Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-04-11 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL TRANSCRIPT   Page 1 of 79  Special Meeting April 11, 2017 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 5:05 P.M. Present: DuBois arrived at 5:32 P.M., Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka arrived at 5:36 P.M., Wolbach Absent: Closed Session 1. CONFERENCE WITH CITY ATTORNEY-EXISTING LITIGATION Subject: Ferreira, et al. v. City of Palo Alto Santa Clara County Superior Court Case No. 16CV289765 Authority: Government Code Section 54956.9(d)(1). 2. CONFERENCE WITH REAL PROPERTY NEGOTIATORS, CALIFORNIA Government Code Section 54956.8 Property: U.S. Post Office, 380 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto 94301 Agency Negotiators: James Keene, Lalo Perez, Hamid Ghaemmaghami Negotiating Parties: City of Palo Alto and United States Post Office Under Negotiation: Purchase and Lease: Price and Terms of Payment. Mayor Scharff: Now, we have a Closed Session. We have two items, a conference with the City Attorney on existing litigation, Ferreira v. the City of Palo Alto, and also a conference with real property negotiators, California Government Code Section 54956.8, on the U.S. Post Office at 380 Hamilton Avenue. Can I have a motion to go into Closed Session? Vice Mayor Kniss: So moved. Council Member Wolbach: Second. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to go into Closed Session. TRANSCRIPT    Page 2 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes with Council Members DuBois and Tanaka absent. It passes unanimously—not unanimously. Everyone else is in favor. MOTION PASSED: 7-0 DuBois, Tanaka absent Council went into Closed Session at 5:05 P.M. Council returned from Closed Session at 7:18 P.M. Mayor Scharff announced no reportable action. Mayor Scharff: Seeing no City Manager, we'll wait. Why don't we just move to Oral Communications then, unless anyone has a concern? Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions None. Oral Communications Mayor Scharff: Our Oral communications is for items not on the agenda. Our first speaker is Andie Reed, to be followed by Jenny Kiratally [sic]. You'll have 3 minutes. Andie Reed: Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. My name is Andie Reed, and I live at 160 Melville, about 200 feet from Castilleja School. I'm following up on a formal complaint that our group, Protect Neighborhood Quality of Life, filed with City Manager Keene, and we emailed to all of you on March 25th. I will discuss two of these violations. Over-enrollment is one of many use violations that we documented in our complaint. It is especially important to our current issue with the school. Castilleja has been out of compliance with their enrollment number of 415 since 2002. They bargained with the City to settle at a higher enrollment during 2013 on condition that they file for a new use permit which, as you know, they have recently done, asking for an additional 30 percent in enrollment and simultaneously submitted major expansion plans. Planning Director Gitelman responded that she will investigate the other violations we describe but not the over-enrollment. The City Council has revisited fines for Edgewood, fees for developers. We ask that the City also revisit this issue that has festered for many years in our neighborhood. That the City could actually entertain putting the residents through 5-plus years of staging and construction, including excavating for an underground garage, demolition of two old homes, and destroying canopies of old redwoods and oaks so that a single private school could increase their TRANSCRIPT    Page 3 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  enrollment is appalling. The school makes public statements that they have met with the neighbors and included our input in these expansion plans, but that can be easily disputed. The City needs to interview us, the 24/7 residents, to heard our input, not what the applicant says is our input. Another violation of Castilleja's CUP is the number of events that occur outside of typical school days. The CUP allows for five major functions each year plus several other events during the year. Castilleja is currently on track to have 100 events this year, taking place on weeknights and weekends, often consecutive. This results in cars coming in and out of the school driveways at late hours with the attendant noise and lights. We have compared other schools' and residential neighborhoods' agreements on events. Typically allowed is from 0 to 15 per year. When we have spoken to our fellow Palo Alto citizens, they are eager to sign our petition and add their support to our cause. You have seen our lawn signs proliferating around town. We met with the City Council on February 6th and handed over our original petitions with 412 signatures. Today please accept another 100 paper signatures. We're also happy to report 70 more people have signed online, for a total of 582 signatures on our petition asking for the City to enforce Castilleja's Conditional Use Permit. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Jenny Kiralti, Jenny, to be followed by Rita Vrhel. Jenny Kiralti: I'm Jenny Kiralti, and I represent the Barron Park donkey project. I want to start by thanking you for the support that you voted on December 12th of $10,000 to support the donkey project and an additional 5,000 if the community was able to raise 10,000. I'm happy to say that we did that very quickly. Our year-to-date income is nearly $17,000 from the community, and the Fiscal Year is July through June. We have raised nearly $12,000 since the Council meeting on December 12th, and we reached our goal of $10,000 by February 22nd. With the City Council funds, we're doing quite well and 3 more months to go. A very brief report of the accomplishments. We acquired a new donkey, Jenny. She's the larger one in the front. They're getting along quite well. They're together almost all the time. We have done quite a bit of pasture maintenance and much of it with the engagement of Mr. Witt. We're very grateful for his support. I'm particularly happy about the new watering devices that we put in just a few weeks ago. We have reorganized the handler's group, including a training program for handlers for walking and allover care. We've included a few new volunteers. The donkeys have been walking quite a bit in the community, which is really fun. The vet came and visited us for a donkey clinic, to talk about health issues. We're hoping to schedule another one. Very recently, we've returned to Sundays in the park, which is a tradition that goes back many years. Between 10:00 and 11:00 on Sunday TRANSCRIPT    Page 4 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  mornings, the donkeys are there to visit with families, whoever wants to come and see us. Please join us if you haven't. We are working on a number of things including the website revamping. I've engaged with a group called Get Involved Palo Alto, which is a community service group for high schoolers. We have great plans to work towards the community history and fundraising. We were recognized in the Metro as part of the best of Silicon Valley for 2017 for celebrity sighting. Finally, I just want to thank you very much for ongoing support. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Rita Vrhel to be followed by Bob Moss. Rita Vrhel: Good evening. It's hard to follow the donkeys, but I'll do my best. On March 8th at something like 12:05 in the morning, the City Council passed an ordinance allowing accessory dwelling units on any size lot, in any neighborhood, with minimal setbacks and no parking requirement. I think this is horrible. Traffic is the number one problem in Palo Alto. It's been identified over and over again. I think parking has a lot to do with traffic. You have Residential Parking Permit programs. You have a waiting list for some of these. The dentists are upset. You discussed a large parking garage last week. You're going to discuss a parking garage this week. Yet, you are going to be allowing junior and regular dwelling units on any size lot with no parking. That doesn't mean covered parking. It just means no parking required. Please tell me I am wrong. I hope that everyone will come to the City Council meeting on 4/17 and speak out against this ordinance. I feel that with the Comp Plan the City Council did their best to gut it. I feel like you're basically now gutting our neighborhoods. You have no, to my knowledge, Airbnb rules in place. These are supposed to be for families, individuals with disabilities. I think they will turn into much more than that. If you cannot come to the meeting, please email the City Council. Go to the website to get the address, city.council@cityofpaloalto.org. If you do not speak up now, the City will be changed forever. If you don't act, don't complain. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Bob Moss to be followed by Sea Reddy. Bob Moss: Thank you, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. At the meeting last week, wherein the garage was identified for the California Avenue location, actually on Sheridan and Ash, there's some question about the aquifer and whether the garage going down two stories would interfere with the aquifer. I dug out the data on that site. The answer is yes. The aquifer on that property is down only 13 feet. The bottom of the garage would be 21 feet, so it will penetrate the aquifer. It doesn't mean you can't build it. It just means that when the garage is built, you have to take care to seal the basement and put in barriers against water intrusion from the aquifer TRANSCRIPT    Page 5 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  into the garage itself. Also, typically it requires periodic surveys, maybe every 6 months, every year, just to make sure the garage isn't leaking. I passed out a copy of what the aquifer looks like, so you have that for your records and you can see what I'm talking about. The other two issues are monitoring wells and the toxic plume. There is a monitoring well, F37A, on the property at Ash, right near Sherman. When a garage is built, you have to take into account the fact that you have a well there and talk to the Regional Water Quality Control Board about how you're going to protect that well or build around it and also allow monitoring on that well to continue. That's another potential cost. These additional potential costs should be factored into the cost of the garage if you haven't already. The final issue is toxics. Is there contamination from the toxic plume that originates at the Research Park, primarily 640 Page Mill, on the site? The answer is no. I gave you a copy of the toxic map. Basically, the contaminated water doesn't go much across Page Mill Road. Building a two-level, underground garage will not get you into a situation where you're exposing people aboveground to toxics from the contaminated groundwater. The groundwater there is at least clean in terms of TCE. All of these issues should be considered when you get into the detail and build a garage, so the actual cost is realistic, and the monitoring for things like water leakage from the aquifer are taken into account. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Sea Reddy to be followed by Mary Sylvester. Sea Reddy: Good evening, Mayor and the City Council and the citizens of Palo Alto. Last week, the State Legislature passed $52 billion worth of projects that will require us to pay 12-13¢ a gallon. We did not send Marc Berman and Jay Hill to tax us more. It is a tax on a lot of people. Regardless of how much wealth they have, the 12¢ is a lot of money for a long time. This is a road to nowhere. Again, another boondoggle for unions. Which of the Council Members are supporting this? I would like to know. Who is opposing it is more important for us. This is absolutely unneeded, unnecessary, quickly rushed by my beloved Jerry Brown. I totally oppose it. I think it is not good for our communities, a waste of money, again going into places where it shouldn't be going, road to nowhere. Thank you. The second item I want to talk about is the United Airlines fiasco. A doctor raised in Vietnam had a Chinese background—he looked Chinese—was forcibly removed of the four people that were picked and dragged like a snake out of the airplane, which should never have been done. (inaudible) thought out properly. How do you take—they wanted to take four seats and send the crew to Louisville. They can take corporate plane and send them to Louisville too. I think they should remove the CEO right away. I would like City of Palo Alto not to have any employees travel on United for a little while, until they remediate this. It's an absolute insult to a citizen, a honest TRANSCRIPT    Page 6 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  man regardless of what background he is. This looks like another Rodney King event. We should learn from it. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Mary Sylvester to be followed by Stephanie Munoz. Mary Sylvester: Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Honorable Council Members. I'm Mary Sylvester. I live at 135 Melville Avenue. I'm a 39-year resident of that address. I live half a block from Castilleja School. I am here on behalf of myself and a group of neighbors who live in the immediate vicinity of the school. On April 7th, these neighbors and myself requested from the Palo Alto Planning Department an extension on our scoping letter regarding Castilleja's Environmental Impact Report. The reason why we submitted this request for an extension is because Castilleja is submitting its required documents 2 days after the public comment period. The comment period ends Saturday, April 15th. Castilleja is submitting its documents April 17th. Therefore, we asked the Planning Department for 2 weeks to review those documents before we submitted our final scoping letter. We've incurred significant legal fees as well as expert consultation on our scoping letter. To deny our request for a reasonable period of time when Castilleja may submit new documents that make our comments null and void, we believe, constitutes an undue burden on our free speech rights as well as violating CEQA guidelines. Therefore, we would like to ask the Council to reconsider our request for a reasonable period of 2 weeks to review new documents submitted by the school. Thank you very much for your time. I'd also like to thank the Council for opening up your retreat last Friday and Saturday to the public. I found it fascinating. I appreciate the transparency and the inclusion of the community. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Stephanie Munoz is our final speaker. Stephanie Munoz: Good evening, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. I have the Heart and Home or the remnants of the Heart and Home homeless women's shelter again this year. I just couldn't stand it. It's cold out there. It just seems unreasonable that these are regular people. They came. They went to school; they got degrees. They do jobs. They rented houses. Then, the City of Palo Alto improved the value of all the properties in Palo Alto by putting a big complex of industrial and commercial in, which raised the value of everything. These people were just simply pushed out of their homes. They're very sweet. It's driving me crazy; they keep buying me things. Some new placemats, honey, I've got placemats. A new dishpan, your old dishpan is kind of cruddy. Honey, I have a dishpan; I don't need a new dishpan, a new this, a new mop, a new broom. They're very big on cleaning. Anyway, the thing is like all of you, I'm onboard with capitalism. I TRANSCRIPT    Page 7 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  can live with the fact that I get to eat, from time to time, [foreign language] and Grand Marnier soufflé. Other people have to eat peanut butter sandwiches every day. I can live with that. Lately, I've had some kind of myalgia, and I can't sleep at night. I can't turn, I can't move, I can't rest, I can't get up. I'm sleepless, and then I'm sleepy in the daytime. I have to tell you, you have to provide a place for regular citizens to sleep. Something, like an exercise mat or something out of the rain and safe from predators. It's just not civilized to have people, especially women, wandering about in the dark, unable to sleep. These people have jobs by the way. I believe if necessary you could put in a port-a-potty in the downstairs garage, any place that they could get out of the elements and just put their head down and go to sleep. Having people with no place to sleep is not civilized. It's not your standard. I know you have better standards than that. Thank you very, very much. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. City Manager Comments Mayor Scharff: Now, we turn to the City Manager for City Manager Comments. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I apologize for being out. A couple of updates. First of all, a report on the VTA Next Network initiative final plan. On last Friday, April 7th, VTA released its Next Network initiative final plan, which really deals with the bus transport in Santa Clara County. It does include major cuts to Route 88 and a reduction in paratransit service for residents on the east side of Palo Alto, along U.S. 101. In a change from the draft plan released in January, Route 89 would continue to run between the California Avenue Caltrain station, College Terrace, and Stanford Research Park. City Staff has identified an opportunity to partner with the VTA to replace the service along the Route 88 corridor by expanding the Palo Alto free shuttle program. We will have this concept for Council discussion at your meeting next week on the 17th of April. Funding will be critical to make a new shuttle route possible. Our Staff will be asking Council Members to urge your contacts on the VTA Board to provide funding to operate this new route even before Measure B transit operations become available. We'll get you all some of the information for any conversations you can have between now and when the VTA Board votes. That vote will take place on May 4th. An update on High Speed Rail. On Wednesday, April 5th, our Staff along with some of our citizens attended a public open house hosted by the California High Speed Rail Authority in San Francisco. This was the first in a series of three meetings, which will be held over the next several weeks. These meetings are being held to provide TRANSCRIPT    Page 8 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  an update on the San Francisco to San Jose segment of the High Speed Rail project. Based on the materials presented at the meeting, the Authority does not appear to be moving towards an option with passing tracks in Palo Alto. They do seem to be moving towards a short four-track section in south San Mateo, Belmont, and San Carlos. According to the Authority, this option provides less operational flexibility but minimizes potential impacts to residential land uses. If that holds, for us a good update. The current project schedule shows the presentation of a preferred alternative to the California High Speed Rail Board of Directors in the summer of 2017. According to the presentation, all at-grade crossings will be upgraded with quad gates, vehicle intrusion detection, and median barriers. At this time, only existing at-grade crossings within the multitrack, passing-track segment have been identified for grade separation. Stay tuned. I know I've been updating you almost every week, it seems, on RPP. Just since we're in some transition periods and there are some deadlines, I did want to report that as of April 9th all Downtown and California Avenue employees are eligible to purchase employee parking permits for both the Downtown and the Evergreen Park/Mayfield RPP programs. This open purchase period follows a low-income employee purchase period earlier this month. Currently, enforcement activities in the Downtown RPP program area are focused on citing vehicles with no permit and those re-parking within the same employee parking zone. Beginning about April 17th—I want to keep it loose a little bit here—enforcement personnel will resume normal operations. Our Staff will ensure that all eligible residents and employees have had ample opportunity to secure permits before issuing citations for expired permits. Installation of new RPP signage in the Evergreen/Mayfield Park program is slated to begin on Monday and take about 3 weeks. After the sign installation is complete, enforcement personnel will begin to issue warnings and include permit purchase instructions. Staff will ensure that all eligible residents and employees have ample opportunity to engage with us on permits. We did want to share that Palo Alto has received an upgraded rating from FEMA related to flood insurance in Palo Alto. Flood insurance just became a little less expensive in Palo Alto thanks to the hard work of our departments including Emergency Services, Parks and Recreation, Development Services, and other public service operations as well as the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority and other organizations that have worked to put in place what is called the Program for Public Information, which is used to raise what is called the community rating system that ranks and then ultimately prices flood insurance. Also, special thanks to Council Member Lydia Kou and to Dan Mellick for volunteering as stakeholders in this PPI program. The community rating system is a voluntary program under the National Flood Insurance Program that allows communities to earn flood insurance premium discounts by conducting floodplain management activities that exceed the NFIP minimum TRANSCRIPT    Page 9 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  requirements. The City just received notice that we'd been upgraded to a Rating 6 from 7, which means a discount of 20 percent. I think the Mayor and I were informed on Friday at a Santa Clara County Cities Association that we're the first city, I think, in the county to achieve this 20 percent level. That's up from the previous 15 percent for our residents on flood insurance. There are 3,319 policies issued to property owners in the City of Palo Alto who paid $3.95 million per year in flood insurance premiums for this most recent year. The total annual savings to policy owners attributed to the Class 6 rating is approximately $875,000. Lots of folks will at least see some reduction. The new rating will be effective and applied to all National Flood Insurance Program policies issued or renewed on or before May 1, 2017. Thanks to everybody for their help there. Just a few weeks ago, I shared another recognition related to the City's Urban Forest Master Plan and our recognition as a Tree City. This week, our City Utilities Department has been recognized for a third year by the Arbor Day Foundation as a Tree Line City U.S.A. This is a national program that recognizes public and private utilities for practices to protect and enhance America's urban forests. Our Utilities folks were honored for their commitment to proper tree care practices that benefit residents by providing cleaner air, increasing property values, and improving quality of life as well as training employees in quality tree care practices and helping homeowners to plant appropriate trees near utility lines. Lastly, I on behalf of all of the Staff and just to the Council did want to thank you all for spending a very productive Friday afternoon and really all day Saturday at Rinconada Library at a second Council Retreat dealing with governance effectiveness and how we can all work together effectively and efficiently in our City. I think it takes a lot of dedication for councils to do that sort of thing. It's a progressive thing to do. Again, on behalf of the Staff, from our perspective I want to thank you and certainly hope it was worthwhile for all of you. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Minutes Approval 3. Approval of Action Minutes for the March 27, 2017 Council Meeting. Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll move to the Consent Calendar. We have one speaker, Herb Borock, speaking on Item Number 8. Minutes, I always forget the Minutes. Can we have a Motion to approve the Minutes? Vice Mayor Kniss: So moved. Council Member Holman: So moved, as amended. TRANSCRIPT    Page 10 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: As amended? Council Member Holman: As amended. Mayor Scharff: As amended. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to approve the Action Minutes for the March 27, 2017 Council Meeting including changes outlined in the at places Staff Memorandum. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Consent Calendar Mayor Scharff: Now, Mr. Borock. Welcome. Herb Borock, speaking regarding Agenda Item Number 8: Thank you, Mayor Scharff. Good evening. This is about Item Number 8, the proposed charter for the Rail Committee. It's related to an item at the end of your Agenda, Item Number 12. Specifically, in both the purpose of the Committee and in Guiding Principle Number 2, it states that the Committee will focus on electrification and that it equates modernization of Caltrain to include electrification. I believe it's a mistake to focus on electrification. Until now the Guiding Principles have used the word modernization, especially related to Number 12 which talks about a ballot measure. There are, I believe, enough people on the Caltrain corridor who will have problems with electrification as the means of modernization for Caltrain, both for aesthetic reasons, for the trees that have to be taken out, and the catenaries that have to be installed, and also because they would see it as the first step in High Speed Rail. I don't think anything is gained by mentioning electrification and, therefore, on this Agenda Item I would suggest you remove this from the Consent Calendar for two things: one, under purpose replace the word electrification with modernization and, in Guiding Principle 2, to remove the words that follow modernization. To be consistent in Item 12, when you get to that, I would remove the specific priority of electrifying Caltrain or at least to change it to modernizing Caltrain. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thanks. Now, we need a Motion on the Consent Calendar. I'll move the Consent Calendar. Vice Mayor Kniss: Second. MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to approve Agenda Item Numbers 4-9. TRANSCRIPT    Page 11 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  4. Approve Updated City of Palo Alto Debt Policy. 5. Approval of a Water Enterprise Fund Professional Services Contract With Cal Engineering & Geology for a one Year Term With a Not-to- Exceed Amount of $139,213 for a Geotechnical Investigation and Assessment of the Existing Subgrade of the Mayfield Reservoir (WS-11004). 6. Approval of Urban Forestry On-call Services Contract Number S17165735 With Davey Resource Group for Review and Inspection of Planning and Development Applications in a Not-to-Exceed Amount of $200,000 Annually for a Three-year Term. 7. Request for Authorization to Increase the Existing Contract for Legal Services With the Law Firm of Renne Sloan Holtzman Sakai by an Additional $100,000 for a Total Not-to-Exceed Amount of $195,000. 8. Adoption of an Updated Rail Committee Charter and Guiding Principles. 9. Selection of Applicants to Interview on April 26, 2017 for the Human Relations Commission, the Library Advisory Commission, the Public Art Commission, and the Utilities Advisory Commission. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Action Items At this time Council heard Agenda Item Numbers 10 and 11 concurrently. 10. Council Direction on Parking and Retail Program and Related Zoning Changes Needed for the new Downtown Parking Structure Located at Existing Surface Parking Lot D at 375 Hamilton Avenue. 11. Receive Results of a Downtown Parking Management Study and Provide Direction to Staff on Next Steps. Mayor Scharff: Now, we move to our two Action Items. Staff has asked that I take both of these items together. I'm going to do that; I'm going to call both "10" and "11." The way we'll do it is we'll have a Staff Report and then any public speakers. If anyone comes in—it's now 8:00—I am going to let anyone speak who comes in a little after 8:30 or so, if they're here to want to speak. I'll make that announcement as well. If you want to go ahead. TRANSCRIPT    Page 12 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  James Keene, City Manager: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. As I think everybody gets up, I just would preface this important conversation with, if you wouldn't mind, me just telling you a very brief story. When I was first in Berkeley as City Manager, I was at a dinner at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab with a bunch of folks. It was fascinating because I ended up being at a table with a bunch of interesting people. In the course of the conversation, I asked the first person who they were. They said, "I'm so-and-so. You might have heard of me. I won the Nobel Prize for" plutonium or something. There were three other Nobel Prize winners at the table. I thought, "This is incredible. Nobel Prize winners at Berkeley. What is that like, to win the Nobel Prize? How does your life change?" The first guy said, "It's the best thing in the world that happens to you. You get your own parking place and everything." I thought, "Everything comes down parking, even the Nobel Prize." With that, I'll turn it over to the Staff on this presentation. Josh Mello, Chief Transportation Official: Thank you, Jim. I'm Josh Mello. I'm the City's Chief Transportation Official. I'm joined this evening by Brad Eggleston, our Assistant Public Works Director, and Julie Dickson with Dickson Resources, a consulting firm which we engaged to conduct our Downtown parking management study. This evening, we're going to have a three-phase presentation for you. The first phase of the presentation will be conducted by Julie. She's going to give you an overview of some data collection, which occurred in 2016 and early 2017, around our Downtown parking occupancy and operation. She's also going to outline an intercept survey and some of the results from the public who uses our parking on a daily basis Downtown. We kicked off this Downtown parking management study back in early 2016. One of the first phases of it was an extensive data collection. She'll give you an overview of that. The second phase of the presentation is a presentation by the Public Works Department on the Downtown garage proposed to be located at Lot D at Waverley and Hamilton. Then, we'll cap if off with another presentation by Julie, which will outline some of the recommendations that are included in the Downtown parking management study. She'll explain how they all tie together to form a cohesive plan for us moving forward around Downtown parking. With that, I'll turn it over to Julie. She can dive right into the data collection efforts and the results from the first phase of the study. The study kicked off in early 2016, and immediately upon initiation we formed a stakeholder group that included Downtown business owners, property owners as well as business operators and Downtown residents and City Staff from various departments. I think we held a total of five stakeholder meetings throughout the process. There was a lot of coordination between different departments in the City. We thought Julie and her firm were best equipped to conduct the study given her background. She'll go over that in a little more detail. With that, I'll turn it over to Julie. Thank you. TRANSCRIPT    Page 13 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Julie Dickson, Dickson Resources Unlimited: Thank you, Josh. It was actually when we talk about the intercept surveys, we did a lot of "man on the street" type of interviews. We actually recruited more stakeholders during intercept surveys as well. We had some of your residents that got so intrigued and interested in the questions that we were asking them, that they actually asked to participate and became engaged in the stakeholder meetings, which we'll talk about here today. Just a little bit about Dickson Resources Unlimited. I've been working in the parking and transportation industry my entire career. It actually started when I was at UC Santa Barbara as a student, and I was recruited by the Sheriff's Department to become the very first parking enforcement officer for Isla Vista. It just so happened at the time, besides being the number one party school in America, we were also the most densely populated 1 square mile west of the Mississippi, and they hadn't done any parking enforcement. Basically, the lieutenant at the time handed me a ticket book and a bike and said, "Good luck." Now, many, many, many years later here I am, focused on parking as well. Also, throughout my career, some of you might be familiar with a project called SFpark. SFpark was the first federally funded program associated with congestion mitigation for on and off-street parking. I was actually one of the project managers for that program from the actual solicitation of the UTA grant as well as the implementation and managing all of the vendor programs and procurements that we did for the SFpark program. Dickson Resources actually started back in 2012. We've been working with municipalities all across the country. In fact, your program in particular was very unique in the fact that there were so many factors of introducing the potential of paid parking because of the fact that you have such a dense occupancy need. I've lived in the Bay Area for over 5 years. Having the firsthand experience, it was really enlightening to spend even more time on your City streets. Getting into what we talked about here in Palo Alto. I don't think it comes as any surprise because I believe you've been hearing about this three-legged stool approach when it comes to the approach towards the integrated parking strategy. Today, we're really going to talk a lot about the parking management and the parking supply aspect of it. Most importantly it all really relates back to the transportation demand reductions and the hope to fund some of those opportunities and some of those solutions that come along with those programs. The overall study objectives when we basically started this was to really look at your current parking utilization within the color zone areas. I'll show a map of the color zones here in a moment, but the focus truly was the Downtown parking and looking at what kind of turnover and occupancy you actually had as well as looking at some of the parking management strategies of how we could basically manage those parking spaces and getting into some of those longer-term recommendations for both on and off-street parking. As I mentioned and Josh said, we basically conducted data collection in May of TRANSCRIPT    Page 14 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  last year. We came back for September and October to ensure that we collected the data when you were really at what I'll call full performance, when school was in session, the university was basically in, and there really wasn't any kind of summer vacation schedules or anything like that. We collected data basically May, September, and October. We chose to collect data on Thursday and Saturday in order to show a clear representation of the utilization Downtown. At the same time, we actually went out and collected the data for the intercept surveys. The intercept surveys were a combination of us going into the storefronts and actually talking to the business owners as well as the employees. We also conducted on-the-street interviews, jogging along with some of your locals that were running off to work or running off to shop and asking them questions. We'll talk a little bit more about those questions as well. We also had an online survey that went along with that as well. Josh mentioned the stakeholder meetings. I have to tell you, you had a very active and engaged stakeholder group. In fact, I see some of them in our audience behind us. It was a very dynamic group, where we had a lot of conversation and a lot of debate about some of the solutioning that we're going to talk about here today. Again, I have to say we were able to draw in further participation as we went through the process. To the intercept surveys. The intercept surveys basically covered an array of questions, but it dealt with everything from how did you get Downtown; if you drove a car, how long did it take you to find a parking space; how easy was it to find a parking space; how did you know where to find a parking space; how long are you coming Downtown for; how long do you plan to park for. All of those types of questions were basically culled together so that what we could really, really identify was what the overall perception of parking and parking availability was as well as the ease of being able to take alternative forms of transportation to come Downtown. Now, let's talk about the actual data results. Overall, when we talk about the issues that were identified, it really comes down to the fact that we were looking at the core Downtown area, again in the color zones. What we were really looking at was just the overall capacity for those particular locations when we actually went out there and collected the overall data. Talking first about the Blue Zone. Before I even talk about this, let me talk a couple of things about some industry theory. There's actually parking theory. Not only do the Nobel Prize winners like to look for that available parking space, but when we talk about congestion, the basic threshold is 80-85 percent. When you hit an 80-85 percent occupancy rate, you're basically full. The overall goal—this goes back to the SFpark project—is where you're really looking to have 1-1.5 parking spaces available per block face, so that you basically have that ongoing turnover for parking spaces. When we start to talk about 80 percent, 85 percent, if you're at that capacity, you're basically full. As we start to look at your numbers, you can actually see the blue zone is actually right below those thresholds. You can see they're right at that TRANSCRIPT    Page 15 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  number where you really need to establish that concern overall. When we start to get into your lime and into your coral zones, this is really your core Downtown area. This is where you have your highest occupancy. On the left side, you can actually see the data that was collected on Thursday. On the right side, you can see the data that was collected on Saturday. We did four data collection routes, which included morning, afternoon, midafternoon, and early evening. What you can see is consistently, once you get past that morning hour threshold, you are basically full all day long and into the evening hours. It is very consistent, as you can see, in the lime zone as well as you get into the coral zone. I want to highlight importantly that on Saturdays you do not have time regulations or time restrictions on your Saturday parking. You can see that the density is absolutely there when you talk about your on-street parking. The other color zone is the purple zone. In a purple zone, still on the weekday, on Thursday, you can see that you have the density and occupancy happening Downtown. Again on Saturday and into the evening hours, it is ongoing and continuous. I don't think it's any surprise to all of you sitting here that you definitely have an occupancy issue in Downtown Palo Alto. Getting into your off-street, hourly occupancy spaces, you can see that consistently on both Thursdays and Saturdays, regardless of the morning hours, all throughout the rest of the day, you are beyond full by what would be considered the industry standard. Getting into your permit parking times, you can see that your permit areas are basically below the threshold and below average, but this comes in when we're going to talk about the recommendations. You have a parking permit that is definitely below industry standards. We did some comparable cities analysis. We can actually see that your permit rates are very much on the lower side. In fact, you are the lowest in the region. What we've identified through some of the interviews and some of the happenstance comments that some of your stakeholders have made is that, because your permit is so affordable, there are some folks that basically are going to keep a hold of that because it's such a cheap rate. Even if they only come Downtown maybe once or twice per month, it's actually more effective for them to have a guaranteed space in one of the permitted areas. You can see that on Saturday day the occupancy is well below the standard because typically people are here Monday through Friday. That's going to definitely tie in when we talk about the overall recommendations. We just wanted to show you some of the heat mapping. The colors aren't really that clear on the larger screen. Hopefully, they show up a little bit better on your closer screen. The colors are really to indicate the density of parking. This is the overall daily average. We want to show you that there's still quite a bit of red, but this definitely accounts for the overall 3-month study, and it incorporates mornings. You can actually see that there's still a lot of red but, when we really start to talk about the afternoons, where we talk about your real density, you can see the abundance of red. To just really show TRANSCRIPT    Page 16 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  you again, those are your thresholds of where you are basically overfull at this point. Into the evening hours, it's still there. Currently, your parking rules for time limits do not extend into the evening. You can see that the folks are basically coming. They're coming Downtown, which is a great thing and we want to continue to preserve that and make sure that continues to happen. Some of the key takeaways, when we talked about the actual heat maps, is that the density is definitely in the core area. When we talk about the recommendations, we're going to talk about a tiered zone, but I'll save that for the later times. When we talk about occupancy in the hourly spaces, the Civic Center is consistently full. The Cowper-Webster lot definitely has lower thresholds. We think that's actually tied to wayfinding and signage which, again, we'll talk about when we get into the recommendations as well. Overall, the fact is you again have a very dense location. The City has actually implemented quite a few ideas including the valet parking in the garages and other solutions to try to make it more efficient. Some of the items we'll get into when we talk about recommendations will hopefully help mitigate those ideas further. Some of the other ideas that were identified as we basically went out there and did data collection. The way that your color zone structure is set up, you can only stay for the time limit within that designated color zone for that day. We were able to identify, because of the way we did data collection, that you have an abundance of folks that are actually hopscotching from color zone to color zone throughout the day. On average, it's about 300 vehicles that are hopscotching throughout the day. It's actually quite a significant number when you talk about that kind of impact that that many folks are out there basically moving their cars to try to take advantage of the time limits. That also ties into the fact that the wait list you have for the permit zones makes it so that employees that are hopscotching aren’t able to obtain those permits as well. That was one of the bigger complaints that we received when we did the intercept survey. I can tell you from personal experience— I am a parking industry expert, as they say—I on my first visit to Palo Alto got two tickets on the same day. I thought I was going to tear my hair out. Because of the way my license plate was captured the first time, I did not realize that I was in the same color zone at the same time. To tell you some one that does this for a living, I didn't understand the rules the first time I came here. If I can't figure it out, I hope that maybe is a statement to your average visitor as well. Getting into the wayfinding and aspects of being able to clearly find parking, I think that's something that you're going to see is going to tie into the recommendations. The areas where people could potentially park, we want to be sure to educate and inform those folks to find that available parking. I'll return the floor. Mr. Mello: Thank you, Julie. We're going to turn it over to Brad from the Public Works Department. TRANSCRIPT    Page 17 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Brad Eggleston, Public Works Assistant Director: Good evening, Council. I'm Brad Eggleston, Assistant Director of Public Works. Now, we're going to shift gears a little bit and talk about the first project that's trying to add parking supply, the new Downtown parking garage. With me also here but not sitting up here because of our little bit of a crowded situation is Holly Boyd, who's our Senior Engineer in Public Works working on this project, as well as several members of our design team. Just a summary of the brief presentation, the status, options and costs that we've looked at, some analysis of mechanical parking that we did for this parking garage, public facility zoning issues, and then the Staff recommendation. Just to orient you, again, to the status of this project, not going too far back in time. We had done a feasibility study in 2014 with the Council kind of settling on this site. Last September, we did a Request for Proposals for the design team on the project. We brought the design contract to Council in December of last year. Similar to what we've discussed on the California Avenue parking garage last week, the first task for our design team was to look at several options for the garage with a goal of coming back to the Council and essentially finalizing the program before we move into the design and environmental review. Looking forward, once we have those decisions, we'll be jumping right into the EIR scoping and ARB process with a goal of certifying the EIR next February. It's a little behind the process on our other parking garage. Completing the final design later next year, and then actually completing construction of the garage winter 2020. That's a little confusing sometimes. What we mean is very early in 2020, not very late in 2020. This is just a view of the existing Lot D. Kind of to the right of the lot, that street is Hamilton. Up towards the right top, the cross street is Waverley. Next to the lot, the red terra cotta roof is the Post Office across the street. The large building down to the bottom left is the AT&T building. Just to orient you