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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-04-25 Parks & Recreation Summary MinutesDRAFT Draft Minutes 1 1 2 3 4 MINUTES 5 PARKS & RECREATION COMMISSION 6 REGULAR MEETING 7 April 25, 2017 8 CITY HALL 9 250 Hamilton Avenue 10 Palo Alto, California 11 12 Commissioners Present: Anne Cribbs, Jeff Greenfield, Jeff LaMere, Ryan McCauley, Don 13 McDougall, David Moss, and Keith Reckdahl 14 Commissioners Absent: None 15 Others Present: None 16 Staff Present: Daren Anderson, Rob de Geus, Kristen O'Kane, Tanya Schornack 17 I. ROLL CALL CONDUCTED BY: Tanya Schornack 18 II. AGENDA CHANGES, REQUESTS, and DELETIONS: 19 Chair Reckdahl: We'll move onto Agenda Changes, Requests, Deletions. Does anyone 20 want to change anything, move things around? If not, we'll move on to Oral 21 Communications. 22 III. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS: 23 Chair Reckdahl: We do have two speaker cards, but these are for items on the agenda. 24 Does anyone have anything for subjects not on the agenda? We'll move on. 25 IV. BUSINESS: 26 1. Approval of Draft Minutes from the March 28, 2017 Parks and Recreation 27 Commission meeting. 28 Chair Reckdahl: Herb wanted to speak about draft Minutes. Herb Borock is going to 29 speak. You have 3 minutes. Thank you. 30 DRAFT Draft Minutes 2 Herb Borock: Thank you, Chair Reckdahl. I request a correction to my remarks at the 1 top of page 30, the first line. The word lease should be a proper name, Lee, L-E-E. It 2 will read "easement on the common area of the Lee subdivision." Thank you. 3 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. 4 Approval of the draft March 28, 2017 Minutes as amended was moved by Commissioner 5 Cribbs and seconded by Commissioner McDougall. Passed 6-0 McCauley absent 6 2. Golf Course Parking Lot Solar Panel Project 7 Chair Reckdahl: The first item is going to be golf course parking lot solar panel project. 8 Daren Anderson: Good evening. I'm Daren Anderson with Open Space, Parks and Golf. 9 It's my pleasure to introduce my colleague from the Utilities Department. This is Shiva 10 Swaminathan, and he's a Senior Resource Planner with the Utilities Department. His 11 colleague, unfortunately, is also working on this project but couldn't be here tonight, 12 Sonika Choudhary. With that, I'll turn it over to Shiva to lead you through the 13 presentation. 14 Shiva Swaminathan: Thank you, Daren. Good evening, Commissioners. You have a 15 report in front of you. This is a project we are contemplating at the golf course parking 16 lot. The discussion today and your input would be valued as we move forward in 17 defining this project better and getting it launched hopefully in the coming months and 18 years. We'll talk about the community's aspirations for solar PV, something which 19 Council had set goals for us back in 2014, what's the objective of this project and what 20 does community solar mean and then land use and community benefits as a result of this 21 project and consideration of design elements and then next steps. In 2014, the Council 22 set a goal of trying to meet 4 percent of the City's electricity needs with local resources, 23 primarily solar PV. Currently, we're at about a 1 percent level, and we are on a path—24 trying our best to get to that 4 percent through various programs. One of the programs 25 identified is a community solar program where we provide the opportunity for residents 26 and businesses who are unable to have PV on their roofs either because of shading or 27 they live in multifamily homes. As we know, about 40 percent of our homes are 28 multifamily here in the City. Those residents don't have an opportunity to have PVs on 29 their roof. This community solar program will provide them an opportunity to source 30 their electric supply from PVs centrally placed. In this instance, the project proposed is 31 at the golf course parking lot. 32 Chair Reckdahl: I have one question about that. I'm a little confused about how this 33 works. Doesn't this just put the power back on the grid, and then anyone pulls it off the 34 grid? 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 3 Mr. Swaminathan: That's correct. Electrons don't flow directly to the customer 1 subscribing, but it reduces the amount of intake we depend on the transmission grid, but 2 it puts it in the distribution grid. Correct. 3 Chair Reckdahl: Why is it organized that these people who are pulling the energy off the 4 grid are associated with these solar panels? I don't understand the benefit of having 5 people apply and enter this program as opposed to them just pulling it off the grid. How 6 does that change the … 7 Mr. Swaminathan: They have more price certainty, and they encourage local solar as a 8 result. Our dependence on the grid is reduced by that amount. 9 Chair Reckdahl: They would pay a lower cost than they would if they just were not part 10 of this program? 11 Mr. Swaminathan: It's probably going to be a premium product, so customers who have 12 expressed interest in it, when Council approved this to site solar—our retail rate is 13 already below, compared to say joining communities for PG&E. Solar is still—anybody 14 who puts solar on their roof currently tends to pay a premium over what they would have 15 otherwise gotten from the City central plant. It's likely to be a premium product. We 16 don't know for sure. We're in the early stages of exploration, but it's likely to be a 17 premium. 18 Chair Reckdahl: These are people who are willing to pay a premium price. As a result, 19 you will put the panels up. That makes sense. Thank you. 20 Mr. Swaminathan: Good question. Thank you for that question. In 2015, staff 21 formulated a committee to look at different sites within Palo Alto. The golf course 22 parking lot turned out to be the top site, primarily because of its accessibility to the 23 community and its relatively large space, which can provide 100-200 customers 24 electricity. What you see here is an aerial view of the parking lot, the top graphic. At the 25 bottom is just an illustration of what the carport panels will look like. It will be a 26 relatively large project, 500 kilowatts, which can serve about 100-200 residents who are 27 interested to source PV but aren't able to do so. The reason we are here is this area is 28 designated a parkland, and any improvements or construction in that area requires 29 Council approval of a Park Improvement Ordinance. In terms of considerations, the 30 carport PVs would provide shading for the golf course patrons. It also doesn't impinge 31 on existing land use. The parking lot would remain a parking lot. In terms of community 32 benefits, it'll provide energy for the community. It's rather small within the greater 33 scheme of things, but it moves us towards that 4 percent goal the City has set. We have 34 an opportunity to showcase a project along with other facilities in the Bay Area, in the 35 Baylands. 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 4 Mr. Anderson: If I could speak to that briefly. Within the Baylands, we have the 1 EcoCenter staffed by the Environmental Volunteers. We have the Baylands Nature 2 Center, and we have the Water Quality Control Plant that is often on a tour for the school 3 kids. They'll stop and learn about recycled water. They visit the EcoCenter, the Nature 4 Center, the rest of the Preserve. This could be a complementary piece to that 5 environmental, green infrastructure puzzle of that natural area. 6 Mr. Swaminathan: That will be another benefit potentially. Thirdly, since it's an 7 independent parcel, if we later on after installation find other additional sources to put 8 energy storage, we can store the electricity and use it in case of an emergency. That's 9 down the road. These are some of the benefits in addition to the benefits provided to 10 subscribing customers. In terms of design elements, if successfully—it is for the 11 customers who are currently unable to get solar PV. To the extent they subscribe, they 12 know—these projects, once built, their fixed cost is spread over the life of the project so 13 the cost is known. It provides certainty. Whereas, for the Utility, if our supply costs vary 14 over time, we pass it on to customers. The benefit that subscribing customers could get, 15 though they may be paying a premium, is their costs are relatively fixed for the supply 16 portion. The golf course users benefit in different ways as we have just discussed. The 17 community as a whole benefits with the education outreach effort. We are hoping the 18 project—we expect the project to be aesthetically pleasing, complementing the golf 19 course plans, and make it a community asset down the road. Here we are today to seek 20 your input to the project and facilitate a discussion with the community. In the month of 21 June, we plan to go to our Utilities Advisory Commission for their review and their input. 22 On a preliminary basis for the Council to approve a design guideline. 23 Commissioner McDougall: What does screening of panels mean? 24 Mr. Swaminathan: What was that again? 25 Commissioner McDougall: It says community as a whole, education opportunities, 26 aesthetics of PV design, and screening of panels. What is screening of panels? 27 Mr. Swaminathan: To the extent that—there will be some structures in terms of 28 electronics in the parking area, so that could be with shrubs. There is some discussion 29 about potentially from Embarcadero, whether we could put some shrubs and partially 30 screen. 31 Commissioner McDougall: I see, hiding the panels. Thank you. 32 Mr. Swaminathan: That's all we have for you in terms of timelines and next steps. We 33 are seeking your input today. We are not seeking any approval of any ordinance because 34 that requires much more definition. This is an early discussion with the community. We 35 plan to go to Council with these design elements in the summer, and then we'll put out an 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 5 RFP for potential vendors, who will then come and price a system. Then, we'll 1 competitively bid it for the benefit of takers. We expect to come back here sometime in 2 the summer/fall of 2018 once we have a better project definition, costs, all that, for a 3 specific ordinance approval, and then the project launch sometime in the spring of 2019. 4 We're 2 years away, but this is the early discussion we would like to have with the 5 community and Commissioners. 6 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. We have a couple of speaker cards here, Edie Groner 7 followed by Rebecca White. Please come up to the microphone. 8 Female: I'm actually (inaudible) agenda item (inaudible) talking about the Cubberley 9 field (inaudible). 10 Chair Reckdahl: I guess that would be under fields. We have no public comment, so we 11 can move on to Commissioners. Jeff, do you have anything to comment? 12 Commissioner LaMere: What's the lifecycle of a commercial solar project like this? 13 What do we expect for it to last and any upgrades that would then need to happen or as 14 technology changes quickly, the efficiency of a project versus needing to upgrade the 15 solar cells? Would that be the responsibility of the third-party contractor who bids on it 16 or is that the responsibility of the City? 17 Mr. Swaminathan: That is a two-part question. What is the life of a project like this? 18 We have a number of larger projects in the Central Valley. Those, the life is about 30 19 years. In those contracts, it's an off-take agreement; only when it produces, we pay. If it 20 doesn't produce, we don't pay. That's private-sector owned, and there is a lot of tax 21 equity, which goes into financing these projects. This project, since it's local, since 22 readily we could maintain it, we still plan to leverage tax equity, but we won't have the 23 option of potentially owning it down the road when the tax equity window shrinks or 24 lapses. Who will be responsible? Depending on who owns it. The solar panels 25 themselves have a 20-30 year life. If the golf balls bounce on them, some of them may 26 have to be replaced periodically. The inverter, which is the electronics which converts it, 27 has a life of about 10 years. That's built into the cost premium. 28 Commissioner McDougall: My questions are the same as, I think, other questions I've 29 asked you in terms of context. The first thing is this is 0.1 percent of the 4 percent. A 30 quick calculation would say we need to do this 40 more times in order to come up with 31 the 4 percent. The report says that 50 sites were considered. I'd be really interested in 32 the list of 50 sites because I find it hard to believe that we could find 40 sites in Palo Alto 33 without getting into real contentious "we don't need Foothills Park anymore, so let's cover 34 up that" or whatever it is. I'm only concerned that this is a pilot; it keeps getting defined 35 as a pilot in the thing. We say let's do this pilot, and it lasts for—30 years, I think, was 36 the answer to the question, but we can't find any other places to put more solar panels. It 37 DRAFT Draft Minutes 6 sits there as the one example. I don't know what it costs. If the objective is carbon-free 1 Palo Alto or whatever the thing might be, is there some other way we should be pursuing 2 this as opposed to trying to get this 4 percent local or whatever? I'd like to make sure we 3 understand the context. We don't need to have one of our parks end up being the only 4 example. 5 Mr. Swaminathan: Could I answer that question? 6 Commissioner McDougall: Sure. 7 Mr. Swaminathan: I think there are three parts to that. One is of the 4 percent goal, this 8 is 0.1 percent and where are the other sites. The 4 percent goal includes the residents 9 who put it on their rooftop, businesses who are installing PVs. For example, we're 10 already 1 percent there. All of them are pretty much on private property, on rooftops of 11 buildings. Starting in 2020, there's a Building Code which requires all new buildings 12 shall have, to the extent feasible, PVs. That's expected to be a Building Code related to 13 net zero energy. The 4 percent is broader than the community solar. Community solar is 14 just one building block in the broader scheme. 15 Commissioner McDougall: I understand that. That's a good answer. I would make sure 16 that, if I was out telling people like us about that, I put that in context. You're not going 17 to try and find 4 percent by covering up the parks. My second question would be, in 18 terms of this—I understand it's going to be an expensive electricity, not cheap electricity. 19 We keep talking about residential. Is there some reason why we're not talking about 20 commercial customers that might decide the right thing to do is buy more commercial or 21 buy more expensive electricity to be good citizens? 22 Mr. Swaminathan: A program would not restrict it to residential, but demand has in the 23 past come from residents who have said, "I have a shaded roof. I own my home but still 24 have shading on my roof, which doesn't lend itself to PV." They want to promote PV. 25 Commissioner McDougall: Right, but the paper actually talks about the risk of not 26 having sufficient subscription. It would seem to me you'd like to have a marketing plan 27 that covered everybody in the first place. 28 Mr. Swaminathan: Correct. 