Plan Committee votes to discuss residential uses on North Forty

Recommendation now goes to planning commissioners

Updated draft ready soon

By Jeff Kearns

General Plan Committee members voted last week to recommend taking a look at residential uses when the latest draft of the North Forty Specific Plan goes to the Planning Commission.

The action came as the committee forwarded the third administrative draft, after months of discussion. The town's consultant for the General Plan Revision, Bein, Frost and Associates, will incorporate the new direction into a fourth draft, which should be ready some time in September. Planners are shooting for an October Planning Commission hearing on the draft.

The recent push to consider residential uses came from public comments at recent meetings, and was agendized for the Aug. 11 meeting, but the issue was also considered five years ago, when it was shot down over complaints from school districts and concerns that an area surrounded by two freeways and two main arterials wasn't appropriate for residential development.

Former Planning Director Lee Bowman, who continues to work for the town as a consultant, said the town will have to let the school districts that serve the North Forty know that the town will be considering residential uses there as soon as possible. Bowman added that the town has already been approached by the districts, which say the town already has too many residential units.

Los Gatos Union School District superintendent Mary Ann Park says that the districts haven't changed their stance on new development, and that they would oppose new residential uses because existing schools are operating at or above capacity. "We have no money to build new schools, and there are no places to build new schools," Park told the Weekly-Times.

The committee's recommendation will not be considered as part of the North Forty Specific Plan, but rather as part of the broader general plan revision process, which means that the North Forty Specific Plan will not be delayed.

Downtown business owner Larry Arzie, who spearheaded efforts to get the committee to reconsider residential or other noncommercial uses in the area, told the committee that it wasn't necessarily residential uses that his group, the Neighborhood Alliance, was looking for.

"The biggest concern of the community is not how to get more housing, it's 'How do we keep 40 acres of asphalt from happening?' " Arzie said. "A lot of people have come up with residential to stop this from happening. If there's another way to stop it, that's fine. ... What we want is people there 24 hours a day."

Although the committee recommended looking at residential uses, it didn't specify what kind of residential uses those would be. However, committee members said that what they didn't want to see was single-family homes in the area. If housing is formally considered again, specific plans for types of units will not be outlined until later in the process.

An environmental review for the North Forty Specific Plan has already been initiated, and is being developed alongside the review drafts of the plan. The review, however, is based on the draft, which doesn't include residential uses on the North Forty. Both the draft plan and the environmental review will be considered at the same time.

A separate document, the environmental impact report for the revised version of the general plan, is nearly complete and is scheduled to circulate in October. That EIR will later be open for discussion at public hearings, and must be accepted by the Town Council before the revised general plan can become final.

The new draft of the specific plan will also reflect the revised vision statement for the area's master plan, which the committee revised in July.

To help expedite the process, the committee has also scheduled a series of special meetings on Thursdays following committee meetings, and may set more in the future.

The General Plan Committee is planning to meet on Sept. 2, Sept. 16 and Oct. 22, and its rewrite subcommittee is set to meet on Oct. 7. The meetings will be in the Town Council Chambers from 6 to 9 p.m.

For more information, call the Planning Department at 354-6872.

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