HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-01-28 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL
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Special Meeting
January 28, 2017
The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Palo Alto Art
Center Auditorium, 1313 Newell Road, at 9:10 A.M.
Present: DuBois, Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka,
Wolbach
Absent:
Mayor’s Welcome, Overview of the Day, Retreat Orientation and Discussion
of Future Retreats
Mayor Scharff: Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming out on a Saturday
morning here. Thank you to Staff for putting all this together. I see all the
jet noise. No jet airplane noise, I'm with you on that, absolutely, 100
percent. Hopefully we're going to have an enjoyable and productive day
today. The first things to do obviously is we're going to hear from the public
on anything you want to speak to that's not on the agenda, and then we're
going to go talk about the National Citizens Survey. Harriet's going to
present to us her findings, and then we're going to have a discussion about
that. Then, we're going to go through the Council work plan and
performance report and look at that, have lunch, talk about Priority setting,
and then we'll do some wrap-up items. As we go through this—when you
have your binder, I think it's really important to look at the priority projects.
I think what we're trying to get to this year is by the end of the year we
have metrics and we know was it a successful year, did we get done what
we want to get done. What we're looking to do is prioritize all the projects
that we have and say, "What is it at the end of the year we want Staff to
have accomplished? What are the metrics, and what does that look like?"
That's really what's on the board over there. Those are the projects that
Staff identified as what they think are the 21 most important projects out of
the 88 things we have, out of the 1,000 things we probably have, that are
put out there. At some point after we do the Priorities, what we need to do as a Council is say to Staff, "Those are the right projects that we have, that
we want to make sure happen. Are there other things that we want to make
sure happen before the end of the year? If so, what are they?" For
instance, is there anything on there that we don't want to have happen by
the end of the year? That's really the overview. It's looking for metrics; it's
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looking for what is priorities and how do we as a Council know that we've
been successful for the year. We also have planned another Retreat, which
is April 5th and 6th, which will be starting on that Wednesday around 3:00.
It'll be from 3:00 to 6:00, and then Thursday we'll start at 9:00 to 3:00.
This Retreat is about Priorities. As we take our Priorities, we get to how do
we implement them, what's a good governance structure that's effective
management. We always talk about we want a highly effective City, that is well governed, that is efficient, that gets things done. How do we as a
Council facilitate that happening? How do we work amongst ourselves?
How do we interact with each other? How do we maintain and create an
esprit de corps? I like that word. That's really the thought of the
governance Retreat. Let's move on and start with the public comment.
Oral Communications
Mayor Scharff: The first person we have from Sky Posse is Vicky Reich.
You'll have 3 minutes.
Vicky Reich, Sky Posse: Good morning. I'm Vicky Reich. I live in the
Community Center. I've lived there since 1986, and I work with Sky Posse.
Many Palo Alto neighbors, some of whom are here, have participated in the
select committee on South Bay arrivals process. The City contributed a venue and expert studies. Because of our collaborative efforts, we now have
potential opportunities for relief. We've made progress; to finish, we need
to follow through. I ask you to make jet noise a 2017 Priority and to take
critical action to fix the problem. Here's how. The select committee
unanimously recommended that a new regional political body, the ad hoc
committee, be established. Palo Alto must have a seat on this committee.
The City must actively participate in regional processes to get citizens relief.
We expect Representatives Eshoo, Speier, and Panetta to make
appointments after they receive the FAA's response to the select
committee's recommendation in mid-February. These will be highly coveted
appointments. The FAA, in consultation with the ad hoc committee, will
make final decisions as to which recommendations will be implemented and
when and how this will happen. In particular, four of the select committee's
recommendations are very important for Palo Alto. Council has a one-time,
critical window to redress the grievances caused by planes that have been
moved over Palo Alto from other flight paths. We need you, our political
experts—there are no other political experts; it's you guys—to continue your
good work, to use whatever tools and methods you have at your disposal to
ensure that Palo Alto is represented on this ad hoc committee. The City has
an important role to fill. On behalf of those who are here and a great many
others, thank you Council, for your support and for your action. Neighbors,
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if you are bothered by the plane noise, would you please raise your hands or
stand up? Again, thank you very much.
Mayor Scharff: Kerry Yarkin to be followed by Richard. Richard.
Kerry Yarkin: Good morning, Mayor and Council Members. As you probably
know, I've talked a lot about the unfriendly skies, but I'm not here to talk
about the unfriendly skies today. I looked at the City website, and it says
that the City is committed to working with us, the citizens, the Congress and the FAA and the Roundtable to find solutions. That sounds great. I'm here
to invite two to three of you Council Members to form an airplane noise
committee, subcommittee to follow up on the report of the select committee
of South Bay arrivals. There is a lot of recommendations; I ran off just a
few pages for you to see. I know that I attended at least 36 hours of
meetings for the select committee. I spoke a few times. We really need
your help to lobby. As an individual citizen, to go and talk to the head of the
FAA and some of the technical people and the Roundtable people and
different mayors, I'm not as effective. If we had a group of City Council
people that were really involved in the issue and lobbying hard and
representing our interests, I think we could get further along in the process.
We really need to get a seat on the ad hoc committee. As you know, Greg Scharff was an alternate. We, who have 60 percent of all the arrivals,
basically our arrivals runway into (San Francisco Airport) SFO, need
representation on that ad hoc committee, and we need to lobby for that.
There's a meeting on Tuesday the FAA's putting on. It's a community
meeting to amend the Class B airspace. I would hope that some of you
could attend with us and start this lobbying process of getting what the
select committee proposals proposed. I did want to just show—if you're
looking at this, it's just the cover sheet. The members of Congress want to
consider the potential solutions that they came up with. I ran off just the
table of contents. Section 2 is the solutions. They're all highlighted in
yellow. There are, I think, 17 or 18. Those directly could change the whole
situation for us. We could get peace and quiet if some of these can get
enacted. I would just like to end. Together, I think, we can all get some
real relief from the airplane noise and the traffic if we hold the FAA
accountable and follow up with their report and the proposals. Thank you
for your time.
Mayor Scharff: Excuse me. Vice Mayor Kniss has a question.
Vice Mayor Kniss: You mentioned a meeting you would like us to go to. Can
you tell us when it is?
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Ms. Yarkin: It's Tuesday; it's 5:30 to 8:00. I don't know if you want to
stay. It's a community meeting. They're amending the Class B airspace,
which means—I think there's 10,000. It's in San Jose. There's one in
Burlingame; there's one in San Jose; there's one in Oakland. The FAA's
putting it on.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Do you know where it is in San Jose?
Ms. Yarkin: I could get that information to you.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Why don't you send that to us. That way, if some of us
can go, we will try to.
Ms. Yarkin: Thank you so much.
Mayor Scharff: Richard to be …
Richard Staehnke: Staehnke is the answer.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
Mr. Staehnke: I've been a resident in Palo Alto for 63 years. My family, we
had a business here, pretty successful, for 50 years. I feel that this needs to
be the highest priority for the Council to face, stop jet noise. It's day and
night. You try to go to sleep 11:00 at night; they're roaring over, 12:00.
Not one, not two, one after another. There is no peace in between. You go
out during the day; there isn't hardly a 5-minute period you can't look up in the sky and see a plane coming over my house, one from another, this
direction, that direction, that direction. Sometimes turning around and
coming over in this direction just continually. If any of the Council want to
come over to my humble home, we'll sit outside and watch them. In my
house, I've marked as many as 133 planes while watching TV, working on
the computer. Those are just the ones I can hear inside. Were I to make an
effort, I could mark another 100 or more. I often have a hard time marking
them because there's two or three at the time. The stop jet noise app will
only pick up one of them; it won't pick up the other two. We talk about
environmental issues. The amount of jet fuel that is falling on our heads in
unspent jet fuel and spent jet fuel is just tumbling down upon us. What
greater environmental impact can there be? We worry about a 100-watt
lightbulb, but they want me to buy an electric car. We have exhaust just
falling on all of us. It'd be like living under a car. I just can't understand
why we wouldn't take this as the highest priority. If it requires a lawsuit—I
don't have the answers like the people on the stop jet noise program does,
but I have the emotion. This is terrible, terrible. I've lived here my whole
life and never experienced anything like this. It's impacting my health,
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sleep. If it wasn't for family in this area, I'd consider moving. We didn't
choose to live in San Jose or San Francisco. This was Palo Alto; this was my
town. If the Council can't get behind all these people that are being affected
by this, I don't even know what it's for. This is a serious issue that affects
us all. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Rita Vrhel to be followed by Neilson Buchanan.
Rita Vrhel: Good morning. I certainly just wanted to second what that gentleman said with such great passion. I'm not as affected by the airplane
noise, but I do hear it at 3:00 in the morning, 6:00 in the morning, 1:00 in
the morning, 11:00 at night, all day, 24/7. What I wanted to speak about
was the quality of life in the City of Palo Alto. I think we're going to find that
the survey you're going to review shows a decrease in the number of
residents who are happy with the way Palo Alto is going. I think there's a lot
of quality of life issues like Code enforcement, traffic violations, noise
violations including the airplanes, assessing and collecting appropriate
fines—speaking there about the dewatering—adhering to project plans,
conditional use permits like in Castilleja, and conditions of approval. The
other thing I think would be so simple to solve would be something that
affects us all every day, and that is the gas-powered leaf blowers. I know that you have to call a policeman at this time. They try to come out, but
they probably have more important things to do than cite leaf-blower
violators. What I'm wondering is if the City can consider a pilot program
where residents could take the name of the leaf-blowing company and the
license plate of the car and the time and date, how long it lasts, and submit
this to the City. I really think that most of the people that are violating this
rule do not know it. I think most of the gardeners are very hard-working,
responsible individuals. If someone were to simply just call them up and
say, "Do you know that this law exists for, I think, more than 5 years, and
could you please stop doing it?" I think that would be a very effective way
to solve this problem very quickly. It's not as bad as the jet noise, but it
bothers many people because they know it's against the law. We either
have laws or we don't. The other thing I think the City should look into is
the conditional use permits for the tech buildings Downtown. I believe I
have heard that many of them instead of having one person per—the
amount of office space, I think it's 100 square feet—have a lot of cubicles
that are less than that. If they have more people than they're allowed in the
building, that impacts traffic, congestion and everything else. Good luck on
all these problems. I'd also like to invite everyone to come to the 2/27,
Monday, City Council meeting where the 2016 and '17 rules for groundwater
extraction during residential basement construction will be discussed and
implemented. This is a very important issue in the City. If you're tired of
seeing your groundwater going down the drain, please join us. Thank you.
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Mayor Scharff: Farzi Rau to be followed by Terry Holzemer. You're first,
though. Sorry. I called Neilson first; I forgot.
Neilson Buchanan: My hearing's not so good. I thought maybe the airplane
flew over, and I missed that. I don't envy your role of sorting out all the
priorities that get tossed to you from 1,000 feet and underground water to
10,000 feet above us with airplane noise. I want to just make two quick
points. It's all relative to the study that's just been handed to the public, the Citizens Survey. Of all the different inputs that you've got, the National
Citizens Survey done annually is one of the more important things I hope
you'll really take to heart. It's serial information; it's over time; it's
relatively uniform; it's scientific; it's as objective information as you've got
coming to you. Please leverage that and consider it as best you can.
Getting it just a few days ago, I don't think you've had a chance to really
digest it, nor have you had a chance to digest the last four surveys either.
I've spent a lot of my own personal due diligence. I think this is a good
survey. Harriet Richardson's been very cooperative, explaining to me how
it's done. I've talked to the National Survey company. They do a really
good job. We've got a great piece of objective information. The public has
no knowledge of it. It took moving heaven and earth for me to get the earlier copy. I think I got the first copy. Needless to say, people in this
room haven't digested this information. That's my first point. My second
point, this is information that ought to be done early in spring and made
available early in fall. This is prime information for an informed, involved
electorate. Keeping this information delayed 6 months is not good
democratic process. This is the stuff upon which people ought to be elected.
It should be available in October every year. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Farzi Rau to be followed by Terry Holzemer.
Farzi Rau: I'm here for the airplane noise. I agree with a lot of comments
that was made. I would like to remind the Council and the people that Palo
Alto is the City that has more than three routes going over its sky, rather
than most cities that have only one. I just heard of—when I was talking to
friends in Cupertino, they are very unhappy about the route that the plane
takes coming to San Jose as well as going to San Francisco. They think the
one that is going and crisscrossing over their area in Cupertino, that's going
to San Jose, should just come directly over Palo Alto and go to San Jose, as
if we don't have enough. They are actually trying to have a meeting with
the FAA. The city has invited the FAA to go and talk to the city and have
what they call the three sessions of fact-finding so that they can sort of push
that airplane traffic to some other neighborhood. It's a regional issue. It
seems that somehow we just don't get invited to be at any table to do
anything. We need the City to really look at this. As the City that we are—
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60-70 percent of our skies are completely covered by this airplane noise. I
think this is one issue that affects everybody. I just want to thank you for
that, for putting the effort, putting the budget last year. We're just very
close to the finishing line. If we can get the select committee to enforce the
changes or to get Palo Alto as a City that needs immediate relief, so I can
get that to the finishing line, I'd really appreciate that. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Terry Holzemer to be followed by Diane Morin.
Terry Holzemer: First, Council Members, I would like to take the opportunity
to thank you for your unanimous support last Monday night for the
Evergreen Park and Mayfield RPP. I sincerely appreciate the Council believes
that residents should have a say in what happens in the City, especially what
involves their own neighborhood. I want to thank all of you personally for
that. However, my key message today to the Council involves two key
areas. First of all, I'm very concerned about the uncontrolled growth in
office development and its impacts. I think too often we look at office
developments as a great thing for our City without realizing its parking and
traffic problems. I think we need to do a better job as a Council and as a
City in making sure that we do not under-park our office buildings,
something I believe you'll probably remember Jack Morton, a former Council Member, mentioned to the Council last Monday. The other key area I'd like
to mention is Code enforcement. I think this is a critical need for the City.
Too often we have overlooked this great need. There are many areas of the
City which Codes are not being enforced. We need to look at those, the
TDMs, the Building Codes, the effects on neighborhoods, the noise, the leaf
blowing, those things. This doesn't necessarily always involve adding more
Staff. It could be involving just reallocating resources to making sure that
Code enforcement is done properly. If there's one goal for this City, I think
this year it's really Code enforcement, Code enforcement, Code
enforcement. Thank you very much.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Diane Morin to be followed by Valerie Stinger.
Diane Morin: Good morning. Diane Morin, a long-term resident of Palo Alto,
senior, mother of a millennial. You've heard me many, many times, so I
won't belabor this. I'm here fundamentally on two reasons that I'm
passionate about. One of them is I would like to see imaginative, affordable
housing in the City, different approaches to it, by the City Council this year,
whether it be denser housing near transportation hubs, whether it be ADUs.
Different sorts of housing so that not only the well off or the people who are
already invested in this town live here, so that we can have young people
live here, so in 10 years you can have seniors living here. You can look at a
bigger housing fund, which I know you've done. You've already been doing
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this, so I'm grateful to you. Which reminds me, I'm very grateful to you for
the enormous amounts of time that you put in, that you volunteer for this.
The second reason I'm here is transportation. I would like to see different
forms of easy transportation such as buses, the same thing as Marguerite,
that would accommodate people such as myself and younger people, who
have trouble with transportation such as bicycles, who don't want to see all
of these cars that are glutting the City at this point. I also want to say, as an aside, that we have to address this. It was addressed at that March
meeting, the wonderful one that was here at Jordan, I believe, where they
talked about the environment and different ways to approach middle housing
and other kinds of housing and ways to effect a sustainable environment.
Fundamentally, if we don't do that, then what we get is illegal, Code-
breaking behavior. I am surrounded in my neighborhood, whether we want
it or not, by people who are renting out their houses, for example, and
multiple cars. There are ways to restrict that, which is regulated by the City
and which is productive as opposed to just saying no. I say let's say yes to
more housing and to better forms of transportation in our delightful town.
Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Valerie Stinger.
Valerie Stinger: Good morning. I'm Vice Chair of the Human Relations
Commission, but I'm speaking as an individual tonight—this morning, sorry.
I would like to ask the Council to consider retaining the Healthy Cities as a
Priority and expanding it to specifically include this City's commitment to a
diverse, supportive, inclusive and protective community. That commitment
should be expressed by our local Palo Alto initiative and in concert with
neighboring communities. Regional uniformity is critical in general but
specifically in this area. The Priority would be consistent with the Council
Resolution passed in December 2016, and it would promote ad hoc and
proactive programs by the City departments and by the various
Commissions. Thank you for your thoughts.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. That's concludes the public comment. Before
we go on, I actually wanted to give a little update on where we are on the
airplane noise. The first thing I wanted to say is that we are meeting—we're
in the process of setting a meeting with the FAA for March. There's a
number of us who are going to be in Washington and will be talking to the
FAA about that. Vice Mayor Kniss is in the process of setting up a meeting
with Anna Eshoo, where a few of us will meet with Anna and discuss the
issue about the ad hoc committee and how that works and what's the best
approach. Thirdly, I've been talking to the City Manager. We haven't come
across the appropriate structure yet, but a structure whereby the citizens
and a couple of Council Members can interact on this and follow it closely.
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We're open to suggestions about the best way to set that up. That is in the
process. I wanted you to know that we're doing those three things. We're
open to doing other things because obviously this is a huge issue in our
community. It is something, I think, the Council feels strongly that we need
to respond to and do the best we can to solve. Thank you.
Study Session
1. Fiscal Year 2016 National Citizens Survey and Performance Report.
Mayor Scharff: Now, Ms. Richardson.
Harriet Richardson, City Auditor: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, members of the
Council. Harriet Richardson, City Auditor. I'm here today to present to you
the results of the 2016 Performance Report, National Citizens Survey and
Citizen Centric Report. Let me get this working here. All of you have copies
of these in front of you. There's some in the back; they're for people in the
audience who want to look at this as we go along. Those are just the covers
of each of them. To give you just a general idea of the purpose of each of
these reports. The Performance Report is really a summary of spending,
staffing, workload, and performance information regarding the City as a
whole and each of the departments. The City Auditor collects the
information from the departments and compiles it into a report. It does include some information from the National Citizens Survey, which is
conducted by the National Research Center and provides residents' opinions
on a range of community issues, particularly the quality of the community
and City services. It includes questions about community engagement and
eight various facets of community involvement. The Citizens Survey is a
statistically valid survey. I'll be spending a fair amount of time discussing
the survey results. The Citizen Centric Report is a four-page, easy-to-read,
fold-out document that's meant to pull information together from both of
these reports in a format that's easy for citizens to read, puts things in
graphs, easy-to-read format. It's got a little message from the City
Manager. It's just really meant to pull together some information that
citizens would generally be interested in. To talk about the methodologies
for each of these. The Performance Report. As I mentioned, the
departments provide the data and comments on significant changes. We
compile it into a report. The Office of Management and Budget in the
Administrative Services Department provides us financial data and FTE data.
We do not adjust the financial data for inflation in this report, but we do
provide in the report the inflation factor that would be used if you want to
calculate that change. We do collect some benchmarking data from external
sources, primarily from the State Controller's Office. We use some data
from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. A couple of different
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areas that we draw benchmarking data from. The National Citizens Survey.
