Thursday marks 70 years since Saratoga's first City Council sat down to govern the newly incorporated city, and the city's planning department is using its fall newsletter to look back at how the town took shape.
From orchards to a city
Residents voted to incorporate in October 1956, and the first council meeting took place on Oct. 22 of that year, according to the Community Development Department's fall 2026 newsletter, posted to the city website Monday. The early council chose to keep things as they were, adopting ordinances that followed Santa Clara County's rules while it began work on long-range planning.
The newsletter describes a town that started as a lumber center, became known for horticulture and then, by the early 1950s, faced growing pressure to turn orchards near Saratoga Village into subdivisions. Planning for Highway 85 in the 1960s split off an eastern section of the city that came to be called the Golden Triangle.
Buyers came for an easy commute, good schools and the cachet of the hillside estates, the newsletter says, and that pattern, mostly homes with a little commercial and apartment property, largely holds today.
Residents curious about the city's past can look up the Heritage Resource Inventory, which covers designated landmarks plus Austin Way and Saratoga Avenue, the city's two heritage lanes.
CEQA and builder's remedy projects
The same issue explains how state environmental review now applies to the builder's remedy housing proposals that have filled the city's planning calendar. Assembly Bill 130, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on June 30, 2025, fully exempts qualifying housing development projects from the California Environmental Quality Act.