Amy Steward was snaking along the streets of Coronado, a lengthy spreadsheet in hand, visiting one address after another, when the police stopped her.
The city council member was assessing potentially historic properties block by block, but authorities worried she was casing homes. She chuckled as she told the story during the Oct. 21 meeting of the Coronado City Council, in which she said she hoped to visit every home that the city is poised to exempt from mandatory historic review.
Steward hopes to catch any of the exempted homes that may need a second look, and she will bring her list of those homes — so far, she’s identified about 40 — to a future council meeting.
With that in mind, the council voted unanimously to adopt a new historic context statement that will streamline the city’s historic review process.
The move is the culmination of years of debate over preserving Coronado’s charm and the costs associated with its current historic review process. The new process will remove 1,058 homes from mandatory historic review, although property owners can still request it.
Currently, every house 75 years or older must be assessed individually for historic relevance. Between 2019 and 2023, 122 properties were assessed at a cost of about $863,000. Leaders worried that the historic preservation program could become too expensive to sustain.
To address this, the council in Dec. 2024 directed staff to draft an updated ordinance. The proposed plan includes an updated historic context statement (read it here) and will use survey data to exempt certain properties from individual historic review.
The survey considered observable features of homes in the Village built through 1970, evaluated them for architectural significance, and divided them into three tiers. Tier one properties are unaltered or minimally altered structures that may be eligible for historic designation and comprise 186 properties; tier two properties are somewhat altered and not currently eligible for historic designation — 140 properties; and tier three are substantially altered and not eligible for historic designation.
Under the new ordinance, 1,058 tier three properties would be exempt from the historic review process. The goal, supporters of the plan say, is to save money and time. However, this has been a much-debated topic in past years, and critics say the survey approach might miss historic properties that deserve to be preserved.
About 130 properties were not assigned a tier during the survey, either because they were not sufficiently visible from the street or because a determination could not be made. Those would be subject to the determination of historical significance process as they came of age.
Homes designated as historic receive a property tax break under the Mills Act, but they also face restrictions to renovations or demolition.
The City Council will hold a second hearing of the ordinance at its Nov. 4 meeting. However, Steward said she will return with a Policy No. 9 request in December, once she has finished her review of the tier three properties, with those she thinks the council should revisit.
At the Oct. 21 meeting, she said she was about two-thirds of the way through the list and had flagged 40 properties for additional review.
Mayor John Duncan thanked Steward for taking the time to assess each property.
“And please check on the suspicious woman parked outside my house,” he joked.
Are former GEM Award winners eligible for review?