Bill to speed downtown Santa Rosa development dies in Sacramento

Santa Rosa’s effort to sidestep state environmental regulations in order to speed large downtown housing projects has ground to a halt in Sacramento.

“It’s dead,” David Guhin, director of the city’s Planning and Economic Development department, said of Assembly Bill 2267.

Introduced by Jim Wood, D-Santa Rosa, the bill sought several limited exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act, including waiving the city’s need to perform a full environmental review for its plan to raise the height limits for downtown buildings.

“I’m really disappointed,” Wood said about the bill, which emerged from a committee with such major changes that he chose not to advance it. “Whenever CEQA is part of the equation, things get challenging, no matter how worthy the cause.”

The city wants to revise one of its key planning documents, the Downtown Station Area Specific Plan, to be able to make changes it thinks will make it more likely developers will want to build housing downtown.

The revisions could include lifting the 10-story height limit downtown, reducing the parking requirements, changing the boundaries of the plan area, or making city properties available for housing.

The city asked that full environmental review - which can take 18 months - be waived for such efforts during the next five years.

The bill also proposed “judicial streamlining” that would limit to 270 days how long changes to certain planning documents areas could be held up in court, and exempting from environmental review certain types of housing projects on city and county properties within city limits.

Wood, Guhin, Mayor Chris Coursey and others pushed hard for the bill, testifying before often-skeptical legislative committees but managing to keep the bill alive for months. The bill was introduced in the aftermath of last year’s devastating wildfires, which destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa.

The most recent round of revisions, however, eliminated much of the benefit that the city would have received from the legislation, Guhin said.

“It got modified through the process down to the point where it didn’t reflect the intended purpose and ultimately wouldn’t have helped with what Santa Rosa wanted to accomplish,” Guhin said.

Guhin praised Wood’s staff for their hard work and said it was an “eye-opener” working with legislators on Santa Rosa-specific legislation.

“We made it pretty far in the process, and it’s disappointing that we couldn’t see this come to fruition,” he said.

Some legislators had expressed sympathy for the city’s challenges but also hesitancy to create an exemption from the state’s bedrock environmental law.

Wood said he didn’t understand why the bill emerged from the Senate Appropriations Committee with such major changes.

“It’s very frustrating,” Wood said. “It’s something of a black box.”

The city is going to move forward with revising the plan anyway, but it just may take longer. The city hopes to complete revisions to the plan in less than a year from the time a consultant is picked. But if an environmental impact report is required, the process could take 18 months, city planner Patrick Streeter said.

The city has an $800,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to update the plan, and expects to hire a planning consultant to manage the process by early October. It could take six to 12 months to complete the work, or longer if the full EIR is needed, Streeter said.

Raising downtown height limits, however, is likely to be a heavy lift.

Downtown visionaries like architect Larry Simons have long advocated for Santa Rosa to grow up, arguing that a denser downtown would limit sprawl, create a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere and revitalize the downtown economy.

But his proposal for a 15-story tower where the Roxy movie theater now sits was shot down in 1984.

In 2005, in the midst of white-hot real estate market, the City Council raised the limit in the downtown core to its current 150 feet. But dreams of soaring downtown towers got a rude awakening during the 2008 housing crash and recession. Aside from the 51-unit, five-story Humboldt Apartments complex at Seventh and Humboldt streets, no significant new housing has been constructed in downtown Santa Rosa since then.

Since the October wildfires, the pressure has been on city and county staff to speed rebuilding and dramatically increase the county’s housing stock.

AB 2267 was one tool to help that effort, but far from the only one. Others include reducing parking requirements and development fees, streamlining permit processes and offering public property for development, Guhin noted.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@srcitybeat.