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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-09-29 Parks & Recreation Summary MinutesAPPROVED 1 2 3 4 MINUTES 5 PARKS & RECREATION COMMISSION 6 SPECIAL MEETING 7 September 29, 2015 8 CITY HALL 9 250 Hamilton Avenue 10 Palo Alto, California 11 12 Commissioners Present: Stacey Ashlund, Deirdre Crommie, Jennifer Hetterly, Abbie 13 Knopper, Ed Lauing, Keith Reckdahl 14 Commissioners Absent: Pat Markevitch 15 Others Present: 16 Staff Present: Daren Anderson, Catherine Bourquin, Rob de Geus, Peter Jensen, Lacee 17 Kortsen, Walter Passmore 18 I. ROLL CALL CONDUCTED BY: Catherine Bourquin 19 20 II. AGENDA CHANGES, REQUESTS, and DELETIONS: 21 22 Chair Reckdahl: Does anyone have any agenda changes, requests, deletions? 23 24 Commissioner Ashlund: I have a request. Can we extend the community garden ad hoc 25 report to 30 minutes instead of 20? 26 27 Chair Reckdahl: Is everyone okay with that? Okay, 30 minutes it is. That is, Item 4 is 28 now 30 minutes long. We're not obliged to use all 30 minutes obviously. 29 30 III. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS: 31 32 Chair Reckdahl: We have one speaker card. David is up. 33 34 David Carnahan: Good evening, Chair Reckdahl and Commissioners. I'm here to speak 35 to you about recruitment for your body, the Parks and Recreation Commission. The City 36 has extended the recruiting period for Commissioners for the Parks and Recreation 37 Commission. The extended deadline is October 16 at 5:00 p.m. We're hoping that 38 Approved Minutes 1 APPROVED yourselves, staff and members of the public here and members of the public watching 39 from home consider either applying or passing the word onto members of the community 40 that you think would make great Parks and Recreation Commissioners. We're now 41 looking to fill three terms that will run from November 1, 2015 through December 15, 42 2018. Applications are available in the back of the Council Chambers and online at 43 cityofpaloalto.org/clerk. Thank you very much. 44 45 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. 46 47 IV. BUSINESS: 48 49 1. Approval of Draft Minutes from the August 18, 2015 Parks and Recreation 50 Commission meeting. 51 52 Approval of the draft August 18, 2015 Minutes as presented was moved by 53 Commissioner Lauing and seconded by Commissioner Hetterly. Passed 6-0 54 55 2. Informational Report on Sustaining Trees During the Drought within the 56 City and Parks. 57 58 Chair Reckdahl: We have Walter Passmore, Urban Forester of Palo Alto. 59 60 Walter Passmore: Good evening, Commissioners. This is going to be a fairly informal 61 report on the status of our urban forest in regards to drought. I do want to let you know 62 about some of the actions that we're taking and how we're proceeding with some short-63 term responses to the drought. As we all know, impacts are increasing as the drought 64 intensifies or lengthens. You can see in the upper right of this slide, there are some dead 65 pines at El Camino Park. This is just one example of the increasing number of removals 66 that we've seen as drought being a significant stressor. Usually it's not the only cause of 67 tree mortality or decline. More and more, it's becoming very significant when we see 68 problems with trees. Our tree removals have actually increased to more than 400 street 69 and park trees during the past fiscal year. That's as compared to less than 250 during 70 eight of the past ten. The other high year was the previous year, 2014, where we had a 71 little over 300 tree removals. You can see during the short term our trend has been an 72 increasing number of removals. To put this in perspective, the population of trees is 73 29,000 street trees approximately and about 6,000 park trees in the developed parks. We 74 are not currently inventorying or assessing the drought impacts on our open space trees. 75 We imagine the drought is likewise affecting those trees, and it's not insignificant. In 76 perspective, the removals are for the first time exceeding 1 percent of the population. 77 While it's not cause for immediate alarm, it surely does prompt some action and some 78 attention to this issue. We feel like if this continues over the long term, we're going to 79 have to have a much more significant response to drought. 80 Approved Minutes 2 APPROVED 81 Chair Reckdahl; Thank you, Walter. On the bottom right, can you speak to that graph? 82 The bar graph, what is that showing? 83 84 Mr. Passmore: Among other things, it has the number of tree removals. It also has limb 85 pickups, construction inspections and then leveraged funding. The limb pickups ... 86 87 Chair Reckdahl: What we're looking at right now is—we're most interested in the orange 88 bar, is that correct? 89 90 Mr. Passmore: The yellow bar, correct. 91 92 Chair Reckdahl: Okay, my monitor is colored. That yellow or orange bar is showing the 93 increase. Are there any other bars up there that we should also be looking at or is this 94 used from another context and we're really just interested in that one bar? 95 96 Mr. Passmore: No. This is from our annual accomplishment report, so really the most 97 pertinent statistic is just the tree removals on that graph. 98 99 Chair Reckdahl: Okay, thank you. I'll let you finish up, and then we'll have a follow-up 100 question on that. 101 102 Mr. Passmore: In the short term, we are taking some actions. We have been meeting 103 with an interdepartmental drought response team to coordinate outreach and community 104 efforts. We've been collaborating with partner groups, and they expect that to increase. 105 We've increased education and outreach focus during City-sponsored events such as our 106 workshops. We do workshops on zero waste, on mulch and compost, on recycling. We 107 take opportunities at those workshops to talk about impacts of the drought on trees. 108 We've generated some press releases. We're doing social media posts, and we've worked 109 closely with our utility marketing team to do some focused outreach to utility customers. 110 Hopefully all of you have seen one or more of these outreach pieces through some of 111 those venues. Following up on outreach and education, we're also going to do a rapid 112 assessment of all of our City street and park trees to identify which ones are both in need 113 of water and could have the greatest benefit from some supplemental watering. We are 114 going to be increasing delivery of non-potable water so that some of these trees will get 115 one or two waterings prior to natural rainfall resuming, we hope, in November. Sooner 116 would be even better. We're delivering that water via a contract for services and also by 117 extending hours for the City water truck by using multiple drivers. We'll extend hours 118 from 40 hours a week to about 60 to 70 hours a week on the City water truck to keep that 119 in operation. We're also renting two additional water trucks and staffing those with 120 operators. We're going from one truck to four trucks on the road to provide some 121 supplemental water. That being said, that effort is only going to allow us to water once a 122 Approved Minutes 3 APPROVED month for about 7,000 trees which is only 20 percent of the population. Obviously the 123 rapid assessment and all of this action has to be paired with equal response from 124 homeowners, property owners, from our partners in the community to really be effective. 125 We're going to be increasing our outreach efforts in that regard, and our partners are 126 doing the same. We have a picture on the screen of a magnolia tree on Alma which is 127 nearly dead. This would not be one of the trees that would be receiving water, because 128 we would not expect that to respond to something as simple as dumping a little bit of 129 water on it. On this page is a number of resources. I'm going to talk first about the 130 picture which is one of the redwood trees at Magic Forest in Rinconada Park. That was a 131 tree that we did some water injections and some other fairly basic treatments after a 132 prompt from citizens that reported they noticed some symptoms on the tree that it looked 133 unhealthy. We did an inspection, followed up with the water injection and the 134 treatments. Now, if you look closely you can see a lot of little green shoots coming out 135 on that tree, and it's actually responding very well. It's returning to health. That's the 136 type of tree that we would be identifying for watering, not necessarily this species but a 137 tree in that type of condition where we can catch it early—it's showing some of the initial 138 symptoms of drought stress—and have a good response from the water that we apply. 139 Just quickly about the resources. We've produced an informational brochure, and we've 140 also worked with Canopy to produce several additions to their website, so some good 141 resources there. Statewide we've been working closely with California ReLeaf which is a 142 statewide organization that coordinates activities of nonprofits, over 100 nonprofits 143 statewide, that deal with urban forestry issues. They have a Save Our Water and Our 144 Trees brochure that they produced in conjunction with the State Water Board. We've 145 generated a press release; there's the link for it there. The Save Our Water and Trees 146 brochure—this is specific to Palo Alto—is linked. We're continuously updating the 147 City's water page with drought updates. Those are some resources. I'll be glad to answer 148 any questions and talk about what do we do after this initial push to save a few trees, 149 what does it mean for the future. You might have some predictions that would help us to 150 respond in a better way. 151 152 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Before we start asking, we do have public comment. We 153 have a speaker, David Moss. Please go to the podium there. You have three minutes. 154 155 David Moss: Thank you. By the way, I'm one of those people who applied for one of 156 those three positions for the Parks and Rec Commission. One thing about the trees we're 157 losing. Quite a few birch trees in the Greenmeadow area are suffering. They seem to 158 have a particular affinity to shallow water. What I was going to mention is that when we 159 plant new trees, we should plant them with the idea that they too could have some kind of 160 a drip system with a deep watering system instead of the way we water today where it's 161 mostly on lawns and goes down from there. If we could change the way we plant new 162 trees, that would be a great idea. Also, when we talk about the construction of basements 163 and how much water we have to pull out of the ground to keep the basement dry while 164 Approved Minutes 4 APPROVED it's being constructed, there has to be a way to recycle that water and put it back in the 165 ground elsewhere rather than pouring it into the storm drain. That's all I had. 166 167 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Comments and questions from the Commission? 168 Commissioner Knopper. 169 170 Commissioner Knopper: Hi. That's very depressing, what you said. A couple of things. 171 I'm on a couple of neighborhood email groups that have like 1,000 people on them. 172 Everybody has been told to conserve water. Brown is the new green kind of thing. I 173 think that telling residents that trees are different than grass and the impact is much 174 greater, it would be helpful maybe if you guys provided us, at least for me, like that one 175 sheet or if there's a particular resource that I'm looking at that I could go to and pull it so I 176 can send out to my email groups, "Hey, you need to water these trees. This is what you 177 should look for with regard to the stress of the tree. If you're seeing this, this is what you 178 need to do. This is how many times you should water." I don't think people might know 179 that you should water a tree differently than like a regular lawn, bush, etc. Any extra 180 information that you could provide. I know I would like to post it on like my Facebook 181 page, that kind of thing. If you could just let me know specifically, direct me to that, it 182 would be great. 183 184 Mr. Passmore: Right. On the resource page, probably the Saving Our Trees and Our 185 Water brochure that's specific to Palo Alto would be a great start. It has a lot of the 186 information that you're talking about. The press release, a little bit more general, but it 187 has guides to different resources in it as well. 188 189 Commissioner Knopper: Okay, thank you. 190 191 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Hetterly. 192 193 Commissioner Hetterly: I just have a couple of questions. On the tree removals, is there 194 anything illuminating about the proportion of street trees versus park trees in terms of are 195 we losing more of one versus the other or is it pretty much across the board? 196 197 Mr. Passmore: No, it's fairly general. We're not seeing any trend on either side of the 198 equation. 199 200 Commissioner Hetterly: Okay. My next question is about the rapid assessment. It 201 sounds like you're going to start doing that soon, which is a "swing by and check out as 202 many trees as you can" and make an assessment. Is there a plan for ongoing 203 reassessments over time? Obviously if a tree is okay now, it may well be showing signs 204 of stress next month. How do you plan to go forward to keep that monitoring beyond 205 Approved Minutes 5 APPROVED citizen complaints? I think the current way to save a tree is for a citizen to call in and 206 say, "My tree is dying. What do we do?" 207 208 Mr. Passmore. We obviously have limited staff resources. We're conducting about 2,000 209 inspections a year with the staff resources that we have, but that's a pretty small 210 proportion of the population, again when you're talking about 35,000-plus trees. In order 211 to focus our efforts, I wouldn't be surprised if we do another rapid assessment protocol in 212 the spring to see how many of these trees actually responded to our supplemental 213 watering. We're also making a plea to citizens to report trees that have drought 214 symptoms on them. We have included information in our press release about what to 215 look for. 216 217 Commissioner Hetterly: Would you encourage residents to water street trees that they 218 see in stress or would you prefer that they contact you and have you water them? I think 219 that's a (crosstalk). 220 221 Mr. Passmore: No, we definitely need help from property owners. Even with all the 222 supplemental actions we're taking, we're only going to water 20 percent of the street trees 223 max and park trees. We would love for people to step up and say, "I'm going to help this 224 tree through the drought." Hopefully the rains will help it from there. 225 226 Commissioner Hetterly: I think that's great. I have seen a lot of action on the various 227 lists in the last few weeks about concern about trees and the importance of watering them 228 and don't lose track when you're conserving water of what you need to do with the trees. 229 I do think that it would be helpful to include in any ongoing public outreach about that, 230 the importance of watering now, don't wait until the El Nino that may or may not come. 231 Just because we're close to winter doesn't mean they can make it that far. It's really 232 important that they water now. Thank you very much for coming tonight. 233 234 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Lauing. 235 236 Commissioner Lauing: Moving down the list, thanks for the report. Obviously you are 237 budgeting a certain amount of non-potable water for trees, and you're only getting to 20 238 percent. That raises the obvious question of do we need a Council memorandum to 239 double the amount of potable water we should buy so we can save 40 percent of the trees. 240 Do you understand basically my question? Is it a budget item, basically is what I'm 241 asking. 242 243 Mr. Passmore: No. I think the challenge is distribution of water, because we're under 244 State mandates to conserve water and to conserve potable water. Really we don't have 245 the infrastructure in place to effectively distribute non-potable water. We don't have the 246 pipelines, the distribution lines, the irrigation systems hooked up to non-potable sources. 247 Approved Minutes 6 APPROVED Therefore, distributing by truck is a very inefficient method of getting water to trees. 248 That's our limit. It's just how many trucks can we put on the road to deliver water as 249 opposed to how do we efficiently use the non-potable sources that we have. 250 251 Commissioner Lauing: Okay. My follow-up question was actually for Daren as he 252 stepped to the microphone. Even pacing this and trying to cut back, I think it's 30 253 percent, so another obvious question, which I think I know the obvious answer, is we 254 can't really cut back more there to put more water on the trees. It's just a math equation. 255 Do you want to address that? 256 257 Daren Anderson: Yes, thank you. It's a great question. Yeah, 34 percent was our target 258 that we had to reach in potable water reduction. We realized from the get-go that we 259 were going to have an impact on trees if we made that uniform cut in turf areas where 260 there are trees. We made changes in those spots to irrigate once a month, thinking that 261 would sustain most of the trees. In some areas, it wasn't. Even though it may throw us 262 off our target of 34, we've increased irrigation in those areas to sustain those trees. In 263 some cases, it's one time a week. It very well may throw us off our ultimate goal of 34 264 percent reduction in potable. We do believe in sustaining the trees, knowing that it's an 265 asset that takes so very long to grow and sustain. It's so different from the ... 266 267 Commissioner Lauing: I'm stymied by those answers, so I think I'm done. 268 269 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Ashlund. 270 271 Commissioner Ashlund: Along the same line of questions. I was wondering the same 272 thing about the infrastructure Citywide for capturing gray water. I wasn't really thinking 273 in terms of rainfall as well. As far as that infrastructure being in place Citywide not just 274 for trees but for other plants as well, do you know if that's already being included in the 275 Comp Plan moving forward or is it even farther along than that? 276 277 Mr. Passmore: I think it's both, part of the Comp Plan and part of the 278 Sustainability/Climate Action Plan. Water is a key issue for our future and how are we 279 going to use our potable water. The future is probably one where we're using much less, 280 maybe no potable water, for landscape uses and conserving for our indoor uses, to solely 281 use potable for drinking purposes and sanitary purposes. 282 283 Commissioner Ashlund: You're saying possibly conserving to the level of not even 284 directing the water to save the trees? 