2006-03-09 Tplanning_director - Laserfiche WebLink

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Just as a matter of where were trying to go with this, the Charter does call for the Planning Commission to makea recommendation on changes to the subdivision ordinances to the Council. So it has to be taken to the Planning Commission. We do hope that the Planning Commission will make a favorable recommendation today. The court case that came up created a lot of issues within the Department over the status of pending subdivision applications. The specific court case involved a subdivision that had been given what we call tentative approval. And just to give a little bit of background here, there are two big stages in subdivision approvals. The first stage is called tentative approval. Tentative approval basically gives you the layout, says that the layout of your subdivision is okay, where youre planning to put the roads, where the lots are laid out. And it sets out a series of conditions that you have to meet, for example, constructa20-footwidepavedroadwithcurbs,guttersandsidewalks.Thatwouldbeatypical condition of a tentative subdivision approval. Then final approval comes after the subdivider has either made all the improvements required or has bonded the improvements. So tentative approval is important because after tentative approval if you want you can take your construction plans to the Department of Public Works, get them approved, and then you can start building your streets. The significance of final approval is that after final approval you can sell your lots. Final approval is really the last stage; and after final approval youre really out the door. So what happened in the court case is that the court said that tentative approval was improperly granted to this subdivision because when the application came in all of the information thats supposed to be shown on the proposed subdivision map was not there. If truth be told, there are probably several hundred subdivisions that have received tentative approval of which the same criticism can be made. For the most part, these are, the problems with the tentative map are fixed before there is any action because what will happen is that if there was a problem with a map as submitted, the tentative approval letter will say fix this, this and this before final; and it means that it requires that you have to do that. So just to take a very small example, if they omitted, the Subdivision Code says youre supposed to put the northpoint arrow on the map. If they forgot that, we might say on the tentative letter put your northpoint arrow on the map. But under the court case that tentative approval is at risk because the northpoint arrow wasnt on the map when the application was originally submitted. Subdivisions are one of the major functions of the Department. We had about 230 applications last year. This, to make all the subdivisions comply with some of these technical requirements is a huge amount of work and a great deal of it is not necessary. So most of the Code amendments address this kind of issue. And Id be happy to discuss the specific Code amendments if you have any questions about them. One last thing on the bigger picture we have a project to make an overall change to the Subdivision Code. We still have that project. Many of the things that should be improved in the Subdivision Code we intend to do that in that process. In this amendment though were just intending to fix the current process so that we can handle subdivisions without this being an issue and a problem. ALAMEDA:Questions? Commissioner Siracusa? 2EXHIBIT D