HomeMy WebLinkAbout2018-05-30 Planning & transportation commission Summary Minutes_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Planning & Transportation Commission
Action Agenda: May 30, 2018
Council Chambers
250 Hamilton Avenue
6:00 PM
Call to Order / Roll Call
6:05pm
Chair Lauing: Ok good evening. I’d like to call to order the May 30th Planning and Transportation
Commission meeting and please ask role to be called? Ok, thank you.
Oral Communications
The public may speak to any item not on the agenda. Three (3) minutes per speaker.1,2
Chair Lauing: Are there any speaker cards for oral communications on items not on our agenda?
You have one coming. OK is (interrupted)
Mr. Jonathan Lait, Assistant Director of Planning: Item One.
Chair Lauing: That’s for Item One.
[Commission moved to Item Three of the agenda]
Mr. Weiss: How much time is oral communications, two minutes or three minutes?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Chair Lauing: You can do three for oral communications. So just one second, if we’re going to
do this then we’ll let the Assistant Director’s report before we can get to the first item on the
agenda.
Mr. Weiss: This is oral communications but it’s not about the… your agenda item.
Mr. Lait: So oral… this gentleman would like to speak under oral communications for 3-minutes.
That’s proceeds the Director’s Report so I would suggest that we have that opportunity now.
Chair Lauing: Ok.
Mr. Lait: Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Thanks for sorting. Go ahead.
Mr. Weiss: One of my brief professional stents was in management of a semi-pro soccer team
in Palo Alto called the Palo Alto Firebirds. My name is Mark Weiss and I live at 169 Bryant. And
for example, we have a complex relationship with Stanford and a wonderful relationship. And
Stanford in 1994 was a co-host of the World Cup Soccer Tournament which is one of the
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
world’s largest sporting events. In fact, a man named William Morrison was recently an
applicant for the Human Relations Commission and part of his resume which is a public
document is that he was the Protocol Chief and I think he spoke about that at his interview with
Council. And I remember going just as a fan for the 1994 World Cup at Stanford, for example 4th
of July it was USA vs. Brazil and we lost two to nothing. But I mean it’s sports but it has like the
world watches Palo Alto and Palo Alto is you know for… a town of 60,000 we have a world-wide
importance in that we’re the birthplace of a lot of high tech firms, we have a wonderful
University with great public schools, and people pay attention to real estate transactions here;
even they make the Wall Street Journal. I mean so a lot of what we do as Commissions and
Boards it isn’t just to self-govern and provide the greatest experience for the people who live
here but other Cities nearby and far away and farfetched. And even worldwide they kind of look
to us as sort of beacons of democracy and epitomizing the role in what the average person can
do and what a Commissioner can do and what an Elected Official can do. So, I just… I’ve
always… for about 10-years I’ve been very profoundly influenced by the role of people like you
and leaders and Board Members and Commissioners and our Elected Officials. So, what made
me think about soccer is not just that there’s another World Cup coming, it’s every 4-years, it’s
a pretty big tournament, US is not in this year but there’s 32 other teams. And 535 Bryant
Street has a new café called Tuts, T-u-T-s, or Tuts and it’s run by a… I’m sorry if these ideas
seem disconnected but I don’t mean to bore you or waste your time. But there’s a very famous
soccer play from Turkey named Hakan Sukur, H-a-k-a-n S-u-k-u-r, and he was actually an
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Elected Official in his county after he retired from soccer. And he was this [unintelligible] of the
2002 World Cup for his country and he runs… he’s a businessman, entrepreneur, and a believe
a resident. And so, he helps run this café and like a that the Old Pro there will be a lot of people
watching the World Cup which is starting in June and runs for 30-days. And I actually have a
fond memory of Olive Garden visiting the Olive Garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1993 with
the Palo Alto Firebirds. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you.
[Commission moved to the Assistant Director’s report]
Chair Lauing: Right, Wilton is oral communications and we’ve actually passed that but it was
marked incorrectly. So, if everybody is ok with that we’ll just reopen it for your comments so
that’s Harold Hirsch [Note – unsure of the spelling].
Vice-Chair Monk: Three minutes?
Chair Lauing: For three, yes.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Harold Hursch: So good evening people. I have been in Palo Alto for 30-years and this’s the
first time I’ve come to a public forum like this so I’m sorry for being a little nervous. I lived on
Wilton Avenue for the last 8-years and I have a house there. I just heard about the structure
that’s being proposed for that area. I’m not against it on… the only reason I am worried about it
is parking. Right now, when the Hong Kong Restaurant is busy the number of parking spots
there is zero. You have to go about 10 to 12 houses down from El Camino before you get a
place to park and that’s the way that it is right now. And so, the concern I have is that if there’s
a 65 or 67, I’m not sure how many units there are if there’re two or three people in each one
that’s one or two cars. I’m not sure if there’s going to be enough parking allocated to not have
the parking go all the way down to Park Avenue or whatever it takes to take up that many cars.
So that’s the main concern I have about that so if there’s enough parking space for that number
of people probably calculated based on the type of people that we expect to be in there then
I’m cool with it. But I request that you consider that and make sure the analysis done by your
consultants appropriately calculated. Thank you very much.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you.
[Commission moved to Item Two]
Agenda Changes, Additions, and Deletions
The Chair or Commission majority may modify the agenda order to improve meeting management.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Chair Lauing: So relative to any agenda changes, additions or deletions the suggestion is on the
item that is to be continued we want to move that one up and make the decision to continue it
and see if the speaker would like to speak to it. Is everyone ok with that? Yep, ok.
Commissioner Alcheck: [unintelligible – off mic]
Chair Lauing: Mr. Weiss wanted to speak to it but now he’s debating if he wants to or not or
wait for the next time.
[Commission moved back up to oral communications]
City Official Reports
1. Assistant Directors Report, Meeting Schedule and Assignments
Chair Lauing: Ok so Assistant Director's report.
Mr. Jonathan Lait, Assistant Director of Planning: So, I think Chair just before we get to that
there’s the item on the agenda. Maybe you covered this when I was talking about changes to
the agenda. Did you address that?
Chair Lauing: Yes, we said we would switch them but I thought you would give your report and
then we would officially act on that.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Lait: Great thank you so the only item I have to report is the documents that you have
before you but then to also let you know that the… this Commission considered zoning code
changes to the Public Facilities Zone to accommodate the public parking garage and the Public
Safety Building. That ordinance is being presented to the City Council at their meeting on June
11th and just wanted to pass that information along to you. I don’t know that there’s any
Commission representation that necessarily needs to be there for that meeting as we’re just
communicating the ordinance and there was no disagreement on that particular item.
And lastly to just note that the Packet has some information that as far as tentative agenda I
think we actually are going to be modifying some of those schedules. On June 13th we have a
study… the item that we’re continuing today on 2515 El Camino Real and we have two study
sessions on dealing with traffic safety and operations. It’s an annual report and a case study of
neighborhood traffic impacts using street light data. And so that will be presented at your next
meeting. Thank you.
[The Commission moved to Item Number Three]
Study Session
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Public Comment is Permitted. Five (5) minutes per speaker.1,3
2. Council Housing Work Plan Referral: Discussion of Potential Revisions to Parking
Requirements in the 2018 Housing Ordinance Implementing the Comprehensive Plan
and Housing Work Plan
Chair Lauing: Alright so now our big and single agenda item is listed as Number Two.
Mr. Lait: So, I think Chair you had items to speak… requests to speak on Item Number One
and… on your speaker cards.
Chair Lauing: Well we better check these since it’s moved around.
Vice-Chair Monk: It should be Item Two.
Chair Lauing: Yeah it should be Item Two but Mr. Hirsch, did you want to speak on Item Two
which is the hearing on the Council Housing Work Plan referral?
Mr. Joe Hirsch: [unintelligible – spoke from the audience off mic]
Chair Lauing: I see, ok, so you want to do that under oral communications? Alright and let me
also ask Ms. Wang?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Ms. Shirley Wang: [unintelligible – spoke from the audience off mic]
Chair Lauing: The parking? Ok, so that’s actually Item Two.
Ms. Wang: [off mic] I am so sorry about that.
Chair Lauing: It’s alright. I just want to make sure that we don’t skip anyone.
Commissioner Waldfogel: [unintelligible – off mic]
Chair Lauing: Pardon?
Commissioner Waldfogel: [unintelligible – off mic]
[Commission moved back up to oral communications]
Commissioner Waldfogel: [off mic] Is the other speaker also (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: No, the other speaker is on the work plan.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
[Note – many Commissioners spoke at once and off mic]
Commissioner Waldfogel: [unintelligible – off mic]
Chair Lauing: So, Ms. Wang I think I misunderstood you, are you here to speak about Wilton?
Ms. Wang: [off mic from audience] Yes, parking study. [unintelligible]
Chair Lauing: Parking study? Right, right. That’s what I thought, that’s what I thought. Ok great.
So, I now have three speaker cards, that one and… no, no, not now and Becky Sanders and Pei
Liu and you’re here to speak on the parking study as well? Ok fine, we’re not there yet. Here…
I’m just going to outline the game plan so what we’re doing on this item this is a study session
for everyone including the public to get presentations from consultants and Staff, for
Commissioners to ask questions and make comments on this. This comes back eventually in a…
potentially in a draft ordinance so what we’re going to do is to first have the Staff report, then
have the consultant’s report, then have public comment of these three speakers or others, and
then we’ll shift over to Commissioner’s questions and comments. And when we get to that
we’ll want to make sure that we understand the objective here tonight, the outcome is to give
Staff direction on our comments however they sort out. And then we can choose if we want to,
to take multiple straw votes at the end to give more specific direction or not but this is all a
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
study session in advance of a possible ordinance. So, we’re not conducting an ordinance
discussion tonight we’re not making a recommendation to Council so we have a second bite at
this apple so to speak just in terms of the time frames. I want to keep that in mind so I’ll stop
there and turn it over to the Staff report.
Ms. Jeanne Eisberg: Great, thank you. Good evening Chair Lauing and members of the
Commission. I’m Jeanne Eisberg a contract planner so as expressed tonight is a study session.
No action is being taken tonight and this is a discussion of issues with respect to parking
relationship to housing production and ways to encourage housing production through
potential revisions to the City’s parking regulations.
So, we met last month and talked about a range of issues in the Zoning Ordinance that effects
housing productions and affordability from density standards to mixed-use requirements and
tonight we’re just focused on parking. The Chair already explained sort of the order of business
tonight but it’s up here on the screen as well.
A reminder about the Council referral it included these points related to parking. So first to
allow flexibility and how parking regulations are applied downtown and in Cal. Ave which have
the best transit access, highest densities, and the most constrained parking supplies. A
specifically looking at TDM and allowing payment of in-lieu fees instead of building parking on
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
site as is done for office uses downtown. With respect to the second bullet, TMD
Transportation Staff are currently working on guidelines for enforcement, monitoring, and
implementation of TDM programs in line with the Council referral. So, we haven’t addressed it
further in this report but we will bring that back forward to you once those guidelines are
prepared. And then lastly to conduct a study of parking rates to identify the appropriate
amount of parking needs for various housing types and locations. And then look at potential
revisions to the parking requirements in the Zoning Ordinance.
The report explores parking issues that may be affecting housing production and affordability
based on conversations with stakeholders; primarily developers and architectures who are
active in the City. Staff’s experience implementing parking regulations, a number of data
sources including the US Census and an empirical study of parking demand and supply in multi-
family apartments in the City which you’ll hear more about and is in your Packet.
So, breaking down these issues as you’re considering changes to parking regulation it’s good to
understand the trends and where things are going. Looking at the census data we can see that
most Palo Alto residents are driving to work alone and until the City and the region makes
significant investments in transportation infrastructure, bike facilities [and] transit facilities,
that’s unlikely to change. But you can see some trends over time and over the last 15-years, you
can see that the share of people driving to work along has dropped 10 percentage points. And
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
you’re seeing some minor increases across the board in other modes including biking, walking,
and transit. The findings get more interesting when you look at downtown compared to City-
wide statistics so nearly half of people downtown use alternate modes to drive to work or
excuse me to get to work. And as you know downtown enjoys better transit access, peds and
bike facilities, and more retail and community amenities. And so downtown may be attracting
residents who prefer not to drive and therefore choose to live downtown and this is what
planners typically call self-selection.
In terms of vehicle ownership, we likewise see different behavior between people living City-
wide and people living downtown. So, most people tend to own at least one car in the City,
they drive to work, other destinations and will continue to do so in the future but in downtown,
you can see somewhat of a different story. So, 32 percent of residents report just having one
car in their household and 6 percent zero cars according to the census. In contrast, this is a
much slower rate than City-wide. So, while existing and future residents in the City may still
own cars the trend suggests that they are likely to own fewer cars. And this is part of a nation-
wide trend as you’re seeing younger people not getting driver’s license or delaying in getting
them and instead relying on Lyft and Uber and other modes.
As I mentioned earlier we’ve completed an empirical study of parking demand and supply. Jane
Bierstedt is here on my right from Fehr and Peers who will explain the findings from their study
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
when I’m done with my presentation. But just to bring this back to housing production again
buildings that have more parking than is needed to add unnecessary construction costs and
therefore can increase the cost of housing. So, if we better align parking supply and demand
this can help reduce those costs and increase housing without impacting surrounding
neighborhoods from spillover parking.
Third I wanted to mention State Density Bonus Law. This law is an opportunity for developers to
get flexibility in development standards in an exchange for an increased density… increased
residential density in exchange for providing inclusionary housing on site… below market rate
units on site. Additionally, developers are eligible for waivers from development standards,
specifically, state law includes reduced parking standards which applicants can request and the
City cannot deny for an eligible density bonus project. So, this issue is just notable since
projects right now that are required to provide 15 percent inclusionary in the case of for sale
under the City’s ordinance could conceivable… well could by law qualify as State Density Bonus
project and could be using these parking rates. In reality, this isn’t happening. The stakeholders
that I spoke with, the developers, they tend to want to be 100 percent consistent with the
City’s code in order to get through the entitlement process. What they see is more efficiently
and so they’re not making this request but the point is that they could be. So, this could be an
opportunity for them to take advantage for reduced parking requirements.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
So next like in many communities in the Bay area much of site planning and massing decisions
are being driven by parking and access requirements. This issue is one of the top issues
mentioned by developers and architects during the stakeholder meeting about what is
constraining housing production. So, it’s not just the number of stall required but it’s also the
driveway width requirements and the backup distances. And so, the image on the screen you
can see in those orange dotted lines how the cars are backing in and out of the parking spaces.
So, the report… the Staff report takes a closer look at this typically 10,000-square foot lot which
in this configuration has three standalone housing units with two spaces per unit so six total
spaces. It does include an exception to reduce the driveway width from 16 to 10-feet. Now here
adding a fourth unit would trigger the guest parking requirement bringing the total
requirement to ten spaces for those four units and that’s when the site plan would really have
to shift. So, these spaces and their requisite drive isle requirements and back up distances
would necessitate either a ground floor podium, mechanical lifts or underground parking. And
based on conversations with developers and architects none of those scenarios would be
financially feasible so you end up with just three units rather than four or five.
So, we met last month we discussed how most residential uses in downtown, California Avenue
and El Camino Real in those commercial zoning districts are required to be in mixed-use
configurations. So essentially you have to do ground floor retail or some kind of ground floor
commercial and so in the same vain the stakeholders I met with generally agree that it’s also
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
the parking required to serve the retail that presents a challenge to making projects physically
and financially pencil. So, on the bottom of the screen here’s just an example of how this plays
out on a recently approved site on El Camino. You have 20,000-square feet of retail along the
frontage of El Camino which requires 99 parking spaces. There’s a surface parking lot of about
30 spaces and the other 70 spaces are in a subterranean garage. So not including the parking
ramps, this is about 35,000-square feet of parking area which is significantly more than the
20,000-square feet of retail. So, it’s just one of those examples of a trade off the City has to
confront as you’re thinking about what’s important. It’s going to be challenging to continue to
have it both ways. If you want ground floor retail can you provide some flexibility in how that’s
provided in the parking requirements?
