City Council finds points needed to approve desired development
project
Morgan Hill – If the city’s growth control policy won’t foster downtown development, the city council will.
When developer Manou Mobedshahi’s proposal for a townhouse-retail-space-office building collapsed a few yards shy of the point total it needed to win approval under Measure C last week, council members came together to drag the exhausted project over the finish line.
And by reversing a planning commission decision that Mobedshahi hadn’t met city standards, the council stoked still more debate about how to revitalize downtown.
“I think the planning commission scoring was correct,” commissioner Ralph Lyle said. “In fact, the scoring we gave was generous. I think we probably set a record with respect to bending over backwards to award points to the project.”
Measure C, passed by voters in 2004, caps new residential units in the city at 250 a year as a way to stay within Morgan Hill’s target population of 48,000 by 2020. The city currently has 36,400 residents.
Under the Measure C program, developers submit applications to the city that are scored on a variety of factors ranging from their environmental benefits to their potential stresses on the city’s infrastructure.
Projects can earn a maximum of 200 points and must get at least 160 to qualify. Mobedshahi’s project is one of two he has planned for the buildings he owns adjacent to the Granada Theater and includes 23 townhouses, ground floor retail space, office space and an elevated, open courtyard within the building. It received 158.5 points from the planning commission.
Mobedshahi appealed the decision, and last Wednesday, the council added five points to the project, making it eligible for housing allocations that will be divvied out later this year.
And though council members were careful to follow Measure C’s rules, they were able to use the law’s ambiguity to their advantage and approve a project they believe will benefit the city. Most of the points added by council were for the courtyard, which they felt hadn’t received proper credit as a piece of open space because it won’t be at ground level.
“On any level you can judge it, it’s an attractive project,” Councilman Greg Sellers said. “To make it as difficult as we made it points to a fundamental flaw in the growth control initiative. We’ve stretched the meanings as far as we can stretch them to make them work.”
That flaw appears likely to lead to yet another growth control ballot measure in November. Throughout the Council, there is acknowledgment that the city needs another set of rules to encourage downtown development.
Measure C, they said, is too similar to its predecessors, Measures P and E, which were designed to control suburban growth and don’t recognize the inherent benefits of building in the city’s core, such as protecting open space in the outskirts.
Councilman Mark Grzan, who is ambivalent about the benefits of the Mobedshahi development, said the city must do something to avoid a repeat of the two-hour hearing it took to shepherd the project through the planning process.
“I think that’s what the direction of the council is going to be,” Grzan said of a ballot measure. “This project is OK, however, the criteria needs to be followed so we can be fair. I think the council took a broad paintbrush to their interpretation. We need to have different criteria.”
