By Elizabeth Cloutman
 Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier |
Controversial LAH ordinance has officials cautious
When Los Altos Hills was incorporated as city on Jan. 27, 1956, the chief advocates for incorporation wanted to avoid being a part of the urban sprawl that was beginning to develop in surrounding areas.
City founders wrote that they were dedicated to “preservation of the rural atmosphere of the foothills … and orderly, natural, unhurried growth … (and) room to walk around our houses without knocking our heads on our neighbor’s eaves.” Lots were required to be one acre in size.
Forty-five years later, to the month, Los Altos Hills city council members and residents are again discussing their vision for the town’s future.
A four-month-long debate has raged between residents who want fewer restrictions on lot development and those who believe major alteration of the town’s strict codes could affect not only its “rural atmosphere,” but also risk erosion and flooding. The debate was spurred by an ordinance revision, proposed by the city council majority, that would double the amount of lot development allowed by the current municipal code.
By Thursday night, the controversial ordinance revision that spurred the debate appeared to be stalled. Four town planning commissioners present at their regular meeting were split in their vote to recommend that the city adopt the revisions.
Earlier in the day, town Planning Director Carl Cahill received a letter from a Santa Clara Water District official who reviewed the city’s mitigated negative declaration for the proposed revision. “Please note that the district does not inherently oppose the proposed amendment,” wrote William Springer, an associate civil engineer for the Community Projects Review Unit. “However, based on the information provided, we are not able to adequately evaluate the impacts of the proposal on the potential for flooding.”
Also on April 24, the results of a long-anticipated town survey were made public. The survey revealed that 62.7 percent of respondents felt the town’s building restrictions were “about right.”
In an interview Thursday night, Councilmember Toni Casey said that while the city council still plans to hold a public hearing on May 17 at Bullis-Purissima School, she believes the council will probably consider developing a new ordinance.
“We’ll take all the information, synthesize it, and come up with a new ordinance that will serve our town now and in the future,” she said.
The revised ordinance under debate has its origins in the planning commission’s attempt to redress the inequities of the town’s complicated Lot Unit Factor (LUF) formula. As lots get steeper, the city currently requires more acreage for development, because the disturbance of the natural terrain to create a level surface for a home site is greater than that of a home built on a flat lot.
Los Altos Hills resident Art Lachenbruch, a geologist now retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, designed the LUF formula in 1967 to help keep the percentage of level terrain uniform by requiring that more land be devoted to the development of its slope. Not using the formula means risking erosion and excessive rain runoff that could lead to flooding the lower-level areas surrounding Los Altos Hills, he said. This issue is especially important, Lauchenbruch indicated, since runoff from the hills drains down natural arroyos into surrounding creeks that empty into the San Francisco Bay. While there is a storm drain master plan, Jim Rasp, the city’s public works director, said it would be two or three years before the process is completed.
The LUF formula also was a means for preserving the rural appearance of the town.
However, for lots with slopes greater than 10 percent - which means most lots in town - allowable development area can equal as little as 12 percent of the land. Even the more outspoken opponents of change agreed that this is unnecessarily restrictive. Most homes required variances under a strict interpretation using the LUF formula.
The city council eventually passed an ordinance that a home, even on a 30 percent slope, could be 4,000 square feet (maximum floor area or MFA) with a maximum development area (MDA) of 5,000 square feet. There was a problem with this ordinance. If a resident used the full 4,000 square feet for his or her home, only 1,000 square feet was left to build driveways, patios, tennis courts or swimming pools.
In January, the town Planning Commission, after four months of study, presented a recommendation to the city council to amend the existing code, allowing 6,500 square feet of development area for all lots of one gross acre with a LUF greater than .5 but less than 1. These were called constrained lots. A flat one-acre lot would have a LUF of 1. Development area for those lots with LUF less than .5 were downsized proportionately. Affected lots were estimated at about 10 percent of the total.
At the Jan. 14 city council meeting, Casey suggested increasing floor area to 5,000 square feet and development area to 7,500 square feet. A majority of the council approved the increases.
In February, Mayor Steve Finn approved a special committee to study the LUF factor, and Councilmember Bob Fenwick proposed a new LUF formula, since dubbed the Fenwick formula, that he believed remedied the inequities of the original formula.
On Feb. 15, the council proposed that the Fenwick formula replace both the original LUF formula and square footage allotments.
Soon thereafter, Fenwick said his formula should be applied to all lots, since current city ordinances don’t legally define constrained lots.
However, LUF committee member John Harpootlian prepared a chart which illustrated that when the Fenwick formula was applied, lots with the steepest slope received a disproportionate increase in percentage of lot coverage, while level lots received less than under the original LUF formula.
“With the old formula, even if the lot is bigger, the percentage of coverage is the same,” Lachenbruch said. “When lots have the same percentage of grading, it keeps soil disturbance uniform.”
The chart also showed that using the Fenwick formula, development area size at least doubled for all lots.
Town Attorney Sandy Sloan and Cahill realized after hearing comments from the public that a new negative environmental declaration was necessary, because the proposed ordinance change affected more than the 10 percent of the lots described in the initial negative declaration. The California Environmental Quality Act requires that the negative declaration accurately describes a proposed project.
In the new negative declaration, Cahill listed eight existing municipal codes and policies that would mitigate potentially significant effects on the environment, which include requirements for grading, landscaping and submitting detailed drainage system plans to prevent erosion.
Elayne Dauber, a former city councilmember and twice mayor during the 1990s, said in a recent letter to the planning commission and city council that she felt approval of the negative declaration would prove burdensome.
“Approval of the negative declaration by this city council will then obligate the council to conscientiously apply those ordinances and policies to all new development,” Dauber wrote. “The commitment of applying the mitigation measures required by this ordinance should be carefully considered by the council before approving the negative declaration.”
Hill Reiser, also a retired geologist, said he strongly felt an environmental impact report, rather than a negative declaration for the proposed ordinance was “more than warranted.”
In March, both Mayor Sandy Eakins and Councilmember Nancy Maddox Lytle of Palo Alto wrote to Los Altos Hills officials, expressing their concern and suggesting that technical experts analyze the proposed ordinance.
The city hired city engineer and former town manager Jeff Peterson of Wilsey and Ham, and Ted Sayre, a soils engineer of Colton and Shires, Associates, as consultants to aid the LUF committee in their study of the LUF formula. Committee Chairman Jim Abraham said the committee had spent more than 1,000 hours since Feb. 1 to complete their report to the city council.
While a majority of the committee recommended applying the Fenwick formula and approving the proposed ordinance, committee member Harpootlian told town officials at the formal presentation of the LUF committee findings Thursday, “I can’t encourage enough that a professional come and do the legwork on what we’ve come up with.”
Councilmembers Casey, Fenwick and Mike O’Malley recommended that the city council consider adopting the original ordinance change proposed by the planning commission in January, because many applications by constrained lot owners have been in limbo for months.
“I want to listen to more residents before coming up with a final decision,” said Councilmember Emily Cheng. “My campaign promise to the residents was to represent the majority of this town.”
At the city council’s May 17 public hearing on the revised lot development ordinance, potentially a landmark issue in Los Altos Hills, residents will be given an opportunity to have their say.
