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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-12-08 Parks & Recreation Summary MinutesAPPROVED 1 2 3 4 MINUTES 5 PARKS & RECREATION COMMISSION 6 SPECIAL MEETING 7 December 8, 2015 8 CITY HALL 9 250 Hamilton Avenue 10 Palo Alto, California 11 12 Commissioners Present: Jim Cowie, Anne Cribbs, Jennifer Hetterly, Abbie Knopper, Ed 13 Lauing, David Moss, Keith Reckdahl 14 Commissioners Absent: 15 Others Present: Eric Filseth 16 Staff Present: Daren Anderson, Catherine Bourquin, Rob de Geus, Peter Jensen 17 I. ROLL CALL CONDUCTED BY: Catherine Bourquin 18 19 II. AGENDA CHANGES, REQUESTS, and DELETIONS: 20 21 Chair Reckdahl: Does anyone have any changes? 22 23 Daren Anderson: I just had one comment on the agenda. It had been my intent to bring a 24 discussion item under Capital Improvement Projects, and I missed the window. I 25 apologize. While I'll have a brief presentation this evening, the discussion will have to 26 wait until the January meeting. I'll return at that time, and we can ask our questions and 27 have a thoughtful discussion on the topic. 28 29 Chair Reckdahl: There's no way to make it a discussion item at this point? 30 31 Rob de Geus: I think we can discuss it but just more limited. It is an ad hoc committee, 32 and it's an ad hoc committee update. We would have preferred to have it listed 33 specifically on the agenda. The ad hoc committee has met, and we've had some 34 discussion. Unfortunately, it wasn't posted that way. We just want to be sensitive to that. 35 Some limited discussion, a broader discussion in January which is fine with the timeline, 36 we believe. 37 38 Approved Minutes 1 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: I don't think there's going to be any deep conversations about it. If 39 people have questions, we want them to be able to ask questions. 40 41 III. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS: 42 43 Chair Reckdahl: I have no speaker cards, so we'll move on. 44 45 IV. BUSINESS: 46 47 1. Welcome New Commissioners. 48 49 Chair Reckdahl: The first piece of business is Welcome New Commissioners. Did you 50 want to say something? 51 52 Rob de Geus: I'll say something. I'll introduce myself first of all. I'm Rob de Geus; I'm 53 the director of Community Services. We have three commissions within Community 54 Services. The Parks and Rec Commission is one of them. We have the Public Art 55 Commission, and we have the Human Relations Commission. I have a favorite; no, I 56 don't really. I've been with the Parks and Rec Commission for a long time and appreciate 57 what the Commission does and how they support staff in design of parks and policies 58 around parks and recreation. It's extremely helpful to the staff. Welcome aboard and 59 congratulations. I'll also have these guys introduce themselves, because you'll see them a 60 lot. They're at almost every meeting. This is Peter Jensen right here. 61 62 Peter Jensen: Peter Jensen, Landscape Architect for the City of Palo Alto. I actually 63 work in a different department than Daren and Rob do; I'm in Public Works, mostly 64 focusing on Capital Improvement Projects of renovation of parkland and City landscape 65 space. You will see me a lot. Along with them, I don't really consider myself the lead of 66 the project because the project is so big, for the Parks Master Plan. That is probably the 67 most important project that the PRC is working on this year as far as its vast size and 68 what it has entailed in it. Nice to have you on the Commission. 69 70 Daren Anderson: Good evening. Daren Anderson, I'm with Open Space, Parks and Golf 71 which is with Community Services. I'm fortunate to work closely with the Commission 72 on a lot of projects for many years, and looking forward to doing so with our new 73 Commissioners and this whole Commission going forward. 74 75 Catherine Bourquin: I'm Catherin Bourquin. If you need any assistance, please call me. 76 I'm sure you all have my email address and phone number. I've spoken to a few of you. 77 Nice to meet you guys. 78 79 Approved Minutes 2 APPROVED Mr. de Geus: Catherine helps us stay organized. She did prepare some binders for the 80 three new Commissioners. It includes some information about protocols and roles of the 81 Commission, the Brown Act around that, how agendas get set up, those types of things. 82 There's a variety of things in there for you. It's a big binder, so you can add things to it. 83 It's going to take a little bit of time to get up to speed on some of the projects, particularly 84 the Parks Master Plan which is not just a Parks Master Plan but it's Parks, Natural Open 85 Space, Trails and Recreation Facilities Master Plan. It hasn't been done in decades; it's a 86 very, very big endeavor. Staff and the Commission has been working on this for well 87 over a year. There's a lot of information to go over. I invite the three new 88 Commissioners to come and meet with myself and some of the staff maybe before the 89 holidays if that works, if not soon after, so we can just talk for some time about some of 90 the big projects that we've been working on, particularly the Parks Master Plan, and help 91 you get caught up. We can also do a tour of facilities or other things if you're interested 92 in doing that. 93 94 Chair Reckdahl: When Abbie and I started, you brought us around and showed us the 95 facilities. That was very nice. It helped me get an idea of what we're worried about. 96 There will be a lot of stuff; just ask questions. We can answer them now or answer them 97 later. We will be having a retreat in February usually. There we'll go through all the 98 items, and that will give you a nice overview. Between now and then, you'll be 99 frantically swimming to keep up. February, you'll have a much better idea of what's 100 going on. 101 102 Mr. de Geus: Chair Reckdahl, it might be nice to hear from the three new 103 Commissioners and how they did in their interview and why they chose to join the 104 Commission. 105 106 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Moss, do you want to start? 107 108 Commissioner Moss: Sure. I've been a volunteer on a number of different activities, Boy 109 Scouts and AYSO and other activities, Gunn High School Sports Boosters and Gunn 110 Foundation Scholarship. I've always had a little bit of that in my activities, but I have 111 been here for 40 years doing program or business analyst. Also, our family has always 112 enjoyed the open spaces. We go practically every week to one of those three open 113 spaces. We really have a vested interested. 114 115 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Cribbs. 116 117 Commissioner Cribbs: I'm Anne Cribbs, and I am a longtime resident of Palo Alto. My 118 children all went to Palo Alto schools. I worked for the Recreation Department in the 119 mid-'80s and went on to work in Palo Alto. I head up the Bay Area Sports Organizing 120 Committee which seeks to bring national and international sporting events to the San 121 Approved Minutes 3 APPROVED Francisco Bay Area. Since we're not having the Olympic Games here anytime soon now, 122 I am looking forward to working on the Park and Recreation Commission. I absolutely 123 love sports and believe in the value of sports for children and for adults and for senior 124 citizens, and love Palo Alto as well and think we live in an absolutely great, wonderful 125 place. I'm absolutely so happy to be here, especially when we're starting, at least I feel 126 like we're starting, on this Park Plan. Thank you. 127 128 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Cowie. 129 130 Commissioner Cowie: My name is Jim Cowie. I've lived in Palo Alto for 15 years. For 131 most of those years, I served as a basketball coach for my three daughters who are now 132 too old to have dad coaching them anymore. I feel like I have a lot of free time that I can 133 contribute to the community in other ways. I took on a role with the School District on 134 the Oversight Committee for the bonds a couple of years back and felt like I could do 135 more. Like the other new Commissioners, I'm passionate about open space and 136 recreation opportunities, sports for kids. I am a consistent user of the facilities that we 137 have here in Palo Alto and am excited about the opportunity to help the City do 138 everything it can to preserve what we've got and make what we've got even better. 139 140 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Speaking of binders, are they going to get copies of the 141 Parks Master Plan binders? 142 143 Mr. Jensen: Yes. We'll be working on that, and we'll have that for them at the next 144 meeting or perhaps sooner. Yes, they will. 145 146 Chair Reckdahl: Are there any updates for us? We haven't had any updates. My binder's 147 been sitting on the shelf for the last few meetings. 148 149 Mr. Jensen: Yes, there are updates to the binder now. I've started to collected those 150 together, and we will add those to the binders next time. There's some updated plans that 151 need to go in there as well as some of the sections that we have material for now that you 152 didn't have before. 153 154 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. 155 156 2. Approval of Draft Minutes from the October 27, 2015, Parks and Recreation 157 Commission Meeting. 158 159 Approval of the draft October 27, 2015 Minutes was moved by Commissioner Hetterly 160 and seconded by Commissioner Lauing. Passed 4-0, Cowie, Cribbs, Moss abstaining 161 162 Approved Minutes 4 APPROVED 3. Update on the Parks, Trails, Open Space and Recreation Facilities Master 163 Plan. 164 165 Chair Reckdahl: Peter Jensen, take it away. 166 167 Peter Jensen: Good evening, Commissioners. Peter Jensen, Landscape Architect for the 168 City of Palo Alto, here to continue our ongoing discussion of the Parks Master Plan. 169 Tonight we'll be discussing three specific areas, two at length, and then we'll review a 170 plan at the end that was updated. We'll be talking about firstly the evaluation process and 171 the ranking and the scoring of those things as far as our list goes of potential project and 172 program ideas. Then we'll be looking and introducing the list of project and program 173 ideas, which I'll go through in the second phase of this presentation and bring it up on 174 your monitors. We'll talk about how it can be filtered and reviewed in different ways. 175 The final thing, as I alluded to before, we'll be talking about a change to one of the plans 176 in our geographic study. We've added some information to that, most importantly in the 177 brown. If you want to look at it now, sitting in front of you is the City land that's owned 178 which includes parking lots and other things that weren't on the plan before. We'll get 179 into more detail of that as it goes along. First though, I do want to start out with the 180 evaluation process and the criteria and how it's ranked and scored. We're going to go 181 through this process. I have some examples to talk about. Then we'll talk about and have 182 a little discussion about this first thing after that. Then we'll move into the list and have a 183 discussion about that. Without further ado. Just to talk about the purpose of the plan, to 184 bring everyone up to speed and briefly give a description, since we do have some new 185 Commissioners here tonight. The Parks Master Plan, which also includes programming 186 and facilities, has put together the idea to guide decision-making for future development 187 of the parks, trails, open space and recreation system. We have a great park and 188 recreation system now. We want to make sure we have that in the future and, where we 189 can, enhance that, enhancing it in a way based on data collected in the first phase of this 190 project, so we make good decisions and choices when we do decide to use capital funds 191 to enhance or renovate our park and recreation system. This next slide represents the 192 process that we've been moving along to get to the final Parks Master Plan. We are at the 193 criteria and prioritization phase, which you see is getting down closer to the end. Of 194 course, the majority of the first phase of the project was doing site analysis and data 195 collection of our current system as well as a lot of community feedback and input, that 196 went along into this. Just recently over the last few months, we've been working on the 197 framework to develop this list of projects and the way it can be prioritized. The first step 198 of that was creating a list of master principles, which you see here. These principles 199 provide a vision of what Palo Alto would like to see in its park and recreation facilities, 200 programs and its parks. They are drawn from data and analysis and community output 201 from the first phase of the project. I did bring, for everyone who knows what it is and for 202 those of you who don't, the matrix of the opportunity summary that was put together and 203 that basically starts to break down all the data into a matrix that you can start to 204 Approved Minutes 5 APPROVED understand it a little better. You'll understand what I'm saying by this. If you don't have 205 a project binder, it is very thick and packed with a lot of information. This data matrix 206 was used to compile information as well as to relate back to where that information was 207 from when conclusions are being drawn. From that came the initial principles which was 208 worked on by the Parks and Recreation Commission for a few months to get them where 209 they are now. From our initial Study Session with the Council, actually our second one, 210 one has been added. I don't think we discussed this in the last meeting. Is the word 211 "nature" there? That was felt by the Council as well as members of the community that it 212 should stand alone as its own principle. Another thing developed over the last few 213 months was prioritization criteria. This criteria is what we're going to get in more depth 214 tonight, because this is the meat of how we're going to prioritize our list of projects. In 215 the package, if you've had a chance to look through it, you'll see that most of the pages 216 are this very extensive list of potential project and program ideas. We're at the stage now 217 of how do we rank or score and get a prioritized list of what we want to do here. It's 218 going to be done using these criteria. Again, these criteria were developed with the 219 Commission over the last few months and represent key areas of focus that we want to 220 consider while evaluating the potential projects. That brings us then to recommendations, 221 and that's kind of where we are tonight. We are introducing the list of these 222 recommendations. The final steps in developing the Master Plan involve refining, 223 prioritizing and documenting the recommendations generated throughout the process. A 224 list of potential project and program ideas have been developed for review. This review 225 will go on for the next meeting at least, because the list is so extensive. That is kind of 226 the second part of our topic tonight, the list itself. We want to introduce it tonight, talk 227 about it a little bit, and then give you the time between now and next meeting to have the 228 list and review it. At the next meeting, we'll talk about it more in-depth. This is 229 something else that we've been working on, refining over the last few months, the 230 potential project and program ideas and the steps of prioritization and how they're going 231 to be ranked and scored. This is more a flow diagram of how that will be. We are mostly 232 going to be talking about this center circle here and the filtering of the list and then the 233 prioritization of that. How do we do this? We have our list, and we have all these 234 projects that we want to put together. I'm going to go through a few examples tonight. 235 Each example represents a different, I guess, area of specificity. This one being one that 236 is about a park and renovation to a park. The second example deals with an issue that 237 we've dealt with a lot; that's having a dog park and where that should go and how that is 238 ranked. The third one is an actual one about programs. We'll look at a facility upgrade 239 with a park improvement and then a program improvement. This first one is a connection 240 to Adobe Creek from Mitchell Park. That example comes from the list of projects that 241 we have. What happens here in this sequence of how we got to this point and are going 242 to get through to the criteria to judge this is, first of all, our consultant MIG has put 243 together our list of recommended projects from the opportunities and community 244 feedback. That's where this example comes from. They've composed and compiled a list 245 of that. Staff has taken a look at it over the last month and been reviewing that with them 246 Approved Minutes 6 APPROVED to get you to the list that we have today. This represents one of those projects from the 247 list. How it got to the list is in the steps, looking at again the matrix and the community 248 feedback that we have received, then applying the principles to the project. The 249 principles give us an understanding of the overall areas of scope or vision that we would 250 like to see involved in all the projects. We would like for each project to fulfill as many 251 of the principles as possible. This initial review goes through, and you can see there's 252 checkmarks next to the ones that were felt were covered by this project. The principles 253 come back later in the project at the end when we actually have a real specific project. 