Making Your Mark

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Giving Back to the Community

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At our November 13th meeting, staff presented the audited financial results for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2018. The Council ultimately ended up accepting staff’s recommendations as to how to allocate the surplus to various reserves.1

But the more interesting part of the story was in the size of the surplus: nearly $7,000,000, the largest such single-year surplus anyone on staff can remember San Carlos ever producing.2

Equally surprising, to me at least, was what came next. Ron Collins proposed we grant staff a 5% bonus, in recognition of all the hard work they’ve done, and for their willingness, about a decade ago, to accept salary reductions to get the city through some fiscal challenges. It’s estimated such a bonus would cost nearly $500,000.

I’ve always supported compensating staff fairly, and I believe in rewarding employees for doing good work.3 And it’s true staff has worked hard on a number of big initiatives this year, including the revision of single family zoning rules and the firearm store moratorium. I’m less supportive of “paying back” salary reductions, because we’ve used that same argument for years to support negotiated salary and benefit increases that were on the more generous side of what we might otherwise have pushed for. It’s also worth remembering we just invested $7,500,000 in pre-funding employee pension costs. That reduced the risk salaries might have to be cut in the future to cover increased pension contributions. While not something you can spend, it definitely benefits staff, and should count for something, too, I think.

But the most surprising thing is a group of people who didn’t get mentioned: our residents.

It’s true staff’s hard work played a part in generating our recent surpluses.4 But most of the surplus is the result of heightened residential and commercial development, and commercial activity, that has negatively impacted many residents. I frequently hear from people unhappy with traffic, congestion, difficulty finding parking spaces, Laurel Street’s frenetic pace, you name it.

When considering a financial reward made possible by all this development and commercial activity, shouldn’t our residents be first in line?

When the Council meets to discuss granting staff a bonus I will propose doing something comparable for residents. If we can afford to spend $500,000 on a well-deserved bonus, we can afford to give back at least $1,000,000 to the people who make San Carlos what it is.

Distributing funds to residents can be a challenge, because the city does not maintain an up-to-date registry of everyone who lives in San Carlos. In addition, a direct distribution is complicated by having to set rules that can quickly become complex or divisive.5

But there are some simple, broad-based, reasonably fair things the Council could easily do:

  • Declare a one-time reduction in taxes to be paid in 2019 under a city-wide parcel tax or bond measure6.
  • Declare a one-time reduction in garbage fees in 2019;
  • Declare a one-time reduction in sewer fees in 2019.

There may be other approaches that would benefit almost all residents, too.

If you are interested in seeing this happen, I hope you’ll take a moment to share your views with the Council.7

Just make sure you do so before the next Council meeting, scheduled for November 26th. That’s when the staff bonus proposal will come back for review.

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Fitting Into a Neighborhood

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I occasionally get asked about whether or not the City has rules requiring that new homes, or significant remodels, have to fit into a neighborhood. The short answer is yes…but they probably don’t cover what many people mean when they talk about a home fitting in to a neighborhood. There are reasons for that, which I’ll try to explain below, based on some conversations I had with San Carlos’ planning staff.

All land use regulations (which includes the rules governing what kind of home you can build) are fundamentally limited by the fact that, in our system of governance, private property rights are pretty fundamental. They are not absolute — we won’t let you live on a residential lot in San Carlos without a functioning bathroom — but they come quite close. That’s because, while we live in communities, we live in them as individuals, with individual rights. Those rights protect us not only from what “the government” might do, but also what our friends and neighbors might do to keep us from enjoying our own property.

The “functioning bathroom” rule illustrates why private property rights are not absolute. We are regulated as individuals from doing things, or not doing things, which might either inflict harm on others, or could be reasonably expected to inflict harm on others. Not having a functioning bathroom creates not only a nuisance for neighbors, but could also cause them to become ill. So the community can and does impose a requirement that constrains your freedom to use your property as you see fit, and which has the weight of the legal system behind it.

There are other, less obvious, examples, too. San Carlos, like most communities, has regulations limiting how much noise you can create on your property, and under what circumstances you can create it. Noise won’t make your neighbors sick. But it creates harm of a different sort, by damaging their quality of life.

These rules also evolve over time. It’s been lawful to build large homes on almost all the lots in San Carlos for many, many years. But, until recently, when the price of land got sky high, not that many people did. The Single Family Home Advisory Commission (SHAC) was set up by the Council to make recommendations on what, if any, changes to our land use regulations should be made now that the economic environment is leading to more large homes being built.

