HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-11-21 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL
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Regular Meeting
November 21, 2016
The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council
Chambers at 6:04 P.M.
Present: Burt, DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kniss, Schmid, Wolbach
Absent: Berman, Scharff
Study Session
1. Study Session to Discuss the Planned Rebuilding Project of the Junior
Museum & Zoo.
Mayor Burt: Our first order of business tonight is a Study Session to discuss
…
Female: Council Member Kniss is here.
Mayor Burt: In grand fashion.
Council Member Kniss: I knew you'd be delighted.
Mayor Burt: Our first item is a Study Session to discuss the planned
rebuilding project of the Junior Museum and Zoo. Mr. de Geus.
Rob de Geus, Community Services Director: Good evening, Mayor Burt,
Council Members. Rob de Geus, Director of Community Services, here.
We're pleased to provide an update on the rebuilding of the Junior Museum
and Zoo. We have a number of guests here this evening and people that are
going to help with the presentation. We have a special guest that I'd like to
introduce first. That's John Aiken, the Manager of the Junior Museum and
Zoo, and our bald eagle, Sequoia, who lives at the Junior Museum and Zoo.
John thought he might share a few things about Sequoia.
John Aiken, Community Services Manager: We thought it would be fun for
you guys to feel that little bit of inspiration that children feel every day when
they come to the Junior Museum and engage with animals and science
experiments and the fun things that we do. I've always been stunned by
raptors when I look at them. I think birds of prey are particularly intriguing
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to all of us, and I think that's why we choose them as heraldic figures and
figures of state and stuff. I can tell you a little bit about her. She is 28
years of age, and she and I have been doing this for about 27 1/2 years.
John Flynn, the volunteer back there that's going to take her from me when
we're done here, has been working with her as a volunteer, caring for her
almost every day for 26 years. A lot of dedication on everybody's part. She
goes to events and meets school kids at classes and schools. I don't know. What can I tell you? She was an endangered species and, during her
lifetime, they were taken off the endangered species list. They were
endangered because of the pesticide DDT. Now, whether or not we have
bald eagles in our backyard is really about how we take care of water
resources, because they're a bird that depends on fish and strong fisheries
and fishery resources. Thank you for that. I just got splashed in the face.
Do you guys have any questions about bald eagles?
Council Member Holman: Did she fill out a Speaker Card?
Council Member Kniss: Is he understanding what you say?
Mr. Aiken: No, she's not. She certainly understands how I appear and how
I look, more body postures. They read body language very well, like all of
us do.
Mayor Burt: Do we still have the nesting pair at Crystal Springs?
Mr. Aiken: There is. They pulled off two young this last year, so they're
nesting near the golf course, probably again this year. She's got (crosstalk).
Mayor Burt: Are they the only pair in the region known?
Mr. Aiken: No. There actually is a pair south of San Jose in a reservoir and
two pairs in the East Bay, North Bay and Alameda, the San Francisco
watershed properties in the East Bay. Bald eagles are a recovering
endangered species, and there are now estimated to be 350-400 nests in
the state. When I first started working with them many, many years ago,
there was a low of 27 nests in the state. Really a fantastic recovery.
James Keene, City Manager: Mr. Mayor, I had a question. John, I'm just
curious if you could explain why the bald eagle beat out the turkey for the
American bird.
Mr. Aiken: It is that time of year, isn't it? I understand that that was
actually kind of a joke on Benjamin Franklin's part. He really wasn't
proposing the turkey but was trying to use it as a way of describing various
characters, players behind the scenes. I think everybody was voting for the
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bald eagle. They actually would make a bird of state for Canada, but
Canada didn't choose them as quickly as we did.
Mayor Burt: John, can you remind us why she is with our Zoo?
Mr. Aiken: She is with our Zoo because we have handle-able, nonrelease-
able animals that we use in education programs. When I came down from
the San Francisco Zoo, where I had been for 29 years and had worked with
her for a long time, they eventually didn't have a use for her, so they contacted me and said, "Would you like to use Sequoia for education
programming in Palo Alto?" I said, "Absolutely." That's why she's here.
You're welcome. With that, I'm going to pass her off to John.
Mr. de Geus: Another question over there.
Mr. Aiken: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: What's the life expectancy in captivity such as
this?
Mr. Aiken: Good question. That kind of data is difficult to get. What we
know is that the ringing data that's come back in show that birds in the wild
live 20-30 years. We may increase that with more data. In captivity, it was
30-40 years, but the longevity record is 53 years for a bald eagle, the longest bald eagle to ever have lived. She's now 28, so she's middle-age,
upper end. We're hoping for the best.
Mr. Keene: Before you go, John, could I get one of those caps for the
meeting myself?
Mr. de Geus: Thank you very much, John. It's exciting to have Sequoia
here, all the work that the Junior Museum and Zoo does for families and
children. What's even more exciting than that is this partnership that we've
engaged in with the Friends of the Junior Museum and Zoo to rebuild the
Zoo and the building. It's just an amazing partnership, and we're thrilled to
be here this evening to talk a little more about it and where we are in the
process. We have John, who's the Manager of the Junior Museum and Zoo,
who's going to help with the presentation. We also have architects, Brent
McClure and Sarah Vaccaro, who's in the audience from Cody Anderson and
Wasney Architects, who have been working with us and the Friends to
design the Zoo. We also have Paul Hopkins of the Friends of the Junior
Museum and Zoo. He's a Board Member and Co-Chair of the initiative. He'll
speak a little bit about the fundraising later in the program. We also have a
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number of Board Members from the Friends of the Junior Museum and Zoo
here. They can wave. I can't say enough about these individuals, and
there's more than these. Their dedication and volunteerism and fundraising
has been just extraordinary. Thank them for being here, and also a shout
out to Aletha Coleman who's the President of the Board and has been for
some years. Just thank you for everything you've done, Aletha. Last but
not least, we also just want to thank the Staff that work at the Junior Museum and Zoo. They're really the heart and soul of the program. While a
new building is great and much needed, the Staff really are the ones that
make it work. Their passion, their commitment, dedication to engage
children's curiosity in science and nature is really what makes the Junior
Museum and Zoo as special as it is. Just a quick overview of the
presentation. We'll have a background on why we're embarking on this
project. We'll have an overview of the new Junior Museum and Zoo design.
We'll talk a little bit about the potential for an interim facility when we do
rebuild. We'll talk about an update to the fundraising and some estimated
costs. Then, we'll conclude with a timeline and then answer some questions.
We think about 20-25 minutes for the presentation. With that, I'll pass it
onto John to begin.
Mr. Aiken: I believe all of you are familiar with the facility. If you've gone
to the bathroom, there are only four fixtures for all of our guests. It's long
overdue for a renovation. In fact, in 1997 the Adams and Associates
Infrastructure Management Study Report recommended that the facility was
overdue for a major renovation. The Friends, when they began this process
really 14 years ago, commissioned MKThink, an architectural firm out of San
Francisco, to do a feasibility study and look at what the possibilities were
with the site and with the facility. They recommended actually tearing down
and rebuilding, not even a major renovation but a complete rebuild. In
October of 2014, Council approved a letter of intent recognizing or really
authorizing Staff to work with the Friends formally to draft an agreement for
the design and construction of the Junior Museum and Zoo (JMZ) and
agreements for operation and management of the JMZ. We're still in
process with that, and we're going to touch on many of the things that are
being talked about in those agreements tonight. Let me give you a little bit
of background about the people that we serve and kind of what we do for
the community. We have two audiences really. Our drop-in visitors come to
interact with science exhibits and live animals. We estimate over 150,000
visits a year now. Our audience is mostly kids that are 0-9 years of age.
About a quarter of them or less are from Palo Alto. It means that people are
coming from elsewhere, and that elsewhere is really about 15-20 miles in
either direction. It really is our neighboring communities and Palo Alto.
Many, many of them, 74 percent, are repeat visitors, which are the statistics
that any museum would envy to have. We believe it's because we're easy,
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we're free and we are accessible with parking. People can stop by
frequently. Our other audience is our science outreach audience. Most of
the Staff of the Junior Museum and Zoo are educators, part of our education
department. This year, they're serving about 19,000 students on hands-on
lessons in local elementary schools. That includes all of Palo Alto's
elementary schools as well as Friends-supported schools for at-risk youth in
East Palo Alto and Mountain View as well as one-off programs as far north as San Mateo and south to the southern parts of Santa Clara County. As we
approached the design process, we did a number of workshops with Staff,
with various stakeholders, and we came up with a number of intentions for
our design. One is to develop safe and effective ways to connect children
with live animals by rebuilding the Zoo; develop classrooms that improve
student engagement and learning; improve safety, access, toilets and
wayfinding, sort of that basic stuff; create outdoor play areas and play-in-
nature experiences; and improve access to and from the JMZ and Rinconada
Park; to provide facilities for animal health and quarantine to meet the
standards of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. This is part of our
getting accreditation eventually with the new facility with the Association of
Zoos and Aquariums. Also, improve the care and storage of our non-living collections. We have about 4,000 objects that are held in the public trust.
We need to meet the standards of the American Alliance of Museums in
terms of how we care for those objects in the public's trust to meet their
accreditation standards. We also want to improve storage and access and
work areas for our Staff to make sure that they're safe and efficient and
effective. Of course, implement green building practices while we're doing
this, which is a Council priority. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Brent McClure
of Cody Anderson Wasney.
Brent McClure, Cody Anderson Wasney Architects: Thanks, John. To
capture a lot of what John has kind of laid out, we'd like to walk you through
the design as to where we stand. We're still in the preliminary stages.
We've been working with the Friends and in partnership with the City now
for the last—it's been going 3-4 years from early programming, figuring out
their needs assessment, understanding their goals, supporting them at times
through fundraising and just kind of moving through this process. Even
though we've been on this project for a while, we're still in the preliminary or
early stages of the design process for the most part. For the last year, we
have spent—we've been before the Parks and Rec Commission now with
Study Sessions three times. We've been before an Architectural Review
Board (ARB) Study Session as well, and we have future hearings that we'll
be moving forward to in the near future. There's been an extensive amount
of community engagement and outreach both at the Board level within the
City as well as some evening outreach meetings within the town. The image
before you is really—I think everyone here is quite familiar with the JMZ. I
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think it's interesting to kind of take a look at the site in its existing state. As
it stands today, we've got the existing Museum kind of on this little sliver of
land up against the parking lot next to Lucie Stern. The Zoo is the blue,
dashed, outdoor zone, and it's kind of fitting right up against Walter Hays.
There is a significant amount of constraints on this site that we have to work
around, both that you can just observe from looking at this drawing, but
there's underground utility easements. We're working to respect the trees as well as increase parking where possible, and then lastly respect the park
boundary to the greatest extent possible. How we did this was—in this site
plan diagram really this blue represents the building as it fits in and around
some signature trees. We have reconfigured the parking lot to expand and
open up. We've added additional parking spaces. We've eliminated the
driveway that's right up against the existing Junior Museum and Zoo and are
relying on an improved drive access in through here. We have preserved
some of the mature trees that I'll talk about in a second and improved sort
of the park entrance as you come into Rinconada Park. Diagrammatically
this shows you all of these constraints that we're up against. The red being
the parking as it moves in this direction. The green being the park
boundaries that wrap around the Girl Scout building in the back side of the park. This light blue zone is the utility corridor that we don't want to build
upon for budgetary reasons as well, as far as having to relocate utilities.
There are a few signature trees that we're looking to respect. One is this
dawn redwood that is situated right here at this knuckle where this entry
courtyard is. The dawn redwood tree dates back to—not this specific tree
obviously. The species dates back to the Jurassic period, I believe. There's
a very large pecan tree that we're looking to respect and integrate into the
design of the building. As we blow this up, to kind of walk you through,
probably the best way to look at the plan is through this diagram here. A lot
of the program is looking to really create space to support a lot of the
programs that exist today. We're talking about almost right-sizing the
facility. As John mentioned, we want to get accreditation with the
Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). That requires them to have a
certain amount of support space to support the exhibits within the Zoo
space. They want to create a modest amount of additional exhibit space for
the public, and then also a lot of back-of-house education space to support
the teachers and provide the necessary classroom spaces to really continue
the great programs that they have today. A main concept of this project,
though, is what's being titled "Loose in the Zoo." Whereas, today the
animals are in their own individual enclosures, the vision of the Friends and
John and this project is to net the Zoo and allow patron-friendly birds and
other animals—pretty much just birds, right?
Mr. Aiken: Right (crosstalk).
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Mr. McClure: Mostly birds to be loose inside the space, so that the public
can then experience that. We've broken this down into these three zones.
The red is this entry courtyard around the dawn redwood, where there's
ticketing. You can enter into this exhibit space, and then circulate out into
the Zoo and then back and forth. There's an outdoor science courtyard and
an outdoor education corner of the site right here. The educational
classrooms are the blue areas, and then this brown bar is this back-of-house and support space. Other aspects of that back-of-house is not so much just
providing animal feeding spaces and enclosures, but also to kind of make it
more interactive. For example, we're going to have windows that will look
into that, so kids can see the feeding and care of animals within the space
and those types of experiences. Here's the plan, just roughly to kind of
show you all the different types of spaces that we have in the back-of-house
and in the exhibit space, that science courtyard and all of this outdoor zone.
Lastly, there's a little extension of the Zoo support. This is part of the Zoo
itself, but they are primarily enclosed, outdoor, caged zones where animals
are either in circulation and out inside the zoo itself. If they need to take a
break and chill out from being on display, that's where they go off to. All of
these rooms back here are some of those areas for Zoo support. For the Zoo itself, a complete revision. We're preserving the bobcat exhibit that's
over here. You would exit out from the Museum, all new pathways. There's
going to be an anchor feature tree that kids can climb in and around on.
We're going to still have the bridge across the pond with turtles and
raccoons and a variety of different other animal exhibits. We're looking to
have meerkats. This space over here where the pecan tree is will be this
outdoor science courtyard, so it'll have outdoor exhibits from the Museum so
there's this indoor/outdoor connection. This outdoor classroom zone, and
then back over here is that Zoo support that I'd mentioned before. We've
been working closely with the Friends, looking at budgetary constraints and
where that planning lies. I think the long-term plan that's envisioned for
this site is what we've drawn here with this future Phase 2 that would
consist of converting that outdoor classroom into an enclosed classroom
space and having a modest, little, two-story almost bungalow, if you will,
that would have some outdoor staircase that comes up. Upstairs would
either be an insect exhibit and/or butterfly exhibit, and then an ability to
have a little tree canopy walk so that you can then connect at a higher level
within the Zoo. That's getting that over/under experience that was
identified by John and the Friends in the program at the very beginning
stages of the project so that kids can get this richer experience within the
Zoo itself. As I mentioned, we're still in the early stages of what I would call
the formal entitlement process. This is an early rendition still that we're in
development on, that we're planning to go before the ARB, I think, this
spring with the preliminary ARB review and then final ARB review.
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Mr. Aiken: Back to me. During construction, we won't be able to maintain
animals on the site or continue our educational programs without moving
offsite. Staff has actually looked at a number of sites and have determined
that the best site in our opinion is Cubberley Community Center auditorium,
where we can continue to provide a place that, one, makes the JMZ still
relevant during 2 years of construction period or up to 2 years; to be able to
continue our education services to the schools in particular. That means moving all of that stuff and our teachers and having a place for them to
stage. We would also be able to have a site where the public can visit and
interact with some of the old exhibits, because familiarity is important to
very young children, as well as new exhibits that we're prototyping and
preparing for the Museum. The animal care would be primarily behind the
scenes. We would shelter and care for some of the animals there, but it
would not be a public Zoo. Now, I'd like to introduce Paul Hopkins—come up
to the podium—to talk a little bit about fundraising and the Friends. Thank
you, Paul.
Paul Hopkins, Friends of the JMZ: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Just a quick background on me. I, like the other Friends here, we're all
volunteers. I've lived in Palo Alto for 13 years. I have two girls, one at Paly High and one at Addison Elementary. They've taken full advantage—we all
have—of the JMZ and the programs. When I had the opportunity last July to
join the JMZ and get involved in this project, I jumped at the opportunity.