254 We look at this list again and then start to talk about what are the principles that are 255 missing and how can those things be incorporated into the scope of the project to make 256 the project better and more enhanced. That's also based on feasibility. Not all those 257 things, of course, can be done just probably due to budget and costs. They do play a role 258 at the beginning and also, I think, a more important role at the end. The other that's done 259 for each of these projects is it draws again from our matrix. The project team or City 260 Staff will assess the idea based on available data. The opportunity summary describes 261 what the planning team knows about the site. The process uses the same measures the 262 PRC and project team used to develop the opportunity matrix. A sample of the project 263 information is shown in the next slide. For each one of these potential projects, they 264 looked at the areas of the matrix that we have, and it recognizes what's in that matrix for 265 each specific project. It goes through our upper heading which is in the dark green 266 section of this layout. Then it describes in each one how they fulfill that or how they're 267 associated with that specific column. This first sample I'm using because it gets to this 268 point. In Step 3a is where you look at the principle and you look at the data driven from 269 the matrix. At that point, a decision is made if there's enough information to have a real 270 project. In this specific project, where it's calling out to re-establish the natural bank of 271 the stream or a natural area next to the creek itself, that needs a feasibility study. The 272 project that will be first recommended will be to do a feasibility study to see how that can 273 be done. That won't happen to the majority of the projects, but a few of the projects will, 274 so I do want to bring that up as being a step that is considered in the process of this. For 275 our purposes here, the example, we go on to just rank the project. This is where really 276 the conversation tonight is about this. Using the criteria, we've set up a sample scoring 277 card that each project will go through. Each project will be scored in the whole list. 278 Currently our list is 386 projects. It's 143 ideas, but some of those ideas can be applied to 279 different parks, different facilities which gives you the 386 total. All 386 projects will go 280 through this criteria ranking. It's an evaluation set up with numbers in our case. In your 281 packet I put one through five as it being scored. Further discussion after that felt that the 282 zero should be applied to, because some of the projects may not hit one of our criteria. 283 Allowing that to be marked as a zero is something that should have been considered in 284 there. Further discuss too is the point system. That's what we can have further tonight, is 285 a zero through five point system adequate enough to evaluate the projects. There was 286 also some conversation that I had with MIG, the consultant, about using fraction of points 287 too, a half point, a quarter point, to give a varying degree of points. It could eliminate 288 Approved Minutes 7 APPROVED some of the logjam if you had a bunch that were scored the same. How would we then 289 decipher between those? We can get a more accurate description of that. We'll talk 290 about that a little bit more as we go along. This is the score card that will be used. The 291 consultant is going to go through the list initially and score it. Staff is then going to work 292 with them to review that list. The list will be brought back in the next few months as a 293 ranked, prioritized list that we'll have further discussion about. That's the idea that's 294 recommended right now. Again, we can have discussion on that too and how that is set 295 up. That's basically what we're shooting to do. For this project, you can see the total, if 296 you start, add up to the scores of those things. Again, zero being the lowest and five 297 being the highest. This project scores a 19. That is significant when we get to this end of 298 this, because that's how you start to prioritize this list, ranked upon their score. With the 299 maximum amount of five points, the maximum score a project can get is 25 points. 300 That's the process that we'll go through to rank each of these. This slide starts to talk 301 about the principles. What you have then is your project, going back and looking at what 302 principles were not checked off in the initial review and how we can incorporate those 303 principles into the scope of the project to make it a much better project. I would also say 304 too that for our Parks Master Plan, the scoring and evaluation of projects is going to be 305 more significant because we have a full list of all these projects that we want to have. 306 The same criteria, though, and the scoring is being proposed to be used in the future as 307 well. When new projects pop up, this would be the process that those new projects would 308 also go through to be ranked and scored and judged and set against the list that we're 309 going to generate now. This, I guess, process of evaluation is not just for the Master 310 Plan, but it's for continuous set up or structure of evaluating projects in the future that do 311 come up. The second example is having an off-leash dog park in the north section of the 312 City where we are lacking it now. Again, it goes through and reviews the principles set 313 up with that. I think we all agree that developing more dog parks or a better dog park is 314 definitely a project that's high on the list that we do hear a lot about. This is definitely 315 something that's going to be considered. Again, the consideration that runs through our 316 opportunities matrix would consider these for each of those headings and is the 317 background information for why the project was made a project. This one is then scored. 318 You can see that the question of do we have adequate information, which we didn't have 319 in the last project, we needed a feasibility study for the development of the creek side. 320 For this one we do have enough available information, so we move past that stuff and 321 then go into the judging of its criteria. In this case, the criteria totals to be 17 as the 322 score. Again, you'd go back through and look at the principles that were not checked off 323 and try to develop them into the actual scope of a specific project. Example Number 3 is 324 a program. This has to do with the Boost yoga program, expand the Boost drop-in 325 program beyond the indoor facilities in the system to include programs held on lawns in 326 Palo Alto parks. Yoga is a good program to start with this, but this idea could expand to 327 additional programming types. This is a way to move out of our limited facilities space 328 and have programming in the park that is for drop-ins. These are things that have, again, 329 been cited by the community as well as from the analysis of the data we have of our park 330 Approved Minutes 8 APPROVED and program system. It's run again through the Master Plan principles. You can see here 331 that health, walkability and balanced are the ones checked for this; there are a few that 332 aren't. Again, this is an example of how that information is tied back to the information 333 from our opportunities matrix and where the information and background information 334 came for making it a project. Going through its scoring system, this one gives us a score 335 of 21. This goes through, again, the principles and reassigning them to the project to 336 enhance the scope. We go through this whole list. We just ranked three as our examples. 337 From that, we get a grand total of points. From those points, you can see that the Boost 338 yoga in the park hits more criteria and ranks higher than the other two projects. What 339 that means is that on the compiled list of prioritized projects that we get, it'll be ranked 340 from the highest scoring to the lowest scoring. That will give us a good, solid foundation 341 of considering those projects. Of course, there will be a scrutinizing by staff as well as 342 the Parks and Rec Commission as well as Council, that will review the list and how it is 343 prioritized and what is on that list. This will establish our initial draft list to review and 344 provide backup data and information that, I think, supports how they are prioritized and 345 ranked. The use of the scoring. It provides an indication for which projects should 346 advance in the budget and capital planning process. The results can be filtered to 347 compare competing projects or program ideas that would utilize the same space and 348 resources. We can talk about how that is done with our bigger list. It provides a clear 349 and defensible ranking system. The process is designed to continue to be used for 350 evaluating new project or program ideas that come up in the future. These are the main, 351 core ideas of developing this evaluation process. For tonight's purposes, I know that you 352 just got the package last week, so your initial review of it. I do also want to continue this 353 discussion at our next meeting as well. This is definitely a very important process in this 354 whole thing. The things that I think staff and the consulting team is looking for as far as 355 information and guidance kind of go along with the next discussion points. Does the 356 point ranking system provide a clear and concise method of prioritizing projects? Does 357 the zero through five point scoring scale for each criteria work for ranking the proposed 358 projects and program? I also added in this one that this would include do we want to use 359 half or quarter points to help broaden the range of scoring. Are the criteria used for the 360 method enough for prioritization? Finally, if the Commission would like to form an ad 361 hoc committee that works with the staff and project team to help develop the list before it 362 comes back to continue the process of discussion of the prioritization, that's something 363 we'll consider tonight. 364 365 Chair Reckdahl: How is cost and value going to be worked in here? I see down in the 366 next circle we have some iteration that includes that. Even if it isn't perfect, but it has 367 very low cost and very high value, you think that that should make it percolate up earlier. 368 369 Mr. Jensen: That goes along into our potential list. That is going to be—it's not currently 370 now. That's something the consultant is working. There are additional, I guess, columns 371 in our list. One of them being budget or funding. Right now, from our discussion and we 372 Approved Minutes 9 APPROVED can talk about that here in a minute, they're going to do it as a dollar sign. We haven't set 373 what those limits of each dollar sign mean. If it has one dollar sign, meaning that it's less 374 funding to do. If it has two, three, four—I don't know what our range of that's going to 375 be, but we will be considering that as one of the items on the list. 376 377 Chair Reckdahl: That will still be in the prioritization circle? 378 379 Mr. Jensen: Yes. 380 381 Rob de Geus: I was just going to add that there's a lot to take in there. It looked 382 confusing. It's a work in progress. We have to, somewhat like a funnel, get to a 383 prioritization of projects and programs. There's going to be many more, as you see in the 384 list, than we're going to be able to do in a short period of time. How do we do that? This 385 is sort of the process that we're trying to create with you all about that process. I think 386 that's important to say, that it's still a work in progress. The examples that were listed up 387 here was sort of for illustration purposes; they weren't actual point system that we had 388 fully developed. In fact, a point system the way we've been talking about it would need 389 to be a group of stakeholders, the Commission, staff and others, that would all score 390 together to develop sort of an average on those five criteria. I wanted to certainly 391 mention that. The other point I wanted to make was about the dollar amount. This was 392 something that the Commission has discussed before and, I think, intentionally did not 393 want the dollar amount to be a deciding factor of whether a project should be a priority or 394 not a priority. We think it's important that it's on the list so we have an understanding of 395 sort of order of magnitude. Some of these thing are big, particularly expanding the 396 system where we might think about adding parkland, purchasing land. It was a conscious 397 decision not to have cost be a factor there. It's a reality check that we have to deal with 398 but not a factor in terms of prioritization. I wanted to mention that. 399 400 Mr. Jensen: When the list is prioritized, there is a sequencing step that does happen after 401 which does review. That's about the short-term, mid-term and long-term and how these 402 projects all fit into those different areas. Those will consider budget and the cost of the 403 project, will consider how it balances the system. It either balances a specific park so we 404 have passive and active areas or we have a dog park at the north—actually that's the third, 405 geographic distribution that's also considered in that, where you look at how our facilities 406 are broadcast throughout the City. We'd like to have a dog park in the north. Those three 407 things are considered when sequencing when these things will happen in which 408 timeframes. I will open it up for discussion on this topic now. 409 410 Chair Reckdahl: Before we start with the Commissioners, we have one public speaker. 411 Howard Hoffman. 412 413 Approved Minutes 10 APPROVED Howard Hoffman: Thank you. Welcome to the new Commissioners. I'm Howard 414 Hoffman, and I represent Palo Alto Dog Owners. We have more than 300 members. The 415 reason I've been coming to a lot of these meetings for a long time is that the City of Palo 416 Alto really is lacking in facilities for dog recreation. We have a dog leash law in Palo 417 Alto; you can get cited and fined for having your dog off leash. Interesting about the 418 yoga versus dog parks, how that just worked out in that example. There's all kinds of 419 commercial places to do yoga all over Palo Alto. I left my yoga class early this evening, 420 after only 30 minutes of the 75-minute class, to be here. I appreciate yoga. I started my 421 yoga in the City yoga program. You can do yoga anywhere, but you can't do recreation 422 in Palo Alto with your dog off leash except in fenced areas. I did take an early look at the 423 Master Plan and where it was going. It's a little hard to decipher at this point; I guess it's 424 still a work in progress. I just want to say that I'm thankful that there are some provisions 425 in there for some new places for dog recreation, but I'm not sure they are enough. The 426 walkable is one thing that our dog owners really like, having places they can walk. Right 427 now, they walk to their local park, and they walk to their local school, and they take a 428 chance of getting a ticket by doing off-leash recreation. We would like legal places so 429 people like me don't have to run from the dog catcher. It's really not a fair situation. In 430 your deliberations, we hope you'll take that into consideration. Thank you very much. 431 432 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you, Howard. I think the scoring up there was just an example. 433 I don't think that was meant to be final scoring. It was just an arbitrary example. We do 434 value dog parks, and we will do our best to bake them into the plan. 435 436 Mr. de Geus: I wanted to add something, if it's okay, Chair Reckdahl. Howard made me 437 think of it. As we've been thinking about how would we look at something like this when 438 it's all scored, in my view and I'm interested to hear what you think, to have all the 439 projects and programs together with a score and evaluate it that way probably isn't very 440 effective, in my view. I think that having it categorized by the elements, in other words 441 we look at all recreation programs and how well they scored, because I think we want to 442 invest in all of these things in one way or another, open space, trails, recreation programs. 443 There's not a lot of value in yoga classes against dog parks. That wouldn't be a good way 444 to look at it. That's one thing that I think would be important in terms of categorizing the 445 scoring in that way. I thought I'd mention that. Looking forward to hearing your 446 feedback. 447 448 Chair Reckdahl: We'll open up for Commissioner questions. Anything? 449 450 Commissioner Knopper: Thank you for saying that. That was the first note that I was 451 going to say, how we can subgroup the different categories, programming, nature, land, 452 facilities, buildings, etc. Very helpful. I thought that was a perfect example, the yoga 453 versus dogs. With regard to the money comment, when these projects are eventually 454 plotted out onto the immediate, five-year, ten-year, fifteen-year or hundred-year line, 455 Approved Minutes 11 APPROVED today's dollar is different than a project that would be ... It's almost impossible to affix a 456 physical dollar amount, because a project today might cost something very different 457 based on the circumstance of whatever is happening when it's being implemented seven 458 years from now. I wanted to say that in particular. I do agree with breaking the score 459 down a little bit. I know it might become a little more cumbersome than five through 460 zero. Where you can have the quarter point, half point, I think that would be very helpful 461 because of just the mass of all the information being discerned. Lastly, how you take all 462 of those points, I guess, is what I'm struggling with. You have a 19.6, how do you then 463 prioritize? There's got to be a subjective thing attached to each project too. For instance, 464 knowing how many people come to the Commission meetings or write letters with regard 465 to a certain subject. That might not have the same value point; it might look lower. In 466 the example, dog parks looked lower than yoga by a four-point margin, but there might 467 be more community interest for dog parks. Do you know what I mean? It just kind of 468 feels like the number can't be the only thing to represent the project. There's a lot of 469 subjectivity. Am I articulating? 