briefly. Kicking off this project, we looked at the three options shown in this table and that were described in the Staff Report. A little context. When the Infrastructure Plan was adopted in 2014, the goal for this project in reference to Lot D was to add an additional 214 net spaces or so to the 86 spaces that exist on the lot. We wanted to have a garage with a total of about 300 spaces to be able to do that. That was envisioned at that time to have a total project budget of $13 million. Option A in this table is really just the base option that was in the feasibility study from 2014. It doesn't have basement levels. It's five levels above. In fact, all three of these options are five aboveground levels. It doesn't have retail. You see the project costs and costs per stall. Option B was an option where we started to look at adding retail along the Waverley frontage. Similar to the discussion last week, important thing to note is that at least with the amount of retail that we showed in this option, which is about 3,800 square feet, you're required to provide 16 parking spaces. It kind of takes away from the net addition. You'll see that, although we've lost some total TRANSCRIPT    Page 18 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  parking stalls here, 12 of them in fact, because of providing the retail space, the net difference of the spaces we're adding is even a greater difference at a net of 189. This is the option that has the retail. The one other thing I wanted to say about that is in looking at this we asked our consultants to look at the maximum retail space that you could include on that ground floor. We don't necessarily mean to propose that's what we'd go with. Even recently, we've been talking to some adjacent property owners who kind of looked at that and said the sweet spot for retail in this kind of setting would really be more on the 1,500 square feet and maybe you'd want to skinny that up. In the end, this is not designed yet, and that could change, thereby adding more parking and less of the need for parking in the retail. Option C, we wanted to look at what would be the cost and how many spaces would we gain on this site if we were to include a basement level. This is essentially adding a basement level in addition to the five aboveground levels. You see there that we end up with a total amount of spaces of 351 with a net addition being 265. This Option C doesn't include the retail. For comparison to the base option, you can see really what we're doing is adding an additional 48 parking spaces at a considerable cost, though, with the project cost increasing to over 22 million. As you read in the Staff Report, the Staff recommendation is Option B, where we would have five aboveground levels, not have a basement, and have some retail component. Essentially in reaching that conclusion, we wanted to continue the existing retail that exists along Waverley as an urban design best practice. We were interested in looking to see could we add additional parking with the basement option. Looking at that, it didn't seem very cost effective. When you look at those 48 incremental spaces you gain, for those spaces the additional cost nets to be a little over $85,000 per additional space. Even though you would see a cost per stall for the overall garage that's not that much higher, you're paying a lot for those additional spaces that are in the basement. This slide is just providing a layout of Option B retail that we looked at. I didn't want to go into great detail about it, except to show that on the bottom right, the shaded pink area is the retail, the 3,800 square feet. You can see it goes quite far back into the garage layout. At the top of the retail, you see a smaller square. That's a bike storage area of about 500 square feet that we're working on trying to incorporate. One other thing I would point out is at the top and to the right of this L-shape you see the narrow tan area. That's pedestrian access that leads to Waverley and along the back towards CVS. This is an area where you probably saw letters from the adjacent property owners discussing plans they may have in the future to redevelop those sites and the need to provide access to most likely underground parking. We've discussed this, and we do think there are ways we can work with our design team and those property owners to try to make sure that we can provide for future access to parking. The mechanical parking. In this garage, we did consider mechanical parking originally as TRANSCRIPT    Page 19 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  one of the options. We haven't laid it out in that other table because there were reasons we found out, problems with it, that we're not proposing to move forward. I did want to talk about this. We evaluated mechanical parking lifts, the puzzle lift-type systems, for Options B and C, the retail and the basement. What we were able to find is on the ground level for the retail option, that would be the space where we could net an additional 17 parking spaces on the ground level at a cost of about $1.1 million, $65,000 a space for those additional spaces, the incremental cost. We found that to be similar to the overall cost of spaces for the garage. We thought having those mechanical puzzle lift systems on that ground floor, where people are walking around and it's also the area that people are driving through the garage to access the ramps, probably didn't add that much value given that it was only 17 spaces we were talking about. By the way, I have to point out there's a mistake in the Staff Report where we discuss this. We said 27 spaces; it should be 17. We also looked at what if you were to have a basement level where you'd sort of maximize the use of these in-pit puzzle lift systems and could really increase the number of parking spaces. What we found is we could net an additional 54,000 parking spaces … Male: Fifty-four. Mr. Eggleston: Fifty-four. We're going to go down 1,000 levels. Excuse me. Fifty-four spaces at an additional cost of $3.4 million, which again that's $63,000 a space, which is kind of in the zone of what we seem to be expecting to pay for spaces in this garage. The problem with that and why we didn't want to propose that is that necessitates that first you build the entire basement level, which was the $85,000 per space spaces in the basement. Also, we had some discussion about this last week. They are semi-automatic, but they do require some training, which is part of the reason they're not recommended for high peak-hour volume facilities. In discussions with our consultants, they're not typically included in public parking facilities. They're being used more and more often in private developments, especially residential where there's some relatively small shortage in parking that can be addressed through the systems. Since we're talking about these, if people haven't seen them, I just wanted to give you some idea of what they look like. It's kind of like a cage that opens and allows you to drive onto the platform. Then, it closes and places the car either above or below where there's an available spot. The other recommendation, other than the program for the garage, that we're discussing tonight is revising the zoning for the public facility zoning. There are a number of ways the PF, public facility, zoning does not accommodate public parking garages. We've listed some of them here. We discussed before the issue of 35-foot height limit near residential uses. That's actually not a concern for this garage. We don't have a residential district. There's TRANSCRIPT    Page 20 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  limiting site coverage to 30 percent. In this instance, the design work we've done so far indicates site coverage of about 81 percent, to illustrate that difference. The requirement for 1:1 floor area ratios, the proposal here to have five aboveground level is about a 4:1 floor area ratio. Various requirements for setbacks, the PF Code would require a 20-foot setback. What we're currently showing in our layouts is a 2-foot setback, which is consistent with all of the other buildings that are along Hamilton here. The Staff recommendation is to finalize the program to proceed with the preliminary design and environmental review for the option that has retail, the 291 parking spaces, and with five levels of aboveground parking as well as directing Staff to proceed with the revisions we've discussed to the PF Zoning Ordinance. That concludes our presentation. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Mr. Mello. Thank you, Brad. Mayor Scharff: You're coming back to your presentation? Mr. Mello: Yes. We're going to go through the recommendations from the Downtown parking management study very quickly, and then we'll have a Q&A session. Ms. Dickson: Now, I'm back talking about the parking recommendations. We're going to actually go through each of these individually as we go through these slides. One of the things I really want to highlight is the fact that the recommendations that are tied in here are basically all interrelated. They're very much intertwined. It's not a one-off; it's basically a comprehensive solution that we're recommending here. Everything that you're seeing here is really about improving the overall experience of traveling to Downtown, whether it be via alternative transportation or via car. We're trying to facilitate access and make it more efficient and effective. That's the reason why during the previous presentation I tried to highlight the issue of occupancy and the utilization opportunity of trying to achieve 85 percent or lower so that we can try to encourage that turnover and transition so that you have available parking spaces. One of the things that we don't know today is how many people don't currently come Downtown because of the parking experience. One of those numbers that we really can't forecast is—we always hear folks say, "You're going to do this, and people aren't going to come Downtown." We truly don't know how many people aren't currently coming Downtown because they can't find parking. There's always that pros and cons aspect of it, but this overall opportunity is really to try to improve the overall experience as we start to talk about some of these solutions. One of the things that's important is TRANSCRIPT    Page 21 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  we're going to talk about what we call a parking road map. Not everything we can do can happen overnight. This is something that's incremental, and the process really starts tonight. The fact that when we start to talk about outreach and engagement, nothing in parking happens in a vacuum. This is a dynamic process. Everything that we're going to talk about today, there has to be a public outreach component tied in with anything that you do with parking, whether it be messaging, signage, rate structures, permit increases. Any of the details we're going to talk about today, there's absolutely an active engagement program that goes along with that. That's something that's tied in with everything we're going to talk about tonight. Getting into the first part of the solution, I think I might need the other. There we go. The complete parking management solution(CPMS). This really comes back to what we call the CPMS, which ties in everything associated with the Downtown parking program. It makes for an efficient management tool for the City and City Staff to be able to run and manage the overall parking solutions that go into play. The very first part of that has to do with permit management. You have a substantial permit program already existing today. We want to make it customer-friendly, make it efficient and effective and make it easy to use. Some of that comes into the first component when we start to talk about this complete parking management solution. Also a part of that is compliance. When we talk about compliance, that means parking enforcement. It's the tools that are used to manage the parking enforcement, whether it be the citation handhelds or whether it be the ability to issue warning notices and using the various technologies associated with that to ensure compliance. No matter what you do, parking regulations have to be enforced, again whether it is enforcement tickets or whether it be warning notices. That's an important aspect of this comprehensive parking management tool. A real focus on customer efficiency is the tie-in to that overall management system. Now, let's talk about paid parking. I'm talking about how to basically implement paid parking in the Downtown area. Our recommendation is that you are going to implement paid parking for both on and off-street, for your street locations and your off-street including parking lots, surface lots as well as garages. What you're going to see in this next slide is being able to replace the existing color zones with paid parking and then introducing what we'll call a tiered parking rate structure. What that has to do with is—I'll just go ahead and move to this slide. Based upon the demand that you saw from the different color zones, from the different occupancy rates, what we're suggesting is to basically divide the Downtown area into different tier zones. If you're parking in the most dense locations, where you see Tier 1, you actually would pay a higher rate for your hourly occupancy whether it be on or off-street. As you move from the inner core to the outer core, you'll see the opportunity to decrease those different tier rates. What you see here are simply proposed rates. These are not necessarily the way to go moving TRANSCRIPT    Page 22 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  forward. It's just a starting point so that we can start to look at some potential forecasts as we talk about how this could end up impacting the actual Downtown area. Importantly too is that when we talk about this rate structure, you'll notice Tier 2 and Tier 3 are currently structured at the same rate zone structure. What we're saying is establish the tiers currently at the beginning, even though the rates may be the same. What you want to do is have a dynamic and flexible solution where you're defining your tiers today. It gives you the ability to—maybe Tier 3 ends up becoming cheaper, Tier 2 becomes a midpoint, and Tier 1 ends up becoming the most expensive potentially. This is all to allow your City Staff the resources and the ability to be flexible, but you want to design a system that can be adaptable with the future and with the growth of Palo Alto as well. I also want to highlight the daily maximum for the off-street locations. The intent is to also—we're going to recommend putting in what's called a PARC system, which access control systems, into the garages. Right now, it's a little bit complicated if you try to park in the garage if you are looking to stay all day and how to attain a permit to park all day. What we're saying is you pay for use. Most of you probably, if you go to a location today, pull a ticket when you pull into the garage, and you end up paying for the time used. That's what we're looking for with establishing a daily maximum of $24. I have to identify that all of the rate structures, while this is a starting point, all ties into play with the recommendations for your permit program. One of the things you have to do when you talk about industry standards is you want the off-street parking to be affordable so that the people coming to park for the day, you don't want them circling your Downtown streets and traffic congestion. You want them to immediately go to a surface lot or go to a garage where they can park more affordably and stay for a longer period of time. If they're going to come down, grab a bite to eat, run into a shop, park at one of the locations on-street, use your time, spend your money, go, open up that space so somebody else can come and do the same thing. The intent is for your longer-term parkers to park in the off-street locations. As well, you have to find a balance of what that daily maximum is compared to what your permit rate is too. There's a whole mathematical equation that goes into trying to figure out what the rates are. It's a little bit complicated, but it definitely ties into the fact that you want your permits to be affordable, so that you can encourage people who are going to park Downtown can have an affordable rate. If you are going to come down just for the day and you're going to stay for the term, we want to make sure you're parking in those off-street garage locations as well as the surface lots. We're going to talk a little bit about the technology. It's a little bit harder to see on the larger screen. What we're also encouraging as you implement paid parking on-street, we're recommending that you use smart parking technology that allows you to pay with credit cards as well as coins as well as mobile payment. You want to make it as easy to use as possible for any TRANSCRIPT    Page 23 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  opportunity to pay. We're also suggesting along the inner core you would actually implement single-space meters, and along the outer perimeter you would use pay stations. There's a couple of reasons for this. Number one is budget. The single-space meters can prove to be expensive, and we're talking about quite a few parking spaces. Importantly, it's an aesthetic issue as well. When we're talking about that footprint of all of that street furniture, there could be a pole at every single parking space We're suggesting for your outer perimeter locations where maybe there's not as much use, you potentially consider the pay stations that look a little bit like this. The meters on the left side, I think anywhere in the Bay Area you would probably become familiar with. They're very prominent and very popular. On the right side are just some examples of what we call multi- space pay stations. Now, we have another thing, not to make this too complicated. When you start to put in pay stations, you have the option of going what's called pay by space, pay and display, or also pay by license plate. When we talk about pay by license plate, that's something that we're suggesting as we start to talk about your permit program. A lot of agencies are going into what we'll call a digital permit or what we'll call a virtual permit, where your license plate actually becomes your permit number. You can actually manage the compliance from license plate recognition technology as a consideration as well. These are all factors that don't have to be decided on today. It just gives you options and flexibility for that parking road map as the system deploys. Pay by space is very much popular when we start to talk about the parking paid technology. Now, talking a little bit about mobile payment. Any type of solution that you put in place when it comes to paid parking solutions, you need to have a mobile payment solution. All of your surrounding communities currently have these. I would encourage that this be something that is implemented from the get-go. It's a customer convenience and makes it easy for the people to pay. It also gives, if you establish a policy, the opportunity for people to extend their parking time limits as well. That is a policy decision that's not necessarily for discussion today. It's a very user-friendly application that is very well used throughout the various jurisdictions locally. Active monitoring. As I said at the beginning, it's very important to consider that everything we're talking about today is meant to be dynamic. It's something that will continue to grow and evolve as your community continues to develop. It's important that you continue to look at your occupancy to determine what your rates are and what they should be. I mentioned the Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 zone. The reason why is because you might find that you're not having the occupancy in the Tier 3 zone, so maybe it's an opportunity to potentially lower the rates. Whereas, maybe the density in the Downtown hasn't been improved and could be an opportunity to increase the rates. When you really start to look at the SFpark Study, what a lot of folks don't know is there are substantial parts of San Francisco where the TRANSCRIPT    Page 24 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  rates came down as a result of the occupancy and the density studies that were done along with the program. I know it may not seem like that for those of you that park in San Francisco, because it can be expensive. The reason why you look at the occupancy studies is to make sure that you're looking at the rates and what are appropriate for those particular locations to encourage your thresholds and the turnover that we're looking for. Now, let's talk about permits. I already mentioned at the onset that your permits are definitely on the lower side. When we went and looked at the comparable cities and other agencies in the Bay Area, you're definitely on the lower side. I can't emphasize that enough. Your permits are very cheap. The one thing that we really want to push is also looking at the increases to your parking permit program, but also continuing the reduced price for your low-income employees. That's actually a model that you all use and, I have to say, that we've taken onto other jurisdictions. It's very important that you be able to provide affordable permits for your service workers. Without your service workers, obviously it can have a real big impact on your Downtown. One of the things we also got from the intercept surveys was being able to offer frequent payment options. Right now, they have to buy the permits for an annual basis. A suggestion of allowing them to buy monthly and/or quarterly permits, we thought, would make it more inviting for some of your service workers and make it more affordable. We thought that was really important. The other aspect that was discussed throughout the stakeholder groups was also making the permits Downtown consistent with the cost of using the alternative transportation, like Caltrain permits, and make them be comparable in order to further encourage people to use alternative forms of transportation. Off-street infrastructure. I had mentioned the proposal is to put in what's called a PARC system or Parking Axis Revenue Control System. It's basically gating your garages. With the number of spaces you have, your parking enforcement officers have to walk the garages and verify every single vehicle. It's absolutely inefficient. I have to tell you that your enforcement officers are very efficient. Like I told you, I got two tickets in one day. I have to say to make it a more effective program and also make it more customer friendly by being able to pull a ticket or flash a code or an access control card, it makes it very user- friendly. It also makes it more efficient for your permit holders too. I think this really ties in with some of the overall solutioning that's coming to the City as we start to talk about some of the different open fare networks and being able to tie this in with the regional transit cards and things like that. Those were all factors that were considered in trying to look at possible customer conveniences and solutions. Parking guidance and wayfinding. What I highlighted at the onset was being able to encourage folks and being able to identify where parking is available. It's something we know the City is currently working on. Being able to establish a parking brand may sound silly. When