on Agenda Item 1. Why don’t we start with questions
for Staff and an update on the Phase 1 application, if
maybe we could get that first?
LAUREL PREVETTI: We were expecting our Town
Attorney to join us, and hopefully he’ll be on his way.
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CHAIR HUDES: Do you want to hold that until he
gets here?
LAUREL PREVETTI: I think that would probably be
best, thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Okay, so why don’t we just do any
questions for Staff that the Committee Members may have?
Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: This is probably a
question for the Town Attorney, but in our packet there was
a letter from the Applicants addressing a number of the
issues that the General Plan Committee is discussing, and I
wondered how we should consider that? It seemed to me that
we had already made a decision to proceed forward with
amending the Specific Plan, or at least going down that
path, so my assumption was that we can take that into
consideration, any of the comments that we get, including
from the Applicant, but we’re continuing down the path that
we had already decided on. Is that correct?
LAUREL PREVETTI: That is correct. You would
consider those comments just as you would all the other
communications that you’ve received on this item.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Any other questions for Staff?
Okay. So let’s take any public comment on the North 40
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Specific Plan potential amendments. Would anyone like to
speak on that subject? If you don’t mind, we’d like you to
fill out a card, but you can do that after you speak. If
you’d just come up and give your name and address, that
would be great.
CLAY GOODMAN: My name is Clay Goodman and I live
here in Los Gatos on San Benito, and I was at the Tuesday
energetic meeting about supply and demand for water.
This North 40 has been around for a while, and I
know that there are all kinds of legal issues around it,
but I’m wondering, if we don’t have enough water, why are
we growing? I’ve come from Santa Barbara where they had no
growth for a while, where they had no water, and I’m not
positive about this, but I was told that Palo Alto has a no
growth policy now too, so I wondered if anybody has
considered just no growth? We have huge water bills. Mine
was $600 last month for a two-bedroom, two-bath house, a
small house. My thoughts.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you very much. Would anyone
else like to speak on what we’re going to consider tonight?
MARKENE SMITH: I’m Markene Smith and I live on
Drakes Bay Avenue in Los Gatos, close to the North 40, and
I’ve spoken to both the Planning Commission and the Town
Council before, and I wanted to note that most of the
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comments that were heard by both bodies came from people
who were concerned about the health of the future residents
of the North 40, and the safety of people who would live
there getting in and out of their places, getting across
very crowded freeways, the traffic, the problem for
pedestrians, the access, and the fact that the buildings
were so close to the freeway that they become, in fact, the
way that the previous plan was presented, black lung lofts,
because they had no large tree barrier between them and the
freeway.
I had proposed at a previous meeting a 300’
barrier, and I’ve talked to my colleagues, and we agreed
that a 100’ barrier of large trees would help protect the
atmosphere, the climate, for the people so that they don’t
have to live continually in hermetically sealed windows,
and when the children go out to play they will be breathing
air that at least is somewhat filtered by large trees like
are on every other entrance and exit near the freeways to
Los Gatos.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you very much.
LEE QUINTANA: I’ll turn that in later. Lee
Quintana, 5 Palm Avenue.
I think I expressed this before, but I’d like to
say that I think that if you do consider amendments to the
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Specific Plan, either have them address clarifying the
Specific Plan without necessarily changing it, or prepare
amendments that would apply to everything in the Specific
Plan that would not affect the already existing Phase 1,
which is in litigation, and wait to see what happens there,
and then a second one that would address changes to any
future phase, so that when this litigation finally gets
settled you would have something that could go into effect
one way or the other and not have adopted something that
would then be inconsistent if the Town is not upheld or the
other way around. I think that’s important.
Also, the way I wrote this is that the Specific
Plan was approved after the Housing Element was approved,
but the Housing Element was modified considerably after the
draft went to the Council and Planning Commission, and
there is a discrepancy between those two documents now, so
if there’s no plan to change the Housing Element, it’s the
Specific Plan that should be changed to be consistent with
the Housing Element. The Specific Plan itself at this point
has nothing in it that says anything about needing to have
13.5 acres designated as 20 acres or more density. That, I
think, is a major flaw of the plan.
The other thing I would like to address—I have
lots of things I’d like to address—is the question that has
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been raised several times about not having the use along
Lark Avenue blending with the rest of community, and I
think there was a suggestion for a change to five units per
acre, and aside from what that would do to the rest of the
plan I would like to suggest that this is a unique
neighborhood that we’re creating, and it is higher density,
and the Town has always planned for the North 40 to be more
intense than the rest of the plan, all the way back to
1985. Putting lower density housing there and then
immediately backing it up with your higher density housing
provides less of a buffer than if you have that buffer
happening from across Lark Avenue, including the big
setback that is already required by the plan.
I have other things, but that will do.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. Does anyone have any
questions, because I do? Thank you for sending the letter
in so that we could consider it; I think it’s really
helpful and it’s going to enter into some of my discussions
tonight.
LEE QUINTANA: I also sent in the communication
on pocket parks for your consideration.
CHAIR HUDES: Oh, that’s good. The two questions
I had, your Problem 2 where you say there’s a disconnect
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between the plan’s stated maximum and what is actually
possible, could you elaborate on that a little bit?
LEE QUINTANA: Yeah, the plan says 501,000 square
feet of non-residential and up to 700,000 square feet of
residential, but if you take into consideration all the
restrictions that have been placed with the space for open
space, setbacks, and lower intensity along the perimeter on
Lark and Los Gatos Boulevard, et cetera, I don’t think that
if you tested the model that you would actually be able to
even get close to either of those maximums, and by leaving
them in the plan I think that presents a false sense that
the next phases could go up to that intensity, and that
will get us back into a cycle of misunderstanding.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. That issue has come up,
and thanks for pointing that out.
Anyone else have questions? Yes, Commissioner
Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Yes, and thank you for
your letter; I thought that was very helpful. I just wanted
to make sure, you mentioned the Housing Element and you
talked about compliance, and you’re right, there isn’t any
mention of the Housing Element in the Specific Plan at the
moment. My question is this: You also mentioned potential
not identified consistency, but with the General Plan as
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well, and I wanted to ask if you thought there was
something that… Because the General Plan applicable
policies are listed in the Specific Plan, was it mainly the
Housing Element that you felt needed to be (inaudible)?
LEE QUINTANA: No, I think there are still a
couple of policies in the General Plan itself that aren’t
consistent with the Specific Plan as it was approved. I
can’t name them off the top of my head right now, but I
found a couple.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: But you do think aside
from the specific policies that are mentioned in today’s
Specific Plan that there are some additional policies in
the General Plan that may not be consistent with the
Specific Plan, is that right?
LEE QUINTANA: That’s right.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Okay, thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. Any other public comment
on this item? If you would like to, please just come
forward. Thank you.
EDWARD MORIMOTO: Good evening, I’m Ed Morimoto;
I live 460 Monterey Avenue.
I don’t have any prepared comments this evening,
but I did want to just punctuate a few things from when I
was at this lectern at the last meeting, the first being
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that similar to a previous speaker I think it’s very
challenging, if not impossible, to make good decisions
around modifying the Specific Plan when such a significant
thing as the lawsuit is still pending. To crib Commissioner
Erekson, and risk getting it incorrect, the right answer
could be dramatically different depending on if we’re
talking about a case where the lawsuit is won by the Town
versus one that’s not.
The second that I would ask you to consider is
the great complexity of both the document that you are
looking to modify and the impact of those modifications,
and I call an example from your deliberations last time.
What seemingly is a simple and almost slam-dunk
kind of decision, and I’m talking about the elimination of
commercial along Los Gatos Boulevard, the Buildings 24 and
25 from the Phase 1 application, I too wonder does it make
sense to have residential buildings in those locations?
However, please consider that trying to do that elimination
triggers a number of things. I believe there is a letter
from the developers around that changes the traffic
scenario and therefore should trigger CEQA for traffic
analysis.
But more importantly, our own traffic engineers
have said that creating street access by creating a new
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curb cut for commercial allocation is in fact undesirable
from a traffic standpoint, as well as dangerous. Don’t take
my word for that; I could have it wrong. Please refer to
Matt Morley or Jessy Pu. And if that is the case, then we
need to consider whether it is appropriate to have
commercial being served by the residential roads that lead
from behind. I personally don’t think that that sort of
commercial would be very successful, but at the same time I
don’t think if I were living there I would want that sort
of traffic coming through my neighborhood.
The final thing I’d just like to point out is,
again, just reiterating a point that I made last time. Any
attempts or intention to reduce or limit the North 40
commercial for the sake of saving the downtown I think is a
little bit short sighted. Despite the fact of how the
elections went, there is not a wall separating our Town
from the rest of the Valley, and therefore we have to think
about competition from a regional perspective. Just because
we may hobble the North 40 relative to the downtown doesn’t
mean the competition from elsewhere is going to “eat our
lunch,” so I think you should consider that before you rob
the Town of additional tax revenue. Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you very much for your
comments. Do we have any other speakers? Please come
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forward. If anyone else would like to speak, it would
probably help the process if you turned in a card so we can
move this along. Thank you.
KIM: Good evening. A lot of things.
You hear all the people in the Town with concerns
and complaints and things like that. Why this property? Why
are they developing that area? I mean nobody wants any more
residential area, and they don’t want any more traffic. Why
not develop the backside of Lexington, or somewhere far
away that it’s not going to be this issue with traffic and
all this kind of stuff like that, environmental, the
animals, where the animals are going to go?
There’s a laundry list of things that people are
concerned about. I mean, it’s endless. It’s endless. Why
put residential there? Why if you consider even developing
it, not have a sanctuary or something that’s conducive to
the neighborhood, the environment, things like that? I mean
why? The revenue? I mean what is it? People are just so
concerned; they’re so concerned about this. They come to
every meeting and they say we have a problem with that; we
have a problem with this.
You know, there’s no reason to develop this area.
There’s no reason, and we don’t need… There’s so much
inventory on housing here that people are leaving now,
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people are leaving because of all this. It’s just a
concern, and people need to listen to this, you know?
Develop another area, and develop, you know, like the
backside of Lexington or somewhere else. That doesn’t need
to be developed.
You know, there’s so much traffic. You can’t even
park. You can’t even enjoy the town anymore; it’s so bad.
So it’s just a lot of concerns and people just
need to listen, you know, on environmental and the
neighborhood. You know, they have their house; they’re
asking to put a tree or a bush. I mean it’s just, it’s
utterly, I don't know, it’s just a concern, I just needed
to tell you guys this, so thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you very much for your
comments.
JOHN EICHINGER: Hi, John Eichinger, 637 San
Benito.
I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t read the
whole Specific Plan, I haven’t read the Housing Element,
I’m not familiar with all of them, but I have listened to a
lot of things, and some of my concerns are the following.
This phase thing, Phase 1 and Phase 2, I think
should be eliminated from the Specific Plan. How can you
build half of it without possibly knowing what’s going to
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be in the other half, what’s coming down the road? I’ve
said it before; I think the developers are giving us a
sucker punch. I think we should see a plan for the whole 40
acres, not just for half of it, and then we’ll see what
comes down the road later on.
Affordability; I’ve talked about this several
times before. We should have homes that can be affordable
by our police department, our fire department, our
teachers, and not just homes that are going to make the
developer a lot of profit.
I think we should have a new traffic study done.
Things have changed since the last traffic study, and
talking to the actual people who did the traffic study,
they said that they didn’t take anything into account on
weekends; they didn’t look at the traffic on weekends.
The last thing I wanted to comment on is open
space. The developers, when they were here, were crowing
about how 36% of the space was open. Streets and sidewalks
are not open space, and should not be considered as open
space. Parks and grassland, that’s open space. Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. I have one more card
here, Susan Freiman.
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SUSAN FREIMAN: Hello, my name is Susan Freiman.
I have appeared at this mike several times over the course
of the last two years.
First of all, thank you from the bottom of my
heart for your last vote.
Second of all, thank you for showing up at Van
Meter, our opening day of Safe Routes To School. I
recognized some of our Town Council there, and they were a
little surprised when I actually said, “Hey, I know you.”
We do. We follow you. We’re part of this town. We are all
in it together.
My two points, that were in an email, were about
as someone looking to do my own house, and very aware of
keeping the character of the Town, I’m terrified of
submitting my plans.
I am going subterranean, and I was very disturbed
to hear in the last like specific that they were able to
calculate half a parking spot. There was some very strange
less than 1:1 car per bedroom, which seemed off. Then not
an inch of it was below ground, and I think when everyone
saw those orange lines go up, the voices got really loud.
So if we can take into account and say they may
look high, but we’re also going down low, I have no idea
what that does to the environmental impact of the soil or
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whatever—rodents might be needing protection—however, at
least investigate going down below to preserve the roofline
and still give them space and parking that would hopefully
be subterranean.
The traffic study is the feeling that we were
being very taken advantage of with the plan putting 100% of
the houses in the Los Gatos district. It seemed an
egregious abuse of a system designed to help everyone get
ahead.
Development is going to happen. Let’s just have
it be sane, sensible, and take into account as inclusive of
everyone’s best interests as you can. Thank you for all of
your time.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. I do have one more card.
Roy Moses.
ROY MOSES: Good evening, everybody. Roy Moses.
The (inaudible) court in Los Gatos. I just got here. I’m
late, sorry, but I had a chance to get up here and just say
a couple of words. I don’t have any prepared remarks for
tonight.
I’ve been trying to watch everything, the
proceedings going on on the video and everything at home,
but our business, and personal things, and trips, have
gotten in the way. It’s a fulltime job trying to keep up
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with everybody and all the events that are going on in the
community; it’s very, very difficult to really see if we’re
making progress or not.
I guess my main concerns are that we have to deal
with Staff, Town Council, and the Planning Commission, and
I hope and pray that you guys from our initial comments
when these chambers were full, going way back, understand
that this community is still as concerned as we were
before, even though the numbers are not here like we were
in the past, but we are very, very concerned.
I mean putting an amendment to all these issues,
the North 40 Specific Plan and the things that were
approved by the Council, and that and hopefully you’re
making the progress that’s necessary to give the citizens
of this town exactly what we want, and that is the look and
feel and to keep things as they should be.
When I first moved to this town, it was very,
very difficult to do anything and to grow. Obviously, we’ve
grown, and we’ve outgrown what we needed to in this town,
so it’s necessary… I’m glad for Marico and Ms. Spencer for
being re-elected, even though Marcia didn’t vote for our
wishes at that time, but you know the concerns on this
community, and I’m here to tell you that…
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And I’m looking specifically at Staff and the
attorney. Their job is to represent this community. You may
not live here, but your job is to represent the community
and give us what we want, and what we want is the look and
feel of this town, okay? You’ve got your roles and
everything else, and the state passed all these laws. I
mean we’re being inundated. We’ve lot control, the citizens
have lost control, but we’re back to fight for our rights.
CHAIR HUDES: Sir, please address your comments
to the Committee.
ROY MOSES: Okay.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you.