470 471 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, I completely understand. It is going to be challenging. We have to 472 take in some insights from a number of different angles. The matrix over there is an 473 important part of that. For the new Commissioners, what it really represents is 11 or 12 474 different sources of information that we went out and sought from the community, focus 475 groups to surveys to intercepts and a variety of other things including staff input and 476 Commission input. That's going to be a very important part of testing projects and 477 programs. Is it something we really heard is a gap, for instance, from the community? 478 Those types of things. We'll have to provide our own sort of perspective as well as staff 479 that are close to this and are working on it all the time, communicating with the public 480 every day and hearing things. Commissioners too who are very close to this and thinking 481 about the park system and recreation. In some cases, as Peter mentioned, we may find 482 that we're short on information. We don't have enough information, and we have to go 483 back out or we have to do a targeted request about a specific project or program to see if 484 we got it right. It's going to be challenging. 485 486 Chair Reckdahl: Other questions? Commissioner Lauing. 487 488 Commissioner Lauing: Could you get back to the question list that you have for us 489 tonight? I appreciate the presentation which helped on top of the thick packet. I have a 490 number of questions. When we're talking about the prioritization criteria after the areas 491 of focus and the principles, we see how that all fits together. It strikes me that these 492 prioritization criteria might need to be weighted. As we look at what's going on here, 493 filling existing gaps, addressing community preferences and responding to growth, in the 494 ad hoc those were prioritized as more important than leveraging public resources, which 495 is almost an apple pie kind of thing, because we definitely want to do that in all cases. 496 Multiple benefits is a goal, but we also said we can't restrict it to that. It strikes me that 497 Approved Minutes 12 APPROVED slightly modifying your system, if you wanted to stay with this, then I would suggest that 498 maybe those first three get five and the last two only get two or one and zero. Zero to 499 five and then zero to one or zero to two, so that it's not overwhelming the vote in that 500 case. I'm not enamored with fractions. What these are trying to do is just get order of 501 magnitude valuations as we just said a couple of times here. I don't think that helps, to 502 get it down to the decimal points. I think we need to get that sorted out before we're 503 ready to look at all the different things that have to be decided in terms of the specific 504 projects. The other thing that concerns me about that is the whole thing seems to be a bit 505 tactical rather than big picture with respect to the timeline and with respect to what's most 506 important. You guys know that eventually it has to get very tactical when you're putting 507 in turf fields. I'm glad you raised the timeline issue which was really important to me. 508 This is a 25-year program. If at some point in the future we need three more swimming 509 pools, it's going to get scored a lot differently if we're going to do that in 15 years than if 510 we're going to get it in 2 years. The scoring has to be, I think, within a context of some 511 sort of timeline. We might want to be starting that eventually. I'm not saying we should 512 be here tonight, but eventually we should be coming up with sort of strategic direction 513 over the next 25 years of what do we need. If we feel that lacrosse is overtaking baseball, 514 that's even tactical. If indoor sports are starting to overtake outdoor sports, that ought to 515 be at the frontend of this analysis to give direction to Council about what this scoring 516 means. It's already been kind of referenced, so I'll just put a small point on that. 517 Programming stuff that is prioritized at any score, is very low cost and can be done by 518 staff is not a capital improvement project. If we're going to put up a gymnasium, that 519 might be really important, and whether it gets a lower score or a higher score, it has to do 520 with the longer term. I'm missing the timeline here, and I'm missing kind of a strategic 521 overlay of directionally where do we want to go beyond things that are maybe slightly 522 fuzzy like the principles, valuable but slightly fuzzy. Maybe at some point we have to 523 get, in certain areas, here's what the Commission thinks are sort of the top ten things in 524 parks or recreation or whatever when we get to the end of this. I do think that there is 525 some sort of quantitative value that has to go on this if we're going to benefit 5,000 526 swimmers versus three dog owners. I particularly use that crazy example. The former 527 might get a little bit more consideration because of the quantitative benefit. Those are 528 sort of my kind of big picture questions. I'm not sure exactly; maybe you guys can tell us 529 why you don't want to do the first prioritization rather than MIG. You know the City; 530 clearly they're going to be giving us input on best practices and trends. Some of the 531 things that are already in here, I'm not even sure actually why they're in here, because 532 they didn't poll very well, like food carts. There are a lot of those things in here. We 533 want to make very sure that we don't do things because we can do them. I'll go back to 534 one of our very important projects, the acreage in the Baylands. To the extent that we 535 can find other ways to just not do anything with that and leave that resource there for the 536 future, that would be good. If it looks like we want more fields and we can put them 537 there, we want to make sure that we're not just scoring more fields really high and we 538 jump right to the Baylands. Just as an example, again, of the judgment that has to go into 539 Approved Minutes 13 APPROVED the prioritization on the part of staff and others. Those are my kind of overall, general 540 comments. 541 542 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Hetterly. 543 544 Commissioner Hetterly: I agree with all those comments. I like the idea of (inaudible) 545 the rankings by element. Just to start with the principles. The addition of nature, I think 546 that it should have added to it, not just incorporating nature for the benefit of people, but 547 also respecting and enhancing ecosystems. I think that was one of the big pieces Council 548 was trying to get at in adding that. For the criteria, I absolutely think we should weight 549 the first three criteria more than the other criteria. We're serving the community, so if we 550 have identified gaps in our services and clear preferences, those should rank highly. 551 What was the third one? Response to growth. The same thing. I think that's a key part 552 of planning. For existing gaps, I think we have to define that a little more clearly. As it's 553 written here, it says gaps in areas of the City and user groups. I think gaps shouldn't 554 necessarily be limited by geography or demographics. It also has to include unmet needs 555 and preferences. I think there's some overlaps between the gaps and the community 556 preferences piece. For example, gyms is certainly a gap, but the location of it is not 557 really critically important for ranking purposes. It's not like we want to have a gym in 558 south Palo Alto and Midtown and north Palo Alto necessarily. The distribution isn't as 559 important. Community preference, I want to be sure that that reflects not just the 560 prioritization survey but all of the input that we've received from the public. I want to 561 know what the status is of the prioritization challenge and whether the number and nature 562 of ideas that are in here reflect that. When is that going to come back to us? 563 564 Chair Reckdahl: Do you know that answer, Peter? Are we still running it? Is it still 565 online? 566 567 Mr. Jensen: It's still online. We haven't promoted it in about a month, so nothing has 568 really happened to it. It was in the mid-300s the last time we had. We've been 569 transitioning and getting the Council brought up to speed, so we've just left it there. It is 570 hanging there. The end of January is when we will close that. At the first of January, we 571 will promote it again and spark some more interest to get more voting to happen. That 572 way it will help to feed the criteria of community input; it will also use all the analysis 573 from community input before in that section as well. 574 575 Chair Reckdahl: I think that a lot of people do have breaks over the holidays, and they 576 have more time. Promoting it before the holidays may be a good way of getting people 577 who have just been too busy to do it. 578 579 Commissioner Hetterly: Moving on to realizing multiple benefits, that criteria. As it's 580 written, it suggests that the multiple benefits we care about are overlap with other City 581 Approved Minutes 14 APPROVED efforts. I think really the primary multiple benefit we're looking for is multiple 582 community benefits. I think if you wanted, we could maybe add a criteria about overlap 583 with other City efforts, but I don't think they're the same. I think it's apples and oranges, 584 and they shouldn't be together. Do you want comments on the idea list? 585 586 Mr. Jensen: I will do those in a second. 587 588 Chair Reckdahl: Other Commissioners have any comments or questions? 589 590 Commissioner Cowie: I apologize if I cover areas that the Commission has already 591 covered in prior discussions. There are a couple of things that, in my first pass, were not 592 entirely intuitive to me. When we have separate criteria for address community 593 preferences and respond to growth, they both seem to me roughly equivalent to demand. 594 I'm not sure that we don't have a fair amount of redundancy when we score those as 595 separate categories. I'm a little confused by the leverage public resources piece, because I 596 assume the ultimate decision-making body will take into account the return on investment 597 of whatever the project is. That seems like a rough equivalent of ROI, just by the 598 definition. I guess on a related point to that, I understand we're not really intended to 599 factor in cost as a swing either way. It's not intuitive to me why that would be the case. 600 If that's already been debated and settled, fine. I just thought I'd raise that I didn't 601 understand why that would be. In terms of making a recommendation, it seems to me we 602 have to take into account the cost. I think this is related to what Commissioner Lauing 603 said earlier. It seems to me actionability or some rough equivalent of that, which is 604 related to the timeline, how quickly can you get something done, how painlessly can you 605 get something done, ought to be a factor. We ought to take into account, exactly as he 606 said, a longer-term strategy. If there are things that we can do that are not controversial, 607 even if the impact is relatively small, but we can do them quickly for no expense or 608 perhaps even to save money, why wouldn't we just do them? I'm a little concerned that if 609 we literally follow the score card as we have it now, a project like that might come out 610 with a score of 4, but it has no downside and it's free. I'd hate to see that fall to the 611 bottom of the list for years. I just wanted to reiterate the point about—I suppose this 612 factors into the ROI equation as well—I think we need to factor in how many people are 613 going to benefit from the project somewhere in the scoring. That was all I had. Thank 614 you. 615 616 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Moss. 617 618 Commissioner Moss: I agree with many of the comments. We've got like 50 years worth 619 of projects on this list. The timeframe is really a factor. What we prioritize today may 620 not be the same priority we give them in two years or five years from now. It's going to 621 be a moving list, I suspect. The prioritization we give today may change in the future. I 622 don't know how often you're going to come back and revise the priorities, but it's 623 Approved Minutes 15 APPROVED something to think about. Several people have mentioned the size of the stakeholders 624 groups. You have dozens and dozens of stakeholder groups. Dog owners is just one of 625 them. It would be nice to have an idea of how many people are affected. Also, this is the 626 first time I've seen this list of 370, and obviously I could see more added from my own 627 personal experience. How do we update this list over time and maybe push some new 628 things on and push some old things off? I don't know. I don't want to get into exactly 629 which ones I want to add, but it should be factored in that the list might change. I don't 630 know with the Brown Act how much influence my personal experience will have on this. 631 I guess the purpose of the scoring and the criteria is to minimize that as much as possible, 632 the personal views of us as individuals. It's something I'm curious about. When 633 somebody said that some things could be done for free right now, even if they're lower 634 priority, I think the search area of looking for new parkland, if somebody tomorrow 635 donated something or we could buy a piece of property tomorrow that just came on the 636 market, never been on the market, we might jump on it even though it's lower down on 637 the priority list. The last thing is that you're going to get this list of high priorities and 638 lower priorities and lowest priorities. There may be some juggling among the higher 639 priorities by us. I just want to know how that's going to happen, how that fits in. That's 640 it. 641 642 Chair Reckdahl: Peter, do you want to talk at all about changing prioritization? You 643 broke it up into three. We're going to talk about first just the prioritization. What was the 644 middle section that we're talking about? 645 646 Mr. Jensen: We're going to talk about the list. 647 648 Chair Reckdahl: The list is next? 649 650 Mr. Jensen: Yep. 651 652 Chair Reckdahl: What's the last? 653 654 Mr. Jensen: The last is just a review of this updated plan that we looked at last time, 655 which is not going to take very long. 656 657 Chair Reckdahl: Peter, do you want to answer David's question about your thought 658 process about how things are going to be juggled around? 659 660 Mr. Jensen: Prioritizing the list is definitely the first step in the process. There definitely 661 will be multiple chances as it comes before different commissions, definitely the Parks 662 and Rec Commission, to have the conversation and a discussion about that and how the 663 projects are evaluated and ranked. That's just going to be a discussion of the projects on 664 the list and getting down into the list and having a constructive discussion about it that 665 Approved Minutes 16 APPROVED gets us to the point where we all feel comfortable of how the ranking is. We'll take more 666 feedback; we will be requesting further feedback from MIG, our consultant, about that 667 and how they feel that that should be done. If there is other feedback from the 668 Commission of how they would like to structure that, then that's something that is open 669 for discussion as well. 670 671 Commissioner Hetterly: Can I just clarify? The rankings are intended to inform but not 672 determine the recommendations. The rankings, whatever that process is, will produce 673 lists and then there will be a follow-on process that imposes the kind of big picture 674 judgment. 675 676 Mr. Jensen: Right. 677 678 Mr. de Geus: The way I would see this working—it may be specific to David's 679 question—it won't be one ranking exercise and we're done. With one ranking exercise, 680 we'll have a certain picture, but it'll still be fuzzy. We'll take the highest level and have to 681 have another look at all of those. We look at the criteria and say how do we evaluate 682 these higher priorities against the filling of gaps and these other criteria. We might have 683 to go through two or three times before we really get to a recommendation. 684 685 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Cribbs. 686 687 Commissioner Cribbs: I think all my questions have been answered. I think there were 688 some very good comments among all of the Commissioners. A couple of things that are 689 of interest to me and a little bit of concern are the fact that we really want to understand 690 how many groups we're representing and are able to have input into the whole process. 691 Obviously, there's a lot of input and it's been going on for a long time. Secondly, the cost 692 piece. When we talked about the fact that cost wasn't factored into this, I'm really 693 interested in knowing what the cost is before we go very much further on. Not as a 694 limiting factor, but just understanding the opportunities that exist with the cost or if it's 695 something that we can get done for no cost and who our partners might be. Finally, I 696 love the idea of the top priorities and a timeline. I think that's really important for 697 everybody to feel like things are getting accomplished. 