Ping-pong continues as the commission rejects homes
By Nathan R. Huff
The game of ping-pong over a four-house development off Nina Court continued on June 28, as the planning commission denied the project once again, setting the stage for a second appeal to the town council.
Faced with a plan that was virtually unchanged from the last denial, and an architect who was not interested in a study session, the commission voted unanimously to deny Dividend Homes' application.
Skip Spiering, architect for Dividend Homes, later said he was disappointed with the decision, especially with staff's recommendation of approval, and vowed to take the project back to the town council on appeal. The council returned the application on June 5, saying the commission had made an error in the amount of grading and did not have the new information that was presented at the council meeting.
Neighbors--with the exception of a small number of supporters--once again showed up as an organized front against the project. They expressed concern that the way houses are situated in the plan invades their privacy, creates too dense a cluster of homes and relies on unsafe access via a private road.
Neighbors also asked for a study session, which they said would give the developer a chance to work with the residents instead of against them. "If the owners of this property would, once and for all, finally sit down with us and really hear where all of us are coming from, there would be a reasonable middle ground for this," neighbor Paul Izor said.
But Spiering, despite the commission's urging, maintained little would come from a study session, since neighbors' complaints varied so much. "The real constant is narrowing the access, that is not going to happen," Spiering said. "It just can't. There's no other place [the road] can go. We can't talk about things that are illegal."
At least one resident sided with Dividend, saying neighbors who were advocating fewer homes on the site were, in effect, asking for larger homes. "Fewer houses means bigger houses," Bob Bixler, who lives down the hill from the development, said. "It's not going to be developed with 3,000-square-foot houses, they're going to be 5,000 or 6,000 if it's one or two homes."
In the end, commissioners said the lack of changes in the application and the unwillingness to have a study session warranted a denial. While the proposed road to the four-home development had been moved several feet, site-line safety issues were still present, commissioners argued. They also listed a number of other Hillside Specific Plan ordinances relating to double fronted lots and grading quantities that they said were violated in principle, despite staff's recommended approval.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
