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Marin County planning commissioners got their first look at proposed objective standards for offsite improvements made necessary by new housing developments in unincorporated areas.

Under new state housing laws designed to stimulate housing development, counties and municipalities may only attempt to enforce objective standards such as building heights and setback requirements. In response, Marin County has developed a “form-based code” of objective standards governing proposed buildings and accompanying “onsite” changes.

However, the form-based code “does not deal much with the public right of way,” said Robert Brown, a former San Rafael planning director hired to advise the county, told commissioners at a meeting on Monday.

As a result, the county is creating another set of objective standards to cover “offsite” improvements in infrastructure that will be necessitated by new housing developments. These include roads, sidewalks, utilities, intersections, crosswalks, landscaping, lighting, stormwater conveyance and grading.

The county is simultaneously moving to update its impact fees for new development. Impact fees are one-time charges that local governments impose on developers to help pay for increased costs created by their projects, such as the need for additional infrastructure and capital facilities.

“The impact fees are about how much developers would be required to pay towards infrastructure improvements that the county is putting into place,” said Sarah Jones, director of the Marin County Community Development Agency. “The standards will define the physical requirements for infrastructure built by the developers.”

Marin also intends to go one step further, bulletproofing a set of minimum objective standards by demonstrating in advance that they are necessary to protect public safety.

Brown said this is necessary because many developers are using state density law to secure waivers and exceptions from onsite form-based code requirements.

“Those waivers typically have to be granted,” Brown said, “unless the agency can find that lowering the standards would create a significant health and safety impact that can’t be otherwise mitigated.”

The county was recently sued by a developer whose complaints include its refusal to grant waivers to reduce street widths and sidewalk standards in its project.

The developer, 330 Land Co. and Lucas Valley Road LLC, wants to subdivide a 61-acre property at 1501 Lucas Valley Road. The developer qualifies for a 35% density bonus by pricing five of the homes to be affordable for households at or below 80% of the area median income.

The developer is proposing to reduce the width of several roads while eliminating sidewalks on one side of two streets. County planners have stated that such a street configuration and circulation system “would create hazardous conditions and compromise pedestrian safety.”

“So part of our charge — and this is pretty unique, I don’t think it is being done elsewhere — is to establish minimum safety standards,” Brown said.

Brown said the plan is to have county supervisors adopt an ordinance that cites legally defensible evidence to establish in advance that these minimum standards are necessary to protect public safety. For example, fire code standards may be used to determine minimum road widths.

The new objective standards and impact fees won’t apply to 1501 Lucas Valley Road or nine other projects totaling 466 proposed residences for which applications have already been filed. The county has, however, locked in the new requirements for applications filed after April 7. It did so by having supervisors adopt a resolution to “initiate proceedings for adoption of development impact fees and offsite objective design and development standards.”

According to a staff report, doing so will ensure that the impact fees and objective standards adopted in the future will apply to future developments even if the applications are deemed complete before the impact fees and standards are fully adopted.

Brown said the minimum standards the county is considering adopting would require the presence of sidewalks, travel lane widths, bicycle lane widths, landscape strips and on-street parking for certain road types.

The county is beginning its development of “offsite” standards by focusing on revising road standards in the “city centered and baylands corridors” where most of the sites identified for development in the county housing element are located. The Planning Commission is scheduled to review the recommended road standards again on July 27, when commissioners will vote on whether to recommend their adoption by county supervisors on Aug. 25.

“We feel a need to move forward as quickly as we can,” Brown said.