State’s loosened development standards costing local control raise eyebrows on the City Council
San Mateo Daily Journal – by Austin Walsh / December 7, 2017
New state housing laws requiring city governments to cede a substantial portion of their local control alarmed Burlingame officials who fear the regulations may bring unintended consequences.
Officials raised concerns the legislation will invite development of boilerplate, cookie-cutter plans by sapping officials authority to enforce design driven decisions.
“Burlingame for many years has worked very hard to develop guidelines, but many of those guidelines have to deal with neighborhood consistency, so all of that goes out the door with this,” said Keighran.