Santa Cruz Planning Commission votes to end public hearings for fully affordable housing projects; city council to hear item in January

The City of Santa Cruz Planning Commission voted Thursday to drop public hearings for 100% affordable housing developments. The item will go to the Santa Cruz City Council in January for a first reading. If it is ultimately approved, it will mean that there will no longer be public hearings in front of a governmental body such as the planning commission or city council, but public engagement and community meetings in the early stages of a project will continue.

The motion passed by a 5-2 vote, with Chair Michael Polhamus and Vice Chair Rachel Dann voting “no,” citing concerns about cutting back on public input opportunities. Even Commissioner Pete Kennedy, who ultimately voted in favor of the item, hesitated because he recalled past projects that received meaningful and necessary input at the last minute that changed a project for the better – even if that wasn’t terribly common.

“Even though we’re limited in our ability to make requirements of developers, we can influence projects, and that’s important,” said Dann. “Folks don’t always hear about projects at the community meeting level. If they’re prevented from voicing their opinion to their elected decision-makers, that can create feelings of being left out of the process.”

The commission also voted to approve a special zoning area called the “Affordable Housing Ministerial Approval Overlay District,” which would allow any fully affordable housing project to go through a purely ministerial approval process. That means that if the project complies with the city’s objective standards, the granular details of a building’s physical characteristics, it would not require a public hearing process or the typical California Environmental Quality Act environmental review. According to a staff report, other cities including Sacramento, Oakland and Los Angeles follow a similar process.

The district would include all sites zoned for multifamily or mixed-use development and where affordable housing projects are already allowed. However, it would not include any natural and/or protected lands including areas mapped for sensitive habitat or vegetation under the city’s general plan, areas within 300 feet of mapping for freshwater wetlands or salt marshes, sites under study within the city’s Creeks and Wetlands Management Plan, and areas near creeks where developments are either not allowed or require further permitting.

The new district would also rework the process to regulate the protection, removal or replacement of heritage trees. It would establish a set of objective standards that wouldn’t require a project’s plan to be designed around the trees, but would instead require determining whether a tree should be removed based on the distance to the project, size of the tree and impacts to construction. The current heritage tree ordinance requires a single specific finding to allow for the removal of a tree.

City of Santa Cruz Senior Planner Clara Stanger said at the meeting that by the time a project has reached the public hearing stage, it has already gone through a review for compliance with the objective standards.

“At that point, the public input at the public hearing doesn’t make much of a difference compared to the input that can happen at a community meeting,” she said, explaining that the community meetings still happen at the early stages of a project. “This is where the public input can have the most impact on a project.”

During public comment, supporters of the move said that the city desperately needs affordable housing quickly, and that there are consequences at the state level if the city does not plan for enough affordable housing units, including even less local control over new projects. The city’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation allotment, determined by the state, requires Santa Cruz to plan for more than 2,000 moderate-, low- and very low-income housing units by 2031.

“It would actually allow us to stretch our local affordable housing dollars further and create more affordable housing at the same time,” said Rafa Sonnenfeld, a leader of Santa Cruz YIMBY. “I think that’s a win-win, especially in Santa Cruz, where we’re still the least affordable small city in the country.”

Those against the change said that the public hearings are necessary, because without them, the occasional error could slip through the cracks. Alan Speidel said that it happened in his neighborhood, when he said that the planning department said a project had met the objective standards but in fact did not, due to units that were too big for the lot they sat on.

“Without public hearing, these mistakes will slide through, because the planning department is human and occasionally makes mistakes,” he said. “Public input is important just to catch these little errors.”

The Santa Cruz City Council will have a first read of the item at its Jan. 27 meeting, with a second reading expected on Feb. 10.

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