It's been a fantastic experience. I will highlight a quick history of the
Friends of the JMZ and then highlight the fundraising to date. We'll leave it
at that. The Friends, as I mentioned, is a volunteer group. It was formed in
1962 to support the JMZ. Over the past 54 years, the Friends Board has
grown in terms of their leadership and fundraising ability, bringing us to
today's project to redesign and rebuild the JMZ. The generous Peery
Foundation, on July 15th we signed an agreement with them where they
would pledge $15 million when we raise $10 million. Extremely generous
project. We really have been campaigning and fundraising for about 2 1/2
years now. I'm happy to say that it's been extremely successful. We are
very close to our $10 million goal. The Friends has been running that
completely. As of the 17th of November, we're about $9,107,602. We're
very close to that. Our kind of deadline date that we're targeting is the end
of January of this year to finalize this deal. We're very confident that we'll
do that. Also, we have 165 donors total; 58 percent of those donors are
from Palo Alto. We've had a fantastic involvement from the Palo Alto
community, as you might imagine. Our campaign costs, because we're all
volunteers, have been only 1.5 percent of the total campaign budget. Those
were $390,463. The last point I want to make is we have a robust honorary
and advisory council made up of 36 leaders from many sectors, all
committed to the success of this project. Thank you.
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Mr. Aiken: Thank you, Paul.
Mr. de Geus: Thank you very much, Paul. We're wrapping up the
presentation here. Just on the resource impact, there are a few things that
we still need to work out. While the cost of construction and design are
primarily designed by the Friends of the Junior Museum and Zoo, they've
committed to raising $25 million as you heard. They're very close to getting
there. Great stuff. There are other costs that not included in either the Friends budget or currently in the City's General Fund budget. Some of
them are not insignificant. We'll need to evaluate as we move forward with
this process, prioritizing this project against all the other capital needs that
we have in the City. A couple of the costs that we think are fairly significant,
that we need to be aware of, is the interim JMZ and the transition costs. We
think that could be as much as $400,000 potentially. We talked about the
Phase 2 construction of building that extra building and classroom. We think
that's really important, but we don't really have a fundraising plan for raising
those funds yet. We think that's about $3 million to do that. There are a
variety of permitting fees that we hope we'll be able to waive for the Friends,
given all of their efforts to fundraise. That may have some cost to the City.
Also, Rinconada Park generally, when we rebuild the Junior Museum and Zoo, there's a need then to rebuild the parking lot, which supports much
more than just the Junior Museum and Zoo. Also some frontage and
adjacencies to the park will need to be improved at that time, pathways and
the playground and those types of things. We think that capital work could
cost between $3-$5 million in terms of early estimates. Finally is just the
cost of operating the new facility as a much enhanced and better facility and
right-sized generally. We anticipate some modest increases to the cost of
running the facility, particularly operating the Zoo under an accredited Zoo
program and some customer service and education programs. We're putting
pro formas together and looking at where we can generate revenue to offset
increased costs with a ticketed gate and some additional education programs
and services. We still think there might be a slight increase in overall cost to
run the program. We'll be back in the spring with a lot more detail on those
topics. The timeline as we wrap up. We hope to have the design ready for
submittal and formal review in the spring. By the winter of 2017-18,
approximately a year, be ready to start construction. We think it'll likely be
2-year construction or less. Brent thinks we can do it in less, which would
be great. We would reopen sometime in the Fall or Winter of 2019-20. With
that, that concludes our presentation. We're happy to answer any
questions.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Colleagues, anyone have any questions? I can
kick it off. One question on the parking lot. That parking lot serves a lot of
functions in addition to the Museum and Zoo. As somebody who lives right
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near there, I've observed for a couple of decades that it is inefficiently laid
out and in bad need of a redo. Are we either way intending to have some
redo of that parking lot?
Mr. de Geus: Great question, Mayor Burt. We are, and it's part of the long-
range plan for Rinconada Park, to reconfigure that parking lot. It's actually
not only inefficient but it's unsafe. Kids going from the Children's Library or
Lucie Stern to the park or the Junior Museum and Zoo, there's no way to walk easily other than through the parking lot. Too many times I've seen
real dangers there. We would need to rebuild that in any case.
Mayor Burt: It sounds like you're answering one of my next questions. If
and when we rebuild the parking lot, it would be improved in pedestrian
safety and flow. What about bikes as well?
Mr. de Geus: Absolutely, bike and pedestrian. There's a lot that happens at
Rinconada Park as you know, Mayor Burt, living near there. There isn't
really enough parking even for what we have there now. We need to do
everything we can to encourage walking and biking to the amenities there.
Mayor Burt: Does this plan have extensive bike racks planned it?
Mr. de Geus: It does.
Mayor Burt: I did have one question on the ingress and egress. Is it now in this drawing just planning to go opposite Kellogg?
Mr. McClure: Can you repeat the question? I'm sorry.
Mayor Burt: Is the only parking lot ingress and egress intended to be at
Kellogg going forward?
Mr. McClure: Yes, that's correct. There would be an entrance here right at
that intersection. We'd reorient the parking 90 degrees and have
perpendicular parking, drop-off zone in and around the front. We're kind of
separating that out. We would connect over to the lot that's between Lucie
Stern and the Girl Scouts building. There's a raised pedestrian crosswalk
that would come through here to separate that, to allow sort of a clear
pedestrian path and an exit out onto Hopkins.
Mayor Burt: Having observed this lot for a long while and actually witnessed
a serious collision at that intersection, I'd encourage our Transportation Staff
to work with you more closely on whether it's better to retain a limited
ingress and/or egress at or near the current one close to the Zoo building,
but not allow all four movements perhaps at either of these. Having four
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movements at the current lot, the main one opposite Kellogg, is really
dangerous. Allowing four movements at the second entrance today is
excessive and unnecessary. An alternative might be limited movements at
two locations rather than one location with all four movements. It's a really
dangerous intersection there. Maybe there are ways to address that hazard
and have it be only one location. I'd encourage a real serious consideration
of the other. I was looking over the design briefly; the lobby looked really tiny. Is that anything that—it's a big important, welcoming space. Does
that have any latitude? I appreciate that this is a fundraising effort and
every dollar matters. I just wanted to check on and ask whether that's
something that might still be able to be reexamined in any way.
Mr. McClure: In a much earlier design scheme, we did have an interior
lobby. We've now shifted that to actually an exterior lobby entrance space,
so that that courtyard will act and serve as ticketing, outdoor gathering
space, with the large canopy, stroller parking, so that the building square
footage can be utilized for exhibit space.
Mayor Burt: You mentioned the dawn redwood and its prehistoric
importance. Also in Palo Alto, we have a few dawn redwoods, one by the
Post Office and this one. I'm not sure whether there are any others. My understanding is they were planted in the 1930s, I think. That was
essentially shortly after, I believe, the rediscovery of the dawn redwood in
far western China. The world thought there were only two remaining species
of redwood trees, the California ones. These are amongst the oldest dawn
redwoods outside of China. At least that's my understanding. Please make
sure I’m speaking correctly. Finally, on the permit fees, when we redid our
libraries, did we charge permit fees of ourselves or in the case of the
Children's Library of the public-private partners?
Mr. de Geus: I might need Molly's assistance with this. I think there are
certain expectations for cost recovery for certain permits, where we do
charge ourselves to pay for it. Is that correct, Molly?
Mr. Keene: We'll have to look at it. We certainly have a pattern of often
paying for permits, but I couldn't definitely answer that we did that in all of
those cases.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: First of all, congratulations on the fundraising.
That's really fantastic, very exciting. I had kind of random questions. I'm
going to rattle them off. Are there bathrooms inside the new facilities?
Mr. McClure: Yes.
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Council Member DuBois: It wasn't clear. There currently are two. I'm just
curious a little bit how you think charging an entrance fee is going to impact
the number of visits.
Mr. Aiken: It's one of the things we've looked at in our pro forma, that
we're studying. We are currently doing a statistically relevant count of
visitors now, and then we're taking that number and assuming that some
people will drop off and either choose not to come or will choose to purchase memberships instead of buying a ticket each time. Then, the pro forma is
split into revenue from adult and children's ticket sales. It's interesting.
Every museum in the country has gone through these discussions and these
challenges as we figure out ways to pay for cultural institutions. There's
been a recent history of some paid museums going free and then turning
around and going back to paid and vice versa. The challenge is most of
these institutions can't survive on their own, and they also can't survive
without bringing money to the table. There needs to be a balance of both.
We also believe that the community needs time to digest this and to
understand what we're proposing here. We would like to do more outreach
and focus groups and really find out a little bit more about how our visitors
make their choices to come to us versus our competitors like CuriOdyssey and Children's Discovery Museum and some of the other zoos in the region.
Council Member DuBois: Even though it's free now, there's a large donation
thing at the front door. Do you have an effective entrance fee? Do most
people make a donation?
Mr. Aiken: We suggest a $5 donation now. Our last visitor survey showed
that people on average were giving us about $2 1/2 per visit. I think that
has to do with a lot of repeat visitation, but also had to do with some
problems that we had with just having cash on hand for making change.
Recently, we've put a card swipe machine in for making that donation, and
the revenue has gone up. I think people are willing to pay. We've also
asked questions of our visitors about their willingness to pay. Everybody
says they're willing to pay something. The question is how much.
Council Member DuBois: Just looking at the maps—thank you for all those
different. The Girl Scout building, it looked like the park actually goes
around the Girl Scout building. Is it not part of the park? If it's not, is it
City-owned?
Mr. McClure: The actual park boundary itself as it's noted on the maps and
recorded does jog around the Girl Scout building. There's sort of a …
Council Member DuBois: Is that a City-owned building?
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Mr. McClure: The property itself is one parcel. The Lucie Stern Theatre, the
Girl Scout building, Rinconada Park and the JMZ are all on one boundary.
It's just that the park boundary itself as a separate designation follows that
line.
Mr. de Geus: My understanding is that the Girl Scouts actually own the
building, but it sits on City land. I can confirm …
Council Member DuBois: It's just public facility land next to the park?
Mr. de Geus: Right.
Council Member DuBois: Kind of a similar question. For the Zoo, would we
actually change the park boundary or would the Zoo exist in the park?
Mr. de Geus: The Zoo already exists in the park, and the boundary will
change. Originally, we thought it would change more; we pushed into the
park more than what you see here. With talking with the Parks and Rec
Commission a number of times, that was a chief concern of theirs. We
redesigned it a number of times to pull back off the park as much as
possible, to the point where they were satisfied. The Zoo is still essentially
in parkland.
Council Member DuBois: Is there any reason it can't just stay parkland, and
the Zoo just happens to sit in the park?
Mr. de Geus: I believe it's okay. That's correct.
Council Member DuBois: A question about Cubberley. In the Staff Report,
you mentioned that there's a church that uses the auditorium on Sundays.
There was a comment that you'd like that to continue. I wasn't really sure
what that meant. It's not going to be a shared space, is it?
Mr. de Geus: It's unlikely to work as a shared space for a temporary Junior
Museum and Zoo and the church service every Sunday. What we would look
at doing is trying to support that church, which we've supported for, I think,
nearly 30 years at Cubberley. They've been in different parts of the center,
the campus, that we would look for another space during that period of time
that could function for them.
Council Member DuBois: That's still being discussed?
Mr. de Geus: It is.
Council Member DuBois: Just some quick questions on budget. The camps
and the visits to the elementary school, is that cost neutral?
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Mr. Aiken: We pick up our direct costs but not our overheard with our fees
for camps and for our outreach programs.
Council Member DuBois: This is all staffed by City Staff, right?
Mr. Aiken: Correct.
Council Member DuBois: My last question is really about the Phase 2 timing.
It sounded like you view that as necessary financially or it basically improves
the financial outlook. What's the timing on that? Could Phase 2 happen a couple of years later? What's the thought?
Mr. de Geus: Our hope is as soon as possible. We didn't get into the design
too closely tonight, but it's a pretty exciting Phase 2 actually with the tree
fort and upper experience for visitors. We think that some folks will be
inspired to fund that and make that happen. We hope within 3-5 years we
can build that Phase 2.
Council Member DuBois: It's kind of outside the scope for sure of Phase 1?
Mr. de Geus: It's outside the scope for now. The $25 million that the
Friends are committed to and are close to reaching that target won't allow
us to build that piece of the project.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Is it the intention to continue fundraising for that Phase 2 even as the $25 million is reached? Are the Friends doing that or taking a break?
If they should be able to raise it, then maybe it could still be folded in.
Mr. de Geus: These are ongoing discussions with the Friends. They've been
doing such an outstanding job in getting to that $25 million. They certainly
deserve a break. I think that's fair and reasonable. John and I would …
Mayor Burt: That's an incredible fundraising.
Mr. de Geus: Yeah. We're hoping that we can still shake loose this
additional funding from somewhere, but we don't want to put too much
pressure on our Friends.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: This whole project continues what the Junior
Museum really is, exciting, fun, educational. It's fantastic that the Friends
are doing this for the community. It was fun with my kids, fun with my
grandkids, and it looks like it'll be even more fun for future generations. Let
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me just ask a few other questions on top of what my colleagues have asked.
It looks like on Page 13 that the real intrusion into the park is that Zoo
support building. That's the only place where we are adding a good section
of the park into enclosed Zoo area, Zoo support.
Mr. McClure: The physical building structures, walls and roofs, will be the
blue, the shape that I'm drawing on the land around here. That's outside
the park boundary. There's the pecan tree and then that other outdoor space. With the boundary here, the existing Zoo is in this zone, outdoor
space with the netted enclosure and then the wall that's around it, and then
this zone back over here that's being called—hold on a second. It froze. In
any case, the zone that's on the back tail-end of the Zoo itself is an outdoor
containment area. It has the same character as the Zoo itself. There's a
netted enclosure over the top, and there's just a wall around the perimeter,
and that's it.
Council Member Schmid: The new intrusion on the park is the wall around
that support area?
Mr. McClure: Correct.
Council Member Schmid: Can you give me square footage? What's the size
of it? It doesn't look that big.
Mr. McClure: It's approximately 3,000 square feet of that addition.
Council Member Schmid: On the picture you have of the entry to the Zoo, in
contrast to the old Zoo which used to have public exhibit space as you
walked in, now there are windows looking into office and feeding space,
classroom space. The people paying the admission are now excluded from a
good portion of where there used to be exhibit space. Is that right?
Mr. Aiken: The proportions are about the same as they are today. We have
a fair amount of back-of-house space, which includes a mechanical shop for
repairing the exhibits, animal holding and animal care facilities. A lot of it is
dedicated to storing our collections and all of the things that we teach in
schools with. In the plan, it's called the collections hub. What we're doing is
creating windows into those work areas for the public, which they don't have
today, but we have those back-of-house spaces now that the public's
excluded from. It's about the same proportion.
Council Member Schmid: On Page 18 of the slides, that white building used
to be where you'd have special exhibits, and now is a window looking.
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Mr. Aiken: There are also classrooms there for—it's not free access, but it's
controlled access.
Council Member Schmid: I guess a question has already been brought up on
the impact of the fee. It would be a shame to discourage people from
dropping in, but maybe those are the people who would become members
and get a lower per-use fee. Just a question for Rob. We have a voluntary
contribution up at Foothill Park. Do you have any idea what the average per-visitor contribution works out to?
Mr. de Geus: I would have to get back to you, Council Member Schmid, on
that. I know that it's not yielding nearly as much revenue as we would like.
It's something that we're talking with the rangers about to see how we can
encourage additional gifts.
Council Member Schmid: That might be important, because in a way it
justifies having a fee. I guess you just don't want the fee too high that the
casual visitor says, "Let's do something else." The move to Cubberley, the
expected finish date on the rebuilding is the winter of 2020. That's a year
after the current lease with Cubberley expires. Hopefully by that time, we
will have plans on refurbishing. Is there a potential problem that we might
run into?
Mr. de Geus: I think the hope is actually that we would be done by the end
of calendar year 2019, being the winter of '19-'20, a year earlier than what
you just mentioned.
