How many votes does it take to adopt 84 municipal code changes? Just one

One of the biggest challenges for a reporter covering San Diego City Hall is making sense for readers of the giant package of municipal code changes the city approves simultaneously once per year.

Last month, the City Council approved 84 changes to the municipal code with a single vote, limiting opportunities for the public and The San Diego Union-tribune to analyze and evaluate each change.

City officials say comprehensively updating the zoning code each year lets them quickly make small modifications that boost the efficiency of city government and adjust policies that have had contradictory or unintended consequences.

Critics say officials often slip items into the giant update that are important enough to be handled separately and get more attention and scrutiny. They also note that San Diego is the only local city that does this.

Those critics seem to have been at least partly vindicated by this year’s update, which was dominated by a new transit rule that allows higher-density housing developments located within 1 mile of public transit, instead of the previous requirement of half a mile.

Including the transit rule in the package limited the attention it got. But perhaps more importantly, it limited the attention paid to the other 83 items, which also outlawed storage facilities in prime industrial areas and expanded where tasting rooms can be located — among many other changes.

Other items in the package were making downtown more family-friendly with new incentives for three-bedroom apartments and childcare businesses, tougher rules for new projects vulnerable to sealevel rise and stronger wildfire prevention rules for climate-friendly energy storage facilities.

Many of these changes seem important enough to be handled as separate items.

To make sense of them for Union-tribune readers, I wrote multiple stories on the transit rule and a separate story on the other 83 changes.

And then, after the smoke cleared, I wrote a follow-up on a part of the complex transit rule that aims to fight racial segregation by encouraging more housing for low-income residents in wealthier and mostly White neighborhoods.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com