In 2014, we increased the number of surveys from 1,200 to 3,000. This
allowed us to be able to maintain statistical validity but also incorporate
geographic subgroup areas that allow us to pull information from six
geographic neighborhood groups and also from the north and south. The
survey rate has gone down a little bit over the years—quite a bit over the
years. This year we were up 1 percent; we had 744 respondents. The National Research Center mails out the surveys. They do give the option for
respondents to respond online rather than mailing in the survey. Only 116
of the respondents chose to do so this year; that's typical of what we've had
in the past. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4 percent as
a whole. What that means is that if you gave the survey again to a similar
population group, you should get the same response within a range of plus
or minus 4 percentage points from the response. If it's outside of that
range, it may mean that there's a true change in people's perceptions of
what the quality of that service is. On that response rate, we started off
doing the survey in 2003. We started off with a response rate in the high
40-percent range. That was typical for about 4 years or so, and then it went
down; it was in the 30s. It's been in the 20s. This is a national trend. It is not just Palo Alto. It is a national trend. I've had conversations with the
National Research Center about that. They said that is pretty typical of what
they see. It's not just that Palo Alto residents don't want to respond. It's
really the national trend of people having lower response rates. The final
thing that's important to note about the survey responses is the National
Research Center weights the responses to reflect Palo Alto's population.
They do that based on the 2010 census and the American Community
Survey. The Citizen Centric Report, as I mentioned, pulls some results from
both the Performance Report and the National Citizens Survey. It
summarizes key accomplishments from 2006, and it pulls together some
financial information from the budget and the Comprehensive Annual
Financial Report. For the rest of the presentation, because the Citizen
Centric Survey really pulls information from both, most of my discussion is
about information in the Performance Report and the National Citizens
Survey. We organized the Performance Report, and the National Research
Center organizes the Citizens Survey around some themes. In the
Performance Report, we talk about stewardship, public service, and
community. In the National Citizens Survey, they have eight facets. You
can see some relationship between those. There's not an exact across-the-
board relationship, but we do have a fair amount of alignment between
those different facets and themes. In the National Citizens Survey, we
included custom questions that relate to current initiatives. Those can fit
within those facets, this year primarily built environment, mobility and
recreation and wellness. This chart is really discussing some of the
demographics about respondents in the National Citizens Survey. The
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National Research Center doesn't provide historical data on the
demographics, so this is just what you have for this year. These are the "D"
questions in the Citizens Survey at the very back of the report. What you
see is most of our respondents are 35 and older. We have more females
who respond than males. We actually have a lot fewer residents who have
children in the home, who respond to the survey. Annual income, you can
see that's spread fairly evenly across the board; although, the lowest bracket of income has the highest response rate to this survey. Monthly
housing costs, you see a spread where the highest percentages are at the
lowest end of the housing cost, which are most likely residents who have
lived here for a long time or people with costs of $5,000 or more. We also
have a lot more respondents who own homes. We have a fair amount of
respondents who have lived in Palo Alto for fewer than 5 years as well as
ones who have lived here for 20 years or longer. This next chart deals with
the quality of life questions in the survey. There are seven quality of life
questions. What I've done on this one is a little bit different is I gave you
the results for 2016, but I included some sparklines on the right side so that
you can kind of see the trends for the past 10 years. That includes 2006
through 2016. Palo Alto as a place to visit wasn't asked in the earlier years; that's why you only see the 3 years of data, the three data points there.
What you see is a fair amount of up and down over the years. The last 3
years, you see more of a consistent downward trend for most of those
questions. Throughout the rest of the presentation here, when I'm talking
about the Citizens Survey and the Performance Report, I've done a
comparison mostly for the last 5 years. The reason I've done that is you
don't tend to see a lot of change from one year to the next, but you do tend
to see some change over time. It's important in the survey that they
compare last year to this year and say are we similar or different, is the
rating higher or lower. You see a lot more similar than you see of anything
else. As you start looking back over time, like in the last graph where you
look at those sparklines, you see a lot more change than you did from one
year to the next. Starting with capital expenditures, you can see some
increase in the Enterprise Fund capital expenditures, which a lot has to do
with infrastructure. Then, you see a decrease in general capital
expenditures. Both of those have to do with infrastructure, but one is
Enterprise Funds, one non-Enterprise. Jim was just reminding me that a lot
of that was the completion of the big library bond project. Starting with the
built environment, the first fact that the National Research Center
categorizes responses by. We're talking about Pavement Condition Index.
The interesting thing about this is the City made a concerted effort a few
years back to improve the Pavement Condition Index, and it has improved
from 73 to 79. We're right on the verge of jumping over from good into
excellent and very good. I'm expecting that next year you will see that
change. This we take from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's
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records. It's a calendar year number, so this is actually the number that
was from the end of 2015. The number from the end of 2016 wasn't
available yet. Some interesting things from the Performance Report related
to street repair is that the number of potholes repaired increased about 15
percent, but the percent repaired within 15 days increased from 81 percent
to 94 percent. We're doing more of them, but we're also doing them
quicker. The number of lane miles resurfaced increased about 35 percent, from 28.9 to 39. I think that's reflected in that increase in the Pavement
Condition Index. Residents have noticed that change; their ratings in the
past 5 years on street repair has increased from 40 percent to 57 percent.
Another thing related to what you see out on the streets is the sidewalks.
The number of square feet of sidewalks repaired or replaced has also
increased. Again, the respondents to the National Citizens Survey noticed
that with a 10 point increase in the ratings from 2011 to 2016. Just for a
side comment. When you have questions after, I do have in my notes where
these numbers come from in the survey. If you have questions about a
specific point in here, I'll be able to refer you to it fairly quickly as we go
through this. Still related to the built environment. When we talk about
building permits, the number of building permits issued declined about 2 percent. The average number of days to first response to plan checks also
declined; it was about 40 percent from 35 days to 21 days. That's a big
improvement. Even though it says declined, it means improvement. You
want those days to decline. The average days to issue a permit also
declined, about 51 percent. They've cut the amount of time needed to issue
a permit slightly more than half. They've also increased the number of
inspections completed, about 64 percent, from almost 17,000 to almost
28,000. However, the NCS ratings, the National Citizens Survey ratings, of
excellent or good for the overall built environment declined from 67 percent
to 59 percent. That was since 2014 because the question wasn't asked prior
to that. One thing that's important to note about the survey is that even
though we have these scores, we don't ask why people think what they
think. We get these points of interest from them, but we don't really know
why they responded the way they did. That's something to think about as
you think about these percentages. Planning applications have also
increased from 359 to 393, and the completed planning applications
increased about 61 percent, from 238 to 383. The number of ARB
applications declined from 121 to 46. That was a 62 percent decline. The
average weeks to complete staff-level applications increased by about 8
weeks. The number of excellent or good ratings for land use planning and
zoning declined 8 percentage points, from 45 percent to 37 percent. The
number of new Code enforcement cases has declined about 50 percent. The
number of cases resolved within 120 days increased about 3 percentage
points. Citizens are still not recognizing Code enforcement as being
excellent or good; it continues on a downward trend and went from 56
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percent down to 52 percent. Moving onto the community engagement facet.
This involves a lot about how residents actually engage with different
aspects of their community. Volunteerism is one big aspect of that. The
National Citizens Survey respondents indicated that about 45 percent of
them volunteered their time at least once during the past year. That
remained steady since 2011. When we look at the Performance Report and
the number of volunteer hours that are reported, it actually declined. I've got hours in here for Community Services and Library; total combined was
about a 37 percent decline. You can see the numbers there, where they all
were within about that same percentage from the different places where
residents typically volunteer time with the City. There's also some questions
in there with how residents actually engage with the City. To the extent that
they contact the City to ask for help or information, that has actually
increased quite a bit, about 9 percentage points, from 43 percent to 52
percent. The number of people who said they'd attended a local public
meeting or actually watched a public meeting online or on TV have both
declined, 6 percent for actually attending and 13 percentage points, down to
14 percent. This pertains to engagement within the last 12 months, at least
once within the last 12 months. Both of those are declining. The Citizens Survey asked residents about the opportunities to engage in community
engagement activities. Those responses were pretty mixed. They said the
opportunities to volunteer had declined. When I look at the Performance
Report, I see the same opportunities from year to year, so I'm not sure what
leads them to think that they actually have declined. The number of cultural
arts, music activities have increased from 73 percent to 77 percent. They
say that the opportunities to participate in social events and activities or
community matters have both declined. Those were slight declines, not
significant. Moving onto the economy. I mentioned earlier about capital
expenditures. When we talk about operating expenditures, the Enterprise
Fund operating expenditures increased 11 percent, while General Fund
operating expenditures increased 33 percent. You can see here where some
of these changes occurred. Regular FTES, full-time equivalent staffing,
increased 2 percent. Our temporary staffing increased 32 percent. A lot of
the increase was really due to salaries and overtime and the benefit. You
can see the breakdown there of what that General Fund increase—how it
came about. Salaries was an 8 percent increase, overtime 34 percent
increase, and benefits. A large part of that is the Pension Fund increase, the
benefits from pensions and healthcare. That's a 19 percent increase. Also
related to the economy, the Citizens Survey asked a few questions related to
opportunities for shopping in Palo Alto, which is a good indicator of how the
economy is doing. That has increased 9 percentage points since 2011, from
71 percent to 80 percent. They also showed an increase in employment
opportunities, which I think part of that is we were coming out of the
recession in 2011. The opportunities were fairly low at 56 percent, and
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they've increased to 70 percent. Here are some indicators that show some
significant changes between how the economy has affected people
individually. When we look at the median household income, we see an
increase of 15.7 percent from 117,000 a year to just under 136,000 a year.
However, the percentage of survey respondents who said that they pay
$2,500 or more per month for housing cost has increased 22 percent. The
median home sales price increased 46 percent. Really what that's saying is that, even though your income is going up a little bit, your housing costs are
going up a lot more than your income. Only 6 percent of the respondents
rated the availability of affordable, quality housing as excellent or good. The
average residential utility bill also increased. The biggest increase was with
water, an 88 percent increase. Electricity stayed the same, no change in
that. Gas declined. You're seeing that increase primarily being pulled
through the water increase and the refuse increase. The next facet is
education and enrichment. This thinks about different ways that people can
participate in activities to make them healthier, give them mental
stimulation, those types of things. The first one, availability of—the first one
pertains to some opportunities, availability of affordable, quality childcare
and preschool ratings. In the National Citizens Survey, that increased 4 percentage points, but that's still a low percentage, 39 percent. They're
saying that the kindergarten through twelfth grade education ratings
declined slightly, 92 to 90 percent, but those are still considered very high
ratings. Public library services have increased 83 percent to 91 percent.
That's been a steady increase. We've seen that, as the new libraries came
online, those ratings were increasing at the same time. Adult educational
opportunities weren't rated in 2011, and neither were opportunities for
education enrichment. Those questions were first asked in 2014. I did a
comparison of those, and they both declined, the first one about 11
percentage points and the second one about 5 percentage points. Looking
at some things pertaining to the Library. The total items in the Library
collection increased 48 percent. A lot of that would likely be due to bringing
the two new libraries online. Checkouts declined 5 percent, from 1.5 million
to 1.4 million. I think you see a lot of the reason for that in the next item,
where the total number of internet sessions at the libraries increased 35
percent. It seems to reflect that a lot of people are using the Library more
to get information through the internet. That was a pretty big increase
there. Total Library visits increased 7 percent, and that continues to go up.
The Library has increased both the number of programs that it offers and its
attendance in those programs. That increased 122 percent, more than
doubled from 24,000 to about 54,000. With Community Services, the
attendance at performances increased about 56 percent at the Children's
Theatre and declined slightly, about 3 percent, at the Community Theatre.
The art exhibition visitors increased 184 percent, and that's quite a huge
increase. These numbers for these increases are interesting because, when
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you look at the previous slide where I talked about opportunities for
education and enrichment, the ratings declined as far as residents'
perception of opportunities, but yet we're having higher participation. Those
results seem to be in conflict with each other. Mobility. The mobility
questions in the survey rated the lowest of all the questions in the survey.
In the Performance Report, you'll see that the use of public transportation
has increased quite a bit. City shuttle boardings increased 53 percent, and the average Caltrain weekday boardings increased 50 percent. Despite that,
residents rated mobility as worsening. You typically saw a decline in every
category of transportation available. The overall ease of getting to places
that they normally would get to declined about 4 percentage points. Again,
that question wasn't asked in 2011, so I compared it to 2014. Traffic flow,
traffic signal timing, ease of travel by car, ease of travel by public
transportation, and ease of travel by bicycle are all areas that the public saw
as declining in their ease of use. The next facet is the natural environment.
The respondents' ratings on these in the Citizens Survey changed only
slightly. There was a slight increase in the rating of air quality. Cleanliness
of Palo Alto declined 2 percentage points. None of these are considered
significant. Preservation of natural areas increased about 2 percentage points, and the quality of the overall natural environment remained the
same at 84 percent. City expenditures to maintain these natural
environment areas, open space, parks, the golf course, increased about 61
percent, from 5.7 million to 9.2. Parks and landscape maintenance and
expenditures also increased 19 percent; that's a subset of the previous
number. The number of native plants in restoration projects declined about
61 percent, from 27,655 down to about 10,700. Moving onto the next facet,
recreation and wellness. The survey respondents' perception of
opportunities as excellent or good were mixed. The availability of fitness
opportunities changed only 1 percentage point, but the availability of
recreational opportunities declined from 81 to 77, still within the margin of
error, so not significant. Availability of affordable, quality healthcare
increased from 59 to 65 percent. Preventive health services, their
perception of the availability of that declined about 2 percentage points.
Availability of quality mental health care, we didn't start asking that question
until 2014, but it has consistently gone down. This year, the difference from
2014, in 2 years, went down 17 percentage points. Looking at participation
in recreation and wellness programs. Enrollment in CSD Citywide classes
and camps declined about 8 percent, but their enrollment in performing arts
programs and activities increased 234 percent, from 3,600 to over 12,000.
The enrollment in art, museum, and science programs also increased
significantly, 31 percent, from 21,000 to about 28,000. Respondents to the
Citizens Survey indicated that they have increased their use of recreation
centers or services about 3 percentage points. They also visit their City
parks a little bit more often, about 2 percentage points more than 2011.
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They increased their percent of excellent and good ratings from 81 percent
to 84 percent and of recreation centers or facilities from 75 percent to 81
percent. Generally, a slight increase in their perception of recreation and
wellness facilities and their use of them. Moving onto the next facet. We've
got a few categories within safety. The first one is police. The quality of
police services generally rates well. It's stayed the same since 2011 at 88
percent. I've got some statistics in here from the Performance Report. The number of emergency calls increased about 14 percent, and the response
time increased about 29 percent. The number of urgent calls increased 50
percent, and the response time increased about 26 percent. The non-
emergency calls declined by about 5 percent, and the average response time
increased by about 18 percent. We do note in the Performance Report that
Palo Alto's violent crime rate compares well to other nearby cities. About 68
per 1,000 residents is lower than seven nearby cities we compared. Menlo
Park is slightly lower than Palo Alto. We compared it to Milpitas, Sunnyvale,
Santa Clara, Fremont, Mountain View, Redwood City, and San Mateo which
are all higher. Those range from slightly over 1 per 1,000 residents to about
2 1/2 per 1,000 residents. Moving onto fire. The survey respondents'
responses for fire services have increased over time, about 5 percentage points for fire services, 3 percentage points for ambulance or emergency
medical services, and 9 percentage points for fire prevention and education.
In the Performance Report you'll see that the number of medical and rescue
calls increased 18 percent, and the average response time increased about
19 percent. All other calls increased from 3,000 to about 3,500, so about a
17 percent increase there. I can break down these numbers for you. Jim is
asking me to mention what these numbers are. We can go to …
James Keene, City Manager: Just since there's a grouping there of fire and
false alarms, for example (crosstalk).
Ms. Richardson: They're on Page 40 of the Performance Report. The false
alarm calls increased from 1,005 to 1,046. Fire calls actually declined from
165 to 150. General service calls increased from 406 to 541. Hazardous
condition calls remained pretty consistent at 182 down to 180. Moving onto
emergency operations. The citizen ratings in the Citizens Survey as
excellent and good increased about 5 percentage points for emergency
preparedness services. Where you really see a huge increase in emergency
operations is in the work that we do to educate the public on emergency
preparedness. You see the number of presentations, training sessions.
Those also include City employees and exercises. This is a 516 percent
increase from 38 in 2012, the first year we collected data for this, to 234 in
2016. The number of EOC activations and deployments increased 70
percent, from 27 to 46. Moving onto Animal Services. Residents continue to
see continued improvement in their perception of animal control services.
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Their ratings increased from 72 percent to 77 percent. However, when you
look at the Performance Report, you see some declines in some key
performance indicators. The number of animals handled declined 34
percent, which was primarily due to the loss of the Mountain View contract in
late 2012. The percent of live calls responded to within 45 minutes
increased from 88 percent to 93 percent, but the percent of animals
returned to their owners declined quite a bit. Returns of dogs declined from 68 percent to 50 percent, and the percent of cats returned declined from 20
percent to 10 percent. On this next chart, what I did was I—there's a
question in the survey that asks residents how important do you think it is
for the City of Palo Alto to focus on these issues within the next 2 years.
They categorized them by their eight facets. What I've done is I've put
them in order here, highest to lowest, by how important residents thought it
was to focus on those issues. The next column is the average rating of
those questions in the survey as excellent or good. You don't see a direct
alignment where, if they rated it lower, they think there should be a higher
focus on it. What you draw from this is really hard to say. I would have
expected more of a direct correlation between that, but I don't see that
there. Natural environment is something that they think is very important. Recreation and wellness is at the bottom of the list, but that also rates lower
as far as—it's more in the middle of ratings as excellent or good. Natural
environment rated the second highest, but yet they still think that's
something that needs to continue to be a high focus. Anyway, I thought this
would be a helpful way for you to see how these two relate to each other
when you think about your Priorities and your discussion for the next year.
One thing we did a little bit different this year was we tried to pull together
some information on demographics and how different demographic groups
responded to some of the survey questions. I put some information in the
executive summary in the report. From that, I pulled some slightly different
information where you can see some trends even within that. There were
definitely some trends from residents who have lived in Palo Alto for a longer
period of time, especially the ones who have lived here more than 20 years.