Council Member Schmid: The Cubberley lease ends …
Mr. de Geus: The Cubberley lease ends at that time, in December of 2019.
That's something that we'll need to watch closely as we develop plans for
the future of Cubberley and the master planning of Cubberley and what
might happen there and at what time. That needs to be coordinated
potentially with using some spaces in interim JMZ.
Council Member Schmid: Just to be aware that Mitchell Park took a little
longer than we thought. We wouldn't want a Cubberley development to be
caught up in something. The division of expenses is that the City will bear
the cost of any parking lot change. Is that how it's worked out?
Mr. de Geus: That's something that we're in discussion with the Friends of
the Junior Museum and Zoo as they continue to fine tune the budget for
building the Zoo and the new exhibit building. We are currently carrying—
they are carrying some money to support the parking lot remodel. Again, as
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things get tighter or more expensive, I would think that that is an area they
would look to the City to maybe contribute the cost of the parking lot.
Council Member Schmid: There are some issues that we'll be dealing with
over the future but to create an exciting part of town. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: Mine mostly got answered. Thanks. If you do
Phase 2 a couple of years later, that doesn't require shutting down the Zoo for construction for an extended period of time or anything like that?
Mr. Aiken: We haven't finished designing it, but what I estimate is that we
would probably have to catch the birds up and hold them in that back-of-
house area onsite. We wouldn't have to move offsite, but we could do
holding onsite while the netting is opened up when the construction is ready
for that portion of it. My sense is also that the construction duration would
be pretty short, so we should be able to manage it onsite.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. Congratulations on progress so far.
Some of the questions have been either asked or alluded to. One quick
thing. The dawn redwood, I know of at least one other dawn redwood in
Palo Alto, on Forest Avenue, that the private property owner dedicated. On the topic of trees, we don't have any kind of arborist report or anything.
When this goes to the ARB, is that when the arborist reports are going to be
done? I note, for instance, that the—what we have are pretty rough and
basic plans. It looks like perhaps the buildings encroach on the dawn
redwood in terms of construction activity especially. Will those arborist
reports be accomplished and available for the ARB? Have any of those been
done so far?
Mr. de Geus: Yes and yes. There are arborist reports that have been
completed. When the project is a formal project and submitted and we go
through the process of formal review, all of those reports will be reviewed by
the different Boards and Commissions along with Council.
Council Member Holman: On a preliminary basis, I'm sure that the buildings
were located where they are based on something having to do with trees.
On a preliminary basis, are the trees adequately—are there adequate
setbacks from the trees including root zones and all of that sort of thing?
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Mr. McClure: We've looked at root zones. The arborist report in conjunction
with the City Landscape Architect and our landscape architect have
appropriately placed the boundaries of those walls.
Council Member Holman: I've never asked this about a—because of the
environment here, I've never asked this. Are our nonprofits required just
like any contracting project to put up a bond for trees?
Mr. de Geus: I'm not sure of the answer to that question. Do you know, Brent? We'll have to get back to you on that, Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: The Parks and Recreation Commission, the Staff
Report references that there were four things that the Parks and Rec
Commission wanted primarily to be addressed. It said in response to those,
this, that and that has happened. It doesn't say what the Motion was. We
don't have any Minutes. It doesn't say what the Motion was in the Parks and
Rec Commission, if Parks and Rec Commission was satisfied. It only says
how the JMZ responded. It doesn't say compliance with the
recommendations and considerations and concerns of the Parks and Rec
Commission. What is the result of that?
Mr. de Geus: We are still in the preliminary phase even with the Parks and
Recreation Commission, even though we did go three times to that group. We will go again formally to ask for a Park Improvement Ordinance to get a
specific Motion. The third time we did visit with the Commission, they were
supportive of where we were headed. I believe it was unanimous, but I can
certainly forward that Staff Report and Minutes to the full Council.
Council Member Holman: I'm reading these as mostly being massing
models, not plans. Correct? We're not really looking at putting a white
building in parkland. Just wanting to make sure. Having to do with
parkland and parkland encroachment, when you take this back to Parks and
Rec and when you take it to ARB as well and when it comes back to Council,
can the plans and report be specific as to how much parkland is being
encroached and in what way? Also, the area that I understand does exist—
I've visited there certainly. It also says proposed Loose in the Zoo. That
would be in parkland, but other places it looks like that's already in
parkland. Was that done—was it usurped, was it a swap? How did that
happen?
Mr. McClure: The zone that's identified as proposed Loose in the Zoo on the
site plan here, the footprint is roughly the existing footprint of the Zoo.
There's a little sliver that's back over here, that's an extension, as well as
the Zoo support. When we did present the three times at Parks and Rec
Commission, we had an exhaustive square footage and very detailed
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analysis going through all of the moves that we had initially proposed. We
had a different design with our first submission. We listened to their
feedback and their comments, and we went back to the drawing board.
We've done that now twice. On that third submittal, we felt that even
though it was a preliminary review everyone on the Commission gave us a
favorable nod. As it was discussed, we would then be coming back, I think,
for a formal review in the future, the near future.
Council Member Holman: There's still an outstanding question there. As I'm
understanding it, that's there now as I was hearing it described earlier.
Mr. McClure: The net over the top of the Zoo is not there now.
Council Member Holman: The net isn't, but the use is.
Mr. McClure: Correct.
Council Member Holman: That's in parkland.
Mr. McClure: Yes.
Council Member Holman: My question was how did that happen? In other
words, was it permitted, was there a swap done for it? How did that
happen?
Mr. de Geus: That's a good question. We've talked about that. I think the
Zoo was put there before there was the Park Dedication Ordinance that the City has now on the books. The Zoo facility and building occurred years
before, if that makes sense, Council Member Holman. The thing I would say
about this—I've thought a lot about this—we do have other structures and
buildings in our parks. Where I gain some comfort with the Zoo being in
parkland is that I have come to see the Junior Museum and Zoo as much like
an interpretive center that we have at our open space preserves. It's an
intensive interpretive center, very interactive. The families and kids that go
to the Zoo and go to the Junior Museum and learn about the natural world
and science—we're creating many conservationists and people that care
about parks and open space. That has a lot of value. Personally, I think it's
a good fit for what we'd want on parkland. That's a perspective.
Council Member Holman: It is a perspective, and I won't argue it with you.
It's a matter of there's good and there's good. You have to weigh those and
balance those. The building that Council Member Schmid asked about,
that's about 3,000 square feet. It would be a new use in parkland. Correct?
That Zoo support …
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Mr. McClure: That's correct. That's this zone over here. It's not a building.
Mr. Aiken: That's what confuses me.
Council Member Holman: It's not a building.
Mr. McClure: It's not a building. Just a …
Council Member Holman: There is a wall around it, though?
Mr. McClure: That's correct.
Council Member Holman: It's walled off from the park or not?
Mr. McClure: Yes.
Council Member Holman: Whether it's a building or not, it takes the land out
of park use. If there was some other way to integrate that, that would of
course be preferable. The finances, a couple of things. Rob, when you were
going through the costs originally, you said there was a $400,000 interim
cost, and then you mentioned $3 million. I didn't catch what that was for.
You said some programming fees, and then there's the parking lot. Was
there a second item that you mentioned that was $3 million or did I double
dip there?
Mr. de Geus: You did hear that correctly, Council Member Holman. That's
the Phase 2 building.
Council Member Holman: That's the Phase 2. Having to do with fundraising, congratulations. Very good progress and congratulations are definitely in
order here. One hundred sixty-five donors for this amount of money
seems—who cares how you raise it? If you raise it, it's a good thing. It
does seem like a low number though. The reason I raise that is because—
certainly you have one donor that's pretty significant there. The reason I
raise that is because—to kind of revisit the parking lot. Because we have so
many projects and so many demands on City funds, is there any projection
about how likely the JMZ would be to be able to raise a proportionate share
of the parking lot?
Mr. de Geus: It's built into their current budget, but it's very tight. I know
that, having talked to the Friends. I think they're doing everything they can
to keep the costs low and to contribute. At this point, we're just not sure if
they're going to be able to get there.
Council Member Holman: I did hear that there was built-in, but projects can
go a little over. Would the Junior Museum and Zoo be amenable to raising
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their fundraising target in order to contribute a proportionate amount of the
parking lot rebuild?
Mr. de Geus: I think $25 million is their stated goal, and they're sticking
with that. We've had that conversation.
Council Member Holman: If the Council wanted them to, say, go raise
another $1 million. I think those are my questions. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: Thanks very much for the presentation and all
the hard work that's gone into this so far, especially those who have been
doing so much on the fundraising side from the Friends. A couple of
questions and thoughts. Most of my concern is around the funding, the
financing and some of the potential costs going forward. There's something
on Page 7 of the Staff Report that definitely raised some concerns for me.
At the very bottom of the Page, very last sentence, suggesting that Phase 2
may result in us having to put other projects in the City on hold. I was
wondering if Staff had anything they wanted to add to that at this point.
Mr. de Geus: Council Member Wolbach, this is the thing that we're
concerned most about too as Staff. We know there's limited resources.
There's a very big capital plan that we have as a City. We can't do it all, and we certainly can't do it all at the same time. As this project moves forward
and we are ready to contribute and rebuild the parking lot before we may
have otherwise done it, that means we may not be able to do something
else that is also a high priority. Just a reality of that, we need to appreciate
and understand that there's going to be tradeoffs as we go forward. As
wonderful as this is, there are going to be other tradeoffs that are not so
wonderful.
Council Member Wolbach: Remind me—I'm sorry if I missed it—how much
are we looking at Phase 2 costing.
Mr. de Geus: I'm sorry. Could you ask that again, Council Member?
Council Member Wolbach: How much is the cost expected for Phase 2?
Mr. de Geus: Early estimates are $3 million.
Council Member Wolbach: Three million dollars, that's good to keep in mind.
On Page 6 of the Staff Report, it talks about—we've talked about it
somewhat tonight. I want to make sure I understand this. We're looking at
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$250,000 additional costs per year, and that's even if we start charging $5
for children and $10 for adult visits. Am I reading that correctly?
Mr. de Geus: That is correct. We're still working on the numbers and the
pro formas. It's very much a new venture. We're not sure how the public's
going to respond, so we like to be a little conservative on this. Hopefully we
do better. It's going to be a great new center, and we may be able to do
better. We hope so.
Council Member Wolbach: I'll be honest. I'm not excited about the idea of
charging people to visit the Zoo any more than I'd be excited to charge
people to visit Foothills Park or the Baylands or City libraries. If we do end
up charging, I'd probably be more inclined to you pay the $5 or $10 and that
is your year pass and just allow people to come as many times as they want
after that. We're not making those decisions tonight. I'm just putting that
out there for future discussion and consideration. If we didn't charge at all
for entry, how much additional annual operating costs would we be looking
at? Sorry if I missed that.
Mr. de Geus: It's, I would think, somewhere in the $600,000 range, maybe
more than that even. This has given me a little heartburn too. We've had
this free Junior Museum and Zoo for many years. To now charge a fee, how will people respond to that and react? We're still concerned about that, but
we think, with a good membership program where particularly Palo Alto
residents can get a good rate if they want to visit regularly to be able to pay
for that, it can be quite successful. I would also add that it is a phenomenal
service that's being provided, and it costs to run a service like that. It's not
free. Also with our customer feedback so far, there is a willingness to pay.
They recognize that it costs, that it's unusual that something like this would
be completely free to the public.
Council Member Wolbach: I guess one other thing to consider is whether we
might provide a discounted or free rate for Palo Alto residents and charge a
small amount for people who are not Palo Alto residents. Maybe something
to consider for Foothills Park as well. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I think we have covered most of the salient points at
this point. A couple of things. Who is actually heading up the fundraising?
Just out of curiosity. Is one of you in charge?
Mr. Hopkins: Yes. I'm Co-Chair with another gentleman who's not here
tonight.
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Council Member Kniss: Could I ask you a couple of questions?
Mr. Hopkins: Hopefully I can answer them.
Council Member Kniss: Just come on up to the mic.
Mayor Burt: You can come up to the mic.
Council Member Kniss: Otherwise, you won't get recorded properly. I'm
looking at the naming and recognition which is on Page 5. Interested in
knowing, since I can see the Peerys have been extremely generous, whether or not there is some naming opportunity for that family or do they not want
that.
Mr. Hopkins: I believe we're still kind of considering that. We haven't
decided exactly how we're going to approach the naming. You're talking
specifically for the Peerys?
Council Member Kniss: Specifically, right.
Mr. Hopkins: We haven't discussed that as of yet and decided. The $15
million did not include that, but that may be an option, something that they
would like. We haven't finalized it.
Council Member Kniss: That's an extremely generous donation. I have no
idea what their intention was, whether or not they wanted to be recognized
or not. I noticed that in here we are going to look at the possibility of there being naming opportunities.
Mr. Hopkins: Yes.
Council Member Kniss: Which sometimes gets complicated in a City. I know
that we'll do a good job of really taking a hard look at that and deciding how
to do it.
Mr. Hopkins: Absolutely. Thank you. We've been discussing it in our Board
meetings, and we are prepared for that. We will address it with even
(inaudible) to that.
Council Member Kniss: I can see you have a former Mayor on your team, so
I'm pretty sure that he's aware of that as well.
Mr. Hopkins: Absolutely. We've been discussing that. Thank you.
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Council Member Kniss: I'd certainly want to say out loud in public that I
think the Peerys have been extremely generous in other areas of the City as
well. We're fortunate. Thanks so much.
Mr. Hopkins: Thank you.
Council Member Kniss: Thank you for heading up this effort as well. I
appreciate it.
Mayor Burt: Thanks. I have a few follow-up comments that I'd like to make. One is that not everyone on the dais is equally familiar with the
history of public-private partnerships in our community and benefactor
donations. Going back to the creation of the Lucie Stern Community Center,
that was one that was a private donation and would not have existed
otherwise and one of the great community treasures that we have. We had
a number of great contributions made way back in the '30s. More recently
we had the Williams House that is our American Heritage Museum. We have
the Gamble Gardens, which were donated. We think about these community
treasures. Without these generous contributions, we would be a really
outstanding community with great services, but these gems just wouldn't
exist. More recently, we had a prolonged period where there wasn't funding
available for new infrastructure. There really wasn't even funding that was being spent adequately to maintain our existing infrastructure. The only
way that we have had modernization and improvements until very recently
has been through public-private partnerships. We had the outdoor
Children's Theatre, which was probably the first one of a series, and then the
Children's Library, the Heritage Park Playground, the Art Center and most
recently the Magical Bridge Playground. When we think of what makes our
community really treasured by Palo Altans and frankly people from
surrounding communities, it's these gems. I put this in that context. Even
for inflation-adjusted dollars, I believe this is the largest project of a
nonprofit essentially contribution to the City since the 1930s. I think we
really need to recognize how great of an effort this has been and what an
asset it'll be to our community. As a result, I really favor us bending over
backwards to try to help in any way we can. This could have been
something that was proposed as a 50/50 public-private cost, and it's not.
We're having this incredible contribution from donors. It's in that context,
when I look at things like the parking lot. Frankly, I didn't even know
whether there were any funds from the fundraising for the parking lot. I
would have been open to consideration of the City incurring that entire
expense, because it's really something that's well overdue in and of itself,
really independent of this project, long overdue. When we expanded
significantly the Children's Library, not only didn't we expand parking, we
didn't do anything to redesign the lot to make it more efficient, for instance.
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There's the same thing with the programs and the Children's Theatre. When
I heard about the entrance fee, I had to think about that a bit. I realized
that just in that area, we've always charged for the pools and the children's
pool. The fees that we charge there are not nominal, but they certainly
haven't seemed to diminish participation including by surrounding
communities. The same thing with Children's Theatre. We've increased fees
in the Children's Theatre, and our audience participation is really quite high. I think if the fee structure and the annual passes are done not thinking of
a—I appreciate that it's not anywhere near a full cost recovery. It's fair that
there be some fee that is charged. It means I'll have to get the pass,
otherwise I won't be able to just drop in as often. I would like to add that I
really do concur that—especially a zoo, I think of as parkland. Whether
there has to be fencing for animals that is not transparent to the outside,
that really doesn't change that sense for me. We have structures on
parklands, and we should simply go through our process to make sure that
these structures are as thoughtful and well-designed and appropriate for
that parkland as possible. I certainly see it as parkland. Finally, I just want
to share a personal anecdote on how this type of museum and zoo is
different from the Exploratorium and the San Jose one and a lot of these incredible—and the San Francisco Zoo, which are great assets. When I was
five years old, I first went to the Zoo. I know that, because I remember it to
this day. The animals at that point were much larger than they are today.
