HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-01-30 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL
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Special Meeting
January 30, 2016
The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the El Palo Alto
Room, Mitchell Park Community Center, 3700 Middlefield Road Palo Alto at
9:05 A.M.
Present: Berman, Burt, DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kniss, Scharff, Schmid,
Wolbach
Absent:
Mayor’s Welcome and Overview of the Day
Mayor Burt: Welcome, everyone, to the 2016 City Council Retreat for
Priority setting and related matters. We have agendas. I hope everybody
has seen, as they walked in, the pink-sheet agenda and related materials.
As you'll see from it, we have really four segments to this. The first is laying
the groundwork through the presentation by our City Auditor of the 2016
Performance Report and National Citizen Survey, which very much will
inform the discussion around the interests of the community and where the
community perceives that we are as a City today and where we should be
going, what we need to address the most. Second, we'll go into our Priority
setting which will begin with an overview essentially of some of the major
things that were accomplished or in progress last year, and how that is
setting the stage for where we are headed this year. Also a discussion around really the process that we'll be using in this discussion today, and
then a Priority setting exercise by the Council with somewhat of a
presumption that given this is the same Council as we had last year, that we
are not expecting radical changes to our Priority setting. After lunch, we will
have a discussion around really how we would accomplish the work plan for
the year and what can be accomplished within the resources we have and
how we reconcile the Priorities with really our ability to get stuff done. Then,
we'll have a final discussion around what special meetings the Council wants
to have this year to address policy issues that really should be discussed
outside of a regular agendized meeting and trying to cram these things into
an hour within those regular meetings, but instead to have the opportunity
to be able to have thoughtful discussions and deeper considerations of some
of these important issues that we're wanting to grapple with this coming
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year. Finally, we'll have a brief discussion of setting breaks for the year.
That's the rough overview of the day.
Oral Communications
Mayor Burt: Before we begin with the first agendized item, we have an
opportunity for Oral Communications [video malfunction] to consolidate their
comments, members of the public, so that we can have as much of the day
as possible for the actual exercise. There will be opportunities on each
agendized item. I have one speaker. Bob, are you sure this is not otherwise
on the agenda? Okay. Bob Moss.
Robert Moss: Thank you, Mayor Burt and Council Members. You have a lot
of items to discuss today, but there's one item that's not specifically
mentioned but is quite serious and significant and it has been for decades,
going back to the '70s. That's the jobs/housing imbalance. As you know,
Palo Alto's had an imbalance, something on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 times as many workers as we have people that live here who are working age. What
this does is it creates the usual problems of traffic, parking, congestion and
a huge impulse to build more office space and retail space and commercial
space to house all the workers. I think that we have basically an insoluble
[sic] problem, because one of the things that's been happening over the
years, you probably have noticed it. Six or seven years ago, the assumption
was it was 250 square feet per office worker. A reasonable number today is
closer to 80 or 90 square feet. With office rents being as high as they are,
the City's paying almost $7.50 a square foot for the office space across from
City Hall. It's very high. The impulse is for the property owners and the
businesses to cram as many people in as they can which worsens the
job/housing imbalance. How do we get around it? One of the things we can
look at—it's on your master plan, Item 23—is the shuttle expansion. About
a quarter of the people who live in Palo Alto work in Palo Alto. Once upon a
time, Palo Alto had its own bus system. When we first moved to Palo Alto,
we were living on Moffett Circle, and there was a bus that ran right past the
house on Greer. When VTA took it over, they eliminated most of those lines.
We don't have an adequate transit system in Palo Alto. You're talking about
expanding the shuttles. I think that should be a very high priority. I think you should look at how people work, where they live, where they shop and
put in a shuttle system that really serves the residents and takes them to
where they need to go. That's the only way you're going to have any impact
on traffic and parking. As for the jobs/housing imbalance, I don't think
there's an answer. The only possibility—I think it's illegal—would be to have a legal restriction on the number of workers per square foot. If that was
legal, if the City Attorney says yes, you can do that, that would be
something to look at seriously. Otherwise, we're in trouble.
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Mayor Burt: Thank you.
Study Session
1. FY 2016 Performance Report and National Citizen Survey (Continued
From January 25, 2016).
Mayor Burt: On that note, we can now proceed to the Performance Report
and National Citizen Survey that is from our fiscal year of 2016.
Harriet Richardson, City Auditor: 2015.
Mayor Burt: Excuse me. It's noted here. I was wondering on that. 2015.
Harriet, would you like to kick it off?
Ms. Richardson: Sure, thank you. Good morning, Mayor Burt and members
of the Council. Harriet Richardson, City Auditor, here to present the 2015
Performance Report, National Citizen Survey and Citizen Centric Report.
This next slide is primarily to make sure you know which report is which.
Mayor Burt: Harriet, since we're going to have our backs to it, if you could cite the slide numbers as you flip to them.
Ms. Richardson: This is Slide Number 2. I do have a couple of corrections
as I go through the slides. They're correct on what's showing up on the
screen. For the benefit of all of you and what you have printed, I will point
those out so you can mark up your copy of the slides if you'd like. Just in
the interest of time, I have a slide, Slide 3, on the purpose of the reports
and Slides 4, 5 and 6 on the methodologies that I'm going to skip over this
morning and get right into kind of the meat of the presentation. One of the
things I'm trying to do in this presentation today is different than what I've
done in the past. In the past, we essentially took numbers out of the report
and just put them in a slide presentation. I'm assuming that most of you
have gone through those and seen those numbers already. Today what I'm
trying to do is show a relationship between the different reports and how the
numbers in one relate to the numbers in another. I think that's a more
useful way of interpreting what these results might mean. Of course, with
the Citizen Survey, we don't know exactly what's on people's minds when
they give their opinions. To some extent, we're making some assumptions
there. On Slide 7, the format of the Performance Report, we maintained the
same things that we did last year. Stewardship, public service and community was some things. The National Citizen Survey has eight facets.
Within those facets, I tried to put the data that we have from the
Performance Report into that, which is how you'll see I'll go through this
when I present the report. This year, we asked 11 custom questions in the
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Citizen Survey related to current City issues or initiatives, and I'll talk a little
about those at the end. Slide Number 8, this slide provides some key
demographics from the National Citizen Survey. One of the key points on
this is that this is a good reference point when you take into consideration
some of the information on the next slides and how the demographics may
affect how people respond. I pulled out some of the key ones in here just to
help put context to that. Slide Number 9, this is one of the slides that we
look at every year as the key quality of life questions that are in the National
Citizen Survey. There is a correction on this slide. Palo Alto as a place to
work for 2010 is 87 percent, not 84 percent. What I'm doing throughout
this presentation is comparing 2010 to 2015. I chose 2010 as a base year,
gives us five years of data, but primarily because some of the questions in
the Citizen Survey have changed over time, and that seemed to be a point
where I could get consistent information throughout for most of the questions. That's why I chose that one. One of the things that is interesting
this year in the Citizen Survey, for several of these, this is the first time that
the ratings have fallen below 90 percent. Palo Alto as a place to raise
children, the overall quality of life, Palo Alto as a place to retire has always
been somewhat low, but this year it was the lowest rating since we began
conducting this survey, with only 52 percent of the respondents rating it as
excellent or good. Palo Alto as a place to live, even though it's still in the
90s, it is the lowest rating. 2013 also got 92 percent, but we have generally
rated higher than that as a place to live. Slide Number 10, this is where I
begin going through the slides based on the facets and linking the Citizen
Survey with the data in the Performance Report. For the built environment,
a couple of things to point out here. Our capital expenditures have
fluctuated since 2010. They've increased 106 percent since then, but
they've been up and down in the years in-between. The Enterprise Fund
expenditures have gone down. They've been up and down a bit also, but
the key point is really how have we used some of those funds and what are
we doing to improve our built environment and the way we serve our
residents in doing so. One of the key things that Public Works has been
working on is trying to improve the quality of street conditions. We've invested more money in maintenance and street repair since 2010. Actually
in the years in-between, it increased even more than the 22 percent that's
shown here. The result has been that the Pavement Condition Index has
improved from 73, which is the low end of good according to the
Metropolitan Transportation Commission's rating scale, to 79, which is just below moving into excellent or very good. We've also decreased the number
of potholes that we repair annually from 3,100 to about 2,500. What's
notable about that is if your streets are in good condition, you're going to
have less potholes. Your target is really to get a good street Pavement
Condition Index so you can have a low number of potholes repaired. The
key point of that is that residents noticed. In the National Citizen Survey,
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their ratings of street repairs excellent or good has increased from 53
percent to 51 percent. Forty-three to 51, excuse me. On Slide 11, a little
bit more about the built environment. One of the key things on this slide is
how workload has increased over time. The number of building permits
issued—these are processed by Development Services—has increased 13
percent in the past five years, but the average days to the first plan check
response has declined 23 percent. Even though the workload has gone up,
they've improved their efficiency in processing those plan checks. Also, the
average days to issue a permit has gone down from 44 to 25 days, so both
areas have improved efficiency despite the increased workload. Same thing
in Planning. Planning applications increased 29 percent from 329 to 425.
The completed number of applications also increased by a larger percentage,
48 percent. Again, more productivity based on the greater volume. In
Planning, the ARB applications also increased, but the number of Staff-level applications is a greater part of that. Even though the number of
applications increased 34 percent, the average amount of time to complete
them didn't increase at as high of a rate. It increased at 23 percent. One of
the notable things in the National Citizen Survey is that only 40 percent of
the residents rated land use planning and zoning as excellent or good
compared to a 49 percent rating in 2010. Moving on to Slide 12 on
community engagement. One of the key things about this is how well do
residents engage in the community by volunteering their time. The question
asked how much they volunteered in the last 12 months, and that has gone
down quite a bit from 51 percent to 41 percent which is actually also
reflected in the City data. In the Performance Report, you can see that total
volunteer hours throughout the City declined 22 percent from about 22,000
to about 17,000. Some of those hours were the time that people
volunteered to help with restorative and resource management projects,
neighborhood park hours and library hours. Volunteer hours in all those
areas decreased. However, the National Citizen Survey shows that the
opportunities are still there. They only went down one point from 81 percent
to 80 percent which is within the margin of error and not considered a
significant change. Despite people recognizing that the opportunities are they, they are not actually volunteering as many hours. However, more
people did participate in the community garden program, about 30 percent
more than in 2010. Slide 13, moving on to the economy facet. I have a
couple of slides on this. The first one on Slide 13 is talking about the City's
expenditures. This slide is a little bit different than what you have in your slide handout. The first bullet on your slide handout says City operating
expenditures increased 8.3 percent. Those are actually the Enterprise Fund
expenditures. I've added a bullet that talks about the City's General Fund
operating expenditures increasing 16.7 percent. Some of the areas where
those funds were spent for staffing. FTE staffing actually declined 2.6
percent from 1,055 to 1,028. That is both Enterprise and operating.
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Temporary staffing increased 31, almost 32 percent from 95 to 125
employees. In the General Fund, you can see where some of that cost went,
that cost increase, despite the staffing decreases. That is on employee
costs. Salary increases were 1.9 percent, but overtime increased 2.2
percent and employee benefits increased 30 percent from 30.9 million to
40.2 million. A lot of that has to do with pension liability increases and other
employee benefits. Also dealing with the economy, shopping opportunities.
The Citizen Survey asked what the quality of shopping opportunities in Palo
Alto is. Seventy-nine of the respondents rated that as excellent or good,
which is up from 70 percent in 2010. Also asking about employment
opportunities, that has also increased. 66 percent of the respondents rated
employment opportunities as excellent or good compared to 52 percent in
2010. Both of those two items are kind of showing how the economy has
rebounded a bit since coming out of the recession. The next slide on the economy pertains to housing expenses. The median price of a home
increased 19.4 percent since 2010, from about 127,000 to 151,000. Most of
the survey respondents indicated that their housing costs have also
increased. 43 percent said that their costs were 2,500 or more in 2010. In
2015, that increased to 58 percent. What's included in housing costs is rent
or mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance and homeowners' fees. In
addition to that, only 8 percent of respondents rated the availability of
affordable, quality housing as excellent or good. What's not shown in those
housing costs I've separated out below. The average monthly utility bill
increased about 12 percent. If you go back to the previous slide—there's a
slide earlier that says that household income has increased 19 percent. The
people are paying a lot more for housing and utilities. The biggest increase
in utilities was with water. That increased 53 1/2 percent. On your slide, it
says from $43.89; that should be $44.89, to $67.35. Electric utilities have
stayed stable, and gas declined 26, almost 27 percent on the residential
utility bills. Moving on to the education and enrichment facets. The
residents to see opportunities for improvement for education and
enrichment. Although some of these have increased, some of these ratings
can still be higher. The availability of affordable, quality childcare and preschool ratings increased from 25 percent to 49 percent. Opportunities to
attend cultural arts, music activities, etc., increased from 74 to 79 percent.
Library services ratings increased from 82 percent to 91 percent. A portion
of that would likely be attributable to the reopening of the two libraries in
Palo Alto in the past two years. Continuing on with education and enrichment on Slide 16. The total library collection increased 44 percent
indicating that there is that increase in opportunity for education and
enrichment that residents saw in their ratings. However, the number of
check-outs declined 8 percent from 1.6 million to 1.5 million. That does
include electronic check-outs. It may mean that more people are spending
time in the library doing their reading rather than actually checking things
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out. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but the opportunity is there with
much more of the collection available. Also showing the increase in
opportunities to attend cultural art events, attendance at the Children's
Theatre performances increased 45 percent, or the number of performances
increased 45 percent, and the attendance increased 36 percent from about
25,000 to about 34,000. However, there was a bit of a decline at
Community Theatre performances. Those were down about 5 percent;
although, the number of performances were only down about 1 percent.
The number of visitors to the Art Center exhibitions increased 26 percent
from about 17,000 to almost 22,000 since 2010. Slide 17 starts moving into
the mobility facet. The Performance Report showed that City shuttle
boardings have increased 11 percent since 2010 from about 138,000 to
about 152,000, and that the Caltrain average weekday boardings in Palo
Alto increased 101 percent from about 4,300 to about 8,700, 8,800. Despite more people using public transportation, however, the Citizen Survey
respondents generally did not see mobility in Palo Alto as excellent or good.
Traffic flow on major streets declined 47 percent to 31 percent. Despite
more people using public transportation, they're seeing worse traffic flow.
Traffic signal timing declined 56 percent to 47 percent. Ease of travel by
car, ease of travel by public transportation and ease of travel by bicycle, all
of those saw declines in the respondent ratings to the Citizen Survey despite
the increase in public transportation opportunities. Moving on to the natural
environment facet, Slide 18.
Female: (inaudible)
Ms. Richardson: Yes.
Council Member Kniss: So that we have the overall picture, I think it's really
important to mention that as we go along. That was a time of real stress, I
think, in the community. We're quite the opposite at the moment.
Ms. Richardson: In the natural environment, what has changed since then.
Respondents to the survey that rated natural environment questions as
excellent or good, those increased slightly. Air quality increased.
Cleanliness of Palo Alto slightly declined one point. Preservation of natural
areas declined one point. Overall quality of natural environment increased two points. All of those are within the margin of error. The margin of error
for this report is plus or minus 4 percent, so you expect that to be within the
normal range. It's not really considered a change in terms of normal survey
protocols. However, City expenditures to operate and maintain open space,
parks and the golf course increased 53 percent from 5.8 million to 8.9 million. A good portion of that increase was for parks and landscape
maintenance which increased 30 percent, 3 million to 3.9 percent. Another
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area in the natural environment where there was a very large increase was
the number of native plants and restoration projects. That increased 947
percent from 11,000 to 118,000. Moving on to recreation and wellness. The
Citizen Survey asked a few questions about wellness, but we don't have
much in the Performance Report about wellness. Something to think about
as we move forward with questions we might want to add to that for
performance measures, see how we're doing particularly with regard to the
Council Priority related to that. This is Slide 19. The Citizen Survey ratings
of recreational opportunities as excellent or good remained stable or
increased slightly. The availability of recreational opportunities remained the
same at 80 percent. The quality of recreation programs and classes
increased 2 percentage points, and the quality of recreation centers or
facilities increased 5 percentage points from 81 to 86 percent. However, the
number of usage, the amount of usage of facilities as shown in the Performance Report has increased quite a bit. The survey respondents who
used the facilities in the last 12 months—the number who used recreation
centers and services increased from 60 to 65 percent. I can show that in
the next slide on some of the numbers from the Performance Report.
Visitors to neighborhood or City parks remained the same at 94 percent.
That's a high rating. It's showing that our parks rate well and people use
them. Moving to Slide 20, enrollment as shown in the Performance Report.
Enrollment in classes and camps declined 15 percent, but enrollment in the
children's performing arts programs increased 163 percent from about 3,000
to about 7,800. Enrollment also in art and museum and science programs
also increased. That was an 18 percent increase from 25,000 to almost
30,000. The results of this will be useful for consideration when developing
the long-range Parks, Recreation, Trails and Open Space Master Plan as well
as the future uses that will be considered for the Cubberley Master Plan.
Slide 21, these are the wellness questions from the Citizen Survey. As I
said, there really aren't performance measures to relate to this right now.
The residents do identify that there's opportunities for improvement in this
area. The scores aren't exceptionally high. The number of ratings of
excellent or good for availability of quality healthcare, it did increase from 62 percent to 70 percent, but still not as high as it could be. Availability of
preventive health service, from 67 percent to 78 percent. Availability of
quality mental healthcare was 53 percent in 2015 which was down from last
year when it was rated 63 percent. That was actually the first year the
question was asked, so I don't have data from further back on that. Slide 22, moving on to the safety facet. This is the last facet for the survey. The
number of residents who rated safety questions as excellent or good, I'll go
through a little about each of the safety components. The first one is quality
of police services. It increased 1 percent from 87 to 88 percent. Some
notable things from the Performance Report is that authorized staffing was
down from 166.8 to 157.6, but the emergency calls increased 58 percent
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since 2012. The average response time increased 20 percent by 57 seconds
despite the decrease in staffing. Urgent calls increased 62 percent, and
again the response time increased 1 minute and 45 seconds. Non-
emergency calls decreased, so more of the work is shifting into emergency
and urgent calls. The response time increased by 2 minutes and 35
seconds; however, they're still within their target response time for all of
these. Also, Palo Alto's violent crime rate is 0.9 per 1,000 residents which is
lower than the eight nearby cities that we use to compare with. In the
Police Department, what you're seeing is an increase in workload despite a
decrease in staffing but maintaining their rating of excellent or good.
Moving on to Slide 23. As with the Police Department, similar thing with
Fire. The residents rated the quality of fire services at 97 percent this year.
It was 93 percent in 2010. Again, their authorized staffing is down from 126
1/2 to 108. That's a 15 percent decrease. The number of their medical and rescue calls increased 19 percent; however, despite that they decreased
their response time by 17 seconds. All other calls for service, false alarms,
hazardous conditions, etc., increased 10 percent from about 2,900 to about
3,100. I can' break out the response times for each of those; we don't have
it broken out that way in our—we only have Fire, and I couldn't determine
exactly which the others were so I don't have that to compare. Again, the
same message: decreased staffing, increased workload and some improved
response times. Office of Emergency Preparedness, the citizens rated their
services exceptionally better. Those increased from 59 percent to 74
percent. We started tracking staffing in Fiscal Year '12, and it was 4 FTEs at
that point. It's now 3.5 authorized Staff. The number of presentations,
training sessions and exercises that they've done has increased 408 percent
since 2012. They only did 38 back then, and this year they did 193. The
last area of safety is animal control. The citizens rated the quality of Animal
Services higher this year at 80 percent compared to 76 percent in 2010.
The number of animals handled has declined 32 percent from 3,100 to about
2,100 which is primarily due to the loss of the Mountain View contract for
animal control services. Throughout these slides, you've seen a pretty
similar message: declines in staffing but more workload, often faster processing time. Fewer volunteer hours meant that there was a greater
burden on Staff in addition to the decline in regular staffing levels and the
increase in workload. Slide 24, there were 11 custom questions. We sought
to increase information about how residents communicate with the City. We
asked about how they would report a maintenance issue. The primary choice, the first choice of most people is to call [video malfunction] they've
engaged in some communication with the City in the past 12 months either
to communicate an issue or to provide feedback. Again the preferred
method is a phone call, 27 percent. Email was 24 percent. 52 percent of
the respondents said they did not contact the City at all. We've made some
efforts to increase the City's use of social media as an option to contact the
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City. I think the message here is maybe we need to do a little bit more
marketing of those as being options for residents to communicate with the
City if they want to get some information to us. We also asked two
questions about where residents go to shop and where they go to eat out.
We asked them about the frequency with which they go out, how often do
they go out in their neighborhood and other parts of Palo Alto and
neighboring cities or shop online or order take-out or delivery for food.
People do tend to stay in their neighborhoods. For both of those, the most
common response was that they stay in their neighborhoods to shop and eat
at least once a week, but they also go out throughout Palo Alto throughout
the month. The least preferred method for either of those is shopping online
or ordering take-out or delivery. Slide 25, moving on to the next slide. One
of the questions we asked was about how often residents participate in some
of the various City waste programs. A high percentage of respondents don't participate at all in the programs that are established to reduce specialized
waste going to the landfill. 54 percent rarely or never used the food scraps
collection program. 66 percent rarely or never do home composting. 61
percent rarely or never use the household hazardous waste collection
program. Again, there's an opportunity to do some marketing there, maybe
a little bit of surveying to see what would encourage people to participate in
those programs to help the City meet its Zero Waste goals. We also asked a
question about the quality of Palo Alto's trees and landscaping. We asked
them for various different areas of the City. The area that got the highest
rating was parks. 91 percent of the respondents rated those as excellent or
good. The trees and landscaping for schools, streets, residences when
you're out walking or biking rated 80 to 83 percent. The ratings were lowest
for businesses at 76 percent. Moving on to Slide 26. We asked two custom
questions about transportation preferences without a car. The first one was
if it was convenient which would be your preferred method of transportation
if you did not have a car. The most preferred method was biking, 81
percent, followed by walking at 70 percent. We also said if you don't have a
car and convenience is not an issue, then which would you take. Walking
was preferred at 92 percent. The free shuttle was 78 percent, and biking was 76 percent. We asked two questions about priorities for redevelopment
of Cubberley Community Center. The Community Services Department
plans to consider this information as they work with the Palo Alto Unified
School District in developing the Cubberley Master Plan. We gave some
options. The general ones were most people thought a community center would be the preferred option at 58 percent, schools at 52 percent and
playing fields was 51 percent. When we asked people open-endedly tell us
what you would like to see it used for, their preferred choice was indoor
sports and health programs, then outdoor sports and senior wellness. Our
last open-ended question on Slide 27. Again, Community Services plans to
use this information as they develop the parks, recreation long-range Master
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Plan. We asked an open-ended question asking residents to share one
improvement that could be made to the City's parks, arts or recreation
activities and programs to better serve the community. By far, the most
common response was have a bathroom and restroom at every park. There
were other comments that went along with that about how you have to
leave parks early because there isn't a bathroom there, that sort of thing.