698 699 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. I have a couple of comments here. A lot of these are 700 similar to what other people said. I do think there's going to be a lot of apples and 701 oranges when we're comparing these. I do think Rob's point about dividing them up into 702 categories will improve the comparison. Sometimes you just can't compare two things 703 that are drastically different. By definition we want balance, so we want to take things 704 from all the categories. Even if we ranked them on a single category anyway, we 705 wouldn't necessarily just take the top. I'm a little overwhelmed by looking at this list. I 706 agree with David that there's a lot that you could add to it. When I look at it, there's a lot 707 Approved Minutes 17 APPROVED of things that could be missing. That's going to make it even more imposing. I'm a little 708 worried about being swamped with data and being able to sort through this. That's the 709 process. Another thing that is hard for comparison is, at least in my opinion, we 710 eventually will have to start expanding the system, if the population growth continues the 711 way it is. Putting money aside to fund future expansion does not compare well when you 712 start ranking it, because it doesn't do much for you. If I have only a certain amount of 713 money right now and I want to put some of that aside or build a new building or build a 714 new playground, that immediate effect is going to grade much higher than putting 715 something away for future expansion in 10, 15 years. I don't know how that's going to 716 come out. I suspect that if you ranked all these things, expansion would be at the bottom. 717 If you just blindly rank everything, that means that we're kind of painting ourselves 718 further into the corner than we are right now. We should take that into account as we are 719 scoring these things, that there may be some overriding things that the scoring doesn't 720 reflect. You did say that the scoring is not the end-all and be-all. Community input, I 721 think, is quite high; it should be ranked higher. Some of these people mentioned that they 722 should be weighted. If the community really wants something, then we should be 723 receptive to that if we think it's a good use of resources. Realizing multiple benefits 724 doesn't do a lot for me. If a project does multiple benefits, that to me doesn't mean 725 anything unless it does them well. If something serves this group and serves this group 726 but doesn't do a good job of serving either of those groups, it may not be the best. The 727 thing that's attractive about doing multiple things is you get better value. You build one 728 field and one season you can use for one sport and the next season you can use it for the 729 same sport, so for the same cost you get double the benefit. That's where multiple 730 benefits weigh highly. Just the fact that it has multiple benefits doesn't necessarily mean 731 that it should score highly. It really comes down to value again. If this realize multiple 732 benefits is—by value, I don't necessarily mean just money, I mean also land. In some 733 ways land is more scarce in Palo Alto than money. If we only have a certain area and we 734 can do a lot of things well with that area, that is high value. I still am torn about the way 735 we're prioritizing them and the fact that value comes in fairly late in the process. It's in 736 the process, so I think we can go as is. It still makes me a little nervous that we may end 737 up spending a lot of time looking at things that don't have high value. Eventually when 738 we get down to the second blue circle, in that iteration we may throw things out that 739 looked really fun but didn't have a lot of value. That's part of the prioritization. We're 740 going to do a lot of work regardless, and lot of it's going to get thrown out. I'm not 741 objecting to it; it makes me a little uncomfortable. That's all the comments I have, so let's 742 move on to the—did you want to respond, Rob? 743 744 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, because there were a lot of questions and comments. Maybe we can 745 talk a little bit about the questions. I don't know that I caught them all. I can try and talk 746 about the questions a little bit and try and respond to those. I'll just start with the last one 747 on the question of value. I wasn't quite sure what you were saying there, Chair Reckdahl. 748 The criteria is intended to be sort of the highest value of the programs, that fills a gap, 749 Approved Minutes 18 APPROVED that we know the community wants or is a high community preference. The values are 750 built into that, because that's what we heard from the community. Maybe I just 751 misunderstood what you were trying to say. 752 753 Chair Reckdahl: Realize multiple benefits, to me, in itself—you could have something 754 that would be mediocre and have lower scores in the first four, but it does do multiple 755 benefits and you get a five for that. All of a sudden, that's now in the contender where it 756 really should just be a lukewarm idea. If it doesn't do the things that it does well, I don't 757 see why you should be rewarded by doing a lot of things mediocre. 758 759 Mr. de Geus: That I completely understand. I like woodworking, and a tool that tries to 760 do three different things usually can't do any of them very well. I totally get that. We 761 could probably reword that. You're right. If it's multiple benefits, it needs to be really 762 multiple community benefits that are of high value. I think that's what I'm hearing. 763 764 Chair Reckdahl: When we iterate, I think that will come out. After we do one round of 765 this, we may find out that some of the things that percolate to the top are not what we 766 want percolating to the top, and we'll have to reassess the scoring. Probably the best way 767 to assess whether the scoring is accurate or not is do it and see whether we think the 768 things that are percolating to the top are what we want. 769 770 Mr. de Geus: That may be the best way we learn how this works. 771 772 Mr. Jensen: That's one of the reasons of having MIG take a first pass at it. It does allow 773 a little bit more expedited process, just because of the manpower that they can put behind 774 getting those numbers together than staff. Staff will definitely be involved in that process 775 of reviewing what they've come up with. I do think that it is a good idea to get them 776 ranked and then start to look at them. That will start to tell us some things about how it's 777 prioritized, how it's being evaluated, and if the rankings are coming out the way we think 778 that they should. 779 780 Mr. de Geus: I just wanted to follow up on a couple of other things. Commissioner 781 Cowie mentioned the difference between Criteria 1 and 2, fills existing gaps versus 782 addresses community preferences. I think we did see a distinction between the two, 783 particularly to staff who are very close to the park system, the trail system and even the 784 Commission. We may know of a need that is very specific, but that the community is 785 just not really aware of, because they're more passive users. It would be different than 786 what we heard in community surveys and focus groups, which is really the community 787 preference which came up a lot. That's the difference there. You had mentioned 788 actionability and if it's actionable quickly, should it get a higher score. That's kind of an 789 interesting one. We have to think about that, because it makes a lot of sense to do that, 790 but it has to score high though. Nothing's free, certainly it'll take staff time. Any time 791 Approved Minutes 19 APPROVED staff is working on something, they're not working on something else. If it scored low, it 792 doesn't cost anything but takes staff time, it still may not be worth doing. I think that's 793 important. Commissioner Moss asked about the personal experience versus public 794 benefit. That's a good question. Maybe other Commissioners want to weigh in here. It's 795 a really difficult question, because you were appointed to this Commission in part 796 because of your personal experience, I think, and your history here and your 797 understanding of the parks and recreation system. That has to play a role, and it should. 798 Ultimately, I think, you're trying to find out what is in the public's best interest as a 799 whole. You're applying your experience to that goal. If that helps. It's very difficult to 800 know what is in the public's best interest, as Council Member Filseth can certainly attest 801 to. It's going to be very challenging with 68,000 people in the community. That's the 802 goal. Commissioner Cribbs asked the question about—actually several people mentioned 803 it—how many people are impacted by the particular program or project and shouldn't that 804 be in the criteria. I believe that was the thinking around addresses community 805 preferences and fills existing gaps, at least in there. As we would go through ranking 806 these, that's one of the things that I would be thinking about, how many people are 807 impacted by this, is it filling a significant gap, are people not accessing a program or a 808 park or something. It's interesting having new eyes on this, because maybe that's not as 809 clear as I thought maybe it is. We can look at that again. That's, I think, a really 810 important point. How many people will benefit from investing in that sooner than later is 811 a really important part of the ranking system that should be built in. Do you have 812 anything to add? 813 814 Commissioner Hetterly: I'd like to just add a clarification to Commissioner Cowie. I 815 think that you asked about a redundancy between growth and preferences. Did I hear that 816 wrong? 817 818 Commissioner Cowie: Actually it was the second and third items that I thought were 819 overlapping somewhat. 820 821 Commissioner Hetterly: I think the way we saw it as this was taking shape was 822 preferences was what does the community currently want, what is our unmet need now. 823 Growth was looking at demographic changes and what we expect to happen in the future 824 that your neighbor might not expect to need in the future. 825 826 Commissioner Cowie: It's maybe current demand versus future demand. 827 828 Commissioner Hetterly: yeah. 829 830 Commissioner Cowie: I understand. Thank you. That's a helpful distinction. 831 832 Approved Minutes 20 APPROVED Commissioner Lauing: Can I just add one other clarification, maybe for the new people? 833 We talk about community input. We have to remember that these are impressions from a 834 few hundred people compared to the 68,000—is that what you just quoted that are in the 835 City? We need to keep reminding ourselves and eventually Council there have been no 836 scientific studies done in any of this gathering. It's good data, but it's essentially 837 subjective data based on those folks that have voted. We can't really apply that to 838 numbers of people that would benefit from X or Y or Z program, but they're valuable 839 indicators. We always have to keep reminding ourselves of that. We can't go to Council 840 and say the community has voted. And the press, the press needs to understand that as 841 well. 842 843 Council Member Filseth: I just want to comment on something that Keith said a little 844 while ago. Obviously something that requires a huge amount of resource or money is 845 going to be hard to do. I think if one of the answers that comes out of this effort is we 846 need X, Y, Z thing and it's going to cost $20 or $30 million, it's probably going to be a 847 while until we get it. If that is the answer, we need it, then I think this group shouldn't 848 shy away from that. If this group doesn't do that, then the rest of the City will never 849 know. I think it's important that if the answer is we need X, Y, Z facility in Search Area 850 C, then we need to know so we can start planning for it. 851 852 Commissioner Lauing: That's why we have to stay at kind of the strategic level as 853 opposed to scoring all these projects which could take a gazillion years and we just have 854 projects scored and we're still leaving out the big picture items. 855 856 Male: (inaudible) 857 858 Commissioner Lauing: We should do it and justify it and say the whys and the 859 wherefores of that. 860 861 Chair Reckdahl: Peter, do you want to go through the table? 862 863 Mr. Jensen: Yes. This next section of the presentation is discussing the list of potential 864 project and program ideas. It is long and, as we discussed and has been mentioned a few 865 times, definitely has the opportunity to grow. This is again a draft list looking at the 866 community input as well as the data found in the opportunities matrix. I'd like to go 867 through the actual digital list so we can look at how it is broken and filtered, and then I or 868 Catherine will email you the list in the next few days, and then you'll have the list to go 869 through over the next few weeks before the next meeting. 870 871 Mr. de Geus: We're not going through the list. I think we're going to orient to the list. 872 873 Approved Minutes 21 APPROVED Mr. Jensen: Right, we're not going to go through the list one-by-one right now. The list 874 is composed and broken into our 12 areas of focus. The list that you got in your package 875 was divided in two different ways. You got two lists that are all the same. One broken 876 down into site-specific and one broken down into the area of focus, so you could see how 877 they were grouped. The original list was just a list composed so there is no ranking of 878 how the list was put together. Projects or ideas that could be spanned through multiple 879 facilities or parks are all grouped together. If we recognize that we need community 880 gardens, then in a section there's three or four different site locations where community 881 gardens could go. The list then has these little pull-down tabs. You can see what's 882 happening over here is this is for each section and we're looking at—I wish I had a closer 883 monitor to see what section that is. Hang on one second. Let me pull this up here. The 884 areas of focus, you can go and check all the boxes of the areas of focus that you wanted 885 to look at. If you wanted to look at one—I cannot see this list up here. There is a way to 886 ... Whatever one that I did select up there, then it regroups it into that. You can start to 887 divide them in separate ways. Each one of these pull-down arrows works the same way 888 for each one of the columns. Each column, of course, has a group of items that you can 889 filter and divide the list to start looking. If you wanted to look at everything that was 890 planned for Rinconada Park, then you could go into the site one. All the parks and 891 facilities are in there, and you can check them out. The easiest way I found to do that is 892 to—right now, they're all selected to show you the full list—click the top box which is 893 blank, they all go blank, and then go through and start checking the ones you want or just 894 the one you want. It's the easiest way to navigate through there. This list has been pared 895 down a little bit. Column 4, the funding or budget needs of each project, is not included 896 in this because that has not been figured out yet. That will become a column in this to be 897 able to go through and filter the ones that cost the most to the ones that cost the least, so 898 we can look at it in that way. It also starts to look at elements themselves that were from 899 the matrix. We have the three main elements: the parks, trails, open space; facilities is 900 the second one; and programs as the third. You can start to group and look at all the 901 programs together at one time. I think we talked about this before in our examples, that 902 it's very difficult to try to weight or judge between yoga and a dog park. This allows you 903 to look at and rank the programs or rank the facility upgrades or enhancements and look 904 at it in that way. It definitely does help a lot to start to break down the list and look at it 905 in these different ways. Yes, when you start to look at the list of 360 ideas, which could 906 become more, it's not the easiest thing to try to decipher. Again, I think what we're 907 looking for is for the Commission to spend the next month looking at the list and coming 908 back to us in January and us talking more about the list, how it's made, what we think is 909 missing on the list, what needs to be added, what different ways that we can filter. 910 Maybe there's more rows or columns that we want to add. This is kind of the homework 911 that we're giving the Commission to do before the next meeting, so we can have a more 912 detailed conversation about this list and what has gone into it. 913 914 Approved Minutes 22 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: One thing that jumped out at me when I looked through is a lot of things 915 were just best practices. When you remodel a park, adding bottle fillers and making it 916 ADA compliant. There's signage, integrate nature, rainwater swales. Would we go in 917 and retrofit any park outside of its remodel period? I would think instead we would want 918 to lump all those characteristics into some guidelines for remodeling and say, "as we go 919 through the five-year process of remodeling parks, look at all these things." Adding 920 rainwater swales, do we really want to rank that against yoga or dog parks? To me, 921 they're apples and oranges again. The best practices kind of muddy this list and make it 922 hard to pull out what you really want to separate, what you want to rank. 923 924 Commissioner Lauing: You're not going to go back to Johnson Park which has all these 925 things and do them now if Johnson Park's not up for its normal cycle. Right? 