285 286 Mr. Passmore: I'm saying that we're actively trying to identify non-potable sources for 287 landscape irrigation, whether that's recycled water, the water that's being taken out of the 288 ground for various purposes, gray water, rain water harvesting. There's a number of 289 Approved Minutes 7 APPROVED different options that are being considered. I think you're going to see those explored 290 further in the Comp Plan and the Sustainability/Climate Action Plan. 291 292 Commissioner Ashlund: Great, thank you. The other question, as far as impact that 293 individual residents can have, we all know the shorter showers, eat less meat kind of 294 suggestion, but as far as the impact that the residents can make, how significant can that 295 be versus the larger scale water use? Statewide agriculture is by far the biggest. When 296 we come down to the level of the Palo Alto level and residents conserving water, okay, 297 I'm not watering my rose bushes, but am I going to make an impact on the redwoods, for 298 example. Is that too broad a question or does that relate to the individual? 299 300 Mr. Passmore: I think if everyone does their part, then we reach our goals as a whole. 301 Obviously one individual as compared to the population of California is fairly 302 insignificant. 303 304 Commissioner Ashlund: Will there be any sort of Citywide set goals for residents to 305 achieve? The park system has reached their water reduction goals. What about any sort 306 of collective goals resident-wise that we'll be tracking? 307 308 Mr. Passmore: The Utility tracks the Citywide reduction goal. I think we're about on 309 target to meet the State-set goals for water conservation. 310 311 Commissioner Ashlund: The State-set goals for residents and cities, is it all combined or 312 is it separated out, so we know? 313 314 Mr. Passmore: It's all combined. 315 316 Commissioner Ashlund: It would be interesting to see it separated out, I think, so 317 residents would have tangible goals. The City of Palo Alto highly competitive might be 318 worth looking into. Thanks. 319 320 Rob de Geus: Commissioner Ashlund, I just wanted to add that the Utilities Department 321 is doing a lot of work on this and supporting residents in different ways they can help 322 with the goals. I encourage you to go to their website. They have all sorts of tips and 323 advice for residents in how they can help. If you haven't been there before, I encourage 324 you to do that. 325 326 Commissioner Ashlund: Great, thanks. 327 328 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Crommie. 329 330 Approved Minutes 8 APPROVED Commissioner Crommie: Hi. Walter Passmore, can I ask that you publish your 331 systematic checks on the trees so we know which ones you're watering Citywide? Can 332 you make that information public so it's transparent and helpful to other residents? 333 Where would we find you posting that? 334 335 Mr. Passmore: Yes, we can post that to the City website, to the urban forestry page, and 336 then follow up with our outreach outlets to let people know where to find that. The rapid 337 assessment, like I said, is probably going to be just that. We're not going to be 338 identifying individual trees. Instead we're probably going to be looking at a block-by-339 block where our distribution would be the most efficient. We'll probably publish by 340 block and track it that way. 341 342 Commissioner Crommie: How soon can we see that? 343 344 Mr. Passmore: I'm hoping by next week. 345 346 Commissioner Crommie: Do you already have a site on your page where this 347 information is posted so it will be an update or is this going to be a new visual? 348 349 Mr. Passmore: No, this is a new graphic that we're going to put up. 350 351 Commissioner Crommie: We can look and see the whole City? We'll be able to see 352 documentation of the whole City, what you're doing? 353 354 Mr. Passmore: Yes. 355 356 Commissioner Crommie: In about a week? 357 358 Mr. Passmore: That's what I'm hoping for. 359 360 Commissioner Crommie: I think that's really important. Let me see my other. That's my 361 most important question. 362 363 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Crommie, I have a question. You want that information 364 so people know what trees not to water and what trees to water? 365 366 Commissioner Crommie: People can see where the work is being done and not freak out 367 that their neighborhood isn't getting any attention. So we can see the equity across the 368 City, that attention is being given to all parts of the City, and that on a block-by-block 369 basis, if we know where there's a cluster of trees and they're not getting any attention, that 370 can alert individuals. 371 372 Approved Minutes 9 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. 373 374 Commissioner Crommie: How much of the increase in tree death is due to deferred 375 removal of trees? I assume with some of your limited resources you probably have not 376 kept up with the removal of dead trees. Any tree that was almost dead would have been 377 kicked over the edge in this drought. How much is that spike kind of due to deferred 378 attention? When things are good, we don't tend to want to do that. 379 380 Mr. Passmore: I would say very, very little is because of deferred maintenance. If we go 381 back to this graph, you can see the red line for limb pickups actually spiked back in 2010, 382 and it's been declining ever since. Limb pickups is one indicator of how much 383 maintenance may be deferred, because when we defer maintenance we tend to have more 384 broken limbs, more falling limbs. While that can be due to drought as well, you've seen a 385 decline in limb pickups, so I don't think it's a maintenance issue. It's primarily due to 386 drought. 387 388 Commissioner Crommie: How aware are you of the hotspots of neighborhood 389 communication in the City? I'll give an example. Midtown sends out lots of notices. I 390 happen to be on their list; I don't live in Midtown, but I just signed up for it. I think that 391 Commissioner Knopper has mentioned her part of town is very active. Can you do a 392 survey and figure out what parts of the City are not getting this message? We have many 393 dead zones in our City in terms of neighborhood communication. Those are probably the 394 neighborhoods in need of leafleting. We don't have active neighborhood associations 395 across the City at all. I think we need to kind of look at a per-neighborhood assessment. 396 I think it would behoove our staff to do some research on which neighborhoods have 397 active communication for all kinds of reasons. Maybe you go to a PAN meeting to figure 398 it out or the Palo Alto Neighborhood Association, you can ask the leaders of that to tell 399 you. I mean there should be some good ways to figure this out. I know my 400 neighborhood has almost zero communication going on. I haven't seen anything on tree 401 drought just as feedback. Where are you distributing the brochures, for example? 402 403 Mr. Passmore: The brochures have been distributed through our local workshops. If 404 people attend the workshop, they would receive a copy. Electronically, a lot of the 405 information has been distributed, but there's not been like a door-to-door type of 406 distribution effort. We are thinking of doing some more personalized action like you're 407 suggesting, possibly identifying all the trees that we're watering with some kind of a 408 ribbon or leaflet. I don't know, this is kind of a work in progress where we're trying to do 409 something now because we don't want to over-plan and under-act. 410 411 Commissioner Crommie: The last thing I just want to say, an example of an extreme 412 failure in tree health is in Monroe Park. Now that I have Daren Anderson, Peter Jensen 413 and Walter Passmore sitting here, I'd like to tell you that Monroe Park is in crisis. When 414 Approved Minutes 10 APPROVED I moved in that neighborhood 14 years ago, we had eight huge, beautiful, mature trees in 415 our parks. 100 percent of them died; 100 percent of them were removed. They were 416 replaced like a couple of years ago, the biggest ones of the replacements are now dead. 417 One of those has been removed; another one is dead and needs to be removed. We have 418 no shade coverage of the turf in Monroe Park. We have a shortage of trees in South Palo 419 Alto. We have a shortage of parks in our neighborhood. It's in crisis. All the redwood 420 trees at the back of the park are in extreme distress. It wouldn't surprise if within five 421 years all of them are dead. I just want someone in the City to really pay some attention to 422 that park that's in crisis essentially. There might be other people in the City who want to 423 give feedback. Lastly I will say when I personally called your office to ask about four 424 pines on my property that are owned by the City that are near death, I didn't receive any 425 callback. I made those calls two months ago. I made a series of calls; no follow-up 426 whatsoever. I don't even know what to do as a citizen about the four dying pine trees that 427 are on Miller Avenue right by the Wilkie Way pedestrian bridge. They've been dying for 428 a long time, and this might send them over the edge. I'm just ending with that personal 429 plea. Thank you. 430 431 Chair Reckdahl: This is troubling just because it takes a long time to grow a tree. If it's 432 brown turf, you can replace that. Even shrubs, you can replace that. A 40-foot tree you 433 just can't replace. It is troubling that we have issues. The trees that we lost, what 434 percentage of those are non-native and which percentage are native? 435 436 Mr. Passmore: Currently, our native population is less than 10 percent of the total. 437 438 Chair Reckdahl: Can you say are they doing better or worse or are they roughly the 439 same? 440 441 Mr. Passmore: I don't really know without looking at some specific numbers. 442 443 Chair Reckdahl: My question is, are these trees that are dying because of the drought due 444 to being chosen inadequately? Inappropriate trees at inappropriate locations. Now, will 445 this give us a chance to redo it and put something appropriate in that spot or was this an 446 appropriate tree at an appropriate spot and it's just purely lack of water that killed it? 447 448 Mr. Passmore: My general observation is that the trees that were appropriately sited and 449 native and adapted to local conditions like valley oak, we're not seeing much mortality. 450 We are seeing a lot of mortality in non-native pines, magnolias, camphors. Those are 451 species that probably weren't appropriate for local conditions without a lot of 452 supplemental water. I think ... 453 454 Chair Reckdahl: Are those trees still being planted by the City or are those trees no 455 longer planted by the City? 456 Approved Minutes 11 APPROVED 457 Mr. Passmore: No, none of those are planted anymore. 458 459 Chair Reckdahl: You mentioned also in the long run we want to get away from using 460 potable water for irrigation of any sort. This issue with the total dissolved solids in the 461 recycled water is a real issue for trees. Would we increase the use of non-potable water 462 in irrigation by reducing the TDS or would we do that by changing the tree selection to 463 something that can tolerate high TDS? 464 465 Mr. Passmore: I think we're talking about very long-term solutions. Obviously we're not 466 going to convert immediately to recycled water. Conversion would be conditional on the 467 trees being able to use that water effectively and to not have salinity buildup in our soils. 468 There's a number of ways to make sure that we're using that wisely. The other water 469 sources that I mentioned also need to be explored in much more detail. This is not a 470 change that's going to occur in the next year or two years. We're probably going to 471 continue having discussions about how do we budget our water use so that we protect our 472 urban forest, how do we try to minimize the number of trees that are dying and need to be 473 replaced. At the same time, we try to meet some very optimistic conservation goals. 474 475 Chair Reckdahl: What is our primary goal going on? Are we trying to go to more of a 476 native selection of trees so we don't have to water at all? Are we going to trees that can 477 tolerate high salt content? 478 479 Mr. Passmore: Native and drought-tolerant. We think it's the obligation of the non-480 potable suppliers to bring down salinity levels to an acceptable amount so that we can use 481 it broadly. There's a lot of plans in place to do just that. 482 483 Chair Reckdahl: By plans, do you mean concrete plans or do you mean potential plans? 484 485 Mr. Passmore: As part of the distribution for the recycled water, Council tasked staff to 486 pursue sources for extending the pipeline, but also to reduce the salinity through a variety 487 of techniques. For example, one technique being considered is reverse osmosis. It could 488 be a fairly expensive technique, but potential is there to reduce the TDS down below the 489 level of our groundwater currently. 490 491 Chair Reckdahl: You also mentioned using the non-potable water right now. We don't 492 have a delivery system; we don't have pipes and we have to do everything by truck. Can 493 we get volunteers to drive trucks on weekends, for example? If Canopy wanted to 494 deliver, is that something that would even be allowed or is that not possible? 495 496 Mr. Passmore: It's possible. You're just talking about a very inefficient system. 497 498 Approved Minutes 12 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: I'm not talking about going forward; I'm talking about right now during 499 the drought. This would not be a regular, every Saturday they'd be watering for the 500 (inaudible). 501 502 Mr. Passmore: It's possible. There has been a very limited amount of use for the 503 groundwater stations where they're discharging for the basement construction. 504 505 Chair Reckdahl: Have you had any discussions with Canopy? Would they be interested 506 in staffing trucks on the weekend? 507 508 Mr. Passmore: Right now, Canopy does not have that potential to increase their capacity 509 to do that type of thing. 510 511 Chair Reckdahl: If volunteers were available, would you be receptive or is that 512 something that you're not interested in? 513 514 Mr. Passmore: I think there's a lot of challenges, but we're definitely receptive to 515 exploring any solutions at this point. 516 517 Chair Reckdahl: Finally, Daren, how are the open space trees doing? Have you done any 518 inventory on that? 519 520 Mr. Anderson: No, we don't have an inventory. We have ranger assessment from trails 521 by and large. There's a lot of sudden oak death that we've noticed and tree failures, much 522 in keeping with what Walter is describing. It's certainly affecting it. There is a much 523 higher degree of native trees. Lots of oaks are hanging in there, that aren't dying of SOD, 524 sudden oak death. Part of the work that Walter has done in the Urban Forest Master Plan 525 calls for developing plans to address SOD. That is long-term canopy coverage to make 526 sure if it's not signature historic oak, that it's something comparable, so that long term we 527 still have that beautiful canopy that our open space is famous for. 528 529 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Any more questions? Okay. Thank you, Walter. 530 531 3. Discussion on New Online Procedure for Summer Camp Registration. 532 533 Chair Reckdahl: Next up, we have Lacee Kortsen. She's going to be talking about the 534 new online procedure for summer camp registration. Lacee, come on up. 535 536 Rob de Geus: As Lacee comes up, I think you've all met Lacee now. Lacee Kortsen is a 537 Senior Community Services Manager. She oversees the Mitchell Park Community 538 Center, so she manages that center and many of our teen programs in the department, the 539 middle school athletic program and a number of other things, adult sports and those types 540 Approved Minutes 13 APPROVED of things. She's here to talk about the summer camp registration process and the hope of 541 moving to a more efficient online system. 542 543 Lacee Kortsen: Hello, Commissioners. Thank you for having me here tonight. I'm 544 going to be presenting a proposal that a group of employees in CSD have been working 545 on to redesign our current summer camp registration process. Who here is familiar with 546 the draw? It's been around for a while. Everybody. Fantastic. I won't go into too much 547 detail. The draw is our current registration process for summer camp. Essentially it's the 548 first chance a Palo Alto resident has to sign up for a summer camp. They have to submit 549 an envelope with their registration form completely filled out by a certain date. After that 550 date, staff collect all the envelopes, kind of mix them up and randomize them, and then 551 redistribute them to staff on the date of the draw, and we register. It's a manual process. 552 We close down our community centers that entire day and all of our resources are 553 focused on getting all those draw registrations processed. It was very effective, and it's 554 helped to resolve a lot of issues we had in the past with long lines for summer camp. It's 555 worked for several years. Now, with some of the technology upgrades that we've had 556 recently along with just the desire to more effectively serve our customers, we think it 557 might be due for an upgrade to the draw process. With that, the committee was convened 558 and we did—let's do this one. There we go. A committee was convened. The first step 559 in this process was we wanted to do some research. We wanted to make sure that our 560 assumptions were accurate and based in reality. We sent out a survey to customers. 561 Before I get into what the survey results are, I just want to give you some data about our 562 summer camp registration. It is the heaviest period of enrollment for us. We have close 563 to one third of total registrations and $1.2 million in revenue just in summer camps. 564 Outside of the registrations that are submitted for the draw, 77 percent of them were done 565 online. If you didn't get that first chance and submit an envelope to the draw, everyone 566 else, 77 percent of them, preferred online registration. When you look at the entire year 567 of registration, 76 percent of all those registrations were done online. We also recently, 568 in February 2013, upgraded our registration system to ACTIVE Net from Class. 569 ACTIVE Net is just a much more robust online system. We have several modules that 570 customers can use online beyond just registering for classes. They can do facility rentals, 571 look up facility availability. They can purchase memberships; they can refill those 572 memberships. There's several things that our customers now have access to that they 573 didn't before. That's just some background data on our business. The survey. Like I 574 said, we sent out a survey to over 2,200 customers. These are all customers that have 575 registered with us in the past two years, since we made that upgrade to ACTIVE Net. We 576 got 210—we recently got two more responses—responses. Some of the highlights from 577 that survey is that overwhelmingly 96 percent responded that if they were given an option 578 to register online or in person for a summer camp, they would prefer to register online. 