But all these rules have one thing in common: they are balancing acts, compromises, between preserving individual rights and protecting neighbors.

As with all compromises, there is no one, analytically-determinable “solution”. So the specific balancing point a community sets is a political decision (within the broader confines of the Constitution, and Federal and California law).

Some communities, like Hillsborough, require, in addition to the typical home construction rules, that designs stay consistent with a single architectural style. Not necessarily a particular, mandated style; just a single one. So you probably couldn’t put a Tudor front on a fundamentally Mediterranean design, even if that’s what strikes your fancy.

Other communities, like Atherton, have nothing other than basic setback and lot coverage rules. I was surprised to learn this…but on reflection it makes sense. Lots in Atherton are quite large by San Mateo County standards (and apparently can’t be subdivided below a pretty large size). So whatever impacts a design might have on the neighborhood is significantly mitigated by how far apart the homes are, and how far they are set back from the public right of way.

San Carlos falls in between. We have setback rules, lot coverage rules, etc., like Atherton (and Hillsborough, for that matter). We don’t have rules specifically governing what I’ll call the visual style of a home (so you can build something oddball like a Mediterranean with a Tudor front). But we do have rules that target what architects call a structure’s “massing”. For example, we can require that long walls are “broken up” by articulating the surface (i.e., creating recesses or “pop outs”).

Note that I said “can require” not “do require”: some of our rules are triggered only if either the neighbors or the Residential Design Review Committee ask for a design change.

As to why we don’t go further, or why we’ve gone as far as we have, that’s a different question, whose answer grows out of choices made a long time ago. If I had to summarize them, I’d say San Carlos chose to preserve a fair degree of individual choice on design, except when choices create an “overbearing impact” on a neighborhood, irrespective of the visual style of the proposed home.

You might really dislike Tudors while I can’t get enough of them, or I might love to have our neighborhood filled with Arts & Crafts homes while you wish another one would never be built, but we can both agree that having a 25 foot long unbroken wall next door, even one properly set back from a common property line, is too overbearing, regardless of its visual style.

Personally, I think San Carlos’ philosophy seems reasonable. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

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Hillside Overlay Districts

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Recently, over on a NextDoor thread discussing the expected development of what is commonly called the Black Mountain properties, someone cited a four story home on Crestview Drive as an example of how the Council ignores its own building codes. I was curious about the house in question (268 Crestview Drive), which, while in this Google Maps image isn’t four stories as far as I can tell, equally clearly isn’t the two stories that’s the maximum you get under our 28 foot above grade height rule:

This naturally begs the question, how was it approved? Did someone on staff or the Council make a mistake? Or look the other way? Or wasn’t it approved?

So I thought I’d research what happened. Here’s what I found out.

The project did go through the normal, detailed review and approval by the Residential Design Review Committee (RDRC) that all recent homes (and many remodeling projects) go through. The RDRC approval set various requirements the project had to meet, most or all of which looked pretty typical to me. So that rules out the home somehow being built without approval by the City (which is a good thing…for the homeowners and their contractors, as I suspect the City could require the house to be removed if it wasn’t approved, and probably cause the contractors who built it to forfeit their licenses).

But that still leaves us with the question of how a house that appears to be taller than 28 feet above grade got approved.

Answering that question starts with a review of the project file (the City maintains a file on each and every project that it reviews and approves). That file is a public document, so if anyone wants to check what I say here, you can go to the City Planning Department and ask to review the file (which is what I did).

The file contains the approved architectural plans for the project (which is what defines what can be built, and woe betide any developer who builds something other than what is approved). A quick examination of the plans shows that the two stories sitting on top of the garage have a maximum height of 24 feet, 11 inches, well below the 28 foot height limit.

But the garage is 9 feet tall, making the height from the driveway to the top of the building 33 feet, 11 inches, well above the 28 foot height limit for a single family home. What gives?

It turns out — I didn’t know this until today — that San Carlos added a Hillside Overlay District to its zoning code back in 2011. You can find it here. The relevant parts of the Hillside Overlay District for our discussion are these:

  • Single family homes built on lots exceeding a defined slope have to meet additional requirements. The 268 Crestview lot was found by a surveyor to exceed the threshold slope.
  • But they are also allowed to be somewhat taller (up to 35 feet above the lowest developed grade)

City staff explained to me that these changes were adopted by the Council in 2011 (that was slightly before my time) to do a better job of preserving the character of steeper lots, reduce the risks to adjacent property owners from construction, and reduce the visual impact — what architects call “mass” — of the home that gets built.

