HomeMy WebLinkAbout2024-01-31 Planning & Transportation Commission Verbatim 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 1
Action Agenda: January 31, 2024 2
Council Chambers & Virtual 3
6:00 PM 4
5
Call to Order / Roll Call 6
6:01 pm 7
Chair Summa: Good evening, welcome everyone to the Planning and Transportation 8
Commission regular meeting of Wednesday January 31st, 2024. Could you please call the roll? 9
10
ROLL CALL 11
12
Ms. Dao: Chair Summa? 13
14
Chair Summa: Present. 15
16
Ms. Dao: Vice-Chair Chang? 17
18
Vice-Chair Chang: Here. 19
20
Ms. Dao: Commissioner Akin? 21
22
_______________________
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 Akin: Here. 1
2
Ms. Dao: Commissioner Hechtman? 3
4
Commissioner Hechtman: Present. 5
6
Ms. Dao: Commissioner Lu? 7
8
Commissioner Lu: Here. 9
10
Ms. Dao: Commissioner Reckdahl 11
12
Commissioner Reckdahl: Here. 13
14
Ms. Dao: Commissioner Templeton? 15
16
Commissioner Templeton: Here. 17
18
Ms. Dao: We have a quorum. 19
20
_______________________
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.
Oral Communications 1
The public may speak to any item not on the agenda. Three (3) minutes per speaker.1,2 2
3
Chair Summa: Thank you so much and now is the time for public comment for any item that is 4
not on the Agenda. Do we have any speakers? We have no one in the room. 5
6
Ms. Dao: No one in the room but I see Bruce Arthur on zoom, raised his hand. 7
8
Chair Summa: Okay. 9
10
Ms. Dao: If you can unmute yourself, you have three minutes. 11
12
Bruce Arthur: Thank you very much. Oh, video too. Okay. My name is Bruce Arthur, I’m the 13
Chairperson of the Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee (PABAC) and we’ve been discussing on 14
that committee the project that CalTrans wants to undertake to put bicycle lanes on El Camino. 15
We passed a motion that we’ve sent a long to you that should be in your packet, basically we’d 16
like the City to engage and conduct, you know, sort of good due diligence, probably a parking 17
survey along El Camino to understand what this would be, and ultimately to support it. But 18
that’s what we’ve asking for. I know this is sort of not on your agenda, but that is sort of 19
something we think you should be aware of and take a look at what’s going on there. I think the 20
opportunity to add bike lanes to El Camino would be great. I understand that it will take away 21
_______________________
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.
some parking, and there are some other side effects of it, but I think it’s worth investigating and 1
pursuing. So that’s it. If you have any questions for me or the bicycle committee, feel free to ask 2
me, I’ll be on the meeting for a while, or you send it via email, and we can discuss them. We’re 3
not meeting in February; we’ll meet again in March. So, that’s it, and that’s pretty quick. Thank 4
you very much. 5
6
Chair Summa: Thank you very much Mr. Arthur. Do we… our next speaking please. 7
8
Ms. Dao: No other public comments. 9
10
Chair Summa: Okay, with no other public comments we will go to Agenda changes, additions 11
and deletions. 12
13
Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions 14
The Chair or Commission majority may modify the agenda order to improve meeting management. 15
16
Ms. Amy French, Chief Planning Official: There are no changes. 17
18
Chair Summa: Thank you for that, and then City Official Reports, I’m not sure... who else is here. 19
Ms. French? 20
21
_______________________
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.
City Official Reports 1
1. Directors Report, Meeting Schedule and Assignments 2
Ms. Amy French, Chief Planning Official: Yes, so we have Rafael Rius here and he can provide an 3
update on all things transportation. And then we can talk about the upcoming meetings. 4
5
Chair Summa: Thank you so much. 6
7
Transportation Senior Engineer Rafael Rius: Thank you, I’m Rafael Rius, Senior Engineer with the 8
Office of Transportation. Bruce just stole my thunder but a couple of announcements that I had 9
was the February PABAC meeting is going to be cancelled so March 5th would be the next one. 10
I’m going to work on getting the data normally in that packet to this Commission and regarding 11
the El Camino bike lane project, our staff is trying to work with CalTrans to set up a community 12
meeting, we don’t know the date yet, but we’re working on that so, be on the look out for that 13
date to be announced soon. And then lastly, transportation staff is planning to bring our… our 14
parking manager is planning to bring a comprehensive update to this Commission, targeting 15
around one of the meetings in March. I don’t have any other project updates at this time, but I 16
can try to answer any questions. 17
18
Chair Summa: Okay, thank you so much for that, does anyone have any questions? 19
Commissioner Hechtman . 20
_______________________
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.
1
Commissioner Hechtman: Thank you. Perhaps it was at our last meeting, or maybe the meeting 2
before that, I think it was Sylvia who reported to us on a presentation… the city has received 3
something from CalTrans asking for them to approve some design aspects and the City had 4
responded back to that with a lengthy letter with a bunch of questions, asking for more 5
information, and I’m wondering if we’ve received a response to that request that the City sent 6
to CalTrans. 7
8
Mr. Rius: Yes, I’m trying to… yes, we did receive a response letter as well as an updated draft 9
set of plans. They are posted on the website, I’ll try to send a link to Veronica, so maybe she can 10
share within the next couple of minutes or so. But it is…. Our letter… CalTrans response letter 11
and the latest plans are on the City’s web page right now. 12
13
Chair Summa: Thank you for that. Any other questions? Oh, go ahead. 14
15
Commissioner Reckdahl: Public works did that survey of the Wilkey Way Bike Bridge. Do you 16
have the results of the surfaces they’re comparing? 17
18
Mr. Rius: I don’t. Are you talking about different surface types? 19
20
_______________________
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 Reckdahl: Yeah, there were two sample surfaces there and they wanted 1
feedback on those two sample surfaces. 2
3
Mr. Rius: I don’t. I’ll ask and try to get a response from Public Works. I’ll ask them and try to get 4
back to you guys. 5
6
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay. And also, if you know of any plans to resurface that or to add 7
the texture on, because now it’s wet again so it’s slippery, especially for bicyclists and I’ve been 8
on there when… I walk across that a couple times a week and I see bicycles fall down probably 9
two or three times per year, right in front of me. So, I suspect it’s happening when I’m not on 10
the bridge too. So… 11
12
Mr. Rius: Yeah, I don’t have an update for you on that, but have seen it when I have ridden 13
across that when it’s wet also, so I know what you’re describing. 14
15
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay, thanks. 16
17
Chair Summa: Thank you. Anyone else with a question? Okay. Not seeing any we’ll move on to 18
our only item of the evening… Oh… Ms. French were you going to give us a report? I skipped 19
you. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Ms. Amy French, Chief Planning Official: Thank you, I was going to share my screen but I’m 2
having some technical difficulties here, so I will not. Basically, we have a number of upcoming 3
meetings as noted in the report, we are hoping to also have a study session on that El Camino 4
bike lanes and parking, the CalTrans item has not been identified which date, so I’ll just leave it 5
at that. And move on to the next item. 6
7
Study Session 8
Public Comment is Permitted. Three (3) minutes per speaker. 9
10
2. Study Session: Peer Cities Comparison and Stakeholder Interviews Results 11
12
Chair Summa: Okay, so we have a study session this evening and it’s on the peer City’s 13
comparison and stakeholder interview results so we will start off. I know we have some 14
consultants here, and staff, and we’ll start off with those presentations. 15
16
Ms. French: Yes, thank you. Well, I do not have my presentation available so I will just say that 17
on Monday night Council had a retreat and they modified the priority to… for what used to be 18
called Economic Recovery and Transition and now it’s Economic Development, I think, and 19
Transition, something like that, related to what we’re doing now. We did originally retain our 20
consultant back in 2021, we received a report and… the end of the summer 2022, but we never 21
published that report, that report that we had received. Took a look at Redwood City and 22
_______________________
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.
