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General Plan Chapter 9 (Housing Element Summary) Replacement The San Leandro General Plan is formatted as a single document consisting of 10 chapters. Chapter 9 of the Plan is a summary of the Housing Element. The Housing Element itself stands on its own as a separate document. The City has opted not to include the full Housing Element within the General Plan "binder" because the Housing Element is much longer than the other elements and is formatted to meet specific State requirements. While elements like Transportation, Environmental Hazards. and Open Space/ Conservation are generally 40 to 50 pages long, the Housing Element is approximately 200 pages long. As presently formatted, Chapter 9 includes an 8 -page summary of the "background" sections of the Housing Element (the Evaluation of the previous Element, the Needs Assessment, the Sites Analysis, and the Constraints Analysis), followed by 30+ pages of goals, policies, and actions. The goals, policies, and actions are reproduced verbatim from the Housing Element rather than in summary format because they are the most critical parts of the Element, and are similarly formatted to the rest of the General Plan. In May 2010, the City adopted a new Housing Element covering the period 2007 -2014. The existing Chapter 9 is based on the 2002 Housing Element, which covered the period 1999 -2006. A new Chapter 9 has been prepared summarizing the 2010 Element. Its format is identical to the prior Chapter 9. The goals, policies, and actions in the Housing Element match what was adopted by the City Council in April 2010 with two exceptions. Following adoption, the City was asked by the State Department of Housing and Community Development to: (a) add a paragraph to the Housing Element committing to include Reasonable Accommodation provisions in the Zoning Ordinance; and (b) clarify a statement in the adopted Element regarding compliance with Senate Bill 2 (SB2). Both changes are included as part of this General Plan Amendment. Neither of these changes will have an impact on the environment. The environmental impacts of adopting the Housing Element were previously evaluated in a Negative Declaration certified by the City Council in April, 2002. No additional impacts would occur as a result of replacing the existing General Plan Chapter "9" with the new chapter. Environmental Checklist The Environmental Checklist and discussion that follows is based on questions provided in Appendix G of the CEQA Guidelines. The questions focus on individual concerns within IS different broad environmental categories such as air quality, cultural resources, land use, and traffic. The CEQA guidelines provide direction for preparing checklist responses. Each question in the Checklist requires a 'yes" or "no" reply indicating whether or not the project will have a potentially significant environmental impact of a certain type. The Checklist table provides other possible replies to the questions, including one which indicates the project would have a `less than significant" impact, and another which indicates that the project could have a significant impact but that the impact can be avoided if mitigation measures are applied. The `less than significant" impacts correspond to those where relevant information, reports or studies demonstrate that the impacts would not exceed a threshold of significance established by the lead agency. Impacts that are `less than significant with mitigation" include those where it can be demonstrated that the incorporation of clearly defined mitigation measures into the project would avoid impacts or reduce them to less than significant levels. TOD and Housing Element General Plan Consistency Amendments January 2011 • Page 7