We need a pause button on Builder's Remedy!
A temporary ordinance could help protect Carmel Valley while Monterey County completes its housing plan update. We’re asking the County to evaluate that option, and we need your signature:
As previously shared, Monterey County is getting closer to finishing the state-required update to its housing plan. Once the State approves the rezoning and its environmental review, our communities will again be guided by their own area plans, rather than by a developer's profit-driven vision.
However, that approval is still months away.
Until then, "builder's remedy" applications can bypass local zoning. We have already seen two in the Village, at the Airfield and at Blue Sky Lodge. Both are void for now. But a new application could be filed at any time, and it would generally lock the rules in place on the day it's filed.
This summer, Carmel Valley attorney Richard Rosenthal wrote to the County twice, on July 14 and August 4. He proposed a practical step that state law allows: a temporary urgency interim ordinance (Government Code §65858).
Think of it as a pause button: applications would still be accepted, but new projects would have to follow the County's upcoming plan.
What it would do:
Any housing application filed with the County after the effective date of the ordinance can only be approved if it is consistent with the existing zoning and, if the zoning will be changed, with the amended housing element and the specific rezoning.
It "would not… prohibit the acceptance or processing of a project application" but would "require the denial of a project whose proposed uses would conflict" with the
zoning and plan updates the County intends to adopt.
Once adopted, the ordinance would be in place for 45 days. The Board could renew it thereafter.
This is not a ban on housing. It asks new projects to follow the plan the County and the State have already agreed on.
Mr. Rosenthal asked the Board to have County staff and County Counsel study whether this can be done, report back publicly, and adopt it if they can. Neither letter has received a response.
Large projects deserve a careful look at water supply, sewage capacity, and safe fire evacuation before they are locked in. Our goal is simple: gather enough signatures to compel a Supervisor to place this on the Board's agenda. Then, County Counsel reports publicly, and the supervisors must respond on the record.
Please sign the petition:
We encourage you to forward this petition request to all of your friends and neighbors throughout Monterey County.
It is important that all 5 supervisors hear from their constituents in all parts of the county that the Builders Remedy law is NOT creating the housing the community needs and certainly not addressing the "missing middle" segment of housing, which caters to contractors, teachers, firefighters etc. who have too much income to qualify for "affordable" units, yet too little income to qualify for the bulk of "luxury" housing that's being built.
In gratitude,
The FOVA Team
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