So, I met with 22 stakeholders from these 16 organizations over the last 2-months. Again, these
are primarily architects and developers who are regularly using your code and I’ll provide a
complete summary of the feedback next time we meet. But tonight, in the report and on the
screen, I’ve just provided the findings from… excuse me related to parking. So, the feedback
related to parking that I got was that the required parking ratios do not necessarily reflect
demand. That parking requirements are relatively high compared to nearby communities. That
they tend to drive site planning, massing and unit yield. There was a suggestion that parking
ratios account for proximity to the Caltrain stations and to allow reductions for bike parking,
shared parking, and that the parking requirements should be more flexible in those locations
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
that have better transit access. To look at things like shared parking, tandem configurations,
allowing projects to pay an in-lieu fee as offices do and encouraging the use of parking lifts. As I
mentioned earlier that the number of stalls required in addition to the drive aisle requirements,
back up distances, that those are the things that are making site planning challenging. Also, as
mentioned as you know that parking becomes a major expense when it’s required to go
underground.
To help increase housing production we can come back to this but there’re some strategies that
we can explore and these are in line with the Council referral. So first to explore possible
adjustments to reduce the base parking requirements for the following housing types multi-
family housing near transit, affordable housing, [and] senior housing rather than require
parking analysis and TDM implementation. Second to maintain the parking requirements for
single-family and two-family uses. To consider exempting a portion of ground floor retail to
allow more flexibility and to look at in-lieu parking programs, excuse me, in downtown and on
Cal. Ave.
So, the recommendation as the Chair expressed is to get your feedback on these issues and
then we’ll come back with a draft ordinance. Not a draft ordinance a framework for the
ordinance for another study session likely next month. One update here we do have a
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
community meeting now scheduled for June 28th at 6 p.m. in the downtown branch library so
that will be next month.
So now I’d like to hand it off to Jane Bierstedt from Fehr and Peers if you’ll just give me a
minute.
Ms. Jane Bierstedt: Good evening. I’m Jane Bierstedt, Principle with Fehr and Peers and I’m just
going to give a presentation on the parking study that we did to come up with some parking
data for multi-family residential dwelling units in Palo Alto.
So first I’m going to talk about the study purpose, do a quick overview of the available parking
studies that we reviewed, talk about some other parking surveys that we were able to obtain,
focus on the parking surveys that we did for sites in Palo Alto and then conclude with parking
rates that were developed from those parking surveys.
For the purpose of this study was to provide parking rate for market rate, affordable and senior
housing multi-family projects at varying distances to transit. So, one of the first steps was to
gather available studies and look at those results. And so, we looked at studies that were
primarily done in the Bay Area but we also obtained some studies from southern California
some that Fehr and Peers had in their… in our… our southern California offices did. We also
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
looked at Transform’s GreenTRIP database. They have a database online of parking surveys
[unintelligible] residential developments throughout the Bay Area and we also looked at the
Institute of Transportation Engineer’s Parking Generation Manual that has parking generation
rates for a variety of land uses including apartments and condominiums.
From our files and surveys that we’ve gotten from other consultants, we were able to find
parking surveys done at eight sites near Palo Alto that we also provided in our report. But the
main focus of the study was to do parking surveys at nine different sites within Palo Alto. So, we
looked at affordable, market rate, senior housing at varying distances to transit and this table
shows a list of the different sites that we surveyed. They were selected in consultation with City
Staff because we wanted to make sure that we could find sites where we could easily discern
the parking for the residential units. That’s something that was shared with… you can figure out
who’s parking for residential versus office but we also wanted to make sure that we had sites
that had no individual garages where we couldn’t tell if there’s a vehicle parked in them. So,
this is just a map that just shows the survey locations. So, the number of vehicles parked at
each site was counted for five different time periods. They were counted for weekday mid-day,
weekday evening, weekday late at tonight after midnight, mid-day on a weekend and a
weekend night. And you can see from the graphs… so this is the number of parked vehicles
divided by the number of bedrooms just to normalize the data. That the highest parking
demands always occur late at night which is not surprising, that’s when everybody is home. So,
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
in this graph it shows for the affordable housing the lightest line is the site that’s closest to the
transit and as the color gets darker that means that they are a little bit farther from transit so it
shows that the site closest to transit was a little bit lower. So, for market-rate housing, you can
see that during the peak times the site closest to transit was a little bit lower but there are
some other times when it’s a little bit higher but when we looked at parking studies we always
look at the peak rates… the peak times. Now senior housing there was no correlation between
distance to transit and that’s not surprising because you think that people are going to choose
to be close to transit they primarily choose it for community purposes. In senior housing, there
aren’t as many commuters.
So, the results of the survey these are… I’m going to first notice that these are parking demand
rates so these are the number of parked vehicles on the site. Usually, when you come up with a
parking supply rate you want it to be a little bit higher. We presented the data in both the
number of parked vehicles per unit and per bedroom. And we provided the data these two
ways because the mix of units… the number of one bedroom, two bedrooms, and three-
bedroom units was different on the different sites and so we wanted to again normalize the
data. So, for the affordable housing, it was… the parking rates ranged from .91 to 1.30 parked
cars per unit which was .4 to .56 parked cars per bedroom. Market rate the range was a little bit
different, .70 to 1.15 parked cars per unit or .53 to .75 parked cars per bedroom. And the
senior… all the senior units were one-bedroom units so the parking rates per bedroom and per
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
unit were the same so it’s .34 to .69. Now in the report we kind… we focus on the highest
parking rate because you always want to make sure you have enough parking because it’s a
fixed quantity so we don’t average the data. We usually look at… if we had a lot of data we’d
look at the 85-percentile data but with only three data points each we looked at the highest
one. And from the data for affordable and market rate the sites near transit did show a slight
decrease from the highest rate of about 25 percent.
Ms. Eisberg: Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Ok so before we go to questions we want to do public comment on this item. I’ll
try to do these in the order received, Shirley Wang would be first up.
Ms. Wang: Thank you very much for having me. I live on Wilton. I am very disappointed with
this flawed, biased, money driven, and untruthful study. This study didn’t involve any of Wilton
residents even after we met the builder and expressed our desire to work amicably with Palo
Alto Housing with regard to parking and the traffic intrusion mitigation in order to get off on a
good footing with all of our new neighbors. Very, very, very disappointed. If parking is not a
problem especially to the already narrow street like Wilton then why City residents parking
permit program even exist and why City Council Greg Scharff excluded Town and Country and
[unintelligible] from this overlay? Wilton is a low-profile neighborhood with a lot of minorities.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
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Is this the reason why City picked the Wilton diverse neighborhood to build this under parking
high-density housing with this new overlay? This study is made up to lower the cost of the
builder at a cost of both the existing and future residents on Wilton. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you. Next is Pei Liu.
Ms. Pei Liu: Thanks for having me too speaking here. I’m very appreciative. I’m also living on the
Wilton Street. This PAH parking study is very bad to my extent. It never measured how many
people park on the street and didn’t ask a single resident where they park. And ok for the low-
income housing that’s going to build on our street it’s… so if you say some disabled people or
seniors they don’t need lots of parking that’s not true because they need caregivers, they have
visitors, have contractors or social workers visit them. They definitely need more parking [and]
if there don’t provide enough they will park on our street. Another thing is the people living in
low income housing units they often need multiple jobs. They have to go different places. If
they don’t have a car how can they do that? Ok and the other things I wonder… also agree with
Shirley on why we, our residents, not involved in this study and also why doesn’t it have any
study on our street and our neighborhood? As other people already mentioned there’s a Hong
Kong Restaurant right across from the low-income housing is going to be built. They don’t have
a parking space. They already park on our street. I urge you someday you can come down to
our street to take a look at night and during the day how crowded our street already are. And
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
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we have… our community have mostly some retired folks and young professionals with
younger… very young kids as middle schoolers and high schoolers. Yeah, there some are… they
have to ride a bike. If the building built there with lots of parking along the street the safety of
the children are threatened. Ok so as I said keep our community is made of minorities, lots of
minorities and we are humble and always keep low profile. And that doesn’t mean the City has
to cave into the developers who wants to profit at the expense of those who live there.
Developers want maximum their profit and building more units rather than parking… building
more parking lots that’s acceptable. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you. Next speaker is Becky Sanders.
Ms. Becky Sanders: Good evening Commissioners. Thank you so much for holding this hearing
and thank you to Staff for working hard for all of us here in beautiful City. I live near Shirley and
Pei and I just want to acknowledge that they are hoping that whatever parking study…
however… what all the… we’re hoping that whatever recommendation are made are not made
with the provision that this is the best way to get below market rate housing built. We have
been working with Palo Alto Housing to come… get comfortable with the number that they are
providing us. We’ve had some conversations so I think we’re concerned that people that might
be in favor of this will see it as a panacea. You know if we just reduce parking requirements,
ease the restrictions that there will be lots more housing including below market rate housing.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
So, I just want to make that distinction clear. One thing that I heard in the Staff report was we
have a mandate to try to see if we can reduce… relax parking requirements in order to build
more units and more housing and more density. I get that. I don’t think it makes any sense to
shoehorn data to try to fit a political goal. I’m pretty sure that we can continue to build
housing… maybe not solve our three to one jobs/housing imbalance but I’m pretty sure that we
can continue to build housing in a responsible way that does not push cars out onto the public
streets. Where the City has to maintain those streets and then of course the residents have to
compete with neighbors for parking spaces. I know you’ve heard this all before but you will
recall that the charming in-lieu fees for office parking space in downtown was a complete
catastrophe, a bomb. So yeah you get more money, they get to buy their way out of paying for
parking but what do you get? You end up with a catastrophic downtown RPP Permit Program
which has got this cascading volcanic lava effect… hello Pele… that now has RPP going into
Crescent Park. I think that if there were adequate parking in downtown we would not be having
the RPP debacle and on El Camino Real all those dentist offices totally under parked. Where do
the people… there are employees and the clients park? The residents so please an in-lieu fee is
ridiculous and the stakeholders that they talked to I guess I’m not stakeholder. Hells bells I live
here but I don’t have a stake in how decisions are made. Now I know they are going to have a
community meeting and that’s very nice but a lot of this… this ball is in motion now and so I
don’t know… I don’t think… are any of those properties in Ventura? Like the most rental heavy
neighborhood in Palo Alto? Seventy-three percent I think of our residents are renters and a lot
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
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of them are in these high density [unintelligible] units. So, you know I just think it… I don’t think
it makes sense to try to make the report fit some good goals but I’m telling you we do not want
to have a bloodbath on our streets of people fighting over parking. And you know you just
can’t… you cannot legislate who’s going to have a car and where they’re going to park it. And as
far as I can tell this parking study did not address well do you ever park on the street or do you
ever have trouble finding parking? I mean a real drill down, something really meaningful that
we could really believe in. So anyway, I just want to say that its crowded in Ventura and if
parking… if apartments are going up in Ventura that are under parked our children are really at
risk. They are already at risk. We had a real close call, we do not want that so I just… I
recommend that… you know what I recommend. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Thanks very much. Next speaker is Jeff Levinsky.
Ms. Mary Sylvester: [speaking from the audience] Pardon me Chair? May I please add a card?
Chair Lauing: Yeah certainly.
Mr. Jeff Levinsky: Ready?
Chair Lauing: Yep, you’re on.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
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Mr. Levinsky: Ok good evening everyone. I’m hoping tonight you’ll dig deep into the parking
study that has many, many flaws. Right off the hat… right off the bat, sorry, it ignores the
simple truth that Palo Altans experience every day. Namely we need more parking in our town
no less. Visit many apartment buildings at night and you’ll find the streets around them
crammed with cars. Under parked apartments and condominiums also compete with
commuters for street parking during work days and that’s why we have so many RPPs
expanding. Did the people who write this study where they even aware of this? A good study
would have looked at our streets that are crammed solid with cars at night and investigated
why? One major trend that the study completely ignores is that more adults are sharing living
units to be able to afford them. Your own previous Commission member was doing… was
sharing a house with another family. What happens when a three-bedroom apartment is
shared by three separate adults each with a car? I code only requires two parking spaces for
that three-bedroom apartment so where does the third car go? It goes on the street. If you
provide more parking for that unit then more people can share it and that actually makes the
cost of housing go down. So, in fact what this study would do is possibly raise the cost not lower
of housing. What does the study have to say about the trend of sharing? Not one word. It
doesn’t even look at street parking conditions. Another fact Palo Altans encounter every day is
how long the City’s parking predictions have been. I live near Edgewood Plaza and when it was
being redeveloped a few years ago the then head of our Planning Department assured the City
Council the shopping center would have no parking problems. What do we have here today?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
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Major parking problems and it’s not from commuters using the lot as some people incorrectly
think. We’ve studied it and it’s caused by customers and employees and store… trucks coming
to the center. Our City Planning Department was wrong about the parking there. Very wrong.
The City has also underestimated parking needs for offices which is why we have to spent tens
of millions of tax paper dollars to build garages. What does the tonight study have to say about
how wrong our past parking predictions have been? Not one word. These emissions are not
minor. If you reduce parking requires you’ll imperil our City for the next 50 or 100 or more
years. That’s because a building and its successor and the successor of that building all get
grandfathered in with the lowered parking requirements. Who in this room is wise enough to
know what the needs will be years from now? Its likely people will live longer, they’ll stay active
longer, cars will be more desirable because they will be safer and smart. Total cost of
ownership of cars will continue to decline. Cars will then become more popular, not less. We
need more parking. Does the study even mention these possibilities? No. Instead the study
sites obsolete data about lower car ownership. In case you haven’t heard new data collected by
the federal government shows that the households are owning more and more cars while car-
free households are declining in number. I’d like Staff to explain a few things. Why were only
residents among the stakeholders interviewed… why were only one resident? Why didn’t the
City Council… I’m sorry, why didn’t the City consult local parking advocates who do far better
parking studies than the one in this report? How much did this study cost the City? How did we
select Fehr and Peers over other firms? Do they consult for local developers and so there’s a
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
potential conflict of interest? How did you select the nine buildings that you have? And let me
show one thing here in the study they claim that Oak Court Apartments is .8-miles from rail
whereas the Mark is .5. Completely wrong. If you look at the map you’ll see that the Mark is .7-
miles and Oak Court is .6 which by the way reverses a table in their report that’s wrong. Did
Staff review this study? Did they look at the details? So, in sum. [note -summarize] I… what
we’ve been given is riddled with errors, omissions, biases and possibly undisclosed conflicts of
interest. It tells us nothing about parking that is reliable. We should not believe it. We should
instead ask for really good studies that address the problems that everybody in Palo Alto knows
exist. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Thanks very much. Next up is Joe Hirsch.