Mount View as comparable cities, then we modified the scope to expand it in the Spring of 1
2023, and then you had the introduction to this current iteration of this study last October, 2
October 25th. And so, we have our consultants back again today to talk about the outreach 3
interviews and comparisons to the peer cities. So I’ll turn it over to Surabhi. 4
5
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Thank you Amy. So, good evening, everyone, I’m Surabhi Barbhaya 6
from MBI (Michael Baker International) I’m here tonight with my colleagues and teammates 7
Dan Wery and Cameron Savois. We each have a presentation of about 20 slides it will take 8
around twenty-five to thirty minutes. And that will leave us plenty of time later for discussion. 9
So going to the next slide. 10
11
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Give me a second here. As soon as I turned it on it moved my screen, so 12
bear with me for a second, I’ve got to get it back. Working… not working. Sorry guys, hang on 13
for a second. I don’t know what happened to my… as soon as I hit share screen I lost my people. 14
15
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: We can still see the first slide. 16
17
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Yeah, it’s just not advancing, that’s the problem. Oh, here we go. Okay. 18
19
_______________________
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. Barbhaya, Consultant: Thank you Dan. So first we wanted to review the purpose of the 1
project at tonight’s meeting. So the main purpose of the project is to review cities commercial 2
zones and provide accommodation and changes in zoning codes that could help with 3
[TIMESTAMP 23:45 Unintelligible] the first step in doing this was to do a stakeholder outreach 4
and this including peer city interviews and comparing their zoning codes to Palo Alto’s. In order 5
to understand some successful strategies that the peer city’s [TIMESTAMP 24:02 Unintelligible]. 6
So this included the City of Santa Monica and the City of Los Altos. In addition we also 7
interviewed two other cities in the previous report and that was City of Redwood and City of 8
Mountain View. We will provide you with comments to our interview questions at the end of 9
the presentation, for those two cities, but we did include them in that peer city comparison and 10
the zoning comparison with Santa Monica and Los Altos. We also interviewed a mix of seven 11
business owners and property managers as a [TIMESTAMP 24:44 Unintelligible] effort. So this 12
outreach effort will inform us in recommending the changes to Palo Alto’s zoning ordinance 13
related to retail recovery. So next slide please. 14
15
Vice Chair Chang: Excuse me, sorry, we can’t hear very clearly, when Ms. Barbhaya is speaking. 16
17
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Let me see if this will … does this help? Does this sound better? 18
19
Vice Chair Chang: Moderately. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Mr. Wery, Consultant: It’s a little echo-y. Why don’t we continue. 2
3
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Let me know if this is a little better. 4
5
Vice Chair Chang: Yes, that is better. 6
7
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Okay. So this slide shows the commercial zones in Palo Alto. Our 8
focus has been on downtown California Avenue, midtown and El Camino Real. Note that the 9
commercial areas of Charleston Center, Middlefield Road and San Antonio Road on the east of 10
Palo Alto, they share the same zones as other focus area. So on the left side of the screen you 11
can see all the commercial zones for each of these areas, and also the combining District that 12
falls with each of these commercial zones. Next slide please. So Santa Monica was identified as 13
one of the Peer cities by the City and we interviewed with Santa Monica’s city staff in October, 14
mainly focusing on the Third Street Promenade, where Santa Monica focused the majority of 15
their retail efforts. As a part of this study, we show all of the commercial districts in Santa 16
Monica and have documented them in the matrix provided to you with the staff report. Next 17
slide please. 18
19
Mr. Wery, Consultant: There you go. Did it not advance? What happened? 20
_______________________
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.
1
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: I think there’s a little lag. 2
3
Mr. Wery, Consultant: It’s advanced on my page. 4
5
Chair Summa: I’m sorry, it’s very difficult to understand you Mr. Wery. 6
7
Mr. Wery, Consultant: okay. 8
9
Chair Summa: I don’t know.. I think you’re too close to the mic. 10
11
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Oh really… okay. Over modulated? 12
13
Chair Summa: Yes. Maybe that’s the word. 14
15
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Okay. I will speak softly. 16
17
Chair Summa: Thank you. 18
19
_______________________
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. Wery, Consultant: Okay, so I’m just trying to get the slide to advance, I’m not sure… hang 1
on just a second. It seems to be hanging up. 2
3
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: So, while Dan is trying to advance the slide, I wanted to talk about 4
the other city which is Los Altos, so at the last PTC meeting the staff was directed to include the 5
City of Los Altos as an additional peer city. And similar to Santa Monica our interview focused 6
on the Commercial Retail Sales zone which is the CRS zone that you see here in the light purple 7
area. Within their downtown triangle area, so this is their downtown triangle area. We chose 8
this… we were focusing on this because it was most relevant to Palo Alto and specifically Palo 9
Alto’s downtown and California Ave area. However, the districts related to other commercial 10
district is also documented in the matrix. And as I said before, we also interviewed Mountain 11
View and Redwood as a part of Phase I of this project, but that would give me only two 12
interviews within depth zoning … their zoning analysis based on the current element cycle. With 13
that I will pass it on to Dan. 14
15
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Thank you Surabhi, and tell me if I need to speak up or speak down, I’m 16
speaking quite softly for me, but okay thank you. Good evening everybody, I’m Dan Wery with 17
Michael Baker and so just kind of following on with what Surabhi was introducing with, our 18
peer cities zoning comparison and so we can see on this slide we looked at about twelve 19
different criteria and some of these… we won’t go into everything tonight because it takes a 20
_______________________
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.
long time, but there’s about seven we will go through in more detail. So we’ve got about 1
another ten or fifteen slides that we’re going to go through these and kind of show you what 2
we heard and what we have discovered so far. So with that, I will start off with the ground floor 3
restrictions, and with all of these kind of retail, health issues, we’re always looking at the 4
ground floor and trying to understand and incentivize and support good ground floor activity. In 5
this slide, it’s kind of comparing the ground floor restrictions between Palo Alto, Santa Monica 6
and Los Altos and the main things were for… in Palo Alto there’s three main components that 7
really regulate the ground floor and that’s the RPO, the Retail Preservation Ordinance, the GF, 8
and the R Combining Districts. So they’re all kind of extra requirements on top of the base 9
zoning. For Santa Monica, we were focused on their BC zone and then for Los Altos we’re 10
looking at their CRS zone. Those were the two zones that were most relative for direct 11
comparison. And the main differences here, you can see on the slide, is retail preservation… we 12
also have this kind of legend here, these big dots, and that’s just kind of quick snapshot of 13
what’s the difference; and these are really in terms of complexity, difficulty, and restrictiveness 14
on more levels of … of regulation if you will. So, in comparison of these, these are all relative. 15
Palo Alto gets a red dot because it’s by far the most restrictive. It’s got more levels of 16
complication, there’s multiple sections that are kind of overlap and combine and again it’s on 17
top of the base zoning, and you can see some of the restrictions there. So it doesn’t permit 18
office or residential, those are prohibited on ground floor, any replacement of retail is 19
restricted to retail or retail like, and in the GF and R districts, we’ll get into this in another slide, 20
_______________________
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.
there’s even further restrictions. When we compared to Santa Monica, they allow office and 1
residential on the ground floor, the key restriction there is it’s behind the street facing tenants. 2
So, as long as it’s maintaining that active frontage with your retail or other commercial uses, 3
that’s allowed. They also have a limitation on formula or franchise restaurants and their 4
definition for that is 150 locations nationwide, and we have a separate slide on formula retail. 5
In the City of Los Altos, they allow… there is residential but it’s restrictive, so these bullets are 6
what’s restricted. So residential and trade schools are restricted on the ground floor, office and 7
personal service uses are allowed on the ground floor in the CRS zone. So that’s kind of the 8
main comparisons there. And then we kind of looked again at the permitted uses on the ground 9
floor, what is allowed, and these are fairly comparable, they allow retail and restaurants, most 10
of them allow hotels and theaters, some allow commercial recreation and in comparison 11
between Palo Alto and Santa Monica, we have the little box there… Santa Monica is allowing 12
additional uses, more uses than is allowed in Palo Alto … kind of “by rights” these are the by 13
rights uses, they are not subject to a conditional use permit or other restrictions. City of Los 14
Altos again, retail, restaurants, kind of cocktail lounges, personal services, they’re fairly similar 15
so the difference there is Santa Monica is … allows a greater variety of uses on those ground 16
floors. Next slide here is conditional uses, and this is just kind of a quick… they’re fairly 17
comparable and you really kind of need to look at the conditional versus the permitted ground 18
floor or the by right uses, but they… so some may be allowed by right, others may be allowed 19
by conditional use permit. Maybe one of the key take outs here is that both, or all three use 20
_______________________
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.
different size limitation. So, if you exceed 5,000 square feet, you’re going to trigger a 1
conditional use permit. In Palo Alto certain uses for commercial recreation in this case. And 2
similarly in Santa Monica, they’ve got some different size limits, it’s for particular uses and also 3
in Los Altos. So, our next slide is what happens when you change a ground floor use, and this 4
gets really directly to comparing to Palo Alto’s RPO. The Retail Preservation Ordinance does not 5
allow a change of existing retail use to anything other than retail or retail like. And so here 6
we’ve got our color codes again, Palo Alto gets a red dot, it prohibits changes from retail city 7
wide so it’s very comprehensive, that’s all retail areas. And the relief values, if you want relief 8
from that provision, it’s the highest standard you can get. It’s an unconstitutional taking. So that 9
means you lose all … you know the standard is before you can get relief or you can get a change 10
of retail to something other than retail or retail like, you have to demonstrate that this is a 11
completely taking of your property rights. There’s no other value in the property. So that’s the 12
highest you can go and if it were adjudicated it would go to the Supreme Court of the United 13
States of America. So, it’s a very high standard. In the non-ground floor in R combining districts, 14
which is a lot like El Camino Real and some of the other zones, then there is an easier standard 15
which is the alternative active use. And that’s more of just a traditional, I’ve got a hardship, I 16
can demonstrate that I don’t… there’s no market and I can’t make retail work, let me give you 17
another active use in its place. So, in the non-ground floor and R combining district areas, that’s 18
a much easier hurdle. But I’ll note that takes out the ground floor and the R combining districts 19
cover all of University and all of California Avenues. By comparison, in Santa Monica if you want 20
_______________________
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.