Those sound like reasonable and prudent goals. But why would that entail increasing the maximum allowable height, even if it only applies to part of the structure (i.e., as with 268 Crestview, there’s a part that’s built into the slope)?

The reason is this: allowing a somewhat greater height, when coupled to the other constraints in the Hillside Overlay rules, reduces the amount of terracing that used to be done when building a home on a steeply-sloped lot. In other words, when you’re limited to 28 feet, but allowed to do more grading, architects create “stairstepped” designs:

This tends to result in more “massive” (in the architectural sense) homes, when viewed from the street.

If you constrain terracing, but allow somewhat greater height, you pull the stairsteps together, reducing the visual mass by consolidating the elements of the design:

Please remember that I’m not an architect, so this is meant just as a simple illustration of what the 2011 zoning code change was targeted at accomplishing. If you want a better/fuller explanation, contact Al Savay, our Community and Economic Development Director, who can do a much better job of explaining things.

So that’s why 268 Crestview was approved to be built the way it is. It was compliant with the Single Family RS-6 zoning rules, and those additional rules spelled out for Hillside Overlay Districts.

And I have to say, it’s a beautiful design, and one that I’m sure the owners are understandably proud of. Your mileage may differ on that, of course.

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Deciding on Behalf of the Community

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Recently the Council changed the way the Residential Design Review Committee is structured (this is the commission which reviews and approves home remodeling and construction projects). The change involves hiring individuals with design expertise (e.g., architects) to sit on the RDRC.

One of the arguments staff gave for the change was that it would help to level the playing field between design experts representing applicants and the RDRC. It was felt this would lead to neighborhood concerns being better addressed, because RDRC members lacking design expertise can hesitate to push back against an applicant’s expert(s) arguing that some change to a project’s plans cannot realistically be made. Although I voted against the recommendation, I am not strongly opposed to it.

But it highlighted an aspect of public decision-making I wanted to share, and which I hope will make its way to all the residents we appoint to our various commissions. These are my personal views, and not necessarily those of the Council or the staff.

Serving the community as a commissioner is an always challenging and sometimes-thankless task. In part, that’s because commissioners are called upon to take positions or make decisions outside of their areas of expertise. Reasonable people tend to find that daunting, because they want their decisions to be fully informed.

In practice, that’s generally not achievable. Most of the decisions reaching, say, the Planning Commission or the RDRC, involve applying an involved set of rules to specific situations. The rules are involved to provide applicants with a degree of flexibility in meeting their own desires while complying with community requirements. Consequently, commissioners mostly deal with challenging matters, situations involving choices which, while based on analysis, also require intuition and judgment. When coupled to the breadth of issues that come before our commissions, this creates an important role for subject-matter experts, who generally need to be paid for their expertise.

But hired guns don’t necessarily make the best community decision-makers if they themselves are not residents. My most important private sector mentor taught me this, in the context of our merger-and-acquisition department’s work with corporate attorneys: the lawyers are there to advise us on how the law impacts or influences our business decisions. But the business people make the final call, because we are the ones ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the enterprise. It’s unlikely a non-resident hired gun will feel as much of a stake in the outcome of something as a commisioner who lives in our community.

Resisting the temptation to “go with the experts” is hard for a commissioner trying to be reasonable and objective. Which is generally the kind of person the Council looks to appoint to our commissions. In fighting the temptation it is worth remembering that, whatever the knowledge and skill of the expert coming before you, you are the expert on what it means to be a San Carlos community member…and you speak with the voice of 30,000 people.

The experts are there to answer your questions and present their educated perspective. But it is you who are responsible for judging their input, and incorporating it into a decision that best serves the interests of San Carlos.

Sometimes that may involve rejecting outright what they have to say. More often, it may involve telling them to come up with a different approach. One you need not define, and may not be able to define; you’re not the expert, after all. You just know the rules and regulations the community of San Carlos has adopted for itself, to be the City of Good Living.

It’s also worth remembering not to be stifled by expertise appearing before you. The best experts not only know their stuff, they know how to explain it. Put another way, if a commissioner doesn’t understand something after hearing from the experts, that’s not the commissioner’s problem. It’s the expert’s problem: they were unsuccessful in getting a decision-maker to understand something they believe to be important.

In closing, I hope you will keep this in mind when you take the plunge, and apply to become a commissioner. There’s no better way I’ve found to become a better citizen than to learn how to make decisions on behalf of your community. 

And for those who already serve San Carlos, thank you for all you do. Keep up the good work!

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