Mr. Hirsch: Thank you very much. I have the occasion last night to drive back from Sacramento
and today to drive up and back… up to the City and back. So, if anyone thinks there are fewer
cars on the road don’t challenge that assumption by going on the freeways. There are cars on
the road fully packed day and night. I saw some data in this report that suggest that fewer
people are commuting by themselves to work. The problem is we have more people so more
people by a lower percentage probably equates with fewer people ties a higher percentage. We
haven’t made any change overall from the number of cars on the road. We all know that major
public transportation is essentially north/south. To get to any place you need a car. One doesn’t
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
go to the beach, one doesn’t go to Monterey or Napa or Tahoe without a car or even if you live
more than a short walking distance from a major public transportation corridor you’re going to
need a car. Particularly if you’re coming back from work late at night in the winter time. My
most significant concern however is how do you consider individual housing projects if and
when lower City-wide standards are established. And it can be shown that the spaces provided
with regard to that particular project prove to be inadequate. Thereby foreseeing tenants to
park on the public streets… nearby public streets, neighborhood streets where parking is
already inadequate. I had the occasion today to drive Wilton Court. There will be project
coming forward on that street. There was one space available mid-day between El Camino and
the stop sign. I don’t know what the street was the intersecting street. So, if you put a project
there and it’s inadequate there’s going to be no place for the tenants to park and we’ll have to
look at another Residential Parking Permit Program and yet in another part of town. So, my
recommendation is to continue to handle each new housing project on a case by case basis
against currently established parking requirements. And let the developers at that time come in
and prove when an assessment of all the data and all the perimeters regarding that particular
project suggest that fewer parking spaces should be needed and can be allowed. Do it on a case
by cases basis not a City-wide standard that may prove with regard to particular projects to be
totally inadequate.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you and the last speaker is Mary Sylvester.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
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Ms. Sylvester: Good evening Commissioners. My name is Mary Sylvester and I’m a 40-year
resident of Palo Alto and I just want to express my very deep concern tonight about the Fehr
and Peers study. I for 10-years worked at the Packard Foundation and was responsible for a
number of community grants involving stakeholder groups. Those stakeholders always involve
not only developers but community residents. I’m completely shocked and I hope this is not
going to be a precedent for the City not to include neighbors as a vital part of the stakeholder's
group. I’d really like to better understand that from the City’s consultant. Secondly and I am
speaking extemerariously but I’ve been long concerned about Ventura neighborhood being the
part of town where we put projects that no other part of the community is willing to host. And I
think it’s often times because of economic and racial prejudice. We feel that we can put in
more commercial more low-income housing because those residents will not fight back. Well,
I’m happy to see and to report I know several of those residents and they have strong support
in the community and they are going to fight back and we have their back. Please listen to them
and let their voices be a robust part of your process. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Thanks very much and thanks to all the speakers who have come out tonight and
dug into the study and given us perspective.
Mr. Weiss: I just wanted to support some of the previous speakers.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Chair Lauing: Just a second. Ok, so this is Mark Weiss. Ok, go ahead.
Mr. Weiss: I live at 169 Bryant but I use to live on Pepper Street which is very near the site that
the previous speakers are discussing. And I’m going to ride my bike down there from here
tomorrow to give a look to some of the things they are saying but so I have worked 25-years in
the music business. A company here in Palo Alto called Earthwise Productions and I’ve also for
about 10-years make made quite a study of our local policy making and our leadership and our
Elected Officials and our appointed Board Members and Commissioners. And I’m trying to
develop a methodology of listening very carefully to what is said in these meetings and also
reading Staff reports and stuff and I’ve been to quite a few of these meetings. And I want to say
that the last several speakers I really felt that they were making a lot of sense and like to my
music ear they were like in key or in tune and it really made a lot of sense. And so, I really… you
know people like Rebecca Sanders and Jeff Levinsky and Joe Hirsch they really… they are not
being paid to be here. They’re representing their belief system and their neighbors and I really…
my hats off to them. And I thank you all for your public service but I think it makes sense to
listen carefully to some of the dissenting opinions and some of the things that come in over the
transom. So, I too am concerned about what’s going on in Ventura, what’s going on in Wilton
Court, and whether our consultants really have our best interest at stake with due respect.
Thank you.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Chair Lauing: Thank you. Ok so now it’s time to come back to the Commission and this is one of
those subjects that we can spend all evening into the morning on. I’m going to make a
suggestion for a process here which is that we do a round of question in order that anyone
would like to do and try to limit the first round of questions to 5-minutes. Of course, we don’t
know how long the answers are going to be after that and then after that, I’d like to suggest
that we around comments around 10-minutes. So, what that totals up is about 2-hours of
discussion debate from the time we press the buzzer and if we need to look at that at the 2-
hour mark and say you know we need more time then I think we should just make that
collective. But I’d like to get sort of everybody on the record here in the first 30-minutes of the
questions and then make sure everybody has a lot of time to chat about it. Is that ok with the
Commissioners for now? Ok, it’s the first round of questions to go to the either Staff or to the
consultant, correct?
Mr. Lait: [off mic] Yeah, we’re all here.
Chair Lauing: Ok so light up if you’d like to speak. Commissioner Gardias. What’s that?
Commissioner Gardias: Thank you for now. I pass for a moment.
Chair Lauing: Oh ok.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Commissioner Gardias: I may return to my right to speak. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Ok others with questions? Commissioner [note – Vice-Chair Monk] Monk.
Vice-Chair Monk: [off mic] Let me check you… I think Waldfogel is lite up. Let me check your…
you might be out of order. Are you (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: [off mic] Yeah, I’ve got some questions.
Chair Lauing: Do you have a light on?
Vice-Chair Monk: Waldfogel has a light on.
Commissioner Waldfogel: I tapped it but (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: No hit it again.
Vice-Chair Monk: I think this is off. Waldfogel (interrupted)
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Commissioner Waldfogel: [unintelligible – off mic]
Vice-Chair Monk: Are you… everyone is lite up.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Ok while you guys are sorting that out (interrupted)
Mr. Lait: Well at any bit I think Commissioner Waldfogel [unintelligible].
Commissioner Waldfogel: This in on my 5-minute clock. I want to thank everyone that came out
to speak tonight. If I had more time I would list everyone’s name but thank you all for
commenting. I also want to thank Staff for taking on a hard problem and trying to approach it
analytically but I think that the Packet Page 57, the Fehr and Peers memo probably says this
best. There’s a [unintelligible] near the general ten trends is towards slightly higher transit use
and slightly lower vehicle ownership but all the trends are small and a question for Jane is if you
look at this table on Packet Page 57 that is a quote is from the American Community Survey. It’s
the percent of household with zero vehicles. Do you see that column? I don’t have another
reference page. I’m sorry I only have the Packet Page. This is on your May 11th memo.
Commissioner Summa: [off mic] Page Two of [unintelligible] memo.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
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3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Commissioner Waldfogel: So, when you talk about trends relative to that table in the sentence
beneath that table. Are you aware of the margin of error that the census reports for those data
points?
Ms. Bierstedt: We did not report a margin of error and that’s why we said there’s like hardly
any difference.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah but if I told you that the census reports plus or minus 1
percent margin of error would you still say that there’s a trend in that column?
Ms. Bierstedt: I would say that’s why I always use the word slightly. It’s just that there’s hardly
anything to add.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Well but a slightly… I mean is there any trend if the difference in the
numbers is smaller than the margin of error?
Ms. Bierstedt: No.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Ok so it would be more correct to say that there’s no trend in the
data.
Ms. Bierstedt: There’s no… that would be… I would agree.
Commissioner Waldfogel: That would be a more correct statement. Ok, great. The other point
is in your shared mobility services paragraph are you familiar with UC Davis Institute of
Transportation Studies Research Report UCDITSRR17-07?
Ms. Bierstedt: I did see it.
Commissioner Waldfogel: And is that… are the findings in that report consistent with your
statement about… I mean even the statement TNC enable a car free or car light lifestyle. Where
they consistent… is that consistent with the findings in the UC Davis report?
Ms. Bierstedt: We did not compare that for this. These are just some kind of things to think
about in the future that… like there’s no data to support what’s going on in the future.
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Commissioner Waldfogel: Well sure but I mean you know we can all imagine fairy dust but I’m
trying to stick to what we know from actual studies and actual neighborhoods. If we’re going to
use numbers we should use numbers in a correct way. Would you agree with that?
Ms. Bierstedt: That’s correct and so I do not think that we unfairly characterized anything in
here.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Ok I think you just agreed that your statement that slightly lower
rates… I mean or trends is something that’s not substantiated by the numbers.
Mr. Lait: What we reported was that we didn’t have the margin of error reported in Table One
and then (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Right but this is a memo from Fehr and Peers.
Ms. Bierstedt: But [unintelligible] if it’s 1 percent. That’s… I think we’re just splitting hair so I’m
not going to argue with you on that.
Commissioner Waldfogel: No, it’s not splitting hairs because there’s no trend.
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Ms. Bierstedt: But that’s no trend slightly lower I think are… it's (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Well I think they’re (interrupted)
Ms. Bierstedt: Saying… it’s not saying much of a difference but thanks.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Well it is saying something different so but you would agree with the
statement that there’s no trend?
Ms. Bierstedt: We already… I think we went over that.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Ok great that’s a good starting point. The other data questions
(interrupted)
Mr. Lait: I’m sorry I just want to understand that point though for my clarification. So, I just
want to raise that question that you had asked Commissioner Waldfogel. Do we know what the
margin of error is in Table One? Is that data that we know?
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah, it’s in the census… it’s in the census… it’s in the… I just looked
at it in the census report. It’s plus or minus 1 percent.
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Mr. Lait: Ok so you’re reporting that it’s 1 percent.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah, I’m reporting that the margin of error is bigger than the
change in the data points which is… mean that the data points aren’t really… you know we’re
doing something that’s not [unintelligible - crosstalk]
Mr. Lait: I just wanted to know where the margin of error came from.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Well that’s great. One other question for you and I think this one is
directed to Staff but if we look at Packet Page 14. Actually no, we can also do this from your… I
think you have the same chart in your presentation. Go to Page 7 of your presentation. This is
Chart Three of trends in car ownership. So, if you add up in the downtown district the percent
of two plus vehicle households and the percent of one vehicle households what percent do you
get just looking at that Chart Three?
Ms. Eisberg: Sorry you’re adding the 6 percent and the 32?
Commissioner Waldfogel: No, I’m adding the two plus and the one so how many households
have vehicles?
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Ms. Eisberg: Twenty-three.
Commissioner Waldfogel: What?
Ms. Eisberg: You’re adding the 21… I’m sorry I’m not following what you are asking.
Commissioner Waldfogel: I’m asking you add… so what percent of households have two plus
vehicles in the downtown district?
Ms. Eisberg: Sixty-two percent.
Commissioner Waldfogel: And what percent have one vehicle?
Ms. Eisberg: Thirty-two percent.
Commissioner Waldfogel: So, what is the sum of how… what percent of households have one or
more vehicles in the downtown district?
Ms. Eisberg: Ninety-four.
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Commissioner Waldfogel: Ninety-four percent.
Ms. Eisberg: Right.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Ok so we’re saying that roughly one parking space per household is a
floor?
Ms. Eisberg: One parking space per household is (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Would be a floor on whatever formula that we have. I mean you
know any formula that comes to less than one per household would not be consistent with the
ACS Census data.
Ms. Eisberg: This suggests that of the household surveys 94 percent of households have one or
more vehicles available (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Correct.
Ms. Eisberg: To them.
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Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah. Thanks.
Ms. Eisberg: I thought it was a math quiz. Sorry I mean the numbers didn’t add to 100.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah, we didn’t talk about margin of error there.
Ms. Eisberg: No, no I mean we didn’t report that no.
Chair Lauing: Ok we’re going to move onto the next one. Commissioner Summa is lit.
Commissioner Summa: Thank you, everyone, for coming out and welcome for those of you
from the members of the public that don’t often or have never come to speak at Council… the
Planning Commission sorry, before and thanks to Staff. And thank you Commissioner Waldfogel
I was also interested in the very questions you asked but I also had questions about… that was
the main one and really to amplify that even downtown which is our most transit-rich area, 96
percent of the people have at least one car. And we don’t know how many have three or four
but anyhow another question I had was about stakeholder group and I think some of the
members of the public brought this up. And why it was… there was one resident and who was
the resident and where did the resident live and how was that resident chosen?
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Ms. Eisberg: So, the stakeholders came about as we were analyzing the entire Zoning
Ordinance. So specifically, we were really only talking to folks who use the ordinance on a daily
basis. The Council referral on all these items amidated from the Comp. Plan from the Comp.
Plan policies which were as you know underwent a very long and robust community outreach
process. The resident I spoke with reached out to us specifically and so I did meet with that
person.
Commissioner Summa: I think you mentioned that.
Ms. Eisberg: So that’s how that came about.
Commissioner Summa: Yeah, I recall you mentioned that the last time so why did the study not
survey the residents of the 9 sites because I’ve read other studies, especially there’s one that
comes to mind, it’s an affordable housing study from First Community in San Jose who… they
really wanted to find out about housing. Especially for affordable housing sites, we particularly
want to be careful not to incur an extra financial burden to create those by having too many
parking spaces. And they were well aware that they have to balance that with the expectations
of the community that they are going to be in and also with serving their residents. And so why
weren’t the residents of the sites for this study surveyed?
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Ms. Bierstedt: So, the surveys were done just to count the number of parked vehicles. It was
completely unbiased so like what kinds of questions would you like… what kind of information
would you have liked to have gleaned from the residents?
Commissioner Summa: Whether they found the parking convenient and safe by meaning late at
night they could get safely to their front doors. Whether they actually had enough parking. I…
we have a general parking problem shortage in Palo Alto and there are some neighborhoods
that are very affected by it. I went to all but one of the nine sites and this is anecdotal between
11 and 2:30 last Thursday and for instance, the Colorado site is parking solid on both sides of
the street. I noted that at Oak Court the two sides that you can park on were parked pretty
solidly and every single car I walked by had an Oak Court hang tag because they have a hang tag
there. And about half of them additionally had RPP tags so it’s hard to… I really appreciate how
difficult… a problem parking is to solve. You try to fix it one place and it pops up another place
but I think it is… I think that it would be better to redo the study and really survey the people
that are using this parking because they’ll know the most about it. So, let me look at some more
questions and then I wish the Planning Commission had more input to the methodology that
we’re going to be using. There was I don’t think any consideration of street parking around the
sites was there?
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Ms. Bierstedt: We really tried to pick sites that had… that we could see that all the cars would
park on site so that we were expecting them not to be parking off-site. So that was part of it
and I have to go back and check with the actual parking collect… the people… actually, the data
collection because it’s one thing they particularly look at to see if there’s on-street parking but I
will… I need to check into that because that’s… we really try to measure the whole demand.
Commissioner Summa: Yeah but often times the… oh and another thing that I wanted to note
you didn’t seem to differentiate between sites that had all assigned parking or general parking.
The ones I looked at were all assigned and so one would anticipate and you can tell me if this
is… to me, it seems to make sense that ones with all assigned spots would always have a higher
rate of vacancy when you might have been looking as nobody can use their spot but them if
they are not there. And so, like I said I went to all of them but one and they were all assigned
and that’s why I presume people park on the street because it’s closer to their front door. And
then I was wondering over the period… we didn’t get a lot of the… we didn’t actually get to see
any of the raw data so we kind of general feeling it was done in November and December. And I
was wondering if you could provide us the actual date. And I’ll just finish this last question
sorry. And how many times over that 2-month period you surveyed each site? I understand you
did weekdays three times and weekends two times but how many times total did you survey
the site?
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Ms. Bierstedt: So, we just surveyed at those five different times to try to get the peak and
that’s typical practice. And (interrupted)
Commissioner Summa: So, you got a snapshot of five different times for each location and that
was it?
Ms. Bierstedt: Yeah.
Commissioner Summa: Thank you.
Ms. Bierstedt: And that’s typical.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Alcheck.
Commissioner Alcheck: Welcome to the shark tank.
Ms. Bierstedt: Thank you.
Commissioner Alcheck: I think we have an aspiring cross-examiner among us tonight. Well, let
me say look thank you for your work. I think your well aware of our community’s appetite for
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data analytics and studies like this one are incredibly important to our Commission’s work. I just
want to… I don’t have a lot of questions about the study. I understood what I read but I think
it’s probably worth going through a few questions for the community and sort of dispense with
some of the… well, let’s just go through them. How was Fehr and Peers chosen for the work?
