Backroom deal upzoning for fun and profit!

Well, lookie here. After all that open government and transparency we were promised last election, it looks like we're exactly back to backroom business as usual.

While the city is pretending to just now begin the Housing Element Update (selecting sites for high-density development to meet dubious SANDAG mandates), and will go to great lengths pretending to incorporate public input, it turns out that way back in March, city staff had secretly already selected 95 properties they wanted to upzone.

From the Inbox:

"Staff" applied some fancy math and identified 95 proposed upzones around town to identify the allocation. The approval of these upzones would not invoke Prop A because they'd be rolled into resident approval of the Housing Element Update (HEU). The upzones take some properties, for example, from R3 to R30, and that doesn't include the certain application of density bonus.

The City notified these 95 parcel owners of their upzone status in a mailer that went only to them back in March. You'll see from the attached that the potential "options" that these identified parcel owners could enjoy, should they decide to redevelop their property. Suffice to say, there's a message in there.

The City's current problem is, they kicked off this Update in the dark. They approached the identified parcel owners alone, as they considered them first-line "stakeholders." The City did not notify adjacent homeowners. Six months after notifying these 95 stakeholders, the City still did not notify adjacent homeowners or residents in general. So much for "transparency." Only Lisa is saying that she had no prior knowledge of this outreach, although has said she is ok with staff not telling her about it. Tony MAY have said the same, but I'd have to go back and look at the tape from this past Wednesday to see.

Residents learned of this contact to the 95 when an uphappy one of them came forward to tell her story at oral communications.

Funny how the Housing Element Update was quickly placed as an agenda item a week after the oral comms speaker made her revelation. The City could not afford to sit on it a minute longer.

Here's the city flyer that went out only to the chosen few.

But it gets worse.  Controversial political operative Mike Andreen was let in on the secret 95-property plan, and organized an event with Mayor Kristin Gaspar to get property owners behind the mass-upzoning campaign.  Titled "Encinitas Up-Zoning Can Mean Increased Property Values," the flyer for that event is here.  The purpose is clearly to get the property owners to see dollar signs and help fund a mass-upzoning vote in 2016.

More from the Inbox:

In addition to the 95 city staff-identified property owners, representatives from the development industry were at the Andreen meeting, including Pasco Engineering. Word from others who attended was that Andreen, with Gaspar nodding in agreement, blamed this "need to upzone" on Prop A.

So residents are just now finding out about the underhanded approach that the City took in starting the HEU six months ago with not a peep. Residents are not and will not be told that they may vote "no" on the HEU and what the consequences of a "no" vote would be (a few $100K in lost revenue from the State and some extra assigned low-income units), so that they may truly weigh options. They're merely being asked to decide "go up or go out," and will find out about the "no" option at the polling booth in 2016. Council is ok with that approach. By 2016, voters' heads will be so filled with "must comply with State mandates," they'll feel that they must vote yes; I assume that's part of the City's strategy to push the update through this time.

Best for last: we learned from the oral comms speaker, who is a real estate agent, that if you are a homeowner in the vicinity of a proposed upzone property, you must disclose that on when selling your home. It's an item on the list of disclosures alongside things such as cracked slabs, deaths in the home, freeway widening, etc. This puts the selling price up in the air, as the seller will have to say "there MAY be an upzoning" down the street, I have no idea." You can imagine that the home price will go down. There is no threshold for distance from the upzone; the only test is whether the seller knew about the possible rezone (per real estate/State law). If you fail to disclose, you could be sued later by your buyer who was not counting on 40 low-income apartments down the street.

What's the point of the upcoming Housing Element "public input" sessions? The decisions were made in secret six momths ago!

UPDATE: Here's the map of the proposed mass upzonings.