579 In addition, we asked them to rank priorities that they had personally in a summer camp 580 registration process. Number one, again overwhelmingly, was having an online versus 581 in-person option. The ones that came up after that were convenience of process, and then 582 Approved Minutes 14 APPROVED immediate notification if they got into a class or if they were put on a wait list. The draw 583 currently does not address those top three things. It was just another reason for us to 584 continue our research to validate our assumptions. Next you'll see we asked them if they 585 had registered with us online. 88 percent of them said they had. We asked them to tell us 586 about their experience, and 75 percent said it was a good experience. That was very good 587 for us to hear because a very important piece of successfully transitioning to having an 588 online option is that our online system is user friendly and it's efficient and effective. 589 This kind of validated that. The next thing we wanted to know was just more about when 590 we should open up the summer camp registration process. I'm not sure if you're familiar, 591 but it seems like municipalities and other nonprofit organizations are opening up their 592 summer camp registration earlier and earlier. We just wanted to make sure that that's 593 truly what the customer wanted. What we found out is that March is overwhelmingly the 594 most popular month for customers to be able to register for a summer camp. It's just 595 early enough, it's not too early. Also, if we did have an online option, they preferred to 596 have it on a weekday. If it was just going to be in person, they want it to be on a 597 weekend. That kind of makes sense just for people that are working and unable to come 598 in person during the week. The second survey that we sent out was to local 599 municipalities, so neighboring cities, Menlo Park, Campbell, all the way up to San 600 Francisco. We got 12 responses. Of those 12 responses, 10 of them said that they do 601 open up registration online and in person for the day of summer camp. The two that 602 didn't, one of them doesn't have an online option period. Their current system does not 603 support online registration. The other one actually opened up online registration at 604 midnight and then in-person registration at 8:00 a.m. the same day. Some other data 605 points that we got from them. If they feel their customers prefer the online registration, 606 80 percent agreed with that. It was split between when they open up registration, 607 February or March. The majority opened it on a Monday. Looking at all those different 608 data points that we discovered in our research, both of our own data and then the data that 609 we got from our customers and from neighboring cities, we felt like it was time for us to 610 move from the draw to offering an online option for our customers. We do note that 611 that's going to be a significant change from how we've done it in the past, and we don't 612 want to underestimate how that change will affect our customers. Some people get 613 intense anxiety over a process that's changing, especially when you have a camp that you 614 are dying to get your child into. Considering all those things, we kind of put the proposal 615 into three different buckets. The first one is education campaigns. We want to obviously 616 educate our staff to make sure that they know the system inside and out, can answer any 617 questions, understand what they customer goes through. Then educate the customer and 618 kind of over-communicate the change. Some of the things that we'll be doing is training 619 our activity supervisors on how to properly put classes into ACTIVE Net to provide for a 620 better search function. If they know that they're going to provide age exceptions, to make 621 sure they account for that in the entry. Also, ACTIVE Net will allow parents to actually 622 put their friends on their account even if they're not in the same household, so that they 623 can register for a class or a camp together. We'll teach our staff how to do that. 624 Approved Minutes 15 APPROVED Obviously our customer service staff, we want them to be on point, know everything 625 inside and out about this process, so that they can be super helpful for anyone that may 626 have questions. Next, you can see the very comprehensive outreach campaign to our 627 customers. We're going to do that in many different formats. People prefer to get 628 information in different ways, so we'll obviously do the email blasts and have a website 629 available with all the information. In addition, we'll send out packets in the mail, snail 630 mail. We'll also provide for workshops where people can sign up for appointments to 631 come and sit down with a camp concierge who will kind of show them how to set up a 632 wish list, which is the best way to do online registration with us through ACTIVE Net. 633 People, if they want that one-on-one attention, step-by-step, we want to provide that for 634 them. In addition, we'll have online tutorials, FAQs and registration checklists to kind of 635 just get them set up and ready. The City of Chicago's park district actually uses ACTIVE 636 Net as well, and they process several million registrations within minutes when they open 637 their summer camp registration. To account for that kind of load, they've also been doing 638 these education campaigns and have kind of done a lot of the work for us. This is just an 639 example of the FAQs they have, but they also have video webinars, screenshots, 640 checklists that customers can go through. We'll be kind of working with them to tag team 641 and create our education campaigns. 642 643 Chair Reckdahl: When you say ACTIVE Net, do you mean that you're using their 644 software on your computers or that you're using their software on their computers? 645 646 Ms. Kortsen: ACTIVE Net is a private company. They provide the software, and we're 647 just customers. The City of Chicago is a customer as well as Palo Alto and several other 648 cities in the area. 649 650 Chair Reckdahl: This is actually running on their computers. They're providing both 651 (crosstalk). 652 653 Ms. Kortsen: It’s cloud-based. 654 655 Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Very good. Thank you. 656 657 Ms. Kortsen: The third bucket is just "day of" logistics, how are we going to manage in-658 person, online. We have three kind of main goals that day. We want to anticipate our 659 customers' needs. We want to avoid long lines as much as possible. We want to provide 660 equal access for all of our customers. We've decided to have two in-person registration 661 sites, one in North Palo Alto, one in South Palo Alto, and consolidate our staffing 662 resources to those two locations. For those customers that may not trust their internet 663 connection or they don't have internet or a computer, we will have temporary computer 664 labs set up for that day where they can come in and log into their own account and go 665 through their wish list, which again is the best way to get into a class with ACTIVE Net, 666 Approved Minutes 16 APPROVED and some other things that you see on there, other ideas we had for how we're going to 667 anticipate our customers' needs. This is kind of the timeline for implementation. The 668 first part is going to happen soon hopefully. It's a testing period for ACTIVE Net 669 functionality. There's a couple of features that were recently released that we want to 670 make sure do what they say they're going to do. It's kind of critical pieces in our plan. If 671 ACTIVE Net functionality does not live up to what it says it is capable of, then we 672 wouldn't proceed. That's going to happen in October, followed by staff education, 673 collateral for our outreach campaigns and camp concierge appointments, registration fair, 674 and then the registration day. I mean, it's not a small undertaking when you're 675 considering a change like this. We're not underestimating the amount of staff time that 676 it's going to take. This is just kind of an estimate of the different people that will be 677 involved and how involved they will be. While it is a big undertaking, we feel like it is 678 due. Staff want it, and customers want it. It's just now a matter of making sure that we 679 handle this the right way, do our due diligence and make sure that we over-communicate 680 to our customers. Any questions? 681 682 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Hetterly. 683 684 Commissioner Hetterly: Thank you, Lacee. That was a great presentation. I think that 685 your proposal is really well researched and thoughtfully developed. I do have some 686 questions and a concern. My first question is—they're mostly about the registering with 687 friends issue. You're saying that ACTIVE Net does have the capacity to allow you to 688 register for classes with friends by linking them to your account somehow. Does that tie 689 you then to that one friend for all your classes or can you sign up for this class with this 690 friend and that class with that friend? 691 692 Ms. Kortsen: It does not tie you to that person forever. 693 694 Commissioner Hetterly: The other question about that is how did you handle the 695 registration with friends under the old draw system? 696 697 Ms. Kortsen: They would put the registration forms in the same envelope. 698 699 Commissioner Hetterly: Okay, that's right. If either of them gets a spot, they both get the 700 spot. You allot two spots for that ... 701 702 Ms. Kortsen: Hopefully. 703 704 Commissioner Hetterly: ... one you would draw. 705 706 Ms. Kortsen: Right. 707 708 Approved Minutes 17 APPROVED Commissioner Hetterly: My next question is about the automation. I think it makes a ton 709 of sense to do the majority of your registrations online even for the summer camps. I'm a 710 little concerned about switching from the lottery aspect of the draw to a first-come-first 711 serve approach. I know a lot of parents who set their alarm for 5:00 a.m. and sit on their 712 computer to get into their middle school sports class or whatever else it is that's a first-713 come-first serve. I also know a lot of parents who are really bitter about that, because for 714 whatever reason their circumstances don't allow them to be sitting there at their computer 715 at that exact time when things open. It does create an inequity in access to those first 716 spots. I wonder if you guys thought at all about doing online registrations but having 717 your 5:00 p.m. deadline for, register by 5:00 p.m. to be in the lottery or the automated 718 draw. Then you do an automated placement of who goes where, similar to what you did 719 with the draw but without the manual effort. 720 721 Ms. Kortsen: Right. ACTIVE Net unfortunately doesn't provide that type of 722 functionality for a lottery, for a lottery system. That's automated; it would have to be a 723 manual, staff-run process. 724 725 Commissioner Hetterly: That's a bummer. I am really concerned about that. I think 726 you're going to get a lot of push-back from a lot of people about that feeling like an unfair 727 process. I'm not sure where you go from there. If there's something you can do to build 728 on what ACTIVE Net can do or if the only way to accomplish that randomness of 729 placement is by doing it manually. 730 731 Ms. Kortsen: There's a couple of things. The inequity of parents not being able to be 732 online at the time that registration opens, I think you're referring to our middle school 733 athletics registration system right now. In that, we open it at 8:30 on a weekday, so it is a 734 difficult time for a dual-working household or a single-working household to manage. 735 That's why when we went to this process we thought about that and we wanted to push it 736 up to 7:00 a.m. hoping that that would allow for people to be able to jump online if they 737 want to or come down in person and not have it affect them getting to work on time. 738 There's that piece. The other piece of it is it's going to be a mass amount of people 739 getting on at the same time and registering for a limited number of spots. It's kind of the 740 same way we do all of our other registration periods. It's online or in person. If they're 741 super anxious, they can always come down and stand in line. What we found with MSA 742 is that you have a better chance actually of getting in a class if you do it online yourself. 743 It's just kind of instantaneous. At the same time, it's going to be immediate response. 744 You'll know right away if you're in or on the wait list, so you can immediately go look for 745 your second choice and register. It's instantaneous, and so I feel like a lot of the anxiety 746 that we get from customers currently with the draw is not knowing if they're in that camp 747 or not and if they're going to have to change their plans. By the time they realize they're 748 on the wait list, the second camp that they would have registered for is already full. 749 There's pluses and minuses to either way you look at it. 750 Approved Minutes 18 APPROVED 751 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Crommie. 752 753 Commissioner Crommie: I just wanted to echo what Commissioner Hetterly said. I have 754 the exact same concern about going to a mad rush system. I guess there's two of us on 755 the Commission that are really concerned about that. My kids are older now; they're 19 756 and 15, so I'm not doing this. We were a heavy camp user. We did this every year. The 757 first year I moved to Palo Alto in 2001, I stood on the sidewalk all night to get into the 758 camps, because my neighbor took me under his arm and said, "You have young children. 759 You don't know anyone. Come stand on the sidewalk with me, and we'll stay here all 760 night and get into camps." That was my experience. I thought it was a huge upgrade to 761 go to the draw. I loved the draw. I do realize there are some issues like you said. When 762 you don't get in, you can't quickly maneuver with the draw, the point you just made. I 763 just think it's really sad to have this mad rush. I don't know what else to say about it. I 764 agree with Commissioner Hetterly that we need a software that can put people in a 765 reservoir for a couple of hours and then disperse it some way that is more equitable. I 766 would second that. You'll hear from your constituency if people don't like it. You're 767 hearing from two people now about just a heads up that some people might be 768 disappointed. The second thing I wanted to mention was the idea of the friends linking 769 themselves together. Do you put a limit on that? I know some classes only have 12 770 spots. Are you going to allow six friends to link themselves and take up half of that 771 class? 772 773 Ms. Kortsen: That's something that we haven't looked into at all. That's a good point that 774 you bring up. 775 776 Commissioner Crommie: Summer time really is a time for kids to branch out. I think it's 777 really a sad situation if cliques of friends are just wanting to recapitulate that in a camp 778 setting. I personally think it should be a limit of one friend and that's it. It shouldn't even 779 have to exist really, especially for the classes—again you'll have to remind me. I just 780 remember when my kid was young, it was the art classes that typically had a limit of 12. 781 Some of the really popular science classes at the Junior Museum did not have many; 782 maybe they're up to 15 students. You would probably know this. It is a really small 783 number, especially for a very well organized parent to network and fill that up. Let me 784 just make sure. The last point I'd make is I love your idea of helping people practice this. 785 I assume from your timeline that you allowed—tell me if this is right. Somewhere, like a 786 week ahead, can a parent go get a tutorial on how to use the website? 787 788 Ms. Kortsen: Several weeks. We'll that start two months before we actually have the 789 first day of summer camp registration open. It'll start with the summer camp registration 790 fair, and then we'll continue to take in-person appointments right up until the day that we 791 open registration. 792 Approved Minutes 19 APPROVED 793 Commissioner Crommie: Great, thank you. 794 795 Ms. Kortsen: You're welcome. Something too is we felt that concern too. That's why 796 we've been so hesitant with changing the draw. Our research and talking to our 797 customers has not reflected that concern. That was actually interesting to us. We wanted 798 to get a very wide range of feedback. 10 percent of all the surveys that we sent out is not 799 that high of a number, but overwhelmingly 95 percent said they would prefer an online 800 process, so we're just taking that into consider. 801 802 Chair Reckdahl: Was the question online versus not online or was the question random 803 lottery versus first-come-first serve? 804 805 Ms. Kortsen: It was a question of online versus in person. 806 807 Chair Reckdahl: I think that's kind of apples and oranges. The Commissioners aren't 808 concerned about the online issue as much as the fact that you have to be sitting at the 809 computer at 6:01 a.m. or whatever the cutoff time is; and if you're a half hour late, you 810 may miss the class; and that now you have that pressure. That's not the only way to do 811 something online. People may have misunderstood the question. If you say online 812 versus in person, people order stuff off Amazon all the time, I can order a class off Palo 813 Alto no problem. They don't realize the time pressure that may come with that. Do you 814 have questions? 815 816 Commissioner Ashlund: Yeah. My first question was do you plan to do any user testing 817 both of the people who will be new to this process for the first time as well as repeat 818 customers who have registered their kids for Palo Alto camps in the past? 819 820 Ms. Kortsen: Can you define user testing a little bit? Like user testing of the new 821 system, have them go through it and make sure it's ... 822 823 Commissioner Ashlund: Their feedback on the system as opposed to the training. The 824 user research is where you sit the user down and you put eight or ten users one-by-one or 825 whatever and you say, "Let's see how it goes." You sit there and record their problems. 