to do some of these non-retail things … bars, nightclubs, car showrooms, offices, personal 1
services, et cetera, you just need to get a CUP. So, it’s a fairly traditional process. You get 2
additional scrutiny, but you can do it. And then in Los Altos, there are no change of use 3
restrictions. So, you’re allowed to make changes, so they got a yellow dot. So that’s probably 4
one of the most… the biggest gradation in comparisons in there. 5
6
Commissioner Reckdahl: I have a question there on that last slide. By alternative active use, do 7
you know how frequently that’s used and how successful it is for Palo Alto? 8
9
Mr. Wery, Consultant: I would defer to Amy and staff on that, because we don’t know the full 10
history, but it would be limited to primarily like El Camino Real, it would not apply to University 11
in downtown, or California Avenue for most of the area… kind of where the retail is. 12
13
Ms. French: I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time concentrating. I’m trying to send messages to see 14
if this is… we have quite a loud… for the consultants, they may not know this, but there’s quite 15
a loud ruckus outside of City Hall that’s making it hard to concentrate for some of us, so you 16
might have to ask the question again. Thank you. 17
18
_______________________
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 Reckdahl: The question was do you happen to know off hand how frequently 1
Palo Alto uses the alternative active use for the retail preservation and if so, how successful is 2
it. 3
4
Ms. French: Not often. 5
6
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay. Thanks. 7
8
Chair Summa: And just to be clear, we allow these uses under retail, it’s just some of these in 9
the middle column, some of these slides have inaccuracies. Because we do allow all these uses 10
in … except office, in ground floor protected retail. And they can change from one allowed use 11
to another, that’s not restricted, so this slide seems a little misleading to me. 12
13
Mr. Wery, Consultant: I think maybe… yeah… I think it’s the way it’s presented because if you 14
compare just the permitted use schedules and lined them up, you’re right. I’m not trying to say 15
that Palo Alto column doesn’t allow bars and nightclubs and showrooms, we’re just saying what 16
happens if you want to change from a retail use, so it’s a little bit different than a direct 17
comparison. 18
19
_______________________
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 Chang: But if I, I’m sorry, if when I read the comparison matrix it didn’t seem that… it 1
also seemed that in the Bayside Conservation Area there was a problem if you changed from a 2
retail use. Like it’s no different than our downtown, maybe with the exception of what you 3
showed on the prior slide, where we have a different square foot threshold. 4
5
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Okay, well, we can … why don’t we go through, because some of these 6
we’ve got some additional slides, and we can talk about some of the comments we got from 7
staff. So we did meet with Santa Monica and Los Altos staff and interviewed them, tried to 8
confer and make sure we understood their zoning and if we need to correct it that’s fine, but 9
this is our understanding from talking with them and looking at the zoning, and doing a 10
comparison. So, there could be some other more subtle restrictions, but this is our 11
understanding, is that you can make changes from retail, they don’t have a prohibition on non-12
retail uses going into a former retail space. That’s our understanding. This slide… don’t have a 13
lot to say, generally each city has done a pretty good job about keeping the permit approval 14
processes at the staff level, so each city allows a lot of discretion to occur and the approvals to 15
occur at the staff or director level. Which is good, that’s generally recommended. Not too much 16
to say there. Parking facilities approach. Parking is always an important partial of our retail and 17
commercial activities and there’s a whole… we’re going to have a separate discussion on 18
parking and strategy but this was just kind of a quick comparison about how it works with 19
particularly the retail uses and just kind of a basic understanding. So, again, in comparison, 20
_______________________
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.
these are relative. The parking minimum standards in Palo Alto were higher than the others and 1
in particular Santa Monica has no minimum standards any more, they eliminated those I think 2
in 2017 or 2019. They’ve now established parking maximum ratios and those for example 3
would be like maximum of two or 2.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet for retail, which is very very 4
low. I mean most minimums in most cities would be around 3.5 or four spaces per 1,000 square 5
feet. The … in Los Altos, they have a parking district. Parking requirements are exempt for the 6
first 1.0 floor area ratio, so basically all existing uses that we’re doing at the time… you know if 7
you have an existing building as of the time when they put this ordinance in, you can make any 8
change you want, you don’t need to provide any additional parking, and they’ve got six acres of 9
parking that they provided. 10
11
Chair Summa: Just curious if you have the same data… in other words, for all three situations. 12
In other words, you have the maximum … the total number spaces in down town and California 13
Avenue but you don’t provide that information for the other two cities. I don’t know how many 14
acres, but you provide acreage of parking in Los Altos but you don’t do that in the other two 15
places, and we also have an exemption for the first, I forget how many square feet of retail to 16
be park… is it 1,500, I’m not recalling so I mean, once again, it’s hard to compare these three 17
cities from this slide. 18
19
_______________________
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. Wery, Consultant: Yeah, and that’s … you raise a good point because everybody does it a 1
little bit differently, so you don’t always get apples to apples comparisons. Our point here 2
wasn’t exactly how many spaces they have because they’re different size, they’ve got different 3
amounts of uses, so if I said there were 10,000 parking spaces in Santa Monica, you’d have to 4
factor that you’ve got you know 5,000 in Palo Alto between downtown and California… how do 5
you compare that? You need to start looking at ratios and what’s the ratio between total floor 6
area, et cetera, and that really wasn’t the purpose of our analysis, it was really just to provide 7
some more at the operational level, how are they approaching it. And the other reason we’re 8
looking at this is because particularly University and California are almost all within one half 9
mile of the stations, the State has not prohibited the use of minimum parking requirements in 10
those areas. So, it’s going to be a different approach to that going forward. And that’s partially 11
the reason why, excuse me, we also compared it to Santa Monica, because they were kind of 12
ahead of the curve, they eliminated their minimum parking requirements even before the State 13
enacted that. So they were kind of a model in that case. And the other point there is that 14
they’ve got a lot of parking, municipal parking, ten parking garages, they don’t plan to build 15
anymore, if there’s additional demand, what they’re trying to do is manage the demand for 16
parking or reduce the demand for parking through transportation demand, management 17
programs, and Palo Alto has that, Santa Monica has that, and that’s just the way to kind of 18
reduce trips and that helps you avoid you know, traffic and trips and [TIMESTAMP 44:12 19
Unintelligible] occupancy vehicles and it can also reduce your parking requirements and the 20
_______________________
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.
costs that go with that. Okay. Next one, formula retail regulations. Some key differences: in 1
Palo Alto the formula retail applies to all businesses, all types of businesses with ten or more 2
locations nationwide. So it’s a pretty low standard and it’s all franchises. And so that restriction 3
comes in the R retail district which applies on California Avenue, so this is really applicable to 4
California Avenue. So… if you have any sort of franchise really with ten or more nationwide, 5
then you need to get a CUP. Conditional Use permit. That does not apply on … in downtown, 6
midtown or on El Camino Real. By contrast, Santa Monica has a similar formula definition but 7
it’s limited to restaurants with more than … or 150 or more locations nationwide. So a much 8
higher standard in terms of the number on a nationwide basis and it’s limited to just 9
restaurants. Those would be limited to upper floors, they are not allowed on the ground floor, 10
they’d be allowed on a second floor or upper floor, so if it were in kind of a mall, you know, 11
food court type arrangement, that might work. The other criteria there is other than, well 150 12
locations, it’s also if you’re placing orders at a walk up window or counter or machines… that’d 13
be a McDonalds or anything like that, and so specifically, it’s really kind of narrowly targeted 14
towards particularly like fast foods. In Los Altos, there is no limit, there is no restriction on 15
formula retail, in fact they don’t have any chain stores in terms of retail, and they’re actually 16
looking to maybe get some and bring a little new activity into their downtown. It’s one thing 17
that they told us. Let’s see, so I’m going to hand it off now to Cameron and he’s got a couple of 18
slides to go over some of the peer city interviews and Cameron was involved in most of those 19
interviews. I’ll hand it off to Cameron. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Cameron Savois, Consultant: Thanks Dan, so like Surabhi was saying, we interviewed four cities. 2
We started with your neighbors in Mountain View and Redwood City first and then added Santa 3
Monica and Los Altos based on recommendations. We asked a standard series of questions 4
focused on retail, ground floor regulations, permitting processes, parking, strategies to improve 5
retail, among other recommendations. Overall, we received a lot of good information and 6
recommendations which are partially listed on this slide, and also contained in the staff report. 7
Highlighted in the bold italics are a few of the most relevant and interesting highlights from the 8
Santa Monica and Los Altos interviews. Specifically in Santa Monica the city loosened use 9
restrictions to allow for creative and temporary uses that provide entertainment to address 10
high vacancy rates. Like Dan was saying, they also don’t have minimum parking requirements 11
and they removed them prior to the implementation of Assembly Bill 2097, but they do have a 12
parking cap in their downtown. In Los Altos, they allow for a change of use by right, and they do 13
not use Conditional Use permits, the use is either permitted or it’s not permitted. Next slide. 14
Similarly, this slide highlights the answers and questions to several of the key questions asked 15
Mountain View and Redwood City. Like Los Altos, Mountain View and Redwood City also allow 16
change of use, including retail, by right with no discretionary approval required. In Redwood 17
City, similarly there are no restrictions on change of ground floor uses, they also provide 18
incentives for retail mixed use and technical assistance in the form of a retail task force to 19
attract and facilitate new business. Also, in Redwood City they allowed change of use of existing 20
_______________________
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.
