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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-05-06 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 63 Special Meeting May 6, 2015 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 6:05 P.M. Present: Berman, Burt arrived at 6:49 P.M., DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kniss, Scharff arrived at 7:10 P.M., Schmid, Wolbach arrived at 6:13 P.M. Absent: Historic Resources Board Present: Bernstein, Bower, Bunnenberg, Chair Kohler, Vice Chair Makinen, Wimmer Absent: DiCicco Oral Communications Joe Simitian, Santa Clara County Supervisor: Thank you very much, Madam Mayor, Council Members and Members of the Historic Resources Board. We have, as you know, been having a conversation for the last few months about the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park with respect to whether or not we can find a way to avoid the eviction of its 400 residents and preserve the site for affordable housing in perpetuity. From the beginning of that conversation, I have said we need to find two things: partners and resources. To that end, as you know, the County stepped up with an $8 million set aside. Your City administratively has taken the same action subject to Council ratification. We've had 500 folks from the community who joined us here in the Chambers to share their support for the effort. Our local Congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, and our State Senator, Jerry Hill, and Assemblymember Rich Gordon have stepped up as well to try and help with State and Federal funds. We've been in touch with a host of community nonprofits and philanthropic organizations and individuals to see if there's a path to success. I should tell you that at the April 21st meeting of our Board of Supervisors, the Board voted to authorize our County staff to identify and select in a competitive process a partner for us to work with. On April 28th, a contract was signed between the County of Santa Clara and the Caritas TRANSCRIPT Page 2 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Corporation. Who, you might reasonably ask, is the Caritas Corporation? The answer to that question is, you'll hear a bit more from them and about them in a moment, Caritas Corporation is a 20-year veteran of just this kind of exercise. Whenever anything happens in Palo Alto, we always think it's an "only in Palo Alto" event. In fact, we are not the first community to face this kind of challenge. It turns out, much to my surprise and delight, that there are nonprofits out there around the state who specialize in acquiring distressed mobile home parks; owning, operating and maintaining them as permanent sources of affordable housing in the community. One such group and the group that rose to the top at the County was Caritas Corporation. They've been at it for 20 years. They have 20 parks around the state, close to 3,700 park spaces. They have two of those parks here in the Greater Bay area of northern California, so they are not strangers to our area as well. The obvious question is, if you've got a partner, what is that partner expected to do. The contract calls on this partner over the course of the coming months to work to acquire the site, to reach a market rate purchase and sale agreement with the current owners of the property so that we can acquire the site and preserve it in perpetuity and avoid those evictions. That leads to the obvious next question which is how would you pay for this site if you could put a deal together. The answer is with funds from three sources: County, City and a tax-exempt revenue bond which could be issued based on the cash flow provided by the property. Individually, any one of those would clearly be insufficient to the task. Collectively, we can and should be having a serious conversation with the owner about what he wants to do with his property and see if we can't get to yes. One other challenge we face, I just want to put it right out there, because the owner has been planning to either develop or sale the property, there's a substantial amount of deferred maintenance. That deferred maintenance has a significant cost attached to it, so that's another cost we have to consider and that's one of the reasons we've been in touch with the philanthropic community to see if that's an area where folks might be able to step up. Still a lot of questions, a lot of twists and turns, but there is clearly a path to success. This is imminently doable and we wanted to get ourselves teed up prior to any decision you might make on May 26th, so that we can have an immediate conversation with the current owners of the park. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Council Members. Following me, I think, depending on the card order, will be Mr. John Woolley from the Caritas Corporation, their Chief Operating Officer. John Woolley, Caritas Corporation: Good evening, Madam Mayor and City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to be able to speak to you this evening. Over the past year and a half, the Caritas Corporation has become aware of the myriad challenges that have engulfed the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park. Owners have faced numerous obstacles in their pursuit of TRANSCRIPT Page 3 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 closing Buena Vista in order to replace the coaches with a high-end residential development. This process has not only created a conflict with government officials and local residents, more importantly it will permanently displace 400 residents from being able to live in Palo Alto. Caritas believes that there is a very workable solution to the conundrum that currently surrounds the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park. The issues facing the closure and relocation of mobile home park residents are not unique, but at Buena Vista they're exacerbated by the lack of available replacement land for the residents to relocate their coaches. Closing Buena Vista would deprive those residents of enjoying the many unique benefits that Palo Alto provides. The answer is not to close Buena Vista and displace its residents, but rather for Caritas to purchase the park from the owners at a fair market value and then rebuild Buena Vista into the vibrant community that we know it can be. It will be a challenging process, but certainly achievable. We believe that our unique experience and skill sets position us well to turn Buena Vista into a spirited and caring mobile home community. It's important to note that Caritas is a mission-driven organization. What that really means is we are not a financially driven organization. If we were, we would have shareholders and stockholders and be concerned about rates of return and those kinds of things. We're not. We are a mission-driven organization whose mission is to provide and maintain quality affordable housing. With the increasing number of households on fixed or limited incomes and the scarcity of reliable long-term, reasonably priced housing, Caritas endeavors to create energetic communities where quality of life, resident involvement and caring are priorities. In 1995, a group of local business and community leaders, philanthropists and nonprofit experts saw the challenges in providing adequate affordable housing as well as the opportunity to help. The name Caritas was carefully selected by the company's founders whose philosophy was to care for others. The word charity comes from the Latin word caritas. In this sense, Caritas communities strive to be caring communities. Starting with a skeleton staff, Caritas acquired two mobile home communities in Lancaster and one in Brea, California. Today we have developed a team of caring professionals who are dedicated to fulfilling our mission of providing quality affordable housing and to serve the residents living in our communities. We currently own 20 mobile home parks throughout the state that total just under 3,700 units. A number of these parks are located here in the Greater Bay area. It is important to note that our business model is designed to hold the parks in perpetuity. Over the next few months, Caritas is committed to creating a comprehensive development plan that will serve as the basis for entering into negotiations with the owner as well as provide the financial framework for the acquisition, renovation and redevelopment of the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park. Caritas believes that one of the keys to the Buena Vista solution is our commitment to treat all parties to this process with respect and TRANSCRIPT Page 4 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 dignity. With this in mind, we will: 1) commit to work with the owners in order to understand their development goals and to develop a proposal that appeals to them; 2) work with our partners in the County, City and philanthropic community to identify and obtain the resources that will be necessary to redevelop Buena Vista; 3) continue to meet with the Buena Vista Residents Association and their legal representatives to ensure that our plan will also meet the needs of the current and future residents; 4) meet with the Palo Alto City officials in order to expedite the approval process and to design a mobile home park that will meet the long-term needs of the surrounding community; and 5) reach out to the local philanthropic groups in order to ensure that our development plan accurately addresses the needs of the entire community. I was also approached, just before I came up, to be sure that I mention the fact that Caritas self-imposes rent control. We would do this in this case as well. That would not be an issue; we do that automatically. In closing, the Caritas Corporation is genuinely excited at the prospect of redeveloping the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, and we look forward to transforming it into one of our lively and responsive communities of which the County, City and local residents will be very proud. Thank you for your time. Erika Escalante, Buena Vista Residents Association: Good evening, Mayor and Council Members and everyone here. I'm Erika Escalante, President of the Buena Vista Residents Association. As you know this park closure process has been very difficult on all the residents. Now we have a plan. We've met a couple of times with Caritas, and we're very excited and encouraged for the potential of this plan. This plan will allow residents to continue to live in an affordable place and keep our community. We're very thankful for that. If this plan goes forward, we encourage others to join in with their support and resources to keep our community and to save our homes, for this plan to work and for Caritas, the County and the City and for the residents to save our community. Thank you. Herb Borock: I'm going to speak on a different topic. On Monday evening you made appointments to the Utilities Advisory Commission. As originally advertised for recruitment, there were two positions available. At your places you received the recommendation which you agreed to follow, that is to also fill a vacancy that had just occurred. I believe that the Municipal Code Chapter 2.16 on Boards and Commissions read in its entirety makes clear that there's an obligation when a vacancy occurs that you don't automatically fill it, but that you recruit for it. Sometimes people will not apply for a position because they think a particular Commissioner or the number of positions available or the Commission will continue to serve or represent their needs. If a specific Commissioner was leaving, then people if they knew about the vacancy would apply for the position. The word "shall" TRANSCRIPT Page 5 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 is used in terms of the recruitment process. If that had been followed as I believe it should have, I don't know which two of the three people you appointed would have met at their first meeting today at noon. You can't undo what you've done, but the appropriate thing that should have been done was to fill the two vacancies that were recruited for with advertising and that the public knew were available, and then have a separate recruitment following Chapter 2.16 of the Municipal Code for Commissioner Chang's position. There may have been people who didn't feel a need to apply because they thought Commissioner Chang was still going to be on the Commission. If they had known that her position was going to be available, they would have applied for it. Thank you. Study Session 1. Potential Topics of Discussion for the Joint Study Session with the Historic Resources Board. Matthew Weintraub, Planner: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Council Members, Chair Kohler and Historic Resource Board Members. I'm Matthew Weintraub, Planner and Staff liaison to the Historic Resources Board. I'll spend about five minutes presenting some ... Mayor Holman: Maybe you want to wait just a moment until the Chambers are clear, so you're not distracted. Thank you. Mr. Weintraub: Thank you. The Historic Resources Board or HRB is the City's expert body to provide advice in historic preservation matters. Under the City's Code, the Board makes recommendations to the Council on proposed designations to the City's Historic Inventory and provides design advice to the Architectural Review Board, City Staff and property owners. In reviewing historic compatibility, the Board uses the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation which are provided by the National Park Service. The Rehabilitation Standards were adopted by the Council in 1987. The Board is also an important component of Palo Alto's status as a Certified Local Government or CLG by the California Office of Historic Preservation or OHP. CLG status allows Palo Alto to benefit from OHP's information databases and technical expertise as well as to apply for federal funds to carry out preservation projects such as surveys and design guidelines. In terms of application review, the Board reviews building permits involving structures that are listed in the City's Historic Inventory which categorizes structures as exceptional, major and contributing based on a numerical rating system. The Board's purview is exterior architecture as well as the visual relationships of structures and sites within locally designated historic districts. The City's Historic Inventory includes a total of 411 individual TRANSCRIPT Page 6 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 historic properties including those located within historic districts. As we can see on the map, most of the City's designated historic structures and the two locally designated historic districts are located in north Palo Alto where the oldest development patterns have occurred. We may ask the question does the City's Inventory include all known historic properties. The answer is actually no. Historic properties that are listed on the National Register and/or the California Register are not automatically included in the City's Inventory. They are, however, subject to CEQA review. Similarly, historical resources that are identified in a survey or an environmental review process are not automatically listed on the City's Inventory; also they are subject to CEQA review. Here are some examples of buildings that are listed in Palo Alto's Historic Inventory. As we can tell, they represent a variety of building types, construction methods, architectural styles and periods of development. What they have in common is that each provides a unique and significant linkage to the past through historic design values and by associations to important historical events and persons as recorded on documentation that meets State and Federal standards. In addition to individually listed properties, the local Inventory includes two historic districts. Here we see a map of the nearby Ramona Street Architectural District. It's a small district containing only eight structures in total located along a one-block stretch of Ramona Street. When we look at some of the images of the buildings in the Ramona Street District, we do get a sense of the unified architectural character and the high quality of design values that are possessed in the district. The district is a tight collection of commercial buildings designed by master architects Birge Clark and Pedro de Lemos in one of California's distinctive styles, Spanish Colonial Revival. By contrast, the Professorville Historic District is much larger and different in character than the Ramona Street District. Covering all or parts of several City blocks, the district contains nearly 200 contributing buildings within its boundaries. Professorville was home to the first generation of Stanford University faculty and is one of Palo Alto's oldest residential neighborhoods. Architecturally, Professorville is characterized by residential styles that were popular during the early 20th century including textbook examples of Craftsman, Colonial Revival, Mission Revival and Prairie Style homes. The City of Palo Alto encourages owners to preserve and rehabilitate their historic properties by providing valuable development incentives. Here we see listed the preservation incentives that are in the City's toolkit and available to the historic property owners in Palo Alto. Many owners have taken advantage of these incentives over the years, which has helped to abate demolitions and resulted in the retention and rehabilitation of numerous historic buildings. In closing, I'll introduce three recommendations of the Board to enhance the City's preservation program. The first Board recommendation is to include National Register and California Register properties in the City's Historic Inventory. Currently, as mentioned earlier, Federally listed and State listed TRANSCRIPT Page 7 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 properties are not included automatically in the City's Inventory. The next Board recommendation is to make preservation incentives available to more owners of historic properties. For instance, in the Downtown and residential areas, some of the existing development incentives are offered only to the owners of Category 1 and 2 properties and are not available to Category 3 and 4 properties which are considered contributors under the Code. The last Board recommendation is to develop a context statement for Palo Alto's Modern Era which would address post-World War II history and architecture. The context statement would facilitate the identification of Modern Era resources in Palo Alto, a City that led the way in design and industrial innovations in post-War California. This concludes Staff's presentation. Thank you very much for your time. I'm available to answer any questions that you may have. Beth Bunnenberg, Historic Resources Board Member: One thing that the Historic Resources Board has done in the past is to provide some educational component to the community. Sometimes that's been done through doing something through the Preservation month. May is typically Preservation month. Chair Kohler was reminding us that at times we've led walking tours and participated in that way. I would like to add this educational component as a very important one. We also are having, I think, more and more community misunderstandings of what it means to have a property on the Inventory. Does it mean you can't change a thing about it? We know that it is possible to make changes, but they need to be carefully considered. Also there are property owners who are very frightened of having their property listed. Some educational components would be very important. David Bower, Historic Resources Board Member: I'd like to bring up for consideration by the Council two things that the Historic Resources Board discussed at the last three meetings. One is the need for new and better tools to help preserve historic properties in Palo Alto. We're working with an Ordinance that was created in 1986, modified in the 1990s. Effectively we're dealing with what we consider outdated tools. We need to find a way to not only include buildings in the post-World War II group for historic consideration, but also to encourage their owners not to demolish them. As all of us know, there is a rapid loss of any building that is, at least in the north part of the City and the south too, older than maybe 20 years. Tonight we hope that we can review some of those things with you as a Council. Martin Bernstein, Historic Resources Board Member: A couple of points picking up on Board Member Bower's comments. First off, when former Mayor Liz Kniss was mayor during some of the conversations about enacting our current Ordinances, I remember your very specific comment about TRANSCRIPT Page 8 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 where's the teeth in our Ordinance. Because now there are some applications where any comments presented by the HRB to an applicant, some of those recommendations are voluntary, whether they are put into place. This also ties into Board Member Bunnenberg's comment about how do we get the incentives so attractive that that becomes an actionable application. In Chapter 18 of the Municipal Code, there are maybe, I don't know, 14 or 18 different exceptions you can apply for if you have a historic property. As Mr. Weintraub mentioned, there are limitations on where some of those incentives can be applied. One of the recommendations about make the economic development incentives more widely available to property owners, Mr. Weintraub mentioned specifically Categories 3 and 4. The basic question is how can the HRB assist the Council in achieving some of these recommendations to become applicable. As probably we're all very aware, our challenge is how do we implement the goals of the Historic Preservation Ordinances. Again, through incentives that can become sometimes an automatic response for an applicant. May I give an example of an incentive? Mayor Holman: Briefly, and then I'm going to go to Chair Kohler to wrap up the Board's thoughts. Mr. Bernstein: Briefly, one of the application incentives is, it's mentioned on one of our handouts, an applicant can apply for 250 square feet additional square footage beyond what's allowable, if