Room Enough: METHODOLOGY: PIPELINE PROJECT DETERMINATION

Monterey County Planning was approached for an accounting of those projects in some stage of approval, going back a period of ten years. The requested list was delivered and evaluated. The following are the steps taken and methods used to analyze the data received.

• Parcel numbers that match existing Assessor parcel numbers were included. Non-matching numbers were not included, using the assumption that these numbers likely represented expired or deactivated parcel numbers.
  
  
• The remaining list was reviewed for projects that are either approved, complete, ready for hearing, incomplete, referred to a hearing body (usually for consistency) or set for hearing.
  
  
• Planning Commission files were reviewed for any project that resulted in a second (or more) dwelling unit. Single Family Dwellings were excluded as having already been counted.
  
  
• Planning Commission applications include Use Permits and Coastal permits and anything else that falls in the Commission's purview.
  
  
• Subdivision files were similarly reviewed for multiple lots or dwelling units.
  
  
• Duplicate entries were removed.

PIPELINE PROJECT IDENTIFICATION
Once the number of vacant legal lots was established and the number of potential dwelling units calculated, the study approached the identification of projects in the application and approval pipelines of both the County and the individual cities. Staff from each agency were engaged in this identification process.

Pipeline projects are defined as those land use applications that are not yet built, but have been either determined incomplete, ready for hearing, complete, set for hearing, tabled, referred to a hearing body, continued or approved for the past ten years.

Once the lists were received, several filtering tools were applied to this search; they included:

• Removing duplicate projects
• Excluding hotels, motels, timeshare unit projects
• Excluding September Ranch and Highlands Inn projects in the unincorporated area; September Ranch was excluded because of litigation surrounding the project and Highlands Inn was excluded because its units are visitor-serving rather than residential.

The resulting list was searched for the number of dwelling units that were anticipated when built; it is replicated here in a table.

TABLE 4. DWELLING UNITS LIKELY TO BE BUILT FROM PIPELINE PROJECTS IN THE UNINCORPORATED AREA.

The same methodology was applied to pipeline projects in the incorporated areas. The following table itemizes the cities' number of dwelling units likely to be built from these projects.

TABLE 5. DWELLING UNITS LIKELY TO BE BUILT FROM PIPELINE PROJECTS IN THE INCORPORATED AREAS.