space without the requirement for additional parking. Additionally, we interviewed seven 1
business stakeholders including the Chamber of Commerce, Premier Property Management, 2
Freud Brothers, Ellis Partners, Performance Gains, Italico and [TIMESTAMP 49:01 Unintelligible] 3
Kitchen. Again, we received a lot of great detail, a lot of observations, examples and 4
recommendations based on their experiences in Palo Alto. This slide listed some of the 5
comments we received, and a full summary will be included in the report. Highlighted and bold, 6
again, are a few of the key recommendations we received related specifically to the City Code, 7
first one being rescind the ground floor retail protection ordinance. It has created the very 8
problems that it was intended to prevent by increasing vacancies and loss of retail instead of 9
preserving retail and secondly, rescind formula retail on California Avenue. Some other 10
comments included leave it to the market, don’t force retail, and the last comment I wanted to 11
highlight was the code is too rigid and narrowly defined. The standards are too complex. So 12
that’s that. And with the last … and with that I will pass it back to Surabhi to wrap this up. 13
14
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Thank you Cameron. So, I just wanted to take a look at the next 15
steps. We … this is our second PTC meeting, we are planning to come to PTC with zoning 16
recommendations on February 28, so we were thinking of more like a workshop kind of setting 17
where we will present some recommendations and we can openly discuss considerations and 18
we will carry them over in March depending on how far we get, we carry them over in March. 19
And in March we will also give you a summary of the parking study recommendations that we 20
_______________________
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.
are coming up with as a part of this study, this has most to do with the impact of AB 2097 that 1
basically you don’t need to provide parking for multifamily mixed use and any commercial areas 2
that are within half a mile of transit and [TIMESTAMP 51:15 Unintelligible] California Avenue 3
and University … the downtown area. So, we will come with a recommendation on that, like 4
how to deal with the impact of AB 2097. And then the next meeting after that will be sometime 5
in April or May that we will be presenting our final report recommendations to PTC. Next slide 6
please. So this is the overall schedule, as you can see there is a red start on our current 7
meeting, the second meeting with PTC, we still have three more meetings to go and then in 8
May and June we will be taking this for adoption hearings. So that’s generally the schedule 9
now. With that I can open it up to discussion and questions. 10
11
Chair Summa: Okay, do you want to do a round of questions, or public comments. Yes. Do we 12
have any members of the public who would like to speak, or do you would you like to do 13
questions first, clarifying questions first. Okay. We will do… take public comment first. Ms. Dao, 14
do we have any? 15
16
PUBLIC COMMENT 17
18
Ms. Dao: No in person speakers, I see one person on zoom if you want to give public comment, 19
please, raise your hand. No, otherwise no public comment. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Chair Summa: Thank you for that, and then my colleagues would you like to do a separate 2
round of clarifying questions and then comments, or would… no? Okay, and I promise 3
Commissioner Templeton could go first because she would like to get to her… the next event. 4
5
Commissioner Templeton: Thank you so much Madam Chair. I’m sure you’re going to hear 6
variations of this, first thank you for working on this and for your presentation. I have a lot of 7
concerns about the content and how it’s presented, and I guess I’m going to start first with that 8
row of PTC meetings, are they all study sessions or will we be voting some point before … it’s 9
hard to tell if the adoptions hearings is us or City Council, could you clarify that please? 10
11
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Surabhi do you want to address that, or? 12
13
Ms. French: Are you asking me or Surabhi? 14
15
Commissioner Templeton: I would like someone on staff or consultant to answer, I don’t know. 16
17
Ms. French: Sure, well I’ll just say that we’re not going forward with zoning changes to the 18
Council, we would have to come to this body with any changes to Title 18. So, this is… 19
20
_______________________
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 Templeton: That’s great to know. I just wanted to make sure because they’re all 1
the same kind of dots and I wasn’t sure how it was meant. But thank you for confirming that. I 2
would say, I’m so sorry, we have a very loud protest adjacent to us, it’s very hard for us to hear, 3
so I apologize if I sound like I’m shouting. But the concerns I have is that this presentation is not 4
currently in a form that our community can respond to. It is inaccurate and some of the 5
comparisons are incomplete and so I’m hopeful that my other colleagues can be more 6
articulate than I can in this moment because it’s distracting in here, but the point here is that 7
this feedback that you’re going to hear tonight about improving the accuracy and making sure 8
that the this is something that we see our own community reflected in, this report. It’s really 9
important. And understanding that some of the things about it are about where we stand right 10
now are frustrating to some of our business owners doesn’t necessarily reflect the reasons… 11
that it overrides the reasons that it’s put in place to begin with, right? So, we’re trying to deal 12
with that and want to see more of that kind of reflected in here and understand the 13
consequences and or we’re going to go back to where we were before. So, that was confusing, 14
I’m sorry about that, but I think there’s a lot of work here still to be done. Thank you. 15
16
Chair Summa: So, Ms. French has just stepped out to check in with the police, security and 17
what not. But if this is untenable situation, it’s certainly not ideal to conduct this meeting, we 18
can do one of two things. Three things… we can continue the meeting and just get through it, 19
_______________________
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.
we can just take some preliminary comments and then brief comments to give brief direction 1
and continue it, or we can just continue it now. I’m (Commissioners speaking off mic)… 2
3
Vice Chair Chang: I just can’t hear you at the … you know you’re five feet away from me and I 4
can’t hear your comments. So, it’s hard to have a productive meeting I do think that since we’re 5
not having another PTC meeting for quite a while, it may make sense for us to have at least a 6
minimum brief comments so that the consultant has some feedback and can work on it in the 7
interim, but I think that maybe we should limit our comments… really this isn’t for discussion 8
amongst us since we can’t hear each other, it’s more feedback for the consultants. So maybe 9
we could limit it to you know, two to three minutes or something like that. 10
11
Commissioner Templeton: What if we take a five minutes recess, because they’ll open the 12
doors in five minutes and those folks will go into chambers. 13
14
Vice Chair Chang: That sounds like an excellent plan. 15
16
Chair Summa: Okay, I’m going to go ahead and say that we should take a five minutes recess 17
and hopefully this will have cooled down. So, we’ll be back in five minutes everyone. 18
19
PTC took a five minutes break, and all returned to session with all members present. 20
_______________________
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 Summa: (In progress) so we’re going to continue… oh Commissioner Templeton were you 1
finished? 2
3
Commissioner Templeton: Yes. 4
5
Chair Summa: Okay. Who would like to go next? Okay. Commissioner Hechtman. 6
7
Commissioner Hechtman: Thank you and I do thank staff and the consultants for the work so 8
far, I do recognize that it’s a work in progress and we’re in kind of a raw information stage and 9
from the comments that I’ve already heard from my fellow Commissioners, I think that and 10
you’ll hear more of them I think, we’re really looking to refine that raw data, particularly to do 11
it in a way that tells us as Commissioners, that our consultants really understand the… how Palo 12
Alto works right now, because we need to be confident of that so that we know when you’re 13
making recommendations on what changes we might want to consider, that you get the 14
baseline. So, in any event, So my comments tonight are really kind of macro comments which I 15
think are appropriate at this stage. You know, one of the things that struck me and I think one 16
of the consultant mentioned it is you know, it’s a challenge to compare cities to each other 17
because even when we’re looking for cities that are kind of like us, they’re very different. Right, 18
you know, Mountain View has a lot of similarities to us, but it’s very different. Redwood City I 19
would say is even more different. Los Altos in some ways, is very similar to us but actually I was 20
_______________________
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.
kind of fascinated by the data we got here which suggested to me, in their approach, they’re 1
not very similar to us, in the way that they are address economic development. And so I think 2
that that makes the consultant’s task tough, but that’s the job. I was interested and my 3
impression from reading this information was that Santa Monica has taken a comparatively 4
aggressive approach to dealing with parts of their downtown where they felt it was not living 5
up to its potential, and I like that. I like that aggressive approach, whereas Los Altos seems 6
almost a laissez faire approach, we’re just going to let the market do as it will and live with it. I 7
like to think that Palo Alto is more… in this regard more like Santa Monica than Los Altos, that, 8
you know, I think we’ve got the staff to do it, and that we’re going to identify the places where 9
we’re coming up short, where we could be better, more vibrant in our… in these commercial 10
corridors and take affirmative actions to realize the potential. What it was… I was also 11
interested in both Santa Monica and Los Altos, and we only saw the one slide on Redwood City 12
and Mountain View, but all the cities seem to have more flexibility in their regulations that we 13
do and in fact I noted that the business stakeholder comment number ten was “need to be 14
flexible and work with the market” and really, that’s where I’m hoping that this process takes 15
us. Is not a gutting of the RPO but rather a refinement so that we have the flexibility to react to 16
changing market conditions and, you know, keep our downtown and Cal Ave and other retail 17
areas vibrant. So those are my comments. Thanks for the good work so far. 18
19
Chair Summa: Go ahead. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Vice Chair Chang: Hi, so thank you for all the work that you’ve done thus far and I second 2
everything that both my colleagues have already said. I will start with some big picture kind of 3
observations. So, I know that we’re not at recommendation phase yet, but I also don’t know 4
that we’ve seen anything that clearly outlines what the problems are. I mean there was the one 5
slide from the seven stakeholders, but I still don’t understand what the examples are of the 6
specific problems. So, we are going to be making ordinance changes, aside from needing to 7
make sure that you all have an accurate understanding of what are baseline is, we also need to 8
understand what problem we are solving for, so we had already, at a prior PTC meeting, 9
probably about a year and a half ago now, had talked about certain examples, such as you know 10
a yogurt store who wanted to have a place… who wanted to lease space on Cal Ave because 11
more parking spaces were required, so that level of specificity is helpful because then it points 12
to needing to relax our parking requirements in a specific way rather than completely eliminate 13
parking requirements. And again, so it kind of tells us what the problem is and then whether we 14
eliminate the parking requirements or modify them, we can know that we would actually be 15
solving those problems. So, I think that we’re having… I don’t… it’s not clear to me that we’ve 16
done adequate problem definition or if we have, then perhaps it’s not been presented to us. 17
Secondly, I do have concerns about our data gathering and whether or not … maybe it’s just a 18
question of massaging the data in such a way that we actually are doing the best that we can to 19
look at apples to apples comparisons. But some of it I’m concerned that there may not be 20
_______________________
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.