Really we categorized these into a few different areas. 36 percent of the
respondents mentioned that as their preferred improvement. Thirty-five
respondents mentioned some sort of improvement to park spaces, and what
we're referring to is green spaces meaning the landscaping portion of the
parks, not the actual buildings or other amenities at the parks, which we
separated out into the next category which got 34 responses. Those first
three, quite a few of the responses pertained directly to parkland and
facilities. Twenty-eight responses pertained to improving art and culture, and then 22 responses were about classes and programs for adults and
seniors specifically. I think when you see the statistics we had tie that back
to the statistics for the Children's Theatre, you can see some people are
wanting more programs for adults. Slide 28, the Citizen Survey Results.
Last year we gave you a demonstration of the Tableau visualization
software. We have updated that to add this year's questions and responses.
It now has a compilation of almost 7,000 completed surveys since 2003.
We've included all of the survey responses. We don't have the questions in
there that were custom questions for any particular year. Due to size and
our ability to process the data, we also eliminated old questions this year
that are no longer in the survey. Again, that allows people to select multiple
variables to look at, for example, demographics related to a specific
question, who responded what to a certain type of question, so that people
can interpret the results of questions that are relevant to them. I've got a
link there that you can click on if you want to play with that and kind of see
how it works. We will also as always put the results on Palo Alto's open data
website. We put both the Citizen Survey results and the Performance results
there. Slide 29 has the links to our website, the link to the Performance
Report, National Citizen Survey and Citizen Centric Report and again the link to the Tableau visualization results. That concludes my presentation. I will
take any questions that you might have.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. We have until about 10 minutes after 10:00 to
have Council Member questions and comments. I don't have any speaker
cards from the public on this item. We'll need to be pretty brief and watch how much time we use on each of our questions and comments. Council
Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: Just briefly I want to say that this survey is
extremely important for Palo Alto. It's a high quality survey and very
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credible. It stands with the American Community Survey as the best
sources of data. It's something that we can and should use throughout the
year as we look at things. Today, our goal is to look at Priorities. This
survey, I think, gives a very clear and important measure. I compared the
last three years with the period 2006, 2010, and it's very clear where the
concerns are in the community. Traffic is at 33 percent, down 23 from the
earlier period. Travel by car is a 30 percent approval, down 20 percent from
the late 2000s. Public transit is at 42 percent, down 28 percent. Parking is
at 37 percent. These are some of the lowest scores of approval in our
survey. I think it clearly says, if you look at those indicators of mobility
around town, they are the most sensitive indictors of the community around
growth. Growth remains, I think, the critical issue that we should be
discussing today. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I'd like to echo that, again, it's one of our highest
quality surveys, statistical representative. I think a lot of the values in the
longitudinal data over the years, when you look at a percentage for any one
year, you really need to put it in context. I'd like to see, I guess, more of
the trending data in the report, I mean, next year. Things like shifts in
demographics. It's kind of striking that 35 percent of the people here have
been here less than five years. I couldn't find what that trend has been over
the years, so I don't know if that's significant or not.
Ms. Richardson: We put together the executive summary for the report, but
the National Research Center puts together the report itself based on the
data. On the demographic data, they only give us that year. We do have
copies of all of those old surveys, and we can put something together that
shows that shift over time which might be helpful to inform some of the
things that you're talking about.
Council Member DuBois: Is that in Tableau already?
Ms. Richardson: I believe that part is.
Council Member DuBois: I'll go look there. That'd be really useful.
Ms. Richardson: I'll double check that, but I believe we did put all the
demographics in there.
Council Member DuBois: My impression is we're somewhat a bipolar
community at this point. We had 35 percent less than five years, 35 percent
more than 20 years. We have 38 percent of people over 55. The same
thing on income. We had 30 percent of the people paying 2,000 a month or
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less for housing, and we had 20 percent of the people paying 5,000 or more.
I think that's part of what we're seeing in the community, kind of wild
differences in situations. It's kind of interesting to look at income diversity.
It's actually well spread; over every income category it's almost the same. I
think the other thing that we really need do is use this report over the year.
We're going through our budgeting process. We've got planning applications
up 30 percent. We're getting a low rating in that area. I think we really
need to look at how do we shift resources and Staff to the places where
we're getting this kind of feedback. I don't remember seeing it last year,
but thanks for the information on kind of head count versus consultants. I
think that was very useful to see. Again, we'll get to the budget. Even
though we have 30 fewer employees and we had approximately 30 more
consultants, our staffing costs continue to escalate, driven mostly by benefit
costs. Again, I think that's a long-term thing the City needs to figure out, how to manage those increasing costs. I think there are other areas. I
think we're probably doing it. Again, things like how people contact the City
in terms of saving Staff time, if we can add more and more self-service
things where people get the service they want but aren't necessarily
contacting people. I think that helps. There was a lot of good stuff here.
The City's doing a lot of great work. Just to call out one, the Utilities where
the water bill was going up, but the gas bill went down by almost the same
amount. Again, the value of running our own utilities to our citizens is
pretty clear. I had a lot more comments, but I don't have the time. Thank
you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I would associate some of my comments with what
Council Member DuBois just said. Taking this out of context is difficult, I
think. If we can put it into the context of what's happening, as I said, 2010
bad recession year. As you indicated in here, the number of jobs have gone
up dramatically. With the number of jobs going up which is what people
wanted to have happen, the traffic has gone up, the cost of living has gone
up. I think if we just look at this in terms of absolutes and numbers, it's
really difficult to tell where we're going as a City. Big jump in education, enrichment and library and that kind of thing which certainly indicates
people must have either more interests or some more free time. I'm not
sure what that means. I think that's a really valuable kind of information to
have. The one I was concerned about is on your Slide 22, the response
time. Perhaps we can get some feedback on that from Dennis or somebody later. That's always a concern in any community. The last one that I think
is so interesting is what people would do if they could. Since most of you
know I love to walk, they would walk more. I think that's intriguing. Pat
likes to bike. Whatever people like to do, what they're saying is they'd like it
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to be more convenient. I think this is good, but again this is such raw data
that unless we contextualize it and put it into what else is happening in our
community at the same time, especially jobs. I can remember people
desperate for jobs in 2010 and 2011. That really alters how you would see
this type of information. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Thanks, and thank you for doing this. It is a lot of
information, and it's very helpful to have especially in light of doing our work
plan for the year and setting our Priorities. I had a couple of questions. One
kind of goes along with what Council Member Kniss was saying regarding
safety. It's in the report, but on Slide 22 it's pretty clear. It talks about
emergency calls increasing 58 percent and urgent calls increase 62 percent.
I didn't notice a way to tell if those are daytime or nighttime or if they're
differentiated.
Ms. Richardson: I don't have that broken down that way. My guess is that
the Police Department has that information. We don't have it that way for
the Performance Report.
Council Member Holman: If we could do that, I think that would be really
helpful information to incorporate, because daytime emergency calls tend to
be a lot higher. It might be one indicator of how our jobs growth is actually
how it's growing. I don't know if there is refined enough data to know like
per 100 daytime employees you tend to get X number of calls. I don't know.
It could be one way to companion that information with our Business
Registry to see what our daytime population actually is.
Ms. Richardson: I was talking to Chief Nickel this morning about Fire. He
knows that his highest time for fire calls is during the day, in the afternoon.
My guess is Police is also tracking time of the calls.
Council Member Holman: We know that it's higher. It's just how much
higher and what the numbers are would be really helpful and informative for
us. On library, it was interesting that we do have these two libraries that
have come online in the last about 18 months or so, but library volunteer
hours have gone down significantly. If there's any information about that.
Also I think I'll just point out. If you have any comments, I'd welcome those. Area 4—it's identified in the report what Area 4 is—on pretty much
every area except for as a place to work, the numbers are either lower or
significantly lower than other parts of town. If you have any comments
about that, I would welcome those as well. The two points there.
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Ms. Richardson: That was the same last year. They tended to rate things
lower. One of the things about the survey is we ask the questions, but we
don't know why they respond that way. It doesn't ask people why they feel
the way they do. That would take some more in-depth questioning about
why you're responding the way you are. The Citizen Survey isn't designed
to do that, so that would be an extra effort to do that. If someone wanted
to do focus groups or something like that, that would try to get to some of
the heart of why they feel differently than the rest of the City.
Council Member Holman: Could I suggest that perhaps when we do our
neighborhood meetings that we might be able to collect some information
through that process. Any thoughts about the library volunteer hours being
down even though we've opened the additional libraries?
Ms. Richardson: I don't know, but I believe Monique is here and can address
that. Here she comes.
Monique LeConge Ziesenhenne, Library Director: Hi, Monique LeConge
Ziesenhenne. Some of these activities that we've done have been targeted
to teens. Teen volunteers are up; adults are down a little bit. We've had
some changes in Staff, Assistant Director leaving. He was in charge of the
volunteer program. We are actively recruiting again. We just have a lull.
We do have many more people participating. It might just be the number of
hours.
Council Member Holman: Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman.
Council Member Berman: Thanks, and thank you for the presentation.
Obviously all the data, you can spend hours looking through all this stuff. A
couple of questions have been addressed by other folks. One question I
had, I guess, was on page 15 in regards to the perceived increase of
availability of affordable, quality childcare. Preschool ratings increased from
25 percent to 49 percent which isn't what I hear from folks in the
community. Do we have any idea as to what might have caused that?
Ms. Richardson: I don't.
Council Member Berman: Maybe it was just that bad in 2010, that it's
gotten a little better.
Ms. Richardson: That may be. We don't collect performance report data on
childcare and preschools. The City doesn't operate those, so I can't answer
those.
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Council Member Berman: One thing that jumped out to me—I can't
remember which page it was on now—was methods that people like to reach
out and provide feedback to the City or log complaints. 311 wasn't
mentioned in the data you called out. I saw in the kind of tabs in the back
of the report that it was 3 percent of people used 311 to log a complaint
with the City or an issue, which seems to be something that we could work
on a little bit.
Ms. Richardson: Correct. You're talking about Slide 24. What I did was
point out the higher ones, and then I commented about some of the other
things that we're doing and that maybe we need to market those a little bit
more, talk to people about what would get them to use these other
methods. The phone app, also.
Council Member Berman: That's 311, exactly, the phone app. There's a lot
of opportunity there. One quick point about page, I think it was 8 of the executive summary, I guess you'd call it, of the National Citizen Survey.
What really jumped out to me, you've got the Palo Alto ratings compared to
benchmarked communities, much higher, higher, lower and much lower.
Obviously the areas in the lower section, ease of public parking, travel,
traffic flow, those are important issues and issues that we've been working
on a lot in the last couple of years. I think we'll see some gains made, I
hope, over the next couple of years. It was the section below that that
really jumped out to me, the much lower section which was availability of
affordable, quality housing, cost of living in Palo Alto, which is directly
addressed to housing, variety of housing options where we're much lower
than surrounding communities. I think that's an important area that I hope
we'll be talking about a lot more in the upcoming year.
Ms. Richardson: Correct. Just for clarification, if they're similar, they're
within 10 percentage points of our rating. If they're higher or lower, it's
between 10 and 20. If they're much higher or much lower, it means there's
more than a 20-point difference in how other cities rate their questions
compared to how we rated them.
Council Member Berman: That's pretty striking.
James Keene, City Manager: I just want to add. We're not benchmarking ourselves just to other communities in the area. This is on a national basis
of all of the cities. It's quite affected by the difference in cost of living and
issues around the whole country. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
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Council Member Filseth: Thanks. A quick question on page 17. Caltrain
average weekday boardings have doubled over the last five years, which
was interesting. What is in that number? Is that sort of everybody that
uses Caltrain or is it just Palo Alto residents taking the train to go
somewhere else?
Ms. Richardson: I am not certain. We'd have to do some research on that
to find out. I believe that that is reporting people who board in Palo Alto.
Mr. Keene: That's correct.
Council Member Filseth: If you got on the train in San Jose, came to work in
Palo Alto, got on the train to go home, would you be counted in that
number?
Mr. Keene: Yes.
Ms. Richardson: You would be counted when you board in Palo Alto.
Council Member Filseth: Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: I also want to say thank you for putting together
this report. Is this microphone working? I'll just bring it a little bit closer.
As has been mentioned, this is an extremely useful report, and it's also
extremely useful to compare it across years. I don't have the report in front
of me right now, but thank you, Council Member Berman, for pointing out
the very deep dissatisfaction expressed by Palo Altans regarding housing,
affordable, variety, cost of living. You sometimes hear the idea that we all
know and we've always known that Palo Alto has always been a very
expensive place. According to our residents and their comments about
housing and housing costs, they're not impressed. Tying this also together
with this tracking from 2010 or comparing 2010 to 2015 on Slide 14, we see
a 19.4, around 20-percent increase in median household income over those
five years. Coming out of the recession to 2015, we see about a, rounding
up, 20 percent increase in median household income. During that same
period, we see just over 60 percent increase in median single-family home
prices. Housing costs has increased three times the rate of income for Palo
Altans. That's pretty difficult if you're trying to switch from one residence in
Palo Alto to another. Maybe you're trying to downsize, maybe you don't drive anymore, you're trying to downsize somewhere. That makes it very
difficult to do that. For people who are renting, which we also indicated is
about 44 percent of Palo Altans, so a little under half of Palo Altans rent.
Their salaries have increased on average around 20 percent, but their
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housing cost has increased three times that rate. This also speaks to the
question of whether we're seeing continuation of historical expense in Palo
Alto or something that's an increasingly challenging situation. I would argue
it's certainly the latter. I appreciate Council Member Schmid pointing out
that traffic, travel by car, public transit and parking concerns are also
highlights of dissatisfaction among Palo Altans. I agree that this is tied to
growth, but the question is really what kind of growth is driving this. Is it
job growth? Is it housing growth? Is it a growth in our jobs/housing
imbalance? Is it just economic growth? I think we should be thoughtful in
digging into what kind of growth it is that's driving the [video malfunction]
by residents. Those are my thoughts for now.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. I find the report really—I mean, it's got so
much interesting data in it, but it's so hard to interpret what the data means. I was listening to what Council Member Wolbach just said, and he
might be 100 percent right, but he might be 100 percent wrong. If you
asked me what's the availability of housing options in Palo Alto, I would say
it's really poor. If you asked me is housing affordable, I'd say it's poor.
Does that mean that I think that we necessarily can do anything about the
affordability or what do I want done about it? I don't think it shows that.
Does that mean that people want more housing? Does it show that they
want more affordable housing? Does it show they want more work or
housing? I don't think the data is broad enough to say—I don't think it digs
down deep enough to tell us what exactly it means. I thought Council
Member Kniss made a really good point about when we compare to 2010,
that's a recession. One of the other things I was doing which I really like is
on page 26 of the National Citizen Survey. When you go through the
historical results, a bunch of things jump out at me. One is that if you look
from 2006 to 2015, if you go down the columns, once in a while you'll see
an outlier year where things fall dramatically for one year, and then they
jump right back up the following year. It's somewhat significant sometimes
when they do that. It's hard for me to say if we have one year where it goes
down, especially with a margin of error of 4 percent. If it goes down 6 percent, what does that really mean? Also, given that it was a recession in
2010, there's this concept of when you look at data of normalizing the data.
I just sort of have this sense that when we look at this, we look at it each on
an individual year now. I've been doing this for what? Seven years now
we've gone through these things. We always focus in on some change. I mean, it means something. You can tell. It's never clear to me what it
means, frankly. I'd love it if someone actually had a great statistics and
numbers background and could come in and—I hate to have another Study
Session—say we've looked at this data and, given these statistical models
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and the way we look at it, this is what it means. I just don't have that math
background to really know. That's sort of my broad thoughts on it. I guess
to finally fold that up, I'd love to know if what we should maybe doing—not
actually this year, but in the future—is choose a few areas for the following
survey and ask ourselves where would we like to get better data, where we
would like to know why people say what they do, and then follow up. If
there are particular areas that people think that this looks significant, why
are people saying this and what do they want to change, that would be
helpful maybe. I also wanted to look at signal timing on this stuff. In 2015,
47 percent of the people said that traffic signal timing which was not that
good, even though back in 2012 it was at 47 percent and then it jumped up
to 53. In 2006, it had been 55. In 2007, it had been 60. I guess traffic
signal timing seems to me something we could fix. I thought we'd been
working a lot on traffic signal timing. I guess the question is, is there a lot more we can do on traffic signal timing. Obviously mobility I take out of this
is a huge issue. Is that something that would make a huge difference in
getting people around? If so, should we be putting more resources into it?
Can anyone answer that question, tell me what we've been doing?
Mr. Keene: Very quickly, Mr. Vice Mayor, Council Members. We really have
just completed this $2 million investment in our traffic signal system and are
in the position of just beginning to look at how we could better coordinate
and also collect better data to do those sorts of things. I would say this in
the same way that you would question your own statistical abilities, my own
abilities in traffic engineering are also really sketchy. I do know that over
the next couple of years we will be in a position to be able to make
improvements in our signal timing and to be much more flexible and
adaptive. How we convert that and actually measure that against a whole
background issue of other variables that could play into traffic flow, that's a
little bit complicated. I know Hillary's here. Maybe later on when we start
talking about Priorities for the next year, if need to that'd be a good point to
dive a little deeper in that.
Vice Mayor Scharff: That's what I took out of this, rightly or wrongly.
People are most upset about traffic flow in the community. That's the mobility issue. They don't feel they can get around. That's driving
everything else. Back in—I don't know what it was—2010, we focused on
PCI improvements in our street index when people were complaining about
that. People now seem to be complaining about traffic and mobility. At
least it seems to me that signal timing is something that we can actually control, we can actually put a lot of money in. I guess I'm asking the
question of whether or not we should be putting significant resources into
something like, if that's really going to make a difference. I'd eventually like
us to talk about that. Thanks.
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Mayor Burt: I just want to first share that I think the information that we
get here is extremely valuable, and that the changes that we've made to
these surveys have made them even more informative. Having said that, I
still struggle, both this year and prior years, with the need to distinguish
between kind of opinions and perceptions versus actual facts. We have a
mixture of the two, and both are of importance. The perceptions matter, but
the perceptions are not the same things as facts. Even amongst the facts,
we have some of this reporting without certain meaningful context. A couple
of examples that I think are the case. Fire staffing, we had this change in
fire staffing, but we didn't talk about the closure of a station. It's not
staffing per station or staffing per citizen; it was elimination of the station ...
Mr. Keene: The station up in the ...
Mayor Burt: SLAC. We see this huge jump in perception of childcare. In a
different setting, I'd like to know whether we have the ability to understand what's actually happening or not happening there through our Community
Services Department or perhaps through partnering with Palo Alto
Community Child Care, not just on their services but their understanding of
the overall services. I saw classes in Community Services. I wasn't sure
whether that reduction included shifting what were summer school classes
back to the School District. These are really important contextual
interpretations of the data. I am really interested and somewhat concerned
over the apparent significant drop in volunteer hours. I think that's an
important part of both leveraging resources and building community. People
are more committed when they volunteer. Just on this final issue on the
housing. I'm really interested in additional data there on how much increase
in housing we've had over different periods compared to how much increase
in jobs. I don't think we've had a decline in housing. We've had an increase
in jobs. Just a context or a comparison that may help people understand it.
When we look every year in our hotel revenue, transient occupancy tax, we
have two really important metrics, maybe three. We have how many rooms
we have, and then we have the occupancy rate, and then we have the
average daily rate. In a downturn, when occupancy goes down, the average
daily rate really drastically goes down. That's equivalent to how much we're paying for housing. At a certain point in time, we hit essentially full
occupancy for the critical business days, and the average daily rate goes
through the roof. It's not because we shrunk our number of hotel rooms in
that period. It's because the demand went up and the supply increase didn't
keep up with demand. I think that's a way that we can see a model that actually applies to what's going on in the housing and help inform our
discussion later. We're now ten minutes behind. We had a ten-minute
break scheduled. If we can try to do it in a quick five minutes, we'll pick up
back on schedule.
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Council took a break from 10:19 A.M. to 10:31 A.M.
Action Items
2. Council Annual Priorities Settings.
A. Process Foundation.
Mayor Burt: Item Number 2 which is Council annual Priority settings. To
begin setting the stage on that, the City Manager is going to give us a bit of
a context on where we left off, major accomplishments last year, where we
are in the process on some of those, and how they roll into both our work
plan and fulfillment of the Priorities that were the 2015 Priorities so we can
begin the discussion of what Priorities we want going forward. Mr. City
Manager.