Mr. Lait: So, my recollection… I mean we have all kinds of professional service agreements that
we work with a variety of consultants. We certainly know Fehr and Peer’s work, their
reputation, we know that they’ve done work with other… their work spans private and public
sector. This is true for a lot of the consultants that we work with and so we prepared a scope of
work and we sent it to the firm. The response was in line with our expectations and so we were
able to proceed with hiring them to conduct this study.
Commissioner Alcheck: I’d love to sort of get a quick response to the notion that this work
product was pursued in an effort to bolster some Staff agenda. I mean is that the… was that the
request? Were you seeking specific answers for purpose?
Mr. Lait: Yeah no we weren’t. We were simply trying to collect data and present it and we
recognized that it’s… it is a snapshot in time. It does reflect a… you know the data is only as
good as the information that’s out there when we conduct our study. We tried to be as
thorough as we could with the budget that we had. It does take resources to do this. We also
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knew that there’s only so much… it’s difficult sometimes to satisfy the data needs that we have
but I think we’ve heard some good comments this evening. And we’ll certainly do what we can
to follow up on some of those points but no. The idea that this is somehow trying to advance an
agenda is not true. We are trying to present data and we are interested in the Commission’s
feedback and the community’s feedback on the information. We’re not… again there’s no
recommendation we’re just looking for some feedback.
Commissioner Alcheck: Great. I’ll just acknowledge that I am hopeful that this effort represents
a new approach in our City to sort of validating or invalidating the numerous and often sort of
under verified antidotes that we hear as a result of the fact that this is a very publicized
process. And so, this information gathering activity should be welcomed and I think it’s sort of
important to sort of acknowledge while we’re in this room just sort of the inherent reliability
problems with anecdotal evidence. And so, this is why we are here because anecdotal evidence
is problematic and we need data.
Ok so let me turn now to you Jane. I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying don’t shoot the
messenger. Do you… I mean is there any reason to suspect… the way you approached this is
there any reason to suspect that your firm has some bias as you approached this work? I just
want to… I mean I don’t have questions about the study but those are some of the things we
heard tonight and want to get that off the table. And so, if you’d like to respond to that at all?
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Ms. Bierstedt: Of course, like any consulting firm our reputation is everything and we have to
provide unbiased data, unbiased advice no matter who our client is otherwise we wouldn’t be
in business. And Fehr and Peers really prides itself at providing good advice and being very
objective. You know I… a lot of my work is doing transportation and back studies for land use
development projects. Those all go through City contracts now because of this concern about
bias but we always do our studies with the best available data and to provide the best advice.
Now with parking like I said when I was explaining the results we look at the high parking rate.
We don’t look at an average parking rate and we don’t cherry pick the data that we present.
We try to provide a wide variety of data so that you have the information that you need to
make a decision.
Commissioner Alcheck: Ok thank you. That’s the end of my questions.
Chair Lauing: Ok I’ll follow up with a few questions here. Timer on? In the study, you presented
nine in Palo Alto and that’s how many you did?
Ms. Bierstedt: That’s correct.
Chair Lauing: You did nine and presented nine, right?
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Ms. Bierstedt: Correct.
Chair Lauing: I presumed that was the case. And I think what I heard you say is that you didn’t
do any… other than counting spaces you didn’t do anything else like evaluate spill over into
neighborhoods or anything like that?
Ms. Bierstedt: Like I said when we… the way we designed the survey was to try to get any of
that spill over parking and I wanted to… but I know that’s really important so I want to go back
and double check to make sure that we got that. So, like if there’s any people parking on street
is affiliated with that apartment complex should have been included.
Chair Lauing: I see. Ok ok, good thanks for clarifying that. And then so you also didn’t go to any
of the residents. Is there a constraint there in terms of privacy or anything to actually even ask
how many of them own cars? There could be.
Ms. Bierstedt: I don’t think there… there would not have been a constraint. You know like I said
most of are the peak parking times are in the middle of the night so that would have been a
hard time to ask people.
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Chair Lauing: Why? You know their home then. Ok.
Ms. Bierstedt: But it’s something that could be done. Just ask people whether or not there’s
enough parking and that could be added.
Chair Lauing: Ok. A question for Staff on Page 17 on the SDBL. What percentage of… how’s the
BMR calculated in there? So, this is Page 17 and the State Density Bonus Law in exchange for
providing on-site below market rate units to qualify is there a percentage of the total?
Ms. Eisberg: Right so it depends on the level of affordability. So, the minimum threshold I
believe to be eligible for State Density Bonus is 5 percent very low [and] 10 percent low
moderate or senior.
Chair Lauing: Ok because then just for my own mind I’m trying to think about how this might
get us much of the way that we need to get. And not to stop there necessarily but I’m just
trying to evaluate if we can get down to the pipe here with that one. Like we’ve sat up here
before and talked about the importance of definitions such as high-quality transit so obviously
anything we do like this we’re doing off into the future. But I think we have to have… make
some assumption requirements about what high-quality transit is and whether it’s the current
bus system or the stand up all the way at the San Francisco train system. You know there’re
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some gaps there that we have to look at I think. And then Page 20… let’s see… where you talk
about in one of your potential strategies… this is a Staff question. You talk about Number One
reduce base parking requirement without the need for a parking analysis or implementation
TDM measures. And so, my question here is just why? Is that recommendation potentially
because of cost or feasibility?
Ms. Eisberg: So, this is again thinking about housing production and how to remove constraints.
This is essentially changing something from a discretionary action where in order to get the…
because right now your code allows reductions. But in order to get the reduction you would
need to do a parking analysis, request that reduction due to TDM measures, and then rather
than go through that process to simplify it and simple codify in the code changes to the parking
regulations.
Chair Lauing: I see. Ok, I see. Others? Let’s see did you have your light on now? Ok. Sorry, this
is still not lining up quite so Commissioner Gardias go ahead.
Commissioner Gardias: Thank you. Thank you for the report, thank you all you specifically from
Ventura to coming to us… for coming to us and sharing your concerns. So, a couple of
comments I generally agreed with the report but… and (interrupted)
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Chair Lauing: Excuse me Commissioner Gardias? We’re doing questions first so if you have any
questions of these and then we’re going to do a comment round.
Commissioner Gardias: Yes. I will have questions but let me just start with the preamble if you
don’t mind right? We all did so I would [unintelligible] so but however this is one of many
reports that we’ve seen and they pretty much they are consistent. They are all the same and I
mean we can always question the point more or less but pretty much this is the same spread of
the numbers. So, I think that it’s really hard to question the numbers. What I would be looking
for I would be looking for something that’s truly going to provide different perspective on
parking because I don’t believe that this is the right question that we’re asking. Of course, we
can drive the parking utilization lower, we can just go with those numbers and reduce these
numbers. And I’m sure that people will comply because they will have no other option so
there’s no question about this that we can do this. However, there are different questions that
need to be answered and that is pretty the question about the cost. At what cost we are doing
this? So, for example when my colleagues talk about spill over and then counting cars at night
so there needs to be… when we are doing a survey of the front buildings then of course we
would like to verify how many cars park in the neighborhood from this facility. And we’re
talking not only about the cars of the residences we are also talking about some cars of those
who visit those… of the visitors of those residents. Those visitors may not be at night they
maybe are in the evening hours or during the day but certainly there is some sort of number
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that needs to be quantified. Once I worked one of the affordable housing here on Alma and I
just talked to one of the residents. I asked a question of what’s the… what you do if you don’t
have assigned parking stall and she told me that oh, you park on the street. And then I went
also at night, it wasn’t 2:30 in the morning, it was like 10:30 at night in the evening and they do
indeed park on the street. You can just go outside and you can see that pretty much there is a
number of them. They leave in the morning, they really don’t need to have the parking space,
they park on the streets here within the downtown and then pretty much they leave to work
and then return after 5 or 6 or 7 o’clock. So, I would be looking for some understanding of the
spillover effect. Where do those other cars go? I think that pretty much it should be included in
the count and understand how it impacts the neighborhoods [and] how it impacts also ability of
the residents to park in front of their houses? There is at some point when we had our
discussions my colleague Michael and I probably should be using the off-show title
Commissioner Alcheck. In the recent meeting minutes, I said Jonathan and somebody corrected
me to use Mr. Lait as opposed to Jonathan so he said something that was very interesting. So,
he said that we suggest that streets… that parking on the street something like this is limited for
only for some to use which is not true right? Streets are open for all of them however there
needs to be some study that pretty much looks into utilization of the street so we can
understand what… if… we can understand the spillover effect. And also using of those street
parking spaces how it impacts neighborhoods if… and what’s the cost… at what cost of the
residences if they have to park their cars somewhere else or they have to park on their property
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when they aspect to park in front of their house as opposed to parking on the… in their
driveway? So, I would like to include in the study some novelty approach to this and a couple of
other comments.
When… in your studies there are different of… there is a number of different graphs… can I
continue or not? Ok so just maybe then a couple of other comments so in your studies there a
number of the number for example on Page 17 there is a change from 2000 to 2016 how
commuting to work uses different modes of transportation and how it changed. It just shows
this numbers and then in the body of the handouts there is an explanation that surrounds these
numbers but there’s no study about what is causing this change. And I was trying to understand
the very essential question why and it’s not there. So, if you look for example at Chart One… I’m
sorry I’m going to take another couple of minutes… it just shows that pretty much from 2000 to
2016 that number of residents that drive solo from 70… dropped from 75 percent to 65
percent. Which means by giving the population growth that either some people gave up their
cars or pretty much that usage of the newcomers or the new residents moving to Palo Alto
their prevailing propensity is to use other modes of transportation. So, one of those two or
maybe combination and I’m saying only this because I would like to understand why? And this
study nor the report provides… they don’t provide any explanation for me to understand what’s
going on.
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the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
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Chair Lauing: So, you’re into the comments now and that’s what we’re going to go to next so if
you could just hold the rest of your comments until (interrupted)
Commissioner Gardias: Ok thank you.
Chair Lauing: We turn on that. So, folks that… you had a question? Ok.
Vice-Chair Monk: Chair has been giving us 5-minutes so I’ll probably take the full 5-minutes so I
might ask my questions quickly. I’m noticing that there’s a tension in the code between the
ability to increase our housing production and preserve retail. And it’s impacting decision
making so if we want to keep retail how can we do so in a manner that won’t discourage
housing production? Are there examples of accepting the first thousand or so square foot?
Things like that. Can you speak to that briefly or when we get to that section could I ask that
you address it then?
Ms. Eisberg: Sure, I’ll address it briefly now so you can get your 5-minutes.
Vice-Chair Monk: Thanks.
Ms. Eisberg: So yes, I mean you have some provisions for shared parking if there’s a nexus
between retail uses that might need more demand during the day and residential uses that
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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could use that space in the evening. I mention in the report an idea of exempting the first 1,500
or 2,000-square feet of retail which is commonly done in Cities which may be appropriate. And
then also you know we discussed this last month but thinking about where’s retail really most
important and are their places where 100 percent retail project would be appropriate and you
don’t need that ground floor retail.
Vice-Chair Monk: Thank you. Moving on to Ventura. What I understand is happening in Ventura
is that you’re having a lot of homes where you know maybe adult children are moving home or
more people are living in homes than traditionally anticipated for that neighborhoods and so
there are more cars per household and that’s just from some people that I’ve heard. There are
other issues going along as well so I think looking at parking for the City we have to just also
look at what’s going on in the actual neighborhoods and what’s driving it. Do we need to look at
parking requirements in the R-1 or R-2 area? Maybe those need to be increased and maybe
they need to be decreased near transit like as inverse of relationships. So, I think I would
encourage Staff to find out more about what’s going on in that particular neighborhood and
address those concerns.
In regards to the presentation about housing production, it looks like the barrier is two-fold, in
that it’s cost and form. And form was the planning and massing that you had mentioned Ms.
Eisberg. Can you explain how the parking affects the form because if we were to reduce the
parking requirement also how do we know that that would be passed along to the consumer?
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Ms. Eisberg: So, with respect to form you know I mentioned the issues. There are requirements
for driveway width, the backup areas, and then, of course, the actual number of parking spaces
for both the residential use and guest spaces. And so that’s just one of the major drivers when
we’re thinking about all of those development standards that compose how you can build out
the envelope of the site. Parking is one that’s really driving that site planning and therefore how
many units you can actually get on the site. The other biggest one that we talked about last
month is FAR.
In terms of the costs you know that’s not something we control how the… you know if you have
less… if you’re building less parking on the site and the developer is spending less on that we
can’t control what the financial outcome is for how that gets passed along. But we would
expect that can actually increase the unit yield that you can get on the site and that’s really our
focus here is increasing housing production. So, we’re getting more units on the site and in the
little example that I showed of the three-unit project a four or five-unit building on a site those
units in one apartment building are going to be less expensive just by design than three
standalone single-family homes would be.
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Vice-Chair Monk: Alright thanks for clarifying that. On Page 18 there’s a hypothetical about the
State Density Bonus but I’m not really seeing an example of what it would take to build
something like that and how feasible that would be.
Ms. Eisberg: Yeah so, I mean Palo Alto doesn’t seem to see a lot of State Density Bonus
projects. We see them a lot in San Francisco and the East Bay developers use it a lot as a
mechanism to get additional units on a site, get additional bonus density. I did mention the
feedback that I got from stakeholders which is that they want to be 100 percent compliant with
the code. And that’s sort of out of respect for the process that you have and the Zoning
Ordinance that you have. And in other communities, I think just don’t… you just don’t
(interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: Yeah, I know you mentioned that I guess I just didn’t know what you meant
by that? One hundred percent compliant with (interrupted)
Ms. Eisberg: Oh.
Vice-Chair Monk: Palo Alto’s Code?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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Ms. Eisberg: With Palo Alto’s Development Standards so in this case, if you're applying for a
project under State Density Bonus Law you… and you’re an eligible project you can ask for and
the City cannot deny your use of these reduced parking standards. But you don’t really have… I
think there’s one example of a project taking advantage of that but you just… you’re not seeing
it much.
Vice-Chair Monk: Ok and then are there strategies being put in place elsewhere that maximize
housing production without increasing parking on the streets? Like (interrupted)
Ms. Eisberg: I’ve seen this and I wouldn’t recommend it but there are communities that exclude
new multi-family developments from their RPP version of their programs. It’s sort of if you
come in later and you’re a new project then you can be excluded from that Residential Permit
Parking requirement. You can make judgments about whether that’s a good or a bad idea but
that’s something that I’ve seen.
Vice-Chair Monk: I do have a couple quick questions if I could? Regarding peak demand
(interrupted)
Chair Lauing: You’re talking very fast. It’s good.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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Vice-Chair Monk: Yes.
Chair Lauing: Continue.
Vice-Chair Monk: Regarding peak demand, it looks like you’re explaining that on Page 15 and I
just want to make sure I understand it. I thought I heard earlier that you were taking very
conservative figures and coming up with peak demand. Is that… when you were talking about
the 85 percent can you just explain how you come up with peak demand to make sure I
understand it correctly?
Ms. Bierstedt: So, there are two different kinds of peak demand so one is when we do the
surveys we do them at different times of the day to find the time that has the highest or peak
demand. And then when we… in the report when I present the conclusions those were… of the
three different types, I would present the highest rate per bedroom not the average of the
three sites.
Vice-Chair Monk: So, with that, you’re basically saying that for example on Page 15 that at the
worst scenario when everyone’s there when all the cars are there there’s still 20 percent
parking that’s not utilized on that one case example.
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Ms. Bierstedt: That’s right.
Vice-Chair Monk: So that seems pretty compelling to me from a data standpoint. Do you have
any criticism of your own approach or of your own data collection that where you could have
seen areas of improvement or more thoroughness?
Ms. Bierstedt: Well I do want to double check to make sure that we also included the overflow
parking; parking on the street because the idea is to collect the total demand not just the
demand on the site. So that’s one thing that I want to come back and check.