you come into a jurisdiction and you have a consistent message TRANSCRIPT    Page 25 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  or a consistent sign, that shows you where parking is available, it just makes it very easy. Again, being a first-time visitor to really hanging out in Downtown, it's not necessarily intuitive when you come Downtown where to find parking. Some of the items that have been identified are some parking guidance signs, when you come into the main arterials, to define the directions of where parking is available. You're also going to have smart systems in place with the parking access control systems that are going to be able to tell you available parking. Not only can you do this via signage, but there's also a number of applications as well as interactive mapping programs that will be able to guide me to where parking is. I know you've heard a lot over this year about first mile/last mile. We want people to plan their trips before they even leave home, so they can consider, if there's not a lot of parking, maybe jumping on the train or jumping on the bus or grab an alternative form of transportation Downtown. This is all tied into the wayfinding and signage, and it's really an important part of the overall solution. Now, let's talk about enforcement. Not everybody likes to talk about enforcement. In fact, a lot of folks think that's a horrible aspect of parking. I have to emphasize the fact that enforcement is a necessity when we talk about anything parking related. When I talk about enforcement, I always like to use the term compliance. The reason we have rules is to ensure that people comply with the rules. To make sure we're having consistent enforcement of the rules is absolutely important. We are suggesting that you should extend your parking enforcement services into the evenings and into the weekends. You all saw the statistics with the blue graphs and the different colors, etc. You have a parking challenge on the weekends. People are coming Downtown, which is amazing. We want to make sure we're enforcing the rules and make sure people aren't violating or parking in red zones or double parking or blocking fire hydrants. We do encourage you to extend those rules into the evening hours. We think it's really important that you consider that. Also, the technology that your enforcement officers are carrying, it's going to be very important that there are real-time integrations with the infrastructure that we're talking about. It'll make them more efficient in the field. I talked earlier about the license plate recognition technology. This will be an efficiency tool that will help your enforcement officers in managing and monitoring the Downtown parking rules and regulations. Centralized parking operation. One of the challenges we had, as we ran this parking study over this last almost 8 months or so, is you don't have a centralized parking operation in Palo Alto. It's something we are recommending, that you bring the program under one department, one centralized group. Right now, it's fragmented throughout the City; everybody has a piece of the pie or is involved in the operation. To be as successful as you all have been to date is amazing considering the amount and volume that you do Downtown. In order to be effective for the long term, having that centralized program and working from the best TRANSCRIPT    Page 26 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  practices approach is going to be essential for the long-term success of your parking operation. Parking isn't going to disappear tomorrow. I know we hear a lot about autonomous vehicles and things like but, from all the industry standards, we're still 20-30-plus years away. I know you guys are the tech center. I'm sure if it happens anywhere, it's probably going to happen here first. In the meantime, I don't know about you, but I'm not giving my car up tomorrow. I don't think a lot of people are. We really need to be considerate of that when we start to talk about the solutioning, because we need to plan for today and not necessarily just thinking about what's going to happen in 20-30 years. A couple of items we wanted to outline here. When it came to recommendations, what I said at the beginning is this does not happen overnight. The outreach program is absolutely tied into this. What you can see here is over the next 2 years the solutioning that we've outlined and how to roll it out and the timelines to implement it. Another aspect that I should talk about is parking technology, especially the meters. One of the ideas that we shared with the groups was to test and pilot some of the technology. The vendors that are out there will bring technology to you. We can set it up so that the City, the community, yourselves can come out and use the technology, see that you're comfortable with the technology. I always like to explain that all the machines you saw can all basically do the same thing. They can all accept payment for parking. It's about the user interface, the display screen, the buttons, and what you all like for your preferences. We really encourage that type of evaluation process occur throughout this timeline that we've identified. It's something you'll see be an ongoing process throughout the structure. This is just a summary of the overall recommendations. I will let Josh take it from there. Mr. Mello: Thank you, Julie. We do have representatives from the four departments that operate parking in Palo Alto. We have Planning and Community Environment, Administrative Services Department, Public Works as well as the Police Department available for your questions. That concludes our presentation. Mayor Scharff: Thanks. I think we should have quick round of questions maybe, no more than 3 minutes. Council Member DuBois: This is a really big item. Can we split up the garage and the report? Mayor Scharff: I think when we come to Mmotions, we should split it up. Let's do a round of questions on both, and then we can split it if you want. I want the public to then speak, and then we can come back. We'll do the TRANSCRIPT    Page 27 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  garage first, and then we'll do the parking. You'll have other times to ask questions too. Do you want to go first, Tom? Council Member DuBois: No (inaudible). Mayor Scharff: Lydia, do you have any questions? Council Member Kou: I see that the garage is going to be 49‘10”. Even with the solar panels, once it goes up, when it goes up, if it goes up, is it going to still be under 50” or at 50”? Where is that going to be at? Mr. Eggleston: With a solar panel canopy, it would be about 7 feet higher than the 49 feet, 10 inches. Council Member Kou: It's still under 50’? Mr. Eggleston: That would put it at 55-57 feet at the top of a solar canopy. Council Member Kou: The garage, is that going to be—does the parking assessment district folks who paid into it get any space in there? Mr. Eggleston: No one gets any—no. I'd say the answer is no. The apportionment of the spaces between permit spaces and hourly spaces would be at the discretion of our parking program. Council Member Kou: We're just talking about the garage right now, nothing about enforcement, etc.? Mr. Eggleston: That's correct. Council Member Kou: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: First, in the garage, I might have missed it. Do we have designated spaces, even scattered and tucked in corners, for motorcycles and scooters in there? I'm thinking of even experiences in places like our Cal. Ave. garages and Mountain View where there are places that aren't officially designated but are generally seen as okay for people to squeeze their two-wheeled vehicles. Mr. Eggleston: We haven't designated anything yet in these layouts. Council Member Wolbach: As far as what Staff's really looking for tonight, when it comes back to us for Motions later, how much direction are you really looking for and how much detail? Should we basically just be TRANSCRIPT    Page 28 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  providing comments later with our thoughts about things we'd be looking for when this comes back? I don't want to over-prescribe, but I don't want to miss an opportunity. Mr. Keene: (inaudible) different based on the garage and the parking management study as far as specificity. Mr. Eggleston: I think we're looking for more specificity on the garage in terms of recommending one of the options. We're recommending Option B. Council Member Wolbach: Would it be possible to do Option B plus a basement garage with mechanical lifts? Mr. Eggleston: Yes, it would. Council Member Wolbach: Would it be possible to designate that basement and have that be separate for long-term permits, so it's not for people who are just coming in for the day but maybe the monthly, quarterly, annual passes? Mr. Mello: As part of the new garage construction, we would install the automated parking guidance system, the single-space system, which actually allows us to change the parking space designation in real-time. If not a lot of permit holders showed up one particular day, we could actually release some permit spaces in real-time for hourly parkers. Council Member Wolbach: Would it be possible to have—what would the implications be of preserving the 2 or 3-hour time limit for Zone 1 but not including a time limit for Zone 2 or especially Zone 3 if we wanted to allow people to do what you described in the report as pay to stay? Basically, what would the negatives to that be? Mr. Mello: Julie can talk a little bit about that. I'll say that our current Staff recommendation in regards to the Downtown Parking Management Study is that Council direct us to work with the Planning and Transportation Commission to refine these recommendations and further engage in public communications and community engagement to help refine those and discuss exactly those type of modifications or refinements. Julie can talk to specific impacts. Ms. Dickson: Pay to stay was debated quite, I'll say, aggressively during our stakeholder meetings. One of the thoughts that came back was folks in your community would be willing to pay a premium to stay. It might actually inhibit those that maybe couldn't afford that premium to allow them those parking spaces. The fear was, if you allow pay to stay, meaning you literally TRANSCRIPT    Page 29 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  pay the premium for parking in that on-street space, you wouldn't encourage the utilization or turnover that we're looking for in a Downtown core. That space will now be occupied throughout the entire day. Let's just say that space was in front of Joe's Coffee Shop and I chose to pay to stay there all day, then Joe's Coffee Shop won't experience that opportunity to turn that parking space over throughout the day. Also, there might be a community member who necessarily couldn't afford to pay to stay, and it might not encourage others to park Downtown. It was something not the entire stakeholder group agreed upon. Some of the folks said let's pay to stay, let's get the money, let's make it happen. What we are looking to do is encourage the space turnover and to look at that commerce and opportunity to make it fair and equitable to everybody. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Brad, thank you for your mechanical garage information. I appreciate that. I want to go to your parking options considered and look at the price. Council Member Wolbach just asked you about the basement. If we were to do Option C with a basement and retail, what is that coming out to both in project costs and in cost per stall? While you do the math on that, let me ask the other question. Any idea of the price for putting in this incredible, whiz bang parking option type of arrangement with flashing lights and everything else imaginable? It sounds great, but I'm wondering what the price tag is. Mr. Mello: Our latest estimate for the automated parking guidance system was $2 million, but that just includes construction and installation costs. There are soft costs like software. There may be wiring required in the garages. The last time we brought it to you, our estimate was about $2 million. That's for the single-space system. Vice Mayor Kniss: How about the parking meters? Ms. Dickson: I don't have the numbers in front of me today. We actually created a financial modeling workbook. We're going to let Josh look at the sheet he brought here today. The financial modeling workbook allows the City to plug-in the various numbers if they went pay stations versus single space. From a ballpark perspective to equip the entire Downtown area, we're probably just under $1 million. I'm going to guess about that number. If Josh sees anything different the sheet,--that's probably on the higher end. That should cover you. There are some ongoing fees associated with that as well. That should cover you for the entire Downtown area. TRANSCRIPT    Page 30 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Vice Mayor Kniss: For around $3 million, you really move into the technical age, right? Ms. Dickson: Right. Vice Mayor Kniss: Brad? Mr. Eggleston: I would estimate that we'd add about $1 million to the cost of Option C, bringing that to $23.5 million. That could vary somewhat depending on … Vice Mayor Kniss: That's to put retail in? Mr. Eggleston: That's to have retail along with the basement, yes. Vice Mayor Kniss: If the retail were to make some money, wouldn't that offset some of this or not? Mr. Eggleston: That's right; it would. I think we estimated the retail could bring in net operating income of about $160,000 a year if rented at market rates. That would be assuming the 3,800-square-foot space, which I was saying we might want to reconsider. Vice Mayor Kniss: Probably is too big. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thank you. I've got a couple of really low-level questions about the garage and a couple of really high-level ones about the plan. Do you know how tall is the AT&T building next door to that lot? Mr. Eggleston: We took some approximate measures, about 60 feet. Council Member Filseth: Sixty feet, and that's at the very highest point. There's that one sort of spur that sticks up a little bit. Mr. Eggleston: I think the highest point is higher than 60 feet, maybe like 4 feet higher than that. Council Member Filseth: Right now, next to Tai Pan where the garage would go, where that walkway would go, there's a great big tree. Would that tree have to go or can that stay? Looks like it's where the walkway is. Holly Boyd, Public Works Senior Engineer: I think there's about three trees on existing Lot D. They would all need to go. TRANSCRIPT    Page 31 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Council Member Filseth: Finally, one of my Colleagues asked a question about the potential solar canopy. Is there also an elevator at the top, and how high does that go, if there is one? Mr. Eggleston: There is, and that would be about 8 feet I believe. Council Member Filseth: Then, it would be about 57 feet to the top of the elevator. On the parking plan, one of the things I noticed. We got sort of a mix of meters in some places and pay spaces in others. I think all our natural inclination is this thing, to really get acceptance, has got to be really, really simple, as you pointed out. Is it too complicated to mix all these different kinds or should we just pick one and put it everywhere? Ms. Dickson: It really does come down to community preference. In some cases it becomes an aesthetic issue, having the single-space meters per space. I will say that the opportunity to make it easy is definitely single- space everywhere … Council Member Filseth: That's what I would have guessed. Ms. Dickson: … as long as the community is acceptable to this. Vice Mayor, to get to your question, when we talked about the cost of the infrastructure, we pulled up the workbook. To do a hybrid solution where you would have the mix, we're right at $1.2 million, right below that cost for all of the solution with a mix of it. If we went single-space only, we're just over $1.5 million. It's absolutely feasible. When we talk about the long-term, ongoing costs, it pretty much balances out. In the end, pay stations do tend to be slightly cheaper for the long term because of the maintenance aspects and things like that. To make it easy, without a doubt that's the case. In San Francisco in particular, there was a location where we had put pay stations in. Within a year, we went back and put the single-space back in because it was easier. Council Member Filseth: I was going to say it's single-space everywhere in the city, isn't it? Ms. Dickson: Absolutely. Mayor Scharff: You're done. Council Member Filseth: I've got a couple more. Mayor Scharff: You're done. Council Member Filseth: I can't be done. TRANSCRIPT    Page 32 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: You can come back. Mr. Mello: If I could add to that. That's the on-street equipment. The off- street equipment is estimated to be about an additional $650,000. That would be the gates and the revenue collection equipment for the garages. ASD may be able to talk a little bit more about this. It's not a simple calculation. There's a lot of other moving parts, like the cost of enforcement, the wayfinding signage. There's a whole host of other costs that need to be analyzed when we look at all of these recommendations. Council Member Tanaka: My question is similar to Council Member Wolbach's question. Having low-cost or free parking is actually important. One of the things I wanted to ask is if you guys didn't put in license plate readers, could you implement a system, let's say for Tier 1, where the first 2 hours are free, and then after that they have to pay. If they don't pay, they get a ticket even if they move somewhere else. Is that possible? Ms. Dickson: I will say that anything is possible. The vendors will tell you technology can be developed. It becomes an issue of management, the frequency of enforcing that and being able to manage it. The technology is not perfect. When we talk about license plate recognition technology simply for on-street, we're probably talking about a mid-90s level of accuracy, if that. When you start to talk about those types of drivers, is it possible? Yes, but it will not be a perfect system. The one challenge we have in parking is the folks that try to beat the system, just like you currently have the folks that are doing the hopscotching from zone to zone. It would be absolutely challenging to try to offer that type of opportunity with how you modeled your off-street rates. If you're wanting things like that, a lower rate for the first hour or potentially the first hour is free … Council Member Tanaka: I guess the intent is to keep the friction low. We do have Stanford Shopping Center and other areas where there's retail and it's free parking, where the first couple of hours are free. If we have LPRs, we should be able to know—let's say we parked in—again, they just move their car. We should not have to worry about the four color system. Mr. Mello: I think the answer is it would be easier to do that in the garages than it would be in the lots and the on-street parking with current technology. Council Member Tanaka: Second question. Did you guys look at having mechanical lifts throughout the whole garage versus just the ground floor and basement? TRANSCRIPT    Page 33 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mr. Eggleston: No, we didn't do that, because that would require greatly increasing the floor-to-ceiling heights. Council Member Tanaka: It depends on what kind of system. Did you only look at puzzle lifts or did you look at other systems as well? Mr. Eggleston: We looked at puzzle lifts. Are you referring to the fully robotic garages? Council Member Tanaka: Yeah. I've seen a lot of them where—I think the last garage we looked at only had 10 percent of the volume of the garage being cars, or may 11 percent of the garage being cars. If you pack them a lot closer together, you could get much higher density, but you can't build it the same way you build a regular garage. Mr. Eggleston: Right. What we did do this week was go back and look a little bit more at information about the West Hollywood garage. That was interesting. I could show you more information about that if you were interested. Basically what we found is that it looked like the cost for at least that type of garage for the size of garage we're proposing would probably be a little bit higher than what we're proposing here and then would have ongoing higher maintenance costs and the need for a full-time attendant at the garage. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. It's very helpful. One question about the garage. There's a lot of pedestrian access and people walk there already, coming across from the Post Office, coming from the church or Wells Fargo, or coming from Bryant down towards the CVS. That CVS is kind of the node. Was there any consideration given to potentially maintaining pedestrian access particularly on the southwest side of the lot? (inaudible) need it on the north side towards Tai Pan and behind Palo Alto Sports World, but what about between the garage and the AT&T building? Is there any possibility of that? Mr. Eggleston: To provide the—I could ask Michelle from Watry to speak to this too. To be able to provide the 16-foot pedestrian access that essentially runs between the garage and Tai Pan, back towards CVS, and to have the drive aisle widths necessary in the garage, we had to essentially bring the AT&T and close that off. Council Member Fine: Thank you. I'd encourage you to continue looking at that, if there is a way to finesse something there. Two questions about the parking management study. Thank you very much. I thought it was an TRANSCRIPT    Page 34 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  excellent report. One, this is to our City Manager. Do you have an opinion or does Staff have an opinion about consolidating parking into one department or an office? What that means operationally, what the costs would look like for the City. Mr. Keene: No. We haven't looked at it. Obviously, fragmentation of responsibility typically is less efficient. The ability to align and consolidate for the most part—I would say based on prior experience in other areas—is a good thing. Sometimes being able to make that transition has a lot of costs associated with it. Once we ultimately got there, it would be more efficient than what we have now. I particularly think since this is coupled with having a very dynamic, interactive, changeable system, that makes a big difference, having a unified support structure. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Last question along that. You've spoken about a couple of hard costs, some soft costs. Do you know how quickly this system would be able to pay itself back, just a ballpark? Mr. Mello: Kielyfrom ASD has done some very initial projections. She should be able to speak to that. Kiely Nose, Budget Director: Hi, I'm Kiely, the Budget Director. Let me caveat this. These are super preliminary. We ran a few numbers on a couple of scenarios. It's going to be a couple of years before these projects would be repaid most likely, just given the ramp-up time of socializing all the fees with the community, when we would actually institute each component of paid parking. Most obviously the CIP components are going to happen over the course of the next 2 fiscal years; whereas, your revenues are going to start coming in that second, third, fourth year. Most likely, you won't start making money until—I don't know—third or fourth year of this. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you. Kiely, while you're up. I'll ask the question while you're walking. What's the anticipated revenue generation once it starts generating revenue? Ms. Nose: It is extra … Mr. Keene: Be careful. Ms. Nose: I was going to say it's extraordinarily dependent on what you guys decide to recommend. It's the tiers pricing, if you guys choose to go TRANSCRIPT    Page 35 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  with maybe the first hour free versus everything is automatically paid parking. I would honestly say from where you're currently at in terms of the revenues in this fund, you collect about $2 million annually from your existing permits and your day passes. I'm so afraid to give you a number. I'd say probably … Mr. Keene: Yeah, we don't want to do this. Not only have we not worked it out, but it really is dependent upon the choices you would make. I do think we could safely say this because there could be enough variation. Once we had gotten through the capitalization and the implementation phase, there would be clearly a sufficient revenue stream to support our TMA objectives and TDM investments that we want to make, that would have a reciprocal benefit on our overall parking and traffic situation. Council Member Holman: I think it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg. What we choose determines the revenues. It's a little chicken an egg. The retail, same comment as last week on California Avenue. Thank you, Kiely. Same comments as on the California Avenue area parking garage edge retail. You mentioned 1,500 square feet or even less than that per building. It seems to me having just the parking garage directly across from the Post Office is doing a disservice to that. I'll ask that question as one. Edge retail, just small-scale retail as one. Also, the height of this, as I'm sure everybody here knows, the buildings along Waverley are one and two story. Except for the AT&T building next door, everything else along Hamilton, in that block there, is also one and two story. I think the Staff made a comment contrary to that earlier about Hamilton. What were you comparing to, please? The Post Office is like a one-and-a-half story. Mr. Eggleston: I think I was referring to the setback along Hamilton when I was saying what we were proposing was similar to other buildings. Council Member Holman: Has there been any consideration of how this garage would or would not satisfy the Downtown Urban Design Guidelines or the ARB findings? Mr. Eggleston: I'd say not yet, because design of the garage hasn't actually started. We started with the concept that was in the feasibility study that was looked at by the Council in 2014, which envisioned this five story with about this height. Now, we're looking to finalize the program, and then we're going to move into the design. Thus far, all we've done is look at the constraints and potential layouts, approximate costs, and numbers of spaces. TRANSCRIPT    Page 36 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Council Member Holman: I would just add quickly mass and scale, height transitions, all of that are part of it. It seems like early on there are some issues identified. Mr. Keene: We'll be sure to look at that. I would say there's immediate adjacency and then there's the visual adjacency. If we look at something like Bryant Street, we have a similar situation with Avenidas right across the street from the Bryant Street garage. Right to the north, we've got the two- story, at most, athletic facility and that sort of thing. Some comparisons we could be thinking about. Not saying that that's how the determination is made. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois, you didn't speak. Council Member DuBois: Did you do any assessment of the impact on the Downtown retailers? Paid parking, street parking. Mr. Mello: The intercept survey process included some discussions with business owners. We also had representation from retail, office, and other business operations on our stakeholder committee. One of the key recommendations from this report is that this be a dynamic program. I think we would continue to monitor sales tax receipts, occupancy, any kind of indicators that might lead us to believe that the paid parking is negatively impacting Downtown, and then we would come back to you and make adjustments to pricing and policies related to that. Council Member DuBois: What are the maintenance operational costs of single meters compared to pay stations? Ms. Dickson: There's obviously more single-space meters, so there's more equipment to be touched. I would say that it's fairly comparable in regards to the upkeep and the warranty services provided. There's a substantial RMA process that goes along with both the single-space and multi-space meters. Right now, there would be a resource that will be required on the City's side, whether it be outsourced or insourced, that would go out and support the ongoing preventative maintenance support services. Equitably, I'd say it's relatively about the same. Council Member DuBois: Are you saying comparable costs per unit? Ms. Dickson: No, no, no. Just in terms of overall cost from the maintenance staff. There's more units to be touched, but looking at the actual maintenance costs—I don't have the details in front of me today. If you end up going all single-space, there's more equipment to be maintained. In terms of comparable costs for the parts and pieces associated with it, I TRANSCRIPT    Page 37 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  would say that's when you're looking at the spare parts and the pieces of it that go along with it for repair. The warranty prices that are tied into the equipment—when we talked about the $1.2 million, etc., that incorporates the cost for the standard warranty which is usually 3 years. Council Member DuBois: I'm wondering if there would be major cost savings if we upgraded the Cal. Ave. permit selling process and enforcement technology websites. There are some of these tools—if we looked at them both at the same time, would we save a lot of money doing that? Mr. Mello: Our intent is to conduct a similar study for the Cal. Ave. business district after this one is completed. The comprehensive permit management system, the parking technology, the enforcement, all of the recommendations from this would be implemented in a way that they could be rolled out in Cal. Ave. as well. Council Member DuBois: I hope we could do it quicker and cheaper since hopefully we'll learn from this. This took like 2 years to get to us. I hope we're not starting over with a new study or anything like that. There's the bell. Mayor Scharff: Sorry. It does go fast. Briefly, when you talked briefly about how we sell our permits in the garage and you talked about how people buy it because it's so cheap, we don't sell 1:1 permits. We sell more than that. Did you take that into account? Mr. Mello: Right now, because we don't have the automated monitoring system of both garage occupancy and permit holder occupancy, it's more of an art form quite frankly. We try to anticipate how many permit holders are going to show up at a given time. We can't oversell permits, because the worst thing that could happen is a permit holder shows up and there's no permit spaces available. We do typically sell more physical permits than there are spaces for a garage. The ratio varies by garage and by lot. It's to date been more of an art form, and we want to get much more scientific about that and help get some of those garage permit occupancy rates up. The automated parking guidance system coupled with PARC and a more dynamic permit sales system that would allow us to sell weekly, monthly, quarter permits, I think, would help us get that occupancy rate much higher. Mayor Scharff: I completely get the whole garage issue and moving people into the garage. That's, it seems to me, a garage permitting issue in terms of what we sell those permits for. Whether we have low-income permits, you go through that. I'm trying to understand how that relates to having the meters as opposed to a system in which you park for 2 hours free in a TRANSCRIPT    Page 38 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  spot or you could put 30 minutes along University Avenue. Why did you come up with a meter and what are you trying to achieve by that? Ms. Dickson: If you're looking at—let's say all parking was free in Downtown. We'll start with a simple model. Mayor Scharff: It's not. Ms. Dickson: I was just going to say what you would typically start with is charging for on-street parking before you would charge for off-street parking. If you were talking about a clear, blank template, the first place you do is charge for on-street because the commodity is the on-street space. To be able to park in front of the coffee shop or in front of the restaurant is the commodity; that's where you charge; that's where you start the model. You currently have permit parking off-street, where your people are paying for that service or for that asset. Now, we're talking about trying to encourage the folks that are currently taking advantage of your color zone solutions, where you have the time zones—there's value to that parking space. To charge for parking, whatever that rate may be—it might start at a lower threshold, higher threshold, pay to stay, whatever the model is. Mayor Scharff: What are we trying to achieve with that? Right now, you can only stay 2 hours in most of those. I think on-street parking is all 2 hours, right? Ms. Dickson: Two hours for the color zones. You're actually trying to encourage the turnover and the transitions. When I was talking about the 85 percentile, you want to try to always have 1-2 spaces per block face that are always available. That's the ultimate goal. By being able to establish what rate structure you have, it's to encourage that vehicle turnover. The people that want to stay for a longer term go and park in the garages or on the surface lots. That's the ultimate goal. Mayor Scharff: Now, we're going to go to the public. Do we have any cards? We have nine speakers. You'll each have 3 minutes. Our first speaker is Emily Scharff, to be followed by Grant Dasher. Emily Scharff: Good evening, Council Members. Thank you for all of the work that you guys and you guys have all been doing on the parking issue. We all know that parking Downtown is a large problem. However, I don't think the solution to parking is to degrade the quality of our current Downtown, which I think causing paid parking would do. I think a lot of citizens agree with this. The surveys that you discussed from the parking management study showed that most citizens were opposed to paid parking TRANSCRIPT    Page 39 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  as a solution. I think this is for two reasons mainly. Either, one, it does have the desired opportunity and opens up more parking space. Since parking hasn't been added, if it's opening up more parking spaces, this means the cars are going somewhere else, either into the resident neighborhoods and causing more congestion there and really negatively impacting the residents there or to other local areas such as Stanford Shopping Center, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Town and Country. That would negatively affect both the shopkeepers and show that residents are unhappy with our Downtown. On the other hand, if it doesn't change the amount of cars who are going to Downtown, that implies we haven’t solved the parking issues and we've only caused a burden to the citizens who now have to deal with paying for parking, the inconvenience of doing the meter itself, and the change to the feel of Downtown, the aesthetic change and the fact that it feels less friendly, less homey, closer to being a big city than what we currently have. For those reasons, I would say I think we should look at a lot of the other proposed alternatives. I enjoy the idea of the wayfinding or what Tanaka was discussing in having the first 2 hours free. I think there's a lot of alternatives we can discuss, that would cause a solution to the issue of too many cars rather than working instead just for added revenue or some other reason that you might be implementing paid parking. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Grant Dasher to be followed by Stephanie Munoz. Grant Dasher: Hello. I just wanted to appreciate the really interesting presentation that we saw. I certainly don't know a ton about this particular topic. I was really impressed with the amount of analysis that the Staff and the consultant put into it. It was very informative. I think this is an interesting topic for me. I think at the end of the day I would support paid parking in Downtown. I live about 4 miles from Downtown, so I am one of those people who could bike and sometimes does bike Downtown but also sometimes drive when I'm lazy. I'm pretty sure, at least for me, what would happen is I would bike instead of driving. If other people would behave similarly, it would achieve the reasonable policy goal of reducing the amount of traffic Downtown. The problem is I don't really know if that's a knowable outcome. I would really encourage a significant amount of flexibility here. One of the problems is you have to make such a substantial capital investment in order to really do the kind of dynamic pricing that you would want to do. I do think it's probably worth it at the end of the day to put in place the infrastructure that would let us actually have the ability to put a price on parking in Downtown. Then, we can ratchet that up and down. I would want to strongly encourage the Council, if we do go with paid parking, which again I think is the right solution because we know people respond to TRANSCRIPT    Page 40 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  incentives. Creating incentives for behavior is the best policy tool we have to influence behavior. I'm not going to repeat Econ 101 because I think everyone here is very knowledgeable about those issues. I would strongly encourage flexibility and continually monitoring the behavior, relaxing prices in times of low demand, certainly making sure that you take things other than coins. This is one of my big gripes whenever I go to Redwood City; I always forget to bring coins with me. I think it's absolutely critical that it be trivial to pay if we do this kind of thing. It's not about the cost for me; it's about the convenience. I also think it's really important to take a comprehensive approach to parking and try and look at things in the perspective of where do you want cars of certain sorts to go, distinguishing between those sort of business community we have that leaves at 5:00 or 6:00 every day. We have certainly goals with parking during the day, but we have very different goals for the people who are coming to dinner and like me who lives here and works in a different city and trying to adapt the parking to deal with those different goals. If we had a dynamic, agile parking program that we could review constantly and solicit a lot of community involvement, the capital investments to get our City in such a situation would be worth it and would achieve a lot of the concerns that I share about making sure that we don't disincentivize people for coming Downtown. We just change the mode in which they commute, if that's possible. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Stephanie Munoz to be followed by Bob Moss. Stephanie Munoz: Thanks again, Mayor Scharff. The thrust of the City Council's efforts and regulation of the land use is always to make the land more valuable, also more expensive. By giving a greater proportion—every time you give a greater proportion of land to job creation and commerce, you make the remaining land available for residents and all other uses more valuable and harder to get, which means that when you want to have a piece of land for public use or a publicly desired private use, you're bidding against yourselves. You're bidding up a price that you have raised because of giving value to these other uses. We recently passed astonishingly a big bond issue for affordable housing. This use of land has been an issue for a number of years now. The State has mandated that the City have sites nominated to be for housing, even if they don't use them. Even if they never use them, they have to have these sites. I have a hunch that some of these parking places are in that enclave of mandated housing designations. I would like to suggest, inasmuch as you have decided against—not exactly against. You have prioritized the housing of cars over the housing of people. There is a way, I see, that you can have your cake and eat it too. There are a large number of people in this community who are very ingenious. They have made up little houses for themselves, that roll on wheels and can be TRANSCRIPT    Page 41 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  moved from place to place. They're called cars. Almost everybody owns one, even people who don't have houses. I would like to insist, small that I am—I think the town will insist that you make these parking places available at night so that people who have no homes can park their cars there. Paying for the parking, why not? They must have toilets on every floor. I think you should consider very seriously having showers also. Keeping in mind too that you're thinking ahead toward possible disasters in which you will need—like San Jose with its floods. A little car housing in those garages, please, toilets. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Bob Moss to be followed by Peter Stone. Bob Moss: Thank you, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. Let me be blunt. The idea of having parking charges Downtown sucks. Been there, done that, lousy results. You may not have been here; I'm sure none of you were here 45-50 years ago when we had parking meters Downtown. 4:00 or 5:00 in the evening, Downtown was a desert. People didn't come here to shop or to go to restaurants. They went to Stanford Shopping Center. They went to Menlo Park, even up to East Palo Alto. If you charge for parking, you're telling me that when I come to a City Council meeting, it's going to cost me $4.50-$6.00 to park in the garage downstairs and come to this meeting. You should be paying me; I shouldn't be paying you. I think you'll find, if you put this noncompetitive parking fee in—they don't charge for parking in downtown Mountain View, downtown Menlo Park, Los Altos, East Palo Alto—all of the business is going to flow away, and you're going to have a lot of people looking for where they're going to shop. You'll have a lot of business owners and small store owners hurting badly. It's a lousy idea. We did it before; it hurt the City; it hurt the economy. It's going to be bad for business. Don't do it. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Our next speaker is Peter Stone. Peter Stone: Mayor Scharff, who briefly disappeared, and Council Members, good evening. Vice Mayor Kniss: He'll be back. Mr. Stone: I'm sure he will. Speaking on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, I'll be talking about this major infrastructure move that we're making here with the Downtown garage. Of all the parking problems we have, the one that's felt most acutely by business these days is the need for greater employee permit parking, which a garage should be primarily designed to address because we obviously want and expect the shoppers for the most part to be on the streets. Some use of off-street, but more use of the streets. We don't want our employees parking on the streets if at all TRANSCRIPT    Page 42 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  possible. We want to minimize that. The garage occupancy apparently is not as high as most of us might have thought if we didn't have the data. There are still permit waiting lists for every garage; there's not enough permits available. What I would like to urge that—we don't get that many opportunities to build a new garage and a major piece of infrastructure like this. Let's really maximize the parking. We would like actually to see the basement option and find a way to fund it. To the extent that we can take a deeper dive into the world of mechanical, technology-enhanced parking and perhaps—I recognize the result that the Staff study so far has generated. I think there's a lot of technology out there. I hope looking pretty deeply at that as another way to make this piece of infrastructure more productive in terms of the amount of parking that it involves. My final comment, not on the garage, goes to the other parts of the parking program. I guess I'm not terribly worried about the effect of paid parking. When I look at Redwood City and Mountain View, they seem to be doing quite fine in their downtowns with paid parking. I haven't seen stats, so I can't say that's fact-based. What I'm looking for is to see some paid parking revenue flowing into the TMA and trip reduction, which long term is going to be the best way to make sure these problems get better and not worse. Thank you. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thank you, Mr. Stone. Amy Ashton. Amy Ashton: Good evening. I just also wanted to speak in support of the paid parking program for Downtown. It supports the aggressive goals within our City's S/CAP. As a cyclist, I'm excited to see a potential revenue source for TDM and TMA programs in the City. That's a lot of acronyms to say that I support programs that seek to decrease vehicle use overall and facilitate transit and cycling. I can almost, almost swallow the idea of a cost and impact of a giant parking garage in Downtown if I knew that potential revenues would go to decreasing trips overall and generating a more livable and vibrant Downtown. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Rita Vrhel to be followed by Wendy Silvani. Rita Vrhel: Hello. Hamilton Hitchings wanted me to say a little bit for him. He wanted me to say we have 1,500 parking spaces deficit in Downtown. He strongly supports Option C. He does not think adding more retail space to Lot D is the best use of that space. On the second topic of Downtown parking, he wanted to say we used to have parking meters Downtown, but they were taken out because they were hurting local merchants. Not only will paid 2-hour parking hurt merchants, it will also have a negative effect for local residents who want to visit Downtown merchants or (inaudible) run an errand. Eliminate the color zones and make the entire Downtown one color zone to stop spot-hoppers. Provide digital readouts of spaces available TRANSCRIPT    Page 43 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  in garages. Move full-day permit holders to garages, and not allow them to occupy the street parking, which should be used for customers of local businesses. Build the garage on Lot D and maximize the spots by adding the basement. He understands that the City wants additional revenue to fund the TMA, but there are other ways to get it that do not penalize merchants. That said, I think Downtown paid parking is great, having worked in San Francisco and knowing that it was $24 for 3 hours and 20 minutes and more and seeing the uproar when Stanford Hospital put in their parking garage at Blake Wilbur. It was so wonderful to be able to find parking. I don't go Downtown because there's no parking. Charging a minimal fee would be great. I think it would also, like Ms. Julie said, which was a fantastic presentation—it will encourage people to go and stay in the garages rather than occupying the street. The other thing is once again having to build this garage shows that office buildings were under-parked. I hope there's some way to encourage buildings to pay their fair share and to park for their occupants. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Wendy Silvani to be followed by Elaine Uang. Wendy Silvani: Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I'm Wendy Silvani for the TMA. We were part of the stakeholder group working with Dickson Associates. We totally support the notion of paid parking for Downtown. As you've heard many times, it supports the TMA goals and our programs. It really provides an important framework for the community to come together and start taking TDM very seriously and make it more effective. I think there's some refinement things that still need to be worked out. A couple of them I'll just toss into the basket are establishing spaces for people who are carpooling—we're trying to encourage people to carpool— and occasional users who need to drive, who are ordinarily on transit. We'll look forward to working with the consultants on the next phase to make this a reality. Just as a little side note, we have 86 people right now that we're buying transit passes for. On their applications to our program, we ask them where they're currently parking. We're only offering the passes right now to people who currently drive alone. Without exception, they're parking on the street. Of your 300, Julie, 86 of them are already in our program. I think that speaks to what we're all trying to do collectively and how it all integrates. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Elaine Uang. Elaine Uang: Good evening. I just wanted to talk to the parking study, not the garage. I didn't realize you were combining the two. I support all of the comments earlier about using paid parking to help fund TMA and to support the badly needed transportation demand management that we need in our TRANSCRIPT    Page 44 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  City. I think sustainable transportation is, again, the cornerstone of everything we're doing. You've got a really good three-legged stool of managing parking, talking about supply, and reducing demand. That's going to be the way that we reduce future demand going forward and to meet all of our sustainability goals. I'd like to sort of emphasize a couple of things. I'm actually a little bit concerned—this goes to the discussion about how underutilized the garages are. I hope that you'll consider additional flexibility for any sort of permit types that exist out there in addition to the hourly parking. The nature of work is changing. People aren't working here 9:00 to 5:00 for years and years and years at a time. People are coming here on a daily basis. They might need weekly permits. They might need monthly permits. I really emphasize the short-term aspect of work that people are coming into our Downtown for. These are small contractors, project-based consultants, even short-term construction workers, solar installers, and things like that. We really need to make provisions for them, so that there's flexibility for people and we can really use those garage spaces much better than we are currently. Again, the issue of—I'm really concerned. I served on the RPP stakeholder group. I'm seeing now the effects of that. The service and the retail workers are the ones who have been highly inconvenienced by the RPP. I would also hope in this discussion there's some provisions made, whether that's outreach such as Wendy has been doing already, to ensure they know what their options are. I think they don't know. I think we just also need to think holistically what happens. With paid parking, if it does go forward, what is going to happen to the RPP permit? We need to price those in a way that the core parking spaces are convenient, flexible, the best options so that we don't have neighborhood spillover parking going forward with any paid parking provisions. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Now, we return to Council. I think the first thing we should do is take up the parking garage. I am just going to turn it over to Council to talk about the parking garage, and then we'll come back. Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I was confused about one piece. The drawings all show a potential second entrance through the alley, but I think the report says that would not be there. Can you clarify is there a second entrance in this garage? Ms. Boyd: There actually would be a second entrance in that alley between the proposed garage and where CVS is now. I think the Staff Report referred to a second entrance off of Waverley that the feasibility study considered, but we felt it was too close to the intersection of Waverley and Hamilton. TRANSCRIPT    Page 45 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Council Member DuBois: Isn't that where the alley connects out to Waverley? Ms. Boyd: Yes, it does start from Waverley. You go Waverley west towards Bryant. Council Member DuBois: You would drive from Waverley to the back of the garage or not? Ms. Boys: I don't think a lot of people would actually do that. I think it would be more of a possible exit. Council Member DuBois: Still a little confused on that one. I do think it would be useful to see the revenue offset from the retail space. When you look at the cost per parking space, if there's revenue being generated, it would hopefully offset some of that. I don't really see a need for a large indoor bike parking space. I would consider maybe outdoor bike parking and potentially keeping a public restroom. I'm a little concerned that we're losing one of our few public restroom facilities. Was there any thought about moving that existing automated bathroom to another lot or the Post Office or some other location? Mr. Eggleston: We've talked about the potential of doing that but haven't started looking at where the location could be. Council Member DuBois: Personally, I value the retail space. I think it's community building. I think that street could use it. There's Prolific Oven and some well-loved stores there. Some additional retail would be a positive. Again, I'm also concerned about the loss of a public restroom. I'm pretty flexible on this one. I liked Option B because of the retail. We didn't hear a lot about our infrastructure budget and where this puts us if we go underground. I don't think we can go with a Cadillac version on every single infrastructure project, so we should really think about ones where we want to spend extra money and ones where we want to save a little money. I would tend to favor "B," but I could be talked into going underground if that's what people are in favor of. Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, if I could just very quickly say that the Infrastructure Plan numbers that we have shared with the Council, including this gap that we have right now—we have Option B essentially as the Downtown parking garage price in that number. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Council Member Kniss. TRANSCRIPT    Page 46 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Vice Mayor Kniss: With that great lead, Council Member DuBois, I am going to make a Motion that recommends the Staff recommendation, which is on Page 1, to proceed with the full preliminary design and environmental review on a new 291-space parking garage concept with five levels of aboveground and 3,800-square-foot retail space with one addition. I would suggest that we include the underground basement. I will not include the puzzle lift on this one, but I would like to see the underground basement. Council Member DuBois: I would second that. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to: A. Direct Staff to proceed with full preliminary design and environmental review on a new 339 space parking garage concept with five levels of above ground parking and a 3,800 square foot retail space (Downtown Parking Garage Option B); and B. Include a basement parking level; and C. Direct Staff to proceed with revisions to the Public Facility (PF) zoning Ordinance to specifically accommodate public parking garages. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss, would you like to speak to your Motion? Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes, I would like to speak to it. We talked a little about how high this might be, are there other garages like that. I may have missed one, but apparently Alma Street and Cowper-Webster both are at that height. I have a request in the future. It would be such a help if you included elevations with these in addition to the flat architectural view that you give us. It helps me; everyone may not need elevations. For some reason, if you can see how they look in relation to the other buildings, that makes a big difference. I'm concerned about the bathroom as well, Tom, but I don't know how well used that is. I've never seen anyone go in and out of the—which was called at that point a French bathroom. Do any of you know how used it is? Is it something we should try to accommodate? Mr. Keene: We don't have that handy, but we can look into that and get that information to the Council, both as part of relocation, the efficacy of relocation. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm glad we took both of these up tonight, because they really play into each other. We're talking about supply, as Elaine Uang just mentioned. This is more supply, pretty substantial supply. At the same time, I know that we'll probably hear something from stores in that area TRANSCRIPT    Page 47 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  about access. I would like us to make sure we have some way of getting through that alley type of space and around to CVS and some of the other stores that are there. The more able we are to crisscross in the Downtown, the more walkable the Downtown becomes. I don't think I can add much to that. I'll stop there. Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor? Mayor Scharff: Yes. Mr. Keene: Could we suggest a small change to the Motion based on the comment that Brad made? The Staff Report said the retail probably should be smaller. Even if you said up to 3,800 square feet, and then we'd … Vice Mayor Kniss: Accepted, fine. We discussed that as well and said maybe that's too much. We want some retail, but maybe it doesn't need to be almost 4,000 square feet. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to replace in the Motion Part A, “and a 3,800 square foot” with “and up to 3,800 square feet of.” Council Member DuBois: I'll just speak real quickly since I already spoke. I would like to keep it up to 38. Before we reduce it, I'd really like us to go back and see if we couldn't have larger retail there. I know you said we could go underground with retail, so I don't know what we lose for the additional ramps. There's more ramps clearly when you go up and down. I don't know if Council Member Kniss would accept an amendment to have Staff consider a public restroom there and let us know if that's feasible. Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes. That's why I had asked how well used is that. I simply don't know. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Motion, “direct Staff to consider inclusion of a public restroom.” (New Part C) Council Member DuBois: Before we shrink the retail based on what we've heard so far, I'd like us to continue to investigate that. Mr. Eggleston: Council Member Kniss, can I make one comment? If your motion is adding the basement, then we probably should adjust the 291 spaces, which is based on … Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes, I should have done that. Exactly. TRANSCRIPT    Page 48 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mr. Eggleston: I would suggest 339 spaces, I think is the approximate number we'd be looking at. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thank you for mentioning that. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I'll be supporting the Motion. To speak to it briefly, we heard from the consultant about the number of cars still playing hopscotch or the 2-hour shuffle, as we sometimes call it. What we heard was it's about 300 cars. Here's a garage to give those cars somewhere to go. This is really heading the right direction and an important part of solving the puzzle. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you. A couple of questions. Does the Motion allow Staff the flexibility—is it the intention of the maker and seconder for the up to 3,800 square feet of retail space that one of the things you could look at is edge retail as opposed to retail just on Waverley? Is that agreeable to the maker and seconder? Vice Mayor Kniss: I have no trouble with that, but let's ask Staff whether or not that can be accomplished. I know your design isn't completely done yet. The question is can that be done or is that going to compromise the design? Mr. Eggleston: The design's not done, but I think we'll ask Michelle, our consultant from Watry, to help us with that question. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks. Michelle Wendler, Watry Buehler Collaborative: Good evening. Michelle Wendler with Watry Design. It's not impossible to do edge retail along Hamilton. It's more difficult than doing the edge retail on the Waverley street side. Based on the structural system that we have in the building, that's the direction that the beams frame into. If you look at a parking garage and you look up and the beams are coming across, that is reducing the head height clearance. It's much easier to fix that on the Waverley street side than it is to do that on the Hamilton street side. It has more impact to the structural system to do it on the Hamilton street side as well. You're impacting more of the garage footprint by doing it that way. It has a higher cost per square foot overall. Council Member Holman: Again, we're just talking edge retail. TRANSCRIPT    Page 49 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Ms. Wendler: We're talking edge retail, but to make it feasible, the clearance for a parking structure is 8 1/2 feet underneath the beams. That's generally not that accommodating for retail space, even if it's about 1,500 square feet. Trying to work with that, there's not room for ducting and things like that that need to happen in that space. It's possible, and it's been done on other structures, but the cost is more to do it there. Vice Mayor Kniss: Karen, I appreciate the thought, but I wouldn't incorporate that into the motion. Council Member Holman: A question for Staff. With the Council going forward with now—I'm not quite sure how the number of a 339 parking space garage came about. The option on the screen is not any of the options here, so I don't know how you came up with that number so quickly. Mr. Eggleston: It's essentially the spaces from Option B plus the difference between Options C and A. Council Member Holman: Question. If the Council goes ahead with this Motion—sort of generally I support it. If the Council goes ahead with this Motion, are we tying the hands of the ARB by saying we're going to accomplish a 339-space parking garage and hang the ARB findings and hang the Downtown Urban Design Guides? That's my question. Are we saying to the ARB this is what we're going to do? Mr. Eggleston: That's not how we view it. We're trying to define the outline of the program that we would begin design with and take to the ARB. The project will be subject to the ARB's full review. Council Member Holman: With no constraints on their role? Mr. Keene: I must have missed something while I was out. Is the Staff proposing to constrain the role of the ARB? I don't think that's our purview. Council Member Holman: The reason I ask is because we are prescribing a 339-parking-space garage, and that has parameters that are very clearly described in the presentation. That's why I raised the question, are we constraining them because of what we're prescribing. That's what raises the question. Mr. Keene: I wouldn't presume that we're prescribing them. Wouldn't the inverse also be true? If we prescribe what we were going to present to the ARB, they wouldn't be able to look at what it was we actually wanted? We've got to take what we've got as a concept to the ARB. I'm sure they're TRANSCRIPT    Page 50 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  going to comment on the project, don't you, and recommend changes in design or whatever. Council Member Holman: I don't know. I've seen instances in the past—it really is a serious issue for me, and I think it's going to be for the public. I have seen instances in the past at both Planning Commission and the ARB where they have felt like the Council has decided what it wants. It isn't what I would do—I'm just saying what I've heard ARB members say. It's like, "It isn't what I would do, and I wish we could do this, but the Council has said what they want." They do feel like their hands are tied. That's why I want to get real clarity on this. Mr. Keene: Under that description, I'm not comfortable commenting on that. There's a lot of variable factors there. The Council is making a recommendation to the ARB. I can't speak for why somebody on the ARB feels the way they might feel when we take something from the Council. Council Member Holman: Would the maker and seconder of the motion accept an amendment that the Council motion is to describe desired outcomes but is not intended to limit the ARB purview? Vice Mayor Kniss: That's probably a bit of overkill. If you want to make an Amendment and we vote on it, fine. I don't think I'd include that in the Motion. I don't recall us doing that in other contexts. I don't think I'd find that's really acceptable tonight. Council Member Holman: Is there a second? I'll remember what Staff said, and we'll see how it goes. AMENDMENT: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member XX to add to the Motion, “Council’s direction is to describe a desired outcome but not to limit the Architectural Review Board’s purview.” AMENDMENT FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND Mr. Keene: Whoa. I wouldn't take that to the bank either, what the Staff said. Council Member Holman: The intention is not to handcuff the ARB. That's what I heard. Mr. Keene: And not to handcuff the City Council either. Both of those. Council Member Holman: I don't think we're handcuffing the City Council. TRANSCRIPT    Page 51 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mr. Keene: The desire is to say, "This is what the Council wants sort of but, if you think differently, you would prevail." I think there is a dialog that takes place between the Council and the ARB in this case, in this process. Why don't we trust that? Council Member Holman: That's what I'm looking for, the dialog. I don't have any other comments. Mayor Scharff: Briefly, I'd like to say that I'm going to support the Motion. I think it's—now you put your light on. Now you put your light on. I'm just going to let Filseth speak, and then I'm going to let Tanaka speak. Council Member Filseth: Just briefly, we're sort of working our way towards the culmination of a process that's been going on a long time. A lot of it has to do with the genesis of the parking problem. A lot of it came from maybe the City wasn't keeping up quite as fast with employment trends Downtown and Codes and so forth. As a result, we got to this point. Now, we're working through the solution to that. We're going to put up this building. As you go and walk around that area, there's basically one place that you can see it from. If you walk down the west side of Waverley Avenue—right now when you walk down there, you look across that open parking lot and see that beautiful Birge Clark building across the street, the Post Office behind some trees on one side and the church on the other side. After we build this, you're not going to see that from there. You're going to see this big concrete thing. That's about the only place you're going to be able to see it from. You can't see it from Downtown. You can't see it from the other side of Waverley. That view is what we're going to lose. That's the price we're going to pay for doing all this. A couple of years ago, the Council cleaned up a lot of the exemptions that allowed people to put up buildings that didn't have enough parking for their tenants, but we haven't finished yet. We're still putting up buildings like that. If you look at 429 University, which we approved a couple of months ago, our Codes say that building is fully parked even though everybody here knows it isn't. If we don't finish the job and clean up this stuff so that we have a real balance, we're going to be back here some year in the future having the same discussion again. I hope that as we do the comprehensive parking plan, we go back—we've got to go back and look at the source of the problem and make sure we're not digging the hole deeper. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I'm also going to support this Motion. I think parking is badly needed in this area. One thing we ought to consider is that in Downtown there's really not much land left for parking. This is a very TRANSCRIPT    Page 52 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  scarce resource. Maybe in a decade or so, we'll probably regret not putting another level of parking in here. What I want us to consider is what we did on Cal. Ave. On Cal. Ave., we actually had two levels of basement parking. In Downtown, parking is even more scarce. We have even less opportunity to build parking. I think we should—instead of going for one level of basement parking, I want to make a friendly amendment for us to do two levels of basement parking. I'm looking for the maker of the motion … Vice Mayor Kniss: Normally, I'd be delighted with that, but I'm worried tonight that we've already upped the price about $3 million. As I recall from last week, that puts it up to $4 million. I'm not comfortable with that, Council Member Tanaka. I'm sorry. Once again, if you want to make it a separate Amendment, I'd rather not add it to the main Motion. Council Member Tanaka: Is there a second? No. AMENDMENT: Council Member Tanaka moved, seconded by Council Member XX to replace the Motion Part B with, “include two basement parking levels.” AMENDMENT FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND Council Member Tanaka: I'm going to make another one which will probably not succeed, but we'll see. While Staff looked at puzzle lifts, there are so many other parking technologies out there that can really increase the efficiency of parking. I think this is also another lost opportunity for us not to really try to pack cars in here. This could be the lot that would provide a lot of employee parking, especially for the low-wage workers. I didn't do calculations for this garage, but on the Cal. Ave. garage we only get 11 percent volume efficiency. That means only 11 percent of the volume in the garage at Cal. Ave. that we approved just a few weeks ago is cars. There's so many other ways to get a 2X up to 5X increase in parking with the same volume. Given that land is so scarce here and so valuable, I think we should—what I'd like to say is not direct Staff necessarily, but to have them analyze, see if it's possible to do it. I wanted to see if this might be a friendly amendment for Staff to explore this option. AMENDMENT: Council Member Tanaka moved, seconded by Council Member XX to add to the Motion, “direct Staff to analyze additional mechanical parking options.” Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm fine with that. Are you, Tom, or not? Council Member DuBois: I think we heard Staff say they kind of looked at it. I heard a lot of discussion about flexibility between short-term parking and TRANSCRIPT    Page 53 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  long-term parking, which is attractive. I'll go ahead and support having them do additional analysis. I did like what I heard about the flexibility, being able to use it for different uses. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm particularly interested in whether or not it could be in the basement. That's one of the things that I heard about before. I appreciate that, Council Member Tanaka, because I don't want us to rule that out. If we indicate this is to analyze it, you're not directed to do anything, we're just asking you to look at the possibilities. Mr. Keene: Might I ask, Mr. Mayor? Brad, can you weigh in on the implications of the direction as you're hearing it? Mr. Eggleston: It's just a little unclear to me what sort of analysis we're being asked for. If the direction is to look and see are there cost-effective ways to add some more parking using lifts like we talked about earlier or similar technologies that we might not have looked at, I think that's very doable. If the direction is to step back and say, "How are there ways that we could fully maximize parking on this site with a completely automated approach," we've discussed that a little, given discussions we had last week. It looks like that would require probably a new RFP process that would essentially restart the project. Vice Mayor Kniss: What you suggested first is sufficient. We want to look at this in such a way as to see—I know there are several places Downtown that are actually using the puzzle in small ways. I think that's the kind of thing we should look at. I'm not suggesting you completely revamp the entire garage but look at—particularly you mentioned in the basement you might be able to do something like that. Council Member DuBois: I wouldn't support restarting the RFP. If you can do it under the current RFP … Maybe we should clarify that, just say analyze it under the current RFP. Mayor Scharff: Why don't you say without causing any delay to the process. Vice Mayor Kniss: Okay. Council Member DuBois: Something like that, yeah. AMENDMENT RESTATED AND INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the Motion, “direct Staff to analyze additional mechanical parking options without causing a delay in this project.” (New Part E) TRANSCRIPT    Page 54 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mr. Keene: I think the Staff is comfortable with that as the direction. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Anything further, Council Member Tanaka? No. Seeing no other lights, I'll just speak briefly to it. I am going to support the Motion. I appreciate it. I did want to talk a little bit about the retail. This helps Council a little bit too. It says 3,800 square feet of retail. Retail at least in Downtown Palo Alto, I believe, is always triple net. I don't think I've ever seen it not be triple net currently. There might be a few spaces that aren't, but that's the market for new retail. It's really easy to work out how much revenue it's going to make. You could say if it's $3.50 a square foot, you multiple that by the amount of the square foot, 3,800, and you multiple it by 12, if you think it's $4 a square a foot, if you think it's $5 a square foot. That's actually really simple. If you want to get the value, you cap it out, and it's probably somewhere between—Hamid recently thought it was a five cap. I probably think it's somewhere between a five and a six cap. You can do the math yourself as to what that's worth. It's fairly simple. When we look at this, I do think we want to decide what we as a City want to do with 3,800 square feet of retail. I personally think we should sell it. I don't think I want to be in the business of leasing 3,800 square feet of retail frankly as a City and having any political of who we lease it to, who we don't, how that works. I at least want the Legal Department to look at how we would condominiumize [sic] this particular piece of property, if that's possible, or how that would work. Is that something you'd like in the Motion? Are you going to do it anyway? I figured you'd do it anyway. I didn't want to make any decisions about what we do with it tonight. I wanted to make sure when it came back to us, we had options. I would definitely encourage us— it's not a matter of I want big retail or small retail, in my mind 1,500 or 3,800. I think we need to look at what is the market there and what we're trying to achieve. Big retail probably leans more towards a restaurant, frankly, because that's what fills it. There's a certain depth retailers have, that they want. I would just encourage us to think a little bit about what those options are and what you're then building to the market in that we don't just blithely say we want big retail or little retail and we look at obviously how many parking spaces. Staff look at that carefully and actually maybe talk to some retail consultants. I'm sure you'll do that anyway. That was my biggest concern on this, that we do that correctly with the retail. Let's see. Was there anything else here? Other than that, I'm looking forward to this actually getting built. I think it'll be a huge boon to Downtown and helpful with some of the strategies we've talked about and actually solving some of these problems. Now, we have one quick question from Council Member Wolbach, or one quick comment. TRANSCRIPT    Page 55 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Council Member Wolbach: I just wanted to affiliate my views with what the Mayor just said about keeping the options open including the possibility of selling off the retail space. MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to: A. Direct Staff to proceed with full preliminary design and environmental review on a new 339 space parking garage concept with five levels of above ground parking and up to 3,800 square feet of retail space (Downtown Parking Garage Option B); and B. Include a basement parking level; and C. Direct Staff to consider inclusion of a public restroom; and D. Direct Staff to proceed with revisions to the Public Facility (PF) zoning Ordinance to specifically accommodate public parking garages; and E. Direct Staff to analyze additional mechanical parking options without causing a delay in this project. Mayor Scharff: Now, if we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Scharff: Now, coming back to the next item, I guess it would be called. Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I (inaudible) enough of a chance to say thank you very much for this report. I think it's quite comprehensive, touches on a lot of the issues we're seeing in terms of problems, provides a lot of solutions, and also keeps options open. I've got a few comments, and then I'll be making a motion. I do want to emphasize to my colleagues that this is just one more step in moving towards this program. We're not actually buying into it. We will be asking Staff to return with a phasing and implementation and hopefully a finance plan. At this core, this really is a tragedy of the common problem where we have limited availability of a scarce resource, and we're trying to allocate it. We've been working on a lot of parking and transportation solutions and issues. We've put money down on garages. We've launched a TMA. This is kind of the vital parking management piece that I see is needed as the centerpiece to hold up these other pieces. RPP doesn't work if we have free 2-hour parking Downtown. Our TMA doesn't have as much of an incentive. People don't TRANSCRIPT    Page 56 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  have the incentive to take transit if they can park Downtown for free. As I mentioned, overall the Staff Report and recommendations are excellent, but we do have a number of options down the road, whether it's single pay, whether it's pay per place, pay for license plate, whether we use license plate readers, things like that. In general, this parking supply study will allow us to manage that supply more predictably, price and time spots dynamically, which allows us to create incentives or disincentives for different parking behaviors. Maybe we do get an hour of free parking spot in front of retailers or maybe we get folks like Bob Moss to come to City Council meetings because we give out free parking Downtown on Council nights. These are possibilities with a dynamic system. We can also improve enforcement through new technologies, which means less violations, more compliance and, if it is our policy goal, more revenue. Finally, we can create subsidies for specific purposes, whether we're transferring some of the funds to the TMA or giving out cheaper spots to nonprofits. We just approved about $60 million in new parking garages. I think it's really important that we protect and pay for those assets. The Motion I'm going to have is essentially the Staff Motion with a few changes. If you could put the Staff Motion up for this. It's to conduct public outreach and work with the Planning and Transportation Commission and the City's Finance Committee to refine recommendations related to the introduction of paid parking in Downtown Palo Alto and return with a phasing, finance, and implementation plan for Council's consider in fall 2017. The next point is kind of direction to Staff. This effort should be highly integrated and coordinated with our RPP and with garage and permit pricing just to make sure we are really looking at the full suite of parking options and supplies we have available to us. Council Member Wolbach: Second. MOTION: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to direct Staff to conduct public outreach and work with the Planning and Transportation Commission and the Finance Committee to refine recommendations related to the introduction of paid parking in Downtown Palo Alto, and return with a phasing, finance, and implementation plan for the Council’s consideration in the Fall of 2017; and A. Direct Staff to coordinate paid parking in Downtown Palo Alto pricing with Residential Preferential Permit Parking (RPP) Programs, garage permit pricing, and lot permit pricing. Mayor Scharff: Would you like to speak to your Motion? Council Member Fine: I'll hold off for now, but I think I have. TRANSCRIPT    Page 57 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach, would you like to speak to your second? Council Member Wolbach: Yeah. The important thing here is that we're not making final decisions about the details. It's going to the Planning Commission; it's going to the Finance Committee. There's a lot more work that's still going to be done. I appreciate it coming to us in this form at this point. This is a really useful check-in to see the kinds of directions we're going and to start raising for the Council and the public to think about some of the details that we are going to have to make final decisions about later. Personally, I lean more towards allowing pay to stay, and I lean more towards having more individual meters, maybe one meter for every two spots. Others on Council and consultants and others in the community may have strong arguments why they would support not having pay to stay and only having meters at the end of the block. I want to make sure I've heard all of those arguments and that we've fully aired those discussions before we make final determinations. I ask for all of us on the Council and the community to remember that's where we're at right now. We're not making final calls on these details. Just to continue something that Council Member Fine started, talking about the issue of flexibility of a dynamic system. If we find that the rates are too high and that's hurting Downtown businesses or we want to change the hours of operation for a parking meter or if we want to provide, say, free or discounted parking or maybe higher cost for parking at certain times, we'll have the flexibility to do that in a dynamic way. Once we've made some final policy determinations about what gets installed, that's not the end of the discussion about how to use those technologies. I really see this as trying to move us towards future-proofing. I think that's important in guiding how we think about this in the Finance Committee, in the public, and on the PTC, and also back here on Council, how do we adopt technologies and revamp our City processes to future-proof ourselves, to leave open those tweaks that we might need to make if there's an economic downturn, if we find something is not working. That's, for me, one of the most critical things. Something I'd mentioned earlier when we were talking about the garage, I want to highlight two-wheeled vehicles, whether it's motorcycles, scooters, electric bikes, or bicycles that use so much less parking space. Just as a quick anecdote, I recently had to park my motorcycle in Palo Alto, in Redwood City, in San Francisco, in San Jose. San Francisco, everything is metered. You're parking a motorcycle, you're paying at a meter for a motorcycle, but it's a fractional cost to represent the fractional space that you need to use. I was in downtown San Jose, couldn't find designated motorcycle parking, didn't want to take up a whole space, so I did something that seems to be totally okay here in Palo Alto. You park on the edge where you're taking up about 5 inches or so or 6 inches of a space, especially in a big space, and that's fine. In San Jose, in their infinite TRANSCRIPT    Page 58 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  wisdom, decided to ticket it for an expired meter, when I was trying to stay out of their way and not use a parking space. As we look towards making it a little bit pricier to park Downtown, we make sure if somebody wants to take a form of transportation that doesn't take a full parking we encourage that, whether it's in our parking garages or on the street. I think we've done a pretty good job of that in Palo Alto. I want to make sure we're continuing to think about that going forward, whether it's with free spaces or with fractionally priced spaces. I also think, especially with electric bikes, one of the big concerns is security. Frankly, some non-electric bikes are pretty pricey. We want to think about what that means, especially in garages. If you're on two wheels, whether it's myself on my motorcycle or Council Member Tanaka on his bicycle, when it's raining we don't want to get in and out of our gear while standing in the rain. Having covered spaces in a parking garage that has a security camera, that's something to let people know. Here's a great place to park your vehicle where you'll have that amenity of being covered and having security. Those are just a couple of things to think about. I also really want to associate at this point just my inclination towards having flexibility around the number of days somebody gets a permit for. I prefer pay to stay because I want flexibility for a number of hours in case somebody—you come Downtown, you think you're only going to be here for a couple of hours for a meeting, but you decide I'm here, I'm going to do a little shopping and spend more to contribute to the City's tax base. That's great. We want to encourage that, and we want to make it easy for them to stay. That's one of the reasons I'm in favor of pay to stay, at least in some areas. I want to make it easy for people to stick around Downtown and spend their hard-earned money or to just enjoy our amenities or go to Heritage Park. In the same way, having flexibility for the length of a permit, to have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly permits, is really essential in reducing the barriers to getting a permit and getting especially off the street into a garage. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thanks. I have a question, and Council Member Tanaka asked this earlier. It was about flexibility. I don't think I quite understand the answer, so I just wanted to make sure I understood this right. The issue of whether you pay from time zero or whether there's 1- hour free parking or 2-hour free parking, but maybe you pay more after that, or something like that, the third hour costs money or something, I suspect that one's going to get debated for a while. We may be going back and forth on it for some time. Are we going to be forced to lock ourselves into some architecture that precludes that? That is, if we go this direction, you can't have any free time. If you go that one, it has to always be free. Is it going to be flexible enough that we can make those decisions later? TRANSCRIPT    Page 59 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Ms. Dickson: Specifically to the opportunity to provide free on-street to be followed by paid, it basically becomes a resource nightmare. How do you manage it moving forward, and how do you enforce it? It becomes an aspect of resources. The reason why we highlighted the garage is because the garage can be controlled and monitored by the person's access time and exit time, etc. To tell you that you would be limited is always up for debate and discussion and looking at the technology available out there. I can just tell you that the technology that exists today, that type of solution is not in place that I'm aware of. I've looked at the majority of technology advancements to be able to achieve the desire that you're going for. One of the items that the stakeholders did talk about was having available short- stay parking on the block faces by having 15-minute spaces and/or loading zones that are convenient to the local business owners. What I might suggest is potentially a compromise, to look at the opportunity to provide those temporary parking spaces that allow people to do their quick service solutions, but I would suggest, at this point, while it can be evaluated, I'm not aware of how you can effectively or efficiently manage the solution the way that you're describing, at least with the technology available today. Council Member Filseth: Understand. We're going to have to make a— sorry. Go ahead. Mr. Mello: I would add, going back to Council Member Wolbach's comment about being future-proof. If we elect to move into the procurement process for this equipment, our goal would be to pick nonproprietary equipment that could be tied into regional fare payment, fast track, Clipper card, any kind of open payment, Apple pay. Our goal would be to not limit ourselves to a specific technology moving forward. Council Member Filseth: That makes sense. It sounds like we're going to have to make a decision as we go through the outreach process. We're going to have to make a decision whether we're going to have short-term free parking or not, at least given current technology. Ms. Dickson: Correct. Council Member Filseth: The only other thing I wanted to say is that every time the whole RPP thing comes up, the number of 85 percent comes up. I keep saying this is not the right number for a residential neighborhood. It's for Downtown areas. Now, we're talking about Downtown areas, and we're talking about 85 percent. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. TRANSCRIPT    Page 60 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Council Member DuBois: I think since the motion is basically to accept the report, we're kind of treating this like a Study Session, just give some comments. First of all, what governs SOFA parking and how come we never talk about it? It was interesting looking at that map, at the Downtown core and the RPP, and then SOFA is just a hole. Mr. Mello: SOFA is outside of the University Avenue parking permit fund district. I think it's generally 2-hour parking as most of our commercial areas are. We could certainly take, if you wanted us to look at expanding this to SOFA area (crosstalk). Council Member DuBois: It just seems strange. It's not in the RPP either, right? Mr. Mello: We could certainly look at that moving forward if you think that's a wise move. Council Member DuBois: I think we need to. It's just kind of a hole there. The other thing is I really think we're missing the retail impact assessment. I heard what you said about looking at sales tax and looking for closures, but that feels like we're looking in the rear window a little bit. If there's any way to do an economic analysis to think what's going to happen to retail, I think that'd be a much better way to do it. Mr. Mello: I think we could look at Redwood City and some other case studies and see what occurred after their implementation. I don't know that we could predict the outcome of our—what was that? Mayor Scharff: Do they have retail? Mr. Mello: They do, they do, a little bit, yes. Council Member DuBois: I'd actually be really interested in Redwood City's experience because they rolled it out at like .25¢ an hour, and then they upped the price once things were working. They might have some interesting data. The other thing is, in most of these parking studies we get, we say there's a lot of private parking, but that wasn't in the scope. At some time, I think we really need to assess private parking in Downtown Palo Alto, what the opportunities are to use that space. You talk about it a little bit in your report, but we never do it. I really think we should get to it. I too would like to see some free time. Particularly, I'm thinking along University. You talked about all these payment options. Maybe you can pay and you have to put in your credit card, but it charges you zero for that first 30 minutes or whatever. I personally don't support the pay to stay. I think the analysis was right that people will just pay the retail rate and stay there TRANSCRIPT    Page 61 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  all day long. Having some fixed time pricing to protect retail is pretty critical. I do think we should consider free time on weekends. It did look at your—weekend evenings definitely it's full for the restaurants. Considering free parking on Saturdays and Sundays during the days and sucking it up in the evenings might still make sense to bring people Downtown. The other point I want to make is I don't think we should predetermine that this revenue goes to the TMA. I think it's really premature. There were a lot of comments tonight about that happening. I think we've got a lot of transportation projects. We have the City shuttle, we have these payment systems, we have the wayfinding systems. I really think this revenue should go towards those things first and even things like Lyft and Uber for seniors, other things we've talked about for residents of Palo Alto. I think we really need to continue the citizens advisory committee on funding transportation projects. I really see the TMA as something that should be funded more directly by the business community. That's why I think we need that CAC to evaluate some kind of business tax or other business funding mechanism. Hearing that the revenue may not—by the time this all happens, it's going to be 2 or 3 years out, so