While the Santa Clarita City Council has consistently lamented its loss of local control on a number of projects, meaning how much oversight the city has — now the city is hoping to keep some with its new Objective Design Standards.
A number of state housing laws over the past 10 years have limited what the city can do when a housing project comes to the Planning Division at City Hall.
Laws that have largely targeted local control directly and deliberately in an effort to get more housing built have limited how many times a project can be reviewed, what the city can look at and how long it can take to review, among other areas.
The state has tried to remove any subjective elements a city might have for its review, which was seen as a barrier to more housing, City Senior Planner Dave Petersen said at a May 1 meeting of the City Council’s Development Committee.
However, what the state has said the city can have is Objective Design Standards, or ODS.
Peterson explained the purpose of creating them.
“The first objective is to try to ensure that the quality of the architecture coming in the projects is maintained and meets the standards of the City Council,” he said, and the second: “to try to embed as much authority with the city for these projects’ review as we can.”
He also said that by creating a program, the city “checks the box” for the state, which is a requirement if the city would like to have any standards, and it also gives the city flexibility in its review process, including an opt-out clause for developers.
“What it effectively does is it takes the city’s opinion out of the process,” Peterson said. “So whereas we used to talk about, you know, the type of roof tiles that we could use, and go back and forth on that, and the paint color, the state has said enough, we’re just not going to do that anymore. And that’s what ODS is proposing.”
The process over the next several months, which is expected to be brought back for the council’s review later this year, is an attempt to codify a lot of standards that are familiar to residents, he said.
In explaining what could be codified versus what isn’t, Peterson used the example of the landscaping for a project.
“We have standards of where that landscape has to go and how big it has to be, but (planners) make recommendations about the landscaping to use. That’s not an objective standard, right? It isn’t the site-design guidelines, and we’ll continue to push for those things, but it is not being proposed to be objectified.”
Jason Crawford, director of community development for the city of Santa Clarita, said Monday that the “current architectural standards are called the Community Character and Design Guidelines,” which he said the state would consider “subjective.”
“The work we have been doing is to turn the subjectivity into objective design standards that we can enforce to ensure that projects have high-quality design,” he wrote in an email Monday.
The city is developing the standards with a grant from the Southern California Association of Governments.
City Attorney Joe Montes also sat in on the meeting via conference call, answering occasional questions and explaining how the standards need to be worded in order to be compliant.
In giving an example of what wouldn’t work, Montes said, “‘The project should be compatible with the surrounding neighborhood,’” was an example of what’s not considered an objective standard.
“That’s going to be something that is too subjective. So the way to get around something like compatibility with the neighborhood is you try to put as much detail in what you want the residence, the building, to look like, so that it would end up being compatible. Setbacks, colors, ‘bump-outs,’ 360-degree architecture, stuff like that,” he said.
Peterson said the idea also was to retain the existing feel that’s in the community standards, which was part of the feedback the city received in a meeting with community developers.
“In fact, their first piece of feedback was, ‘Please make your design requirements such that they’re not going to make my building exponentially more expensive to build,’” he said. “They also said that they are looking forward to a more predictable, what they called, a more predictable review-and-approval process, but mentioned also that the design guidelines or the design standards need to be designed carefully so that we’re actually still maintaining the character of the buildings and the architecture that we have today.”