James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Council Members. As a
prelude to just kind of looking back at 2015, I did want to compliment the
Auditor on her presentation. Personally, I thought it was the clearest and most succinct integration of the survey itself, and then the report that she
does on a departmental basis for the Annual Performance Report. I don't
know. I sort of feel like if we were taking an SAT test and they had her
presentation up there and they say what's the title to this story, I would say
it's generally really good news about Palo Alto. For the most part, the
problems or the deficiencies we have are almost all—sorry—in my view
linked to positive attributes about our community. We're a great place to
live. We're a great place to work. As Council Member Kniss said, some of
the measures of increase are positive and negative or are directly linked to
the fact that our economy has really rebounded. What we've got are
externalities that for the most part relate to things that almost any other city
in the country would be striving to achieve. I just don't think we should lose
sight of so much of the good news. In addition, when she was going
through the report, it did strike me that in the—it kind of goes back to
Council Member Scharff's questions about the traffic signal engineering
versus other factors in congestion. I see the report full of examples where
leverage or control and where the Council has directed us to put focus, our
numbers have generally improved significantly. Over the five-year period,
even with all of the demands, the actual number of full-time FTEs, Staff people on the full-time payroll we have, has gone down even with significant
productivity increases. Our overall salaries went up 1.9 percent over a five-
year period, an area where we have a better ability to control versus the
pension costs that are more dictated by State policy. Our pavement score
indexes on streets and conditions of our sidewalks, all of those things—so many things are up where we have the ability to focus, make investments
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and deliver on them. More often than not, the most nagging problems, let's
say traffic and housing kinds of issues, are really kind of deep-rooted
systems challenges. The truth is, going back to the Mayor's point about
facts versus perception, I can't imagine that all of our feelings about traffic
are completely determined by our experience inside the city limits of Palo
Alto. I know for a fact, for me, I used to go over to the East Bay where I
used to live in Berkeley all the time. I rarely go over there because the
traffic is so bad. It's not like we get outside of Palo Alto and suddenly it's
smooth sailing down to Mountain View or up in Redwood City or whatever. I
mean, the situation has gotten worse all over the Bay Area, again for many
of the reasons that we were all talking about, this great economy and other
factors. I'd say that sort of as a prelude for the fact that our ability to focus
on things that matter and that are of concern and stay focused on them and
put determined effort in it really does seem to yield fruit as far as improving our situation. That being said, your real focus is looking forward to 2016,
what we're going to focus on in the Council Priorities area. At least some of
our assumptions, in order to let you hit the ground running, is that if you
were to maintain your general four Priorities for 2015, carry them into 2016,
we've already identified, as you'll see later in the background, 69 different
projects, some of which are carry-overs from 2015. I thought it would be
worthwhile to link accomplishments of the last year, give you a little bit of
setting. We passed out a report and the public has this that basically takes
all of the projects that you had under the Council Priorities, the four
Priorities last year, and gave you just sort of a quick update on them. I'm
not going to run through all of these, but just to be able to give you a sense,
on the Comp Plan Update for example, the tasks that we had identified that
we had completed or, as we put down here in red, about convening a
citizens advisory committee that sort of developed in the course of the year
a new item. When we just sort of thumb these, you'll see that the Fry's site,
yes, we did some of the tasks, some explanation. This is hopefully a little bit
of a resource for you when you're thinking about where we go for next year.
The annual limit on office/R&D, a big issue. There's a big check mark if we
hit basically every anticipated action to take. The Sustainability and Climate Action Plan, again, a lot of things in there are in process. Only the one item
that we identified did we feel was fully completed, but a lot of these things
are now happening even in the first part of the year, but they don't get a
check mark, the Parks and Rec Master Plan, Cal. Avenue streetscape. I kind
of go through these just again to remind us how many Priority projects there were within your four Priority areas, and then again this completely ignores
all of the initiatives that are outside of the four Priorities that you've
identified and the things we do as a City. I actually may just flip through
these just to more give an impression of what we have done or not done.
We ought to do a tour actually of 2015 around town and be able to actually
even just look at some of these things that have been accomplished. Again,
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sidewalk repairs for example, this would have had a full check except there
was some policy work and some forward planning we did not quite get
finished. Just scanning through them—sorry—up on the board, more for the
public to give a sense of the range of issues. Again, just projects within the
four Priority areas for 2015. I guess I am going to go through all of them
fast. Again, some of our thinking on some of these projects, like on the
housing funds availability, we really shifted our attention as you know last
year to setting aside money for Buena Vista and trying to work through that
as the main focus for what we would do as a City. TMA formation, shuttle
expansion. One of the challenges you will see—the Vice Mayor and I were
just briefly talking about this—is that we have a lot of projects, as you know,
concentrated in the Comp Plan and the Built Environment area. Those
demands fall disproportionately on some of our department [video
malfunction]. All of these projects and this work in the year went a lot more slowly than I'm spinning through them. Just being able to see the range of
them is pretty interesting. That was it, Mr. Mayor. I just didn't want to
have you jump into 2016 without, one, you all having a little bit of a report
card on 2015 projects under the Priority and just doing a quick pass through
on the year past. Again, ultimately we could get into more detail. In some
cases, some of these things were policy decisions. Sometimes our ability to
deliver on projects actually can be affected by Staff turnover in an area. At
other times, we're dependent upon other parties. For example, on
Cubberley we've been working with the School District on how we do that.
We have to move at the same pace. Then, at other times, there are projects
outside of this area that have come in during the course of the year that we
then shift our attention to, and it does have some impact. Understand it's a
dynamic, but overall just as City Manager I would report I'm quite satisfied
with the organization's efforts to respond to your directives last year. Thank
you.
Mayor Burt: Most folks may have seen it, but on the back wall the Staff has
taken these various, actually all the projects listed in this spreadsheet that
we have and they're all broken out individually so that later in the Agenda
on Item Number 3, Priorities and Staff Work Plan, we'll have an opportunity to look at those major initiatives within the work plan, how they fall under at
least last year's Priorities and have an opportunity to wade into comparative
importance and immediacy of all those different, 40 some odd major
initiatives.
Mr. Keene: That's for this year, 2016 calendar year.
Mayor Burt: Right.
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B. Public Comment
Mayor Burt: Before we begin our discussion around the Priorities for 2016,
we have four members of the public. If anyone else wishes to speak, they
to need bring a card forward now. Our first speaker is David Page.
Welcome.
David Page: Thank you, Council Members and everyone here. I went to the
Sustainability Summit last week, and we talked about a goal of reducing the
carbon emissions; 80 by 30 is what we were talking about. Since last
weekend, I found some information about other cities and countries. I found
out that the country of Costa Rica has already adopted a goal of becoming
carbon neutral within five years. I was thinking how is it that Costa Rica can
have a more ambitious goal than the City of Palo Alto. I mean, we have a
high level of technology, we have a better standard of living. What is it that
they have that we don't have? Apparently they have some kind a way of making priority out of having a better future with our environment. I was
thinking maybe we could do that here. What they were able to do is
prioritize their goal so they could be the first country to have a carbon
neutral nation. We could do that here, if we continue to do the kind of
things that you guys have already been doing. I got a notice in my utility
bill this week. Maybe you saw that. It says reduce your carbon footprint,
and then it says how to do it, this way, that way, the other way. This is
beautiful. This is exactly the kind of thing that fits in with the goal that we
were talking about last week. Hopefully it fits in with the Priorities that you
guys are going to come up with today. If we're able to do that, it addresses
the type of things that we're talking about in terms of housing and
transportation and mobility and floods and drought and all that sort of thing.
I'm asking you to keep doing the good work like you've already been doing
as evidenced by this flyer I got in the mail. Just push it a little further a little
faster. Thank you very much.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Dan Garber, to be followed by
Shani Kleinhaus. Welcome.
Dan Garber: Good morning. I'm Dan Garber, and I'm Co-Chair of the CAC.
I have two things. Actually I want to mention that my Co-Chair couldn't be here today. I've been keeping him up-to-date. He and I have been texting
this morning. Two topics. One, I believe the Planning Director will speak to
you about this later. There is an interest on the part of the CAC to have a
joint meeting regarding housing with you that had been on the Agenda and
was taken off. The other thing was that looking at the latest schedule that was just published this morning of our work, I note that the two land use
discussions that the CAC is having have been moved up a month, a month
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and a half, two months. However, the review of that work and direction by
Council regarding Policy L-8 occurs after that. I'm looking for some
clarification. I know that the Council has given the committee clear direction
on our auspice is supposed to be policy and program. If they are giving
direction, how do they want to use the CAC? Are you asking us to have
discussion prior to that direction or use us to search out what the options
are, etc., or what? I'm just asking for some clarification around that topic,
because I know that's an important topic of both the Council as well as the
CAC and how you'd like us to operate as your arms and legs. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Shani Kleinhaus to be followed by Penny Ellson.
Welcome.
Shani Kleinhaus: Good morning, Mayor Burt, City Council. I'm Shani
Kleinhaus. I'm on the CAC; I don't speak for the CAC. Thank you for
appointing me. It's been a wonderful experience. I am a resident of Palo Alto, and I'm here to speak on behalf of Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.
I'm their environmental advocate. I participated in the Sustainability
Summit last week, and I thought it was a fabulous event. I was really happy
to see that natural resources included nature in the discussion, which is
really surprisingly rare in discussions of sustainability in this region.
Including the natural environment not only as it is a resource for people, but
as it is a resource with a more spiritual in a way or more productive for
livability and cognitive assets. That was in health. That was absolutely
fabulous. Thank you. I think we're doing a lot in the Urban Forest Master
Plan and the trees of Palo Alto which are so valued by our population here.
I'm asking for one more thing. I want to look at the—I've been asking for
that repeatedly for several years now, which is to consider an ordinance for
bird-friendly buildings and deal with the windows and bird collisions. It's a
problem that is really quite substantial. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Penny Ellson, to be followed by
our final speaker, Diane Morin.
Penny Ellson: Good morning. I'm Penny Ellson, 513 El Capitan Place, a
member of the Palo Alto Council of PTA's Traffic Safety Committee. Last
year at this meeting, I made a few comments that are still relevant this year. I'd like to revisit some of them. Palo Alto has created a visionary new
Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Plan that will provide Complete Streets
to address the needs of rapidly growing numbers of foot-powered
commuters. This year, they have begun some implementation and planning
to implement that vision. We're about to submit a bicycle-friendly community application, the City is, with the community. This year, they
have begun—grant money enabled Staff to improve our bike-pedestrian
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safety education curriculum and materials. The previous year, the City
initiated an unprecedented walk and roll mapping community outreach
process that resulted in completion of suggested routes to school maps and
recommendations maps for school routes to every school site. Important
collaborative relationships with transit agencies and local businesses and
PAUSD officials were invigorated last year. Great groundwork had been laid
for future work. We can't afford to lose that momentum, but we're losing
some Staff members. We need to pay some attention to what's going on in
our planning group. I'm going to get to that another day, because I want to
focus on our Priorities. Our current Comprehensive Plan presents a
transportation vision that will provide accessible, attractive, economically
viable and environmentally sound transportation options that meet the
needs of residents, employers, employees, visitors for safe, convenient and
efficient travel by a variety of methods. This vision would create a safe place on the street for all road users, motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians,
transit users. We have spent a lot of time developing the new Bike Plan,
and that was needed because it was work that had been neglected for many
years. With the Comprehensive Plan Transportation Element, it will be
important to address how the Bike Plan fits into the larger multimodal puzzle
and to communicate how the City's comprehensive multimodal approach to
planning benefits all road users. The blessings of an improved economy are
many, but its curse, as we heard from our City Manager earlier, is traffic,
lots of it. Traffic and congestion have increased throughout the Bay Area
including Palo Alto. It is no small matter that we have been able to take
thousands of motor vehicle trips off City streets each day by creating street
environments that invite people to use other modes of transportation. It is
important to communicate that information. It is also important to
communicate elements of plans that are specifically designed to serve other
modes. For instance, the Churchill bike boulevard plan incorporates a
dedicated right-turn lane that is designed specifically to improve conditions
for motorists, but this benefit for motorists was never mentioned in public
discussion of the project which was characterized as a bike project. Moving
forward, I hope Council will prioritize a commitment to implementing the vision for a multimodal mobility management which includes Safe Routes to
School and projects outlined in the City's new Bike and Pedestrian
Transportation Plan as well as Citywide TDM, parking, transit signalization
and road improvement projects. Please make multimodal mobility
management including Safe Routes to School—that's an important part of it—a City Priority. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our final speaker is Diane Morin.
Diane Morin: Hello. I'm Diane Morin. I am a long-term resident of this
community. I think that my hope for the Priorities for the City of Palo Alto
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would be that the two words are included or focused on, and those would be
sustainability and walkability. For me, the reason for that, among others, is
that I hear a lot of complaints, as was said before here, about traffic, about
parking, about all these sorts of issues. That's not a policy, to fix those.
Housing in and of itself is not necessarily a policy. The policy would be to
include—I think particularly after the Summit on Sustainability and Climate
Action last week, it seems to me that the concept of focusing on
affordability—pardon me, on sustainability and walkability would include
some other issues. For example, it was mentioned here that there seems to
be some polarization in our community. If one looked at diverse forms of
housing, then perhaps some of that could be addressed. It was mentioned
here, just focusing on housing alone is simply a Band-Aid. I understand
that. If one looks at housing in the context of addressing walkability and
sustainability and one thinks about what the keynote speaker said last week which was walkability, to increase that, then you would address the needs of
a diverse—by diverse I don't just mean one form of diverse. I mean
economic, racial, different kinds of diversity in the City, seniors, to focus on
seniors. It's been mentioned here that one person likes biking. I adore
biking. One person likes walking. I like to walk. I've got an issue; I'm a
senior. I have trouble now with a knee. It's scary and difficult to bike in the
community for me. I would like not just the Avenidas fix, which is a good
one. It's a partial solution which is more buses and more public
transportation. I would like Palo Alto, that's known as an innovative town,
to also think about multi-housing units, for example, where one could have a
smaller unit. You don't have to go to Channing House, you don't have to go
to Webster Housing. You can have a community where you have people of
different economic types, people who service the City, seniors. It could be
within the context of our town. Our town was built on cars. The world is
moving towards a time when we have to look at a town built on people, not
cars. For me, the concept of walkability and sustainability would include all
of these different things. That's the policy I would like to see. Part of the
policy of the City of Palo Alto, I would like to see focus on sustainability and
walkability for starters. Part of that should include housing. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you.
C. Individual Nominees (Council Member Explanations)
Mayor Burt: As we return to the Council for Priority discussion, let me just offer
a certain framing on this. We have the 2015 Priorities, and we'll want to look
at whether those are ones that we wish to rollover. If we did, how would we fold into them emerging areas of focus that are likely to be different for 2016
than 2015? Does it work to do that within existing Priorities or do the Priorities
need to be different? Those are a couple of different ways we could approach
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things that are evolving and changing. Also, to remember that we now have a
definition of what our Priorities are. I'm recalling it off the top of my head, but
they are particular areas of focus that would have abnormal emphasis over, I
think it's roughly a three-year period. At the time we adopted that first
definition of it, two-plus years ago, we moved off of Priorities certain things that
are perhaps, as we discussed at the time, core values. Trying to distinguish
what are our enduring core values that are always—what reflect our community
values versus these areas of particular focus in this nearer-term period. We
had also talked about trying to limit it to three Priorities. Last year, we ended
up saying no, we want to have four. That's what we have before us. Those are
kind of some contextual considerations as we go into this discussion. Let's
begin a somewhat open discussion. Maybe on the first cut, if colleagues would
offer up what they would suggest as their orientation on what they'd like to see
in direction. After we get those things out on the table, we can come back and then as a group discuss what's been put on the table. Let's try and—just one
minute. In the first go-round, let's not go into the deep advocacy of those
positions, but kind of at a high level offer up your thinking. After we've heard
from each other, then we can absorb that and have dialog on it. Mr. City
Manager, you have something?
Mr. Keene: Yes, thanks, Mr. Mayor. Just a little more background just to be
sure everybody's on the same page. The Council set several years ago the
process for the Priorities which included both outreach to the community in the
late winter, sort of December period. We'd sort of open it up for feedback. We
also solicited from Council Members what your thoughts were about the
Priorities for 2016. Again, for the most part, seven or eight of you for the most
part really talked about carrying over the existing Priorities from last year.
That sort of informed our thinking in the back about grouping those four the
way they were and projects underneath it. Secondly, five or six years ago
when the Council would have its Retreat, as I recall, we would spend all day.
At the end, we would have identified the Priorities, and that was it. We've
evolved to the point where not only do you establish those Priorities, but we
much more quickly start to populate under those Priorities the kind of projects
and initiatives that would bring them to life during the course of the year. Last year we made some progress in that regard, but I know that there was interest
in the Council in being able to let the Council have more direct feedback on the
prioritization of projects also under the project. Everything we've done and
designed has been to try to support you to do that. I would just also remind
you that we did send out to you all—you have a copy of it in front of you—the four Priorities if they were carried over and our Staff view of the projects
underneath of those. There are 69 of them in total on here. This may be a
good document for you to work off of. You got this Thursday late in your
packet. I would just call attention to that. Lastly, the Clerk did at the Mayor's
request do some outreach to the Council. We got three Council Member
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comments at least initially back in advance. The Clerk also passed out a copy
of that before you all. I turn it back to you, Mr. Mayor.
Mayor Burt: We have this document that the City Manager was referring to,
the major initiatives under our existing Priorities. That's aligned as we have on
the back wall. This document which is actually, I think, primarily, not
exclusively, around areas of recommendations for special consideration by the
Council, under Item Number 3 today which is discussion of topics for a special
Committee of the Whole and Council Study Sessions. Some of these may very
well be ones that Council Members want to say no, I want to discuss it under
the Priorities themselves. I'm not trying to limit that in any way, but I'm just
trying to frame what we have before us.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, one last thing. I apologize. There's one anomaly in the
mix which is this big sheet of paper here that's in front of you, that looks like
this. This is actually a potential revised scheduled on the Comprehensive Plan. The Staff is just providing this to you because in one of your most recent
meetings you actually directed us to bring a revised schedule on the Comp Plan
to the Retreat. My own sense is I can't imagine that the Comp Plan, as a
project, isn't going to be one of your Priorities. I don't know that that's
something you need to deal with in this first pass of setting the Priorities. It
may be something you want to have more discussion later on in the meeting.
Thanks.
Council Member DuBois: Mayor?
Mayor Burt: Yeah.
Council Member DuBois: At 11:45, we have this Council Priorities projects
item. Could you just explain again how you see this discussion going? Right
now, we're going to be proposing additions, and then we would talk about them
then. Is that the idea?
Mayor Burt: The distinction is between projects and Priorities. In this section,
we're talking about actually the naming of Priorities. Subsequently would be
where we'd go into, once we've agreed upon Priorities, talk about projects and
particular areas of focus within those Priorities.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you.
Council Member Kniss: Same kind of question. We have Priorities. Do we have something between Priorities and projects? What I'm thinking of, just to
mention it specifically, is our airplane noise. Do we have anything that doesn't
quite come up to Priority? Have we ever named something like that? Area of
focus or of special concern or some other terminology.
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Mayor Burt: I think the term of project is more limiting than the intention. I
was actually earlier using particular areas of focus within Priorities. I would say
the answer is that it's both projects and these particular areas of focus. For
example, the airplane noise, the Council could consider having that as a
standalone Priority or could look at where it most properly fits as an area of
focus, including projects related to it, under whatever Priorities we agree to
today. I think we all know that that's one area that we are having increased
focus on. How to put it within this context is what we'll talk about now.
Council Member Kniss: It may not be. My issue being it may not be a long-
term Priority. That's one that we would hope we could solve within the next
few months. Whereas, most of our Priorities have gone on hopefully for three
years.
Mayor Burt: Your optimism is overwhelming on that.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, may I just ...
Council Member Kniss: One has to be optimistic.
Mr. Keene: As somebody who has worked hard with the Staff on the structure
and the nomenclature for the work plan, I would agree with the Mayor that we
apply the term project both loosely and restrictively. There's certainly out of
these 69 things something that's very clear, like you would typically think of a
project. The Fire Station Number 3, for example, is in the infrastructure list.
We put airplane noise as the first project under Healthy City/Healthy
Community. Clearly that's an initiative, that's an area of focus. It's not exactly
a project in the same way. You'll have the opportunity to work through this.
Going back to Council Member DuBois' question to the Mayor, the first portion
of this, as the Mayor said, you're clarifying the Priorities and doing some forced
ranking as far as what you saw within those Priorities where the focus ought to
be. The real key is ultimately going to be during the course of the year how do
we continue to manage the focus on something. Again, let me just stay with
those two examples. For the most part, I would imagine that on the Fire
Station Number 3, we're not going to have to have a lot of attention and
direction from the Council and the community in an ongoing basis, in a regular
way. We can probably pretty much almost on autopilot get that project done.
On the issue of, again, airplane noise, that may be something that requires much more engagement and ongoing direction from the Council and your desire
to say to us publicly are we putting enough attention to this during the course
of the year or are we not.
Mayor Burt: Just procedurally today, since I don't have light buttons, I'm
relying on peripheral vision to see Council Members. Just wave and make sure that I catch your eye. Also, if you'd all wait to have that done. For instance,
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Council Member Holman, I had recognized her at the beginning, and then we've
had several others who wanted to jump in. Let's try to hold to that process
albeit in a less formal environment than at City Hall. Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. Are you looking for comments or
potentially even a motion at this point?
Mayor Burt: Not motions at this time. It's to lay out on the table your initial
thoughts.
Council Member Holman: A couple of things. Thank you. A couple of things
are I think we ought to stick with the same four Priorities that we have
currently. Briefly I would say two things. One is that while we've truncated the
title here, Built Environment. The Built Environment is actually a multimodal
transportation, parking and livability; Infrastructure Strategy and
Implementation. It's Healthy City/Healthy Community and completion of the
Comprehensive Plan Update with increased focus from Council. That's what the Priorities actually are. They've just been truncated here, to be clear on that.
The reason I would say Comp Plan, I think, is probably very obvious. There's a
State requirement that we have a current Comprehensive Plan. We're several
years late on it, and we have a head of steam and requirements and an
engaged CAC and such. Built Environment, we've made some progress, I
would say. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there including
some rebalancing of some issues. Healthy City, as you said, Pat, the airplane
noise, I think, should be the primary concern under that. Noise is a health
issue and fits, I think, very well underneath Healthy City/Healthy Community.