826 It's standard practice on software design, so I was just wondering if we were able to do 827 something like that in the City before we get to the training point. I don't think you're 828 going to do away with the training point. If you could do that step first and just see 829 where the glitches are, sometimes it's the wording. Sometimes it's not just the software 830 bugs that you wish you could change, but it's actually a lot of times the wording that you 831 do have control over. 832 833 Approved Minutes 20 APPROVED Ms. Kortsen: When we first upgraded to ACTIVE Net, we did do that. We did user 834 testing, both of customers and then of our staff. Because the staff wasn't familiar with the 835 customer side of things, we wanted to watch them go through it. If staff can't understand 836 it, we know that our customers can't understand it. Yes, we will continue to do that. 837 We've done it repeatedly with like MSA. When we moved MSA to an online and in-838 person registration process, it was the same thing. Absolutely, we'd want to see where 839 those bumps are. 840 841 Commissioner Ashlund: Thanks. The randomization factor, I've signed my kids up the 842 past couple of years for several camps that have used the system called Bunk1. It might 843 just be for sleepover camps as opposed to day camps. It does not have the randomization 844 built in. You do have to be online at a specific 12:00 noon on the certain day. Even this 845 most recent year, the system locked out. You could have been on there from day one and 846 they're like, "Oh, we're sorry." They're beholden to this Bunk1 software company. They 847 clearly don't have a lot of other choices, because at least three of the camps that my kids 848 have done have used that. The camp offices just apologize profusely for what Bunk1 849 does and doesn't do. If you're not already requesting ACTIVE Net—is that what they're 850 called? The customers' voices are important to the companies. I would request the 851 randomization feature. That feeling of dedicating your whole day and still getting locked 852 out of the system. It's not even set up to do randomization. It's first-come-first-serve, and 853 that's clearly a disadvantage to a lot of people. I'm not surprised we didn't see it in the 854 survey. I went through the survey myself, and it wasn't something that I really felt was 855 asked. I really felt the whole online versus offline hard copy, of course we want a line, 856 but I didn't feel that I was being asked the question do you want this to be first-come-857 first-serve versus random. I just think if you haven't already asked the software 858 company, put in your future request. It's worth it to put in that request. If they don't hear 859 it from big clients, they're really not likely to offer it. If they are hearing it from a lot of 860 the cities, they might consider that in the future. 861 862 Ms. Kortsen: Thank you. 863 864 Chair Reckdahl: I do have the same concern about the first-come-first-serve, but I do like 865 the feature of immediate response. You know what camp you're in and, if you don't get 866 in that camp, you immediately can go to another camp. Two hours later, you know what 867 camps you have for the summer. With the draw, you would always have this uncertainty, 868 will I get into this camp. I do see the plus side of having the first-come-first-serve. I 869 would want to make sure that that's what the community wants and have an explicit 870 survey to say which do you prefer. Go ahead. 871 872 Mr. de Geus: Go ahead. I just had a thought. 873 874 Approved Minutes 21 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: Last year for the draw, what percentage of the course filled up after the 875 initial draw? Were most of them filled or just some of them filled? 876 877 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, the same ones. I would say less than 50 percent. 878 879 Chair Reckdahl: Fifteen? 880 881 Mr. de Geus: Fifty. 882 883 Chair Reckdahl: Five-zero? 884 885 Mr. de Geus: Less than 50 percent. 886 887 Commissioner Crommie: There's a lot of sports camps that won't fill up, so you really 888 need to ask the question like are 100 percent of your science camps filling up, what 889 percentage of your art camps are filling up. I think that's a better way to ask that. 890 891 Mr. de Geus: Yeah. What Commissioner Crommie is saying, there is some high impact 892 camps that are just very, very popular like zoo camp and there's only a handful of them, 893 and some of the art camps where you can only have 12 or 15 maximum kids. They are 894 very, very popular, and they fill up quickly. Even on the draw when we're doing this sort 895 of manual process, within a couple of hours of registering, they're filled up. 896 897 Chair Reckdahl: We don't have the capability of adding more of those popular camps? 898 899 Mr. de Geus: We try every year. We add funding; we add staffing. Some of them, 900 there's just a limit of space. Like zoo camp, we have one zoo. You can't add more zoo 901 camps. There's only so much space and time. 902 903 Chair Reckdahl: Could they make a bigger zoo? Just kidding. 904 905 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, we're working on that actually. I was going to say this is an 906 interesting challenge and problem. I think there's some history with it, because I ran the 907 Cubberley event when it was first-come-first-serve twice. I said, "There's got to be a 908 better way than this. This is crazy." Lacee's heard this story. We did a survey and asked 909 that question. First-come or random process, what do you think? We put out that survey, 910 and we got 500-plus responses, and it was like 49 percent said first-come-first-serve and 911 like 51 percent said some type of random process. We had some focus groups with 912 people on both sides and sort of tried to work through what is the solution here. The 913 conclusion was the draw, that's what was developed after that, a process that they felt 914 would be more fair and equitable. It was pretty clear because people that were disabled 915 or old or other things, that we can't sleep out all night on the concrete. We had 1,000 916 Approved Minutes 22 APPROVED people in line by 5:00 in the morning. That was some years ago. Now, we're at a point 917 where we have faster and better technology, and most people have access to technology, 918 and we can provide access to those that don't. We do think it's time to think about doing 919 this, and it's the most typical way that cities do it. I think 90 percent or something of 920 cities do. 921 922 Commissioner Ashlund: First-come-first-serve? 923 924 Mr. de Geus: Yeah. An online system, first-come-first serve. 925 926 Chair Reckdahl: I think the best situation is that we have enough classes that it takes 927 hours to fill up and not minutes. 928 929 Mr. de Geus: Right. 930 931 Chair Reckdahl: If it takes hours to fill up and you snooze, then that's more 932 understanding. If it's like three minutes and all of sudden that class is full, that's really 933 high pressure. 934 935 Mr. de Geus: It's going to be even less than that. It'll be seconds. The way the system 936 works, it allows you to set up what camps you would like in your wish list, so you set up 937 your whole summer that way, then you just hit "sign me up for my wish list," and then 938 zip. Everybody's doing that, and so within seconds the highly impacted camps are going 939 to be filled up. The customer then will receive that notice, though, that you're on a wait 940 list or whatever. You can immediately then start searching and looking for something 941 else to put your child into. That's good and bad, I think. I mean it's good because we're 942 hearing from customers they like the self-service. The more self-service, they can have 943 control over things. That's a good thing. The immediate response is really good. There 944 is the other reality, and that is increased anxiety. One, that you see immediately that you 945 didn't get your child into that one camp that they really wanted. You have to then deal 946 with that and quickly look for another spot that's also filling up really quickly. Now, the 947 customer is trying to do that, or the parent or Palo Alto resident is trying to do that 948 rapidly, and that's going to create some anxiety, particularly the first couple of times 949 where it's new. I think that shifts some of the stress of this process of summer camp 950 registration to the parent, which I think is going to be difficult. The more we can 951 communicate and educate the residents about how to use the system and be familiar with 952 navigating the system and working through it, I think, will help a lot. This is a tough one 953 for me. I can see sort of both sides of it. I appreciate the work Lacee's done and the staff, 954 their thinking. We are hearing a lot from our residents that are signing up for classes that 955 online is preferred. The last thing I would say about the survey. The people that 956 responded to the survey are familiar with our system. I think 88 percent or something 957 had signed up before, and they know that it's a first-come-first-serve system. I'm not sure 958 Approved Minutes 23 APPROVED that the people who responded to the survey that they didn't realize that that would be a 959 first-come-first-serve process if it's online. My sense is the majority probably would 960 have understood that. 961 962 Chair Reckdahl: Maybe I'm not typical, but if someone asked me online versus paper, I 963 would just think what am I using to sign up and not the registration style. 964 965 Mr. de Geus: Online randomized registration is pretty rare. You don't see it a lot. 966 967 Commissioner Ashlund: It just wasn't clear. 968 969 Mr. de Geus: Yeah. 970 971 Commissioner Ashlund: It wasn't clear from the survey. 972 973 Mr. de Geus: Right. We could have made it clearer. 974 975 Commissioner Hetterly: Can I just ask a ... 976 977 Commissioner Ashlund: No worries. It just wasn't clear at all from the survey. Our 978 established user base with the draw is used to the randomization. I do think we're going 979 to hit the biggest bump in that. 980 981 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Hetterly: 982 983 Commissioner Hetterly: I have a quick question. I don't know if you've already 984 answered it. If you're a family with multiple kids, can you sign them all up at exactly the 985 same time or do you have to do them sequentially? 986 987 Commissioner Crommie: It stores the information. 988 989 Ms. Kortsen: You can do it all at the same time. 990 991 Commissioner Hetterly: Your family account registers everybody all at once? 992 993 Ms. Kortsen: Yeah, as long they're in the wish list. 994 995 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Crommie. 996 997 Commissioner Crommie: First of all, I didn't understand the wish list system. I've done a 998 lot of online registration mostly for Girl Scout camps. For that, it opened at a certain 999 time, and there wasn't a pre-wish list, so you just scrambled at midnight or whenever it 1000 Approved Minutes 24 APPROVED opened. I've never used a system where you collected in a wish list. For those people 1001 who have collected it appropriately, there is that mini randomization process when they 1002 all hit enter at once, so you have 2,000 families doing that at once. I like that piece. I 1003 like that. I still would like to have the app fixed to have a more random process, but 1004 that's nice to know. One thing I forgot to ask last time is I know one way you can 1005 actually increase capacity for a limited venue like the zoo. I was looking through our 1006 prior calendars for the camps, and I noticed that none of the camps from my research start 1007 until at least two weeks after school is out. I asked someone about that actually, an 1008 administrator at the Junior Museum. She told me, "We don't start until two or three 1009 weeks after school is out because we have to train everyone." I think I had that 1010 information. I confirmed with her; I said, "I see that you don't start for a few weeks after 1011 school is out. Is that true?" She said, "Yes, it's true. This is the reason why ... ." I think 1012 that is an opportunity for some improvement in terms of offering more classes at the 1013 Junior Museum. Of course, with it going under construction and everything, it's going to 1014 be a little bit different until that remodel settles out. The reason I think it's an untapped 1015 resource is because for the Junior Museum, you do have a CIT program. Those kids do 1016 need to go through some of kind training. It's not like you do for the other arm of the 1017 recreation camps. The other arm of the recreation camps seem to have more extensive 1018 training; I don't know exactly. You could say, like for the first two weeks when we 1019 haven't really done adequate training, that's when we would schedule experienced CITs. 1020 Many of the CITs are not in their first year; they are coming back again. I just wanted to 1021 throw that out on the table to maybe look at that. I think also parents sometimes want 1022 camps for right when school gets out. I think it would also help working families. 1023 1024 Mr. de Geus: Thank you, Commissioner Crommie. It is a challenge particularly with the 1025 change in the school calendar and the kids getting out earlier. Many of our camp staff are 1026 college students that are returning, so there's a challenge there. My understanding though 1027 is that it's about a week, not two or three weeks. I'll look into that, because if it's that 1028 long ... 1029 1030 Commissioner Crommie: Look into it. I looked really carefully, and I saw it was at least 1031 two weeks from my research. 1032 1033 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you, Lacee. 1034 1035 4. Community Garden Ad Hoc Update Report and Recommendation. 1036 1037 Commissioner Ashlund: I'm going to kick this off, if that's okay? 1038 1039 Chair Reckdahl: Yes, please. 1040 1041 Approved Minutes 25 APPROVED Commissioner Ashlund: Commissioner Crommie and I have prepared the report. I'm 1042 certainly not going to go through it all point for point; I'm going to summarize it in about 1043 five minutes. I can go slower if people have questions. We'll see. I'm going to try to go 1044 through the background, the history and how we got to this point, and then hand it over at 1045 that point to Commissioner Crommie to review our recommendations. Overall, we found 1046 that there is a disconnect between the community need, the demand for public gardens 1047 and the availability that's based on location. From the map of the three public community 1048 gardens, they're all three not only north of Oregon Expressway, but they're all three north 1049 of Embarcadero. They are Johnson Park, Eleanor Pardee and Rinconada gardens. In 1050 addition, we've listed out three that fall into the public-private partnership category. 1051 Gamble Garden is a nonprofit garden that is a partner with the City as listed on the City 1052 website. While they don't offer garden plots for rent, they do offer gardening instruction 1053 to the community as a whole. The Midtown Community Garden is privately owned land, 1054 but is managed by a nonprofit partner of the City, Acterra. That definitely falls into the 1055 public-private partnership category, because Acterra is a City partner. Lastly is Ventura 1056 garden which we're going to talk about in this report. At the real high level, the entire 1057 property at Ventura is City-owned land, both the buildings as well as the open space. The 1058 garden which is part of the open space is not City managed and not currently under City 1059 rules and regulations. The Ventura Community Garden is currently managed by PACCC 1060 which is the Palo Alto Community Child Care nonprofit that's a City partner. If you go 1061 way back to 1981, the City purchased the entire Ventura property and leased it to 1062 PACCC. In reality, it is just the buildings on that property that were leased to PACCC 1063 for community child care and office space and community use. The open space was 1064 retained by the City being responsible for all the open space at that site including the 1065 playing fields and the playground which make up what we call Ventura Park. It also 1066 includes what is now the garden. The garden wasn't created originally by PACCC; it was 1067 created and funded by the Ventura Neighborhood Association approximately in '93. 1068 Ventura Neighborhood Association requested funding to build the garden on that land, 1069 and funding was not provided, but they were allowed to build the garden on that land. At 1070 some point, PACCC assumed management of the garden using rules and pricing and 1071 regulations that are different from the City public gardens. We did look at who is 1072 currently renting the plots at the Ventura site. Two of them are the child care center 1073 onsite that PACCC runs called Sojourner Truth. Ten of the plots are rented by the 1074 Country Day Little School which is a tenant, a sublettor of building space by PACCC, 1075 that also provides child care. One which we believe might be the largest plot is rented by 1076 the Keys Middle School which is adjacent to the Ventura property, but it's unrelated to 1077 PACCC and unrelated to the City. There's additionally one Mountain View resident and 1078 the remainder of the 29 plots are rented by Palo Alto residents presumably most likely 1079 that are in close proximity to the Ventura area. The Ventura Garden application does say 1080 it's restricted to Ventura area neighborhood residents, but they don't enforce that 1081 restriction. In the lease which we've included after our report in this packet, it stipulates 1082 that the City pays for the water for all the open space at the site. PACCC pays just for the 1083 Approved Minutes 26 APPROVED water that the buildings use, so the child care centers that the building houses. PACCC 1084 pays for that water. The water for the open space, for the playing fields as well as the 1085 gardens is all paid for by the City. We looked at the lease and included that here, and 1086 specifically want to call your attention to page 31 of the lease. It's very near the back of 1087 your packet. Exhibit C for the guidelines for site usage specifically states that all other 1088 open space is subject to the same use conditions that govern the use of City parks in this 1089 class. At this point, I'm going to hand it over to Commissioner Crommie for 1090 recommendations. There's really a wonderful opportunity here as far as the educational 1091 use of those gardens. The preschools getting access to it are wonderful, but there's a bit 1092 of a breakdown as far as availability of that garden and transparency in the process about 1093 how the plots are available and how they're rented. 1094 1095 Commissioner Crommie: Thank you, Commissioner Ashlund. I want to just take you 1096 through the recommendations. Commissioner Ashlund ended with Attachment C of the 1097 lease which shows that the open space should be governed by City guidelines. This park, 1098 this community garden is within the open space. Our recommendation is to bring this 1099 parkland which includes the Ventura Garden under City rules and regulations. Like I just 1100 said, it is supported by the lease. Another rationale is that we have a great need for public 1101 garden space in the southwest neighborhoods of the City. That is indicated when you 1102 look at the map that Commissioner Ashlund went over, that shows that our public 1103 gardens are on the north side of Embarcadero. We also need consistency with City rules 1104 and regulations on how this garden is managed. That is our primary recommendation. 