you have a qualified historic structure in a certain district. It costs about $300 a square foot to build that square footage. The instant the paint dries, the market value for a Professorville home, for example, is about $1,100 a square foot. That's $800 a square foot instant profit compared to demolishing the house and building a limited square footage. There's an example of economic incentive. If a developer is looking for a profit motive, for historic preservation who cares how you get there. Instead of teeth in the Ordinance, let's let the incentives be a good vehicle. Thank you. Roger Kohler, Historic Resources Board Chair: I thought I'd chime in on the bonus situation, since I, good or bad, made it on television a week or two ago. One of the points that I made to the CBS people was that on the house on College, Staff and the Board had recommended that if they kept the existing home, they would gain 250 or 300 extra square feet on the floor area limit. Architects on the Board and builders figured out that if you remodeled the existing house, maintained it, added the 200 or 300 extra square feet and added a basement under all those, your gain was close to $1 million. They just didn't quite understand that whole situation. It's probably not clear in the Ordinance that you can get some of these pretty TRANSCRIPT Page 9 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 hefty, as Martin just pointed out, bonuses for keeping an existing home. That was just a comment. Ms. Bunnenberg: There is one more incentive that we have talked about over the years that is used throughout California, and that is the Mills Act, which is extremely helpful to owners and has been very successfully used. I'm sorry that Board Member DiCicco is not here, because she has a property with a Mills Act and has found it to be very successful. One more to add to the list. Mr. Bernstein: One other comment I'd like to make as far as one of our challenges, that is understanding perceived compatibility and differentiation between new buildings and historic buildings. That is one of the Secretary of the Interior's guidelines, for any work done on the historical issues, that there is differentiation between historic and non-historic. That could be one of the other challenges that the HRB and the City Council can engage in, understanding the difference between perception of compatibility and differentiation on projects. If there are any comments about that, I look forward to that discussions. Michael Makinen, Historic Resources Board Vice-Chair: Just building on the statement that Matthew presented here, developing a Modern Era context statement to address post-World War II history and architecture in Palo Alto. This is one of my pet areas I think is totaling lacking in the historic considerations. The industrial sites in Silicon Valley, we have not captured any of these in our Inventory. Council Member Greg Schmid reminded me of that at one time, and it's a, I won't call it a disgrace, but a lacking element in our historic resource endeavors. We've got to pick up these industrial sites. It's a glaring omission in my opinion. Also, the Eichler historic districts need to be addressed. That's mid-century and has become historic in itself. I propose that we consider doing a survey to develop the list of industrial sites that would be worthy of consideration for historic inclusion in the City of Palo Alto's Inventory. Council Member Kniss: Martin discussed something that we did discuss way back when. That was where are the teeth. What we're talking about tonight are the incentives. What are the incentives that are out there? The example that he gave of what it adds in value to the house is very significant. Why would we think that most people wouldn't do this? For those of you who have more background than I do, why would one choose not to preserve when they can? Is it more expensive? Martin, maybe you could answer my questions, since you brought it up. TRANSCRIPT Page 10 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Bernstein: The answer lies in Board Member Beth's comment, education. When an applicant goes to the Development Center to say, "I'm thinking about doing this," unless that applicant asks, "Are there any incentives involved for my historic house," I've been in the business for 30 years now, people always say, "I didn't know about that." That goes back to my earlier question, how can the HRB assist the Council in getting that information to property owners. Council Member Kniss: In other words, we as a City need to do a better job of indicating what is out there and what other options exist. I'm glad you mentioned that. I know that it was something we discussed a great deal before. I would think if I knew about that, that would be one of the options I would look for. Mr. Bernstein: Picking up on that conversation, I hear often, "I don't want my house historic. You can't do anything to it." That's as far from the truth as possible. That goes back to how does a property owner learn of the incentives. Even without using incentives, there's still flexibility because of the Secretary of Interior Standards. Council Member DuBois: Thank all of you for coming and for serving on the Board. It's much appreciated. I have been the liaison, and I have gone to meetings when my schedule allows. First of all I'd like to say to the recommendations, at least in my perspective and hopefully my colleagues will weigh in, we should do all of those things you mentioned. Updating the Inventory, adding the Federal and State historic sites. To me that's a no brainer. Yes, please do that, make the recommendation. We need to do a survey and make sure that we're up-to-date on our own properties outside of those Federal and State buildings. Yes on the properties since World War II. We're Silicon Valley and none of the buildings from the start of Silicon Valley are on our Register at this point. Finally, we do need to think of some incentives that apply more outside of the Downtown area, particularly if we do add those post-World War II buildings. They're going to be further south in Palo Alto. In terms of the Mills Act, I didn't know much about it. From my fellow Council Members I've learned a bit about it. It's basically a program that a city can set parameters to incent people through relief of property tax to commit to a maintenance program. They have to have defined maintenance, and there needs to be a process to make sure that maintenance happens. I would like the HRB to come back and propose some parameters for an updated Mills Act application for Palo Alto. You guys need to strike a balance for the right amount of incentive for preservation without taking too much revenue away from the schools and the City. Just a little incentive there could help particularly for some of these Eichlers and those kinds of buildings. On Monday night, we heard about a project that TRANSCRIPT Page 11 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 impacts Kipling Street. The issue came up that Kipling is not a historic district currently. The question is should it be. Are there other areas in the City that should be considered historic districts? In terms of education and communication, you guys have discussed the idea of potentially collapsing the number of tiers. If we went from four tiers to two tiers and defined the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2, that might make it more clear for the public to understand what historic designations mean. The last thing I'd like to say is I'd like to see you guys be more proactive and bring some proposals to us. We're eager to hear some of these ideas. I'd like to see you bring them forward. Thank you. Vice Mayor Schmid: Good to have you here tonight, and thanks very much for your recommendations. You've developed a series that could be influential on your role in our City in the future. The post-World War II history is important because at the current moment rather than incentives there are very high costs for claiming historical things. If that could be put into a better balance, that would be positive. Let me talk about a little walk I had over the weekend on new trails in Byxbee Park. For the first time I got on top of the hill and looked west at the Federal Telegraph building. I never really had a good view of that before. I was astounded, went home and spent half a day on what is this building and why is it here. Why can't we get into it? Why isn't it part of Palo Alto? It has an amazing story to tell. It started as a company called Poulsen Wireless in 1909, just when there were early experiments on using the atmosphere to send radio signals great distances. In 1911 two people from Stanford, David Starr Jordan, the president, and the head of the engineering department, Adams, invested in the company. They went public as the Federal Telegraph Company and became a seed bed of innovation on radio, telegraph and wireless communication and tools that could help foster this. Just some of the names, Lee de Forest worked for them for a few years between 1911 and 1913. It was during that time he developed the tri-element vacuum tube, which became the push innovation that transformed radio and wireless communication over the next 20 years. The research lab for Federal Telegraph was in Palo Alto on El Camino and had a series of innovators working there who spread the gospel around. In 1916, the City Council came and said, "Four 50-foot wireless towers on El Camino is disrupting the neighborhood. This isn't working." So they developed what's called the Marsh site, which is what we have today out in the Baylands, and continued their innovation push. It was called the hub of pacific coast communications there. Federal Telegraph was the first successful Silicon Valley company. Key technologies in radio, telephone and wireless, a series of innovations that came out of there, that transformed the rest of the country and the rest of the world. The first time that Stanford got deeply involved in investing in tech innovation very successfully. Fred Terman, who became the generator TRANSCRIPT Page 12 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 of ideas at Stanford University over the next 20 or 30 years, started working in the summertime for Federal Telegraph, where he first got his notion of the excitement of it. It's the first time we get Palo Alto as a center of innovation. This little orchard land producing tech innovators that went everywhere. Why isn't that Number 1 on our list of historic sites in Palo Alto? It is an industry site. It's the last Federal Telegraph building left in Palo Alto. Symbolically, it's so important. The Council just voted for a bridge across Highway 101. Do you know what that bridge does? It connects the Federal Telegraph site, innovation center in 1909 or 1910, with the Fairchild building on the other side, where the microprocessor got its push to transform the valley. What a bike ride or a walk that would be across the innovation decades of Palo Alto. Yes, I would encourage the HRB to make sure that our history, where we come from, why is Silicon Valley here. Every resident at some point asks that question. Why don't you help answer it for them? Council Member Berman: I don't want to follow that. That was far more eloquent than anything I’m going to say. Thank you guys very much, first of all, for the work that you guys have been doing. I've found this session to be helpful, because you came with concrete ideas and suggestions and things that you think are lacking that should be there in idea form. I agree with a lot of my colleagues that I'd love to see you guys come back to us with concrete proposals for some of these suggestions. You've introduced a lot of ideas that I've never thought about. I'd obviously love some more context and understanding of what the different changes would mean to property owners and to the City. I can't necessarily say that I'm in support of all the ideas you've mentioned. I'm very interested, open and curious about all the ideas that you guys have suggested. One suggestion that was brought up was an information campaign for owners of historically listed buildings. It looks like there were 411, I think I saw, sites on the Historic Registry. Could we put together an information packet and send that to the owners of those properties? It's not the most creative idea in the world, but would be a way to get them information. Martin and others mentioned there is this fear and belief that if you're on that list, you're totally handcuffed to do anything. If that isn't the case, we should tell people and we should tell the community. Martin had a comment. Mr. Bernstein: Council Member Berman, another source of information packet could be any time a house is being listed for sale, there could be a disclosure item. The City could request it be part of a disclosure package for historic property. There's another source of information where someone representing an owner or buyer can say, "Here are these incentives that go along with this. Look what that does to your market value. Look how it TRANSCRIPT Page 13 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 benefits the school system, property tax issues." There can be a win-win- win here. Again, it goes back to exactly your point of information. Council Member Berman: I had another thought, and I lost it. I'll stick with that for now. Thank you. Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. I want to echo my colleagues here, and I want to thank the Historic Resources Board for your service in doing this. It's something that's very important for Palo Alto. I wanted to ask a question. The first bullet point about the National Register and the California Register, that seems like such a no-brainer. Why don't we do that now? How many properties do you think we're talking about? I guess that's a Staff question. Mr. Weintraub: Thank you, Council Member Filseth. I'll take a shot at answering that question. I do know that most of the individually listed properties in the City are also listed already on the National Register. There have been a few properties listed on the National Register more recently that were also already listed in the Inventory. The outstanding properties that are on the National Register but not in the Inventory are the two Eichler districts that have been listed on the National Register, Green Gables and Greenmeadow. The Ordinance simply doesn't allow for an automatic inclusion of National Register and California Register properties to the Inventory. In other words, the Ordinance has a mechanism by which properties are added one-by-one through an application process or districts are added through an application process, rather than being included automatically as they might be added to the Federal or State listing. Council Member Filseth: Can you take a guess at how many properties we're talking about? Is it every Eichler in south Palo Alto? Mr. Weintraub: No. The largest of the districts is a few hundred properties. The other district is not quite that large. I'd say under 100 properties. Council Member Filseth: It's a couple hundred as opposed to a dozen or a thousand. Mr. Weintraub: A few hundred, yes. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you Staff and also to the Board for your work and for the presentation and for being here today. I have three areas of questions, so I'll just go through them one at a time. The first is a question about outreach, how much you do already, how much you envision doing in the future. If you're not doing a lot and if your very busy schedules allow, I'd encourage more. There are a few organizations that I'd suggest TRANSCRIPT Page 14 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 reaching out to if you do envision in the future doing a greater outreach. Palo Alto Neighborhoods and the neighborhood associations individually; a couple of organizations that have formed in the last couple of years that have been very interested in the past and also the future of Palo Alto, Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning as well as Palo Alto Forward. Palo Alto Unified School District, I don't know if there might be opportunities to work with the schools perhaps as they craft their curriculum around history for students in our community to incorporate more about our local history. I don't know if any of you would be interested in working on that. I just throw it out there as a brainstorming idea. Also Stanford as well as the Chamber of Commerce, a couple others that I think would benefit from engagement with you, again if your time allows. I don't know if there are any thoughts or comments on that. Before I move onto my next question, I'll just let that one sit there. Also, with the Palo Alto History Museum and efforts to bring that online, where do you see collaboration with the History Museum? How will that work? Mr. Bower: If I could briefly answer the Palo Alto history building. Almost all of us have visited the building, not a quorum, individually, two or three. I would anticipate that that building would come before the Historic Resources Board when its plans are completed. As a Board, we can't really do outreach. We can't really do anything other than represent the City, because we have no funds and until very recently Staff was overwhelmed by the hospital project. While we're all available and several of us own historic homes or buildings, it's hard to have any City representation as a Board to do that. Ms. Bunnenberg: Quickly to answer your question about how much time we have, interestingly enough when I came on the HRB we met very regularly every first and third Wednesday. In the past year, we have had months that we haven't met at all or the meetings have been few and far between. There certainly is, on the part of the Board, time because we committed to come that often. In terms of the History Museum, it went through the HRB some time ago. All those parameters have been set for what can and can't be done to the building. There are completed plans. In fact, it's ready to pull permits when funds are finally raised. The other interesting thing at the History Museum is that there is a space saved for the archives of the City of Palo Alto, which would be a real benefit for the City to have it in a larger space and a dedicated space. Council Member Wolbach: It was alluded to earlier, I don't know how much we could get into it tonight, but I wanted to mention that we did refer something to you on Monday. If you haven't had a chance to look into that, I'd encourage you to. It's a little bit different from our ordinary expectations TRANSCRIPT Page 15 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 of the Board. I do hope that you'll dig into that to the best of your ability and purview. Council Member Burt: I'd like to follow onto this last discussion about the Board's frequency of meetings and this example that came up on Monday of the 429 University project which we specifically referred to the HRB. We had discussions about what's the process by which items get referred to HRB, really some questioning and concern as to whether projects should be getting to the HRB that aren't today. Beth, hearing from you that you're meeting less frequently than historically, it begs the question do you perceive any change in recent years versus traditionally as to what things were being referred to the HRB. Are you seeing fewer things referred? Ms. Bunnenberg: We are, in some ways, seeing not as many things being referred. I'm not quite sure why that's happening. I did want to mention one important thing is that we do study sessions. This is word that needs to get out, maybe again at the Development Center. If you have a historic property, if you can put some conceptual plans together, come in and talk to the Historic Planner and put some conceptual plans together, maybe you could get a study session and find out whether you're on the right track before you pay for full plans. This would be one kind of thing. We've had a fair number of historic properties sold recently. It does take a while for people to decide what they want to do with a particular property., Council Member Burt: Using this project of 429 University as illustrative of what may be going on in the process, one of the questions we had was what triggers a project to be referred to HRB. In this case, it was not a building that in and of itself was historic, but whether the demolition and construction of a new building would have an impact on adjacent historic structures. What I took away from Monday is that there aren't real clear criteria as to determining what gets referred to the HRB. It's a lot of discretion and subjectivity. Do you have any insights on that, what was done either traditionally or today? Chair Kohler: This is the beginning of my 21st year on the HRB, so I have some history. It's all because of Liz Kniss down at the end of the hall. She said, "You ought to sign up for the HRB." I did. In the first few years I was on the Board, there was a year where we met two or three times a week, because all the homes in Palo Alto were being reviewed. We were in the little room next door and there were people out in the hall. It was quite a deal. In fact, I have the picture in the Weekly that was there. It's been up and down in terms of where we go. As I'm sitting here listening about the mood on University Avenue, in a sense all of University Avenue, and I didn't bring my aerial photo from Downtown Palo Alto from 1940. It was historic in TRANSCRIPT Page 16 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 a sense. Some of the buildings that were there in 1940 are still there, but not many are left. Somewhere along the line, maybe 21 years ago, we should have suggested that all of University Avenue is an historic district. That's not going to happen now, I don't think. I don't know exactly how to answer. Things come to us from Staff. Sometimes we as Board Members see things happening around the neighborhood. Many times we don't hear about it until it's torn down sometimes. Mr. Bower: To follow up, Council Member Burt, on your question. I'm the second youngest member of the Historic Resources Board. I've been there nine years. We stick around. All of my tenure on the Board, throughout that tenure, the only projects that ever came to the Board originated through Staff. Some place in Planning there is a decision made to have the Historic Resources Board review these projects, largely because they're either in Professorville or in the Downtown Historic District. I don't have any recollection of ever having a Board Member bring a project to the Board. We discuss projects, but it's all generated by Staff. Council Member Burt: I wouldn't expect too much otherwise in that regard. It doesn't sound like you're aware of what are the objective criteria by which a project does get referred to HRB. Mr. Bower: You're absolutely right. Council Member Burt: Maybe this is the most substantive outcome of this meeting, if my colleagues agree, why there shouldn't be a topic for this year of the HRB to work in discussions with Staff to formalize in a better way how things get referred to the HRB and when they shouldn’t be. Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: If I can jump in for a minute. I'm Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. There is a section of the Municipal Code that identifies the purview of the HRB. Staff will use that to guide us in referring projects to the HRB. I would love to note that there's a section in that list of duties of the HRB that says essentially other duties as assigned. To the extent the Board and the Council have agreed on a series of additional projects and things that the HRB would be interested in working on this year, there's an opportunity to have many more meetings. As Member Kohler indicated, you can quickly devolve into a Board that meets very often if you're going to undertake new surveys and inventories of historic properties. We'd be happy to work with the Board to identify a reasonable work program that could be fit in along with a review of those criteria that are in the Municipal Code that specify the projects that we routinely refer to the Board. TRANSCRIPT Page 17 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Burt: My point is that it doesn't sound like the Muni Code criteria give adequate clarity. We could review the criteria with them, but not provide additional clarity. I’m interested in additional clarity, so that we don't go from one period of time where maybe 20 years ago too many things were being referred to perhaps today too few and we've got the same Municipal Code. That sounds to me like we may have an important issue. We want to hit the sweet spot. Margaret Wimmer, Historic Resources Board Member: I was going to respond to that. My own thought process was that our priority is to review individual projects that are submitted to the Development Center to do alterations. Mostly they're residential projects, and the homeowner decides to do some remodeling of some sort that will affect the exterior of the building. Those are typically the projects that come to our Board. Recently we haven't had a lot of projects to review, so we've been identifying some subjects that we as a Board have found interesting and educational unto ourselves to discuss. That's what led us to this meeting. We've been identifying some things that we think we can work on, that we can improve. Even without new projects to review, as a Board we've decided to keep our schedule and meet twice a month, every other week. It's been quite nice. I'm the newest member, so I'm the least experienced and I'm still learning quite a bit. For me it's a wonderful opportunity to understand the process and understand the formality and the protocol and all of that. I've been getting a lot out of it. I feel like our Board is coming together as a small community. We are working well together lately. Ms. Bunnenberg: There is, Council Member Burt, a concept in historic preservation that we sometimes think about. It is what are the properties adjacent to or across the street from, and then how wide an arc do you put there. That's one of the ways that some preservation groups look at what's impacting our historic resource. Council Member Wolbach: We've heard from a couple of my colleagues and myself, at least hints that we want to continue to encourage taking initiative. As was mentioned before, bringing things to us, Council Member DuBois mentioned that. I would second that. If there are ideas that you want to bring to the Council or other things that you want to educate us about going forward, please do. Whether it's outreach or this educational stuff that you're working on, at least you've got my support to expand your own purview if you feel it's necessary and appropriate. Council Member Kniss: Off this topic for a minute, but one that the Vice Mayor brought up. We may not want to go into it tonight, but it's one that you may want to take up as a Board, looking down the row at Roger. That is TRANSCRIPT Page 18 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 the Eichler preservation. Some of the Eichler areas have been preserved by their own will, by a vote sometimes, sometimes some different method. That would be an area that would be worthwhile to take up. As we've mentioned, they're beginning to be seen more as special areas, as historic and so forth. Not to go into tonight, but it might be something that you would like to take up as a Board. Mr. Bernstein: Responding to Council Member Wolbach's question or comment about how can the HRB help facilitate some educational aspects about historic preservation. One of the challenges that comes before the HRB often is regarding the Secretary of Interior Standards. One of the Standards is about compatibility and differentiation. That's something we look at very closely when applications come before us. That could be an avenue to explore with how can the HRB assist the Council in understanding the idea of differentiation and compatibility and how to apply that particular Standard. The decision about compatibility and differentiation is used on careful areas of judgment. That judgment is based on principles of design, which is more of an artistic pursuit. That's a difficult thing to put in prescription form of saying, "Here is something that's massive or not massive appropriately or differentiated enough." There are principles of design that could be, not in the next few minutes here, a discussion if so invited by the City Council for HRB Members who are well versed in the principles of design. That specifically and directly applies to the application of differentiation and compatibility. There's a perception of when those things are met in that it takes an eye to understand that. Based on experience and using judgment, there's a conclusion that it does meet the definitions of compatibility and differentiation. If the Council so elects, it'd be great to have the appropriate members be invited in that discussion. Thank you. Mayor Holman: Thank you all. I believe, Matt Weintraub, this is your first City Council meeting when you've actually sat at the table. Is that correct? Mr. Weintraub: That's correct. Mayor Holman: Welcome. Mr. Weintraub: Thank you very much. Mayor Holman: We won't keep you here until 11:00, but just wait. Thank you all to Board Members for your service. Twenty-one years. If we paid by the hour, you still wouldn't be rich, Roger, based on Council Members' remuneration. A few comments here. I support everything that you put in your recommendations. I support comments made about HRB being more proactive and initiate some endeavors. I really appreciate that and would TRANSCRIPT Page 19 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 support that. The review process, I don't know if this needs clarification or not. Apparently it does. When you look at the Code, the Code says at 2.27.040 the duties of the HRB. "B" does say inform the Architectural Review Board of the historical and/or architectural significance of historic commercial and/or multifamily structures in the Downtown area and any other such buildings designated as significant elsewhere in the City. It seems to me that the HRB is supposed to advise the ARB if something is historic or not. It seems to me the trigger for things going to the HRB should be if there's an historic analysis that's required. It should go to the HRB to see if the consultant's report is accurate, adequate, whatever before it goes to the ARB. Board Member Bunnenberg in response to Council Member Burt's question was talking about the area of influence or the compatibility or effect on historic properties even if the project itself is not historic. This is exactly what came up with 429 University the other day. I would suggest that there's another on El Camino that is the same thing. I haven't been doing this for 21 years, Roger, but I guess 13 years. My recollection is that the City used to hire, choose and select the historic consultant at the applicant's expense, rather than the applicant selecting the historic consultant. My perception over the years has been that peer review is a defensive position. Maybe it's just perception, but it is my perception. It's more appropriate for the City to select and hire at the applicant's expense, because it's the City's responsibility to preserve and protect the resources. I'm wondering if the City counts or records the loss of an historic resource including those that are on the National Register and on the California Register. There's hasn't been mention of the potential California Register of homes. That hasn't been mentioned at all. CEQA does apply, but no one knows it. No one knows that CEQA applies. It's a burden on the public to prove or demonstrate that those homes or a home is eligible for the Inventory or the Register. Again, no one knows that, so they just get demolished. My curiosity is does the City even count how many of those we have lost. That would be an indication of the importance of being more proactive in promoting incentives, benefits and keeping an accurate Inventory. Agree with the comments made, although it's not specifically listed, yes it is, the National Register Districts, the Eichler neighborhoods. That does of course involve outreach. Another thing that I've mentioned a number of times is the definition of demolition. I brought it up when the HRB and the Council met before. I guess it was when we had interviews. From my perspective, it seems like we're losing resources because the definition of demolition is such a narrow definition that we actually lose a resource and it isn't considered a demolition. That's something else I wish the HRB would take up, the definition of demolition. When there are TDRs granted as a result of historic preservation, then it seems to me that there ought to be some plaque or something attached to the building that has to stay on the building to demonstrate that. It not only promotes the program, TRANSCRIPT Page 20 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 but it also keeps things from happening like happened on a home on Kipling where the home was sold. It was in a commercial district, and the home was sold. After the TDRs were sold, the owner didn't seem to be aware of the TDR sale and transfer and the covenant. We lost a lot of integrity on that house. Making people aware of the responsibility. Conservation districts are akin to preservation districts. It helps the community better preserve their own neighborhoods and in a manner that they might choose, or that the HRB might suggest if they want to come to the HRB for a consult. I've seen this written or mentioned a good handful of times. When it comes to either a home in Professorville or a commercial building wherever in town, the building isn't on the Inventory and it wasn't considered as such when the Inventory was updated. The fact is that buildings on the Inventory and commercial buildings were not considered in that update. It implies that it's not historic and it's not likely to be because it wasn't added then. It wasn't even looked at then for consideration. I know this takes funding, and I don't know what funding is available. Are we in compliance with our CLG status? Our Inventory is probably not up-to-date. I wonder about that and how we might get some funding to do that. A question that I have asked myself and asked maybe a couple of HRB Members over time and actually even Staff, but not necessarily current Staff, is are we best served by the HRB recommending to the ARB. I know there's some kind of sequence that makes sense in terms of review process. I also wonder if the HRB recommendations get lost because they go to the ARB. One thing that was disturbing to me, this is probably going to change now that the HRB is meeting on Thursdays, is I used to see projects go to the HRB on a Wednesday and the next morning go to the ARB. That meant there was no time for minutes, no time for anything. There was no time for digestion of any of the materials or even provision of the materials. The ARB was not well or adequately informed even by the HRB referral or recommendation to the ARB. I'm hoping that we're not doing that anymore with the Thursday meetings now. Also that it's not one Thursday and then an oral presentation that's brief. Some of the projects are complicated. I don't know if HRB Members want to comment on any of that or Staff wants to comment on any of that. One last comment that I see in my notes here is that, to be clear here, everything in Palo Alto is not historic and we all know that. We do have a number of significant resources that we're obligated to preserve and protect. We're a stronger and more culturally rich community for doing that. As an indication of what is happening and has been happening. In the last Inventory survey, Coleridge in Old Palo Alto was identified as a potential historic district, but no more because we've lost too many of the houses. I don't know if anybody has anything to say. We've spent our time. Does any Board Member have anything to add? Or Council Member or Staff? Enough said then. Thank you all very much. Council Member Scharff, I didn't give you an opportunity, but you weren't here for the first part. TRANSCRIPT Page 21 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Scharff: No, I'm fine. Thanks. Mayor Holman: Thank you so much. Appreciate your time and your efforts. We look forward to a more proactive future. Thank you so much. Council took a break from 7:20 P.M. until 7:34 P.M. 2. Study Session on Public Safety Building and Site Selection Process. Mike Sartor, Public Works Director: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Members of the City Council. I'm Mike Sartor; I'm the Public Works Director. We're here tonight to talk about the Council infrastructure priority project Public Safety Building and the work we have done on identifying potential sites for that building. With us tonight we have Brad Eggleston, to my right, the Assistant Director of Public Works, who will be doing the presentation. Also with us is the Project Manager, Matt Raschke from Public Works. We have Staff from the Public Safety groups, Chief Burns, Director Dueker, Geo Blackshire from the Fire Department, and others. We have our Real Property Manager, Hamid Ghaemmaghami, who has been working diligently on trying to identify both private and public sites. We also have Tomm Marshall from our Utility Department that can talk about the PG&E site if you have questions on that. Lastly, with us is Michael Ross from Ross Drulis Cusenbery, if there's any questions you might have on the Public Safety Building program. With that, I'll turn it over to Brad, and he'll walk through our presentation. Thank you. Brad Eggleston, Public Works Assistant Director: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Council Members. We're happy to be here for this Study Session on the Public Safety Building project this evening. On this first slide, you can see what we'll be running through. A little bit of the background, status and some of the past efforts, what we've been doing to review available sites. We're very interested in hearing the Council's initial thoughts on the sites and also other issues that should be considered in the evaluation process. Then we'll move onto Council feedback and questions. This is the project page for the project that was shown at the Council Retreat in January. It shows some of what we're hoping to make some good progress on getting started this year. A key take-away from this is that we're planning a Public Safety Building, not simply a police station. What you see in the goal is we are including here all of our public safety functions, the 911 Center, the Emergency Operations Center and the Fire Department administration in addition to some of the core police functions that you would expect. James Keene, City Manager: I'd like to point out that this concept of a water feature of that nature was from an earlier era. TRANSCRIPT Page 22 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Eggleston: A little of the background. The current building is under- sized, inefficient and doesn't meet standards for an Essential Services Facility. The City's been working now for about 30 years on planning for a new Public Safety Building. The good news is this process has now led to the new Public Safety Building being fully funded with existing City funds and being named as the top priority in the City Council's Infrastructure Plan from June 2014. Now that the funding is in place, our goal is to move as swiftly as possible to make progress on this project. With everything we know and we've learned, further delay just prolongs the risk to the community while essentially further limiting our options and increasing the eventual cost of the project due to escalation in project costs. Some of the recent work that has occurred. This slide reviews our most recent efforts starting with the Blue Ribbon Task Force that published its report back in 2006. I just wanted to quote that report. It opened by saying "The Task Force recommends in the strongest possible terms that the City proceed expeditiously to build a new Public Safety Building." There were some efforts made at that point and some progress. Due to issues with funding due to the recession, we were not able to proceed. The Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission in 2011 also concluded that a new Public Safety Building should be built as soon as possible. The Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission, or IBRC, also looked at work that had been done to evaluate rebuilding the Public Safety Building on the current site next to City Hall. They recommended against doing that in their report. They also recommended against splitting functions that could potentially be housed together in the Public Safety Building into multiple sites. Most recently, as I mentioned, the June 2014 Infrastructure Plan included the Public Safety Building as its top priority and included a total project budget of $57 million which we now have in place. That includes $10 million for land acquisition. A little more on that. I wanted to point out that the project budget of $47 million excluding potential land acquisition is based on this building program size of 44,848 square feet. I wanted to touch on that and emphasize it a little bit, because that square footage number is one that's evolved significantly over the years with the work on the project. There have been multiple efforts to reevaluate and reduce the building size. That occurred during the Blue Ribbon Task Force's tenure. That was also continued by Staff in the aftermath of the IBRC's work and the Study Sessions with Council that occurred. All of those efforts resulted in that 2012 building program figure of the 44,848 square feet. What is in that program? This slide is a little hard to read. There's some detail there. It shows the categories of functions and space needs for the Public Safety Building that add up to the 44,848 square footage figure. Basically that figure is based on estimates that were done of potential 2032 staffing levels. It includes, as we touched on, the Police and Fire Department administration, 911 Communications Center, Office of Emergency Services and Emergency Operations Center as well as the TRANSCRIPT Page 23 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 various functional areas that are needed by the Police Department. It also includes a community room. Along with that, there was developed the parking program for the Public Safety Building. That includes the parking needs for the Police and Fire Department vehicles and for Staff and visitor parking that add up to the 191 parking spaces that are estimated to be needed. I also wanted to point out that just a little under $10 million of that $47 million project figure is for the construction of a parking garage that would fulfill those needs. This next slide shows some of the important criteria for the new Public Safety Building. Probably most importantly, the building needs to meet Essential Services Standards to provide continuous operation during and after a major earthquake. That's one of the significant problems with the current building, other than its small size. The building should provide for all of its parking needs. It should be planned to meet the City's needs for many years to come. We're thinking at least 50 years in the future. It should be operationally efficient for the functions that will be conducted there, but also be both secure and inviting to the public. When we talk about essential services and the need for a structure to be operational during a major disaster like an earthquake and after, I'll just touch on this briefly. These requirements for facilities come from the Seismic Safety Act of 1986. They apply to facilities like Public Safety Buildings, fire stations, hospitals, etc. that are deemed to be essential. With that background, we'll transition to the site evaluation work that's been done by Staff since the approval of the Infrastructure Plan last year. We did look back at the list of sites that were considered by the Blue Ribbon Task Force along with other sites that have been suggested since that time and some additional sites that were suggested while we were in the process. Of these, 22 were included on a list for evaluation during the work we've done in the past year. That list of 22 sites and some information about them was also included in the Staff Report. We also engaged the services of a commercial real estate broker to try to identify potential sites, but that person wasn't able to identify any suitable sites. From the 22 sites, Staff narrowed the list to three City-owned properties that you see on this slide. While each one of these properties has its own individual challenges, the thought here was that proceeding with one of these sites that are City-owned was the most likely course of action to allow the City to move forward with the project relatively quickly. I just wanted to point out that Staff is also open to considering other options that may be suggested. Our hope would be that if there are other sites that we are to consider, that we manage to do that on a parallel timeline that would keep us with completing the site selection this year and being able to move forward with the design and environmental review phase. The first of the three sites that we have is a 3.5 acre PG&E switching station that's located on West Bayshore Road. We've had some preliminary discussions with PG&E where PG&E indicated that the remaining switches on that site could be moved across Matadero Creek to the City's Colorado TRANSCRIPT Page 24 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 substation, which would then make the site available for the Public Safety Building. Some very preliminary cost estimates for what that might cost is about $7 1/2 million. To pursue this, we would need to work with PG&E on a feasibility study that would confirm the feasibility of doing that and determine what the schedule would be and a more refined cost estimate. I should also point out that this site is in the tidal flood zone and is expected to have soils that would be subject to liquefaction. Neither of those things are ones that you would hope for in a site for a building like this, but both of them are things that can be mitigated in the building's design and would, of course, have cost implications for the project. The next site is the former Los Altos Treatment Plant site which is located on San Antonio Avenue east of Highway 101. You can see here there's three areas there. The one we're talking about now is Area C which is 2.6 acres and already has the environmental clearances that would allow us to proceed with a project there. Areas A and B can't be utilized without going through significant environmental permitting and mitigation that needs to be completed as part of a specific proposal for a project there. The 2.6 acres of "C" is the one that's currently available that could be developed quickly. The LATP is jointly owned by the General Fund and the Refuse Fund, so that's a nuance. With its location east of Highway 101, it has the same issues of being in the tidal flood zone and liquefaction. The third site is Parking Lot C-6 in the California Avenue area. It's located between California Avenue and the County Courthouse. The parking lot itself is about 1.2 acres. The site could potentially be increased to 1.5 acres if the Sherman Avenue right-of-way that's between the parking lot and the Courthouse was to also be used, if that street was to be closed for that block. Under this scenario, the surface parking spaces that would be lost at Lot C-6 could be replaced by building a new parking structure on Lot C-7, which is just to the west of that lot, or one of the other surface lots in the area. There's a linkage here because, in the Infrastructure Plan, there's also $9.5 million designated for a new parking garage in the California Avenue area. If this concept moved forward, the funding could be used to build a larger parking garage than just what would be needed to replace the spaces on the existing surface lots and provide additional spaces. This site doesn't have the flood zone or liquefaction issues. It is significantly smaller than the others. You could expect that we would have increased costs for providing underground parking for the Public Safety Building parking needs. Another factor, the new parking garage would have to be built first before the Public Safety Building to avoid at one time losing the current surface spaces in both lots. Next steps that we're proposing. The next step would be to move forward with a site selection and evaluation study that would include these three sites we described and could also include other sites. Mike Sartor mentioned that Michael Ross of Ross Drulis Cusenbery Architecture is here this evening. He's worked with the City on this project for many years, and he's very familiar with the Police TRANSCRIPT Page 25 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Department needs and that 2012 programming square footage. He helped develop that. We would contract with him to help us in this site assessment work. We'd start by revalidating the 2012 program square footage numbers to see if there's any adjustments needed due to changes that may have occurred since then. For each of the sites, Michael Ross would create test fit and massing diagrams that would lay out how the program we have for both the Public Safety Building and the needed parking could fit on those sites and what approximately the building massing might look like to be able to accomplish that at the sites. The study would also include weighing a number of pros and cons for the sites, including issues like impacts on the project budget; how long it might take to complete a Public Safety Building for each of the sites and the differences between those; whether the particular site has impacts on operational efficiencies for the Police Department; whether there's potential for future growth that could be needed; the accessibility of the site to the public; and ability of the site to be appropriately secure. Those are some of the key ones that we pointed out here. Our thought was we would go through this exercise, then we would take the information that was developed and go through some public outreach steps to get community input. We'd complete a technical report and bring that back to the Council. Our goal would be to complete that report and have a site selection hopefully in the late summer of this year. That is the presentation. Mr. Keene: Thank you Brad and team for that work. If I might add, when we were working on the Council agenda, the original plan suggestion was to bring an award of a contract to the Council for Michael Ross to do more in- depth analysis of these three sites. In our discussions, we felt for a number of reasons we needed to have a Study Session before that decision was made. One, it's been a while since we've been before the Council. We have new Council Members who have not been involved as in-depth as prior Council Members. This would provide ground for a better briefing on this subject. Secondly, as Brad indicated, if there were other potential sites that for whatever the reason the Council knew about or wanted to be sure we looked at before we made the decision to go into things further, to do that. Third, even though we've been on a track to do the recommendations on three, it's quite possible that there could be enough difficulties with one or more of these sites that you might decide not to go into a further analysis on those. Let's not waste the time or the money; let's focus on the one or so that we think have a lot of advantages or more advantages. Along those lines, I'd like to speak to one of the proposals. This has nothing to do with the process we would have to go through. In my own view, out of the three that we have, even though as acknowledged they all have challenges, the Sherman Avenue site has more upside to it and less downside than the other two, when we talk about some of the pros and cons in the others as it TRANSCRIPT Page 26 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 relates to time and other issues. One of the values that we want to be paying attention to is that this is a community-based community. Our public safety folks ought to be within the community as far as access and even symbolism. In the current contemporary conversation we're having today in our society about police and community relations, it's important that we're sensitive to that; not that the location in and of itself answers all of those questions. There's a plus side to what Brad mentioned at the last minute about the need to proceed with building a parking garage at the Cal. Ave. location right away. We could move ahead expeditiously with building a public parking garage that could serve the public in that area while we are doing the more detailed design and building a Public Safety Building, which is a lot more. Lastly, it's something I don't think we've talked about. I do want to acknowledge the shrinking of the program that has taken place over time to get us to this 44,000 square feet, having Fire added to the list. I appreciate that work. That was done before. I would remind the Council that several years ago, when we didn't have any money and we were planning, we were designing a building to fit on a Park Boulevard site. This had nothing to do with the Jay Paul project. It predated that. That was about a 1.7-acre site. It was very close to the size of this one. The last thing I would mention is that the initial parking program identified this 191 spaces, of which 114 are for visitors and Staff, which seems like a lot. This was pre-TDM and other mindset about how we ought to be dealing with our parking and transportation issues. If we're in a location that has access to transit, there is the potential to build a parking garage that could serve more general public needs in addition to this building. That's something for us to be thinking about when you're comparing one location to another. We'll have more to talk about, but I did want to share those initial thoughts with you. Thanks. Annette Glanckopf: Good evening, Council. Our passion, a Public Safety Building. I'm going to highlight a couple things and maybe say something different from the letter I sent you. 2015, Public Safety Building, Number 1 infrastructure project. 1997, Council directed Staff to initiate the process for site selection and the construction of a new Public Safety Building. Actually it started, I think, closer to 1985. We all know about the Palo Alto process, but this project must break every record on the books. Today we had another wake-up call. I don't know if you heard about the earthquake in Concord. Actually there were eight small quakes in the last couple of days over there. So let's get moving, no pun intended, on the Public Safety Building before this inevitable disaster hits our City with this building being pancaked, roads impassable and no phone service. By that, I don't need to remind anyone that our 911 Call Center is in the basement. The time is now. I challenge this Council, the brightest minds that we've had in quite a while, politically savvy, to make it happen during your term. Make it your TRANSCRIPT Page 27 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 legacy. You've solved the huge problem of funding; that stopped us for many years. Now let's hire the consultant who's been working on the insides of this building for 17 years and select a site. Frankly, I think we can do better than the three selected in the Staff Report; although, the Sherman Avenue is the best. Let's think out of the box. We could rent space in the Stanford Research Park as Fire Station 2 is done. We could build on the site of the Red Cross building. We could even do eminent domain. I know that's a pretty thorny issue. Let's update costs. It's been a number of years since the Blue Ribbon Committee. The prices are old, and we need to update. Finalize the function for the building. It must last for 50 years or so. When they moved into this building initially, they knew it was already too small. It's a little bit too soon for architectural design, but do not build a glass building like the Jay Paul one. This should be a solid structure. In closing, don't build in the Baylands, in a flood zone where liquefaction is possible. It's time to get this building built. Make it your legacy. Let's make this Number 1 high priority project happen. Let's get shovels in the ground during your term. David Bower: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Council. How nice to see you again. I was a member of the 2011 Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission with Council Member Berman, and specifically was part of the Public Safety subcommittee and worked with the very talented Staff in Public Works and the Police Department. I would like to encourage you tonight or as quickly as possible to select the Sherman Avenue site and move forward with the design and construction. The other two sites are problematic because of tidal flooding as Brad pointed out. We certainly don't want to have a Public Safety Building that's east of 101, because the three bridges that cross 101 are pre-current earthquake technology and are likely not to survive or at least be useable. The most favorable bridge would be University Avenue, and even that doesn't meet current standards. The PG&E substation site, if you've ever dealt with PG&E, you'll know that they move at glacial speed, even though we're losing our glaciers. I can't imagine that site would be available in seven years. Finally, this project, as the former speaker and Staff have noted, has been going on for 25 years. When I was on the Public Safety subcommittee, the backup plan for a failure or loss of our current Police Services Building is, or was when I was on the IBRC, parked out at the Animal Services Center and effectively is a trailer. A tent would be erected next to it, and that would become our Public Safety Building. We need to do better than that, and we need do it quickly. It's not going to get any cheaper. Let's move this forward as quickly as you can. Thank you. Bob Moss: Thank you, Mayor Holman and Council Members. This has been going on, as you know, for decades. I remember when Lynn Johnson made TRANSCRIPT Page 28 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 a presentation at a Barron Park Association in 1989, talking about the desperate need for a good Public Safety Building. We all agreed and we sent a letter to the City Council which, of course, was ignored because we haven't built the building. It's time we moved. Just a couple of general comments. First of all, the location should be in an area where after a disaster it's not cutoff from the rest of the City. When we have El Grande, there's a high probability that overpasses and bridges are going to be damaged. If you put the site on Bayshore or near the airport, there's a high probability that they'll be locked in there and not be able to get into the City when we have the big earthquake. For that reason plus the fact that I think we'll have a problem with ground shaking, both the proposed site on Bayshore and the one on San Antonio should be taken off the table. There are a couple of other sites we could look at. They have problems, but they're vacant. You might want to consider them, give them a review. There are three of them on El Camino. One of them is listed in the Staff Report. It's Site 11, 3600 El Camino. It's only 1 acre. The problem is that the woman who owns it is asking for a ridiculous amount of money. The Staff Report says $10 million. I think she probably asked for more than that. It's a small site and fairly expensive. There's the Thane property which is 4046, which is only about 3/4 acre. You can probably get that a lot more reasonably, but I don't know that it's big enough. The third one, which is pretty small by itself, is what I call Coombs Auto, which is 3495 El Camino. It's been vacant for like 35 or 40 years. It should be available. The only way sites on El Camino would work is if you not only bought the vacant land, but you'd have to buy and condemn some of the office buildings or retail buildings along side. That might be too expensive and it might be too disruptive. That leaves us with the Sherman Avenue site which has its own problems. The ones that are available, that probably is the best way to go right now. At the very least, take a look at the sites on El Camino, talk to the property owners, talk to the people at the adjacent properties, and see if you can get them there. The location, in terms of accessibility and ability to serve the community, is pretty good. Whatever we do, let's do it quickly. Herb Borock: This project has been going on for so long that the project as described by Staff is what it was originally, which is to have all the various Public Safety functions, the Police, Fire and Communications. At one point, it was reduced to just the Police without the Fire and Communications. For public relations purposes, the Police function was rebranded as Public Safety, because it sounded better and would probably get more public support. We're back to the original idea, which was to combine all of the Public Safety functions. I agree with the previous speakers that the sites on Bayshore and the Los Altos Treatment Plant are not good sites for this function. I believe that the site on Sherman may be too small. We do own a large site. We have 8 acres at Cubberley. With a site that large, it's possible to provide TRANSCRIPT Page 29 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 both for a Police building at the currently estimated size, for expansion possibilities, and for recreating the floor area for community services that is there now. Working with a larger site probably makes more sense than working with the smaller ones. In regard to the site that Glanckopf mentioned, which was where the Red Cross property is, which I believe it's lease ran out on June 30, 2013, those sites have never been owned by the City of Palo Alto. The City of Palo Alto had leases from Stanford. Following the 1965 Charter Amendment adopted by the voters, the Red Cross building lease was included in park dedication. When it became time to renew that lease in, I believe, 1976 , that site was removed from park dedication, so the Red Cross could stay there. It's 120 feet by 200 feet or 0.55 acres. The Red Cross building is next to MacArthur Park which is a little over 1 acre, 1.09. Between those two buildings and El Camino Real is dedicated parkland. None of which we own. We have a lease on the park until 2033. In exchange for extending the park lease until 2033, we gave up the leases on all of those income producing properties to Stanford. We're not even part of the real estate transaction for the Red Cross building, MacArthur Park or what used to be Holiday Inn. The Red Cross building is too small. It's a bad location, and we don't own it or have a leasehold on it. I would suggest you take a look at Cubberley. Vice Mayor Schmid: Just a couple of questions. It is nice to get the update of the number of sites that you looked at and comments on each one of the problems with them and why you have come down to the last three. There are issues with all of them, but the Council has committed to a Public Safety Building and approved funds for it, so it is time to move ahead. When we last discussed this, we spent a lot of time looking at space and space needs. You have summarized a little bit of the square footage needed and come up with 44,000. I know that's smaller than we started with, but there seemed to be agreement that the needs of Police, Fire, Emergency Services could fit in there. One thing we have not had a discussion about is, let me call it mobility. One of the striking things about the Police Department is response times. As a 911 call comes in, in a couple of minutes there will be a respondent on site. The way of doing that is the effective personnel are scattered through the City. They're not sitting in a police station. It raises the issue of how many times in the course of a day do policemen need to be at central headquarters. How much time is spent commuting? As we talk about increased traffic in town, to have a site isolated in a corner might mean you spend more time commuting, which doesn't make sense. If you could give a general idea of, given the range of Staff, how many people are scattered around town and how many times over the course of an average day would they be needed at the central headquarters. TRANSCRIPT Page 30 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Dennis Burns, Police Chief: Great question. Thank you very much, Vice Mayor. Dennis Burns from the Police Department. Every day our police officers begin their day and end their day here at the police station. They come in, they get changed, they load up their vehicles, they go to a briefing. With the advent of technology in our vehicles, essentially they're driving, as you said, a mobile office. They don't necessarily have to come back during the course of the day. There may be calls that bring them back into the station. A call to meet a specific victim or a witness for an interview or to return some property. They're not absolutely mandated to come back. In fact, our goal is to keep them out in the field as much as possible, so they are available to respond to calls for service. They are available to observe and report things that are going on the community. As we acquire and deploy more and more technology, the goal is going to be to keep them out in the field as much, even more. To answer another part of your question, we have minimum staffing. Minimum staffing means that we'll have at least six officers on at all times. Along with that will be a supervisor and a watch commander. The supervisors and the watch commanders by virtue of their jobs, they'll be coming in to the station more often to handle administrative tasks, to meet with other City Staff, to work with communications. The patrol officers don't necessarily need to come back to the station, certainly not as much as before. We've purchased a new records management system which will allow us to go ahead and write our reports on our computers in our cars and beam that report, once it's completed, to a supervisor. The supervisor will review it and beam that report into our records management system inside of our building. That's going to be another reason we can have people out of the station. Quite frankly one of the jobs of our sergeants is to chase the officers out and make sure they're in the field. Vice Mayor Schmid: I assume detectives spend more time at the office. Mr. Burns: Excellent. They do. Depending on the nature of their job, a lot of the jobs are more office driven and they do a lot of work on their computers, following with fraud cases frequently. Burglary investigators, person and crimes investigators, they tend to spend time in the station and also in the field following up, working with the DA, going to court, interviewing people. Vice Mayor Schmid: In general, your conclusion of the site is commuting time is not an issue. Mr. Burns: No, it is not. We'd like to have a facility which is centrally located, that's accessible for the community, for people to get to easily. For TRANSCRIPT Page 31 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 the patrol staff which is the meat and potatoes of police work, they're out in the field. It's secondary for us where it is. Vice Mayor Schmid: Public coming with questions, do they usually do that remotely? How many people knock on the door? Mr. Burns: That's a great question. We'll track that for you by the next time we come back. We probably have between 50 and 70 people come in each day for a variety of things. They're getting their cars; they're getting property back; they're meeting an officer, meeting a detective, getting their vehicles back after it's been towed, asking questions, trying to resolve issues with a report; those types of things. Vice Mayor Schmid: Did you say 50 to 70? Mr. Burns: That would be a guess. We'll track that for a period of time. The next time we come back, we'll have some numbers for you over a period of time that we can explain to you. Vice Mayor Schmid: Thank you. Second question is disaster response, since we have all three units in one place, and security and safety of that building is important. When disaster strikes, you call in officers who are not there to come and help. You have other people coming in. It becomes a center of action, and you want to make sure you can respond. East of Bayshore seems to be a problem. If something happens to one of those bridges, the ability to get there and back into town would be an issue. It seems to me the Sherman Avenue has similar issues. If something happened to the Oregon overpass and remembering the '89 earthquake, when a disaster happens everyone hops in their car. If you have the employee density on the west side of Alma trying to flow to the east side of Alma, it seems to me emergency vehicles would have a hard time crossing that barrier. Any comment on the vulnerability of Sherman Avenue being closed down? Mr. Sartor: As you may recall, the Public Safety Building design that we were underway with back in the 2008 timeframe was at the Park Boulevard site. I would hazard to say that the vulnerability issues of that site and the Sherman Avenue site would be relatively equivalent. Vice Mayor Schmid: I would raise the same issue. It seems to me that El Camino would become a parking lot. Park Boulevard is a dead end. How do you get out of there? Mr. Sartor: As Dennis mentioned, and he might be able to elaborate on this, a lot of the emergency responders are out in the field already. Similarly, for the Public Works Department and the Utilities Department, we're located at TRANSCRIPT Page 32 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 the Municipal Services Center on the east of Bayshore already and would be able to mobilize. We were able to function out of there during the 1998 flood as well as the near flood in 2012. Mr. Keene: I apologize. I might not have heard it in the question, Vice Mayor, as it relates to a disaster event. In a routine environment, and Dennis can speak to this more, it's important to remember, one, we run three shifts a day. You've got six or seven vehicles that are going out. Many of those are going to be off-peak times. You've got evening shifts and some of those sorts of things. We're not talking about 30 police vehicles that have to get out at the worst possible time of day. Vice Mayor Schmid: I'm thinking of the disaster situation where you have six vehicles and you want to have 18 out. These others ... Mr. Keene: If we have a disaster, the police would take control of the traffic situation in many ways as it related to access and being able to get out and that sort of thing. Vice Mayor Schmid: I would think that's one advantage that the West Bayshore site would have; it does not have a natural barrier to get around town. A third question is just a small one. The Sherman Avenue one talks about closing the right-of-way on Sherman. That is a busy intersection at the rush hour. You're going to close Sherman down? Mr. Sartor: That is not absolutely necessary. One of the things we will do in this next step will be to look at the C-6 lot to see if that would be needed or not, and also work with our planning and transportation folks to see what potential impacts there might be to closing off Sherman. Remember the Courthouse is just across the street, so there is some synergy there. Vice Mayor Schmid: We are building around that area, and there are concerns about movement on a normal day. I'm sensitive to that. Thank you. Council Member Berman: Thank you, guys, very much, Staff, for all of the work that you guys have done over the past 30 years, it sounds like. I was talking with a resident and a friend the other day, and he asked, "What are you most excited to work on over the last year and half of your first term on Council?" I talked about a whole bunch of stuff, but I ended up deciding upon finalizing the plans for a new Public Safety Building. We already have plans for two new fire stations; those are moving forward. This remains the big X factor of the bigger projects that David Bower and myself and 15 other residents worked on on IBRC in 2011 and 2010. This is a great step. There's clearly a lot of work to do. As we have the conversation today, we'll TRANSCRIPT Page 33 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 realize that no site is going to be perfect. We really shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the really good in this instance. We've done that for a long time. This has gone on for numerous reasons, but it's time that we come to a decision on a site and mitigate whatever issues might exist and start moving forward so that we can develop this new Public Safety Building for Palo Alto for the next 50 years. This is a really exciting step. I have a couple of questions. This might have come up when we discussed this; although, I wasn't on Council in 2012. On Slide 6 you guys have the 2012 Public Safety Building space program. Staff has done a good job of becoming much more efficient with space and shrinking the size of the Public Safety Building from the first proposal. I took a trip down memory lane and was reading the Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission report that we put together. It cites the San Mateo Police Department and how they combined their Emergency Operations Center, a training room and a public meeting room into one flexible space where technology enables conversion on- demand for any of those uses. I don't know that we have a joint Emergency Operations Center and training room, but we have a separate community room. Was there any discussion about merging those three into one room that can have multiple uses? Mr. Sartor: Yes, there was some discussion. We are also including in our tasks for this siting to look at that again. Council Member Berman: Might as well be as efficient as we can with space. I'll ask a couple of questions about other possible sites before I talk about the sites that have been proposed. Can you elaborate a little bit on what conversations we've had with the Stanford Research Park and with Stanford University about potential sites in the Research Park? The Staff Report touches upon it a little bit. How creative have we tried to get in terms of possibly finding a useable site in the Research Park and on the periphery as close to town as possible? Mr. Eggleston: I wouldn't say that we've tried to get creative in this. We had a list of a few sites in the Research Park. When we made contact with Stanford, the question we asked was would they be amenable to working with us to try to identify a site or looking at sites that we had identified. We specifically mentioned that it could be a similar situation to the lease we have with Fire Station Number 2 on Hanover. I'm not the person who was in those conversations. Hamid Ghaemmaghami, the Real Estate Manager, might be able to add more. I was told that Stanford said they would be happy for us to use the Fire Station Number 2 site if we could use it for this purpose, but at this time they weren't interested in working with us to find a site. They essentially have no sites available, and they would be happy to TRANSCRIPT Page 34 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 put us on their list to watch for opportunities that might come up over the coming years. Council Member Berman: There was no discussion about we've got this site for a different purpose right now, but if we were allowed to have a Public Safety Building on that site, could we transfer the square footage from that site to a different part of the Research Park, any sort of those conversations? Mr. Eggleston: The one discussion that we did have was about the Stanford- El Camino Playing Fields that are leased by the City. We did raise the potential idea of would it be possible to site a Public Safety Building there and try to find a different site to place those fields. The answer was no. Council Member Berman: Was there any reasoning for their no or was it just a short email back? Mr. Eggleston: I think it was a phone call. That was no. Council Member Berman: They said they weren't interested in that. Anything to add, does that sound about right? Hamid Ghaemmaghami, Real Estate Manager: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Council Members. Hamid Ghaemmaghami, Real Estate Division. I contacted Stanford Real Estate Division by email and also by phone calls, going over certain sites. I asked them if they would consider allowing the City to use those for a Public Safety Building. Overall they were not open to it. Let me just put it in a summary format. It didn't go anywhere. Council Member Berman: Cubberley, I noted, was on the list of sites in the Staff Report. It was eliminated from contention based on the new lease that we've entered into with the school district. I've had at least one resident reach out to me and zealously advocate for us to take a look at that site. Has Staff considered the pros and cons, in this instance more particularly possible cons, there would be to having it at that site as part of the City's 8 acres, for instance? Mr. Eggleston: We haven't at this point. Our main reason was that, in the spirit of trying to find a site that we could proceed rapidly, it seemed that with the new lease and the requirements for conducting a Master Planning process with the school district, it just seemed likely that that would be a prolonged process. That doesn't mean we're not open to looking into it. It could be a site that we evaluate during this process. Mr. Keene: If I just might add to that. It's in the realm of possibility that a planning process could separate our 8-acre piece to allow this component. TRANSCRIPT Page 35 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 I'm saying it's possible. We didn't want to say it was out of the question. It begs the question that there would be multiple uses, of course, on that 8- acre site. A little bit of the planning for a Public Safety Building there would have more factors we'd have to be thinking about. In some ways some sense of joint use or reuse has always been one of the factors that we would be thinking about in the Cubberley process. There's a little more detail to why we thought it was a little bit more complicated. On the other hand, we own the property and it's there. Council Member Berman: Has there ever been any conversation with the school district about the possibility? Have they ever weighed in with their thoughts on it? Obviously, it's our property, but we have talked a lot about joint use for the whole 35 acres. Mr. Keene: No, sir. Again, as you well know, we have a new school superintendant. We've been working well together on the Cubberley site. We have certainly talked about the need to get the Master Planning process going this year. There's been receptivity in that regard, but we didn’t get into details. Council Member Berman: My last question on prospective sites would be, two more. First, the Red Cross site has been brought up. There was different feedback from different folks on what the situation is there. Can you guys explain what the situation is there? Mr. Eggleston: We've heard that suggestion. The two issues that kept us from considering it is it's our understanding it's dedicated parkland or at least a piece of it. It would take a vote to undedicate parkland, which seems like a fairly high hurdle. Separately, the fact that it's owned by Stanford and would be subject to a lease with Stanford. Those were the reasons. Council Member Berman: Lastly, somebody actually mentioned to me the other day, and we heard again tonight, the idea of eminent domain, which is always a very touchy thing. I'll preface that I'm not advocating for it necessarily. Has that been looked at, studied, used in other communities for a Public Safety Building? What have we done to take a look at that possibility? Mr. Sartor: I am not aware of any eminent domain proceedings for a Public Safety Building in particular. Michael Ross might. Before I go there, I know the eminent domain process is a very lengthy process and can be very controversial. It would obviously take a Council action to start that process. There would be legal ramifications as well. We haven't considered that as a tool. As far as I know, I'm not aware of Palo Alto ever invoking eminent domain. TRANSCRIPT Page 36 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Berman: Of the three options, the option that I have the biggest problem with is the one in the Baylands. I'll read a different section of the Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission report. I wasn't on the Public Safety subcommittee, but I was on the Municipal Services Center subcommittee. The second paragraph of our problem statement says the MSC site lies in a flood zone on the east side of the freeway. This location creates risks and exposures related to resiliency and disaster recovery. A damaging flood, earthquake or other catastrophic event could prevent or impede the movement of emergency response vehicles into the City and/or disrupt the City's Utilities Department's Emergency Operations Center currently housed at the MSC. A conversation that we had a lot on that committee was is it possible to move the Utilities Department's Emergency Operations Center from the east side of the highway to the west side for resiliency purposes. Given that, I'm not very interested in moving our Public Safety Building into that danger zone. Given that, we have better options both proposed tonight and probably even better options that we haven't considered. I'm not interested in locating the Public Safety Building on the east side of the highway. With what I already know, I wouldn't support that option. There are similar issues with the San Antonio site. I think, of the three, by far the best site is the Sherman Avenue site. I'm definitely open to other ideas and possibilities that colleagues have. Given the three on the table today, none of them are perfect, as I said earlier, but of those that aren't perfect, Sherman Avenue is by far the best. Thanks. Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. I concur with Council Member Berman. Particularly the San Antonio site is a long way away and over the bridge on the other side of the freeway. The City Manager's comments about the value of being central and accessible are well taken. I thought I saw somewhere, probably in The Daily Post or something like that, that you folks had looked at the VTA lot at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino at one point. Did you guys look at that one? Was it too small? Mr. Eggleston: I'm not recalling looking at that site. Too small. Council Member Filseth: Just in the spirit of out of the box stuff, the school district actually owns an option on 2-4 acres on Ventura in between Alma and El Camino. It's run down. I think it's not being used for much right now. Did you guys look at that one at all? It's probably a mile south of the Sherman site. Mayor Holman: Council Member Filseth, you said it's not being used for much right now. Council Member Filseth: Is it a day camp there or something like that? TRANSCRIPT Page 37 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Scharff: It's a daycare. The Ventura school site, is that the one you mean? Council Member Filseth: It's 3990 Ventura Court. Lalo Perez, Chief Financial Officer: Mayor Holman, Members of the Council, Lalo Perez, Chief Financial Officer. It is owned by the City. It has an option for the school district to buy it back from us. It has certain conditions. It is heavily utilized. Palo Alto Child Care Center has its headquarters there. There's a child care center that they run there too. There's subleases of other child care centers and other offices that are there as well. Council Member Filseth: That answers that. Of the three, I would weigh toward the Sherman one as well. Council Member Kniss: I'll use my three minutes for something much less objective. My office used to be right in that area, in fact probably 50 feet away. That is the best area for a whole number of other reasons. It looks to me like you evaluated the 22 sites. You looked at them pretty carefully. Beyond that, Jim probably alluded to this as well, there's something about a police station or Public Safety Building being in a very visible location. That's very visible. We've just done a great job on California Avenue. You'll all be there tomorrow afternoon, I'm sure, at 2:30 to celebrate that that's done. The thought of putting a parking garage with this at the same site, which is something they really need on California Avenue, Greg Scharff will shake his head to that. It's really tight parking over there now. That would be a terrific cap to that entire area. It's very centrally located. I know we're worried about the traffic in that area, but there's no area that's without traffic. The Red Cross site is probably impossible given all of the different entities that come together there as well. I would feel strongly about that. I thought the same thing before. I even thought at one point you might look at the County land, which is on the far side of the Courthouse, but that probably is not available. I'm going to guess if it was available, you would have looked at it. You know the one I mean, right? I would be in favor of pursuing that site, and look forward to what's going to happen next. It's how many years now? Sixteen, 20. Thirty. That's a lot of years. It really is. Go forth, do good work. I'll be anxious to hear what happens next. Council Member Scharff: When I was reading these three, I also had strong negative reactions to the LATP site and the Colorado substation site. The LATP site, because it was in the middle of nowhere. The Colorado substation site, because the General Fund loses $850,000 which is a huge deal. One of the ways we're funding these things is through a new revenue stream. I forget how much we're making out of the TOT, but I thought it was like $2.5 TRANSCRIPT Page 38 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 million a year. To give away half of that simply made no sense to me. You said three to four years in the Staff Report. When you say three to four, my experience has been it's four. We should not look at that site, the Colorado substation. That would be a lot of effort, a lot of work, and a waste of Staff resources. The LATP site, if there's anyone who wants to tell me that this is a good site, I want to hear about it. If it's not a good site, and it didn't strike me as one, we should just forget it and move with the Sherman Avenue site. I've heard from a lot of the California Avenue merchants that parking is an issue there. If we do this right and we started construction as soon as possible on building a new parking garage, then the fact that we lose this space makes a lot of sense. I like the Staff Report thinking out of the box a little bit. As much as we talk about saving retail on California Avenue, we're not going to do that through any mechanism other than subsidized rents, if we want to be honest with ourselves. The locally owned businesses on California Avenue over the next 10 or 15 years, probably sooner than that if things go the way they are, could very well be forced out by higher rents. There would be an opportunity to have retail in the parking garage on the ground floor. That was thinking out of the box, and I wanted to commend Staff for that. That was a real solution to some of the pressures and concerns we have on California Avenue. We could solve a lot of issues by doing this. The money was interesting. We have $10 million that we talked about building a new parking garage. Then you were going to spend $10 million to buy new land which now seems unrealistic given where land is. That means there's $20 million to throw, to some extent, at this issue of how you would like to deal with it. That gives us a lot of opportunities to make this work for all the stakeholders on California Avenue. It's about outreach and making sure that people understand what we're doing and that everybody will be better off if we go with that. I would advocate for moving full speed ahead on the Sherman Avenue site. I don't see any other opportunities out there. I would be prepared to argue for eminent domain in choosing the right site. Given how much money that would cost, I don't see it. I would encourage Staff to get this done and to go forward with the Sherman Avenue site. I am concerned about closing Sherman Avenue. If we can fit it on the parking lot, that would clearly be my preference. Closing that street creates all sorts of controversy and concerns and traffic studies and all of that, that we probably don't need in terms of slowing this down and getting into problems. To the extent we can do that, I would advocate for that. It was a great Staff Report. Let's focus on the Sherman Avenue site. Council Member Burt: First, I want to go back and see if I can establish a baseline. On the 2006 Blue Ribbon Task Force, how many square feet was that project sized at? TRANSCRIPT Page 39 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Sartor: My recollection is it was about 50,000 square feet, but it didn't ... Male: It was more than that. Mr. Sartor: It did not include the Fire administration as you recall. At that time, we did not have the Office of Emergency Services. Council Member Burt: Fifty-plus I thought it was. What was in my head was 52, but it goes back a while. For an equivalent group of services, we would be maybe at 42,000 or something like that. It's about a 20 percent reduction in the size. I want to put that out there as we look at the final requirements on square footage for meeting the program needs. Council Member Berman spoke about the perfect being the enemy of the very good. There was a lot of back and forth going back a long time on how big of a expansion we really needed. I've been a big supporter of a new Police Building. Going for the perfect size has been one of our biggest barriers on two levels. One, the cost of construction and, two, the availability of sites. I've made this pitch a number of times which is if we look at what we need rather than what we want, we could get this thing built. We're on the cusp of it now. I want to have us continue to look objectively at what we need, so we can get that done. On Slide 6, we have 2032 staffing; that's total staffing. I don't see reference points on other points in time. What's our current staffing on this same slide? What were we in 2006 when we had the Blue Ribbon Task Force? At 2006 they were comparing a trend line. I don't know whether on the police side Chief Burns or anybody has that information of what's our current total staff and where were we a decade ago or so, so that we understand those trend lines. I remember conversations about what we were anticipating in growth trends in staffing, and that we were going to size this thing for the next 30-plus years. I think that was anticipating certain growth trends in staffing. I don't know how that theoretical pattern is comparing to what we're really experiencing over the last decade. The Chief may have some answers or insights. Mr. Burns: Thanks for the questions, Council Member. First I want to apologize. I didn't catch this error up here. It says for 2032 staff 152 people. I think that number is going to be shy. In 2015, we have 156 people. That does not take into account approximately ten people for Fire administration and another four folks for our Office of Emergency Services. If you factor in another 17 years, I'm going to give a guess of 10-15 percent more people. I'll stop there. Council Member Burt: Do you know how the 2016 number compares to 2006 or 1996 or anything like that? TRANSCRIPT Page 40 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Burns: We've actually shrunk. I believe in 2003 we had 173 employees in Police alone, not including OES, not including Fire administration. It's been primarily as a matter of cost cutting to make the bottom line. Council Member Burt: We had a reduction, but we're anticipating a future growth. That's going to be one of the things we're going to need to look at, what are those assumptions that are driving that anticipation that we'll go up again fairly significantly in staffing. I don't know if this question is better directed toward Brad or who. On that same page, we have the first line which is Police, Fire administration, personnel and training. Right below it we have Fire administration. Is that double counting or are those referring to two different groups of people on the Fire administration? Mr. Eggleston: I'm not certain. I'm pretty sure that it's not double counting though. This is a summary of the program, and the program itself is much more detailed than this and contains specific square footage numbers for every single person that has an office or any office space in the facility. Council Member Burt: It's confusing. Although the Chief has already clarified that that total staff number that we have here is low, we're going to want to get those different point in time comparisons. We also have a training space under that first line, part of the 2,573 square feet. We have the ECO/training room. Are these two different training areas? Ken Dueker, Director of Emergency Services: Good evening, Mayor, Honorable Council Members. Ken Dueker, Director of Emergency Services. Part of the reason that you see these different conflated terms is the fact that there's a 30-year history of trying to make compromises and fit different programs in. Some of the nomenclature has drifted. On behalf of Staff, I apologize for the lack of clarity. The EOC can and is currently being used for training from time to time. It has a different function than what's envisioned up above. In fact, some of that is also Staff space for training. Perhaps Lieutenant Lum from the Police Department might want to come up and give further clarity. I want to point out that the EOC is not a training room. Council Member Burt: Is it under the new facility design intended to be dual purpose? Mr. Dueker: It depends on how we do the layout. There will be a core of it that will not be dual purpose. In the new model, we keep our EOC active during normal business hours as an adjunct to the 911 Center. A larger breakout space when we collect other Staff could be dual-purpose or multipurpose. TRANSCRIPT Page 41 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Burns: With regard to the first line, it says Police/Fire admin, personnel, and training. Personnel and training is a division for Police that has about six employees working it. The fourth item down, EOC training room, that would be one location as opposed to a division. The EOC is obviously part of OES, Office of Emergency Services. Council Member Burt: I concur with a number of my colleagues. I've got real trepidation about the Colorado West Bayshore site. My concern is that it is in the floodplain. We could elevate the building and address the building itself, but it's the access to the building in the event of a flood that would concern me the most. I do have concerns about the remoteness as well as the appropriateness of putting the Police Building down at the LATP site. On Cal. Ave., that's an interesting site. A couple of comments. I agree that closing Sherman is problematic. My reason for real concern is, what's the street right next to Sherman? By the Courthouse. Birch, no, no. Grant I'm talking about. That's a one-way street. That means if cars are on Park and need to get over to Birch, say to get onto Page Mill, if you close Sherman and they're south of Cal. Ave., they have to go to Sheridan. Sheridan left turn onto Birch is already a very dangerous spot, that I don't think left turns should be allowed today. It's one of the most dangerous intersections there, and not too many people dare to use it for that purpose, because people are taking an off ramp from Page Mill at pretty good speeds. Unless you can solve that circulation problem, I wouldn't go down that path on Sherman. If it wasn't for that, I'd be open to it. That's not a high-volume street, but there's a circulation issue in that whole area. Maybe there's some other solution out there for it. There are a number of these issues that will be coming up and that we've addressed in the past of why aren't we rebuilding the site here, why can't we do it in stages, and all those different things. I want to make sure that we're not only getting those formerly addressed questions out there for the public. For many members of the public, this is going to be a new conversation. It feels like Groundhog Day for a lot of us. For others, it's going to be fresh. We're going to need to address all of those things that sound like they're legitimate alternatives on the face, and there are reasons why they've been considered several times and determined not feasible. We're going to have to get that info and not just a FAQ list. We're going to have to figure out a way that we push this information out there for the public. At the Sherman site, have we had either consideration or discussions with the County about shared parking? They have all surface parking there. They have a lot of land there. Other than closing Sherman, is there a possibility that we would build some structured parking that would serve both their needs and our needs perhaps on their land? I don't know whether they'd be open to it. They have a lot of land there that was laid out in an era where the land value and criticality was lower. I did want to speak to the Cubberley site. At Cubberley we have a lot more demand for that TRANSCRIPT Page 42 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 area, both our land and the school's land, than we're going to be able to meet. Adding the Police Building would further take away from what we could do at that site. It's too little land to begin with. On top of that, I don't think the location is ideal either. It's not very centrally located. I would not support that. I share with the City Manager questions on the parking program for the Public Safety Building, this 114 visitors/Staff. It seems like a high number. Once again, these kinds of things are driving a limitation on the alternatives that we can consider. I encourage that. I look forward to having that in the next discussion. Council Member DuBois: As a new Council Member, this isn't Groundhog Day for me yet. I may ask some basic questions. My fundamental question is how much square feet is required. There's the 48,000 from June of last year; is that the need? How much square feet do we need? Mr. Eggleston: We can still evaluate that, and we plan to do that in our next phase. There has been a lot of work put into that over the years. I would expect that any changes that were made would probably be fairly minor. We talked about the Blue Ribbon Task Force number of about 50,000 square feet. I was just looking over the Blue Ribbon Task Force report again this morning. I forget the exact number, but I think it referenced them starting out with a number more like 65,000 square feet. That had been the number when the Task Force began its work. They actually did a lot of work to reduce that to the 50,000 number. With the addition of the Office of Emergency Services and Fire admin to that program, we're actually down closer to 45. Mr. Keene: We did a lot of work on the architectural program and the size. We went through lots of different alternatives. That program informed a building design that we even got close to 35 percent design drawings on the building. The program makes sense now. That being said, like any project, site or cost constraints or anything else could come into play. There are times you do value engineer your program down, because of those factors. Our thinking right now is that if we can accommodate this within the construction budget for now, this is the program that is optimal and makes sense at the same time. Council Member DuBois: On the 114 parking number, how much of that is Staff and how much is visitor? If you know. Mr. Eggleston: No, I’m afraid offhand I don't have that. Mr. Keene: I look back to Michael Ross. I don't think he's got that number either. Clearly, we all even instinctively share the concern that it seems like a lot. TRANSCRIPT Page 43 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Michael Ross, Ross Drulis Cusenbery Architecture, Inc.: Good evening, Madam Mayor and Members of the Council. I'm Michael Ross, principal at Ross, Drulis, Cusenbery Architecture. I've had the good fortune and opportunity to work on this project for a number of years. With that, I have a memory of the project and knowledge of the project. Tonight I have also fresh eyes about the project. I also bring lessons learned from other projects. To answer your question about parking, the parking is going to be subject to the program verification process that we will begin this effort just like the building is. To Jim's point, that's one of the things that's going to be a driver of the site. What did we learn before? The efforts that came before us really helped us understand this building. At 44,848 square feet, it's a compact Public Safety Building. How do we know that? Because we actually designed it twice, all the way down to every workstation, every locker, every piece of equipment, the EOC, the 911 consoles and everything. We really understand it in a very detailed manner. We tested the program not only against the mathematics of it, but also against the actual floor plate, the program stacking and on some pretty tight sites. One of the things that I was pleased about through that effort is we found we can make sites that appear relatively small, say 1 1/2 acres or so up to around 3 acres, that the program could be flexible and would fit all those sites. Council Member DuBois: You're getting to where I was trying to go with my question. Is there an assumption about how many stories the building would be? Mr. Ross: We worked with the Jay Paul Group as a consultant to them and resolved and reconciled some of the issues that were on that site. It's a 1.75 acre site. It has a combination of basement parking and surface parking. The parking demand for the Public Safety facility was based on double shift overlap. That's how you start getting this larger number. You have two shifts coming and parking at the same time as well as visitors as well as special events. We sized that 114 number that way. Council Member DuBois: How many stories was that? Mr. Ross: It was three stories over a basement. One of the things that drives the stacking of a building like this, stacking means the functional work groups are on the first floor, second floor and third floor, is that as you make a denser program, a three-story building, when you start applying the need for sustainable design and LEED, one of the things that you want to do is bring natural light deep into the building if you can. All of these buildings that we designed that were more compact, we also had a light well down the middle. That's being charged against the 44,848 square feet as well. In that regard, it was very efficient. TRANSCRIPT Page 44 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member DuBois: Thank you. We had 3 1/2 acres, 2.6, 1.5. How many acres do we need? I was getting to what Council Member Burt was getting to in terms of are we eliminating sites because we haven't defined it enough to what we need. The other thing I was expecting to see, again maybe this has happened in the past, was the characteristics of a good location, the metrics and criteria used to evaluate these locations. I do think geography is important and the perception of being in the community versus out on the edge, adjacent property uses, the transportation and circulation of the location. There wasn't much in the Staff Report. It just said we narrowed it down to these three. Were there formal criteria? Did you score the sites? Were those the only three that looked possible? How did you get to the three? Mr. Eggleston: I would say, Council Member DuBois, that we didn't get into that level of assessment at this stage. What's a little interesting is that when we worked with the real estate broker, we had provided them with some characteristics like that at first. I don't remember what all of them were, but they were things like being centrally located, having multiple entry/exit points in case of blockage of a street or something like that. Maybe there were a couple of other items. When we were first hearing back that there were no sites being identified whatsoever, we said let's not ask for those criteria at this point in time and try to see what's out there to get the biggest list possible and then narrow down from there. As I was saying, it turned out that we found no sites available. Mr. Ross: I actually have a list of site evaluation criteria that we would apply to these sites. If you would like, I could go over some of them. It starts with location; supporting appropriate response times; size; cost and availability; relative environmental complexity; convenient, safe access to public streets; consideration of manmade and natural hazards; site perimeter security; ability to integrate patrol vehicle traffic and police operational requirements on the site; allowance for security setbacks; ability to house the entire program within an Essential Structure; ability to accommodate and secure patrol vehicle and Staff parking; ability to provide a floor plate geometry and configuration which optimizes departmental adjacencies; neighborhood and zoning compatibility; and supports sustainable design goals. When we go into this process, we will look at all that as well as issues that have to do with neighborhood and things that are very important to this community. Relative to the Sherman Avenue, we'll approach Sherman Avenue, should we embark on this together, and view it as two sites. One with the closing of Sherman and one without and what does that do. We would provide two options. It would be yes or no, and you would see the pros and cons of both. TRANSCRIPT Page 45 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member DuBois: I know we're running late; I wanted to get through some more questions. That definitely helped. It just seems a little backward. I know you're going to go into detail on those criteria, but I expected an estimation against those criteria. It sounds like there weren't any sites that met the criteria, so we got the list of everything possible. There are a couple of empty lots on El Camino. I saw that there were some comments that there was concern that it wasn't the best economic use of that land. Some of those lots have been empty for a long time. 4120 El Camino is the one with the big billboard on it. 3600 El Camino has two adjacent properties that are fairly run down as well. Again, you may have already looked at them, but I wanted to throw those out there. I was going to say the same thing that Council Member Burt said about Cubberley. We have too many things that want to go in there. I was interested in the Palo Alto Square One. It's 15 acres, a central location. Can we negotiate harder on that? What would it take? Was it the same Stanford Research call where they said they weren't interested? Did we talk to them specifically about Palo Alto Square? Mr. Ghaemmaghami: Hamid Ghaemmaghami, Real Estate Division. We're dealing with Stanford since it's a large organization. It's not like you're dealing with a private landlord that can make a quick decision. When we contacted their real estate division, everything that we brought to their attention, the response was, "We need to discuss that with our land committee." It wasn't something that they could make a decision quickly. After contacting them several times, I thought dealing with Stanford would be something better, that could be done at a higher level if you're trying to set up a Public Safety Building on their land. Most of the responses were "no, that's not going to work," "we have plans for that." They were not open to working with us diligently to help us with this process. Council Member DuBois: Do they own Palo Alto Square? Mr. Ghaemmaghami: Yes, they do. Council Member Burt: They own the land. Council Member DuBois: We would have to negotiate with the leaseholder in that case and Stanford as well. Mr. Ghaemmaghami: A lot of Stanford properties, they own the land. Developers enter into land leases with them. At some point, if the lease runs out, then the building reverts to Stanford. I'd also like to point out we talked about eminent domain a little bit. I've done a lot of eminent domain work. I worked on the University Circle project (inaudible) and in Oakland I assembled 41 parcels for the Uptown project. In the eminent domain TRANSCRIPT Page 46 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 process, if you're interested in assembling anything on El Camino, then you need to have your CEQA document set up before you can exercise eminent domain. For that it really takes a lot of political vote. When we were looking at parcels over Palo Alto, one of the problems is there's not that much land that comes up for sale. You all know that. The second thing is that if you're going to do site assembly, are we willing to exercise it? If you can't enter into an agreement with property owners, is there motivation to exercise eminent domain to assemble parcels? Sometimes on El Camino you have parcels that are owned by not one person, but maybe three different landowners owning adjacent properties. I just want to point that out to you. Council Member DuBois: A question for Staff. What's going on with the Courthouse? Is it being completely utilized? It seems like it's not very busy. Mr. Ghaemmaghami: Several times we heard that they're thinking about not using the Courthouse. I contacted the County about a year ago, asking them if they were thinking about vacating it. He said, "No, not really." Tommy Fehrenbach and I talked about it again. We didn't get a clear answer. I don't think they're in the process of vacating it at this point. Council Member Kniss: No, they're not. Council Member DuBois: Commissioner Burt beat me to the punch. There's a huge empty parking lot right across the street. It'd be great if we could talk to them further. If we split some of the parking and put multiple parking levels near the Courthouse and then not block Sherman and maybe get some space on that parking lot. I'm the liaison right now to the California Avenue merchants. They are unanimous in that they want more parking as do the residents in