That is a dynamic document anyway, the Resolution, and can encompass a lot
of different arenas. It's certainly a health issue. Infrastructure, while we've
made remarkable progress, the City Manager mentioned some of them up here.
We've made remarkable progress, but I think there are some that we really
should continue on and even a couple more that aren't on the list. I'll stop
there.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: Since we're just laying out ideas at this point,
essentially brainstorming, I'm going to put out several things. Happy to hear
colleagues' thoughts about how we can merge these, how we can eliminate—I just want to put some things on the table for now. I think that's what the
Mayor is asking for. Some key ideas that I'd like to see focused on in our
discussion today. Consideration of the most vulnerable in our community. We
see this under the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities. I think it can probably
stay there. Anything relating to social services or facilities for at-risk populations, we see currently in our work plan, identified already a couple of
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those. Project Safety Net, focused on youth well-being and safety, as well as
continuing to work both locally with nonprofits and with the County and other
governmental agencies on providing services and housing for the homeless.
It's important any community with all the resources that Palo Alto has, that we
don't lose sight of those who might be at the margins or face various risks. A
couple of other groups that we might want to identify. I would mention people
with disabilities, also seniors and people of low income who might not be
unhoused but might be vulnerable to that or other negative health benefits that
result from having very limited income in a place with very high cost of living.
That's one area. I appreciate Diane Morin and her focus on sustainability and
walkability. I don't know that those need to be identified specifically as
Priorities on their own. I think they're important frame considerations as we
talk about our Priorities. No surprise, I think housing should be a major focus.
In the submission of possible Study Sessions, just to kind of make the point about how much time we could spend talking about housing, I mentioned four
different Study Sessions we could have on different elements of housing from
BMR, below market rate housing; looking for ways to incentivize landlords not
to escalate their rents so quickly; focusing on homelessness; and also the
larger question of supply and demand. As has been pointed out, it's not just a
supply question and a historical dearth of supply, but it's also the demand. We
can't neglect how demand ties into housing costs and the concerns there. On
sustainability, I think it's important that we think very carefully both about
sustainability and also about climate adaptation, whether it's fire risk, flooding
risk, etc. We think really carefully about climate adaptation, wherever that fits,
possibly significantly under Built Environment and under Infrastructure. It can
have major impacts to both of those. Those are some of the key themes I'd
like to have considered. I'm very open to colleagues' thoughts about how we
work those into both our Priorities and our projects.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: I agree it's pretty clear that the four Priorities we
have identified we should move into the new year. Amongst those four, I think
there is one critical Priority, and that's the Comp Plan Update that also includes
the Built Environment in that. I think it is critical that we translate that into Council Agenda Action Items, a commitment. Chair Garber made an excellent
point. We have a CAC Committee of excellent volunteers in the community
working hard on delivering that Priority to us. I note we all have a copy of the
Community Element that's coming to us. Thirty-two pages of visions, goals,
statements, programs, policies. The Council will review it, make some amendments, but this is the deal. Chair Garber pointed out that they are
working now on transportation and land use. It does not coincide with Council
Agenda Items. We will be discussing some of that after the CAC has gone
through their deliberations and prepared programs and policies for us. I think
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it is critical that we establish that this is a critical Priority, that we get Action
Items on the Agenda to deal with things like the development cap, mixed use,
housing, basic demographic assumptions, jobs/housing balance. Council
guidelines on these issues are so critical, and the only way to get them is to put
on the Action Item Agenda chances for us to interact with the CAC as they go
through these deliberations. I think that should be a Priority for us today.
Mayor Burt: I just want to remind folks that under Item 3 is when we're going
to talk about those particular Council meetings that will have focus on some of
these very things. Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. I think it's really interesting when we think about
Priorities that one of the things Staff's clearly asking us to do is say we have—
what is it? Sixty-nine work plan items, let's prioritize, let's make choices, let's
do less work, let's prioritize what we're going to do. When we look at adding
new Priorities, I think we'd have to be really careful about what new work we add, given this direction of let's try and prioritize [video malfunction] done.
With that said, it did strike me that from our earlier morning conversation that
the biggest issue in Palo Alto really emerging is mobility. I could see mobility
as a Priority, actually frankly as a fifth Priority, which would basically cut up the
Built Environment and add a little bit more of an emphasis on mobility. We'd
take out some of the stuff we're doing in the Built Environment, put in mobility,
and then put more emphasis on that. I actually think I would advocate for
doing that. Karen did point out that it's not just the Built Environment; it's the
Built Environment: multimodal transportation, parking and livability. I think
that sort of captures mobility, but I think mobility is what people really want us
to focus on and fix. I actually would advocate for a fifth one when it comes
down it of mobility.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I'm not sure I agree with the Vice Mayor, but I'm
willing to think about it during lunch. As we add more Priorities to this, it
becomes more and more difficult to focus on just what those are. The ones
that I see that jump out at me, where I'll use, as it turns out, my green sticker.
I know we have different colors. Looking on the Comp Plan in front of us, the
ones that really jump out are 12 and 13. If we're talking about mobility and we're not talking about parking guidance or parking study of our housing types
and so forth, I don't see how we're going to get anywhere in the area of
mobility without doing that. I also want to go back to one of the comments the
City Manager made about traffic, which I think we tend to forget. We hear a
great deal of complaining about the traffic in Palo Alto. If I drive into Menlo Park, actually I think it's worse. I even think it's worse in Mountain View. For
any of us who went to the dinner the other night, parking there was difficult
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even though it was—I found it about three blocks away—hard to park in
Mountain View as well. I imagine it's the same in Sunnyvale or Milpitas,
wherever we go. The Bay Area is absolutely impacted with traffic right now.
Waiting through two or three lights is not impossible. Again, talking to what
Jim's comments were, how do we get our traffic signalization so it's really
smooth and so people really do move through it. I'd be interested in knowing
how people feel about Oregon Expressway now that that's been altered and the
signals are changed and so forth. I'm getting used to it, but I think a number
of people have really complained about that signalization. Last one was
Number 31 which had to do with housing. I'd like to emphasize housing. In
fact, we're going to be doing the Housing Element overall in the Comprehensive
Plan. Also, I think what's going to be a hotly discussed issue in town is second
dwelling units, whether we call them ACU or granny units, whatever they may
come to being. I was on a Council that discussed this before. It's a topic when it comes again to parking—the same with Airbnb—is where do you park the car
and does the street in front of your house become congested. Those would be
the ones I would focus on at this point. As I said, I'm not sure that I'm ready
for one more Priority at this point, but I like the idea of prioritizing particularly
under the Healthy City and Healthy Communities the discussion that we just
had about airport noise. This will come a little later, but there's also one I'd
like to add which the World Health Organization is emphasizing and has come
to our county which is called the seniors agenda. I'll say more about that later.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman.
Council Member Berman: Thank you very much. I think the Vice Mayor's
suggestion is intriguing, and I'll have to give it some thought. I'll be brief. I'd
like to see us somehow in one of the Priorities—I think the Built Environment is
the most logical one—call out housing and mention it explicitly. I don't think
housing should be its own Priority, but I think it should be listed as a sub kind
of emphasis of one of the existing Priorities. If there's a good fit in Healthy
City/Healthy Community, that might be a good place to do that. We might
want to consider airplane noise or something like that there as well, just as an
indication to the community this is something that we take seriously and that
we want to address, and we want to kind of make sure we don't lose sight of it moving forward.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I think Jim's comments about a lot of our problems
being caused by success is accurate. Again, I think we want this to remain a
great place to live. I think we need to listen to the feedback we get in the surveys and that kind of thing. Again, I think the idea of focusing on things
that are under our control is a great way to think about ranking these projects.
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Just briefly, looking back, I think last year we had a lot of great
accomplishments. We moved the ball forward on all of our Priorities. Again, I
would support keeping these Priorities and keeping that momentum going. This
idea of kind of values versus Priorities, again, I'm happy to keep the Priorities
as is. I see sustainability and to a degree Healthy Cities as core values. I think
when we talk about projects, we can almost start to prioritize our Priorities and
prioritize them in terms of how much of our Staff time is invested versus how
much of our Council time is invested. For me, I think Comp Plan and the Built
Environment would be the top Priorities. I have a lot of policy questions for
Council. Infrastructure to me should remain a Priority, but that's almost a
minor Priority in that, again, it's going to involve a lot of Staff time, less policy
time. Healthy Cities for me—again, it's almost like sustainability. I'd like to see
us start to weave that into other projects incrementally, maybe it's not as much
Staff time, but we're considering it while we do work. I mean, I think there are a few separate projects there. The one I'm struggling with is kind of this idea
of long-term financial stability. I almost want that to be a Priority but, again, I
think it's maybe something we just have as a value, and we work it into a lot of
the work we're doing. I think it's going to require more and more of our
attention. When we get to the projects, I do have some clarification questions
about some of those projects. Again, I'd support strongly keeping these as four
Priorities.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: I think it's not going to be tremendously detailed, but
Council's role is vision, policy and oversight. I think as we approach this, we
need to keep that frame of reference, and I think we are and so forth. I think
the four Priorities we had from last year, these are not things that change
radically from year to year. I think they still make sense to keep going down.
Although, I think the Vice Mayor has had an interesting suggestion which let me
come back to in a minute. A couple of things. First of all, the list of 64
projects, 69 or whatever it is, I found that tremendously helpful to think about
this kind of stuff. It gives you a real concrete feel for the kind of things we're
talking about. That being said, I want to make—I think we're not going to do
this. I don't think the Council should be in the business of saying this one is Priority Number 37 and that one's Priority Number 38. I think the Council
needs to be higher level than that. Having these in front of us is tremendously
helpful to think about that kind of thing. I think what most people in our
community care about the most from their government is first of all basic City
services. Toilets flush, the lights stay on, the Fire Department shows up when the house is burning down. I would add to that list there is a healthy, best in
class, state of the art school system as well, which is less of an issue for this
particular piece of government, but I think it's at the top of everybody's list. I
would argue that traffic has actually reached such a point that it actually is on
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that level as well, which is why I think the Vice Mayor's suggestion sort of is an
interesting and makes sense. Under normal circumstances, you say that's part
of the Built Environment, but the question is, is that so extreme at this point
that it actually deserves a higher Priority than that. I think that's an interesting
possibility. I think that's important as we go through and think about all the
projects. The last thing I'd say is that if one had to drop off the list, I think the
Infrastructure one. I don't think it should drop off the list, but if one had to, I
think it's going into execution mode. There's a question of should it be on the
Council's list or is that sort of no longer in the vision, policy and oversight space
the way that other things are. I agree with Council Member DuBois on the
importance of grappling with our long-term finances particularly if, as many of
us believe, there's going to be a recession in the next few years. I think that
fits under the Healthy Cities category, but I think it's an important thing.
Thanks.
Mayor Burt: I found the comments informative and thoughtful. One of the
things that we continue to not have quite resolved is what's a Priority versus a
core value. Because we haven't set the core values, we keep struggling with
should we take a core value and make it a Priority. If we look at our existing
Priorities, I suspect that over the longer term several of them, if not three out
of the four, are ones that we will consider seriously for core values, the Built
Environment, Infrastructure, perhaps Infrastructure as part of the Built
Environment discussion as a core value and Healthy City. We've had in the
past Priorities that came off that are part of our core values, environmental
sustainability, long-term financial planning. We had youth well-being which is
now within our Healthy City context. Those will be important considerations.
Last year when we struggled with the Built Environment, we were including
within that impacts on transportation. Now, we do have an even greater
immediacy and focus on whether it's transportation, mobility, however we
name it, but that topic. I'm very interested in considering that as well as the
need to look at, in this next Agenda Item, where we put some high emphasis
on certain major topics within these, like airplane noise, as rising to the top
amongst Healthy City actions in the coming year. I'm hesitant to add a fifth
Priority. We just start building that list. I'm also inclined—as someone who was very supportive of the Infrastructure focus, I do think it's entering the
execution phase. It's important to remember that just as Built Environment,
Infrastructure, Healthy Cities, they're not going to go away. They will always
be there. The question is are they going to have this additional, particular
focus. As we move Infrastructure into principally execution, it doesn't mean we'll have no policy considerations. Every year, we have policy considerations
around long-term financial planning. We have them around the infrastructure.
We have them around environmental sustainability which is not a Priority even
though we're not talking about it in the year where we're adopting our new
Sustainability and Climate Action Plans. We're not talking about it as a Priority,
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in a lot of ways, because it has its own path and momentum. Arguably, that
could be one that we would be talking about as a Priority this coming year until
we've adopted it. I'm interested in breaking up the Built Environment,
separating mobility or transportation from the rest of the Built Environment, as
well as whether Infrastructure should move into a category of an execution
phase and not have to have a designated Priority.
D. Action: Final Grouping into Priorities, Vote and Approval.
Mayor Burt: Now, let's loop back. We've heard each other; we've had a
chance to think about it a bit. Unfortunately, it won't be until after lunch that
we get to do that, because lunch is about both the Staff work plan and the
special meetings of the Council. Let's now come back to discussion and
motions. Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: I want to make sure I don't put words in your
mouth. It sounds like there was at least the consideration maybe in the long term of looping Infrastructure under the Built Environment. I wonder if maybe
we should explore that possibly today, maybe moving Infrastructure under the
Built Environment and saying that the main foci within that would be housing
and infrastructure and then pulling mobility out of Built Environment to replace
Infrastructure as our fourth Priority, maintaining Comp Plan completion and
Healthy Cities as the two others. That's not a motion yet, but that's the
direction I'm leaning.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think Council Member Wolbach took my thoughts out of
my head right there. I think that would make sense. I want to make sure that
we complete our Infrastructure Plan; that's very important. We promised the
voters; I don't need to go into all that. I think we move it under the Built
Environment to recognize that we really are in the implementation phase,
frankly, more than anything else. As long as we keep focused on the
implementation phase, I think moving it under the Built Environment makes a
lot of sense. As I said earlier, I think mobility is very important, and we should
pull out of the Built Environment and have that as our fourth. I will make that
motion, that we have a separate Priority for mobility and that we take
Infrastructure and we move it under the Built Environment.
Council Member Berman: I'll second it.
MOTION: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Berman
to adopt the following Council Priorities for 2016:
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A. The Built Environment: Infrastructure, Housing, Parking, and
Livability; and
B. Mobility; and
C. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
D. Completion of the Comprehensive Plan 2015-2030 Update with
increased focus from Council.
Mayor Burt: Did you wish to speak more to that?
Vice Mayor Scharff: No, I think I've spoken to it.
Mayor Burt: Do you wish to speak to your second?
Council Member Berman: I think that's a good evolution of our Priorities.
Obviously, being one of the biggest proponents of Infrastructure, it's been a
Priority for, I think, all three years I've been on Council. We try to have
these be for three years in length. We've made great strides. We are in the
execution phase. I'd be uncomfortable seeing it fall completely off of the list, but I think moving it under the Built Environment and adding housing to
that—was that part of the motion?
Vice Mayor Scharff: Sure.
Council Member Berman: Makes a lot of sense, and then creates a added
emphasis on mobility which clearly the comments we get from the
community and the data from the Citizen Survey warrant. Hopefully in
2017, we can see even more change to some of these things as more things
get completed. I think that makes sense.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor?
Mayor Burt: Before we go further, can the maker look at the motion? It
looks like it might need some refinement. We'll revisit that.
Mr. Keene: I was partly getting to that point. It seems that there are two
ways to be—two factors to keep in mind when you set the Priorities. One,
you want language about the Priority itself that speaks to the relevance of
the issues and that the public could understand sort of intuitively what it's
about. Secondly, I think that the projects themselves help frame the
language for the Priority. One question I would ask you to think about here
is parking—the current language is Built Environment is multimodal
transportation, parking and livability. Multimodal transportation moves to mobility or whatever. Where does parking go? Is parking part of mobility or
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is it part of the Built Environment? That starts to distinguish where the Built
Environment is drifting to. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: I think the motion has disappeared. Is there any
way of getting it back up? I'm concerned that we've transferred our concern
about mobility into what's called multimodal transportation. Is the problem
transportation or is the problem how we have created that mobility issue? It
seems to me in our Comp Plan we are trying to deal with the issue of
development caps, jobs/housing balances or imbalances. Mobility is a
manifestation of this deeper problem. There have been a couple of people
who have said that someone else is creating this regional transportation
problem. We are the only City in this area that has a 3:1 jobs to employed
resident imbalance. It's almost twice as high as our neighboring
communities. It's not elsewhere; it's with us. I think that's what the CAC is trying to grapple in their land use and that's what we're trying to grapple
with in the Comprehensive Plan. I don't think we can take it out by saying
let's fix our traffic signals. I think this is a fundamental issue that comes
with very fundamental questions and is dealt with in the Comp Plan. I'm not
in favor of just saying mobility is a critical issue. That is a piece of the Comp
Plan Priorities we're trying to set.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: I appreciate the introduction of the notion, but I
have concerns about it, because of some of the reasons that Council Member
Schmid also brought up. If you look at our current Priorities, the Built
Environment: multimodal transportation, parking and livability. I also point
to the comments City Manager made. If you look at some of the projects
that are under Infrastructure, Foothills Park 7.7 acres, that's not the Built
Environment. You have some issues like that too. Where do those go then?
I think there's some issues with separating them out. Also, what is meant
by just—something is being added to it here. Also clarification about what
that is. Built Environment and transportation, mobility, all of that, are so
tightly interwoven too, I think it makes sense to keep them together, even if
we decide we wanted to make some kind of subsets of them. They're just so interlinked and interlaced. Livability has been added back up there.
Penny Ellson is here. She was talking about the Ped Bike Plan. That is
about mobility, but it is also absolutely intrinsic to development projects and
the Built Environment. How do you separate those? It could be that it has
to do with revisions to the Zoning Ordinance. I don't know really in a practical sense how they're separated. Appreciate the concept, but I don't
know in a practical way how they are actually separated.
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Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I find myself agreeing with Karen. Mobility is very
tempting because we have such a traffic problem. I'm actually very
comfortable with where we were before. I'm concerned as much about the
housing, traffic and work interchange as I am about the rest of it. I don't
know how we separate out mobility from the housing from the traffic from—I
just don't know how we put it into one big sort of glob. I'd just as soon we
kept the ones we have and put mobility of some type back into the mix
where it has been.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I think Council Member Kniss said it pretty well. I
actually think I'm hearing a lot of alignment in terms of project Priorities. I
think transportation projects should be a high priority in the Built
Environment, but I think the top level goals need to communicate clearly. I think this kind of muddies it up a little bit. When you look at all of these
Infrastructure projects, we have golf course, we have the anaerobic
digester. I mean, there's just a whole bunch of stuff under Infrastructure
that, I think, is kind of separate from these Built Environment issues. I'm
comfortable with the top Priorities as they are, but I am also comfortable
with emphasizing the project priorities that I've heard everybody else
speaking about.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: Having thought about this along with the rest of us
for the last five minutes, I think my inclination is to concur with Council
Members Kniss and Holman on how to structure this. That being said, I
think the Vice Mayor's suggestion has been tremendously valuable to this
discussion. As I think about it, it seems to me that the argument—there's
an apples and oranges thing going on here. The reason to keep mobility as
part of the Built Environment is because, from a functional perspective, land
use and mobility are inseparable. I mean, they impact each other. The
argument to make it separate is not that it's so important it deserves top
billing. The question is which one of those—where do you slice the line that
way. I think that the right way to slice the line is to recognize that mobility and land use are intimately linked and not separable. I think that's the way
to go. That being said, I think the thing which has come out here is that
mobility has become so important that it deserves a special focus. I'd like to
see some way that mobility could be part of the Built Environment but still
have some special focus. Instead of having three Priorities, maybe we have three and a half or something. I don't know. I do support Infrastructure
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being part of the Built Environment as opposed to a separate, because I
think we are in that phase of its (inaudible).
Mayor Burt: First, I'd like to address this concern that if one Priority has a
relationship to another Priority and a strong relationship, that therefore they
can't be two different major Priorities. Really, we actually have few
circumstances where we don't have relationships between these. We went
through an exercise a few years ago in our project work plan where we
ended up having some resolution because people were trying to put a
project under a single Council Priority, and really they applied to multiple
Priorities. The same thing applies to the relationship between these
Priorities. If we look at it, the Comprehensive Plan very much deals with the
Built Environment and with Infrastructure and with Healthy Cities. Would we
argue that because those things have very strong relationship that
everything should be under the Comp Plan or that the Comp Plan shouldn't have a Priority? I don't think that follows very well. We've had these
discussions in the past. Absolutely we want our Priorities to have
relationship to each other, and they intrinsically do. That doesn't mean we
can't break them out as particular emphasis over the next two or three
years. I think that just as I served on the Planning and Transportation
Commission for nine years in a period where we added transportation to the
Planning Commission, and we said those two things are very much linked.
At the same time, I don't think that that should inhibit us from being able to
recognize that transportation or mobility is a crucial Priority in our City
today. It has a very strong relationship with the Built Environment. It has a
very strong relationship with things we'll be looking at in the Comprehensive
Plan about our long-term jobs/housing imbalance as a root cause, but not
necessarily as a Priority. That doesn't undermine its importance. It's just
how we've defined what a Priority is. Yesterday the Vice Mayor and I were
invited to join the Stanford Research Park new emerging Transportation
Management Association that they have. It was interesting not only how
strong they're addressing these issues, but the companies, the major
employers in the Research Park said the same things that our residents were
saying in our surveys, that our mobility or transportation problems were foremost. Out of the ten major companies there, nine said their biggest
issue was transportation, and one included housing. That was kind of
shocking to me, that they didn't have housing at that level of priority. It
doesn't mean that housing isn't that important in our community and that
much of a problem, but it was interesting how strongly they said transportation [video malfunction] the transportation issues are in the whole
quality of life. Our citizens didn't say all these other things about—we spoke
about different elements of the Built Environment, but it was foremost the
transportation problem. Those are reasons why I actually think that in the
way that we define Priorities, I've become convinced and I was informed by
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this discussion today that mobility or transportation, however we want to call
it, does deserve to be its own Priority with a strong recognition of its
relationship to the Built Environment, with a strong recognition of how both
of those are essential and the predominant portions of the Comprehensive
Plan. Nevertheless, I think they are appropriate as we define Priorities.