They were actually more likely to rate Palo Alto as an excellent or good place
to retire, and they were also likely to give higher ratings to the value of
services for taxes paid. They were less likely to rate mobility and the built
environment questions as excellent or good. Residents with children under
age 18 in the household were more likely to give higher ratings to the
quality of life, mobility, and built environment questions than residents
without children under age 18 in the household. High-income residents,
those who earn 300,000 or more annually, were more likely to give higher
ratings to quality of life, mobility and the built environment questions than
residents in the lower income brackets. There were also trends between
homeowners and renters. Homeowners were more likely than renters to
give higher ratings to the quality of life questions and the value of services
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for taxes paid and slightly higher ratings to the built environment, but they
gave much lower ratings to mobility questions. This year, we asked nine
custom questions. Some of them were repeat questions from 2015, just to
see if there were some other trends—if the trends had changed much. We
asked them questions about transportation. This was a repeat question
from 2015, asking about residents' preference for transportation if they
didn't have access to a car. The first one was depending on how convenient it was, biking would be their first preference, a rideshare service such as
Uber or Lyft would be their second, and walking would be their third. If
convenience was not an issue, then walking became their first preference,
the free shuttle became their second preference, and biking was even with
that. We also asked questions about the energy source for the vehicle they
use as their primary transportation. Still, gas is the highest; 77 percent use
a gas-fueled vehicle. Fourteen percent had a hybrid, 5 percent electric, and
1 percent diesel or a plug-in. Then, we said, "If you were going to buy a
new vehicle, what is the likelihood that you would buy something other than
a gas vehicle?" We weren't able to draw clear conclusions because the
questions overlapped. We probably should have worded the question a little
bit differently and said which one would be your first preference, second preference. The National Research Center discourages us from having a
ranked choice type of question. They suggested that we word it the way we
did. What we ended up with was some overlap. Of the 392 respondents
who said they were most likely to buy a gas car, they also answered that
they would be very likely to buy another type of vehicle, hybrid, plug-in or
electric. We really couldn't draw clear conclusions about what they would
most likely buy if they bought a new car within the next 2 years. We had
some similar issues with the question that we asked about to gain interest
in—to see what people's interest would be in converting to electricity from
some other fuel source. We asked a preliminary question about what the
primary fuel source is for their hot water heater, home heating system,
cooktop or stove, or clothes dryer. We asked them, "Is it currently electric
or is it natural gas or some other fuel?" When we then asked them about
converting, some of the people who said that it was electric in the first
question expressed an interest in converting to electric, even though they
already had electric. We couldn't draw a clear conclusion on that. The one
thing we were able to draw a conclusion about is, as the energy bill would
increase, their level of interest in converting would decrease. If we want
people to convert to electricity, we need to find a way to make sure that it
doesn't have as much of an impact on their utility bill. The more likely that
that would increase, the less likely they would be to convert. We also asked
two questions regarding Community Services Department, which were the
same questions we asked last year. These questions are to help the
Community Services Department and the School District use the results as
they finalize the Cubberley Master Plan. The first question was what were
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residents' priorities for redevelopment of Cubberley. The order of their
priorities stayed the same. Their most preferred thing is indoor sports and
health programs at 74 percent. That was 75 percent in 2015. Outdoor sport
types of activities, 71 percent, that was 72 percent in 2015. Senior wellness
programs, 70 percent, which was 69 percent in 2015. Really no change
there. We also asked an open-ended question about what would be the one
improvement you would like to see to City parks, arts or recreation activities and programs to better serve the community. The top two priorities
remained the same, but the order of the others changed. Bathrooms and
restrooms continue to be the number one priority. The comments say
bathrooms at every park. A lot of the comments say things like, "I can't
stay at a park long enough because I have to go somewhere else to go to
the bathroom." Bathrooms is the number one priority. Some of the order of
these changed. Dog parks, leash enforcement moved up in the list and so
did park recreation and art facility amendments. Generally the same
categories of responses, just a slightly different order than last year. We
continue to update the Tableau visualization results—the Citizens Survey
results in Tableau software. This allows you to go online. We show the link
right there. You can go online. You can kind of play with the data and select multiple variables to see how different people responded. You can
look at them by the geographic subgroups. You can look at them by
demographics. It's really whatever you choose to look at, that you can do it.
We've got the data from the surveys from 2003 all the way through this
year. We have about 7,300, 7,400 survey responses included in there, and
we will continue to update that each year. This just shows where you can
get the survey, the Performance Report, and Citizen Centric Report online.
Again, the link to Tableau and to the City Auditor website. That concludes
my presentation. I will take any questions.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Beth, do we have any speakers from the public?
Beth Minor, City Clerk: No.
Mayor Scharff: We'll return to Council for any questions. Vice Mayor Kniss.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Harriet, looking at the one that's kind of all purpose,
called the built environment, what do you think most people think of when
you ask that question?
Ms. Richardson: The survey actually says what they're talking about in
there. They say overall design, buildings, parks and transportation systems.
The National Research Center tries to guide them as to what they mean, but
it's still pretty broad.
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Vice Mayor Kniss: It seems like it's too broad. I realize you're probably not
going to change their national questions. Somehow that seems as though it
includes infrastructure and housing and streets and sidewalks and almost
everything that exists in your community.
Ms. Richardson: It does.
Vice Mayor Kniss: A pretty vague question.
Ms. Richardson: It is. If we wanted to get more specific, we could do that through custom questions.
Vice Mayor Kniss: I would really recommend that, because it just doesn't
address things in a granular enough way.
Mayor Scharff: Cory.
Council Member Wolbach: Actually, I was also going to mention that. If
we're looking at maybe doing custom questions to get greater granularity
around the built environment, just off the top of my head some things that
people might include would be things like too much new building
construction or not enough new housing or thoughts on the aesthetic quality
of new development or thoughts on the aesthetic quality of the existing City.
There's a lot of specific things in there that might be useful. I also wanted
to make sure I was reading this correctly. It looks like in the entire survey, looking through all of the tables, when you look at the benchmark
comparisons to other cities around the country, I only found—I just want to
make sure I'm not missing something. I only found three areas where Palo
Alto is considered—Palo Altans rank Palo Alto much worse than citizens in
other cities rank their cities. The only three categories where I could find
Palo Altans saying Palo Alto is much worse than other cities' citizens are
housing options, affordable housing, and cost of living on the first two.
Housing options and affordable housing on Page 17 of the survey and cost of
living on Page 20 of the survey. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing
any others. It seemed that those really stood out.
Ms. Richardson: I did notice there were not very many of those. The scale
that they used to say much lower is a difference of more than 10 percent.
Council Member Wolbach: Looking at what kinds of things got rated as poor.
If you look at Page 15, Table 24, Question 5, variety of housing options or
availability of affordable quality housing, 55 percent of Palo Altans said
variety of housing options were poor. Eighty-three percent of Palo Altans
said availability of affordable quality housing was poor. I couldn't find
anything else in the whole survey that came even close to that level of
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ranking us poor by Palo Altans. None of the other categories just seemed to
even touch that.
Ms. Richardson: That's correct. When I took the raw data and sorted it by
the response rate, we used the excellent and good, so we kind of do it the
reverse way. That was the lowest rated item in the survey. One thing I
forgot to mention. There is an error in the National Research Center's
report. On Page 21, there's actually three. They have a standard format, and somewhere along the way this year it changed. They didn't catch that,
and I didn't catch it. On Page 21 in Table 34, what they do is they have
three questions in there that start off "did you"—they're yes/no questions.
Did you observe a Code violation? Was a household member a victim of a
crime? Did someone in your household report a crime? When they put the
results in and the percent yes that they have, it actually should say "did not
observe a Code violation," a household member was not a victim of a crime
and did not report a crime. In Table 34, those three should have the word
"not" added.
Mayor Scharff: Anyone next? Adrian?
Council Member Fine: Thank you. This is very helpful. This is really, as
Neilson mentioned, a guiding document for a lot of different operations across the City. At least on the Planning Commission, this was a very
helpful document in evaluating some of the questions that came before us.
Just at a high level, it's quite clear that housing and mobility are the top
concerns among folks. I also do want to call out there's a lot of stuff it
seems the City is doing well. Many of our services, public safety, natural
environment, Community Services, our residents are quite happy with. I
was interested by your comment. You had that one slide where it was
talking about how we're doing versus how important residents think it is. I
would suggest to my colleagues that that slide is actually quite useful.
There is something we can draw from it, which is where can we have the
most effect, where do we put our efforts behind. If you look at these eight
or so categories, where residents rate them as excellent versus where they
say it's an important or essential service, the ones that we might want to
focus on are where the percent rating is lowest. To me, the ones that stand
out are the built environment, mobility and community engagement. Those
seem to be the areas where residents say these are essential services, this
is what we want our City to do well, but there is the biggest gap as opposed
to something like the natural environment. We all think it's very important,
but we're also doing pretty well. It may not be a focus area. Just a few
comments, and maybe you have some ideas here. I was a little surprised
about two areas of the City, Areas 5 and 6, which had pretty low response
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rates. Has that been the trend in general? I think it was Downtown North
and College Terrace, Evergreen, Southgate.
Ms. Richardson: I asked about that. I think part of the reason—the map is
a little bit different this year. If you look at the map on Page 5, we moved
Palo Alto Hills into Area 4 for better alignment demographically. There's
fewer residents in Area 5 than there are in some of the other areas. If you
look at Page 6 in the survey and you look at the number of surveys distributed, it was actually a fairly low number. It's because there's not as
much of a population in those particular neighborhoods. When you get the
response rate—actually their response rate is low, but it's also fairly
consistent with Area 6, which had the highest number of surveys mailed.
Council Member Fine: That's helpful. Thank you. Just a last thing. Just
looking over this, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about our
City's population. I was kind of writing down some of these cohorts.
They're young folks; they're working folks, they're people with children;
there's renters and owners; there's income levels, retired or longtime
residents. Just would suggest to us all that this is a nice way of considering
our citizenry. That's how I kind of saw the responses breaking down in a big
way. I'll be excited to look at the Tableau reports to kind of look at that, see how do renters versus owners consider our Community Services or our
schools. That's a nice way to look at these things. Thank you very much for
this report; it's very helpful. I encourage everyone to play with the Tableau
reports; it's a really nice way to look at our City.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Anyone else? Karen.
Council Member Holman: Just one at the moment. Thank you for the
report. Look forward to having the opportunity to dig into it more
completely. Thank you. One question. I was a little perplexed by this one.
On your Slide 29 about Animal Services, it talks about number of animals
handled declined 34 percent. It says primarily due to loss of Mountain View
contract. As you noted, that was in 2012. I'm not understanding why this
result would be so far lagging.
Ms. Richardson: I'm comparing 2011 to 2016 in this particular number. In
2011, we still had the Mountain View contract, so that's why the number was
higher then. We lost it at the end of—I think it was November of 2012.
Council Member Holman: Compared to 2011 and now. That makes more
sense. Thank you very much.
Mayor Scharff: Greg.
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Council Member Tanaka: Thank you for your work on this. It's very
exhaustive and impressive. I think it's going to help us really make better
decisions. A few questions. First question is does your office actually do
something on the order of an NPS score, a net promoter's score.
Ms. Richardson: Pardon me?
Council Member Tanaka: Does your office or does anyone in the City do
something like a Net Promoter's Score (NPS)?
Ms. Richardson: No.
Council Member Tanaka: Is that something that you guys could consider
doing? It's very, very common in the private sector, where you ask
customers one question after the service, which is how likely are you to
recommend this service to someone else. I think it's great that we get this
once a year. We do this very exhaustive survey. The problem is it's a one-
a-year snapshot. It's a relatively small sample size. What we want to do is
make sure we're providing excellent service to our residents, our
constituents. By asking that one question after a service, it allows you to
judge whether the service is good or not good right in the moment. There's
actually a lot of methods to do that. That's one thing that I didn't see in
here. I was thinking that would be a really great thing to have for all departments. For instance, if a resident goes to the Development Center to
get a permit to replace a water heater, they could answer one question, how
likely are you to recommend this. The City could get a feel as to how do our
constituents interact with the City and how they feel after that interaction.
Mr. Keene: If I might jump in here. This is the Annual Citizens Survey that
is designed to essentially do two things, provide an annual survey that lets
us compare trends within Palo Alto over time and lets us benchmark
ourselves against the performance of other cities. We do other surveys in
the City. There are small-scale surveys, sometimes strategic surveys on
particular issues. Your question, Greg, is a good one as far as us having
some follow-up discussion in the right forum as to are we maximizing how
we survey or how we collect information on how we're doing. There may be
some changes that ultimately we—or enhancements we want to make. I
wouldn't think it would be something—obviously what you're suggesting
wouldn't actually be accommodated very effectively here because this is an
annual survey.
Council Member Tanaka: I wasn't recommending that. It's just something
that I would say that it's extremely common. In fact, there isn't almost any
business out there that doesn't do some sort of NPS score. In general, it's
probably a good thing for us to do as well. My second question has to do
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with—I'm not sure what page it is. It's vii on this book. For me, what was
really interesting was to see what the changes were year over year. Some
of them are plus-seven, and some of them are minus-eleven. For me, it was
really interesting to look at the ones that were down big time year over
year. I don't know the long-term trend or whether it goes up and down or
whether these are—I did look at the survey itself. It's a massive survey, 60
pages of stuff. I know that (inaudible) survey exhaustion happens as you get a massive (inaudible) the response rate drops. The quality of their
answers are also not there. I saw some that I started grouping them
together. For instance, how well Palo Alto government does at being honest
has dropped 7 percent. Overall confidence in Palo Alto government has
dropped 9 percent. How well Palo Alto government does at generally acting
in the best interests of the community dropped 9 percent. There's three
areas that are somewhat related with a pretty big drop. Is this just
statistical noise? Is this something that is common, is acceptable? Any
ideas of why this might be happening?
Ms. Richardson: When I first came here, I had quite a few conversations
with the National Research Center to help me gain an understanding of the
survey itself and how to interpret a lot of the results. What they told me one year to the next you see changes. If it's 5 percent or more, it typically may
be a true change in residents' perceptions, their opinions of things. It's
really a lot more meaningful to look at changes over time. I think you see
that in the quality of life questions. At the beginning of my presentation,
where I showed those sparklines, you see the year-to-year changes. Let me
go back to that slide here. Right here, you see ups and downs from year to
year all the time. What you really want to be looking for is consistent
trends. For example, if you look at Palo Alto as a place to retire, it was high,
and now you see a drop. Even though it went up a little bit in 2014, it's
dropping again, and it's staying down at that lower level. Overall quality of
life was high, and now you see that downward trend. You really want to be
paying more attention to those trends over time than just one year to the
next. I put that information in here so you can see it, but it's also an
indicator of something to watch, to say is that changing over time or was
that a one-year change. You look at some of those others, your
neighborhood as a place to live. If you look at 2006, it was down low, and
then it went way up, and it stayed up. You really want to pay attention to
the trends over time.
Council Member Tanaka: I didn't seen sparklines for these questions. I just
didn't know whether it goes up and down all the time or whether it's a
longer-term trend. That's what I was asking you.
Ms. Richardson: It's time consuming and a lot of work.
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Council Member Tanaka: Should we be worried about it or is everything
okay?
Ms. Richardson: We could do more of that. It's just the timeline that I had,
I didn't have enough time (crosstalk).
Council Member Tanaka: The really good thing is you made this available in
Tableau, which is great. I haven't actually had a chance to figure out where
this is in Tableau. I think it's important for us to be transparent, to actually make the data available online. Not just this data, but all data in general. It
helps build trust among the community. I'm just looking at that. I also saw
that the engagement has been dropping as well in terms of volunteering
hours, in terms of attending meetings, or watching things online. I'm just
trying to understand is there a problem here. I don't know if you have a
comment or opinion about that.
Ms. Richardson: I don't. We did some analysis on some of the questions,
but we'd have to do more work on it to (crosstalk).
Mr. Keene: Could I just add something, though? Obviously, we have a lot
of questions in here. Despite the breadth and, in one sense, the depth of
them, they're actually not deep enough. If there are some areas ultimately
where the Council would say, "This is a trend we'd really like to get a better understanding about," then we're going to have to do more. Let's just take
the issue of trust in government or whatever at the City level. We need to
cross-tabulate that with trust in State government, trust in the national
government, how do people see how the—whatever it is. To be able to start
to parse out to what extent this is Palo Alto-specific versus other factors.
Ultimately, there may be three or four things in the course of any given year
that the Council may say, "This is a trend we would really like to understand
more about."
Council Member Tanaka: I agree. I'm not thinking we should jump to
conclusions. I've known some other cities, like the City of LA, has decided to
put all of the natural data at transaction level online because they wanted to
build trust among the community. I'm just trying to understand if that's
something that we should consider? I think it's definitely good to know how
this benchmarks against other cities. Next question is on 21 on this book
here. I noticed that Palo Alto spent about $946 per capita. Sunnyvale
spends $414 per capita. Do you know why we're the highest in the area?
Mr. Keene: (crosstalk) on the same page.
Council Member Tanaka: It's Page 21. I don't know if you guys have this
slide up there.
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Mr. Keene: The best way for us to do this is if we could collect—if you have
some particular questions like this we're not able to answer right on the
spot, we'll collect it and be happy to send the Council a written response.
Council Member Tanaka: That's all I had. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou.
Council Member Kou: First, I want to say thank you so much for everybody
that's here. I know you're giving up a Saturday. Thank you. Going back to Council Member Tanaka's question in regards to the per capita expenditures,
is the population in the other cities similar to Palo Alto in comparison?
Ms. Richardson: I don't know off the top of my head, but we can get that
data.
Mr. Keene: The population is sort of all over the map in a sense. The
population itself is quite different. We're 66,000 to 68,000 depending upon
who counts. Fremont's 220,000, for example.
Council Member Kou: It's a little bit more spread out then.
Mr. Keene: Right, but these are based on per capita. There are a lot of
different factors. We'll look into that.
Ms. Richardson: When you look at per capita, this combines fire, emergency
medical services and police. Just thinking about police, if you go back to the crime rate per 1,000 that I showed in one of the slides, we have a lower
crime rate per thousand. There should be sort of correlation between how
much you're spending per capita and what your crime rate is.
Mr. Keene: I'll just give you one quick example more to be illustrative and
not definitive right now. Just in the fire area in EMS, we have the highest
per capita expenditures. At the same time, for the most part we're the only
jurisdiction in here I see that actually runs the ambulance service directly as
a city. That may include a higher level of service in it than we provide. Of
course, that's a service that, for the most part, we collect offsetting
revenues for. Probably if we did a cost-effectiveness list and what the
quality of the services is, we'd also get some interesting takes on this.
Ms. Kou: Thank you. My other question is Page 33 of the presentation.
Ms. Richardson: What page?
Ms. Kou: Page 33. What are the demographics that those questions are
targeted to? I know you send out a—it's online, and you send out the
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survey itself. The thing is when it comes to determining initial costs for
plug-ins and electric vehicles, there's obviously a cost compared to getting a
gas vehicle initially.
Ms. Richardson: Correct. I didn't run demographics against those
questions. I'd have to do that. I primarily limited the demographics to the
mobility, quality of life and built environment questions.
Council Member Kou: Page 14, on the volunteer times, how do you collect that number?
Ms. Richardson: We get that from the departments. The departments
provide that information to us.
Council Member Kou: Animal Services, do you happen to know why the
number of pets returned to their owners have decreased?
Ms. Richardson: No, I don't. One of the things about the Performance
Report right now is the departments provide us the information. We compile
it. We actually don't audit the numbers or ask a lot of questions about why
they are what they are. Over the next 2 years or so, we're going to be
transitioning the Performance Report to the City Manager. I think Jim will be
talking more about this a little bit later, establishing more of a performance
management system. The auditor's role will change to auditing those numbers. Right now I can't answer that question.
