Sunnyvale UDO adopted by Town Council

Regarding the town council's consideration of the proposed Unified Development Ordinance tonight, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the town council voted 6 to 0 to adopt the ordinance, despite its many problems, and fix it later. There was no consideration of the request made by several people during the public hearing to give the town's residents time to review the latest revision, or to respect the will of the people by placing it on the May 5th election ballot. However, there is good news in that three of the most onerous provision were eliminated or significantly modified. 1) The provision to compel the compliance of nonconforming properties as quickly as possible was deleted. 2) The provision making most properties in Sunnyvale "non-conforming" has been modified to state that "residential buildings and structures either built or approved prior to the date of adoption of the UDO are deemed conforming buildings and structures", which is essentially a grandfather clause. 3) The provision applying all of the UDO requirements to a property if the owner expands the structures by more than 10% has been change to state that only the newly expanded portion of a structure must conform to the UDO requirements. All previously existing aspects of the property will continue to be deemed conforming. However, the bad news here is that this relief is not applied to a newly created category of items other than the structures (such as a driveway or landscaping) which if expanded by 20% or more will subject all aspects of that particular item (both the old and the new portions) to the UDO requirements. Also good news, is that the council committed to proactively continuing its work on improving the UDO and added this topic to their next council agenda. However, with 5 of the 7 seats on the town council open in the May election, we need to ensure that the candidates we elect have this same commitment and are diligent in fixing the large number of problems still embedded in the UDO, particularly those infringing our private property rights.

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