A Goleta land use ordinance that has outlived its usefulness is on its way out after the Goleta City Council voted unanimously Tuesday evening to repeal the Goleta Growth Management Ordinance.

The GGMO, an interim ordinance, was enacted to control the development of nonresidential land in the city as it worked to come up with its first General Plan.

It works by allocating a fixed amount of square footage every year to applicants wishing to build or expand businesses. The amount of allocatable square footage also depends on applications for housing projects, as the GGMO also was enacted to correct the city’s housing/jobs imbalance.

“We’re never going to satisfy the jobs housing imbalance,” Councilman Michael Bennett said. “There’s no way for us to build out of that.”

However, the Goleta General Plan, first adopted in 2006 and having undergone more than 100 amendment initiations this year, has rendered the policies in the GGM redundant. And the mechanics of the ordinance made it so that big projects, such as the proposed Camino Real Hotel on Storke and Phelps roads, would have to wait years to accumulate the required amount of square footage.

Not only would it make development and permitting of such projects complicated, senior planner Patti Miller said, but the financing of such phased projects would be extremely difficult.

The repeal of the ordinance will come up for a second reading Jan. 19, 2010.

— Noozhawk staff writer Sonia Fernandez can be reached at sfernandez@noozhawk.com.