Council Member Kou: I just want to say thank you so much for all the work
you did on getting this together. As you were presenting, I think my heart
was sinking with the number of declines. On your report to the citizens over
here, I see key measures. There's 25 of them. Out of the 25, 18 are
declines. It really, really gives me an idea of—it does make me concerned
on a trend. At the end of the day, more importantly we need to remember
it's about the existing residents that are living here and their quality of life
and how to ensure that we keep that moving upward rather than going
down. That's all I have to say. Thanks.
Council Member DuBois: One quick question, Harriet. When do we get the
initial report back from the National Research Center?
Ms. Richardson: The very first draft came in mid-November, and then we
have some back and forth with the corrections.
Council Member DuBois: Again, thank you for the work your team did. I
actually want to thank the community for the excellent feedback. Council
Member Filseth pointed us to the open-ended responses. Some people have
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asked about where do these come from. I think you get a lot of flavor about
what people are talking about in questions about the built environment and
that kind of stuff. This is a scientific study, plus or minus 4 percent margin
of error overall. The point's been made; the multiyear trends are really the
most useful piece. You do get an annual snapshot, but it's the trends that
are really useful. I think we have a crisis in confidence. I look at these
numbers on confidence in local government, 44 percent. The Council acts in the interest of the community, 44 percent. Code enforcement, 52 percent.
These are all trending down. These are key performance metrics that we
really need to take some time to discuss and understand. We really should
read through the open-ends. This issue about confidence in government,
fire the Council, replace the City Council, don't allow developers to control
the City Council, less influence by special interests, listen, listen. People are
telling us things here that we really need to pay attention to. The other
point I'd like to make is this is a meaty and expensive report. We got it on
Thursday; it's a lot to digest. I really think we need to agendize some time
at the follow-up Retreat to talk about this a little bit more. I just don't think
we're doing it justice for what we have here. On the City finance front, it's
more about the Performance Report. You look over time, our population has increased about 2 percent, our Staff has increased about 2 percent, but our
expenses—it's hard to pull it out here immediately, but it's 15-20 percent.
That's not matching up. I think we know we potentially have a structural
issue we need to address. The other thing, traffic flow, 30 percent
favorable. It's one of the lowest as well. Other things that jumped out at
me, overall emergency response has a good rating, but the trend is bad,
especially in response time. We've seen this over a number of years. I
think basic safety is one of our highest responsibilities. A 20 percent
increase in response time for emergency services is something we need to
pay attention to. I like the custom questions. We're getting a pretty clear
message on Cubberley about sports and about improved senior services.
Couple that with the decline in a feeling of community in our City, we really
need to prioritize and get moving on the Cubberley Community Center. I
actually appreciate some of the comments from the audience about this data
is fielded in August of 2016; we get the initial report in November. We
should talk about a process where maybe we get just the initial report from
the National Research Center. Maybe later on, we get the Performance
Report and some analysis of this. Holding it back until the analysis is done,
the data does get stale. It would be useful to have it earlier, be able to
digest it before we have this Retreat. I do feel it's a little bit unreasonable
to digest all this right now and then talk about our Priorities. I'd hope that
we could put some time in the follow-up Retreat to come back to this and
talk about it a little bit more.
Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth.
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Council Member Filseth: Just briefly, Council Member DuBois said most of
what I was going to say. Cost of housing, traffic, and parking is consistent
with everybody's expectation. There are major concerns in the community.
Again, the one that leapt out at me too was the confidence in government
one. Given events at the national and world level, we really need to spend
some time thinking about the way of that, which you don't get from this
survey. That's one thing we should take seriously. Thanks.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you all for your comments on that. The only thing we
didn't touch on that I wanted to touch on was the availability of housing
options. I wish I knew what they meant. Are people thinking there's not
enough apartments, not enough condos? What options are they not thinking
about or is this really an affordability question? There's enough options, but
they just can't afford the different options. There's also a bias in those
questions. If you asked anyone—the real question is who are the 6 percent
that thought we had affordable housing in Palo Alto. That's the real
question. I don't find that question that useful. It's obvious to most people
that there's not affordable housing in Palo Alto. The question is what do
they want us to do about it. Do they want us to build a lot more affordable
housing? Do they want different types of—are they thinking of housing for their kids? Are they thinking of housing for people that work in our service
industries? What are people thinking here? Obviously, those are the three
areas where we're the lowest, housing options, affordable housing and
obviously cost of living. Is that a housing question or is that just a general
Palo Alto is really expensive question? It would be nice, especially on the
things we're the lowest, what is driving that, what are the thoughts behind
it. As to confidence in government, I agree also that it would be nice to
know what's driving that. Is that part of the national trend? There's a
national loss. We actually look pretty good compared to the State and local
governments, and we always have. It's dramatically poor. As everyone
says, everyone loves their own Congressman but hates all of Congress.
Understanding those issues would be very helpful for us. Thank you,
Harriet, for all your work on this. How much time does it take your office to
put this together?
Ms. Richardson: I actually haven't added up the hours this time. As you
know, I was out on a medical leave and was working on it at home. Dennis
in my office was working on it. We've actually cut down quite a bit the
amount of hours that we've put in it over the last couple of years. This year,
we did a lot more analysis, running some pivot tables so that we could draw
these conclusions. We did more work, but I think we did it in less time.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much. Now, it's time for a break.
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Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, just real quickly.
Mayor Scharff: I guess it's not time for a break.
Mr. Keene: It is. Just as far as break info, I don't know if it's 15 minutes.
Folks should know, who need to use the restroom, that they are limited
here. They're very constrained here. Part of the City's Healthy City Healthy
Community initiative, you can walk outside and around to the front door of
the Art Center itself, where there are more facilities, or you can go around to the right and through the yard.
Mayor Scharff: Why don't we reconvene—it's now 5 of 11:00. Why don't we
reconvene at 11:10?
Council took a break at 10:57 A.M. and returned at 11:20 A.M.
2. 2016 Council Work Plan Performance Report.
Mayor Scharff: We're reconvening. City Manager, do you want to move us
forward on the Council Work Plan Performance Report?
James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of Council.
We are about half an hour behind schedule. That was the easy part. That
being said, I'm going to try, as they say when you're speaking of airplane
noise, to see if I can't make up a little bit of time in the air here. Right now,
your schedule was targeting 11:45, which is a half hour from now, for lunch.
Mayor Scharff: Mr. City Manager, I just want to tell you that I was informed
that the lunch won't be here until noon.
Mr. Keene: What is scheduled right now is I was going to touch on last
year's Work Plan Performance Report, and then put some more texture to
the process for the Council Priority setting and some background. I would
guess that then you may have an—the next thing that would happen is the
Council's actual work on the Priority setting. Before that, you will take public
comment—is that correct—from the community. I'm guessing, Mr. Mayor, if
lunch doesn't get here until noon, we'll be able to get to public comment
before lunch, at least get that started. For the most part, you all have a
book there. After the agenda, there's a tab that says the 2016 Work Plan
Report Card. All that we were really expecting to do with this—that's this
sheet that has 79 projects that we put together for the Council, and you
added some. We did a midyear report to the Council last year. It's been an
evolving process to get more specific about how we actually implement and
perform on the Priorities that the Council has. Years ago when the Council
first adopted Priorities, we didn't actually specify projects or develop an
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actual work plan. The main point here is that for you, if you didn't get a
chance to look at it, just on the Council Priorities—this is not the work plan
for the whole City for the course of a year. I asked the Staff to arrange this
according to the far-right column, which is the go or no-go column. It's
basically the ones that are coded green, yellow and red. The concept that
we shared earlier in the year—for the new Council Members, it was a simple
way for us to color code whether we were on track, green. In some cases, actually fully completing within a project what we expected. Yellow, there's
some warning we've made some progress but not enough. If you turn to
the very end, you would look at the red projects. You will see, starting on
the next-to-the-last page, we have twelve and two others ones that were
added by the Council. Eleven to thirteen of the 79 projects on your work
plan, we basically didn't do anything on them. Why didn't we do anything
on them? It's not that we don't care, that we're lazy, that declining scores
about trust in government are fully warranted, all of those sorts of things.
It's actually that really speaks to the fact that our process for how we
prioritize our work and how we focus on it needs to get more focused and
actually even more disciplined. I say that as a prelude to, when we start
talking about how you identify your Priorities for the year and then our suggestions that I'll go over after this piece under the process foundation,
some suggestions for how you could use the rest of the Retreat. I didn't
know if you had any questions or comments. Again, these are just coded by
the results, the colors. You will note that we actually had the Council last
year rank the importance of a project—for example, the first one on this list
is the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan—as to what we would do. Six
out of the nine Council Members last year, for example, said that's an
important project for us. I would suggest two things. I don't know if you
had any initial comments, if you had any sort of question. If not, I'd be
more than happy to invite some specific questions from the Council. After
the Retreat, you could send me an email or something, and we would be
happy to respond to the whole Council. Of course, that would be public.
That being said, this is last year. Last year is over; we're in 2017. The
more cogent comments are anything that may relate to or inform
expectations that you would have in 2017, not so much spending precious
time we have here at the Retreat recapping what we did. I will give you my
own general impression as City Manager. The City got a hell of a lot of stuff
done on some really complex initiatives and projects. Again, if you
remember this iceberg metaphor that I've been using for years, most of the
work that the City does is below the waterline. It's the regular work of
responding to emergency calls, of picking up trash, running recreation
programs. These priority projects are above the waterline, and they're the
very top of this iceberg. We really got most of them done. Some of these
things are pretty challenging and thorny projects. By far, the largest of
them fall into two areas, one in the Planning Department area—that's all in
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response to a lot of the mobility and built environment issues—and secondly
in Public Works, a lot of those around infrastructure and other related issues.
That's all I had on that section, Mr. Mayor, but I welcome (crosstalk).
Mayor Scharff: You're ready to go on to the next section, if we don't have a
lot of comments?
Mr. Keene: I am.
Mayor Scharff: First, I'll see if we have any comments. Adrian.
Council Member Fine: One quick question. Mr. City Manager, what do you
regret not working on the most? Which of these? What do you think was
the biggest mess that you would have liked to have … What do you need to
get it done, if you still plan to do it?
Mr. Keene: I'm not begging off on that. If I were to hit some specific
projects, I'd rather come back and tell you all what it was. I will speak to it
a little bit in the next piece of this.
Mayor Scharff: Karen.
Council Member Holman: Just clarification. Basically you're just reporting.
As you go forward, you want questions or comments from us about this next
year? I just want to get clear on what you're looking for right now.
Mr. Keene: What I wanted to say was if this report card, in a sense—if there were questions that you had about it, they'd be best handled just sending
them to us afterwards. We'll report to you. From my own point of view,
that's less important than to what extent this is a foundation at all for you
when you're thinking about Priorities for 2017. We're going to ask you to
look at some projects later, not just the Priorities, but the Council signing off
on projects for FY '17 in some general way. This might be helpful in that
regard. A good example is just take the Comp Plan.
Mayor Scharff: Just to tee it up. What the City Manager is saying is he's
provided us this from last year. It's good background information. If there
are particular in-depth questions you have, you should email him. He'll
respond to the entire Council. We're basically a half hour behind. If there
are some burning questions you have on this, that you want to get out,
obviously now is an opportunity to say something, but don't feel like you
have to say anything. Tom.
Council Member Holman: Just to follow up on that then. I'll make it really,
really quick here. I continue to recognize that the Fry's site is not on this list
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or on the list that the Council got more recently for this year. The build-to
line, I presume—maybe Hillary can answer that—will be carried forward.
That was a 2012 Colleagues' Memo. That was not just build-to lines but
encompassed a number of other design criteria. Hopefully that will be
encompassed in the Comprehensive Plan and zoning-related.
Mr. Keene: We'll get in this a little bit. The Fry's site is on the 2017
materials, just as an example. The build-to line, we should have a report on that for last year. I can't necessarily say that's in there for 2017. We'll deal
with that as we get to the next phase, if that's okay.
Mayor Scharff: Tom.
Council Member DuBois: I'm not going to go into any specific projects. I'll
keep that for the 2017 discussion. I found this process really useful, Jim. I
hope we continue it. I think the larger work list is useful. Maybe we didn't
all give you feedback, but the prioritization and the midyear check-in was
really good. I just hope we continue it and don't create an entirely new
process. Continuing on would be great.
Mr. Keene: Thank you. We'll revisit that when we get—later on in here I
think you'll find what we're trying to suggest is actually trying to sharpen
and focus that and make it even more regular.
Mayor Scharff: You want to move on, Jim?
Mr. Keene: Yes.
Action Items
3. Council Annual Priority Setting.
A. Process Foundation.
James Keene, City Manager: A couple of things then. You don't have to
look at this right now, but I would turn to the next tab then, which is the
2017 Priority setting, Council and public input. Just to orient you on that. If
you turn over the first page, it actually has the Consent Calendar Staff
Report to the Council on January 9th that dealt with the prep for this
Retreat. If you turn to Page 3 on it, that includes the list of suggestions
from the City Council about Priorities in advance of the Retreat. On the back
page, Attachment B, there's a tally that tries to aggregate or group the
items that the Council had. In addition, there is attached to this both a
summary report, a one-page report from community feedback that the
Council got in advance of this meeting either through Open City Hall or
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through Nextdoor. There's all of the detailed comments from citizens
attached through January 25th, this one page that lists the feedback with
issues like airplane noise, traffic, bike safety, infrastructure, etc., etc. That's
all just background in the book for your work. Again, since a third of the
Council is brand new, a few things. Several years ago, the Council adopted
a definition of Priorities that basically said these would be things that needed
special focused attention. Generally the expectation was that the Council would limit them to 3 Priorities. You can see we had four Priorities last year.
We actually kind of get artful about the Priorities, so we then start to
combine the Priorities into things like the built environment, and then we put
mobility, housing, parking. Last year, we put a special emphasis on
mobility, for example. Again, the direction from prior Councils was that your
policies would be that we would not keep a Priority for more than 3 years.
One of the things that you may want to think about as members of the
Council before—you had gone through some discussions saying, "As we get
more focused on these Priorities," what started to happen is we dropped off
things like sustainability, civic engagement. There was discussion amongst
the Council about those things clogging up the Priority process by saying,
"How do we really let go of that sustainability or civic engagement or whatever?" These are really, really important to the City. There's a whole
bunch of discussion about thinking about those things more as core values
or guiding principles. The Priority process each year would really focus on
some of these initiatives. We wouldn't lose sight of these core values and
these core principles. I'd like the Council to think about this. Today, we're
going to be setting your Priorities, and we're going to be asking you to
identify key projects within those Priorities. We've taken a first cut at that
on the things that are listed here. The discussion we'll go over after you
hear the public comment. We're also going to have a governance discussion
Retreat in April as the Mayor talked about. I'd like you to think about the
priority projects and really what it is you want to most focus on in 2017.
The governance process Retreat is really about getting more strategic and
effective on how we're going to be able to accomplish that work during the
course of the year. One of the pieces that may be missing a little bit is the
why part of this, which is this values discussion. Maybe some way that the
Council would think about some means to identify those values, not just in
the way of integrity or openness but things like sustainability, financial
stewardship, Healthy City. If you take this off your Priority list, we're not
going to say, "We're going to be an unhealthy City initiative in the future."
There's even issues like to what extent are we Palo Alto first oriented versus
regional unconcern. Are there particular values around the built
environment in place that you would want expressed that are just guiding?
That may be more complicated. I'm just trying to put this piece out there to
realize that if you're going to stay true to your directives about the Priorities,
you may want to get more explicit about how you can define some of these
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value factors that can be used during the course of the year. That's that
thought. The last thing I want to say about this governance Retreat is we
put a whole bunch of materials in your packet that are designed more for
that next Retreat. There's a lot of readings on effective Council, Staff-
Council relations, community engagement. I will confess that a couple of
the pieces were written more from the City Manager point of view working
with the Council. That's just the access to some of the materials I had, that I thought were worthwhile. I still think they have some real relevance there.
Hopefully, there's a chance for you all to start to look at those in preparation
of this next item. That next Retreat's important because even once you
establish your Priorities and we look at projects, there are always new things
that come up. They either drop out of the sky like airplane noise or they
bubble from the ground up like dewatering. There are also issues of the
Staff capacity during the course of the year. We have turnover. We lose
people, some key people at times that suddenly affects our ability. We also
have our own culture and some issues. We have a strong labor environment
in California. That injects a lot of process into stuff that makes things often
go slower, in a sense. We also have systems issues in our own organization.
Some of them are technological. Some of those comments about how do we do better review and analysis on different trends. Even simple things like
the ERP system that we use for financial management and performance
management work are things that we need to continuously improve. Things
come up during the course of a year. Priorities do change. After you set
your Priorities, the Staff capacity is always an issue, and the Council capacity
and the Council effectiveness. You guys are limited too, and you have
cultural issues, and you have system issues, how you use your Committees
and all of those things that are important. That's why the follow-up is
important to us. What we were hoping to do today was for you to set your
Priorities. We took some liberties based upon the initial groupings that the
Council had put together, as I said, on page—the attachment to the Staff
Report. Nine Council Members roughly had identified the built environment,
housing, parking, livability as key. Next was infrastructure, Healthy Cities,
completion of the Comp Plan, etc., going down. A number of these had one
Council Member in there. What we did last year, as you recall, is we came
to you with a list of 60, 70-some work plan projects, and then the Council
went through a kind of nominal group technique, not voting, to sort of say
what you thought was more important versus not. I don't think we ever
really developed a process during the course of the year where we could
really effectively make sure that we were really staying on track with the
things that you thought were most important. We didn't necessarily come
up with a way transparently and effectively to modulate our work plan
during the course of the year when new things came up. That's why we
have a bunch of things that you said at the start of the year we didn't do
anything on. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but I'd
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rather not give a report that has 12 or 13 projects that are red, when at the
start of the year we would know we're not going to be able to do some of
those things. Let's stay more focused. What we're suggesting today is that
you hear from the public, you're going to set your Priorities, and then we
would identify the key projects that you would see wanting to happen under
those Priorities. If you go to the next tab, it says 2017 priority projects. I
don't know if you had a chance to read that. I asked our Staff under the areas of transportation, housing, the Comp Plan, the Climate Action Plan,
infrastructure and budget and finance to identify a number of issues and
projects, and then to identify the most important for 2017 within those
areas. If you look at this—this is on Page 2 and 3 of that tab. We listed, for
example, six projects under transportation as most important, grade
separation alternative identify. These were the idea of thinking about them
during the course of the year and by the end of the year, an alternative
identify. Secondly, ensuring that the VTA Measure B funds, we're securing
our fair share, positioning ourselves to maximize what we get. Three, we've
got Downtown parking management decisions. We'll be bringing to the
Council this year a set of recommendations and plans to move to pricing
parking in a comprehensive way in the City in order to really manage demand and facilitate movement to alternate modes and also to generate
funding that could significantly fund the TMA and other issues. Fourth is
bike boulevards. Fifth is shuttle funding. Lastly is the TMA funding and
maturation. I'm not going to go over all these. I'm just using this as an
illustration of what we said. In the area of mobility, we would think at a
minimum these are six things that we really need to get to work on. If you
turn to Page 5 on that report, if you look there, you'll see this piece here
that's got blocks of projects under different topics. The highlighted ones in
gray are the six items that we identified were most critical. That doesn't
mean we're not going to do anything on this other list. It doesn't mean that
there isn't going to be some pop-up issue that comes about during the
course of the year. I'll be honest with you. Seventy-nine or 85 or 100
projects is not comprehensible or strategic or just with priorities by the City
Council. What we were trying to get to—and for the Staff—is to, once you
set your Priorities, that we get in a more focused range of 20, 25 projects
that really matter, one. Two, with you guys taking more ownership over
what those really are in identifying them, if we can do that today. If you
said these are the most, 20, 25, I'm not saying exactly what the number is.
