Belmont residents push against trail removal and road

While the area is privately-owned property, residents have grown accustomed to using the trail, as the previous owner left the area undeveloped and allowed for public access. Huang said he still welcomes residents to use the area until construction begins, but things heated up when a neighbor began building a playground on his property without permission and tried to convince him via email that building up the property wouldn’t be worth his time. 

“That’s kind of been the attitude in the neighborhood, that ‘this is our dog trail,’” he said, adding the road would be public, but not the private property along with it.

The tensions have only risen since then, he said, despite his years’ worth of geotechnical analyses, engineering reports and the city’s validation. 

But resident Jennifer Lai said the effort would impose serious environmental risks, which have not been addressed because the city has determined it is exempt from environmental impact reviews. 

“There’s been many groups of people that have proposed to build a road here and ultimately none of those were ever approved. No development commission or council has ever approved or found it safe or reasonable to do so,” Lai said during the Planning Commission meeting Tuesday, May 7. 

Environmental impact reports are typically required under the California Environmental Quality Act but, according to the city staff report, projects such as the Monte Cresta proposal are exempt if there are already existing EIRs for that area. Evaluations such as the San Juan Hills Area Plan EIR and the 2017 EIR in the city’s General Plan both contain analyses of the area, and those reports are all factors in the decision to invoke Section 15183 of CEQA, which allows for exemptions, Community Development Director Carlos de Melo said. 

“All of these would be applicable to this kind of project. This gave the city additional information to allow us to navigate towards a 15183 determination related to the project,” de Melo said. 

Many housing advocates often point to the weaponization of CEQA as a key strategy by some neighborhood residents to delay or prevent unwanted housing development in their communities. A GoFundMe page by the Friends of Monte Cresta states it is concerned the trail will be removed “to make way for the development of 3,500 [square-foot] mansions.” 

Huang said such tactics used by resistant homeowners to significantly delay or scrap a project has contributed to the affordability crisis in the Bay Area and beyond.

“This is not just my project, but it’s a pattern. This is the reason California does not have enough housing. There’s an entitlement there,” Huang said. “I understand those won’t be affordable houses, but I think any additional supplies to the market helps.”

But for Lai, and many other residents who spoke during the Planning Commission hearing May 7, landslides and other environmental risks are being overlooked. The Friends of Monte Cresta are also represented by Ariel Strauss of Greenfire Law, who wrote a letter to the commission stating the project should not be exempt from an EIR, stating it would have “environmental effects that were not considered in previous EIRs and are unique (i.e., “peculiar”) to this specific site.” Those include exacerbated wildfire risks and recent landslides that were not taken into account in previous analyses, some of which are decades old. 

During the meeting, commissioners ultimately decided to conduct a second hearing on the matter next month after the influx of public comments and legal documentation were presented, with some reiterating the limitations and scope of such an advisory board. 

“We don’t get to make the rules. We don’t get to vote on what rules are being made. We get to evaluate what other people bring to us,” Commissioner Nathan Majeski said. “And it’s important as a property owner that you enjoy having rights of development that are under our code for your home.”

The item will be discussed again June 4.