29 Commissioner McDougall: My second thing on that would be wouldn't it be better if in 30 fact there was some early adopters that were already identified. If you went to the 31 neighbors of the golf course, went to the golf course itself, went to the Environmental 32 Volunteers, went to the sewage plant, and went to the athletic fields and said, "Let's get 33 them signed up right now," you would enter into this with somebody already signed up. 34 The other thing is if you're serious about doing this, we're looking at the timeline. The 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 7 timeline is summer, winter, spring, fall, summer. My experience is if you say winter, 1 that's a 3-month period. If you slip to spring, that's 3 months of slippage, but that's only 2 one unit of the calendar you've framed it in. It's only one quarter. It's only one unit; 3 you've only slipped one unit, big deal. You've really slipped 3 months. I would rather 4 see some specifics. When you say summer, is that July or August? When you slip 3 5 months, we'll know you've slipped three units. The same all the way through here. 6 There's no reason why—you're going to slip. I'd rather you slip a month unit, not a 7 quarter unit in doing this in terms of getting it done. The thing this doesn't talk about is, 8 during the timeframe that you're building this, there's going to be a lot of disruption in the 9 golf course. That needs to be identified as well. 10 Mr. Swaminathan: That's the only constraint we imposed on ourselves. We'll have 11 greater definition as we proceed, so that's why we have 3-month chunks. One thing we 12 want to target is construction would be in stages. It won't disrupt completely the parking 13 lot. Daren and his team tell us that the golf course is least used in the winter period, so 14 we are trying to stage the construction in the winter. That was winter of 2019. Any 15 slippage can be accommodated as long as that timeframe is met. We were trying to see 16 whether it could be winter of 2018. It was too soon for that. That's on the time scale. 17 Just in terms of the other sites, none of them were parkland. The next bigger one we have 18 is the airport. They have a project to do hangars, but that's not readily accessible and 19 they're still further away from where we can be. The rest of them are mostly City-owned 20 building rooftops. 21 Commissioner McDougall: I understand that it wouldn't be all parks. In the end, I think 22 it would be a mistake if we couldn't figure out the rest, and we ended up with the one. If 23 there's a possibility of spending whatever this money is, achieving the same carbon-free 24 goal in some other way. Thank you. 25 Mr. Swaminathan: Just one other comment in terms of carbon free. Existing electric 26 supply is all carbon free. 27 Commissioner McDougall: I understand that. 28 Mr. Swaminathan: This is mainly to serve residents who have indicated to us. We don't 29 know, when we come up with the premiums—we don't know what the premiums are—30 how much subscription there is going to be. It's mainly to serve the residents who have 31 said, "We would like to participate in a community solar program." It would not reduce 32 the imputed carbon content of the supply because we'll buy less from outside. 33 Commissioner Cribbs: I did have a couple of pretty simple questions. Do you know how 34 much this is going to cost to get started? 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 8 Mr. Swaminathan: Yes. These are capital-cost intensive and low operating costs. We 1 estimate the cost to be about $1.8 million for 500 kilowatts of PV panels. That would be 2 financed through tax—different structures, but it'll be spread over the life. Currently, we 3 are estimating it at 20 years. After that, it becomes free electricity. That's (inaudible) cap 4 the project. It'll be funded not with—someone has to fund it. Because there is 5 inexpensive capital because of federal government tax credits for tax equity financing, we 6 plan to leverage those funds. That'll be the primary source of funds at the early stages. 7 Commissioner Cribbs: I guess I thought the City was going to provide the parkland, the 8 golf course parking lot, and a third-party vendor would come in and create the solar 9 panels. They would run it and secure it and all of that. Is that right or not right? 10 Mr. Swaminathan: Correct. That's right. 11 Commissioner Cribbs: Who provides the security for this very attractive carport with 12 solar panels on the top? 13 Mr. Swaminathan: Security to the person who is investing? Is that the question? 14 Commissioner Cribbs: Yes. 15 Mr. Swaminathan: The Utility will enter into something called a Power Purchase 16 Agreement over 20 years. 17 Commissioner Cribbs: If we don't have enough residential subscribers, is there an option 18 B to make this work? 19 Mr. Swaminathan: That's part of the design guideline. Amortizing $1.8 million over 20 20 years, the annual cost we estimate to be $150,000. The cost premium is about 20 percent, 21 so $30,000. We are pursuing this because the committee wants it. We do plan to reach 22 out and get some pre-commitment before we launch. The commitment wouldn't be for 23 10 years or 20 years. It'll be kind of ongoing commitment. Part of the design guidelines 24 with—the Utility Advisory Commission has discussed who is going to pay out that 25 $30,000 a year risk premium. That is a risk the rest of the customers would pay. Does 26 that answer your question? 27 Commissioner Cribbs: It does. When we say it's a pilot program—to me a pilot program 28 assumes there's going to be other programs coming after these. It's either going to be 29 scalable or something. Where would you think that you would put others of these, once 30 this was a success? 31 Mr. Swaminathan: You're absolutely right. The pilot program means multiple things. 32 One is the first site, where there's demand, for example, we think it is, but we don't know 33 for sure yet. That's part of the discussion. The other is what is the level of demand for 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 9 such systems. That's a function of price. It's going to be very sensitive to the price. Only 1 through an RFP process, we could gather that information. We have some estimates, 2 which pan out to the numbers I just outlined, 20 percent premium compared to what we 3 would buy otherwise. It very well could be that the pilot doesn't even get off the ground 4 because there's not enough subscription or the committee says, "There is 50 percent 5 subscription currently, but in the long term it will be of value to the community because 6 of the education needs and whatever else. Let's still put it up." There is a possibility, as 7 Commissioners correctly point out, that this may be the only site if there's not sufficient. 8 If there is a price discount, clearly there will be higher subscription. That's the pilot 9 nature. The design element is we're trying to make a cookie cutter. If it works out and 10 there is demand, we can contract structures, how we solicit customers, how we evaluate 11 these proposals. When we find other sites, we can replicate this model in other sites. 12 That's the intent. 13 Commissioner Cribbs: Thank you very much. 14 Vice Chair Moss: I want to piggy-back on what Don said about parking lots. When I 15 look down on Palo Alto from 5,000 feet, I see maybe ten parking lots or more that are the 16 same size as that one, like HP's parking lot and Varian parking lot. There's a number of 17 parking lots out there. I would like to make sure that those parking lots also—maybe we 18 can mandate that all parking lots should be covered with these solar panels and not jump 19 to a park first. We're going to do that. I want to get Palo Alto to carbon neutral as fast as 20 possible. If this helps, great. Now, my question is to Daren. I didn't quite realize until 21 this meeting how big the parking lot was for the golf course. I'm thinking also to the 22 Cubberley parking lots; there's two of them, three of them. They're huge. I don't want 23 any more cars. I'd like fewer parking lots. Is there an opportunity to reduce the size of 24 the parking lot for the golf course? Why did we decide that the golf course had to have 25 that big a parking lot? Could we get half the parking lot and still do this experiment, this 26 pilot, but reduce the size of the parking lot by half? What would I put in there? A 27 playground, some native plants, something that's park-like and less parking lot on 28 parkland. That's my comment. 29 Mr. Anderson: I would just say the size of that lot probably reflects the really heavy golf 30 play. At one point, we had 100,000 games a year on that course, 100,000 rounds a year. 31 It had very heavy play. The hope is, with this very large investment, that we'll get back 32 to a high number, higher than we are now. I don't know if we'll ever see 100,000 rounds 33 again. I believe we're probably going to need a good portion of that lot for this. Shiva, 34 correct me if I'm wrong. How many stalls do we lose by adding the solar? 35 Mr. Swaminathan: It's not clear. It won't be more than a couple, our estimate. It's going 36 to be right in the middle. It may not be any or maybe a few. We don't have any 37 inclination of what that would be until we see the preliminary design. 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 10 Mr. Anderson: To answer your question, we certainly don't want any more parking lot 1 than we need. We don't want excessive, unused asphalt areas in any park. We also don't 2 want to be under-parked. It's a fine balance. I guess we'll learn more once our golf 3 course opens in November. 4 Rob de Geus: I was just going to add, if I might. We're also talking about adding charger 5 stations at the parking lot. The electric cars will get the premium spots at the golf course. 6 That's another thing we're looking at. 7 Mr. Swaminathan: Yes, the HP parking lot, there are attempts for the Stanford industrial 8 park campuses to put some PV there. We're not mandating them. They're doing it—9 there are some other incentives called the CLEAN program, where we provide incentives 10 for projects to come online and sell that electricity back to us. Those premiums are a 50 11 percent premium. That's what got them going. Council decided to, for about 1/2 percent 12 of our load, provide almost a 50 percent premium, 16 1/2 pennies. We are getting some 13 proposals for that, but that'll be part of the larger mix but not for the community solar as 14 such. 15 Commissioner Greenfield: I think there are lots of precedents for applications of solar 16 panels over parking lots, so I think this is a very reasonable program to consider. I know 17 that we have—is it the MSC on Bayshore that has solar panels over the parking as well? 18 Are we talking about similar panels, a similar look? 19 Mr. Swaminathan: On the MSC, one is parking lots, which is inside, and the other is a 20 tracking. Not the tracker, but the parking lot there is coverage like that, correct. 21 Mr. de Geus: I want to add a little bit here. We've been working closely with Shiva and 22 Utilities on this. A couple of interests that Community Services has—it's not foremost 23 for Utilities but it is for us—is that we have attractive solar panels, something that has an 24 artistic flair or vibrancy to it, almost like it's a bit of a destination to go to. We want to 25 attract people to the golf course. There's some really interesting, creative solar designs 26 out there right now. I know this adds cost, so that's something we would have to 27 consider. That's something that we're very interested in and hope to look at, not just a 28 cookie cutter, very mechanical look. Something that's a little more interesting is our 29 hope. 30 Commissioner Greenfield: You're considering going in front of the Art Commission as 31 well? 32 Mr. de Geus: Maybe, if we have to. 33 Commissioner Greenfield: This model seems to have similarities with the very 34 successful Palo Alto Green plan, which included a premium for the customers. Is the 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 11 premium anticipated to be similar to the Palo Alto Green, similar or higher, it sounds like 1 perhaps? 2 Mr. Swaminathan: Comparable, similar. 3 Commissioner Greenfield: That suggests you might not have that much difficulty getting 4 people to sign up. 5 Mr. Swaminathan: That's our current market view. The difference is the success of the 6 program was from 10 years ago, which we discontinued when we became carbon neutral. 7 Given 6 percent of our load subscribe for Palo Alto Green program, that's a big market. 8 Commissioner Greenfield: Do you have an idea of roughly how many subscribers you 9 need for this program to be successful? Is it 200 or more than that? 10 Mr. Swaminathan: For the first project, 100-200. 11 Commissioner Greenfield: I'm sure the UAC will have a lot more to say about all that. 12 Just one other question. Is there any potential issue with light reflection off the solar 13 panels impacting the airport flight path? 14 Mr. Swaminathan: We are doing a preliminary review of that with a consultant from the 15 airport. We haven't formed the results yet. That study will determine the orientation 16 potentially. That's being planned. 17 Commissioner Greenfield: Thank you. 18 Commissioner McCauley: No questions. This seems like a win-win for both golf course 19 users as well as the City. I'm very glad to hear about it. Thank you. 20 Chair Reckdahl: Overall, I'm very optimistic. They still have some issues. There's a lot 21 of risk associated with this. It's a very expensive project. I'm not going to dwell on those 22 as much as how does it affect the park. You mentioned the attractiveness. We've put a 23 lot of money into this new golf course. If this degrades from the experience and people 24 don't go, there's a lot of subtleties. That's why businesses want attractive storefronts. If 25 it's unattractive, people are subconsciously less likely to go. I think it's really important 26 that we look at attractiveness. We don't want—go ahead. 27 Mr. de Geus: I really appreciate that, Chair Reckdahl. I totally agree with you. It's not 28 easy to run a golf course and fully recover costs. That's what expected from our golf 29 course, not only the cost of operations but the cost of any overhead that may come from 30 City Hall. That's a challenge, and we do have a pretty saturated market on the Peninsula. 31 Our hope is that the design of the golf course is very sustainable. It takes 50 acres of 32 what used to be manicured lawns and now is going to be natural, native Baylands. In 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 12 other words, we had 130 acres total of managed turf; now we'll only have 80. The point 1 is one of the main themes around the new Baylands golf links is a much more 2 sustainable, environmentally friendly course, almost 100 percent recycled water. We 3 hope that a solar project like this, particularly if it's attractive and has an education 4 component and is artistic, will add to that theme and may have people want to play at 5 Palo Alto because of that concentration that we have for our particular course. 6 Chair Reckdahl: The point I want to make is it's not vanity. This is a business issue; we 7 need to keep it attractive. The second thing is Palo Alto's not going to own the panels. A 8 third party is going to own the panels? 9 Mr. Swaminathan: At least in the first 7 years to take advantage of the tax equity. 10 Beyond that, it will be a business decision, whether it's more attractive for us to own or a 11 private party to own. The output obviously will go to the community. 12 Chair Reckdahl: When we sign this contract, we're guaranteeing them so many panels. 13 What I'm concerned about is will this tie our hands. If we want to remodel, if we want to 14 reduce the size of the parking lot, if we want to move things around down there, what 15 kind of constraints will this apply to the park renovations? 