1105 Within that primary recommendation, we recommend that we proceed by creating a clear 1106 timeline and a multiphase process. That's one thing we want to discuss with this 1107 Commission on how we should proceed. Commissioner Ashlund and I wrote out some 1108 steps which I'll just quickly go through, because I want to open this up to discussion as 1109 soon as possible. What we need to do to proceed is we need documentation of current 1110 garden dimensions and plot sizes. We need to determine who will manage this garden 1111 under City rules and regulations. We wrote in that we recommend that we first consider 1112 PACCC to manage this garden under City rules and regulations. They're the current 1113 manager, so it just seems logical to involve them. Again, make a timeline at which we 1114 designate how long we'll go into negotiation with them. If that doesn't work out, we 1115 thought we might recommend considering another nonprofit City partner. That's mostly 1116 with sensitivity to the workload that managing gardens produces for our staff. If there's 1117 no partner that's found within a certain timeline, we wouldn't recommend leaving the 1118 search for another nonprofit open to a year's time. We would recommend giving that 1119 some finite amount of time. Again, this is all predicated on it not working with PACCC, 1120 but we wanted to lay it all out. If PACCC doesn't work out nor another nonprofit, we 1121 would recommend that the City take over management of the garden. In concert with 1122 that, we do want to be sensitive to staff demands, so we would recommend that we have 1123 some additional City resources to manage gardens. Some of them, I think, should be the 1124 introduction of new web-based technology to help streamline communication with the 1125 Approved Minutes 27 APPROVED garden liaison. Each of our public gardens have a liaison, and that person does pick up 1126 quite a bit of work for staff. In return, I believe they might not be paying a garden rental 1127 plot fee. We need them to have all the information at their fingertips in a web-based 1128 format so they don't have to keep calling City staff to get information, which I've heard 1129 sometimes is the case. In addition, some kind of additional staff that might come in the 1130 form of hourly support. That really relates to bringing this garden under the City's 1131 regulations. In addition to that, we recommend obviously to revise the lease so it can 1132 state that there is a Ventura Garden. The Ventura Garden is not mentioned in this lease, 1133 even though this lease was last updated in 2013. This lease has been updated many, 1134 many times since the inception of this garden, but never mentions that this garden exists. 1135 We would want to have that visible in the lease. Two other points. As far as big picture 1136 and planning for our City resources, we would like to assess ongoing needs of expanding 1137 the community garden network, so that we do have geographical distribution of these 1138 gardens. Ventura would go a long way, but we also might certainly benefit by looking at 1139 some other gardens. We noticed that people who use the gardens tend to be clustered in 1140 that neighborhood. It's just a nice resource if we can provide that. Sort of a subtext of all 1141 this is that we hear we don't have land to do these things. A strong point I want to make 1142 is that here's a prime example of land. We have City-owned land with a community 1143 garden that is not on the radar of our residents. I just want to say that loud and clear to 1144 people who say we don't have resources. We do. The last point is that we would like to 1145 have this exercise, this endeavor help establish the rules for public-private partnerships 1146 for other community gardens. We see there is a deficit in institutional documentation and 1147 memory of how these gardens have grown up which is a natural occurrence, because it's a 1148 very hodge-podge system. There really is a deficit of documentation, so we don't even 1149 know how Johnson garden was formed for that neighborhood. Moving forward, there's 1150 two arms of moving forward. Should the City be managing other public gardens 1151 themselves? We certainly want to know how to do that, how to move forward with it. 1152 When we do these proposed public-private partnerships, we also want documentation for 1153 that. Now, I'd just like to open it up to questions. 1154 1155 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Knopper. 1156 1157 Commissioner Knopper: Thank you. You mentioned in your—thank you. Obviously 1158 you guys put a lot of thought and work into this, so thank you for that. You mentioned a 1159 wait list. Do you specifically have information on how many people are on a wait list of 1160 the four gardens for each specific garden? 1161 1162 Commissioner Crommie: Are you talking about our public gardens within the City? 1163 Which garden ... 1164 1165 Commissioner Knopper: No. Rinconada, Eleanor Pardee, Johnson and Ventura. 1166 1167 Approved Minutes 28 APPROVED Commissioner Crommie: Yes, we absolutely have data on that. Catherine Bourquin is 1168 our staff member who is the liaison with the managers of those gardens. She absolutely 1169 has information. We have set rules and regulations for those gardens on our 1170 Commission. 1171 1172 Commissioner Knopper: No, no. I'm asking how many people are wait listed. You said 1173 that ... 1174 1175 Commissioner Ashlund: That does change on a fairly regular basis. 1176 1177 Commissioner Knopper: Do you have that information, like, handy? How many people 1178 currently are sitting on—because your report is predicated on a lot of people that are 1179 waiting. I'm just wondering how ... 1180 1181 Commissioner Crommie: There's a nuance here. For instance, if you don't live near the 1182 north end of town ... 1183 1184 Commissioner Knopper: That's my next ... 1185 1186 Commissioner Crommie: ... you're not necessarily going to put yourself on a wait list. 1187 1188 Commissioner Knopper: That's my next question. Where do the residents reside who 1189 actually have plots? For instance, I live near Eleanor Pardee Park, and a lot of people 1190 probably don't live in and around Pardee Park who have their community plot. It's like an 1191 "a" and "b" question. 1192 1193 Commissioner Ashlund: I think that's a good question. If Cat could address that, but 1194 what we have found is generally people do live in pretty close proximity for the most 1195 part, but I'd really like to turn it over to Cat just for that. 1196 1197 Catherine Bourquin: I think we ... 1198 1199 Commissioner Crommie: She has the address list. 1200 1201 Ms. Bourquin: Not with me, but we did bring it up when we were working with the 1202 consultants on gardens. 1203 1204 Commissioner Crommie: I was at that meeting. 1205 1206 Ms. Bourquin: Exactly. There were a lot of—I think it's 94306 which is on the south 1207 side. There's quite a few, but we never ... 1208 1209 Approved Minutes 29 APPROVED Commissioner Knopper: On the wait list? 1210 1211 Ms. Bourquin: No, no, not on the wait list. That are actually gardening at Rinconada for 1212 instance, who possibly if there was one on the south side might want to go on that side. 1213 There never was, so ... 1214 1215 Commissioner Knopper: Okay, that's what I'm trying to clarify. 1216 1217 Commissioner Crommie: Yeah, you have to understand—a point of clarification for that 1218 ZIP Code is it does run on a band in our City that also includes College Terrace. 94306 is 1219 not only south. 1220 1221 Ms. Bourquin: Okay, but it was close enough to the south side compared to 94303 and 1222 94301, which is a lot of them. Johnson has its own waiting list. I just sent an email out 1223 to the ones that are on there asking if they still wanted to be on it. We've never had that 1224 many vacancies at Johnson. They've been on it for two or three years. 1225 1226 Commissioner Knopper: There are open plots to be ... 1227 1228 Ms. Bourquin: Johnson, right now there ... 1229 1230 Commissioner Knopper: You said vacancy. 1231 1232 Ms. Bourquin: There is a couple right now, but there's like eight people right now on the 1233 waiting list for Johnson. 1234 1235 Commissioner Ashlund: You said some of them have been on there for two or three 1236 years. 1237 1238 Ms. Bourquin: Yes. But only Johnson. Everybody that wants a plot there lives within 1239 walking distance. 1240 1241 Commissioner Knopper: Right. Thank you. Have there been complaints to you? Since 1242 you're sort of the manager of the list, do you get complaints with regard to lack of access 1243 or specifically I live in the south and I have to work in Rinconada? 1244 1245 Ms. Bourquin: Do I get complaints that they have to go so far to get to the garden? 1246 1247 Commissioner Knopper: Correct. 1248 1249 Ms. Bourquin: No. 1250 1251 Approved Minutes 30 APPROVED Commissioner Knopper: Thank you. With regard to the Ventura plot, 29 are Palo Alto 1252 residents and 13, 12 are of the immediate tenants, the preschool people, and then one is 1253 Keys School. Correct? 1254 1255 Commissioner Crommie: There's a humongous plot that's about four or five times the 1256 size of all the rest. Sometimes the absolute numbers don't make sense, because someone 1257 can have one plot which is the equivalent to five or six plots. We weren't able to get that 1258 information to map who has the plot and which plot it is. 1259 1260 Commissioner Knopper: I would imagine that would be difficult. I've been in that 1261 garden quite a bit. Do you have waiting lists for that particular area? 1262 1263 Ms. Bourquin: Not for Ventura. That's the child care. 1264 1265 Commissioner Ashlund: Cat doesn't manage the Ventura garden. PACCC does. 1266 1267 Commissioner Crommie: So we have no information. 1268 1269 Commissioner Ashlund: It is not managed by the City. 1270 1271 Commissioner Knopper: Can you kind of clarify—you want the garden—I'm just trying 1272 to sort of clarify ... 1273 1274 Commissioner Crommie: We want it to come under the City regulations. 1275 1276 Commissioner Knopper: Right. I guess my question is how are they running the garden 1277 that is not to your liking versus what the City's regulations would be with regard to the 1278 management? That's Question A. "B," why would you want another nonprofit to 1279 manage it potentially when the PACCC people are onsite and use it for their student 1280 population? 1281 1282 Commissioner Ashlund: Great, thank you. As far as how is PACCC running it, it's not a 1283 question of liking versus not liking. It's just a question of transparency in the City. As a 1284 Barron Park resident, as Commissioner Crommie is a Monroe Park resident, we're in 1285 close proximity, closest to Ventura. We weren't aware that it existed. On multiple 1286 searches on the internet, you cannot find out how to rent a plot at Ventura garden. You 1287 cannot find that it is City-owned land. Until we requested the lease and received the 1288 lease through staff, we couldn't even confirm that it was City-owned land and City-1289 owned water. It's a wonderful resource, and it's being used for educational purposes. 1290 When City-owned land and City-paid water is being run by a nonprofit where the rules 1291 and regulations are not made available to the public, it's in violation with City rules and 1292 regulations. 1293 Approved Minutes 31 APPROVED 1294 Commissioner Knopper: But there are 29 Palo Alto residents that have—they have the 1295 majority of plots there, so somebody—if Palo Alto residents are being ... 1296 1297 Commissioner Ashlund: People know about it. 1298 1299 Commissioner Knopper: I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm just trying to clarify ... 1300 1301 Commissioner Ashlund: No, no, no. It's okay. Ventura Neighborhood Association 1302 originally built that garden. It was intended to be neighborhood, and it still mostly is 1303 neighborhood and Ventura site tenants that are using it. It's just a matter that we have a 1304 wonderful resource that isn't available unless you know by word of mouth. Because the 1305 lease specifically says the City governs the open space, that land needs to be brought 1306 under City rules and regulations. We are in violation of the current lease. Because 1307 PACCC is managing it, it's not a lot of money, but PACCC receives the rentals for these 1308 plots. The prices aren't even consistent with our plots on the other gardens. Maybe they 1309 don't need to be. I just wanted to jump quickly to your second question about why 1310 another nonprofit. Absolutely the first choice—the City is very strapped for time and 1311 resources in managing the three gardens that they manage on the north side of Palo Alto. 1312 Absolutely PACCC would be a perfect partner to manage this as long as the City rules 1313 and regulations are being followed by the City land. It's simply a matter of policy and 1314 what the lease says and what the lease doesn't say. The lease being updated in 2013 does 1315 not mention that PACCC is renting these garden plots to anybody. There's no mention of 1316 the garden. It's simply a matter of clarity with rules and regulations and transparency for 1317 the policy. If that makes sense. 1318 1319 Commissioner Crommie: I'd like to follow up and say, Commissioner Knopper, you 1320 might know about the garden because your child goes to the Keys School, so you had a 1321 connection through a school. Those of us who live in the neighborhood know nothing 1322 about this garden. You asked what is the problem with what is happening. There's no 1323 problem per se with PACCC being the manager of this system. It's just that there's a 1324 problem with the rules that PACCC is using being outside of the rules that our City has 1325 developed on this Commission. Some of the rules are very unusual. One of their rules, 1326 which they actually don't seem to follow, is that only people in the Ventura neighborhood 1327 should have garden plots. That would be excluding some of the people who currently 1328 have plots. There's not a clear use of these rules. Also there's not good institutional 1329 memory, so that within PACCC there's no documentation, an oral tradition of what 1330 they've done. They just had a recent staff change, and they don't know what was done in 1331 the past. Within PACCC themselves, it's not documented. There's some issues there. I'd 1332 say those are the problems. In answer to your question of why do another nonprofit, I'd 1333 say we don't need to if we can work that out with PACCC. PACCC is an absolute ideal 1334 Approved Minutes 32 APPROVED candidate to work this out with. We don't know that we would find another nonprofit to 1335 do this. 1336 1337 Commissioner Ashlund: Our first recommendation is to come to an agreement with 1338 PACCC and have the lease updated to reflect that accurately. 1339 1340 Ms. Bourquin: Can I make a comment? Things have changed since you started doing 1341 your ad hoc committee. Daren and I met with the new person. She got copies of the 1342 rules and regulations that we follow, and she has made them theirs. That part of it is 1343 done. 1344 1345 Commissioner Crommie: She can't do that until all those plots have been measured, 1346 because you charge on your gardens per square foot. 1347 1348 Ms. Bourquin: The fees would be the only issue the City would have to look into at this 1349 moment. As far as the rules and regulations, she's made it Palo Alto residents only. 1350 1351 Commissioner Crommie: If that's true, you have to grapple with the private schools that 1352 are using it. What you just said is not fully fleshed out. With the tenants that they have 1353 now at those gardens, they are not in compliance with our rules and regulations until we 1354 make accommodations as such. That statement is actually false. 1355 1356 Ms. Bourquin: True, but I was just saying that they have worked on the rules in trying to 1357 follow what we have going right now. 1358 1359 Commissioner Ashlund: Thanks. I'd like to continue. 1360 1361 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Hetterly, do you ... 1362 1363 Commissioner Hetterly: Do you want to weigh in on something? 1364 1365 Mr. de Geus: I don't know if it'll help. Just because we're going back and forth a little bit 1366 here, I want to be sure it's understood that PACCC didn't start this garden. It was started 1367 by the Ventura neighborhood many years ago. I don't know how long ago. This garden 1368 is serving some Palo Alto residents, and it was sort of happening in the background. I 1369 think PACCC just as good tenants were trying to provide support. They're willing to do 1370 whatever, I think, the City requires. We haven't asked them to do anything. They're very 1371 willing to have the garden be consistent with the other gardens. I think that's perfectly 1372 appropriate. 1373 1374 Commissioner Hetterly: I have several questions. One is also about the PACCC 1375 management. If there's a short answer to this, what does their management entail? They 1376 Approved Minutes 33 APPROVED collect the rent. They keep the forms. Are they responsible for maintenance, for waste 1377 disposal, for coordinating work days, all the other things that happen in the management 1378 of the other City parks? 1379 1380 Commissioner Crommie: The answer is no. 1381 1382 Commissioner Ashlund: They do coordinate work days. The only mention of Ventura 1383 Garden on any City of Palo Alto partner website is requesting volunteers to help manage 1384 the garden. The City maintains the playing fields, but I don't think the City maintains or 1385 hauls away anything from the garden area. Is that correct? 1386 1387 Commissioner Hetterly: PACCC doesn't either? 1388 1389 Commissioner Crommie: No, no one does it. When I went to visit the site—this is an 1390 illustration—there was a gardener who was digging up the dirt around one of the trees 1391 near the garden to get that dirt for her own garden. It's not a highly regulated space. 1392 That's not to say that there aren't some very important uses going on in that garden, but 1393 there's not a regulation. 1394 1395 Commissioner Hetterly: I have some more questions. My next question is the rents, 1396 PACCC collects the rents, $25 a plot it looked like. What do they do with that? That's 1397 supposed to cover their costs of management which is collecting the money? 1398 1399 Commissioner Ashlund: It doesn't go back to the City. What they do with it is 1400 presumably in exchange for the management. What we've heard through word of mouth 1401 is that in exchange for managing the garden they collect the rent, that small amount, for 1402 the plots. Yeah, but it doesn't go back to the City. 1403 1404 Commissioner Hetterly: It sounds like your goal of consistency in rules and access, 1405 certainly as far as rules, is well on the way to being achievable with the remaining 1406 question about the fees. Yeah? 1407 1408 Commissioner Ashlund: Actually our main concern is not consistency with the rules. 1409 That is a sub-goal of updating the lease to ... 1410 1411 Commissioner Hetterly: I'm getting to the other priorities. 1412 1413 Commissioner Ashlund: Okay, great. 