926 927 Mr. Jensen: Right. 928 929 Commissioner Lauing: I'm not sure why they actually even should be on here, because 930 you know you're going to do those. 931 932 Mr. Jensen: We should decipher between the list that we're looking at here is things that 933 are new. There is also a list of things that exist in the parks now or facilities that we have 934 now that are in a schedule to be maintained or renovated, that don't show up on a new 935 list. Things that will continue to keep happening. Yes, if there are things on this list that 936 are prioritized high for, let's say, Johnson Park. It's up in five years from now to do a 937 renovation there, like we did Scott Park and Monroe Park that we're working on now. 938 We would look at including the new items off this list into that scope of work and 939 expanding it to include new as well as upkeep and maintenance items. 940 941 Commissioner Lauing: Why are these even listed as projects then? Why wouldn't that 942 just be considerations when the normal cycle comes up for Johnson Park? 943 944 Mr. Jensen: Because in our current list of those things that you're mentioning, the water 945 bottle fillers, retaining water on site, those are not in the parks currently, so they're not in 946 a list of a project, they're not in the scope of our projects. These would be new things to 947 consider doing that. 948 949 Commissioner Hetterly: They're here so that we can advise about whether or not we 950 want to recommend to Council that those get added to the regular list of things that get 951 considered when you do a (crosstalk). 952 953 Commissioner Lauing: When Johnson Park gets done. 954 955 Approved Minutes 23 APPROVED Daren Anderson: Another way of looking at it could be, you could consider having it be 956 a policy as opposed to a project or a program. The policy would apply, as you said, 957 broadly. The next time you renovate any park, do these five things, whatever they may 958 be. 959 960 Mr. Jensen: I would say too the policies is another list we're going to look at. Of course, 961 it's not going to be as extensive as this list because we aren't going to think up 300 962 policies. It is going to be a list that we'll generate, that we'll be looking at over the next 963 few meetings, that we'll discuss of which ones we do want to recommend as far as going 964 into the Master Plan. That is actually another step from this. It's interesting to note that 965 staff's initial review of the list, we did remove a few things on there that were just direct 966 policy. It didn't really specifically call out a project, but more of an overall policy that we 967 eliminated from the list because again we have to generate another list of actual policies 968 that we want to carry forward. 969 970 Mr. Anderson: I could tack on one thing to the list. This may be helpful as you review 971 them. As you look through all the projects and programs that MIG had pulled together, 972 we thought it would be helpful if you also saw the lists that live elsewhere, that is in our 973 existing capital budget. You'll see that called out as CIP project. These are existing ones. 974 You're not saying, "Where is this? It lives in a separate document. You're going to have 975 to look elsewhere." We added it all to this. The other one is called the—you'll see it 976 down there—IBRC, Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Committee project that may not be in the 977 existing CIP book, may not be in this document, and lives on a second one. This pulls 978 them altogether and gives you one shot to see did we capture everything, are we missing 979 things, or is this right one. 980 981 Commissioner Moss: You have a whole lot of Capital Improvement Projects. Many of 982 them are already in progress. What are you asking us to do about those? They're already 983 being done. 984 985 Mr. Anderson: I think part of it is to help you again see is there a hole. If you weren't 986 savvy to that or aware of what those CIPs are, it could lead you to believe, "Wait a 987 minute. When is this going to happen?" Part of it's to paint the full picture. The second 988 part is some of these CIPs are outlying years. They'll probably need to go through this 989 process. They'll probably need to be prioritized via the Master Plan. Almost to your 990 point when you said, "We create a master list. At some point, don't we renew that?" Just 991 like our CIP process, we do it every year. We plan out five years, but every year we look 992 at it again and everything gets shuffled up. I can't see a way that we wouldn't have to do 993 that with this Master Plan list too. There's a lot more discussion that has to happen 994 around that. I can't envision how you wouldn't continually update it when you've got 386 995 programs and projects. 996 997 Approved Minutes 24 APPROVED Mr. Jensen: What arises from this list as far as future or new projects go, if we do have a 998 CIP for a specific park and then on this list there's something new that can be considered 999 as well, then that is something that we would consider in the discussion next year with 1000 the CIPs. We have X park and from our Parks Master Plan now we see that there's a 1001 project or something new that we would like to add to that. Is it feasible as far as budget 1002 goes to add it now into that project thing? That will definitely be considered in the 1003 projects. Even though they may exist now, we have the opportunity to enhance or 1004 expand them depending upon what we find in this list or in the prioritization (inaudible). 1005 1006 Commissioner Hetterly: Do you want comments about the list? 1007 1008 Mr. Jensen: Yes. 1009 1010 Commissioner Hetterly: I think first of all the program descriptions need to be more fully 1011 articulated, and they need samples that you provided that were more specific, less vague 1012 and include more language about why that's on the list. Is the implication from your 1013 examples that you're going to have a similar workup for every single project on this list? 1014 None of the items in your examples are actually in here. Are we likely to see things like 1015 those? Should we expect to see what you presented on the screen today or is this really 1016 what we're working with in terms of rankings and explaining what the projects and 1017 programs are? That's my first question. 1018 1019 Mr. Jensen: MIG will go through and compile all the information that ranks the projects. 1020 There will not be an individual sheet made for every one that calls out each individual 1021 line of the matrix. We're relying on them to put that together and ranking them in that 1022 respect. 1023 1024 Commissioner Hetterly: I guess in terms of level of detail, let me use the yoga example. 1025 You do have some things in here about expanding Boost, but there are no specifics about 1026 what particular parts of Boost. Yoga is not the only program that's offered through 1027 Boost, right? Do you want us to be engaging in that level of detail of specific 1028 programming or are you wanting us not to do that? Whether we generally want to 1029 support expanding Boost or do we want specific areas of Boost, that level of detail would 1030 be helpful to have some guidance. Also, I think the locations that are designated for 1031 several of these didn't make any sense to me. I would like to see a little more explanation 1032 of why those sites were selected. For example, for dog parks you picked—I don't 1033 know—five or six locations there. What was it that led MIG to recommend those sites as 1034 opposed to other sites? I think that's information that we need to know because it may be 1035 that we think a different one should be on the list. There's several places that that comes 1036 up. All over this, I'm saying "why" next to the locations. As Commissioner Lauing 1037 mentioned, there are also several items in here that received very low rankings from the 1038 public when we surveyed them directly about that particular issue. I'm not sure whether 1039 Approved Minutes 25 APPROVED they belong on the list at all. It's not the comprehensive list of every idea that was 1040 proposed; it's already gone through a filtering process. It made me concerned that having 1041 gone through one filtering process already, there were several items that, in my opinion, 1042 should have fallen out based on what we have already learned. I'd like a little more 1043 working of the details in that regard. I guess I have several of those. I don't know if it's 1044 helpful for you to have me point them out. I could send them in an email. I don't want to 1045 take the whole night tonight to go through my particular edits. Also, I think there are 1046 several things that need to be added. 1047 1048 Mr. de Geus: Just feedback to Commissioner Hetterly. I had a similar reaction to 1049 reading it. There's a lot there. I think most of us did. It still needs quite a bit of work. I 1050 would actually describe this list as a rough draft. What we need to do is develop the list 1051 so that we can actually rank them. There's not enough information to fully rank. That is 1052 what we need from the Commission. It is work to go through it and ask the questions. 1053 Some of them are obvious, that we heard that through the outreach process. I get it. 1054 Those where you think "I didn't hear that. Where did that come from?" note it and then 1055 go to the next one. Go through that kind of process. Things like you need more 1056 specificity, you need to understand why that is on there. If there's things that you think 1057 ought to be on there and it's not listed anywhere, then add that so that can be evaluated. 1058 The idea is by the end of January hopefully we'll have a much better list. It might be 1059 smaller but much more specific, that can actually be gone through the process of the 1060 ranking that we talked about. By that time, hopefully our ranking process will have 1061 tightened and you're more comfortable with and we're more comfortable with. 1062 1063 Commissioner Hetterly: Would you like us to do that individually and send it in to you? 1064 Do you want us to cover them all in a Commission meeting? What's your preference? 1065 1066 Mr. de Geus: My preference is to take the time to do it individually, just because it's so 1067 long and it does require some real time just to sit with it. We can collect all of that data 1068 and then merge it all. Where there's conflict between feedback, we'll highlight that, point 1069 that out and then we'll have a discussion about those areas. 1070 1071 Mr. Jensen: I think for ease of collecting that data, I will add a row onto the end that will 1072 say "Commissioner remarks." In that you can type whatever you would like into those 1073 things. We'll collect them all, submit them to MIG and start to massage and rework the 1074 list per those comments. 1075 1076 Commissioner Hetterly: Do it electronically on the ... 1077 1078 Mr. Jensen: Yes, do it electronically on the thing. Type it and then email it either back to 1079 Catherine or myself. We'll collect the comments that way initially. 1080 1081 Approved Minutes 26 APPROVED Commissioner Lauing: I'm still not quite with the process here. What is it that you really 1082 want? You don't want us to go through all of these and score them, right? 1083 1084 Mr. de Geus: Not score them. 1085 1086 Commissioner Lauing: You want us to go through them and say which ones shouldn't be 1087 here or should be here? 1088 1089 Mr. Jensen: You have questions about, yes. Items on the list, if you feel that they 1090 shouldn't be there, weren't from information that we thought we'd heard in the past, you're 1091 not sure how they got onto the list, those are the questions that we're looking for. If 1092 there's things that don't appear on the list, those are the things that we're looking for. 1093 1094 Commissioner Lauing: When you get to a park, it just randomly opened to page 19 1095 which is Hoover and there's 13 things on there. You want comments on those 13 things 1096 or do you just want comments on Hoover Park is a good priority for now? 1097 1098 Mr. de Geus: They're all things that we've heard from the public through the variety of 1099 outreach that we've done. What we're looking for is for you to look through this list to 1100 make sure that it's understandable, that it reflects what you think we heard, if it's a 1101 specific enough project or program or is it more of a policy that was suggested. There's 1102 some things in here I think that were more like best practice, policy that ought to be 1103 withdrawn from a project list and be somewhere else. It's that kind of feedback we need. 1104 1105 Commissioner Lauing: Does that mean that you want to go from a rough draft to a draft 1106 before we get it or shall we use what we've got now? 1107 1108 Mr. de Geus: You should use what we've got now, this rough draft, so we can improve it. 1109 We're doing the same thing as the Commission. 1110 1111 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Cribbs. 1112 1113 Commissioner Cribbs: On an earlier screen there was something about other cities that 1114 you had contacted for best practices or ideas. Are you at liberty to talk about which cities 1115 those were? 1116 1117 Mr. Jensen: That is actually through the consultant, MIG. One of their areas of focus is 1118 Master Plans. There's not many landscape architectural firms that do just Master Plans. 1119 They are taking their experience from the Master Planning they do all over the United 1120 States, and they do a lot of them, and then applying it to our particular situation and 1121 changing it per what they've heard from us. They're looking at that information that 1122 they're gathering from other reports that they're doing and applying it to us. The list is 1123 Approved Minutes 27 APPROVED quite long. At some point they did present some samples of Master Plans that they had 1124 done for other cities for the Commission to review to get an idea of what that was. That's 1125 something that we can talk offline and start to give some examples of that. 1126 1127 Mr. de Geus: I would just add to that. They are in close contact with the National 1128 Recreation and Parks Association and the California Recreation and Parks Association. 1129 They collect a lot of data from cities, best practices. They're feeding a lot of information 1130 to MIG and to staff. 1131 1132 Commissioner Cribbs: I have another really silly question. That wasn't a silly question; 1133 this might be a silly question. Are you able to, just from your gut or from your instinct, 1134 create a top 20 or 30 list of programs or athletic fields or open space that you think would 1135 be great? 1136 1137 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, I think I can do that. I think Daren can and Peter can as well. We're 1138 talking with the consultant all the time about this as they bring things forward. We push 1139 back all the time and say, "That's not what we're hearing. That's not what the public 1140 wants here." 1141 1142 Commissioner Cribbs: I think that would be really interesting to be able to see that. 1143 Maybe I'm just the only one, but it just would be interesting to see how that would go 1144 against or be compared with this incredibly long, very specific list of things. 1145 1146 Mr. de Geus: I think it's an important piece of input, significant piece of input. We're 1147 probably the closest to the park system and the public to some extent. We fully 1148 appreciate and recognize that we are limited too in our perspective. We need to hear 1149 from a lot of sources, Commission, public, Council and staff as well. I appreciate that. 1150 1151 Mr. Jensen: I think the list goes a step further than just putting the list together, because 1152 it does discuss some overarching things, dog parks, community gardens, nature in parks, 1153 athletic fields. Those things that we've heard from the community. We have data 1154 analysis on it that we've done by looking at our current system, but not really attached or 1155 applied to a specific park yet. We have general ideas of things that we'd like to do, but 1156 this list starts to recognize the space that we actually can do it in, which I think is one step 1157 more accurate than just having the idea. 1158 1159 Chair Reckdahl: When I looked through list, I thought "There's a lot of chaff here." 1160 There's a lot of stuff that I've never heard of. Art for dog parks, I don't think any of the 1161 dog people are asking for art; I think they're asking for dog parks. I think a lot of this 1162 came from MIG, and they have some ideas that they think are good, but I don't 1163 necessarily think they're all good. Turf for fields, AYSO, I don't think they want artificial 1164 turf on their fields; I think they want grass. They listed a whole bunch of small fields that 1165 Approved Minutes 28 APPROVED are used for AYSO and add artificial turf. I don't think that's something that the public 1166 wants. As Jennifer mentioned, I'll compile a list of things that I just don't think should be 1167 on the list. You always can cast a net really wide and do a lot of work and sort out the 1168 stuff, or you can cast your net smaller. I think we should be casting our net smaller than 1169 we have here. That's an iteration. They also mentioned about camping. The camping in 1170 Foothills Park, I thought, was a decent program that they've suggested. They also said 1171 Arastradero. If I have a tent, can I go into Arastradero and nature? 1172 1173 Mr. Anderson: No, neither Baylands nor Arastradero have camping available. 1174 1175 Chair Reckdahl: Should we be taking that out? There was one line for Baylands and one 1176 for Arastradero. 