Vice-Chair Monk: Yeah, I think everyone would want to hear about that. And you talked about
GreenTRIPS data. Can you just tell us what data you acquired or was that in your report and
maybe I didn’t see it? And if you have anything on GreenTRIPS that you can enlighten this
Commission about?
Ms. Bierstedt: So, do you know the organization Transform?
Vice-Chair Monk: I do. I’ve heard of GreenTRIPS but I don’t think it’s… it hasn’t been presented
to this Commission.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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Ms. Bierstedt: So, Transform is an agency and they are really trying to reduce vehicle trips or
reduce vehicle parking demand. That’s kind of their mantra but they do have an onsite… they
do have a website that has parking data and so it’s just in here as information for your
consideration. And it’s… they give us… they have information on the location of the complex,
whether or not it’s affordable or what percent of it is affordable, the type of location whether
or not it’s more urban or more suburban, the parking rate, the parking supply rate, the parking
demand rate and then they also have some information on why the parking demand rate
maybe lower like if they have really great bicycle parking programs, it’s near transit and things
like that. So, it’s (interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: Are you looking at a particular page in the report?
Ms. Bierstedt: So, if you… in my report on Page 5 and then I just pick out some examples from
that database.
Vice-Chair Monk: So that’s different from GreenTRIPS.
Ms. Bierstedt: It’s called Transform Green… they call their database GreenTRIP.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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Vice-Chair Monk: Oh, ok I thought it was a different organization. Alright, question for Staff
when was the parking requirement set forth? I think it was in the report I just don’t recall. In
the 70 something? 80’s?
Ms. Eisberg: So, in 2003 the City updated its code to implement the 1998 Comp. Plan and that
established parking standards for land use and standards for different uses. I don’t know if that
meant that the actual standards changed. It’s just when the ordinance was reconfigured. It was
previously by use of distract and now it’s all in one section.
Vice-Chair Monk: Thank you.
Ms. Eisberg: But it was based on the ’98 plan.
Chair Lauing: Ok. Ok very good are there any other burning questions that somebody gets in
otherwise we’ll just go on to comments and this could take longer but let’s try the 10-minutes.
If it doesn’t work we’ll just have to expand it and we can come back for another round. So light
up the board if you’d like to make comments on in general, your perceptions here, direction
you’d like Council to… I’m sorry, Staff to address and so on. So, Commissioner Gardias is lit up.
_______________________
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Commissioner Gardias: Thank you. I have a question to Staff. So, because this is preparation for
the ordinance that we will see what, in a month or so?
Mr. Lait: Yeah, I mean I think it’s probably more like the end of summer. We’re… we might
come back in July with some basic parameters of an ordinance but we’re not drafting language
specifically for next month.
Commissioner Gardias: We’re not?
Mr. Lait: We’re not going to have an ordinance for the Commission to look at next month. We’ll
have concepts that we would want to translate into an ordinance that we would return in
August.
Commissioner Gardias: Will it be… because the reason that I’m asking is because I think that
there are a number of the related factors. Of course, we can restrict parking by some degree
but then there is, of course, there’s the transportation element getting… [unintelligible] getting
to the jobs. So, I was wondering if that ordinance would be connected with some other
transportation elements or it would be solely from the perspective of reducing parking? The
reason is that if we reduce the amount we might just need to think about just increasing the
supply of transportation means if that’s possible. So how comprehensive that [unintelligible]?
_______________________
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Mr. Lait: So, I think there’s… this ordinance that we’re contemplating, and it’s not drafted at
this point, this builds on a dialog that we started with the Commission and there’s a lot of
different levers that we’re looking at to see what could be modified to encourage housing
production. Which is our understand… we understand to be this dated objective of the Council
and so that’s what we’re looking to advance. Parking is certainly one of those components but
before this meeting, you had a conversation about other aspects unit density and floor area and
process and other matters. We’ll be looking at those things too in an ordinance that comes back
to the Commission.
With respect to transportation specific items our code already has some language about TDMs
and when they are required and so we have that as a standard. And we are also going back to
the City Council in August with a transportation impact fee that we are hoping to get advanced
which will adjust our current program and establish some new requirements for housing
develop or any development that is subject to that ordinance. So, I think there are multiple
efforts underway, they may not all be reflected in the ordinance that we are presenting to the
Commission at the end of the summer.
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Chair Lauing: But you’re saying that there are a lot of interrelated items which is Commissioner
Gardias is saying and to get two more housing we’ve got a lot of levers that we can pull. Is that
right?
Mr. Lait: Yeah that’s what we’re exploring and hoping to move forward.
Commissioner Gardias: Yes, so thank you very much and this was from the… of course from the
housing perspective how to mitigate the shortage of housing. I was… my question was around
how we can make travel to work and become easier in absent of cars. And that element is
missing to me and I understand that maybe we have limited abilities to pretty much intervene
in the market and then increase the or improve the frequency of buses or frequency of Caltrain
or some other transportation. I mean I totally get it. I was wondering if there was some other
element considered in conjunction with parking reduction that would allow people to transport
flexibly to different places of work where they choose to be employed.
Mr. Lait: Right and I think what you’re articulating is something that is sort of the grand idea
that we’re trying to advance. And we do have out recently adopted Comprehensive Plan, we
have our bike and ped… pedestrian plan that we’re implementing and so I think all those
different efforts are underway to be implemented to help us move us closer to our goal. This
ordinance though just so we can establish expectations would not solve that problem. This is
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just one… this is a multiyear effort and even at the conclusion of that multiyear effort for… that
the Council adopted with this Housing Work Program the goals that you’ve articulated I think
extend beyond the horizon of this effort. Those are long-term objectives that we’re trying to
accomplish.
Commissioner Gardias: It may be so but I still have a concern that if we reduce parking supply
then we pretty much may reduce a freedom of the [unintelligible] that will live in these houses.
We may leave… we may reduce their ability to work in different locations because some
locations may be distance, they may require cars or various means and then pretty much they
will be stuck. And you know if there is a recession coming it may be even worse in some social…
it may impact some social problems so for this reason I’m just looking carefully into this and
there are some shorter-term opportunities. We talked for example about reaching out to the
neighboring municipalities and connecting TMA efforts that would be pretty much for low
hanging fruit from my perspective. Just connecting… working with Mountain View to pretty
much extent transportation between our two Cities. I don’t think this is long term, I think this is
a short-term and that’s the point I wanted to make. Thank you.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Summa.
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Commissioner Summa: Just one more quick question. When you do traffic, studies do you
always count and I’ll say it’s a snapshot because that’s kind of what it was. Do you always
count… do it that way where you count an observed snapshot vacancy as correlating to an
oversupply of parking spots? Is that the way it’s always done?
Ms. Bierstedt: Yes, but I also wanted to say that we also get information on the occupancy of
the units of the apartment complexes as well so they are mostly fully occupied.
Commissioner Summa: Right. I noticed that they were all more or less fully occupied you know
that so that wouldn’t have made a significant difference. Ok, thanks.
Chair Lauing: You can keep the floor if you want to do your comments now because we’re on
the comments round.
Commissioner Summa: So, I’m uncomfortable with the whole approach of increasing housing
through under parking buildings and that’s kind of what I think this would result in. I mean by
your methodology if you had gone to my house between… last Thursday between… when I was
observing most of the sites between 11 and 2:30 you would have said hey they have too much
parking at that… on that… at that house. That’s a single-family home so you wouldn’t have gone
there but I just don’t understand that a temporary vacancy correlates or demonstrates an
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oversupply of parking. I can see if there were tremendous differences and if it was observed in
a more rigorous manner then I would find it more convincing actually. And I think we have such
a parking problem in this City already and you know not everybody experiences it the same
way.
That I am very uncomfortable with this approach and I find a lot of the arguments to not be
making a lot of sense. And one I’ll call out in your memorandum is relates to automated
vehicles and it’s a simple statement you make that next generation vehicles that operate with
or without a driver will aboard will be available in the next few years. They will likely be
provided as a subscription service and would not need a residential parking space. So, all the
studies that I have heard and I have some personal conversations to rely upon because my
husband just left Uber. He was the Director of Market Data Science and I read him this and he
said no that’s ridiculous. And he literally said that’s if the parking fairies are at work because if it
ever happens it… a lot of people in the industry that if it ever becomes a widely adopted model
of transportation it could take 30-years or more. And there’s a lot of problems associated with
it that I think have been demonstrated lately such as the difficulty of computer systems
recognizing human beings that are in front of them which tragically happened in Arizona. So,
it’s… and it’s really not… the industry has not decided which model if this ever becomes
massively embraced and it could be in some parts of the world and not other parts of the world
and it could just be for big Cities. There’s no understanding yet of what the… whether it would
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be individually owned ones and there’s no understanding yet in that industry of whether they
would be owned by people who own fleets. But the one thing is there is an understanding that
at the peak demand which from parking moving people around in cars is always in the morning
that you would want to have the vehicles whether they are personally owned or owned by
people who own fleets near the people who were sleeping. So, they would be close by when
they got… left their houses whether it’s to work or school or whatever it is. And so, it’s very
unclear to me how we can rely… and I’ve said this before from up here, how we can rely on
unproven unknown technologies. We don’t even know if that’s going to end up being the main
model going forward so that is troubling to me.
A lot of the ideas in here are really good, I would like to see people using lifts. I think it makes
parking much more affordable for developers. I would like to see a process… I do not believe in-
lieu parking has been a great success. We don’t have any reliable… not one single reliable… not
one single study that shows how well TDM are working. Our recently departed Director of
Planning told me that directly there are no studies. So, at this point, we can’t rely on those and I
think that though like many things there are going to be some winners and losers. And R-1
neighborhoods and R-2 neighborhoods will not be affected but all the other neighborhoods
would be. And I was very moved by a member of the public who’s no longer here that even
though there was sort of an unfair perhaps racial component to this. And maybe racial is not
the correct word but that some neighborhoods have a lot more renters and a lot more recent
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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immigrants and a lot more first-time homeowners or renters. And they would be unduly hurt by
this and I don’t see how it’s solving a problem that we have. And that problem is our
jobs/housing imbalance which was created by producing way too much office and the jobs that
go along with them compared to the housing.
So, for me this study with the combination of Chart One in the memorandum and Chart Three
on Page… Packet Page 14 proves that we shouldn’t be deducing the parking one bit for multi-
family housing. So, I’m sort of surprised by it and I could make a lot more comments but I will
leave it at that and let my colleagues speak.
Chair Lauing: Others with comments? Commissioner [note – Vice-Chair] Monk.
Vice-Chair Monk: I very much appreciate Commissioner Summa’s perspectives. I have a slightly
different perspective. I was out to dinner last week with another couple and the husband lifted
up his phone and he said, “this is my car.” And you just can’t ignore statements like that
because this is a person who chose to commute from his home in Los Gatos to San Francisco
then chose to commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto to meet us for dinner via Lyft or Uber
or whatever ride share he’s using. He’s more than happy to use it and so I think we can’t ignore
those trends and although we might have issues with what’s presented in the report or it’s not
there yet, it’s going in that direction. So, I just want to point that out that we do need to be
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cognizant of those sorts of trends and myself included in that I live less than 2-blocks from here
in a 2-bedroom condo. We have two parking spaces. We really didn’t need two cars because I
can walk everywhere. I walk to Whole Foods, walk to restaurants, post office, to City Hall.
That’s where I choose to live because I like those amenities. I think in your report you referred
to that as self-selection on Page 14 and I think folks in that category expect a certain level of
congestion and more intense parking circumstances.
And I think my overall issue with our approach to parking is it has been… is that we’re looking at
this City-wide and we’re not looking at this by the various neighborhoods. And I think that’s
something that we relay should evaluate and I think we can’t ignore that fact. I think there’s a
higher threshold for people that are living in these denser more transit-oriented cores as
compared to folks that are living in your more residential R-1 neighborhoods. And to put the
same requirements in those two or more than two circumstances just doesn’t seem
appropriate and I think we need to be a little bit more progressive in our overall approach.
The issue that we’re talking about today is the impact… the negative impact that the current
residential parking requirements have on housing production and to some extent affordability
so just separating those two things out. It’s not just whether or not they are affordable or not
or making them more affordable by not having parking. It’s the entire envelope that we’re
talking about as far as in terms of actually producing more housing by not having the parking
_______________________
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there or lessening it. So, I find that the data presented in the report seems comprehensive
enough to me to suggest that at least in the multi-family units that are near transit are not
being utilized to the extent that they were built for. And I would support reducing parking
requirements proposed at the 20 or 25 percent rates within a ½-mile of transit based on the
evidence that you presented to us.
There were four other points that you brought up in your presentation I think Jane and so I do
support those. You know I liked what Mr. Levinsky said about streets should be looked at and I
think a lot of people mentioned that as well and I think that needs to happen when the report
comes back to us. Particularly in regards to paid parking downtown and I don’t think that’s
within your purview but that was something that sort of peeked its head before the
Commission and then kind of went and hide. I don’t know where it is right now but we do need
to look at the streets.
And in regards to the study not involving residents you know I feel like this is a data-driven
study and it should be driven by the experts who know how to collect and analyze data.
Whether or not we’re choosing the right vendors or they’re not using the right mechanisms you
know we have a democratic process to point that out, bring it up. I think that’s why we have
this public forum so I don’t know that residents are going to be collecting data and I don’t think
they have a role in that. What I think is valuable is that they are coming and they are sending us
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letters, they are coming and they presenting their positions here and we’re hearing them in this
format and we’re vetting all of those concerns before this goes to Council. So hopefully that
when you present to Council you’ll have a sense of what to expect in terms of the community
sentiment. And so, I think there is value in that and I’m not critical of the City not reaching out
directly to residents in that regard. I think it’s just ultimately an issue of trust and finding the
right vendors that we can rely on as a Commission and I rely on Staff to choose those right… the
right people to do the reports. But I also appreciate the opportunity for people to comment and
criticize. I think that’s the beauty of our democracy.
I just had a few of those points at this juncture but I have more to go to later on. Thanks.
Chair Lauing: Ok others? Let’s see Commissioner Waldfogel.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Thank you. So just so we don’t lose sight of the broader issue
tonight’s report is on parking which is one of the knobs that we can turn to stimulate the
residential development in the commercial districts. But a work product that I’d like to see from
the stakeholder interviews is a financial model for development because in mixed-used district
where office commands twice the rent that market rate residential commands I’m not
convinced that parking is the real cost or the parking cost is the real issue that’s deterring
residential development. So, I’d like to see financial models and I’d like to see models… I would
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like to see a spreadsheet model where we can put parking ratios and we can put… you know we
can turn FAR knobs. We can turn lot coverage knobs. I think those are the big knobs that we can
turn in a model but I’d like to see a model because I mean I’ve heard… Commissioner Alcheck
doesn’t like antidotes. I’ll give you anecdotal, I built a model and, in my model, when I zeroed
out the parking requirements office was still more profitable than residential. So, I think we
need some professionally built models to vet whether we’re talking about the Number One
issue or the Number Four issue tonight.
The place where I’m stuck on the report is that the census data just contradicts the F and P
[note – Fehr and Peers] counts. They’re just… there’s just no consistency and I’d like to see
those inconsistencies reconciled. I mean I just did a quick look again looking at some of the
census data… I mean looking at that same Chart Three and if you actually take the numbers you
get every hundred households generate 175 vehicles. And then if you take some other numbers
in the census report and set them against parking rates that are required in the current code
the current code would require 190 spaces for those 175 generate vehicles. So, we’re actually
pretty close to right if the census data is right so there are just giant inconsistencies here that
we have to reconcile before we push this forward. The counts just don’t add up relative to the
census data. They also don’t add up relative to the DMV data. I’ve looked at the DMV data and
the DVM actually shows growth in vehicles in operation in Palo Alto over the last 8-years.