You get too many things there, it becomes less effective. We'll revisit this
when we go through the process. Our thought was you may change some of
the—you may say these aren't quite the right priorities. We've got to figure
out where we go from there. I know a bunch of these things, I'm sure, will
be there based upon your prior feedback. Let's nail down the projects. Mr.
Mayor, you and I have talked about this. To the extent that you could
identify any outcomes that you would want to see by the end of the year—
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that could be pretty ambitious today; I couldn’t imagine you could do that
across all of them—that would be extremely helpful. Then, we all know
where we're going. I'll end with this. This really is an effort for you to be
able to see the forest for the trees; for you, during the course of a year, to
be really articulate with the community when you're going out and saying,
"Here are our Priorities. In mobility, these are the six things that we're most
focused on. Here's what we're attempting to really have done by the end of this year. We're in a better position even to give you some quantitative
data." Those sorts of things. To set up a quarterly reporting process, where
we sit with the Council and we really sharpen what this is. You may then
look and say, "You're being too slow on this. I think we have too much
process on this. We're not going to get to the end result; or we think you've
missed some critical things." We have a way to do that during the course of
the year. See the forest for the trees. I'll end with this. Years ago, Stephen
Covey wrote his bestselling book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
At one point, he's talking about organizing to get work done and everything.
He told a story about these guys are clearing a jungle or whatever. They've
organized the teams. They've set the route. They've sharpened up all of
the implements and the tools, and they're hacking their way with the machetes through the jungle. They're cutting through this road and all this
stuff. All of a sudden, one member of the group climbs up this palm tree,
looks over the top of the jungle and says, "Wrong jungle." Everyone yells
back, "Shut up. We're making such good progress." We want to be sure
that we're in the right jungle. The Council has to be able to see the forest
for the trees. We have to have a way where you can really help guide, set it
now and guide it during the course of the year. If there's too much, we're
not going to get where we want to go. If there's less projects initially, it will
be easier for us to report the conflicts with other projects that we have, that
are on the list. We're still going to do those things, and we will continue—
Tom, to get to your point—to be able to report on those. The Council has to
really say, "Here's our Priorities. Here's how we would express those
through the projects during the course of the year." That's our thinking.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. I just want to make sure everyone takes a look
at those Pages, 5-11. Particularly note like on the infrastructure, there's
actually a number of key dates and what the metrics would be at the end of
the year. I personally think some of those metrics—it would be nice to
speed up some of that stuff. We can have a discussion about maybe how we
could and what that would take. I also think the metrics on the Rail
Committee, for instance—I think the Rail Committee needs to meet and
come up with a plan about what it wants to have by the end of the year,
what the timing should be, and all of that. That's something the Rail
Committee could do fairly quickly and what we want to look like at the end
of the year. There is a thing on grade separations on Page 6 that the City
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Manager put together. That would be a starting point for that. With that, I
don't know if anyone has any comments they want to make. Tom.
Council Member DuBois: Overall, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a little
confused about how we're going to take this list, which is a particular
subset—there's some key categories missing entirely. How do we get to a
good starting point? We're starting in a particular direction. I'm not sure it's
entirely—a lot of it's good, but there are some things missing.
Mr. Keene: Trust me, Staff has no interest in imposing on the Council what
we would think are the issues. It seemed clear that there are a lot of things
that are already set. Most of the things that we have here on these lists are
not new things we're generating. They're directives we've already been
given. They are expressions of things in this area. To be honest with you, I
didn't put everything that even I would think would be a project, thinking
the Council would be adding projects.
Council Member DuBois: I'm not even thinking of big categories. The built
environment seems to be missing. Anything to do with commercial space is
just not there.
Mr. Keene: That's a good point. I'll go back to what I said. This was trying
to group some projects under what we could put together in a way that made some sense to us. I put budget and finance there. You very well
would say that's not going to be one of our Priorities. Yet, we're going to be
doing a lot of work here, and it will have an impact on our ability to
accomplish some of these things that clearly are Priorities. We wanted to
highlight it and call it out. I think what the Council has to do, after you hear
from the public, is relook at this, identify the Priorities themselves and the
language you want to use for it. If you put the built environment, then
you're going to have to do a little bit of work here. Either some of these
things move out or you've got to add some other projects to it. I would love
it if, at least by the end of the day, we have a really good feeling of what
those projects would be as you change this around. I know that seems a
little bit harder than last year, but it'll be more meaningful than last year.
You guys have to do some hard work here yourselves about identifying
what's most worthwhile. This isn’t going to be the end of the road. After
this, we'll come back. We may have to refine it for you and send it back to
you after today. I think you'll walk out of here saying here are our Priorities.
Not only that, we don't have just some huge list of the projects; we're
saying here today what you see as most important. I think it'll be clearer
than it was last year, when we just gave a "6" and a "5" to different things.
That's all.
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Mayor Scharff: What the City Manager has talked to me about, when he put
this together, was he wants a list of Priority projects that, at the end of the
year, he says, "These were what we were working on." Doesn't mean you're
not going to work on other things as well. These things he was planning on
working on and moving those forward.
Council Member DuBois: Because we're starting with a certain framework, is
the categorization correct before we even start talking about projects that fit within it? I think there's a couple of buckets missing.
Mayor Scharff: When we get to that stage, you can talk about adding
buckets.
Mr. Keene: Let me be clear. There's a lot more blank paper in this room.
With the idea of being able to pull stuff off and put it up on the wall. We
may have to capture. We may have to do some actual in-process work
here.
Mayor Scharff: Cory.
Council Member Wolbach: I just want to check with the Mayor and the City
Manager on the process, just to make sure I'm clear about how we want to
proceed here. Probably after lunch, we're going to establish our Priorities,
which we're going to try and keep to three, might be four like last year, but we're going to try and keep it narrow, try and keep them clear rather than
just having grab bags that you can throw everything into it, so we actually
establish clear Priorities. We'll have a separate discussion about projects.
Mayor Scharff: That's correct.
Council Member Wolbach: That's what these listings are.
Mr. Keene: That is correct.
Council Member Wolbach: The projects may be reflective of the Priorities or
may be a continuation of projects that were highlighted in Priorities last
year. Even if our Priorities change, some key projects that have already
been initiated, maybe because we made them Priorities in past year, can still
continue. Correct?
Mayor Scharff: Yes. For instance, if we took infrastructure off the Priorities,
it wouldn't mean we would stop doing the Public Safety Building and all
those things. I think that's your point.
Council Member Wolbach: As far as selecting among the projects, you've
highlighted several of them. We've got the longer lists, and you've drawn
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out six or seven of them, for instance, on Page 5 that you pointed to with
the transportation. You've got a whole bunch of transportation projects
there. You've highlighted seven of them, two of them related to rail that
maybe go to together. Are you looking for us to affirm your highlighted
ones and say those are our top priorities within all of those projects?
Mr. Keene: Yes.
Council Member Wolbach: Or to say we want to (inaudible) which ones get the top priority from those projects listed?
Mr. Keene: Let me restate. I want to go back to what Tom said also. It
seemed difficult to us—it seemed most effective to us if we were going to
ask you to add the projects today to the Priorities you set, for us to not
come in identifying the framework we saw. Then, you get an idea of how
this could look. We clearly see that you're going to go back now and say
what are the Priorities. At least, it's fairly easy when we've only got 24. You
start to realize do these projects match up at all with the Priorities that we
have. I would like you to say—I'm going to assume that 75 percent of them
at least do or else we've been on the wrong track for 2 years. You're going
to add some other things potentially. I think this is something that's going
to get clearer as you do it. You're going to have to make the road by walking on it a little bit.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Let me ask one …
Mayor Scharff: Sure.
Vice Mayor Kniss: … last clarifying thing. Just to get specific, the bike
boulevard has been my concern for about 5 years.
Mayor Scharff: Bike bridge.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Bike bridge, yes. Sorry. What are we going to call that,
a project or a goal?
Mr. Keene: That's listed as a project under here.
Vice Mayor Kniss: It's one that we've voted on already. My concern is some
of these could have more urgency. That one's not done until 2020. Is that
as fast as we can move along a project? It's going to take 3 years?
Mr. Keene: There's two things. You probably didn't get a chance to write
the one-page cover that I wrote on this. Some of these projects are things,
in one sense, that the Council's going to have to expend very little effort on
directly during the course of the year, because you've already voted on it,
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approved it. You guys aren't going to be doing the engineering drawings for
it, etc. There will be other things that are going to really require your
hands-on, policy involvement and decision-making. For example on the
Downtown parking issues, we're going to be bringing recommendations to
you as it relates to establishing on-street, paid parking, on how we put
different controls and everything in our garages, how do you look at
reframing the cost for parking, and those sorts of things. The first example, though, was trying to—let me say this also. This is just a simple description
of these things. As you identify this project, we would come back pretty
quickly with specific milestones on them. By doing that, you could do
exactly what you said, Liz, which is can't you do this any faster. I'm not
saying this is the right number, but we say by the end of the year we're
going to have architectural drawings at 35 percent. You're going to go, "35
percent? Go faster." Then, we start to be able to tell you how we could do
that.
Vice Mayor Kniss: That's just the answer I wanted. If we see something as
a real priority, even if it's underway, we can indicate that we'd like to see
you intensify that process.
Mr. Keene: The other thing I would invite you to think about—I was very pointed when I said for the Council to have more ownership of the work
plan, the projects start to represent your sense of progress during the
course of a year. We have to a way to be connecting back and reporting
back with you. The second thing I would state on a more general level is to
what extent could we turn a work planning process into a communication
vehicle for you with your constituents. In the course of the year, you can go
out and say, "Here's our Priorities. Here's what we're working on. Let me
tell you what we want to get to by the end of this year. Let me tell you
where we are." We're able to give you reports that are useful when you talk
to the public; they're not just internal. When we do the year in review, it
isn't just me up here talking. You guys are able to say, "We got to where we
said we were going to get to this year," or "We didn't, but here's a good
reason why, something new came up."
Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks.
Mayor Scharff: Greg.
Council Member Tanaka: I liked how you laid this out. In general, it makes
sense. I want to be clear in terms of what we're trying to do today. There
are ideas of Priorities, which is what do you put first versus second, and then
there's ideas of goals, which is we want to have this date by the end of the
year or by the time we meet again next year for our Retreat. What are we
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trying to do today? Usually, in order to set your Priorities, you need to know
what your goals are. To set your goals, you need to be pretty specific about
what you're trying to achieve. You're saying by this date we want to achieve
this, and then you figure out what your Priorities are. I don't know if you
could have some insight in terms of our main objective today.
Mr. Keene: I would bet you could get debate on the Council that could
invert that, that Priorities are first and then goals. It's how we define the language. I'm not disagreeing one way or the other, which is why I injected
this values piece of it as a missing component for the long-term strategy.
All I'm dealing with is the evolution of the Council's developing focus on
Priorities. It used to be you just said, "Here's our three Priorities." That was
it. Sustainability, that was all the discussion that we had for the year.
We've started adding what is happening in the City as it relates to the
Priorities that you have set. Now, we're trying to take it a little bit further by
saying, "How could you identify what you most want to see happen this year
in this Priority?" I'm even going further and saying, "Is there a way to take
it to a specific goal and a metric?" It's probably going to be hard to get to
that today. The projects themselves, that are representative of what you
want to do, and some of the outcomes and metrics you could get to. You could even say, "I want this project, but I'd like to see how it could happen
faster than the way you're thinking about it right now."
Mayor Scharff: Lunch is here. A couple of announcements. I didn't see you.
Go ahead.
Council Member Kou: These projects that are identified, for example the
infrastructure, their funding is already available. Is that so?
Mr. Keene: The funding is available. The point we always make is the
funding is at risk dependent upon how long it takes us to do stuff, since time
is money. If we delay things, they most likely will cost more, and we may
not have the money. Right now, we have the money.
Mayor Scharff: Now, we will have lunch. The lunch is here. It'll be a
working lunch. If you could get your food and come back up here, we'll
reconvene as soon as we can. I want to tell the public and the Council
Members that the bathrooms here have backed up and are now closed. It's
like the airlines. Everyone will have to use the other bathrooms.
Council took a break at 12:05 P.M. and returned at 12:19 P.M.
Mayor Scharff: If we could reconvene. We have a number of public
speakers. Jim Poppy would be our first public speaker, followed by Nelson
Ng. Jim, are you here?
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Female: He had to leave.
Mayor Scharff: That's okay. Nelson Ng, come on up.
Nelson Ng: I didn't know where to classify my speech. It's no problem.
Thanks. Please start your lunch. Actually, happy Chinese New Year. This is
the first day of the Chinese New Year. [Foreign language] Today, I'm
actually going to talk about the same topic some of you may have heard
about, how it relates to some of your priority items that I have heard early speakers and also in some of the survey items. That is the annual Priority
setting. For people who do not know me, my name is Nelson Ng. I live at
1260 Emerson Street, in the single-family neighborhood in Old Palo Alto,
right across the street from Castilleja, an all-girl private school which is also
part of the single-family neighborhood. We have been living there for 20
years, my wife and two kids. We have been supportive of the school, of
their mission and all that. However, since the middle of last year, we have
learned about the expansion plan and very concerned about it. As we learn
more, we become more concerned about it. One of the things that we are
looking at right now is that Castilleja right now is operating under a
conditional use permit, CUP, since year 2000. The permit allowed them to
have up to 415 students. Since 2002, 15 years ago, they have violated that CUP and gone above it, currently at 438 students. I understand one of the
Priority for the Council might want to look at this next year is enforcement.
Fifteen years of violation, I think the City should really look hard into it and
enforce that law. As part of that, we also have been circulating a petition to
have citizens of Palo Alto to sign, and we will be presenting it to the City
Council so that City Council have some way to go about enforcing that law.
This is one of the first things. For Castilleja for the last number of years,
instead of working to be in compliance of the CUP, they file a new CUP and
asking for a 30 percent increased enrollment. This is one of the things that
is really interesting. Instead of compliance, all they need to do is file a new
CUP so that they don't have to be in compliance. Some logic that I'm still not
quite sure how to work that. As part of that, they're increasing the 30
percent enrollment with 73 percent of students coming outside of the City.
This will have major impact to our traffic as well. It's one of the item. As
part of that, they will want to demolish two single-family homes. That is just
for now. We don't know how much more for the quest of expansion that
they will encroach more into the single-family neighborhood as well. Also as
part of that, they want to remove the 160—they will impact 168 trees with
57 to be removed, 25 to be transplant.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
Mr. Ng: All this will have impacts to the City's Priorities.
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Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Mary Sylvester to be followed by Rob Levitsky.
Mary Sylvester: Hello, Council. Thank you for taking your Saturday to have
this planning Retreat and open it to the public for our input into the process.
It's very nice to be heard from. I've lived in Palo Alto for 39 years. My
husband, Jim, who actually had to just leave, and myself have raised two
daughters here. On our block for decades, they used to be able to play in
the front yard. Our neighborhood was the kind of amenable neighborhood where you could easily walk down the street, not have cars racing out of the
Castilleja parking lot, traffic being diverted from Alma onto our street. Now,
I feel like we live in the Costco parking lot. Between parking from Castilleja
students and parents, cut-offs from Alma, Embarcadero shortcuts, my 100
block of Melville is one-half block from Alma, one-half block from Emerson,
and 1 1/2 blocks from Embarcadero Road. We are completely hemmed in.
That's the background. For decades, we've had a very cordial relationship in
the neighborhood with Castilleja. We've tried to collaborate. In fact, this
great T-shirt from Rob Levitsky, who will be speaking soon, characterizes
our peaceful orientation and collaborative approach with the school, even
though after 15 years of lying to the community, lying to the neighbors and
the City about their enrollment levels, they've continued to do things around the back of the neighbors, divide the neighborhood up of one block against
the other. We're now at a point of saying very directly to the City, why for
over 15 years have you allowed over enrollment. On February 8th, the City
is again considering a major expansion for Castilleja School. We're
rewarding bad behavior in this school. I'm sorry. I'm a therapist in a Palo
Alto elementary school. We would say that the child has to accept the
natural consequences of their actions, meaning no consideration of an
expansion plan until they are in compliance with the law. The law is 415
students. They now feel they have de facto authorization from the City to
grow and grow and grow …
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
Ms. Sylvester: In our face, we've been called a group of tree-huggers.
We've been called NIMBYs.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
Ms. Sylvester: Thank you. I encourage you to enforce Castilleja's
Conditional Use Permit.
Mayor Scharff: Rob Levitsky followed by Amy Crystal.
Female: (inaudible)
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Mayor Scharff: Are you on the list?
Female: No.
Mayor Scharff: Why don't you put a number in the list, and I'll just go to the
next person. You can just take your minutes. Rob, Amy, Lee Crystal.
Female: He was here earlier.
Mayor Scharff: Hamilton Hitchings, I see Hamilton.
Hamilton Hitchings: Thank you. Today's comments are my own. When I look at what has improved in Palo Alto—I'm a longtime resident—over the
last 10 years, the first thing I think of is the libraries. I was just telling one
my friends the Palo Alto libraries are amazing. I'm sure Jim's glad to hear
that. They are fantastic. When I look at the Citizens Survey for the things
that have improved most in the last 10 years, three out of the four top items
are the Library. I also really appreciated the investment in our storm drains.
We've had a lot of rain, and things went really smoothly because the City
has invested a lot. When I look at the Citizens Survey, Number 3 is the
storm drains. I also have really noticed a big improvement in our roads.
I've been living here over 20 years. The roads are so much better than they
used to be. It's a great example of how when you execute well, it really
makes an improvement. Sure enough, our roads are high on this list as well. When I think about the Priorities and what this Council can do over the
next few years to really have a long-term, positive impact, I think about
infrastructure. All these projects are going to make a really big difference to
the community. The Public Safety Building, we have a dilapidated, outdated
Police Department in the basement of the City Hall, which will not function
after a major earthquake. We have fire stations which can't let their fire
trucks out after a major earthquake. When it was raining, many of us were
hitting refresh on the creek monitor to make sure we didn't have another
flood because I bought my house 3 months before the '98 flood and was
wading around in the rivers on Channing and stuff. Improving those
bridges, the parking structure, and Liz was bringing up earlier the bike
bridge, biking is part of the DNA of Palo Alto. It's part of who we are. It's
another great infrastructure project. Even though those plans are already in
place, execution is the area where all of you can leave a really big positive
impact on the City. I encourage you to make sure that moves forward
quickly. The other thing there's going to be a lot of discussion on over the
next year is housing. It's not about if we do housing; it's about how we do
housing. Really, the issue is not a housing issue; it's an affordable housing
issue. What that really is about is economic diversity. Are we trying to get
a better deal for multimillionaires or are we trying to keep our community
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diverse so many of the people who work here, whether it's the teachers, City
Staff, community service workers, can live in the community and be part of
our community? We're not just excluding them because they don't make
several hundred thousand dollars a year. When you look at how you're
going to do the housing policies, think about economic diversity and how you
can bring that affordability component in, in conjunction with working
locally. When we talk about transportation, the golden standard is vehicle miles traveled. You want those people who live here, that we're creating
additional housing for, to work here. Things like teachers and City Staff, it's
a no brainer because they have to work for the City to fall into that category.
The last thing is when we talk about confidence in government, really being
thoughtful and considerate and careful about impacts. It is possible to do all
three of those. That's what we call smart policy. Sometimes in our gusto to
do housing the biggest complaint is about parking. A lot of stuff gets under-
parked. Figuring out how to do all three of those would result in really great
housing policy. I encourage you to aim high and actually achieve it with
that. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Rob Levitsky. Is Rob back?
Rob Levitsky: Right here. Rob Levitsky, 60-year resident of Palo Alto, 30-year neighbor of Castilleja. I would just like to know one thing. When if
ever are you going to enforce the year 2000 conditional use permit which
authorized Castilleja to be at 415 students? That's really a question. We
have this wonderful body that sits here and deliberates and makes rules,
and then doesn't enforce them. What does that say to anyone around here?
What does it say to us neighbors who have to live with this overinflated
school for the last 15 years? In terms of report cards, it's a failing grade.
That's something you can work on for next year. The plan is to have—if you
want to make our neighborhood functional again, the goal for the year would
be to get them back to 415 students. Lately, we've been under an assault
because they're trying to jump from the 415, which they've been out of
compliance for 15 years, to 540. Another 130 students and 46,000 a year,
kind of a greed thing for them. Our neighborhood has been under assault
lately. We lost this tree, which arborists like Dave Dockter and Walter
Passmore have pretty much agreed after looking at the stump that it was in
no danger of falling. We've had surveyors in the last week or two, people
drilling for the water table. On Thursday morning at 1:00 in the morning,
we had a rogue setup of traffic devices set up in the trees and telephone
poles on Emerson Street. We don't know why we bothered—sent some
emails to Amy French. Yesterday afternoon, those things went away. It's
kind of odd that 1:00 in the morning somebody would just come into the
neighborhood and put up traffic boxes. Our neighborhood's under assault,
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and we need your help. We're going to be here day-in, week-in, week-out.
Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Suzanne Keene to be followed by Stephen Levy.
No Suzanne, so Stephen Levy.
Stephen Levy: First, thanks to you and the Staff. I've lived and worked
here since 1963. I work on these issues at the regional level professionally.
Jim Keene, I'm pretty sure I’m right in the forest even if I don't have the Priorities here. On mobility, I think reducing single occupancy vehicle trips
at peak period is the big impact area. It goes for the people who are
worried about parking; it goes for the people who are worried about traffic.
It helps the people who live here. It helps the people who want to come
here. It helps the employers here trying to get workers here. It is, I think,
the only specific mobility goal that helps all of those things. Now, you have
a huge platter of projects. I don't want to add to them. I want to give you
three things that are worth a talk or a letter but have big impact. There's
going to be a series of Dumbarton corridor proposals that come out in this
year from VTA and from folks in San Mateo County, that's worth engaging
in, that could bring people from the East Bay here without having to drive.
San Mateo County is going to do something like our Measure B. They know that their transportation plans help workers get here. They're very
interested in collaborating. The third point is I know there's a big deal about
VTA, but one part of the VTA proposal is beefing up service on El Camino
and to El Camino, so low-wage service workers can get here. I think
reducing SOV is a big goal. The second one, I don't know if you call it
collaborating with Stanford, working with Stanford, engaging in discussion
with Stanford. Stanford has the most ability to do TDM proposals. Stanford
has the most ability, if we're in a collaborative space, to add housing units.
Stanford has three major regional operations here beside the University that
they are going to go forward with. They're incredible opportunities to
negotiate and talk to them about shared goals. I don't have any interest in
Stanford; I don't own any land. I think they are the largest holder of
employees, the largest place that we can work on traffic and housing.
You've got housing already as a goal. If you're at the State level in
discussions like I am, they talk about reducing barriers and reducing costs
and making it easier for people to build. They talk about locations—was that
telling me I'm about done?
Mayor Scharff: You're done.
Mr. Levy: I'm done. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Esther Nigenda to be followed by Rita Vrhel.
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Esther Nigenda: Thank you, Council Members and City Staff. I want to
second other speakers' comments on the need for Code enforcement and to
tie this end with several Council Members' concerns about confidence in our
local government. The two are linked, and Code enforcement or the lack of
it is directly observed by our citizens on a daily basis. A couple of examples
of lack of Code enforcement are the conditional use permit for Castilleja and
the lack of a fine, which was approved by not implemented, for the developers who dewatered for longer than the permitted 10 weeks in 2016.
If City Council thinks an issue, any issue, is important enough to consider
and/or regulate, it is important to make sure there is follow-through. Doing
this would increase residents' confidence in City government. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Rita Vrhel.
Rita Vrhel: I hope somebody claps for me. Sorry. Looking at this list, I
think there's several things that are very important to me. I hope the City
takes time to just stop and evaluate the traffic problems that have been
caused by the over-building of office space. This seems like it has
diminished the quality of our Downtown. I never go there any more, except
to the Stanford Theatre. It's just too hard. It also has caused overflow
traffic into many of the neighborhoods that previously weren't affected and now are looking at how do you get across the street because there's so
much traffic. Even I personally had someone drive their car across
Middlefield on Everett at a high speed from a stop because she couldn't see
the oncoming traffic. I crashed into her; it wasn't my fault, but it ruined my
car. That was a real personal loss to me. I think this is happening more and
more. I hear that Lincoln Avenue is used as a conduit down to the freeway
to bypass University Avenue. Many of the office building projects approved
in the last couple of years have been significantly under-parked. We have
transportation mitigation programs of which I have never seen any data as
to whether they have been implemented and what the implementation has
actually produced. To say, like for the Olive Garden project, that the
building or the employer or whoever is going to give Caltrain passes and
under-park the project really is not doing any good for the citizens of Palo
Alto. The second thing I want to say, as a private person not representing
Save Palo Alto's Groundwater, is when you're talking about housing
affordability, when basements continue to be allowed at 2,000 to 3,000
square feet, you are significantly decreasing affordable housing. I've
actually tracked this over the last 2 years. You will have a $2 million
housing, which I know sounds extravagant. Someone will buy that house;
they will tear it down even though it's in perfectly good condition. They will
build two stories and then put a full basement underneath. That house will
go from $2 million to $8 million. That house is not available to probably
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90—maybe 80 percent of the residents. That is affordable housing. The
other thing is I think …
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
Ms. Vrhel: … it's really important to decrease pensions. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Christian Pease to be followed by Jacqueline Taylor.
Christian Pease: Good afternoon. I'm going to try to be very brief here. I
just want to revisit the notion that arose earlier about the build quality issue in the national survey and about it being too vague to be meaningful. Just
looking through the survey again today, I went to Page 61. I actually read
the question. It says overall built environment of Palo Alto including design,
buildings, parks and transportation systems. That really sounds like major
capital investments in either the private or public sector and not sidewalks.
When you go back to the executive summary on Page 8, that answer
actually declined 20 percent. Sidewalks actually did pretty well, up 9
percent because of increased maintenance. I just wanted to point that out
and also suggest that at the very beginning of this survey, at the top of Page
2, it attributes the overall drop in the rating of quality of life in Palo Alto to
under 80 percent primarily because the average in area 5 declined
significantly from 84 percent in 2015 to 69 percent in 2016. I would remind you the level of intensity around development and transportation issues
around California Avenue. This area is all of the residential neighborhoods
surrounding that area. When you take these as a whole, this looks more like
a pattern than an amorphous, uninterpretable question and set of answers.
Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Jacqueline Taylor to be followed by Kimberley
Wong.
Jacqueline Taylor: Good afternoon, City Council, new City Council Members.
Good to see groundwater people here too. I'm speaking to the topic of City
enforcement. Again, just chiming in with my colleagues here about the
importance of enforcing CUPs. The Castilleja School has been out of
compliance for 15 years. When you look back at the record, Steve Turner
and his colleague before him did in fact attempt to enforce the CUP by a
gradual reduction of enrollments at Castilleja to try to get back to 415. That
no longer is the case. The school seems to have been given a carte blanche
for 438, the current enrollment. As you know, they're asking for a 30-
percent increase in that enrollment. We would like to see that enrollment
enforced. It's not the case that the TDM is working. If the City again isn't
checking on that and enforcing that, then you don't know that the TDM is
being maintained. I have been stuck on Embarcadero, trying to turn on
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Bryant on more than one occasion. The light changes, and my car is stuck
there because Castilleja is not adequately bringing traffic. I think you're
relying on Castilleja's self-reporting of traffic management. Really, we don't
want the City Council looking like the (inaudible) of a school that is
attempting to put one over on the neighborhood. We also—did that beep
just go off?
Mayor Scharff: No.
Ms. Taylor: Also, we would like to request a full EIR scoping and invite
members of City Council to come to the February 8th meeting that the
Planning and Transportation Committee is having to look at the scoping
issue for Castilleja. I think there are numerous—that groundwater issue is
huge here because of the proposed underground garage—land stability
issues as well, all kinds of things, also the trees. Some of us were at the
lovely Canopy event, an amazing event the other night. The importance of
trees to Palo Alto—there are 168 trees to be impacted, 167, one is already
gone. We would love to see you enforce the preservation of that as well. I'll
stop here. Thank you so much for your time.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Kimberley Wong.
Kimberley Wong: Hi. My name is Kimberley Wong, and I live at 1260 Emerson Street, across the street from Castilleja girls schools. My family
has been here since 1905. I was very upset to hear about the Master Plan
and their plans to tear down two homes cross the street from us, to remove
168 trees on the Castilleja campus, some of which are redwoods and oak
trees over 100 years old. Why? To be build an underground garage. This
will change the traffic flow of our streets from and onto Embarcadero and
cause backups around the neighborhood by the spillover effect. Believe me,
cars will spill over to the neighborhood, communities, every which way. It's
not about me or my daughter who walks to school every day; it's about the
impact to all the children who have to travel through Palo Alto to their
schools. My biggest fear is about the increase in traffic and the resulting
safety dangers involved. I'm fearful for the traffic on Embarcadero corridor
currently clogging the cars coming to Paly, Stanford and Town and County.
Who will be at most risk? The students on the bikes traveling to school.
Adding more cars turning onto Bryant, our special bike boulevard created to
provide safe passage for bicyclists, will endanger the students of Addison,
Jordan and Paly. Increased bikes, cars, pedestrians, frustration with the
gridlock along Embarcadero is a dangerous combination which has gotten
worse over the years. If Castilleja wants to be serious about traffic
mitigation, they need to consider offsite parking, shuttling students. They
cannot propose a plan to add more traffic with an onsite, underground
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garage. Close to 75 percent of the students of Castilleja come outside of our
City, and they propose that 220 cars will be coming through this proposed
garage in 1 hour. Recently I saw an article, build a garage and cars will
come. This is what is going to happen. I hope the City will realize that they
have an obligation first and foremost to the students of Palo Alto who live
right here and reduce the traffic through Palo Alto as a whole. Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Thank you.
B. Individual Nominees (Council Member Explanation).
Mayor Scharff: Now, we return to the Council. I think the best way to do
this would actually be to start with Karen, if you're willing. Talk about what
you think Priorities should be and why. We'll just move down and hear from
every Council Member. We'll try and get some motions on the board as to
what those would be.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, do you feel everyone's prepared enough? I had one
little suggestion that might help, unless you think everyone's—you guys all
good to go that way?
Mayor Scharff: I think they're pretty prepared, but if you want to make a
suggestion.
Mr. Keene: I did want to just remind you if you went to the Priority list that everybody had pulled out, you can pull this one page out. It's got what
everybody had said before to the extent that you want to use the item that
Harriet point out, that showed these important things. Lastly, at least for
now and/or later, under the tabs 2017 Priority projects, if you would open it
up to Page 2 and 3, where it's open. Those are the project lists that we had.
If you would just leave that there, I think once you establish your Priorities,
it'll be easy for us to start to figure out how we mash stuff up. I did want to
make it clear. I was more focused on identifying projects under some of
these big areas, which could be Priorities. You may come up with some
different ways to express it. Thanks.
Mayor Scharff: Karen.
Council Member Holman: One clarification around that. Projects. Some of
the things that are …
Mayor Scharff: We're not doing projects right now. We're just going to put
…
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Council Member Holman: No. It's a clarification about Priorities having to
do with projects. Some of the things that have been proposed aren't
projects like physical projects. We're all understanding that, right? They
don't have to necessarily correlate.
Mr. Keene: If you look at the top of Page 2, I put projects in quotes, partly
just to address that issue, that it's a loose definition. Thanks.
Council Member Holman: Thank you. I obviously give a lot of thought to my own submission and give a lot of thought to other Council Members'
submissions as well and listen to the comments made by the public today. I
had submitted the built environment to continue as it has in the past. There
is much there that we have not address. Yes, it does include some things
that could almost be Priorities among themselves or by themselves. I think
it's so encompassing that it does sweep those up. Those being housing,
parking, livability and mobility. They all come under what the influences are
and impacts are of the built environment. That does include design. If you
look at the list of open questions, there were—I did add them up here—29 of
the open-ended questions directly address design negatively and want that
to be improved. Housing, we do need to address adding some housing,
particularly affordable housing. Parking, we're starting to address that to somewhat better of an extent with the additional RPP that we just approved
the other night. Livability has to do with both of those and mobility. As you
can see in the Citizens Survey, transportation—I do believe that
transportation is a bigger issue than housing even. No matter how much
housing we build here, it isn't always going to be of a type of that people
want to live in. They're still going to want to live in other communities for
other housing options. That affects the employment opportunities and
possibilities for not only individuals but for the businesses here including our
City. Health City Healthy Community, I would like to continue 1 more year.
Reason for that is we just had another meeting, as we have, with Staff this
last Thursday. This year we're going to be addressing—I know Council
Member Kniss is a fan of this as well. We're going to be addressing metrics
and how to measure the progress that we have made. I think that's a
critical piece of that. We're also getting more refined, and some of the
programs are going to implement around Healthy Cities. There's a lot of
interest in this, both in our City. The committee has a lot of support from
different organizations in the City as well as City Staff. There's also a lot of
interest in this at the County level. I think we would be prudent and wise to
continue this for 1 more year, especially until we can get the metrics in place
so we can measure the progress that we're making. I do believe that the
long-term staffing strategy is different than financial responsibility. I think it
is a specific aspect and does merit some specific focus. I don't think I need
to say very much to that because it has to do with housing. Transportation,
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again, is an even bigger issue. Of course, benefits, CalPERS. It's a
burgeoning issue, has been and continues to be. We would be wise to take
that up. I did add one, which is living up to City promises and agreements.
There are a number of things that fall under this, Code enforcement, traffic
violations, noise violations, assessing and collecting appropriate fines,
adherence to project plans and conditions of approval. Having gone to two
of the Town Hall meetings last year, both of them this year as well, I don't know if there was anything that came up more than Code enforcement.
Whether it is construction routes associated with development projects or
whether it is illegal uses in ground-floor zoned buildings or whether it's—leaf
blowers come up quite a bit too, and the City's making progress on that.
This also supports the focus that our City Auditor is going to have this year
on initiating a Code enforcement audit. This goes beyond that, though. As
we see in the four-pager that the City Auditor prepared for us, if you look
just under stewardship, generally acting in the best interest of the
community. Overall confidence in Palo Alto government. The value of
services for taxes paid, and sense of community. Those alone address what
citizens expect for us to be doing. These are quality of life issues. They are
public trust issues. As we look at what we're going to be doing in terms of adding housing stock, which I think we all are one degree or another
interested in doing, especially on the affordable housing end of that. For us
to be successful in that regard, we need to be able to demonstrate to the
public that we can manage what we have now. If we're going to add more
to manage, we have to be able to manage what we have now and give the
community the confidence that we will not overburden our ability to maintain
and manage a quality of life that people have a reasonable right to expect
based on our Comprehensive Plan and on our public statements and our
campaign statements and our individual comments that we make all the
time and very regularly. This is critical, and it is really time that we address
it. You heard from several comments today, but we hear it regularly. We
have some opportunities to be able to address this. The question of how do
we pay for something like this, if we would but collect some of the fines that
are probably outstanding, we would have some funding to support this. We
have collected a fair amount of money from the Edgewood noncompliance.
The City's been doing a much better job of facing that issue. We have some
rough, back-of-the-envelope numbers between $500,000-$700,000 that
we've collected on that regard. I don't need to point out the Castilleja. It's
just another point and a comment also about Code enforcement and
compliance. Infrastructure, I'm not not supportive of that. At the same
time, we are far enough along in a lot of our commitments—we've made the
commitment to the bike bridge. We've made the commitment to the Public
Safety Building. I don't know that we need to continue that this year as a
separate Priority. The Comprehensive Plan, we're also so far along in that.
I'd be open to having—this year, we have four Priorities. I'd be open to
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having four or five this year because a couple of them—like the
Comprehensive Plan and infrastructure, we're so far down the road
accomplishing them anyway, I'd be okay with that. One of the things having
to—just one quick point I will make about transportation under the built
environment. I seriously think and especially after hearing the comments
made by VTA at our Study Session that we ought to pursue backfill funding
from VTA if they do indeed cut bus service in Palo Alto.
Built Environment: Housing and parking, livability/mobility/
transportation
Healthy City/healthy Community continue for 1 more year
Long term staffing strategy
Living up to city promises and agreements…have 4 or 5 priorities
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Adrian.
Council Member Fine: Just at a high level, when I think about Priorities, I
actually think of two or three. That's what I would be supportive of, keeping
them narrow and just a few of them. I'm also (inaudible) surprisingly. I'm
probably not going to support the built environment as one of our Priorities.
I think that is way too big of a grab bag if we're talking about housing,
parking, mobility, livability. That's half the City. We would do ourselves well by splitting that apart. The three I've got on here are roughly what I'm
going to go with. I believe mobility options or call it transportation is
extraordinarily important. Perhaps I might even agree with Council Member
Holman. It may be more important in some regards than housing. That
means working with VTA on their changes this year, looking at bike paths,
technology for parking, our shuttle system, paratransit, the whole range, the
whole suite of mobility options that our residents and folks coming to this
City to work can use. Second topic or Priority for me is housing. It's a little
more self-explanatory. It could be affordable housing; it could be market-
rate housing; it could be backyard units; it could be in-law units; it could be
rentals, a whole range of things there I don't believe our City has done
enough on that. The third one is where I'm a little more flexibility. Right
now, I've got listed smart, efficient, experimental City which is personal
important to me and is really part of Palo Alto's life blood. As I look at other
Council Members' options, the one where I see some overlap in a way are
the topics of infrastructure, financial health and maybe even the
Comprehensive Plan. I don't see any other folks supporting a smart,
efficient, experimental City. To me, I just will signal that infrastructure and
finance might be good substitutes in my opinion for that. Those are my
three.