enough data. So, seven data points is not enough when three of them are landlord, one is the 1
Chamber of Commerce and we only have three individual businesses. And none of them are 2
traditional retail per se. So, at least… I mean grant it, we are tasked with looking at retail for all 3
of Palo Alto, but we’re not even getting one restaurant, one retailer, one gym, from downtown 4
Palo Alto and another one on Cal Ave, we don’t have anybody from downtown Palo Alto, 5
actually, so, again, for problem identification, we’re hearing the problems that landlord are 6
experiencing for downtown Palo Alto, because I think some of them are property managers in 7
downtown Palo Alto, but we haven’t a single business from downtown Palo Alto, and for the 8
the individual businesses, we have a gym, a restaurant, and a provider of cooking classes. So, 9
I’m just concerned that whatever the needs are … I mean we don’t even have a variety of types 10
of eateries, right, so I know there’s a problem for a yogurt store. So… but we have Italico, who 11
has multiple restaurants in Cal Ave that are very very popular and serve a particular type of 12
clientele so again, that’s my concern there. And then finally, I mean I have a whole slew of 13
other comments, but I think we want to keep it kind of brief. I understand that for Santa 14
Monica you focused on the Third Street Prominade downtown area, but that’s not at all really 15
analogous to Cal Ave or anything but our downtown. And so I think that in terms of the scope, if 16
we’re looking at adjusting the retail preservation ordinance, we need to understand what the 17
implications would be citywide. As part of the Housing Element we had talked about maybe we 18
relax the Retail Preservation Ordinance in other areas, other than our retail corridors right now, 19
like Cal Ave and downtown Palo Alto, but we didn’t do any benchmarking about that with 20
_______________________
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.
respect to other cities and how they’re thinking about it. We also know that coming down the 1
pike we’ve got some really big change happening in our city in areas that aren’t at all analogous 2
to both the triangle in Los Altos, as well as downtown Santa Monica and may in fact be much 3
more analogous to say Pico, or Montana in Santa Monica, or on El Camino in Los Altos because 4
we’re going to see a ton of housing development in our section of El Camino. We’re going to 5
see a ton of housing development in San Antonio, and we need to be cognizant of the… like, if 6
we want retail to serve those many residents that will be coming in those areas, we need to 7
think about do we relax our retail preservation in those areas, or what do we do instead to 8
make sure that people that fifteen minute radius type thing that we always hear about here on 9
the PTC. So those are my overall comments, and I have many many more, I don’t know how to 10
best get them to you. 11
12
Chair Summa: Thank you, Commissioner [Vice Chair] Chang, and I wanted to mention that 13
Commissioner Templeton has left the meeting, and do you want to just continue down the line 14
Commissioner Lu? Okay. 15
16
Commissioner Lu: Thank you, and I appreciate the work thus far and like my other 17
commissioners have said, I also appreciate that we’ll have a tight feedback loop, so we’ll be 18
meeting again … monthly basically and so I think we can have a lot of opportunities to 19
incorporate the feedback. Just kind of a baseline question… Are we going to make any updates 20
_______________________
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.
to these slides, and will those updates be available in future meetings, or at least for kind of, 1
this part of the analysis, or do you think we’re just going to move on? 2
3
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Good question, do we reuse these slides in the future, I think we can use 4
them as a reference as a starting off point, we’re happy to refine and improve them as we go 5
along. The next steps I think we’re going to be talking about some of the things you’re missing, 6
you know, the problem identification, very good point, we kind of jumped into this reaction, 7
and the engagement responses, so we probably should have gone back and maybe at the 8
October meeting really talked about what are the goals and what are the problem and agreed 9
to that, and that has been discussed between us and staff, but we need to have that 10
conversation with you. So, as we go forward, I think we’ll use some of these slides, and we can 11
continue to refine them and you know, if they make direct comparisons that’s fine. Part of the 12
challenge is just what gets on a slide and what are the most you know, relevant comparisons 13
here. So, we’re happy to do that. 14
15
Commissioner Lu: Yeah, thank you, that’s great. And yeah, I think that gives us much more 16
room to give more specific comments about what we want to see on the slides, and it’s good 17
that we will see those updates later. Another kind of process question… how much feedback do 18
you want in this meeting about potential zoning? Or parking recommendations, or are those … 19
_______________________
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.
or would you do workshopping for those separately, and do we want kind of reactions to 1
what’s presented here. 2
3
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Really good question and I really think that’s where we’re really going to 4
get into the recommendations and the reasons for those recommendations you know, one of 5
the problems that we’re trying to solve and what are the various techniques. That was really 6
going to be in the next series of meetings in February, March, and April. So, again, looking at 7
zoning, we’ve got a couple that we were going to… we’ll probably have enough to talk about… 8
it gets really complicated over probably two meetings and then also talk about the parking and 9
hopefully by that point we’ve got some, you know, consensus on what you like and don’t like 10
and what the best options are going forward. As Amy mentioned, we’re not preparing them at 11
this point, but we’re trying to set the table for that. So again, there’s an understanding, provide 12
that kind of baseline so you understand, you know, why we’re doing this, and what the options 13
are, and that’s really what tonight was a about, was just kind of to take a sample of what the 14
different approaches were in some of these peer cities and then also hearing from some of the 15
stakeholders. So, again, I think, you know, the more specific recommendations we’re planning 16
for the next meeting in February, March, and April. 17
18
Commissioner Lu: Okay. 19
20
_______________________
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. Wery, Consultant: But, we’re happy to hear some… if you got specific reactions, I won’t say 1
no. 2
3
Commissioner Lu: Okay, yeah, I generally agree with Commissioner Hechtman that in terms of 4
the direction that I would at least would like to go, it would be more like Santa Monica where 5
we moderate and make some things more flexible, and less like Los Altos, where we might get 6
rid of formula retail restrictions all together, or be too laissez faire. And I’m not sure if that’s a 7
consensus here, but if that’s useful in terms of the framing of your actual recommendations, I 8
think that’s good information for you now, so that we don’t go in with recommendations that 9
we would potentially just… or at least some portion of us would just immediately strongly 10
disagree with. One more question, one more kind of broader question. Can you give the 11
breakdown of the landlord versus business responses to your interviews? Was that feedback 12
that you listed in the slide basically unanimous or were there any points where the businesses 13
and landlord disagreed, or any feedback that only came from one group or another, I think 14
more context would be good. 15
16
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Maybe you have like some of these or the feedback we received 17
from the business owners, and most of the responses were pretty united as far as some of the 18
restrictions to the zoning code, or like the, or the time for the [TIMESTAMPED 1:19 19
Unintelligible] those kind of comments were pretty much same throughout the interviews. The 20
_______________________
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.
business owners, those interviews were not as focused on the permitting processes or the 1
change of view kind of questions, but they thought the parking, all that was adequate, they had 2
some other sets of issues like signage, a bit of a change of sign that would take a little bit 3
longer, those kinds of issues. But generally, like with similar sentiment of all the other 4
interviews. 5
6
Commissioner Lu: Okay. I guess in particular I ask because there’s some things like rescinding 7
formula retail on California Ave where I can imagine some retailers might want like … anchor 8
businesses like a Trader Joe’s or something just to get more foot traffic, but I kind of would 9
expect in general that there would be too much competition, or there would be more 10
competition of formula retail and rents would be higher and businesses wouldn’t generally like 11
that, and yeah, if there’s any kind of quick color that you can provide that’d be great… 12
otherwise (crosstalk) 13
14
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: (crosstalk) We can provide some specific examples at the 15
[TIMESTAMPED 1:20 Unintelligible] that were tried or rejected or with complexity. At the same 16
time we are not sure as to how many businesses might not have approached you with a 17
proposal to open a business because you don’t allow for formula retail. So, we don’t have that 18
data. 19
20
_______________________
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 Lu: Okay thank you. 1
2
Mr. Wery, Consultant: I’ll just say one general point, data… some of the data has been hard to 3
come by. We had hoped to interview a lot more of the business owners and we set up a lot of 4
different meetings and appointments and invitations and just had a hard time getting anybody 5
really to participate. So, we’re happy to do more and hear more, so what we’re reporting is 6
what we’re able to collect and that’s been over several months trying to get participation from 7
that. So, we’d love to have more, you know… love to have more sample size and more data. As 8
Surabhi mentioned though, that the things that we’ve heard, have been very consistent across 9
the board, now you can disagree you know… on how maybe extreme or how far somebody 10
wants to push an idea, but they were pretty clear and consistent about what they saw as the 11
issues. 12
13
Chair Summa: Are you finished? 14
15
Commissioner Lu: Yeah. 16
17
Chair Summa: I was just going to ask if you had been here in person trying to talk to business 18
owners or if this was conducted over the phone. Because I find business owners to be very 19
_______________________
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.
anxious to talk about the problems, both in downtown and on Cal Ave. So were you able to do 1
that in person or were you emailing or…. 2
3
Mr. Wery, Consultant: These … go ahead Surabhi. 4
5
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Yeah, no, we were trying to email or call. Then when we did that a 6
few times, but yeah, we haven’t been there in person. 7
8
Chair Summa: Okay, thank you for that. Okay, then we’ll just continue down the line… 9
Commissioner Reckdahl . 10
11
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay, could you pull up slide 17. 12
13
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Yeah, let me share my screen again… oops hold on. It has gone missing… 14
alright, I thought I could. 15
16
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: do you want me to share? 17
18
Mr. Wery, Consultant: My cursor seems to be stuck on one screen and not getting over to my 19
powerpoint. (crosstalk) Okay here we go, I got it. Okay, let me get back… share screen. 20
_______________________
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.