1414 1415 Commissioner Hetterly: That, I think, seems like a problem that can be solved. The next 1416 question was about transparency. How do people know about it? How can they sign up 1417 for a plot? It does make sense for City-owned land, City-owned water, that there ought to 1418 Approved Minutes 34 APPROVED be a City affiliation with this garden. I think it is important to move forward in some way 1419 to make that happen. Whether or not it can have different exceptions to the standards that 1420 apply to the other gardens is yet to be seen. I think that's very tricky because of the 1421 amount and type of users you have in that garden right now. You're talking about you 1422 have 12, it seems under your proposal—maybe this is incorrect—I gathered that you were 1423 proposing that the Country Day Little School, the Keys Middle School and the Mountain 1424 View resident be ejected from the garden in order to free up those spots for residents ... 1425 1426 Commissioner Crommie: No, not exactly. 1427 1428 Commissioner Hetterly: ... consistent with the City rules. 1429 1430 Commissioner Crommie: Do you want to clarify? 1431 1432 Commissioner Ashlund: Yeah. First and foremost, we want the lease updated to reflect 1433 the existence and the management and the rules of the garden. After it comes in 1434 compliance, those accommodations are to be determined. Once we have the City land 1435 under City rules and regs, then that is a relatively easy question. Since the building itself 1436 is leased to PACCC and these are all tenants, the child care are all tenants of PACCC, 1437 Sojourner Truth and Country Day. Country Day I assume is a nonprofit although that 1438 wasn't verifiable on the website, but they are a child care tenant on PACCC. Sojourner 1439 Truth are the only two. The majority of these 29 are Palo Alto residents. This isn't a big 1440 issue about who's renting the plots. It's ... 1441 1442 Commissioner Hetterly: My only question was whether you were interested in having 1443 plot use consistent with the rules in all of our other City community gardens in terms of 1444 resident requirements. 1445 1446 Commissioner Ashlund: What we put in our recommendations regarding that is that ... 1447 1448 Commissioner Crommie: It's under "C;" it's under "1C." 1449 1450 Commissioner Ashlund: On "1C" under recommendations, determine whether PACCC 1451 can assume management of the garden under the same rules and regs as the City's three 1452 existing public gardens with an accommodation for PACCC and nonprofit child care 1453 centers at Ventura to retain existing plots. We did not address Keys, because the 1454 fundamental issue is the lease and the ownership and the rules. We just didn't touch it. 1455 It's a private school; it's adjacent to the property. They're not renting the property. That's 1456 not for us to decide. That's a much later down the timeline decision. 1457 1458 Commissioner Crommie: Also, I wanted to point out that another aspect of compliance 1459 that might not be obvious is that our public community gardens have what is called a 1460 Approved Minutes 35 APPROVED liaison, a person who is there to mentor other gardeners. Right now, we don't have that 1461 role being fulfilled at Ventura garden. That's another very critical aspect of the garden, 1462 especially given some of the practices that I saw going on at the garden. There's a 1463 vacuum there now. It's not that anyone did this on purpose; it has to do with institutional 1464 transitions of staff. There wasn't a backup plan for transitions between staff members. 1465 Maybe some people were doing more mentoring in the past. At some point, a Ventura 1466 Neighborhood Association was involved. That's a void. 1467 1468 Commissioner Hetterly: That's a question that you want to cover in terms of consistent 1469 operations across gardens. Okay. You may or may not entertain thoughts of 1470 grandfathering the current users who aren't residents. As far as the lease goes, it seems to 1471 me more important, if you're going to make this a City-affiliated garden, to make 1472 information about it publicly available. Changing the lease, I think, is a somewhat 1473 cumbersome process that doesn't improve transparency or awareness of the garden. I'm 1474 not sure I would put a ton of energy on that side of it. I would focus instead on 1475 community education and awareness of how it works. 1476 1477 Commissioner Crommie: That's number two on our recommendations. 1478 1479 Commissioner Hetterly: I'm working from my list. (crosstalk) 1480 1481 Commissioner Crommie: Okay. I just wanted to say it does tie back. We're very 1482 interested in that, in what you just said. The public communication is very critical. 1483 1484 Commissioner Hetterly: I would even go so far as to say I wouldn't bother with changing 1485 the lease unless you have to. I don't think it buys you much and it's a lot of effort. The 1486 next thing was expanded access. It seems to me your goal in elevating the visibility of 1487 this garden is to expand access, have better transparency and consistent rules. Right? 1488 Expanding access, it's full now and you have a wait list. We don't know how big the wait 1489 list is. Was it your sense that there's room for expansion of the site? 1490 1491 Commissioner Crommie: Absolutely. Again, that would be downstream, but there's a lot 1492 of land there. It's been expanded one time already, we were told anecdotally. 1493 1494 Commissioner Hetterly: I think that's worth pursuing as part of the Master Plan process 1495 and with City staff to figure out how much room there might be to grow in that location 1496 and what the impact would be on other uses of the City-used open space. Let's see. I 1497 think if you're looking at grandfathering all the current users and there's not room for 1498 expansion, then we're not buying a whole lot by getting the City involved in management 1499 of this garden, if we were to do that. It's a garden that's working, that people like. What 1500 you're missing is ... 1501 1502 Approved Minutes 36 APPROVED Commissioner Crommie: We don't know that for sure. I mean ... 1503 1504 Commissioner Hetterly: Wait a minute. What you're missing is the ability to compete 1505 for the plot. Right? Your access is limited because it's full and people don't know how to 1506 get into it. If and when there's turnover, then you're not filling it in an open and good 1507 way. That's something that you can focus on. I'm trying to evaluate where the return on 1508 investment is in terms of staff time in making this conversion. I think that's something 1509 that's worth thinking about for you all. The first thing I would do is investigate capacity 1510 for expansion. The transparency—I'll leave it at that. I think I made all my points. 1511 1512 Commissioner Ashlund: I do want to come back. We did consult with staff on this, and 1513 we do defer to staff and the City Attorney's Office on whether the City is out of—I don't 1514 know if compliance is the word—if the lease does need to be updated to reflect the 1515 current use of the land and the current financial arrangements. 1516 1517 Daren Anderson: Yes, thanks. We consulted the City Attorney specifically about the 1518 question of is it permissible or is it legally advisable to have a City garden run and 1519 managed and charged fees for a certain way and to have on City land another community 1520 garden with different rules and different fees. The City Attorney advised us we should be 1521 making it consistent. We should have them consistent. Regarding your lease question, it 1522 makes good sense to me to change the lease or at least bring this up at the expiration date 1523 of the current lease. The point behind that is the ambiguity that we're suffering under 1524 right now of when did this happen. It would be formalized and captured in a legal 1525 document which makes sense to me. 1526 1527 Commissioner Lauing: That was one of my questions. When is the lease up? 1528 1529 Mr. de Geus: Next year. 1530 1531 Mr. Anderson: I think it's June 2016. 1532 1533 Commissioner Crommie: It's like eight months from now. 1534 1535 Commissioner Ashlund: Yeah, I think it's 2016 as well. 1536 1537 Commissioner Lauing: Am I next? 1538 1539 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. 1540 1541 Commissioner Lauing: Are you done? 1542 1543 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. Commissioner Lauing. 1544 Approved Minutes 37 APPROVED 1545 Commissioner Lauing: Yeah. I don't think this is ready to take action on. I just want to 1546 add a couple of things to what Jennifer said. We now know when the lease is up. I don't 1547 think we should be taking action on it until the lease is up a year from now. There's 1548 already a lot of cooperation on the site with the City, and you can get a little bit more 1549 with a little bit of discussion as opposed to legal documentation. As I read the numbers, 1550 basically 98 percent of the people that are using these plots are either Palo Alto residents 1551 or go to school in Palo Alto. I certainly wouldn't want to take it away from the kids, 1552 which I know is being debated as yes or no or whatever. The biggest point is that you 1553 don't get any more plots which was Commissioner Hetterly's point. I totally support that 1554 idea, that we should be looking at expanding community gardens generally and in the 1555 south. I would say currently this is a very small problem that we don't have to go through 1556 legal changes. We need some research on more land. As was stated, 30 of the 43 plots 1557 are already being used by Palo Alto folks. The transparency, I think, can be better 1558 coordinated through Cat. That could solve that problem right there. Also, the press is 1559 here tonight, so everybody's going to know about it by Wednesday. Thank you. 1560 1561 Mr. Anderson: May I chime in on that? Catherine Bourquin and I met with the staff 1562 from PACCC, and they did agree and were amenable to the concept of advertising 1563 through our website. That's something we can move on an action item relatively quickly. 1564 1565 Chair Reckdahl: I have a question about the nonprofits. Are nonprofits eligible to get 1566 plots of land at other parks? 1567 1568 Commissioner Crommie: We wrote the rules and regulations, Commissioner Reckdahl. 1569 They are not. 1570 1571 Chair Reckdahl: They're not. It has to be an individual? 1572 1573 Commissioner Crommie: We wrote them on this Commission. 1574 1575 Ms. Bourquin: I inherited the program. With the gardens at Rinconada, like a housing 1576 authority, they get a plot there. I don't know if they're a nonprofit or not, but they don't 1577 pay. 1578 1579 Chair Reckdahl: Who's the housing authority? 1580 1581 Ms. Bourquin: The housing authority. There's some people, they get on a list through 1582 the housing authority, and then they have a plot there. I inherited that. 1583 1584 Commissioner Hetterly: They're individuals. They don't represent the authority? 1585 1586 Approved Minutes 38 APPROVED Ms. Bourquin: Correct. 1587 1588 Commissioner Hetterly: (inaudible) they're not using the plot for the authority? 1589 1590 Ms. Bourquin: No, no, no. 1591 1592 Chair Reckdahl: They're not Palo Alto residents or they are? 1593 1594 Ms. Bourquin: They are. In Palo Alto. 1595 1596 Chair Reckdahl: How much maintenance do we do on the gardens? Daren or Peter, can 1597 you answer that question? On the gardens. 1598 1599 Mr. Anderson: On the City-managed gardens at Rinconada, yeah. A decent amount. 1600 Right now the infrastructure for the irrigation system is very old, and there are frequent 1601 repairs. Peter Jensen's heading up a project to replace that infrastructure. I anticipate 1602 there will be a significant drop-off in how much time out staff spends fixing main line 1603 breaks. A reasonable amount, it's not too disproportionate to where we deal with other 1604 irrigation spots in the City. 1605 1606 Chair Reckdahl: When people pay garden fees, where does that money go? 1607 1608 Mr. Anderson: To the general fund. 1609 1610 Chair Reckdahl: It doesn't go to the Parks Department? It goes to the general fund? 1611 1612 Mr. Anderson: Correct. 1613 1614 Chair Reckdahl: Then you get your funding through the ... . Okay. We talked about 1615 having the nonprofit run it. Is that just because you don't want to change horses in 1616 midstream? If you're trying to get uniformity, it would make more sense to have Cat run 1617 it. 1618 1619 Commissioner Crommie: You're absolutely right about that. It's just trying to walk a 1620 fine line between staff feeling overburdened, PACCC already being there, this confusion 1621 over the schools. Right now, everyone's taking all these numbers very literally, beyond 1622 what they should be. You need to do a tour of the garden. Not all these plots are being 1623 used. We were given these numbers by someone who didn't know necessarily who was 1624 assigned to what plot. There's one plot, I'm telling you, that like takes up a fourth of this 1625 garden or a fifth of this garden. We think it's called one plot, so that in itself is very 1626 confusing. There's a lot that's not known right now about the availability of plots in this 1627 garden. Actually I take exception at those kinds of statements like should we open this 1628 Approved Minutes 39 APPROVED up to more advertising that we wouldn't have some turnover possibilities to absorb 1629 another 12 residents into that garden. We don't really know how these numbers work. 1630 We really need our staff to figure that out. Our staff hasn't done that yet. This is very 1631 preliminary, so we can't really draw conclusions about capacity at this point. 1632 1633 Chair Reckdahl: Didn't we go through the gardens and shrink the plots recently? 1634 1635 Mr. Anderson: There was some reconfiguration done at Rinconada when we did the 1636 recent project to the Library and Art Center. There was an annex that was changed, and 1637 so some reconfiguration did happen. Also for very large plots in the past, as those 1638 gardeners have cycled out, some of them have been split into smaller sizes. 1639 1640 Chair Reckdahl: The path forward, is the ad hoc going to be working on this issue? Is 1641 staff going to be working? What's the next step? 1642 1643 Mr. de Geus: I think staff can take it from here. This wasn't really on our radar. It is 1644 now, and so we'll work closely with PACCC and the gardeners that are there and work 1645 our way to get it compliant with the rest of our gardens in the system. I'll be happy to 1646 come back to the Commission and provide updates. That's what I would suggest. 1647 1648 Commissioner Ashlund: I wanted to add. This is the current version of the lease that we 1649 received from staff. When it was most recently renewed in 2013, it was a two-year lease 1650 which expired August 2013. The previous terms were a five-year and a ten-year. We 1651 don't have documentation of whether this expired in another two-year term this past 1652 August, last month, or whether it's a three-year term. We don't have that information 1653 from staff. If it was another two-year term, it may have expired this past month. 1654 1655 Ms. Bourquin: Are you referring to Ventura? Is that what you're referring to, the 1656 Ventura? 1657 1658 Commissioner Ashlund: I'm referring to the lease of the Ventura property, yeah. 1659 1660 Ms. Bourquin: Donna Hartman from real estate said it's going to be expiring in June of 1661 '16. 1662 1663 Commissioner Ashlund: June of 2016? 1664 1665 Ms. Bourquin: Yeah. It's confirmation on that, yes. 1666 1667 Commissioner Ashlund: The terms aren't ... 1668 1669 Ms. Bourquin: The lease is basically for the buildings. 1670 Approved Minutes 40 APPROVED 1671 Commissioner Ashlund: The lease is for the buildings, not the open space. 1672 1673 Ms. Bourquin: Yeah, it's not for the open space land. 1674 1675 Chair Reckdahl: I think we can handle this offline though. The end result is staff will 1676 work this, and we will get an update. 1677 1678 Commissioner Crommie: Yes. I think our Commission for our ad hoc, I mean, 1679 sometimes our ad hoc committees do result in a recommendation from our Commission. 1680 I think sometimes that's a position of strength to get to do that. I don't know if we should 1681 decide immediately that we're not going to at some point take action on this item on our 1682 Commission. I mean, I just sort of wanted to open it up for some discussion. 1683 1684 Chair Reckdahl: I think my preference would be to let staff work it, and let's reevaluate 1685 this further and see if we want to act on it or whether everything's in a good situation. 1686 1687 Commissioner Ashlund: Can we have a timeline for follow-up from staff? 1688 1689 Mr. Anderson: Catherine and I are working on this one right now, so we'll continue in 1690 dialog. I think we've got pretty clear direction of transparency both from the Commission 1691 and from our City Attorney's Office on where we need to be. I think we can take steps 1692 for the transparency portion of having it posted on the website. The rules and regulations 1693 are already underway. I think in the next three months, we could have that part fairly 1694 well flushed through. Some of the other parts, I think, will lend itself to some public 1695 outreach, some meeting with the gardeners. That pertains to bringing it in alignment with 1696 what we charge at our other gardens and how that would transition with the Ventura site. 1697 That might take a little longer. I'd probably need some time to talk to PACCC about that 1698 and those gardeners before I committed to any timeframe for that portion. 1699 1700 Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Thank you. Let's move on. We are behind time, so let's move 1701 onto the next. 1702 1703 5. Update on the Parks, Trails, Open Space and Recreation Facilities Master 1704 Plan. 1705 1706 Chair Reckdahl: Isn't natural spaces in there too? In any case, Peter Jensen will be 1707 talking about the Master Plan. 1708 1709 Rob de Geus: I'll just kick it off. There isn't a whole lot to go over this evening. I just 1710 wanted to give the Commission an update. We did have a Study Session with the City 1711 Council on August 27th. Is that right, August 27? 1712 Approved Minutes 41 APPROVED 1713 Peter Jensen: 31st. 1714 1715 Mr. de Geus: Okay. End of August. We got some feedback from the Council Members. 