Actually, fairly substantial growth so there’s just… there’s a bunch of different datasets. The
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hard thing with doing data-driven analysis is really normalization and reconciling the data. You
know it’s whether you do averages, it’s whether you linear regression, I mean there’s a lot of
tools that you can run against it and I’m not just not sure that we’ve got the A-team doing the
analysis here. So, I think we need to step up and try to reconcile all the different sources.
I’d also like to echo something that Commissioner Summa just mentioned about the in-lieu
program. I’ve asked Staff several times now for some reporting on the in-lieu programs. Since
it’s in the report I think it’s appropriate… you know you’re proposing to potentially expand it.
Before we do that we really need a study session on the in-lieu program because we really need
to know with the existing program how many spaces have been paid in? What’s the backlog?
What’s the median age of the spaces that are… that have not been built in the program? How
much was paid in per space and what’s the actual cost in the budgeted garages? I mean is the
in-lieu program actually working? I mean until we know that I think it’s rash to even
contemplate extending it. It may be that we need to suspend it for commercial projects until
we actually catch up to the backlog. And that may be a way to put commercial and resident on
a more equal footing but I think the talking about expanding the in-lieu program before we’ve
seen any of the statistics on how it’s performed just seems very rash. I’d just like to ask Staff
did… do we actually have that data? I mean is the data available on how many spaces have
been paid in through the in-lieu programs in the parking assessment districts? And I mean is
that data that can be supplied to us?
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Mr. Lait: It might be data that can be derived. I don’t know that that’s data that is actively
collected in terms of the number of parking spaces. We collect a fee and the fee gets put into
an account and there would be some kind of calculation to sort of back into the number but
(interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Right but [unintelligible] the fee is calculated because of a project is
supposed to generate ‘x’ spaces and then that’s translated into a fee but do we ever keep track
of the ‘x’?
Mr. Lait: Well I’m not sure what the ‘x’ is in that equation but we do know what the fee… we do
have a fee that we charge for the in-lieu parking spaces that we… that somebody would be
eligible to apply for.
Commissioner Waldfogel: But do we know the number of spaces that have not been built and
that have been paid for as in-lieu instead?
Mr. Lait: I’m sorry. See that’s what I was trying to get at before so no, we don’t have a direct
answer. I mean we don’t maintain a data set that I’m aware of for each one of those projects
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that may have sought an in-lieu space. We collect a fee and then we would have to go through
overtime all the time contributions to that account and then (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: So how do we know that those in-lieu fees are actually comparable
with the cost of developing the parking spaces? I mean if a developer can get a good deal by
paying an in-lieu fee and not building the spaces that are a bad deal for the citizens.
Mr. Lait: Yeah, I understand that and our code Entitle 16 does set forth a process by which the
fee is set and so that’s what we have. I mean I think that is a fair comment and one that we
should probably looking in terms of how we are assessing that fee and how that’s keeping up
with the cost of construction.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah thank you. I mean I just think that we… you know before we
even contemplate expanding a program we should at least study it and see if it’s performing as
we expect. Thanks, those are all my comments at this point.
Chair Lauing: Ok I have a few… one of mine you just actually stated very well which is that we
have a lot of levers we can pull and the whole thing is just we need more housing. So, for
example, I think that the suggestion of relaxing retail standards if that really turns the dial to get
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a housing project up, particularly affordable housing which is my next point, I’d be very open to
that. And we already have some examples of retail that’s not working anyway but we really
need to get the housing inventory up not the office inventory up. So, the types of incentives
that we give to developers should obviously incent that and if Commissioner Waldfogel’s
numbers show that taking parking out still makes office that much more profitable then we
need to get our pencils out and figure out some other things.
So, then the second thing that I want to make is that always want to keep remembering our
priority that we set here starting last year in the Comp. Plan and so on and that’s around BMR
and affordable housing. So, I still believe personally very strongly that that should be our
emphasis. I understand that Council is saying we need more housing for everything but I
wouldn’t put market rate housing first and I don’t think we did in the last year and a half. So, to
the extent that we can incent more folks that whether that’s teachers or policemen or whoever
can live here so we have diversity as a value in our City that is how I think we should prioritize
it. Obviously, seniors are in there as another sort of deserving group but I wouldn’t be
emphasizing all this for market-rate housing because people are going to find market rate
housing.
Thirdly as was emphasized actually in a couple of times in but also got a letter where it points
out that Caltrans officials said about the Stanford GUP. There’s no assurance that Caltrans in
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the future will be able to meet Stanford state of reliance on them to meet needs to commuting
employees, students, and facility. So, we just can’t duct this, we do not have good mass
transportation here, anywhere so we’re stepping into that. We hope that improves just like we
hope the TDMs improve and we hope that there are more automatomic vehicles and that the
trend gets big but right now all we have data that says that 97 percent of Palo Altans like to
drive their cars. And the other stuff is more speculation so I’m personally open to making
adjustments downward inconsistent with… on parking constraints consistent with Council’s
direction that that’s away. But I just think that we ought to be thinking collectively a close look
of what are the best ways that you get real bang for the buck on getting more affordable
housing in here. I’ll just leave it there. Let’s see, Commissioner Alcheck.
Commissioner Alcheck: Ok. It’s true I really don’t like the antidotes and it goes both ways. Just
cause a former Uber employee says it doesn’t… Executive says it doesn’t make it true and a
phone… a friend at a restaurant suggesting there doesn’t… that sort of information isn’t quite
reliable enough for us to make land use planning decisions on and I’m very encouraged by a
process that is more data-driven. I think in a pollical process like this one if you don’t like the
data you can attack the data and that’s just the way we do things now. That’s the way
everybody approaches almost everything that we do stateside.
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So, I’ll just suggest that I think the reason by midrise residential cannot compete with office in
Palo Alto is because the playing field isn’t level. I think that is precisely the essence of the
information that was presented to us a month ago. I think our last meeting on this topic was
about how the playing field isn’t level and how there are incentives that create greater
flexibility for commercial development and that creates discentives for the development of
residential. We are absolutely and one of the most expensive residential areas in the United
States.
I think… I just want to acknowledge something that you said and I’m… the notion that
developers are underutilizing housing bonus eligibility out of respect for the Palo Alto process is
unbelievable. I think something was lost in translation there so I’ll leave it at that. There’s
something… that sentence doesn’t work for me. I think we need to really dig deep to
understand. There may be an issue that State Density Bonuses go hand in hand with affordable
housing and affordable housing is very politically unfavorable in the process and so, as a result,
people are just not going that direction. It might the commercial… there might be a number of
issues but I don’t think that they are avoiding opting for bonuses as a result of the process. I’ll
go through it and you can kind of get back to that one if you want. I’m… I think there’s
something there that I missed.
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I think may residents… I think they're a lot of residents who would agree that our current
parking standards perfect… and specifically with housing perfectly optimize the concept of low
hanging fruit in our effort to address the housing crisis. So, I’m hoping that when Staff comes to
us the next opportunity that we really sort of explore all the different opportunities we have to
fix that… those standards. And I would suggest to Staff I would request that you please give us
the opportunity to sort of debate the spectrum. And what I mean by that I would implore you
to find the most aggressive approaches in the Bay Area, I’m not suggesting that you go much
farther but if you would like to please and present them to us. Reach out to the planners in
some of the local agencies that have really aggressive parking approaches for housing and ask
them… please ask them why and what’s been working. I think it would be incredible to have a
discussion next time around where you said you know we talked to some senior planners in San
Jose where we… were they have basically zero parking requirement when it comes to
residential in their downtown and here’s what they saw. Did it immediately result in greater
development? I think that our Planning Department is acutely aware of just how many little
things would we need to fix to sort of level the playing field. I think the reason why we
separated this one out… I suspect the reason why this one was separate out is because this is
low hanging fruit. If our data is demonstrating that our parking standards are greater than
necessary then let’s adjust them so that we don’t create hurdles that are expensive and
problematic for the housing development. So again, any effort I think to better align parking to
housing types, proximity to transit, geography, I think we should be persuading that with gusto.
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And I don’t even… I mean I think the… there’s a lot of suggestion… there’s a lot of ideas sort of
broached in this Packet. I think we would be… I think one of the best uses of our time would be
to identify some of the obvious ones and then reach out to our neighbors. Some of the Cities
that are a little effective in their approach and ask. I just think… I don’t know, I don’t know if
that’s a common practice in Planning Departments for Senior Staffers to call each other but
look we’re in a crisis. Our agencies should probably be talking to each other. I’m sure someone
would welcome the opportunity to talk. I hope that somehow our Staff… our City can create a
little bit of a budget for our Staff members to meet. Meet someone over there and ask them
how is this working? Is it working? What kind of results are you seeing in terms of the sparring
of housing development?
Two things happened since our last meeting. Right we got this report which I believe suggests
that there is a future for Car-Light Housing. And the second thing that happened at the May
Fete Parade and I’m just raising this because it was brought up last time. At the May Fete
Parade, I ran into PAEA. They had a booth, the Palo Alto Educators Association, they represent
the certified employees of the Palo Alto Unified School District with 900 members. Exclusively
they represent them exclusively and the reason why I mention it is because they came up… I
met one of their leaders at a booth very randomly and the… I mentioned… the Planning
Commission role came up and the first thing they mentioned was that housing was a critical
issue for their employment. And so that was something that we touched on last meeting and I
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just want to highlight that the goal here is to encourage housing. If this is one lever and it’s out
of whack let’s correct and I think in order to have a healthy debate we should see a real
spectrum. So, I would assume that the current standard is the most aggressive version of doing
nothing and we should also know what the most… what Cities who are approaching it
completely opposite side of the spectrum are finding with their policy.
And then I’ll just address I think tonight… we heard Mr. Weiss suggest that the world looks to
Palo Alto for leadership in many industries and I always take pride in that. Right we all do. We
are very proud residents but I don’t think that’s necessarily true about our land use strategies. I
don’t think the world is looking to us for our land use planning approaches. And that’s not to
suggest that our City Staff isn’t exemplary but I think we have to be honest with ourselves that
historically our peninsula planning departments have been used too often… exploited to often
to exclude rather than include right? And I mention that because I think we should turn that
around and I’m really hopeful that our City and its Staff will really reach much higher and
present our leadership with the sort of actionable opportunities that can make us the sort of
City that people would say wow, they are really addressing their land use crisis in a way that we
should all be taking note of so I… again I really am happy about this report. I was… until we
received it I had no idea to what extent this… we were looking at these things. I think we should
not ignore this information and I don’t know when the date is that we’re going to look at this
again but if it… I guess it would help if I knew in advance, for example, there’s no real protocol
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for us to contact the City of San Jose Planning Department and talk to them. Like if there
doesn’t seem to be a way to sort of bridge the gap between the agencies that are doing things a
little more aggressively than us I’d be happy to do it. I’m volunteering my time here anyways
with a goal of creating effective and promising change for housing and so if there is a way for
me to set up a meeting with a Planning Commissioner in San Jose or even Planning Staff I’ll do
it. So, if that seems unreasonable, if that request seems like something outside of the
wheelhouse let me know, email me and I’ll try to do so that at least we can get some more
information and sort of push the ball down the row.
Chair Lauing: Ok thank you. Any others with comments in this round? Yeah, we’ve all had our
or in on both questions and comments. So, a question at this point would be do you want to
tonight take up any of the specific items and deal with them? For example, a portion of ground
floor retail or things like that or is this enough to set the stage and Staff has enough direction
that we could pick that up later? So, it’s a question both to Staff and to any Commissioner that
would like to comment.
Commissioner Alcheck: Can I just respond your question? I’ll just say that I wouldn’t… my
preference would be not to straw vote ideas tonight because I’d like… if we’re going to… if Staff
is planning to come back to us with 15 options I’d hate to eliminate one tonight. I’d rather have
that list be exhaustive than limited based on tonight’s discussion.
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Chair Lauing: Yeah, I get it. That makes sense. Sorry, Commissioner Summa?
Commissioner Summa: Yeah and I thought tonight was really about this parking study and
what we would do with retail seems kind of a different conversation. And with regards to
reducing drive lanes for multi-family housing and those specific and even the size of parking
spots, I think we would need more discussion just on that. So, we could really understand it
because I thought drive lanes and turning ratios and widths and stuff I thought that was sort of
kind of written in stone because you can’t make them smaller and have things be safe and have
people move around. So, I would almost think we would like to discuss those things on their
own.
Chair Lauing: Ok Commissioner [note- Vice-Chair] Monk.
Vice-Chair Monk: I have an observation about the report and it kind of follows with what
Commissioner Summa was saying in regards to that specific issue in that the report identifies
five, I don’t know what you call them sections I guess, issues but they are not framed as issues.
And you’re giving information… it is… well, it says key issues but they are not framed as issues.
They are framed pretty objectively in my viewpoint. You’re just talking about trends and car
ownership in Item One, you’re talking about State Density Bonus in Item Three, you’re not
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really putting out action items or scenarios that we can opine on in the way that it’s presented
and I’m guessing that’s intentional. So, if you want us to go over any of those five points more
in depth if you haven’t received enough then we could. I just wanted to point that out that I
thought there could… I couldn’t do much with the information as it was presented as far as
giving great input if that stirs up anything in you (interrupted)
Mr. Lait: Yeah, I don’t think we’re looking for a more conversation on the issues. The strategies
are some of the areas that we’ve identified as possibly benefiting from further dialog. I think
we’ve heard some pretty strong remarks about the in-lieu parking programs, we’ve talked
about not addressing single-family and two-family residential properties. What’s left on our key
strategies then is sort of this is there some threshold by which we would reduce parking
requirements for multi-family developments and this consideration of retail. And I think those
might be areas that we could benefit from a little bit further dialog but maybe before we do I
just would like to offer a few other comments when the times right.
Chair Lauing: And just with respect to the current schedule which is we know is fluid I think it’s
scheduled to come back on June 27th.
[Note- many Commissioners starting speaking at once]
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Vice-Chair Monk: I guess on top of that the other thing that I would want to explore is this
height limit situation. I know that has been something that you put forward to the
stakeholders. I don’t think it is. If it is let us know but I’m seeing that that wasn’t presented as
an option even though it’s mentioned in our Comp. Plan as an option.
Mr. Lait: For tonight we’re just talking about parking.
Vice-Chair Monk: But wouldn’t that have an impact on the ability to increase housing
production if they could go up beyond the 50-feet in certain areas on certain circumstances?
Mr. Lait: Yeah, we (interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: Or if there’s a retail requirement?
Mr. Lait: Absolutely but again tonight’s focus is really just about parking. We wanted to keep
the topic isolated to the parking question so yes, we will (interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: So, it’s not a reasonable question to say hey if you went up 10-feet
(interrupted)
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Mr. Lait: We’ve been asking… Yeah, I think Jeanne has been talking to stakeholders about
height but again we try not to get into that conversation tonight right because we’re just really
talking about parking right now.
Vice-Chair Monk: Ok. To me, it seems tied to the building.
Mr. Lait: Well everything is tied together right? The whole conversation that we had the month
before and parking and height. I mean we can spend… I mean Jeanne could speak to it right
now if that… the Commission is interested (interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: I’d be interested to hear what they say about if it’s a factor or not.
Ms. Eisberg: So that was one of the more mixed responses. Some stakeholders thought it was
limiting in terms of the yield they can get on the site and others said it wasn’t. That really it was
parking and floor area ratio that were the limiting factors. So, I think some of it depends where
you are, what district you’re in or type of project you have. But it was just one of those things
where there wasn’t… it wasn’t really conclusive and so you’ll see that when we get back with
the stakeholder summary report.
Vice-Chair Monk: Alright thank you very much.
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Chair Lauing: Commissioner Waldfogel.