1
Commissioner Reckdahl: Yeah, I could talk about it but it would be nice if we could have it on 2
screen. 3
4
Mr. Wery, Consultant: Okay, is it up… oh here we go. Not really what I wanted, hang on, I got 5
the wrong screen. 6
7
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay, well while you work on that, let me talk to it. I had the same 8
reaction that Commissioner [Vice Chair] Chang had, is that slide 17 lists the business 9
stakeholder comments and that was really good information, but it wasn’t actual information. 10
Like code is too restrictive and complex, or the City is not known as business friendly, that 11
doesn’t set us up to do any specific actions. And so it would be really nice to have concrete 12
examples of why… where it’s too restrictive or why is it not business friendly and… because 13
eventually we’re going to have to change the laws and we want to know what aspects we 14
should be changing. 15
16
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Yeah, we can definitely give some examples, we’ve got a lot of 17
examples during the course of our interviews so we can definitely point to come up with 18
examples like keeping the identity anonymous, yeah, we can definitely do that. 19
20
_______________________
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 Reckdahl: So, you know we need more data, and as you’re putting together the 1
data, we also need that data to be in a form that’s actionable and can lead us to specific things 2
as opposed to just generalities. Similarly on slide 15, which talked to the peer cities interviews, 3
do you have the details… Santa Monica said they loosen restrictions on blocks with high 4
vacancy rates and in the packet they something similar but they don’t say exactly what they 5
did. They said they wanted have more restaurants, and so for us, that’s not a restriction, 6
restaurants are the…. Okay, there’s 17, can you step back to 15 now? What are the …. So on the 7
left there, number 3, loosened restrictions on blocks with high vacancy rates, and what 8
restrictions did they loosen… they wanted to encourage restaurants in that… did they allow 9
restaurants in locations that previously restaurants weren’t allowed at? Or what did they do… 10
11
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: So, yeah, I can talk to that… that particularly point was a 12
recommendation that they … in the interview we asked what would be some of the 13
recommendations that they would suggest for other communities and that was one of the 14
recommendations and I can talk about some of the loosening of restrictions, and that included 15
greater flexibility to for… so they have [TIMESTAMPED 1:26 Unintelligible] recovery ordinance 16
which they recently extended for five years and what that does is it allows for greater flexibility 17
for restaurants that provide entertainment, which on the Third Street Prominade it expands 18
alcohol exemptions. It allows for [TIMESTAMPED 1:27 Unintelligible] and to consider 19
commercial uses that are not clearly defined in this zoning, it allows for long term temporary 20
_______________________
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.
usefulness and allows for outdoor rooftop commercial uses of public parking structures, so they 1
have a few restrictions they have moved through the Economic Recovery Ordinances 2
[TIMESTAMPED 1:27 Unintelligible]. 3
4
Commissioner Reckdahl: Okay, that would be really good to know, all the details what did 5
they… what do they do to restrict that they consider successful. And so, Commissioner [Vice 6
Chair] Chang also mentioned the problem statement and I think there’s a lot of aspects to 7
retail. One is just sales tax collections, other is just the quality of life and you know, what are we 8
trying to achieve here. One thing that we do have a problem with is vacancies. We do, and that 9
bothers us. But we don’t even know the cause of the vacancies, there’s two schools of 10
thought… one is that .. oh the zoning is causing this glut of retail spots and as a result, all of the 11
retail spots can’t be successful and that’s what’s driving people out of business then the other 12
school of thought says well, if there’s a glut you would think that rents would come down and 13
all these businesses moving out, almost everyone I’ve heard out is moving out because rents 14
increased. So on one hand we have this glut but we also have high rents and how does that 15
compare? And, so, an apples to apples comparison of for example Menlo Park or on Castro 16
Street… how much does a square foot of restaurant cost there, versus University. And is it that 17
the landlords think that University is a premium and they’re overcharging and the market is 18
saying NO… I’m going to move my business down to Menlo Park because I can get price half as 19
much but I can get almost as much business. And those types.. that type of information I think 20
_______________________
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.
would be really useful to us in trying to figure out what is the cause of the vacancies and then 1
that… once we know the cause then that makes it much easier. Otherwise, you just kind of do a 2
knee jerk reaction based on your philosophy, whether your pro landlord or pro-business owner, 3
so anything you can do to help us figure out the causation, that would be very useful. Thank 4
you. 5
6
Chair Summa: Commissioner Akin. 7
8
Commissioner Akin: Thank you Chair. My fellow Commissioners have already done a good job 9
of covering much of what I wanted to cover, but I will add a few things. First some specifics, the 10
meeting back in October we asked you about businesses that had moved out of Palo Alto and in 11
a few cases specifically to Los Altos. Did you have the chance to talk to any of those to see what 12
their reasons were for moving? 13
14
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: No we didn’t have the chance to talk to them, we tried to reach to 15
them but we were not successful in reaching out to them. 16
17
Commissioner Akin: Okay, and this just echoes Commissioner Reckdahl’s comments about 18
understanding the fundamental causes here. Had a couple of comments and questions 19
regarding Santa Monica and parking, one might argue that Santa Monica eliminated parking 20
_______________________
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.
minimums and established maximums early because they had a glut of parking and structures 1
and another factor that suggests that this is the case is that they’re actually eliminating entire 2
floors of parking structures and turning them into outdoor cinemas. So, how this translates to 3
your task is that I think somehow you have to come up with commensurate descriptions of the 4
amount of parking that are available in these cities so that we can guess what kind of zoning 5
changes we would need to make to provide adequate parking in Palo Alto without having an 6
access this is a hard problem and I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with good suggestions 7
for you, but I think we should talk about that at the subsequent meeting, but at the very least 8
something like parking space per square foot of retail something that makes a measurement 9
that we can… something that is commensurate that we can compare between cities. Let me 10
provide you a little bit more context about Palo Alto so you understand what’s driving that 11
question. I see that one of the comments is that we have an abundance of parking in Palo Alto 12
and yet, in downtown, the feeling before the pandemic was we had so little parking that we 13
had to establish a residential preferential permit system that allowed commercial parking in the 14
adjacent neighborhoods, because there was not enough. So, if we continue to take away 15
parking by say converting parking lots into housing and by eliminating minimums for new 16
development according to AB 2097, the evidence we had in the past suggests that we will have 17
a shortfall. So, we really need to understand how to measure the parking that’s available for 18
various uses in these different cities to see where we truly fall in on that ranch. Sort of related 19
question is, on packet page 26, I like the pedestrian count data for Santa Monica, do we have 20
_______________________
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.
something like that for Palo Alto? Because I would like to understand whether our area is 1
attracting significantly more or significantly less for the amount of… significantly more or 2
significantly fewer people for the amount of retail that we have. Let’s see what else can I say… 3
the most general comment that is going to relate to zoning later, so you’ll have to deal with this 4
as well, is the question of is tall high density housing the savior of retail downtown and in 5
California Avenue and I frequently hear this claimed, and yet as I walk around downtown, I find 6
maybe a half dozen significant high density large apartment and condo developments… I’m 7
thinking 101 Alma, the Mark, Mio over on Everett and more than a dozen decent sized medium 8
density developments, including all of those that came about as part of the SOFA realignment 9
and these are all within a short walk of the downtown area, the downtown business area. So, 10
getting back to commensurate numbers again, show me a graph that says how much more 11
retail space I can expect per unit of living space, housing space added. Now there is a study that 12
I can dredge up if you’re curious, which did an analysis of how retail changes with densification 13
in an area, and it says unsurprisingly that retail space does go up as density increases. Perhaps a 14
little more surprisingly it says that the amount of retail space per resident goes down and I 15
think the reason for this is fairly obvious… that this is what increasing density means. IS that 16
there is less space for everything per person, less space for retail, less space for housing. Less 17
living space. That’s what increasing density means. But I think we need to understand where we 18
are on that spectrum in order to make a reasonable decision about rezoning for additional 19
amounts of housing, where it goes and for how much. So, that’s a homework assignment for a 20
_______________________
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.
