Sonoma County officials have problems with proposal to transform Sonoma Developmental Center

Eldridge Renewal, the corporation formed last April to guide redevelopment of the beloved and contested Sonoma Developmental Center campus, has submitted its formal application to Sonoma County.

The documents, filed Feb. 16, and including hundreds of pages of analysis, maps and charts, were not immediately embraced by the county.

Permit Sonoma, the county’s planning and permitting agency, has signaled its concerns to The Press Democrat — and in informal conversations with Napa-based developer Keith Rogal, who is partnering with the Grupe Company to turn the historic but shuttered and deteriorating state campus in Glen Ellen into a vibrant mix of housing, retail and office space, plus green spaces and a hotel.

“To us, the template is the plan the board (of supervisors) approved,” said Tennis Wick, director of Permit Sonoma, referring to a specific plan for the site approved by the board in December 2022 that envisions just over 600 housing units. “That’s what we’re going to enforce.”

Wick’s office will present a formal response to Eldridge Renewal after a 30-day public comment period, during which residents can weigh in on the redevelopment proposal.

The state, which is selling the core 180 developed acres of the property through its Department of General Services, has selected Eldridge Renewal as builder of choice. But the state will remain on the sidelines for now as Sonoma County evaluates the proposal.

Wick’s criticism is a rare misalignment between Rogal’s team and the county, which has generally been a supportive advocate of the effort to add much-needed housing units at the bucolic site. It was one of the state’s landmark residential institutions for the developmentally disabled, in operation nearly 130 years before closing at the end of 2018.

Whose housing formula applies?

Permit Sonoma is raising several objections to the proposal. The most tangible is related to the number of required affordable housing units, and the guidance Eldridge Renewal used to calculate them.

California law dictates that land being unloaded by the government and converted to housing, as SDC is, must set aside a certain percentage of the living spaces as deed-restricted, affordable units. When a developer satisfies that requirement, they automatically qualify to add a “density bonus” and can boost the overall housing units by 50%.

Eldridge Renewal announced months ago, to the county’s surprise, that it will take advantage of that provision. The company took the maximum 620 units allowed under the SDC specific plan, applied a county ordinance that calls for 20% of new construction to be affordable to lower-income residents and came up with a total of 124 deed-restricted units.

Rogal argues that all of the housing units applied under the density bonus — which increases the total number of units at SDC to 930 — can be market rate.

Permit Sonoma disagrees. The agency contends Eldridge Renewal should be applying a California statute that calls for a quarter of new housing units to be affordable at sites relinquished by the government. And that the same percentage, they say, must apply to the density bonus.

In effect, Eldridge Renewal’s proposal identifies 124 deed-restricted units. The county believes the number should be 232.

“It doesn’t work,” Wick said of Rogal’s formula. “They said it’s because you base the affordable housing on the base zoning, not the density zoning. That is illogical and in conflict with what density bonuses are supposed to do. They are meant to result in more affordable housing, not less.”

Rogal, speaking to The Press Democrat on Thursday, sounded confident Eldridge Renewal had used the right formula. He cited California Government Code 65915, and specifically a section that says the calculation for total dwelling units “excludes a unit added by a density bonus awarded pursuant to this section.”

“The language seems straightforward,” Rogal said.

If the developer and the county wind up at odds over the number of affordable units, he said, the California Department of Housing and Community Development will play referee.

“There’s a body that sets those laws and rules — the state,” Rogal said. “We’ll seek their guidance. Whatever they determine is the correct way to interpret that, that’s how it will be built.”

Debate over housing, hotel placement

Permit Sonoma has other problems with the Eldridge Renewal application, especially the preponderance of free-standing, single-family homes and the siting of a hotel that is permitted under the specific plan.

The submitted application calls for 342 detached homes, grouped in clusters around the property. The free-standing units take up a large share of the land used in the redevelopment plan.

