Council pulls growth amendment from ballot

In a surprise move Monday night, the Healdsburg City Council decided not to put an amendment to the Growth Management Ordinance on the November ballot.
Though the city had worked for two years crafting the amendment that would have added limited flexibility for different types of housing and an additional “bank” of 60 units, some councilmembers felt it wasn’t going to get the city the type of housing the community needs.
“At the end of the day, (the amendment) was a compromise at best,” said councilmember Gary Plass. “We had a feeling with the strategic plan and the housing element being processed, we realized it doesn’t get us to where we need to be.”
The idea to amend the Growth Management Ordinance, which originally passed in 2000, was sparked during the development of the Central Healdsburg Avenue Special Study Area plans. A subcommittee decided on language for an amendment that would have changed the GMO city-wide, but some felt it still didn’t provide the flexibility the city would need to build housing for people working in town.
“There’s a growing sentiment that we need more housing,” said Mayor Jim Wood. “I don’t feel (the amendment) gets us where we need to be. We want people to be able to live and work in our community.”
Wood said instead of putting an amendment on the ballot that still probably wouldn’t allow for enough mixed use, apartment or moderate income housing, the city should take a second look at what can be done.
“Do I want to see hundreds and hundreds of units here in Healdsburg, no. But you have to have enough flexibility to have economy of scale. The dynamics of building an apartment complex are different than a 30-unit development,” Wood added.  
The Growth Management Ordinance establishes growth control measures for the city. A revision would also have needed to be approved by voters. Under the current ordinance, some said it would have been too difficult to develop higher density housing, given the restrictions of the original ordinance.
The revision could have loosened up those restrictions and allowed for building permits to be banked, which would have allowed developers to build more units at once. The current growth management ordinance does not allow for un-used units to be carried over year after year, and instead is a “use it or lose it” allocation.
Councilmember Tom Chambers, who served on the subcommittee and shepherded the amendment through a nearly two-year process said he was disappointed in the council’s decision to pull it from the ballot.
“We worked extremely hard to find a compromise that wasn’t too much growth. It was a compromise — both sides didn’t get exactly what we wanted, but it seemed like it was something we could all live with,” Chambers said.
Chambers was the lone vote against the decision to remove the amendment from the ballot.
Though the revision would have covered growth within the entire city limits, concerns surrounding the Central Headsburg Avenue buildout pushed the process forward to allow for more mixed use development to occur in the central core.
“We don’t want sprawl or uncontrolled growth, but to be developed properly, it needs to have more freedom,” Plass said of future projects in the central Healdsburg area.
The revision would have set up an initial “bank” of 60 building permits, and 30 additional permits would be added to the “bank” each year. A cap of 70 permits could be issued each year and there would be a total cap of 226 units in the Central Healdsburg Avenue Plan Area. The amendments would sunset after 15 years and the growth management system would revert to the original ordinance in place currently. It would only have increased the number of houses allowed over the 15 years from 450 to 510.
But the council decided four-to-one to hold off on placing the amendment on the upcoming ballot.
“I’d rather see us step back and refocus on what it is that we really need,” Wood said.
Chambers said there’s no clear answer moving forward, and had hoped the council would have let the public vote to decide the issue.
“I think people understand there is a need for housing for people who live and work in Healdsburg and they would have come to the right conclusion,” Chambers said.
The council asked city staff to put the item back on the agenda in September for further discussion about how to move forward.