16 Mr. Swaminathan: It would impose constraints because the private party is trying to 17 recoup their investment over 20 years. Any reconfiguration or removal of panels and 18 reduction of output would have to be compensated for. That's a risk we'll have to bear. 19 Who bears that? We'll find out. I'm presuming it's the Utilities, but that has to be part of 20 the lease. Currently, we do have lease agreements with the City, not for the golf course 21 parking lot but on City parking lots. As we speak, there is PV panel designs being 22 reviewed by the Architectural Review Board and going to Council for the parking 23 structures in Downtown on high-rise parking structures. There are lease agreements 24 between the panel owner third party and the City. I don't know the terms of that. For 25 example, the same would apply in that instance for whatever reason the City says, "I want 26 that area." I'm presuming the risk would be borne by not the third party but the Utility 27 because, with such a risk, the third party cannot secure financing if that risk is passed on 28 to the project owner. Yes, it would constrain us. We should go in this with eyes wide 29 open for a 20-year commitment. 30 Chair Reckdahl: Go ahead, Rob. 31 Mr. de Geus: I was just going to say the third thing that has me interested in this. The 32 first is it complements the sustainability of the course theme. It could be attractive if we 33 get something that's really interesting, that people will want to be there for. The third 34 thing that we're talking about a little bit here is this third party or some type of lease 35 agreement could involve some revenue to the park system or the golf course to help 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 13 offset costs, which could be great for the golf course, given that's it's, as I said earlier, 1 difficult to fully recover costs. 2 Chair Reckdahl: I don't understand the tax consequences. Why does this have to be a 3 third party? Do they get a different tax break than if we do it ourselves? 4 Mr. Swaminathan: Correct. 5 Chair Reckdahl: Why is that? 6 Mr. Swaminathan: The federal government provides a tax write-off up to 30 percent of 7 the project for anybody who invests. There are tax equity funds which—I'm not too 8 familiar with the details. 9 Chair Reckdahl: Are you saying basically since it's a tax break only entities who pay 10 taxes would be interested in this? 11 Mr. Swaminathan: Correct. 12 Chair Reckdahl: It would not do the City any good to get a tax break since we do not pay 13 taxes. 14 Mr. Swaminathan: That's correct. All our projects, which the City gets a lot of PV 15 power from in the Central Valley, are financed with private sector. Any investment they 16 make—it's no different than you putting it on your roof as a private citizen. You're a 17 private-sector party. If you put it on your roof, you get the write-off. If it's a $10,000 18 panel on your roof, you pay $3,000 and get a write-off on your taxes. Similarly, that 19 same structure has been created for commercial projects by tax equity investors. 20 Chair Reckdahl: I'm concerned that we may have—if trees get around it and start 21 shading it, we may be constrained with what kind of vegetation we have down there. If 22 we wanted to plant shrubs or trees that, for aesthetics, partially shade them, we may be 23 not able to do that. This does not come risk free. It does tie our hands, and it may have 24 financial impacts if we … 25 Mr. Swaminathan: That's right. We have looked at the tree shading. It's not a major 26 problem as we see it, but we have to study it more closely. 27 Chair Reckdahl: That would be one area that I'm concerned about. Another area is 28 repaving. We've been talking now for many years to repave that parking lot. Would this 29 be repaved as part of this project or is that a separate issue? 30 Mr. de Geus: There is a repaving project in the CIP now to do that this year prior to 31 opening because it's in pretty bad shape right now. Unfortunately, the projects are lined 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 14 up in such a way that we can't do it all at the same time. When Utilities goes in there to 1 install the panels, should we get to that point, there will be some repaving that will need 2 to happen, hopefully not the whole thing. 3 Chair Reckdahl: We'll just cut it up and patch where needed. 4 Mr. Swaminathan: Yes and no. Yes, in certain limited circumstances. One thing we did 5 evaluate and discount in the past 3 months is to lay conduits before the repaving, which is 6 planned for this summer. We discounted it because the current technology is boring, not 7 trenching. These conduits would be laid through boring devices without the need for 8 trenching. You don't need mass trenches. In certain sectors, we would have to dig up 9 mainly to put the posts, but that's limited to that post area. We don't anticipate major, 10 open trenching to lay conduits. 11 Chair Reckdahl: Does anyone have follow-ups? I hope we can work this out. This 12 would be a nice project to have, but I'm also concerned about impacts on parks. We have 13 to be very careful that we don't paint ourselves into the corner. Good luck. 14 Mr. Swaminathan: Thank you very much for your input. 15 3. Review of Field and Tennis Court Use Policy 16 Chair Reckdahl: We'll move on to the review of field and tennis court policy. Kristen is 17 going to talk about our field use. 18 Kristen O'Kane: Good evening, Commissioners. Kristen O'Kane, Community Services 19 Department. Beside me, next to Daren, is Adam Howard, a Recreation Manager with our 20 department. Adam oversees the field and tennis court use policy and also does the field 21 brokering among managing other programs in the Recreation Division. I've asked Adam 22 to come because he knows the policy and the fields very well. I've asked him to join me 23 here tonight to give a presentation. Before we do that, I wanted to give a little 24 background on why this item is here tonight. When Chair Reckdahl and I were talking 25 about the agenda for tonight and planning it, we thought it would be a good idea in light 26 of the comments we received at the March meeting regarding pickleball. Specifically, 27 some of the speakers commented on the reservation policy for tennis courts and how that 28 precluded pickleball from reserving those courts. We're not here tonight to talk about 29 pickleball but just as a starter. Considering we have many new Commissioners, we 30 thought it would be a good idea to introduce the policy, explain the history of it, what it 31 says. As Adam's going to share with you, the policy was first developed in 2009. At that 32 time, the agreement was that the policy would be adopted with the condition that it would 33 be reviewed periodically. It was updated in 2012 after that review happened. It's now 34 been 5 years since the policy has been updated. We might want to talk about is now a 35 good time to review that policy again, perhaps a Commission ad hoc group be formed to 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 15 look at the policy. We can discuss the ad hoc tonight or we could discuss it at the retreat. 1 For now, I'm going to turn it over to Adam. He's going to give you just a brief history on 2 the policy as well as some key points of the policy. 3 Adam Howard: Thank you, Kristen. Good evening, Commissioners. Again, Adam 4 Howard, City of Palo Alto Recreation Manager. This is a pretty brief presentation 5 compared to how in-depth the policy is. I won't go into every detail. It's a 15-page 6 policy that gets into details we don't necessarily need to do tonight. If you have 7 questions, we can go over those. This is pretty top level information. As Kristen said, 8 this was originally created in 2009, revisited at the end of 2012-2013. There were some 9 changes made at that point. The basic overview here is the policy was created to help us 10 manage the fields, help us decide what play was put on what field, help us decide who 11 got fields, and really to make sure Palo Alto residents got priority, and that we were fair 12 to everyone involved. This is the basic level of priority that we use when we are 13 brokering our fields. It goes from top down. As you can see, City and district activities 14 get first shot. Palo Alto youth nonprofit organizations with at least 51 percent residency 15 is next. Then, we go to Palo Alto adult nonprofit organizations with at least 35 percent 16 residency; nonprofit groups with 25 percent or more Palo Alto residents; and then groups 17 that don't fall in that category follow at the end. We also decided that, in the importance 18 of making sure that adults have time to recreate, we carved some time out in the evenings 19 that is strictly for adults. Youth play is extremely popular. If we didn't carve out this 20 time, we figured adults might not get any time. We thought it was important to really 21 carve those times in. The policy really does go into detail about how long a practice is, 22 how long a game slot is, what ages are on what fields to really help us make sure 23 everybody's on the same page and to make sure that, as staff, we have a driving factor for 24 how we broker these fields out. Issues that still exist with this policy. The changes in 25 2013 were great. The policy is working really well, but just a couple of things. One is it 26 doesn't face the reality of the fact that most practices—most teams would like to practice 27 5 days a week. Our policy allows them two practices a week. That's the only way we 28 could really provide space. The meaning there is they put more people on their field slots 29 than what we require. On to the tennis court policy. The tennis court policy was actually 30 not addressed in our last review. The field policy itself was such a huge project that we 31 decided to separate them out and not go too deep into tennis courts. This is a very similar 32 policy to what we had when the policy was created in 2009. The biggest thing here is 33 tennis courts are only reserved to Palo Alto Tennis Club and U.S.T.A. tournament or 34 match play, and the City will keep 50 percent of its courts open even when we do reserve 35 for U.S.T.A. match play. We don't allow reservations for individual use or private 36 lessons. The rest of the courts shall remain open for first-come-first serve. The big thing 37 is it really does spell out that the tennis courts are specifically for tennis use. Some issues 38 that are coming up is (a) it's restrictive. There are other sports that are growing, that we 39 can't reserve for. Actually, this doesn't provide any kind of priority to residents. Right 40 now, it's just first-come-first-serve, resident, nonresident. The only difference is a little 41 DRAFT Draft Minutes 16 bit of a price difference. Those are the basic overview of the policy and some of the 1 restrictions that we're having currently. Do you have any questions? 2 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Before we move on to the Commissioners, we have some 3 public comment. We have Tom Foladare followed by Edie Groner. 4 Tom Foladare: Good evening. My name's Tom Foladare, and I am the founder of the 5 Silicon Valley Pickleball Club, which is based out of Mitchell Park. I'm here to request 6 that we get permission to reserve courts for both play, our programs, and tournaments. In 7 January of this year, we actually incorporated. Part of that was to go out and buy 8 insurance, and part of that process was that we actually have to track our members' play. 9 We have some pretty hard numbers at this point. We currently have 200 members. 10 We're growing at about 10 percent month over month, and all this growth has been 11 organic. We have not run any programs or any outreach to date. We're starting to move 12 in that direction. We're running several programs throughout the week as well as open 13 play. On Saturdays, we use three of the tennis courts, and we have an average of 80 14 players using them. On Sundays, we use the same three tennis courts, and we have on 15 average 60 players using them. On Tuesdays and Thursdays in the morning, we run a 16 Palo Alto City-sponsored class with about 25 people. On Wednesdays, we run a seniors 17 programs with about 30 people. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, we run a "get the 18 techie some exercise" program, which is growing, and it's got about 15-20 people each 19 night. We plan in fall to add a program for homeschoolers in the afternoon. Part of 20 doing that is we have to figure out how we're going to fund that program. We would like 21 to request use—we would like to request the ability to reserve the courts. We'd also like 22 to request the ability to run tournaments so that we can increase these programs. Our 23 initial outreach will be to seniors. About 80 percent of the players that are playing right 24 now are over 60. Our secondary approach this year will be to the technology companies 25 to get their people out and then finally to the homeschoolers. Thank you. 26 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Edie Groner is up, followed by Rebecca White. 27 Edie Groner: Good evening. I'm a Greenmeadow resident of many years, living by 28 Cubberley field, being very shocked to see what has taken place in our field. Many of 29 my neighbors are also shocked and disturbed to see the field being used for commercial 30 enterprise instead of the rules that the City has for the use of the field for the community. 31 My husband did a lot of research about the rules of the City. According to the first 32 paragraph of the City of Palo Alto field use policy, the facilities that are owned either by 33 the City or the School District, Palo Alto fields are utilized for recreational, athletic, 34 cultural, educational, social, community service functions that meet the needs and 35 interests of the community. Blue Flame, a global brand activation production company, 36 is using Cubberley's synthetic turf field from April 24th through May 10th for a private, 37 commercial event. It's use of the Cubberley field appears to be purely commercial and 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 17 does not appear to be for recreational, athletic, cultural, educational, social, or community 1 service functions. Furthermore, Blue Flame's use does not appear to meet the needs and 2 interests of the nearby community. Are we missing something that we don't understand 3 how Blue Flame's use of the field was justified by the City? In addition to the points 4 raised below, you should know that so far the event mentioned has prevented the 5 neighbors, schools, sports teams from using Cubberley field, track, and part of the 6 parking lot for 2 days. We expect that at least half the field will not be available for use 7 for another 15 days. The teams which require the full field will be precluded from using 8 it during that time. No use of the field and track by anyone will be possible for any 9 additional few days during that period. Furthermore, we expect substantial traffic to 10 disrupt the Greenmeadow neighborhood around May 2nd through the 4th. We don't 11 understand why individual neighbors and Greenmeadow Community Association was not 12 consulted before this disruptive event was approved by the City staff. It seems that this is 13 a use that's outside of the City rules and is not a benefit to the neighborhood and to the 14 purpose of the fields. We're very disturbed about this. Many of my neighbors have been 15 talking with me, letting me know that this has wide implications. There are many soccer 16 teams, track events, things that have been canceled where the majority of the field users 17 will now have to look for places to go elsewhere for their activity. We feel very left out 18 of this process and very angry because this is not a community use as outlined by the 19 City. I hope that you will take some steps to make sure that this does not happen again. 20 It may be too late to stop this event. For the next 2 weeks, it will cause major disruption 21 to members of the City, the citizens, and the neighborhood. Thank you. 22 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Rebecca White followed by Susan McConnell. 