Commissioner Waldfogel: Yeah just one other request as Jeanne you look at this. In all the
other uses in the mixed-use districts, the parking regulations are by 1,000-feet of development
and I wonder whether a standard like that would work in residential. You know rather than
think about it per bedroom but I mean I’ve been trying to… just been running some simple
models but I wonder if you could just explore that. You know look at some ideas on number of
spaces per 1,000 as opposed to number of spaces per bedroom and if that would get to
approximately the right yield and make it more comparable. You know make it easier to
compare residential and commercial development costs. That might be productive.
Ms. Eisberg: Yeah, I don’t… you don’t typically see communities do that partly because you
know here we’ve got 4,000-square foot units with (interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: Well yeah you probably need an adjuster when you get above a
certain size.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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Ms. Eisberg: So, it’s… I think… you know make Jane can speak to this but you know Palo Alto
does it by bedroom, some Cities regulate parking by unit but those tend to be better predictors
of demand than per square footage calculation.
Commissioner Waldfogel: I think it would be interesting to just model it. I mean I think that
you’ve got nearly the same fit as you do with per bedroom if you look at the… any way we can
talk about this offline.
Chair Lauing: Assistant Director Lait did you want to additional comments?
Mr. Lait: Yeah thanks. I… you know I just wanted to suggest that we’re not really expecting and
not trying to convince anyone who has a perspective or an opinion about the issue. We don’t
expect that that would necessarily be changed by the report that was transmitted. We do know
that there’s an interest in having data and so we made an effort to put that forward and we
understand that… I think it’s probably improbable that we would ever produce enough data
that would satisfy people who may have an interest in this topic.
I wanted to note that the report doesn’t single out any neighborhood. Ventura neighborhood
has come up a couple times this evening. This is a general study that talks about residential
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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parking City-wide. We had nine sites that we identified in the City. This isn’t…this is a more
overview and again a City-wide approach, not the neighborhood approach.
I appreciate the comments that we’ve received regarding the study and there are some
questions that have come up and we’ll need to look at that and see if we can address some of
those issues. We heard about the census data and maybe taking a closer look at that. The
comment about the 94 percent of the downtown units of… had one or more cars and how that
represented a sort of a floor. We’ll take a look at that. Concerns about the spillover parking and
we’ll check with our surveyist to understand if that was contemplated or studied when they did
this. We heard comments about assigned and unassigned parking spaces so we’ll take a look at
that as well and see if that’s something that we can’t take a look at. And then also getting some
feedback from the residents who live in these different areas. These are all things that we’ll talk
about after the meeting tonight and see if there are some areas where we can’t tighten up the
report and give some additional information on those areas.
We know that from a policy perspective we know that parking is expensive. We know that
there is a cost to parking, even the free parking that we provide on our public street. We do
know from talking to stakeholders and developers that parking does have an impact on
development. Just this month the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released a study for
Alameda County that tackles this very issue and this is a regional problem. We’re all trying to
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figure it out and the best way to go forward. With respect to Palo Alto what we’re trying to
figure out I guess from the commission tonight and get some guidance is we’re presenting a
range of options and I’m hearing very clearly that maybe some of them aren’t going to advance
to Council as a recommendation but we do know that we need to put forward an ordinance this
year. We do know that there’s different levers that we need to adjust and modify and we
believe that parking is one of the ones that we need to look at. So, to the extent that if we don’t
look at in-lieu parking as an item and if the parking study that we’ve presented or modify
doesn’t provide enough… I feel like we spent a lot of time talking about the parking study
tonight. And there’s… another piece about that is ok so we can get those comments about the
parking study but is the Commission as a whole going to get to a place where parking has a little
bit of flexibility to adjust in some way and if not then that’s fine. The Commission doesn’t
forward a recommendation onto Council that touches parking but it may not be that the
parking study gives you the answer to support your recommendation. A lot of this as people
who live in this community you… and I know Commissioner Alcheck has talked about anecdotal
information but a lot of… you know you receive that because you talk to people who live here.
And you interact with them and so you receive some information through that and that will
inform some of your recommendations to Council. So, I guess what I’m getting as we’re not
going to be able to provide you data that you’re going to be able to pin your hat on and say this
is it. This is exactly what we’re looking for and now I can make… I have confidence in making my
recommendation to Council. Part of this is going to have to be based on what you’ve observed,
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what you know about this community, what you know about the neighborhoods and talking to
the people who are experiencing them. The housing challenges and the parking challenges that
we are trying to balance.
So, I guess with that I guess… Oh, I don’t know if I mentioned this but there’s been a suggestion
that we do more studies and more analysis. And I know that’s always… that’s a frequent
request that we get and I don’t know that we have the time or the consultant funds to do that
additional analysis. But what we can do is to the extent that we can find the Commission’s
comfort level if any in adjusting the parking thresholds for multi-family. If there’s something
that you absolutely need for an assistance in that decision-making process we’d like to know
what that is. If it’s… can we… are we able to move the needle in any direction to lower parking
and if not then maybe that’s not an area where we can make a recommendation ultimately to
Council on this ordinance. But if there is that would be helpful to have that dialog and I think
we’ve presented to you one is related to retail and one is related to just generally adjusting the
parking numbers for multi-family.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Summa.
Commissioner Summa: Also, I was wondering in your list of things that maybe we didn’t feel
where in the study the other thing that I was wondering was the effect of a neighborhood that
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has an RPPP on this and it was Oak Court. I was concerned about that and then it was… it’s clear
that people at Oak Court so I don’t know. I don’t know what it would say. I just think it should
be considered and you know I think parking is really hard because like I said you push it here
and it bloops out over there and it’s really hard to do. But I’d just… and thank you everybody
but I actually agree with Commissioner Alcheck. I don’t want to rely on anecdotal evidence and
I felt like this study was to anecdotal for me. So, I didn’t… it didn’t have a convincing… you know
it wasn’t rigorous for me. So… and I would… I also wonder why Staff… I was wondering why
Staff didn’t choose the lower Mayfield project as one of the affordable ones because it was just
built at a lower… I think its 25 percent because of being in the transit district. And I was curious
how that one is working and I happened to be there at the opening and stuff and they also have
lifts. And I think that would have been a good one to look at so… and if it’s working out there
and I haven’t… I live very close to it. I haven’t observed any spillover from that one so that
would be good information to have. Especially because we really, really, really want to get it
right for affordable housing and I think that we learned… I think the main objection to the
Wilton project from the people that live close to it is the parking. It’s all about the parking so I
really think it’s important to get that right and if the… if lower Mayfield got it right it would be
great for us to know that. And the ones that I did observe had a ton of spillover parking. I…
actually because you can’t into Tan, it’s gated. I went next door there’s an affordable project on
Arastradero and it was solidly parked in front of it and only 10 of 90 I think it was… I have all the
information here… vacant at that time. So, to me it’s just like how do you know somebody
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didn’t go get home? How do you know some of those people didn’t get home an hour later or
where on a business trip or at their (interrupted)
Mr. Lait: And we’re never going to answer that question. I mean just so I can lower your
expectation we will never have that answer for you.
Commissioner Summa: Ok, yeah.
Mr. Lait: Ok.
Commissioner Summa: Ok thanks.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner [Note-Vice-Chair] Monk.
Vice-Chair Monk: On the issue regarding multi-family parking requirements I would encourage
Council to explore adjusting in the area that’s in close proximity to transit; the ½-mile of
Caltrain stations to be more specific. I 100% support that. I’m curious to see if anyone else on
the Commission supports that. In the report by Staff, there’s also a lower parking demand in
the senior housing areas but I thought we had a lower parking requirement for senior housing
or do we not? I don’t see that identified here but if we don’t I… yeah, I think it is a lower
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requirement so I’m not really sure what you’re asking in that regard. And I think the Wilton
Court project brings up an interesting point and it will be interesting to see what happens there.
I think we ended up going pretty close to the current requirements on that project. I think the
concern is that if we do make a change or an adjustment to the parking requirements and we’re
intending it to be in a certain area but then we go and have an overlay like we did for Wilton
Court then we don’t really know what’s going to happen. And so, if there’s a way to put some
protections in place so that residents can feel confident that it’s not going to reduce parking
requirements in areas that would actually impact that neighborhood with access cars on their
streets. And I don’t know if that’s making sense or not but I guess limiting it by the Caltrain
station might be a way to do that. And I would maybe go then .75 like we did… I would go a
little bit further than a half a mile and lower it by what you proposed in the report which is .75
space per bedroom for a studio I guess. I’m looking at Packet Page 16 and trying to give you
input on it but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.
Chair Lauing: Is this the kind of detail that you want tonight? This kind of input? That’s fine but I
just want to make sure. My sense is the general question is that I think that over time that there
is openness on this Commission to make some adjustments to that. You know what they are at
this… Commissioner [Note-Vice-Chair] Monk is getting to a level of detail that needs to be
worked but I think there’s… that that’s an option.
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Mr. Lait: Yeah no I think that we got a sense of the tenor of the Commission so do you feel like
there’s anything we need?
Chair Lauing: We have a couple more Commissioners who have comments but I just wanted to
mention (interrupted)
Mr. Lait: Well I guess one thing that might be helpful is on this idea that… of retail. We talked
about retail and retail policy in Palo Alto and you know for mixed-use development it’s
sometimes a challenge to provide that commercial base with the residential on top or exploring
eliminating that requirement. But parking… retail parking adds up to a development to and so is
there some threshold where we might be willing to [unintelligible]
Chair Lauing: I think there is from the seven of us here. I think there will be from the seven of us
here in certain circumstances.
Mr. Lait: So, if there’s a sense for… I mean again we’re just looking for some direction. We don’t
want to come back with an ordinance that’s completely off the mark.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Waldfogel is up.
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Commissioner Waldfogel: I’m flexible about retail. I mean I think we probably need to align the
different retail uses better. You know right now the code is very complicated but different uses
for restaurants versus stores, we need to simplify that. Align it because we’ve seen cases where
developers have not accurately predicted what uses that they will actually put into a space so
let’s avoid those kinds of problems going forward. You know I don’t have a specific proposal for
you today.
I’m also flexible… you know in multi-family I’m flexible on what the final parking ratios are.
Although the place where I’m inflexible is anything below one space per unit for market rate is
a place where I probably won’t go because I just don’t think data supports it. I think the data is
pretty clear that one space per unit is a place that we need to be at for the foreseeable future.
The proximity to transit I looked at this pretty hard and I’m actually having trouble gleaning
from the data that there’s less parking demand. I believe there’s less trip generation from units
that are close to transit but I can’t see in the data that there’s less demand for parking. So, I just
think we just need to get clear in our minds what is actually reduced from proximity to transit
and if it’s trip reduction you know that’s great. It certainly feeds into our VMT goals and our
carbon standard goals but… our carbon goals but it really does absolutely nothing for shifting
parking standards. So, I’m kind of uncomfortable with just interrupting the data based on what
we’ve seen so far.
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Chair Lauing: Commissioner Alcheck.
Commissioner Alcheck: So, to respond to your question directly I would support all of those
ideas in your ordinance and I think the retail one sounds incredibly promising. Look I want to… I
want you to know that I am… I completely understand where you’re coming from when it
comes to this notion that you have these constraints; time; budget; you’re under Staffed. There
are… this is not the only thing that you’re working on and you have… and you’re overwhelmed.
And that providing this sort of data collection is super time consuming. I get it, I understand… I
totally heard what you said a minute ago when you said don’t expect the encyclopedia here but
let me just say this. If the… if your objective… and I mean this totally sincerely if your objective
is to lead this department in an effort to help us address this housing crisis then let’s
acknowledge that we have heard a lot of anecdotal evidence. And a lot of us have perspective
on this dais about what we’ve seen in the community and the input. And yet there isn’t strong
representation here of what I would say is sort of third-party reliable data from developers. So
interesting tonight there was this interaction, Commissioner [note- Vice-Chair] Monk wanted to
hear a little bit more about height. I would argue height is not low hanging fruit. There was
varied opinion in your interviews but what there was not varied opinion about was parking and
costs. And yet that info has not yet pursued the community’s leadership to determine that
those are real hurdles that need to be addressed quickly and so maybe we need to focus a little
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bit on the data collections. So that we can… so that when you say that, when you say that you
heard across the board about the retail parking requirements and the residential parking
requirements where the real reason, not height which to be perfectly honest came as a little bit
of a shock to me, that those where unanimously the problem. What we can… what you can do
to bolster the strength of that information when you communicate to us whether its maybe a
transcript of the interaction with the stakeholder because I don’t think that we’ll hear that. I
don’t think… I shouldn’t say we. I don’t think there’s enough of that communication happening
so it’s difficult for community leaders and volunteers to bring that input in to the decision-
making process. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is I appreciate the constraints on time but
there is some information that if provided could significantly improve the decision-making
process. And I think to the extent that our objective is to actually accomplish a goal here that
maybe we need to focus on hearing that perspective. I don’t know exactly how to recommend
doing that but if every residential developer who’s ever done work here is pointing to the same
problem that’s enough for me to spend the meeting trying to address that problem. And I think
the data collection is an effort to say maybe they’re right but I feel like we, especially on this
Commission, very frequently interact with the stakeholders you interviewed. So interestingly
even though you had no interactions with residents we do that a lot. The individuals that you
ended up interacting with we never speak too and so I found that set of stakeholders being
incredibly informative. So, to the extent that we can get more reliable input from them so that
we can make these decisions is the reason why I am… that’s what I’m employing you to do. I’m
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not suggesting that you run around collecting evidence that you’re right will be invariably
rejected for incompleteness because that goal is really to impossible to achieve.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Summa.
Commissioner Summa: So, I think there are things we could fix really quickly with retail. One of
the problems on Cal. Ave that I know retailers are having it’s very specific there compared to
downtown and for instance, for take-out, you have to have one parking spot forever 33-feet.
And this is very prohibitive for any flexibility especially now that the assessment district is
closed. There’s no flexibility between aloud retail uses on the ground floor there because when
the assessment district was open you could just pay for more and now everybody is stuck. And I
know that a couple of really… at least one really welcome business was turned away because
they were a take-out place and they couldn’t go into what had formally been a coffee shop. So,
I think that’s something… and I actually talked about this with former Director Gitelman before
she left. That’s something that I think we could fix right away because the lack of flexibility
between uses in that district is really… what it’s getting us is 7 million gyms really. It is so I have
a lot of hope that we could fine tune the retail requirements as well.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner [note-Vice-Chair] Monk.
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Vice-Chair Monk: On that note, I was thinking also of Cal. Ave and the fact that we are I believe
still on track to put in a parking structure. We also do have existing parking structures and so I
don’t know where the code is in regards to taking that into account and having the retail
parking requirements in proximity to major parking structures. We discussed it in regards to
transit stops but not in regards to parking structures. And I don’t think that should be ignored
because I frankly find it kind of ridiculous that for example the restaurant that came before us,
Portege, which was a building that had sat vacant for I don’t know even know how long
because it was built for ground floor retail and we had to change it so that a restaurant could be
in there. And then we had a very long discussion about the square footage and the parking
requirements and ended up allowing them to put in a scissor lift which takes up three spaces in
order to create five spaces. But now no cars park there because no one wants to go anywhere
near it so I welcome you to go and look at their garage. So that wasn’t to me a good solution
and right behind Portege is a big huge empty parking structure in the evening time that you can
park. In the day, Cal. Ave’s a completely different scenario. So, I just think looking holistically at
the existing structures make sense as well as looking at just reducing or changing the retail
requirements in general.
And I just want to point out one… again on that study that you’re going to look into further
with car ownership and the downtown area and 93 percent. I’m a perfect case example of that,
in that we didn’t have to have two cars. We don’t really need two cars. My car sits there most
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
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of the time. We have two cars because we can. So even though your studies might support
these findings when you build it, it will… people will park there if they need to. So, it’s one of
those things where we don’t really know in my opinion. You can’t study it enough to know
whether or not there’ll be an impact and why people have cars and why they don’t have cars.
