As usual, it takes an army of residents to get Town staff, commissioners and now Town Council members to do the right thing by residents. The north parcel at Mountainside and Palisades – commonly referred to by homeowners who live in the adjacent Lost Hills neighborhood as the “church parcel” – is no different.

Developers want to rezone this single-family parcel into multi-family and they are pulling out all the stops. They are meeting individually with some Council members and going door-to-door in the neighborhood, attempting to convince anyone who’ll listen that more density, more cars, more pollution and lots more traffic traveling down residential streets like Mountainside, Tumbleweed, Ponderosa, Lost Hills and Sunflower is a good thing for the neighborhood. Hey, just trust them!

Never mind that people who live in the area bought into their neighborhoods and invested in their homes with the understanding that the zoning that’s been in place for decades at Mountainside and Palisades as single-family will remain as single-family. Not surprisingly, not a single homeowner who attended the recent and well-attended Planning & Zoning meetings stood up and proclaimed, “I want more apartments and cars and traffic in my neighborhood!”

Zoning should only be changed in extreme circumstances, if at all. Otherwise, why have zoning if you can’t depend on it? If you care about the dangerous precedent this will set if zoning is allowed to be changed because a developer waves around shiny photos and makes lots of promises, you’ll want to attend the Town Council meeting where the zoning for this parcel will be decided. Otherwise, the next lot to be rezoned could be in your neighborhood. This should be an easy “no” from all council members to the developer’s rezone request. We’ll see.