23 Rebecca White: I'm Edie's next door neighbor. Last night I was walking with my son 24 through Cubberley, walking our dogs. We usually scoot—there's a place where you can 25 go in Greendell and bring your dogs. We live in Greenmeadow, so we usually scoot 26 through the track. We were stopped, and someone grabbed my arm actually and told me 27 that I needed to leave. All of the track has been fenced in, and there's that green mesh. 28 It's totally creepy. Further, we're disturbed by the fact that the letter and all the 29 communications from the Commission have been relating to Blue Flame, which isn't the 30 client who's throwing the party at Cubberley. Palantir is the client throwing the party at 31 Cubberley. Blue Flame is just an event production company. That in and of itself in a 32 very savvy town just reeks of deception and is just not cool. Why did you allow that? 33 There are a number of things we're concerned about. Why you are overriding the rules of 34 the committee, which you just outlined for us? Who decided that you would do that? 35 What recourse do we have in the future? Do you answer questions when we comment? I 36 don't know how this works. 37 Chair Reckdahl: No. In general, we're listening to your comments. We may react, but 38 we generally do not have discussions. 39 DRAFT Draft Minutes 18 Ms. White: We're going to picket the event. Our neighborhood is super stressed about 1 this. In the future, it'd be better if you engaged us and asked us whether or not we 2 thought that a commercial event was appropriate for our community, particularly a 3 company like Palantir, who we're already in bed with. They're renting half of Downtown. 4 They are a defense contractor, which—I grew up in Palo Alto, lived here my entire life—5 is not the values of this City. It's simply not. People may come here, and they don't 6 understand that that is not what Palo Alto is about. 7 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Susan McConnell. 8 Susan McConnell: Good evening. First, I would like to thank all of you for listening to 9 our comments at the last meeting. My name is Susan McConnell. I have been a resident 10 of Palo Alto since 1973. For 20 years, I have captained Palo Alto U.S.T.A. tennis teams 11 and have been a member of the Palo Alto Tennis Club. Unfortunately, serious knee 12 problems and an ever-aging body sidelined me. Along came pickleball, and I was back 13 on the courts again. I have to say being back on the courts again was life changing for 14 me. Now, I am a Board Member and Secretary of the Silicon Valley Pickleball Club at 15 Mitchell Park. Our club is an official entity with insurance. Going forward, we would 16 like to hold tournaments including fundraisers for charities. We need the ability to 17 reserve courts. Apparently the rule that only U.S.T.A. and Palo Alto Tennis Club could 18 reserve courts was done pre-pickleball. We really hope that you will add our club to the 19 list of names that reserve the courts. I also want to say coming up very soon, May 5th 20 and 6th, are the Bay Area senior games at Mitchell Park. We would love to have as many 21 of you come to see it. You could come and watch the extra older players, like me. 22 Really, just thanks for listening to us and thanks for everything. Adam, thank you for 23 your support too. 24 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. We'll move on to Commissioners now. Ryan, do you have 25 any comments or questions? 26 Commissioner McCauley: Adam, the last speaker's comment, maybe you can give a little 27 bit of history and the background of why the Palo Alto Tennis Club and U.S.T.A. are the 28 two designated organizations that can make reservations. 29 Mr. Howard: I'm not positive I have that history. It's long before me. I know the Palo 30 Alto Tennis Club has a co-sponsorship with the City for offering free youth programs and 31 youth tournaments. During their times that they have the courts, they offer open to the 32 public to come in and get lessons for free as well. They have a co-sponsorship is my 33 understanding. The U.S.T.A. was just an organization that we could monitor when they 34 have real matches. They have to sign up with the U.S.T.A., so we can identify official 35 teams and captains. It was a way to track who was actually playing tennis for those 36 reasons rather than just reserving the courts for personal use. 37 DRAFT Draft Minutes 19 Commissioner McCauley: Is there any staff recommendation around allowing other 1 groups to make reservations? 2 Mr. Howard: Nothing official; although, we see the need for a more expansive policy 3 that will have some flexibility for up and coming sports like pickleball. 4 Commissioner McCauley: Thanks. 5 Commissioner Greenfield: I have a lot of experience working with Adam on the field 6 policy from the soccer users group. I want to say you have done a great job, and you've 7 also done a great job evolving the policy over time. My first question is does staff have 8 specific needs to revise the policy at this time based on things that have come up in terms 9 of the workability? 10 Mr. Howard: I think with the tennis use policy there is some. We see a group like 11 pickleball using first-come-first-serve, but they have a huge need. It would be beneficial 12 for somebody to be able to have a time that they could use the courts officially. 13 Commissioner Greenfield: I'm sorry; I should have been more specific. Beyond the 14 pickleball application that obviously we have in front of us. 15 Mr. Howard: I also think that writing something in to give Palo Alto residents a priority 16 when it comes to brokering tennis. Right now, it's first-come-first-serve, whoever gets 17 their applications in first. I think it makes sense to have something that would give a Palo 18 Alto resident priority over a nonresident to rent the courts. Even with just tennis, it's 19 becoming more popular. Being able to find space is becoming more difficult. 20 Commissioner Greenfield: Thank you. What percentage of available tennis courts are 21 currently reserved in advance now and would opening reservations to alternative uses 22 impact the current user reservations with respect to the 50 percent limit? 23 Mr. Howard: The major tennis courts, Cubberley, Mitchell Park, Rinconada, are often 50 24 percent booked with U.S.T.A. match play in the evenings, during the week, and 25 weekends pretty consistently. Yes, anything we do to allow additional brokering of 26 tennis courts will create a shortage of tennis courts. There are other tennis courts out in 27 the parks that aren't used nearly as much, specifically because to book for U.S.T.A. match 28 play there has to be an open bathroom, which some of these courts are not in relation to, 29 so they can't be brokered for U.S.T.A. match play. Often they're just used for first-come-30 first-serve. 31 Commissioner Greenfield: If we were to expand and change the policy, we would have 32 to include brokering stipulations perhaps similar to what you're doing for the field users. 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 20 Mr. Howard: We would need to add some guidelines to decide how and how often we 1 would broker to an additional sport or additional organizations. 2 Commissioner Greenfield: Do you know what percentage of the current U.S.T.A. 3 reservations are from Palo Alto residents? 4 Mr. Howard: I do not. 5 Commissioner Greenfield: How is that determined, whether they're residents or 6 nonresidents? 7 Mr. Howard: Whoever fills out the application form. 8 Commissioner Greenfield: They may or may not bear a resemblance to who's actually 9 using the courts. 10 Mr. Howard: Yeah. We cannot prove that that person is actually out on the court the day 11 of the reservation. We could also not—a team of six could be one resident on the team, 12 and that's the person that filled out the application. 13 Commissioner Greenfield: Do tennis court fees currently only apply when there are 14 reservations? 15 Mr. Howard: Correct. 16 Commissioner Greenfield: As we consider new users like pickleball, are there any other 17 potential new users that we should be considering for the use of tennis courts? 18 Mr. Howard: That would be the biggest group. There's been a small uptick—I think this 19 has more to do with the rain—with youth soccer players using it like a foot control 20 practice. They use the courts and they use the netting as a way of controlling the ball and 21 their foot control. That's been pretty minimal, so I don't think that's something that would 22 tend to grow. I think it's just because we've had so much rain, and they were limited on 23 field space at the time. 24 Commissioner Greenfield: On another subject, I was kind of surprised to hear your 25 comment that most soccer teams would like to practice 5 days a week. My experience is 26 most teams practice twice a week; some would like to practice three times a week. What 27 percentage are you talking about there? 28 Mr. Howard: I don't have specific numbers. As we broker fields, that's the number one 29 concern. As they say, we don't have enough space, we don't have enough space. I kind 30 of point out at two practice slots a week per team, we have plenty of space. The 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 21 overwhelming answer is we're becoming more competitive. We practice four, five times 1 a week. 2 Commissioner Greenfield: That's all I have other than a question to Keith. Is it 3 appropriate to ask staff for any information regarding the second and third comments 4 regarding what's going on at Cubberley? 5 Chair Reckdahl: Do you want to talk to that at all? 6 Ms. O'Kane: I can. Kristen O'Kane, Community Services. The event that the two 7 speakers were referring to is a special event that is happening at Cubberley Community 8 Center on the synthetic turf field. It's a private event being put on by a local business. 9 It's an all-employee event, so it's—they were in a pinch to find a venue that could hold all 10 of their employees. They came to the City and asked for our help. We put a lot of 11 thought into our response and also in our decision whether we would allow the company 12 to use this field. While it's not typical for us to allow this sort of special event to occur at 13 the field or anywhere on any of our fields, we made the decision to support this local 14 business and to issue them a special event permit to have the event. The event actually is 15 May 3rd and May 5th, but their setup takes a significant amount of time. That's why half 16 of the field is being used from April 24th, yesterday, 'til May 10th. Most of that is setup 17 and whatever rehearsals they need to do for their keynote speakers, and then they'll have 18 the event, and then they'll break down the event. We've noticed the community 19 through—we delivered letters to people within 600 feet of the field, and then we've also 20 posted the information on the Greenmeadow Nextdoor site. That's how the neighbors 21 were communicated that this event would occur. We didn't have a lot of time to make a 22 decision. A few of us got together and discussed what the potential impacts would be to 23 the neighbors, to the field users. We really did think about it. It may or may not happen 24 again in the future. Right now, we're just focusing on this event and trying to mitigate for 25 any impacts and inconvenience to the community. We know there is an inconvenience; 26 we're aware of that. We're trying to mitigate that as much as possible. 27 Chair Reckdahl: I think one of the problems that people had with it wasn't so much that 28 there was a private event, but also just the duration, that it's 2 1/2 weeks. That's a long 29 time to lose that field. 30 Ms. O'Kane: It is a long time. 31 Commissioner Greenfield: Is there any precedent in the City for closing a field for 2 1/2 32 weeks for a private event like this? 33 Ms. O'Kane: Not that I'm aware of. I would maybe need to ask Rob as well or Adam or 34 Daren, if you know. 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 22 Mr. Howard: Not for that duration, not since I've been here. 1 Commissioner LaMere: Is that a field that currently sees heavy use for recreational 2 activities or youth sports? 3 Mr. Howard: The field does get used daily and on the weekends for youth sports. We 4 were able to reallocate all of those individuals to different spaces or they could use half 5 the field. Not the perfect situation, but they were able to reschedule everywhere to 6 different locations with our help, of course. 7 Commissioner Cribbs: How much time did you have to make these decisions? How 8 early? 9 Ms. O'Kane: I think it was—I could go back and look at the exact date we were asked. 10 Maybe 2 weeks. Yeah, it was pretty quick. 11 Commissioner Cribbs: Thanks. 12 Commissioner McDougall: If we're on that subject, is there any community benefit that 13 Blue Flame or allegedly Palantir are offering other than just the $7.50 an hour or 14 whatever it is? 15 Ms. O'Kane: Actually, the fee that they're being charged is the hourly rate to rent the 16 field. The fee that they're going to be charged, because it is a long event, will be about 17 $40,000 to the City. They've also paid for the soccer fields. If the soccer clubs had a fee 18 at another facility that they would have to pay, that has been paid by the company. 19 They've also donated $10,000 to each of the soccer clubs, Palo Alto Soccer Club and 20 Stanford Soccer Club. 21 Commissioner Cribbs: Did you say forty or four? 22 Ms. O'Kane: Forty thousand. 23 Commissioner McDougall: Thanks, Kristen. 24 Commissioner LaMere: What was the date? The dates were about April 24th to May 5th 25 that the field's not in use. Is that correct? 26 Ms. O'Kane: April 24th to May 10th. Half of the field is still being used for practices 27 and can be used for the public. The other half is not available. 28 Commissioner Greenfield: That's all at this time. 29 DRAFT Draft Minutes 23 Vice Chair Moss: I want to talk about both, the Blue Flame subject and the pickleball 1 subject. I'll start with the pickleball subject. I definitely think we should change the 2 policy to allow the pickleballers to be able to reserve a court. There should be no 3 discussion. The problem that I see is when he says that they're going to do outreach. I 4 think Palo Alto first should—the same rules that took us 5 years to come up with or 3 5 years to come up with on the brokering and the resident percentage rules should apply to 6 them and to the tennis people. Now, we have a constrained resource, and it's only going 7 to get worse. For them to do an outreach to get especially non Palo Alto residents, I don't 8 think they should have carte blanche to do that when we have these rules right now that 9 say 50 percent should be Palo Alto residents. Can that be 50 percent of 10,000 people? I 10 didn't see that there was a limit to the number of people that you could get, say, for 11 AYSO or CYSA. Is there? 