Permit Sonoma believes it’s an “overreliance,” Wick said, “because it challenges the physical capacity of the site in design and number, in a way that’s inconsistent with what the board approved. The board said to keep the existing streetscape, to the greatest extent possible. With all of these free-standing homes, they have to introduce even more paving, with inefficient, small yards.”

The dispute cuts to the heart of the oft-stated desire to boost the “missing middle” of the housing market — smaller properties, or living spaces with shared walls, that may be in the financial range of North Bay families who don’t qualify for public subsidies but also can’t afford median-priced houses.

Rogal believes the Eldridge Renewal application satisfies that goal.

“In our mind, there’s nothing we did regarding the housing types that is different than what is called for in the specific plan,” he said. “There was a sense of what the overall framework would be for the so-called missing middle, which calls for a mix of townhomes, duplexes and single-family homes. But there was no rigid assignment of those types of housing.

“Most people seem to prefer to have a relative degree of privacy. But there’s a wide range on the site,” Rogal said.

As for the hotel, Wick acknowledged it’s a logical component of the specific plan, because it creates a potential revenue stream to compensate for the huge costs associated with refurbishing the historic buildings that will be retained. But it’s in the wrong place, according to Permit Sonoma — the far northwest corner of the campus, adjacent to an important wildlife corridor.

“By moving the hotel out to a very large hillside, right next to a wildlife corridor, with massive grading and a big fence around it, it means it’s trying to divorce itself from the community we’re trying to create there,” Wick said.

Rogal pushed back at this characterization, saying Eldridge Renewal’s analysis determined the reverse is true.

“I think a hotel is actually a vastly better use of that area than a mix of live-work employment and housing types,” the developer said. “Homeowners all have their dogs and cats. They’re not regulated. A hotel is a much more controlled physical environment. You can create the boundaries, and you are not attempting to manage the behavior of individual homeowners or small business owners with workshops.”

The initial proposal in the specific plan, according to Rogal, was to put the hotel in the iconic, brick administrative building that towers over SDC’s central oval. That would be a mistake, he said.

“Why would the best and most visible place on the property, the very center of this new set of neighborhoods, be for out-of-towners coming in to have their private space?” Rogal asked.

Fire risk at issue

Eldridge Renewal’s application offers the most detailed look yet at the types of architecture the developers are proposing, and the layout of the new community (including parks, gardens and greenbelts). It also specifies the buildings, and the heritage trees, to be preserved.

Included in the preservation plan is the bank of light-industrial shops behind the main building — the maintenance and construction workspaces that kept the developmental center running over many decades.

“In our mind, they’re architecturally interesting,” Rogal said. “This should be by a place that has coffee, fresh bread, a farmers’ market, live music. You can easily imagine working there. Then you’ll walk a couple hundred feet to the central green and gather with others.”

Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin, whose district includes the SDC campus and who has made its renewal a major part of her final term in office, said she is withholding judgment until after the public comment period, but she didn’t hold back in enumerating her initial concerns with the Eldridge Renewal application.

Those uncertainties include the concentration of development along Arnold Drive, a lack of clarity on water rights, how to achieve the creek restorations the property sorely needs, connecting paths to public parks like Sonoma Valley Regional Park and a failure to address light pollution.

Gorin also wonders about the apparent removal of the “charming” cottages on either side of the traffic oval, as well as other “immediately reusable buildings.”

But many of her concerns, and those of her Sonoma Valley neighbors, revolve around fire risk.

Gorin lost her home to the 2017 Nuns Fire, and the experience strongly influences her thinking on development in wooded areas. She isn’t sure Rogal and his team have adequately addressed evacuation routes out of SDC, selected the most fire-resistant building materials or laid out parcels in the safest way.

“Given my history of fires and my focus on defensible space, the developer needs to rethink their plans to open up areas around houses,” Gorin said. “Otherwise, there’s nothing you’ll be able to plant around those houses. Because there is no defensible space. Most fire survivors have replanted or rebuilt with that in mind.

“The beautiful illustrations show these lovely, tall trees. But they are very close to the buildings.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @Skinny_Post.