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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2025-03-13 Historic Resources Board Summary Minutes City of Palo Alto Page 1 HISTORIC RESOURCES BOARD MEETING MINUTES: March 13, 2025 Council Chambers & Zoom 8:30 AM Call to Order / Roll Call The Historic Resources Board (HRB) of the City of Palo Alto met on March 13, 2025 in Council Chambers and virtual teleconference at 8:31 a.m. Present: Chair Alisa Eagleston-Cieslewicz, Vice Chair Samantha Rohman, Boardmember Christian Pease, Boardmember Geddes Ulinskas (joined 9:14 am), and Boardmember Caroline Willis, Absent: None. Public Comment No requests to speak. Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions No changes reported. City Official Reports 1. Historic Resources Board Schedule of Meetings and Assignments Steven Switzer, Historic Preservation Planner, provided the City Official Report via slide presentation starting with the 2025 meeting schedule. He requested directing any planned absences to his or Veronica’s attention and showed the 2025 subcommittee assignments. He reported the Certified Local Government Annual Report was submitted to the state early and they were waiting to hear back. Study Session 2. Study Session for Historic Resources Board Awards City of Palo Alto Page 2 PUBLIC COMMENT No requests to speak. Mr. Switzer provided a slide presentation about the HRB Awards and 24/25 workplan implementation including discussion from February 13, 2025, timing and frequency, evaluation criteria and proposed HRB bylaws draft language. Boardmember Willis mentioned there were a few duplicate projects listed so they were actually looking at about 27 projects. A couple were category changes. She thought they were looking at a limited list and they needed to go back and see if some things got lost. She suggested talking to past board members. She thought they needed to have serious discussion about what they wanted to give awards to. Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz wondered if it would be possible to expand the list for consideration to structures with historical designations that have had projects even if those projects had not come before the HRB. Vice Chair Rohman commented over the last 10 years the HRB had 53 projects that were within the realm the HRB would need to review. Of those, 75% were nonresidential, commercial or mixed use. Less than 25% were residential. If the goal of the awards was to create excitement about preservation and going back to the incentives for preservation, it reaffirmed the idea that the property owners of commercial buildings saw the benefit in historical designation and preservation and individual homeowners perhaps did not. Only about 50% of the 40 permits that had come to the HRB were historical preservation related. About 17 seemed to have had some historical preservation or restoration mentioned in the description and 4 were duplicates. There were 13 eligible projects she thought they might want to look into. Eight of those were nonresidential, one commercial, one public and three residential. She agreed they needed to look to categories three and four and outside the downtown area to projects the HRB has not necessarily seen. Boardmember Willis thought they needed to put together a list of options about what kinds of awards would be considered and bring it back to the Board. She thought 2026 was optimistic for the awards. She felt they should review the list and possibly expand from projects the HRB had seen. Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz was interested in seeing a new list with the other projects for listed structures and see what expansion that gives them. She invited suggestions from Staff about other ways to increase the scope of the group. Mr. Switzer explained what appeared in the list was elevated up to the Board’s level of review. There were a few planning entitlements and building permits processed at the staff level. He offered to include that in a subsequent list for the Board’s review to provide a larger number of projects to sift through. He said it could be accommodated by the next meeting. Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz inquired if there were other items for discussion. She thought the frequency and the general outlines of what they would do to give someone an award were fine. City of Palo Alto Page 3 Mr. Switzer suggested having an action item at the next meeting for amending the bylaws. The study session of the day was to discuss any friendly amendments the Board would like to make for some of the language detailed. The second section of specifying that criteria for the awards was to have it flexible. He invited suggestions from the board to be brought forward for an action item at the following meeting. Boardmember Willis opined they needed to wait until they looked at the new list and determine what the preservation awards were going to be. Vice Chair Rohman agreed with Boardmember Willis adding the two of them needed to review the additional properties that were on the inventory and had projects that were not reviewed by the HRB. Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz indicated for the next time they would look at the list, make modification to the language and potentially vote on the amendment at the following meeting in May. Boardmember Willis requested some explanation of what determines whether something is minor or whether something comes to the board when compiling the list. She had been surprised about things that were obviously historic being visibly altered but not reviewed by HRB and wanted to hear about those projects at the meetings. Mr. Switzer stated he would prepare some language to include in the following packet at the next meeting to provide some clarity on that. He instructed that the preservation ordinance of the City (16.49) detailed the qualifiers of the reviewing bodies. That was reserved for what was detailed in the ordinance of minor alterations. At the decision of the planning director, that constituted anything that would not adversely affect a historic resource. That was typically reserved for changes or minor alterations. If they wanted to go further, the review of the Historic Resources Board was for category 1 and 2 resources as well as the structures listed in the preservation district. Categories 3 and 4 were not subject to review under the ordinance. Boardmember Pease indicated it would be interesting to see what was coming in and what they were asking for as background information. Vice Chair Rohman commented that the reason they were not seeing these projects was because people did not want to add their homes to the inventory and they did not see categories 3 and 4. She added it goes back to making changes to the code that other subcommittees are working so they could see additional projects and have incentives so people want to put their houses on the register. She hoped to have a slide at the next meeting to present projects the HRB had seen that had actual preservation actions and ones they had not seen they would recommend. Boardmember Pease wanted to see the selection process be rank order to help with comparison. Boardmember Willis asked if she could review the newly compiled list before the next meeting. Mr. Switzer confirmed the list would go out with the board packet. He believed there was an opportunity with the ad hoc for this work plan goal item to have some collaboration on this so Staff could accommodate some discussions on the list. City of Palo Alto Page 4 Approval of Minutes 3. Approval of Historic Resources Board Draft Minutes of February 13, 2025 MOTION: Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz moved to approve the minutes from the February 13, 2025, meeting seconded by Vice Chair Rohman. VOTE: The motion carried by voice vote 4-0-0-1, Ulinskas absent. Announcements Chair Eagleston-Cieslewicz reported that workplan goal one was on pause until it was agendized with Council, which was not anticipated for at least another few months. Council would have to kick it off because it involved changed to the municipal code. Mr. Switzer explained that workplan goal 1 was limited modification to the ordinance. It had been a floating goal of the Board that when that opportunity did arise and they were given direction by Council to reevaluate this ordinance they would further provide clarification on the HRB's role and solidify some of questions in the ordinance. The ordinance had not been updated since the 1980s. Directing Staff resources without Council direction was not advised. Boardmember Willis queried if it would be productive if the committee came up with changes they thought were appropriate or highlighting things that they thought were problematic. She asked to be signed up for item one. Mr. Switzer thought an ad hoc committee evaluating areas of potential improvements and providing a list of recommendations to the Board and Staff would be welcomed. Boardmember Pease gave a slide presentation describing workplan goal 2 including publicly relevant/available information sources, a site map of the City’s website, a flowchart of possible user navigation paths, Midpen Media Center, Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto Standford Heritage, Palo Alto Museum and issues/questions/opportunities. Vice Chair Rohman discussed workplan goal 3. She had received a spreadsheet with a little over 1,000 properties on the Palo Alto inventory. Her next step would be to figure out the best way to crowdsource getting the pictures they need to evaluate how the historic structures had or had not changed prior to the 2023 inventory. She mentioned this to PAST at their board meeting last night and let them know she would go back to them once she knew more about how they wanted to proceed with this project and would keep the Board updated. She wanted to make the legwork of taking pictures of the assets on the inventory a community project. She thought it could also serve getting the word out about preservation. The assessment of if the structure had changed significantly since it was last evaluated would have to be done at this body’s level or some very committed volunteers level they were able to talk to and had an understanding of what qualifies as historically eligible and retains integrity versus what is too far gone. City of Palo Alto Page 5 Boardmember Ulinskas provided a slide presentation about workplan goal 4 including context of the goal, explanation of benefits that could be offered to property owners who participate in participation in preservation, digital preservation, incentives for digital preservation and registration and incentives for salvage/reuse and relocation of structure. Boardmember Pease announced Multivista was the firm Sobrato hired for the Cannery. Vice Chair Rohman reported she had been accepted to be the HRB liaison for the PAST board and would attend their meetings. They were seeking additional docents for the tours. She had been to talk about her work in historic preservation at her former graduate advisor’s class at Cal State East Bay. Boardmember Willis provided a copy of Gone Tomorrow for each board member. Adjournment Adjourned at 9:29 a.m.