It has been four years since Mountain View held its last gatekeeper hearing, a kind of backdoor approval process for development proposals that don't comply with the city's zoning rules and regulations. But a new plan put forth by the city aims to change that, with criteria that will exempt some projects from going through the onerous process.

But while developers welcome the return to a regular schedule, the City Council recently questioned the entire concept in a study session Tuesday evening. Several council members raised concerns about a piecemeal approach.

“I think we need to rethink the gatekeeper authorization process and what it strives to achieve,” said Council member Lucas Ramirez. “I don’t want to have a huge patchwork of exemptions."

In the past, gatekeeper hearings were held annually, providing the City Council with the chance to review projects that required a legislative amendment to city guidelines, often times giving developers early consideration for projects that involved major land use changes. The upside to this arrangement was that the city could leverage key concessions – typically framed as community benefits – from developers.

But for city staff, the gatekeeper process was difficult to administer; it ranked third in their workload priorities yet consumed much of their time as projects piled up. It became so onerous that the city “hit pause” on the hearings in 2019, a situation that was extended during the pandemic because of staff vacancies, said Assistant Community Development Director Lindsay Hagan.

The new plan put forth by staff is to revise the process, not only to streamline the city's review but also to comply with the state’s housing element, which stipulates that the city hold annual gatekeeper hearings for residential and mixed-use projects.

Although a step in the right direction, the proposed modifications are not enough, according to Peter Katz, president and CEO of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. The process has strayed too far from its original intent, he said in a letter to the council, urging it to consider other models that are more pragmatic, business friendly and serve the city better, particularly in regard to the timely review of projects.

All the council members agreed to bring back the annual hearing schedule, with the next one likely occurring in the fall of 2024. They also suggested modifications to the application criteria: to make it more prescriptive and to bring it more explicitly in line with city objectives, which Mayor Alison Hicks specified as “quality of life” issues, like affordable housing, green spaces, connectivity and economic diversity.

The bulk of the discussion, however, centered on the purpose of the gatekeeper and its exemptions, which would allow for approval without a council authorization hearing. Typically, these projects are smaller in scope, ask for a simple legislative change and are seen as less controversial, Hagan said. The flip side is that these projects also do not require community benefits.

Council members generally agreed with staff’s proposal to modestly expand the exemptions that would exempt, for example, 100% affordable housing projects, irrespective of whether it received city funding, that are on sites less than two acres. But they grappled with the idea of exemptions as a whole.

“As I thought about exemptions, I realized I disagree with a lot of the presumptions that are made in the staff report,” Ramirez said, adding that small projects could be highly controversial while large projects might receive very little public engagement.

Several other council members also questioned the purpose of gatekeeper projects given recent updates to the city’s general and precis plans, which revised zoning standards for development in the city's intended vision.

“I would like to see us put our resources and actually realize this general plan and the precise plans that we have worked so hard to develop," said Council member Margaret Abe-Koga. "So, the gatekeeper really was just used at a time when we had an old plan that was outdated. We don't have that anymore."

Abe-Koga argued that gatekeeper projects should really just be a “one-off exception” and not a pattern of circumventing the city’s rules.

Council member Emily Ann Ramos expressed a different opinion, comparing the gatekeeper to a “release valve” that allowed for innovative changes that might otherwise be constrained by the city’s established plans, a point supported by Vice Mayor Pat Showalter.

“We've done really good planning, we've done really extensive planning, but we haven't remembered everything,” Showalter said.

In considering other gatekeeper models, Ramirez raised the possibility of switching the order of the process, similar to the gatekeeper process in San Jose. Instead of bringing the application to council immediately, staff could review it first and make the decision of whether the project aligns with the city’s objectives and goals. “I would rather staff be the gatekeeper, we set the policy parameters,” he said.

While other council members supported the idea, city staff approached it more cautiously, given the potential workload increase, with city manager Kimbra McCarthy pointing out that San Jose has a staff of 4,000 while Mountain View has 700.

“Maybe there's a middle ground,” McCarthy said. “And we may even want to say, ‘Alright, let's try this for a year or two. And see how it works.’ That's what I'm hearing, maybe kind of a pilot gatekeeper process, if you want it to look differently than the way it looks now. And we can just try it,” she added.

Staff plan to return to council with the updated amendment authorization criteria, which will include zoning amendments for review and eventual adoption in early 2024. After the ordinance goes into effect, applicants will have 90 days to submit their gatekeeper application, which likely will go to a council authorization hearing in the fall of 2024, according to the study session report.