future meeting for the PTC. That’s something I’d like to see. That’s everything from me. Thank 1
you. 2
3
Chair Summa: Okay. So I will … I’d like to associates my comments with a lot of things my 4
colleagues have already said… and just going back to for instance, the parking that 5
Commissioner Akin was just discussing, we also have TDM’s, we have an automatic reductions 6
of parking that the Director of Planning is … can use at his discretion and we have in lieu parking 7
downtown so people who… typically new developments haven’t had to provide onsite parking 8
because of all these reasons, and yet pre-pandemic as was noted, we still had a huge shortage 9
of parking spots in downtown and we don’t have a way right now of knowing how much of 10
our… how much of that will change. Hopefully, if it changes it won’t go all the way back because 11
that created a horrible undesirable impact on neighborhood streets, so we already have these 12
mechanisms and just another example, I mean I have probably too many detailed comments to 13
give you all the comments I have tonight, but Action 9, to consider amending section 1876.2, 14
it’s actually .020, architectural review of the municipal code to enable more over the counter 15
approvals for minor changes… we already have that in our code. It’s 1876.020 b1B, and that 16
gives the Director, one person of planning and development services, the ability to designate 17
what are minor enough projects so they don’t have to have any review whatsoever. So, there is 18
at the same time that we are finding it difficult to actually get the level of data that we need 19
from your report, there are also mistakes, I think we talked about it a little bit and redundancies 20
_______________________
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 we should be careful not to have in the next round of discussion. Another thing is Los Altos 1
in your report was considering introducing CUPs specifically for nail salons and maybe some 2
other personal services, but I believe it was nail salons because they have too many of them in 3
their one sort of downtown area, and we have… that’s the way we use CUPs. You know, to have 4
some control over the mix of businesses which is very important for a healthy retail area. And 5
even at a higher level, at some of my colleagues have mentioned, you don’t either explain in 6
your report or identify the cause of either vacancies or lack of attractiveness of our retail spaces 7
and at our last meeting we did talk anecdotally give you a list of businesses that had relocated 8
to outside of Palo Alto and are still in business. And that’s the kind of specific information we 9
need, to make changes to our zoning code that are meaningful in terms of achieving these retail 10
goals; and not just sort of ideology based assumptions. And I think that we’re going to need a 11
lot sort of more from you in this regard. It’s.. let me look some more at my notes in here, I 12
mean, I really had a lot of very specific comments but it seems like what we’ll need to do is give 13
you an opportunity to respond and get more data with and more [TIMESTAMPED 1:40 video 14
skipped] especially the cause and really compare the three cities, if it’s going to be that, in the 15
way that is meaningful to us. I also think that the seven, yeah four and three, seven 16
stakeholders that were consulted represents a very paltry number of the people that we are 17
trying to help and those are the people that own retail businesses. It was the Chamber of 18
Commerce downtown and three large large property holders, no business operators, and we 19
have legacy businesses that have been here for generations in some cases, and they would love 20
_______________________
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.
to tell you, I bet, what they thought about what the problems were. Our intuition tells us that 1
the problems are the high rents, and the change in patterns of purchasing things with the 2
internet. But we can’t effect those things, at all by changing our zoning code. So if we’re going 3
to change our zoning code, let’s do it in a meaningful way that means something, not just gives 4
us the impression that we’re streamlining and relaxing things when it’s not going to help at all. I 5
was unaware that there was any formula… maybe staff can .. I thought we had prohibited 6
formula retail on Cal Ave, are you confirming that you can have … you can get it with a CUP? 7
8
Ms. French: There’s limitations, I could pull up the code perhaps. 9
10
Chair Summa: I thought… for some reason I thought that we had just absolutely prohibited that 11
in the Cal Ave area, which is very different from having it with CUPs because my 12
recommendation might have been to consider formula retail for Cal Ave with CUPS. So, we’ll 13
need to know, and maybe my memory is wrong on that, but we should confirm that. There are 14
other omission and kind of … oh and then there’s also… for Cal Ave, you talked to two business 15
owners, and I think that that’s inadequate. Also I noticed in rereading the minutes from the 16
August 14th City Council meeting that their motions emphasized getting information from all 17
the retail areas across the city and at least one City Council member emphasized El Camino 18
south of Paige Mill Road because that is the downtown for a huge portion of Palo Alto and it 19
gets a little forgotten and so I don’t find that we did that, so for Cal Ave you interviewed two 20
_______________________
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.
business owners and then you interviewed a person I think Commissioner [Vice Chair] Chang 1
already mentioned this, a business that is basically a school in midtown, but there was no 2
analysis, or inclusion, not just analysis, inclusion in any way of the midtown shopping area, 3
parts of El Camino, some of our other shopping plazas. So, this …. Today, this is really not giving 4
us the rich information we need to make recommendations or suggestions to you and I imagine 5
that… and there were just frankly sort of what looked like… I mean, on the slides, and I couldn’t 6
see the slide numbers so I didn’t take notes with the numbers, but you would sort of say oh… 7
you can have a retail, approved retail uses in Palo Alto, and you would enumerate all of those 8
different retail uses which are interchangeable unless they’re conditional uses and Palo Alto’s 9
are virtually the same. So, we need to make those slides more direct than they are in giving us 10
the information. So, Los Altos in one slide you told us does want… had CUPS or didn’t have 11
CUPs there was missing information or information that did not add up about CUPs and you 12
said they had CUPs but in your interview with them they say, and I quote “they don’t dabble in 13
CUPs”. And I remember because of the word dabble. You know. They don’t differentiate … they 14
just have allowed uses and not allowed uses. So, without going into… oh and the other thing I 15
thought that was really missing from this report was… I know after the August 14th meeting, by 16
City Council last year, they started a retail ad-hoc to look at these problems and I don’t know if 17
they have any deliverable report yet but it would be nice to have found out a little bit about 18
what they were doing and if they had made any conclusions and I think that, we don’t want to 19
throw out the baby with the bath water and make ultimately, when we make a 20
_______________________
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.
recommendations, we don’t want to hurt…. End up hurting retail more than helping it in our 1
precious retail areas and I will say also, already on San Santonio, we have that in that … which is 2
area slated to have a considerable, about a third almost of the units, new units in palo Alto, so 3
far, the projects we’ve entitled there, have basically refused to have any retail. So, that’s a baby 4
that’s about to slide out too. Slide down the drain, so I feel some urgency in some ways but so… 5
I don’t mean to be negative, but this was not ready for us this evening, from my point of view, 6
but I thank everybody, including staff because I know they did a lot of work on this also, 7
especially the matrix. But those are my comments and if anybody would like to have a second 8
round, go ahead Commissioner Hechtman. 9
10
Commissioner Hechtman: Thank you Chair, I just want to sort of push harder on one issue that 11
a number of my fellow commissioners have raised, as the Chair mentioned, the whole purpose 12
of this effort is to make our… it’s economic development. It’s to make our… the retail 13
component of this city more vibrant. And that serves the business owners, that serves the 14
property owners who rent to them, and more importantly it serves the residents, who get the 15
benefit of a wider variety of retail things. And so, we’re going to go through this process and 16
we’re going to have recommendations for zoning changes and what I don’t want to happen and 17
what I fear will happen is we’re going to get to Council hearings… they won’t even happen at 18
the PTC because they’ll bypass us… we’ll get to Council hearings and we will get the business 19
community organized in saying this isn’t going to help us. You’re making the changes, this isn’t 20
_______________________
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.
going to help us and so I want to avoid that result and I think to avoid that result we need to 1
hear from the business community… and the landlords, not necessarily just the big landlords, 2
the small ones too, we need to hear that now, on the front end. And so, and I frankly, again, 3
these are members of our community, they deserve the courtesy of a face to face. An 4
opportunity for a face to face. And so one thing I’m really hoping will happen between now and 5
when this comes back which I think I saw in one of the slides, could be a month from now, 6
February 28, is that staff will work with these consultants to make a plan to aggressively chase 7
our business owners and secure meetings and then the consultant bring a couple people from 8
wherever your home office is, for a day and talk to thirty or forty of these people. Right? Make 9
appointments in advance and just hit them all in a day because we need them to feel like 10
they’ve been heard. They may not agree with all the recommendations that ultimately come 11
out, but this is one thing that we can control. And so, I’m going to ask staff to look at that with 12
the consultants. I don’t know if there are budget issues, if there are, move things around in the 13
scope of work to make it happen because to me, it’s not a critical component, it’s an essential 14
component, that their voices be a part of this process. That’s my addition. Thanks. 15
16
Vice Chair Chang: Hundred percent agree with Commissioner Hechtman. I did happen to ask, 17
which is… I know a significant amount of work was done on Redwood City and Mountain View 18
before you gave us the project overview in October and I’m hoping that that report can be 19
passed on to us and then if we are to see slides or whatever format you use, either updates of 20
_______________________
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.
