Council Nod for Bigger Buildings, Revised Parking on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito

The El Cerrito City Council Monday night appeared to endorse raising limits on building height and density on San Pablo Avenue while also supporting revised parking policies to discourage use of private automobiles.

The bulk of the meeting was devoted to a three-hour presentation and discussion of reports and recommendations from consultants and city staff on how to attract transit-oriented development to El Cerrito's main commercial and transit artery.

"We're really right now near the threshold where projects may be feasible in El Cerrito," said Alexander Quinn of AECOM, a consulting firm advising the city on development strategy.

Quinn said "some creative development strategies" could push several sites on San Pablo into the realm of financially attractive possibilities for developers, especially near El Cerrito Plaza. Two effective strategies, he said, would be achieving less demand for parking and rent increases.

The council also heard more than a dozen recommendations from another consultant for revised parking policies – including reducing the minimum parking required for developments, 10-hour meter parking and allowing BART commuters to use on-street parking for the same fee they would pay to use the BART lot.

The ideas, from Chi-Hsin Shao of the CHS Consulting Group, also included "unbundled parking," which would allow parking spaces attached to a building to be rented or sold separately. Another proposal would to allow developers to use on-street parking to meet parking requirements.

His parking report also featured a complex set of revisions for parking regulations that would vary according to the type of development and location. For a residential development near El Cerrito Plaza, for example, he recommended two options to replace the current requirement of 0.8 parking spaces per studio/1-bedroom units: either 0.5 spaces per studio/1-bedroom or 0.8 spaces for any residential unit.

A third report, from city staff, recommended that building height and density limits be raised near the two BART stations and near City Hall. Near the BART stations, for example, the staff report urges that buildings be allowed to grow to about 70 feet from the current limit of 50 feet. Residential density near each BART station, currently limited to 45 units per acre, would increase to 70-100 units per acre.

The presentations were part of a multi-year planning effort by the city that includes revision of a city planning blueprint called the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan and another program called the Del Norte Transit-Oriented Development Strategy.

The advance versions of the consultant and staff reports that were contained in the council packet distributed Thursday are attached to this article.

The council did not take a vote on the planning effort. City Manager Scott Hanin said that if the council did not find "a fatal flaw" in the staff recommendations, the planning effort would proceed over the next few months with the staff incorporating the details into the revised San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan for presentation to the Planning Commission and then to the council.

None of the councilmembers identified what they called a fatal flaw, though a few reservations and exceptions were expressed. Councilwoman Rebecca Benassini said she was dubious about provisions removing maxmimum parking restrictions, and Councilman Bill Jones said he had problems with the parking strategy, saying he wouldn't want to see neighborhoods around BART stations suffer from increased shortages of parking for residents, for example.

Mayor Ann Cheng said in her concluding comments, "I'm very proud of our city that we're getting to this point of having these conversations, of considering the full palette of tools available to us and that are starting to emerge over time." She said she was excited about the goal of developing "performance metrics" that could lead to "overall reducing driving over time" and a commensurate "increase in walking and biking and transit."