Vice Mayor Scharff: If I could just follow up (inaudible).
Mayor Burt: Let me recognize Council Member Wolbach first, and then Vice
Mayor.
Council Member Wolbach: Thanks. I just haven't had a chance to weigh in
on the motion yet. I said before I wasn't ready to make it as a motion, but
having seen it as a motion and heard the discussion, I am more comfortable
with this. I want to piggyback on what Mayor Burt was just saying.
Certainly none of our Priorities are siloed. The overlap is tremendous. I
appreciate pointing out how mobility and the Built Environment and everything that we have under the Built Environment, Infrastructure,
housing, parking, livability, are certainly essential to the Comprehensive
Plan. Members of the Citizen Advisory Committee for the Comprehensive
Plan here know well, as does Staff as well, that those are critical foci of
Comprehensive Plan discussions. Housing, I would argue, along with
transportation certainly impacts people's health. A Healthy City and a
Healthy Community is tremendously influenced by how far people have to
drive to get to work or whether they can easily move around the City and
how much of their income they're spending on housing and what type of
housing that they have and whether it's suitable for them. That's just to
recognize that there is a lot of overlap and interplay. To comment on the
comments earlier by Council Member Schmid, I fully agree that the
underlying drivers of what causes consternation and problems around
mobility are very important. I think that by elevating—basically all we've
done here is switched Infrastructure and mobility. In the 2015 Priorities, as
Council Member Holman pointed out, they are longer than what we see up
there. The Built Environment highlighted multimodal mobility as a focus
within Built Environment. We've basically just switched that with
Infrastructure. Infrastructure got subsumed under Built Environment, mobility got pulled out. We could play with the language. I think actually
by elevating mobility, it then becomes incumbent upon us and we telegraph
to Staff and our Commissions and the public that we want to have a deeper
analysis of mobility including focusing on the drivers of the problems that
lead to the mobility challenges.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
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Vice Mayor Scharff: I just wanted to add on this a little historical context in
the way I'm thinking about this. Back in 2010, Infrastructure was a big
issue. Our infrastructure was falling apart. We didn't have a Public Safety
Building. We really needed to figure out how to solve that. It had been an
issue in Palo Alto in elections for at least 10 or 15 years. We'd been trying
to get a Public Safety Building for much longer than that. We elevated
Infrastructure out. I could see you could have the same discussion today by
saying we shouldn't elevate Infrastructure out because it's part of the Built
Environment. By taking Infrastructure out, focusing on it, I would actually
say we solved the problem or at least we're now in the implementation
phase. Now that implementation phase moves Infrastructure back into the
Built Environment. Now what we really need to focus on is not
Infrastructure, as Council Member Filseth said, from that high policy
direction to Staff point of view, but mobility is. I think by folding Infrastructure back into the Built Environment and pulling mobility out, we're
then setting a new path that this is really important to us and we need to
solve it, much like we were successful with the Infrastructure. I mean, the
purpose of a Priority, in my view as a Council Member, is to set direction to
Staff of what is the big challenge facing the City that we want to solve. I
think mobility is that big challenge that we want to take on and we want to
solve. That's why it should be broken out. That doesn't mean that it's not
related to the Built Environment, much like Infrastructure is related to the
Built Environment. I really would like us to do this if we possibly could.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: It's been a good discussion, but I do think we
ought to think about what we are asking Staff to do and the public, and
that's to set Priorities. The Priority isn't to tinker with the transportation
issue, but rather the transportation issue is linked to our land use, Built
Environment, and so on, and look at these problems as connected.
Therefore, I'd like to propose an amendment to add mobility between
housing and parking in Number 1 and drop Number 2.
Mayor Burt: Do we have a second?
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) second that. See where it goes.
SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Schmid moved, seconded by
Council Member Kniss to adopt the following Council Priorities for 2016:
A. The Built Environment: Infrastructure, Housing, Mobility, Parking, and
Livability; and
B. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
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C. Completion of the Comprehensive Plan 2015-2030 Update with
increased focus from Council.
Mayor Burt: Did you wish to speak more to it?
Council Member Schmid: I think the linkage is what's important in our
message to the Staff and to the public.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I actually agree with that. I couldn't agree more
that mobility is the highlight. I'm delighted Infrastructure seems to have
been solved. I think we've got to constantly maintain this ability to discern
between a recession and what is now an incredibly prosperous time. I would
submit that our great prosperity has allowed us to do some Infrastructure,
certainly as we go ahead with a Public Safety Building. To put mobility all on
its own—I know that Jim probably would like to speak to that as how would
Staff deal with that. It just makes more sense to me to put it back in and say housing, mobility, parking, because those all go together for me. I'm
not quite sure, even though you made a great argument, Greg, why mobility
stands alone and what that would indicate to Staff.
Mr. Keene: Not yet, but when you're done with the Council Members, I'd
love to comment.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you for the amendment. I might have a
friendly amendment to the amendment. I think there's two things going on
here. One again, I think clarity of communication is really important. I
think we're getting caught up a little bit in the details here. To me, when
you read that list, it's like which thing doesn't belong in Built Environment,
infrastructure, housing, parking and livability and mobility. I just think
infrastructure is there whether it's Built Environment or not. I just think it's
confusing communicating to the public what the Priority is. Again, I agree
that mobility should be an additional focus. I guess my friendly amendment
to the amendment would be rather than just listing mobility under the Built
Environment, to say the focus is on housing, parking, livability with a
particular emphasis on mobility. I think they're related, they need to be
together.
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) see what Greg says, but I think
(inaudible).
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Council Member DuBois: Then the question is do we have Infrastructure
remain as a Priority or does it just drop off the list.
Council Member Schmid: Your amendment is to add those but to drop
Infrastructure from the list?
Council Member DuBois: Yeah. From a communication perspective, I don't
think it belongs in the Built Environment. I'm willing to see what others
think on that.
Council Member Schmid: I'm willing to accept that.
Mayor Burt: Seconder?
Council Member Kniss: Yes (inaudible).
INCORPORATED INTO THE SUBSTITUTE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add at the end of Part 1 of
the Motion, “Mobility, with a particular emphasis on Mobility” and add to the
Motion, “Infrastructure.” (New Part B)
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Could the motion as amended be clarified then?
Council Member Dubois: It could be housing, parking, livability.
Council Member Holman: With a particular emphasis on mobility, and then
you'd drop Number 2. Right?
Council Member DuBois: Yeah. My (inaudible) is Infrastructure is different.
I would leave it as its own Priority.
Council Member Holman: Infrastructure then gets dropped down as its own
Priority the way it was originally, the way it was last year. That's what your
intention is with the amendment?
Council Member DuBois: Yeah, if they're willing to accept that.
Council Member Holman: You have a second with ...
Council Member Kniss: (crosstalk) he wants Infrastructure as Number 2.
Council Member Holman: Yeah. That's what I think the amendment is
intending. My comments. If I'm completely understanding, I think I'm in
support of that. I think it accomplishes what Greg Scharff is trying to
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accomplish. It eliminates some of the confusion that, I think, is created by
putting Infrastructure under Built Environment and by some of the things
that are in Infrastructure. The other thing too is while I agree with Pat
about what—you touch the mobile and everything moves. Everything is
related to each other. I would argue that no two things are as connected as
what we build and the traffic impacts and the parking impacts. Nothing is
more interrelated than those two, that I can think of. Everything does affect
everything else. That's a given. That's recognized. Those two things have
such stark relation to each other, I think, it makes perfect sense to keep
them together with adding the emphasis on mobility as is in the amended
motion.
Mayor Burt: I'm not going to be supporting the substitute motion. As I go
back, when we look at both the community survey and, I think, what we
perceive is going on and today's problems within our community and, frankly, sub-regionally, the top problem that has been identified is
transportation. We certainly have right behind that housing and noise issues
and those. If we look at our community and the responses, as Council
Member Schmid has pointed out about the importance of those surveys, it
rises above everything else. If, under this motion, we would say some of
these other items like Healthy City is a immediate Priority for the next three
years but transportation is a subset of Built Environment, I just think it
stands as its own Priority and importance. I think the community is going to
question why we're not placing as one of our Priorities the thing that is more
important to the community at this point in time. Mr. City Manager.
Mr. Keene: Thank you. Being more of a poet than a prose person, I do
think the language is important for communicating to the public. I would
just go back to what the Mayor was just talking about. When the Council did
set your guidelines for Priorities, as the Vice Mayor and others were talking
about with Infrastructure, it was really designed to ensure that there was
enough special focus in the nearer term to distinguish and nurture a
particular area, so that it could really kind of get the momentum. I actually
still think "1" is a little of a mashed up Priority, but I do think as City
Manager that mobility being called out is important not only because it's the distinguishing factor. I would say it's the hardest to solve issue out of all of
those other ones, infrastructure, housing, parking. In truth, we sort of know
what can be done in that area. Mobility is new territory in many, many ways
for us to be able to resolve this in the way that would be satisfactory. We
can't just say let's do X times more mobility, like X times more projects or X times more housing. It's sort of a whole new strategy about how we're
going to do things. I think it does have special focus. Whether it's mobility
as a service or other approaches, it's really worthwhile. I'd like to just throw
something in under "4" though, since I think that that's kind of a boring bit
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of language there. The Comp Plan is there, and it kind of gets back to the
interconnectedness. Maybe you say something more like at the bottom of
this, tying it together: completion of the Comp Plan 2015 to 2030. It was
interesting when we were asking the public about what was important—this
was in the open-ended question—hardly anybody talked about the Comp
Plan. I would think that unless you're an insider in City Hall stuff, people
don't really necessarily aren't thinking about the Comprehensive Plan. The
fact is that it is this integration piece of these different things that you're
talking about, and it does set the vision. I think you should get some
language that's a little more meaningful to the public and makes it more
relevant to how it does tie these different components together. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: I think I'm not inclined to support the substitute
motion. I would actually go kind of a different direction. Maybe we'll vote on it and then come back to it. I'm kind of thinking, as the City Manager put
it, the mash up of the Built Environment, we might want to trim that or
rearrange that a little bit. I would actually suggest that we pull parking out
and put that with mobility. As Council Member DuBois was suggesting,
maybe drop Infrastructure altogether or move housing up to the top of the
list. Kind of like Housing and Livability, Mobility and Parking, Healthy
City/Healthy Community, and then completion of the Comp Plan. That's kind
of the direction that I'm leaning right now.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman.
Council Member Berman: I like the idea. First off, this just seems to be
kind of a philosophical difference on the Council of what the purpose of
Priorities are and whether or not they need to all fit cleanly and neatly under
buckets that are all interconnected or whether the importance of Priorities is
to clearly indicate to the community we've heard what they've been saying,
some things rise above others and the need to emphasize and send that
clear kind of communication and signal to the community. I won't be
supporting the substitute motion. I think it's really important for all the
reasons that have been mentioned, that I won't repeat, that we highlight
mobility. I like the idea of fleshing that out a little bit, similar to what we've done in Number 1. Whether it's traffic and parking, I'm not going to quibble
on what terms we use to make it clear to the community of what exactly
that means. I mean, what mobility means. Also, it helps kind of streamline
the mish-mash under Number 1 right now. I'd like to keep Infrastructure
there, but I'm not going to fall on my sword for it.
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Council Member Kniss: I know you want to keep it ... Sorry. What you
have said is provocative. If we were to make mobility a major thrust, how
would you then as a Staff come toward that differently than you would if it
were put in a different way?
Mr. Keene: Thank you, Council Member. I don't necessarily know that we
would come at it differently, but the Council would be articulating to the
community and to us that this in and of itself really required some special
focus and some special thinking. Personally, I feel like it gets lost. I
actually don't like the Built Environment one just for the same reasons that,
again, I don't think most of the public knows what Built Environment means.
I think that's insider language. I'm not saying something like this is right,
because it's a completely different direction. I'm trying to think about what
everybody talks about. It's more like Housing and Jobs: the right balance;
forget that other stuff; move parking into mobility; or you say Livability: housing and jobs the right balance; you drop Infrastructure out and know
that we're going to deal with; parking is part of mobility; and you put tying it
all together the Comp Plan. I just throw that out as it sounds like it's more
in the zeitgeist of the community right now, those pressure points.
Council Member Kniss: That actually does make a lot of sense. I really
appreciate your adding that.
Mayor Burt: I can take a short stab at answering your question. I think if it
was the Priority, it would give additional focus on two areas: the strategies
and the funding. We can have all kinds of solutions, but if we don't have
really significant funding to address these things, we don't go anywhere with
them. The strategies we already have are TMA and how does it go from a
concept to a really impactful initiative and what are the functions that would
be performed by the TMA versus those that would be by the City. I mean,
do we have a future where we might have a shuttle system that is really a
local shuttle system where it's reliable and really extensive and all the other
aspects of mobility? That's what I would see would be over the next, if it
was a Priority, the next three years.
Council Member Kniss: Mobility defined, I think, would certainly persuade
me.
Mayor Burt: Are we ready to vote on the amendment? Council Member
Holman.
Council Member Holman: I'd like to point us to the Citizen Survey. Question
Number 2, for instance, one of the points there is overall quote/unquote
built environment of Palo Alto including overall design, buildings, parks and transportation systems. It's not to say that Citizen Survey is defining our
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Priorities, but it certainly is consistent with what we have laid out as
Priorities. That's why they're in the Citizen Survey and actually do pretty
well define what Built Environment is. I'm comfortable with the substitute
motion.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kniss, you actually seconded the
substitute motion. If you'd withdraw your second, I'd be more than happy
to define mobility for you. [video malfunction]
Mayor Burt: Let's not do the horse trading right now. We can put on the
table that if we return to the primary motion, we'll have additional discussion
on that. Council Member Filseth. Now the final, and that's it.
Council Member Filseth: As I think about it, here is maybe my biggest
concern about breaking mobility out as a separate item. My sense is that a
lot of what we need to do is kind of basic block-and-tackle stuff as opposed to sort of the intergalactic stuff. Just take this as an example. I mean, what
comes up in the Citizen Survey is that everybody thinks traffic has gotten a
lot worse in the last five years. Yet, we keep doing these Environmental
Impact Reports that say no traffic impact, no traffic impact, no traffic
impact. I think we ought to go back and revisit how we do traffic impact
analysis. That's sort of a block-and-tackle basic kind of thing. My worry
would be as we go down the mobility path, are we going to spend all our
time focusing on self-driving cars and stuff like that as opposed to going and
doing the block-and-tackle stuff associated with land use. That would be
probably my biggest concern about breaking it out separately. I hope that
whatever we do we're going to capture that.
SUBSTITUTE MOTION RESTATED: Council Member Schmid moved,
seconded by Council Member Kniss to adopt the following Priorities for 2016:
A. The Built Environment: Housing, Parking, Livability, Mobility, with a
particular emphasis on Mobility; and
B. Infrastructure; and
C. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
D. Completion of the Comprehensive Plan 2015-2030 Update with
increased focus from Council.
Mayor Burt: Let's vote on the amendment. We don't have lights, so it'll be
a vote of hands. All in favor of the amendment. That passes on a 5-4 vote
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with Council Members Schmid, DuBois, Kniss, Filseth and Holman in favor.
We now have that as our adopted Priorities for the year.
SUBSTITUTE MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Filseth,
Holman, Kniss, Schmid yes
Mayor Burt: Our schedule is to have lunch now. It occurs to me that maybe
we should introduce the next item, so that over lunch we can go through the
exercise leisurely. What we have is—what's the math here? Twenty-four
dots. That's somewhat of an arbitrary number. It happens to be how many
are on one of these tags. We could go into a debate whether we should
have 25 or 23 dots. Let's accept that the purpose of this is to inform us, not
necessarily to have this be a definitive vote. What we'd want to do is go
back there on the back wall and place your dots on what you think would be
the most important things for Staff to focus on this year. It doesn't mean
that things that get in the upper 24 get worked on, and the ones below there don't get worked on. This is just trying to have a relative sense of informing
us for our subsequent conversation and the Staff what our sense is of the
most important projects.
Council Member Berman: Can I ask two questions? It's just questions
about what you want.
Mayor Burt: Just a second. I've got Council Member Wolbach, DuBois and
Berman. Let's try to have this just be clarifying questions rather than
advocacy. Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: Indeed. First, two questions. One, can we
double up? Two, must we use all of our stickers?
Council Member Berman: Exactly my two.
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible)
Mayor Burt: No, the doubling up is something that's done frequently in this
kind of process as a weighted response, if you want to really say something
is particularly important. I was struggling with that question. Mr. City
Manager.
Mr. Keene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let me just bring up another issue that
came up. First of all, I wanted to just let you know that the Staff being so
in-tune with the Council put many of the housing-related projects under the Built Environment back there in advance. That being said, when you look at
the projects that we have there, there may be projects or initiatives that are
not there that you would somehow think are critical to your Priority setting.
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We've got blank pieces of paper if there were any need to write something
up. I don't know with the process how you want to do that. You are just
trying to get a sense of things. Secondly as it relates to doubling up,
everything that we put on that project list as Staff, you had either in one
form or another directed us to do at some point in time or it was sort of
within our wheelhouse. To go to the Mayor's point, it's not like automatically
things are going to drop off. What we would be using is from you—I mean,
if we had to choose, we would at least be able to gravitate towards what was
more important. There are a lot of other factors that are involved there.
You're only getting a third of the projects up there stickers. I could kind of
argue that it might be more informative not to be doubling up on stuff with
the stickers, since you're got a small amount.
Mayor Burt: Let me hear from others before we answer that question.
Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I think Jim just touched on the two items. I
thought we were going to have a little bit of a discussion about clarifications,
maybe additions. Grade seps, High Speed Rail is not up there. How do we
vote for that?
Mayor Burt: You've got a—did you say, Jim, that there's blank sheets?
Mr. Keene: The Staff has some blank sheets of paper. We're all set. I
mean, if there is a way you want to roughly, without wordsmithing it too
much right now, like grade seps. If you want to give us ...
Mayor Burt: Why don't we put a few blank sheets under each category?
Council Member DuBois: Sure. If we don't have a discussion, it's
(crosstalk).
Mrs. Keene: I mean (crosstalk).
Mayor Burt: The discussion follows ...
Council Member DuBois: in terms of you placing votes on some new thing I
wrote down, you may not even be aware of it.
Council Member Berman: How about a couple of minutes to add things?
Council Member DuBois: I would rather we just maybe talk about additions
after we vote, and then just recognize that for time purposes we ...
Council Member Kniss: I kind of like that.
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Council Member DuBois: The other thing on doubling up, I think it is a really
important question, because it turns into more of game theory. If I place 24
votes on one item, does that outweigh what the eight of you think? I really
think we should say one vote per item.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman.
Council Member Berman: Cory's two questions were my two questions.
We've answered the doubling up; we haven't answered do you have to place
all your stickers. Just so we know what the rules of the game are, or the
activity, does it matter?
Mayor Burt: You can do with your stickers (crosstalk) you want except
doubling them.
Mr. Keene: Just do not take your stickers out of the building please.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. You can cede me your votes if you
want. That's fine too.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. I had the same questions about
stickers. Thank you for that. You can collect all of the excess stickers that
eventuate. One clarifying thing, though, is I think Council Member DuBois,
Tom, referred to this. I think if we vote and put our stickers up before
there's any even realization of any additions, the things that get added are
at a definite disadvantage.
Mayor Burt: Let me suggest then a sequence of go write any additions, grab
food, then do stickers. Stickers are to be neither bartered nor sold.
Mr. Keene: The Staff will be back there with some paper and some Magic
Marker. You can write it up and stick it up underneath the Priority.
Vice Mayor Scharff: We're sticking with one sticker per (crosstalk).
Mayor Burt: Yeah. Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I just wanted to say we're definitely sticking with one
sticker per ...
Mayor Burt: No doubling up. We settled that. Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: Got it.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
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Council Member Schmid: I guess I would be in favor of doubling, at least be
able to use two stickers. This is a session on Priorities, what is the Council
Priority. It's hard to give a Priority if you have a maximum ...
Mayor Burt: No, it's not absolute Priorities; it's just dividing in kind of two
halves of most important and important. I think we've kind of had a
consensus and gone past that. We're going to not double. Council Member
DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I'm sorry to delay. I have one that was really a
question before I write it up there. The Fry's project, I know we put it off.
Do we need to talk about it at all this year? Are we going to end up not
talking about it and then being in a rush (crosstalk).
Mayor Burt: I think that's pretty granular. You're welcome to put it up
there. If there are stickers, then ...
Council Member Dubois: I just thought if somebody had an answer that we absolutely don't need to worry about it this year, I (crosstalk).
Mayor Burt: I think we have a lot of different things that could fall into this
kind of discussion. We really do.
Council Member DuBois: It was on our list last year.
Mayor Burt: Ready, break.
Council took a break from 12:22 P.M. to 12:53 P.M.
3. Priorities and Staff Work Plan: Getting the Work Done.
A. Council’s Priorities Projects.
Mayor Burt: At this time, we're going to continue on Item Number 3 which is
Priorities and Staff Work Plan: Getting the Work Done. Everyone, the meeting
is reconvening now. The first aspect of this, while our Staff is going to be
pulling together somewhat of a dot count, is the review of the current projects.
The City Manager, I think, wanted to provide us some context for what's going
on and some of his thoughts. Mr. Keene.
James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council Members.
