For the past month we have been working with the County of Santa Cruz to define how our proposed use of our property can be accommodated under their rules. The county’s term for their land use determination is called a “matrix”. According to the Santa Cruz County Building Code, the purpose of the matrix system is to “provide a consistent methodology for the determination of the development potential of rural land based on available services, environmental and site constraints and resource proportion factors”. The county analyzes various factors on our property and assigns them a numerical value which then determines the extent of development that is allowed.

The matrix report only assesses the development potential of our land. The decision to approve or deny our specific plan is done when we submit our application for a discretionary use permit, which we should be able to do later this year. It is important the matrix supports our proposed use, but it does not guarantee approval.

In May 2000 we hired the county to prepare a rural density matrix report for our property. Then in February 2005 we had the county review and update their initial report. (You can view those reports here.) The result of these reports is that the county has assigned a matrix calculation for our property of 3.7 matrix units. (A normal single family residence is 1 matrix unit.) The county then requested us to submit a proposal on how we would use the matrix units for our proposed development project.

We submitted our plan to the county (see below). Finally, after many meetings, plan revisions, emails and phone calls, the county accepted our proposal! Even though this approval is only for the proposed use, it is an important step in our approval process.

Here is our proposal that was approved: