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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-04-27 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 60 Special Meeting April 27, 2015 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 6:02 P.M. Present: Burt, DuBois, Filseth arrived at 6:05 P.M., Holman, Schmid, Wolbach Absent: Berman, Kniss, Scharff Closed Session MOTION: Council Member Burt moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Schmid to go into Closed Session. MOTION PASSED: 5-0 Berman, Filseth, Kniss, Scharff absent Council went into Closed Session at 6:03 P.M. 1. CONFERENCE WITH CITY ATTORNEY-Potential Litigation Significant Exposure to Litigation Pursuant to Subdivision(b) of Section 54956.9: One Potential Case, as Defendant Communications and Power Industries: Amortization Study The Council reconvened from the Closed Session at 7:13 P.M. Mayor Holman: There is no reportable action. Study Session 2. Fiscal Year 2016 Proposed Budget Overview. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you. Good evening. I'm a little bit under the weather. On top of which, you all have just scheduled a half hour for this session, because you've got a big topic this evening. I probably will depart after the Consent Calendar, but I did want to be sure to fulfill my obligations here on transmitting the Operating and Capital Budgets for Fiscal Year 2016. What we will do, particularly for those of you Council Members who are new, I'm going to read some excerpts from the transmittal letter TRANSCRIPT Page 2 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 that's in the Budget document itself. Then Walter and his team will hand out the Budgets and very briefly go through the document just to orient you to it. In particular, we want to show you some slides related to the Capital Budget, since we made some significant changes in the reporting in the Capital Budget to follow up on directives from the Council. Honorable Mayor and City Council, in accordance with my responsibility as City Manager as outlined in the City Charter, I'm submitting this City of Palo Alto Fiscal Year 2016 Proposed Operating Budget. The Citywide Expenditure Budget of $553.7 million has increased by $83 million, I'm going to round these off, or 17.7 percent in comparison to the Fiscal Year 2015 Adopted Budget of $470 million. This is primarily due to a change in carrying forward capital funds from one year to the next, so you can see the full impact of capital funding in projects. That accounts for slightly over $50 million of that $83 million increase. Utility purchases at $9.3 million, salary and benefits at $8.8 million, and additional general infrastructure funding of $5 million are the notable deltas between the two fiscal years. The Proposed General Fund Operating Budget is $185 million, increased by $14 million or 8.2 percent in comparison to the prior year. Again, primarily due to an increase in infrastructure funding. All of that $5 million is there. Salary and benefits costs of $5.9 million. I know that the Finance Committee and ultimately the Council will want to, as you did last year, take a hard look at the position recommendations in this year's Budget. I did want to be sure Finance had the opportunity to assess and respond to our attempt to respond to Council priorities and demands facing the City. Citywide across all funds, full-time FTE [Fulltime Equivalent] benefited positions are increasing by a net of 7.3 FTEs. That's less than 1 percent, up from 1,033 in the 2015 Budget to 1,041. The net year-over-year increase of 7.3 includes a decrease of 6 FTE positions approved by the Council in this fiscal year, offset with an increase of 13 positions. Despite this increase, a decade ago the City's total budgeted position count was 1,073 FTEs or 3.3 percent above this level. For the General Fund over this same period, the Budget position count was 649 FTEs or 7.5 percent more than the recommended Budget that I'm proposing at this time. During that same ten-year period, the City's population grew by approximately 4,300 residents or 7 percent, to put these numbers in contrast. I share, though, the Council's concern about the impact in particular of long-term benefited positions. The General Fund Expenditure Budget is balanced with $183.5 million in revenues and $1.6 million in Fiscal Year 2015 carry forward surplus funds which is out of an estimated $5 million surplus that we project at the end of April 2015. As part of this Budget, the General Fund Budget Stabilization Reserve, often called in shorthand the BSR, is projected to be at the 18.5 percent mark or $34.2 million by the end of 2016. That's right in the sweet spot of the Council's policy recommendations. Compared to last year's Adopted Budget, General Fund tax revenues increase $8.2 million in the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget. TRANSCRIPT Page 3 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 These are major contributors towards the $14 million or 8.3 percent increase in General Fund Budget. It is important to note that a third of the growth in tax revenue, about $3 million, is due to the voter-approved Transient Occupancy Tax [TOT] rate increase approved in November. As you well know, in January you adopted Priorities that address transportation, long- term planning, infrastructure investment and healthy communities. To support these Priorities, the Proposed Budget includes investment in parking and transportation funding, infrastructure, increased library hours and reporting on City funding related to the Healthy City Healthy Community initiative. As directed by Council, Staff has started to implement several strategies to address traffic congestion in the City. As part of our multilayered mitigation plan, efforts include parking management strategies such as Residential Parking Permit Program, implementation of parking technologies, garage wayfinding signage, Transportation Demand Management strategies such as the creation of a Transportation Management Association, enhanced shuttle services funding, Caltrain GoPass program for employees, and short-term and long-term parking supply strategies such as valet parking, construction of new garages as identified in the Council-approved Infrastructure Plan. This Budget proposes additional investments for parking and transportation to implement the Council- approved strategies, including two positions in the Planning and Community Environment Department related directly to transportation and planning. There are actually three positions being added in Planning, in one sense shifting one and backfilling one in Development Services, adding a fourth position in Planning, which I'll explain later. In June 2014, the Council approved a $125.8 million Infrastructure Plan which provides funding for a new Public Safety Building, replacement of two fire stations, funding of our bold Bicycle Pedestrian Transportation Plan, two parking garages and other projects. For detailed information relating to that plan, Walter will be directing you to the Proposed Capital Budget. Although adopted, the Council-approved Infrastructure Plan had a funding gap of $7.5 million at the time of adoption. To address the gap and consistent with the Long Range Financial Forecast of 2016-25, an additional $9.4 million and $4.7 million in Fiscal Year 2016 and Fiscal Year 2017 is proposed to be transferred from the General Fund to the Capital Improvement Fund to support the full Infrastructure Plan. This transfer, which is due to additional TOT receipts, will close the funding gap of $7.5 million, provide funding for the Public Art Program related to the Infrastructure Plan and fund a small reserve for cost increases. The 2016 Budget includes that first-year transfer of $4.7 million. To support the implementation of the plan, the Budget does include the addition of one Engineer position in the Public Works Department. In November 2014, the City opened the new Mitchell Park Library and Community Center and the remodeled Rinconada Library to our community. In response to feedback from users who are enjoying the new facilities and TRANSCRIPT Page 4 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member comments to me, this Budget proposes to increase Library operating hours by 32 hours or 14 percent per week, from 228 hours to 260 hours per week beginning in mid-August to coincide with the start of a new school year. To support these increased library hours, the Budget includes the addition of the equivalent of 4.8 positions, 3.3 full-time positions and 1.5 effective temporary or part-time positions. In conjunction with increased library hours at the Mitchell Park Library, the Budget also includes funding for increased recreation operating hours supported by modest Staff additions at the Teen Center located at Mitchell Park Community Center. I would imagine the Finance Committee may want to take a closer look at my recommendations to see if you think that that is enough expansion at that location given the extended range of hours for the libraries. For this year, the Council added the Healthy City Healthy Community initiative. This Budget includes funding for a community public health consultant to conduct a study regarding health challenges for our residents based on age and other demographics, use of emergency medical services and other statistics. We'll be mostly trying to cobble together different funding sources that are already provided or initiatives we have in our Budget to report on how we are responding to the Council's initiative in that regard. In addition to the 2015 Council Priorities, this Budget addresses other important initiatives such as continuing to advance the Development Services Blue Print, the takeover of the Palo Alto Airport and initial funding towards planning and rehabilitation of the Cubberley Community Center included in the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget. Further, as I've reviewed the City operations during the last year in addition to listening to issues consistently raised in our community and by Council, this Budget recommends more spending in Code Enforcement staffing, adding additional special events in arts and sciences program funding, and enhancements towards operational effectiveness and design of alternative service delivery models and greater use of information technology. As of April, this month, Staff anticipates that the General Fund, as mentioned, will have savings of $5 million. As I mentioned earlier, we are carrying forward $1.6 million into the '16 Budget. Just a highlight on some of the new funding or the additional funding in this Budget. Related to parking and transportation funding, a total of about $574,000, that includes a Parking Operations Lead Staff to support that work. A Traffic Operations Lead to support that work. Some of it is funded in the General Fund, some of it is coming out of the Parking Fund to fund those positions. As I mentioned earlier, the Library opening hours and service enhancements is $493,000. I mentioned the staffing. With the addition of those hours, all Library branches at the City will open at 10:00 A.M. except for College Terrace which will remain on its closure schedule and the Downtown Library which will remain on the days it's closed during the week. It will expand weeknight Monday through Thursday operating hours at Mitchell Park and Rinconada Libraries until 8:00 P.M., double Sunday operating hours at TRANSCRIPT Page 5 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Mitchell Park and Rinconada Libraries currently now 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. and increasing those to 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. There is Code Enforcement staffing of $115,000. That adds one full-time Code Enforcement Officer primarily funded through the General Fund, a bit funded through Development Services which is offset by fees. This is to bring in a Code Enforcement Lead who will train, coordinate and provide daily direction to the two Code Enforcement Officers. There's $100,000 in the Budget related to a seismically vulnerable buildings study, which the Council asked us to take a look at and certainly part of Healthy City Healthy Community. The Recreation Division and special events staffing has about $223,000 added to it. It does add a Community Services Superintendant in Recreation to provide as a lead, coordinating not just this but Citywide special events. It will work on a lot of the Division marketing initiatives and other programs related to cost recovery and recreation. Palo Alto Airport staffing, $79,000 increase. We did some analysis of contracting out versus bringing on a Staff person to handle the maintenance operations. It proved to be more effective to bring on a Staff person, so this adds a net of one Manager of Maintenance Operations with some cost savings elsewhere. Lastly, there is a Senior Technologist position recommended for consideration to support the Public Safety Department with the implementation of a lot of technology systems. We've got $95,000 in the Budget for field patrol body-worn cameras to add to our Police Department. There is a staffing position to support facilities management. There is a funding proposal to initiate a priority-based budgeting model, which ultimately during the Budget process and beyond with Finance and the Council Walter can talk about this methodology to add more discipline and rigor to how we prioritize even working with the community and the Council. There's $50,000 funding for an Individual Review process peer review study, $75,000 for a regional fire and emergency medical services efficiency study, and a number of investments in technology, etc. On the Enterprise Fund side of things, as you are aware, given the interface between the UAC [Utilities Advisory Commission] and Finance, the 2016 Budget includes utility rate adjustments for fiber optics, refuse, storm drain water and wastewater charges. The average monthly residential utilities bill will be expected to increase 6.3 percent or just under $15 a month from $237 to $252. At this time, there are no rate increases in our most expensive services and funds and electric and gas services. This does include a 12 percent water rate increase due to water supply costs from the SFPUC and other challenges we're facing; a 9 percent wastewater increase due to capital improvements at the plant; and a 9 percent refuse fund increase as part of the expansion of the residential food scrap collection program. The storm drain fee has its 2.6 percent CPI increase. Our city continues to be at the epicenter of a thriving regional economy. The economic good times as well as the voter approved Transient Occupancy Tax increase have generated significantly higher revenues for the TRANSCRIPT Page 6 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 City. The local boom has also resulted in increases in job growth, traffic and demand for parking and other City services. These issues are well recognized by the City Council as reflected in your Priorities. As best we best could with the revenues that we had, we tried to align with Council Priorities and initiatives the investments as I've outlined here. While the City Council will need to approve an annual Budget for this coming year, we have to keep in mind the long-term goals of the City and the Council. Work is still needed with our employee groups to reduce long-term pension and healthcare liabilities while remaining a competitive employer. The City has made good progress, and we're in negotiations with our Public Safety unions and next year with SEIU [Service Employees International Union, Local, Local 521]. We'll need to focus on that. This Budget has funding to support some degree of new contracts for those groups. It also includes a $7.6 million revenue receipt from Stanford University anticipating a continuation of providing fire services to Stanford. As you know, we're in negotiations with Stanford right now in that regard. As I mentioned to the Committee the other night, it does not include any additional funding for transitional support in the Animal Shelter operations. To the extent we go down that path, that will be something we work through at Finance as we look at it. I want to thank our Council for your leadership, and our Exec Leadership Team and our entire Staff who provide outstanding services to our community. A special thanks to Walter Rossmann, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and his team, Christine Paras, Eric Bilimoria, Michael Bruckner, Paul Harper and Sean O'Shea, who worked countless hours and evenings and weekends to put this Budget together, along with Lalo Perez, Chief Financial Officer, Joe Saccio and Tarun Narayan and Staff across the Departments. We're honored to work with a dedicated Council, professional City workforce, and a highly engaged community. We look forward to working with Finance and the Council over the next month in bringing in a Budget that can best serve our community. With that, I will turn it over to Walter. Walter Rossmann, Office of Management and Budget Director: Thank you, Jim. Good evening. Walter Rossmann, Budget Director. I would like to quickly orient you, especially new Council Members. We have two Budget documents, an Operating Budget document and a Capital Budget document. The Operating one has sections for each major fund section, such as Citywide, Enterprise, General Fund, etc. The real focus I want to share with the entire Council today is the changes we have made to the Capital Budget. Last year as part of the Finance Committee hearings, there were several changes which the Committee asked for. The Council approved changes in the [Municipal] Code about how we carry forward funds from one fiscal year to the next. That's the main reason why the Capital Budget is going from $57 million to $150 million just for the next fiscal year. Instead of carrying TRANSCRIPT Page 7 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 the funds through an accounting process, we're doing it more through a budgeting process now. This Budget document, the Capital one, increased by 50 percent, not in pages though only by 200 pages, but increased by 50 percent extra projects which we are showing to you now, projects which are in flight, projects which are currently handled by Staff and many which they hope to close out this next fiscal year. Going through this quickly,the major change is carrying forward funds, which we're doing differently. You'll see this in the Capital Budget. We added a Fund Overview section for you. If you look at the Water Fund, we don't show you the project pages, but we have a description on what's happening in this Capital program. We made changes to the project pages in the design and format. Let me look at one specific section here, the Electric Fund. You will see in the Capital Budget document a fund summary narrative where Staff brought together the major issues they're facing in that fund. You will see a description of the major projects, what their major accomplishments are, and their major next initiatives. A financial summary which brings all the projects together and rolls them up in one big table on the source side, revenues as well as expenditures. Lastly, a little tidbit for you, infrastructure inventory whether it's how many gas mains we have, how many vehicles we have, what types of vehicles, just interesting information to lighten up your day as you're going through the Budget document. If you look at the project information, there are several things we did there. We added in initial project start date, which you see here. The revised project start date, in case it changed. You will have a much better sense of we funded it initially this year. That's when we want it to start; however, we had two issues. These are described in significant changes. Every year we'll keep track of those and you can look back at what happened to those projects. The same thing happens with the revised project completion date, the initial one and the revised one. Lastly, the financial information. There's several things you see new. We're actually showing you the entire cost of a project, whether it's past costs which we've done before, the Budget from this fiscal year. Are we going to spend this money, that's the estimated 2015 Budget. If we don't, we will ask you to carry it forward. Then we're looking at how it's going to spend in the new plan. Sometimes the projects are so large they go beyond the five- year plan, and we show an estimate of that cost as well. You'll see in the total project cost what this entire project is potentially going to cost the City. It's a plan and every year, as you know, it will get refined. The other thing which is still a work in progress for us is the Operating Budget impact statement. What's really important is the linkage between Capital and Operating. We make decisions about the capital side. We see this today with the Mitchell Park Library. On the operating side you will see this year additional funds we are requesting for the green roof, for extra cleaning of the floors, they're wooden floors, little tidbits you see on the operating side. The plan is if we do Capital budgeting really well, as you get closer to the TRANSCRIPT Page 8 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 project being completed, Staff refines the impact on the Operating Budget before you approve it. The Council has a better idea whether approving a capital investment, which is great and wonderful, has a long-term and heavy Operating Budget impact or is it minimal. That's one thing we're trying to do as well. That's it for this short presentation. We'll pass out the Budget documents. Looking forward to the conversations in Finance and later on in June with Council. Thank you. Mayor Holman: Thank you, City Manager and Walter as well. Yes, we have our gifts being distributed. This was a presentation; it was an opening of the conversation. If there are any brief comments by non-Finance Committee Members, this would be the time to put them out there. We have four members who are not on Finance. If any of you have brief comments. Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: First of all, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to reading this. I can't wait. Seriously, thank you. We got an interesting email that I thought had some interesting points. One was a measure spanning control and are we staffed at appropriate levels. I'd be interested in if you're going to include any kind of metrics of that sort as part of the Budget. The other thing I think would be useful would be to provide some analysis of FTE in total including consultants. It would help people understand why we're using consultants. You could show full-time Staff and potentially a cost savings over hiring versus outsourcing. We hear quite a bit from the community both sides, why are we hiring, why do we have so many consultants. Making that clear could be useful. There was also a comment about the priority budgeting model. Could you explain that a little further? Is that going to start in certain areas? Mr. Rossmann: Sure. There's a request in the Budget to fund a consultant to get us going on priority-based budgeting. What that effort does is, which is a pretty heavy organizational effort, going beyond department level and towards programmatic-level of the organization. If you look at the typical finance department, you have a budget office, accounts payable, accounting, payroll. Looking at the programmatic level, we have opportunities for outsourcing. Do we have to do this service because it's federally mandated or City Charter mandated? How do the services align with broader services the City is trying to provide to its citizens? You go through this analysis and figure out as part of the Budget process how often is this program used and how important is it to contributing towards outcomes. It's at least a year if not two years effort. It may inform the '17 Budget already. Again, it takes a lot of work by Staff to look at our organization very differently and then assign dollars to it in establishing this process. It started about five years TRANSCRIPT Page 9 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 ago with the Center for Priority-Based Budgeting. They have done this in about 60 cities nationwide and a few in California. Council Member DuBois: Would we potentially roll that out partially in 2017? Maybe you don't do every department, but you do some areas. Mr. Rossmann: That would be a possibility. Usually it's done Citywide or organization-wide at once. It's a question of capacity. You can get it done in six months, but that takes Staff time away from other priorities. That's what we're trying to balance. Council Member DuBois: The last quick question was the mention about the Animal Shelter. There was no increase in the Budget? Mr. Keene: Yes, Council Member. The Finance Committee Members were privy to this a little bit on the presentation that we had. The recommendation from the Auditor and my response, which was completely aligned with hers, recommends for the long term maintaining animal control and spinning off the Animal Shelter itself to either an existing or new not- for-profit. There was good support for that from the stakeholder community. To do that, we've got about a year transition period. We're losing the existing Director. We've got to get some consultant assistance to do that. Those transition costs that we were estimating were wild guesses; we will sharpen them with Finance Committee. It could be $200,000, $250,000. That's not in the Budget yet. I wanted to call out anything that I thought was a looming potential that I had not specifically included yet. Council Member Burt: Thanks. I'll start with the Capital Improvement Program. Just want to commend these changes in the format. Having looked at this as a Planning Commissioner for nine years and seven on the Council, this is a really good improvement to how this is going to be presented. We can really see the totality of what's going on in projects and see how things roll forward and not try to understand something through a snapshot, when it's really a moving picture. This is really well done. Second, I want to say this is really great that we're going to be able to expand the Library and Community Center hours. That's going to be very well received by the community. The new Libraries seem to be extremely popular. All we hear is, "Why are they closing?" This is a great response to that. I want to ask a follow-up question on the Staff changes. We didn't have any written presentation in front of us, so we're all trying to go off of what we heard verbally. What I thought I heard the City Manager describe in additional Staff positions within departments sounded to be more than what I thought I heard at the beginning of seven net Staff position TRANSCRIPT Page 10 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 increases. Did the two add up or are there some reductions in other places that made this pencil out? Mr. Keene: There is a combination of some changes this year. I did mention, but I probably zoomed over it, that it does include a reduction of 6 FTEs this year from the 2015 Budget that have already been pushed through and away. There's more like 13 positions, but a net of 7 year-over-year changes. When the Finance Committee and the Council looks at this, you'll be looking at about 10.9 positions or so in the General Fund and enough to make 13.3 in the other fund. 2.4. Council Member Burt: I was glad to hear that we're having another Code Enforcement Officer, but then I heard that it was a Lead and the description was that it would give oversight to the other two Officers. I wanted to understand whether that additional position is ... Mr. Keene: It is a working lead. Council Member Burt: It's a working lead. Mr. Keene: Yeah, it's not sitting back at the office. Council Member Burt: The other thing was in the Development Center and Planning. I certainly understand the additional transportation positions, because we're investing a great deal into that. That's going to be an ongoing investment in our community. Given the direction we are taking with things like the cap on new office, which would mitigate the level of new office growth that we've been having the last several years during a peak period, I was assuming that if anything that might reduce the Development Center demands on the commercial side and maybe to some marginal degree on the planning side. I understand that Planning has been understaffed. Could you explain that a little bit more? Mr. Keene: That's a good question. We'll have to work through that with the Finance Committee and with the Development Services Director. The positions in the Development Services Budget can be a little confusing. There is the addition of an Assistant Chief Building Official, which is a new position. That's the one in particular we'll need to respond to, what you're talking about, Council Member. The other main position is the addition of a Planning Manager, but that is because the Planning Manager that has been assigned to work with the Development Services Staff from Planning is going back to Planning to support more of the current Planning efforts. To be honest with you, I thought it was easier to fund the position that way with offsetting it by new fees or whatever. Having it in Development Services rather than in the General Fund. The heart of the matter is the Assistant TRANSCRIPT Page 11 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Chief Building Official, how does that relate to that. In the next two weeks or so, we will have before the Council the consultant budget for Development Services that does have significant flex funding for consultant assistance to provide development-supported work. We have some of those large budgets to do precisely what you're saying, to not staff up as much as we need to so that we can let go of consultant work without having to lay people off as there's a downturn. Those need to be looked at in conjunction with the entirety of the consultant budget and the staffing we have in Development Services. Council Member Burt: My final question/comment is about a specific capital improvement area, rather than the format. This is probably best framed in terms of addressing our Healthy Community Priority, but it's also recognizing a priority that is emerging in the community. That is around potential capital investments that may be needed to provide security for our tracks. We talk about Healthy Communities, and we have what many people have recognized as a current teen health crisis in our community. We're coming to understand what experts have identified as an important way to address it, that may be to a great degree a City role. I appreciate that the discussions are ongoing right now and we don't have that plan in place. If we are anticipating potential capital expenditures that could be significant, how does that into the Capital Improvement Plan? If we come forward in the coming months and say that we want to move aggressively in this direction, where will that fit in the Budget? Mr. Keene: Thank you, Council Member. I agree with you. I've been thinking about this a lot myself. One, we didn't have detail. Two, we're doing a lot of outreach, as you know, with Caltrain. We want to look at those numbers after we've gone down the road with them. Our view is that there is a fair degree of fungibility with the accounts that we have in the Infrastructure Plan that could allow us to loan or transfer funds. The truth is even if we needed to, we would come to the Council with a Budget Amendment Ordinance for a particular item. We've got things in the out years. We could find a way to pull that from the Infrastructure Plan to fund those. Council Member Burt: We have our General Fund Reserve, which has a range. We transfer from the General Fund varying amounts of dollars every year into the Infrastructure. Am I correct that you would also have that fungibility that you could propose and we could approve, moving additional dollars from our General Fund Reserve into the Infrastructure account? Mr. Keene: We could do that. The Budget as we put it together predicted an 18.5 percent Budget Stabilization Reserve just in that particular account. TRANSCRIPT Page 12 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 We have flexibility to alter that and take from that and still be within the Council's guidelines for the Reserve. Mayor Holman: I have just two or three things. Thank you, Council Members. One of the things that I've mentioned previously, and I just want to have Staff comment briefly on utilization of the open data programming that we have and data that we have. Can Staff respond to how that will be utilized during this Budget process? Mr. Rossmann: Sure, Mayor Holman. Before I respond directly to your question, the Budget documents will be uploaded tomorrow and available on our website. We realized today that the data files are so large that we need to break them apart and have a subpage for the Budget documents. That's the disadvantage of going for a larger document. You'll see this hopefully by mid-afternoon tomorrow. Regarding open data, we appreciate your comment. We're trying to upload the Budget data from our Budget system into the open data platform and make it available to the public. Our goal is to get this done by Tuesday of next week, when we have the Finance Committee hearing, hopefully sooner. Once we have it updated, we'll advise you. Open data is the platform which we use to show actual Budget data for the last two or three fiscal years. The public can go into each department, cost center and fund and drill down to a much deeper level of accounting and funds budgeted than you'll see in this Budget document. It allows a different view of our data. It allows comparative views from year-over-year. You'll be able to see how salaries and benefits data went up. If you look, for instance, at pension, it was budgeted at a certain amount in the General Fund for '15 and what's the change for '16. This is what data will allow the public and you as well to look at. Mr. Keene: If I might add, Madam Mayor? Talking with the Director, obviously it takes a lot of work by their team and everybody to get this document done. This provides the basic information for us. Literally, they just got this done this weekend. By the time we're with Finance, my understanding is this will be on the Open Gov website. It's extremely important for us to do that. Those of you who aren't aware of it, we were the first OpenGov organization at the local level. They're now all over the country. I'm actually speaking this week to a bunch of folks about what it is we've done. I will be sure to weave in the Mayor's urgent question about how quickly we're going to be getting this updated. It's a good measure of how receptive the Council and the community is to having that simpler data available. Mayor Holman: I appreciate that a great deal. When you had been here just a little while, Jim, you took the Budget on the road. Maybe with the TRANSCRIPT Page 13 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 upload of all the data into open data it might be a good time to do that, because we have this great tool. You're right; we were the first city to do it. I don't think it's very well known, what it is, how it can be used, even including our City Council and Staff. If there's a way you can work in a Budget on the road with the open data utilization, that would be great, or find some way to do some kind of tutorial or something for Council and the public. It's a great tool. It's wonderful, the capabilities it has. Just two quick things. In addition to that, this is just for the Finance Committee to look at with City Staff. I won't take longer than that. One is to look at beat police, especially in the Downtown and California Avenue areas, if that requires reassignments or additional staffing. Safety is one of the primary obligations of City Council and the City. We do occasionally have issues arise, so I'm wanting to know what it would take to get some beat police at critical hours. Dennis Burns will have some input on what those hours are. Other people will have input on what those hours might be to create a safer environment for us. I would appreciate Finance taking that issue up. Also, if we need to move forward with having our redundant power source, if we need to have some kind of Budget line item to help us move that forward, look at what we might do, if there are sharing capabilities with our communities so we might share that source with another community as well. Let's see what we can do to move that forward. It's been several years now. We've talked about it, and we haven't made any progress in terms of implementation or creation of that. Lastly, I was glad to hear that you have special events coordinator added back in. We had one many years ago and haven't had one for a good long time. I know that we have some organizations and individuals that help support community events. Stanford Credit Union has been very generous this year and in years past. We need to look at also having some additional cultural events that build on the Healthy City Priority that we have. I don't know if that requires any kind of line item addition or not. It depends on what kind of outside resources or private resources that have been volunteered or offered to the City. That's all I have. Vice Mayor Schmid, your light is on. I was hoping to keep this to non-Finance Committee Members, because we are at 8:00. Vice Mayor Schmid: Just very quickly. I want to thank my colleagues who are not on the Finance Committee for their ideas that we can carry forward. Looking forward to the open source. One other thing. I've had a couple of people come up to me and ask, "When can I go to a Finance Committee hearing and hear a department budget?" If we could make the agendas clearly available on the City Council website. If we could give some notion of each agenda, how long each department discussion might be. If people are interested in a specific department, they can have a general idea of when that might take place on what date. That would be very helpful as part of the reach out. Look forward to May. TRANSCRIPT Page 14 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Timothy Gray: Tim Gray, south Palo Alto. I just wanted to offer a couple ideas on a Budget process, ideas that could engage the community a little bit more. If we could express the Budget in terms of services provided to the town and communicate the value and prioritize. Right now there's some who think that we're in a prosperous era. Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about new things to spend things on, but rather put a little bit more down payment to maybe a Public Safety Building, which would get a little bit more cooperation from the voters if we asked them to approve a bond measure. If we do with a little bit less from our Operating Budget and put a down payment towards more of our infrastructure, then we could get better cooperation from the community. The other thing I'd like to see is a little bit more benchmarking. There's some belief that we spend a lot more administrative dollars per resident, even after you factor out the utilities, than other cities. I'd like to roll the numbers out, show the community what we do spend and either validate that or disprove that and show how responsible we are in our spending. That's a fair request. I hope that you can generate some of these ideas within your committee structure as we roll into the Budget season. Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions None. City Manager Comments James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. In the spirit of enhanced special events, I did want to remind everybody that this Saturday, May 2nd, is the May Fete Parade and Fair, which will begin at 10:00 A.M. For the history buffs, this is the 93rd Annual May Fete Children's Parade. It starts again at 10:00 as well know, but for newcomers in the community, on University Avenue, Downtown and ends with the fair at Heritage Park. This year's parade theme turns on with a theme of No Space to Alienate. I want to thank Mayor Holman for her support this year, which included some ideas related to a number of additions to the parade that we were able to easily make. One is an expanded route to include Lytton Gardens and Channing House residents. The public and the kids will be walking past the senior housing. Additional music groups and student bands, return of the Kids with Pets category or any child that wants to walk in the parade with their pet. We'll note that this is not specifically limited to dogs. I guess that could be a very interesting menagerie at the parade. Children who are not part of a specific group can also walk in the parade in the Kids on Wheels category, which is a non-motorized event. The fair at Heritage Park runs 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. It is organized by the Palo Alto Recreation Foundation and the Kiwanis Club of TRANSCRIPT Page 15 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Palo Alto. The fair includes an array of fun children's activities, performance stage featuring local entertainment groups, lots of great food and picnic space and more. In addition, the Museum of American Heritage just across the street from the Park will be hosting their annual vintage vehicle and family festival with lots of activities. We hope to see you there to celebrate. I didn't have any specific comments on [Palo Alto] Perry and where Perry will be appearing or not. I don't know if, when we're all done, the Mayor wants to add to it. On my Twitter feed, I'm getting a lot of tweets about where Perry the avatar donkey is showing up around town and everything in response to the Love of Palo Alto. Should I break quickly? Did you want to add something Madam Mayor? Mayor Holman: Palo Alto Perry, the real Perry and Niner, his good friend, the real donkeys are not trailer trained, so they will not be appearing in the parade as we had originally envisioned. That also saves our City Manager his effort of scooping, which he had offered to do should they actually appear in the parade. Palo Alto Perry, which is in response to the contest that the City Manager put out with a $500 startup funding. Palo Alto Perry, after his sneak preview at the Tall Tree event the other evening, will be appearing at the parade and will be at Heritage Park. He'll be accepting comments. He will have saddlebags, so you can put notes in there. Palo Alto Perry will be making his rounds around town. Just one quick addition to that. In addition to the parade route being expanded to include Lytton Gardens, Avenidas will be going to Lytton Gardens and they'll be having a joint party. Stevenson House will be going to Channing House to have a party there as the parade route goes by there. Really happy to have them back included and the cooperation among and between the different elder homes. Thank. Mr. Keene: Thank you. Anybody who follows us or me on Twitter, one of the tweets is from Palo Alto Perry. It says, of course this is a stuffed version of Perry, it's fairly big. At the Stanford Playfest picture, "They love me here. Thank you Stanford Federal Credit Union for taking me. Palo Alto Perry." Lots of fun. The Cubberley Artist Studio Program will open their working studios to the public during the annual Silicon Valley Open Studios. This diverse group of artists of our newly re-launched artist residency program will show their recent and new work in progress on May 2nd and 3rd, from 11:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Twenty-two artists will open their studios during the Open Studio, so please try to put that on your calendar. Since it is coming up next week, just a reminder to celebrate California Avenue, which will occur on Thursday, May 7th, beginning at 2:00 P.M. at the plaza on California Avenue. Our Staff is working with several of the merchants to plan the commemoration with music and the official launch of the fountain on the plaza, a recirculating fountain I would like to add. We appreciate TRANSCRIPT Page 16 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 greatly the patience of the California Avenue businesses and residents and shoppers through this construction. Now it's time to celebrate, so come to the plaza and help us inaugurate the new California Avenue. It's pretty cool; I've been out there a number of times over the past week. That's all I have to report except one thing. On the Mayor's comment related to the secondary transmission line, we have been working, our Staff, Utilities and other members of our team, directly with Stanford. It involves the Federal Energy Commission, a bunch of folks. Pretty complicated. It probably would be in order sometime this summer for us to give an update to the Council as to where we are to follow up on your comments. Thanks. Mayor Holman: I appreciate that very much. Just one quick note is this past week, April 21st, was the 121st anniversary of Palo Alto's incorporation. Thank you for coming back and visiting us; although, I know you don't feel well, City Manager. Oral Communications Sea Reddy: Thanks to the City Council and the citizens of Palo Alto. On Saturday night 7,500 miles away from here, there was an earthquake in Nepal. There is a lot of lessons to be learned as they're doing the search and rescue at this time. I hope someone or a team of people in Palo Alto, emergency readiness preparation teams and people like us, individuals, families read up on how things are happening. There's a lot of lessons to be learned. A 7.9 size earthquake. The last one, I was in LA, was the Northridge. I was 45 miles away, and it caused a lot of devastation. They claimed 6.9. I urge people to be cognizant of this, and maybe a team could go up there, of volunteers and things like that, to see how we can handle it if and when and how that happens here. Thank you for that. The second thing I'm going to bring up is not very popular. There is a professor by the name of Beau Oppenheim that used to work at Northrop. He is an expert in the industry on the lean opportunities. He offered me one time about he would like to help public sector as well. If you are interested in the process of putting together budgets, how we could incorporate lean, which is a big thing in the industry. A lot of people in Lockheed Martin, Boeing have teams of lean and doing everything, something like zero-based budgeting and all that. We all know all these things, but there is new things coming up. If you want his offering services, maybe a free one-hour session on that, I could facilitate that. I'm not sure he's going to do it for free. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Don Anderson, speaking for five people: Thank you. Mayor Holman and Honorable Council Members, my name is Don Anderson. I represent the Friends of Buena Vista. Our membership includes a large list of Palo Alto TRANSCRIPT Page 17 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 community organizations, including the League of Women Voters, Palo Alto Forward, Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning, the Community Working Group, churches with congregations of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths, and many more organizations. On April 14th, you made clear your intention to approve the owner's application to close Buena Vista Mobile Home Park. The next day, April 15th, all four local newspapers ran headlines reading Council votes to close Buena Vista. This was, as you can imagine, devastating to the residents of the [Buena Vista Mobilehome] Park. Many of them were here the night before. There's a difference between listening to five hours of somewhat unintelligible nitpicking among lawyers and reading those headlines the next morning. Since then we've tried to reassure Buena Vista residents that all is not lost, that they do have friends in high places. With help from our friend Doug Kreitz and the MidPeninsula Media Center, we made a brief video that has now been shown to many Buena Vista residents and is continuing to be shown. I'd like you to see it now, but I don't have a mouse. There it is. I'm guessing this doesn't count against my time. [Video shown.] We're grateful for your sentiments and for your commitment to save Buena Vista. We want to assert as graphically as possible that time is of the essence now for you to act on this commitment. Please imagine yourselves in the following situation. At the end of May, you're served with a notice to vacate your home no later than Thanksgiving or Christmas or be forcibly escorted from the premises by the Sheriff. In less than three months from the end of May, your children will start the new school year. What do you do? Do you wait 'til Thanksgiving to move? Do you sit tight because the do-gooders say there's hope? Send your children to school in Palo Alto in the fall knowing that at most they'll be able to stay a few months or do you start making plans now to leave Palo Alto? I think we all understand that no relocation package is really going to allow residents of Buena Vista to live long-term anywhere anything like 35 miles from Palo Alto. On May 26, you will conclude your duties as judge and jury. We urge you, we implore you to be proactive between now and then. There is hope for Buena Vista but, if we're to save this community of people who have called Palo Alto home for years and in many cases for generations, we must move fast. Decisions are needed. Policy decisions must be made immediately. Immediately means in some cases within minutes of your decision to approve the closure of Buena Vista. Gail Price, the next speaker, will talk about some specifics. We've held out hope to Buena Vista residents for months, for years. To paraphrase a very old saying, some of you probably haven't ever heard of it, hope and $3.50 will buy you a cup of coffee. What's needed immediately on May 26th is action. Without immediate action, saving Buena Vista will mean at best saving an empty husk, not saving an established community of flesh-and-blood neighbors in our midst. Please use the next 30 days to prepare for swift and decisive TRANSCRIPT Page 18 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 action to save Buena Vista as a community for our neighbors who live there. Thank you. Gail Price: Good evening. My name is Gail Price. I'm speaking on behalf of the Community Working Group Board in support of the Buena Vista Mobilehome Park residents, their future and all actions needed to maintain and upgrade affordable housing in Palo Alto. I'm also a neighbor and a former School Board and City Council Member. The video illustrates your considered and heart-felt comments. Palo Alto City Council has the power, authority and responsibility to support the Buena Vista community and to protect affordable housing. You can demonstrate your leadership and commitment to a fair and just outcome. Thank you to [Santa Clara County] District 5 Supervisor Joe Simitian and his colleagues for the recent actions on April 21st. They showed leadership, and they showed a commitment to helping people. They identified processes and partners. They are in the process of doing that to preserve and operate Buena Vista Mobilehome Park. Events are quickly unfolding. The Council needs to move from rhetoric to action. In anticipation of the results of the County's process to forge a partnership and a solution, we recommend the following. One, last week the County of Santa Clara added another $3.3 million for a total of $11.3 million set aside for Buena Vista acquisition. The City should follow the County's lead by allocating at least $3 million more as a match from the City's Affordable Housing Fund in addition to the $8 million the City Manager has already set aside. If a policy change is required to secure these additional funds, then change the policy. The General Fund is also a potential source. Two, approve and release soon any City funds set aside for the acquisition of Buena Vista, preferably no later than May 26th, when you'll meet to ratify your appeal hearing findings. Three, be prepared. Direct the appropriate City Staff to do whatever advance work is necessary to ensure the City can act quickly, if needed, if and when alternatives to closure materialize. Four, to secure additional resources, the City Council should actively and publicly support Supervisor Simitian's fundraising efforts by seeking out and encouraging businesses, community members and relevant State and Federal programs to help fund the preservation and upgrade of Buena Vista. As our elected officials, your deliberations and actions must reflect your commitment to Palo Alto residents, affordable housing and economic and ethnic diversity, all that Buena Vista is and represents. You can oppose and prevent displacement by taking action. Only by doing so, will you protect Palo Alto's reputation as a caring community. Thank you. Nicolas Martinez: Good evening. My name is Nicolas Martinez. I am speaking on behalf of Buena Vista residents. We want to make sure that Council Members are aware that Buena Vista residents are exploring all possible options and are heavily relying on the Council and City of Palo Alto TRANSCRIPT Page 19 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 to do all that is within their power to preserve Buena Vista. We are extremely concerned especially about Buena Vista Children and how quickly families will have to act in order to get them into new schools by August, at the latest September of this year. Time is running out, but we the residents are hoping for a better outcome like the one that Supervisor Simitian is working on. This will only happen if everyone pulls together, including our City, your City of Palo Alto. Please highly consider our situation. We need your help. Our situation is urgent. Thank you. Consent Calendar MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Schmid to approve Agenda Item Numbers 3-6. 3. Approval of a Final Map to Subdivide One Parcel Totaling 12,375 Square Feet Into Six Condominium Units Within the RM-30 Zone District located at 405 Curtner Avenue. Environmental Assessment: Categorically Exempt From the Provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Per CEQA Guidelines Sections 15303 and 15061(b)(3). 4. Preliminary Approval of the Report of the Advisory Board for Fiscal Year 2016 in Connection with the Palo Alto Downtown Business Improvement District and Adoption of Resolution 9505 entitled “Resolution of the Council of the City of Palo Alto Declaring its Intention to Levy an Assessment Against Businesses within the Downtown Palo Alto Business Improvement District for Fiscal Year 2016 and Setting a Time and Place for a Public Hearing on May 18, at 7:00 PM or thereafter, in the City Council Chambers 5. Policy and Services Committee Recommendation to Accept the Utility Meter Audit: Procurement, Inventory, and Retirement. 6. Approval of the Revised Joint Exercise of Powers Agreement: Workforce Development Services for NOVA Consortium to Include the Addition of San Mateo County. MOTION PASSED: 6-0 Berman, Kniss, Scharff absent James Keene, City Manager: Madam Mayor, with your okay, I'm going to turn my seat over to Assistant City Manager Ed Shikada. With your permission. Mayor Holman: Absolutely. We expect you to be tracking Palo Alto Perry's activities. TRANSCRIPT Page 20 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Action Items 7. Comprehensive Plan Update Planning Process Status and Review of Existing Comprehensive Plan Goals and Vision Statements. Mayor Holman: Assistant City Manager, I believe this is your first presentation to Council. Is that right? Ed Shikada, Assistant City Manager: Yes, it is. I've now activated the microphone, so I've passed the first test. Mayor Holman: You're indoctrinated, so welcome. Mr. Shikada: Thank you. Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you, Mayor Holman, Council Members. I'm Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. This next item is, I hope, going to be a long and fruitful discussion of the ongoing update to the City's Comprehensive Plan. My presentation is somewhat longer than usual, but there are several complex issues to talk about tonight. One is we want to give you an update on the planning process itself and spend some time on that. Then we want to continue a discussion that was started earlier this year with the Council on the structure of the Comprehensive Plan. As we go into the update, it would be useful for us to have the Council's direction and input on the overall structure of the Plan. We had discussed at an earlier session the overall vision statement and themes of the Comprehensive Plan. Today we're going to focus on the next level down, which is the Vision Statements for each of the individual chapters or Elements of the Plan and then the Goals and the subheadings that form the structure of those elements. Before I get into the process part of this, I wanted to say again thank you to the Council for identifying this important planning effort as one of your Priorities this year. Also, thank you to the Leadership Group of Palo Alto citizens who have been working with us to plan the May 30th [Comprehensive Plan] Summit and the outreach efforts that will follow and to the Staff and the Planning [and Transportation] Commission that has been working on the Comprehensive Plan Update for many years now and put a lot of effort and thought into some of the materials that you're going to review this evening. I like to start every presentation on the Comprehensive Plan Update with a short summary of the reasons we're doing this. There are really four reasons that we've identified. The first is that the Plan that we're working under right now, called Embracing the New Century, was adopted in 1998, and there have been changes in circumstances. The world has changed quite a bit since 1998, and it's necessary for us to update our State-required Comprehensive Plan. General Plans like the Comprehensive Plan are often referred to as the TRANSCRIPT Page 21 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 "constitution" of the local jurisdictions. The second reason is that the Comprehensive Plan is a function of State law. An updated Comprehensive Plan will form a sound legal foundation for future decision making by the Council and the City. The third is that an updated Comprehensive Plan can help us manage growth and address some of the issues that we face and challenges we face as a community today. The third reason is it's an opportunity for us to work together. These issues around growth and other things are potentially divisive issues. Preparing an update to the Comprehensive Plan provides a real opportunity for us to come together as a community and understand fully those issues and work to identify policies and programs that will help to address them in the future. It's been a long process so far. As many of you know, the City recognized the need to update the Comprehensive Plan in 2006, because the current Comprehensive Plan was set to sunset in 2010. The work really began in earnest in 2008 with some public workshops, a lot of effort by Staff, the consultants and the Planning and Transportation Commission. Then in early 2014, the results of the Planning Commission's efforts were provided to the City Council, and the City Council directed the Staff and others to start on this effort to restart and reshape the process to include additional community input and consideration of the issues of the day. A key part of the restart in early 2014 was this concept that we should widely engage with the community on the issues inherent in the Comprehensive Plan and get them more involved in drafting the Comprehensive Plan Update. A Leadership Group of Palo Alto residents was formed as a group that would aid the Staff and consultants in seeking input from a broad cross-section of the community. One of the main things that the Leadership Group has been working on is planning for the May 30th Summit. We have over 300 people registered for the Summit, which has clearly struck a nerve in the community. It will be an all-day event at the Mitchell Park Community Center. I hope you will all be there and join us. We plan to discuss the issues we face as a community, really start a dialog about a collective vision for the community. It's a recruiting effort too. We want to recruit people to participate in the community work sessions that will follow the Summit and build confidence in our ability to work together on some of these, again, potentially divisive issues. We've posted an agenda for the May 30th Summit on our website for people who want to see how the day is organized. I invite you to look closely at that. If anyone has questions about that, they're welcome to email me or Planning Staff with those questions. This will continue to be fleshed out as the day gets closer. I hope people will see reflected in this issues that they want to come and hear about and discuss and participate in at least some of the day on May 30th. Now I'd like to spend a few minutes on the process we envision after the Summit. There's actually a complicated diagram in the Staff Report which I chose not to repeat in the PowerPoint. There are a few slides here that try TRANSCRIPT Page 22 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 to explain what we've envisioned in terms of the community and Council work sessions after the Summit. Up here on this slide, you'll see at the left, we see Council work sessions and Community work sessions happening in parallel through the rest of this year and into early 2016. There will be an exchange of ideas between the Council and the community as they work through issues. The Council, as you know, has already been working on Comprehensive Plan-related issues, retail preservation, growth management systems and the like. That will not end with the Summit. The Council's discussion on major issues will continue. The idea is that after the Summit the community work sessions will convene and start focusing on policy and program language consistent with the Council's direction. At some point when we've made it far enough along in that community process, a revised draft will be prepared and that will be provided to the City Council for review. That will be the Council's opportunity to get involved in the policy and programs that have been generated by the community work sessions. At the end of this process, of course, there are formal public hearings. The Council and the community sessions are focusing, as I indicated, on slightly different levels in this process. This graphic attempts to show that the Council's real priority in these early work sessions is on issues and ideas, providing direction to Staff and the community members who will hopefully, willingly, eagerly volunteer to participate in these sessions. The community work sessions themselves will get more into the actual policy and program language of the Comprehensive Plan. Even those sessions probably can't be wordsmithing sessions, but maybe "policy-smithing" sessions. The idea is to look at policy language and see which policies and programs in the current Comprehensive Plan require updating, what new policies and programs need to be included. What the community work sessions generate in terms of a revised draft will be provided to the City Council. Then there will be an opportunity for the Council itself to get into the "policy-smithing" arena and weigh in on the policy language of the plan before we produce a final list of changes for the public hearing process. This will be a cumulative process along the way. It's going to be informed by significant public input, data and analysis. This slide shows, at the bottom of the screen, some of the inputs to the process along the way. Importantly you'll note that sometime later this summer a draft Environmental Impact Report and Fiscal Study will be available. That would be presented to both the public, obviously at the community work sessions, and the City Council for some substantive review and comment on the cumulative impacts and the policies and programs that will arise from the mitigation that's necessary to address those impacts. The Staff Report includes a possible schedule for work sessions, suggesting that the revised draft would be produced in the May-June 2016 timeframe, if all of this goes according to plan, provided there's sufficient clarity on the choices from the Council and the policies and programs from the community working sessions to meet that timeframe. We've always envisioned the TRANSCRIPT Page 23 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 process to be a little different than the [Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee] CPAC process that was involved in the preparation and adoption of the current Comprehensive Plan, mostly because we're at a different stage in the process than that Comprehensive Plan. So much time has elapsed since the beginning of this effort in 2006 or 2008, it didn't seem like we could start all the way at the beginning again, so we've tried to design a process with that in mind. We also have a few new tools available to us since the late '90s in terms of our access to open source data and public participation, and we want to take advantage of those new tools. The Staff Report does acknowledge that all along we as Staff have been recommending that we don't use an appointed committee that instead we use community outreach and engagement to try to entice people, anyone who wants to, to come and participate in the community work sessions. Some Council Members have suggested that it would be easier to get a cross-section of interests represented if the committee was appointed. We suggest to you today that if there's going to be a change in direction and appointment of a committee, today would be the day to make that decision because, as I said, the Summit is a recruiting opportunity . The Summit, May 30th is almost here. In addition to process, today we wanted to talk about the structure of the Comprehensive Plan. As I mentioned earlier, at a prior evening the Council discussed the overall vision for the Comprehensive Plan, which is summarized on this slide. The Council also discussed the themes for the existing Comprehensive Plan and talked about how these themes still rang true to a large extent, but may need to be revised to be made more contemporary as we move forward. Tonight we're seeking the same kind of overall input on the part of the Comprehensive Plan structure that's just a little deeper into the document. Just to review, each chapter or element of the Comprehensive Plan has its own vision statement. Under that vision statement is a series of Goals. Then those Goals are implemented by policies and programs. That is the structure that's set up. That structure has never proposed to change, but it's important to recognize that. What we're going to be focusing on tonight is the Vision and the Goals, the highest tiers in that system. This slide just explains in more detail what those tiers are. As we've discussed, the focus tonight is on process. It's on the Vision Statement for each Element. We'd like to know what you think of the two versions that were included in the Staff Report. There's a table with columns showing the current Comprehensive Plan Vision Statements for the Elements on the left-hand column. On the right-hand column is the edited version that was recommended by the Planning and Transportation Commission. Again, we probably can't get into wordsmithing tonight, but we'd like to know is there one of these two versions that you prefer or would you like to direct Staff and the community who work on this in more detail to synthesize these and find some middle ground. Similarly on the Goals for each Element and the headings that make up the structure. I recognize that TRANSCRIPT Page 24 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 the table providing the comparison in this case between the current Comprehensive Plan and the Planning and Transportation Commission's version are difficult to compare, because the point of the Planning and Transportation Commission's input to a large extent was to reorganize the Goals and the structure of the plan itself. You can't really compare the two columns, except as a whole in each of the Elements. We'd like to know what you think about this structure, whether you'd like to stick with the structure of the current Comprehensive Plan, whether you see some value in the direction that the Planning and Transportation Commission was heading, streamlining and clarifying that structure as it's reflected in the Goals and subheadings, or whether you think there should be some synthesis that provides a little easier crosswalk between the two columns. With that, I will stop talking. Just a final slide to show the next steps. We're hoping to get some general direction from the Council this evening. We'll next talk about the Comprehensive Plan at the May 30th Summit. Immediately thereafter, I hope to commence these community work sessions and continue to work with the City Council through some of the issues that need to be addressed in the Comprehensive Plan Update through the rest of the year. We also anticipate there will be periodic check-ins and again crosswalk between the Council and the community sessions. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Most of all, I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all of these issues, process and organization. Thank you. Mayor Holman: Thank you, Ms. Gitelman. I have no cards from any members of the public. I see no one rushing to fill out a card, so we will bring it back to Council. Council Members, a reminder here, as Director Gitelman said, we're not going to be looking at wordsmithing here. We're looking for vision direction to the Staff. Council Member DuBois: Thinking about the session and my comments... Mayor Holman: Could I intervene just for second? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. Mayor Holman: If we can, let's try to make our comments in the range of seven minutes. If we need to do more than one round, we can certainly do that. So we don’t... Council Member DuBois: You took the words out of my mouth. I was personally thinking of three rounds. I had some general comments I wanted to keep short, and then I thought maybe if we did a round on the Vision of each Element and then a round on the Goals. It's hard to do it all at once. TRANSCRIPT Page 25 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Mayor Holman: Let's certainly start with the Vision and stay on the Vision first. Council Member DuBois: Before I get to the Vision, I with the help of [Council Member] Eric [Filseth] created this hierarchy of Plan Goals which was at places and available to the public. I wanted to talk about that for a second. I mentioned in our last meeting on March 6th, I felt like it was important to have some kind of framework to weigh competing Visions, competing Goals against each other. This handout is an attempt to do that. It's one of the toughest areas of the plan. When you talk about controversy, it's usually where one Element conflicts with another Element. I was hoping we could have a framework like this for the Summit and the working groups that would lead to a result that would make it clear what trumps what when something is in conflict. I'd like to ask my colleagues to consider the idea of a framework in general. I did propose some specifics which we can tweak. You could disagree with me. What we have here is basically three levels. I grouped them into what I called existing conditions, which was the broadest thing. It's the most fundamental to me. It consists of basic services, things like our schools, our neighborhood character, traffic which is existing in community character. A second priority would be new services we're adding to the mix, things like reducing greenhouses gases, fiber, supporting healthy community. All these things are important, as we said last time. It's really how do you weight different categories. The third priority are the outward- facing externalities, things that are external to the City. Again, things we'd like to do but less important than the other two, like our brand image, our reputation, our attractiveness to outside companies to move here. I just wanted to explain that, throw that out there for discussion. I think I'll stop there. Thanks. Vice Mayor Schmid: The focus of the first discussion is on the Visions and the structure of the Visions. I'd just like to make one single point. Each of the Vision Statements is good. You can read it and say, "This makes sense for the area discussed." The base problem I have with the Comp Plan [Comprehensive Plan] though is they don't mesh. They don't fit together. They contradict each other. They're not in balance. Let me just give one concrete example. The Land Use Vision Statement says, "Land use decisions shall balance our future growth needs with the preservation of our neighborhoods." Good statement. The Business and Economics one says, "The City's balanced economic goals stimulate and support viable business opportunities." Good. What happens when these two bump into each other? The Comp Plan is very nice. In the Community Services section, it says what to do. It says, "Palo Alto's success will be measured by the satisfaction of its customers, the public at large." The Comp Plan tells us when there's a conflict, let's turn to the public, the citizens, what are they TRANSCRIPT Page 26 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 saying. The citizens survey seems to be sending a clear message over the last three or four years. Things like library, police, fire, garbage collection, schools, parks, have average satisfaction rates of 90 percent. There are four items that are at 50 percent or below: traffic, parking, land use, planning, zoning and quality of new developments. The public seems to be telling us something. These things aren't meshing, and we don't quite like the way it's coming out. How do these issues manifest themselves? There are three jobs in Palo Alto for every employed resident. That's the highest ratio in the Bay area, higher than San Francisco. We are a commuter center. Over the last four or five years, that ratio has been growing dramatically. We've added 537,000 square feet of office space. That's about 2,100 net new jobs. We've eliminated 70,000 square feet of retail space; space that the residents like. Residents over the last four years from the Census Bureau have grown very slowly. They have a hard time measuring a growth in new households. We're in a situation where we have been exacerbating this 3:1 ratio we already have. It manifests itself in a series of problems that the people in the survey each year identified. The crowning issue around this is who pays for the problems that arise. The property tax is critical to local governments. It accounts for 32 percent of tax revenues for the City, and that has grown from 25 to 32 over the last five years. The school district gets 80 percent or more of its funding from property tax. The County gets over 90 percent of its tax revenues from property tax. It funds local government. What's happened is as we grow office space the share of non- residential contribution to property tax has fallen from 30 percent to 25 percent. A base question. Somewhere in our Comp Plan we should address this issue of what is balanced growth, what happens when two parts of a Comp Plan clash with each other, how do we get popular feedback on that, and what are some of the base issues that we need to deal with. I would assert that we should be talking about fair share, fair share in growth, who grows, fair share in where the General Fund money gets spent to foster and help that balanced growth take place, and that the rapidly growing and prosperous business community in town pay their fair share. That's the types of issues that the Comp Plan discussion should deal with. Council Member Filseth: There's a lot of good stuff in the Comp Plan as it is right now. One of the things that we're talking about here is what do we do when there's conflict between Comp Plan says this over here and that over there and what do we do when these things appear to conflict with each other. Something like this is a tool to help us resolve that. If we agree on the buckets of priority, that can give us some guidance on how to resolve these kinds of things. If you look at the introduction to the Comp Plan right now, there's seven major themes. As with the five here on Vision, there's not a lot of guidance on, as Council Members Schmid and DuBois said, how do we resolve that. There is a lot of that in the details of the Comp Plan as TRANSCRIPT Page 27 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 written. If you really weed through the detailed policies and programs in the Comp Plan, there is quite a bit of guidance on how to resolve those things. We've had a lot of discussion about parking. Residential neighborhoods should be protected from the impact of commercial parking. That's prioritization and guidance, but you've got to go really low level into the details of the plan in order to weed that stuff out. That's one of my concerns about the work that's been done in this. This is a starting point we need to work on. Some of that has gotten lost in some of the proposals in here. We need to make sure that doesn't go away. Another piece of this that I want to propose, and I'll try to keep this in a few minutes instead of 20 or something like that. Another aspect of this that will help us address what do we do when this conflicts with that is an essential idea of how much. Let's say we want to have more shuttle services in town. What priority should that have? It makes a big difference whether we're talking about that much or that much. All those are going to have tradeoffs. We're going to have to trade off something here for something there. The Comp Plan per se doesn't give us a lot of guidance on how to do that. It would be really helpful to have a quantitative view of those kinds of tradeoffs. If we take X much of this, what do we have to give up in terms of Y much of that? In particular, it would be desirable to be able to project as part of policy discussions, to at least analyze and talk about how will City growth in the long term affect future demand for City services. This is my stack of paper here. I've been working on a model to do that. I've passed out a first pass. It's very simple. It's an approach. I apologize for dragging people through a gear head thing here, but I think this can help. I've parameterized it to let people try different growth rates and see the impact on initially three City services: park space, commute traffic and water use. I will talk about schools in a little while. I want to do this to support discussion. It doesn't replace [Environmental Impact Reports] EIR or [California Environmental Quality Act] CEQA or things that are much more accurate. It's a high-level discussion. Let me briefly comment on how this works, and it'll be in the public domain. It's intended to be distributed electronically. PASZ [Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning] would like to put it on their website. This is divided into two sections: growth drivers and major City services. The two main growth drivers I looked at were jobs growth, ultimately which comes from the Business Registry I hope, and housing growth which in the long term has been very low but recently has been 1 percent or more a year. If you look at the spreadsheet attached, or the first page, the 2015 numbers are actuals. Currently we have about 90,000 jobs in Palo Alto, give or take some, and about 27,000 housing units. I tried to get the best numbers I could. Most of these are from City documents, draft existing condition reports, some from [Association of Bay Area Governments] ABAG. If jobs grow 1 percent a year, then in 30 years we'll have 120,000 jobs. If housing units grow at the same rate, then in 30 years we'll have 36,000 housing TRANSCRIPT Page 28 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 units. The intent is that the yellow boxes are knobs to twist and see the impact on demand for other kinds of services. For example, the yellow boxes are knobs to twist. The pink boxes are major results. Let me briefly stop. If you look at Line 9, the jobs-housing ratio is currently about 3.3. If both jobs and housing units grow at the same rate, then in 30 years it'll still be 3.3. The population of Palo Alto is about 66,000 right now. At 1 percent growth per year, in 30 years it'll be about 89,000. Let me look at services for a second. The second section of this is divided into three categories. Let me just do the simple one which is park space. If you look at in-town park space, today we have about 175 acres of in-town park space. That's a ratio of about 2.65 acres per 1,000 Palo Alto residents. The Comp Plan actually says we should have 3-4 acres of park space per 1,000 residents. As of today, we have about 2.65. If the City's population increases 1 percent per year over 30 years, then in order to keep 2.65 acres per 1,000 residents in 30 years, we'll need 236 acres of park space or 61 acres more than we have now. Suppose we decide that we'd like to support faster housing growth in order to reduce the jobs-housing ratio. Let's say we targeted 1.5 percent per year housing to the extent that governments can target this stuff, instead of 1 percent. In 30 years if we did that, we'd have 103,000 people living here for the same 121,000 jobs, assuming jobs grew at 1 percent per year. That would bring the jobs-housing ratio down to under 3, under 2.9. On the other hand, to keep 2.65 acres of park space per resident, we'd now need 99 new acres of park space instead of 61. Land is pretty expensive around Palo Alto. We might decide that instead of 2.65 acres of park space per resident, maybe we ought to target 1.75 acres of park resident per 1,000 residents instead. In that case, we wouldn't need any more park space. Is that a good idea? You can't tell from this, but it's the kind of discussion we ought to have. If we do decide we want 1.75 acres of park space per 1,000 residents, then the Comp Plan shouldn't say 4 acres anymore. This is the kind of discussion we ought to have. I've taken a whack at two other services, which I won't spent time talking about. Traffic is incredibly complicated to do. The real answer to that is have the EIR do it. I tried to do a really simple model that looked at alternative transportation and job growth. Water is self-explanatory. I also did some modeling, which is not in here, relative to school considerations, which is obviously a huge priority for a lot of Palo Alto residents. Some people have seen some of this, but it's not in this version. State law places some restriction how school issues are to be treated in municipal considerations. Before this goes into this, I want to make sure that whatever we do is done properly. Again, this is designed so that people can plug in their own numbers and extend to their own services to try to look at these kinds of discussions. I hope this will be a useful part of the discussion as we figure out how to trade off this versus that. I don't know that it needs to be part of the Comp Plan. It ought to be part of the discussion. If people have better TRANSCRIPT Page 29 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 models, we ought to do that. Having both a values-based component to this and a quantitative component is going to make it a much better discussion. Thanks. Council Member Burt: Had we agreed on what we were going to do in each of these rounds or was that just Council Member DuBois' proposal or what? Or was it left open? Mayor Holman: What we're trying to do, and Director Gitelman will chime in here if there’s... Council Member Burt: Within each round is what… Mayor Holman: Within each round. Within each round, you can say anything that you want having to do with how you think the discussion ought to be focused on and how we get to commenting on the Vision Statements. If there are different considerations or different framings of the Statements, then have at it. Council Member Burt: Let me go to a few other comments before going into Vision Statement comments, either this round or next one. First, I wanted to respond to a couple of things that Director Gitelman said. I do think that we want to give consideration to the process and whether this Staff proposal to have this community-wide discussion and somehow figure out how to channel that is going to be the most productive way to get to where we need to go. I would clarify that those of us who have been struggling and talking about something different from that, first it wasn't instead of a community- wide discussion, it was in conjunction with it. Second, we weren't proposing it, or I wasn't, because it would be easier, but because it might be more effective and productive. When we do get into discussion on the vision, I don't plan to feel constrained by saying either/or, which of the Planning Commission or the old plan I want the Staff to go to. I don't think we'll have the time or this is the occasion to do final wordsmithing, but I do plan to talk about words, because they're very impactful especially in a more concise Vision Statement. They mean a lot. I also wanted to respond to the issue that Vice Mayor Schmid had brought up about looking at our trends and where revenues comes from and trying to make sure that we maintain what had been an historic ratio of how much should come from residents and businesses. We may not have a precise notion of that, but it is important that we do examine that. I would want to differ in that I don't think the problem with business property tax is the new development as much as that new development may have other problems. The problem is existing development that changes hands and doesn't get reappraised. We're talking to each other here a lot, so it's a conversation of six of us. I'm trying to talk TRANSCRIPT Page 30 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 to my colleagues, so I want to make sure that we're all thinking. I don't think it's a correct assumption that it's purely the revenue from property tax. It's the new development that's the problem. It's the existing development not being reappraised at the same rate that residential is. Then I want to talk about this issue of conflicts in the Comprehensive Plan between different sections and the wording that's there. Having some frameworks for discussion are helpful. Maybe there's a way to even put them within the Comp Plan. Overall we need to look at the wording of these different Visions and Goals and reconcile the wording. That's what the task is before us. Whether it be in the example of the Business section versus the Land Use section and some degree of a contradiction, because the emphasis in Land Use is a balance between residents and business interests with an assurance that we wouldn't be degrading the residential component and the business component doesn't have that. We can fix that with words. We need to look at those words and tackle those issues. I also wanted to make sure that there's an understanding, Council Member Filseth said, for instance, in the existing Comp Plan that we should have a certain amount of parks according to the Comp Plan. That's not what the Comp Plan intended when it established goals. I know this because I had this argument 17 years ago when that Comp Plan was being adopted on what it should mean. It was explained in detail at the time that these are goals and not mandates. If we want to establish something as a mandate, then we need to have that clarity. We also should have clarity on what we mean by a Goal. I do think it's overly ambiguous that different people understand the intention of a Goal differently. We don't do a very good job of explaining what we actually mean. That alone, a definition of what's a Goal, what's the consequence of a Goal, is something that's missing from our Comp Plan and leads to confusion. It's happened a number of times at recent Council meetings about jobs-housing. This document talks about a jobs-housing ratio. Is jobs-housing normally spoken of in terms of number of jobs versus number of housing units? Ms. Gitelman: Thank you for that question, Council Member Burt. There are two ways to look at it. One way is to look simply at housing and jobs. A more refined way that I'm used to seeing it is a comparison between jobs and employed residents. Council Member Burt: That's my understanding, the way that I've always seen it used. We have to be careful with nomenclature. If we take from one area an intention that is meaning something, and then we turn it into something else and compare the two, that's not a proper comparison. Once again, clarity in our words and in our definitions is critical. Otherwise, we can move things all different directions. I'll leave it there for right now. Sorry. I'm going to check a couple more notes. At a broader level, tonight TRANSCRIPT Page 31 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 we're going to talk about comparing Visions and Goals. One we didn't have before us, laid out, the goals of the old Comp Plan and the PTC [Planning and Transportation Commission] recommendation and, for that matter, any other directions on goals that fairly recent Council policies have informed an intention on new goals and putting them side by side somewhat similar to what we have envisioned here. That's the way that we'd have a more productive discussion. I couldn't go back and look at the old Comp Plan and create those tables, so I've gone to the Planning and Transportation Commission version under goals and looked at those. Frankly, when I talk to that, I don't know in each case how that Goal compares to the Goals in the current Comp Plan. I'll be speaking to the Planning and Transportation Commission draft, and I won't be speaking to the old Comp Plan. It'd be relevant to be speaking to both. At a high level on the organization of the Plan, we talked about vision, but there's also a higher level which is the organization of the plan. I mentioned previously that it's just an odd marriage of orphans to put Safety and Environment in the same chapter. They each needed to have a place, and they got thrown together. Nobody's been able to explain to me why they're in the same chapter under the new Comp Plan. They should be separated. If there's no rational reason other than that they don't have a home elsewhere, I don't think that's a good way to organize it. We have at the back a concept plan for East Meadow and Fabian Way. One of the things I'll want to see reflected, at least in Goals if not Visions, maybe there's way to do it in both, is a greater intention to utilize Concept Plans, or as we've called them in our prior Comp Plan Coordinated Area Plans, as a valuable and critical planning tool going forward in this new Comp Plan. I don't see it yet reflected in the text. I also have a question on the Landscape Element, which section that should belong in. Is it in Natural Environment or is it part of Land Use? I'm not sure. I want to raise this. I'd like to see it become more a question of Natural Environment rather than the historic that it's probably more of our unnatural land use. Those are my initial comments. Council Member Wolbach: Since it looks like this round, we aren't just focusing on one thing or another, I'll mention... Mayor Holman: Let's do try to keep focused on the Vision Statements. Council Member Wolbach: I'm going to say just one thing about process going forward. I know we'll talk more about that as well, but I want to have one initial statement about that. Just a couple of comments about the Vision Statements and also a couple of my thoughts on the comments I've already heard just now from my colleagues. On process, it is important that we do have meetings in the community, primers on urban design, community planning, architecture, transportation, to provide an introductory level of TRANSCRIPT Page 32 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 public education, engagement and discussion. The Our Palo Alto meetings that we had last year were a start down that direction. We've had a number of meetings like that over the last few months convened by groups like Palo Alto Forward, but not as much by the City. I want to echo what Council Member Burt said about having more community engagement following the Summit. Doing that and having an appointed committee is not in conflict with having open source discussions. It's important that we have a good level of public education throughout this. Having an appointed committee would be useful. A group that can work together, bring together diverse viewpoints, diverse experiences, but work together on an ongoing basis and explore these issues as a group, in addition to the, as you put it, the open source input that we can gather along the way. On the idea of having a quantitative aspect that Council Member Filseth brought up, great. I'm not sure how much of that should be done. It needs to be articulated in that way in the Comp Plan. I'm not sure how I feel, because I've just had a chance to look at the model. As Council Member Filseth said, this is a first stab at it. I appreciate that effort and that attempt to start thinking quantitatively. That's a good start to thinking about how much we want of different things and what kinds of ratios we want. Council Member Burt's responses and critiques, Council Member Filseth will be very open to. I appreciate both of those comments. Perhaps this is getting into wordsmithing, but I'll just mention a couple of words that I didn't see in these Vision Statement that maybe we should. Under Natural Environment Element, I don't see the word wildlife. I don't think it would hurt to add that. Under the Transportation Element, I'm looking for things like flexible, dynamic, anything about performance measures or alternatives to driving for all, not just that we have a system for drivers and a system for bikers and a system for people who take the bus, but that there are multiple parallel systems which everybody would be able to utilize. Something about performance measures is worth mentioning. I'm not sure if it needs to be here in the Vision Statement, but the performance measures are very important and should be an important tool for us moving forward in our Comp Plan. I also want to echo Council Member Burt's comments about having Concept Plans or Coordinated Area Plans be a tool that perhaps we learn to use more efficiently. Again looking at the model of our next door neighbor to the southeast of Mountain View that has a very large number of Precise Plans. I don't think that's something we should shy away from doing. That's a good way to figure out what works in different parts of the community. Those are my comments for now. Mayor Holman: I'll make a few comments at this juncture. It is important that we have some kind of tool like what Council Member Filseth brought forward. I don't know how we integrate it at this point in time, in this discussion tonight. It's important to have that discussion, have some kind of TRANSCRIPT Page 33 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 backdrop in front of which we consider where we're going as a community. I appreciate your bringing that forward. Having to do with the Vision Statements in the Comp Plan, a broad statement, a very broad statement. I find that the Planning and Transportation Commission recommendations, while it's clear that there's been a lot of effort put towards them—this is not to one but generally speaking—I find them to be diluted to such an extent that they don't provide much vision. They're so high level that I don't find them giving guidance as to what the vision should create in terms of Goals and policies. Council Member Wolbach said in the Natural Environment he didn't find wildlife. The word I had put down was habitat. The Planning and Transportation Commission did mention habitat. Let's just say in Natural Environment, it's habitat. Urban forest is referenced. Urban is a fine way to put it, but I also would like to see that integrated more into Land Use, but you can decide where it should go. I want to see more canopy integrated into our built environment. As an aside here, having the vantage point of the seventh floor every day, I look out and I see buildings that are solid buildings and don't have breaks in them, really interrupt our canopy. It interrupts our urban forest. That's something we ought to talk about as a vision. In terms of transportation, I appreciate the Planning and Transportation Commission adding reduction of greenhouse gases as a Goal. There's much in the existing Comp Plan language that is absolutely relevant. There are pieces of it that we're past, like the 10 percent in alternate transportation methods. Some of it's a little dated. The Goals there that are stated as vision are still viable and meaningful. Land Use and community design. We have a lot of conversation about community design these days. I'm happy to have that conversation. When I look at the Comprehensive Plan in the Introduction section, this is a question too, we're looking at Vision Statements here but we don't have information about what's happening with the vision statements. When I look at pages 12 and 13, pages 2 and 3 of the Introduction of the Comprehensive Plan, there's some very good language there, very good language there, that ought to be transferred. Happy for it to stay here, but it also isn't integrated into any of the Vision Statements either current or Planning Commission ones. Palo Alto's diverse neighborhoods are the building blocks of the community. That's strong and good. The City is committed to build upon the strengths of its neighborhoods and maintaining a distinct identity for each neighborhood. Those kinds of comments are great Vision Statements. The community treasures the special qualities of the City including its historic buildings, pedestrian scale, high-quality architecture and beautiful streets and parks. Maintaining the physical qualities of the City is an overarching consideration incorporated into all parts of the Plan. That language is visionary. We talk about in the Vision Statements both current and Planning Commission recommendations. We talk about where we're headed mostly. We don't talk so much about where we are. We do some, but not enough. TRANSCRIPT Page 34 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Where we are and what we're building upon, that's an important piece that ought to be better integrated. Some things that aren't mentioned. Habitat is mentioned. Canopy, I made some notes previously. The built environment, under community design we have a fair amount of work to do there. We'll talk more about that in a bit. We don't talk about Animal Services in terms of some of the Community Services and Facilities Element. That's something the community has absolutely said that we want to keep here. We're working on how best to do that. It's not mentioned at all; it is a community value. We don't talk much about cultural activities. We seem to have gone from art and culture to art and science. I don't know why we can't have art, culture and science. They aren't mutually exclusive of each other. In terms of process, I agree with comments that have been made previously about, you have heard me say this before so it will be no surprise, having a committee that is a consistent body that works through the Comp Plan, a body of people that can get more informed. Some people will be already informed pretty closely and intimately with what the Comp Plan is, what land use is, what transportation is, what our community services are. A diverse range of people but really, as I called it before, a "sleeves rolled up," informed group of people to help guide this. The group of people that we have currently participating in the Comp Plan process is an outreach group. That's fine, well and good, but there needs to be this other body as other people have referenced. That's my seven minutes. By the way, we should at some point get to, where are we time-wise? We are an hour into this. At some point I am going to look to motions so if we can get clarification on some of these Vision Statements, so Staff has a clear notion of where we headed. Again, we're not wordsmithing; we're talking about vision, to give clear guidance to Staff. Ms. Gitelman: Excuse me, Mayor Holman. If I can interject? After there's been one round, I wanted to comment on a few of the Council's suggestions. Mayor Holman: Absolutely. Ms. Gitelman: Starting from the end there. If we are going to have an appointed committee to get that consistent participation that a couple of you have mentioned, Staff would really like your help in defining the charter of that group. Are we talking about a CPAC-type process, starting with a whole series of educational forums, ground zero or are we building on some of the work that's been done already, trying to take advantage of the work that this Council has done in the last few months on the issues and some of the work that the Planning Commission has done, with public input along the way on the Goals, policies and programs? That would be very helpful. Also a great observation about the strong language in the themes in the Introduction. Certainly there would be a way to incorporate that into some TRANSCRIPT Page 35 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 of the Vision Statements throughout the book. The idea of the quantitative look at the issues is important. As we start to get the results of the Draft EIR analysis and the fiscal analysis, we're going to be able to give the Council and the community the ability to do this in a more refined way. Hopefully we can work with you, those of you who are interested in it, in finding a way to make it a useful tool in defining choices. We won't have all of the quantitative information in time for the Summit. The Summit is intended to be a discussion where we start to talk about some of these tradeoffs and issues that we face. We want to get beyond it's got to be this way or it's got to be that way, and talk about these ideas and how they relate to each other with some richness in the discussion. There was a couple of references to coordinated area plans. I wanted to clarify that the Concept Plans for East Meadow Circle and the California Avenue area are policy and goal plans, so they don't get to the level of detail as a Coordinated Area Plan. I expect, as I hear many of you do, that the updated Comprehensive Plan will include policies and implementation programs calling for more detailed planning. In Mountain View they're called Precise Plans; here they're called Coordinated Area Plans; in State law they're called Specific Plans. We've heard that from the community and from the Council on several occasions and expect that that will be something we see developed further in the Comprehensive Plan Update. With that, I'll stop. Happy, of course, to hear more comments and suggestions. Council Member DuBois: That's a good round one. Thank you for taking all those notes. You asked a few items I'll react to, and then I'll get into visions. The idea of open source community versus standard community. I'd be willing to try the open source community if we could have some very strong incentives to get people to come to all the meetings, so we'd have continuity. It's worth some thinking. We have over 300 people currently signed up for the Summit. How can we keep that number up? Maybe that's going to be impossible, but that's a really good goal. Maybe if we agree to try the open source system and we don't see enough consistency, maybe we have to figure out how to readjust mid-course. Let's try it but, if it's not working, let's not keep going. You also asked the question about whether we should expand the period of time for community input. We need to allow flexibility based on feedback. I'd like to see us be quality driven instead of time driven. That can be hard to measure, I agree. Rather than seeing us locked into a schedule, we need to listen to the community. We should consider additional tools for community input. Again, I'll make a plug for some kind of online weighting tool for the goals, forcing people to make tradeoffs, maybe allocating points. Ideally if we could collect that data by neighborhood, it'd be interesting to see how people are weighing in on the vision for the whole City by neighborhood. Something like Eric's quantitative impact tool, the same thing. If we could put that online, we need to make it TRANSCRIPT Page 36 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 very clear what the assumptions are so it's not just a black box, because then it'll just cause more questions. If we do these online things, we need to leverage all of the online sources in Palo Alto including promoting it on Palo Alto Online, Facebook, not just the City website. I'm going to get specific. One quick question. Housing wasn't including; I guess the assumption was we just did the Housing Element, so we didn't include it. Ms. Gitelman: That's right; although, the Council has identified one of the issues that we'll be talking about is whether there are adjustments that we want to make in the Housing Element sites and densities. Council Member DuBois: That's one of the three sessions of the Summit, but it's not in the discussions. Ms. Gitelman: That's right. We weren't going to do the same kind of in- depth review of Goals, policies and programs, because that was just done. Council Member DuBois: Right. Starting on page 149 in the packet which is the Visions. I'll be very specific in my opinion. On Land Use, I prefer the current Comp Plan. It's clearer. What Mayor Holman said that some of these things are diluted down, and they also use a lot of buzz words. We should speak with clear language when we can. I like how it calls out specific uses, neighborhoods, shopping, employment centers. The PTC statement just says, "Will balance growth with preservation of neighborhoods." That seems more unclear to me than the current Plan, which says, "All neighborhoods will be improved." On Transportation, I like the PTC version, but I'd like to include the sentence about "the adverse impacts of automobile traffic on residential streets in particular will be reduced." Again, that's a specific sentence that I would like to add to the PTC's vision. Mayor Holman: Council Member DuBois, if I can interrupt? I'm trying to track. Are you picking up a sentence from the existing or are you adding a sentence? Council Member DuBois: I'm picking up from existing and adding it to the PTC. Mayor Holman: About midway down is the adverse impacts. Council Member DuBois: Yeah. Mayor Holman: All right. Thank you. Council Member DuBois: Hillary, if you're not following me, let me know. TRANSCRIPT Page 37 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry I didn't get it. Staff is here; one of us will get it. Council Member DuBois: On the Community Services, I like the current language. I particularly like measuring success through customer satisfaction, which is missing from the update. On the Natural Environment, again I like the current Comprehensive Plan language. It makes it clear that there are two things, the open space and parks versus the urban forest. The new language blends the two, and the new language doesn't have anything about conservation either in the Vision or in the Goals. The current language mentions conservation several times. In the Business Element, I like the PTC version here, but I would like to include a sentence again in the middle of the current plan that makes it clear that "the competing needs of residents and businesses will be balanced so that neighborhoods are protected." Then the rest of that sentence. Again, that kind of clarity is good, and a lot of that got diluted out. I'm going to keep it short. I hope we do a third round where I'll go into the Goals. Mayor Holman: Council Member DuBois, you went through some of those. You could have been making motions or maybe you're just getting out there what your intentions are. Council Member DuBois: I'd like to get them out and hear everybody. Council Member Burt: First, I concur with a number of Council Member DuBois' comments. Although, at the same time, I want to move in the direction of a more concise set of Vision Statements than the old Comp Plan. We have to try and figure out a way to do that. Council Member DuBois favored some of the more concise on the Planning Commission and some with a few inserts, which are well chosen additional sentences or themes. We may find ways to take those same sentences and make them more concise. We need to have a little more discussion on what Mayor Holman brought up about the purposes of the introductions. The introductions are not the Vision Statement, but they illuminate the Vision Statements. They're auxiliaries to those, and we haven't given much discussion about that. For instance under Land Use, I have some problems with the current statement aside from its length, there are things in here. The fifth, sixth line down, it says, "The diverse range of housing and work environments will be sustained and expanded to create more choices for all income levels." I'm always cautious about "will be" and that kind of absolute statement that is not something that we necessarily live up to. If we want to say it's our intention or our goal, then we should describe it as that. Even over on the PTC side, there's some things that, I'll give as an example, are either redundant or other surplus language. It says, "Palo Alto's land use decisions shall balance our future growth." "Our future" is redundant. The growth is TRANSCRIPT Page 38 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 future. It's not about growth needs necessarily. I would simply say "growth." There's an implication there by stating "needs" that whatever growth we have is the growth we needed. With the preservation of our neighborhoods to address climate protection priorities, that should be more broad which would be environmental priorities. Focus on sustainable development near neighborhood services. I would say "sustainable development near services." In the Transportation Element, I'm struggling with whether the description of this on the PTC side of a sustainable network of safe, accessible and efficient transportation, whether "network" adequately describes what we're envisioning. It may, because I want to look at assuring that we have both diversity of modes and an integrated system. On the sixth line down, we talk about "enhancing the quality of life in Palo Alto neighborhoods." We actually want to do it Citywide. As much as neighborhoods are important, I don't want to limit it to neighborhoods. In the Community Services section, I haven't reconciled the old Comp Plan vision statement versus the PTC. Under the PTC side, I would drop "this generation must." The last generation must have too and the one after this must. I'd just say invest in the people and places and programs. If we want to make a stronger statement, then make a stronger statement, but not lofty language. Under Natural Environment, we talk about preserving our ecosystems. I wonder whether we should also be talking about restoring. If we've destroyed something, do we want to preserve whatever it is we destroyed or damaged? Ecosystems and habitat adequately address the issue of wildlife. Further down we talk about water quality. We're no longer just talking about quality of our water, we're talking about quantity. I'd really want to look here and in the Goals about a sustainable water supply. That is what captures where we're trying to head. On the second to last line, we talk about a plan for climate change mitigation. Under Natural Environment, we certainly have our climate protection initiative as well as our mitigation or adaption. I guess that's what they're meaning by mitigation here. Also it talks about a plan, but I'd rather have implementation than a plan. We need both. We need to speak about what we're going to do and not just what we're going to plan. On the Business, under the old one it says, "Palo Alto's business environment will be exciting." We're really talking about continuation of what we have in our dynamic business environment, not creating one. I would add "continue to" or something to that effect. The Planning Commission one was more succinct and good, but would be better with the addition of the sentence that Council Member DuBois suggested to inject from the old Plan. I'm also concerned on how we're going to be able to get through all the Goals. As I went through them, I have one comment or another on a majority of the Goals. That's a longer discussion. I don't see how we're going to get through that tonight. We probably are going to need to talk about how we're going to talk about them. TRANSCRIPT Page 39 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Mayor Holman: It would be helpful if pretty soon we had some motions put on the floor to help guide the rest of this discussion. Otherwise, we'll have to get another round to do motions and discussion on the motions. Vice Mayor Schmid: Our goal is not to get into wordsmithing of each item. I do like several general comments. Mayor Holman pointed to the theme part of the report as articulating very well general statements and to capture some of that language. I like some of the comments supporting the more focused wording that comes out of the PTC, especially on Transportation, Community Services and Natural Environment, but without losing some of the critical statements that people have identified. From my perspective though, I want to note that we're not just approving statements that have been here for two decades now, but dealing with some of the issues that have arisen from them. From the comments I've heard from my colleagues, there are four things that jump out at me. How do we deal with conflicts? When we find that two of the statements in practice run into each other, how do we prioritize a response to those impacts? Maybe some kind of overarching statement on that. Number 2, a number of people have made the point that quantification of impacts, measurements of impacts is very valuable and focuses attention very clearly. I don't know whether that belongs in the Vision Statements, but it is something that many of us keep coming back to. The third element is who do we expect as the judge of conflict, of how we're doing in prioritizing. The current Comp Plan seems to state clearly that the public is a key judge of whether things are successful. How do we get that type of language in there clearly stated of what the appeals would be when there's a conflict? Finally, the word "balance" appears in virtually all of the statements. How do we measure impacts? How do we look at growth? How do we look at who pays, who benefits? How do we share the cost of adjustment to things? Those are overarching issues that cross the boundaries of the Vision Statements. It's something anyone trying to work with the Vision Statements over time keeps coming back to. Is there some general guidance we can provide to users of the Comp Plan? Council Member Wolbach: I'm not sure it's quite time to make motions. I wanted to ask Planning Director Gitelman, are you looking for motions relating to the Vision Statements or is listening to our discussion adequate feedback for you to continue to work on crafting those or coming back with a different vision? Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Wolbach. We certainly don't need a motion. What I'm hearing from the Council is a very thoughtful weighing and blending of the two. In the case of different Elements, choosing a different column as the starting place and weaving some of the TRANSCRIPT Page 40 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 thoughts from the other column in as necessary. If you agree that that's what you think is the right approach here, we certainly don't need that in the motion. That seems very clear, but I'll leave that up to you. Council Member Wolbach: I believe it was Council Member DuBois who pointed out the line under Transportation Element from the old Comp Plan, that the adverse impacts of automobile traffic on the environment in general and residential streets in particular will be reduced. I'd mentioned wanting something about performance measures. Our sentiments are shared there. Combine that also with Council Member Filseth's emphasis on having something quantifiable, that's one that's worth highlighting and bringing over either verbatim or, as Council Member Burt suggested might be possible, capturing that objective even if not using the exact language. There seems to be a consensus that we would like to see a consistent committee that works together as a group, as a body, through the Comp Plan process. I see a couple of options for how that could happen. There may be others. Before we make motions, I'd like to hear my colleagues' thoughts on that as well as any Staff thoughts. A couple of options would be to recruit that from the Summit. Say, "You're here at the Summit. That's a great sign that you're involved and interested. We're going to have more meetings over the next several months, and we encourage everybody to come back. We're also looking for really committed people who can engage in a deep way on an ongoing basis who can make that commitment." Another way to do it might be to take our existing Leadership Team for the Comp Plan which, as Mayor Holman pointed out, has generally been an outreach team, but it's been called a Leadership Team. We could consider repurposing them to be less focused on outreach and more focused on transitioning their role to be the core of that committee. Those are a couple of ways we might go about getting a committee rolling. We're going to have a motion before we leave tonight calling for a committee to be created. Those are a couple of ways to do it. I leave that open to colleagues to suggest how we should do that. On this general question of being concise or being prescriptive, it was mentioned earlier that the Comp Plan is the constitution for the City. The US [United States] Constitution is a model in brevity. I would keep that in mind before we get too prescriptive in our Comp Plan. Council Member Filseth: I have a couple of observations on this. I don't want to add too much to what's been said already. We said we're not going to wordsmith this, but we are wordsmithing it a little bit. I don't know that that's a terribly bad thing. We're the Council; we're supposed to be responsible for vision. This is vision stuff. This is the kind of stuff that we should be involved in. I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing to have people on the Council trying to do what Council Member DuBois and Council TRANSCRIPT Page 41 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Member Burt were doing in trying to pick out words from this and make sure it's right. I don't think we should outsource it to some other group, especially this part. Maybe other pieces, when we get into detailed programs and stuff like that. The high-level vision stuff, we need to keep very closely tied into this. I was going to ask a question. How do we resolve this? How do we do the final edit on this? I'm not sure. I see us grappling with the original language on these things, which is wordier, versus the PTC's wording, which is simpler. I do agree with the people who have spoken before that said it. The brief versions have lost quite a bit from the original version. We need to be judicious in this. The one comment I would make on, it really applies to the Land Use decision. Council Member Burt was talking about the words of "growth needs." We need to be careful to distinguish what are policy choices versus environmental things that are going to happen to us, particularly with the issue relative to growth. Growth is a policy choice. There's people that say it's going to happen to us and we have to mitigate it. It's impacted by choices we make in terms of zoning and planning. At that level, it's a policy choice. The revised language seems like it's going to happen to us. Actually it's something we need to control. There's a difference between stopping it and managing it. We need to recognize that this kind of stuff is stuff we manage. That's my two bits on that point. I'll stop there. Mayor Holman: I'll start with a simple motion which is having to do with the working group, I'll call it, having to do with the Comp Plan discussion. I don't think it should be the same group that is the current Leadership Group, because they were chosen for very different reasons, not expertise or familiarity with the Comp Plan. I'll look for suggestions from colleagues about how it's chosen. MOTION: Mayor Holman moved, seconded by Council Member Burt to form a working group to work through the Comprehensive Plan for the duration of the process. Mayor Holman: We'll need to see the motion on our screens, if we can. Molly Stump, City Attorney: Excuse me, Mayor Holman. Mayor Holman: Yes. Ms. Stump: Maybe the Council wants to think carefully about how it wants to structure that committee in terms of the Brown Act process. If the Council sets up the committee, then it will be a formal Brown Act body and it will require noticing. It needs to have agendas and meet in public. A committee that's formed and appointed by the City Manager to advise him has more flexibility. Recently almost all of those committees have indeed TRANSCRIPT Page 42 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 been open-door committees that have invited participation and attendance, but they are not required to follow all of the formalities of a Brown Act body. Mayor Holman: Having to do with that, correct me if I'm wrong, Council Members could make recommendations. Council Members could make recommendations to the City Manager, and he could select from the recommendations from the Council. The other thing that we could adjust that process with is—even though the working group would be advisory to the City Manager as opposed to the Council, if that's the way the Council wants to go—it could also include reporting to the Council. What happens sometimes is it gets lost; the Council doesn't see any minutes. We don't see any outcomes; we just have a Staff Report that includes no input from the committee. We lose a lot. I don't see any reason why we couldn't do both. Ms. Gitelman: Mayor Holman, if I can make an observation? The process that was used for the Housing Element update that went efficiently last year was what the City Attorney described. The City Manager solicited interest from members of the community and selected from the applicants a balanced group that worked with the Staff. We had regular reports to, in that case, a Council Committee, but we were able to share the work of the committee. Ultimately it was their recommendation that came forward for the Council's action. That's a model that has worked quite recently. We'd be happy to follow that model and solicit applications from people at the Summit and encourage people who don't get appointed to participate in the meetings, which would be public meetings and noticed even though they would not be required under the Brown Act. That's, again, what we did with the Housing Element group. Mayor Holman: You're right, though there is a difference there. There was a Housing Element Committee, so people reported to that. There were people on that Committee, actually at one point in time there was a Planning Commissioner on that Committee who sat at the table with them. We had some direct input. What I'm looking for is direct input. Ms. Stump: Madam Mayor, the important thing for the Brown Act is if the Council sets up the committee by vote tonight, that is a Brown Act body. Mayor Holman: My proposal was that the Council could submit names to the City Manager, and he could select from those and names could also be coming forth from the Summit. He would have a pool of people to draw from. Ms. Stump: Yes. I wasn't clear. It's not just the composition of the committee. It's the establishment of the committee. The motion on the floor now would create a Brown Act body. TRANSCRIPT Page 43 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Ms. Gitelman: We could say something like the Council would move to request the City Manager to solicit interest in participants at the Summit to form a working group to meet on a regular basis for the duration of the Comprehensive Plan Update with regular check-ins with the City Council. Mayor Holman: I didn't see this as prescriptive. Ms. Stump: There are some cases on this. I appreciate the creativity of the Planning Director. It would be better for the Council not to reflect this direction in any action tonight. The Planning Director has gotten the message and will compose a committee through the City Manager. I'm sure that the City Manager will solicit Council Members for their suggestions and recruit widely for it. Mayor Holman: If you have amended language you think the motion should say, so it doesn't look like we're being prescriptive and the Council is forming the committee, I'm open to that. Ms. Stump: I recommend that you don't address the topic by motion tonight, unless you wish to create a formal Brown Act body. Council Member DuBois: Could I ask a question? Mayor Holman: Council Member Burt, since you're seconding the motion, do you have any comments? Council Member Wolbach: Just to make sure I'm clear on the advice we're getting from the City Attorney. It's not the details of the composition or selection of the committee being prescriptive that leads to it being a Brown Act committee. It's the very creation of the committee by direction of the Council that makes it a Brown Act body. Ms. Stump: That's what the case law says. That's the case whether the Council directly creates the committee or directs its official to create the committee. Council Member Wolbach: That's what I understood. I appreciate you clarifying that. In that case, having heard that... Council Member Burt: I deferred to you, but I haven't spoken to the second. Let's not go into positions on this. Council Member Wolbach: Fair enough. TRANSCRIPT Page 44 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member DuBois: My quick question was a lot of these committees are told to act as if they're under the Brown Act anyway. Why not just make it a Brown Act committee? Why is that an issue? Ms. Gitelman: I don't think that's an issue other than the serial meetings issue is often very difficult for newly appointed members of the public. Particularly with a large group, it's hard to keep track of that as well. When we form committees like this, we do notice them in advance, make them open to the public, make sure the agendas are posted in advance, and we don't discuss items that are not on the agenda. In that sense we do follow those tenets of the Brown Act. Council Member DuBois: With the Housing committee, you asked the members to treat it like a Brown Act. If you had a forty-person committee, no more than 20 people could talk outside the meeting. Is it really an issue? Ms. Gitelman: We did. We've had some committees recently who found that constraint to be too much of a constraint, and said, "We're not subject to the Brown Act. Do we really have to count how many people we talk to outside the meeting?" We would enjoy the luxury of not having to keep tabs on that if we didn't have to. Council Member Burt: Molly, do you happen to know when we had our former Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee, CPAC, was that fully Brown Acted? Ms. Stump: No, I don't know the answer to that, Council Member Burt. Council Member Burt: I'm not necessarily opposed to having it be a Brown Act committee. It would be in all likelihood a large committee. If we have 30 members and anybody thinks that they have to meet with more than 15 in series, then they probably should choose a different committee to be on. I don't really have a problem with that. If they have that complaint, then too bad. Council Member DuBois: Just reply all to (inaudible). Council Member Burt: Hillary, did you want to say something? Ms. Gitelman: I should clarify. It's not just meeting with other 15 people, but it's a constraint on emailing the rest of the group outside of the meetings. Council Member Burt: Yeah, I understand the Brown Act. When we had the SOFA [South of Forest Area Coordinated Area] Plan, that was Brown Acted. TRANSCRIPT Page 45 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 We had a fairly large group, maybe that was 15. People adapted pretty well to it. It wasn't a big deal. The question before us is are we comfortable with this just being a Brown Act committee and then what additional guidance. The more I think about it, I would like to go ahead and continue with the motion with the understanding that it would be Brown Acted. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to change “working group” to “working group of diverse stakeholders.” Council Member Burt: This is akin to what we had in the SOFA committees. Mayor Holman, is that language good? I'll just speak to that as well. When we set up this, we had people apply for specific stakeholder positions, so we defined the set of stakeholder positions and then took applicants for each. That may be a way to do it. I'm not going to put in the motion how we would execute that diverse stakeholders. We may want to have a little more conversation on that, if we give it some thought. I just wanted to toss out that that's one method that we might use. I also wouldn't want to imply that the current Leadership Committee wouldn't be strongly considered to be part of this, but I agree that it shouldn't just be rolled into them. There are people on that committee who have been engaging in the Comp Plan. Whether they had a background in it, I wouldn't agree that that matters. When we had CPAC, most of the people in it didn't come into it with a background. They acquired it; they dove into it and everybody learned. The same thing with the SOFA areas. They had their certain stakeholder expertise, but we didn't know much about concept plans or specific plans. Those are the reasons that I would still welcome going forward with this and the guidance on what I'm thinking would be its structure. It's a pretty important decision. This will have a big influence on how this process moves forward. Undoubtedly this will return to us, right, for some way in which we would put some meat on the bone as to how this would be structured and how we would go about interviewing and selecting candidates and those kinds of things. Right? It doesn't have enough clarity to go forward. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you for that question, Council Member Burt. That depends on the Council's intention. If you want the City Manager to solicit applications and make appointments like we did with the Housing Committee, then... Council Member Burt: No, we just said we were going to do a Brown Acted committee. Ms. Gitelman: The City Attorney has indicated just by calling for the creation of the committee this evening it is a Brown Act committee. TRANSCRIPT Page 46 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member Burt: Then it appears that we need to add that clarity. One question before us then would be whether we intend for this to be a City Manager-appointed committee or a Council-appointed committee. Depending on our determination there, what process do we need to go through to give design of how this committee would be created? Mayor Holman: As the maker of the motion, for me if it's simply a City Manager-appointed committee and we're having this motion here. I don't know why we'd even do the motion if we just want it to be a City Manager- appointed committee. We could ask meetings to be noticed and all that kind of thing. I don't see the advantage if we're just deferring all of our capability of providing or even selecting the committee members to the City Manager. Ms. Gitelman: If I can... Ms. Stump: Council... Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. If I can make a suggestion. Council Member Burt's suggestion that the Council try and identify for us the stakeholder interests that would like to be represented. I'm just concerned that if the Council itself makes these appointments and reviews applications and the like, we're talking about a long process not just for the Council the evening that you make those appointments or the evenings that you review those applications and make those appointments, but for the Staff to design that process. We know that the Council has a lot of business to get done before the summer break. When you get back, we're going to have even more for you. I'm just concerned that that would be a time consuming way. If we could find another way to accomplish your objectives of a consistent appointed group with a wide variety of interests, that would be terrific. Council Member Burt: How about this? INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to direct Staff to return to the Council with a proposal for stakeholder selection process and the purposes of the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee. Council Member Burt: Hillary, you had said you want us to say what stakeholders. I'd like you to come back. You can review what we had in the prior Comp Plan and what we did, for instance, with the SOFA plan. You'll see that there's at least a good starting point for the types of stakeholders, rather than us try and come up with this on the fly. We can always modify what you bring back. TRANSCRIPT Page 47 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Burt. Of course, we'd be happy to do that. My only concern is timing. If we're viewing the Summit as the opportunity to recruit and solicit applications for this group, I'm not sure that we can make that timing work to bring an item back to you before then. Council Member Burt: I could see where you could still be doing recruiting at the Summit but not selection. When you look at the categories of stakeholders that we've used in the past, they're not rocket science. We may modify them, but giving people a sense of the type of stakeholder categories, we probably had pretty good alignment between what we had in the former CPAC and what we had in the SOFA plan. You just look at them, and they're different categories of neighborhood representatives and then people who have some transportation knowledge and affordable housing knowledge and certain people from the business community. It's not unusual sorts of categories we're talking about. We may refine it, but at least for purposes of the Summit if you want to be able to say, "We'll be looking for people who have interests or expertise in these areas, but not limited to..." That leaves it wide open for us to refine that when you come back. Mayor Holman: Does the Assistant City Manager have a comment you wanted to make? Ed Shikada, Assistant City Manager: I was perhaps suggesting similar lines of what Council Member Burt did. That we'd come back with some categories for the stakeholder group to be solicited. We're thinking along similar lines. Again, it comes down to a question of how specific the Council would like to get in the identification of the individuals. Mayor Holman: There is one word that needs to be added. It says in the motion itself, "Council Member Burt to form a working group." Add in that word. Council Member Filseth: This is a thoughtful discussion. My comfort level is higher with the structure proposed by the City Attorney. I worry that, particularly when we start going down Brown Act committees, we're going down a path of introducing a lot of rigidity and structure pretty early in this process. There's a lot of stuff left to be done. We already have a lot of groups involved in this. There's us and there's the Planning and Transportation Committee and the stakeholder group. We're going to have the open source process. I worry that we're adding too much structure to this and inflexibility right now. Going down this direction seems like a good direction. My personal comfort level is going to be higher with the structure that the City Attorney suggested. TRANSCRIPT Page 48 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member DuBois: I was interested in the open source process. I understand that this is a proposal to replace that. Correct? It would be in addition to? Is that your understanding? Ms. Gitelman: If I understand the Council's intention, we would form this committee of appointed representatives. We would also solicit information in an open source process. This committee would help us evaluate the input that comes in through that open source process. Council Member DuBois: These would be additional meetings not happening at the same time. My concern is that members of the public diligently show up and they're told they can only speak at the beginning or end of the meeting and not participate. I would rather see, if people show up to a majority of the meetings, they be treated like a full member of the committee. If it was one meeting, if you're having separate meetings and you're still going to do the open source, great. It's a busy time. We want more participation, not less. There's a little bit of a feeling that you're not included if you're not in the selected group. I would not want to discourage people from participating. Mayor Holman: I might just add a little bit, playing on the SOFA experience. A lot of people come to meetings, but they don't consistently come to meetings. The purpose of this is to have a group of people that consistently comes to meetings, that listens to any input from any individuals or representatives from groups or organizations. It's still open source, but this is providing a steady continuum throughout the process. Council Member Dubois: Would you be open to an Amendment that said something like a member of the public would be entitled to participate equally with the working group if they come to a majority of the meetings; otherwise, they could only do it during the time for public comment? Mayor Holman: That is totally counter to having a committee. Council Member Burt: If we were talking about trying to have a large volume of people participate in these big meetings, you really have to look at the practical impact. How large of a group and subgroups can you have that can work effectively? Our last Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee was pretty large; it was 30-plus people. Then they broke into subgroups on Transportation and Housing and those things. They were manageable; there might be six or eight people in a subgroup. In the SOFA process, we had neighborhood representatives both representing the neighborhood as stakeholders and then neighborhood folks who were also other stakeholder representatives. Then we organized as a Neighborhood Advisory Group that informed that representative. If we go back and talk about classical TRANSCRIPT Page 49 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Athenian Democracy, at what point in time do you have 300 people all trying to speak to a subject and voting on each thing? Then we've got the other extreme that Council Member Filseth was saying that even this might be too rigid. This is a public transparent process that's being proposed here. We shouldn't forget that we've all talked about our allegiance to transparency. Having an open, public meeting is an important part of fulfilling that commitment to transparency. At the same time, having two different layers to this, where we have the open meetings and the open source process that feeds into this, is the right balance between these two different approaches. Everybody who wants to participate can have a significant voice. In reality, you can't work effectively on products in a massive group. There are tradeoffs and compromise. This is a good balance. Mayor Holman: Council Member Wolbach and Vice Mayor Schmid both want to speak to this. Then let's vote. Council Member Wolbach: A couple of questions. If it's all right for me to ask a question of Council Member DuBois? You were on the Housing Element Committee last year, correct? The fact that it was not a Brown Acted organization, how restrictive did you find that? Sorry, how liberating was that? Would it have been restrictive to ... Council Member DuBois: We were told to act as if it was a Brown Act committee. Council Member Wolbach: It didn't make a big difference. Like Council Member Filseth, I was also leaning towards not having any motion. The transparency is useful, and if it doesn't make that big a practical difference, then it's useful to have some level of Council input. However, the question of timing is also important. When this comes back to Council for approval, can it go on the Consent Calendar? I'm not asking necessarily will it. Ms. Stump: What can go on Consent Calendar is a completed action that just requires you to say aye. If you need to define categories of stakeholders or appoint individuals, that is not a Consent Item. That's an Action Item. Council Member Wolbach: My hope, at least, is that when this does come back, Staff will have looked at the prior examples, SOFA, the previous CPAC, will have a proposal in the Staff Report. It'll be on Consent. If we don't like it, we can pull it. I'm leaning towards supporting it. Vice Mayor Schmid: I'm a little confused. When we came in tonight, you presented a chart of the flow, starting with the Summit. The Summit was open to anyone there, and anyone at the Summit could then sign up for TRANSCRIPT Page 50 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 follow-up committees. I thought there was going to be a series of open committees where people could say, "I want to talk about transportation or natural resources," and there'd be a focus committee on that. Then you had a structure where each month after the break there would be a Council meeting and a committee meeting going on, so there'd be interactions between those committees. Did I get that right? Ms. Gitelman: Thank you for the question, Vice Mayor Schmid. What we were trying to show is that there would be community meetings; we called them working sessions, scheduled in advance on each of these topics. It wouldn't be that there would be a committee created for each one. Vice Mayor Schmid: Right. It was an open committee, so anyone could go to a topic of their interest. Ms. Gitelman: That's correct. Vice Mayor Schmid: There might be several meetings of a committee on a single topic? Ms. Gitelman: That's correct. Some elements or topics are going to take multiple meetings. Some are maybe going to be faster than others. Vice Mayor Schmid: It seems this is going in a different direction, where we end up with a single committee that is not open in the sense that anyone can join it and participate. The interaction with the Council, would you still schedule monthly meetings? How would the Council interact in the process? Ms. Gitelman: The structure that we showed had the Council acting independently on issues that ultimately provide guidance to the committee. The Council was talking about some of the big issues and ideas that need to be fed into the committee's work or the community working group's work. I don't see that that would change, and we would still have this challenge of regular check-ins, finding a way to walk back and forth between the two parallel activities. Vice Mayor Schmid: I'm much attracted to your earlier idea of using the Summit as a recruiting tool for a large pool of people who are free to follow up in areas of interest to them with the continual interaction of the Council. I see getting a committee of stakeholders as narrowing that. Stakeholders are good when you have a technical, focused topic. On something as important as the Comp Plan, I would think that is too much of a narrowing. I'd probably vote against it. TRANSCRIPT Page 51 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Ms. Gitelman: Vice Mayor Schmid, if I could add one additional comment. The proposal that's being advanced uses this appointed committee but is attempting not to lose this concept of open sourcing. The meetings would be in public and people would be encouraged to participate even if they weren't on the committee. There would be active engagement online and in other ways to try and get broad participation even from people who weren't on the committee, enough ways for people to participate that that happened. Vice Mayor Schmid: Participating as a member of the public rather than as a member of the committee. Ms. Gitelman: Correct. Council Member DuBois: Thanks for that clarification. I'm still confused how the open source committee is going to interact with the seated committee and who's going to carry more weight. I would vote against this motion as I understand it now. I'd like some clarity either from the makers or from the Planning Director. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member DuBois. Mayor Holman: Go ahead. Ms. Gitelman: What I had understood the motion to be would be to set up an appointed committee, but not to lose this concept of open sourcing. The committee would meet in public. We would do everything we could to ensure wide participation by members of the public who are not on the committee. We'd make ways for them to participate at the meetings, online and in other ways, so that we still had at the end of the day a Comprehensive Plan Update that we could say had been open sourced, even though there was an appointed committee that was helping to coalesce and evaluate the input that was coming in from the wide variety of sources. Council Member DuBois: Are we doubling your work? Are you holding more meetings now or they're the same number? Ms. Gitelman: I don't see it as doubling my work once the committee's established. The idea of coming back to the Council multiple times to establish a committee is effort that we weren't anticipating, particularly in advance of the Summit. Council Member Burt: Karen, can I... TRANSCRIPT Page 52 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Mayor Holman: Let me give a shot at this. I agree with pretty much everything you said, Director Gitelman. This does not eliminate the open input, the open source and the input from the public in general. It is not to replace that. I'll be briefly redundant. People come to meetings, but they don't come to meetings consistently. Most people don't. They'll come to the Summit. You'll have maybe 300 people there. The next meeting you might have 30; who knows? The purpose of this is to have an established group that commits to carrying through the conversation of the Comp Plan, to act as advisors. That's the purpose of this. Council Member Burt as seconder, do you want to say something? I have three other lights. Council Member Burt: In the prior Comp Plan, we did have something similar to this. We had some very well-attended, open public meetings, where we had hundreds of people there. We had charrettes and different valuable, informative meetings. If you have this open source, who takes all the input from the open source and turns it into a presentation? As we have it set up right now, it would be Staff that would be filtering all that information from the open source. This committee instead would be a citizen group who would be taking that information and doing deep dives into the Comp Plan, enough that they would understand it backwards and forwards, and attempt to consolidate that information—it would include their own inputs—and to integrate it and reconcile it. It's a citizen committee that would be doing that function. That's a pretty democratic process. Relying on Staff to be the filter of all the open source input from the public is less grassroots and less democratic than what this would be. Mayor Holman: Do we need more clarification or can we vote? Council Member Wolbach: I'd like to offer a friendly Amendment to address what I see as one of the key concerns here. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add at the beginning of the Motion “to direct the City Manager and Staff to form...” Council Member Wolbach: That way we are establishing it. We are making the direction. It will be Brown Acted, because it's coming from our direction, but we're not mandating that every step of the formation process come back to us for review. That allows a little bit more flexibility in the establishment by the City Manager and Staff and requires less micromanaging by us. Mayor Holman: My thought about that is we aren't establishing stakeholder groups and, at least built into this at this point in time, doesn't have the Council having input on who those individuals might be. That could be incorporated. TRANSCRIPT Page 53 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member Burt: This is a viable alternative. There's a hybrid between those as well which is that the stakeholder categories could still come to the Council approval. We could delegate to the City Manager and Staff the selection of the individuals to serve within each of those categories or represent those categories. I would be open to that process. In the SOFA plan, it did come to Council. We had applicants for each of the stakeholder groups, and the Council selected. It can go either way. I could live with either way. Let me go back to the maker after those comments and see what she says. Mayor Holman: If we can add "Staff shall return to the Council with a proposal of stakeholder ... Council Member Burt: Categories. Mayor Holman: Yes. Categories is fine. To replace... Council Member Burt: Would it replace? Mayor Holman: No, no, no. That was for myself. "With Council Members having the capability of making working group member recommendations to City Manager and Staff." Council Member Burt: Let me ask how that process would go. That sounds pretty ad hoc. That Council Member who shouts the loudest in the ear of the City Manager gets the appointment made. Mayor Holman: I would hope the City Manager has enough experience not to listen more to somebody who yells louder. Council Member Burt: We're free to encourage people to apply for the stakeholder positions. As far as trying to be those who would influence the City Manager to make certain selections and not others, that gets politicized. Mayor Holman: I could see that. Then the motion would stop after categories. Council Member Burt: It would really be to select. That's what we mean by forming, right? What we haven't talked about here is the scope and purpose either. Let me add this then. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to change “selection process and the purposes” to “proposal of Stakeholder categories, along with a proposed purpose and scope.” TRANSCRIPT Page 54 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member Wolbach: (inaudible) already said purpose. Council Member Burt: There's a little repetition down at the bottom. I see it. Mayor Holman: City Clerk, you want to keep "along with a proposed purpose and scope of the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee." Delete everything in between. Council Member Burt: Got it. Mayor Holman: That's good. Are we there? Council Member Burt: Where we have "Direct the City Manager and Staff to form," I would say "to select." Mayor Holman: I want to keep the word "form" there, because we can have input. "Form" is a better selection of words. Council Member Burt: What do you mean by "input" then? Is that a work around against what I spoke against? Mayor Holman: No. Council Member Burt: What do you mean? Mayor Holman: If you use the word "select," it sounds as though ... Council Member Burt: What do you mean by "form?" Mayor Holman: Form is to coalesce. Council Member Burt: I don't know what that means. To create it, you're saying? Mayor Holman: "To create" then. How is that word? Council Member Burt: I'm just trying to ask now. Let's slow down on the changes. I'm asking what's meant here and then I can come back with what I agree or don't agree with. I’m trying to understand what you mean by "form." Is it to select? We're going to be doing the purpose and the scope. What is there to the forming that is different from selecting? Mayor Holman: It seems like we're deferring the whole selection process to City Manager and Staff without Council input. TRANSCRIPT Page 55 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Council Member Burt: The selection of individuals we would be, yes. This is what I was asking about the work around. If you're meaning that "form" means that Council Members would still be allowed to—this is my wording— campaign to the City Manager on who ought to be selected, I go back to my original point that that might work great for the people that I want to have selected. It's highly politicized as... Mayor Holman: It's 10:38, and I’m not going to argue over one word that doesn't make any difference. Council Member Burt: It is substantial in the difference. If you mean that the City Manager would be selecting based upon recommendations from the Council, that's different from the City Manager would be selecting based on his own best judgment and Staff's. That is a difference. Let's be clear on which it is, and then we can agree or disagree. Let's not use a word that has ambiguity. Mayor Holman: Let's look at "Direct City Manager and Staff to form a working group of diverse stakeholders created from an application process." That's too formal. Council Member Burt: I want to eliminate the ambiguity of "form." I'm concerned that putting this in here is intended to mean something different from "selecting." Selecting is clearer. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to change “to form a” to “to select a.” Council Member Burt: Okay. Mayor Holman: "From applications received ..." Council Member Burt: "From an open application process." INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add “created from an open application process” between “stakeholders” and “to work.” Mayor Holman: Now, are we there? I still have two more lights, folks. CALL THE QUESTION: Vice Mayor Schmid moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to call the question. Council Member Burt: This is on whether to call the motion. We first vote on whether we're going to vote. TRANSCRIPT Page 56 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 CALL THE QUESTION PASSED: 5-1 Filseth no, Berman, Kniss, Scharff absent MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 4-2 Filseth, Schmid no, Berman, Kniss, Scharff absent Mayor Holman: It is quarter to 11:00. Ms. Stump: Mayor Holman, this raises the question about whether the Council has taken an action tonight on this item. You have four affirmative votes on a Council of nine. Mayor Holman: This is what we talked about earlier, isn't it? Is it an affirmative vote or not? Ms. Stump: With respect to setting up a committee, it's not sufficient to do that. You should... Did you have five? Mayor Holman: We had four. Four to two. Council Member Burt: I'm sorry. Can you explain that? Ms. Stump: You have a nine member Council, and a majority is five. You generally need five to take an action. Certainly our Charter requires that for contracts, employment, any kind of Ordinance. I'm not sure that we've looked at this with respect to setting up an advisory committee, but it is a somewhat formal body. I don't know if Council is comfortable setting it up with four votes out of a nine member Council. Council Member Burt: It still has to come back to full Council anyway, right? Ms. Stump: That's a great point. That makes sense to do it that way. Why doesn't Staff take this as direction to return with the items that Council asked for and then you can get a vote with all members present? Thank you, Council Member Burt. Mayor Holman: It is a quarter to 11:00. We do have a Closed Session item. I don't know if Staff feels like you have enough guidance from the Council Members from their comments about these Vision Statements or if we should do a lightning round. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Mayor Holman. We did get substantive comments from the Council that we can incorporate into a third version at some point in this process to bring back to the Council. It would be useful to continue this discussion at some point about the structure that's created by the Goals. I recognize it's so hard to compare those two columns. We'll TRANSCRIPT Page 57 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 have to give some thought to how to pose the question in a more constructive way to get that input from you. Given our calendars between now and the Council break, I'm not sure that we're going to be able to do that before then. The input we got this evening was valuable. We will incorporate that into the next version of the Vision Statements that you see. Mayor Holman: My comment on the structure of the goals is consistent with what we talked about earlier. They aren't comparing apples to apples now, so there's not a parallel track. If something's talking about water, air quality isn't commensurate. They need to stagger, so you can't compare apples to oranges and expect people to comment on them. That structure needs to change. Council Member DuBois: Could we do a two-minute lightning round? I should just go ahead and do it. Council Member Burt: Of Goals? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. I had some real specific comments. Council Member Burt: So do I. Mayor Holman: On Goals? I can't imagine we're going to be able to do a two-minute lightning around on Goals. Council Member DuBois: Just two minutes of comment on process. It'd be more useful to align the common Goals regardless of number. Mayor Holman: We're doing a two-minute lightning round. Set the timer for two minutes, please. Council Member DuBois: Even if it's different numbers, I'd rather see current L-7 equals L-4. Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry; I'm having trouble hearing you. Council Member DuBois: Even if the numbers change, I'd rather see the same topic aligned rather than have it be in the footnotes. I'm wondering if we could make a quick motion to email our comments to the Planning Director on details. I did want to propose perhaps two new Goals, worded as Goals. One would be focusing on grade crossings with our train corridor. The second would be—I want to make it specifically about Cubberley but that's probably too detailed for a goal—a community center, senior wellness center in South Palo Alto. Those are two new goals I'd like to see added. TRANSCRIPT Page 58 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Mayor Holman: Question for the Director. Should there be some reference to those in the Visions before we pop them into Goals? Hillary, shouldn't there be some brief reference to those in the Vision Statement before you pop them into Goals? Ms. Gitelman: I don't think it's possible to have the Vision Statements ... Mayor Holman: They can't cover everything of course. Ms. Gitelman:... be a laundry list of every topic. We take the point that those are issues that are going to have to be included. Council Member Wolbach: I have a couple of comments that I could do in a two-minute lightning round. I'd like to defer to Council Member Burt and hear his thoughts. I think they're going to be on process. Council Member Burt: Good guess. I have a bunch of comments on Goals. I won't attempt to offer them up tonight. If we did do as Council Member DuBois suggested of input to the Director of Community Development, those would only be input and advisory for you to see as comments and non- binding. Correct? That's the way it needs to be. Just wanted to make that clear. Ms. Stump: It is a little bit of an unusual process. To the extent that Council Members are commenting on the same items, it puts the Staff in a difficult position to weigh and balance those and does potentially create some Brown Act issues as well. Council Member Burt: That's why I wanted to frame it that we would not be able to give explicit direction in any way. These are comments for Staff to consider, but not a binding direction. Otherwise, we don't do it at all. You can give your input on what I described as permissible. I feel comfortable that more than that is not permissible. I want to find out whether we should be thinking about another occasion to be able to publicly give that input. Mayor Holman: Do we have any comment down there? Ms. Stump: We can try it. It's certainly not a way of working that we should get into the habit of engaging in. Council Member Burt: I don't have a problem with us scheduling a separate Study Session on an off-night or something, I know we have a busy schedule, if that's a better way to do it. This is an important discussion. This thing's been going on for several years, and the Council has never had TRANSCRIPT Page 59 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 an opportunity to wade in on the Goals. If we have to bite the bullet and have another meeting, I'm okay with that too. Ms. Stump: Why don't I work with the Planning Director and figure out a process, given what Council has said tonight, and get back to you with a recommendation? Mayor Holman: That sounds good. Council Member Wolbach: I agree that we should have this discussion in public. I'm okay with doing it tonight, especially if we're quick or at least starting it. If we feel it needs to be continued and picked up further in the future, then we do that. I’m fine with having a short discussion tonight though. Mayor Holman: I can't imagine there's any way it's going to be a short discussion. It's ten to 11:00. If we could make it a short discussion, Council Member Wolbach, I would be all for it, but it's not going to be a short discussion. Look how we've been two-plus hours on Vision. Council Member Filseth: I don't think it's a short discussion either. A Study Session is the right approach. Mayor Holman: We can look for an additional date, depending on what kind of input we get. They are hard to come by; the calendar is full. We will get some push back too. Be aware of that. Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs None. Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements Mayor Holman: Anyone have any? Closed Session MOTION: Vice Mayor Schmid moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to go into Closed Session. MOTION PASSED: 6-0 Berman, Kniss, Scharff absent Council went into Closed Session at 10:52 P.M. 8. CONFERENCE WITH LABOR NEGOTIATORS Authority: Government Code Section 54957.6 TRANSCRIPT Page 60 of 60 City Council Meeting Trasncript: 04/27/2015 Agency Representatives: Mayor Karen Holman, CAO Chair Pat Burt, PSO Director Kathryn Shen Unrepresented Employee: City Clerk Council reconvened from the Closed Session at 11:40 P.M. Mayor Holman advised no reportable action. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:40 P.M.