1177 1178 Mr. Anderson: That was in my initial four pages of notes for MIG as well. Their counter 1179 was it's a very popular program to learn camping, was their idea. If we expand that to 1180 these other areas, it could be very valuable. Almost like a class as opposed to a regular 1181 camping set up. It'd be more of a one-time program or class. 1182 1183 Chair Reckdahl: It would be ranger led? 1184 1185 Mr. Anderson: Something like that. 1186 1187 Chair Reckdahl: If a ranger wanted to bring people into Arastradero, is that permitted? 1188 1189 Mr. Anderson: We'd have to change the rules. Right now there's no overnight camping 1190 allowed there. 1191 1192 Chair Reckdahl: Even by permit? 1193 1194 Mr. Anderson: Perhaps on a permit basis through the Director's approval, something like 1195 that would be permissible. 1196 1197 Chair Reckdahl: Baylands, I don't see any place you'd even want to camp in the 1198 Baylands. Maybe if Byxbee was done, then maybe that would have some flat areas 1199 where you could camp. Anyway, that was another thing that I looked at and I said, "That 1200 doesn't seem to agree with what I think is in the top 100." 1201 1202 Mr. de Geus: That's exactly the kind of feedback we need, so we can cull down this list. 1203 1204 Commissioner Knopper: To Keith's point and other Commissioners' points, some of the 1205 lack of detail. You just clarified it's a camp class versus real camping where you'd need 1206 real facilities and garbage and bathrooms. Just overall, the first couple of times I looked 1207 Approved Minutes 29 APPROVED at this list, I was like, "I don't understand what I'm looking at." It took me a few minutes 1208 to go, "I get it." From a formatting perspective, there just wasn't enough room to give 1209 enough detail to make an informed comment. Now I know that I'll just put my comment. 1210 1211 Chair Reckdahl: I mentioned this earlier. After thinking about it, I really think we 1212 should have a separate list for best practices or guidelines for remodeling. There we can 1213 do the same scoring and same prioritization and say where does swales compare to bird 1214 habitat or whatever, and do those on just a generic. Right now, they have all these that 1215 list the bird habitat and have all these parks. There's a half page right there. That's why 1216 this thing is so thick. I think we're making it harder than it has to be. I think we should 1217 break it apart and say guidelines for general remodeling and, if there's some special 1218 features that we want to attach to specific parks, have that in this list. We shouldn't have 1219 general bottle filling stations on this list. I think that's just too detailed. Those are my 1220 comments. 1221 1222 Commissioner Moss: I think it's important to have this master list. Maybe we can 1223 shorten it, but have all the original list somewhere safe so that we can refer back to it in 1224 the future. If somebody in the public says, "Where is my ... I recommended this; why 1225 isn't it on the list," we can point to it. 1226 1227 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, for reference. I don't think we want to go through and score 1228 everything that's on this list, because we'd spend a lot of time that most likely will be 1229 wasted. 1230 1231 Mr. de Geus: I complete agree. That's great feedback. Regarding the bird habitat, what 1232 we want to see is increasing sort of bird habitat, if that's the topic, at a specific park is 1233 recommended because that park has a unique set of qualities and characteristics that it's 1234 going to be of value there. If that's the reason, then it should be defined in that way, so 1235 that we can (inaudible) it. We gave that feedback to MIG as well. 1236 1237 Mr. Jensen: I think on some of those things, you didn't get a list of 1 through 386. At the 1238 end MIG started to pull from the Urban Forest Master Plan and the Comprehensive Plan. 1239 You'll see a big block of things that are related to policies or programs that want to be 1240 accomplished in the Urban Forest Master Plan that have a reflection on parks. They're in 1241 there as well. Some of those are a lot more specific, and they kind of stand out on the 1242 list. Just to give you an orientation of that in there. 1243 1244 Chair Reckdahl: Peter, do you want to walk through the maps? Is that the next step? 1245 1246 Mr. Jensen: Yes. MIG had produced this geographic map last time. It is virtually the 1247 same map that we looked at before. What the map is, the light blue sections that are in 1248 here represent areas of town that don't have an accessible outdoor, open space within a 1249 Approved Minutes 30 APPROVED half mile and a quarter mile depending upon driving and walking. These blue areas are 1250 lacking park space or open space. What has been added onto this is the brown sections, 1251 which include all property owned by the City. A lot of those are parking lot areas that 1252 weren't shown on the plan before. What we'd hoped to find is that in some of these blue 1253 areas there would be a distinctive area of brown that the City owns, so we could say that 1254 maybe we want to consider changing that parking lot into a park to meet our park 1255 requirements there. Unfortunately, as you can see, that doesn't happen, but that is added 1256 to it. What mostly this is looking at is if we were ever going to consider purchasing or 1257 someone donated land, these would be the main areas that we would concentrate on 1258 doing that. They're the areas lacking open park space for the community around them. 1259 As you can see, there is an interesting correlation between the areas that are lacking space 1260 and schools. It seems to be schools located in some of those areas that are lacking park 1261 space. How do we have dialog with the School District in the future to maybe help 1262 relieve some of that space? A lot of these schools are already being used as open park 1263 space, that we should recognize as being that way. If there is a part of town that doesn't 1264 even have a school located in it, maybe that has a higher priority of acquiring parkland to 1265 fulfill that need. That's this updated plan, which is now showing all the land owned by 1266 the City on it as well in brown. The green is of course parks. 1267 1268 Commissioner Hetterly: Peter, does the City have any substantial easements that would 1269 be worth considering for the same purpose? If so, it would be great to have them on the 1270 map as well. 1271 1272 Mr. Jensen: I will discuss that with them more. I'm not quite sure how that was 1273 highlighted on the plan. I don't think there was anything that was significant. You can 1274 see over by Seale Park there's the easement that we looked at before. I'm not quite sure it 1275 has a name. Daren, what is it called over there? It's by Greer Park. 1276 1277 Mr. Anderson: (inaudible). 1278 1279 Mr. Jensen: That shows the easement way on there. It would probably be good to update 1280 the map to show, maybe in a different color, what the easements are, so they're not just 1281 property owned lands. Most of them are just little straight lines that could be a trail. We 1282 can work on that. 1283 1284 Chair Reckdahl: There's also that utility, we talked about this before, at Colorado and 1285 West Bayshore that may not be easy to convert into parkland but is at least possible. I 1286 had one question for Daren. Esther Clark, are there restrictions? If we wanted to put a 1287 playground in Esther Park, can we or is that designated open space where you can't put 1288 structures on it? 1289 1290 Mr. Anderson: It is designated open space. 1291 Approved Minutes 31 APPROVED 1292 Chair Reckdahl: That was one of the things also in the list, doing stuff for Esther Park. 1293 It's similar to Arastradero, where you can't put buildings. 1294 1295 Mr. Anderson: I wouldn't quite go that far. I don't think it has the same stipulations as 1296 Arastradero necessarily, but the dedication does say to be used for open space purposes. 1297 It differs a little bit from urban parks. I think it's a good question, what exactly is 1298 appropriate there or not. I think it probably needs some more fleshing out. 1299 1300 Chair Reckdahl: That is one area that is not served by a traditional park. We have Esther 1301 Clark; that's a very nice open space. If you want your kids to play in a playground, 1302 there's nothing over there. 1303 1304 Commissioner Lauing: Peter, what's the brown on Rinconada? Is that parking lots or the 1305 zoo or both? 1306 1307 Mr. Jensen: The zoo and Lucie Stern on the left side of the page, and the Art Center and 1308 the library on the other side. 1309 1310 Commissioner Moss: Is the Stanford Industrial Park owned by Stanford and, therefore, 1311 we can't do things on it? That whole park to the south of Page Mill is all owned by 1312 Stanford, isn't it? All the way to Bol Park and including Gunn High School, which you 1313 have there. The light brown is not Palo Alto land or—what's the difference between the 1314 white and the brown? 1315 1316 Mr. Jensen: The browns are, I think, School District land. 1317 1318 Commissioner Moss: No, I meant the land that Stanford is lighter brown than the School 1319 District. I can see Gunn High School. Stanford land is a different color than the School 1320 District. I was thinking that area around the Stanford Industrial Park should be the same 1321 color as the rest of Stanford. 1322 1323 Commissioner Hetterly: I think the Stanford Research Park is owned by Palo Alto and 1324 leased by Stanford. 1325 1326 Commissioner Moss: I didn't realize that. 1327 1328 Chair Reckdahl: I think the difference is that Stanford owns the Industrial Park; they 1329 lease it out to the various companies for a long-year lease, but Stanford actually owns the 1330 land still. It's not incorporated. The Industrial Park is part of Palo Alto; it's in the City 1331 Limits. The top or whatever, the light tan that's Stanford, that is not part of Palo Alto. 1332 Approved Minutes 32 APPROVED That's not incorporated. I think that's the difference. I think it's correct as is. White is 1333 private property still. 1334 1335 Mr. Jensen: The white is representing those things that fall within the boundary of Palo 1336 Alto. Even though that land may be owned by Stanford, it's still in our City Limits. The 1337 tan color of Stanford is their sole priority of land outside of our City Limits. That's all I 1338 have for this evening. I do want to thank the Commission again. Your feedback is really 1339 valuable in this process and putting it together. As you can see from tonight, you've 1340 provided a lot of feedback that is good, that is going to guide this process and make it a 1341 lot better. We do thank you for that. We will be incorporating your comments into the 1342 list as we develop the criteria more and talk about it next month. With that, I'll end my 1343 presentation for the night. 1344 1345 Commissioner Lauing: One question that was asked, do we want to do an ad hoc 1346 committee. We actually have an ad hoc. Are there things on this that we want to talk 1347 about in ad hoc before the next meeting? For example, reviewing the scoring system 1348 based on comments tonight. 1349 1350 Mr. Jensen: The ad hoc is a—if you'd like to proceed with having an ad hoc, the ad hoc 1351 would be focused on the criteria and making sure the scoring and judging and more 1352 conversations about that. That ad hoc group can also include the review of the list as well 1353 or that could be another ad hoc or we just leave that to the full Commission and just come 1354 back again. Up to you and how you want to tackle that. For some things, of course, I 1355 think for the criteria and the list itself as well, it would be nice to have an ad hoc group so 1356 we can convene and get feedback from the Commission sooner than once a month, which 1357 would help move the project along. I also wouldn't mind having just a Parks Master Plan 1358 ad hoc that wasn't specifically tied to a certain topic, so we didn't have to keep having 1359 new ones over and over again. We'd just have a core group of the Commission working 1360 on the project until we're done with it. That's something for you to discuss further, of 1361 course. I don't know if Rob has any recommendations on that. 1362 1363 Mr. de Geus: I think we discussed that at the inception of the Master Plan. Because it's 1364 such a big and broad scope of a plan, the Commission wasn't comfortable with that. 1365 That's what I recall. Rather to have the whole Commission involved because also there's 1366 so many elements that need to be worked on, there was enough opportunity for numerous 1367 ad hoc committees to work on specific areas that needed additional work. It's just really 1368 up to the Commission how you want to handle that. 1369 1370 Commissioner Hetterly: I think we should clarify to the new Commissioners that ad hoc 1371 committees, they are not decision-making bodies. They're just trying to take the 1372 temperature of the Commission and weigh in as things are being sorted out. Everything 1373 that's considered in an ad hoc committee is then presented to the full Commission. 1374 Approved Minutes 33 APPROVED 1375 Mr. de Geus: We often do our best work that way. You have a smaller number of 1376 Commissioners working with Staff. Something like the criteria, where we can actually 1377 discuss different options about scoring, run a couple of programs through to see how it 1378 works, and then change language and then staff will write it up and bring it to the full 1379 Commission and say, "Here's what the ad hoc came up with, with staff. What do you 1380 think?" It just makes for a little more productive Commission meeting, but it does 1381 require another meeting outside of the regular monthly meeting. It can be very, very 1382 helpful, I find. 1383 1384 Chair Reckdahl: In general, I'd like to avoid it because this is a big thing. At this point, 1385 this list is so rough that I think it would be useful for an ad hoc to get one iteration just so 1386 we don't waste too many meetings on this. When I look at this and see how far it is from 1387 being useful, I think it would be August by the time we're done with this thing. I would 1388 be open to having an ad hoc iteration. If we're going to do that, we should do it before 1389 the next meeting. As this converges, I think we want the whole Commission to be taking 1390 a look at that. 1391 1392 Commissioner Lauing: Even before the list issue, this issue of should there be weighting, 1393 should we drop of some of these criteria entirely, should we add quantitative impact on 1394 people, that's something we might be able to distill everything that happened here and 1395 come back with a recommendation and why, and then have another discussion about it. 1396 1397 Chair Reckdahl: As long as we present it like that, I'd be happy with that. What do you 1398 think? 1399 1400 Mr. de Geus: Staff recommendation is actually an ad hoc committee on the process and 1401 criteria and scoring and how we would manage that given the information and 1402 presentation today. Not an ad hoc committee on the list. I can appreciate what you're 1403 saying. I had trouble with it too. When I first took a look at it, I had to go to it like three 1404 different times. What helped me was to actually set aside just a couple of hours and go 1405 through it. You begin to get a rhythm and go through and add your comments. You can 1406 do it in a couple of hours. I would appreciate hearing from all the Commissioners on the 1407 list. 1408 1409 Chair Reckdahl: I think all seven should be sending Peter our assessments. When we 1410 give those assessments to MIG and they come back ... 1411 1412 Mr. de Geus: I see what you mean. 1413 1414 Chair Reckdahl: ... I think we need another beat on the head with MIG before we have 1415 something that's going to be useful for another meeting. 1416 Approved Minutes 34 APPROVED 1417 Commissioner Hetterly: It may be worthwhile to wait and see what comes out if 1418 everybody submits their comments and then you have another draft. If we see that and 1419 find that it still needs substantial work, then we do an ad hoc at that point. 1420 1421 Chair Reckdahl: I'd be happy with that. 1422 1423 Mr. de Geus: That would be good. 1424 1425 Commissioner Moss: How do ad hoc committees work? How many is minimum in an 1426 ad hoc committee? 1427 1428 Commissioner Lauing: (crosstalk) one. Max is three. 1429 1430 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, we can't have a quorum. There's no decision-making being done. 1431 Once you have four people, that's part of the Brown Act. I'm sure that they have that in 1432 the binders. Once you have four, you can't talk shop unless it's a public meeting. You 1433 can have two or three people sit down with staff and go through things and give some 1434 feedback to staff, and that's not considered a public meeting. It doesn't require a public 1435 meeting. 1436 1437 Commissioner Hetterly: I'll move that we establish an ad hoc committee to work with 1438 staff on the process. 1439 1440 Commissioner Lauing: Don't we already have one that we've been working on this exact 1441 same process? It already exists. I don't think we have to ... 1442 1443 Female: (inaudible) 1444 1445 Commissioner Lauing: We can reconstitute it if we want to. 1446 1447 Mr. de Geus: I think that's why we brought it up. We know we have new 1448 Commissioners. We ought to do that. 1449 1450 Commissioner Knopper: Who was on it? I've lost track. 1451 1452 Chair Reckdahl: It was us three. We didn't lose anyone off of it. We could keep it 1453 unless we want to—personally I think it's most efficient to just keep the three of us and 1454 do an iteration if needed. 1455 1456 Mr. de Geus: That would be great. 1457 1458 Approved Minutes 35 APPROVED Chair Reckdahl: The new Commissioners are going to be ... 