12 Mr. Howard: That's correct, no limit on the size of the organization, purely the number 13 of residents in it. 14 Vice Chair Moss: We should change the policy and put a limit—a total number of people 15 in the organization plus a percentage. When somebody asked how many people show up 16 at Cubberley, there are hundreds of kids playing on Cubberley. It didn't used to be like 17 that. Even 3 years ago, it didn't used to be that way. Now, it's hundreds of kids in 18 Cubberley. Multiply that by all of the facilities, all the fields, all the tennis courts, and 19 we cannot grow with those same resources infinite. I would encourage a change in the 20 policy that way as well. That's what I have about the pickleballers. As far as the Palantir 21 event, it's near and dear to my heart because it's right behind my house. These are all my 22 neighbors that were represented there. Not only the comment that you heard here but 23 also somebody said many soccer teams and games have been displaced. There isn't much 24 room on the other fields for those. There was also supposed to be middle school 25 soccer—I'm sorry—a track event with five teams, five schools that was displaced. It's 26 more than just let's try to move people. I noticed in the fine print that you do not have to 27 find room for everybody. You try to find room for everybody, but you don't have to find 28 room for everybody. I think when you moved everybody, you probably impacted the 29 people who are using the other fields. It's not good. The biggest issue I have is you had 30 2 weeks' notice. It's similar to the Bernie event last year, which was very, very short 31 notice. They set up in a day; they did their event; and they were gone the next day 32 because they had to move on to the next city. This should have been a couple of big red 33 flags. You know from experience that Greenmeadow Association is quite verbal and 34 quite vocal. There were enough red flags that you should have gotten them involved. I 35 don't want to see a picket. The two main issues that were brought up are it's a private 36 event. Even if it were a private event, if it was one where there was public benefit, that 37 would have been okay. Because it was a private event, no public benefit, no notice, and a 38 huge impact of 2 1/2 weeks, which is unprecedented, I think it's something of a public 39 DRAFT Draft Minutes 24 relations nightmare. If we can avoid that in the future, any one of those red flags but not 1 all of those—especially all of those red flags, I would appreciate it. 2 Commissioner Cribbs: I'm very happy to talk about pickleball. As many of you know, 3 I've been a big proponent of pickleball since I learned about it about 4 years ago, when I 4 thought it had a really silly name. I would like to commend the people in the audience 5 for the work they've done in organizing the—thank you very much—pickleball club. I 6 sure would like to see how we could work out a time or some times, a change in a policy 7 that they would have the opportunity to be treated like the tennis group as well. Maybe 8 it's a matter of having the club apply for co-sponsorship or maybe it's looking at different 9 policies. I would really love to have us do that. I think it's in the Master Plan. I would 10 love to see some dedicated pickleball courts in the future. I really appreciate Adam and 11 the City for your responsiveness to pickleball, certainly for the Bay Area senior games. 12 We really appreciate it. I would like to invite my fellow Commissioners to come to see 13 the Bay Area senior games, where we will have 140, 150 seniors playing pickleball on 14 the weekend of May 5th and 6th. I think 12:45 might be a good time on Saturday to 15 come. I'd love to see you out there right after the parade. Thank you very, very much for 16 being interested. Thank you, pickleball club, for being exercised. It's just a great sport 17 for seniors, and it's just a great sport for everybody. You're all so enthusiastic and so 18 happy that it's a good thing. Thank you, Keith. 19 Commissioner McDougall: This is where the Chairman is supposed to say no clapping in 20 the audience. I'm really glad he didn't because I support everything Anne said. I want to 21 talk briefly about the event. My question would be—I'm not sure that I'm opposed to 22 having our fields rented or whatever if there's enough community benefit or even funding 23 involved. You told us that the event is the 3rd and the 5th or maybe the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. 24 They have the field 'til the 10th. I'd be really interested—I would request that we go back 25 and say, "What can you guys to do to get out of there and show a response to the citizens 26 by not keeping the thing 'til the 10th? Tell us now you can tear it down overnight, and 27 we can have it back on the 6th" or something. Even 4 days at this point would at least 28 show a responsiveness. I don't challenge your decision. I'm not asking us to go back; we 29 can't go back. At this point, we could at least try and mitigate it a little bit. I think we 30 should try that. In terms of pickleball, they know my enthusiasm; it's the same as Anne's. 31 At the last meeting, you'll remember I said at the end we would be remiss not to bring up 32 pickleball at the next meeting. I guess I want to ask staff or whatever what do we do 33 next. We've all said good things about the nice, noisy people out there. We go away, and 34 maybe they should come back next meeting because we like having them here. How do 35 we do something? We're just talking about—they're asking can they reserve it. What 36 about the fact that the policy says they can't even be on the courts. The policy 37 specifically says nothing else other than tennis. I think we should—they're all here. Let's 38 fine them while they're here. We need to decide what we're going to do and do it quickly. 39 Not "let's see if we can't do this sometime next year, in the next 5-year plan" or whatever. 40 DRAFT Draft Minutes 25 I don't know if that means—I look at this and say this is one line in the field thing. 1 Adam, what you do in terms of juggling all the fields and those violent soccer players and 2 whatnot is outstanding. Maybe we need a separate court policy as opposed to just a field 3 policy. I'm not sure we want to wait that long to at least change it so that pickleball is 4 allowed. I keep wanting to comment that we keep saying pickleball-like. It's not 5 pickleball-like; it's pickleball that we're talking about. Your example of another like is 6 soccer. I can't believe that kids playing soccer on the tennis courts are good for those 7 nets. I would say specifically the other thing that ought to be going into here, if you want 8 to have a statement about no other sport, is it should say no soccer. Kids with soccer 9 balls are going to see how hard they can kick that ball into that net. I know it. That's my 10 questions, Adam. Maybe I should shut up and let you answer. What do we need do to? 11 Mr. Chairman, do we need a motion that says let's do something? I'd like to see us do 12 something. Maybe, Adam, you want to pass that to somebody else? 13 Mr. Howard: Rob (crosstalk) better answer. Ultimately, any changes to the policy would 14 need to be approved by Council. This is the part—staff could decide that we are going to 15 re-look at the policy, in which case a subcommittee of the Rec Commission would help 16 address the issues that we would be moving forward with. We could simply just look at 17 the tennis court policy. It doesn't have to be open to the entire policy. We can do that 18 with your direction. 19 Mr. de Geus: I think that is a good idea, Adam. I would have suggested something 20 similar. How we typically do this is a couple of Commissioners may volunteer to be on 21 an ad hoc committee to review the policy. If there's not a lot of changes, if it's generally 22 working pretty well, which I think it is, we can make revisions, bring it back to the 23 Commission for review, get a vote, bring it to Council for approval. You can make the 24 decision this evening to put an ad hoc committee together to work on that. I would 25 suggest we do that. 26 Commissioner McDougall: Mr. Chairman, rather than making more long speeches, I'd 27 like to volunteer to be on that ad hoc committee. 28 Commissioner Greenfield: I'd be happy to serve as well. 29 Chair Reckdahl: We can have a maximum of three on there. Are you interested? 30 Commissioner Cribbs: I guess I should be. 31 Chair Reckdahl: Are there any objections if Don, Anne, and Jeff are the ad hoc? 32 Male: No objection. 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 26 Chair Reckdahl: No objections. We now have an ad hoc. They will work offline, gather 1 the facts, and propose a change with staff. Then, we will come back, if not next month, 2 the month thereafter with a proposed change. That would have to be an action item. 3 Commissioner McDougall: Just a quick question. Why did you say not next month? 4 Are you just trying to be realistic or being … 5 Chair Reckdahl: If not next month. 6 Commissioner McDougall: If not next month. Sorry. 7 Ms. O'Kane: I wanted to add also that in addition to the policy regarding reserving the 8 courts, one thing that we're doing at the staff level is looking at whether we can have 9 dedicated pickleball courts or if we can stripe the tennis courts for both uses. We're 10 looking at that. We want to be careful as to what path we go and which courts we would 11 do that on. We are having those conversations and looking at that as well. 12 Commissioner McDougall: Thanks, Kristen. 13 Mr. Howard: Could I just quickly add? To be realistic in terms of timeline, once this can 14 opens, we will have a group of tennis players behind us that will be very vocal about their 15 fear of losing space or the perception that one sport is going to be chosen over another. I 16 think there will be quite a bit of need for public outreach on this in terms of both 17 pickleball and tennis. 18 Commissioner Cribbs: Is there something that you would recommend we would do from 19 the offset instead of just announcing that we're having an ad hoc committee to address the 20 idea of looking at the policies and be more inclusive about it? 21 Mr. Howard: I think that's correct. Part of the description for the ad hoc will be to get 22 public input from both sides, which result in public meetings and some brainstorming 23 into how we can make the policy work for both groups. Ultimately, that would be our 24 goal. 25 Commissioner Cribbs: I just want to be really careful that it doesn't look like we're going 26 in one direction, that we're seeking information from everybody so that it's fair to 27 everybody given changes in recreation these days. That's all, just the way we define 28 ourselves. 29 Vice Chair Moss: To follow up on that. Is it possible to do an experiment and let them 30 tomorrow start reserving as an experiment so that you use that data to come up with a 31 policy? 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 27 Mr. de Geus: We generally don't do that because that's an experiment outside of the 1 existing approved policy by Council. I don't think we would do that. 2 Commissioner McDougall: I like the word pilot. 3 Vice Chair Moss: Pilot, yes. 4 Commissioner McDougall: Since we were using that in the previous discussion. 5 Commissioner Greenfield: I was just going to add that it seems that the tennis court 6 policy has not evolved to the extent that the field use policy has. It seems altogether 7 appropriate to take a look just at the tennis court side of things in the interest of 8 expediency and moving forward more quickly and to leave the field use side as it is. 9 Commissioner LaMere: My only comment, everything was covered as far as the 10 pickleball and the field policy. My only comment would be with the event being held at 11 Cubberley field, we should be very cautious especially with the field crunch. That's all 12 I've heard about, how valuable our field space is to our recreation sports, our youth, and 13 everyone else who would like to use it. To lose field space for over 2 weeks, we just 14 need to be very sensitive to those issues and cautious about if this does set precedent or 15 how we move forward with some of the decision-making. 16 Chair Reckdahl: I have some questions about—was it Tom? Tom, can you come up 17 here? I have a couple of questions about the pickleball logistics. In particular I want to 18 know, if you wanted to reserve courts, how many tennis courts would you need at one 19 time? 20 Mr. Foladare: We would reserve courts 5, 6, and 7 at Mitchell Park, so it's only three 21 courts. These courts are lightly used because there's so much debris from the trees. 22 We've actually had to buy electric blowers and a set of brooms. We spend probably 23 about 3-4 man hours a week keeping them clean, which has brought the tennis players 24 back onto them, since they weren't using them previously. 25 Chair Reckdahl: These are the courts over by the Magical Bridge? 26 Mr. Foladare: Correct. 27 Chair Reckdahl: What do other cities do for pickleball? Does anyone around here 28 support pickleball? 29 Mr. Foladare: The City of Concord just put in 14 dedicated courts. The City of Santa 30 Cruz is about to put in four dedicated courts and four what we call blended line courts, 31 which are courts where they have the pickleball lines in specific colors so they're not 32 white and they don't bother the tennis players as much. Cambria, for example, just put in 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 28 six courts. Santa Rosa just put in eight courts. Visalia is at the end of construction for 1 eight courts. Eight courts actually fit on two tennis courts; that's why it's an eight, except 2 for Cambria because they started from scratch. 3 Chair Reckdahl: When you play pickleball, which direction is your net? Is it parallel 4 with the tennis net or is it perpendicular? 5 Mr. Foladare: It can be either way. We actually have court 5 as parallel, which is a little 6 bad because the courts are facing east-west. We have courts 6 and 7 facing north-south. 7 Chair Reckdahl: When you use it, you have two pickleball courts on every tennis court? 8 Mr. Foladare: No, we have four. 9 Chair Reckdahl: Four on every tennis court. 10 Mr. Foladare: Sixteen people. 11 Chair Reckdahl: Those three courts give you 12 pickleball courts? 12 Mr. Foladare: Yes. We currently have the capacity to have about 45 players playing 13 simultaneously. 14 Chair Reckdahl: If we restripe something—added pickleball stripes, you would be 15 bringing your own nets, and all we'd be doing is painting the surface? 16 Mr. Foladare: The City approved us putting a box outside the courts. We currently store 17 13 nets there. We've given all 200 of our members the combination to that box, which is 18 why there's so much open play during the week. 19 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Does anyone else have … 20 Mr. Foladare: Can I mention one thing? The outreach that I was talking about was 21 strictly to Palo Alto. 22 Chair Reckdahl: Does anyone have questions? 23 Mr. Foladare: We have failed to do that in the past. We're making amends. 24 Commissioner Greenfield: I have a question. What percentage of your organization is 25 Palo Alto residents? 26 Mr. Foladare: I don't have that exact number, but I'm guessing it's just 20 percent. 27 Again, we started with meet-up, and it just drew everybody. Now, we're looking at 28 DRAFT Draft Minutes 29 targeted programs to Palo Alto. The first one is the City-sponsored class on Tuesdays 1 and Thursdays, which has 25 people in each session. 2 Vice Chair Moss: What he said about competition with tennis players, it's only going to 3 get more heated. There should be a limit on the number of players. Even though you 4 want to increase the total number of people playing in the United States, the City of Palo 5 Alto has limited resources. We have this dance that we have to do. I don't know how to 6 solve it. 7 Mr. Foladare: The programs that we're really focused on are the senior program, which is 8 on Wednesday when the courts aren't being used during the day, and the homeschool 9 program, which will be during the afternoon when the courts aren't being used. That's 10 really where our focus is going to be this year. There are 2.5 million pickleball players in 11 the United States. We're not inviting them all in at the same time. 12 Commissioner LaMere: Just a quick question. How did the decision to use Mitchell Park 13 come about as opposed to any of the other parks that have tennis courts? 14 Mr. Foladare: When I first came up with the idea of the group, I was a paddle tennis 15 player. Mitchell Park has two paddle tennis courts. All my friends were getting old and 16 hurt, so we needed a sport that had less impact on their bodies. We just shifted them all 17 over to pickleball. As people walked by the courts, they all wanted to play. Eventually, 18 we had to go beg Adam to move us to a facility that could handle more than 14 people at 19 a time. 20 Commissioner Greenfield: I think the usage limitations will get—the question will get 21 answered when we establish brokering guidelines for the courts. 