1716 Some of you saw it. Chair Reckdahl was there, and thank you for speaking. I think that 1717 we learned that we did not have enough information to share with Council, didn't give 1718 them the full story of the path that we've been on as a Commission which has been pretty 1719 extensive and pretty deeply involved in this process. What we shared with Council was 1720 sort of too narrow of a perspective of where we've been and where we are. They shared 1721 their feedback, and it was very fair actually. We're taking some time to redo with the 1722 Council in another Study Session which is planned for November 2nd. A much more 1723 comprehensive report from MIG and a staff report as well. We're excited about that. In 1724 fact, the report that MIG prepared for the Study Session that we had has already been 1725 reworked considerably. The latest draft was yesterday, I believe. It's, I think, nicely 1726 written and much better and closer to what we need, what the Commission is looking for 1727 and the Council is looking for. Peter's going to, I think, talk a little bit about that. I 1728 would like to suggest that between now and that Study Session that either the ad hoc 1729 committee continue to meet to refine the presentation to the Council, because you've been 1730 so close to this. I think it's helpful to have us aligned with that presentation. I think this 1731 time it was staff sort of on our own there, and the Commission wasn't quite there with us. 1732 That's on us. We could do that with the ad hoc that's been meeting. By the way, thank 1733 you for doing that. That's Chair Reckdahl, Commissioner Lauing and Commissioner 1734 Hetterly, have been meeting with us these last couple of months on this. We could do 1735 that or we can have a special meeting with the full Commission between now and the 1736 Study Session. I mention that because the next regular meeting is October 27th, I think. 1737 That's like a week before the Study Session with Council. I'm eager to have sort of some 1738 more time with the Commission on the Parks Master Plan particularly before the next 1739 Study Session. We can talk more about that after Peter shares just a little bit about the 1740 latest report we've got from MIG. 1741 1742 Mr. Jensen: Yes, as Rob was alluding to, the Council wanted to see a lot more 1743 information on the process that we've been going through as well as a detailed breakdown 1744 of where we're actually going and how the Master Plan will be put together and the 1745 recommendations that we've made. The newest draft of that report is much more 1746 detailed. It has a lot of information on how we get to that final destination, which I know 1747 that some of the members of the Commission here have definitely had questions about. 1748 Just in general I feel very positive about what we are producing for the Council report, 1749 but I think it also will help solidify the direction that we're going in and tells the story all 1750 the way to the end. We've been, I think, getting to that process but, I think, we want to 1751 see it now. That's kind of what this does. I am excited to see that that is going along and 1752 looking forward to working with the ad hoc and then also coming back to the 1753 Approved Minutes 42 APPROVED Commission at the end of next month before we do our Study Session with the Council 1754 again to discuss those more and to lay out that whole thing so everyone can see it. 1755 1756 Commissioner Hetterly: I just have a quick question about the survey. How are you 1757 feeling about survey responses? 1758 1759 Mr. Jensen: Survey responses, I haven't received an update from MIG in about a week. 1760 We were past 200 responses already. There still is further outreach that City staff can do 1761 to bolster those numbers. We're feeling pretty good about the response that we're getting 1762 so far. 1763 1764 Commissioner Hetterly: When does it close? 1765 1766 Mr. Jensen: We were looking at doing it at the end of this week. Because of our 1767 response to the Council, we're going to keep it open for another two or three weeks. 1768 1769 Mr. de Geus: Just anecdotal feedback. The people that are participating, they like the 1770 money piece and having to make choices about where to invest. That seems to be 1771 somewhat effective. I look forward to seeing the summary response. I do hope we get 1772 quite a few more than 200. The other thing that is important to mention is we do have a 1773 stakeholders meeting this week, on Thursday evening, the 1st. The meeting is not going 1774 to be so much about working the priorities or getting into recommendations. The 1775 stakeholders group hasn't come together as a group for some time, largely because we 1776 took a couple of steps back and did more data and outreach. They've been engaged, come 1777 to different community meetings and some of the specific focus groups meetings we've 1778 had during that process. We really think it's important to give them an orientation as well 1779 as where we are at and what we've discovered through the process and the building of the 1780 matrix and the areas of focus and sort of talk through those things and allow them to ask 1781 questions, share with them the variety of reports that are on the website, so that they can 1782 really do some homework and some harder thinking before our workshop, so they come 1783 really ready to help us out with the prioritization and recommendation exercise. That's 1784 the focus for the stakeholder group meeting this Thursday. Hopefully some 1785 Commissioners can be there. I think we decided on a couple of Commissioners to be ad 1786 hoc to the stakeholders committee, but I can't remember who that is right off the bat. 1787 1788 Commissioner Hetterly: We did. I think it was Commissioner Crommie. 1789 1790 Commissioner Crommie: I went to the original meeting. I know I'm on that ad hoc. 1791 1792 Commissioner Hetterly: It might have been Pat. 1793 1794 Commissioner Crommie: I forget who the second person was. 1795 Approved Minutes 43 APPROVED 1796 Mr. de Geus: I think we have the documentation of that. I'm sure we can find it. 1797 1798 Commissioner Crommie: For the stakeholders meetings, was it Keith? Okay. We can 1799 always have three too. 1800 1801 Commissioner Ashlund: I was at the first one, but I'm out of town this Thursday night. I 1802 can't attend. 1803 1804 Mr. Jensen: The meeting is at 6:30 at the Embarcadero Room at the Rinconada Library. 1805 If you haven't been in that room yet, it's one of our beautiful, new public spaces. It's 1806 always good to have more meeting spaces and use that room. 1807 1808 Commissioner Crommie: I have a question. Are you opening it up at some point? Is this 1809 time for questions? Are you ... 1810 1811 Chair Reckdahl: Are you done? Yes, go ahead. 1812 1813 Commissioner Crommie: Can you review with me what the ad hoc committee on the 1814 Master Plan's goals are? You mentioned it's comprised by Commissioners Hetterly, 1815 Reckdahl and Lauing. I'm a little bit confused. I know they were formed when we were 1816 looking over some of the document. I just need clarity, because I want to make sure that 1817 a lot of these issues are still coming to the full Commission, which is what we decided as 1818 a Commission. Sometimes when this work gets taken offline, we lose the transparency 1819 on the whole Commission. This is a really important topic. I don't quite get what the ad 1820 hoc is doing. Can you review what those goals are, of that ad hoc? Whoever is in 1821 charge, whoever is the staff liaison to that ad hoc. 1822 1823 Mr. de Geus: I don't think we established specific goals. I don't think we've done that for 1824 any ad hoc committee specifically, other than you're going to be involved with the 1825 stakeholder committee and follow that process along. With this particular one, it was 1826 more recent, and it was focused primarily on the criteria. We did the principles, and then 1827 there was sort of the next filter which is the criteria. The Commission and staff, I would 1828 say, was not satisfied with the initial first sort of draft and even second draft of that. We 1829 said we could use some help working with a few Commissioners on redefining those. 1830 That was very helpful. Actually I think we're in a much better place with the criteria. 1831 That's how it was formed. I think it was pretty much limited to that, so this does expand 1832 a little more if we're going to (crosstalk). 1833 1834 Commissioner Crommie: I guess that's what I want to know. I kind of understood why 1835 we formed them, and they reported back to us with a report. Tonight, we didn't even get 1836 a report on anything for this agenda item, so I feel a little bit in the dark. I just want to 1837 Approved Minutes 44 APPROVED make sure that something hasn't just been taken offline with that ad hoc that's not 1838 transparent to the rest of the Commission. I don't think it's a good thing to have a 30-1839 minute agenda item on something this important with no report, unless I missed it in my 1840 packet. 1841 1842 Mr. de Geus: No. Maybe it's not clear, but there isn't a whole lot to report, I guess is 1843 what we're saying. We had the Study Session with Council, and we're taking a step back 1844 and going to redo it. 1845 1846 Commissioner Crommie: I wasn't at that Study Session with Council, so it would have 1847 been really nice to document what came from that to our Commission. I can go back and 1848 watch the tape, but usually we get some kind of information exchange when things like 1849 that happen. 1850 1851 Mr. de Geus: I think every other meeting we've had an update report. We didn't have 1852 one today. We're just giving you the verbal report of what occurred. I didn't think that it 1853 was an especially good use of our time to write that all up, but rather focus on the return 1854 to Council and rewriting the report so that it's more closely fitting to what the Council 1855 needs. The Commission's going to see that report as well, and we'll be sharing that report 1856 with you at the next meeting. My hope would be that the Commission and I would 1857 recommend that the ad hoc, maybe that's a redefining of what the ad hoc committee's 1858 doing. That's ... 1859 1860 Commissioner Crommie: That's what I want definition on. 1861 1862 Mr. de Geus: If we do that, work with staff in our preparation for going back to Council 1863 on the November 2nd, it'd be very helpful for staff if the ad hoc committee would be 1864 willing to do that. We could then meet over the next few weeks and then on the 27th 1865 even sort of dry run the Study Session with Council the week before we go to Council for 1866 feedback from the full Commission. You'd have the report, of course. 1867 1868 Commissioner Crommie: I think that ad hoc—what is the name of that ad hoc 1869 committee? 1870 1871 Mr. de Geus: I don't know that we have names for ad hoc committees. 1872 1873 Commissioner Crommie: We do. We have a name for every ad hoc committee on the 1874 Master Plan. 1875 1876 Mr. de Geus: We have a topical name. 1877 1878 Commissioner Knopper: Master Plan Stakeholders Group. 1879 Approved Minutes 45 APPROVED 1880 Commissioner Crommie: We have Master Plan Survey Ad Hoc. We have Master Plan 1881 Stakeholders Ad Hoc. We had a third. We were very careful in how we divvied this up. 1882 I can't remember the name of the third ad hoc. Someone here who's on it. I was on the 1883 Master Plan Survey Ad Hoc with Stacey Ashlund. 1884 1885 Mr. de Geus: Let's call it the Master Plan Council Study Session Ad Hoc. 1886 1887 Commissioner Crommie: Then I think we should open it up and make sure—I don't 1888 think it's a good policy to form an ad hoc for a certain purpose which was served. Again, 1889 I'm not asking for a space on this myself. I'm not doing that. I think if it's a new ad hoc 1890 for a new purpose, we should at least go through the exercise of opening it up and make 1891 sure that everyone who wants to be on that has a chance. I guess I defer to our Chair of 1892 our Commission on that. 1893 1894 Chair Reckdahl: Right now we have three of us. You have no interest in being on the ad 1895 hoc? 1896 1897 Commissioner Crommie: At least I now know what this ad hoc is. I really have been 1898 confused about what the new role of this ad hoc is and what the name of it is. Can you 1899 just summarize that and then we can open it up? 1900 1901 Chair Reckdahl: We don't have a name. The name is that we are helping the staff work 1902 on the Master Plan for the Council, the presentation for the Council and the final report. 1903 1904 Mr. de Geus: I did name it. 1905 1906 Female: (inaudible) 1907 1908 Mr. de Geus: Right. Up until now, we've been talking about the criteria with the ad hoc, 1909 which is what it was formed for. I think I brought it up for this very reason, that it would 1910 be helpful to have the ad hoc continue with a little bit of a different focus to help us get 1911 ready for the Study Session. That's completely transparent in my view. 1912 1913 Commissioner Crommie: It's called the Master Plan Council Presentation Ad Hoc? 1914 1915 Mr. de Geus: Sure, that's fine. 1916 1917 Commissioner Crommie: We really do always name our ad hocs. We really do. 1918 1919 Mr. de Geus: They have a topic that they focus on. Right? 1920 1921 Approved Minutes 46 APPROVED Commissioner Crommie: Is there anyone else who wants to be on this? It just seems like 1922 we should form it tonight. 1923 1924 Chair Reckdahl: Stacey, are you interested? 1925 1926 Commissioner Ashlund: No. 1927 1928 Chair Reckdahl: We have three interested and three on it. We'll keep the status quo then. 1929 Do you guys have anything else to add for the Master Plan? 1930 1931 Mr. de Geus: I have nothing more to add. 1932 1933 6. Other Ad Hoc Committee and Liaison Updates. 1934 1935 Chair Reckdahl: Do we have any ad hoc updates? 1936 1937 Commissioner Hetterly: Daren's going to do an update on the dog park situation. 1938 1939 Daren Anderson: Thank you so much. I'll give you a real quick update on where the ad 1940 hoc committee's at working on the shared-use dog park concept. This'll be a brief update. 1941 In October I'll bring a staff report. We'll discuss this more fully and get the 1942 Commission's feedback on how we best meet the City's dog park needs. A quick recap 1943 on what the Commission has done on dog parks. In 2010, the Commission had a policy 1944 that said we should be looking for dog recreation areas every time we do a park 1945 renovation. That has not resulted, as we all know, in any knew dog parks. We said we 1946 should take a holistic look rather than a piecemeal approach. As every renovation 1947 arrives, let's look holistically. Along came the Parks Master Plan which does exactly that 1948 and it will do that. It's looking at our entire park system and giving advice on where we 1949 best should locate these dog parks. However, the ad hoc said in the interim would it 1950 make sense to do a six-month pilot study to look at a shared-use concept. Shared use 1951 being some place where we've got a partially fenced off or a fenced off area—typically it 1952 ends up being athletic fields—where it's already partially fenced and large where dogs 1953 can exercise. This issue was discussed with the Commission on September 23rd, 2014. 1954 The Commission advised the ad hoc should move forward looking at a proposal 1955 including outreach to neighbors, user groups and the strategy for evaluating how this 1956 criteria might work and metrics of success. The ad hoc committee met with a small 1957 group of stakeholders from the newly organized Palo Alto dog owners group representing 1958 300 dog owners in Palo Alto, and met separately with the athletic field users or some 1959 stakeholders from them to figure out their interests and concerns. The athletic user group 1960 explained that they're concerned that the off-leash activity, should it take place in an area 1961 where teams are practicing and competing, would pose a threat to the safety of kids 1962 playing soccer and baseball. Primarily dogs digging holes, kids turning ankles or balls 1963 Approved Minutes 47 APPROVED taking bad hops out of those holes and injuring players. They were also slightly 1964 concerned about gradual deterioration of playing conditions should there be dogs 1965 exercising and playing on soccer fields or baseball fields and perhaps there being dog 1966 feces that might not be picked up. The representatives from the dog owners group 1967 explained, not surprisingly, that there's a shortage of dog parks in Palo Alto and that we 1968 need more desperately and that ideally they would have spaces for small dogs as well as 1969 large areas where big dogs could really open up and run. Staff hosted a community 1970 meeting on July 30th, 2015 to collect feedback on this concept of shared dog parks. We 1971 brought locations after the ad hoc committee and staff had analyzed what places would 1972 lend themselves to having sensible shared use facilities. There were really three that 1973 jumped out. That's Greer, Hoover and Baylands Athletic Center. There were hours that 1974 also we proposed as Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. It was a well 1975 attended public meeting; approximately 75 people attended. The vast majority of 1976 participants were dog owners advocating for additional parks. A small number of the 1977 participants were neighbors to one of the three parks, saying that they were very 1978 concerned that we would have more off-leash activity. The primary concern is 1979 confrontations between their children and off-leash dogs and an increase in unpicked-up 1980 dog feces. There were also a small group of people mentioning their concerns that the 1981 off-leash activity would have a negative impact where the sports teams practice and 1982 compete. In general, the dog owners were not satisfied with the proposed hours and 1983 locations. Several people had pointed out that if we went with what we were proposing, 1984 that would be 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., we would be excluding a large majority of park 1985 users or dog walkers that aren't available at that time; they're either working or busy. To 1986 be fair, it really had to have a.m. and p.m. hours. We also heard that you really need dog 1987 parks all over. The idea that we'd have one pilot really seemed to draw a lot of frustration 1988 from folks. Because the need is so great, one little spot is just insufficient, and we needed 1989 to find spaces in a number of areas to make it successful. One participant also pointed 1990 out the City of Mountain View had recently added several dog off-leash areas and 1991 suggested we look into that. After the community meeting, the ad hoc committee and 1992 staff did some additional research. We started by verifying the amount of use we have at 1993 those three sites we talked about, Greer, Hoover and Baylands Athletic Center. By use, I 1994 mean scheduled recreation activities, soccer, baseball, etc. We met with our recreation 1995 staff and found out where the conflicts would be, specifically looking at the a.m./p.m. 1996 thing. It would be a conflict at Greer and Baylands Athletic Center, where we have 1997 evening athletics taking place. That would be a challenge. Hoover would also be if it 1998 was inside the baseball field, but there's also turf at Hoover outside that baseball field that 1999 seemed to be the area where we'd have the least conflicts with the user groups. We 2000 researched how the City of Mountain View has experimented with their shared-use dog 2001 parks. The City of Mountain View started a pilot program in June 2014 and made it 2002 permanent in May 2015. I spoke with one of the staff that managed that and got it off the 2003 ground and did some of the public outreach. He explained that the success of the 2004 program really depends on who you're talking to. His experience was that if you ask the 2005 Approved Minutes 48 APPROVED dog owners, they're loving it. It's going extremely well. Many other residents aren't so 2006 happy with the program. Only one of their nine sites is on an athletic field, that is a 2007 shared use with an athletic field. The other eight are unfenced, passive recreation areas, 2008 passive turf. One of the sites is fenced off; that's the Shoreline Park dog park. The other 2009 ones that they added in 2014 are all unfenced, so dogs could meander in and out of the 2010 area without any fence to contain them. Lack of fencing has caused some issues for 2011 them. They said that the dog owners frequently stray outside the confines of the off-leash 2012 area or end up treating the entire park as an off-leash site. There were a number of 2013 complaints during the pilot program. The major ones focused around the people not 2014 observing the hours or days, dog owners coming on days where they weren't supposed to 2015 be there off-leash. The other concerns were from parents whose dogs had approached 2016 their children. Mountain View hired a security firm, CLM, to do security at two of the 2017 parks. They also have a partnership with Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority to 2018 help with the enforcement of these rules. The staff also pointed out that their Park and 2019 Recreation Commission did not recommend doing any pilot off-leash shared-use sites. 