Los Gatos Said You Get One 90-Day Window. HCD Said No.

You file a preliminary application to lock in today's zoning and development standards. The town reviews it, finds it incomplete, and hands you a list. You have 90 days to supply what's missing and resubmit — that part is clear. Then the town tells you the part that isn't: that was your one 90-day window. Take a second round to get complete, and your application — along with the vested rights the preliminary application bought you — is treated as expired.

That is the reading the Town of Los Gatos applied to a 68-unit townhouse project at 980 University Avenue. HCD's answer was direct.

Here's the thing: under the Permit Streamlining Act (PSA), HCD's position is that the 90-day resubmittal window is not a single, once-per-project shot. It restarts every time the town finds the application incomplete.

What happened at 980 University Avenue

The project proposes 68 townhouse units, with at least seven of them — ten percent — affordable to lower-income households. The applicant filed a preliminary application in spring 2024 to vest the project's rights, then submitted a full development application on September 24, 2024, inside the six-month statutory window that keeps a preliminary application's vesting alive under Government Code § 65941.1.

The Town determined the application incomplete on October 22, 2024. The next day, per HCD, the Town told the applicant something more: it read the PSA to give the applicant a single 90-day period to reach completeness. In HCD's words, the Town "interprets the PSA to provide a single 90-day period to achieve completeness and will treat applications not meeting this deadline as expired." On that clock, the applicant had until January 20, 2025. The Town and applicant later agreed to extend the deadline, but the Town held to its one-window position.

What HCD told the Town

HCD had already flagged the same reading in an August 30, 2024 technical-assistance letter to the Town. When Los Gatos kept the position, HCD escalated to a Notice of Potential Violation, dated February 12, 2025. Its core correction:

"…the 90-day deadline resets after each incompleteness determination made by the Town. A project with multiple incompleteness letters and responses may have multiple 90-day periods."

HCD spelled out the stakes: "Failure by the Town to allow for an additional 90-day resubmittal period after each of its incompleteness determinations would be a violation of the PSA." It also pointed to a Los Angeles Superior Court ruling reaching the same result — one that concluded "that when an applicant receives an incompleteness determination pursuant to section 65943 – not just the first incompleteness determination – an applicant has 90 days to respond."

Verified against HCD's Notice of Potential Violation to the Town of Los Gatos — 980 University Avenue Project (February 12, 2025).

Why the single-window reading matters

The completeness loop is one of the quietest ways a project stalls. There's no denial to appeal — just a clock that supposedly ran out. Read the PSA as one finite 90-day window and, as HCD noted, you effectively limit the whole completeness process to "only one or two resubmittals," squeezing exactly the diligent applicants the preliminary-application system was built to protect. Read it HCD's way and the math changes: keep curing and resubmitting within 90 days of each incompleteness letter, and your vesting holds.

Two things worth keeping straight. First, this is HCD's enforcement position, not the last word — a Notice of Potential Violation says the conduct "would be" a violation, and courts, not HCD letters, are the final arbiter of what the PSA requires. Second, the 90-day clock can be extended by mutual agreement, which is what Los Gatos and this applicant did while the dispute played out.

What to do with it

If you've been told your application "expired" after a round or two of completeness review, that's the moment to count your windows again. HCD's consistent position is that each incompleteness determination opens a fresh 90 days. This isn't legal advice, and an HCD letter is its interpretation rather than settled law — so verify with your jurisdiction or your counsel before you rely on it. But the position is specific, it's tied to the statute, and Los Gatos got it in writing.

What CrossBeam does with it

When the letter lands on your desk, CrossBeam turns it around the same day: what each item is actually asking, the code or law behind it, and a written response you can hand to your team or your attorney — the back-and-forth that used to eat weeks, done in a couple of hours.