ROY MOSES: Well, to everybody. So I’m just
saying. I’m glad to have the opportunity to be here and say
that I am still concerned, even though my face hasn’t been
here at the last couple of meetings, and I’m looking
forward to seeing the positive results from the citizens of
this community.
Thank you for all your work. I admire what you
all do. I couldn’t do it, to be honest with you. Maybe it’s
because of my age I couldn’t do it, but that’s just what it
is. Okay, thank you very much. And I’ll be praying for you/
I believe in prayer, that the wishes of the people will be
addressed. Thank you.
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CHAIR HUDES: Thank you very much. That’s the
last card that I have, so what I’d like to do is now close
the public comment and move to discussion.
Now, in order to get through this, again, what
I’d like to do first of all is to discuss the remaining
portion of the Town Council’s suggestions that we started
at the October 27th meeting, starting with the general group
of questions, and then come back to any open items from our
previous meeting, and then move to any suggestions from
General Plan Committee Members or the public, and
incorporate that as we get through this.
But before we do that, maybe, Mr. Schultz, you
could give us an update, if you wouldn’t mind, on the
status of the Phase 1 application.
ROBERT SCHULTZ: Sure, I can do that. Good
evening, sorry I was late. I thought it was a 7:00 o’clock
start, so I was up in my office actually working on the
North 40 litigation.
As the public knows, and you know, litigation
was filed. Just yesterday we were in court with the judge
and came up with the stipulation of the deadlines and dates
that are will come forward.
The first milestone is actually next week, or
actually it’s tomorrow. We have to submit an administrative
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draft record to the other side. Just the index of that
draft, it’s currently 13 volumes and over 900 pages, but we
are trying to whittle that down to the actual
administrative record, which is the proceedings that took
place in front of the Council, the Planning Commission, and
other advisory bodies.
We have a couple of meet and confirm meetings
with the other side over the next couple of weeks where
we’ll go over the documents and try to get a stipulated
administrative record without the court intervening to
determine what the record is.
The records do (inaudible), and December 9th,
which is just a few weeks away, then I believe it’s
approximately January 9th, and I don’t have the exact dates,
but about 30 days later is when the Petitioners, that’s
Grosvenor and the ones that filed the lawsuit, their brief
is due. And 30 days after that, approximately February 9th,
the Town’s brief is due, which is called the Opposition.
Then about 30 days after that, about March 9th, is when the
reply brief is due from the Petitioners, which is the
Applicants for the North 40.
The trial is set currently for March 27th, but
it’s only tentative; there has to be a courtroom available,
but that’s the courtroom date that we get, so it’s a very
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fast process. The State Affordable Housing Act requires it
to be expeditiously processed, so those are the dates that
we’re working with, and we’re working quite diligently to
get done. The first date, obviously, is that administrative
record, which is due December 9th.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you, and is there the
possibility of appeal by either side?
ROBERT SCHULTZ: Yes, there’s always an appeal
from that date. If the trial did occur on March 27th, we
wouldn’t get a decision that date, but some time after a
decision will be entered by the Superior Court, and that
can be appealed to the Appellant Court, and then that
decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court of
California.
CHAIR HUDES: Okay, thank you very much. Let’s
move to where we stopped last time, and that’s the
discussion of the remaining portion of Town Council’s
suggestions.
There were seven items listed in the category of
General/Other; some of them are weightier than others. I’d
like the to group the first two together, if we could,
because I think they’re really tied to each other.
The first one is shalls should replace shoulds,
and the second is confirm that the Guiding Principles in
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the Specific Plan is mandatory language rather than
permissive language. So maybe just open with Committee
Members’ thoughts and comments on the shalls and shoulds.
Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I took a look at the
Specific Plan again in the last week, and I was considering
what we discussed at the last meeting, and I wondered if
the real issue wasn’t that we didn’t have as many numerical
or specific standards for some of the items in the Specific
Plan that we wished we had, because when I looked at what
we were discussing before, we were talking about when you
want to meet the needs of a certain residential population,
seniors or millennials, what constitutes meeting that? Is
it a minimum number or something like that? So I wondered
if that wasn’t more the issue than shalls or shoulds?
But we do have a fair amount of shalls, and the
other thing was I know in the Planning Commission, when we
had our deliberations, we looked very carefully and
considered shalls to be objective standards that we could
rely on, even if they didn’t have a number associated with
them, so I felt like we did have a good number of those,
but then people might contest that they weren’t objective,
because they didn’t have a number, but I thought that shall
meant objective. So those were my general thoughts.
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CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. Anyone else, thoughts on
shalls and shoulds and Guiding Principles?
I have a few thoughts, if it’s okay. I was very
disappointed to learn that under the existing North 40
Specific Plan the Planning Commission had very narrow
grounds for considering what is described as by right
development, that is, for an application that contained
even a small amount of affordable housing.
Most significantly, key elements, maybe the
essence of the Council’s Vision and Guiding Principles,
which I believe were carefully crafted, were considered
subjective, and thereby not objective grounds that could be
used for denial of an application that was opposed by 97%
of the residents who spoke and corresponded with the
Planning Commission in 500 unique communications.
For whatever reason, perhaps because the law was
evolving or otherwise, the consultants and attorneys
advising the Town did not address the need for objective
standards adequately, in my opinion, so when we finished
with the Specific Plan we ended up with key elements of the
Vision not secured with objective language that was there,
and I think that some of that needs to be corrected, and I
think there are a couple of ways to do it.
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One is to start with the should and shall list,
and not consider all of them, because I think, as some
Committee Members have pointed out to me, there are a large
number of them, 243, I think. But it’s only a subset of
those, I think, that are related to the four Guiding
Principles, and I’d looked at a few, and there are some
examples where I saw it was not that difficult to trace
back some of these shoulds to a Guiding Principle, and to
potentially use that linkage between Guiding Principles and
the shoulds and promote some of those to shalls on that
basis.
To remind people what those Guiding Principles
are, “The North 40 will look and feel like Los Gatos. The
North 40 will embrace hillside views, trees, and open
space. It will address the Town’s residential and/or
commercial unmet needs, and it will minimize or mitigate
impacts on Town infrastructure, schools, and other
community services.” So I think that’s one way to go about
it.
The other way, I think, is to go the other
direction, and that’s to look at the Vision Statement and
Principles and see if they are adequately addressed in the
plan, and if not, propose some clear language.
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As an example of that, let’s take the look and
feel of Los Gatos. Potentially we could have some examples
in the plan that illustrates architectural styles; defines
what is good, what is not good, such as we do in the
Hillside Standards; or to maybe even put some language
like, “The architectural type, style, pattern, and layout
shall be commonly found with other Los Gatos neighborhoods
of similar use, whether they’re residential, commercial, or
otherwise.”
With regard to hillside views, I think that we
could set some standards for view locations, defining the
predominant hillsides that should be viewable, and
potentially craft some more objective way to evaluate
whether hillside views are going to be embraced. As an
example, and this is probably not very good at all, but say
something like, “The views of the predominant hillsides, El
Sereno and El Sombroso, shall be available from a minimum
of 30% of the intersections and roadways within any
project.” I’m sure Staff could do a much better job of
identifying some objective ways, viewing platforms or
locations, or something like that.
Maybe I’ll just stop there. I have a few other
examples, but I’d like to get Committee Members’ reactions
to some of those thoughts.
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Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. I actually
had the same thoughts as Mr. Hudes, except that I didn’t
delve down into the work that he did. I noted that in the
Staff Report it talked about the Staff going through and
changing shoulds to shalls, and my thought was not that,
but go through and look at the shoulds and change them to
shalls if it’s necessary to bolster the Vision Statement
and Guiding Principles.
So that was my concept of what I thought needed
to be done, or could be done, and what I heard Mr. Hudes
say is that he’d actually gone through the document and
started making the changes and finding where those changes
could be made.
Now, I don’t necessarily agree that the document
is not already objective as it is, but if we’re going to
make these changes I would make them bolster, augment, the
Guiding Principles and the Vision Statement.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. Other thoughts?
Mayor.
MAYOR SAYOC: Thank you, Chair. Just a question
in terms of process. Would you like to share the list that
you’ve prepared, or is it something that you are hoping
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that we would individually look at and provide to Staff?
I’m just trying to think how we should go through this.
CHAIR HUDES: I just did a sample, and I’m not
prepared to take everyone through that. I was suggesting
that perhaps Staff could go through that in preparation,
not for our deliberations, but in preparing a report for
the Planning Commission or the Council, to take a cut at
linking those shoulds that could be promoted based on the
linkage to the Principles.
Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: What Mr. Hudes just said
is exactly what I thought the next step would be if this
Committee were inclined to move in that direction.
CHAIR HUDES: Would others like to weigh in on
whether the Committee is inclined to move in that
direction?
Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I think that makes a lot
of sense, and then like I said earlier, combined with the
discussion that we had in our last meeting where we had
many, many different suggestions for modifying the Specific
Plan to make it more reflective of the specific direction
that we wanted to see in an application, I think combining
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those two things would really help a lot with the Planning
Commission and Town Council deliberations.
CHAIR HUDES: Mr. Barnett.
COMMITTEE MEMBER BARNETT: I have a quick
comment. I did quickly go through the 243 applications of
should in the Specific Plan, and we’ve talked briefly about
the concept of testing those in consideration of their
relation to the Council Vision. I think that’s an excellent
idea, but I did take away from that exercise the idea that
we’re going to have some that are going to be more clearly
included, and a lot that are going to be in sort of an
ambiguous status that we’re still going to have to go
through.
CHAIR HUDES: Before we move on, any comments
about more clearly identifying language about translating
the Vision into clearer language in the Specific Plan? Any
other areas or examples, or do we feel like that’s another
view we ought to take? Getting some head nodding, no
objecting.
Before I move on to the next item, are there any
other considerations with regard to making sure that the
plan adequately addresses the Vision Statement and Guiding
Principles, or addresses the shall/should question?
Commissioner Erekson.
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COMMISSIONER EREKSON: I have a question, I
suppose for Staff. It says here, “Confirm that the Guiding
Principles of the Specific Plan is mandatory language
rather than permissive language.” While I understand the
meaning of all those words, what’s the implication? How
does it play itself out in real life if it’s interpreted as
mandatory language versus permissive language? So, for
instance, the Guiding Principles are mandatory--it says in
the statement that it’s mandatory language—but the Guiding
Principles are very short and the document is this long, so
there is a lot more information. So how does that play
itself out? What does it imply if we apply that meaning,
and what does it imply differently than how we viewed the
Specific Plan in the past?
JOEL PAULSON: I think that what Chair Hudes
mentioned, we would go through the shoulds and probably
some of the shalls as well, and look for opportunities to
provide further clarification in the form of potentially
more objective standards that could be discussed by the
Planning Commission and Council to help solidify those in
relation to the Guiding Principles. I think one might say
you have the Guiding Principles and then all of the
policies and language that are in the plan, or to implement
those Guiding Principles and Vision, and so it’s really,
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from my perspective, tightening that up or providing
opportunities to insert more objective clarifying language.
CHAIR HUDES: Let’s move on to the other
considerations.
Number 3 was to require a plan for the entire
Specific Plan area, and maybe Staff could help me
understand that better, because I’m trying to understand a
plan for a plan. Was this meant to require an application
for the entire plan at once, or was it meant to address the
need to re-plan for the entire area when an application is
approved? Maybe you could explain a little bit about what
was behind this suggestion from Council.
JOEL PAULSON: Well, a couple Council Members are
here, but generally I think it was either a potential for
reducing or eliminating phasing, or as an application comes
in, getting information on those next phases, even if
they’re phased having the plan for what those are going to
entail. As we’ve said throughout the whole process and
stated here, given the multiple property owners that
becomes challenging, because an Applicant may not have
control over all of those properties.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I have a question related
to that. The Specific Plan does cover the entire North 40.
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It’s a vision for the future, and it lays out some
parameters, and we’re discussing amending some of those
parameters, but it does cover the entire 40 acres. So then
I kind of had the same question as Commissioner Hudes, but
my additional question is this: Quite a number of residents
have suggested we need to have a plan for the entire North
40, and it makes a lot of sense to view the things that
way, because you don’t know what you’re going to get in the
other phases. But if we were to do that, just for the
benefit of the audience, because of the Housing Element and
all the other stuff, what would happen if we required there
to be an application for the entire North 40?
JOEL PAULSON: I think the potential is that
you’d never get an application for the entire North 40,
which may be a positive scenario depending on your take,
but that’s the challenge and that was kind of the basis for
creating the Specific Plan, knowing that there were
multiple property owners out there. That way we can create
this vision, create this land use patterning, and then that
way as the applications come through they’ll all be
complying with the same requirements, and so you’ll end up
with a more cohesive development in the end.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Relative to my question
about the Housing Element, supposing that we require any
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future application to cover the entire North 40 Specific
Plan area? My understanding is that no developer at the
moment would have access to the entire North 40 property,
so what implications would that have for our Housing
Element?
JOEL PAULSON: It would depend on the individual
application. You could have to wait, and so you’d never be
able to produce any of those units if any application
didn’t come forward, because they weren’t able to acquire
all of the property.
But there’s also the potential for someone to get
close to you, or work together with some of the other
property owners from a future perspective, so there’s still
maybe some phasing but you may have a plan for the entire
area, and so then that could accommodate the Housing
Element requirements. That may not necessarily be an issue,
but I think it’s extremely unlikely, frankly.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: One follow up question. My
understanding from having been on the Housing Element
Advisory Board is that the requirement was for us to zone
for the 13.5 acres at 20 dwelling units per acre, not to
have an application for them and not to build them. That is
the Housing Element law, as I understand it.
JOEL PAULSON: That’s correct.
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LAUREL PREVETTI: Mr. Chair, I could just add
that one of the purposes of the Housing Element is to
identify barriers to development, and so if it’s perceived
that requiring an application for the entire area is
infeasible, that could be considered by the state to become
a barrier to housing on the site.
CHAIR HUDES: Mayor Sayoc.
MAYOR SAYOC: Question of Staff. We talk a lot
about phasing, Phase 1, Phase 2, but realistically we don’t
know that it will only be two phases, correct? Nowhere in
the document does it state that?
JOEL PAULSON: That’s correct.
MAYOR SAYOC: So is it possible to actually
specify a minimum or a maximum on how many acres could be
phased in the future?
ROBERT SCHULTZ: It would be difficult, unless
you found out all the parcels that are out there and took
the minimum as the smallest parcel there is, because the
challenge there is what if you say the minimum is three
acres—just to throw out to you—and you have an acre-and-a-
half parcel that you want to develop, haven’t you prevented
them from doing any development on their own piece of
property, and then the argument would be it’s a taking.
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MAYOR SAYOC: So then what about the flip side, a
maximum? It just occurred to me right now.
ROBERT SCHULTZ: We’d have to do more research on
that, on whether you could limit a maximum. The argument
was we’re trying to do it all at once, and now if you put a
limit on the maximum, are you not going with the more
cohesive development, if possible?