1459 1460 Mr. de Geus: They’re going to get their green binder, so they'll have enough to read. 1461 The binder is all of the data on the matrix and the background. There will be a lot there. 1462 1463 Commissioner Hetterly: I would be happy to give up my spot if any of the new members 1464 would like to participate on the ad hoc. Not because it's a horrible group to work with. 1465 1466 Commissioner Moss: I can do it, if you want. Up to you. If you want to do it, fine. I'm 1467 sort of a deer in the headlights right now. If you don't want to do it, I'll do it. 1468 1469 Chair Reckdahl: I think my preference would be to keep Jennifer on it for this next 1470 month while you come up to speed. We can reevaluate the assessment. Are you happy 1471 staying on it? 1472 1473 Commissioner Hetterly: That's fine. 1474 1475 Chair Reckdahl: I think Jen's history in it would help to be efficient with the iteration if 1476 needed. Peter will be sending via email the updated spreadsheet. We'll go through that 1477 spreadsheet. Either type your response via text or put them in the comments and mail it 1478 back. They will digest that and find out if they get indigestion or not. 1479 1480 Commissioner Moss: Are you going to send us a soft copy of the spreadsheet? 1481 1482 Mr. Jensen: Yeah. I'm going to email you a copy. Usually how I do that—this is 1483 another Brown Act thing—I do blind cc you all so you can't reply to all. Replying to all, 1484 you're not supposed to do. If that doesn't happen, if you do see a list, just note that you're 1485 not supposed to reply to all. 1486 1487 Chair Reckdahl: Reply to all is not a good thing to do. 1488 1489 Mr. de Geus: We'll have to put some type of deadline on that, fairly early, just so we can 1490 get it back to MIG so we can merge the list again so we're ready for our January meeting. 1491 1492 Chair Reckdahl: Mail it out and give your requested due date. 1493 1494 Mr. de Geus: We will. 1495 1496 Chair Reckdahl: Any closing questions, comments? 1497 1498 Commissioner Moss: What was that about January 11th? I thought this was every third 1499 Thursday. 1500 Approved Minutes 36 APPROVED 1501 Mr. Anderson: That's the Council meeting. 1502 1503 Chair Reckdahl: Are we going back to Council on the 11th? 1504 1505 Mr. de Geus: On January 11th we have a Study Session with the City Council on this 1506 plan. I hope you all have that on your calendar; it would be great to have Commission 1507 presence and participation at that meeting. 1508 1509 Chair Reckdahl: The updated memo, when is that due? 1510 1511 Mr. de Geus: I know it's due to our City Manager by next Wednesday. After all the 1512 internal reviews are done, we can get that out to the Commission. 1513 1514 Chair Reckdahl: Do you need any more Commission input to that? 1515 1516 Mr. Jensen: I don't believe so. 1517 1518 Mr. de Geus: I don't think so. We got a lot. We had tried to get a Study Session earlier, 1519 a month ago. We were right there with the report and MIG's report and the Commission's 1520 input at that time. It's just been on hold really for the new date. 1521 1522 4. Other Ad Hoc Committee and Liaison Updates. 1523 1524 Chair Reckdahl: The next item is the ad hoc. The first one would be the CIP. 1525 1526 Daren Anderson: Thank you so much. Again, I'm Daren Anderson with Open Space, 1527 Parks and Golf. I want to just share with you ... 1528 1529 Chair Reckdahl: Can you give a two-minute introduction of what a CIP is for the new 1530 Commissioners? 1531 1532 Mr. Anderson: I'd like to give you just an update about our capital budget. We call them 1533 CIPs, Capital Improvement Projects. Typically they're projects that cost $50,000 or 1534 more. They go into a five-year budget cycle. I'll get into some of the examples in just a 1535 minute that will help kind of give you context for what they look like, what we've 1536 recently accomplished. Then we'll get into a little bit more of what we're looking at 1537 going forward. I'd be glad to answer any questions that you have further regarding CIPs. 1538 Let me just start with what we have accomplished in 2015. El Camino Park, we had the 1539 ribbon cutting today. It was a great, great achievement, finally seeing the completion of 1540 that park and reopening it to the public. We actually reopened it on target. We shot for 1541 November; we hit November. November 20th was the soft opening. The public came in. 1542 Approved Minutes 37 APPROVED The second the temporary fencing came down, people just started seeping in, enjoying 1543 the park which made staff very happy to see that. Of course, the grand opening today. 1544 Scott Park, you can see from the photo another ribbon cutting. That was completed and 1545 the park reopened to the public on July 30th of the year. We have the new playground, 1546 the new picnic area, a basketball court and our City's first bocce ball court. It's up and 1547 running and doing really well. We also provided free bocce balls at that site, and they're 1548 well used. The Magical Bridge Playground was opened on April 18th, 2015. Hopkins 1549 Park was another Capital Improvement Project. This one was opened also in April 2015. 1550 This CIP is a little different. The previous ones you've seen were to reconstruct a park. 1551 Sometimes they're studies. In this particular example it's a feasibility study looking at the 1552 Boardwalk that stems off the Lucy Evans Baylands Interpretive Center. It's been closed 1553 for quite some time, because it was in structural poor repair. The feasibility study came 1554 back, gave us some information. One piece of the information was if you carry out these, 1555 I guess for lack of a better term, low-cost repairs, you can open up the first 200 feet. In 1556 the example in the photo, you can see the arrow indicates where our own staff and 1557 Rangers went underneath and fixed up what we could and were able to open up that. 1558 Great to have that CIP accomplished. This is another example of an accomplished CIP, 1559 but this is a different one. It's an ongoing CIP. This one is tennis court resurfacing. 1560 You'll see this one when you look at a capital budget book repeats year after year, same 1561 monetary value. That's because it's on a cycle of replacement or fixing. In this last fiscal 1562 year we redid Hopkins, Terman and Weisshaar. That's in a nutshell some of what we 1563 accomplished in 2015. We probably have five other ongoing CIPs. Some of them are for 1564 benches, signs and fences. Others for lakes and ponds. Though you don't see one project 1565 that you can say, "Look at this. We accomplished this." It's a lot of little pieces here and 1566 there. It's also a tremendous amount of staff time that goes into accomplishing those little 1567 pieces. Oftentimes they augment or supplement a project like El Camino Park. There 1568 was a tremendous amount of funding, but still there were shortfalls or things that were 1569 missed. One small example was $35,000 in trash receptacles and recycling containers. 1570 That came out of one of those recurring CIPs; that's where the benches, signs and fences 1571 come in. Another park project where we go over budget and there's not enough for a 1572 sign, and we lean on one of our ongoing CIPs that does signage. These are projects 1573 underway in 2015, not yet completed. Monroe Park is under construction right now. 1574 We're looking at early February for completing that. We've got the Byxbee Park Interim 1575 Plan. That was a CIP where the plan was completed, but the actual renovations have 1576 started but aren't completed yet. We've got about 90 percent of the trails constructed. 1577 The area is being hydroseeded right now. The next steps will be constructing the habitat 1578 islands, installing the seating areas and putting in the interpretive signage. Stanford-Palo 1579 Alto turf replacement is underway right now. We just got the contract signed, and we 1580 should be starting construction in a few weeks. It'll be a 45-day construction window for 1581 that project. That's replacing the synthetic turf fields at that site. That's what we've 1582 accomplished, and now we're looking at this next CIP cycle. We update it every year. I 1583 mentioned it's done in five years. This current cycle we're going to be working on is the 1584 Approved Minutes 38 APPROVED FY '17 to FY '21 cycle. Only the first year in that cycle is funded. This FY '17 that we're 1585 just kind of finalizing now will be the one that's funded. The rest are more of a plan that 1586 says, "In '18 through '21, where do we think we're going to accomplish? What does it 1587 look like? What does it cost?" We build that out. Each year, that kind of gets updated. 1588 Is that still right for 2018 or do we lack the capacity to implement it? Are there other 1589 priorities that supersede it? That's kind of how we re-envision that CIP plan every year. 1590 What I'd like to do is just walk you through some of the things that we've highlighted. 1591 The following list that you see on your screen, these are proposed projects not in the 1592 existing CIP; they're new. Most of them are coming from either the City's—I mentioned 1593 the IBRC, Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Committee. Most of these projects are coming 1594 from that or some other staff need that we've identified that hasn't been captured yet. It's 1595 a new CIP. I'll just briefly cover some of these. In FY '17, we've got a few. The 1596 Children's Theatre black box, this is a particular room also known as the Castle Theatre. 1597 It needs some repairs. It was never built up to Code; it lacks insulation. To make it work 1598 and function properly, it needs a Capital Improvement Project. The Magical Bridge 1599 replacement, I'm not referring to the playground but the actual bridge that leads across the 1600 creek to the playground is in need of replacement. The Cubberley tennis courts, they're 1601 probably one of our poorer conditioned tennis courts. The nice part about this project is 1602 it looks like we'll have funds outside of our general fund revenue. There's a special fund 1603 for Cubberley that will help fund this particular one. We're looking at a one-year increase 1604 to one of those existing, ongoing projects, the trails CIP. Up at Foothills Park there's a 1605 trail called Los Trancos that's got some substantial issues that need to be addressed 1606 fundamentally, not through some of our existing funding. It's a one-time bump that we're 1607 hoping can address that and fix it on a long-term basis. The Baylands Comprehensive 1608 Conservation Plan, this one is already in the plan. It's already in our existing budget for 1609 2017. A comprehensive conservation plan, as backdrop, is to look at the habitat, the 1610 wildlife, the vegetation and give a guide to staff that manages, in this case, the Baylands 1611 Preserve and say this is how you best take care of this. This is how you prioritize your 1612 volunteer efforts and your restoration and where you allow recreation. Just recently, in 1613 conversations with other groups and within our department, we thought we should be 1614 augmenting that with a few things. We can expand the funding and the scope just 1615 slightly to include a Baylands Interpretive Master Plan. While we're looking at all these 1616 other elements, it really lends itself to say, "We're looking at your wildlife. We're 1617 looking at your vegetation, your recreation." Now is the perfect time to say, "Is the 1618 interpretive messaging supporting that? Is it comprehensive? Is it thematic? Are they 1619 done piecemeal?" We believe if we just add a little bit of money we could get that done 1620 at the same time. Likewise, there's a public arts component. There's a lot of projects 1621 happening in and around the Baylands. Just one example is Ming's is going to be used by 1622 Mercedes, it will be taken over as a Mercedes dealership. They're obligated to have some 1623 piece of public art there. Rather than having it done piecemeal, that Ming's would do a 1624 little piece, the golf course would do a little piece, does it make more sense, as we're 1625 looking at the entire Baylands, to say let's have a Public Arts Master Plan tied into there 1626 Approved Minutes 39 APPROVED too, just for the Baylands. That's another CIP where we'd ask for some. We also are 1627 looking for an ongoing increase into that CIP trails project. Unlike the one-time bump 1628 that I mentioned for Los Trancos Trail, this would be an ongoing slight increase to 1629 increase the level of service. We've gotten some feedback that the trails and open space 1630 haven't been maintained to the standard that the City would like to see. To do so, we 1631 need a little extra money. What that would actually look like is the trail contractor that 1632 comes out and services those trails does it twice a year now. We'd get a third service out 1633 there, so it's be three brushing trail services with that increase. The same for the benches, 1634 signs and fences CIP, another kind of ongoing CIP that we'd like to bump up 1635 incrementally just a little to help address and keep up with demand. As I mentioned, it 1636 gets drawn on often. El Camino Park was a recent example where $35,000 was sucked 1637 off into one project. We'd like to fund an ongoing restroom CIP. This had been in place 1638 before, and it was defunded as we started the Master Plan process. Rather than choosing 1639 locations for restrooms somewhat arbitrarily, it made sense to defund it, wait until the 1640 Master Plan presented a bunch of options. Is it still a priority? In this preliminary phase 1641 where we're at with the Master Plan, we clearly see that park restrooms are a very high 1642 priority. It made sense to us to go ahead and refund that CIP. We have a couple of ideas 1643 for things, but really the Parks Master Plan could help fill that out. What had been done 1644 previously was there was $200,000, I believe, every year or every other year, and you 1645 could do a park restroom. Something like that is what we're going to be proposing for 1646 park restrooms. In FY '19, we're looking at a Foothills-Arastradero-Esther Clark 1647 Comprehensive Conservation Plan much like that Baylands one I mentioned. This would 1648 apply to the Foothills, Arastradero and Esther Clark collectively. We envision something 1649 like that is going to take about a year and a half. It is demanding. We specifically 1650 staggered the Baylands one so it wouldn't overlap with our efforts on this Park Master 1651 Plan, because it's so staff intensive. I'm sure each one of these, the Baylands and then 1652 this FY '19 Foothills-Arastradero-Esther Clark one, will be similar. Very heavy public 1653 outreach, very staff intensive project. FY '20 Foothills Interpretive Center displays, this 1654 would hopefully be something that we learn from that aforementioned in the prior year 1655 comprehensive conservation plan for that site, where it informs us and tells us what 1656 should the interpretive displays be at the Foothills Interpretive Center. This will be a 1657 follow-up CIP to fund that and implement it. In FY '21, we looked at Foothills Park 1658 irrigation. This is one where it's reached the end of its lifespan. It's slated out for 25 1659 years; it was 25 years ago from that date that it was previously installed. This CIP would 1660 fund its replacement. Likewise ... 1661 1662 Chair Reckdahl: This is irrigation for the meadow or is this elsewhere in the park? 1663 1664 Mr. Anderson: No. The only irrigated spots we've got in Foothills are the upper and 1665 lower turf. This is near the entrance and down in front of the Interpretive Center, about 1666 15 acres of turf. With that also the Sunfish Island Bridge replacement. This is the little 1667 island in Boronda. The bridge is antiquated and needs to be replaced. Also in FY '21, 1668 Approved Minutes 40 APPROVED Pearson-Arastradero, there was a myriad of items, the fences, the gates, the bridges, were 1669 all in this infrastructure backlog listed in 2021. We want to pull them together as one 1670 CIP. We'd also like to lump in a seasonal trail improvement element to that Capital 1671 Improvement Project. There are a number of trails that are closed every winter, and we 1672 believe with minimal upgrades, that is probably rocking and maybe a little reshaping, you 1673 wouldn't have to close them as often if at all, if we can do it right. That's some of the 1674 things we're looking at. This, is again, a draft; it's not complete. There will be more 1675 projects probably. At some point soon, we'll have to kind of filter them down. I didn't 1676 mention this yet, but it's also a very competitive year to be proposing projects. The City 1677 Council has a number of priorities such as the police building and fire stations that are 1678 going to consume a lot of the available funding. At the same time, we feel we've got 1679 some important projects that we'd like to move forward and see if we can get them done. 1680 The CIP schedule. November and December is typically when staff is pulling these ideas 1681 and consulting with our ad hoc committee from the Commission to vet them, make sure 1682 we're on track. We recently met with the ad hoc committee with our Commission to 1683 discuss these. In mid-December, our CIP submissions are due; we have to put them in. 1684 In January, they go through a review committee. The City review committee is 1685 predominantly department heads. They help filter down what can make it kind of 1686 realistically to the budget. In February, it goes to the City Manager. In early May, it 1687 goes to the Planning and Transportation Commission. The Planning and Transportation 1688 Commission's role is to make sure that the projects are consistent with the 1689 Comprehensive Plan. This is typically when we ask a representative or two from the 1690 Commission to attend and just kind of listen and observe. Lastly, in May it'll go to the 1691 Finance Committee, and in June it would be adopted by the Council. Again, I'll bring 1692 this back to the Commission in January as a discussion item, and we can get into some 1693 more details. That concludes my presentation. 