Every year the Council is expanding or deepening or building on your process
for delivering on Priorities and results that you want to see. Again, just
harkening back to last year, in one sense even as imperfect as that quick little
dot exercise is, it's further than we got last year. I would say I know that there was an effort for us to get out the work plan and get Council feedback. We
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weren't actually able to accomplish that successfully last year. This year we've
just gotten a first pass. I think the way the Mayor introduced it is right. This is
just to inform us even where we are right now. What I really wanted to do is
just lay a foundation for the Council on actions that I think that the Staff feels
that we need to find a way to spend some time on during the course of the year
so we can maintain the focus that you establish when new issues and items
come up to be able to assimilate them or reprioritize in an effective way. The
truth is we have no real formal process for that now. It's sort of done
intuitively or instinctively. We will have a count for you on this. I think what
this will do is it will inform some processes and approaches that we need to
take as a City to refine this so that it's even more useful and the fact that it's
going to need to be dynamic during the course of the year. I mean, new
initiatives are going to come up. Something is going to be more complicated
than we might have thought. I just wanted to take the liberty as City Manager to give you a report on sort of how we're trying to approach it at the Staff-level
to be able to not just manage our work but be accountable for results that you
want to see. I just took the liberty of thinking about this in terms of balance.
Healthy City/Healthy Community, as some of you had mentioned, while it's a
Priority right now, it's actually probably more of a kind of core value. How is it
that we have a balanced environment and approach to this? I'm trying to see
why I can't get my show up here. Kind of to get clearer to go back in time, just
to sort of show you that when we're focusing on the Council's Priorities, even
those 69 back there, and we kind of call them Priority projects. As somebody
said earlier today, the majority of the work we do as a City is the regular stuff
of the City, the Police Department responding to calls for service, us fixing the
roads and all of those sorts of things. I just wanted to revisit the fact that
there are Council Priority projects. This idea of these are things that are
important and that are visible above the line. There are also Council Priority
projects that are not within your identified Priorities, that during the course of
the year come up. Just as an example, we had included one non-Priority
project even though it could be put under Healthy Cities. That's the
Neighborhood Engagement Initiative that you asked us for. I only put that one
up there to give you an indication. There are things that matter to you that are outside of the projects on the Priority list. There will be new ones that come up
during the course of the year. In addition, we have all sorts of department or
ELT priority projects during the course of the year also. Most of our work
focuses in this area we call core services. Again just as an example, there were
69 projects listed under the Priorities. The Council added what? I don't know, five, six, seven, eight, whatever. Some of them were ones that we actually had
in our draft list and didn't get in there. Even our inability to get this list
perfectly is an indication of the state of affairs in our City. If I were to just
identify ELT priority projects that aren't listed up there on your list, everything
from how do we create the Development Services function as an Enterprise
Fund. We've got a regional Fire and Police Dispatch initiative going on. We
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have a big issue related to Animal Services and a shelter and the outsourcing.
We have labor negotiations with almost all of our employees. We have a bunch
of neat library projects that, in one sense, I could have put under the
Infrastructure, but they're so far along that they're more on our project level.
We've got the Stanford fire contract issue and negotiations. We have a big
Staff initiative all related around Smart Cities and how do we use technology
and some of this different sensor technology and all those sorts of things that
would inform things like our parking strategy, but they go beyond that. There's
just a whole bunch of initiative work that, again, we are working on that are not
being reflected back there in the Council's Priorities. We are working at the
Staff level on actually trying to develop almost a play book for us to manage
our work. Right now, this page here is the "above the water line" work, if I
could stay with the iceberg metaphor. We're really trying to identify the
Council Priority projects, the list, and ultimately to identify both the individual and the collective percentage of time that we expect people to be devoted to
working on those projects. The second phase is we are concurrently developing
the ELT priority project list. These are department visible or critical to success
as a City or they're cutting across the Executive Leadership Team. The same
thing to identify for people in our organization who work on Priority projects,
how much of their time goes to that. The important thing to remember is that
most of our employees are working in that core service area, "below the water
line." We've got 1,100 employees; we have less than 100 who are working on
these Priority projects. In this core service area, we'd like to think about the
fact that we've got team work which includes things like administration and
management. A lot of our people who work on Priority projects also have
responsibilities of planning, managing Staff, communicating. That's answering
emails and that sort of thing. It's maintaining relationships. In other words,
supporting Commissions that they work with, working with their peers if they're
department heads. The bulk of the work is in this area of service. That
includes all of the routine duties, customer service and, to the extent that we
do troubleshooting and responsiveness. When you see the information from
the public about how they access the City, that comes in through this sort of
service area. When the Council gets requests from citizens about issues or problems, they go to our Staff. Many times it does require people who are
working in the Priority project area to also intervene. Lastly, there's an area
that we call renewal which is training and learning. Is there any
unprogrammed time that exists for Staff? Obviously we need to have
unprogrammed time if we're going to have new initiatives. We're really ultimately going to be capturing a measure of the capacity in our organization
for people to function in this core service area. We've got "above the water
line" Priority work, which is what's visible to the Council and to me when I'm
looking at these important projects. Yet, we have all of this baseline work of
the organization as a whole which also applies to people who work in the
"above the water line" area. We're developing an actual roster of capacity for
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people in our organization. I would say this. Remember a couple of years ago
when we did this estimate, I actually went through and we identified 66 people
in our organization who are the folks who worked on all of the stuff that
matters to the Council. It's just a fact of life that we don't have 1,100 people
working on this. We've got 66 when we did the count a number of years ago.
Actually when we went through the Budget cutbacks, at one point it had
dropped down to about 55. I'm assuming we're around 75, but we're actually
doing a count. We obviously can't pull off one of our water, gas, wastewater
repair people to work on the TMA policies and that sort of thing. The fact is
that the two Staff people I have in this graphic versus the nine or ten below,
that's about the right average ratio of the amount of folks that we have to work
on these important initiatives. The real critical issue we have for our Staff and
for you all being able to be successful is the same issue that you have for
yourselves individually, which is there's 24 hours in a day, seven days a week, and there's no more capacity than that. We have that for each person. My job
is to make sure that we have enough people allocated to the projects and we
can manage that in an effective way in the coming year. I will just tell you that
over the past couple of years, our productivity has increased, but we have Staff
turnover. We have not been very formal or accountable for how we're
reallocating our time from one situation to the next which really leads to the
fact that there are many times the Council can say to me why are we behind
schedule on an issue. I can say let's see, the two people we had working on
that, one of them left for another job or we reallocated people's time to
something else. We don't have a process for really being open and transparent
with the Council about our capacity to do that. I feel that we have an
obligation to be able to do that and to develop a process for managing the work
plan. The thought here is that you have a lot you want to accomplish already.
We start to look at it. There are many, many things that will come up during
the year. We need to, on the Staff side, be able to report to the Council more
specifically what it is we do. We've got a challenge here. There is a puzzle in
our capacity to be able to deliver on things. On the bottom right-hand side,
there's a question of managing scope. This is an issue for the Council. You
have two main roles: one is policy and the other is oversight. I would argue that there's no substitution for your policy role. I mean, you can't really
delegate that to the Staff. I mean, we can do research for you, but you
ultimately set the policies. To the extent that you spend time in oversight of
what it is the Staff is doing, it takes away from your policy role. In truth, it
generates extra work for the Staff. It's a necessary role, but how we modulate the balance between policy and oversight, I think, is something we've got to
get a better handle on. Scope, there are project adds. There are new additions
that come up or there are do-overs that take place. When we bring an item
back to the Council, if you think we haven't looked at it completely enough or
you want to expand it, in many we send it back, we're doing it over. I do think
we need to find a way where we have more clarity about the scope. The
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second is we need to manage time. There's a question of meetings, all sorts of
meetings. How do we review our structure and process this year in a
meaningful way to be sure we're responsive to the values that you have, but
also that we can get the work done? Finally, in the right-hand corner, we have
to manage our resources which is money, but it's people mostly. I would just
say that consultants can be a great assistance, but they're not an equal
substitute even for Staff, because it still requires ongoing Staff oversight and
management for consultants. Half the time when you bring in consultants, the
first part of the whole effort is trying to get the consultants up to speed, which
means the Staff are spending a lot of time working with consultants. It's sort
of a mixed bag. It's a puzzle. One of the things that we've been thinking about
at the Staff level is post-Retreat effectiveness. How is it that we can explore in
an ongoing fashion, how it is that we really build on just this initial work that
you did in a meaningful way. I just am putting out a few suggestions here. I'm not asking the Council to do anything right now, other than think about how we
could start to look at some issues like this. Right now, we're working on the
Council Priority work plan. We'll be working with the Staff on the next item on
integrating the Council work plan with the larger Staff work plan, so I can
ultimately give you better reports about what capacity we have to deal with
things. We've talked about this idea. You're going to talk more about either
quarterly Retreats or other kinds of Study Sessions. One, to deal with topical
issues, but we also need to have a way—we really need to have a more formal
way to review where we are on the work plan during the course of a year. One
of the questions that I would just pose is when the Council makes requests,
how does it know that the work can get done, whether it's a casual comment at
a meeting or a motion change or a project itself. One of the thoughts I had is
should we have some sort of a rules committee role between Retreats where
the Staff can work with some subset of the Council about how we manage the
work. I'm not saying it should be a rules committee. Maybe it's some more
clarity about the Mayor and Vice Mayor's role or whatever. I'm telling you we
have a deficit right now for us to be able to communicate with the Council
about are we really getting the work done in the way that you would like it.
How do you look at the Council meetings itself? I'm just proposing that we really talk about how we manage more strictly the time. Same thing with
Committee meetings. The next to the last issue on the bottom right is rules for
direction, ultimately getting more clarity about how we're in a position as a
Staff to respond to Council motions, either giving you feedback at the meeting
about what it might take or having some post-meeting process working with the Mayor and Vice Mayor to be able to come back and say the implications of
the motion change you made are such and such. Right now, we have no—
we're going with it. Lastly, streamline products and processes. We've been
having some little conversations about what are things that we've developed
over time that the Council and/or the Staff could agree are anachronisms that
we don't need any more, do we restructure Staff Reports, do we get
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presentations out to Council in advance with the reports. There are a hundred
little things we could begin to do that could streamline and make our work
[video malfunction] trying to work through all of these big issues. I just need
to let you know that I felt that we had a very productive year last year. It was
not without its toll on our capacity in a lot of ways. I want to be sure that we
can make commitments to the Council that we can keep, and we can report to
you in a way, in reality, that you actually—I'm asking you for more oversight in
the realm of governance where we don't have a lot of that oversight. We do a
really good job on getting into operational and strategic oversight. On really
managing work, I think for us to really honestly deliver to you what it is you
want to achieve and be accountable, we've got to put some effort this year in
that. When you are looking at opportunities and processes during the year to
sharpen your work plan or dive deeper on some issues, I want to be sure that
you make time for us to really put some attention to the governance structure and the Staff, Council, community interface in a way so we can be successful.
Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. First, I don't have any comment cards from the public
on this Agenda Item. If anybody wishes to speak, please bring them forward.
While Staff is wrapping up the green dot initiative, I think some of what the
Council was struggling with as we were going through that exercise is we have
not just a lot of different sheets there and projects, but they're really vastly
different scale and granularity. I mean, we have one sheet that is within the
Comp Plan, the Comp Plan. Then we have in the Built Environment and
elsewhere certain capital improvement plan projects that have already
established schedules and funding and everything. A number of us were
confused as to what's discretionary about it. It's just moving forward in the
pipeline. They weren't necessarily larger in dollars or importance than other
capital improvement projects that weren't there. It kind of goes back to how
we framed it. This is informative, but it's got its own imperfections at the same
time. I think as we go forward in this discussion, one is a time check. We're at
1:20. It sure doesn't look like we're going to have a wrap-up by 1:50. I want
to check with the Council. Is everybody okay with extending at least a half
hour?
Council Member Kniss: I'm okay 'til 2:30.
Mayor Burt: Seeing no objections, we'll tentatively move it out into the 2:30
range. That gives us an hour for a discussion on this. I think we're going to
need that. There's a lot of things to try to digest here. Just to frame it in
advance, just as last year we had a Committee as a Whole shortly after the Retreat, there are going to be things that we're discussing here that are not
going to be able to be completed today. That's a part of this whole "3B" which
is discussion of topics for special committee. Some of that may be just
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continuing some of this conversation at a higher level in addition to more
discrete, important topic areas. Council Member DuBois had mentioned earlier
something that I think that, or touched on it, that the City Manager also did.
We've got issues around the Staff work plan, and the Council work plan and our
time. Within that subset, the City Manager spoke about how much—we need to
ask ourselves to reflect on how much of our focus we want to be on policy and
how much, for instance, on oversight. Two of our principal functions. I'm not
assuming that gets resolved today. I'm just laying some things out on the
table. Within that Staff time issue is this issue of ongoing relationship between
our Priority setting around subcategories of our City Council Priorities and Staff
resources and having to figure out how to balance what we've asked to be done
with what can be done. That's kind of one level of trying to frame and a little
bit of a stall while we're counting dots. This is not meant to be comprehensive.
What the Staff did is they listed the ones that are five dots or above. How many—that looks like a pretty good number, five. Seventeen got five or above
out of 24 dots. What did we have? Twenty-four. That's a good reference
point. It doesn't mean that if you got four dots, you're off the list. Remember
we put that in context. This just helps us. I should have mentioned too that
some of those projects look like they could have been folded together into one.
The voting got divided perhaps. We just have to keep all that in mind. This is
very imperfect, but maybe it'll inform conversation. If it's okay, I'll just read off
the ones. Seven dots, grade crossings.
Female: (inaudible)
Mayor Burt: I just did.
Council Member Berman: Seven dots.
Mr. Keene: No, the number of the item.
Mayor Burt: No.
Council Member Berman: That would take forever.
Mayor Burt: It's high level.
Mr. Keene: You'll have it by next week.
Mayor Burt: We'll get it sent out. Then we have the following six with six dots:
local transportation funding which is a sheet that was added, it wasn't up there;
Public Safety Building; traffic signal timing; Bike and Pedestrian Plan, I'll note there were a lot of sheets up there related to Bike and Pedestrian Plan; Housing
Element, and there were a number of things up there related to housing;
Sustainability/Climate Action Plan. The following ones all got five: Parks, Trails
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and Open Space Master Plan; Downtown parking garage; Business Registry;
fiber to the premise, I'll note there that wireless was separate from fiber to the
premise, so that was a little dilemma; CEQA transportation analysis; Cubberley
Master Plan; California Avenue parking garage; the bike bridge across 101;
airplane noise; and Project Safety Net. That's kind of informative. I'll keep this
here, because people may want to ask for reminders on which those were.
Now, I guess we have to figure out have we—I'm not sure how much more
discussion we can have on these. This was informative. We went through an
exercise. We could go into the next two hours debating whether one of those
should have gone up or down or sideways or whatever. If colleagues want to
kind of at a high level give any quick comments on what we just had as
feedback, that'd be great. We also have kind of a need to discuss how we will
contend with the reconciliation between the work that Staff would do and the
Priorities that we have for projects. Finally, how these topics might fold into special meetings of different sorts. We kind of have three things to yet do in
the next hour. Council Member Holman, then Filseth.
Female: (inaudible)
Mayor Burt: That was within that reconciliation between our project Priorities
and Staff work plan and capacity. Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Are you saying I have an hour?
Mayor Burt: Pardon me?
Council Member Holman: You're saying I have an hour? I'm just kidding. I do
like that we got this list. We're not going to get through it today. It seems to
me we ought to have maybe a Committee of the Whole meeting or something
like that. There were, as you mentioned Mayor, there were some things that
seemed to be redundant or so closely related to each other there could be some
of those that got three and three, so they didn't make this list. I guess there
needs to be some clarification, for me anyway—maybe other Council Members
will weigh in—about what got on the list and maybe some others that didn't,
then also maybe what some of these projects really are. There was
redundancy or seemed like split projects.
Mayor Burt: Can I suggest that—if I might interject. Maybe for our Committee
as a Whole, one of the things we'd want Staff to do is look at how maybe some of these can be grouped that was there. That would help us.
Council Member Holman: And maybe how the voting would come out if they
were grouped.
Mayor Burt: Right.
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Council Member Holman: Thank you for that. We do have this. You've
mentioned for some time—last year Staff performed heroics. It was kind of a
catch-up year, it seemed to me and maybe to other colleagues. I know some
colleagues at least. It was kind of a catch-up year where we were
accomplishing some things and tackling some things that hadn't been
addressed in a good long while. Again with the improved economy, we had
things that were happening that hadn't happened for a while or had been
exacerbated in the last year or two or maybe three. Thank you to Staff is an
understatement. I think with the post-Retreat effectiveness, addressing the
things that are on that—there's not a slide number to it—the Council Priority
work plan and Staff work plan and quarterly Retreat. I think it would be really
helpful to have a quarterly Retreat. We don't always know. If we wait a year
to see where things are and where the work plan is and what things have been
accomplished and how we move things around, I think that would really be helpful. It also could help address the thing that we've talked about
sometimes, City Manager and I and others as well. If the Council adds
something, then what are we moving to the side? That should be a policy
decision by the Council, not putting Staff in that kind of awkward position. Is
that at a quarterly Retreat? Perhaps that's one good way to address that, so
we don't just add to the burden. We actually to prioritize and say what things
could slip to the side. I'm not in favor of a rules committee because I think
prioritization and Staff work, I think, is a Council responsibility and not any
subset, whether it's two or four or whatever, two, three or four, whatever
number of Council Members. I think it's a Council responsibility, and it keeps
the Council informed of what's going on to. One thing, Liz and I were kind of
bouncing this little hot potato back and forth. I'll take the heat and bring it up
first. I guess one way of saying this is that in the community it's a little hard
sometimes to get the understanding that Council works as hard as—excuse me,
Council too—that Staff works as hard as it does because sometimes there's a
misperception or maybe is the 9/80 system the best, most effective system.
There are pros and cons to everything. I guess maybe that was implemented
many years ago, before you came on as City Manager, Jim. Is it time we had a
discussion about that? Is it effective? Is it efficient? Is it not? I know it's a negotiated thing, but still do we need to have a discussion about that? It's a
question; it's truly a question. I know a lot of Staff members even on a 9/80
Friday, they're in working anyway. If they're working the 80 hours, but they're
still putting in another day, is that an advantage to Staff or not? I think there's
some questions and issues that we might benefit from having just a discussion about it. I know other Council Members have the same question. Certainly,
members of the community do. I'll just throw that hot potato out there.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
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Council Member Filseth: Just real briefly. I think this is really interesting. I'm
glad that we did it. I think given sort of the constrained nature of the exercise,
I think its value is primarily thematic as opposed to specific. I think Staff ought
to take the great lead in sort of figuring out how we incorporate this into
prioritization of the work plan.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you, Jim and Staff, for doing that. I think it
was a really worthwhile exercise. I look forward to building on it. Not only
what were the top votes, but I think it's interesting if you look back there at the
spread of votes. I think part of that is it actually would be useful to have more
discussion. I don't think it's just a grouping issue. I think, again, us having a
shared understanding of these projects. If we spent more time discussing it
upfront at the top of the funnel, not that we're all going to be 100 percent
aligned, but I think we could be more aligned which would actually save an enormous amount of Staff time. Spending that time upfront is really worth it.
I totally agree with flexibility in the idea of maybe having a quarterly Retreat to
adjust throughout the year. I think it would be very useful to us at Council
meetings if you can highlight how staffing relates to projects. It also highlights
the importance of hiring. I think we're generally aware; we may not always be
aware of exactly where we're understaffed and how that's impacting a project.
Your comment about managing scope is another great one that I think we
really need to take to heart. I think about the Sustainability Summit. It was
great. There were a lot of ideas. It struck me as I was looking at the projects,
some of them related to sustainability. If we narrowed the scope and got some
of those things done right now, I feel like that funnel is so wide it's almost
holding us back a bit. Again, sustainability is just an example, but I think you
guys get the point that some of our projects are just scoped so broadly I think
it just consumes a lot of time and slows us down.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. I really appreciate the fact that we're starting to
talk about a realistic Staff work plan. I think that's really helpful. I guess I'm a
little unclear on what we just did with the dots. I thought all of those things up
there ...
Mayor Burt: (crosstalk) the rest of us. We're all clear.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I know you were. Everything up there, I thought we
actually agreed on as a Council that we wanted to do. If that's the case, I
thought that what this was really doing was showing Staff what we thought was
the most important of those things to make sure we get done. If Staff has to prioritize, that's one we'd prioritize. That's very different than needing more
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discussion on this stuff, frankly. I'm not sure we do need more discussion. I
think that's helpful for Staff. I mean, are we really going to sit here and argue
about how much priority each one of those gets? One of the other things on
here, I noticed that they only want committee meetings from 6:00 to 8:00.
Here we're talking about having more meetings. There's two things I'd like to
see. I don't care if we start at 5:00 frankly, but I'd like to see us end by 11:00
on our Council meetings. I personally think it's fine if we go to 9:00, but I
agree committee meetings should be done right around there. I don't really
want to add all these additional meetings that we're talking about. I'm just
thinking about it. We're talking about quarterly Retreats. That's another three
meetings, if we're going to do that. We're talking about Committee of the
Whole meetings; are we talking about doing those outside of Council meetings?
Mayor Burt: I think that's one and the same (inaudible).
Vice Mayor Scharff: Maybe it's one and the same. I'm just saying how many meetings do we want to add in addition to this. I don't know about the rest of
you. You're probably more up for this than I am sometimes. We just did the
Sustainability Summit, and we just did this. I feel a little pushed when we do
that on two weekends in a row like this. I don't know how Staff feels about
spending their weekends on this. I think when we talk about more meetings,
I'd like to see us try not do it. I'd like to try and accomplish everything we can
on a Monday. That doesn't mean we can't have another meeting, but I do think
we should keep it somewhat sensitive to those issues.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: It's always handy when people do talk in front of you,
and then you can respond. To talk about the 9/80 issue, which I've certainly
talked about for ages. One of my solutions to that—Jim, I think you and I have
talked about this before. Why does everyone have to be off every other Friday?