MAYOR SAYOC: Sure, okay. Because, I mean, after
the fact we’re looking at this, and you could make
arguments to both scenarios. If you did all 44 acres, then
you know exactly what you’re getting, whereas if you do
parcels, whether it’s five, ten, fifteen at a time, the
next phase would be more realistic of the environment at
that. So I see there are pros and cons of each scenario,
and I was just wondering legally if there was ever any
precedent in past specific plans that had approached it
that way?
LAUREL PREVETTI: No, not that I’m aware of. The
closest that I’ve seen is when a developer does have
control of the majority of the parcel, say, 40 of 44 acres,
something like this, and then they apply for a master
permit. That way they essentially identify this is the
approach that they’d like to take for all of the site,
however, for financial or other reasons they’re going to
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phase the actual development over time, and they may come
back for additional development review during the
subsequent phase, because the market changes, or the needs
change, or suddenly we want more bike lanes or something
like that.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you. Any other thoughts on
the phasing for the plan for the entire specific area?
One thing that I did hear in addition was that
perhaps after receiving an application there might be the
need for a very substantial part of the zone to potentially
look at what’s left, because there may be no housing left,
or there may be other big changes that affect many acres,
so maybe that’s something that should be considered,
whether it’s in law or practice, to re-look at the rest of
the Specific Plan once a big application comes in.
I’m going to move on to the next item, which is
number 4, preserve existing Live Oak trees. Language could
be added to address this suggestion. Any Committee comments
on that one? Mr. Erekson.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: I wouldn’t see the need or
the appropriateness to specify a particular species of tree
or plant, but if the intent of this is to provide guidance,
then it would be best to preserve native species. That
would seem like to be more appropriate from my perspective,
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but to specify a particular species seems to me to be not
clear in its intent, other than if I was a huge fan of Live
Oak trees.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Question. We did the Tree
Ordinance last year, and I think it was still in process
when the Specific Plan was approved in June 2015—I’m not
positive of that—but I wondered why wouldn’t the Tree
Ordinance apply to the Specific Plan? I guess if you write
in the Specific Plan that it supersedes other ordinances,
but that was a question I had.
CHAIR HUDES: Was that a question for Staff?
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I guess it’s a question
for Staff, because protection of Live Oak trees is a key
component of the Tree Ordinance.
JOEL PAULSON: The Tree Ordinance does apply, but
that also doesn’t mean that you can’t remove a Live Oak
tree.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: And that’s true of many
applications.
JOEL PAULSON: Of any tree, correct.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Yeah, okay.
CHAIR HUDES: Yes, Mayor Sayoc.
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MAYOR SAYOC: Just to clarify with Staff—I don’t
have that appendix—we actually listed, I believe, the trees
that we recommend in this area, and if I remember
correctly, we identified native drought tolerant, and Live
Oak trees are in that list?
LAUREL PREVETTI: That’s correct.
MAYOR SAYOC: Okay.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. Clarification
for me, because I thought preserving existing Live Oak
trees sounded like a good idea. What I’m confused about now
is are we talking about a list that identifies trees to be
planted versus a list of what should be preserved? And I
guess if I could ask Staff, what rules would Staff be
applying to the removal of existing Live Oak trees?
JOEL PAULSON: The removal of existing trees, the
Tree Ordinance would apply, as it does with any application
that comes through town. I think Mayor Sayoc was just
asking if we had from a replacement or a suitable planting
plan in our tree palette, whether Live Oaks were in there,
and they in fact are.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: So if I were developing
a parcel of property and it had Live Oaks, and I wanted to
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remove those trees, would it be a request I made of the
Town and the Town would have to say yay or nay?
JOEL PAULSON: That’s correct, as with any tree
removal, whether it’s associated with a development
application or it’s just an individual property owner not
doing development, they can request a Tree Removal Permit.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: I don’t recall why
Council Members placed this on the list. Is there an issue
as to whether or not Live Oak trees are going to be removed
on this parcel?
JOEL PAULSON: Live Oak trees will be removed,
and I believe there was a speaker at the Council meeting—if
not both Planning Commission and Council meetings—that
expressed an interest in those trees specifically and
thought that whatever could be done to preserve those
should be considered. I believe that’s probably the genesis
of why this was carried forward by a Council Member.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: But didn’t you just say
that under our current Tree Ordinance the Live Oak trees
would be preserved, unless there was some reason under our
law to allow them to be removed?
JOEL PAULSON: Yes, they have to make at least
one of the findings, and those findings can be made.
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COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you, Chair and
Staff.
CHAIR HUDES: Thank you.
LAUREL PREVETTI: In addition, if it’s the will
of the Committee, you could recommend a policy statement
for the Specific Plan that addresses tree preservation more
explicitly. So if that is something based on the public
feedback and your own deliberations that you think is
worthwhile to strengthen in the Specific Plan, whether it’s
for a particular species or native species overall, that is
something you can consider adding.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: The think the Tree
Ordinance in really important in this consideration, but I
think it would be worth considering adding some additional
language, because I’m thinking of the look and feel of Los
Gatos, and pretty much any application that we looked at on
the Planning Commission there were Live Oaks on the
property, and that’s one of the most pervasive trees, and a
native one at that, so I would consider (inaudible)
strengthening that in the Specific Plan.
CHAIR HUDES: I’ll weigh in that I agree that a
more general language addressing tree preservation in the
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document I think would be helpful to address some of the
public concerns that we heard quite a few times.
Yes, Mayor.
MAYOR SAYOC: Sorry to focus on logistics, but
one thing that may be helpful as this moves on to Planning
Commission, as part of the Staff Report as one of the
appendices, the actual Tree Ordinance, so that it can
remind us what exactly are the findings, so that if there’s
anything that we feel that is necessary to be bolstered, we
could do so.
CHAIR HUDES: Okay, thank you. I’d like to move
on to item 5, which is to consider widening Los Gatos
Boulevard. I know that Staff has something to say about
this, so maybe we’ll start with Staff’s comments on this,
but I do believe this is in response to a great number of
resident concerns about traffic.
JOEL PAULSON: I believe as we stated, the nexus
from the environmental analysis relating to traffic did not
require that, so if the Town was interested in pursuing
that the Town would need to acquire that property and make
those improvements. The Town Attorney may have some
additional input, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to require
that burden of, or place that burden on, any developer to
make those improvements.
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LAUREL PREVETTI: And if I may, Mr. Chair, just
add that we also heard loud and clear the concern of our
community with respect to the traffic. The Environmental
Impact Report identified and studied very thoroughly those
impacts and identified appropriate mitigations, both onsite
in terms of how people move between their homes and the
shopping areas with the North 40, as well as appropriate
offsite, so we just want to reinforce that we’ve heard the
concern and that it’s been adequately addressed, and as
much as a lot of people would love for us to widen the
Boulevard with this plan and with any applications, we are
limited in terms of how much we can ask of developers.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I had a question related
to this. In our packet there was a letter from the
Applicant and they attached the Transportation Impact
Analysis. I read through it, and there was a statement in
there with regard to the Lark District, that the assumption
was that the residents would be able to walk and not have
to do a lot of commuting outside of the development, but
the reality of the Phase 1 application that we got was
there was not a very large amount of commercial, and
probably not enough to satisfy the need for not having to
leave the property. So relative to the Applicant’s
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statements that any changes we’d make could invalidate the
Transportation Impact Analysis and require new CEQA action,
I wondered if the existing application didn’t have that
issue as well, because of the statement in the
Transportation Impact Analysis that the residents would be
able to stay within the North 40 for the majority of their
shopping and retail needs? Because of that, that kind of
dovetails into this traffic on Los Gatos Boulevard issue as
well, so I just wondered if anyone else thought that might
be an issue.
JOEL PAULSON: I don’t have the TIA with me, but
I understand the language that was referenced both in the
Applicant’s letter and what you’re talking about from the
TIA. I think what you need to look at is a couple of
things.
One is if we do ultimately make a determination;
let’s say, on distribution, we look at moving residential;
that’s generally the lowest generator. Then the question
becomes when an application comes forward how much of that
commercial, if any, moves into the Lark District? So then
that would have to be looked at to make sure that the
analysis that was done in the TIA is still adequate from a
distribution standpoint.
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The other thing you need to look at with relation
to the Phase 1 application itself is, as you stated, it was
such a small amount of commercial in that first phase that
the traffic that was going to be generated by that is far
less than the total build-out of the plan area itself.
I don’t anticipate that being an issue, but those
are things that as we move forward we will be working with
the Town’s Traffic Engineer to make sure that we don’t run
into any challenges.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: That’s makes sense.
Thanks.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: For this question I
personally am not looking at any current application or
development, I’m just looking at whether or not we’re going
to amend the Specific Plan, and I do not believe, as
basically has been stated, that there is any possibility or
feasibility of widening Los Gatos Boulevard, so when I was
going through the seven things that we were supposed to
prepare for tonight, that was the easiest one for me to
come to a conclusion on.
CHAIR HUDES: Just to consider that there’s this
one small item that says consider widening Los Gatos
Boulevard, but traffic was cited by 26% of the 500 comments
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that we got, and it’s a significant issue, so I’m just
going to ask the question: If it’s not feasible to widen
the Boulevard, is it feasible to consider other traffic
moderating measures within the North 40 itself, such as
reconfiguring the roads? I know that some have been
considered, but is it possible to continue to look at ways
to potentially move traffic in parallel, or, I don't know
the answer, but to look within the plan itself at traffic
flow?
JOEL PAULSON: There are a number of ways that
the internal circulation could be analyzed or looked at.
Ultimately we look at the application and make sure that
that does work from a traffic flow and circulation, both
internally and as it goes out onto Lark and Los Gatos
Boulevard, in this case. It comes back to the same
conversation, that ultimately we’re looking at the
circulation pattern of the Town, and the internal is
important, but no issues were brought up from an
environmental perspective from the traffic analysis that
would necessitate that. Could an applicant propose a
different configuration? Sure, and that would be looked at
to make sure it doesn’t create any additional impacts on
the outward network as well.
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LAUREL PREVETTI: I would just caution that
modifying the plan to address circulation options might not
really yield the kind of benefit that folks might be
looking for, because the analysis really looks more at the
borders of the project area for CEQA purposes, and I think
that while theoretically there might be some different ways
of doing it, it would not make a measurable impact or
change to the CEQA analysis that’s already been completed.
CHAIR HUDES: If I may, just to follow up on
that. There are other considerations in the General Plan
related to this that to me were not addressed very much in
the Specific Plan, and that is Goal VLR-9, which is to
reduce traffic impacts to residential development within
the Vasona Light Rail area by taking advantage of mass
transit opportunities; coupled with Policy VLR-9.5, which
is promote the development of mass transit links between
Los Gatos Boulevard, particularly any development on the
North 40 site and the planned Vasona Light Rail station.
So while not addressing widening the Boulevard,
is it possible to look a little deeper at ways of making it
easier for us to have mass transit incorporated within the
North 40 Specific Plan? Because if I recall, there was very
little in the actual application that we got, and there
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were not a lot of specifics about how to do it in the plan
itself.
JOEL PAULSON: Mass transit is generally
controlled by VTA here, and so the mass transit that does
exist is the bus route on the Boulevard, obviously. I know
there are discussions happening as to whether or not some
or most of the routes throughout town may be modified in
the future; that to my knowledge hasn’t happened yet. I
think some of those other ones with the light rail and
taking advantage of that when that does come, I think those
links inevitably… I would imagine VTA, as it does I think
periodically, will look at routes and ridership, and if the
circumstances change there may be increases. I don't know
that the General Plan policy that you’re referencing to
requires developers to implement mass transit improvements.
CHAIR HUDES: Mayor.
MAYOR SAYOC: Thank you. If I could, Chair, just
take the opportunity to talk about how that specific
General Plan policy links to regional efforts happening,
and as Director Paulson said, VTA is looking at bus lines
and that plays integrally into what we are looking at for
the North 40.
There is discussion about potential loss of bus
lines, specifically 49, on Los Gatos Boulevard, and so
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since we have a captive audience, it’s just one of those
discussion points that we discussed during the North 40
hearing of how do we make sure we as a community are aware
of the regional decisions that are being made that affect
us? That’s a specific example where if you can and are
interested and concerned, that’s a way to help the Town,
because yes, we’re monitoring this, our Public Works
Department as well as Transportation, but the more active a
community we have in saying keep 49, keep whatever line,
that helps us as we figure out these regional
transportation issues.
I do have a question though specific to North 40
in terms of CEQA. I was talking to the chair of the
Transportation and Parking Commission about Samaritan, and
their CEQA analysis makes certain assumptions based on the
North 40 CEQA analysis, the cumulative impacts. If anything
is changed with our North 40 plan, either through the
litigation or just changes we do, in any way does that
trigger any changes for them? Because if they’re assuming
their traffic mitigation, and it’s compounding onto what is
already assumed for ours, would we in any way lose out?
JOEL PAULSON: I don't know if lose out is the
right phrase.
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MAYOR SAYOC: Would we lose any opportunities to
do some combined traffic mitigation on Los Gatos Boulevard?
I guess I should be more specific.
JOEL PAULSON: I think the challenge that we’ve
talked about in a number of hearings is the Traffic Impact
Analysis is really a snapshot in time. We set that
baseline, you use the best the best available information
you can at that time, then you move forward, and then
subsequent projects have to handle that. I think the
potential is that your scenario, and I don’t have the
numbers in front of me, whether they used our reduced
number in their assumption or whether they used the
assumptions that we used in our EIR that were higher on
both the commercial and residential sides, so I’ll look
into that with Director Morley and find that out,
ultimately will get picked up as it moves forward, but I
don’t also imagine we’re going to be looking at
modifications to the Specific Plan that are going to
potentially increase environmental impacts, so I don’t see
that necessarily being a concern in this specific case.
LAUREL PREVETTI: For the Samaritan project, they
have the same nexus requirements as we do, so even though
that is a very large development, its influence and nexus
may not come down quite as far along the Boulevard or even
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south of Samaritan Drive, so it may not even have a nexus
to create meaningful improvements within our own community.
MAYOR SAYOC: I haven’t looked at it in a while,
but if I recall, didn’t they also look at the traffic
coming off of 85 as well as 17? I guess the question is
when they were looking at the 17, was it under the
assumption of our proposed improvements of 17 on Lark, or
was it based on what currently exists there? I’m getting
into the weeds, but as you work with Director Morley, make
sure you’re just on top of the Samaritan project, because I
am concerned about how the two projects are going to work
out in the future.
LAUREL PREVETTI: We’ll take a closer look at
that. Thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Okay, thank you. I’m going to move
on to number 6, which is try to acquire some land for a
park or community pool. Staff’s response on that was that
given the Town’s limited resources for this type of action,
this suggestion does not appear to be feasible. Would
anyone like to comment on that, Staff or anyone else?
