Saratoga News
News
New hillside home gets council approval
By Shannon Burkey
The Saratoga City Council voted 4-1 at its May 2 meeting to uphold a planning commission decision to allow a 6,179-square-foot, two-story home to be built on the Saratoga hillside.
Alok and Sangeeta Aggarwal will be able to begin construction on their dream home on Wardell Road despite objections from neighbors who say the project is incompatible with the neighborhood.
Matt Christiano, a neighbor of the Aggarwals, filed an appeal to have the council take another look at the planning commission's February decision.
The Aggarwals' home, one of four large houses to be built on a hillside property that was previously divided into four parcels, is the first to come before the city for approval.
Neighbors say the home does not meet city codes when it comes to bulk or height and asked the council to take a second look at the plans and require the house be scaled back.
"Our code is meant to avoid exactly the situation we have here, where a few developers or speculators come in to build large, incompatible homes in a neighborhood of much smaller homes," Christiano said to the council.
The height of the house reaches 28 feet, which Christiano said exceeds city code, which allows for a 26-foot maximum height.
But community development director John Livingstone said the house does meet the code requirements because the height requirement is based on an average.
"Approximately four years ago, we changed our height requirements. We originally had it so it followed the contour of a lot so that no portion of a building could increase over 26 feet," Livingstone said. "Now, on a slope lot when you take an average you will have portions on a downhill side that could appear to be over the 26-foot height limit, but on an overall average it would equal out."
Christiano also reminded the council that city code says a house must be compatible in size and height with the houses in its neighborhood. In a neighborhood where the average size of a house is approximately 2,000 square feet with heights of less than 18 feet, Christian said the Aggarwals' house does not meet the code and fit into the neighborhood.
"At every step in the project, the applicant uses loopholes to achieve results that are amazing to an ordinary citizen," Christiano said. "The applicant should be held to city code even when it's inconvenient to them. It's not fair to the immediate neighbors, and it's not fair to the city of Saratoga."
Barton Hechtman, attorney for the Aggarwals, said the couple has met the city requirements needed to gain approval for their new house and added that because of the area's terrain, the house is far from the existing houses.
"When you're asked to just average the size of 10 homes and make that the square footage of any new home, if you did that you would be ignoring your entire ordinance that tells you what size home should be on what particular property," Hechtman said.
Councilman Chuck Page said although he was struck by the beauty and raw nature of the area, he needs to follow the city's code, which he says has been met.
"I knew it would change to whatever the people who bought it wanted to do within our code and I have to fall back on the code," Page said. "What it all boils down to is that when a property comes up for sale, that has been subdivided years before, changes are going to be made."
Councilwoman Ann Waltonsmith said she is sad to see the changes, but she thinks the appeal is based on emotion rather than the specifics.
"I'm going to vote to accept the house and deny the appeal, but I do understand what the neighbors are feeling," she said. "I do have some sense of entitlement and rage at the change."
The lone dissenting vote was cast by Councilwoman Jill Hunter, who said more of an effort should have been made to deal with the bulk and that she would like the house to be more compatible with the neighborhood.
"This is absolutely glorious land and I think it's not just this one house, it's the four houses," she said.
And it's that idea of four "monster homes" that deeply worries the neighbors, too.
"When you leave Wardell Road, you essentially leave the city of Saratoga and move into a rural area that is just so beautiful. This house is going to tower over the road that we drive up and destroy that," Christiano said. "Once you let this one in, there's no stopping the next three, we know that. We have to stop the first one because the second one will be compatible with the first one and the neighborhood will be destroyed from the inside out."