I know some people do come in. I think again perception from the community
is why isn't somebody there, especially on a Friday when you're going to have a
huge meeting on Monday. I don't like to disturb people at home, even if I've
got a cell phone. I think that's troubling. I, for the life of me, cannot see why
we can't figure a way to divide that more equally. To go through some of the
rest of these. As far as the Council meetings, I honestly don't care if we start at 4:00 or 3:00. I really feel strongly about being done by 11:00. It's for
these reasons. When we're sitting there beyond 11:00, aside from the fact that
we, I think, get—just as each 15 or 20 minutes goes by, we become that much
less effective. Also, constituencies are often waiting to talk to us and the Staff
is sitting there. Staff may go home at 1:00 in the morning, and they're back again—the expectation is they're back at 7:30. That's a pretty short night.
That really troubles me. As far as the committee meetings going only from
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6:00 to 8:00, that's probably going to be hard. Again, I'd support what Greg
Scharff said; be done by 9:00 at least so it's a decent time. Rules for direction
and motions, is what you're looking for there, Jim, is more clarity? That's
Number 7 on your list.
Mr. Keene: I think a good metaphor would be the Council sort of looking at the
Priorities back there and sort of saying wait a minute, some of these are
redundant or how do they fit in. The fact is, if you think about the Council
meetings, any time there are amendments or modifications to a motion, there
is new direction that is being given on the spot. There is no way to put that in
context to sort of say wait a minute, you already asked us to do something like
that before or if we do that, it's definitely going to have an impact on
something else you asked us. The Mayor and I had a little conversation about
this. Would we build a more formal way early in a motion for the Staff to be
invited to give some feedback to the Council on the direction of the motion just if there are implications? There are times you guys literally—you've got a
motion, and we're just watching it unfold before us. To be truthful about it,
sometimes it is a kind of just mash-up of series of amendments that ultimately
get five votes. I don't mean this in a negative way. When you step back and
look at them, it doesn't necessarily always make sense when you see that. It
would be nice to modulate that before it happens, but at a minimum after the
fact for us to be able to go back and say wait a minute, we got this motion,
what's it really going to take before we go off and just start working on it, to be
able to kind of come back and say here's what could be required. This wouldn't
always happen. Clearly, there are times we need to have some process, some
rules that would say good, we can come back within three weeks and kind of
give you an assessment as to if there's some difficulty with this or it's going to
have some impact on some other directions that you've given us. As I sort of
said before, when the Council asks us to do something, how is it that you know
that we can get the work done? We have no process for you knowing that we
could get the work done. The only way we could get the work done, if the
assumption is we're sitting around there with unprogrammed time waiting to be
filled up by the new direction. I'm basically telling you that most of the people
who are working on the key issues, not only do we—I'm not whining about this. I'm just stating this as a fact. Not only do we not have unprogrammed time,
we're ignoring other responsibilities that we have in that "below the water line"
area of administration, management, responsiveness. Perfect fodder for the
Auditor to be able to go in and point out failures after the fact, because we're
triaging on project work, and why didn't you get your house in order.
Council Member Kniss: Thanks.
Mayor Burt: That gives us the opportunity for oversight time though.
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Council Member Kniss: Thanks, Jim. That's helpful. My last comment is about
the Retreats. I don't know when we would have quarterly Retreats. I presume
that means another Saturday or something similar. I think the idea of a check-
in quarterly is a good idea, but I think a full Retreat every three months is—I
think that's not a direction I would like to go in.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: We're a world-class City in a lot of ways, or a world-
renowned City in a lot of ways. I think that it's important that we start really
working towards becoming a world-class bureaucracy. I want to thank the City
Manager for his presentation. I think that his presentation that he just gave
along with this discussion are important steps towards creating that future
where we can point to the structure of the governance, the relationship of
Council to Boards and Commissions, to the Staff as a positive model rather
than something less than that, that it might be at the moment. I just want to say thank you very much for pushing this discussion. I think that having
feedback opportunities for Staff to let us know how we are burdening them or
creating expectations which are just simply unrealistic is really important. I
don't right now know what the exact answer to that is. For me, maybe that's
something that we should have put up there as one of our Priorities. Just the
numbers of meetings we have which create not just time constraints and
problems for ourselves on Council, but also create a lot of Staff time because
Staff have to be present throughout our meetings. If we're going to have a
fourth meeting of the month, maybe that's the time to have the fourth meeting
be less action, less typical action. Maybe that fourth meeting should be these
check-ins, Committee as a Whole, talking about our core values as hopefully we
get to do this year. Actually we just had a meeting where we just did Study
Sessions which I actually really liked. I thought it was a very informative
evening. It wasn't as contentious and stressful because we weren't taking
formal votes. If we're going to have a fourth meeting of the month, that might
be a good one also that might be able to wrap up a little bit faster because
we're not hashing out the details of trying to get to five votes on motions.
Something I'd mentioned last year I'll just mention again for consideration once
more is a different idea for how we approach our scheduling and agendizing meetings. Perhaps we say that the first and second Mondays of each month
will be our regular meetings, but we expect that the second and fourth are very
likely to be utilized, but keep those agendas open so that whatever we don't
finish by 11:00 P.M. strictly on those first regular meetings automatically gets
rolled to the very next week. We would expect that we would be there for a lot of second and fourth weeks. It means that when we continue an item because
we haven't completed it, it comes back the next week so it's fresh in
everybody's minds, Staff doesn't have to prepare a whole new packet right
away. It's just whatever we didn't finish the previous week, just continued. I'd
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mentioned this at our Retreat last year. I'd offer it again for consideration.
There are pros and cons that come with any change. After a year on Council,
I'm more certain that something like that might be useful. Otherwise, the
alternative is the one I mentioned before which is let's try and reserve our
fourth meetings of the month for just regular stuff. On the 9/80 thing, I guess
I'd posit the question of whether there's a way to consider trading the 9/80 for
greater opportunities for ...
Mayor Burt: I should have jumped in before. That whole thing is getting into a
discussion of a particular topic as opposed to whether that's a topic we want to
talk about in the future. I apologize, because I should have done this earlier. I
don't want everybody going into that. That's a rat hole that we can't do today.
Council Member Wolbach: Forget anything about the 9/80 then.
Mayor Burt: Just whether you want to talk about it in the future.
Council Member Wolbach: In discussions about how we make workload manageable for Staff, increase opportunities for telecommuting, I think, are
important, I think, are already being discussed as part of our own TDM efforts
and single occupancy vehicle trip reduction efforts for within the City. I
encourage that continued discussion. As far as overall consideration, big
picture consideration of Council time commitment and what that means for
relation to Staff, I think there are a couple of questions that I'm certainly not
ready to dive into today, but that I think we need to have in our minds and
have a conversation at some point in the next couple of years, especially before
our Council size reduces in three years. Those two questions are whether we
want to continue the trend of the last couple of decades of becoming a more
full-time Council and just make it official and say we're going to be full-time like
San Jose or San Francisco. Whether we want to pull back and be very
disciplined about how much time we expect future people running for Council
and serving to commit. A related question is whether Council Members should
have Staff dedicated to assisting them where we say we're going to make the
investment to do that. Those are a couple of things to consider. One other
question to consider when Staff is over loaded, I wonder if there are ways that
we could lean more heavily on our Boards and Commissions to do some of the
early work and maybe even some of the detailed work on exploring some of our Council Priorities. I'd just put that out there as a question for consideration.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman.
Council Member Berman: Thanks. I mean, just to kind of go quickly. I
thought the green dot project was good. Like Vice Mayor Scharff mentioned, I
think it's good for prioritization. Maybe that's something that we revisit as we continually add on more things which we do every year and we almost do every
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meeting. Staff come back and say okay, but then this is getting knocked off. I
agree that some of those things could be grouped together. I don't think it's
quite as easy as combining the dots, because some of us might have voted on
all three of the subsets and then essentially one person is getting three votes
on a grouping of a project. That was discussed earlier. I don't know if it's
going to happen, but Staff needs to keep that in mind if they do that kind of
grouping together. We got a lot done last year, but I thought we had an insane
amount of meetings. I can complain and nobody will care, but as Cory said, it's
the impact on Staff. Not only do they have to be at the meeting, but they have
to prepare for the meeting and they have to be prepared to answer any random
question a Council Member might ask about anything that's on the meeting.
We all spend probably an hour preparing for every hour in a meeting,
sometimes more, sometimes less. I imagine for Staff it's the same thing if not
more. We are our own worst enemies when it comes to discussing and—we always talk about this at Retreats. As the [video malfunction] onto the work
plan. We can't do everything we want to do. It's on us. We talk about it every
year, and then we don't follow it. I would love for us to have hard rules on the
length of time in Council meetings. That would be difficult at first, but I think it
would force us to be more concise. We would quickly realize that we can get
the same amount of work done in 75 percent of the time. Getting out of
Council meetings at 12:30, everybody's next day is kind of blown after that.
Again, that's on us. Whether it's the Mayor at the beginning of item saying
everybody's going to get three minutes or four minutes or five minutes on a
first round, I think we'll find that we actually can say—it's like the 20/80 rule.
You can say 80 percent of what you want to say in 20 percent of the time.
That next 80 percent of the time you're just droning on and really not adding a
whole lot of value to your talking points. Committee meetings, same thing.
One thing to consider—our Staff does an amazing job. There are times—it's not
all the time—where a Staff presentation might be quite long. If maybe there's
a rule for Staff presentations also of 10 minutes or 15 minutes if it's a more
complicated subject. There have been times where I've felt like we've had a
half hour Staff presentation for something that wasn't that complicated. Just
trying to find ways to streamline our meetings. If we're just talking at a high level right now, those are kind of my high level thoughts.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: Three Council Members have mentioned the 11:00 as
a reasonable time to end meetings for Council Members, for Staff, for the
public. I think there's been a procedural change taking place this year with Staff reports now coming out nine, ten days ahead of the meeting, a request
for questions by Wednesday with a Staff response by Friday. It seems to me
that, if taken seriously, could get on the table for the Staff and the public
before the meeting a lot of the critical questions and maybe get Council during
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the meetings to get to the action steps much quicker. Hopefully that could
really have an impact on the length of meetings.
Mayor Burt: At the risk of sounding facetious, I've heard that we want shorter
meetings and fewer meetings. I've heard very little about reducing the number
of subjects that we want to tackle nor the amount of oversight that we would
do. I haven't quite figured out how these recommendations from everybody
would get reconciled. We're still going to have the same number of Action
Items unless we figure out that some of those we're either going to put off or
that we're going to reduce the scope or breadth or depth of how we'll be
addressing them. I left out we want our colleagues to speak less but not
ourselves. That's the other important one. It basically points back to that
these are not simple solutions. We did have this meeting last Monday that was
all Study Sessions. I also like kind of having that. That basically allows us to
have something—we don't have to call things Retreats or even Committees as a Whole, but they're opportunities to be thoughtful and not debating so much and
not having to get into the sausage making of legislation in real time that the
City Manager was talking about. I think there is merit to that. We do need to
recognize that saying that the four meeting of a month will be for that purpose,
if we went in a direction like that, does not in any way reduce the number of
Action Items that we have before us. It hasn't really solved that problem, even
though I think it has merit as a way to structure what we do. I think it is better
to have Study Sessions grouped around common subjects and to have just a
temper to a given meeting that is around thoughtful discussion rather than
having to force forward legislation in real time. I think that one of the things
that as we get in toward a wrap-up in the coming minutes, whether we are
going to have—someone was mentioning a whole bunch of Retreats throughout
the year. Committee as a Whole started getting morphed into Retreats, and
there might be some similarities, but they're not quite the same. Either way,
one of the things that the City Manager and I had talked about is the need for
us to have perhaps on a quarterly basis where we say since we last met, we
had the Staff work plan. These two things have been completed. They come
off the work plan. The Council has just given direction for four new things.
Two other things have to be pushed out if those new things are all going to be added in this coming year or whatever timeframe we agree on. We have to
have that kind of deliberative process, deliberate process I should say, so that
we aren't just piling on and then being frustrated that Staff didn't do everything
we piled on when we're not being responsible in terms of the structure. We
need the feedback from Staff that says we now understand that these items are larger than we thought they were. We now have looked into them. As a
Council, you asked us to pursue a given item. We went back two weeks later
as Staff came back and said this is going to take more than we said on the fly
on that Monday night. Somehow we need a process to be able to continue to
recognize how changes to the work plan get restructured and a common
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agreement between the Council and the Staff as to revised work plans that are
updated periodically throughout the year and transparent. This is one of the
things that we as a Council have been looking for. We have that starting point
here today, but now we need a next iteration. I don't think we need Retreats
throughout the year, but I think we do need a follow-on to this meeting that
will be talking about in greater depth these different special meetings or
referrals. I'd put them into four buckets, these kind of larger scale discussions
that aren't reactive to just Action Items that must come forward. They could
be certain things in a Committee as a Whole. They are Study Sessions which
we have routinely. Some things could be referred to standing committees. We
simply say at the Committee as a Whole, like we actually did last year, those go
off to a given Standing Committee and let them work on it. Some of them we'll
simply say no, that's an Action Item. Let's bring it back and, yes, it has some
Study Session elements to it, but we want to have it come back as an Action Item. Those are the four buckets I had in mind. Maybe I'm not capturing all of
them. I don't think we're going to be able to figure out today which of these
various items that we want to have more discussion on this coming year should
be done in which format. We had some of our colleagues put together some
recommendations. In addition to what's written down here, Staff didn't capture
some of what I had down, but they're either here or some of them are on the
dots. We have our Housing Element implementation and the transfer of sites to
Downtown. We have how we're going to deal with transportation. We have the
traffic impact methodologies. As Council Member Schmid had talked about,
how do we align the Comp Plan process with actions that the Council is taking
related to the Comp Plan and make sure that the alignment and sequencing is
right. We certainly have additional work on airplane noise. I still want to
return or have the Policy and Services Committee look at core values so that
we don't continue to kind of struggle with what belongs as a priority and what
does not. Various topics like that. That's kind of what colleagues have put out
here, several of our colleagues, some of those. We have a number of things
still as prospective subjects for future meetings. It doesn't look like we're going
to be able to identify which ones should be when. I think one of our issues is
when and how do we grapple with that. Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: Here's a thought. In figuring out where to go from
here and specifically how all these items are going to come back to us, are they
going to come to a Committee of the Whole? Are they going to go to a
Commission? Are they going to go to a Committee? Are they going to come
back as a regular Action Item? I'd be fine with—rather than all of us working through each of these and saying here's how it goes, here's where this goes,
here's where that goes, I'd be fine with letting the Mayor, the Vice Mayor and
the City Manager sit down and do that and then bring a proposal back to
Council even on Consent. Say here's our plan for how these items will get
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handled over the course of the year. I'd be fine with deferring that in that way
or something like that.
Mayor Burt: Can I jump in there? I would be open to doing some work, but I
think it needs to come back to the Council for them to decide. I wouldn't be
comfortable with that being on Consent. I do think it could make our next
Committee as a Whole or whatever much more productive if that groundwork
was done.
Council Member Kniss: Pat or whomever else?
Mayor Burt: Pardon me?
Council Member Kniss: Whomever is in line, I'll ...
Mayor Burt: Go ahead, Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: It's an interesting idea, Cory. It probably puts a lot of
burden on the Mayor and the Vice Mayor. In addition to that, what I think is
that as is done many places, more work can be done in committees than we're currently doing. I think what happens currently is it's done in the committees.
It then comes to the Council where it's completely thrashed out again without a
lot of credence paid to what the committee did. Frequently in government
bodies, the committee does the bulk of the work. It comes to the Council. I
would presume at that point those who are on the committee say far less and
those who are not say more. That's a process I'd like to see us get into. It
doesn't seem to be one that we've done lately, but I'd be interested in Jim's
comments back on that. I know you've suggested shorter committee meetings.
That might mean that those committee meetings go three hours instead of two.
Do you want to make any comments on that as far as committees? You've got
to staff them.
Mr. Keene: I think you raise an interesting question. From my perspective, I
would think my colleagues would agree with me that for the most part with the
Standing Committees, with the exception of the Budget, the Council doesn't
really delegate a whole lot to the committee that isn't then subject to a lot of
review by the Council when it comes back. I think that is an accurate
observation. There are other governing bodies when it does go to committee,
the committee is more empowered. Clearly it has to come back for oversight to
the Council, but there is a tendency to redo it. If there were more discipline at the Council when it delegated something to a committee that was more
receptive of the committee's work, then it would seem that that could warrant
longer committee meetings. To be honest with you, I just sort of imposed the
two-hour thing knowing that it was going to get redone at the Council again.
To be honest with you, it's like let's not spend too much at the committee. If
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you could get to the point where you really were more comfortable with
delegating it, I do think the committee setup a lot of times does engender a
better conversation in ways, just the nature of the interchange and sitting
around the table and more back and forth than the Council. That's more up in
you guys' bailiwick as to how comfortable you are in delegating to a committee.
Council Member Kniss: I toss that out just for our consideration. If we're
willing to give the committees more responsibility and speak up less ourselves
at an actual Council meeting, I think that might be some goal we could have
towards streamlining.
Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I thought your comments, Mayor, were interesting about
we haven't taken anything off the list when we do this. One of the difficulties
we have is we have so many items that come before us. I look at our
schedules and I say to myself how are we going to get this finished by 11:00. We have so many items. Staff seems overly optimistic a lot on these items. I
know we're going to go longer. I'll just throw that out. One of the things we
could do is we could put everything but public hearings on Consent, and then
you could basically have to say three Council Members would have to pull it off
Consent if we wanted to discuss it. Between that notion and what we do now
may also be a possibility in terms of how do we get more items heard and dealt
with that are the noncontroversial items. They're the items that are more
routine but don't necessarily fit into our protocols about why they're on
Consent. Some items I look and I go, I know that's getting a 9-0 vote right
away. There are other considerations. I know there are. There may be the
public wants to weigh in on stuff, and they want us to have a discussion. There
are other reasons. We either have to have more meetings. We either have to
be more streamlined. I don't know if other people have noticed, but every
Retreat we've now had since—I don't know—at least since I've been on the
Council in 2010. You've been on 2008. We've talked about how do we keep
those meetings shorter. I mean every single Retreat. Obviously streamlining
it, doing it, I lose a little faith in it. One of the things I think works better,
frankly, from a time point of view but we lose something in it is you go directly
to Council Member comments, questions and motions as opposed to let's do questions, then let's do comments, then let's do motions. It may be a better
discussion if you do it that way, and I think it is actually, but it takes a lot
longer because everyone does another round. These are all balances of how
we're going to do this. We started the meetings at 7:00 when I first got on
Council. We had a big fight about it, and we moved to 6:00. Now we routinely start at 5:00. Liz mentioned 3:00. We could. You could basically take all of
the Study Session items and say let's do the Study Sessions starting at 2:00 in
the afternoon. If Council Members can or can't make it because they have their
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work considerations or some issues like that come up, no motions are being
taken, it's a Study Session. You could do it that way. I don't think there are
any easy answers to any of this.
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) Staff would (inaudible).
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think Staff would prefer it if we did it during the day.
You can speak up, but I'm convinced that if ...
Council Member Kniss: 2:00 to 11:00?
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think Staff would prefer 2:00 to 11:00 than—correct me
if I'm wrong—6:00 to 1:00 in the morning any day of the week.
Council Member Kniss: 4:00 to 11:00.
Mayor Burt: Let's keep going.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I just think what might be helpful is if we thought about
how to make those meetings end at 11:00. I actually thought Cory's
suggestion was not a bad one, that let's end at 11:00 and things automatically get transferred over to the next Council meeting if we don't. That way we
know it ends at 11:00. Right now we're supposed to have three Council
meetings a month. Let's plan on four, and that fourth Council meeting basically
being the one where you do the leftovers and not plan on doing other stuff.
Mayor Burt: Now we're up to two uses for that fourth meeting, because he had
suggested Study Sessions.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I was moving those to 2:00, remember.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: Let me just raise the question of whether we should
eliminate Study Sessions. Council's role is to make discrete policy guidance, to
approve decisions. Actions, guidance on policy and oversight. None of these
can be done in a Study Session. Study Sessions produce information, but just
look at what information the Council has. We have very high quality Staff
presenting reports. They use high powered consultants to help them. We have
Boards and Commissioners who are doing studies and giving us their advice.
All of those use regional studies that have been done. We have Council
committees spending hours on things, and we have a very educated
community. If we miss something, they will fill us in. What's the role of a
Council Study Session? It avoids us making decisions which is our real role, so why not eliminate Study Sessions, make them Action Items, and get to the
action as quickly as possible.
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Mayor Burt: Anyone else? Tom.
Council Member DuBois: Super quick. We didn't go through the Performance
Report today. Again, I think seeing some alignment on our key metrics could,
again, keep us aligned around Priorities and keep Staff and Council focused on
things that are really actionable. Pat, you were saying there's some kind of
process where a project would come back and we'd kind of prioritize it again.
We could either push something else out or do that. I think there's another
option there. How we implement this process would be tricky. When we have
to make that tradeoff, do we push it out or do we say that we've largely
accomplished our goals and maybe it's time to end it? The difficulty there.
There could be three options.
Mayor Burt: Actually that was one of the examples that I cited, whether certain
things ...
Council Member DuBois: You think about that. We don't want to re-debate and re-vote on all projects. I think that process ...
Mayor Burt: I'm sorry, you might have misunderstood. It's how a project—not
whether something would be done, but how it fits in the Priority schedule or a
how a set of projects that came forward over a quarter fit in the Priority
schedule.
Council Member DuBois: Right. I'm saying there is another alternative which is
not only just fitting into the schedule, but saying that that older project is
largely done and we've accomplished what we wanted. At that point, I'm trying
to figure out how we don't re-debate and re-vote kind of every project when
we're moving things out. Just something to think about. That process of
saying we're going to put this to the side may sound to some Council Members
like we've now decided not to do it. The third thing, I think Council Member
Schmid made a good point about using the questions prior to the meeting.
Again, I think if we can use email documents in a way that's still open to the
public to disseminate information and perhaps get questions on the table, that
will help shorten our meetings. Kind of this idea of Study Sessions is kind of
analogous to these information reports we get. If maybe there was a process
of Council questions on information reports being replied to and distributed out,
again it might take time out of meetings. I think we spend a lot of time in meetings communicating the information rather than actually deciding on what
we're going to do.