Yes, Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. This one for
me was vying with number 5 as to which one was easier for
me to weigh in on. There are Committee Members who thought
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this was a good idea. There are members of the community
who have said in I don't know how many emails—I’m not as
diligent as Mr. Hudes in counting them—that it would be
really good if we just take that property and have a
community pool, or this, that, or the other thing, and
that’s not realistic. It’s not realistic because the Town
doesn’t have the resources to purchase the property, which
is what the Staff Report says, and no one else is coming
forward to buy that property and put in a big pool. So that
one was an easy one for me to just go by.
CHAIR HUDES: Any other comments on the pool?
Okay.
Number 7 is a procedural one, consider making the
Town Council the deciding body for applications, so I would
really like to hear from other members, being that I have a
little bit of a bias on this one.
Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. I actually
had a question of Staff, because in reviewing Appendix E it
showed which items go to which body, and some items do go
to the Planning Commission, one item does go the Council,
and so I don’t recall what the Council was asking on this.
It seems to me that unless something is what I would call
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solely technical, it does go to the Planning Commission or
Council, so help me out there.
JOEL PAULSON: That’s correct; your reading of
that is correct. The only two things that are currently
required by either the Specific Plan and/or the code are if
someone applies for a Vesting Tentative Map. That must come
before Council pursuant to our Town Code, and if someone
applies for a Specific Plan amendment, that must come
before Town Council. Otherwise, absent a Vesting Tentative
Map for the Phase 1, the Planning Commission would have
been the ultimate deciding body.
I think there were some comments, and I don't
remember if it was during Council discussion or from
members of the public, of maybe the Council should be
looking at Architecture and Site applications, for
instance, for news structures, so that’s why we brought
that one forward.
CHAIR HUDES: Clarifying question. In the case of
the application that fell under the original Specific Plan,
the final deciding body was the Planning Commission for
Architecture and Site, and then it was appealed?
JOEL PAULSON: Because it had a Vesting Tentative
Map, it had to go the Council.
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CHAIR HUDES: Right, I see. So anything that
would have a Vesting Tentative Map would have to go to the
Council?
JOEL PAULSON: Correct.
CHAIR HUDES: Other thoughts on this one? Yes,
Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. If we assume,
because a Vesting Tentative Map is a process that an
Applicant may or may not use, if there were not a Vesting
Tentative Map, and using Appendix E as an example, the only
thing that would come to the Council is a Specific Plan
amendment. All other A&S type reviews would be done at the
Planning Commission. So it would be if this group wanted to
make an amendment and have more things go to the Council,
which apparently some of us may have thought that we
should, we would have to suggest a change to this appendix?
JOEL PAULSON: Correct.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: All right, thank you.
CHAIR HUDES: Other thoughts? Yes, Mr. Barnett.
COMMITTEE MEMBER BARNETT: I’ll just state my
personal preference that the items that are not required to
go to Council go first to the Planning Commission to give
the public more of an airing time, and also the right of
appeal should be recognized.
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CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: Given the importance of
the North 40, even though normally the process of the Town
would be to do Architecture and Site at the Planning
Commission with appeal rights to Town Council, I wondered
if we wouldn’t want to move the Architecture and Site to
the ultimate deciding body, being the Town Council? There’s
always the process of the appeal, but it just seems like
given the importance, how much it matters to the residents,
and all the complexity of issues, that having an additional
higher layer to be the ultimate deciding body might be the
right thing for this property.
CHAIR HUDES: Just kind of betraying my own bias
when I read this. What’s the purpose of the Planning
Commission hearing if they’re not the deciding body, and
will the applicant take the recommendation process
seriously? I think one of the things that we learned from
the previous application was that there was not very much
sort of give and take once the application went in; it
really didn’t change at all from the time it went in till
it was voted on.
My own bias just from my short time on the
Planning Commission is that the Planning Commission is
equipped to take a first pass and ask that some things be
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modified, and actually ask for rescheduling the item, and
give and take that would probably be bypassed if they were
only a recommending body, so just my own opinion.
Yes, Mayor.
MAYOR SAYOC: Actually, Chair Hudes, you said
what I was about to say. Having sat as a Planning
Commissioner for eight years, I do think having the
deciding body be the Planning Commission in my opinion
makes the applicants more willing to be deliberative in the
dialogue that’s actually happening at the Planning
Commission versus seeing it as just a stop along the way,
so I would support keeping it at the Planning Commission
level, knowing that there are appeal rights and someone is
able to utilize those appeal rights.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Erekson.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: This is something that I
don’t see as broken for all the reasons that were said, and
one of the reasons I don’t see this as being broken is
because there are multiple landowners and there are some
small parcels, so if there was a really small parcel that
was coming up for application I don’t see the reason for it
prescriptively or mandatorily going to the Town Council.
If we knew today that there were a single
landowner for all 44 acres, and that none of it was
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developed, including the existing medical buildings, the
gas station, and so forth, and that it were going to be,
for this town, massive for Los Gatos, then I might rethink
whether or not it should go directly to the Council.
But given that it’s more likely to be developed,
and the likelihood of it all being developed at one time
and all being owned by one party at one time doesn’t seem
to me… It seems to me it would place an undue burden on the
Council to deal with Architecture and Site applications
that they would prefer to vest in the Planning Commission,
so it doesn’t seem to me that it’s broken from what we know
today.
CHAIR HUDES: If there are no more comments on
that one, which will obviously be decided by the Council,
so we’ll find out the answer to that in a few months, I’d
like to move to discussion of any open items from our
previous meeting on October 27th. I had a couple, and I’m
sure others do, and then we’ll move to any new suggestions
from GPC members or the public.
Starting with Staff was kind enough to prepare an
analysis of Conditional Use Permit requirements, and in the
report helped us with a list. First of all, let me read
what the original suggestion was, that the CUP requirements
should be the same as downtown. We considered this last
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time but we didn’t have adequate information in front of
us. Part of the discussion last time was about businesses
that are substantially competitive with downtown or other
districts that require a CUP, and so maybe Staff would like
to give us a summary of how CUPs are used elsewhere in the
Town so we can understand what might apply in the North 40
if we were to consider that.
JOEL PAULSON: Given the Council’s suggestion,
what we tried to do was pull out the uses that currently
require a Specific Plan either in the downtown and/or other
commercial areas in town that are permitted uses in the
Specific Plan, so that’s that list that included both the
initial memorandum as well as the addendum that has which
zones currently require Conditional Use Permits.
The other thing we tried to do is in the table
itself, the attachment, highlight uses that ultimately,
through either a permitted use and/or Conditional Use
Permit, aren’t accounted for in the Specific Plan. We’ve
heard from at least a couple of people about one specific
type of use relating to continuing care or those types of
uses which are in our Conditional Use Permit and do require
Conditional Use Permits, but aren’t permitted anywhere in
the Specific Plan.
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So that’s the categories. I don't know if you
want to walk through each one, or if members of the General
Plan Committee want to give their list of which—some, all,
none—of these should comply where appropriate, where
downtown requires a CUP, and whether or not the Specific
Plan should be modified to match that as well.
CHAIR HUDES: I think that might be useful for us
to scan this list. The table of 90 uses throughout the Town
I think was daunting, and so it was helpful to see the 13
that are uses that are in the current North 40 Specific
Plan where CUPs are required for that same activity in
other areas, I believe. I formed my own opinion about some
of those. Maybe the Committee would like to weigh in on
which of those…
In light of the background of the discussion was
the level playing field discussion and the concern that we
really wanted to encourage economic vitality across the
whole town, and in order to do that and raise the overall
economic vitality the Town and create synergies with the
North 40 that it might make sense to have a more level
playing field, and understanding that CUPs could disappear
elsewhere as other actions, but that’s not the purview of
this Committee, so what we suggested was let’s focus on
those that exist today elsewhere and see whether some of
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those might be needed in the North 40, or a good idea in
the North 40, since that same activity requires it in other
areas.
Any reactions to this list of 13 about which ones
sort of fall into that category of addressing the overall
economic vitality of the Town?
Commissioner Erekson.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: I have a question of the
Chair that would help me before I can answer that question.
You use the term “level playing field,” creating a level
playing field, and I’m trying to understand what you mean
by that phrase. Does that mean that the use of CUPs in all
parts of the Town should be identical, or what does level
playing field mean in this case if that’s the objective?
CHAIR HUDES: I’ve used that terminology myself,
but the Council has also used it, and I know some of the
Committee Members on our Committee have used it, also
Council Member Jensen I believe used that terminology as
well to talk about the economic vitality of the Town. I can
answer from my perspective, and maybe others would like to
as well.
My sense is that we have a very unique and
somewhat fragile resource in our downtown, and that it is
really the heart of the Town, and that we need to think
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about how to create synergies with that rather than to put
up barriers to the downtown being successful, and so my
sense in looking at that was that there are certain things
that are very tightly regulated in the downtown that are in
fact active in the downtown. Some of them are regulated but
not very active that fall into that category of things that
we ought to look at, giving the downtown a chance to thrive
by now allowing just anything goes in the North 40; I don't
know if that’s helpful.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: I have a reaction to that.
To me, level playing field means some version of equal
treatment, or equal treatment across the… I don’t know how
to put any other meaning to the term level playing field.
I would agree with something that you said, and
that is that we have a precious resource in the downtown
area that needs to be protected; maybe that’s not exactly
the right word, but I can’t think of a better word. That
would suggest in and of itself to me that we shouldn’t
apply a level playing field across all commercial areas in
town by treating them equally. That would suggest to me
that in fact one would want to be very clear about what
sort of practices achieve what one wants to achieve in
different commercial areas of the Town that are playing
different roles in the overall economic development of the
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Town. That’s what causes me to pause when using the term
level playing field when I think most people would
interpret that as consistent a treatment across the Town,
so that’s what concerned me about the phrase.
CHAIR HUDES: Maybe I can just respond quickly.
It’s not our purview to look at the entire playing field;
we’re only looking at the North 40 part of it. That, to me,
is where we should think about creating an ability to have
a thriving North 40 and a thriving downtown, and I know
there are others who would think about this from the other
side. I think we have to think about it in terms of the
North 40 side of the equation.
Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I had a couple thoughts.
The first one is the discussion we had about all these
other developments that are happening that are going to be
close to there, Samaritan, Dell, and so when you think
about level playing field, if we spend all our focus on
making a level playing field between the North 40 and
downtown, are we ignoring the global problem, which is is
Los Gatos on a level playing field with the surrounding
communities that are also building and will be competing
for our business?
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So having thought about that, and then given that
we can only change the North 40, it just seemed like we
would be putting the North 40’s arm behind its back to
compete by throwing out additional CUPs that weren’t a
revision in the Specific Plan. To me the other approach
would be to look at what we could do to make it easier for
downtown to be competing with… We don’t want them to
compete with the North 40, with other communities outside,
to bring in business. I mean that seemed like more the
right answer.
The second thing that I wanted to bring up is I
thought Mayor Sayoc brought up a great point at our last
meeting about some of the thriving neighborhoods, and I
thought about the Downing Center, for example, and I was
kind of looking at the businesses that are in the Downing
Center and wondering is it possible for either downtown or
the North 40 to be able to put in more of those kinds of
businesses? One of them that came to mind that’s gotten
very popular, and we’ve seen this at Planning Commission,
are these…they’re not health clubs, but these exercise
places: Orangetheory Fitness; I think the Downing Center
has Cyclebar; we had SoulCycle downtown. These are the new
retail. This is what people are doing instead of shopping;
they’re going to Cyclebar or whatever. So I had a question
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for Staff. I didn’t know what category they would fit under
in the list of permitted uses in the North 40 or the
downtown.
JOEL PAULSON: Those are generally categorized as
group fitness classes, and they do require a Conditional
Use Permit both downtown and outside downtown. I’m just
looking through here to see if that one carried forward.
I’ll look through my notes; that might be one of the ones
that are highlighted, because generally we don’t have a
specific category for them. You could potentially put them
in a health club scenario, but that’s generally more of a
larger sense of a health club. The category we typically
put them in is the art/dance/music classes, school, and so
they require a Conditional Use Permit, but I’ll look and
see if that’s one of the highlighted topics of the
attachment.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I know it also came up in
terms of a parking issue as well, because we were applying
general retail standards to these fitness places. That’s a
whole other discussion.
But getting back to overlying point, I know that
we’ve had many people testimony that we can’t let the North
40 hurt downtown, but I am really concerned about this more
global issue about are we going to be hampering ourselves
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relative to the surrounding communities? I think we have to
consider that.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Erekson.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: Another question that I
have that isn’t clear to me at least, to help me understand
how we should proceed in this way. I went back and looked
at and tried to understand what guidance we’re providing to
someone who would develop this property about the
commercial property, and at least it wasn’t clear to me if
we intended for it to be neighborhood-serving or regional
serving, or what it was supposed to be clearly serving. It
felt like to me that it was a smorgasbord without sharp
focus, and if that’s what the intent is, that’s the intent.
That, however, potentially has the consequence of
allowing the developers to decide more than maybe the Town
wants it to decide on what the focus of that commercial
development is. So if we want to give more shape to it, and
therefore more guidance, we might need to make it less of a
smorgasbord and have the menu be a little more limited than
it is now.
Obviously, if we talk about something like the
Downing Center, the Downing Center is very clearly in its
approach a neighborhood-serving shopping center. Their
strategy is very clear and they execute it. You will never
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find a hotel being built there. But we talk about this
being neighborhood-serving, and then we permit a hotel to
be built there. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but
those are really two different needs being served that may
or may not be compatible with each other. It’s the extreme
example of the smorgasbord.
I think that’s an important question ultimately
to answer. Do we want to have the smorgasbord? And we gave
it some definition. I’m not saying that we just said
develop anything that’s commercial, but the plan, those of
us that were involved, there was a lot of give and take,
and lot of compromise, and language and those kind of
things, and I worry about is it sharp enough and
intentional enough if we want to be more intentional?
CHAIR HUDES: Maybe I can comment on that a
little bit, because I did make some remarks on that last
time when we talked about the broader retail. One of the
suggestions that I had was to change the language regarding
retail and restaurants, not hotels, throughout to be
primarily or principally neighborhood- or resident-serving,
and for the folks down the line to debate that idea,
because that would then say it’s important for us to use
that as a filter rather the way it’s currently worded, that
it should be neighborhood-serving; it doesn’t say that that
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should be the main focus of the retail. That’s one way to
address that.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: I have a reaction to that.
If I were thinking about developing the property and the
primary focus was going to be neighborhood-serving, and I
were thinking about building a hotel there, I probably
wouldn’t, because I need other stuff, other access to other
kind of retail to support the people that are coming to
stay in my hotel that are a different need than serving
residents in the immediate neighborhood.