These giant ducks and all these reptiles that were this big. Aside from that,
that sort of impression—I lived at the time in Sunnyvale. Memories of these
assets were what made my wife and say, "If there's any way possible, we
want to work to be able to buy a home in Palo Alto and raise our children
here." This is really a unique asset. What's different is that is a Museum
and Zoo on a child's scale. They don't feel overwhelmed. We as adults may
go there and say, "I've been to the San Francisco Zoo. What's so great
about this?" For a child, this is their experience. It's really something that,
frankly, other museums and zoos should come to understand more. I see
John shaking his head, who has been at one of the great zoos certainly of
the West. They each have their respective roles, but this is quite special. I
just want to commend that and, again, really thank the Board and the
donors who are stepping up to the plate and making this happen. Council
Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you for that. I just really want to echo the
Mayor. This is really a fantastic project. It's really exciting. I can't wait to
go to the opening. It's kind of our job to ask probing questions, so I hope
that wasn't taken in a negative way. This is a very exciting project. I've
been to the current Museum many times with my kids and really do
appreciate the small scale and intimacy of the Museum. Thank you for
bringing this to us.
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Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Just a quick closing comment going along with
Council Member DuBois' comments. It is a really good project. You know
that we have a job to scrutinize various aspects and obligations and
commitments that we're making. Do hear our questions and comments in
that light.
Mayor Burt: On that note, thank you all very much. We look forward to the golden spike. Maybe the Stanfords will supply a golden spike.
2. Study Session to Present the Findings of the Citywide Engineering and
Traffic Speed Surveys and Discuss Alternatives to the Establishment of
Speed Limits and Requirements for Enforcement.
Mayor Burt: Our next item is a Study Session to present the findings of the
Citywide engineering and traffic speed surveys and discuss alternatives to
the establishment of speed limits and requirements of enforcement.
Welcome, Mr. Mello and the rest of the team.
Joshuah Mello, Chief Transportation Official: Good evening, Mayor,
members of Council. My name is Josh Mello; I'm the City's Chief
Transportation Official. I'm joined this evening by Sergeant Craig Lee of the
Police Department and our consultant, Chris Thnay, from the Stantec consulting firm. Ruchika Aggarwal is also in the audience; she's the Project
Manager for this project. Hopefully we can all answer any questions you
have. Con Maloney is also here from the Police Department. This is a pretty
complicated subject, and I wanted to just first get into it by going over the
purpose of this study that we conducted, engineering and traffic surveys.
Early on, we talked at a Staff level about how to best communicate this issue
with the public. California is unique in the fact that there's a State law
governing how municipalities set speed limits, not only on State roadways
but on local roadways as well. We are required to do radar enforcement on
local streets. We're required to have what are called certified engineering
and traffic surveys. Several of these were out of date, and we needed to
update these. As we thought about how to best present this to you and the
community, we thought this was a good chance to have a community-wide
discussion about speed limits and enforcement. We also needed to update
the required engineering and traffic surveys. This study also provided us an
opportunity to collect data on average speeds and collision rates for 70
roadway segments in Palo Alto. Some of the goals we kind of established
early on were to identify enforceable speed limits under State law; establish
target speeds where average speeds exceed the current speed limit; and
also use this as an opportunity to implement the reduced school zone speed
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limits which are now permitted under State law. I want to set a little bit of
context for this study before we dive into the results. As I mentioned,
California has a very detailed law which municipalities are required to adhere
to when setting speed limits on local roadways. Prima facie speed limits are
permitted on local residential streets. Speed limits of 15 miles per hour and
25 miles per hour are permitted on local streets, and 15 mile per hour zones
are limited to those areas around schools. We are not allowed to set prima facie speed limits on streets that are not considered local residential streets
There's a definition of what is considered a local residential streets. That's a
roadway that's not more than 40 feet wide, not more than 1/2 mile of
uninterrupted length, and not more than one traffic lane in each direction.
Most of our arterial streets do not meet this definition. Palo Alto has a
unique roadway classification called residential arterial. Quite a few of those
are wider than 40 feet and do not fit the definition. Despite being
residential, they do not fit the definition of a local residential street.
Therefore, for those roadways, we are required to conduct what are called
engineering and traffic surveys. Those surveys collect data as to what the
85th percentile speed is in off-peak periods, non-congested periods. The
85th percentile speed is defined as the speed at or below which 85 percent of all vehicles are observed to travel under free-flowing conditions past a
monitored point. This is used as a guide under California law to set the
speed limits on nonresidential, nonlocal streets. The issue with this is the
prevailing speed may conflict with neighborhood quality of life and the use of
active transportation modes. In some cases, the 85th percentile speed may
not be the speed at which the community would like traffic to travel along
that roadway. This is a diagram that illustrates how to calculate the 85th
percentile speed. The red arrow there is the 85th percentile speed point.
Every vehicle above that point is traveling at or below the 85th percentile
speed. In this case that speed is 42 miles an hour. This is a map that
shows our current posted speed limits. Every roadway that's unshaded and
gray is currently signed for 25 miles an hour. The green, dashed roadways
are 35 miles an hour. The blue, dashed roadway, El Camino Real, is 40
miles an hour. The western part of the City, there's a couple of 45 and 50
mile an hour roadways. When we presented this to the Planning and
Transportation Commission (PTC) a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of
questions about our current speed limit enforcement activity. I do have the
Police Department here this evening to answer any specific questions you
may have. The table in front of you on Slide 8 illustrates the citations and
warnings that were distributed by the Police Department over the last five
years. You can see there's a little bit of a drop this Fiscal Year. Sergeant
Lee can answer any questions you may have as to that. There are three
different enforcement mechanisms that the Police department uses to
enforce the speed limit. The preferred option, of course, is radar and lidar;
however, this requires that a roadway have an approved survey as well as a
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trained officer. Not everyone can operate radar and lidar. Currently 25 out
of 75 officers are certified to operate lidar and radar. Pacing can also be
used; this is where a police officer follows a vehicle in close proximity in
order to calculate the travel speed by pacing alongside or behind the vehicle.
Visual estimation is where an officer uses his judgment to estimate the
travel speed of a vehicle. These types of citations are not often held up in
court. Delving into the details of this particular study and this project. In 2012, per California Assembly Bill (AB) 32, the City of Palo Alto conducted a
study of roadways surrounding local schools. This particular study was just
limited to public schools; however, the PTC suggested that we also look at
private schools if we elect to move forward with this. AB 32 allows the City
to extend the 25 mile an hour speed limit from 500 feet to 1,000 feet in the
vicinity of schools. It also allows the City to reduce the speed limit to 15 or
20 miles per hour within 500 feet of the school grounds under certain
conditions, which are listed here. The next series of three maps shows the
roadway segments that we could potentially reduce the speed limit on based
on AB 32. The yellow segments of roadway could be reduced to 15 miles
per hour, and the orange segments would be the extended 25 mile per hour
school zone. One of the main goals of this study and project was to update the engineering and traffic speed surveys, which are required under
California State law in order for the City to enforce the speed limit using
radar. If we were interested in pursuing radar enforcement, the corridors
that you see highlighted in green here would need to have new engineering
and speed surveys adopted. These are the roadway segments that we found
to be noncompliant currently and ineligible for radar speed enforcement.
I'm sorry. Go back here. I'm sorry. Let me correct myself. The segments
here shown in red as well as green are the segments that were part of this
study. There's 70 segments of roadway that were studied. The data that
we collected on those 70 segments of roadway included the average daily
traffic, the average speed by radar. This is conducted in accordance with
DMV regulations, so there's a certified engineer that uses a radar device.
That device has to be used during free-flow periods. You cannot conduct
these during congested peak hours. We also looked at five year collision
data. We were able to develop a collision rate for each one of these
segments, which is a very interesting data point. Based on that data, we
were able to identify the top five high-crash segments along arterial and
residential arterial streets. I have an inkling here that a lot of these are
probably related to the amount of pedestrian activity, especially the top two.
We would, of course, need to delve more deeply into this data. This is an
interesting point because we now have a collision rate calculated for each of
these 70 roadway segments, which could allow us to focus both our
engineering and our enforcement efforts on these particular segments. The
collision rate is the number of collisions per—I believe it's 1 million vehicle
miles traveled. There's a denominator that's calculated independently of the
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actual number of collisions. It's a good way to compare different roadway
segments that have different volumes against each other. The results of the
speed limit analysis. We found that 14 street segments in Palo Alto would
need to increase the posted speed limit in order to conduct radar
enforcement. We're not recommending that those speed limits be enforced.
If we were interested in pursuing increased radar enforcement along those,
we would need to increase those speed limits. Highlighted in purple, you can see the segments that would need an increase in the posted speed limit
in order to conduct radar enforcement. These include segments of
University Avenue, Alma Street, Embarcadero Road, Middlefield Road as well
as Arastradero Road. Arastradero Road, of course, is scheduled for
reconstruction in the coming years, so I really would not encourage
increasing the speed limit on that street as we're making design decisions
based around a 25 mile an hour speed limit today. One of the other things
that we would like to come out of this study is the identification of a target
speed for each of our corridors, particularly our arterials and our residential
arterials. A target speed is a proactive way to encourage travel speeds that
are appropriate for the community and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Once we establish a target speed hypothetically of, let's say, 25 miles an hour, we would then make our design decisions around that 25 mile an hour
target speed. It's not based on the current operating speed or the posted
speed limit. It is a community-driven desire, framing what the desired
operating speed should be along that roadway. This is a rather new
practice. It's actually described in detail in the National Association of City
Transportation Officials (NACTO_ Urban Street Design Guide. A hypothetical
here in the table below. You could see the current operating speed on the
roadway may be 42 miles an hour. We have a goal of a 35 mile an hour
operating speed. The speed limit today could be 40 miles an hour; but we
have a goal of also having a 35 mile an hour speed limit. We would set a
target speed of 35 miles an hour with the goal of reducing both the
operating speed and the speed limit to 35 miles an hour. Once we establish
a target speed, some of the tools that we could use to bring those operating
speeds down to the community desired target speed include chicanes which
are lane shifts, curb extensions, the installation of edge lines, gateways or
median islands and a whole host of other treatments. On collector and local
streets, we can be a little more aggressive and look to things like speed
humps and speed tables, which are called vertical deflection devices. On the
arterial and residential arterials, we'd want to stick to horizontal deflection
and signing and striping improvements generally. This is a chart from the
NACTO Urban Street Design Guide that shows how lane widths correspond to
increased travel speeds. Generally the wider the travel lanes, the more
comfortable people feel going at higher speeds. Generally in urban areas,
we like to keep travel lanes down around 10 feet wide. On freeways, travel
lanes are typically about 12 feet wide. We have a real-life example in
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Middlefield Road. This summer we restriped Middlefield Road, and we added
edge lines along the travel lanes, effectively reducing the travels lanes to 10
feet. This is the section between Lowell Avenue and Oregon Expressway.
We did a before and after speed study, and we noticed a 4 mile per hour
reduction in the 85th percentile speed. That's the operating speed along the
roadway. If we did elect to temporarily increase the speed limit in order to
allow radar enforcement as we redesign the roadways, one other thing we could look at as a tool is the establishment of advisory speed zones. These
are not enforceable by law; however, these are standard Manual on
Uniformed Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) compliant signs that we could
install. We could use different warning signs, school crossing, pedestrian
crossing, bicycle. We could create advisory speed zones where we think
we'd want to advise folks to go below the speed limit. This is a Study
Session; we're not asking you to take any action this evening. We're really
just starting the conversation around this topic. We do have two community
engagement meetings planned, that are included as part of this project.
One of the things we asked PTC for and we're also asking you for this
evening is some guidance on how to best present this topic to the public
when we go out to the community and how to best frame this. It is a complicated topic, and a lot of people feel very strongly about speeding in
our community. We'd also like to implement the reduced school speed
zones limits in the future. You saw the maps; they're included in your item
as well. We could increase the speed limits and conduct radar enforcement
if we elected to establish speed limits based on the engineering and traffic
surveys. We could also establish advisory speed zones, establish target
speeds, and adopt a City policy to design streets to that target speed. We
could look at focusing our limited speed and traffic enforcement resources on
the high-collision segments that we identified through this study. We could
also advocate for changes to the State speed limit law, allowing cities to set
a default speed limit instead of having to base the speed limit on the 85th
percentile. Our next steps as currently planned are to conduct community
workshops in January. I did mention I'd love to get your feedback on what
those workshops should look like and if you think they're even worth
pursuing at this point and what topics we should cover at those workshops if
you think they are. In the spring, we'd return to City Council with some
action items. We don't know what those action items would be yet. They
could be several of the ones I presented on the earlier slide. Ideally we'd
like to implement the changes and begin any associated enforcement in the
summer of 2017. With that, I'd be open to any questions or comments that
you have.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Kniss.
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Council Member Kniss: Some of you know I just recently ran for reelection.
I can pretty much guarantee there is very little appetite in this community
for raising the speed limit. If anything, there's an appetite for controlling it.
I cross Embarcadero in the morning frequently to walk, as Jim knows. The
speed is phenomenal. While it would be very tempting to alter it so that you
could do that, I have sat here at another point where people have come and
just filled the chambers at even the thought of raising the speed limit on one street in this community. For some reason, it is absolutely one of those
buzz points that just gets everyone down here to talk about it. I know it
doesn't make a lot of sense. It seems as though if you could do that, that
would allow us to use radar, and that is a very effective tool. I just haven't
heard support for it. While community meetings sometimes are a good idea
simply to vent, because people do. If there's one thing they do want to talk
about, it's traffic. Without question. The amount of traffic, how fast it's
going, how it's going through their neighborhood, how it is not—they'd
prefer it goes …
Mayor Burt: Questions?
Council Member Kniss: I did it again.
Mayor Burt: We'll have comments. I'm sorry. I take it back. This is a Study Session. Feel free to mix questions and comments. I take it back.
Sorry.
Council Member Kniss: I can continue on my tirade here. As I said, having
listened to this very frequently over the past three months—if there is
somebody out there, I'm sorry we don't have an instant feedback system
that we have of the public calling right in and saying no, no, no. As I've
said, I'd be very surprised if you find someone in the community who is
saying please raise the speed limit on Middlefield. I will ask one question of
you, Josh. I think that Alma controls itself relatively well, because those
lanes are quite narrow. I don't know if that's my own perception of them
being narrow. I've never gotten out and measured them. Certainly in the
Downtown area, they feel tight enough so that I notice people do slow down
as they get into that area.
Mr. Mello: The segment of Alma where we found a discrepancy between the
speed limit and the 85th percentile was the segment between University and
Lincoln. That's the segment that's 25 miles an hour. In order to conduct
radar enforcement, we would likely need to raise that speed limit to 30 miles
an hour.
Council Member Kniss: I hear what you're saying, and I'm intrigued that
we're bringing this up again tonight. It would be fun to go back through our
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history and see how many times we have dealt with a discussion of raising
the speed limit. If we are to believe the public, the traffic is getting worse.
There are more people on the street. Certainly on both Oregon and on
Embarcadero, which are heavily commute streets, the speed is exceeded.
This is not by way of saying I don't recognize they're traveling at an
excessive speed. At the same time, I don't think you'd find a lot of support
for raising the speed limit. I'll be interested in what my colleagues think.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: On the school speed limits you're talking about,
would those be when school's in session or all the time?
Mr. Mello: They are only limited to the period when school is in session.