22 Chair Reckdahl: Adam, which tennis courts does the U.S.T.A. use? You mentioned that 23 earlier, and I didn't catch which are the major courts. 24 Mr. Howard: The most popular are Mitchell Park, Rinconada, Cubberley. Again, that's 25 the grouping of tennis courts have five, six, seven courts at a time, bathrooms, and 26 parking. 27 Mr. de Geus: I'm curious, to the gentleman at the mic, if there's any interest in indoor 28 facilities? We do have gymnasiums at Cubberley. I know that pickleball in Milpitas is 29 very popular indoors. Is that something that we could look at as well? 30 Mr. Foladare: Throughout the Bay Area, there are indoor games on a daily basis, Los 31 Altos, San Jose, Milpitas, Walnut Creek. There's probably about ten indoor facilities per 32 day. We can continue to add there. It's not part of our group. There's a larger concern 33 that deals with the indoor sport. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 30 Chair Reckdahl: Adam, we're talking about checking IDs right now. Don't we check IDs 1 on soccer fields? 2 Mr. Howard: We check residency by utility number. 3 Chair Reckdahl: When people put a team together, they list … 4 Mr. Howard: If it's a priority group—we only look at people claiming they're above 51 5 percent. They would provide their roster and the utility number of any Palo Alto 6 resident. 7 Chair Reckdahl: We don't go on the field and check? 8 Mr. Howard: No, we don't. 9 Chair Reckdahl: I know when we were planning, that was one of the things we wanted to 10 do, but that takes effort. 11 Mr. Howard: Yeah. It would be very difficult with one player showing up one night. 12 We would be chasing our tail at that point. 13 Chair Reckdahl: If we went to tennis brokering, would we do the same thing where you 14 have a roster of the tennis club? 15 Mr. Howard: We would have to do something similar if we're going to make residency 16 count. Right now, it's really about the team captain who is a resident or nonresident. 17 Chair Reckdahl: You have one team captain and everyone else can be out of—am I 18 right? 19 Mr. Howard: Correct. 20 Chair Reckdahl: The ad hoc can deal with that. We don't have to deal with that tonight. 21 Mr. Howard: That's part of the logistics of what we would need to figure out. 22 Chair Reckdahl: I do also want to compliment you. I get a lot of compliments. People 23 who work with field brokering are very happy. We do a good job here. The citizens get 24 their money's worth. Thank you. 25 Commissioner Greenfield: It's probably also worth pointing out the 51 percent number in 26 the policy applies to youth organizations and 35 percent is the number for adult 27 organizations. 28 DRAFT Draft Minutes 31 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. The ad hoc will get together and will work with staff and 1 do outreach as needed and come back eventually with a proposal. We'll move on. 2 4. Planning of Council/Parks and Recreation Commission Joint Study Session, 3 May 22nd, 7 p.m. 4 Chair Reckdahl: Next is planning for the joint study session. Kristen, you're up. 5 Mr. de Geus: I can kick this off if you like, Chair Reckdahl. 6 Chair Reckdahl: Please do. 7 Mr. de Geus: This is really a discussion for the Commission to have on what you want to 8 use the hour you have with the City Council, what you want to bring up. Typically in the 9 past, we do spend a little bit of time reflecting on the year past and what the Commission 10 has done and what the Commission is proud of. I know we have a number of new 11 Commissioners, but that's okay. I think it's important to do that, establish the relevance 12 of the Commission. We typically then will have a discussion—the Commission will—13 about the priorities that you see as a Commission for the year ahead. There's nine 14 Council Members, seven of you; we have an hour. It goes pretty quick. The presentation 15 should be brief in terms of the background. It's important, but then get to—three is 16 usually the maximum—somewhere between three and five topics that you really want to 17 get some feedback from the Council on. You'd want to talk about that here this evening. 18 You should also talk about—Commissions have done it differently between the HRC and 19 the Arts Commission and this Commission as it's changed—who speaks and who 20 presents. Sometimes all Commissioners would like to say something. Other times, just a 21 couple or the Chair takes the lead. These are decisions that you can make as a body, how 22 you want to handle that evening. 23 Chair Reckdahl: When is our retreat scheduled? 24 Mr. de Geus: It's in May. 25 Chair Reckdahl: May 19th, isn't it? 26 Ms. O'Kane: Friday, May 19th. 27 Commissioner Greenfield: Four days before. 28 Chair Reckdahl: Four days before. We can polish it up there? 29 Mr. de Geus: That's really timely too. You don't have to have it in the packet for the 30 Council necessarily or a major, formal presentation. Typically, we have a retreat earlier, 31 and that helps define what you're going to talk about. This will be right before, but … 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 32 Chair Reckdahl: We won't have much prep time, but we can … 1 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, you'll be ready. The other thing we do before is the Chair and the 2 Vice Chair meet with the Mayor and the Vice Mayor. You get a little bit of a sense from 3 the Council about what they're seeing as priorities as you prepare for it. It's May 22nd, 4 which will be an interesting evening because the Palo Alto Youth Council also has a 5 study session that same evening with the Council, and then we have the Parks Master 6 Plan going forward for feedback from the Council. It's a Community Services evening at 7 Council. 8 Chair Reckdahl: That is scheduled for the vote, the Master Plan? Or is (crosstalk) 9 Mr. de Geus: It's scheduled for action, not to approve the Plan. They're going to do that 10 over two meetings. This will be the first time that they see the whole Plan, give 11 feedback. Depending on the level of feedback they give, we'll do some tweaking to the 12 Plan and then come back once the CEQA's complete in June for final adoption before the 13 break. 14 Vice Chair Moss: When does the Chair and the Vice Chair meet with the Mayor and the 15 Vice Mayor? 16 Mr. de Geus: That's to be scheduled. 17 Vice Chair Moss: Is it before the … 18 Mr. de Geus: Yes. 19 Vice Chair Moss: … 22nd? 20 Mr. de Geus: It is. In the next couple of weeks. 21 Ms. O'Kane: I can help schedule that meeting. 22 Vice Chair Moss: I have some comments. Is that okay? 23 Chair Reckdahl: Go ahead, please. 24 Vice Chair Moss: I think that the most important thing is the passing of the Master Plan. 25 If we spend a significant amount of time in the session to do that, then we will be 26 shortchanging ourselves as far as what we do the rest of the year. I would suggest that 27 maybe we have an additional—we put on the calendar an additional breakout session. 28 Chair Reckdahl: My understanding is that this study session is not going to talk about the 29 Master Plan at all. Is that your understanding? 30 DRAFT Draft Minutes 33 Mr. de Geus: It's really up to the Commission what you want to do there. I would think 1 that you would want to say something because you spent so much time on it, particularly 2 this last year. Maybe it's part of that introduction and reflection on the year past, what 3 you've been able to accomplish with the Master Plan, that you're proud of your 4 accomplishment. I think that would be good as it leads into their review of the Plan later 5 that evening. As for spending a whole lot of time on it, it's probably not necessary unless 6 you think it is. I think you're all pretty supportive of it at this point. 7 Vice Chair Moss: I'd make a recommendation that the new Council Members spend time 8 understanding the Plan ahead of time rather than be going through it with a fine-toothed 9 comb in the session, which we did last time. Last time we spent a lot of time going 10 through it. Maybe this time we don't have the time to do that. I would think the best 11 benefit for the rest of the year is for people to decide what they want to spend their time 12 on. The Master Plan talks about 20 years' worth of stuff to do. We're not going to get it 13 all done in 1 year, so what do we work on. Some of the stuff is long term that we have to 14 get a start on. Some of the stuff is short term that we can just knock out in one year. It 15 takes the initiative of us so, if we're interested in something, we should come prepared to 16 talk about what's interesting for us and then decide what are the low-hanging fruit we can 17 knock out this year and what are the things we have to start now that aren't going to get 18 done for 10 years. 19 Chair Reckdahl: Any other comments? 20 Commissioner McDougall: Kristen, I mentioned what the Library Commission does. 21 They have this buddy system. I always thought the name was awful. This might be an 22 opportunity to do exactly what we were talking about. Between now and the 22nd, every 23 one of us identify one of the Council Members and simply sit down with them and the 24 Parks Master Plan on a one-on-one at least to gauge their interest. Some of them, I think, 25 will be very interested. Some of them may not be. We'd be able to identify what 26 questions so we don't have to make that meeting. When I listened to Rob say what you 27 do in that hour, my reaction is you've got the Baylands and the Foothills. You've got the 28 big things, and then you've got the parks, which is really a big emotional thing. Then, 29 you've got all the recreation activities. I would say you need to find a way to divide it up, 30 a third, a third, a third, between those things relative to near-term things that we would 31 like to see done—the pickleball thing or the recreation or whatever it is—and not spend a 32 lot of time on a 20-year Plan. Just assign us to identify a buddy and go get them up to 33 speed, which would mean each of us, the new people like myself, have to put effort into 34 being an advocate for the Plan as it is. That's goodness, not badness. 35 Chair Reckdahl: I think Council input is very valuable; whereas, it's very nebulous. For 36 example, what to do with the—what is it? How many acres is up … 37 Commissioner McDougall: Seven and a half. 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 34 Chair Reckdahl: 7.7 acres, thank you. Or the 10.2 acres down by the Baylands. Those 1 right now—we don't have concrete plans of what we want to do. Having some input 2 from Council could actually be useful. The other option is just go through that—we do 3 have a very concise action plan in the Master Plan. Maybe that's the best route. That 4 contains some of these things that are nebulous, but we also put a lot of thought into that. 5 Maybe that would be the appropriate vehicle to talk through. In the past, when we've 6 presented things to Council, they've always been—we'll present for 20 minutes, and then 7 the Council will go on and on and on. We can hardly get a word in edgewise. We get 8 our pitch at the beginning and then, at that point, we just listen, which is probably the 9 good thing to do because they're the ones who eventually have to vote on anything that 10 we approve. We don't want to put—if it's something they don't want, we don't want to 11 spend our time making something that will not be accepted. 12 Commissioner Cribbs: I think that's right. We're all interested in, after all the work on 13 the Master Plan, seeing it move forward when we get the required studies that are coming 14 in. I'm particularly interested in what the Council's reaction is going to be to the Master 15 Plan and what they think is important. At the end of the day, as you've said, they're the 16 ones that are going to make the decision. After all, it's just our recommendation. The 17 only thing, Don, I would say to your comment, which I thought was really excellent, was 18 I would very much like to include Cubberley as one of those big things that should be on 19 our horizon. The two open space plots, to do something about those, and the big deal 20 with Cubberley. 21 Commissioner McDougall: Yeah, there was actually just a long letter to the editor 22 relative to Cubberley. 23 Chair Reckdahl: What is the status? There was a separate group that was looking at 24 Cubberley between the School District and the City. Wasn't there some … 25 Mr. de Geus: I think you're referring to the Cubberley Community Advisory Committee. 26 The CCAC, a few years ago, met for a year and a half and put together … 27 Chair Reckdahl: They've been disbanded now. 28 Mr. de Geus: They've been disbanded now. Staff have been working with the School 29 District staff to try and define a scope of services to get some consultant support for 30 design services. We're getting closer to that. We have a draft. We hope to be able to 31 present that to the City/School Liaison Committee meeting next month. Kristen was at 32 the meeting last week with our City Manager, Jim Keene, and Max McGee, 33 Superintendent, to talk about Cubberley. Did you want to add anything? 34 Ms. O'Kane: It was really—our meeting last week really was to check in and just 35 reaffirm that we're going to proceed jointly on Master Planning the Cubberley site. I 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 35 think we got that reassurance from both the City and the School District. We are going to 1 move forward and look at the site together, considering that the City has 8 acres and the 2 School District has 27 acres. We really reaffirmed that. Like Rob said, we have a scope 3 of work that we would like to proceed with an RFP soon to get a consultant to help us 4 with that Master Planning effort. We're going to go back to the City/School Liaison 5 Committee next month to just give them an update on that. 6 Chair Reckdahl: What is the scope of that? We have Cubberley; we have Greendell. 7 There's another property that this School District owns. This would just be looking at the 8 Cubberley portion and not those other two properties. 9 Ms. O'Kane: At the moment, we're thinking that it would be the 35 acres of Cubberley, 10 which is the fields, the tennis courts, the buildings, the 8 acres the City owns, and then 11 the 27 acres that the School District owns. That doesn't include Greendell. 12 Vice Chair Moss: It's not only Greendell, but also that Athena property is also, I think, 13 part of the school. It goes all the way over to … 14 Chair Reckdahl: San Antonio. 15 Vice Chair Moss: … San Antonio. My hot button is more land, more parks. In this 20-16 year Plan, as you can see just by this audience that was here, there's a lot of need for 17 every aspect of our parks. If I had a legacy, it would be to have another park. It could be 18 taking the Fry's property and building 1,000 homes on it but also a park or it could be 19 something more with Cubberley where you take away some of the buildings and make 20 them two stories or three stories, and you put parkland and fields instead of the sprawling 21 one-story buildings and massive, massive parking lots. If we could talk about 22 opportunities to expand the land now, because there won't be any 20 years. It's one of 23 those things you would have to start working on now. 24 Commissioner Cribbs: If I could, I would like to go back specifically to Cubberley and 25 just say would it be useful for all of us to have some very factual—a short presentation 26 about Cubberley, where it came from, how many acres there are. For the Commissioners, 27 yeah. I think there's a lot of assumptions of how much land do we really have, who's in 28 charge of that land, what's the timeline, what did that committee do that met 2 or 3 years 29 ago, that we're kind of not sure what happened to it. Going forward for the future, how 30 can we make something happen there? What's our role in doing that? What's the 31 community's role? What's the staff role? What's the combination between the City and 32 the School District? That's what I would love to see us have on a regular basis if that's 33 possible as things develop. Thank you very much. 34 Mr. de Geus: That's a good idea. 