So again, if I do primarily residential, if my
direction is primarily residential neighborhood-serving,
but I leave a hotel there, I still have the same problem
that I was talking about a minute ago; I have incompatible
uses. So if we want a hotel there, and we want some of the
benefit of a hotel—meeting space and conference space has
been a benefit of a hotel that’s been discussed at our last
meeting and earlier— I think we probably need to think
carefully about saying we want it to be neighborhood-
serving and we want you to build us a hotel, because my
guess is Marriott will check the box no for Courtyard, and
anybody else would check the box no, so I think we have to
be very careful about the mix and the direction of
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commercial, because there’s no purpose in putting in
commercial direction that will never be realized.
CHAIR HUDES: Mayor Sayoc.
MAYOR SAYOC: Actually, Commissioner Erekson, you
bring up a very good point. I’m going to bring up two
points to complement that.
One, when we began this process of the Specific
Plan many years ago, I think the economic conditions
continue to change, and so the concepts that we were
discussing eight years ago are much different than the
concepts now.
But one thing that has been consistent among
those that are looking at the commercial is the idea of a
hotel and a conference center, and even last time we met as
a group that was an area that we all seemed to have
consensus on, but I guess I never really connected the
neighborhood-serving with the hotel and how that would
actually look.
One other interesting point that I’m trying to
layer into this discussion is we talk about the lack of
hotel spaces, but having talked with several people that
work at Netflix about where do they house their many
employees that come in when they’re at company
headquarters, the lack of hotel, but also the lack of
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amenities close to Netflix. Would that be neighborhood-
serving? I mean, how do we define it? Netflix and their
employees, would that be a neighborhood as well?
As we’re discussing this, to me I’m having more
questions now versus clarifying answers, and I’d be
interested to hear what others have to say, because we’ve
always talked on neighborhood-serving, but which
neighborhood are we in fact trying to serve is one question
I keep grappling with.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I wasn’t on the original
North 40 Committee, but if you look at the plan it seems
that the direction that was given is that any retail in the
southern part of the North 40 was going to be more
neighborhood-serving, and then as you moved into the
Northern District, that would be more regional-serving. I
don’t think that’s a bad strategy, and that’s where we
would envision the hotel to be, and I think if you look at
the permitted uses, the formula retail and whatnot would be
there, and then you’re kind of getting down a layer, like
restaurants and personal service and stuff, those are
permitted there, but are they going to be regional- or
neighborhood-serving, as you said, if people from Netflix
come to visit.
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But I don’t think the direction we have in there
is bad now, that’s kind of the direction that we gave in
the original plan, because we do have conflicting needs. I
have a need to take care of people outside of the North 40
in terms of hotel space and amenities that are related, and
then we also have the need for the residents that are in
the North 40, so I think we have to accommodate both.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. Well, you’ve
all brought up a lot of issues. They’re not necessarily
linear in their analysis, but first of all I’m going to
start with Staff.
This new list you gave us with the 13 items, much
easier to deal with than that huge list. In my mind, I was
familiar with these uses and where they needed a CUP, but
after seeing your list, I was not. I did not realize that
we had the downtown, and C-1 and the CH, and the LM and the
CM, that all had CUPs pretty much for all of the uses, with
the exception of the personal service, which was downtown
only. So that was a new, good, interesting piece of
information for me.
Secondly, we have to keep in mind what the CUPs
are used for, and they’re used for balancing. We talk about
other communities, and I hope our neighboring communities
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aren’t listening to me tonight, because when one looks at
balancing one looks at Saratoga, which became all
predominantly restaurants and it really hurt their
downtown. We may have another community more recently,
Campbell, that again went restaurants at night and is
hurting its retail and it is now working on that issue.
The reason Los Gatos has CUPs, the reason other
communities have CUPs, is so you can balance these uses, so
you don’t have a downtown that has only personal service,
because for some locations, including Los Gatos, that could
become a big use, or you could have CUPs so you can balance
the uses of restaurants with or without liquor, because if
you don’t have that balancing, it could become an
overwhelming use.
I find CUPs to be a good tool for balancing that
has served our community well, and like I said, I didn’t
realize how much of the Town we were using it in. I would
be inclined with at least some of this list to include CUPs
on the North 40.
With regard to what sector we are trying to
address on the North 40, and I’ve been working on this so
long that I don't remember if what I remember was something
that was kept in the plan or jettisoned, but my sense was
that we wanted neighborhood-serving retail services,
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restaurants, being for the people who lived on the North 40
and also the people who were in the north part of the Town.
I specifically remember input from people who live on Lark
or immediately south of Lark who felt as though they didn’t
have anywhere to go and they were really looking forward to
the North 40, so I saw those two locations being served.
As far as the further north where we were talking
about the other part of our commercial or retail that
wasn’t being addressed for the entire town, that get’s back
to our general merchandise, what we have in the past called
the “small targets.”
With regard to the hotel, yes, what does the
hotel need? I am not convinced that we’re going to get a
hotel, although there are a lot of parts of the hotel that
I would like, but I’m not sure we’re going to get it, and
if the hotel is there, it seems to me that they will have
within their hotel a lot of the uses that they need, and
then what else are they going to need? They’re probably
going to want restaurants, restaurants with bars,
restaurants without bars, and I think that that will be
included just by virtue of serving the North 40 and the
folks who live in the northern part of our town.
CHAIR HUDES: Maybe I could comment as well. My
concern, and why I would strongly oppose language about it
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being regional-serving is that that opens us up to a
Santana Row or a shopping mall that I think would be very
destructive of the downtown and wouldn’t create synergies,
but would actually diminish our downtown. I think we’ve
seen that in San Jose; we’ve seen other shifts in Saratoga
and Campbell, and I think Los Gatos has a remaining vibrant
downtown that is fragile. We’ve heard from numerous
business owners about their concerns about having that type
of a shopping center in the Town, and so while I’m
supportive of the Town doing well versus surrounding
communities, one of the ways that I think we do well versus
surrounding communities is we have this fantastic downtown.
So that’s why I am in favor of language that
makes… And I actually took the language “resident-serving”
I believe from Commissioner Erekson from the last meeting.
Maybe that’s better to replace the word “neighborhood-
serving,” to use that as a filter about whether this is
going to be something that helps us overall.
I’m in agreement with Council Member Spector, I
think there are some cases for CUPs in the North 40, not
all of them, but some of them, and it’s the ones that I
think are directly linked to some of the unique,
independent, creative, dynamic establishments that we have
in our downtown, and that would include formula retail, the
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market hall specialty market, the restaurant, personal
service, maybe the hotel, and the botanical nursery. Some
of the others, like financial institutions, or
supermarkets, or drugstores, or public buildings, I don’t
think are as important to consider.
I know we may not all come out on the same page
with this one, but I did want to weigh in that I think we
really need to be careful, because one of the things that
makes us so vibrant and such an attractive town is the
downtown, and let’s think about ways of having some
synergies rather than put some things in place that really
start to see a destruction of our downtown.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. Interesting.
I went through this list of 13 and I personally marked four
that I thought the Town would benefit with the CUP, and it
was formula retail, market hall, restaurant, and personal
service. I just stopped at that. I know that Mr. Hudes just
mentioned hotel, but I actually just stopped at those four.
CHAIR HUDES: Mayor Sayoc.
MAYOR SAYOC: Thank you. I think I just want to
echo what you said about being careful. I think what we’re
learning through the various economic discussions we’re
having is I think quite similar to what everyone is saying
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here today, that what we don’t want to do is create
unintended consequences, and how do you develop policy that
actually is implemented in the way that you are hoping to
do so?
As you mentioned the downtown being fragile, the
key point that I think we all have consensus on is how do
we be careful in moving forward so that we don’t cause any
downshift to downtown and our other neighborhood centers?
Because I think, as we’ve seen, it does create some
excitement within the neighborhoods. Downing Center, we
talked about that earlier, just the residents around there
and how much that has enhanced their quality of life, and
so moving forward, how do we create some policies that in
no way creates a negative impact to any of our economic
centers?
CHAIR HUDES: Other comments on this? It sounds
like we don’t have consensus or unanimity on this, but I do
think we have some diverse perspectives that need to be
passed on to the next groups that consider it. There were a
couple of other ideas that were considered during the
original North 40 Specific Plan deliberations.
One of them was the inclusion of a business type
or a square footage table, and I know we discussed that
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previously; that was felt that that might be one way to be
careful.
Another way that was considered was an advisory
committee, an ongoing advisory group, that looked at what
was happening there and made recommendations about whether
adjustments were necessary to zoning as we started to see
things unfold and looked at the impact as well, and I
believe those are things that might again be considered if
we’re concerned about this issue.
The other open item that I had, which was not in
the Staff Report but I just wanted to cover it quickly and
then we can move on to other suggestions—we’ll take a break
after this last one that I have—is options for distributing
13.5 acres of twenty dwelling units per acre across the
site. I sort of took some notes from last time that we had
several options.
One was to leave it open, but distribute all
housing over various districts. Another option was to
rezone, specifying the location of housing in each
district. Another option was to allocate a portion of the
13.5 to each district, meaning an actual number value. The
last option is to leave all of the above to the next body
that considers it, not to go any further than the options.
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Do Committee Members have any opinions on this,
because this was a little bit open after our last
discussion?
Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: After having sat through
all of the deliberations this summer and the discussions we
had recently, it seemed to me like a pretty simplistic way
to do it would be… Part of the problem is we left it too
open in the Specific Plan, so coming up with a percentage
that is applicable to each district seemed… Or maybe
arrange 20-30%, or 30-40%, might be the right approach, and
that way it would leave some flexibility, but it would give
more guidance than what we have in the plan as it stands
today.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. On that issue
I was anticipating that we would get some guidance from our
Town Attorney, because I understand this issue to be in
part governed by numbers, i.e. you want X number of homes,
or you want to try to do that under RHNA, et cetera, but
also there would be a way that we might be able to do that,
and I don't know if Mr. Schultz can speak to it or not, but
that’s what I was thinking where we would go.
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ROBERT SCHULTZ: The issue I think is if you’re
talking about what the density bonus was, you remember we
backed that number out to get to the 270, so that’s the
number really you’re working at, and knowing that any
project may or may not have that density bonus is how we
got to the full number of 360. So really how you want to
try to spread them out is what basis do you want to use?
I think the Chair mentioned the different ways to
do that. Maybe you don’t want to specifically say yet or
put a recommendation, but just say yes they do need to be
spread out to make that formula work later, and there could
be a range. I mean you could easily say one-third, one-
third, and one-third, or it’s one-fourth to a half and
each, and then you wouldn’t have that issue that we do have
if someone came in the beginning and put half up on the
first phase, and then you don’t have any left for the
second; I think that was part of the issue that came up
before if you do give a range.
There are all these different components you’re
working for, but I think the number you’re working with is
the 270, and the density bonus will happen by state law;
you really don’t have control over it.
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CHAIR HUDES: No other opinions on that one, then
obviously this will move forward with at least those three
options, and I’m sure people will come up with more.
I am going to ask the Committee whether they’d
like to take a break. We have one more item, which is other
suggestions from GPC members or the public. I only have a
couple. I just want to get some sense about whether we want
to take a break now and then get back to it. Okay, so let’s
take a ten-minute break and start again at 8:10pm.
(INTERMISSION)
CHAIR HUDES: Let’s get started again, because
we’d like to try to conclude our work tonight, so if I
could have people take their seats, that would be great.
We’ll take the last item that we have, which is
other suggestions from GPC members or the public, things
we’ve heard tonight or during the process. I’ve been
incorporating a lot of those along the way, so maybe I
could just get a quick sense. Do people have a few of
those? Yes, okay.
Commissioner Hanssen, it sounds like you’re ready
to go.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I think Ms. Quintana had
this in her letter, and I had been thinking the same thing,
I think that we need to add some language about
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consistency. Generally speaking there is language about
being consistent with the General Plan and the Housing
Element, but we don’t have any of the Housing Element
policies referenced in the Specific Plan.
I don't know that it changes anything, but
probably the biggest issue that I see is the way that the
Specific Plan is set up right now. We discussed this in our
last meeting. You had the 270 units cap, which works out to
exactly 13.5 times 20, and so basically when you consider
those two things—and I’ll leave aside the density bonus—you
can’t have any other housing besides that which is zoned at
20 units per acre in the North 40 at all.
I don't know if that was the intended
consequence, and if that is what we intended, then it makes
it really hard to do housing in the Northern District
because above retail we found out in our testimony trying
to make 20 dwelling units on top of retail is very hard
unless those units are really small, which might be fine,
but I think that at a minimum we ought to take applicable
policies of the Housing Element. There’s a lot of
discussion in the Housing Element about unmet needs and
that kind of thing and we ought to have some of that in the
Specific Plan to tie it together, especially since the
Housing Element and the Specific Plan have probably the
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most issues we’re trying to stay together from a legal
perspective.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. The only
thing I would say, and I think it’s akin to what she was
saying, is I’m going to accept for the basis of this
statement that the housing has to be on 13.5 acres and it
has to have X number of units per acre, and in order to do
that you can’t have certain types of housing. So with that
assumption, I’m going to agree with her so that one could,
for example, have cottage clusters.
CHAIR HUDES: Other comments on consistency? Yes,
Mayor.
MAYOR SAYOC: If I could see if we could get
further clarification then. I’d actually like to remove the
CUP requirement for cottage clusters, and one thing I would
like Staff to look at as we look at the 20 units per
density, is if, let’s say, one acre was 25, could we do
cottage clusters on an adjacent, and would that still meet
the density rules so that we can have the different housing
types but still meet the legal requirements?
JOEL PAULSON: That’s potentially possible, yes.
MAYOR SAYOC: Okay, so I’d like that explored
further to the next point.
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CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: I’m going to go beyond
explore it. I’d like that in. There are two of us.
CHAIR HUDES: I would agree with that. I think
actually we did make that desire known earlier about the
cottage clusters, and I agreed with that and agree with it
again.
In terms of the issue of consistency, maybe Staff
can talk about this a little bit, because do we need to
duplicate the language between these three documents, or do
we need to reference them better, or are there areas that
have to get cleaned up in these documents, in your opinion?
JOEL PAULSON: I think there may be scenarios of
all of the above, so we will take a look at that. There may
be some elements where we want to reference other
documents. I’m not sure that it’s the best practice to just
duplicate the information in all the documents across, I’m
not sure that that’s going to be necessary, but we’ll take
a look at that and see where we can try to get a little bit
more clarity as far as acknowledgment of these other
documents so people know they exist, and then they have
links or some other mechanism to get to those documents.
CHAIR HUDES: I would agree with that, because I
think that the public in reading one document was maybe not
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aware of some of the constraints that existed in other
documents that were also governing, so it would be really
helpful to straighten that out as well; I think it’s a
great suggestion.
Other ideas? Okay, there was another one that
came in in a letter and I just wanted to bring it to
people’s attention. This was an additional use potentially
for assisted living and memory care; I believe there was a
letter from Mr. Javanbakht either in the original report or
in the addendum, and that triggered a question for Staff in
my mind. If we were to think about assisted living and
memory care, or senior services, how does that relate to
the letter that we received from the developer saying that
there were certain things we could not do in terms of
designating senior development?