these slides of whatever in the future, that we see all the data for Redwood City and Mountain 1
View also. So there’s a very detailed comparison of Santa Monica and Los Altos, admittedly with 2
some inaccuracies on the Palo Alto column, but we didn’t see Redwood City and Mountain 3
View in that same view and that would have been help… to the extent that you already have it, 4
it would be very helpful to see it there side by side. And then, similarly, when a statistic is 5
presented, you know like there are “x” acres of parking in Los Altos, well, we can probably 6
figure out how many acres approximately, that we have too. Like 80/20 [TIMESTAMPED 1:51 7
Unintelligible]. I mean like that’s where like the colors would be helpful. You know, like this 8
community is parking rich, this one’s not or something. Just order of magnitude type thing. 9
Similarly vacancy rates, so I don’t know… so… part of it was information in the interviews that 10
Santa Monica does X or Los Altos does X and we don’t… Staff will know the answer to this … of 11
whether Palo Alto does X also already or that we’ve tried it, or that maybe we should do that 12
too. But we don’t know what our baseline is either, at least on the PTC , we commissioners 13
don’t have a shared understanding of those on those dimensions, do we do that already? And 14
so I think that some of that would be helpful. My suspicion is that information kind of exists in 15
your minds already, but we need it in order to bring us all on to the same page. Thanks. 16
17
Chair Summa: Commissioners, other comments? Going once… okay. 18
19
_______________________
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 Lu: So, I agree, and I think we all agree that there is some refinements and 1
corrections and framing, more community input, like a few more things as well that we need 2
out of this study. Is there a timeline or a plan or a scope of what you can add for us? 3
4
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: We have like a specific scope and that is what we have been 5
following, if there is any additions that we need to do , for example coming in and doing some 6
interviewing or adding more businesses or getting a little deeper into the zoning code at 7
Redwood or Mountain View, we can definitely work with staff and see how we can change the 8
scope, and we can do that. As far as Mountain View and Redwood City goes, with them as a 9
part of Phase I scope, our scope was to do interview with particular questions that we 10
presented, we were not looking into the zoning codes as detailed as we did for Santa Monica 11
and Los Altos. 12
13
Vice Chair Chang: Can I just ask a follow up question? Because I was looking at the October 25th, 14
the October 25th staff report and that included a scope of work dated March 24, 2023 from 15
MBI, and so I was wondering, is that scope of work still the same scope of work or has it 16
changed since then? I’m getting nod yes that is the same scope of work and has not changed, in 17
which case, can we get a sense of all these, are we on schedule, are you on schedule? Because 18
there’s very specific deliverables and tasks on that and like what percent of this have we done… 19
I don’t know… I’m trying to get a sense of… I think George is… sorry, Commissioner Lu’s 20
_______________________
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.
question was are we on track? And so I’m referring back to their initial scope of work and 1
maybe you all can give us a sense of that. 2
3
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: So, as far as deliverables at Council, we are working on the parking 4
study which we were hoping to present to you in March, so that would be one of the 5
deliverables, the matrix, strategy matrix was one of the deliverables of the peer city so that is 6
already delivered, we can make changes, we can make improvement to it for [TIMESTAMPED 7
1:56 Unintelligible] and then the parking recommendation that is to come in the next two 8
meeting and based on that we will be updating the Phase I report that we provided earlier as a 9
part of previous scope and so everything will be included together, that report will be created 10
like one report to present to you. So, if the scope remains the same then yes we are on track, if 11
the scope changes then might have to figure out the timeline. 12
13
Chair Summa: Thank you for that answer. Do I have other comments from anyone right now? I 14
think we’ll leave it at that, except I did want to say something positive which there were some 15
ideas that you presented from other cities, I can’t remember… Santa Monica I think, where the 16
city or the Chamber of Commerce in that city kept a list of vacancies and allowable uses In 17
those locations, I think that was a great idea, and I also think if there are actual ways in which 18
we can grab more types of business categories, I don’t think we prohibit pop ups, but it was in 19
the …. There’s some thought that we could… there are some businesses proposed that sort of 20
_______________________
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.
fall in between the allowable uses, and I think expanding that, our definitions to capture any 1
legitimate business where the public can go in and find something they need is a really great 2
idea also. I’m not sure how often in practical terms that happens, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it 3
there for the times it does. And then just in general, thank you again, and I hope our next 4
meeting will go very well, my colleagues have no further comments so thank you for coming 5
tonight and thank you to staff and we will move on to the next item which is comments from 6
Commissioners. 7
8
Commissioner Questions, Comments or Announcements 9
Chair Summa: Commissioner questions, comments, or announcements... anyone? 10
11
Commissioner Hechtman: Thank you Chair, so , I wanted to share… 12
13
Ms. Barbhaya, Consultant: Thank you. 14
15
Commissioner Hechtman: Yeah, thank you consultants and staff. I wanted to share a couple of 16
recent experiences I had with what we call the Palo Alto process. So, on New Years eve, around 17
5 PM, I had a sewer back up. Fortunately I was able to get a plumber out. They were able to 18
clear the clog, they ran a camera and said yea there’s a problem on your property we’re not so 19
sure about and then there’s this big gnarly root on the City’s part of the line and we can’t deal 20
_______________________
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.
with that, you’ll have to call the City. So that was Sunday night, New Year’s eve, so Tuesday 1
morning about 8:30, I called the city, I think I waited until Wednesday, so Wednesday morning, 2
8:30, called the city, they had someone out within the hour. Somebody was out within an hour 3
and that fella did whatever those people do with pipes to clear it so problem solved. So that 4
was success story one. So, ten days later… another sewer back up, so I called out the plumbers 5
who had come before and so they tried to clear it, they couldn’t, they figured out that I had a 6
broken pipe in my front yard. So, and of course to fix a broken pipe, the public should know, 7
you need a permit. You don’t just do it. You need a permit. So the next morning I got up and 8
about 8:15 I got onto the city’s website to see when I could get my next… get an appointment … 9
8:30. I could get an 8:30 appointment at 8:15 in the morning. So, made that appointment 10
online, went down at 8:30 and I met with a wonderful member of our building team … I’m 11
going to call her out because she was terrific, Ariella Yendler. In an hour I had my permit and 12
was ready to go. At lunch time, because it was pretty expensive to repair the pipe, so I wanted 13
to go… I wanted a couple of other estimates, I used my Cresent Park neighborhood association 14
email to ask for recommendations, I immediately got a bunch and I called one of those and 15
about twelve noon and he said oh I’m just down the street can I come now? I said sure. He 16
came over, cleared it. No broken pipe… clogged… and incidentally he suggested that you… 17
specifically in Palo Alto, everywhere, should only use Scott 1000 toilet paper. I mentioned that I 18
did not know what that was but I said okay I’ll look for that but I mentioned it to a friend of 19
_______________________
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.
mine who said do you know what Scott 1000 is? That is like the thinnest possible unsatisfying 1
toilet paper made. No one will use your bathrooms if you have that. So, …. 2
3
Chair Summa: But it keeps your lateral running. 4
5
Commissioner Hechtman: That’s right. In any event, no broken pipe. So now I’ve got this 6
permit I don’t need. So, I called Ms. Yendler, I said what do I do? Because I don’t want this 7
permit just hanging out there because it looks like I did the work but never got it final-ed and 8
that can be a problem. Right. She said no problem we have a process, she sent me a form, I 9
filled out the form, it’s like a cancellation of permit and I get 80% refund, which is great because 10
it actually took some staff time to process my permit and process the cancellation. So, these are 11
two success stories from my perspective and for me the Palo Alto process really worked and I 12
wanted to commend, not only the people I worked with but, you know, the organization that 13
built that mechanism that worked so well. 14
15
Chair Summa: Excellent fable. I wanted to mention that … I’ve said this many times but it’s also 16
in here somewhere, either Santa Monica or Los Altos mentioned it, and that is one of the 17
greatest hold ups in getting a permit is mistakes that are made on the permit itself. Incomplete 18
permits. You see it over and over and over again and that isn’t really fair or to attribute that to 19
_______________________
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 Palo Alto process, so I wanted to mention that too because one of the other cities 1
mentioned that also. Other affirmational components? 2
3
Commissioner Reckdahl: We’ll add my story, my water heater broke, and the Palo Alto process 4
worked well. By the time our door was ready that was on Saturday, we called them up Monday 5
morning, Monday afternoon they were out, and the City put a heat pump water heater in by 6
midafternoon that day. So that was very quick, and it worked. We have to get the permit signed 7
off on Friday, so we’ll see. So I hold that in reserve, but so far, so good. 8
9
Chair Summa: Thank you for that. Anyone else? Okay then I’m going to call this meeting 10
adjourned. Thank you everyone. 11
12
Adjournment 13
7:51 pm 14
15
_______________________
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 1
Commissioner Biographies, Present and Archived Agendas and Reports are available online: 2
http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/boards/ptc/default.asp. The PTC Commission members are: 3
4
Chair Doria Summa 5
Vice-Chair Bryna Chang 6
Commissioner Allen Akin 7
Commissioner Bart Hechtman 8
Commissioner George Lu 9
Commissioner Keith Reckdahl 10
Commissioner Carolyn Templeton 11
Get Informed and Be Engaged! 12
View online: http://midpenmedia.org/category/government/city-of-palo-alto or on Channel 26. 13
14
Show up and speak. Public comment is encouraged. Please complete a speaker request card 15
located on the table at the entrance to the Council Chambers and deliver it to the Commission 16
Secretary prior to discussion of the item. 17
18
Write to us. Email the PTC at: Planning.Commission@CityofPaloAlto.org. Letters can be 19
delivered to the Planning & Community Environment Department, 5th floor, City Hall, 250 20
Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301. Comments received by 2:00 PM two Tuesdays preceding 21
the meeting date will be included in the agenda packet. Comments received afterward through 22
2:00 PM the day of the meeting will be presented to the Commission at the dais. 23
24
Material related to an item on this agenda submitted to the PTC after distribution of the 25
agenda packet is available for public inspection at the address above. 26
Americans with Disability Act (ADA) 27
It is the policy of the City of Palo Alto to offer its public programs, services and meetings in a 28
manner that is readily accessible to all. Persons with disabilities who require materials in an 29
appropriate alternative format or who require auxiliary aids to access City meetings, programs, 30
or services may contact the City’s ADA Coordinator at (650) 329-2550 (voice) or by emailing 31
ada@cityofpaloalto.org. Requests for assistance or accommodations must be submitted at least 32
24 hours in advance of the meeting, program, or service. 33