1694 1695 Chair Reckdahl: Do people have questions either about the process or about the 1696 individual projects? Do you want to say anything, Ed? 1697 1698 Commissioner Lauing: No. Keith and I met with Daren and Rob to kick it off, a little bit 1699 later than last year, but we'll pick up the pace and get it done. For the new 1700 Commissioners, the year '17 starts July 1st of '16. 1701 1702 Chair Reckdahl: The Foothills fire plan, that is in the operating budget now? 1703 1704 Mr. Anderson: That's correct. A former CIP that's been moved to operating. 1705 1706 Chair Reckdahl: The bike bridge, do you have a date of when they're going to start 1707 construction? 1708 1709 Mr. Anderson: I don't. I can look into it and get back to you. 1710 Approved Minutes 41 APPROVED 1711 Chair Reckdahl: Do you know where we are in the process? 1712 1713 Mr. Anderson: I don't. It's not a Community Services managed project. 1714 1715 Commissioner Knopper: Can I ask a question on an update on a project? 1716 1717 Chair Reckdahl: Sure. 1718 1719 Commissioner Knopper: The hydrologic study at Buckeye Creek on the 7.7 acres, I 1720 haven't asked about it in a while. I was just wondering if you could give me some 1721 context, where we are. 1722 1723 Mr. Anderson: Great question. It's a high priority for our staff. We've been working 1724 closely with Public Works to finalize the scope. The more we started working with the 1725 scope, the more we saw we needed to bump it up and make it very robust. We're just 1726 finalizing that now. I hope within the next two weeks to have it out to bid. We're 1727 anxious to get going, to get a hydrologist firm on and start analyzing this, especially to be 1728 timed with El Nino so they can see the impacts of the rain on this creek and how it 1729 impacts both Foothills, our shop area and the 7.7 acres. 1730 1731 Commissioner Knopper: A quick follow-up. When they start, how long is their process? 1732 How long would it be before you would potentially have results. 1733 1734 Mr. Anderson: I think some of it will depend on the consultation with the hydrologist. 1735 Right in the beginning as we go out to bid and they submit their bids, we'll get to see how 1736 long they need. I'm not in a position to answer what length of time is enough. Do they 1737 need to physically see it, will testimony from prior creek studies be enough? We don't 1738 have one on Buckeye Creek proper in Foothills Park; we have studies of adjacent creeks 1739 in Arastradero. Is some of that usable? I'm not quite sure. We are hoping that in one 1740 calendar year it would be completely done, I'd be back to the Commission to discuss the 1741 findings and make a recommendation for Council. 1742 1743 Rob de Geus: I just wanted to add, if you're interested, the City Council is having a 1744 special meeting tomorrow evening, a second meeting this week. There is a Study Session 1745 on the infrastructure plan update on the IBRC report. As Daren mentioned, there is some 1746 really large commitments that have been made and important commitments. The police 1747 building is at the top of that list, the fire station, bicycle bridge, bike-pedestrian Master 1748 Plan, still Byxbee park and completing that project. There's a lot of demands on the 1749 capital budget. I think once we finish the Master Plan, we'll have a much better idea of 1750 what we want to include in future five-year plans. There is that staff report that's online. 1751 If you're interested, you can attend that meeting tomorrow evening. 1752 Approved Minutes 42 APPROVED 1753 Chair Reckdahl: Commissioner Moss. 1754 1755 Commissioner Moss: I heard that there was an urban forest meeting tomorrow. If I go to 1756 that, how much input—I guess I can't give any input. Is that correct? I can just listen. 1757 1758 Mr. de Geus: You can always give input as an individual citizen, as long as you make 1759 that clear, that it's not input from the body of the Commission. 1760 1761 Commissioner Moss: I've been interested in that all along. 1762 1763 Mr. de Geus: That's something that you would want to state, that this is an individual 1764 perspective that I'm sharing. You certainly are able to do that. 1765 1766 Chair Reckdahl: Other ad hocs. Do you want to talk dog parks at all? 1767 1768 Commissioner Hetterly: Yep. I think that was supposed to be on the agenda this month. 1769 I don't know why it got bumped. It'll move to next month I guess. 1770 1771 Chair Reckdahl: It got bumped to January. 1772 1773 Commissioner Hetterly: That's all I know. 1774 1775 Mr. Anderson: We're seeking City Manager advice and guidance on a couple of the ad 1776 hoc recommendations. We need that input before we can move forward. We'll have that 1777 by January, for sure. 1778 1779 Commissioner Hetterly: That'll be as an action item, right? 1780 1781 Mr. Anderson: That could be. I think I'd like to convene one more time with the ad hoc 1782 post-meeting with the City Manager and talk that through. 1783 1784 Chair Reckdahl: We're done with ad hocs. 1785 1786 V. COMMENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 1787 1788 Chair Reckdahl: Rob? 1789 1790 Rob de Geus: I have a few that I would like to share. We had a successful tree lighting 1791 event last Friday. I don't know if you had a chance to attend. It's the fifth time we did 1792 that at Lytton Plaza. The lights went on, very happy about that. That looks nice. This 1793 weekend on Saturday, we're having an event called Frozen, after the movie Frozen still 1794 Approved Minutes 43 APPROVED very popular, at Mitchell Park Community Center and Library, sort of celebrating the 1795 first year of being open at that center. The library staff and recreation staff and Children's 1796 Theatre have got a whole lot of programs planned for that day. I think 11:00 to 1:00 is 1797 when most of the activity happens there. If you're interested in that. We also have a New 1798 Year's Senior Brunch for seniors in our community. We've been running that event for 1799 many years now. It gets great attendance. We can always use volunteers and help with 1800 that. It's on the last day of the year. A countdown that happens at midday. I also wanted 1801 to mention tomorrow evening the infrastructure Study Session. There's also another item 1802 on the agenda, that is the discussion by Council on the natural environment—I think 1803 that's what it's called—element of the Comprehensive Plan. The Council will be 1804 reviewing the vision and goals of that particular element. That will then inform the 1805 Citizen Advisory Committee that's working on the update to the Comprehensive Plan. 1806 That might be of interest to the Commission as well. The last thing I wanted to mention 1807 is I've made some decisions on some hiring, which is really exciting. Thank you to 1808 Commissioner Lauing who spent a day with us in the interviews. We have a new 1809 Assistant Director; she started today. Her name's Kristen O'Kane. She comes from the 1810 Santa Clara Water District. Very bright and brings a depth of knowledge in 1811 environmental studies I think will be very helpful for our Master Planning process and 1812 some of our comprehensive conservation plans that we're invested in making happen. 1813 Look forward to introducing her to the Commission. She'll be the key liaison to the 1814 Commission going forward. We also hired a Superintendant of Recreation, which is a 1815 position that was removed from the budget for a number of years. The Council 1816 generously added it back last year, which we're very appreciative of. We've gone through 1817 that process and hired someone. Her name is Stephanie Douglas. She comes from 1818 Milpitas. A great individual, and I look forward to introducing her to you all as well. 1819 That's what I had. 1820 1821 Chair Reckdahl: They both sit over by you? 1822 1823 Mr. de Geus: I'm sorry? 1824 1825 Chair Reckdahl: Their offices are in Lucie Stern? 1826 1827 Mr. de Geus: Kristen O'Kane will be at the Lucie Stern Community Center. Stephanie 1828 Douglas will be at the Cubberley Community Center. There's so much going on at 1829 Cubberley right now and the future of Cubberley and the Master Planning of that site, 1830 we're going to have her stationed there initially. 1831 1832 Commissioner Lauing: You have one more opening still? 1833 1834 Mr. de Geus: There's another promotion that we made. A long time Ranger, Curt Dunn, 1835 28 years, has been promoted to Senior Supervising Ranger for Foothills Park. A terrific 1836 Approved Minutes 44 APPROVED individual. He did outstanding in the interview process. Daren's been mentoring him for 1837 some time. It's a thrill to see him step up in that way. He's now a new manager. We now 1838 have a vacant Ranger position that we need to fill. Was that what you were referring to? 1839 1840 Commissioner Lauing: I thought you had another supervisor? 1841 1842 Commissioner Hetterly: Superintendant. 1843 1844 Commissioner Lauing: Superintendant, excuse me. 1845 1846 Mr. de Geus: The Superintendant of Parks has been vacant for a year. We finally feel 1847 like we have a good pool of candidates for that. We'll be interviewing later this month, 1848 hopefully before the end of the calendar year, so we can make some movement on that. 1849 Daren would appreciate that. That reminds me there's a lot of recruiting and hiring 1850 happening. The Project Safety Net Director position is also in play right now. We've had 1851 first interviews. Second interviews are tomorrow. There's three applicants left. It's a 1852 long process, largely because there's so many stakeholders involved and need to be part 1853 of the process of hiring that person. Those interviews happen tomorrow. The final 1854 candidates will meet with Dr. Max McGee from the School District and City Manager 1855 Jim Keene. Hopefully we'll have a decision by the end of the calendar year also, if we 1856 can. 1857 1858 Chair Reckdahl: I have a couple of things to add. You mentioned the Baylands 1859 Boardwalk. A big king tide is coming Christmas. I think the 23rd, 24th, 25th are the big 1860 days for the king tide. The Boardwalk will be under water. If you want to see that, that 1861 would be ... It's always impressive. I think it's like 10:00 a.m. to noon roughly on those 1862 days. A question for Peter. The infant mortality of the items in Magical Bridge. How 1863 are they holding up? We have a lot of new items there that we haven't had in parks 1864 before. 1865 1866 Peter Jensen: Daren can answer some of this too, because he's been working on it as 1867 well. In general, I would say that the playground is actually holding up very, very well 1868 for the thousands of users that come to it every week. I think the weakness is that some 1869 of the synthetic turf isn't doing as good as we wanted it to. We are looking at different 1870 options of repairing or replacing that. Generally though, the equipment is all very good. 1871 I think the demand of keeping the area clean, just because of the amount of use, required 1872 more attention than was first given to it. In general, I think the playground is doing very, 1873 very well. It is holding up very, very well. It's good to see that happening. I will also 1874 add that this week the Magical Bridge Playground won a parks design award for its 1875 inclusive and cutting edge design for inclusivity. That was very exciting as well. 1876 1877 Approved Minutes 45 APPROVED Mr. de Geus: I'm not sure if I've shared this with the Commission. It's been really 1878 interesting opening up this playground, the Magical Bridge Playground. The new 1879 Commissioners have been there. It's a universally accessible playground that people of 1880 all abilities can play. It's one of the best in the country, so it's getting a lot of attention, 1881 not only nationally but internationally. What we've experienced is, one, the maintenance 1882 is a big job because it gets so many visitors. There's 150 people there every day or at any 1883 time almost. Another thing that we're experiencing is there are so many people there and 1884 most of the kids that are playing there are actually able-bodied kids. I spoke to a couple 1885 of parents that have kids with disabilities, and they go there and its overwhelming. They 1886 actually can't get access to some of the play equipment. It's really a challenge and a 1887 problem. This is a new area and we need to work on it. The Friends of the Magical 1888 Bridge who raised the money to build the playground have been tremendous support of 1889 the playground and are there a lot and have started an ambassador program where they 1890 have actually children learn about people with different abilities. They get T-shirts and a 1891 little bit of training. They look out for kids that may need some help or make sure they 1892 get access to certain play equipment. There is a programming element to this particular 1893 playground that needs attention and focus and some resources. We're working with the 1894 Friends to see how we can keep them in play and helping support that playground with a 1895 volunteer program or some other thing. Pretty interesting. Great addition to the system, 1896 but there's some challenges that we're learning about. 1897 1898 Commissioner Moss: That's our neighborhood park. It's an incredible number of people. 1899 Talking to some of the parents who have autistic children, you can't tell that they're 1900 autistic. They bring along their siblings who don't have a problem. Having the 1901 combination of all those is pretty incredible. It's really amazing. 1902 1903 Chair Reckdahl: I'm always mobbed when I go there. It's very impressive. Let's move 1904 on. 1905 1906 Commissioner Hetterly: I have a couple of calendar items, since we got our important 1907 dates calendar. I just thought to add on January 11th along with the Master Plan Council 1908 Study Session, Council will be reviewing the Community Services and Facilities element 1909 of the Comprehensive Plan as revised by the Community Advisory Committee. I guess 1910 the last action by the Community Advisory Committee will be next week, 1911 December 16th. That's a subcommittee for that element, then Council will review it on 1912 January 11th, when I saw it last. January 19th, there is a joint Council session with the 1913 Community Advisory Committee for the Comp Plan and Council on the Comprehensive 1914 Plan Draft Environmental Impact Review. 1915 1916 Chair Reckdahl: Anything else? Okay. 1917 1918 Approved Minutes 46 APPROVED VI. TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR JANUARY 26, 2016 MEETING 1919 1920 Chair Reckdahl: Next month we have dog parks, either a discussion item or action item, 1921 hopefully action item. Commissioner Hetterly and I, after El Camino Park, went over 1922 and checked out the area. It does look very promising. It's a slippery slope whenever 1923 you start—it's very rough. We don't expect it to be polished, but I think it would be a 1924 good learning experience for the City. Dog parks next month. 1925 1926 Commissioner Lauing: The Boardwalk? 1927 1928 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, Boardwalk is coming in January. Are we coming back with the 1929 Master Plan also? We have the Master Plan. 1930 1931 Male: (inaudible). 1932 1933 Chair Reckdahl: Master Plan, dog parks and Boardwalk. 1934 1935 Rob de Geus: I'll have to check in with the Junior Museum and Zoo team to see if they're 1936 ready. I suspect they will be. 1937 1938 Chair Reckdahl: We have CIPs also. CIPs and perhaps Junior Museum. 1939 1940 Mr. de Geus: We also generally select the Chair and Vice Chair at the January meeting. 1941 1942 Chair Reckdahl: Are we planning to do the retreat as our regular February meeting or are 1943 we going to schedule that between meetings? 1944 1945 Commissioner Lauing: My guess is we're going to have to schedule it separately, 1946 because of the workload of the Master Plan. 1947 1948 Chair Reckdahl: We'll talk about then in January. Schedule retreat. 1949 1950 Commissioner Cowie: Could you talk a little bit more about that? So I can get a sense 1951 for it and get a sense for what the calendar looks like. 1952 1953 Chair Reckdahl: The retreat usually occurs typically on a Friday morning. Do we go like 1954 9:00 'til noon, something like that? We just get together. It's basically another meeting, 1955 but we just get together and not talk about new meetings but talk about planning for the 1956 year, talk about what the ad hocs we want, what issues we want to work on. It's an 1957 organizational meeting, big picture and it's both the little picture stuff that we do here 1958 each week. 1959 1960 Approved Minutes 47 APPROVED Commissioner Cowie: Could we schedule it now? I'm just concerned if we wait 'til late 1961 January that it might be challenging to make it work. 1962 1963 Mr. de Geus: We can send out a poll. Friday seemed to work best for most people in the 1964 past couple of years, like a Friday morning. Look for a date in February, see what works 1965 for most people. 1966 1967 Commissioner Cowie: As long as we do that relatively soon, that would be helpful. As 1968 long as I have enough notice, I can probably pull it off. If it's two or three weeks in 1969 advance, it might be tricky. 1970 1971 Mr. de Geus: Fair enough. 1972 1973 Chair Reckdahl: Cat is sending out a poll then. 1974 1975 VII. ADJOURNMENT 1976 1977 Meeting adjourned on motion by Commissioner Hetterly and second by Commissioner 1978 Cribbs at 10:00 p.m. 1979 Approved Minutes 48