JOEL PAULSON: Right now it’s not permitted
anywhere in the Specific Plan, so it’s allowing for that
opportunity, whether that’s through a permitted use or a
Conditional Use Permit requirement, so it’s adding that
type of use or those types of uses to the permitted use
table in the Specific Plan; I think that was the request.
CHAIR HUDES: So Committee Member’s opinions
about including something like assisted living and memory
care?
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Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I was glad you brought
that up, because I actually thought the same thing when I
read that letter, and I thought the right answer was to
make it a permitted use, especially given that a third of
our population in the Housing Element planning process is
going to be a senior, not that it will get built, but at
least to make it a permitted use made a lot of sense.
LAUREL PREVETTI: Mr. Chair, if I may? Last time
when we met we did talk about adding that as an allowable
use, but as I recall at least, the interest was to require
a CUP, so allow it as being permissible but have the CUP so
you could still do the balancing of the uses.
CHAIR HUDES: I see a lot of nodding heads on
that. Yes, okay.
There was discussion last time about senior
living and ground floor and other things, and this actually
came up in the Council deliberations on the application and
some suggestions that were made there. Yes, there was some
language in the letter from the Applicant about things we
could not do. Were there any other thoughts or things that
you wanted to share with us about opportunities for senior
living in locations across the plan?
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ROBERT SCHULTZ: It’s permitted, the senior
housing, and I think what the letter was saying, which we
don’t disagree with, is you can’t make it mandatory that
there be senior housing. It has to be voluntary by whoever
the developer/applicant is. It would still be a permitted
use, but certainly we could put other requirements on that
if in fact senior housing comes forward, and I think that
was some of the things that have been brought up in that
senior housing that is vertical as opposed to on the ground
floor, that might be some of the issues we can look at if
you want, but more requirements on your senior housing, if
in fact it does come forward.
CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I actually had a related
question. I think you said yes, but I actually wrote as I
was reading through… I understand clearly that you can’t
restrict housing to seniors except the particular case of
the Eden Housing development; that was not the case, that
it qualified as a…they were able to age restrict that, if
that actually ends up happening.
But it did seem to me that there is no reason we
can’t specify that the type of housing has to have the
parameters that could be appropriate for seniors without
even using the word seniors. Like there needs to be so many
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single-story units, or so many single-story access units
with elevator or whatever. So my question is can we do that
and not be accused of discrimination?
ROBERT SCHULTZ: Yes, you can do that. The issue
becomes though if you’re really, truly trying to obtain
senior housing, will you be able to obtain it if in fact
there are too many requirements that are put on that type
of use? You heard Eden talk about their prototype is
straight up and down, and we’ve talked about hotels and
what are the height limits they need, so if you begin to
say yes, we want a hotel but it can only be 30’, you won’t
get a hotel. If you say you want senior housing but it
always has to be on the ground floor, chances are you won’t
get senior housing then, so it depends on what type of uses
you’re really trying to attract to this area.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: It seemed to me that it
might be worth a little bit of extra effort to try to ask
some of our seniors. I’m not forgetting millennials, but
I’m just bringing up seniors for the moment, that we could
ask them what would they want in move-down housing? Or what
would be the minimum requirements for move-down housing?
And just make sure that we have a certain number of units,
it’s built to have at least that minimum set of features.
That was my idea.
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CHAIR HUDES: Mayor Sayoc.
MAYOR SAYOC: And also, I think with the single-
story unit we could emphasize that although many of our
seniors are move-down housers that would be utilizing it,
we still have a population that can utilize it. We have
people who may not be able to walk a flight of stairs, and
so I don’t think it’s necessarily designing it for a
certain age group, but just for a population that may or
may not be able to utilize stairs I think is something that
we should start looking at.
CHAIR HUDES: Mr. Barnett.
COMMITTEE MEMBER BARNETT: If I recall correctly,
Staff said although the senior housing could not be
compelled, that it could be incentivized, and I was
wondering if you could give me some examples of the type of
incentives that we could consider and whether they might go
into the Specific Plan.
ROBERT SCHULTZ: Parking, height, setbacks, those
types, usually what we’re looking for when we’re looking
for incentives.
CHAIR HUDES: Just to weigh in on that, I think
it was one of the things we heard very clearly as an unmet
need in the Town. There was debate about whether housing at
all was an unmet need, but there was very little debate
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that reasonable options for seniors for move-down and other
considerations for seniors was a strong unmet need, so I
would hope we could do a little more in the Specific Plan
to incentivize and to allow that to happen. I do think that
that would be really important, particularly if we’re
looking at distributing housing more than we’ve seen, so I
would weigh in that I would be very supportive of getting
some guidance, and again, talking to seniors would be a
great way to do that, but also there are other resources
that can help us, I think, to think about how we can build
that into the plan; I’d be very supportive of that.
Are there other items that Committee Members
would like to discuss? Commissioner Erekson.
COMMISSIONER EREKSON: If an outcome of the
revision would be to distribute types of housing across all
of the districts, then I think the Staff would need to look
at and carefully consider Section 2.3, which is the
designation of the land use districts, and those
descriptions, which are a fundamental assumption in the
plan that drives a whole lot of the policies and guidance
in the plan, may not be appropriate.
In fact, if a major thrust of redoing the plan is
to accomplish distributing all types of housing that are
allowed across all the districts, then it becomes
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questionable for me whether the idea of having districts at
all is still appropriate, but for sure whether the type of
districts that are described, which are based on some
pretty clear assumptions about where housing is allowed and
what types, it calls into question that which…
So I wonder, if one were conclude then that
concept of districts that then drive a whole bunch of other
assumptions in the plan no longer is appropriate, that will
likely require a nightmare for Joel Paulson and this Staff,
because it would likely require a rewriting of most of the
plan potentially, because the plan is structured around
some assumptions that are captured largely in the concept
of districts.
I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but I’m
just saying it’s something that needs to be looked at
carefully.
CHAIR HUDES: Council Member Spector.
COUNCIL MEMBER SPECTOR: Thank you. I don’t
remember how we wrote all of this, but it could very well
be that the distinctions that we have memorialized in this
document are permissive rather than mandatory, and so
therefore even if we have these proposed changes, it may
not require a massive change in the document. I don't know,
because I don’t remember.
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CHAIR HUDES: Commissioner Hanssen.
COMMISSIONER HANSSEN: I just wanted to do a
sanity check. I thought that when we were discussing
removing the CUP, for example, from cottage cluster, it was
only going to be permitted in the Lark District. That was
where I thought we went with the discussion, and I’m not
saying that any changes wouldn’t end up influencing what’s
written in Section 2.3, but the other point was in the
Northern District I don’t think we had any discussion about
removing the requirement for any residential to be over
commercial. I remember we talked about if we wanted to have
more residential in the Northern District that we might
have to look at increasing the height limitation in order
to get the twenty dwelling units per acre density, and that
obviously needs to be looked at, but clearly we have to
look at the language and make sure we’re not contradicting
the plan, but based on what we’ve discussed so far it
didn’t seem to me that we were going to be violating what
was in Section 2.3.
CHAIR HUDES: Just to weigh in, that was my
recollection as well, that we were looking at some sort of
minor adjustments to where housing might be located across
the site, but that the fundamental idea of the districts
and what they did, in my mind, was a good thing and was
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valuable to carry forward. But we will see when we see the
Staff Reports that come to us for consideration, since we
didn’t tick and tie and vote on everything, but that one I
think we’ll see how that turns out.
Other comments or suggestions from the Committee?
Okay.
I want to thank the Staff in particular for
tremendous work. I know the Community Development Director
and the Town Manager paid really close attention to this.
Where earlier we had a lot of resources and consultants and
whatever, this is now falling very much on the Staff, and I
appreciate all of the work that’s gone into this first
step. I’m looking forward to a report that summarizes the
opinions and consensus of this committee, and ideas that
come out of this committee as this moves forward.
And I want to thank my fellow Committee Members
for putting in the work and the attention to this, but also
putting up with me as I sort of muddled through leading us
through this process, so thank you, and this concludes the
work of the Committee.
General Plan Committee Discussion
Regarding Town Council Suggestions for
Potential Amendments to the Adopted North 40 Specific Plan
The Town Council suggestions for potential amendments to the adopted North 40 Specific
Plan with staff responses follow in italicized font. Staff recommendations for potential
amendments to Specific Plan sections follow in regular font, as a starting point for the
Planning Commission’s consideration.
Residential
1. In the Lark perimeter overlay zone we should set a maximum density of eight units/acre.
This suggestion could be added to Section 2.5.7 on page 2-15 as noted below. Staff is
concerned about the implementation of this suggestion because this will reduce the number
of units available to meet our Housing Element requirement of 13.5 acres at 20 dwelling
units per acre. To address this concern either the Housing Element would have to be
amended or additional changes would need to be made to the Specific Plan to allow an
increase to the current maximum number of residential units (270) equal to the number of
units that are approved at less than 20 dwelling units per acre.
2.5.7 Perimeter Overlay Zone
The following standards apply within the Perimeter Overlay Zone:
a. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Lark Avenue shall be
restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
b. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Los Gatos Boulevard
shall be restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
c. Additional setback requirements are provided in Table 2-5 of this chapter.
d. No building shall be located within 30 feet of a property line adjacent to the
freeway.
e. The maximum density for residential units in the Perimeter Overlay Zone along
Lark Avenue is eight units per acre.
2. Housing units should be spread across all three districts.
A member of the GPC made a recommendation on percentages to address distribution of the
residential units. This suggestion could be added to Section 2.5.1 on page 2-10 as noted
below.
The Planning Commission should discuss whether this is the appropriate approach and
whether these are the right percentages for each district. Another option is adding a new
Land Use Policy to page 2-2 that contains this language.
Suggestions
Page 2
2.5.1 Maximum Development Capacity
A maximum development capacity of 501,000 square feet (sf) has been provided to limit the
overall build-out of the Specific Plan Area and provide an appropriate balance of land uses
that meet the goals and objectives of the Specific Plan.
Table 2-2 defines maximums of 250,000 sf of new office/hotel, 400,000 sf of other new
commercial (includes: restaurants, retail, specialty market, health club, personal services and
entertainment), and 270 residential units.
More restrictive than the Town’s General Plan, the Specific Plan has a maximum capacity of
501,000 sf which includes 435,000 sf of new non-residential square footage and 66,000 sf of
existing commercial uses.
The number of residential units shall not exceed: 40 percent in the Lark District; 30 percent
in the Transition District; and 30 percent in the Northern District.
Additionally, the potential changes below to the Table 2-1 on page 2-7 should be discussed by
the Planning Commission if there is a desire to allow all residential types in all three districts.
Table 2-1 Permitted Land Uses
Lark Transition Northern
Residential
a. Cottage cluster CUP P P
b. Townhomes/
Garden cluster
P P P
c. Rowhouses P P P
d. Multi-family P P P2
e. Condominiums P P P2
f. Live/work lofts P P P2
Note:
1. Medical Office is only permitted on Assessor Parcel Numbers 424-07-102 through -112, 424-07-099, and 424-06-129.
2. Residential only allowed in Northern District when located above commercial.
3. Make sure that you somehow have a vision of how you’re spreading these units to make it
fit with the other uses and fit in the neighborhood idea.
The Town’s Residential Design Guidelines note that existing neighborhoods vary widely,
reflecting the community’s growth over time. For that reason, the intent is to respect the
scale and character of residential neighborhoods, with an emphasis on compatibility. The
Land Use and Development Standards, found in Chapter 2 of the North 40 Specific Plan, set
the parameters of new development to prescribe pedestrian-friendly residential architecture
that is compatible with existing single-family neighborhoods. Language could be added to
Suggestions
Page 3
Section 2.7.3 to reinforce the requirement for more traditional architectural design as noted
below.
2.7.3 Residential Units
The Specific Plan Area should accommodate a mix of residential product types and sizes to
create the character of an authentic neighborhood rather than a typical development project.
The following standards set parameters to guide future residential development that reflects
the traditional character of existing residential architecture. Also refer to the Residential
Design Guidelines in Chapter 3 of this Specific Plan.
Additionally, Tables 2-7 through 2-9 provide images illustrating the massing and character
of the residential product types. These images could be reviewed and modified to reinforce
consistency with the look and feel of Los Gatos.
4. Require smaller, more affordable units.
Language currently exists in section 2.7.3 on page 2-26 that references the Conceptual
Model of Residential Sizes table on page 6-14 in the Definitions section. Modifying this table
as illustrated in Item 5 below would result in smaller units that would generally be more
affordable than the larger units which are currently referenced in the table.
5. Only allow smaller units from 900 to 1,500 square feet.
The GPC recommended that this suggestion be modified to only allow units between 500 and
1,500 square feet. This suggestion could be addressed by changing the table in the Glossary
on page 6-14 as noted below.
Conceptual Model of Residential Sizes Table
Types Net Unit Gross Unit Approx. Percent Approx.
Area Range Area Range Unit Range of Total Range Total Area
Cottage Cluster 1,000 - 1,200 sf 40-50 20-25% 40,000 - 60,000
(Detached Product) 500 - 1,200 20,000 - 60,000
Garden Cluster 1,000 - 1,999 sf 40-50 20-25% 40,000 - 60,000
500 - 1,500 20,000 - 75,000
Townhomes, 1,000 - 1,999 sf 130 - 140 30 - 40% 130,000 - 280,000
Rowhouses 500 - 1,500 65,000 - 210,000
Gross Unit Area
Total 210,000 - 400,000
105,000 - 345,000
Condos/ 1,300 - 2,350 sf 90 - 110 25 - 30% 117,000 - 258,000
Multi-Family 500 - 1,500 45,000 - 165,000
Apartments/ 500 - 750 sf 45 - 55 10 - 15% 22,000 - 42,000
Affordable
Maximum Units Allowed 364
Net Unit Area
Suggestions
Page 4
Total 139,000 - 300,000
77,000 - 207,000
Refer to definitions for Net Unit Area and Gross Unit Area.
Note: 100% is not intended to be achieved by adding the example Percent of Total Range numbers, as it is not
required to use every residential product type listed in the table.
These changes would also necessitate changes to Section 2.7.3 d. on page 2-26 below.
d. New residential shall be a maximum of:
• 400,000 345,000 gross square feet for Cottage Cluster, Garden Cluster,
Townhome and Rowhouse products
• 300,000 207,000 net square feet for Condominium, Multi-Family, Apartments
and Affordable products
• These are maximums, not a goal
6. Reduce the maximum size of some of the units to 1,700 square feet maximum to encourage
less expensive units.
The GPC’s recommendation on item 5 above conflicts with this suggestion because they
recommended a maximum of 1,500 square feet for residential units.
7. Apply the Town’s BMP Ordinance requirements.
This is currently required in Section 2.7.3 c. on page 2-26. Staff does not have any
additional suggestions for additional modifications.