Mayor Burt: First, I want to respond to this concern that somehow
prioritization is a revisiting of all the items. I don't know why it was construed
that way, because that's not what I described. Prioritization is that; it's how does it fit within a broader work plan, not a revisiting of the subject. They're
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not one and the same. I don't get it. This question about whether Study
Sessions have value, I think we can look back at Study Sessions and ask
ourselves did that work well as a Study Session or should it have been an
Action Item. There are times that we reflect and say it might have been better
if we combined a study and an Action Item. Study Sessions have an ability to
have thoughtful discourse. That is not the framework of an Action Item. They
function differently, and they have different outcomes. Not every outcome is a
legislative action. We take last Monday, just heard that that was a valuable
evening with no Action Items. That would have been eliminated from that sort
of discourse. I don't see what action was ready on those subjects, was ripe to
be taken at this time. It was really us having an opportunity to digest what we
had learned and heard in the Summit and begin to have an opportunity for
follow-up questions and frame what we're going to have in Action Items two
months or three months from now on that same subject. For that matter, for the Staff to hear from us in a way that allows them to come back with Action
Items that were informed by our Study Session. When they come, we don't
come back and say why did you bring this forward. They'd say because we
didn't have any sense from you of where you were coming from on the subject.
I think Study Sessions have their role. We want to make sure that we use
them appropriately. In my mind, not eliminate them and assume that suddenly
they no longer have a function. We are now at 2:15. I think we need to think
about where we're going from here. This is another go-around though.
Council Member Holman: Just quickly on the matter of Study Sessions. In the
past we have talked about at least having Study Sessions immediately followed
by an Action Item on the same topic. That way we could have the Study
Session in that format, and if there's an action the Council wanted to take, it
was available to us. We implemented that for a very brief time, and we've
abandoned it again so we have this awkward situation that ...
Mayor Burt: I don't think we've abandoned it. I agree that it has—there are
times where that's the appropriate sequence, but I don't think we've
abandoned it. As we've looked at some of the upcoming schedules, that very
question emerges. It doesn't mean that it's appropriate in every circumstance.
I mean, like last Monday's, I don't think it was appropriate there. I would think there are ones on the horizon where it would be. Either way, we haven't had—I
guess we have to figure out our next step to begin to have structure to what
comes out of this discussion today. I think we had a discussion and we're not
having real guidance or action or clear intentions of what we're going to do
next. Mr. City Manager.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, a couple of thoughts. Thank you all for the
conversation so far. This is further than we—even though the references to
prior Council Retreats, we've gotten further into the year on this Retreat than
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we have on any others. That being said, if we don't have a good means for
following up, it'll again in many ways be for naught. My suggestion for having
quarterly Retreats wasn't so much to say it was a [video malfunction] sounds
like we've got to do that. If you would indulge me, I would just throw out a
couple of questions that struck me as we were talking about possible changes
that we could make. I do it more illustrative of the fact we could identify ten
other things, but the question still will be can we implement these. We do need
to have a process to be able to discuss it. This idea of if we started meetings
earlier, would we end meetings earlier? I think we could all sort of go not sure
about that. I mean, just given our past practice. If we answer questions in
advance, does it actually speed up the meeting itself? Don't have the data to
show that. I mean, the truth is if you had a hard and fast two or three to pull
something off Consent, the process right now could let nine individual Council
Members ask a lot of questions. We'd spend a lot of time on it that you wouldn't if you had to just pull it off. If a Staff Report is shorter, will the
meeting be shorter? I don't think there's necessarily any guarantee. I could
certainly agree we could make Staff Reports shorter, but I would just tell you
as the Staff we wouldn't necessarily say that saved 20 minutes on the meeting
if we cut it down by 20 minutes. I just say that in a sense that there aren't
these other boundaries that are able to be imposed to manage the other
aspects. I don't mean it critically, but what I do mean is until we get to that
point, I think it is going to be hard to manage some of our issues. I think we
have to have some way where there is some opportunity, at least in the nearer
term, to work with a subset of the Council, even the Mayor and Vice Mayor, to
at least try to put a little more meat on the bones about how we might next
follow up with some of these things, knowing that any—if it was the Mayor and
Vice Mayor, just as discussion. That's as much to just be getting a sounding
board from some Council Members. We wouldn't take any action; we never can
unless we bring a whole item back to the Council for some discussion.
Mayor Burt: Some of what is the established role is on Agenda setting. That's
not outside of established roles. I wouldn't want to go beyond what is that
Charter authority without Council consent.
Mr. Keene: I do think it is relevant as to how we start to structure how it is to get the work done is really within the realm of the Agenda process. In this
case, it wouldn't be just—we wouldn't be following the direction of the Mayor
and Vice Mayor, but we would be having some discussion to be able to bring
back to the Council for direction. The last thing I just would say is that the
truth is—I put it in the report we wrote—even though we have all those items up there, we're not going to get them done this year. We never get them done
any year. What we are trying to do is get more disciplined about how we make
decisions about what we're going to do and not do and that we make that
explicit more with the Council. Right now, to be honest, I am or Molly in the
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City Attorney's Office, whatever, is making decisions about go/no go on
different issues almost every week just based on who's in the lineup and can
play or whatever. I'd much rather make that more transparent and clear with
the Council. That's what we're really after.
Mayor Burt: Let me put something on the table as we try and wrap up.
Leaving open the question of what else we'll do the balance of the year, should
we have a follow-up meeting of the Committee as a Whole to focus on following
up to some of these things that are left open today? If so, I would recommend
perhaps the second half of March, so that it not drive into either the Budget
season or get too far disconnected from having this conversation today, so that
it's still fresh or relatively fresh in people's minds. Let me toss that out there.
Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: Just a technical question. What is the Committee of
the Whole? Does it have action associated with it? How does it differ from an Action Item?
Mayor Burt: It does have action associated with it. I think we discussed it in
Policy and Services last year and brought that forward. It has certain informal,
deliberative discussions similar to a Study Session but has action ability
associated with it. Just like this meeting. This meeting has the characteristics
of a Study Session and is a set of Action Items that allows us to vote and move
forward. That's the similarity. Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: To echo the earlier comments, I think if the Mayor
and Vice Mayor took a look at the work and you decided to refer some of it to
Policy and Services and some of it to a future meeting of the Council. Again
this idea of a Retreat or Council of the Whole doesn't necessarily mean it needs
to be all day Saturday. Maybe we can find an evening.
Mayor Burt: The input from the Mayor and the Vice Mayor would not be
referral to a committee; it would be a recommendation to the Council. The
Council would make that decision. Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: Are you looking for a motion on this?
Mayor Burt: If we ...
Council Member Wolbach: I'm happy to offer one.
Mayor Burt: ... are interested in following up with a Committee as a Whole meeting to continue this, then maybe that would be appropriate as a motion.
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Council Member Wolbach: I'm happy to offer a motion. I'll essentially offer
what I was suggesting before. I move that the further planning on the work
plan and topics for Committees of the Whole, etc., be delegated for proposals
to the Mayor, Vice Mayor and City Manager to bring back to Council for
approval. If somebody has better wording, go for it.
MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Council Member
Kniss to delegate further planning on the Work Plan and the topics for
Committee of the Whole Meetings to the Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City
Manager to generate proposals for Council approval.
Mayor Burt: That didn't sound to me—maybe it was. I think it would be
appropriate to instead have a motion to have a follow-up Committee as a
Whole meeting and that preparation work for that based upon what occurred
today be delegated to the Mayor, Vice Mayor and City Manager.
Council Member Wolbach: Do you want to second that with a friendly amendment essentially, basically?
Mayor Burt: Sure.
Council Member Wolbach: That's fine, we would go with that. We'd hold a
follow-up Committee of the Whole meeting with preparatory work to be
performed by the Mayor, Vice Mayor and City Manager.
Council Member Kniss: Second.
MOTION RESTATED: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by
Council Member Kniss to schedule a Committee of the Whole Meeting, with
preparatory work to be conducted by the Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City
Manager.
Mayor Burt: Do we have discussion on that? Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: Can you restate, please, the topic of the Committee
of the Whole meeting?
Mayor Burt: Good point. It should probably be included in the motion.
Council Member Wolbach: We lost the bit about continuing items from this.
Schedule a Committee of the Whole meeting regarding work plan, Study
Sessions and other topics discussed at the Retreat.
Mayor Burt: How about special areas of focus for the Council for the year
which would allow the various formats?
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Council Member Wolbach: That's fine.
Mayor Burt: Let's say that the purpose of the Committee as Whole meeting
would be ...
Council Member Wolbach: To address work plan and other areas of focus for
the Council for the year.
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE
MAKER AND SECONDER to add at the end of the Motion, “to address the
Work Plan, and other areas of focus for the Council for the year.”
Council Member Kniss: When is that going to be?
Mayor Burt: The final question is do we want to include in it a rough timeframe
to maybe occur before the end of March.
Council Member Wolbach: Yes. It could be sooner as far as I'm concerned.
We would put a Committee of the Whole meeting prior to the end of March.
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Motion, “prior to the end of March”
after “Whole Meeting.”
Council Member Filseth: On that question, the areas of focus like disposition of
Study Sessions and so forth, I can see. The work plan, isn't that really just the
responsibility of the City Manager? I want to make sure that we're not
overstepping the line between policy and oversight on this.
Mayor Burt: You're right, we probably should clarify that is to reconcile the
Council project priorities with the work plan. The City Manager wants that
feedback and prioritization of what our Priorities are so that they can then
integrate it in the work plan. Is that correct?
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE
MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Motion, “(to reconcile Council
project priorities)” after “Work Plan.”
Council Member Filseth: We haven't done that today?
Mayor Burt: No, but we got part way there. I mean, we did a dot exercise. If
they had nothing but the dot exercise, that helped them. Now I think what
they'll do is to say we saw your dots. Within those dots, we say we have this
many total man hours of the team that can work on this stuff. They may come
back and say we can do the 18 things that you had here plus five others or they may say we can only do 13 of those 18.
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Council Member Filseth: Essentially what you're saying is the Staff presents a
work plan, and the Council says yea or nay or adjusts it. Staff presents the
Council their work plan, is that what you're saying?
Mayor Burt: Yeah. I would say potential decisions that the Council would have
on Priorities within the limits of what the work plan can accomplish. That's
what I think will be our responsibility.
Council Member Filseth: Understand. I just want to make sure we're treading
the line correctly between sort of setting broad policy agendas and trying to
micromanage Staff.
Mayor Burt: It's not micromanaging Staff. It's managing our own Priority
setting. Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: It's basically just trying to wrap-up what we didn't
get done today. I would also add—I don't know if it needs to be part of the
motion. If this was tagged onto a regular Council meeting, I'd be fine with that. If it's scheduled on a regular Monday night as this whole item on a
Monday night, I'd be fine with that rather than making it another Saturday or
weekend day. That would actually be my preference.
Mayor Burt: We have one more minute. We have 30 seconds on this. I'm
trying to frame this a little bit here. Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Is the intention then that—it's something that several
of us talked about earlier. With the dot exercise, while it was very helpful, we
did talk about how some of them were like overlapping or redundant. Where
does that get reconciled?
Mayor Burt: I think that'll be the City Manager trying to take our feedback on
how to group some of these things in ways that allow us to have that much
more focus when we have that Committee as a Whole meeting.
Mayor Holman: Is there any possibility—it says prior to the end of March. Do
we have any idea really how soon it could come, because the end of the March
is a fourth of the way through the year.
Mayor Burt: No.
Council Member Holman: Before you adjourn, I have a couple of questions on
next items. By the way, the 9/80 question was actually about work
management, work flow. It was actually very related. That was the intention.
Mayor Burt: The topic's there, but then we started getting into debates on the
merits. Council Member Schmid.
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Council Member Schmid: Other areas of focus, does that include the discussion
we had about running meetings, trying to make sure the meetings are run
efficiently and effectively?
Mayor Burt: We can include that. It's not part of the motion, and that would
be another area for Council discussion.
Council Member Schmid: Could I make a friendly amendment? That we
include effectiveness and efficiency of Council meeting or the Committee of the
Whole.
Council Member Wolbach: How about to address work plan, efficiency and
other areas of focus? Just adding one word, efficiency?
Council Member Schmid: Yeah.
Mayor Burt: Council efficiency.
Council Member Schmid: Council efficiency, yeah. Thank you.
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Motion, “Council efficiency” after
“project priorities.”
Mayor Burt: Everything we add to it moves it potentially from a Monday night
to a Saturday.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I'll make a friendly amendment that we don't do it on a
(inaudible).
MOTION RESTATED: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by
Council Member Kniss to schedule a Committee of the Whole Meeting prior
to the end of March, with preparatory work to be conducted by the Mayor,
Vice Mayor, and City Manager, to address the Work Plan (to reconcile
Council project priorities), Council efficiency, and other areas of focus for the
Council for the year.
Mayor Burt: Let's go ahead and vote on the motion. All in favor. That
passes unanimously, I believe.
MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 9-0
B. Discussion of Topics for Special Committee of the Whole and
Council Study Sessions.
None.
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4. Resolution 9574 Entitled “Resolution of the Council of the City of Palo Alto
Setting the Council’s Summer Break and Winter Closure.”
Mayor Burt: Our next item is setting of Council break and winter break.
Council Member DuBois: Pat, could we ...
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member DuBois: Sorry.
Mayor Burt: You said you wanted to speak on the next item.
Council Member Holman: Not this item, but it's like for the wrap-up because
there are some dangling things here.
Mayor Burt: That's the item after next then. Vice Mayor Scharff and then
DuBois.
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think what we did last year worked really well. That
would mean that we do this year instead of July 6th to August 14th, (inaudible)
July 5th to August 12th. I'll move that we do July 5th to August 12th.
Council Member Kniss: Second.
MOTION: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Kniss to
schedule the Council’s Summer Break from July 5 to August 12.
Council Member Kniss: Do you want to say winter at the same time?
Vice Mayor Scharff: I actually think—winter is a little less clear to me. We
want to take the week ...
Mayor Burt: When is the school break?
Vice Mayor Scharff: When is the school break? I didn't quite have that. Last
year we did December 21st to January 1st.
Mayor Burt: What?
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think last year we did December 21st through
January 1st.
Council Member Kniss: We had two Mondays off.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Right, we had two Mondays off.
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Mayor Burt: I'm sorry. You're talking about that winter break and not a winter
spring break week. Got you.
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible)
Vice Mayor Scharff: I can (inaudible) pull this off for December. Hold on a
second; I'll just get the calendar out, do it right. December 23rd is a Friday
next year. I think we could just basically break from December 24th, no that
wouldn't work. It's really the 26th to the 30th is the break.
Council Member Berman: It's a short break.
Mayor Burt: Isn't it normally two weeks?
Vice Mayor Scharff: If it's two weeks, do you want to do it—so we should do it
the week before then, the 19th?
Council Member Berman: Can I ask a question of Staff?
Mayor Burt: Okay.
Council Member Berman: For some reason on my calendar, because it's a combination of all sorts of calendars, it says that Monday, January 2nd, is New
Year's Day observed. Does the City Staff observe ...
Mayor Burt: You get a holiday.
Council Member Berman: Which is that Monday, the 2nd. It's got to really go
through that week then.
Vice Mayor Scharff: We want to take Monday the 2nd off and do it to the 3rd?
Are we doing it the 19th to the 2nd then?
Mayor Burt: Through the 2nd, let's see.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Or are we doing it through the 6th and then we have our
Council on the 9th?
Council Member Berman: On the 19th.
Vice Mayor Scharff: That's three weeks.
Council Member Berman: Not if you have the meeting on the 19th.
Mayor Burt: The 6th is a Monday, correct? You're saying.
Vice Mayor Scharff: The 9th. The 9th is a Monday and the 2nd is a Monday.
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Mayor Burt: I see.
Vice Mayor Scharff: The 19th is a Monday.
Mayor Burt: Let me see what Council Member DuBois has to add.
Council Member DuBois: A friendly amendment that we let Staff go home while
we figure out our schedules.
James Keene, City Manager: Yeah, you can (inaudible) out there.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you, guys, for being here all day.
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) July, Greg, and let them (inaudible) we'll
figure it out later.
Mayor Burt: Let me just say before you go, thank you all for spending a
Saturday with us.
Council Member Holman: One of my follow-ups has to do with the Planning
Director though. One of my ...
Council Member Berman: Hillary wasn't going anywhere.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Everyone but Hillary can leave.
Mr. Keene: Hillary, you were within moments of a clean getaway. Mr. Mayor,
may I just ...
Mayor Burt: Sorry. Let's vote at this time on a summer break and defer to the
Committee as a Whole meeting. We don't have to decide the winter now.
Council Member Holman: I have a question about the schedule though. Some
of us were thinking about—we didn't know until we got the Agenda really
basically that we were going to be doing this today. Some of us were thinking
about being out of town on July 4th. I'm just wondering if there's any
consideration of June 27. I'd like to amend June 27 to August 5. I don't think
the school schedule affects any of us here. I'd like to amend the summer
schedule to June 27 to August 5.
Mayor Burt: The school schedule doesn't affect any of us?
Council Member Holman: I don't think any of us have kids in schools, do we?
You do still?
Vice Mayor Scharff: I do.
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Council Member Kniss: We wouldn't be meeting on (crosstalk).
Council Member Holman: Yours aren't in Palo Alto schools.
Vice Mayor Scharff: Yeah, but they have a similar set of things. Tom does.
Eric does.
Mayor Burt: Wait a minute. Just a sec. We don't have to—just a second. Just
a second.
Council Member Holman: The amendment is June 27 to August 5.
Mayor Burt: Just a second. We don't necessarily have to go the full week
before say the 4th of July to let the 4th of July weekend—what day of the week
is the 4th of July?
Council Member Berman: Monday.
Beth Minor, City Clerk: It's Monday.
Mayor Burt: Inclusive one way or another is that Saturday and Sunday. That
would be—if we said we were on vacation from the 2nd onward until whatever day in August, it's the same thing if you want to take the 4th of July weekend
off.
Council Member Holman: All right. Looking at the calendar, that is true.
AMENDMENT: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member
XX to replace in the Motion, “July 5 to August 12” with “June 27 to August 5.”
AMENDMENT FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND
Mayor Burt: Trying to wrap this up. Do we continue it, though, all the way to
the 12th to align with the schools or what?
Vice Mayor Scharff: I think we do.
Mayor Burt: Let's call it from July 2nd through the 12th. Is that what we're
doing?
Vice Mayor Scharff: Sure, that's fine.
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE
MAKER AND SECONDER to replace in the Motion, “July 5” with “July 2.”
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MOTION RESTATED: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council
Member Kniss to schedule the Council’s Summer Break from July 2 to August
12.
Mayor Burt: We're ready to vote. All in favor.
MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 9-0
Mayor Burt: We will bring back up the winter break (crosstalk).
Council Member Kniss: (inaudible)
Mayor Burt: That's all right.
Council Member Kniss left the meeting at 2:38 P.M.
5. Wrap-Up and Next Steps.
Mayor Burt: We kind of already went through wrap-up and next steps, I
believe. Mr. City Manager.
James Keene, City Manager: Can I just say something before we lose any
other folks? I did want to just specifically on behalf of the Staff here thank all the Staff who worked. Not only our Staff all involved in the input on the
reports, but Beth and her team and Rob and his folks and Khash and Janice
and Suzanne and Staff from our office on all of the logistics and everything.
A lot went into this Retreat. We've come a long way since the meeting at
Ventura where it was cold, and the coffee was bad, and the lights were dark.
Thank you, guys.
Vice Mayor Scharff: We still haven't fixed Ventura, have we? I saw it up
there. It got no dots.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: The two things. One is I was thinking that the
motion that Council had put forward was for the Council to be able to discuss
the Comp Plan schedule and our interaction, interface with the CAC. We're
obviously not going to discuss that today. I just didn't want it to fall to the
wayside. Appreciate the schedule. I thought we were going to discuss it, so
when would that be? I'll just put both things on the table at once, and then
I'll hush up. That's one. The other is last year at the Retreat we invited
comments from the full Council as to things we wanted Policy and Services
to consider as part of the annual required procedures and protocols update.
Where will that and when will that happen then?
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Mayor Burt: That second one is a good point, because that's actually
something that's in our existing procedures and protocols that occurs every
year. We can defer that until the Committee as a Whole meeting, and add
that. That's actually a requirement. Or we'll have to take it up at a Council
meeting in between now and then. Are we good with rolling it to the
Committee as a Whole?
Mr. Keene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Not to force a linkage, but it does seem
to me that some of the conversation we have from your earlier motion
related to work plan, and some of those other items could result in some
changes to Council procedures and protocols. I'm trying to deepen what's
on the procedures and protocols to deal with how we actually get the work
done. Do you formalize any role of the Mayor, Vice Mayor more formally
than you just did at this session? Thanks.
Mayor Burt: In that case, we'll go ahead and include that Agenda item on the next Committee as a Whole meeting. On the final topic of when the
Council will get to discuss the Comp Plan meeting schedule of the Council
and how it relates to ...
Council Member Holman: I would include even that the Co-Chair came and
had a question about the schedule as well.
Mayor Burt: When's the next Council meeting where we might be able to do
that?
Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environmental Director: Thank
you, Mayor Burt, Council Members. Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director.
You did pass a two-part motion quite recently. The first part was to bring a
revised schedule for your review today, which we've done. I'm sorry we
didn't get a chance to talk about it. I could certainly walk you through that
schedule the next time we do have an opportunity. If you look at it
carefully—the second part of your motion was to schedule pronto quick a
discussion of jobs/housing balance and this fifth scenario. We're trying to
get that on your Agenda for February 22nd. I'd suggest that that's probably
the best time where we could look at the schedule overall and figure out if it
has sufficient sessions and topics that you want to discuss in a timeframe
that makes sense as it interacts with the CAC's schedule.
Mayor Burt: That's great. That's three weeks away. That's pretty soon.
Let's go ahead and do it then. On that note, the meeting's adjourned.
Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 2:41 P.M.