Council Member DuBois: Just some thoughts about private schools. It's an
interesting idea. I'd be concerned about what is a private school. Is it a
preschool? Is it a very small school? Can any of them ask for signs? What
happens if they close and move? Who pays for that? It just seems like it
could be more complicated than it sounds initially. If you only do some
private schools, larger ones and not others, can we justify that? In the Staff
Report, you mentioned the California highway accident rates. I was trying to
figure out are our streets safe or not safe. That seemed like an apples to oranges comparison, to compare a local City street to a highway. Do we
have data on collisions by street type?
Mr. Mello: I'll let Chris field that question.
Chris Thnay, Senior Project Manager Stantec: We do have data for different
street types. It's not just comparing major State highway. Appropriate is
tied and also for urban or non-urban, different shaded.
Council Member DuBois: A lot of the table seemed empty for that. If I'm
looking at the state average column, is that …
Mr. Thnay: The state average that we show there already reflect the type of
roadways. For example, what is arterial collector street, local street.
Council Member DuBois: I'm just seeing a lot of zeroes. Is that really the
state average for those kinds of streets? If I'm looking at the right thing,
I'm looking at this chart that was at the back of the Staff Report.
Mr. Thnay: The state averages, they range from 1.7 high to about 1.22
down. I'm not sure (inaudible).
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Council Member DuBois: The first line is Alma Street from University to
Lincoln.
James Keene, City Manager: That has zero on it in the average collision rate
with a C underneath it. Is that the same column?
Mr. Thnay: Maybe during the—it should be 1.7. I'm not sure during the
formatting whether something …
Mr. Mello: We're going to have to get you a corrected table. We can do that. It looks like there was a formatting issue when it was dumped into the
Staff Report.
Mr. Keene: Just so we're clear. They can pretty much assume wherever
there is a zero, that's not accurate.
Mr. Thnay: Correct.
Council Member DuBois: The big question—it'd be great to see that, but it's
really how safe are our streets. Are we okay or do we have—clearly, I think,
we have some streets that look to have a very high accident rate. What's
your assessment overall?
Mr. Mello: We're about, I'd say, 75 percent through this project. We can
certainly provide you with more detailed information around that. We can
look at how we compare to other similar cities as well as the state average and get back to you on that.
Council Member DuBois: Do you have an assessment yet? Just a gut …
Mr. Thnay: Some streets, I think, for example some of these higher collision
area is above the state averages. Many of these local streets are pretty
normal.
Council Member DuBois: In some of them, they were really high. I did have
questions. The University segment Downtown, that's a pretty slow street
generally but had a pretty high accident rate. I'm wondering are we
capturing night life, people drinking and driving. What is that?
Mr. Mello: Chris can correct me if I’m wrong. The collision rate is only
calculated based on Average Daily Traffic (ADT). It wouldn't calculate the
pedestrian activity, right?
Mr. Thnay: The collision rate Josh mentioned is 1 million miles vehicle
travel. It's a function of multiplication of the daily trips, average day trips,
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over the whole year divided by the distance. Sometimes when a street
segment is very short, it kind of accentuated the high yield rate.
Council Member DuBois: Maybe it's statistically if you had a couple of
accidents, it throws it way up.
Mr. Mello: All of the pedestrian activity is also not reflected in that collision
rate, so …
Mr. Thnay: Correct, it is.
Mr. Mello: … the denominator could be much higher than is shown because
we're not counting the pedestrian trips that are occurring on the roadway.
They would lead to more collisions most likely.
Council Member DuBois: I'm wondering on Slide 16 where you showed five
bad streets, those didn't seem to be the worst streets according to the
average collision rate.
Mr. Mello: Those are the highest arterial and residential arterial segments.
Below that on the slide are the highest. A lot of those are local streets
that—a lot of them actually have a lot of bicycle traffic. We're going to have
to delve deeper into that and see how many of those are bicycle collisions.
Council Member DuBois: Those are the streets. I'm glad you pointed that
out. High Street and Waverley Street from Lytton to Channing, I'm curious what's going on there. El Camino Way and California Avenue, we made a lot
of recent changes. Was that measurement after those changes?
Mr. Thnay: It's for the last five complete years. It's probably …
Council Member DuBois: In the middle then? They changed in the middle,
right? El Camino Way was …
Mr. Mello: El Camino Way was restriped about 2 1/2 years ago, 2 years ago.
The tail end of the data would probably include that restriping. My guess on
El Camino Way and California is it's probably related to the amount of bicycle
traffic. There may be a high number of bike collisions. We'll have to look
into that in more detail.
Council Member DuBois: These are the ones that concern me the most.
They seemed very high. This is kind of a broad question. You had that
example of Middlefield where you slowed the speed, but the flow actually
improved in segments. How do you factor in thinking about gridlock and
balancing flow and speed?
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Mr. Mello: Any type of traffic calming or redesign of an arterial street or a
residential arterial would need to consider how it's going to impact
congestion. The bulk of congestion occurs at intersection approaches. A lot
of the treatments we're talking about are on roadway segments, not at
intersections themselves. In the case of Middlefield, we're also working to
improve the signal timing in conjunction with restriping and reducing kind of
the overall travel speed.
Council Member DuBois: Again, I think it's important, if you do have these
community meetings, to mention that as probably an interesting example
where flow improved actually. I wanted to talk about Alma a little bit. It
looked like the data suggested it should go up to even 40 miles an hour on
segments of it. Thirty thousand daily trips is probably—it was our second
busiest segment next to Oregon Expressway, had a very collision rate south
of Churchill. I understand we can go below the survey rate if there's special
circumstances. What are the circumstances for Alma to go down to 35?
Mr. Mello: The only segment of Alma where I see the need to increase the
speed limit in order to conduct radar enforcement is the segment between
University and Lincoln. In order to conduct radar enforcement, we would
need to increase the speed limit from 25 to 30.
Council Member DuBois: I'm looking at Alma from Oregon Expressway to
East Meadow, 85th percentile was 42 miles an hour.
Mr. Mello: The speed limit on that segment is 35. In order to conduct radar
enforcement, we can leave it at 35. The last column there, recommended
speed, that's the speed we would need to post in order to conduct radar
enforcement.
Council Member DuBois: Again, my understanding was—just tell me if I got
this wrong—that you would round down to 40 miles an hour, and then you'd
have to say that there was some other extenuating conditions to go below
that.
Mr. Thnay: Essentially because of the all the businesses close by and all
that, there are sort of situation besides high collision that you could use to
justify lowering from 40 miles per hour to 35.
Council Member DuBois: It's a 0.9 collision rate. It seemed very low. I was
just trying to understand.
Mr. Mello: You can also look at density of driveways, pedestrian and bicycle
activity. The lanes are narrow in that particular stretch, so that could be
another line of reasoning.
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Council Member DuBois: I'll be interested what my colleagues think. I think
on our major—first of all, safety is first. No question about that. On some
of these major arterials—Alma is 30,000 trips a day. I think we do need to
think about flow and have basically—I think you're doing this. Look at our
different types of streets and handle them differently. When you look at the
major streets that handle the bulk of the traffic, if we slow some of those
streets too much, we end up diverting traffic onto local streets. I think when you go out to the community, I'd be interested to get some feedback about
speed on our arterials versus traffic going through neighborhoods. I use
GPS systems a lot, just coming here tonight. It always routes me down
Bryant Street. I was thinking about this item and thinking about the
meeting. The reason it takes me down Embarcadero all the way to Bryant
because there's a roundabout with no stop sign. There's only two stop signs
between there and Downtown. Our bike boulevard is actually the fastest car
route. Something's messed up there if that's true. If I turned onto
Middlefield, I'd hit multiple stop lights. Again, I'm just following the
computer navigation. It's figured that the ultimate route is our bike route.
We want to be safe, and we want to have safe speeds, but we should also
think about optimizing our car flow on the streets that we want our cars on and keeping them away from the bikes. I kind of had a similar question to
Alma for East Bayshore, which is also one of our faster commuting streets. I
do think enforcement's important. If we're going to make our streets
enforceable, it's a tough message to the community that we need to raise
our speed to be able to lower the speed and to enforce. Making clear that
we would do that on the highest accident rate segments makes a lot of
sense, not that we're out to generate revenue or write lots of tickets. My
last question is how are you thinking about holding these community
outreach. You said you were thinking about two meetings. How would you
do public outreach and where would you hold them?
Mr. Mello: We're still thinking about that. This needs to be a Citywide
discussion, so we've thought about whether to hold two Citywide meetings,
do a north and south meeting. We'd definitely be open to any suggestions
that you may have this evening.
Council Member DuBois: It's an interesting one. If you can separate the
arterial and collector discussion, I think I would consider even asking some
of the major employers who are on some of those streets. I think as much
as you can keep it data-focused, that's a good way to go. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth.
Council Member Filseth: Hi. Thanks very much. There's a ton of stuff. A
couple of comments and a couple of questions. I think I concur with Council
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Member DuBois over here that a school is a school whether it's private or
public. If there's kids there, it's a school. Another that sort of jumped out
at me was the Hamilton one, which is right out here in front of us. One of
the characteristics of that one is the speeds there are really slow too. It
doesn't seem like a speeding, radar kind of thing. There's probably other
stuff going on out there. People trying to park or make an illegal turn or
something like that. I don't know. Let me ask one question. I noticed one of the segments in here that there wasn't data on was the Middlefield section
from Willow Road to University. I think that was outside the study. Is that
right?
Mr. Mello: There were 36 segments done in 2014. That segment was
certified in 2014 at 25 miles an hour.
Council Member Filseth: Do you happen to know offhand what the accident
rate there was in comparison to the rest of these?
Mr. Mello: We're doing a very detailed collision analysis right now as part of
the community-driven process around that project. I can get with you
tomorrow and give you that data if you'd like.
Council Member Filseth: I was just curious how it factored in with the rest of
these.
Mr. Keene: We'd send it to the whole Council.
Council Member Filseth: Zeroing in a little bit. I thought the PTC discussion
of the limits and enforcement go together. I thought that was really
seminal. I think that's very much right. I think that's an issue. If we're
going to raise speed limits to enable radar enforcement, the other piece of
that is actually doing the radar enforcement. If we're not going to get there
anytime soon, then what sort of problem have we solved here? I wanted to
ask as you guys looked through this, is there any sense of sort of priority
buckets for these? Is there an A set, a B set and a C set? Is there a small
number of really urgent ones or is it a pretty large number? How does that
all break down as you guys looked at this?
Mr. Mello: There's the community priorities which, I would say, are
Embarcadero Road and Middlefield Road, particularly Middlefield Road south
of Oregon Expressway. Those are the segments we hear most often about.
Of course, Charleston and Arastradero but we have an infrastructure project
that's going to address a lot of the issues on that corridor. I think the
collision rate and a more deep dive into what particular types of collisions
are happening on maybe the top five segments would be a good way to start
the prioritization process.
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Council Member Filseth: That sort of sounds like the right kind of zone. I
actually used to live on Embarcadero, at the corner of Embarcadero and
Emerson, 25 years ago when there was radar enforcement there. There was
one day when the study—there was a study. The next day the speed traps
were all gone and never came back. People argued over that, should we
raise the speed limit or not. The thing that struck me when I was reading
through this is you guys are saying, "Where should we take this?" The thing that really struck me was a real focus on what problem are we going to solve
here. I think that would help a lot with the community outreach too. If
we've got too many accidents on this stretch of street, then we're going to
raise the speed limit to enable radar enforcement, and we have this team
that's going to come out here and do it, so that there's a consistent program
to do that. I think that's good. If it's a question of we've got a mismatch
between the speed limits on all of these streets and the 85 percentile, so
we're going to rationalize that, I think that's a much more ambiguous kind of
thing for folks. As you go out to the community, a real concrete focus on
what problem we're going to solve and also what's the whole plan to do it
and by when, even if it's fewer segments, it's like we're only going to do
these five segments first and get to the rest of the City later, I think that would be really good. I live in Downtown North. The whole Middlefield
corridor is an interesting experiment. The City went ahead and put up these
signs that say you can't do left turns at these hours, and yet there's no
enforcement out there and everybody knows it. A lot of people in Downtown
North go yeah, yeah, because we didn't actually solve the problem. We put
up some signs, but people still back up to turn left at rush hour. As you go
out with the community, if you can go, "Here's what we're going to do here,
here and here. Here's how it's going to happen, and here's the timeframe,"
I think you'd have a very successful community outreach process if you did
that. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. It's a little bit hard to get your mind
around some of this. As Council Member Filseth was just saying, given that
we've put some things in place physically in the community such as the no
left turn blah, blah, blah, but there's not any enforcement. No matter what
we do here, if there's no enforcement, if we don't have Staff to enforce it,
there's nobody running the radar, we've just raised the speed limits. Is
there any program or plan for increasing staffing to implement enforcement?
Mr. Keene: If I might jump in. Just a couple of clarifications. First of all,
it's not that we're not doing enforcement of traffic in the City, first of all. I'll
come back to that in a second. The second is I think there was some
misreporting perhaps in some of the media about the sense that the City
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does not have budget for a traffic enforcement team. That's not the case
either. We have that budgeted; that was funded. You will recall—I actually
think Mr. Borock sent a pretty good summary of this to the Council. We did
reduce the traffic enforcement team back in some of the recessionary days,
but that is back and funded. What the Police Department has been dealing
with is overall Staff shortages between turnover, being able to have new
people coming into the academy and joining the department. The funding is there. The important thing is to realize the City has committed the funding
to ensure the actual traffic team enforcement. That doesn't mean we don't
have officers out doing enforcement, but the full support that we would
typically have is not there. This is sort of a triage of taking care of all of the
responsibilities that our department has for public safety and not being able
to have that just dedicated Traffic Enforcement Division. As we staff up and
as we keep that funding there, then we'll be in a position to do that. I think
that the Council will be in a position, as Council Member Filseth pointed out,
to look at how you might stage any of these policy decisions about changes
to coincide with our ability to actually provide that level of enforcement.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. Better stated. I had also understood
…
Council Member Filseth: He said it better than I did.
Council Member Holman: I had also understood fairly recently that there
have been conversations with neighboring communities that we might share
enforcement Staff, in other words trade back and forth, so that we'd have
better capability to enforce our speed limits, stop-sign runners, stop-light
runners. That's what I'd understood from not a low level Staff member.
Mr. Keene: I'm going to look at the Sergeant here. I'm not familiar with
any conversations like that or certainly elevated to the point where we're
actually planning to deploy something like that. We certainly have had
emerging conversations between some of our neighboring cities through this
City Managers Mobility Partnership about how we'd try to begin to coordinate
lots of our planning and traffic-related transportation efforts, but those are in
the very preliminary stages and for the most part so far have focused on the
bike share program and things like that.
Council Member Holman: I didn't mean to indicate that we're ready to
deploy, but I did understand that there were conversations ongoing and it
was looking fairly promising.
Mr. Keene: The City Manager doesn't know anything about it.
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Council Member Holman: A few things here. Traffic calming is always a
good thing. I'll just give a nod to Council Member DuBois' comment about
cut-through traffic too and how it relates to that. Just one comment. I
didn't notice anything in here about landscape and trees being traffic
calming devices; although, one of the slides, for instance, indicated a tree
being planted, but I didn't see a written reference to landscape and trees.
Did I just miss that? There's the tree being planted, but I don't see …
Mr. Mello: We have street trees listed …
Council Member Holman: Street trees, there it is. Street trees is there.
Mr. Mello: … under arterial traffic calming.
Council Member Holman: Other landscape can also make a difference.
Agree about school zones. Public or private, I don't know why they'd be
considered any differently. Also agree about the Palo Alto Avenue actually
to Embarcadero and Middlefield. Sequencing, a couple of things. One is
how fast the traffic goes sometimes is dependent on—it can work either way.
Either there's too much traffic—traffic can be slowed because of congestion.
If there is too much traffic also, it can lead to different patterns of driving.
It seems to me that there ought to be some coordination and consideration
of street speeds and enforcement with our Transportation Demand Management (TDM) programs and how those relate to each other. I haven't
seen that. The other is kind of a more generic question or maybe even a
comment. If we have to do these studies in order to be able to enforce by
radar, if patterns change such that we would need to increase street speeds
to be able to enforce by radar, are we not just over time leading to a gradual
degradation of quality of life by increase of traffic speeds? Help me
understand why if we have posted speeds of 25 miles an hour and we
haven't done one of these studies for a good long while, but the 25 miles an
hour zone was based on, in all theory, the prevailing speeds at that time and
the desires based on the kind of street it is, do we have no—it just seems
odd that we can't enforce that via radar or any other mechanism.
Mr. Mello: It could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy where you
increase the speed limit, operating speeds increase. You do your next
survey, and it recommends increasing the speed limit again. You could end
up gradually increasing the speed limit to the point where it really
dramatically affects quality of life and livability. If you look at the slide up
here, Slide 19, conventional highway design, you would use the operating
speed to determine a design speed. Then, your posted speed would be a
result of the operating speed after the roadway was opened and operating.
The new way of thinking is that we would collaboratively as a community
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establish a target speed, the speed at which we want that roadway to
operate, and then we would design all elements of that roadway to
encourage motorists to travel at that target speed. Ideally, when we did our
engineering and traffic survey, the 85th percentile would be somewhere near
that target speed. The speed limit, the operating speed and the target
speed would all be consistent. Currently, that's not how things typically
work.
Council Member Holman: The target speed is higher than the currently
posted speed on a number of the segments.
Mr. Mello: We have not established target speeds yet. We're starting that
discussion with this project. We currently don't have target speeds
established for a lot of our roadways. We don't have a design—if we were to
make design changes to Embarcadero Road, we would use the speed limit
because effectively that's the target speed today. We don't actually have an
official target speed established.
Council Member Holman: How long has this State law been in place?
Mr. Mello: I would say decades. It was created to combat speed traps along
state highways in small towns where the speed limit would drop
substantially, and they would have a large amount of enforcement in order to generate revenue for small towns. They would hide around corners.
That's why a speed survey is required in order to prevent those kind of
"speed traps."
Council Member Holman: I do concur with the comments of Council Member
Kniss earlier. I have no reason to think, based on the number of emails that
I've seen already, that there's much appetite for raising the speed limits.
Maybe with a more full discussion, maybe that would change. I think the
gradual degradation is really a concern that the community's going to see.
Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: It seems very convoluted to increase speed so
that you can get an effective enforcement, so you can then lower speeds. I
took just a simple thing of the data, take the data and what does the data
tell us. You have a list here of 70 segments, and you're raising the rate in
14 of them. I looked at the 14 using two criteria that are available here.
One is the collision rate, and one is the access of kids, schools and
afterschool activity sites. If you take the collision rate, the median rate is
about 3.4, around 4. If you take above the median of collision rate, it's a
more dangerous intersection. Of the 14 that you're suggesting, you have
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outlined in red, 9 of them either go by schools, a number of schools, or busy
shopping centers where you have heavy cross-traffic, especially of kids
during the day, or you have collision rates above 4. The majority of the
numbers that come in this chart, just by the chart, seem to say, "Wait a
minute. These aren't the streets that we want to be increasing rates at a
rapid pace." I think you need to have data that has identified the streets
that you think are reasonable to do. Just personally, I drive home on Alma Street after Council meetings, 11:30 at night, drive probably …
Mr. Keene: Be careful. Sergeant Lee is here.
Council Member Schmid: It is very hard to see those signs saying the speed
limit is 35 when you can look up miles ahead, miles back and there's no one
else on the street. It's very tempting, but I use my time instead to calculate
and figure I go about 2 1/2 miles on Alma. If I exceeded the speed limit by
10 miles an hour, I'd save something like 90 seconds. It's a trivial game for
upping the speed limit by 5 miles an hour. If we could just convince people
that the speed limits are there for a reason and a purpose, it's mostly kids,
pedestrians, collisions, accidents. A couple of minutes of time is not a big
deal.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, if I just might clarify something here. Maybe I misunderstood what the Staff was saying. In the report so far, what I've
heard our Staff say is that they would favor looking at reducing speed limits
in some areas around schools and pursuing some design options that might
calm traffic to slow speeding down. These 14 that have been identified have
been identified as needing to have a speed limit increase in order to provide
radar enforcement in order to control speeding. The Staff has not
recommended any of these and, as a matter of fact, made the point that
that was not a recommendation. It was putting out the data and the
requirements under State law if we wanted to be able to more strictly
enforce through the use of radar. I think that's really, really important,
because I think even some of the media stories picked up that as the Staff
recommendation. That is not the recommendation. It is laying out the facts
under State law as to what it would take to provide greater enforcement
through radar use.
Council Member Schmid: I guess my using this is—very clearly there's the
redline marks and three of them go through schools zones, some two or
three schools zones. It's clear that the data we have is raising questions.
Mayor Burt: First, I'll say that Council Member Kniss alluded to that this has
been a discussion that's occurred in the community every—I think the last
time was over a decade ago. I don't know to what extent Staff had an
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opportunity to review those community discussions. The reaction is similar
to what we have today, that there's little to no appetite for increasing the
speed limits in our local streets. Having that laid out as my outlook as well,
even if it did occur, if you were trying to do this to be able to enforce radar,
how much over the speed limit would you ticket someone when using radar?
Normally, when a cop is following a speeding driver, the rule of thumb I
think is 10 miles an hour above. Is there a rule or rule of thumb that's generally used with radar?
Craig Lee, Palo Alto Police Department Sergeant: Thank you very much.
There is no set rule of thumb. Every officer has his or her own ouch factor.
A lot of those pertain to the segment of roadway, crash data, other
community complaints that come in. There's nothing that anyone would say
5 miles, 10, 15 comes into play.
Mayor Burt: What would you say is typical?
Mr. Lee: When I was a motor cop, I would usually say 15-plus over the
speed limit, because that is something that I can articulate in a traffic court
why it's something.
Mayor Burt: With radar?
Mr. Lee: With radar.
Mayor Burt: If we have a 25 mile an hour speed limit, we can't enforce with
radar. If you could, you'd enforce at maybe 40. Thirty-five sounds like at
the low end. If you raise it to 30, you're not going to enforce it at 40. It
becomes 45. Even with the radar, we increase the average speed. We were
able to ticket more, but we didn't slow folks down under that principle. I
think that illustrates that that doesn't really address our problem. On the
other hand, when we put the traffic calming—the restriping of Middlefield
and some of the other measures that went in there, I had observed within
the first week—I drove there twice. I have to admit I drove twice. I
thought, "I'm driving slower, and I think people around me are driving
slower." I was very anxious to see this data. I don't know if everybody
stared at Page 22 of the PowerPoint presentation. It showed that those
measures on Middlefield decreased—this is Oregon to Menlo Park. We didn't
really decrease it much elsewhere. This doesn't really parse out Oregon to
Embarcadero. Is that correct, Josh?
Mr. Mello: The top section, the 85th percentile, was taken at Portal Place.
That's between Lowell and Oregon. The travel time data was calculated by
somebody traveling all the way from Menlo Park to Oregon.
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Mayor Burt: The first one, 4 miles an hour was decreased by these traffic
calming measures. That's pretty much what our goal was. I think this really
leaps off the Page. This tells us that we can at the same time achieve the
traffic calming. We have a capital investment rather than kind of a futile
operating investment. At the same time, we got safer bikeways. I never
would have ridden a bike on Middlefield until this went in. When it went in, I
tried it, and it's not my preferred bike route, but it now feels moderately safe, certainly at certain times of the day. We get both benefits. Seeing
that on streets like Embarcadero or some version of that seems very
attractive to me and something that I would like to pursue more. I'd also
just like to note that this whole claim that—I saw that we had in the press
and very unfortunately our new Chair of the Planning Commission made a
whole series of comments that I think were really out of line. They were at
best beyond the purview of the Commission to really start talking a lot about
how we staff and those sorts of elements. There certainly could have been
comments about the importance, if we were to go forward with this, of some
correlation to enforcement. This whole series of comments is highly
inappropriate. I thought that our Planning Commission had been moving
toward returning to their appropriate role, which is to advise the Council on planning and transportation issues, and to do so in a thoughtful, informed
manner that provides value to the Council and the community. I found this
flippant, arrogant, inappropriate, counterproductive. I won't go on from
there. I do want to note that on Slide 8 we see a history of the citations.
We can look at warnings and citations. Just citations, in 2011, which I think
was after we had had staffing cutbacks in the downturn, we were all the way
down to 385 citations a year. That was Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, I should say.
It says FY '11-'12; that means Fiscal Year 2012. Fiscal Year 2013 was the
first year that we had no official traffic division, and we had a modest
increase in citations. The following year we almost doubled, and the same
after that. Fiscal Year 2016, it's dropped drastically, and that seems to be
as a result of vacancies in the Police Department as opposed to the
elimination of a dedicated traffic division. We saw from FY 2012 to 2015 a 2
1/2 fold increase in traffic citations. The whole notion that it's principally on
the basis of whether we have a dedicated traffic division. It is important
that we have officers who have time available to be able to do traffic
enforcement. I want to say also I'm interested in the slower yet speed
zones around schools. I wonder whether 20 miles an hour is more
appropriate. What we really want to do is once again have drivers who will
respect the speed limit. If we were to take this in extreme, if we said 5
miles an hour, nobody's going to pay any attention. At what point in time
does a driver say, "That's reasonable. I'm going to respond to that"? I'm
not sure what that number is, but my sense is reducing to 20 makes
everybody—it stands out to everyone, and they would slow down. That
might be the most appropriate. I also want to ask—we have our new smart,
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adaptive traffic signals that are coming online throughout the City. Some
members of the public have asked about synchronizing signals. I wanted to
ask Josh whether that in some ways runs in conflict with the ability to be
adaptive or is there some way in which we could have synchronization at
certain times of the day or certain streets. How might that work?
Mr. Mello: Our entire signal system is not adaptive. We have adaptive
technology on Sand Hill Road and San Antonio Road. We're looking to expand that to other corridors. What we're doing right now is implementing
coordinated signal timing during the peak periods. We rolled out
Embarcadero Road earlier this year. Middlefield Road will be the next
corridor. We're also working on updating timing along Alma Street to take
into account some of the recommendations we heard earlier this year around
maximizing the green time at the rail crossing, the signals that are adjacent
to the rail crossings along Alma. The way that'll work is the signals will be
coordinated in the peak direction during the peak hour. In the off peak,
they'll operate on free operation, which the majority of our signals today
operate on free operations. They're on-demand.
Mayor Burt: In the peak hour, they would be synchronized?
Mr. Mello: Yes.
Mayor Burt: They would be at the maximum speed limit or would they be at
25 or what would they …
Mr. Mello: The signals along Embarcadero Road have been coordinated at
25 miles an hour. The green band is large enough that you could feasibly
travel faster than 25 and still potentially—but they're timed at 25 miles an
hour.
Mayor Burt: If that's already occurring at peak, I think nobody knows that.
The question is do we want to add signage that will induce people to take
advantage of that. I didn't know it, and I'll bet nobody does before tonight.
I also wanted to just note what Council Member DuBois had mentioned
about how the GPS is directing folks to our bike boulevards, in particular
Bryant. I know that you have coming up at Mitchell Park on what date a
public event on the next phase of the bike plan.
Mr. Mello: We’re having a construction review meeting on November 29th at
Mitchell Park. This will be a chance for the public to look at the construction
plans for, I believe, seven bike boulevard corridors.
Mayor Burt: It includes Bryant, as I recall.
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Mr. Mello: Yes, it includes Bryant Street.
Mayor Burt: Are there any additional barricades being considered?
Mr. Mello: In regard to Council Member DuBois' comment, there would be a
new traffic circle at Kingsley and Bryant and a couple of other neck-downs
and curb extensions. I think travel times for motorists may be reduced
enough where GPS units stop recommending Bryant Street.
Mayor Burt: But no barricades?
Mr. Mello: No barricades, no.
Council Member DuBois: Can I ask a follow-up?
Mayor Burt: Yeah, go right ahead. I think that covers my questions too.
Council Member DuBois: Josh, just to be clear. Roundabouts seem to speed
up the cars, because there's no stop sign. How would that make it less
attractive for cars?
Mr. Mello: There's currently no stop sign on Bryant at Kingsley, so this
would reduce the travel speeds through the intersection. That coupled with
the one at Addison would probably make it a less appealing than parallel
streets for motorists.
Council Member DuBois: I'm not sure I want to—I know barricades are
pretty controversial. That stretch of Bryant, it just kind of struck me how straight-through it is. I just wanted to—kind of final comments. You're
talking about averages and 85th percentile. Even today, we probably have
people going 15, 20, 25 miles an hour over the speed limit. We just can't
enforce it. I'm kind of struggling with this idea of enforceability. I think it's
important. I like what Council Member Filseth suggested about maybe we
pick five streets or a handful of streets and try it. Raise the speed limit,
follow through and enforce it, rather than a blanket statement for all these
streets. Not doing anything doesn't feel right either. People are going to
exceed the speed limit by a certain amount, but we're talking about
averages. We already have people going very fast on some of these streets.
I also wanted to say that I know there's been spot enforcement around the
schools. I think that's a great thing, and we should continue to do that. I
may be in the minority, but I just want to re-emphasize that I think we
should hesitate to add design enhancements that would actually slow down
Alma or East Bayshore, commuting routes where we don't have really
accident issues today.
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Mayor Burt: Just wrapping up on my comments. I personally would like to
see at least a limited number of additional barricades on bike boulevards
included as a consideration. Let's get it out and have it discussed in the
community, pros and cons, and see what the response is. The response
may be too much opposition or it may be that they're embraced. I would
also just take exception that we're not talking about not doing anything.
What was done on Middlefield is very impactful. If we do measures like that on other arterials, I think that could have a comparable impact. That would
be permanent and effective. It would increase safety at the same time for
bikes and cars. Before taking a few more comments from colleagues, I want
to just go to the public. We have one speaker card from former Mayor
Yoriko Kishimoto. I know there are at least two people here who are certain
they didn't break a car speed limit getting to the meeting.
Yoriko Kishimoto: Good evening, Mayor Burt and Council Members. I've
been pleased with the general tone and direction that this is going. I'm here
to ask you to strongly oppose, banish the thought of raising any speed limits
in Palo Alto. Instead, concentrate on what you have been doing the last few
years, which is on Middlefield the structural changes which don't depend on
enforcement, which we don't seem to be very impactful with. Middlefield is great. Charleston-Arastradero, I think, has transformed that corridor,
allowing smooth but safe travel. I appreciate the recent changes on
Embarcadero and El Camino as well. To my mind, raising the speed limits
no doubt will raise the average and cause unsafe speeding on these
residential arterials. They do serve the commuters, but they're also heavily
residential. Embarcadero has 120 active driveways and three schools and
many facilities that we all walk and bike to or at least cross to get there.
Council Member Filseth mentioned goals. I think we need to keep our eye
on the ball. The long-term goal is long-term reduction in Citywide
automobile traffic and long-term reduction of unsafe speeding that deters
people from walking and biking. Please direct Staff to take raising the speed
limits off the table—I think there's no need to stir up that conversation—and
instead concentrate on the permanent. Just one word about the Safe Routes
to School. It's really great to enforce around the many schools we have, but
Safe Routes to Schools are of course across town. They're not just within
1,000 feet. Most people have to cross a residential arterial to get to the
middle school or high school. Citywide traffic safety is great. Thank you so
much.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. We have another speaker, Grant—I think it's
Dexter. Dasher.
Grant Dasher: Hello. I live on Middlefield. I actually want to be the
contrarian and say that I think—I moved here about a year ago. I thought
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the speed limit was much lower than I would have expected, given the
nature of the street between Oregon and Mountain View. It's a four-lane
road. Clearly people who drive on it drive faster. I think the data says 37 is
the 85th percentile. That's consistent with my experience. I'm a biker; I
bike around Palo Alto. I used to live in a City where I didn't have a car. I
only bought a car when I moved out here. I totally sympathize with the idea
of a bike-able, livable community. Unfortunately, most people out here, I think, commute between communities. They sort of are required to do some
driving in a way that's not true in some other purely walkable and bike-able
communities. I actually quite like the bike road on Bryant; I make good use
of it. I do think it's important, as Council Member DuBois said, to find a
place to send the cars. I think Middlefield, in particular south of Oregon, is a
pretty standard exit route for the community. If we were to say that we
didn't want people to take that as the exit route, we should redesign the
road to not be a four-lane road and to have a much less enticing roadway to
take. Given its current state, it sort of feels unreasonable to me to have a
25 mile an hour speed limit when essentially everyone drives much faster
than that. I would totally support raising the speed limit to a point where it
could actually be enforced. I think it's kind of silly in its current state. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our final speaker is Stephanie Munoz.
