Council Adopts Citywide TDM Ordinance, Advances BMR Phase Two
May 15, 2026
Mountain View City Council voted 7-0 on first reading to introduce a Citywide Transportation Demand Management ordinance and to advance the Phase Two amendments to the Below-Market-Rate Housing Program.
The May 12th Council meeting was the shortest in recent memory — Mayor Ramos adjourned at 9:29 PM with a “woo-hoo!” and noted it was the earliest she’d ever adjourned a meeting. The brevity wasn’t because the agenda was light. It’s because both public hearings landed as unanimous 7-0 votes with no friendly amendments, no carve-outs, and no McAlister speech against housing. Two long-running planning efforts crossed the finish line on first reading.
Citywide TDM Ordinance (Item 6.1)
This was a 14-year project finally landing. Mountain View has had a TDM ordinance since 1994, but it only applied to large employers required to participate by the regional Congestion Management Program. Project-by-project TDM requirements have been bolted onto roughly 27 entitled developments through individual Conditions of Approval and the four Precise Plans (San Antonio, El Camino Real, North Bayshore, East Whisman). The result is an inconsistent patchwork: different ADT reduction targets, different monitoring obligations, different strategies, different enforcement.
The new ordinance replaces that patchwork with a single citywide framework. It applies ADT reduction targets and a defined strategy toolkit to new development across the city, including residential. As we argued in our letter (and as James K. argued at CTC the week prior), a standardized framework with a parking exemption pathway for residential projects is a meaningful step up from the ad hoc approach.
What Council Approved
Councilmember Ramirez moved to approve staff’s recommendation with two technical modifications to Section 121, Definition 11 and Section 124(I), with the ordinance read in title only, CEQA-exempt under §15308, and a second reading set for May 26, 2026. Motion carried 7-0.
Ramirez specifically thanked “thoughtful deliberations from the EPC and the CTC and comments from the public” — a fair acknowledgment that some of the late changes (lower ADT reduction targets, dropping the metered-parking precondition on the “Limit Parking Supply” strategy, allowing combined credit for limiting parking and unbundling) came out of those forums. Several of those align with positions we and others have pushed at multiple stages.
What Didn’t Make It
We made three asks in our letter that did not get into the first-reading version:
Stronger scaling for the parking-reduction strategy. A project that reduces parking to near-zero gets the same flat 10% credit as a project that just slightly undershoots the ITE manual. This understates the value of the single most consequential land-use lever a developer can pull. Staff has signaled that the toolkit (as opposed to the ordinance itself) can be modified administratively, and Ramirez leaned heavily on that point in his deliberation. “Living document” is doing real work here, and we’ll be watching the first administrative toolkit update to see whether the scaling concern actually gets revisited.
How we work
Reform the rules
Back zoning reform and streamlined permitting so more homes are legal to build, especially near transit and jobs.
Educate & engage
Turn out residents to the meetings that matter and make it easy to take a pro-housing position on local projects.
Build partnerships
Work with neighbors, labor, faith groups, and builders toward a shared abundant-housing agenda.
Mountain View YIMBY is a chapter of YIMBY Action.
One of the local groups organizing for more homes across the country, backed by the national team.
5-year cap on residential TDM reporting. Medium and large residential projects are still on the hook for annual TDM reports for at least 10 years. Five years is enough to see strategies to maturity without piling continuing administrative burden on housing operators.
Explicit language confirming that TDM compliance is satisfied by adopting a qualifying TDM Plan from the toolkit without additional discretion. This matters increasingly for AB 130 ministerial review and other state-law objective-standards pathways. Some toolkit strategies — “Active Transportation Gap Closure Improvements” was the example we flagged — are vague enough to be hard to apply objectively. Staff did not engage this concern directly.
Council Discussion
Councilmember Showalter pushed hard on two themes that we think are worth flagging. First, monitor the cost of running the program, not just the outcomes — “it’s not going to be free,” and if staff capacity isn’t budgeted and assigned, the program won’t actually function. Second, monitoring should be purposeful, focused on learning and improvement rather than data-collection for its own sake. Both of these are correct, and they’re more interesting questions than the ones McAlister kept asking.
Councilmember McAlister delivered his standard cautionary speech about the 2014 North Bayshore TDM program: lots of strategies, no enforcement, nobody fined in 12 years. He’s not wrong about that history, and the question of who will actually be responsible for enforcement under the new citywide program is one we’d like a clearer answer to. But the lesson from North Bayshore is “fund the program adequately,” not “don’t have a program.” He voted yes.
Councilmember Hicks supported the program but emphasized she wants the toolkit to feel like a menu, not a punishment — acknowledging the diversity of household transportation needs (kids, eldercare, work commutes that can’t be transit-served). That’s a reasonable framing for residential TDM and consistent with our position that the program should target new trip generation, not the freedom of individual residents to own a car.