that area. We would need to replace all the units lost as well as build additional units. I'm a little bit worried that we're talking about a monster garage if we take a parking lot away to put on a Public Safety Building. The City Manager's comments about maybe there would be parking on the Public Safety Building lot. We need to look at all these parking lots and figure out how we maximize them. None of the sites seem great. It seems like we're coming to consensus around Sherman Avenue. On the PG&E site, I share the same concern about loss of revenue. I go back to how many acres do we need and could you peel off 1 1/2 acres and still get half the revenue from PG&E on the remaining 2 acres. That's complicated and would probably take a lot of time. Thank you. Those are my comments. Council Member Wolbach: Thanks to the Staff, to the Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission and also to the members of the public who have come to speak tonight and have been involved in this for a long time. It can't be TRANSCRIPT Page 47 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 said enough how much we appreciate all the hard work. Council Member Burt mentioned earlier the importance of being ready to answer and proactively putting out information, preemptively even, around questions that people in the public will have, especially those who have come to this issue late. People like myself. As an example of that issue, I'll probably ask a couple of question which my more experienced colleagues probably already have the answers to. This is a Study Session. If my colleagues have thoughts on these as well, please feel free to jump in. On Cubberley, we don't need to spend a lot of time. I'm not a huge fan of it, because of the location being at the periphery of the City. I like that it's in my end of town, but there are probably better things we can do with that site. We got a pretty good answer from the City Manager before, but the Staff Report did say that the lease renewal essentially got in the way. I was curious on that specific aspect. What about the lease renewal got in the way of it? Policy-wise, I'm not sure it's the best site either. I was hoping I could get a little bit more clarity on that. Mr. Keene: I don't know if that's a historical artifact or something else. Do you guys know? Council Member Wolbach: As you mentioned before, it is still a possibility, but maybe not ideal for a variety of reasons. The Cal. Ave. region, you look at the map of Palo Alto and you're looking at centrally located. That's important. Obviously we have police out in the field and we have fire stations around the City, but I do like the idea of something being not terribly far from Cal. Ave., not terribly far from the crossroads in the middle of Palo Alto at El Camino and Page Mill. That also brings up some of the sites that Council Member DuBois alluded to earlier. At the risk of rehashing these, I want to make sure I'm comfortable that we've thought more about these; 20, 21 and 22 on the list. I'm not very familiar with this site, the 2390 El Camino Real, on the edge of College Terrace. Palo Alto Square again, and also 2600 El Camino Real. We talked a little bit more about Palo Alto Square. The 2390 El Camino Real and 2600 El Camino Real, how outside the realm of possibility are those? Mr. Eggleston: For the fact that it didn't seem to be for sale; 2390 El Camino Real I'm talking about now. Although we hadn't set up a hard and fast rule and said we wouldn't look at anything below a certain size, 0.8 acre did seem to be too small. The other question was 2600 El Camino Real. That was a location that wasn't on our original list. We had an interested citizen put forward the idea that it might be a suitable site. It got added to the list. In the end, because it's another Stanford-owned site, we didn't seriously pursue it. It's an existing 1950s era building that would probably TRANSCRIPT Page 48 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 be extremely expensive if not impossible to retrofit to Essential Services Standards. Council Member Wolbach: This is where my colleagues who have been more involved in this and also Ken Dueker might have thoughts as well. As one of the new guys on the Council and being new to this issue, not that I'm advocating in favor of splitting them up, but where are the real harms and what would we lose as a value for the services and for the City if, worst case scenario, we decided to go for two separate sites that were smaller, easier to get for the real estate reasons and split Police from Emergency Services or from Fire, either three separate sites for three different components or two separate sites? What would we lose if we did that? Just looking at a backup, worst case scenario. Mr. Eggleston: I wouldn't try to speak to the operational issues. We did some work looking at that back in 2012 when the program was finalized and we came down to the 44,800 square foot number. Part of what was looked at there was some alternatives, potentially splitting off certain functions that didn't need to be in an Essential Services Facility to be housed offsite somewhere else. Functions that were looked at were the parking enforcement unit and the property and evidence. One of the alternatives where it looks like we were looking at potentially shaving 6,500 square feet off the size of the Public Safety Building, we found that we would reduce the cost by about $4 million. It was less than 10 percent, maybe on the order of a 7 percent cost reduction. Council Member Wolbach: Marginal gains financially. It looks like Ken Dueker might have something to add on this one. Mr. Dueker: I would address the operational efficiencies. Council Member Wolbach: That's really the question. Mr. Dueker: You have a fiscal disadvantage. The operational disadvantages are actually manifold. Now you go from one central site that you have to protect and build to Essential Services Standards and all that good stuff to possibly more than one. You have the transaction costs, if you will, of having people separated by distance. One concern that exists in the realm of the Emergency Operations Center and the 911 Center, as we move towards looking at all the possibilities, we want to make sure there wasn't just a random reason that all of our Public Safety Buildings to date put the 911 Center next to the EOC as part of a core Public Safety function. It wasn't just for convenience; it was for operational efficiency, protectability and cost savings. The marginal cost savings that you get don't amortize or TRANSCRIPT Page 49 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 pencil out when you look at the total cost of ownership of the facility. Thank you. Council Member Wolbach: I appreciate that. A question maybe for the City Manager or others. Along the same lines, what do we lose by moving Emergency Operations away from City Hall and away from the rest of City government? Not saying that we shouldn't keep them right here, but considering what general location in the City. Mr. Keene: The same comment that Ken Dueker just made about adjacency and operational efficiencies extends beyond the Public Safety units to the organization itself. All of the benefits of centrality and co-location and that sort of thing are important. Even before a major disaster, we are in situations where we activate the Emergency Operations Center. That extends way beyond just first responders and we're back and forth between our regular day job and the emergency itself. It goes back to part of your earlier question about bifurcation. Those things can be done as a second choice, not as a first choice. I'm sure if we were in a situation where the only options we had versus continuing to stay in the situation we're in right now were to have sites that require that, then we would all agree Public Safety, management, everybody that we'd take that less than optimal union in order to have a modern Essential Services Standard building. We're not faced with that option. Our sense is that unless we got into some other issues that trumped them, we have a program, we have a plan and we have a cost that we think can be delivered and we have some locations that we think could work. It just tilts that way. Council Member Wolbach: I appreciate that. Looking at our options and looking at next steps. We don't have a lot of options in the Downtown area, so moving to another part of town seems reasonable and acceptable. You lose the benefit of being close to the rest of City government, but you gain the benefit perhaps especially if you move around Cal. Ave. or El Camino and Page Mill. If you move to that area, at least you're more centrally located for the City. There's something you gain in location; something you lose in location. That's probably an acceptable tradeoff. Going back to Cubberley or over at New Middlefield and East Meadow or any of the options by Bayshore, you're losing the proximity to the rest of City government and you're also losing the central location within the City. As far as location goes, those are not ideal. For the concerns that have been raised by a number of people about losing access in the case of an emergency by roads being washed out or bridges broken, the locations on either side of Bayshore are very problematic. I'm not crazy about any of those. Again, I keep coming back to around Cal. Ave., around Page Mill and El Camino. If we are TRANSCRIPT Page 50 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 looking at having Ross Drulis and Cusenbery study up to three or four sites, according to the Staff Report ... Mr. Keene: That was how we came into the meeting. You can't vote on this tonight, but clearly there's one or two of these sites that you just don't even think are worth the effort at this stage, that we can save the time and money in doing that. You guys don't disagree with that, do you? Council Member Wolbach: You're just looking at the list in totality and just wanting to make sure that we haven't ruled out any of the other options. Speaking only for myself, all the ones on the periphery of the City are out. All the ones by Bayshore are highly problematic again. If there is an opportunity, a need, a desire to look at more than a single site at Sherman, which of the highlighted options are definitely the best. We've heard a lot of concerns, important ones, that are probably manageable around circulation of traffic, etc. around Sherman. It's definitely at least currently the top site. I agree with that. If there is a desire or an opportunity to look at backup sites, my current thinking is that any other backup sites that we're looking at, any other alternatives should be in that general vicinity, even if that means picking up a conversation with Stanford, especially if we do encounter problems with Sherman that haven't already been discovered. Sherman's at the top of the list for very good reason. Really appreciate the work that Staff's done in getting us to this position. That is it for me. Mayor Holman: A couple or three questions. I missed something that I’m going to ask about in a minute. I agree with pretty much everybody here. The ones east of Bayshore are non-starters. The one on the PG&E site, because of liquefaction issues, is a non-starter. In a way I feel like we've been presented with three options, two of which aren't options. That's what it feels like. It feels like we've been directed to the Sherman Avenue site. You came up with these three for reasons that were clearly explained, but you understand what I'm saying. It seems like we've been presented with one possibility actually. I have a couple of questions, which other people have brought up. The Courthouse site, I heard Council Member Kniss say that the County has not abandoned that. They have, however, cut back services there. They vacated some offices and those are taken up by other, I've forgotten exactly what's there now that replaced those services. Maybe Council Member Kniss knows, not that it matters. I don't know how big that site is or if there's any opportunity there to co-locate. Was that considered at all? Mr. Sartor: Back when the Police Building Blue Ribbon Task Force did their work, there was some communication and discussion with the County about potentially locating a Public Safety Building on that site. We're certainly TRANSCRIPT Page 51 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 open to talking with them again, particularly as Council Member Burt suggested about doing some shared parking things to eliminate the impact on Lot C-6. We'll take that into consideration as we go through our evaluation process for the Sherman Avenue site in particular. Mayor Holman: That is a good idea. That was the idea that Council Member Burt had that City Manager Keene was nodding his head up and down about, the shared parking. I've never been by there when that parking lot was even close to capacity, so it is something that should be considered. I also have concerns about Parking Lot C in a couple of regards. One of them is, again to point back to Council Member Burt, we've reviewed projects, those of us who have been around long enough, and become aware of some of the traffic constraints and access constraints along Sherman. That's a real concern. That needs to be considered, rectified, mitigated, something of that nature. When we're talking about a 45,000 square foot building on this size of a parcel, are you thinking of taking up the whole parcel? None of that's been considered yet, because it's not designed yet. Are you looking at a three-story building? What are you looking at here? On 1 1/2 acres, are you looking at a two-story building? Are you looking at a three-story building with some open space and public spaces? It is a police station, a Public Safety Building. What are you thinking in terms of the design? I'm not trying to get into designing it tonight. The reason I'm asking these questions is because when you start reaching out to California Avenue merchants, these are questions you're going to get. That's why I'm asking what consideration has been given to this so far. Mr. Sartor: When the California Avenue site was looked at, again going back to the 2006 Police Building Blue Ribbon Commission, there were some sketches done. Mike Ross might be able to elaborate on it a little more, if you'd like. My recollection is the C-6 site would be a three-story building with underground parking. We didn't get past that in terms of massing. In this stage, we'll look at what the opportunities might be for open space and air and light and that kind of thing. Mike, do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Mr. Ross: Great question. It's likely it'll be a three-story building over a one-story basement, an operational basement, which means that the basement level of the Public Safety Building would have prisoner processing, evidence processing and things that support the patrol functions but don't necessarily need the light of day, so to speak. There would be underground parking. A model for that was the Jay Paul proposal. Three over one basement level of program and underground parking. A combination of underground and surface. TRANSCRIPT Page 52 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mayor Holman: You're not speaking then about perimeter, open space or a greenbelt or anything like that? Mr. Ross: We will. It's really important for this building to be a great neighbor to the Cal. Ave. area. One of the defining features of a Public Safety Building is it needs to have adequate security setbacks. In these security zones, they can be green; they can be storm water retention bio- swales. They also function as vehicle barriers for car ramming, things like that. You get multiuse out of the setbacks and green areas. Mr. Keene: We can have a lot of features. Mayor Holman: Regarding Site 8, a quick question about that one. It says it was eliminated due to long and uncertain property acquisition process. I wouldn't want to compare anything to the Post Office property process, but you're comparing it to that. Is that really what we're talking about? Is it truly that uncertain or how long is it likely to be? I don't want to delay this. The advantage that it has, from my perspective, is it's further away from California Avenue. It's still centrally located, but it's a bit further away from California Avenue businesses. That's why I’m interested in it. It's not the only reason, but it's the primary reason I'm interested in it. Mr. Eggleston: Hamid's telling us that we didn't actually have conversations with the County about that site. That's certainly something we can follow up on. Mayor Holman: I would absolutely recommend and appreciate that for reasons already stated. Other Council Members didn't comment on that very much, somewhat though. That's the disadvantage of going last. That would also give us more than one potentially viable site to be looking at. We've already said there's no point in going out and researching these other two sites that were part of the three Staff recommendations. If that could take us up to two, I'd really appreciate that. Especially if it hasn't been explored. Council Member Wolbach is nodding his head up and down over here. That is the end of my questions. My only other comment is I don't ever want to see again that the City's building a 50-year building. We should be building for much longer than that. Flexible functions inside, but we shouldn't be building 50-year buildings. It's probably some template that's been around or language that continues to carry forward, but let's not build for 50 years. Any other comments? Mr. Sartor: To follow up on your request on the County, we'll bring back information on that when we bring back the report. TRANSCRIPT Page 53 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Mr. Keene: I had three comments. I agree the County parking thing is a great idea. Secondly, there are aspects for the Sherman Avenue site that aren't just about transportation. The nature of the blocks in Cal. Avenue form the urban pattern. If we add things behind the main Cal. Avenue, keeping that fabric has a lot of value. I don't think we've mentioned, but we've talked about it many times, that this is something you want to do sooner than later. Time is really money in this situation. We've got a project that's got a $47 million construction estimate, if we didn't have the land cost on it. A year or two ago we were seeing 20-30 percent annual increases in the construction cost index. They may not be quite as high as that now. Even a 10 percent increase a year is almost $5 million, so we lose. That's something important to remember. I would invert the way we're talking about our situation right now. We going, "We don't have a lot of options." We're talking about one viable option. It's not that I'm trying to sell that one. At the same time, we're always talking about for the most part we're a built out City. We're responding to demands for other building to take place and saying, "Our City is really built out." We can't be acting like we're some vacant land place that ought to have a lot of options. We don't. We have some options where we own the land. That immediately saves us $10 million that could be reprogrammed for something else. It could be a for a second garage or doing something even better. Lastly, Council Member Klein was a big proponent of this amongst other Members of the Council. To the extent that we can get going sooner than later and there's anything we can do, even the design of a parking garage could be done in an interesting, artistic, creative way that could also enhance the quality, particularly if we were in that area. We shouldn't lose sight of that thought also. The issue of aesthetics has been on this Council's mind a lot, and there are opportunities there. Thanks. Mayor Holman: I appreciate what you're saying. The only thing about Number 8, that site, it sounds like there hasn't even been conversation with the County about what it might take or not take. Council Member DuBois: If Sherman's the site, I think you just said it. We need to see the plan for the parking garage at the same time. Action Items 2a. Policy and Services Committee Recommendation Regarding Changes to City Council and Standing Committee Minutes. Beth Minor, City Clerk: Good evening, Mayor Holman and Council Members. Beth Minor, City Clerk. I have a very short presentation for you, but no PowerPoint. On December 16th, Policy and Services Committee met to TRANSCRIPT Page 54 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 discuss meeting minutes. They voted 3 to 1 with Vice Mayor Schmid voting no to recommend that the City Council immediately move to action minutes and the DVD as the formal record of meetings. They further recommended that the full Council discuss whether to have only action minutes or to have sense or verbatim minutes completed also. The Municipal Code currently states that we are to take sense minutes of all meetings of Standing Committee and Council. Whatever your final decision is tonight, I will bring back to Council on Consent Calendar an updated Ordinance for adoption. As stated in the report, there were 72 agencies that responded to a listserv question about the types of minutes that agencies take. Thirty-five of those use action minutes and the DVD as the formal record. Last week I had a meeting with the Menlo Park City Clerk and the Saratoga City Clerk who also advised us that they only use action minutes and the DVD. They were not part of the listserv survey that was done. Those are two additional agencies local. The questions tonight are: Are we going to do away with sense minutes altogether? Do we move to verbatim minutes for all minutes as a backup to the action and video? Do we have the verbatim minutes as part of the official record? If so, would we continue to bring those minutes to Council for approval, even though they're verbatim and we wouldn't be doing any checking on them? Another option would be to do verbatim minutes when requested on certain items. Say a planning item, you may want verbatim minutes from Finance or Policy and Services. There might be other issues. If verbatim minutes are the choice, this would save my office hours of reviewing the sense minutes. This past weekend, I sprained my ankle and spent four hours reading the minutes to ensure they were correct. That was sense minutes. In the event you do choose action minutes and the video, we could potentially save up to $25,000 annually in our transcription contract. If we choose verbatim for certain items, I would choose to keep about $5,000 or so on a contract for an outside transcriptionist to do those minutes. That's the end of my presentation. I'm waiting to hear from you. Mayor Holman: I was trying to discern, I couldn't quite tell, who the Chair of Policy and Services was last year. I don't remember, and I couldn't quite tell. Council Member Scharff: (inaudible) Mayor Holman: I'm thinking it was. Council Member Scharff: I made the motion, so I'd be happy to give the presentation of what we were thinking. Mayor Holman: Feel free. TRANSCRIPT Page 55 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Scharff: The City Clerk did a fairly good job of setting forth what we talked about. The one thing I would correct a little bit is that we actually did not suggest at all that we go to sense minutes. There was no sense that we would want the Council to go in that direction. There are several issues that occur here. This came out a little bit with the City Attorney talking about there was an issue where sense minutes were done in one of the labor disputes where we had that. It turned out the sense minutes were actually incorrect and hurt us in a legal case. There was some downside in terms of doing sense minutes. We felt as a Committee that the important thing to do was to have the action minutes and the video as the formal record. When the City Attorney went to that hearing, what happened is she pointed out that the video contradicted the actual sense minutes. The judge said, "That doesn't matter. You adopted the sense minutes as the formal record, so the video is not the formal record." If we have the video and the action minutes, that's the formal record. That's the best. Mostly led by Vice Mayor Schmid, there's the issue of when you look at the video, it takes a lot of time and it's much easier to have verbatim minutes. Myself and Vice Mayor Schmid believe that we should do both, that the formal record be the action minutes and the video, but we should also have for the Council to read the verbatim minutes and everyone else could look at. That would not be a formal record. The City Clerk's Office wouldn't have to go through them, for instance, to make sure they were correct. We wouldn't have to vote on them to make sure they're correct. Any of that kind of stuff. They would be there. If there was any discrepancy, someone could go check the video which would be the formal record. That was the view of myself and Council Member Schmid. Council Members Klein and Price thought it was a waste of money and thought we should not have the verbatim minutes. That was what we left to the Council. Vice Mayor Schmid, if you disagree with what I said in terms of your perspective, I know you voted against it, you can obviously jump in. That was my understanding of where the Committee was. Vice Mayor Schmid: That's a good summary. My feeling, and it might be personal and I'm willing to accept the majority of the Council on this, is that verbatim minutes are valuable. I find, as a Council Member, when I look at what the Planning Commission does, what Parks and Rec does, to be able to look at the verbatim minutes, I can do that at a ratio of four to five times as fast as trying to get the same information on the video. Just from a practical, efficiency point of view, I find I go more often to the verbatim minutes, because they are easy to get information from. I use the video less. I notice on packet page 868 there are draft action minutes of various things that take place. 870, there was an action item and a discussion and you have listed everybody who talked to the action item. I assume if we go TRANSCRIPT Page 56 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 to video, there will be this list of people who talked and a place on the video where you could go and find so-and-so speaking. Is that right? Ms. Minor: Not specifically, no. The video, just as it is right now with the Media Center, would go to that item but not to the specific speaker. Vice Mayor Schmid: I would be more sympathetic if you had something like this and maybe Granicus does this, but every time a Council Member, for example, speaks, you have a location on the video that you can go to immediately. You're still left with the fact that watching a video takes three times as long as reading a transcript. You're still spending more time. If you had that kind of fine tuning, I would be more sympathetic to using that as an official record. Ms. Minor: I'm not aware of any, not even Granicus or MinuteTraq does that. When you want to mark a place in a meeting, you have to have somebody who goes in on the computer and marks when it starts, marks when it stops. Every time somebody speaks, you would have to do that. There is not a program that automatically does that. Vice Mayor Schmid: Then I'm less sympathetic. You say for $20,000 we can get verbatim minutes. Even if only a few Council Members are using them, a few members of the public, it seems a worthwhile investment. Council Member Filseth: The discussion that we've had with Council Member Scharff and Schmid makes lots and lots of sense to me. I find that on controversial issues I absolutely go back and read the minutes. If the DVD is the official record, that sounds great. Not having access to either the sense or the verbatim minutes, I'm probably indifferent to which one, would be a big loss for us. Council Member DuBois: For me, sense minutes have been a valuable tool. I haven't seen a problem with them. They seem to be a great summary, much quicker to read than verbatim minutes. The video is always there, but it takes a long time to watch a video. There's the legal aspect of the official record, but the minutes are also a tool for new Council Members, new Committee Members, for the public to know what's happening. It's important for transparency that we continue to have a written record that captures these meetings beyond the action minutes. There's two things: the legal side and the transparency side. On one hand, could we just say that the video trumps the sense minutes and just leave things as they are? From a legal perspective, the video is the record. I'm looking at the Ordinance. Section C says the minutes are sent to heads of the City, to the newspapers, posted in the libraries. Whatever we make the legal minutes, I TRANSCRIPT Page 57 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 would still want either the sense or verbatim minutes to be the public minutes that are posted on the website and distributed to the public. Ms. Minor: We can do that. If you choose to go to verbatim minutes, on the website we can put a link to the verbatim minutes. Council Member DuBois: It sounds like you're favoring verbatim from a workload perspective. Ms. Minor: From a workload perspective, yes, verbatim would be easier, because we would not go back and review them at all for sentence structure or anything else. They are verbatim; they're word for word and we would not have to review them. Council Member DuBois: I'm just curious. Not to get into too many details, but there's a lot of machine-based transcription these days. Is machine- based summary available? Ms. Minor: I'm not aware of any. Council Member Kniss: By the way, I still like sense minutes. How long has Palo Alto done sense minutes? Ms. Minor: I believe at least from 2001. That's when this Ordinance was ... Council Member Kniss: They did them all through the '90s. Ms. Minor: I know they changed it back at one point. Then back in, I think, 2001 is when they updated the Ordinance. Council Member Kniss: I don't know where we're going to go on this. Sense minutes are far easier for the public. Reading through verbatim minutes, if any of you have done that recently, takes a long time. You've really got to go carefully through them. They've got to be produced, and there's tons of paper involved and so forth, unless we do something like a reference to it. It sounds as though, except for maybe a short period of time, for at least 30 years Palo Alto has used sense minutes. I'm guessing. Ms. Minor: I don't know the exact length. Council Member Kniss: You can only go back to 2001. Herb Borock: I urge you to adopt either the verbatim minutes or the sense minutes as the official record, rather than a video or just the action minutes. In terms of workload, preparing sense minutes requires the person preparing them to make good judgment about what should be in it. The TRANSCRIPT Page 58 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 person reviewing it also makes a judgment about whether the first person's judgment was correct. The quality of minutes varies depending upon who's doing them. The Planning Commission, in my history, used to have a contractor who attended the meetings and was capable of spelling everyone's name correctly, was capable of preparing verbatim minutes with proper grammar and didn't leave blanks in the minutes when they said they couldn't hear what something was. Who is doing it and how they're doing it, whether they're listening to a tape of a meeting they never attended and whether they're capable of doing it is going to make a difference. In terms of the cost, I was trying to think of how much money, $20,000 or $25,000, is. I believe it's less than the annual housing cost for one Assistant City Manager, just to give a comparison of money. There was a time when the previous City Manager got the Council, at least for Standing Committees, to try and go to action minutes and said, "You'd have the videotape to look at." He neglected to tell the Council that those videotapes were only kept for a year and then were written over. It was only when someone from the public went to the Media Center and explained that to them that the Media Center started preserving the video record. We can't depend upon some other organization to be keeping the City's records, because they're not the City's records. They're the video records of the Media Center. Those are easier to alter or destroy than people having their own copies of the verbatim or the sense minutes. There were two types of sense minutes. I would guess it was in the 1980s when Gloria Young was the Clerk that she was encouraged to find some cost cutting. She decided that one way to do that would be have sense minutes that were not as extensive as the previous sense minutes. Some people tend to think that those minutes from the '80s were verbatim minutes, because of how extensive they were compared to more recent sense minutes. They were both sense minutes. Verbatim minutes are the better ones. Those of you who have been on the Planning Commission or those who attend Commission meetings and follow issues notice that it's possible to prepare verbatim minutes and for the Commissioners to make a decision of whether or not those minutes are accurate. It's better for the members of the legislative body who are here when those meetings were held to make a judgment that they have accurate minutes rather than having them produced 10 or 20 years later because someone wants to look at an item and there's no way of knowing if it's accurate or that's what occurred at the meeting. I would encourage you to spend the money, which I don't think is a large amount compared to other amounts. I understand what Council Member Kniss said about the difference of the ability to read sense versus verbatim minutes, but that has a qualification, that is, the quality of who is preparing those sense minutes in the first place. Thank you. TRANSCRIPT Page 59 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member Scharff: I agree with Herb that reading verbatim minutes, I don't think it's that difficult. It's the quality of the people that make up the sense minutes, and that varies dramatically of who you get. I don't know about any of you, but it's too much work to look at the sense minutes, go through the video and compare, unless something seems really off. What you often get in those is something that's slightly off in the sense minutes. Whereas, I can easily scan the verbatim minutes. We should definitely produce the verbatim minutes. MOTION: Council Member Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Schmid to move to action minutes and a video as the official record of City Council Meetings. Verbatim minutes will also be prepared. Vice Mayor Schmid: The important point is that sense minutes are an interpretation and they take some work to go through. At the extreme, you have the minutes that come out of the UAC in which a 2 1/2 hour meeting is turned into two pages. It is not helpful. Verbatim minutes give it to the reader to decide how to read, how much time, how useful it is. There are enough Council Members who find it valuable to go ahead. Mayor Holman: Can I ask a clarifying question before going to Council Member Filseth, who has hit his light? There's reference in the Staff Report to DVDs and the Media Center. I'm not comfortable with relying on, maybe this was just a for instance, a physical medium, because they go away, they corrupt, readers go away. I'm not sure what the long-term sustainability is of that. I was wondering if the intention is or is not to have the video record be what's on the Media Center's site. Also, can we take Media Center video and put it in the cloud as well? Ms. Minor: Mayor Holman, the video goes on the Media Center's website. It also goes on our MinuteTraq IQM2 website. When we move to the new way I want to have our website for the agendas and minutes, it will also be linked there. We are keeping the hard copy of the DVD. It will be in numerous locations. Mayor Holman: I feel better about that. Council Member Scharff: My intention on this is that if it's the official record, the City has a duty to keep its official records safe and available. I wouldn't say how to do it. I would expect the latest IT to make sure that our official records do not get lost. Council Member Kniss: Are the verbatim minutes in the packet? We get verbatim minutes every time. Yes, no? TRANSCRIPT Page 60 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Ms. Minor: When we send minutes out now, they come back sense. That's what you get in the packet to review. Council Member Kniss: I don't think it's answering the question. The verbatim minutes take pages and pages. Are they attached the way our minutes would be now? Ms. Minor: If you want them attached that way, they can be attached that way. Council Member Kniss: If not? Ms. Minor: Then the verbatim minutes would be kept on our S drive or some other safe location. A copy of the minutes would be put on our website and available. Council Member Kniss: I would find that doubly troubling then. I'm not supporting it. Council Member Filseth: I assume there's no reason, if we get out a couple of months and we all hate the verbatim minutes, we can't go back to sense minutes. Ms. Minor: That's correct. Council Member Wolbach: Just to be really clear, we're talking about four different things here: action minutes, sense minutes, verbatim minutes and video recording. Correct? Great. What we're talking about is eliminating the production of sense minutes. Correct? Ms. Minor: That's correct. Council Member Wolbach: Just relying on action minutes and the video as the official recording, and then verbatim or transcript minutes would also be prepared. Because they are not the official record, the verbatim minutes would not have to be printed out. We would not have to get reams of paper, they would not have to come to us for approval. We're not going to kill more trees than we already do. It would probably save a lot of paper. It would save work for City Clerk Minor. I will be supporting this. It is important that we have the action minutes for quick reference. If we can continue moving forward to improve the linkability of our action minutes to the video, that would be great. If there's an opportunity at some point without too much Staff time or contract cost to have the verbatim minutes, even though they aren't official, link straight to the video, you could click on something in the verbatim minutes in the future and it would link to the spot TRANSCRIPT Page 61 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 on the video where you can watch that, that would be great. That's not in the motion right now, but that's something we can work towards. I like the motion; I'll support it. I hope that Council Member Kniss will reconsider. Council Member DuBois: I don't find this motion clear in terms of what happens to the Ordinance. I would propose an amendment that Section C of the Ordinance would read, "As soon as possible after each Council meeting, the verbatim minutes would be distributed publicly." We're producing verbatim minutes, but it's not clear what is happening to them. Council Member Kniss: I didn't hear that, but that's good that that happens. Council Member Scharff: That's acceptable. Mayor Holman: You're saying produced. Do you mean publicly available? Council Member Scharff: The way I see this working is we give this broad direction. You clarified something that's important. The City Attorney comes back with an Ordinance. We see the Ordinance. We vote on the Ordinance. If we're unhappy with it, we can make changes. Council Member DuBois: The Ordinance would come back on Consent though Council Member Scharff: That's true. Council Member Burt: I wanted to get clarification on what this means, that verbatim minutes would be publicly produced. Rather than produced, you're talking about provided to the public. Right? Council Member DuBois: I'm specifically referring to Clause C of the Ordinance which is fairly detailed. Council Member Burt: What does that mean? Council Member DuBois: It says that copies will be made available to every Council Member, City Manager, Department heads, newspapers, be made available to the public on the front counter in the Clerk's Office ... Council Member Burt: Are these all hard copies? Council Member DuBois: ... the table and bulletin board in Council Chambers and City libraries except the Children's Library. Council Member Burt: You're talking about hard copies? TRANSCRIPT Page 62 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 Council Member DuBois: Yes. Council Member Burt: Of all these verbatim minutes. Do we have any idea how many pages this might be? Ms. Minor: Our minutes at this time are around 40 pages or plus. Council Member Burt: Of verbatim minutes. Ms. Minor: Of sense minutes. Verbatim would probably be longer than that. Council Member Burt: Much longer. I've got a problem; that's a lot of printing. Council Member Scharff: I agree with Council Member Burt. That's too much printing. Council Member DuBois: All the public will see is our votes in all these records. Council Member Burt: Most of the public has access to computers these days. If we as part of the action minutes also put on that hard copy clarity as to how to access the verbatim minutes, anybody can go and access them. I don't think we have to print 100-plus pages for all these different locations, to every Council Member. That seems like a waste to me. Ms. Minor: Mayor Holman, if somebody wants a copy of the minutes, they can also contact us. A lot of our public records that we're doing now, we will send them electronically to somebody. If they want a copy, we can print a copy for them rather than printing all these other copies. Council Member Burt: I would propose a change in wording to this, "Verbatim minutes would be made available digitally to the public and hard copies available upon request." That could be available to Council Members upon request too. Council Member Scharff: That's acceptable to me. Vice Mayor Schmid: Yes. As long as it's clear that it's the option of each Council Member how to receive a packet of verbatim minutes from the Council and from the Commissions and Boards, if they so want. Council Member Burt: This doesn't speak to Boards and Commissions. Mayor Holman: To go to Council Member DuBois' point, it does say in the Ordinance now that a copy will be forwarded to all these different entities. I TRANSCRIPT Page 63 of 63 City Council Meeting Transcript: 5/6/15 don't want to send paper to all these entities either. Right now, I guess the public could be broadly interpreted. "Digitally to the public" as opposed to "publicly available." I don't know if that makes any difference. "Publicly available" means everybody can access it. "Digitally to the public" sounds like we're talking about people out there as opposed to internally. I'm suggesting to the maker of the motion that instead of "available digitally to the public," "be made publicly available." Council Member Scharff: "Publicly available digitally." That's fine. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER: Direct Staff to return with an Ordinance updating Municipal Code Section C to read "As soon as possible after each Council meeting, verbatim minutes would be made publicly available digitally and hard copies available upon request." MOTION PASSED: 7-2 DuBois, Kniss no Closed Session MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Schmid to go into Closed Session. MOTION PASSED: 8-1 Scharff not participating Council Member Kniss left the meeting at 10:17 P.M. Council went into Closed Session at 10:17 P.M. 3. CONFERENCE WITH REAL PROPERTY NEGOTIATORS, CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT CODE SECTION 54956.8 Property: U.S. Post Office, 380 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto 94301 Agency Negotiators: James Keene, Lalo Perez, Hamid Ghaemmaghami, Joe Saccio, Hillary Gitelman, Meg Monroe, Molly Stump, Cara Silver Negotiating Parties: City of Palo Alto and United States Post Office Under Negotiation: Purchase Price and Terms of Payment. The Council reconvened from the Closed Session at 11:00 P.M. Mayor Holman announced no reportable action. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:00 P.M.