2020 Instead, they had recommended a permanent dog park, but their City Council had said 2021 that they would like to go ahead and proceed with the pilot for one year, and they did so. 2022 When they came back and had done analysis on their one-year pilot, shared it with their 2023 Parks and Recreation Commission, the Commission said, "We need to do more. We need 2024 more enforcement, and we need to analyze this for an additional year." Their City 2025 Council did not agree and said, "We're going to go ahead and make it permanent right 2026 now." They did so in May of 2015. That's the initial outreach we've got from or learning 2027 lessons from the City of Mountain View. Our ad hoc committee working on this, 2028 because of some of the challenges we learned from that public outreach, the desire to say 2029 a.m. is not going to be enough. You really have to have more. One site's not enough; 2030 you need to have more than that. The ad hoc committee and staff started to investigate 2031 opportunities for permanent dog parks that could be implemented soon without 2032 necessarily spending too much money and not having to wait for the Parks Master Plan to 2033 be completed. We sat together, talked through some different options that staff had been 2034 thinking about as had our Commissioners on the ad hoc. We came up with three sites 2035 that we think are going to be viable options. That is, they'll be fairly low cost to put up 2036 the necessary fencing to secure it. We can't think of too many obstacles in them. It 2037 would not have to necessarily wait for the Parks Master Plan to be completed. These are 2038 still preliminary; there still has to be some additional ideas fleshed out. I'll give you just 2039 an example. One of them is Mitchell Park dog run. It's about .5 acres, but there's a 2040 significant amount of passive turf adjacent to that area that, with a minimal amount of 2041 fencing, could almost double the size of that dog run. We could have a fairly large dog 2042 run where large dogs could kind of open up and get a real run in. Another idea was at El 2043 Camino Park. We'd originally looked at a dog park being on the north side of El Camino 2044 that was closest to San Francisquito Creek. We found out that because of creek setbacks 2045 that was not a viable option. However, there is undeveloped portions of El Camino Park 2046 on the south side. This is closest to Red Cross. It's undeveloped; there's nothing on it 2047 Approved Minutes 49 APPROVED except for some underground utilities that pertain to our Utilities Department. We 2048 thought that might be a viable option. We looked into what kind of size approximately 2049 we could have if we fenced off this. It's about .77 acres which would be our biggest 2050 existing dog park. You could get a fairly sizeable dog park out of that. There are a 2051 couple of nuances that we still need to flesh through. That is, Stanford may have an issue 2052 with this. There's some conversation about perhaps a pathway going through there. 2053 Right now I'm working with the Planning Department to look into that and see if this is a 2054 viable option. One last site similar to this one and that we've got a few hoops we need to 2055 go through, but the Colorado substation. This is adjacent to Greer Park on the Colorado 2056 side. It's a utility site, and there's a large landscaped area. It's just under an acre in size 2057 actually, passive turf, not used for anything but aesthetics. We had thought at one point 2058 could we fence that off and could it be a dog park. We're having preliminary discussions 2059 with Utilities right now to see if they'd be amenable to that. It could be another viable 2060 option for something we could implement sooner rather than later. There's no other uses 2061 for that site identified or planned right now. That's where we're at right now with the ad 2062 hoc. I'll defer to Commissioner Hetterly and Knopper if they have anything else to add to 2063 that. Again, we look to come back next month with a staff report with some of this more 2064 fleshed out. Thank you. 2065 2066 Commissioner Hetterly: I don't have anything to add. That was a very detailed report. 2067 I'd just reiterate it's not a discussion item tonight; it's just an update. You got a detailed 2068 preview of what will be in the staff report for full discussion next month. 2069 2070 Chair Reckdahl: Okay, thank you. 2071 2072 Commissioner Crommie: I mean, I have a comment on some of the material you said. 2073 Because it is not on the agenda, I guess I have to withhold it which sort of begs the 2074 question of why we got that beautiful report when we can't respond to it. I think we do 2075 have to keep with our goal of noticing ad hoc presentations on our agenda. It would be 2076 lovely to get to respond to that presentation. 2077 2078 V. COMMENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 2079 2080 Chair Reckdahl: Comments and announcements? 2081 2082 Commissioner Crommie: Before we left ad hocs, I didn't get to say we do have a Lucy 2083 B. Evans Ad Hoc Committee. We have not really been able to do anything on it, because 2084 we've been waiting for a presentation from Mr. Aiken. Our last meeting was with him, 2085 and then the next step was for him to come and do a presentation which we haven't had 2086 yet. I do want to point out there's a very important community outreach meeting taking 2087 place on the Lucy B. Evans Interpretive Center. Can staff remind us? Commissioner 2088 Ashlund and I think it might conflict ... 2089 Approved Minutes 50 APPROVED 2090 Commissioner Ashlund: We think it's this Thursday, October 1st. 2091 2092 Commissioner Crommie: Yeah. It might conflict with the stakeholders meeting. 2093 2094 Rob de Geus: It's tomorrow, the 30th, 6:00 at the Lucy Evans Center. 2095 2096 Commissioner Ashlund: It is tomorrow. 2097 2098 Commissioner Crommie: I just want to make sure I get that in my notes. It's 2099 Wednesday, the 30th at 6:00 p.m. I wouldn't ... 2100 2101 Commissioner Ashlund: It's at the Interpretive Center. 2102 2103 Mr. de Geus: Yes. 2104 2105 Commissioner Crommie: I will get to go. Commissioner Ashlund won't be in town, but 2106 if anyone else from the Commission wants to go, I think that would be really great to 2107 have someone else there. 2108 2109 Mr. de Geus: I had two announcements I was going to mention. That one that 2110 Commissioner Crommie just mentioned. We did have a Commission recognition, 2111 Commission and Boards recognition event on September 12th. Those that couldn't 2112 attend, I've got a little gift and it's in the box right here. You can pick that up as you 2113 leave. It was a nice event at Mitchell Park. There's also an interesting event happening 2114 out of our Office of Human Services. We'll be doing a little more work across the 2115 department. Their Commission is doing a variety of things, doing a veterans summit this 2116 Friday which you may have seen or heard about. It's Friday afternoon. I think there still 2117 may be some seats available if you're interested in doing that. The Commission's 2118 focusing on a couple of things. One of the things is ending veteran homelessness. It's a 2119 big issue around the country, and it's an issue here in Palo Alto too. It's estimated that 2120 there are 40 homeless veterans in Palo Alto actually. Proportionately our county has 2121 more veteran homeless folks than around the country. There's some people coming from 2122 the White House actually that work on this topic; they're going to be speaking on Friday 2123 afternoon. It starts at 1:00. I just thought you should be aware of that. I can send you a 2124 link so you can get a little more information. If you are interested, I can make sure you 2125 can get into that event. Peter. 2126 2127 Peter Jensen: Aurora, the sculpture in front of City Hall, is being replaced with a new 2128 sculpture. If you didn't notice on the way in, we're dismantling it. The new sculpture 2129 will be installed October 8th. It's called Rondo. Right now it's on display at Cal 2130 Berkeley. Associated with that, the planting that's going to go back into the circular 2131 Approved Minutes 51 APPROVED planter out there on October 17th, which is a Saturday, there will be a volunteer planting 2132 day. I will be leading that. I will also be discussing some of the things you heard about 2133 trees today. Trees and water, plants that are adequate with those trees. We'll be doing 2134 planting and I'll be doing a demonstration of installing a drip irrigation system. That's 2135 happening on October 17th. October 24th, there's a volunteer tree planting day that I'm 2136 working on with Canopy and the Barron Park Homeowners Association along the Bol 2137 Park pathway next to the veterans construction site there. That will be on October 24th. 2138 That's a Saturday as well from 8:00 'til noon. We'll be planting 60 trees on that day. If 2139 you'd like to attend either one of those, please feel free. 2140 2141 Chair Reckdahl: I had a question about El Camino Park. When is it scheduled to open? 2142 2143 Daren Anderson: We're scheduled for November. It's looking like mid-November. We 2144 just got the sod in today, so it's going to be establishing. Got a few last amenities like 2145 trash cans and recycling totes coming in. I should have a firmed up date coming soon. 2146 We'll probably do a grand opening. I'll be sure to send it to you guys right away. 2147 2148 Chair Reckdahl: Bowden Park, what's the status on that? 2149 2150 Mr. Anderson: I'll have to get back to you on that. I don't have a date for that. 2151 2152 Chair Reckdahl: Monroe Park, is that (crosstalk) Council. 2153 2154 Mr. Anderson: Monroe Park, we're going out to bid right now. 2155 2156 Chair Reckdahl: What? 2157 2158 Mr. Anderson: We are going out to bid. The contract has gone to Council, so we're 2159 waiting for approval. 2160 2161 Chair Reckdahl: Magical Bridge, how's the durability? Has there been any problems 2162 with the new ... 2163 2164 Mr. de Geus: That's been a big challenge for us. A good challenge in some ways, 2165 because it's such a successful playground. It's very, very popular. With popularity comes 2166 additional challenges of trash, of bathroom maintenance and equipment, just wear and 2167 tear. The need to invest more time and resources to support that new asset we're 2168 discovering is very much needed. We don't have all of those resources, so we're working 2169 hard on that, Daren and his staff in particular, and working with the Friends group who 2170 are still contributing a lot. They're there and helping. It's something that we're going to 2171 be asking for in the budget probably to support some additional maintenance costs for 2172 that new playground. 2173 Approved Minutes 52 APPROVED 2174 Chair Reckdahl: Last thing. I went out to Byxbee. I hadn't been out there for a month or 2175 so. A lot of stuff going on. They've gone through and almost the whole park now is 2176 being redone including the part over by the poles. That whole park that has been open for 2177 years, now they're putting new soil on it. Was it early 2016, we're going to open the 2178 whole thing or is it mid-2016? 2179 2180 Mr. Anderson: I believe they're wrapping up the prep right now. What they did was 2181 bring it back into compliance. It had settled near the pole fields. It was significantly, 2182 almost 5 feet depressed from where it needs to be per the regulations to manage the 2183 landfill. They brought that back up, and they've hydroseeded and put down straw wattles 2184 to prep it for the storm that'll be coming hopefully November-December. 2185 2186 Chair Reckdahl: They've hydroseeded? 2187 2188 Mr. Anderson: Mm-hmm. Significant portions. It's coming along very nicely. 2189 2190 Chair Reckdahl: I noticed they put like burlap on that slope right by the parking lot. 2191 2192 Mr. Anderson: Yeah. That'll help a lot with that erosion. Brand new soil brought in like 2193 that will not hold well when the storms hit. Those are the measures, hydroseeding and 2194 put down that. 2195 2196 Commissioner Lauing: Let me piggy-back on that. It was just in time for the eclipse. I 2197 went up there for the eclipse. There were hundreds of citizens in the dark by the poles. It 2198 was awesome. You couldn't get a parking spot in the no parking areas. It was just 2199 absolutely terrific to see at night time all these people using our parks. Yeah, good job. 2200 There was no moon, but everybody had fun in the park. 2201 2202 Chair Reckdahl: That's it. Go ahead. 2203 2204 Mr. de Geus: I just had one more. I wanted to do a shout out to Commissioner Lauing 2205 for his support of our interview process for the new Assistant Director. We're down that 2206 very important key position in the department plus two superintendants which has been 2207 challenging with all the stuff going on. Commissioner Lauing made himself available for 2208 two days, two afternoons, one full day and then an afternoon which was today, to 2209 interview seven or eight candidates. We appreciate that very much. We have a couple of 2210 good candidates that we're looking at and hope to make a decision soon. 2211 2212 Approved Minutes 53 APPROVED VI. TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR OCTOBER 27, 2015 MEETING 2213 2214 Chair Reckdahl: Did we want to consider moving it up a week to give us an extra week 2215 between the meeting and the Council meeting? 2216 2217 Rob de Geus: We could do that. That might be helpful. I don't know how ... 2218 2219 Chair Reckdahl: What do people think about it? October 20th versus October 27th. 2220 2221 Mr. de Geus: Actually I have to be at another committee meeting on the 20th. The 2222 Finance Committee meeting, I will be at. 2223 2224 Commissioner Crommie: I'm out of town on the 20th as well. 2225 2226 Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Let's keep it the 27th then. What's on the list? 2227 2228 Mr. de Geus: I think we have a dog park report. 2229 2230 Commissioner Crommie: Yeah, I vote for dog park to come back. 2231 2232 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, the staff report. 2233 2234 Chair Reckdahl: The agendized staff report. 2235 2236 Mr. de Geus: Obviously the Parks Master Plan will be on there. 2237 2238 Commissioner Hetterly: We'll probably have a website (inaudible). 2239 2240 Mr. de Geus: A website update. 2241 2242 Chair Reckdahl: We had mentioned last month about possibly having the Junior 2243 Museum. Is that in the cards or do you think that's going to be a slower rolling ... 2244 2245 Mr. de Geus: I'll have to check with the team on that to see if they're ready to come back. 2246 2247 Commissioner Crommie: It might not hurt to come back to Byxbee Park since so much 2248 is going on. It'd be nice to just get a report periodically. 2249 2250 Mr. de Geus: Byxbee Park, okay. 2251 2252 Commissioner Crommie: If we don't have other, more pressing matters. 2253 2254 Approved Minutes 54 APPROVED Commissioner Ashlund: The bulk of that agenda is going to be on the Master Plan, 2255 planning for the meeting with Council. Is that correct? 2256 2257 Chair Reckdahl: The meeting on Council is going to be just a few days later, so we'll 2258 basically say what we think will be on it. We won't be able to do major changes. We 2259 may be able to polish it up here and there. We have to submit it ahead of time, ten days 2260 ahead. Don't we? 2261 2262 Mr. de Geus: Yeah. The packet for the Council for the 2nd will already have gone out, 2263 and it'll be public. You'll all see that. Of course, (crosstalk). 2264 2265 Chair Reckdahl: We won't be able to change it, but we ... 2266 2267 Commissioner Hetterly: How early would we have to meet if we were to have a special 2268 meeting to discuss that and still get it (inaudible)? 2269 2270 Chair Reckdahl: Two weeks. 2271 2272 Mr. de Geus: Within the next couple of weeks. We'll get something on the calendar right 2273 away. 2274 2275 Chair Reckdahl: The last time we mentioned something about an auditor fee study. 2276 What ... 2277 2278 Mr. de Geus: I don't have anything to report on that just yet. The auditor is doing a fee 2279 study on ... 2280 2281 Chair Reckdahl: When is that going to be done? 2282 2283 Mr. de Geus: They usually take about three months to do their audit, and they're 2284 probably six weeks in. I can check to see if there's anything to report. 2285 2286 Chair Reckdahl: Do you have ... 2287 2288 Mr. de Geus: November, we might want to talk about the November meeting. I think it 2289 lands the week of Thanksgiving. We'll probably want to move it out or up. 2290 2291 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, we should not have it Thanksgiving week. 2292 2293 Mr. de Geus: Everybody's calendars get filled up so quickly; it might be good to make a 2294 decision this evening. 2295 2296 Approved Minutes 55 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: Do we want to pencil it in a week early? 2297 2298 Catherine Bourquin: Why don't I just send an email out with some dates? Just so I can 2299 check and see if a room's available. 2300 2301 Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 2302 2303 Mr. de Geus: That works. 2304 2305 Chair Reckdahl: The other option is leap frog the other way and just have an early 2306 December meeting and not having anything late December. Just split the difference. The 2307 Master Plan may be driving us if the Council wants certain stuff done. 2308 2309 VII. ADJOURNMENT 2310 2311 Meeting adjourned on motion by Commissioner Hetterly and second by Commissioner 2312 Ashlund at 10:00p.m. Passed 6-0. 2313 Approved Minutes 56