Quick Take
Ashley Scontriano and her husband wanted to add a simple staircase and a few terrace walls on the hillside lot behind their home on Santa Cruz's Westside. But when the city received an anonymous complaint from a nearby resident, the entire project came to a standstill, beginning a yearslong process of going back and forth with the city’s planning and building departments.
Ashley Scontriano stands atop the Westside Santa Cruz hillside oasis in her backyard on a Friday afternoon, pointing out how she and her husband, Jeff Frederick, have a good view of the coast and even the city’s downtown from there.
A sleek concrete staircase leads down the steep hillside from their house to a patch of grass and a small creek at the bottom of their property. Every few steps, there are planter boxes with oak and fig trees just beginning to grow. The couple built the staircase and the terraced walls to plant whatever fruit trees or vegetation they wanted. The property is the perfect space for Scontriano’s two dogs to run around or for the couple to host friends and family.
But every time Scontriano, owner of a dog day-care business, and her husband, a retired firefighter, look at the finished product, the pair can’t help but think about the challenges they went through with the City of Santa Cruz’s planning department to make their vision a reality.
The stressful and tedious seven-year process to build the backyard staircase in accordance with the city’s rulebook took an emotional and financial toll on the couple. They even had to dip into Frederick’s retirement savings to cover the $536,000 in costs.
“All we wanted was a simple staircase, and as time went on, it turned into this,” Scontriano said, gesturing to the elaborate concrete staircase and terrace walls on her property.
Before purchasing their home, located on California Street on Santa Cruz’s Westside, in 2017, Scontriano and her husband researched any possible restrictions or requirements they could face if they chose to do any renovations to the property, she said, such as what types of projects were permitted on the site.
After taking a closer look at the hillside lot — one that used to be filled with dried weeds that almost reached Scontriano’s shoulders and fruit trees planted by previous owners — the couple decided to renovate the land.
Work on Scontriano’s property started in April 2018, but came to a halt almost a month later when someone called the city’s code compliance department and said displaced dirt from the project was blocking water from flowing in the creek. The couple suspect a tenant living in an apartment complex on the other side of the creek called code compliance.
Thinking they were in the clear from the city because they hadn’t heard anything following the first call to code compliance, Scontriano and Frederick decided to pick up the project again in September 2019. They hired a new contractor for the job. Two months later, in November, the city issued red tag — a notice that required them to stop any work until they had the proper permits — pausing the project, again. The couple faced the threat of daily fines of up to $2,500 by the city if they had continued the work without proper permits.
“We learned that what we thought was OK to do actually required many, many steps that we didn’t even know were going to be a part of this process,” Scontriano said.
When the City of Santa Cruz received the complaint, the project did not have any permits on file, said Lee Butler, planning director for the city. City inspectors visited the area and identified two main issues: the slope was too steep for any sort of construction to be done — per city rules — and since the hill led to a creek just right off the property, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife had to get involved.
That would require the couple to hire a biologist, an archeologist and a civil engineer to conduct various studies needed to acquire a permit from the city’s planning department, Scontriano said. It cost the couple $5,100 for a biologist, $1,500 for an archaeologist, $20,235 for a geotechnical engineer to test soil conditions on the property and $45,930 for a civil engineer to provide a report showing a structure could be built on a slope that steep. The couple also hired two consultants to help navigate the city’s planning and building permit requirements at a combined cost of $15,629.
The city used to prohibit hillside developments on slopes greater than 50%, regardless of whether they were in a coastal zone or not, said Butler. The ordinance addressed safety concerns and potential risks for landslides. Scontriano’s property had a slope greater than 50%, which had prevented any work from continuing in 2018, she said. In 2022, the ordinance changed to be more lenient for non-coastal zone areas, said Butler, allowing for construction on hillsides.
A biological report is an uncommon requirement, Butler added. If Scontriano hadn’t removed the existing greenery from the land, they wouldn’t have needed to hire a biologist. The couple had removed the vegetation to start the renovations, and because the overgrown brush made it too difficult to walk down the hill.
As for the city’s requirement that the couple provide an archaeological report, a portion of Santa Cruz does have archaeological sensitivity — areas in the city that could possibly have undiscovered resources of cultural significance — considering the county used to be home to Indigenous tribes, said Butler.
Scontriano’s home on California Street lies on the edge of the area identified as sensitive for archaeological resources, which spans from Highway 1 to Beach Street. In any other situation where a resident is seeking a building permit, some of these requirements — like having to hire a biologist and a civil engineer — typically aren’t needed.
“It’s a really unique site,” said Butler. “Some of [the requirements] are site-specific in terms of what they needed.”
The couple also had to hunt down records from the city’s water department to prove that a small concrete wall along the creek was not built by them, but by the city in the 1970s, said Scontriano. The city’s planning department wanted to verify that the wall existed before the couple began renovations on the property, even though a representative from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife visited the home to inspect the wall and its relation to the creek, verifying the riprap wall was not new.
