When the wealthy suburb of Woodside on the San Francisco Peninsula declared itself a mountain lion habitat, it was such a shameless ploy to exempt itself from a new state law allowing more housing density that not even mountain lion advocates bought it.
But more significantly, neither did California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who sent the town a letter Sunday informing officials that that excuse was not going to fly. After the letter — and a lot of bad publicity sparked by a story in the Almanac, a local paper — town officials, wisely, retreated from their stance as quickly as a spooked mountain lion scampers back into the wilderness.
Ever since the passage last year of Senate Bill 9, the controversial law that allows up to four units on a single-family home lot, cities up and down the state have been trying to concoct ways to get around it or impose tough standards that might discourage property owners from taking on the building project. For example, a new ordinance in Los Altos Hills regulates the color of walls and exterior lighting, prohibits rooftop decks and requires a hedge along the parcel line near the SB 9 unit.