Just throwing that out there anecdotally. Thank you.
Mr. Lait: And I’ll just give you the same response I gave Commissioner Summa. We’re not going
to be able to solve… answer that question. I mean people’s behaviors are what they are and a
study… you know we’re not tracking them 24/7. We don’t know what the different
(interrupted)
Commissioner Waldfogel: [unintelligible – off mic]
Mr. Lait: So, but I did want to also comment on the retail component. So, these are great
comments that we’ve received and we should probably have more of a conversation about Cal.
Ave., particularly on parking. What we’re interested in when we talk about parking… Johnny,
you’re about to miss the best part.
Chair Lauing: Don’t leave now. Don’t leave now.
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Vice-Chair Monk: [Off mic]
Commissioner Alcheck: [unintelligible -off mic]
Mr. Lait: So, when we talk about retail to the extent that we’re addressing those in a mixed-use
development and how retail might be modified in mixed-use developments, in particular, is
what we are looking for because that’s the added cost for housing. Clearly, we can have
another conversation about stand-alone retail or retail on Cal. Ave or those other places.
Chair Lauing: Yes, so I think we can sync up with you on how we kind of formulate this to get it
to the next meeting or the meeting after that based on what you’ve said. And I’m sorry, based
on what you’ve heard just [unintelligible] the normal planning process. Good.
[Commission moved to the approval of the meeting minutes]
Commission Action: No action was taken by the Commission
Action Items
Public Comment is Permitted. Applicants/Appellant Teams: Fifteen (15) minutes, plus three (3) minutes rebuttal.
All others: Five (5) minutes per speaker.1,3
3. PUBLIC HEARING / QUASI-JUDICIAL. 2515-2585 El Camino Real [17PLN-00448]:
Recommendation on Applicant’s Request for Approval of a Vesting Tentative Map to
Merge two Lots and Subdivide the Combined 39,953 Square Foot lot Into 13
Residential Condominiums and up to 13 Retail Commercial Units. The Subdivision
map Would Facilitate Construction of the Previously Approved 39,858 Square Foot
Mixed-use Development Project (15PLN-00170). Environmental Assessment: Reuse
of a Previously Adopted Initial Study/Mitigated Negative Declaration Prepared for the
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Associated Development Application (15PLN-000170). Zoning District: Neighborhood
Commercial (CN) and Community Commercial (CC) (2) Zoning District. For More
Information Contact the Project Planner Margaret Netto at
margaret.netto@cityofpaloalto.org
Chair Lauing: Ok so we’ll do that first and recognize Mark Weiss.
Mr. Mark Weiss: Good evening. My name is Mark Weiss, 169 Bryant, Palo Alto. I actually want
to talk about Olive Garden but I understand that was going to be continued. Is that right or
should I wait?
Chair Lauing: Jonathan, Olive Garden agenda item?
Mr. Weiss: Number Three originally, I guess.
Chair Lauing: What is that?
Mr. Weiss: Is it continued or can I talk about it here?
Chair Lauing: You can speak to it because it’s on the agenda but if you wanted to speak to it in a
more timely fashion do we know when that’s coming?
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3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Jonathan Lait, Assistant Director of Planning: Actually, yeah, I’m sorry, thank you Chair. So,
this item is actually on the agenda. Staff is recommending that it be continued to (Interrupted)
Chair Lauing: I see.
Ms. Weiss: So, can I generally speak on the topic right now?
Mr. Lait: So, if I (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: Go ahead.
Vice-Chair Monk: [unintelligible – off mic]
Mr. Weiss: And how much time do I have to talk about this today?
Chair Lauing: Let’s get Jonathan’s feedback here.
Mr. Lait: Right so thank you. I think you’re looking to speak… let me just get… pull it up here if I
have it. Sorry, I don’t have the Packet in front of me but there is a request for a continued item
on 2515 El Camino. Staff recommends that this item be continued because we haven’t had the
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
chance to proper noticing for this and so we re-noticed it for your next item or your next
hearing. When did we say? For I guess it’s June 13th or June 14, whatever that next meeting is.
So, at this point where you are on your agenda is open oral communications. And so, I think it
would be fine if the Commission wanted to receive some testimony I’d probably wait to have it
at that item the Commission can call that item up and you can have a discussion about it.
Chair Lauing: Ok.
Mr. Lait: Maybe we just reorganize the agenda so that we dispense with that one before we get
into our parking discussion.
Chair Lauing: So, we’re going to do a few procedural things. One of which is going to be change
the agenda so that one comes up next and you can speak to it. So (interrupted)
Mr. Weiss: Oh, so you’re going to continue an item but because someone is speaking at it
you’re going to (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: I’ll allow you to speak on it.
Mr. Weiss: But you’re not actually going to do your study session?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Lait: So maybe while the Commission continues its action I’ll talk to this gentleman and let
him know what we’re doing.
Chair Lauing: Ok, great.
[Commission moved back up to agenda changes, additions or deletions]
Chair Lauing: Ok so now we’re going to address what was Item Number Three in the Packet
which Staff is recommending be continued to June 13th. That’s the 2515 to 2565 El Camino Real
Vesting Tentative Map. Is there any discussion about that or everyone ok moving that?
Commissioner Waldfogel: [off mic] Do you need a motion?
Chair Lauing: Yeah.
Commissioner Waldfogel: [off mic] I move to continue it to June 13th.
Chair Lauing: Ok.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
SECOND
Commissioner Summa: [off mic] Second.
VOTE
Chair Lauing: And second? Waldfogel and Summa. Any other discussion? All in favor? Ok, that’s
been moved. Thank you.
MOTION PASSED 6-0 (Riggs absent)
Commission Action: Item was continued to June 13th meeting with Commissioner Waldfogel
motioned and seconded by Commissioner Summa (6-0, Riggs absent)
[Commission moved back up to Item one]
Approval of Minutes
Public Comment is Permitted. Five (5) minutes per speaker.1,3
4. Approval of April 25, 2018 Draft Minutes
Chair Lauing: Let’s move onto the next agenda item which is approval of the minutes of April
25th, 2018. I was not present so I won’t be voting on this but everybody else here was.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
MOTION
Commissioner Summa: I’ll move approval.
Chair Lauing: Commissioner Summa moved to approve.
SECOND
Vice-Chair Monk: I’ll second.
VOTE
Chair Lauing: Seconded by Vice-Chair Monk. All in favor? 5-0.
Commissioner Waldfogel: I was here for that meeting.
Chair Lauing: Yeah you were. 5-0 with one abstention.
MOTION PASSED 5(Summa, Alcheck, Waldfogel, Monk, Gardias)-0-1(Lauing)-1(Riggs absent)
Commission Action: Motion to approve by Commissioner Summa and seconded by
Commissioner Monk (5-1-1, Lauing abstained, Riggs absent)
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Committee Items
Chair Lauing: Ok I don’t think there are any Committee items.
Commissioner Questions, Comments or Announcements
Chair Lauing: So, any other questions, comments, announcements and I don’t think we can go
into future agenda items at this point right because we went as far as we could on that. Yeah,
Commissioner Gardias?
Commissioner Gardias: Question to Director Lait so when can we receive an update on the
overpasses… on the train overpasses option selection? The reason I’m asking because the
process just keeps going on and it looks to me that options are being narrowed down every
week… couple of weeks. I can see some notes in the local press so I’d like to have Commission
to receive some visibility on the process.
Mr. Lait: Yeah well, I think last night the City Council… yeah Tuesday the City Council had a
discussion about the topic about the Caltrain and (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: Grade separation.
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Lait: Grade separation, thank you, I was blanking on the word. And so that might be an area
to first start if you’re interested in catching up on that project. I believe the… I wasn’t at the
meeting but I believe the Council narrowed it down to 10 different alternatives/scenarios to
look at. And I believe that before the Council goes on break there’s going to be a Policy and
Services meeting where they are going to take up the topic again. So, if you’re not already
signed up to those Policy and Services email alerts then that might be something to do if you’re
interested in tracking that. And there may be another conversation before Council goes on
break so those are things that I can alert you too if that gets scheduled.
Commissioner Gardias: Yes, I mean this was from the personal visibility but when will we
receive an official update on this topic?
Mr. Lait: Well I suppose I can report out what the Council has done but I mean this is… the
Council is having public hearings and meetings about this so that’s the official discourse of the
topic at the moment.
Commissioner Gardias: With no schedule of an update to PTC in sight?
Mr. Lait: Well I mean are you asking for just an update of what the Council has done or are you
asking for Commission input into the discussion?
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Commissioner Gardias: Yes, I mean some update would of course tie to some input of the
Commission. So, the reason that I’m asking is that while different options are being removed
from consideration I have no visibility. I would, of course, appreciate a link to or some mailer
that I can subscribe too if that is the process. I’d be happy to personally get updates and
probably others too but I also I would like to understand what options are being removed. The
reason I am asking because at the end of the day we will be faced with a few options which we
would have to provide input too while other options and then there may be some value in
other options would be removed from our visibility. And then, for this reason, some potential
input or exchange between the Commission and the process may be lost in the translation
because we will never be able to speak to some other options already gone.
Mr. Lait: Thank you Commissioner Gardias and I’ll just say this. At this point, the Planning
Commission does not have a direct role on the grade separation discussion. However, as
individual residents, you are all able to participate in the Council discussions and offer your
individual comments and that would be the forum to do so.
Chair Lauing: Ok I just wanted to report that the Baylands Golf Links is open… officially open
after 7-years and there’s the [unintelligible]. It looks beautiful and it’s all about land use
because we created 10 more acres out there that’s just for future use and I think it’s 75 fewer
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
acres of watered turf because it’s all grasses and stuff. So, it was a nice little ceremony that we
had out there. Commissioner Alcheck.
Commissioner Alcheck: Yeah, I’m just looking at the schedule. The May 9th meeting was
canceled, right?
Mr. Lait: I’m being told it is, yes.
Commissioner Alcheck: Ok that’s not reflected on Packet Page 5. I just think it should be and
then my only other question was with regards to June 27th do we know what… is there anything
you can tell us about the discussion on PTC bylaws and procedures?
Mr. Lait: Well I can tell you what else is tentatively scheduled for that meeting. You have an
appeal of a Conditional Use Permit at 999 Alma that the Planning Commission will consider. The
City… the Director approved a gym to locate at the former anthropology site and the
Commission will be having a public hearing on that appeal. We anticipate coming back and
having further housing discussion… we’re not having that. That’s going to be in July and you
have a tentative map that is going to be presented to the Commission and then lastly the
discussion on the bylaws and procedures. And so, this was something that I think the
Commission has talked about at the retreat and there’s been a couple of spotty sort of
conversations that we’ve had since then. I understand that Staff has some recommended
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
changes to the bylaws just to streamline procedures and I think maybe the Chair may have
some thoughts on that. So, what we’d like to do is present your… a strikeout underlines version
of your bylaws that the Commission would have a discussion about and vote to accept or not.
Commissioner Alcheck: Ok and then my second question was being this the first appeal to a
CUP that… I think this may be one of the first appeals of a CUP this body has heard in a very
long time. And so, I think it would be… I didn’t know that was coming but since you mentioned
it I would be… I think it would be really helpful if there was some portion of the Packet that
helped us understand the parameters of an appeal since I don’t know… I’m assuming this is a
Director’s approval that’s getting appealed. I don’t know that we’ve done an appeal in a really
long time.
Mr. Lait: Yeah its… yeah, it’s relatively straightforward. It’s… So, Albert is suggesting that similar
to the First Baptist and I hope it’s not going to be but the process is similar in that the findings
that you have to make for the CUP are the same. Anyways we’ll lay that out for you in the Staff
report and make that clear with like what the Commission’s parameters are.
Commissioner Alcheck: Yeah, I’d just be curious to know how the appeal process works. Is the
appeal by right? You just file one?
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Lait: Yeah, we’ll lay that out for you. It’s straightforward.
Commissioner Alcheck: That would be great.
Chair Lauing: Ok unless there are any other comments… whoops sorry. What?
Vice-Chair Monk: I just had a question. Any idea on Castilleja if that’s coming to us? Also, the
downtown parking garage is going… downtown parking study rather is that coming back to us?
Those two things because we were (interrupted)
Chair Lauing: What was your first question?
Vice-Chair Monk: If Castilleja… they came to us with the… their… I guess with their draft
(interrupted)
Chair Lauing: That was a CEQA right?
Vice-Chair Monk: Yeah, I thought they were going to come back at some point. I’m just curious
as to where things are at on these.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Mr. Lait: Yeah, I’d have to check on the parking study. I think the (interrupted)
Vice-Chair Monk: The downtown paid parking was one question and then also just if you can
give us an update on where the garages are because I feel like (interrupted)
Mr. Lait: Right so the… I believe there is a discussion scheduled before the Council goes on
break on the paid parking study. So, I’ll look for that and send an email to the Commission if
that’s coming up. Regarding the garages, I believe we’re working on the environmental analysis
for the downtown parking garage and so that’s just going through the planning process. The
Cal. Ave one is… and the Public Safety Building is going to Council on I think June 11th. And your
other question about Castilleja we’ve received some updated plan information and the project
will be presented to the Commission, at least some form of it. I know the map is coming
forward to the Commission and I don’t know if other aspects of it are so we’ll have to take a
look at that but that’s not going to happen probably until later in the year.
Vice-Chair Monk: Ok just people might ask us in the community about certain things so it’s just
nice to know generally what’s happening.
Mr. Lait: It’s not going to be (interrupted)
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Vice-Chair Monk: And then also is it possible to get some sort of report from TMA or maybe you
can include it in the Package? I don’t really know what this Street Light Trip Visualization Tool is
that we’re doing in the middle of June.
Mr. Lait: Yeah that’s not directly related to the TMA I don’t believe but I can speak with Josh
Mello about coming back to the Commission with an update on the TMA.
Vice-Chair Monk: Thank you.
Commissioner Summa: When we have our bylaws and procedures discussion are we going to
discuss the option of having a Consent Calendar at PTC because I mean we did that once and
we don’t have a procedure recently. Do we want to do that or are you thinking that’s
something that we want to have as a tool?
Mr. Lait: Yeah, I think we will include a discussion to that discussion or that topic when it comes
to the Commission.
Chair Lauing: Alright, absent any further comments we stand adjourned. Thanks very much for
your efficiently tonight. Really appreciate that everyone does.
_______________________
1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Adjournment
11:02 pm
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1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at
the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to fifteen (15) minutes at the discretion of the Chair,
provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually.
2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers.
3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers.
Palo Alto Planning & Transportation Commission
Commissioner Biographies, Present and Archived Agendas and Reports are available online:
http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/boards/ptc/default.asp. The PTC Commission members are:
Commissioner Michael Alcheck
Commissioner Asher Waldfogel
Commissioner Przemek Gardias
Chair Ed Lauing
Vice Chair Susan Monk
Commissioner Doria Summa
Commissioner William Riggs
Get Informed and Be Engaged!
View online: http://midpenmedia.org/category/government/city-of-palo-alto or on Channel 26.
Show up and speak. Public comment is encouraged. Please complete a speaker request card
located on the table at the entrance to the Council Chambers and deliver it to the Commission
Secretary prior to discussion of the item.
Write to us. Email the PTC at: Planning.Commission@CityofPaloAlto.org. Letters can be
delivered to the Planning & Community Environment Department, 5th floor, City Hall, 250
Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301. Comments received by 2:00 PM two Tuesdays preceding
the meeting date will be included in the agenda packet. Comments received afterward through
2:00 PM the day of the meeting will be presented to the Commission at the dais.
Material related to an item on this agenda submitted to the PTC after distribution of the
agenda packet is available for public inspection at the address above.
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manner that is readily accessible to all. Persons with disabilities who require materials in an
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