Glancing at the the natural wear and tear on the wall, which is made of concrete blocks, it’s easy to tell the structure has been there for almost 50 years. Scontriano recalls filing a public records request to the city, asking for a copy of the resolution approving the wall’s construction and being told such a file doesn’t exist.
Another hurdle — also unique to Scontriano’s situation — is that the couple had to set aside $2,250 for a landscaping bond. It’s a guaranteed amount of money the city can hold for a certain amount of time, in this case 18 months, if the couple doesn’t take certain environmental protections, said Butler.
Since Scontriano removed the vegetation near the creek, the city wants to ensure the couple plants species that are native to the area, and that those plants are maintained to survive. If Scontriano and her husband ignore that, the city can take the money they’ve guaranteed and use it to plant the correct vegetation, he said.
After work stopped in 2018, Scontriano said she and Frederick had to wait almost four years before picking up the project again. Once the ordinance on hillside developments changed in 2022, the couple had the green light to move ahead with permitting, she said. The couple entertained the idea of abandoning the project, but decided they had already invested too much of their time and energy to give up.
At that point, Scontriano and her husband had put more than $100,000 in the staircase, including for multiple contractors and reports for the city. If they had opted to abandon the project, the couple would’ve had to return the land to its original state — which would possibly cost almost double than what they had already spent, said Scontriano.
If the land behind the Scontriano home was flat, it probably wouldn’t have taken the couple so long to get the project moving, said Mike Freitas, a civil engineer hired by the couple to design the project. Freitas worked with the couple from 2018 to 2022 before leaving the project because of its challenges with the city, he said.
“The city just made them jump through every hoop and go to every requirement and do everything to try and get what they wanted built,” he said.
Once the couple acquired the proper permits to continue the project, the next challenge was finding a contractor willing to work with them because of the added pressure of city inspections to make sure it was built to code, Scontriano said.
Construction didn’t begin until last August, and what was supposed to be two months of work turned into three. Before each of the five city inspections, the project would undergo a civil soil test — a process that determines whether the soil is suitable for construction, said Darren Barry, the third and final contractor the couple hired.
Particularly galling for Scontriano are what she feels are inconsistencies in the city’s permit enforcement.
After Scontriano shared her initial project plans with a neighbor, whose property has a similar layout, the neighbor decided to do the same, even hiring the same contractor. Scontriano watched as her neighbor was able to get work completed on their property in a month, and seemingly faced no challenges.
While Scontriano and her husband had to find specialists to conduct reports for a single building permit, her neighbors didn’t have to go through that trouble, she said. “What’s the purpose of making sure all of these boxes get checked if one person doesn’t have to do it and another person does based on a complaint?” Scontriano said.
The city’s planning department very rarely does proactive code enforcement, Butler said. It simply doesn’t have the capacity or resources — there are only two code enforcement specialists for the entire city. Instead, the department investigates code compliance issues mainly based on any complaints that come in.
“If there wasn’t a complaint received on an adjacent property, we’re not going to look at it,” said Butler. “We’re not in people’s backyards.”
The process for the couple to acquire a building permit and finish the project took several years, not only because of the city ordinances, but also the lack of timeliness from the city, Scontriano said. Sometimes it would take weeks to hear back from planning and building specialists.
Currently, the city is working on ways to streamline the permit process and how it communicates with permit applicants, and inspections are going to be easier to schedule, said Butler.
He added that the city is beginning to issue permits digitally. Instead of physically mailing an applicant’s paperwork for architects and engineers to review, the city’s planning department is sending select projects digitally, said Butler, cutting down processing time and cost for applicants.
For example, if a project has a six-week review process, the new changes can take off two weeks from the process, said Butler. The city plans to fully implement the digital system in early summer.
A new permit tracking system will also roll out at the end of the summer, he said. The new system will help with internal communication between departments. The program, called Bluebeam, will allow multiple departments to work on a single plan simultaneously instead of each department reviewing the documents one at a time and sending their comments.
Comments from each department will be visible to each other, said Butler, and help with reducing inconsistencies, saving time in the permit review process.
“[Applicants] will be able to better communicate back and forth with the city and with reviewers,” said Butler. “They’ll be able to get a consolidated list of comments, rather than separate letters from each department.”
Scontriano’s only concern about the city’s plan to streamline the process is to ensure that residents like her, who want to renovate their property with the proper permits, will benefit from the updates, not just big construction companies working on large-scale commercial or multi-residential buildings.
Ultimately, the people who will primarily use these departments are homeowners and other small property owners, who might not be as knowledgeable about the process, unlike big developers, said Scontriano. “You don’t know if the reports you’ve produced are going to be good enough, if they’re going to ask for a revision, which happened four different times, those things all cost money,” she said.
The process will be easier for contractors, who already know how the system works, but also for homeowners, said Butler. The city is also working on a series of questionnaires that will flag specific details, like if a lot has a historic house or is on a steep hill, so applicants will know what to submit and city staff know what they need to receive to approve a permit.
“I love the idea that they are streamlining it,” Scontriano said. “I just hope it’s for the right reason, and it’s not just to expedite big projects, but actually to help everybody see the justice for a project that they set out to complete.”
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