BMR Program Amendments (Item 6.2)
This was the legal/procedural follow-through on the November 4, 2025 study session that approved Phase Two of the BMR Program update. Phase One (clean-ups) was adopted in February 2025. Phase Two is the substantive piece. The staff report lists seven amendments:
Increase physical accessibility of BMR units
Add requirements for alternative means of compliance (incl. acquisition/preservation options and AFFH provisions)
Update the in-lieu fee escalator and amounts
Remaining program cleanup, including allowing ownership projects to weight-average up to exactly 100% AMI (a fix to a long-standing bug) and moving program administration to the Housing Department
Remove the obsolete HOA Reserve Fund requirement
Adopt a graduated fractional in-lieu fee reduction for small projects (under 7 units)
Allow updates to the BMR Program Guidelines to occur administratively
Several of these — particularly Amendment 4 (the 100% AMI fix), Amendment 5 (HOA reserve), and Amendment 6 (graduated fee) — are improvements we’ve been supporting through the process.
What Council Approved
Councilmember Ramirez moved to introduce the ordinance amending Chapter 36, Article XIV, Division 2, and adding Section 36.40.32 governing graduated fee reduction for small projects, with the additional direction to relocate BMR provisions out of Chapter 36 (Zoning) into Chapter 46 (Housing) by the end of 2026. Councilmember Showalter seconded the motion. Second reading set for June 9, 2026. Motion carried 7-0.
Ramirez announced up front: “Ordinarily I’m a meddler — I’m not doing that tonight for either of these ordinances because staff did great work.” It was a clean adoption.
The relocation to Chapter 46 is a small thing that matters: BMR is housing policy, not zoning, and pulling it into a Housing chapter makes future amendments procedurally easier (and less likely to require state-law-triggered findings about zoning changes).
What’s Still Pending
The Phase Two adoption is good as far as it goes, but the most consequential lever for actually producing small-scale ownership housing was deferred. We asked Council to extend the graduated in-lieu fee reduction beyond the current 7-unit threshold to 10 units, consistent with prior Council direction. Staff has chosen to defer that question to either the upcoming Low- and Middle-Income Homeownership Strategy or the 2028 BMR Review.
We continue to think that’s the wrong call. Small subdivision projects in Mountain View are already absorbing a park land dedication penalty on top of the BMR fee, and the absence of recent 7-to-10-unit ownership projects is itself a data point — there aren’t any to measure outcomes from, because the fee structure makes them infeasible to build. Waiting for a future review to assess outcomes you won’t have data for, because the policy itself has frozen the project type out, isn’t a measurement strategy. It’s a delay.
Kevin Ma made the same point in public comment, explicitly echoing our letter. He also raised a separate point worth tracking: San Francisco recalibrates its inclusionary zoning requirements every three years and has likely converged to a lower rate than Mountain View’s. The 2028 review is a chance to ask whether our overall inclusionary rate is calibrated to actually maximize BMR production rather than to maximize stated requirements.
Council Discussion
Robert Cox — former EPC member — spoke in support of Amendment 2 (added requirements for alternative means of compliance), recalling EPC discussions where the alt-compliance pathway was meant to be a real evaluation rather than a rubber stamp. We agree, and the inclusion of “qualified development partner” criteria in the draft ordinance is a meaningful tightening.
Councilmember Showalter took the same monitoring posture she took on TDM: she’d like a 3-to-5 year evaluation of the BMR program post-amendment, with attention to units produced, costs, and how many people the program has actually helped. That’s a reasonable ask. The point of two-phase Housing Element reviews is to produce that kind of evaluation; building it into the ordinance work formally is a good idea.
Ramirez closed with thanks to Housing Director Wayne Chen and his team — a deserved acknowledgment that housing staff have been pushing through an unusually heavy stretch of substantive policy work over the last 18 months. We agree.
Public Comment
Public comment on both items was supportive across the board. James K. spoke for MV YIMBY on TDM. I spoke for MV YIMBY on BMR. Robert Cox, Alexander Amoroso, Kevin Ma, and Karen Berky spoke on BMR, all in support of the program with various refinements. No opposition speakers on either item.
Our Take
This was a quietly productive meeting. Two multi-year planning efforts moved decisively forward without drama, on unanimous votes, with explicit staff acknowledgement that both ordinances are designed to keep iterating — the TDM toolkit administratively, the BMR program through its scheduled reviews and the upcoming Chapter 46 relocation.
That iterative posture is the right one. Neither of these ordinances is going to be the last word, and we’d rather have a workable first-reading version that the city can refine based on actual project experience than a perfect ordinance that takes another year to negotiate. The first administrative TDM toolkit update is the next thing to watch — that’s where the parking-scaling concern and the AB 130 objective-standards alignment can get resolved without re-opening the ordinance.
On BMR, the relocation to Chapter 46 is the procedural move that matters most over the medium term, because it positions the next round of BMR work (which will need to happen — the program will produce its 2028 review whether or not we ask it to) to actually be tractable. We’ll keep pushing on the 10-unit fee threshold until the policy catches up to the reality that small-scale ownership housing is being priced out of Mountain View by the city’s own fee structure.
A short meeting that gets two things done is worth more than a long meeting that doesn’t.
