By Elizabeth Cloutman

Over the years, Los Altos Hills residents and the town’s planning staff have said the town’s maze of municipal construction codes, policies and voluntary guidelines can be complex, sometimes vague and even conflicting, and thus vulnerable to subjective decision-making. Mayor Toni Casey made the analysis of these directives for consistency, relevance and conformance with the town’s General Plan one of the top priorities for her 2001-02 term as mayor.

Thursday evening at the regular council meeting, Evan Wythe, chairman of the Municipal Code and Policy Review Committee, reported a large majority of current policies and design guidelines don’t match the municipal codes on which, according to city documents, they are based. “Eighty percent don’t match the codes, 10 percent do and 10 percent are ambiguous,” he said.

The committee, formed by the city council in early July, unanimously agreed on seven general recommendations. The council must decide which town documents contain the core town regulations on which the planning commission and city council base their findings. Core regulations should be kept only in the municipal code. The relative weight recommendations have in the decision-making process must be determined. The committee urged the council to replace ambiguous and subjective recommendations with unambiguous regulations in the municipal code. It also recommended setting aside the current design guidelines and rewriting them to closely follow the municipal code “in user-friendly language” and to consider adding a section of nonobligatory options, which have been successful in the past.

The committee made two additional recommendations. The town should keep its present wireless communications facilities policy. It should set aside policies regarding exterior colors of structures and fences, site development, development area and tennis/sport court, driveway and impervious surfaces, grading and lighting, and instead make certain policies, as recommended by the committee, into codes.

“There’s a lot of good things in those guidelines that should be in the municipal codes,” Wythe said.

“The most important document of all being completely overlooked is the General Plan,” said Dot Schreiner, longtime resident and veteran planning commission member. “There are at least five elements mandated by state law. The intent of the design guidelines was to give residents another document. (The design guideline document) is the implementation from the General Plan. I do agree it should be made sharper, but at the time, the council wanted something more adaptive.”

The council requested that the town staff come up with its own recommendations as to what changes should be made. Planning Director Carl Cahill agreed to come back with some recommendations by the Oct. 18 meeting.