To have a good understanding of the issues I think it’s important to be familiar with how the state mandates to communities the number of high density housing units must be zoned in each city. They do this through regional “joint powers” entities, in our case it is ABAG,  the Association of Bay Area Governments. ABAG  comes up with a Regional Housing Need Assessment (RHNA)  which is the number of  high density units we must zone for.

The specific issue we are concerned about right now is the  approval of what the city calls the Housing Element Update. The state requires all cities to have a Housing Element Update. Currently the planning commission will be reviewing what they expect to be the final version on August 13, which will then be given to the city Council for approval on September 2.

The specific concern that many of us have is that  the current version of the Housing Element keeps in it 1292 units zoned for high density housing which are in excess of our RHNA required number of zoned units, which is 2067.   I am including a link to the city’s website that shows the Housing Element so that you and your friends will see the specific language we need to be concerned with. You can find a housing element at  http://www.cityofpleasantonca.gov/pdf/Draft-HsgElem-June-2014.pdf

As you can see, it’s a large document with 182 pages. The meat of the document is the goals section which begins on page 5 (page 9 according to Adobe). Most of the goals for the housing element, which sets in stone Pleasanton’s growth plans for the next eight years, are included to comply with RHNA. Changing goals that are inserted for legal compliance is a bigger issue than we can take on now, however removing excess high density zone property from the housing element is something we need to do now.

If you go to the very last page of the Housing Element, which is page 7 of Appendix B, you can see on the bottom line the numbers of concern. It shows very clearly that we have 2067 units zoned in order to comply with RHNA,  with an excess so and of 1292. Of the 2067 housing units that are a part of RHNA most of them  have begun construction or will be starting construction soon.

 Please look at appendix A,  which according to Adobe is page 143. This is the section in which the goals are discussed along with the rationale for changing or keeping them. If you look at Goal 1 you can see that the Housing Element clearly states that the city should maintain these 1292 extra zone units. Additionally, if you scroll down to  Program 9.4 you will see that the Housing Element not only wants to keep these unnecessarily sound high density properties but also wants to actively encourage developers to build on them. In my view this is completely out of character for the city that for decades has been careful to manage its growth.

You may hear at the meeting that the city has a Growth Management plan which only allows for the building of 235 housing units citywide per year. It’s misleading to raise this to defuse concerns about rapid growth, because as you can see referenced under Program 9.1, the city exempted about 1900 high density units from this  Growth Management plan. These units are in the process of being built now.

I honestly feel that most or all of our city Council members and Mayor are good people and give them the benefit of the doubt that they want to do the right thing for Pleasanton. But some of them believe the right thing is to roll over and let the state dictate to us how many high density units to put in to our city and for good measure at another 1292 units to please the state and please developers. The fact is, we don’t have the water or the sewer capacity, and the developer fees that go to our school district are inadequate to pay for the number of new students this growth will bring.

We are asking the City Council to  reverse the zoning on these excess 1292 unit parcels so that high density projects cannot be built on them. We are also asking the City Council to slow the building of the approved projects to the greatest extent possible.

Simply put, I think letting our City Council know that the majority of residents and voters in town wants slow growth, are extremely concerned about our limited resources, want the excess high density zone properties reversed to their prior zoning, and want the existing nearly 2000 high density units being built to be slowed as much as possible.

The City Council should shift its attention away from growth and on to the limited resources of water, sewage, traffic, and particularly the overcrowding of our schools.