Please review and provide your feedback on the Baseline Zoning Ordinance.

Help make Berkeley’s Zoning Ordinance easier to use and understand by participating in this survey between now and Sept. 30, 2020 to share your opinions about a draft rewrite of the Zoning Ordinance. Please let us know if our work is moving in the right direction by taking this survey.

The Zoning Ordinance is the part of the Berkeley Municipal Code that contains the City’s land use regulations.  Using the Zoning Ordinance, a Berkeley resident or property owner should be able to understand what can be built on a particular piece of property, what uses are permitted on that property, and what process is required to get a project approved.  The Zoning Ordinance should be easy to read and use for Berkeley residents and property owners, without being overly complicated, full of technical jargon, or consisting of hard-to-find “hidden” rules.

At the direction of the City Council, staff has drafted a new version of the Zoning Ordinance called the Baseline Zoning Ordinance (BZO). The point of the BZO is to improve the presentation and usefulness of the existing Zoning Ordinance, rewritten into easily understood language, and updated with improved illustrations.  This draft BZO does not include major substantive policy changes to existing rules, regulation or procedures. Rather, it aims to make the existing land use rules easier to find and understand.

This survey, which will close at the end of September, will help the Planning Department understand whether the draft BZO meets those objectives.  We'll evaluate the results, distribute them publicly, present them to City Council and use the information to inform improvements.

This survey can take as little as ten minutes to complete, depending on how much input you wish to provide.  Since the draft BZO is a long document, the survey provides the option to review as much or as little of it as you please, while providing a venue for feedback of any length. You can also save your comments and revisit the survey to add comments or to review additional sections.

This survey is part of Berkeley's larger Strategic Plan efforts to improve customer service. The draft BZO is Phase I of a larger City Council project called the Zoning Ordinance Revision Project (ZORP). For more information on this project, visit the ZORP project page on the City’s website.

Any questions or comments about the survey can be sent to the Justin Horner, Associate Planner, at [email protected]. Please complete the survey and help the City more clearly articulate its land use rules for easy use by you and your neighbors.