By Clarence Cromwell
Saratoga voters will decide next March whether they want a hand in certain planning decisions or if the city should continue to handle them.
The Saratoga City Council put the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative on the March 26, 1996 ballot by a unanimous vote at its Dec. 20 meeting.
If passed, the measure will let voters decide on proposals to increase density in residential areas or rezone them for commercial use. It would also require an election to rezone open-space land for commercial or residential development.
Putting the initative on the ballot was the strongest action the City Council could do against the proposed policy. Under state election codes, once proponents collected enough signatures to qualify the initiative for the ballot, the only other choice the council had was to adopt the initiative as an ordinance that night, as initiative proponents urged.
The council declined to do so.
"What I find ironic is that people who say they don't trust us to make prudent decisions are asking us to take away from the public the right to vote on this," Mayor Paul Jacobs said.
Councilmembers sharply criticized the initiative before taking the vote, saying it would block senior housing from the city and would trade a planning process that works well for a cumbersome, poorly defined one.
Vice Mayor Gillian Moran, who moved to put the item on the ballot, said it would block proposed expansion of the Odd Fellows retirement home, a project currently before the City Council.
"It promises to derail senior housing forever," she said. "If we don't get senior housing there, we don't get senior housing."
Councilmember Ann Marie Burger, calling the initiative "anti-neighborhood," said public votes would be worse for individual landowners.
"A majority of the residents of Saratoga may not share the desires of an individual neighborhood," Burger said.
She said city councils have been sensitive to the desires of individual neighborhoods.
An unusually combative City Council rebutted individual speakers during the public hearing on the matter. During the council discussion, Jacobs spent five minutes refuting past letters to the editor of the Saratoga News.
Initiative proponents likewise lambasted the city staff's report on the initiative, saying it was inaccurate, but they nevertheless asked the council to pass the initiative straight into law that night.
The city staff raised a flurry of questions about legal matters and the practicality of carrying out the public votes proposed in the initiative.
A number of legal snarls could result from unclear passages of the initiative, City Attorney Michael Riback advised the council. He said the initiative is unclear on whether the council could alter a project or refuse it once voters accepted it and on whether voters would cast a ballot before or after the city considers a project application.
Riback wrote that it's doubtful the initiative could be applied to projects approved between qualification of the initiative and the election, as initiative language calls for.
"It is anticipated that this issue could lead to litigation," he said.
A Dec. 14 memo from Riback states that the 30-year life of the initiative is too long because the city will very likely want to change the general plan within three decades "for legal and/or policy reasons."
Community Development Director Paul Curtis sent a memo to City Manager Harry Peacock and the City Council detailing eight zoning changes made since 1984 that would have required an election under the initiative. Curtis also noted three current projects that the initiative could put on the ballot: the expansion of the Odd Fellows retirement home on Fruitvale Avenue, the nine-home Nelson Gardens project on Saratoga Hills Road and the previously rejected commercial development on the Kosich property at Saratoga Avenue and Lawrence Expressway.
City Manger Harry Peacock estimated the city would spend $25,000-$30,000 reconciling the city's general plan and zoning regulations with the initiative.
The city or the developer of a project would additionally have to foot the bill for any vote. A one-item special election would cost $60,000. Officials could place on item on a general election ballot for $6,600, or in a general municipal election for $3,300.
Jim Shaw, a founder of the initiative committee and the last speaker, dismissed legal questions raised by the city staff as well as questions about how the initiative's public vote would actually be carried out.
"People of good will can work out the obstructions," Shaw said. "This is not a scary endeavor the proponents are trying to foist on the city."
In addition to putting the item on the March ballot, the council directed the city attorney to write an impartial legal analysis of the initiative. Councilmembers elected Moran and Jacobs to write an argument against the initiative for voters to read at the polls.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, Wednesday, December 27, 1995.
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