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 36 Commissioner McDougall: Including the residency, both temporary and permanent 1 residency that's there. 2 Mr. de Geus: Cubberley alone, we could spend an hour on with the Council. 3 Commissioner Moss' point about land acquisition, which is a really good one, is another 4 really big topic and could take an hour or so. We have to think … 5 Chair Reckdahl: I don't want to bite off more than we can chew. Right now, with the 6 Master Plan coming forward, I would rather have them go through the Master Plan items 7 and maybe give them short shrift. We won't have enough time to go deep but overview 8 what we talked about. 9 Mr. de Geus: See what resonates with them. We've got dog parks; we know that's a hot 10 issue. People want to see more of them. We also know when you start trying to do those 11 dog parks in parks, people generally don't want to see them in their community parks. 12 That's just getting a read on Council's real support for that, if we want to push that along. 13 Bathrooms is another example, where clearly in the Master Plan people want to see more 14 bathrooms in parks. Again, when you add them at a local level, there's definitely some 15 push back. I heard from a resident today that I talked to for half an hour about Seale Park 16 and how that's been the worst thing he believes for the community. He lives right by 17 there, and it's just, he feels like, a lot more use of the park, a lot more parking, people 18 don't leave. It's been a real problem. 19 Chair Reckdahl: If that's the worst problem, that the park is being used, then … 20 Mr. de Geus: I did explain that. I also appreciate where it was coming from. That could 21 be another approach, hit a few of the high-level things we know are important to the 22 Commission, and then see where the Council wants to take it. Staff can also help by just 23 preparing a memo based on some of this feedback that we heard. One thing I didn't 24 understand was about the open space. We have big open space properties in the Baylands 25 and up in the hills. What was the topic for Council as a discussion point for the study 26 session? I didn't understand that. 27 Chair Reckdahl: What was that for? 28 Mr. de Geus: Someone mentioned … 29 Commissioner McDougall: The ITT property? 30 Mr. de Geus: No, it wasn't that, I didn't think. Maybe I misunderstood it, but I … 31 Chair Reckdahl: Tonight this was or this was a previous … 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 37 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, as a topic for Council at the study session. I heard open space as just 1 a topic. 2 Commissioner McDougall: I said there were three things. One was the open space, one 3 was the parks, and the other is recreation as the three umbrellas. Then specifically 4 Cubberley became a fourth. My question was whether you said there was a separate 5 session on the Master Plan later that same evening. 6 Mr. de Geus: Yes. It's a regular Council meeting that evening. After the study sessions 7 are finished, they move into their Consent Calendar and then action. The first action item 8 is the Parks Master Plan. 9 Commissioner McDougall: Would we be redundant if we used our first hour and then … 10 Chair Reckdahl: That was my initial impression. We would be redundant if we dealt 11 with the Master Plan in the first. If you're trying to keep them from getting distracted, 12 maybe we should just do that, all Master Plan all the time until it's approved. This would 13 be a chance—there's more dialog going on. It's a more informal setting. Maybe we 14 could be more useful by having two types of interface with this Council. One with the 15 Master Plan in the working meeting, and then one in the Council. 16 Mr. de Geus: I think that's right. They're very intertwined. The Master Plan is 17 comprehensive of parks, open space, and recreation programs. The things that you're 18 going to bring up that are important, they're hopefully listed in the Master Plan as key 19 priorities. Land acquisition is certainly in there; Cubberley is in there, some of the other 20 things we talked about. 21 Commissioner Greenfield: I would advocate for picking three or four key topics that are 22 near and dear to us that we want to push and really focus on those in our time with 23 Council. To an extent, I feel like the study session is ours to direct to a certain extent. 24 When Council hits the Master Plan on their agenda, they're going to have their own 25 agenda to address there. Most likely, I would hope, whatever we're discussing as our 26 priorities is our key issues within the Master Plan anyway. We're really just emphasizing 27 key sections of the Master Plan that we're looking to act on and get direction for this year. 28 Commissioner McDougall: Here are the four things we're interested in and, oh by the 29 way, they're on pages 7, 24, and 48 of the Master Plan. 30 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. 31 Commissioner McCauley: The other thing I would add is that I think we should 32 definitely think about things that are a little bit more immediate term, just given the 33 nature of the fact that the Master Plan is long-range planning. Staff knows this better 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 38 than we do, but just from reading the newspaper I imagine the Council is a little bit 1 fatigued with some of the Master Plan discussions. I think they'd probably appreciate 2 talking about the here and now a little bit as well. 3 Commissioner McDougall: You're suggesting we should relate our whole conversation 4 to the Comprehensive Plan discussion. 5 Commissioner Greenfield: One thing that I'll throw out now that I hope to cover in more 6 detail during our retreat is what's kind of low-hanging fruit in this year where budget 7 surpluses are at a premium. If we can look to dedicate park space that isn't currently 8 dedicated, that's a very cost-effective use of time and could be a good priority to focus 9 on. 10 Chair Reckdahl: I mentioned this when I was talking with Kristen when we were doing 11 the agenda. Maybe this is good for the retreat. I would like a 10-minute explanation of 12 what does it mean to dedicate parkland, what does it prohibit, and how hard is it to undo. 13 Commissioner Cribbs: That's good. That's very good. 14 Chair Reckdahl: In one of our study sessions, they were talking about having a second 15 category of park-like land that wasn't really dedicated but still had recreation 16 opportunities and why would you not want to dedicate that. We should talk about that at 17 the retreat. That would be a good … I'm not sure, and I'm sure the newer members are 18 even more cloudy than me. 19 Mr. de Geus: We certainly can do that. We can send it out in advance so that you can 20 read it. If it's unclear, then we can talk, just for efficiency. 21 Chair Reckdahl: You're talking about dedicating land. The other thing is even if it's not 22 dedicated, as long as it's available for recreation, that's the biggest thing from our point of 23 view. To me, whether it's dedicate or not is kind of a check mark. 24 Commissioner Greenfield: What I'm talking about is there are parklands that are 25 functionally in use now, but they're not locked in, to go through the process to make sure 26 they are properly dedicated as parkland so they are locked in for that use. 27 Chair Reckdahl: What kind of properties are you talking about? 28 Mr. de Geus: An example would be—there are several actually. We have a list; Emily 29 Renzel helped us put it together. We had our own list as well. The community gardens, 30 big pieces of land, not dedicated parkland, could we bring that forward and dedicate it? 31 Even some tennis courts in town are not dedicated parkland as well. The Winter Lodge is 32 another example, which was swapped for parkland at the time when the Lodge was saved 33 by the community, but it's not dedicated parkland. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 39 Chair Reckdahl: This was brought up at one of the study sessions, Winter Lodge 1 specifically. What I don't know is should I be for incorporating the Winter Lodge into 2 parks or not. I don't know the tradeoffs on that. 3 Mr. de Geus: That's a fair question. We can send you the information related to what it 4 means if it is dedicated parkland and what restrictions are on there. We'll do that. 5 Chair Reckdahl: Maybe the action then for the retreat is everyone look through the 6 Master Plan, especially the section where we list our greatest hits, the highest priority 7 items, and then say this long list of 20 items or whatever, if you had to talk about two or 8 three or four at the Council, which ones would you want to see. We can discuss that at 9 the retreat and come to consensus of what material we want covered. 10 Vice Chair Moss: I'm available if anybody wants to talk about the Plan or walk through 11 the Plan. I'm available. 12 Commissioner McCauley: I have one other question. I think this was raised quickly at 13 the last meeting. We're going to have, I think, as it's scheduled, three meetings in quick 14 succession, the retreat, the study session with the Council, and then, I think, the next 15 night there's another meeting. I'm a little worried about fatigue within our Commission 16 and/or the staff who we'd be dragging along for all of that time period. I think we 17 probably have to make a decision if we're going to cancel the regular meeting on the 18 23rd. We have to do that, I presume, sooner rather than later. I think we should 19 definitely discuss that, whether or not we should go ahead and cancel the meeting on the 20 23rd. 21 Chair Reckdahl: Obviously, the first two we don't have control over. We want the 22 retreat, and we have the study session. Do we want the meeting on Tuesday after our 23 study session? 24 Ms. O'Kane: I would recommend that, if the decision was to not have it on that Tuesday, 25 possibly to reschedule it as opposed to cancel it. For our May meeting, the agenda is 26 getting full. If we cancel it completely, June is going to be really full. 27 Chair Reckdahl: Should we bump it 1 week? 28 Commissioner McCauley: That's fine by me as well. I just think having three meetings 29 in 4 days or whatever it might be (crosstalk). 30 Chair Reckdahl: Can Tanya send out a Doodle poll—considering how hard it was to find 31 the open time for the retreat—and see if there's another week, whether it be the following 32 Tuesday or whatever, that we could have our special meeting? 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 40 Vice Chair Moss: I'd like to recommend that we leave it just the way it is and promise 1 not to do it again. This hasn't happened before, and it probably won't happen again. This 2 is an extraordinary month, and it might be better just to keep the meetings the way they 3 are and spend the time, even though it is exhausting, knowing it won't happen again 4 probably. 5 Chair Reckdahl: I'm more concerned about staff. Will you have the resources to support 6 all three? 7 Mr. de Geus: We're sort of thinking the same thing, not about the impact on staff but 8 make sure we have a productive meeting. If we have a retreat and then a Council study 9 session, to be ready then to have a productive discussion about those, it's helpful to have 10 a little bit of time in-between so we can think through what was said, where the themes 11 are. I think a little delay would be better, more productive if it works for the 12 Commission. If it doesn't, then we can go forth. 13 Commissioner Cribbs: That would be moving to the 30th of May? Is that what we're 14 thinking? 15 Commissioner Greenfield: I would like to support what Kristen said. If we do not hold 16 the meeting as scheduled, we reschedule it. We got a late enough start as it was this year. 17 Chair Reckdahl: I agree with that. 18 Commissioner McCauley: I think everyone's on board with that idea. I think it's just the 19 question of moving it to the 30th. Is that a date that works for staff? 20 Chair Reckdahl: The good news is there wouldn't be any conflicts with other meetings 21 then, because they're usually in the first four. The fifth Tuesday would not have a 22 meeting on top of it. 23 Ms. O'Kane: It could be the 30th. It doesn't have to be on a Tuesday. It could be … 24 Commissioner McDougall: Do we need a motion? 25 Chair Reckdahl: I don't think we need a motion. Do people know if they're available on 26 the 30th? 27 Ms. O'Kane: It's the day after Memorial Day, just to remind everyone. We can send out 28 a poll; Tanya could do that for that week and see if Tuesday, Wednesday or even 29 Thursday would work. 30 Chair Reckdahl: Let's set on the poll. Let's try to include the 30th. I think that's a good 31 option. If we don't have consensus, we will just keep it as is. If we can find a date. 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 41 Mr. de Geus: Can I suggest that the review of the implementation chapter of the Master 1 Plan happen more quickly, if the Commission can do that? Even within a week, it's not 2 that big of a read and you've probably already looked at it. It would be helpful to have 3 that feedback a couple of weeks before the retreat, as we prepare for the retreat and also if 4 you're meeting with the Mayor and Vice Mayor, that you have some of the feedback from 5 other Commissioners. 6 Chair Reckdahl: They would email Kristen then with their opinions of what are the 7 topics that they'd want to talk … 8 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, the top three as they read through the implementation chapter. 9 Mr. de Geus: When you meet with the Mayor and Vice Mayor, you want to go in saying, 10 "We're proposing to do this. What do you think?" If you go in saying, "What do you 11 think," you're not going to get a good—they won't have had the opportunity to really 12 anticipate a good answer to that. They won't have the background. 13 Chair Reckdahl: Graduation is the week of the 30th, so that's going to be a busy week. 14 We'll send out a Doodle poll, and we'll find out. I think 30th will not work. I think 15 there's going to be a lot of constraints with graduation. 16 Commissioner Cribbs: Is the most recent copy of the Master Plan posted online now or 17 has there been another update? 18 Ms. O'Kane: There has been another update. We had an editor look at it just to correct 19 some inconsistencies and make sure the grammar was correct and everything. We also 20 made some changes based on our last Council study session. I can send out that version. 21 You probably won't notice much difference. I can also point out the changes that were 22 made, that were in response to Council comments to help guide your review, if you'd 23 like. 24 Chair Reckdahl: It is really looking nice compared to a year or 2 ago. 25 Commissioner Cribbs: It's looking great. 26 Chair Reckdahl: This is really good. 27 Commissioner McDougall: Are hard copies available? 28 Ms. O'Kane: We can make hard copies. If anyone would like one, just let me know. We 29 can either mail it or you can pick it up at one of our centers or here. 30 Commissioner Cribbs: I'll pick it up. 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 42 Commissioner LaMere: Is the Council set to vote on the Master Plan or they're just 1 reviewing it at this next meeting? What's the process for them to approve it? 2 Commissioner McDougall: That's a two-step process. This one is the first review of the 3 full Master Plan. It will be an action item, so they can make motions to amend it, change 4 it. We will go back and do that, and then final approval in June. We'll come back to 5 them, another action item, make sure we captured their input in the way they had hoped, 6 and then approval that same night. 