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Mobility options
Housing
Smart, Efficient, experimental city-infrastructure and finance
Mayor Scharff: Greg.
Council Member Tanaka: I'm going to agree with Council Member Fine in
terms of I'm not going to be very supportive of really broad, generic,
nebulous Priorities. I think it's going to be heard to achieve; it's hard to measure. I don't think it helps. If we have goals like breathing, everyone's
going to breathe whether we make it a Priority or not. That's not helping;
that's not helping Staff figure out what's important and what's not
important. To really be useful for Staff, it's got to be specific. We've got to
make tradeoffs, not everything can be important. Some of these goals are
super generic, vague, unmeasurable. I do not support. With that said, I
just have two goals. The first one is really—I put down specific numbers. If
we want to sit here next year and see how did we do against these Priorities,
these goals, we've got to set a target. We can't just say make life good.
We've got to set a target. I put a target, which is probably too aggressive,
but it's better than no target. Then, we know whether we hit it or not. One
reason why I really focus on revenue is because there's a lot of things competing for our resources, our time, Staff's time, our own personal time.
What we're doing is fighting over one pie of a certain size, because you only
have so much resources. Rather than trying to make this a zero-sum game,
if we actually take advantage of the fact that we are in one of the most
prosperous areas of the world—not just the country but the world—we have
some of the wealthiest residents. We have some of the most innovative
companies. I believe that with a concerted effort we could greatly increase
the revenue in the City. If we greatly increase the revenue in the City, it
means rather than us fighting over should we fund this or fund that, we
could actually fund everything or more things. Rather than having a smaller
pie that we're trying to figure out what makes sense, we have a bigger pie.
We could actually provide better services for the residents in our City.
Making this a strong (inaudible) where we actually have a strong base of
revenue to build from, to fund the programs that we want, be it Code
enforcement, be it a bike bridge or whatever might be your particular issue.
Like airplane noise, having a lobbyist. If we had the money for it, it wouldn't
be that big of a deal. Right now, we have only so much time, so much
revenue to fund things. That's one reason why I put that down. In general,
whether it's this one or another one, we should have very specific, targeted
goals and Priorities so we know how we're doing. The second one, it's
something that we could probably only say for this year. It's either going to
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happen or not. As most everyone here may not know, there's electrification
of Caltrain that's coming about. I was just at the meeting on Thursday.
That's starting to go through. The ship has almost sailed in terms of could
we ever think about undergrounding Caltrain or High Speed Rail. Let's think
about why would we even want to do that. First all, when those gates go
down during rush hour, when the train goes by, it creates massive traffic
jams. We all complain about traffic; it's a big problem. When there's an accident on those tracks, we've seen how we have carmageddon. We have
the most terrible traffic jams you could imagine. With electrification, you're
going to have more frequent trains; the gates are going to down more often.
We're going to have more traffic. For us, if we want to actually underground
Caltrain, now's the time. Now's the time to actually figure out whether we
could do it or not. Why would we want to do that versus—first of all, grade
separations are actually very, very necessary. Measure B is actually going
to fund a lot of this. If we just take the train at-grade right now, the big
problem with that is what happens during the construction time. You have
all these intersections that are going to be blocked. It's going to cause an
incredible amount of disruption. If we actually are able to massively
increase the revenue in the City, which I think we can, then we could actually fund a tunnel through the City so that we don't have this massive
disruption when this thing's being built. With regular grade separations, we
have to shut down intersections, which is going to cause a lot of challenges.
What happens if we actually are able to recover the land on top of the
railroad tracks right now? We would have more land for parks. Instead of
having a freight train running down and blowing his horn at 1:00 in the
morning, you have a park nearby. Which one is nicer? I think more people
know. Or housing. We don't have a lot of land in this City. This would
create land for that. There's also the safety and suicides. It's tragic what
has happened in our community. This is something that is far better than
just having crossing guards 24/7 at the intersections. I was talking to one
of the Council Members from Mountain View; I carpooled back with him from
the Caltrain meeting. He was talking about how far ahead Mountain View is
compared to us in terms of the projects. The Measure B is a little bit of a
grab bag from what he explained to me in terms of it's first-come-first-
serve. The longer we take to take advantage of those funds, the worst it is.
The harder it is for us to get those funds for our City. The majority voted for
this, and we should get our share. That's why for us we should focus on a
few specific goals. That one automatically happen already. Then, next year
look at how we did this year. Thank you.
No broad generic nebulous priority
Increase City revenues by 50 percent without new tax increases
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Underground Caltrain
Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Eric.
Council Member Filseth: First of all, I'm glad we're looking at big, long-term
things here. This is our job as Council, to look at those kinds of things.
There's some tendency of governments to do a few easy things and declare
victory. I don't see that's what we're doing here. That's the right direction.
Most of these things are not shocking and new things and unfamiliar. The built environment, jobs, transportation and housing costs. They're all
related to each other. They're not independent of one another. We
recognize that. I'd just say a couple of comments on housing in particular.
The Bay Area housing is a very broad problem, as the whole built
environment is. We just need to be careful and pick our targets on that very
carefully and deliberately. If we're not careful, we can break quite a bit of
glass. I did want to make a comment on Code enforcement, which a couple
of people have mentioned and a number of the speakers from public. We
are underestimating the importance of this. One of the reasons it's coming
ahead now is, if you look at the kinds of Codes we're talking about, it has to
do with traffic restrictions and housing restrictions and Airbnb and hacker
houses and business registries and water use. One of the reasons we're seeing a lot more demand for this is that the City has been using ordinances
and regulations to try to mitigate and manage the impacts of growth. No
left turn restrictions onto Middlefield and stuff like that. We haven't
expanded our Code enforcement capacity to keep up with those things. In
fact, in some cases it's gone the other direction. We need to pay more
attention to this than maybe even we're thinking now. The other thing I
wanted to talk about for just a second was the financial stability, which a
couple of other people have mentioned as well. This one's a little odd
because it's more of a constraint than a goal. I believe when you look at our
finances, the major outstanding thing is we have somewhere $500 million
and $800 million unfunded public pension and health liability in town, which
I believe we are still actually in negative amortization on even now. If you
properly accounted for that instead of the Enron accounting that most State
agencies do, you would see that the City is losing money every year. That's
not a sustainable situation. We need to get back to a situation where our
expenses are not growing faster than our revenues, which is where we are
today. It should absolutely be a Priority. Is it a goal? It's more of a "let's
fix it" thing; although, that won't be an easy thing to do. It's hit the point
where even today, even the minimum payments on the bill that CalPERS
requires have reached the size that they're starting to crowd out other
things we want to spend money on. We're starting to notice it, so we need
to deal with that. Thanks.
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Built environment
Long term financial stability
Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss.
Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm looking at this in the same way. Clearly built
environment is the overarching piece of this. Mine is really affordable
housing. We have put that off for too long. It's now going on 3 years since
we've concentrated on that. I would really put my first Priority as let's get up one affordable housing project this year. Just because it probably fits the
best under mobility, the bike crossing over 101. Just to say a little more
about that. If we're really concerned with getting people out of their cars
and concentrating, as somebody said here, on reducing SOV use at peak
periods, that is one of the best ways to cross 101. How many of you in here
would love to use that bridge to get to work or to go south? That's a huge
turnout. We certainly don't have people here that are in the software or
hardware business. That's a very common route for people to use as they're
heading south. It's been wet this winter, and almost impossible—you've got
to find a totally different way if you're used to using the bridge. My last one
is going to be a different one. I'd like to see us concentrate on Cubberley
again. We're in the middle of the lease. Since both Greg Tanaka and Eric Filseth have talked about money—I think I saw that on yours, long-term
financial stability—and in working with the schools because I wouldn't dare
not mention that, Cubberley has the potential for actually increasing the
financial stability for both sides. That has sat there for such a long time.
It's well used in a variety of ways. It really needs to be altered long term to
make it a true asset to the community. In adding to that, not surprising to
Karen, I would also continue on with Healthy Cities, Healthy Communities.
For some people that sounds pat, as though we've done it for a long time.
Who's talking about health anyway? This really adds that extra layer of
cultural wellbeing that we should have in our community. This has been a
group that has really flourished. I'm working with another group called the
Senior Agenda, which is coming out of the County. This really does lay the
groundwork for a whole variety of things that make this a more flexible and
easier City for people to live in over a very long period of time. I hope we'll
continue that. That also plays into what I do in my regional work which is
head up the Board for health air, our Bay Area Air Quality Management
District. If you think of it as the "spare the air" group, that's that group in
particular. It also concentrates on health, in particular respiratory kinds of
illnesses. Those would be my Priorities, Mr. Mayor.
Affordable Housing
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Bike Bridge
Cubberley Community Center
Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities
Mayor Scharff: Cory.
Council Member Wolbach: Let me first say that everything on this list is
important. There is nothing that any of my colleagues have suggested on
this list that isn't important. I would add to that those things that have been raised by the community today and in recent days, weeks, months. Very
notably issues around groundwater safety, groundwater supply, the flooding
issues. My own house is in the floodplain, so I'm very sensitive to those
issues. We were lucky in '98, but a lot of other folks weren't. We were
lucky this year. Thank you, Hamilton, for pointing out that it was close. So
far this year—knock on wood—we've been lucky as a community here in Palo
Alto. Also the issues around airplane noise, which are receiving already a lot
of attention from the Council and from the Staff. All of these things are very
important. The question, then, is if we're only going to pick three or maybe
four Priorities, what do pick from this excellent list of lots of Priorities?
Again, the idea of these Priorities is that they're things that we have on our
short list for 1-3 years. They get extra Staff time and extra Council time and attention. What we should be looking at are things where, with 1-3
years of extra Staff and Council attention, we can make real, demonstrable
progress in a way that helps the City, either in a way that the community
really sees or, if it's a backend thing like finances or changing City culture,
something like that, where it has a positive impact that might not be
immediately demonstrable to the community but has a long-term benefit for
how the City is run and long-term benefit for how we deliver services
efficiently. That's how I'm approaching thinking about this. What can we
pick from this great list as a top three? The ones I've focused on here are
housing, I can talk about the different parts of that; transportation, the
different parts of that; and one that's a little bit different. I would suggest
not just putting it under Healthy Cities, Healthy Communities but
transitioning. We've done Healthy Cities Healthy Communities for a couple
of years. I think we've made real progress. We can take that one off our
Priorities list without losing it as something that's important for the City.
We've taken the important steps to become a Healthy City and a Healthy
Community. The one I would suggest adding is human and civil rights,
building upon the Resolution that we passed unanimously last month,
recognizing the changing administration at the national level, recognizing the
concerns that still exist and will increasingly exist for a lot of our I our
community, looking at the group from Oaxaca that did not visit Palo Alto
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because they did not feel that human and civil rights were well enough
protected for them to even make the visit from our of our Sister Cities.
Recognizing that, this is not one that I thought a year ago was going to be
an issue, even 6 months ago was going to be an issue for us. Things
change. The world has changed around us. It is worth, with one of our
Priorities right now, saying the context has changed, we have to be dynamic,
we have to be flexible. How are we going to focus with a little bit of extra Staff time and a little bit of extra Council time, maybe just for the next year,
maybe the next couple of years, on making sure that human and civil rights
are really well protected here in Palo Alto? How do we demonstrate being a
leader in that in the same way that we've been a leader in other ways? I
don’t' see that as something that's a new value for Palo Alto, just like none
of the values that drive any of the things on this list are new values. The
question is what do we need to focus on right now. Going back briefly to
housing. The key foci there are—it's still general—affordability and options.
We saw that in the Citizens Survey we were talking about earlier today.
Affordability at a range of income levels, particularly at moderate to below-
moderate income levels and just options. Whether you are a City employee
or School District employee, whether you are a young person starting your career and is happy to live in a tiny little place, as long as he does not have
to commute or ride an SOV car every day to work, whether you're a senior
who's looking to downsize, if that's what you want to do, or you want to
have some more options for how you redesign your house so you can stay in
your house and age in place. Having all those options available is important.
We have talked about this. We have included it as part of the built
environment. I think we should really prioritize within the built environment.
That's why I have pulled out housing and transportation from the built
environment rather than just saying the built environment. Not that all the
parts of the built environment aren't important, but I'm really trying to be
more precise, more specific, so that we can be measurable and meaningful.
On transportation, the foci there should be fluidity, adequacy and safety.
People visiting Palo Alto but most important people who live here can get
around within the City when we need to, we can find a place to park our
bike, our car, our motorcycle, our electric bike or scooter, whatever.
Adequacy for whatever mode you're using, adequacy on Caltrain as that
electrifies so more people can use that, adequate space on any mode you're
using whether you're doing it alone or it's public. Safety, all the things that
go into safety with transportation, that we do spend a lot of time on. I think
we must continue. I do hope my colleagues will consider housing,
transportation and human and civil rights as key Priorities for the coming
year.
Housing
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Transportation
Human and Civil Rights
Council Member Kou: I just want to bring up the organizational chart for the
City. At the end of the day, it comes back to you as residents of Palo Alto.
When we're going about figuring out these Priorities, we have to recognize
and remember who it affects when we—these are Priorities—how it affects
the residents. When we're looking at the built environment, one of the biggest things is mobility in town. It has to circulate. Of course, the
parking. At the end of the day, the livability, which is your quality of life. Of
course, naturally, when we're looking at that, we also need to take a few
steps back and look at the root of the issue and ensure we're going about it
the right way when we're looking at how to move forward on that Priority.
Again, I feel that, as Council Members, we also have a fiduciary duty to all of
you, to ensure that we are doing the right thing, that we are trustees of all
our resources, not just Staff resources but also natural resources. We want
to make sure that we're taking care of that. I agree with a lot of what
Council Member Holman said. Enforcement, living up to our promises so
that you, residents, are not having to watch out and to carry on the load to
ensure that we're doing it. There has to be some sort of way that is not self-reporting. We need to have checkmarks of these agreements that we
have the different entities, and that they are acted upon. I would go with
living up to City promises and agreements also. Infrastructure, we've
identified the projects. That's something already going on. I'm not so stuck
on it because we have identified it. We do need to have an action plan to
make sure that it does go forward, especially after I found out from City
Manager that we could lose the funding for it if we don't do so. I do agree
with Healthy Cities and Healthy Communities; we have to carry on with that.
Airplane noise is something that falls under Healthy City Healthy
Communities. Obviously, it's not just for your health, wellbeing but also
there's a social aspect in that as well as mental aspect. I would think that
would fall into that. I read a lot of the comments, and I see how much it's
affecting everybody just mentally. That's bothersome. Social equality is
under Health Cities and Healthy Community and diversity. Of course,
there's the natural aspect of our town with the trees. I don't know if that's
supposed to go there, but I do have it there because there's so many
attributes that trees do for our health. Those will be my four.
Built Environment- mobility/parking/quality of life/
Living up to city promises/agreements
Infrastructure
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Healthy Cities, healthy communities
Council Member DuBois: … than half, but increasingly more and more of our
budget is just for Staff. I do think there is something—I'm still thinking
about how to word it—around this idea of living up to our
commitments/enforcement. I don't think it's just enforcement, but it's this
idea—again, a lot of what we hear from the community, some of the
unhappiness that shows up in the survey is we have these ordinances, but we're not enforcing them. We keep saying thing like we're not enforcing
them, which doesn't help publicly. It's traffic enforcement; it's Building Code
compliance; things like the Building Registry. It gets back to this trust in
government. We need some focus on it. The other thing to think about is it
would save us all a lot of time. It would cut inefficiency where we keep
revisiting these issues. If they were enforced and it was the way things
were, they wouldn't be coming to us all the time as exceptions to be dealt
with. My four are the built environment, infrastructure, I'm going to call it
finance but it's primarily staffing, and living up to our commitments.
Built environment
Infrastructure
Long term staffing strategy/finances
Living up to our commitments
Mayor Scharff: What struck me is how most people have been saying very
similar things with few exceptions. When you look at it, it seems to me that
we've been talking about transportation, housing, infrastructure, budget and
finance, and then a lot of things under Healthy Cities. Airplane noise would
go under Healthy Cities. With deference to your comment on it, civil rights
and human rights would fit under Healthy Cities. What strikes me is if you
add Health Cities to that, you then have all of the stuff we've been working
on plus those other items that we've been talking about. In terms of living
up to our promises, I do think we live up to our promises. That's not a good
way to phrase it. We actually as a City do what we say we're going to do.
There are issues that come about. We have been dealing with them. We
did add a Code enforcement person recently. We are doing an audit on
Code enforcement. We will have information as we allow the new Code
enforcement person to do their job. That's why we're having the audit start
a little later. We'll have the information to see what's really going on and if
we do have a problem there. The public should know that we're on top of
that and that we're working on it. It's not that we're saying we're not doing
it. I actually think we are. I agree with Tom; it was well put when he said
that infrastructure is really important, and it's executing on it. We can drop
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the Comp Plan because that's pretty much a done deal. I don't see that to
be a problem in getting that done this year. That was really my comments
that I had. I'm going to bring it back to Council for motions. I'm going to
make the motion of what I think should be the Priorities after listening to
you all. Hopefully, I'll get a second. I would say, first of all, it should be
transportation, housing, infrastructure, budget and financing, and Healthy
Cities.
Vice Mayor Kniss: Second.
MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to adopt the
following 2017 Council Priorities:
A. Transportation; and
B. Housing; and
C. Infrastructure; and
D. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
E. Budget and Finance.
Mayor Scharff: I'll just speak to my second. Yes, five. Why five? We often
talk about three. That's because we don't want to overburden and have too
much. When I look up there, we have all this stuff under transportation, all
this stuff under housing, all this stuff under infrastructure, budget and finance. There's a bunch of stuff under Health Cities that are important,
human rights, airplane noise and a bunch of other things we talked about. I
don't think by having five we overburden Staff. What we really do is put
them in independent categories that allow us to then communicate
effectively to the public. I originally had the built environment down, which
encompassed a lot. I was swayed by a lot of the comments here that we
actually should break that out into something that's clearer and more
understandable. Frankly, the built environment has always bugged me a
little in that it's seems jargon-y. We want to communicate clearly with the
public, and those do. To say to the public, "We're working on
transportation," they know what we mean. We're working on housing.
We're working on the infrastructure. We're working on budget and finance.
We're working on a Healthy City. That's fairly clear to the public and easy to
communicate. Thank you. Do you want to speak to your second, Council
Member Kniss?
Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes. As we always say, briefly. Listening to all nine of us
talk, this sums up what we have said as a group. I hope Staff will pay
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attention to this as you have also heard the underlying subtext as we've
gone along. Just a lump of transportation, even though it works well for a
Priority, we have some transportation issues that we can really attack pretty
easily. TMA would be one of them for me. I've said enough about housing.
Infrastructure sort of stands on its own. Great to hear the new budget and
finance emphasis, both from Greg Tanaka and from Eric Filseth. Yahoo,
Karen. We'll carry on Healthy Cities and Healthy Communities. That hasn't been easy to continue to do.
Council Member Wolbach: A couple of thoughts, a couple of questions.
