The city of Santa Clarita on Tuesday took the first step in adopting new rules for planners, with the Planning Commission’s approval of objective design standards, or ODS.
City planners recently described their need for ODS as one of the few ways it could enforce keeping the distinct looks and feels of Canyon Country, Newhall, Saugus and Valencia consistent.
The Planning Commission unanimously recommended the approval of the staff’s recommendation for the standards and guidelines.
The City Council has complained about how state laws have continually taken away its ability to review housing developments, an intentional effort by the state Legislature to limit local control in order to address a statewide housing shortage.
The so-called “local control” has been seen as a major obstacle to more housing approval, according to the legislative analyses for some of the recent housing bills.
In Santa Clarita, the city is seeking to exert more local control so it can have more of a say in what can be built and what it should look like.
That ability now can only legally come from the formal adoption of the standards that the Planning Commission approved Tuesday, according to a previous explanation from City Attorney Joe Montes.
Montes said phrasing that could be seen as a subjective determination, such as, “a project should be compatible with the surrounding neighborhood,” would now be considered illegal under state law.
“So, the way to get around something like compatibility with the neighborhood is you try to put as much detail in,” Montes said in a May city Development Committee meeting, “so that it would end up being compatible. Setbacks, colors, bump-outs, 360-degree architecture, stuff like that.”
That’s what the Planning Commission reviewed Tuesday, according to city planner Zarui Chaparyan.
“Staff is proposing 63 mandatory design standards that we identified as key components to the architectural review process,” Chaparyan said Tuesday during a staff presentation, adding the rules were “taken from existing guidelines and converted to be ‘objective.’” The changes replace “encouraged” and “should” with must and required, according to the city presentation.
There are another additional 99 design “guidelines,” which remain in place, but are not considered part of the objective review of a project.
The next step is for the guidelines and standards to go before the Santa Clarita City Council for approval and formal adoption.