Stephanie Munoz: Good evening, Mayor Burt and Council Members. I'd like
to add a voice of assent and appreciation for the Council Members who have
suggested in one way or another that communication would help as well as
enforcement. Not only communicating the likelihood of having a traffic
ticket, but also what you could expect. For instance, the signage. Signs
could be telling you that, because there's a school, you have to go slower.
They could tell you where you could turn left. For instance, Middlefield. I'm
at Alma and Palo Alto Avenue. As I go down University Avenue at 5:00 in
the evening, it takes an hour to get that mile for the Bayshore Freeway. I'm
looking for a way to go around on the other side of the creek on Woodland.
To do that, I have to turn left on Middlefield. I can't turn left on Palo Alto
Avenue. I can't turn left on Everett. You're left wondering, "Am I going to
be able to turn left on Lytton?" I certainly don't want to turn left on
University. I don't want to spend the next hour just standing still in traffic.
Sometimes you could have a sign telling people where they can turn and
other useful things that they might like to know that you could probably
figure out in advance if you thought about it. That's really my most—let's
see. Add the signs. I think we realize that you don't really expect people to
drive at that speed limit when it's put there for the radar. El Camino Way is
like three blocks long. You don't need radar there. You could just have a
little sign, once a week we're going to have somebody here, and manually
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watch and ticket you as you go too fast on El Camino Way. I think probably
people would slow down. It's only three blocks long. Alma is a funny thing.
It's more like an expressway because there's the railroad track on one side.
There isn't any cross-traffic to speak of. When you see that—it's called a
block house at Alma Place. You get the impression that you could go a little
faster. I travel on Alma almost every day. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Kniss.
Council Member Kniss: I'm glad Yoriko was here, because I can tell she
went through this. I've gone through it before. It sounds so simple to raise
the speed limit, use radar. We take care of it all. I don't think it's that
simple. I do want to, though, just mention again what the Mayor just
brought up as well, which is the synchronicity of our lights. Is there an
answer to that and where we're headed with that, Josh?
Mr. Mello: We are actively retiming all of our arterial and residential arterial
corridors. We've already implemented signal coordination along
Embarcadero Road. Middlefield Road and Alma are next in line. Charleston-
Arastradero will be outfitted with adaptive signal technology when the
infrastructure improvements are completed.
Council Member Kniss: Would you anticipate any of the statistics would change after that happens?
Mr. Mello: All of the data that you see before you was collected between
intersections in free-flow segments. That's the way that the surveys need to
be collected. We're not really looking at the speeds of folks passing through
intersections, particularly those that are controlled by a traffic signal. One
way to get a better handle on that is we're doing before and after travel time
surveys. We have a car that actually drives the corridor back and forth.
We're doing that before we implement signal timing and after we implement
signal timing. We did that for Embarcadero Road. I'd be glad to share the
results of that with you if you're interested.
Council Member Kniss: I'm feeling some discomfort asking this. One of my
friends asked this morning, "Why don't we have red light enforcement at
some of our really tough intersections?" I can remember Pat mentioned—he
brought this up one time. I brought it up another time. What is the
answer?
Mr. Mello: Red light cameras are authorized under State law, but I know a
lot of communities have really struggled with upholding the citations.
There's a lot of calibration that needs to be done. A lot of them have been
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challenged. I think the City Attorney may have some more background on
that.
Council Member Kniss: Our neighbor uses them pretty effectively, which is
interesting. Menlo Park, as does Millbrae by the way.
Molly Stump, City Attorney: I'm not familiar with the history of whether
Council has explored wanting to use that technique. It certainly is
something that we could with Transportation explore if Council is interested in that. There are lots of factors, pluses and minuses, as Josh mentioned.
Council Member Kniss: For those who are enthused about them, because
they are effective. For those who get the ticket, they're very unhappy of
course. I'm not sure it isn't something we might want to look into again.
There is no question people run red lights. Most of us are really—at least I
sit at the light and wait for a few seconds just to make sure nobody is going
to go through it. I think that's probably not uncommon around town.
There's something about that that's kind of distasteful, but at the same time
I think it's pretty effective.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach.
Council Member Wolbach: I'd just like to associate my views with the
comments made by former Mayor Kishimoto.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: Just a quick comment. Liz, I don't know if you're
aware. I think Jerry Hill actually had a bill. Because of the Millbrae traffic
lights, there were some issues in terms of the timing there. I don't know if
you're aware. I think Jerry Hill actually had a bill to stop the red light
cameras in Millbrae because they were abusive and issuing huge amounts of
citations. You might want to talk to Jerry about it, just to understand what
happened there.
Council Member Kniss: Is the bill still live? Was it a 2-year bill?
Council Member DuBois: I'm not sure what happened with it. There was an
issue. It was mostly about right turn on red. I think the cameras were very
quick to ticket.
Council Member Kniss: As I said, they're never without controversy.
Mayor Burt: I'll just wade in on that last point. When red light cameras
started being proliferated on the Peninsula and really throughout the state,
maybe 6-8 years ago, there ended up being a number of issues. One, they
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were being used as a revenue source. I think a lot of the other issues
flowed from that. Some of the earnings of the private companies were tied
in with some of these decisions on whether to have too much of a hair
trigger on a rolling right versus what we really care about is people blowing
through a red, going straight. I think those were all legitimate issues, but
that doesn't mean that they don't have value when done correctly. I haven't
heard of significant problems with Menlo Park's utilization. I would support looking at them in a carefully designed manner to make sure that they're not
intended to be speed traps but focused on egregious violators, which are
those that blast through red light signals and really endanger people. I think
that is one of the tools in the tool kit that we should be open to but doing
them right. That looks like it concludes our comments. Thank you all very
much. I think it's a Study Session, but there seems to be some consensus
on a number of directions.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, I'd like to thank the Council for their discussion but
also commend Josh and his team and Hillary's department. It's not an easy
topic. It was unfortunately misunderstood, I think, in some ways. Look
forward to the next step here. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Thank you.
Council Member DuBois: Shall we start the meeting?
Mayor Burt: Now we get to—our meeting tonight was principally these two
Study Sessions. It's a little unusual that we're getting close to 9:00 P.M.
and ahead of schedule.
Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions
Mayor Burt: Looking for Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions, of which
I'm not aware of any.
City Manager Comments
Mayor Burt: We have an opportunity for City Manager Comments.
James Keene, City Manager: Thank you. I'm not going to try to get you
behind schedule. I'll rush through these. In preparation for another rainy
winter hopefully, the Public Works Department has once again opened up
sandbag stations at Mitchell and Rinconada Parks. Filled sandbags will be
available while supplies last. Empty bags and loose sand will be available
throughout the rainy season. A reminder that Palo Alto residents who pick
up sandbags are advised to only take ten filled bags per trip for safe driving
purposes if they're loading into a standard passenger vehicle. Public Works
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and our Office of Emergency Services are planning a sandbag pickup day in
mid-December in order to assist the elderly and physically challenged with
loading bags into vehicles. More information on this event I'll share and will
be announced elsewhere in the next few weeks. If you have any questions,
you can call Public Works, Public Services Division main line at 650-496-
6974. We did want to announce, even though the funds sort of shrink year
to year, there are Community Development Block Grant funds available from the Federal government. Applications are available for the Fiscal Year '18
and Fiscal Year '19 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program
years. We expect to distribute locally about $500,000 in funds from the
Department of Housing and Urban Development for programs in those fiscal
years. Eligible projects include public services, economic development and
housing rehabilitation projects. The application deadline is Friday,
January 6, 2017. Applications are available on the City's website under the
Community Development Block Grant page. With the passage of Santa
Clara County Measure A on November 8th, a $950 million bond will provide
funds for affordable housing throughout the county. $700 million will be
targeted to the most vulnerable populations including supportive housing for
homeless residents. $100 million will be designated for low-income families. The remaining $150 million will be for first-time homebuyer programs. The
details of the funding application process are still to be worked out. Our City
Staff will stay on top of this process. We anticipate funds will be available by
the fall of 2017. Important news travels fast. It's possible that the Council
has already heard what the City Staff learned this afternoon, that Stanford
University submitted its application for a new General Use Permit or GUP to
Santa Clara County earlier today. While it will take some time to review the
details of the application, we understand the proposal, if approved, would
extend the GUP to the year 2035, would allow more on-campus housing as
well as academic facilities. The proposal would also maintain the existing
campus footprint and preserve the cap on commute trips by automobile.
Stanford will be presenting its proposal at a community forum to be held
January 25, 2017 at 6:00 P.M. at the Mitchell Park Community Center and is
tentatively to present to the Palo Alto City Council on Monday, February 6th.
Santa Clara County will also be scheduling an environmental scoping
meeting sometime early in the new year. Just got to love local government.
Due to an ongoing problem related to birds roosting on Embarcadero Road
directly underneath the Caltrain tracks, our City's Public Works Department
will be cleaning the site extensively over the next few weeks and installing
bird netting commonly used to deter birds from roosting on the structure.
Embarcadero will be closed from Emerson to El Camino Real on the nights of
November 28th-30th, December 1st and December 5th-8th. The road along
with both pedestrian walkways will be closed from 10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.
on those dates. Detours will be in place during the closures. We anticipate
there will be some noise related to the cleaning, which we'll try to keep as
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minimal as possible. We have notified residents in the area and will be
getting the word out on all of our communications channels. Obviously this
is work to be the least disruptive overall even given these difficulties have to
take place at night. Just a reminder. As we wind things up in December,
our City Council will hold two neighborhood town halls in December as a
continuation of your initiative to strengthen citizen participation and
outreach to neighborhoods. The first will be in the College Terrace neighborhood on Wednesday, December 7th, at Escondido Elementary
School, 890 Escondido Road. The second will be held at Barron Park on
December 14th at the Barron Park Elementary School, 800 Barron Avenue.
Both town hall meetings will run from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. It will be on our
end attended by a number of representatives from the City Council and
various City Staff. That's all I have to report. Thanks.
Mayor Burt: Thank you.
Oral Communications
Mayor Burt: We now can go to Oral Communications. I have two speaker
cards. Our first is Rob Lancefield, to be followed by Stephanie Munoz.
Welcome.
Rob Lancefield: Good evening. My name is Rob Lancefield; I live at 189 Walter Hays Drive. I have six compliments, one request and four comments
in support of the request. The compliments are last Friday and yesterday, I
had terrific response from two of the City Staff in the Business Development
Center, two people in the Department of Public Works, and two people in the
Community Services Department. They were open and responsive. You
couldn't ask for anything better. My request relates to the change of
management of the Rinconada pool. I'm asking that you put a 90-day
delay. I went to the Community Services Department (CSD) this afternoon
and got this Report, which is dated—it's well done. Although, I think there's
some additional information that the Council needs. It's dated
September 27th, and that was about the time we were all really focused on
the election. I certainly was. The timeline proposed by this is that
January 1st Time Sheeper would be basically running the pool. Five weeks,
and we're just starting the holiday season and we just finished a big election
season. What's missing? What could be added to the Report? For one
thing, it says that they can't find employees to work at the wages they paid,
but there's no mention of what wages they're actually paying or what wages
Time Sheeper pays in order to get work. Are these our kids that we're kind
of stiffing, short changing? I don't know. I'm guessing that a lot of our kids,
a lot of the Staff are kind of local kids. What are we doing? If that's the
decision, then let's talk about it. There's reference to the average number of
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users for lap swims. That's my interest in this. Maybe a median or a mode
rather than an average would be better. I don't know if it was considered.
The last thing is that the price increases seem to be sort of skewed in favor
of benefitting senior citizens like me. Palo Alto's a great City. I'd pay for
more. I pay $2.50 if I buy a bunch of tickets all at the same time, 2.50.
Reading the Report, I could not tell immediately whether that was going to
increase and, if so, how much. I guess in a way I'm asking you all to think about charging me more. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Stephanie Munoz. Welcome.
James Keene, City Manager: Mr. Mayor, while Ms. Munoz comes up here, let
me just comment. We're going to have the item related to the aquatics
contract, just a portion of it, scheduled for the Council agenda on
December 12th. I'll certainly share the comments made tonight with our
Staff. It will be back before the Council on December 12th.
Stephanie Munoz: Good evening, Council Members and Mayor Burt. You
know I'm interested in the possibility of teeny, tiny houses as an alternative
to having to go out to Stockton or Vallejo to commute to a job in Palo Alto.
I know you're all dedicated, and I know you're all intelligent more so than I
am. Sometimes it seems to me—I'm not sure you really appreciate the problem of the human condition. People are born. They have no choice in
the matter. Every square centimeter of land is already owned by somebody.
If they can't get the education so as to get a good job, they can't have a
place to live. Where will they stay? Since society at large, since the
governors of society—that means you people—are responsible for the
parceling out of the rights to use the land, I think it behooves you—us,
because we pay attention and we vote for you—to see to it that everybody
has some place to go to sleep at night, not a palace and not even a really
nice, modern home, but someplace that's safe and that has a toilet and
possibly even a shower, but at least a toilet. You do realize if you give a
company permission to come here and put the jobs here, that's where
people have to come. They have no choice. They can't stay in Fresno or
(inaudible). There's no job there. They have to come where the job is. If
you allow a job to come here, I think the only solution you have is to have
one—for large companies, they themselves provide one bedroom for each
employee that they have, not a whole house but at least a room. They
could do that on their own property. The City also could use its own
property, the extra property on the schools. The pet shelter, why they can't
they have apartments above the pet shelter? The libraries? There's land—
the schools, certainly there's land there. Why can't the City house its own
employees? It would be financially appropriate. I think about the 14 people
that wanted to live in a house a few weeks ago, and the neighbors objected.
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Why did they object? Because of the cars, that's why. Think about the cars.
Don't cut down on the housing, but think about how those cars could be out
of the City, leaving the people inside it. Thank you.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. That concludes our public comments. I think we
need to take a quick five minute break.
Council took a break at 9:03 P.M. and returned at 9:06 P.M.
Minutes Approval
3. Approval of Action Minutes for the November 7, 2016 Council Meeting.
Mayor Burt: Our next item is Approval of Action Minutes from
November 7th, 2016. Do we have a Motion to approve?
Council Member DuBois: So moved.
Council Member Wolbach: Second.
MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member
Wolbach to approve the Action Minutes for the November 7, 2016 Council
Meeting.
Mayor Burt: Motion by Council Member DuBois, second by Council Member
Wolbach. Please vote. That passes unanimously with Council Member
Berman and Vice Mayor Scharff absent.
MOTION PASSED: 7-0 Berman, Scharff absent
Action Items
4. PUBLIC HEARING: 2016 Water Utility Public Health Goals Report.
Mayor Burt: We will now move onto our final Action Item, which is a Public
Hearing on the 2016 Water Utility Public Health Goals Report. Mr. Shikada,
welcome.
Ed Shikada, Utilities General Manager/Assistant City Manager: Thank you,
Mayor, members of the Council. I'll ask Jon Abendschein, our Acting
Manager of Water, Gas, Wastewater Operations, to report on behalf of Staff.
This is a required public hearing and simply fulfilling that obligation. Thank
you.
Jon Abendschein, Utilities Operations Manager: Good evening, Council
Members. Jonathan Abendschein, Acting Water, Gas, Wastewater
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Operations Manager. I'm here tonight to talk about our 2016 Utility Public
Health Goals Report. As Ed said, this can get pretty detailed. I'm going to
try and keep it at a pretty high level. I can go deeper into any of these
topics if you request it. I think it's important to note, just as Ed did, that
this is an obligatory public hearing. This Report isn't about problems with
our water system. We've a well-run system with high quality water, and we
regularly receive positive feedback from the State Water Resources Board about how we run it. We meet our regulatory requirements. This Report is
about goals set by the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard
Assessment. They are not regulatory requirements, but there is a regulatory
requirement that we report when we exceed these public health goals every
three years. These background slides—essentially what we're talking about
here are certain regulatory requirements set by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and the State Water Resources Board. We manage
our system; we monitor weekly and monthly and on a whole variety of
timeframes to make sure that we stay within these goals, within these
maximum limits. Generally we're compliant with the one exception of
coliform that we'll talk about in a moment. Generally, we're compliant on
coliform as well, but we've had a couple of instances in the last three years, so we exceeded. What we're talking about tonight, though, are not those
regulatory limits, but rather these public health goals. These public health
goals are set by the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment.
They represent a level below which a contaminant does not pose a
significant risk to health. Public health goals are usually lower than the
regulatory limits, often by quite a bit. They don't take into consideration
whether it's technically or economically feasible to actually achieve those
levels. Water can be considered perfectly acceptable for drinking even if it
contains contaminants in excess of the Public Health Goals Report. The
public health goal doesn't necessarily represent a dividing line over which
water is unsafe. As I said, we're required to submit one of these—to provide
these reports once every three years. In the last three years, we've
exceeded the public health goals on two contaminants. One is coliform, and
the other is lead. I'll start with coliform here. Coliform bacteria are
organisms that are generally—they're pretty common in nature. There
aren't particularly known health effects associated with them, but they are
an indicator organism that we use to establish how well our disinfection is
working. It's not uncommon to have occasional coliform bacteria show up in
your water. It can be the result of debris accumulating in a line, a
contaminated sample port. It can be related to low flows on the system that
allowed debris to accumulate. It can be associated with high flows where
the water is delivered too quickly and doesn't have time for the disinfectant
to work. The drought has likely contributed in the last few years due to
lower flows and the fact that we've been flushing the system less to save
water. Generally, we review our system, and we work with the San
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Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to diagnose issues and solve
them. Most importantly, we haven't detected any fecal coliform, and that's
the stuff that you need to watch out for. Overall, we think our treatment
techniques are working effectively, and no additional action is needed at this
time on coliform. Moving onto lead. The other contaminant we detected is
lead. We detected those at very low levels but in excess of the public health
goal. It's important to note that with lead the sampling is done at the customer tap, so it can be hard to distinguish whether the lead is coming
from the customer's fixtures—this is actually where we think most of it is
coming from—or from the City piping. I'll talk about that in a minute. I'll
show you this chart. These are the samples that we took at the customer
taps. Most of the samples were actually below the public health goal level,
which is excellent. The 90th percentile sample is what we gauge ourselves
on. That was at 1 part per billion, which is above the public health goal. I
think it's worth noting, as you look at this chart, this is the regulatory limit
up here at 15 parts per billion. This is where lead levels are in Palo Alto.
Palo Alto has some of the lowest lead levels on the Peninsula. These are
Santa Clara County and San Mateo County agencies. We really are pretty
much the lowest.
Mayor Burt: Jon, I was trying to make out on this graph where that line is
on the public health goal. I see it. The little one right near the bottom. Got
it. Thank you.
Mr. Abendschein: The public health goal is the tiny green line. Lead does
have risks even at low levels, though. It tends to be neurological effects in
children, and that understandably makes people nervous. The Office of
Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) uses safety factors and
assumptions about how much lead people are getting from other sources
when they set the public health goal. They set it fairly low, at a blood level
that has been statistically associated with a one IQ point change in
neurological development. They also make some fairly conservative
assumptions about how much lead children are getting from other sources.
Then, they apply safety factors, and that gets you down to the public health
goal level. We are fairly close to those levels. When you factor in the safety
factors and things like that, I think we're actually very close. That said,
each person needs to make their own assessments about how much lead
they're comfortable with in their drinking water. Fortunately, it is something
that you can—if you want to be able to control it to an even lower level,
there are things that you can do. There are water filters that will take lead
out of water. There are customer plumbing changes, plumbing upgrades
that you could do to deal with lead. We suspect that as far as sources go,
the sources of the lead we're seeing in our samples is likely customer
plumbing. We've removed all known lead from our system. Lead can still
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come from older brass fixtures or meters, but we don't think that's
necessarily the source. We didn't see any real correlation between the older
fixtures, older services and the actual lead levels in the samples we took. It
didn't seem to be correlated with them at all. We're pretty confident that
we're looking at customer plumbing issues here. Overall, because we're
seeing such relatively low levels, because customers can control lead levels
in their water independently through changing plumbing or through using filters, we're not recommending action. The other reasons we're not
recommending action are that the State and the Federal governments are
both considering action on lead. We want to wait and see where that's
going. That's the basis for our recommendation.
Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Schmid.
Council Member Schmid: The Report and the data look very positive. We're
doing well compared to all the surrounding agencies. There was one
sentence in the Report that just stopped me. Maybe you can go a little
further with it. On Packet Page 79, last sentence of the first paragraph says
the public health goal of 0.2 parts per billion was determined from a
maximum daily lead intake through water ingestion that corresponds to a
level of concern for neurobehavioral effects in children designated as a decrease of one intelligent quotient point. In our sample of 37, we had 10 of
the 37 that were ten times—no, well above the 0.2. A drop in IQ point in a
child for ingesting the minimum amount, and we have many over that?
Mr. Abendschein: You'd like me to speak to that a little bit?
Council Member Schmid: What does that mean?
Mr. Abendschein: I think what's important to understand about the public
health goal is, first off, it's set around places that have fairly high other
environmental sources of lead. Part of what they're trying to do is protect
children who are also receiving lead from the air, from dust, from paint. I
don't really have information on how Palo Alto compares, but I would be
surprised if Palo Alto had as high an exposure to other lead sources as …
Council Member Schmid: The sentence is only parts per billion of water, of
drinking water.
Mr. Abendschein: Right. What the OEHHA is doing is they're saying that
blood level that affects the child's neurological development is based on lead
from all sources, not just water. They say if you're getting lead from all
these other sources at fairly high levels, your water needs to be really clean
to try and protect children in those situations. They add in a safety factor on
top of that as well. It's belt and suspenders as well.
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Council Member Schmid: Could you give a reference to the State
documentation for that?
Mr. Abendschein: Absolutely, I can provide that.
Council Member Schmid: I would like to see that.
Mr. Shikada: In point of fact, I believe it's stated on a footnote of that page.
Mr. Abendschein: Yes, it is. Footnote 5 right there.
Mr. Shikada: Or 4 online as the case may be. It actually provides a website.
James Keene, City Manager: Packet Page 81, is that correct? Is that it or
not?
Mr. Shikada: I'm looking at the Report itself. Page 4 of the Report indicates
a footnote at the bottom of the page.
Mayor Burt: Of the Staff Report?
Mr. Shikada: Of the Staff Report.
Council Member Schmid: Packet Page 71.
Mr. Shikada: Yes. With the website address and, again, the calculations
done by the OEHHA. Again, Jon is not a scientist or a health specialist in
this area. We simply wanted to acknowledge the significance and the
seriousness of this contaminant and put it within that context and recognize the analysis that had been done by the State.
Council Member Schmid: Let me look at that. If I have any follow-up
questions, I'll …
Mr. Abendschein: May I just add one other thing? This is also where it
comes back to individuals having the ability to gain some control over this.
If this is coming from customer plumbing, you have the ability to filter your
water. You have the ability to redo your plumbing to get yourself below that
public health goal.
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Before I say anything else, I just want to
compliment you, Jon. Every time you come to the Council, you're always
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very well prepared and you're prepared to answer questions and very
familiar with the subject matter. I wanted to thank you for that.
Mr. Abendschein: Thank you.
Council Member Holman: Noting, you could say I guess, Footnote 5. You
clearly know the material. Thank you. Actually on Slide 12, it talks about
recommended actions. The last point there says it would temporarily divert
Staff from other priorities while the program is being set up. For instance, what other programs?
Mr. Abendschein: There are a whole variety of maintenance tasks that we're
working on right now. It would depend on which Staff I was diverting.
We're looking at, for example—we have a whole seismic upgrade program to
our reservoirs right now. There's a lot of maintenance that we're having to
do around that project. We're also looking at seeing if there's some
improvements we can make to the way that we operate our reservoir
system. Those are among the things that we're looking at with the Staff
that, I think, would most likely have to work on this.
Council Member Holman: Would it be feasible to—while you say this has
been the customer's purview to make some changes but so are, for instance,
appliance upgrades that would use less water, less energy, whatever. What about if there was a rebate or incentive program that encouraged people to
change out lead pipe, for instance, in their homes?
Mr. Abendschein: I think these are all possibilities. They're possibilities, and
we'd have to evaluate them, I think, in the same vein as the alternative that
we laid out here in the Report.
Council Member Holman: Understanding that we're not at an alarming rate,
if we're not at the desired goal or desired level—lead's not something you
mess around with, of course. We do, as Council Member Kniss knows, have
as one of our Priorities Healthy City Healthy Community. I'd actually be
interested in looking at what we might be able to do in making some choices
around how we encourage property owners to make improvements.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: Hi. I'm just curious. Are there other contaminants
that have public health goals, that we just passed (crosstalk)?
Mr. Abendschein: A lot of the public health goals are around source water.
The SFPUC actually does a lot of that testing. I think it's about 130
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contaminants that they looked at. There were two that they were just over
the public health goal. We actually have some really excellent water.
Council Member DuBois: Actually, you're kind of getting to my next
question. On the coliform, do we test upstream from the City to know if it's
coming from outside the City or within our pipes?
Mr. Abendschein: It is a complicated topic. Sometimes it might be;
sometimes it might not. We do work with the SFPUC. We're coordinating with them right now on some projects to do a little bit of upstream
measurement exactly like you're talking about.
Council Member DuBois: That's not done as a matter of course?
Mr. Abendschein: It is, but it can be a little more complicated than that.
We're trying to find if there are locations where the pipes are configured in a
way where the debris might stack up and there's not a sample port in that
location, then we have to work together to try and get a sample port in the
right location in order to do the right diagnostics. Sometimes it takes time,
but we're building a good working relationship with the SFPUC on those
types of things.
Council Member DuBois: Thank you.
Mayor Burt: I have a question on the alternative actions. Other than a Staff-run program, has there been any consideration of putting an RFP out
to, say, nonprofits who could then do this as a service? We've had Acterra
do green auditing of homes in a program. Checking for lead is not a real
exotic process. Rather than us think solely as a Staff-approach, is there an
alternative that we could outsource that and maybe even have it be cost
neutral?
Mr. Abendschein: I think that'd be a perfectly reasonable alternative to take
a look at. The only thing I'm talking about is the Staff time that it takes to
actually evaluate the alternative and do the Request for Proposals (RFP).
Over the long term, that might be a good option. It would likely still require
some funding, but it's always possible. If we had a good volunteer group or
somebody who was taking that on as a public service, we might be able to
minimize those.
Mayor Burt: This is actually a Public Hearing. I need to open the Public
Hearing, but I don't have any Speaker Cards. I'll now close the Public
Hearing. We can now return to the Council for actions. The Staff
recommendation is that the Council accept the Public Health Goals Report.
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Public Hearing opened and closed without public comment at 9:27 P.M.
Council Member Kniss: So moved.
Council Member DuBois: Second.
MOTION: Council Member Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member
DuBois to accept the City of Palo Alto 2016 Water Utility Public Health Goals
Report.
Mayor Burt: Motion by Council Member Kniss, second by Council Member DuBois. Would you like to speak to your Motion?
Council Member Kniss: No, but thank you.
Mayor Burt: I would like to offer an Amendment along the lines of what I
was just inquiring about. To request Staff to evaluate the alternative of
submitting an RFP to private or nonprofit entities to be a provider of lead
testing for residents at a cost-effective basis and a program established and
supported by the City. This would be to evaluate it, not to determine that
we do it.
Council Member Kniss: Fine.
Council Member DuBois: Did you accept it? Can I ask about your last point,
about diverting Staff from other priorities? Is this …
Mr. Abendschein: I don't think it's going to destroy our work plan, but it will take some time. There will be some things we'll have to move around, some
things we'll have to push out. It really just depends on how much of a
priority is over those other things.
Council Member DuBois: You're not suggesting it gets done in any particular
timeframe?
Mayor Burt: Nor even that we necessarily do it. It's for Staff to evaluate
the prospect of an RFP as opposed to directing them to do an RFP.
Mr. Abendschein: If we have a little flexibility on the timeline, that would
probably help us.
Council Member DuBois: All right.
INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE
MAKER AND SECONDER: to add to the Motion “and request Staff to
evaluate the alternative of submitting an RFP to a private or non-profit entity
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to be a provider of lead testing for residents on a cost-effective basis, and
that the program be established and supported by the City.”
Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman.
Council Member Holman: Just to be ridiculously obvious, Staff is to return
this evaluation to the Council. That's the point of it, right?
Mr. Abendschein: Of course.
Mayor Burt: Please vote on the board. Sorry.
Council Member Schmid: The amendment has been accepted? We're voting
on the amendment or we're voting on the Motion?
Mayor Burt: The amendment has been accepted.
Council Member Schmid: We're voting on the Motion.
Mayor Burt: Yes. That passes on a 7-0 vote with Council Member Berman
and Vice Mayor Scharff absent. That concludes our public hearing.
MOTION PASSED: 7-0 Berman, Scharff absent
Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs
Mayor Burt: We now have Intergovernmental Legislative Affairs. I don't
believe we have anything.
Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements
Mayor Burt: Final Council Members' Questions, Comments and Announcements. I've got something. Did you want to … Council Member
Holman, did you want to talk about the big Bol Park event?
Council Member Holman: Sure. This last Sunday, yesterday, there was a
memorial for Niner, Miner Forty-Niner, the Bol Park donkey that left us in
late September. The donkeys are such a great community asset and have
such great fans. There were between 100-120 people there in Bol Park.
Mayor Burt was there and spoke.
Mayor Burt: On a rainy day.
Council Member Holman: Perry has returned to Palo Alto, and he has a new
partner donkey, Jenny. They're doing very well together. It is great to see
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so many people in the community turn out to support the donkeys and that
community project.
Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois.
Council Member DuBois: I think it was the first memorial I've ever been to
where they served Rick's Rather Rich Ice Cream. It was a good event.
Mayor Burt: It's the only memorial service I've ever been to where they
began by saying, "Let us bray." It wasn't my line; they actually said it. I did want to report on one thing and then offer a comment. I last week was
asked to speak on Palo Alto's Smart City initiatives at the Global Internet
conference in Wuzhen, China. A main reason that I bring it up is that with
where we now stand potentially on the national level on climate change
initiatives, in the United States at least, in some ways we may be returning
to where we were before the Paris accords, where the initiatives of local,
regional and State governments become what the United States
predominantly will be able to do in climate change. Our practices and what
is being done on our Staff, which I think is the whole understanding of what
a Smart City movement is about and how it relates to sustainability and
climate change, is not really well understood. I think it's something that
we'll want to share more with the community, not just what we're doing but why it matters to them and why it matters more broadly. The second thing
that I just wanted to share is that one of our priorities for this year was
housing. One of the areas of housing that we, I believe, touched on at our
Retreat but have not gone any further in discussing, in large part because of
just how full our Staff's plate has been, is around the displacement and
severe impact on renters in our community. We are seeing that a number of
surrounding communities are taking initiatives of different sorts to try to
provide renter protection. We certainly are not going to have an opportunity
this year to take that up. I won't be on the Council next year. My
colleagues here and the incoming Council Members will have such an
opportunity. I would suggest at the upcoming Retreat Council Members add
this as a significant item, without attempting to suggest what the particular
actions might be, but that it is an item of critical importance to our
community. We see many longtime residents who are being pushed out.
We need to look at what we can and should do to address that. That's my
spiel. On that note, meeting's adjourned.
Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 9:35 P.M.