Again, I like everything we've talked about. I like everything said by my
colleagues. I also failed to mention earlier all the discussion about making
sure that we do Code enforcement well, making sure that the expectations
of the community and the rules that we have are followed or changed. You
either enforce the rules or change the rules. That's very important. I do
appreciate the Mayor's comments and the reminder that we have hired an
extra Code enforcement person. That doesn't mean it's a done deal. It
means that we are continuing to work on that. Looking at these five, my
first question is to the City Manager. I'd like to ask City Staff for their
thoughts on whether going all the way up to five, when our target is three, whether you're convinced by the Mayor's suggestion that this doesn't add a
lot more to your plate but helps provide clarity rather than creating
additional workload. That's my big concern: throwing too much at you
guys.
Mr. Keene: First of all, hopefully the meeting won't go too much longer.
Molly and I are into Cheetos, and that is not a good sign. The point is well
taken. From the Staff point of view, the number of Priorities are not the
issue. The issue is the number of projects and initiatives under the Priorities
and what happens outside of the Priorities.
Council Member Wolbach: With that, I will be supporting the Motion. I will
also ask whether we want to provide any additional clarity. We've talked,
and Staff has heard our comments. When it comes to Healthy City Healthy
Community, Rob de Geus is probably going to be one of the point people on
a lot of those elements. Lalo's here for budget and finance. (inaudible)
might still be here as well. Obviously, transportation and housing both,
Hillary Gitelman is here. Infrastructure, it's a little bit Hillary Gitelman and a
lot of Public Works. Obviously, the City Manager is here. The question is do
we need to provide any sub-bullet points or do we want to keep it simple. I
could make a couple of suggestions, but I'm also totally (crosstalk).
Mayor Scharff: Given that we have 30 minutes before we end the meeting,
keeping it simple may be …
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Council Member Wolbach: I'm totally fine with that. It's been made clear
what some of the specific elements of each of these might be. I'm open to
that going either way, though.
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, may I make a comment?
Mayor Scharff: Yes.
Mr. Keene: If this Motion passes—I agree with you, we have 30 minutes
left—maybe there would be 5-10 minutes under the headings for you to quickly restate a couple of those things. I've got the mash-up under Healthy
Cities, but if we could get those down on the list. Understanding that we'll
report back to the Council on these. There's always the chance for you to
modify that.
Council Member Wolbach: (inaudible) after we pass the Motion as a further
discussion point?
Mr. Keene: I think it would be better after the Motion. What do you think,
Mr. Mayor?
Mayor Scharff: That was my plan. I was going to go back to those things,
just to have everyone comment. They could add a couple of things or give
their comments. All in favor. Tom.
Council Member DuBois: That was a little quick. I'd like to understand the intent here. We've had the built environment. It's a balance. We've talked
about it. We passed a lot of things in the last 2 years to balance
jobs/housing, residential/commercial. It looks like what's being proposed is
to pretend that commercial doesn't exist; we just dropped it. A lot of people
in the community are going to be upset about that. I'm going to be upset
about that. I would offer a motion that we go to six or, again, we talk about
the built environment as being composed of housing, transportation and
commercial development. There are a ton of projects that are underway,
that aren't listed, which I would list under the commercial environment,
which is the annual limit on new office, quality of design, build-to line, retail,
Fry's, parking requirements. I just don't understand why we have dropped
those. They're critical. I would either offer an amendment to add the
commercial environment or call it the built environment and group these
together again or I'd offer an alternative motion. The other thing I'd like to
say just on transportation. It's not on the list, but one of our number one
issues is traffic flow and congestion. A lot of the comments are about
congestion. It's not a project on there.
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Mayor Scharff: When we get to the projects, we can add traffic flow and
that to that. The parking is under transportation, if you want it to be. I
think parking's under transportation frankly. If you want to make a motion,
I don't think commercial environment is a particular focus. We've dealt with
a lot of those issues. I would probably disagree.
Council Member DuBois: I think a lot of them are temporary Ordinances.
Mayor Scharff: We're still moving forward, and those were coming to a head. I don't think there's new initiatives that we're focusing on. All of that
goes in the Comp Plan, just like we're focusing on the Comp Plan. We're
going to get the Comp Plan done. Most of those issues get talked about.
Council Member DuBois: I'd make a Motion that the Priorities be budget and
finance, infrastructure, Health Cities, and the built environment including
housing, transportation, and commercial development.
SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by
Council Member Holman to adopt the following 2017 Council Priorities:
A. Budget and Finance; and
B. Infrastructure; and
C. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
D. Built Environment: Housing, Transportation, and Commercial Development.
Council Member DuBois: Just to speak to it briefly. I think I made the
point. You need all three legs of the stool. It doesn't make sense to focus
on two and pretend the third doesn't exist.
Mayor Scharff: Do you want to speak to your Motion?
Council Member Filseth: Not (crosstalk).
Council Member DuBois: That was me speaking to my Motion.
Mayor Scharff: Eric, do you want to speak to your second?
Council Member Filseth: I think Karen actually beat me to it.
Mayor Scharff: Karen seconded the Motion. Karen.
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Council Member Holman: I second the Motion for a number of reasons,
many of which have already been spoken too. I would add to built
environment—they are so interwoven. We can break them out, but to what
end? They are very, very interwoven. Look at how we're looking at the
Comprehensive Plan. We're weaving together because they're so
interconnected, transportation and housing. Land use, I should say. They
are interconnected. There's no way to separate them. You can't do one without the other. To lose the built environment component is—look at all
the comments we got. I think there was 29 comments about the look and
feel and integration of new development. To lose that is to defy the public
and their comments. I would offer the amendment, though, that we add to
create as the Mayor had a fifth Priority which is living up to our City
agreements. Hopefully Council Member DuBois would accept that. Again,
listening to the public.
Council Member DuBois: Was that in the original Motion?
Council Member Holman: Your Motion was budget, infrastructure, Healthy
Cities and built environment. You didn't have living up to City agreements.
Are you agreeable to adding that one?
Council Member DuBois: I'd accept that.
INCORPORATED INTO THE SUBSTITUTE MOTION WITH THE
CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Substitute
Motion, “living up to City agreements.” (New Part E)
Council Member Holman: Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: You want to speak?
Council Member Filseth: (inaudible) I have a question or the maker of the
original Motion. I think Council Member DuBois and Holman brought up the
issue of commercial development, which the previous Council actually paid
quite a bit of attention to in terms of the relationship of job growth, loss of
retail, protection of personal services and so forth as part of that. That fits
in the built environment. If we don't use the built environment, if we break
it out separately in housing and transportation, where do those things go
under the original motion? I think those are important.
Mayor Scharff: That's a fair question. For most of them, they fit
somewhere—the question you're raising is retail, for instance. What else
were you raising?
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Council Member Filseth: The last Council innovated, I think, relative to the
Bay Area—it should be that innovative—in recognizing the impact of
commercial development on a lot of other things, notably transportation and
housing costs but also protection of retail and how we grow that way,
protection of personal services and so forth. That's part of what Council
Member DuBois is trying to get into this under the built environment, the
relationship of commercial development and job growth to all these things. Where do those go if we don't adopt the substitute motion?
Mayor Scharff: My is that we're discussing those particular issues in the
Comp Plan and also in Ordinances. The Priorities are where we're moving
forward in 2017. I don't think there are new things under commercial
development that we need to move forward in 2017. I think we've
discussed those. I think we're finishing those up. Just like we don't have
the Comp Plan on there, I don't think we need those things. That doesn't
mean that we are not going to continue forward with the retail ordinance
that's coming to us—I believe the Planning and Transportation Commission
has already looked at it. I think that comes to us anyway. The whole Comp
Plan discussion gets to all the issues that Council Member DuBois—we're
talking about that on Monday. We're obviously going to have that discussion. I don't see those as 2017 issues frankly, that goes in that.
People may disagree, but I actually don't.
Vice Mayor Kniss: (inaudible)
Council Member Filseth: I have another comment. I thought the Mayor's
discussion of living up to City agreements was more cogent in terms of
where it went than having it a separate category by itself. I think that
weakens the motion.
Mayor Scharff: Adrian.
Council Member Fine: I prefer the original Motion action for a few reason.
One, I'm persuaded by the Mayor's argument that our Comp Plan is dealing
with a lot of the commercial impacts. Tom, I completely acknowledge that
they are integrated with the housing land use choices, the transportation
land use choices. We might as well throw in water and environmental
resources as well, at which point I'm not sure we're giving Staff proper
direction of the silos that we do want to focus on. Sometimes, here in Palo
Alto we try to fix the whole show at once. It may help us to pull some of
these apart into things like transportation and housing specifically to focus
on those issues. I'm more in support of the original motion, but we'll see
how it goes.
Mayor Scharff: Greg.
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Council Member Tanaka: I have a question for the maker of both Motions. I
heard these Priorities mentioned, and I saw Staff write it, but they're not
necessarily writing in the same order that was said. Are these actually
prioritized or bulletized? I'm trying to understand the intent here.
Mayor Scharff: The order is not order of importance.
Council Member Tanaka: Thank you.
Mayor Scharff: Cory.
Council Member Wolbach: I'm still going to support the original Motion. I'm
very sympathetic to the concerns that were raised, that motivated the
Substitute Motion. I would not agree with the contention that if something
is not named in our Priorities, it's not important. As I said at the start of my
comments, when we were first going down the line, everything that we've
talked about today is very important. The issues around Cubberley are
important. The issues around groundwater are important. The issues
around airplane noise are important. Every one of these projects is
important. That's why we are investing Staff resources and time and energy
and our time and energy on each of them. I'd want to be really clear. Just
because a particular word isn't listed in our top, top Priorities, it doesn't
mean it's not important to the City. As far as the question, which is an important one, how is the interaction, the systems thinking around
commercial uses of space, housing, transportation, adequately reflected in
the Priorities here. The transportation one is a big part of that. A big part of
our transportation discussion is how does our commercial sector contribute
in a meaningful way to solving our transportation problems through things
like the TMA for primarily Downtown but which might expand, the TMA for
the Stanford Research Park, Stanford's on-campus transportation initiatives.
We'll be weighing in on the GUP. We're putting together a committee to look
at a possible additional funding measure to provide funding for
transportation. Although, it's not guaranteed where the money will come
from; there's clearly a strong indication that one of the most likely funding
sources will be the commercial sector. Not hidden but clearly implicit
reference and understanding we all have if we're going to be genuine in our
discussion about this, the commercial sector is going to be contributing on
the transportation side a lot. I don't think that's going to change. Even if
we do bring a new initiative forward, this isn't an exclusive list of everything
that we're going to touch during the course of the year. Again, I'll be
supporting the original motion. Again, I do appreciate all the concerns that
were raised, that motivated the substitute.
Mayor Scharff: Lydia, you did have your hand up? I thought you did.
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Council Member Kou: I am concerned with taking out the built environment.
We're still having to look at everything we do in the City as a whole and how
it affects all the interlinking different elements and segments. The Comp
Plan, while we're really relying on it right now to be finished this year, it's
not finished. It does need to be a Priority to remain a built environment so
that we can still focus on that and keep it as a reminder.
Mayor Scharff: If we could vote—you've spoken.
Council Member Filseth: I'm actually going to make a Motion. I want to
offer a friendly amendment to the Substitute Motion, which is to eliminate
Bullet 5. That one doesn't really fit with the others. In many ways, our
transportation woes and our housing woes are downstream effects. The
upstream effect is commercial development. It seems odd to bury those
things. I don't think living up to City agreements rising to the same level.
Council Member DuBois: I'm going to accept that, to strike that. It's
important. The way the Mayor talked about it and your comments make
sense.
Mayor Scharff: Karen, do you accept that?
Council Member DuBois: It would be things we would focus on, but maybe
it's not one of the top five here.
Council Member Holman: I have two comments. One is …
Mayor Scharff: Karen, the question is do you accept that?
Council Member Holman: I do not, and I need a clarification on both this
and the original Motion. I don't accept that because I think it—listen to the
people, listen to the people. They talk over and over and over again about
how important this living up to our City agreements is. I don't think we do
in many regards that could help our quality of life and actually boost our
Citizens Survey response. Clarification about the substitute and the—it's
relevant to both the substitute …
Mayor Scharff: No.
Council Member Holman: … and the original Motion.
Mayor Scharff: Karen …
Council Member Holman: That is one of the comments was made by maybe
the Mayor about commercial is being addressed in the Comprehensive Plan.
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Mayor Scharff: Karen, this is not the question. We're getting off track. The
question was do you accept the Motion. You said—the amendment.
Council Member Holman: I do not.
Mayor Scharff: You do not.
Council Member Holman: At some point in time before we vote, I want to
have a clarification about the original and Substitute Motion.
Mayor Scharff: You do not.
Council Member DuBois: I will second it.
AMENDMENT TO THE SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Filseth
moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to remove Part E from the
Substitute Motion.
Mayor Scharff: You'll second it. Now, we're just talking to this issue. Do
you want to speak just to the issue of living up to City agreements?
Council Member Holman: I think I've already done that.
Mayor Scharff: Anyone else want to speak?
Council Member DuBois: Just to speak to my second, because I originally
accepted it. I do think it's really important. I'm disagreeing with you there,
Karen. I just think it can be incorporated under some of these other
Priorities. It needs to be a focus. How we word it and what we do, traffic enforcement, there are a lot of areas where people would disagree with the
Mayor that we're doing those things. We're working to improve it, but it
needs attention. I disagree that it shouldn't be one of the top four.
Council Member Holman: This has nothing to do with that. I apologize for
interrupting. I just got a text from somebody saying the meeting was
scheduled to 2:00, but the stream has stopped. They're not able to see it at
home any more. I don't know if that can be fixed or not.
Mayor Scharff: Lydia.
Council Member Kou: As the City continues to grow, we have a lot of pilot
programs that are coming up and, of course, TMA and the TDMs that are not
really in place and moving forward as smoothly as we'd like to see it and not
even evaluate it, that I've seen, and transparent to all the residents and
citizens here in town. I really think that living up to our City agreements or
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even just the original one that you had, Karen, living up to Code
enforcements and City agreements.
Council Member Holman: City agreements.
Council Member Kou: It's necessary to keep that in there in order to have
us focus on ensuring that all these agreements we have around town are
lived up to and we don't have citizens over here having to come forward and
tell us or monitor all of these agreements also. I do think that should remain as a Priority. Thanks.
Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on the Amendment. All in favor of the
Amendment. This is just the amendment to his Substitute Motion, strike
Bullet 5. The question is whether or not to remove "5." That passes on a 6-
3 Motion.
AMENDMENT TO THE SUBSTITUTE MOTION PASSED: 6-3 Holman,
Kniss, Wolbach no
SUBSTITUTE MOTION RESTATED: Council Member DuBois moved,
seconded by Council Member Holman to adopt the following 2017 Council
Priorities:
A. Budget and Finance; and
B. Infrastructure; and
C. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
D. Built Environment: Housing, Transportation, and Commercial
Development.
Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll vote on the Substitute Motion. All in favor of the
Substitute Motion. The Substitute Motion no longer includes "5." Vote on
the Substitute Motion. The Substitute Motion fails.
SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou yes
Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll vote ..
Council Member Holman: I still needed to get the clarification.
Mayor Scharff: What's your clarification?
Council Member Holman: The clarification is if commercial development
does not need to be addressed and is rolled into the built environment
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because it's being addressed in the Comprehensive Plan, so is housing. How
is it any different?
Mayor Scharff: You're asking a question of why is housing different?
Housing is different because it's an area of particular focus of where we're
talking about getting affordable housing projects and market-rate housing
projects built this year. That's why it's different. We're not talking about
doing commercial development this year.
Council Member Holman: We're talking about how much to do and what it
looks like and stuff.
Mr. Keene: You have a cap. You've adopted a cap.
MOTION RESTATED: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss
to adopt the following 2017 Council Priorities:
A. Transportation; and
B. Housing; and
C. Infrastructure; and
D. Healthy City, Healthy Community; and
E. Budget and Finance; and
Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll vote on the main Motion. All in favor of the main
Motion. It's 7-2 in favor. Thank you.
MOTION PASSED: 7-2 Holman, Kou
C. Action: Final Grouping Into Priorities, Vote and Approval of
Priorities and 2017 Key Projects.
Mayor Scharff: I guess we'll probably end up at 2:10 if people can tolerate
that for a little bit.
Vice Mayor Kniss: May I just explain that I had a 1:30 commitment?
Mayor Scharff: Before you go, why don't you tell us if there's anything you
want to add or anything that you want to take or anything you have an issue
with? We're going to have to limit this to really short …
Vice Mayor Kniss: Of all this over here?
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Mayor Scharff: Yeah. We have Healthy Cities up there. Is there something
you want to add before you …
Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, if I could just clarify. All of those are there
essentially, except you've changed other to Healthy City Healthy
Community. If there's anything in particular under that and you want to
shout out, that would be key.
Vice Mayor Kniss: I think that's more than adequate. Anything I would add to it at this point would be … Now, we need to think about the layers that
we're not putting on rather than additional layers.
Council Member Kniss left the meeting at 1:50 P.M.
Mayor Scharff: Cory.
Council Member Wolbach: What I would suggest adding to Healthy Cities
Healthy Communities, two items. One is airplane noise.
Mayor Scharff: Does anybody have a pen? They could just go up there and
write Healthy Cities and write airplane noise.
Council Member Wolbach: I just want to make sure that we're clear that is
one of the parts of, one of the projects or underneath the Healthy Cities
Priority. I want to make sure that's not lost. The first one that I would add
under Healthy Cities Healthy Community is airplane noise. The second one is human and civil rights.
Mayor Scharff: Tom.
Council Member DuBois: I'd like to move we just continue this to the next
Retreat. There's a lot of projects here. I've got probably 15 or 20 that I
want to talk about. I don't see how we're going to do it.
Mayor Scharff: I think that's probably true. I tell you what, why don't you
make a motion to continue this, and let me talk to the City Manager about
how we integrate that into the next Retreat.
Council Member DuBois: I'll make the Motion that we continue the
discussion of projects within the City Priorities.
Council Member Fine: Second.
MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member
Fine to continue the Agenda Item as it pertains to project prioritization to
the next Council Retreat.
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Mayor Scharff: All in favor.
MOTION PASSED: 8-0 Kniss absent
Mayor Scharff: Can we have a Motion to adjourn then? Did you have
something?
Mr. Keene: Only one thing, Mr. Mayor. We have a set date, as the Mayor
said, for the second Retreat. It is on a Wednesday and a Thursday.
Between now and the end of April, these were the only two dates that we could get, that were even remotely working. I want to be able to confirm
with our facilitators, who we're bringing in, that those are the dates we're
going to have. That's the understanding. A governance Retreat just like
this one in particular really needs to have everybody in attendance.
Mayor Scharff: Karen.
Council Member Holman: Remind me of the hours. It was a Wednesday
afternoon and a Thursday day. How's the public going to participate?
Mr. Keene: They're going to come in the daytime. There's a lot of people
who can come in the daytime, who can't come at night.
4. Wrap-up and Next Steps.
Mayor Scharff: With that, meeting's adjourned.
Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 1:58 P.M.