8. Don’t allow residential on Los Gatos Boulevard.
Language could be added to section 2.5.7 on page 2-15 as noted below.
2.5.7 Perimeter Overlay Zone
The following standards apply within the Perimeter Overlay Zone:
a. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Lark Avenue shall be
restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
b. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Los Gatos Boulevard
shall be restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
c. Additional setback requirements are provided in Table 2-5 of this chapter.
d. No building shall be located within 30 feet of a property line adjacent to the
freeway.
e. The maximum density for residential units along Lark Avenue is eight units per acre.
f. Residential is only allowed when located above commercial along Los Gatos Boulevard.
Alternatively, the note in item 11 below could be the only place where this is addressed.
Suggestions
Page 5
9. Provide senior housing at the ground level.
Language could be added to section 2.7.3 on page 2-26 to address this suggestion, below.
2.7.3 Residential Units
The Specific Plan Area should accommodate a mix of residential product types and sizes to
create the character of an authentic neighborhood rather than a typical development project.
The following standards set parameters to guide future residential development. Also refer to
the Residential Design Guidelines in Chapter 3 of this Specific Plan.
a. Residential units shall range in size. Refer to Residential Unit Size Mix in Glossary
(Chapter 6).
b. There shall be a maximum of 270 residential units. This is a maximum, not a goal, and
includes the affordable housing units required and the existing units.
c. Affordable housing (Below Market Price housing) requirements shall be met pursuant to
Town Code.
d. New residential shall be a maximum of: 400,000 gross square feet for Cottage Cluster,
Garden Cluster, Townhome and Rowhouse products, 300,000 net square feet for
Condominium, Multi-Family, Apartments and Affordable products. These are
maximums, not a goal
e. Single family detached units shall be a maximum of 1,200 square feet and be designed as
a cottage cluster product type as defined in Glossary (Chapter 6).
f. If age restricted housing is proposed, at grade accessible units and/or units that are
accessed via elevator, ramps, and lifts are encouraged.
10. Consider the possibility of moving the houses away from Highway 17 and putting
commercial in that area.
This suggestion related to the EIR for the Specific Plan regarding air quality concerns. The
EIR noted that this concern would be addressed by new stricter air quality standards that
have already gone into effect. Section 2.5.7 on page 2-15 could be modified to increase the
buffer size highlighted below and/or prohibit residential uses in that area.
2.5.7 Perimeter Overlay Zone
The following standards apply within the Perimeter Overlay Zone:
a. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Lark Avenue shall be
restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
b. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Los Gatos Boulevard
shall be restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
c. Additional setback requirements are provided in Table 2-5 of this chapter.
Suggestions
Page 6
d. No building shall be located within 30 feet of a property line adjacent to the
freeway.
e. The maximum density for residential units in the Perimeter Overlay Zone along Lark
Avenue is eight units per acre.
f. Residential is only allowed when located above commercial along Los Gatos Boulevard.
11. Remove the Conditional Use Permit (CUP) requirement for cottage clusters.
Table 2-1 on page 2-7 could be modified to address this suggestion as noted below.
Table 2-1 Permitted Land Uses
Lark Transition Northern
Residential 2
a. Cottage
cluster
CUP P P
b. Townhome
s/ Garden
cluster
P P P
c. Rowhouses P P P
d. Multi-
family
P P P2
e. Condomini
ums
P P P2
f. Live/work
lofts
P P P2
Note:
1. Medical Office is only permitted on Assessor Parcel Numbers 424-07-102 through -112, 424-07-099, and 424-06-129.
2. Residential only allowed in Northern District when located above commercial.
2. Residential is only allowed when located above commercial in the Perimeter Overlay Zone along Los Gatos Boulevard.
A change to Section 2.3.1 on page 2-3 would also need to be modified as noted below.
2.3.1 LARK DISTRICT
Cottage cluster housing is generally characterized by detached cottages oriented onto
common greens and will be considered with a Conditional Use Permit.
12. Increase the total number of residential units on the North 40.
If the suggestion in Item 1 above is implemented then the number of units available to meet
our Housing Element requirement of 13.5 acres at 20 dwelling units per acre will be
reduced. To address this concern either the Housing Element would have to be amended or
this suggestion could be implemented to increase the current maximum number of residential
units (270). The EIR for the Specific Plan considered 364 residential units so that is the
Suggestions
Page 7
maximum number of units that could be considered for any potential increase since we are
not doing further environmental review for these potential amendments. Table 2-2 and
section 2.5.1 on page 2-10 could be modified to address this suggestion by providing a
recommendation on an increase to the highlighted numbers below.
2.5.1 Maximum Development Capacity
A maximum development capacity of 501,000 square feet (sf) has been provided to limit the
overall build-out of the Specific Plan Area and provide an appropriate balance of land uses
that meet the goals and objectives of the Specific Plan.
Table 2-2 defines maximums of 250,000 sf of new office/hotel, 400,000 sf of other new
commercial (includes: restaurants, retail, specialty market, health club, personal services and
entertainment), and 270 residential units.
More restrictive than the Town’s General Plan, the Specific Plan has a maximum capacity of
501,000 sf which includes 435,000 sf of new non-residential square footage and 66,000 sf of
existing commercial uses.
The number of residential units shall not exceed: 40 percent in the Lark District; 30 percent
in the Transition District; and 30 percent in the Northern District.
TABLE 2-2 MAXIMUM DEVELOPMENT CAPACITY
LAND USE UNITS Square Feet
RESIDENTIAL 270* Refer to section 2.7.3
OFFICE/HOTEL 250,000
COMMERCIAL
(EXCLUDING OFFICE/
HOTEL)
RESTAURANTS
RETAIL
SPECIALTY MARKET
HEALTH CLUB
PERSONALSERVICE
(BEAUTY SUPPLY, NAIL
SALON, ETC.)
ENTERTAINMENT
400,000
Suggestions
Page 8
Note: The new non-residential portion of the project shall include a mixture of commercial (shopping center),
and/or hotel, and/or stand-alone general office that does not create a significant unavoidable impact as a result
of the development. The total new square footage shall not exceed 435,000 square feet (sf). With the exception
of Assessor Parcel Numbers 424-07-102 through -112, 424-07-099, and 424-06-129, no new Medical Office
will be permitted. If destroyed, the existing buildings on the parcels referenced above are allowed to rebuild in
substantially the same manner as they existed before their destruction. The existing 66,000 sf of recently
constructed buildings on the parcels referenced above is in addition to the 435,000 sf of new non-residential
square footage. Each project shall provide a current traffic analysis demonstrating compliance with this
requirement.
Projects cannot exceed the maximum traffic capacity evaluated in the EIR
*Total number of units, includes existing units and Town required Below Market Price units. Action HOU-1.3
General Plan Density Bonus does not apply to the Specific Plan Area.
13. Is it possible for the Town to allow a developer to have a density bonus if the developer
requests it, but not necessarily have those 13.5 acres in a certain location, i.e., spread
throughout the property?
The distribution suggestions and recommendations outlined in Item 2 above address this
suggestion.
Commercial
1. The CUP requirements should be the same as downtown.
The GPC discussed making modifications regarding the following uses in Table 2-1 on page
2-7 as noted below.
TABLE 2-1 PERMITTED LAND USES
LARK TRANSITION NORTHERN
COMMERCIAL
FORMULA RETAIL P CUP P CUP
MARKET HALL/ P CUP P CUP
SPECIALTY
RETAIL
ESTABLISHMENT SELLING ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES FOR
CONSUMPTION ON PREMISES
IN CONJUNCTION P CUP P CUP P CUP
WITH A
RESTAURANT
RESTAURANT P CUP P CUP P CUP
PERSONAL P CUP P CUP P CUP
SERVICE
Suggestions
Page 9
2. Only allow commercial or mixed-use on Los Gatos Boulevard.
Language has been suggested to be added to section 2.5.7 b. on page 2-15 to address this
suggestion (see Residential, Item 8, above)
3. Explore commercial uses in the Lark District.
Table 2-1 on page 2-7 could be modified to address this suggestion.
TABLE 2-1 PERMITTED LAND USES
LARK TRANSITION NORTHERN
COMMERCIAL
FORMULA RETAIL CUP P CUP P CUP
MARKET HALL/ CUP P CUP P CUP
SPECIALTY
RETAIL
ESTABLISHMENT SELLING ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES FOR
CONSUMPTION ON PREMISES
IN P CUP P CUP P CUP
CONJUNCTION
WITH A
RESTAURANT
RESTAURANT P CUP P CUP P CUP
PERSONAL P CUP P CUP P CUP
SERVICE
4. Consider maximum square footages for commercial uses instead of CUPs.
This could be done in a number of ways. A GPC member offered a couple of way to address
this which included, but wasn’t limited to, including a distribution matrix with ranges,
recommending a maximum number of tenant spaces, and a maximum number of square feet
or number of tenants based on use type. Table 2-2 on page 2-10 (see Item 5 for existing
Table 2-2) could be modified to address this suggestion. Additionally, staff will provide the
Planning Commission a table, which was not included in the Specific Plan, as a starting
point for discussion.
A member of the GPC also made a recommendation on percentages to address distribution
of commercial square footage. This suggestion could be added to Section 2.5.1 on page 2-10
as noted below.
Suggestions
Page 10
2.5.1 Maximum Development Capacity
A maximum development capacity of 501,000 square feet (sf) has been provided to limit the
overall build-out of the Specific Plan Area and provide an appropriate balance of land uses
that meet the goals and objectives of the Specific Plan.
Table 2-2 defines maximums of 250,000 sf of new office/hotel, 400,000 sf of other new
commercial (includes: restaurants, retail, specialty market, health club, personal services and
entertainment), and 270 residential units.
More restrictive than the Town’s General Plan, the Specific Plan has a maximum capacity of
501,000 sf which includes 435,000 sf of new non-residential square footage and 66,000 sf of
existing commercial uses.
The commercial square footage shall not exceed: 15 percent in the Lark District; 35 percent
in the Transition District; and 50 percent in the Northern District.
The number of residential units shall not exceed: 40 percent in the Lark District; 30 percent
in the Transition District; and 30 percent in the Northern District.
5. Consider a reduction in the amount of commercial square footage.
The GPC discussed separating Office and Hotel into individual categories, increasing the
Office and Hotel maximum square footage, and lowering the maximum square footage for
the general Commercial category. Table 2-2 and section 2.5.1 on page 2-10 could be
modified to address this suggestion as noted below.
TABLE 2-2 MAXIMUM DEVELOPMENT CAPACITY
LAND USE UNITS Square Feet
RESIDENTIAL 270* Refer to section 2.7.3
OFFICE/HOTEL
HOTEL
250150,000
150,000
COMMERCIAL
(EXCLUDING OFFICE/
HOTEL)
RESTAURANTS
RETAIL
SPECIALTY MARKET
HEALTH CLUB
PERSONALSERVICE
(BEAUTY SUPPLY, NAIL
SALON, ETC.)
ENTERTAINMENT
400350,000
Suggestions
Page 11
Note: The new non-residential portion of the project shall include a mixture of commercial
(shopping center), and/or hotel, and/or stand-alone general office that does not create a
significant unavoidable impact as a result of the development. The total new square footage
shall not exceed 435385,000 square feet (sf). With the exception of Assessor Parcel
Numbers 424-07-102 through -112, 424-07-099, and 424-06-129, no new Medical Office
will be permitted. If destroyed, the existing buildings on the parcels referenced above are
allowed to rebuild in substantially the same manner as they existed before their destruction.
The existing 66,000 sf of recently constructed buildings on the parcels referenced above is
in addition to the 435385,000 sf of new non-residential square footage. Each project shall
provide a current traffic analysis demonstrating compliance with this requirement.
Projects cannot exceed the maximum traffic capacity evaluated in the EIR
*Total number of units, includes existing units and Town required Below Market Price
units. Action HOU-1.3 General Plan Density Bonus does not apply to the Specific Plan
Area.
2.5.1 Maximum Development Capacity
A maximum development capacity of 501,000 square feet (sf) has been provided to limit the
overall build-out of the Specific Plan Area and provide an appropriate balance of land uses
that meet the goals and objectives of the Specific Plan.
Table 2-2 defines maximums of 2150,000 sf of new office/hotel, 150,000 sf of new hotel,
and 400350,000 sf of other new commercial (includes: restaurants, retail, specialty market,
health club, personal services, and entertainment), and 270 residential units.
More restrictive than the Town’s General Plan, the Specific Plan has a maximum capacity of
501,000 sf which includes 435,000 sf of new non-residential square footage and 66,000 sf of
existing commercial uses.
The commercial square footage shall not exceed: 15 percent in the Lark District; 35 percent
in the Transition District; and 50 percent in the Northern District.
6. Address the commercial needs that have been previously identified: general merchandise,
building materials, and resident serving businesses defined as serving the north part of Los
Gatos and the North 40.
Existing commercial needs could be specifically identified in the Specific Plan, but these may
change over time. Another option may be to provide more language regarding the types of
uses that are envisioned for the Specific Plan area.
Policy LU4, LU6, and LU11 on page 2-2 and Section 2.6.6 on page 2-24 could be modified
as noted below.
Suggestions
Page 12
Policy LU4: Maximum Commercial Development
Commercial development within the Specific Plan Area shall be complementary to
Downtown through the careful control of primarily neighborhood serving uses and permitted
square footage as set forth in the Maximum Development Capacity Table (refer to Table 2-
2.)
Policy LU6: Retail
Retail uses within the Specific Plan Area are intended to serve primarily North 40 residents,
adjacent neighborhoods, nearby employment centers and the unmet needs of the Town of Los
Gatos.
Policy LU11- Economic Balance
Proposed uses should shall be primarily neighborhood serving and shall complement the
existing balance and diversity of businesses located along Los Gatos Boulevard and in
Downtown Los Gatos.
2.6.6 RETAIL TENANT SPACE SIZE
The Specific Plan allows for a mix of retail sizes, including smaller primarily neighborhood
serving stores that will support the new residential, as well as, larger space for commercial
uses, such as sit-down restaurants, specialty market, entertainment, and formula retail.
7. Consider reducing the total amount of commercial square footage with the goal of
addressing our unmet needs.
See comments and suggested changes in Item 5 and 6 above.
8. The intent of the Specific Plan was to protect downtown while providing neighborhood-
serving commercial and reducing retail sales tax leakage.
See comments and suggested changes in Item 5 and 6 above.
9. How do we make the commercial that’s near residential be truly neighborhood serving and
not shoe stores and handbag stores that draw people away from downtown, and then how
do we get the other portion of it to be general merchandizing, again, without creating a
food court and a bunch of small stores with dress shops and so forth?
See suggested changes in Item 5 and 6 above. Additionally, the suggested changes in Item 1
would require CUPs for many uses that are permitted uses in the Specific Plan which would
provide the Town with additional tools to address this suggestion.