7 Commissioner LaMere: During their review, that's open to public comment as well. 8 Will they also ask questions of Commissioner Reckdahl or somebody on the Commission 9 if they want clarity on something within the Master Plan during that meeting? 10 Mr. de Geus: Yeah, they might do. We, in the past, have always had the Chair there to 11 represent the Commission. Good question. 12 Ms. O'Kane: We will be there as well. We'll be giving them a presentation first. 13 Chair Reckdahl: Coming out of this, we have two actions. One, people should look 14 through the Master Plan and give their recommendations to Kristen. We'll get a Doodle 15 poll out to see whether we want to move that meeting that's currently scheduled for the 16 23rd. 17 Commissioner McDougall: Is it reasonable to pick a date that we need to give an answer 18 back on our priorities? 19 Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. I would say just in spring. Do you want to say 2 weeks, 2 weeks 20 from today? What date is that? Whatever date 2 weeks from today is. 21 Ms. O'Kane: It's May 9th. 22 Chair Reckdahl: Is that it then? We'll move on to the next. 23 5. Other Ad Hoc Committee and Liaison Updates 24 Chair Reckdahl: Ad hoc committee and liaison updates. Do we have any ad hocs? 25 Vice Chair Moss: I had an opportunity to meet with Rich Green, who's the head of the 26 Palo Alto Historical Association about the ITT property. He would like to bring in a film 27 crew to go through the building with a couple of old timers from the ham radio club to go 28 and say this is what this was used for and this is what this was used for and this is what 29 the building was used for and get it on video. I don't know when it's due to be dedicated. 30 Do you know? 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 43 Mr. Anderson: It's coming up. I'm submitting the staff report to Council soon. 1 Vice Chair Moss: It has, as you know, been vandalized and is getting rundown. He 2 wanted to get somebody in there to do it one more time and then decide what we want to 3 do with that property, once it's dedicated. Do we save the building or do we level it and 4 put another building in its place or do we put no buildings and just put plaques to tell the 5 story? That kind of thing. That's one thing. The other is that we had a discussion about 6 closing a loophole as far as how you determine a resident who wants to get into Foothills 7 Park. It says in the fine print that a resident is somebody in your household or a blood 8 relative. It's sometimes difficult for somebody who's away from the house to prove that 9 they are still a resident of that house. I hope that we can continue to come up with an 10 alternative for how you show residency. 11 Chair Reckdahl: I thought you just used either a utility bill or your license. 12 Vice Chair Moss: The child would use the utility bill of the parent. 13 Chair Reckdahl: This is a kid. If a minor shows up there by themselves? 14 Vice Chair Moss: Yeah, especially if their driver's license doesn't show the house 15 because they're at school or they're living in San Diego. They're still a resident if the 16 family still lives in the house. It's complicated 17 Mr. de Geus: It's not something that happens a lot, but it does happen. There is a bit of a 18 loophole here that we're working on. We're aware of this. My interest is any young 19 person that is away at college is still considered a resident of the family that's living here 20 in Palo Alto. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to get access to the park. 21 We want to be sure we're not putting our rangers in a difficult spot, though, in making 22 that judgment. We want to be sure they have some kind of ID that allows the ranger to 23 allow them to come in. We're working on a way to make that simpler for that particular 24 age group. 25 Vice Chair Moss: That's all I have. 26 Chair Reckdahl: Maybe in future meetings we will have an ad hoc for pickleball or I 27 should say tennis court reservations ad hoc. 28 V. DEPARTMENT REPORT 29 Chair Reckdahl: Department Report. 30 Ms. O'Kane: I just have a couple of things. If you look at the calendar that's in your 31 pack, we do have in May—again the May Fete Parade is coming up. Just a reminder, if 32 DRAFT Draft Minutes 44 you would like to participate in the parade as a VIP, let Tanya or me know, and we'll 1 make sure that you're all set up for that. 2 Chair Reckdahl: Everyone is encouraged. Last year, even the Library Board beat us. 3 Can't let that happen this year. If you can make it, please make it. 4 Ms. O'Kane: I wanted to turn it over to Daren. He is going to provide an update on our 5 water conservation practices. 6 Mr. Anderson: Thank you, Kristen. Daren Anderson, Open Space, Parks, and Golf. As 7 you know or may not know for the new Commissioners, we've been working on water 8 conservation since the drought was declared rather seriously, looking at every irrigated 9 area that we control and systematically looking at where we could dial back irrigation, 10 swap over turf to native landscaping and put it on drip or go to mulched areas or more 11 recycled water. Those were our efforts, and they resulted in significant savings. We 12 realized 37.5 percent relative to our 2013 use. Most recently on April 7th of this year, 13 Governor Brown declared an end to the drought. The question was what does that mean 14 for our endeavors to conserve water. They're going to remain by and large the same. 15 We'll no longer have the imposed requirement of a certain percentage. Now, it's a 16 voluntary 10 percent imposed by our water supplier; that's the San Francisco Public 17 Utilities Commission. As a City, we're still obligated to enforce the permanent water use 18 restrictions around wasteful practices like leaks, runoff, irrigating during or immediately 19 following rain events, things like that. We'll do that in perpetuity. We're also being just 20 good stewards of the land, particularly in open space and park areas. We'll continue 21 those endeavors we've been doing. In fact, currently we're at 35 percent compared to the 22 2013 numbers. We're still on track to vastly exceed that 10 percent voluntary goal. 23 Citywide, we're at 24.1 percent savings. Even excluding the open space, parks, and golf, 24 we're still doing pretty well. Specifically one of the things we're doing … 25 Chair Reckdahl: (crosstalk) by Citywide, you mean the community or the government? 26 Mr. Anderson: All water use in the City, 24.1 percent savings. Where are we going with 27 water conservation, what's coming? Like I said, we're going to continue those things 28 we're doing. One of the big endeavors is to increase our use of recycled water. There's 29 two big pushes. One is at the golf course we converted to a turf type and the size of our 30 course now that allows us to use almost 100 percent recycled water on all the fairways 31 and tees. The greens will still be potable, but everything else recycled. Before we had to 32 do a split because the turf type couldn't accommodate that level of salt that comes with 33 the recycled water. That will be a significant savings. We also ramped up the amount of 34 recycled water we use at Greer and Baylands Athletic Center, the two other sites that use 35 recycled water. We are not seeing any impact on the turf or vegetation, which is great. 36 Concurrent with that move was an endeavor by the water quality staff to bring down the 37 TDS, the total dissolved solids, which are your salts in that recycled water. They've done 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 45 repairs to lines where they've limited the intrusion of the Bay water into that recycled 1 water line, which in turn just makes it cleaner and more usable by different palettes of 2 vegetation. Our parks are doing well with that. The other big future endeavor with 3 recycled water is extending that line to the Stanford Research Park. I talked to Public 4 Works today about where they're at in that project. They've completed an EIR of 5 extending that water system. The next step in that process is to do a business plan and 6 preliminary design. It's about a $30 million project. The business plan will analyze is it 7 sustainable financially. They're also exploring grants, loans, and other things in that 8 business plan. The important part for the Commission to know is as they extend that line 9 up to Stanford business park, they'll be branching off. We don't know exactly what the 10 distance limit will be, but to hit parks along the way with recycled water, which will be 11 great, mainly in south Palo Alto, it seems according to Public Works, but I'll know more 12 as the project moves forward on how many parks could be switched over to recycled. In 13 about the next 6 months, they hope to have that business plan and the preliminary design 14 done to see if they can progress to a full design. Hopefully, more information on that to 15 come. A couple of other things we're doing right now and will continue to do so. I 16 mentioned converting passive turf to native landscaping. We're kind of tying in an 17 element of the Parks Master Plan, which was to create pollinator pathways. Right now, 18 we've just converted—some of these are smaller pockets but still pockets of irrigated, 19 ornamental turf to landscaping especially relative to either monarch butterflies, where 20 you've got the milkweed and other species that are helpful to the pollinators. We just did 21 this area on Embarcadero near Primrose. We had a volunteer help us, supported by our 22 staff to convert that. It turned out beautiful. She got 100 percent buy-in from residents in 23 the area. Other people are coming up to her and saying, "We'd like to do that in our 24 neighborhood or at our church." It seems to be spreading; it's really exciting. Concurrent 25 with that, we're also trying to—we have a new plan to try to get milkweed in every single 26 one of our parks. You've got these monarch stations, if you will, where monarch 27 butterflies can have habitat all around our areas. Another good example is a pilot project 28 at Hoover Park called a rain garden. We've put rain barrels all around—not all around 29 but in strategic spots around the restroom. That rain barrel will feed a small area that was 30 once turf and now is native landscaping. We put milkweed there too. Some exciting 31 stuff coming. I think we're going to continue the effort to save water, be good land 32 stewards. I'll report back when I know more regarding the recycled water line. 33 Chair Reckdahl: When we talked about this last year, there were some areas where it was 34 a slam dunk. Under some trees, we said there's no reason to have irrigated turf under 35 there; let's mulch that and bring that back. There were some areas where we worried 36 about turf or there was currently water that we worried about the trees being stressed. 37 Are any of those trees being stressed, and have we had to go back and water those? 38 Mr. Anderson: Yes. There were issues where we were obligated to cut water. There 39 wasn't a choice. We tried to take a thoughtful, sensitive approach specific to trees. In 40 DRAFT Draft Minutes 46 some areas, we pushed them, and stressed them out a little bit. We've come back and 1 changed that. Those are being irrigated. I can't think of any specific examples off the top 2 of my head, but it did happen. 3 Chair Reckdahl: Down by the Baylands Athletic Center, there were some areas where 4 we cut off, and there were trees there along the—which probably we cut down with the 5 new project anyway. The bottom line is that the trees in the parks—there's no areas 6 where we feel they're stressed out now. They're being … 7 Mr. Anderson: We're not going to restrict water to any areas that need it for trees or any 8 other sensitive species. The obligation now is to really look for places with very little 9 impact to any sort of vegetation other than passive turf. 10 Chair Reckdahl: Thank you. Does anyone have questions for Daren? Daren did a very 11 nice job. It was about a year ago. It's in the notes on the agendas. Maps of all the 12 different parks and what areas were being cut back. If you're worried about water use, 13 that's one are to look at. 14 Vice Chair Moss: Do we have any update on dog parks, Pardee and the other one? 15 Mr. Anderson: We're in the process right now. The ad hoc met with me and was very 16 helpful in discussing next steps. We decided to move forward with preliminary design 17 for Peers Park. It's in process right now. I saw an early draft. We had some edits. As 18 soon as I get this back probably in a couple of days, I'll be setting up a meeting with our 19 ad hoc members and keep working on it. I think we're going to drive this one forward. 20 VI. COMMENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 21 Chair Reckdahl: Comments and Announcements. Do you have any? We're all set. 22 VII. TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR MAY 23, 2017 MEETING 23 Chair Reckdahl: We'll move on to agenda for May 23rd. 24 Ms. O'Kane: Right now, we have Buckeye Creek hydrology study will come back, the 25 Junior Museum and Zoo as well as an update on aquatics. Those are the three items so 26 far. Like I said, our agenda is getting a little full. If it gets too full, we can move 27 Buckeye Creek probably to June. 28 Chair Reckdahl: The other things I had on were—I guess the PIO for the solar panels 29 will not be next month. That's been bumped. 30 Ms. O'Kane: That'll be June. 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 47 Chair Reckdahl: The dog park approval might be next month? 1 Ms. O'Kane: It may be or at least information on … 2 Chair Reckdahl: The ITT dedication, that might … 3 Ms. O'Kane: That's doesn't need to come back to the Commission. 4 Chair Reckdahl: That doesn't have to come back, just straight to Council. 5 Vice Chair Moss: What about AT&T property? Can we have an update on that in a 6 couple of weeks? 7 Ms. O'Kane: I can give you a very brief update right now. I think at the last meeting I 8 may have reported that AT&T had submitted their application for the lot line adjustment. 9 That actually was not correct. They didn't submit the application. They were asking for 10 a meeting to talk about submitting their application. The application has not formally 11 been submitted yet to the City. They have submitted what the lot line adjustment would 12 look like and some lot—there's different parcels within that property that would be 13 combined, and then the lot line would be adjusted. They've shared those, and the 14 conversations are starting. We're doing a little bit of research on our park impact 15 development fees and our parkland dedication fees, so that we can present some 16 information to the City Manager to just inform him that this is the background of this 17 property, this is the status. If Council were to make the decision to purchase it, these are 18 potential funds for it. We're looking into that just to make sure we have the right 19 information. We'll get that memo over to the City Manager. 20 Vice Chair Moss: Is there any update on the Fry's property that's next door as far as 21 being able to use some of their funding for that? 22 Ms. O'Kane: I'm not familiar with the Fry's property development. I don't know if you 23 are, Rob. 24 Mr. de Geus: I'm somewhat familiar, but I don't have any information on it now. We can 25 look into that a little further and report back. 26 Chair Reckdahl: Jeff. We'll take a pass. Unless anyone has anything else, we have 27 adjournment. 28 VIII. ADJOURNMENT 29 Meeting adjourned on motion by Commissioner McDougall and second by 30 Commissioner Cribbs at 9:30 p.m. 31