Milpitas planning commission recommends council adopt comprehensive zoning ordinance update

The Milpitas Planning Commission on June (date on record) recommended that the City Council adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance update, an accompanying zoning map amendment and a general plan amendment after staff and consultants summarized changes and answered commissioner questions.

Special Projects Associate Holly Pearson told commissioners the item before them is “the comprehensive zoning ordinance update phase 2,” and said the city’s consultant, Jen Murillo of Lisa Wise Consulting, would summarize the project and the changes made since the draft was last reviewed in February. Murillo described the work as a final-stage rewrite that “modernize[s] the city's zoning ordinance, bring[s] it up to date reflecting best practices, making it user friendly” and aligning the code with the Milpitas 2040 General Plan.

The project package presented to the commission included the zoning ordinance rewrite and renumbering, internal municipal code cross‑references, a zoning map cleanup, a general plan amendment (GP25-0001) translation table and an addendum to the Milpitas 2040 General Plan EIR. The addendum, staff said, concluded that the ordinance changes are within the scope of impacts analyzed in the previously certified general plan EIR and that “no further environmental review” was required under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Why it matters: the revised ordinance reorganizes and modernizes definitions and land‑use categories, creates clearer procedures for approvals, and adds a staff-level “minor deviations” approval to allow modest departures (e.g., small percentage adjustments) from development standards without a variance. Staff and the consultant said…