Suggestions
Page 13
Open Space
1. The perimeter overlay zone should be larger.
There Section 2.5.7 on page 2-15 could be modified to increase the buffer sizes highlighted
below.
2.5.7 Perimeter Overlay Zone
The following standards apply within the Perimeter Overlay Zone:
a. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Lark Avenue shall be
restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
b. Buildings or portions of buildings located within 50 feet of Los Gatos Boulevard
shall be restricted to a maximum building height of 25 feet.
c. Additional setback requirements are provided in Table 2-5 of this chapter.
d. No building shall be located within 30 feet of a property line adjacent to the
freeway.
e. The maximum density for residential units in the Perimeter Overlay Zone along Lark
Avenue is eight units per acre.
f. Residential is only allowed when located above commercial along Los Gatos Boulevard.
2. More open space should be required.
Section 2.5.4 on page 2-12 and Table 2-3 on page 2-12 could be modified to increase the
amount of open space required.
2.5.4 Open Space Standards
To ensure that adequate open space is integrated into future development in the Specific Plan
Area, a minimum of 30% of open space is required (Table 2-3). This 30% requirement
should be a variety of green-spaces and plaza spaces dispersed throughout the different
districts. By specifying minimum open space requirements/ standards, the Specific Plan
provides incentives for the consolidation of parking into podium parking and parking
structures, minimizing at-grade parking, minimizing road widths, and increasing pedestrian
spaces.
a. Open space means a ground plane open and generally unobstructed from the ground
plane to the sky. Balconies, shade structures, and roof eaves may extend over a portion
of the open space. Open space includes both “green open space” and “hardscape”
(plazas, courtyards, pathways, sidewalks, and pedestrian paseos). Plazas, courtyards,
and planters over podium parking or on roof decks also qualif y as open space.
Suggestions
Page 14
Table 2-3 Minimum Open Space
Requirements
Open Space Designation (Excluding Parking and Roadways)
Percent of Specific Plan Area
Green Open Space 20% Minimum
Hardscape (Plazas/
courtyards/pathways/
sidewalks and pedestrian
paseos) and/or additional
green open space
Remainder of Required Open
Space
Total Open Space 30% Minimum
b. To ensure the open space is distributed throughout the Specific Plan Area, a minimum
of 30% open space shall be provided across the entire Specific Plan Area. The 30%
requirement shall be calculated for each application or group of applications.
c. The 30% open space requirement shall include a variety of green and plaza spaces with
a minimum of 20% being green space.
i. Green Space/Green Open Space: for purposes of this Specific Plan and calculating
open space requirements green space and green open space is grass or landscaped
areas. These can include but are not limited to parks, bioretention, common and
private residential green space, planters larger than 50 square feet, landscaped
planting strips, drivable turf-block, and parking lot landscaping. Trees planted in
tree wells shall not be calculated as part of the green space requirement.
ii. Hardscape: for purposes of this Specific Plan and calculating open space
requirements, hardscape refers to private or common paved areas for the use of
pedestrians including plazas, courtyards, pathways, sidewalks, and pedestrian
paseos. Roads and parking areas shall not be calculated as part of the open space or
hardscape requirement.
d. 20% of the 30% open space requirement shall be publicly accessible.
e. Every application for Architecture and Site Review shall include an exhibit(s) that shows
the open space and pedestrian network.
f. Remodels of existing structures along Los Gatos Boulevard that do not change more than
50% of the existing footprint are exempt from the 30% open space requirement.
3. Have real open space.
Suggestions
Page 15
Section 2.5.4 on page 2-12 above in Item number 2 could be modified to address this
suggestion to require more green open space. Additionally, the definition of Green
Space/Green Open Space below could also be modified to limit what qualifies as green open
space.
GREEN SPACE/GREEN OPEN SPACE
For purposes of this Specific Plan and calculating open space requirements green space and
green open space is grass or landscaped areas. These can include but are not limited to parks,
bioretention, common and private residential green space, planters larger than 50 square feet,
landscaped planting strips, drivable turf-block, and parking lot landscaping. Trees planted in
tree wells shall not be calculated as part of the green space requirement.
A GPC member provided the following information from the EPA in New England:
Open space is any open piece of land that is undeveloped (has no buildings or other built
structures) and is accessible to the public. Open space can include:
• Green space (land that is partly or completely covered with grass, trees, shrubs, or other
vegetation). Green space includes parks, community gardens, and cemeteries.
• Schoolyards
• Playgrounds
• Public seating areas
• Public plazas
• Vacant lots
Open space provides recreational areas for residents and helps to enhance the beauty and
environmental quality of neighborhoods. But with this broad range of recreational sites
comes an equally broad range of environmental issues. Just as in any other land uses, the way
parks are managed can have good or bad environmental impacts, from pesticide runoff,
siltation from overused hiking and logging trails, and destruction of habitat.
4. Public access easements shall be required for the open space.
Section 2.5.4 d. could be modified to address this suggestion as noted below.
d. 20% of the 30% open space requirement shall be publicly accessible and easements for
the publicly accessible open space shall be provided.
Suggestions
Page 16
Parking
1. Underground parking should be explored.
Language encouraging underground parking could be added to section 2.5.8 on page 2-16
could be modified to address this suggestion as noted below. Additionally, the Planning
Commission could consider recommending incentives for projects that provide underground
parking.
Parking Structures:
a. Maximum height of a parking structure shall not exceed maximum building height
requirements and shall be measured from the adjacent street grade, without restrictions on
the number of internal stories.
b. Setbacks shall be heavily landscaped in accordance with the Landscape Palette provided
in Chapter 3.
c. Parking structures fronting the Neighborhood Street shall be wrapped with commercial
space at the ground floor.
d. Parking structure facades visible from Primary Streets over 150 feet in length shall
incorporate at least one or more of the following:
• Differentiation of the ground floor from upper floors.
• Changes in architectural materials.
• Projecting forward or recessing back portions or elements of the parking structure
facade.
• Horizontal openings broken up with vertical columns to create a rhythm of openings
similar to a building with windows.
e. Underground parking is encouraged.
Suggestions
Page 17
Height
1. Increase the height to 45 feet, as long as there is more open space.
This was included in a previous version of the Specific Plan. The previous language that was
included is provided in Section 2.5.2 on page 2-11 below for the Planning Commission’s
consideration.
2.5.2 Building Height
a. The maximum height of any building, excluding affordable housing and hotel uses, is 35
feet with the following criteria:
i. Maximum building height shall be determined by the plumb vertical distance from the
natural or finished grade, whichever is lower and creates a lower profile, to the uppermost
point of the roof edge, wall, parapet, mansard, or other point directly above that grade.
For portions of a structure located directly above a cellar, the height measurement for that
portion of the structure shall be measured as the plumb vertical distance from the existing
natural grade to the uppermost point of the structure directly over that point in the
existing natural grade. No point of the roof or other structural element within the exterior
perimeter of the structure shall extend beyond the plane established by the maximum
height plane. Maximum building height includes all elements and height exceptions are
not permitted within the Specific Plan Area.
ii. Lark District - 15% of the overall development provided (building footprint) within the
Lark District shall be structures of a maximum of two-stories with a 25 foot maximum
height. The majority of this requirement may be provided within the Perimeter Overlay
Zone (refer to Section 2.5.7). Every application for Architecture and Site Review shall
include a table that identifies the following:
• Total building footprint square footage within the Lark District existing at the
time of the application submittal.
• Percent of total building footprint square footage located within the Lark District
currently satisfying the 15% height requirement at the time of submittal.
iii. An increased height up to 45 feet is allowed in the Transition and Northern District if the
project provides an additional 5% green open space.
2. Reduce the height of the residential to 25 feet.
Section 2.5.2 a. ii. on page 2-11 above could be modified to address this suggestion and
require more than the existing 15% of the residential in the Lark District to be a maximum
height of 25 feet.
Suggestions
Page 18
General/Other
1. “Shalls” should replace “shoulds.”
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
2. Confirm that the Guiding Principles in the Specific Plan is mandatory language rather
than permissive language.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
3. Require a plan for the entire Specific Plan area.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
4. Preserve existing live oak trees.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
5. Consider widening Los Gatos Boulevard.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
6. Try to acquire some land for a park or community pool.
Given the Town’s limited resources for this type of action this suggestion does not appear to
be feasible.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
7. Consider making the Town Council the deciding body for applications.
Information will be provided Monday December 12, 2016.
N:\DEV\PC REPORTS\2016\N40 SP Amendments\N40 SP 12-15-16_Amendments12-9.docx
Joel Paulson
From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
David Weissman <gryllus@gmail.com>
Thursday, November 17, 2016 10:10 PM
Joel Paulson
please forward this ....
to Commissioner Melanie Hanssen and Commissioner Matthew Hudes.
The Town's new Tree Protection Ordinance became effective 7/2/2015.
Item 4 on tonight's agenda for the North 40, was a discussion of retaining the existing li ve oak trees on the
property. I have a few comments. First off, the denied plans called for the placement of a large amount of fill in
the area where the pres ent live oaks are located. If this were done, then these live oaks would probably be killed
as they don't tolerate well having such fill placed around their base and roots. This situation is reflected in many
of Deborah Ellis' reports for the Highlands project where she, as the Town's Consulting Arborist, notes that oaks
are not very tolerant of such fill.
Also discussed were what replacement trees would be required if the live oaks already there were removed. Sec
29.10.0985, note 4, addresses this issue: "Replacement with native species shall be strongly encouraged." This
is the requirement for non-hillside areas in LG, such as the North 40. On the other hand, Sec. 29.10.0987
addresses the same situation in the hillsides where replacement trees (for native trees) must be natives taken
from Appendix A of the HDS&G. So the flatlands and hillsides are treated differently as far as removed live
oaks are concerned. I think that live oaks would be an excellent, mandated choice for the North 40 for several
reasons : after 2-3 years of watering, they are self sustaining and, in fact, don't tolerate summer watering. They
don't grow that tall and would be less obstructive of hillside views than some non-native trees that were
proposed in the original plan. They also provide good habitat for many birds and squirrels and other nativ e
animals and they are evergreens. Their one downside might be that they probably grow slower than many non-
native trees.
Hope that this helps.
Dave
Dave Weissman
15431 Francis Oaks Way
Los Gatos, CA 95032
H: (408) 358 -355 6
gryll us@gmai I. com
!EXHIBIT 8
1
From:
Sent:
To:
Cc:
Subject:
Diane Dreher <ddreher@scu.edu>
Friday, November 18, 2016 12:03 AM
Planning; BSpector; Marico Sayoc; cerekson@losgatos.gov; mhanssen@losgatos.gov;
m hudes@ losgatos.gov; j barnett@ losgatos.gov
Diane Dreher
Thank you and a comment
Dear Planning Commission members:
Thank you for your careful consideration of the suggested changes to the North Forty Specific Plan and your
work to ensure the best future for our town.
I would like to underscore the importance of the proposed word change with "Shalls" replacing "Shoulds"
throughout the Plan.
Full disclosure-! am an English professor.
The difference:
"Shall" is future tense, meaning that something will be done.
"S hould," on the other hand, expresses only an ideal or a wish (that may not actually come to pass).
I could say "All American citizens should vote." But, as we know, that doesn't mean they will. However, ifl
say "I will vote" or "I shall vote" the intention is clear. (More formal than "will," "shall" is 'used legally to
indicate an intended future action .)
Therefore, as you revise the Specific Plan, changing "should" to "shall" will make the Specific Plan more
objective, preventing any future confusion. "Shall" conveys a clear message that the Planning Commission and
the town actually intend for the relevant sections in the Plan to be complied with.
Thanks for considering my email, and again, my thanks for your vital work on the Specific Plan.
Sincerely,
1
Diane Dreher
Diane Dreher
Professor of English
President, Faculty Senate
http s:/ /www .s cu.edu /fa c u lty-s en ate/
Past President, AAUP Chapter
http ://www-relg-studies.s cu.edu/aaup -s cu/
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara CA 95053
( 408) 554-4954
ddreher@ scu.edu
http://www .dianedreh e r.com
Check out my blogs:
http ://www.ps ychologytod a y.com/blo g/your-personal-renai ssance
https://blogs.scu.edu/writeherewritenow/
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful , committed citiz ens can change the world . Indeed, it's the only
thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
2
Joel Paulson
From:
Sent:
To:
Lee Quintana <leeandpaul@earthlink.net >
Sunday, November 27, 2016 2:19 PM
Subject:
Laurel Prevetti; Joel Paulson; Sally Zarnowitz; Robert Schultz
North Bayshore Precise Plan , Mt. View
http://www.mountainview.gov/civicax/fileban k/blobdload.aspx?BlobiD=20935
FYI
The link is to the North Bayshore Precise Plan draft Oct. 2016. The Plan was originally adopted by Council in
2014. This draft includes amendments to include residential uses, including a section on Affordable
Housing. Tables have modified. Individual tables for each area/topic have been deleted and replaced with
tables that combine all areas for each topic into a single table.
Elements that I liked:
Lee
Clear statement of Vision, Principles, Objectives.
Use of tables for topics broken down by areas.
Inclusion of Standards and Guidelines in each section.
Organization that reduces repetition.
1
Sally Zarnowitz
From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
Importance:
Gerber, Andrew (Andy) <agerber@belmontvillage.com >
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 11:22 AM
Sally Zarnowitz; Joel Paulson
1.59-acre site i n North 40
High
Good morning Sally and Joel. My company is looking into the 1.59 acre site at the corner of Los Gatos Blvd. and Burton
Road in the "Northern District~~ of the North 40 Specific Plan Area . I understand that some of my competitors may have
already been in contact with you about this so I'm a bit late to the party. That said I was hoping you might be able to
confirm a few things for me regarding the site to the extent possible given the status of the Specific Plan :
1. My company develops and operates for-rent senior housing communities with a focus on assisted living and
memory care. We are typically classified as a residential care facility with "Iargen or some similar designation as
a qualifier (our projects are typically 100-175 units). Would our use be permitted under the Specific Plan, either
by r ight or with a CUP?
2. What would the basic development regulations be-i.e . maximum permitted height, FAR, maximum lot
coverage, and front/side setbacks?
3. What is the status of the Specific Plan? Is it approved? If not, is there an approximate timeline for approval?
Any assistance you can provide very quickly would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to call me at the number
below if it makes more sense to discuss by phone. Thanks!
Sincerely,
Andy Gerber
Vice President of Acquisition & Investment
{619) 455-9846
www .belmontvillage .com
BELMO @//l,!fl-'
SENIOR liVING
'
Sally Zarnowitz
From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
Hi Sally,
Joseph Gemignani <josephtheweatherman@gmail.com >
Saturday, December 03, 2016 12:15 PM
Sally Zarnowitz
north 40 comments
It seems no one is addressing the look and feel of the boxy modem buildings that are proposed on the north
40 . I thought in the boulevard plan the buildings are supposed to have a look and feel of Los Gatos.
Why did those buildings make it this far? Is anyone going to address that?
Thanks Joseph
1