I don't think we want the TMA necessarily waiting for the revenue from these parking systems. In terms of the new parking organization, it was interesting to see the comparison between cities. I hope we can run—some cities were quite large. It was shocking how many people they had in their parking operations. The more we can automate and the more efficient we can be, the better to kind of minimize those operational costs. Along the way, it was pretty interesting to read about things like the sensors having an ongoing $10 per space fee. It was mentioned that there's some new companies coming out with much lower costs. I think we should be really aggressive, not be conservative and go with these traditional providers. I don't want to see us impose all these fees on people for parking that just go to private companies to have this system perpetuate itself. Personally, I favor the pay stations. I think San Mateo uses those downtown without individual meters. The individual meters are not attractive. I was asking about the operational costs. This seems easier to vandalize individual meters than pay stations. That's my preference. The other thing about the comparison to other cities is we didn't really get time to ask questions about this. You had some stats in there like 25-40 percent of people who buy permits in Palo Alto actively use that permit. I wondered how that compares to other cities. Are we unusual or is that pretty typical? Also, about 60 percent of people said it was easy to park. Is that typical? Are we doing okay or is that low? Ms. Dickson: I didn't know if I should answer them one at a time. What we have found comparatively in the Bay Area, because of the price that the people are paying for permits like in Berkeley for example, they're actually using those permits because of the value of what they're paying for. The TRANSCRIPT    Page 62 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  comment we made earlier was also feedback that we received from your stakeholders and from the intercept surveys. Because the price of your permit is so low, even if they come Downtown and park a couple of times a month, it's worthwhile for them because it's easy to access. I actually personally did a lot of the interviews on the street. When we talked about how easy it was to park, it was often interesting to hear the person sit there and debate. At first, it was like, "It was so hard." "How long did it take you?" "Only a couple of minutes," when they really started to think about it. The general standard is people don't want to walk more than a block or two. Everybody wants to park right in front of where they go; that's why we have the circulation and congestion issues. In general, you have a very walkable Downtown. I've walked every single block of your Downtown while we were counting cars and collecting license plates. When you take the walkability aspect of Palo Alto, that should be a big part of the promotion of the wayfinding program. We worked with a program before that also identified the walking distance. If you park at one particular garage, how long it would take you? Are the distances equitable? With everybody with their fitness bracelets on and things, you can kind of tie all of that together. That could be part of a really proactive education campaign to think about as well. I just wanted to point out too, Councilman, the issue of pay station versus single-space. This is a debate in every community that we work in. That's why when we say no decisions have been made, it really comes down to the community and the decision by the community. What works in one jurisdiction doesn't necessarily work for the other. The technology can all accept the smart payments, they can do the credit cards, program the dynamic rate, special events. All of the technology that we're proposing here can do it. It's whether you do a hybrid solution, some of this, some of that. San Mateo actually does have the traditional pay stations, but they do still have the old-school, coin-operated, single-space. You just don't necessarily see them as prevalently because they're more in the outlying areas. It's just the opportunity of where you put the equipment and to maximize on those. Council Member DuBois: Again, that 60 percent number saying it's easy to park, is that low? Ms. Dickson: I think it's pretty consistent with the statistics we found for community to community. We talk about the perception of parking, and that's usually what it really is, a perception. When you start to really drill in and talk to people and start to talk brass tacks, and they really start to think about it, that's when they start to come back with the whole maybe it's not as big of a deal. When you're sitting in the coffee shop or gabbing in the morning with your neighbors, it's always about it's so tough to park. If you really think about the example of people can ride their bike versus walk, a TRANSCRIPT    Page 63 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  lot of the folks we interviewed on the street were residents that had walked to Downtown. They found it was just a matter of convenience for them. They could drive and park, but they knew they would just park on the outskirts. It was just easier to walk that day. Council Member DuBois: One other thing. When you asked about professions, it seemed like about 40 percent of them were services or other services. It might be good to break that out. I noticed you didn't ask about high tech companies. Forty percent is a pretty big bunch where we don't really know what they do. Finally, I've said it before. I'd really like to see us apply this learning to Cal. Ave. without going through this whole process over again. Again, if there's a way when we put out the RFPs for things like the website or enforcement or selling permits, for it to be written where we could extend it at some point to include Cal. Ave., just to think about it at least rather than starting from scratch. In terms of the motion, I don't think we really needed to add "A." My reading of the report was that is going to be considered already. I'm going to support the motion. Mr. Mello: Just one point of clarification, Council Member. The recommendation for the period of paid parking in the report is only Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. There is a recommendation that we conduct enforcement on the weekends, but that would only be enforcing things like double parking, illegal parking at fire hydrants, those kind of things. Council Member DuBois: Thanks for that clarification. I'd support that. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: Council Member DuBois basically said everything I wanted to say. Mayor Scharff: That's great. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I was glad that Tom brought up the APGS issue. Could you say a little more about that? I have been anxious for an APGS for ages. I have had envy in other cities when I look up, and they tell me exactly what floor I can park on and how many spots there are. Mr. Mello: Our APGS system, which we brought to you last year, you recommended we move forward with the single-space LED system. Each space would have a color-coded LED. We have moved forward with that. We're in the final design phase. It's in the current 5-year CIP, but the funding for that is dependent on additional parking revenue. When we programmed that CIP, we assumed there would be additional parking TRANSCRIPT    Page 64 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  revenue available. That's actually one of the capital projects that we would recommend be funded if we elect to move forward with paid parking. Vice Mayor Kniss: Council Member DuBois' question, I think, was does it feather somebody else's nest instead of … Council Member DuBois: No. The parking fees should go to pay for things like wayfinding first. Vice Mayor Kniss: I thought you indicated there were different types of systems that sometimes return more to the owner. Council Member DuBois: Exactly. Vice Mayor Kniss: I want to be sure we get the system that is the most advantageous for us and the least expensive. Mr. Mello: We would do our best in the procurement process to avoid being locked into some type of proprietary system that would require an annual fee in perpetuity and that we'd have to replace if that company went out of business. That's not advantageous for the City. We would do our best to avoid that type of technology and have something that can be adapted with different software and integrated into different operating systems moving forward. Vice Mayor Kniss: Most of us have anecdotal evidence about other cities around us. Council Member Wolbach and I were in San Mateo recently and had most unfortunate experiences with parking. It happened to be a rainy, rainy day, and we had meters that only took coins. If you're not used to having coins with you, it's incredibly frustrating. I would certainly hope that we have credit card machines. Probably, we will be all over the place on this. I prefer the ones that are—the double-headed ones that can take two cars at once. The maintenance of the parking meters, what experience have you had with that? My experience in San Mateo was they had some issues with maintenance. Ms. Dickson: I will highlight again that San Mateo has the single-space, coin-operated meters in the few they have. I used to manage the City of San Francisco's parking meter counting and collections operation. We worked very closely with the City's parking meter maintenance program. There's over 25,000 single-space meters. With the smart meter systems that do go in—this is what I was trying to refer to the Council Member. It's actually fairly low maintenance. You would actually be surprised. There is a level of vandalism; don't get me wrong. It actually is fairly insignificant compared to the overall inventory. There's a theory that just because TRANSCRIPT    Page 65 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  they're shiny and silver and new, people are afraid there are little cameras in them. There aren't. The fact is people are a little bit intimidated by the infrastructure. They still have a little bit of the stickers, and people do random things with them, but it's not that significant. The maintenance for both the multi-space and the single-space is actually component based. Your maintenance Staff or your outsourced maintenance staff can come in and do swap and play, meaning that you literally can take the head off the neck and pop a new one in if it's significant, or pop it out and do whatever little maintenance you have to do. It's actually quite simple to maintain. Your City Staff can be trained by the vendors to support the system. Currently, the City of San Francisco, I want to say, for the 25,000-plus single-space meters has a Staff of about 25 parking meter repair technicians to support 25,000 meters. In terms of a program of your size, we're talking about roughly 1-2 potential Staff-related type positions. Again, the warranty programs are very robust with both the pay station and single-space meters. The cities I've worked with that have implemented the solutions have had very minimal to low upkeep. They are green; all of the equipment we are proposing is solar powered. Basically, a minor carbon footprint, all of those aspects as well. Everything that we're talking about today takes credit card payments as well as the mobile payment solutions as easy as you could possibly make it and, again, the dynamic pricing models. Vice Mayor Kniss: I appreciate hearing all that. I am supporting this, but the last line of the recommendation does say consideration. This is not in cement yet. We are really going to consider this. Mr. Mello: I think in reality we'll be bringing back different components to the Council because some are more ready to go forward than others. We will definitely make different decisions as those come to you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I'm going to support this Motion as well. It makes a lot of sense. I don't have any amendments or anything to the motion. I do just have a couple of comments. In order to get buy-in with the community, having some portion of free parking is going to be important, especially for retail. I have two ideas. One is kind of a high-tech idea, and the other one is kind of a low-tech idea. The high-tech idea is I've actually seen some startups use drones to fly and monitor the license plates of all the cars. That's one way to do it. Another way is using the traditional license plate readers on cars. I understand the accuracy is maybe only 85 percent if you don't have a straight view of the license plate. That means the enforcement will not be perfect, which is not ideal. What we could do is just have a higher fee, a higher penalty. Rather than just a $50 fee or a $100 TRANSCRIPT    Page 66 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  fee, it could be $400. If you're doing the parking shuffle, you're deliberately moving your car every 2 hours. You get nailed once; that will be the last time you'll do it. The word would spread. We may not catch you most of the time but, the times we do catch you, you're dead. That will really prevent this kind of parking shuffle that happens. Ms. Dickson: Council Member, if I could take you with me to different municipalities and advocate for that, I'd really love that. I don't know how well that would go over with the community. Being able to increase the penalty [thumbs up]. Council Member Tanaka: Two ideas to help try to make something like this happen. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you. A couple of questions. I know this has been a longstanding issue with Vice Mayor Kniss. Since we don't have the Minutes that we used to have, we're making a lot of comments that we'd want to be forwarded to the Planning Commission and even the Finance Committee as we get refreshed of this. How are those comments going to be forwarded? Anybody. Mr. Mello: We can forward the notes from this meeting as part of the Staff Reports for both PTC and the Finance Committee. Council Member Holman: As you've taken notes of people's comments? Mr. Mello: Yes. Mayor Scharff: Don't we do actual Minutes? I thought we did verbatim Minutes. Council Member Holman: For the Motion. Mayor Scharff: We do verbatim Minutes for the entire meeting. We do verbatim Minutes. Council Member Holman: I guess I read the Motion Minutes. As Council Member Kou said, Council Member DuBois asked a lot of the questions, suggestions or comments that I had a lot of. I won't repeat any except for just a couple. I think it's particularly important to find out from retailers how they anticipate this is going to affect them. I got an email today from a retailer who's nearby the parking garage, for instance. They had significant concerns about doing paid parking, especially while the parking garage was going to be built near their business. They had real concerns about how it TRANSCRIPT    Page 67 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  was going to impact their business. There are a couple of things along those lines that bear repeating and pronouncing along with Council Member DuBois' comments. If we don't do regular and frequent interviews and analysis with retailers, once they've closed or been impacted so badly they can't survive, it's too late. We're going to lose some of those businesses. I don't know what your frequency rate is for wanting to poll and how broadly you're going to poll retailers and personal service businesses. Mr. Mello: Before we bring it back to you, we'll develop a plan on how we'll try to monitor that in advance of them experiencing any hardship and try to get ahead of the curve. Council Member Holman: Fully support comments that several have made; I just want to strengthen that. Having some free parking is essential. I can't imagine wanting to pay $2.50 to run in Mack's Smoke Shop to pick up a newspaper or run into New York Pizza just to pick up your order. I just can't imagine that's what people are going to be willing to do. On Slide 26, what are the boundaries of Tier 3? It just runs off the graphic, if you will, outside Tiers 1 and 2. Mr. Mello: Tier 3 on the west side would be south of Lytton and east of Alma Street. On the east side—I need to find the color zone map. On the east side, it would be west of Webster and north of Forest. Council Member Holman: You just didn't put dashed lines around those areas. The areas (crosstalk). Mr. Mello: It would be the current extent of the color zone area. Council Member Holman: Also have a preference for the—I just lost the term—for the pay stations as opposed to individual meters, partly aesthetics, partly maintenance. We have enough things going already. Just adding individual space meters really makes for a complicated, complex, and littered Downtown. In terms of looking at Redwood City, I don't know if Redwood City is really a comp. It's a very different geography in terms of other shopping areas in towns than is Palo Alto. I really don't know that it's a comp in looking at their experience with paid parking. We have Menlo Park, Mountain View, Los Altos, and the Stanford Shopping Center. We have all of those right here. I don't know what you're going to find that's a comp for paid parking impacts on another community as we're considering this. If you have any thoughts besides Redwood City, it'd be great to hear them. Ms. Dickson: In terms of California cities that are implementing paid parking, Napa is in the process of considering it as well. Really we're talking about non-California-based cities that have the most recent implementation TRANSCRIPT    Page 68 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  of paid parking solutions. Really, we're talking about programs in California that have actually been established for a pretty decent amount of time, if not a couple of years or longer. We can roll our sleeves up and look a little bit deeper to make sure we're not missing one. Most of them have been established, operating for a few years if not more. Council Member Holman: It's important to see that we do have a comparable situation when you're looking at the impacts. Let me see if that covers all the … One other place that I think is perhaps sensitive is to keep an eye on the Aquarius Theater. They have matinees in the afternoon. If you have to pay an extra $2.50 to go to a—actually that would be Tier 3, so that's not so bad. That would be Tier 3, so not such a big deal. I think those are my comments. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: I've heard a lot of Council Members raise some interest in having an hour or possibly 2 hours of free parking. That’s what we have now. One of the things I'm concerned about is the way the motion is written. It doesn't clarify that we want more options. I'll suggest some wording changes. What I'm looking for you guys to do is come back and think about this and say, "Do we want paid parking? If so, this is what it's going to look like. Here are the benefits of paid parking in terms of"—the biggest one we should discuss—I guess if the bottom line came down to it, if paid parking made us a lot of money, then there may be a value to it. If it costs us money, I wouldn't go there. I'm not convinced frankly that we're going to make money on it. I'm concerned about the cost of the infrastructure. I'm even more concerned about the cost of the personnel. I don't want to have all these pension and—we have what? Eight FTE right now? I would hate to see us have 30 FTE related to parking and say we're making money on it. We want to be really thoughtful as we go through this and ask ourselves what are we trying to accomplish. I haven't yet connected the dots—it's probably me—between why paid parking. When we talk about paid parking, we already have paid parking in Palo Alto, in the Downtown garages. I believe we sell permits in our street lots too. We have paid parking in Palo Alto. We don't have paid hourly parking. Right now, you can park for 2 hours for free. Unless we're going to have—what do we call it? If you stay longer, you can stay longer. What is the cute term we have for that? Pay to stay. If we don't have pay to stay, what are we getting that's different from that we have now? We're doing away with color zones. Why couldn't you just say you can park for 2 hours free in the Downtown period? Other than that you basically have to buy a permit. Maybe we could have technology to buy 3 hours, 4 hours, I don't know. What do we get that's different than that? I haven't really seen that. If you're worried about turnover, why can't you say—you see this all the time. On University Avenue it's a green space, and you can park for 30 minutes. TRANSCRIPT    Page 69 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Other places, you can park for 2 hours. If you want turnover, why can't you say—if you want people not to switch within the Downtown, why can't you just say it's one color zone anywhere you park in the Downtown? I guess what I’m looking for is you to come back with, if we don't charge for parking, how would you put this together without charging for parking? Mr. Mello: It sounds like you want us to return with various pricing structures that you can discuss when we return. Mayor Scharff: I do. I didn't do counts in my head, but I heard at least three Council Members and possibly more say they want some free parking. I heard you say the technology is not there to do that. Ms. Dickson: To the degree that the Council Member asked to provide free parking for a time limit on-street and then to pay for it, the technology does not exist today to allow you to do that. In the combination of using parking sensors as well as LPR, the systems are not accurate enough to be reliable, to allow you to do that effectively today. Mr. Mello: I think we can return to you with various pricing structures, one of which includes a free period of parking. We can look at the financial impacts of that on the greater cash flow plan. Mayor Scharff: I think that would be really great. The other thing I wanted to say about the whole parking choice thing is what I'd like us to do is hone in on what we're trying to achieve and why this achieves it. One of the concerns I have is if we go to paid parking with no free parking anywhere, what are we going to do about people who decide that they're going to park in the neighborhood for 2 hours in the RPP space and then move their car somewhere else or move themselves within the neighborhood. This gets back to your studies. I had some concerns that your studies—you're meeting people on the street and you're interviewing and you had September, October. You got some very different answers. I was concerned that the statistics did not seem to be applied to this, and that it wasn't a statistically valid study. The conclusions drawn from non- statistically valid studies are not valid. I also noticed that most of the people you interviewed—Council Member DuBois talked about this—seemed to be in the retail, maybe 60 percent. If you looked at their salary ranges, the salary ranges people reported were fascinating. In some of those, a huge majority of people said they make no more than $75,000 a year. The conclusions of the report are Palo Alto is an affluent community so people won't care. Those people you interviewed cared deeply. They were adamantly opposed to paid parking at the same time. I was trying to square that. That struck me that what we need to do is get those people low-income garage permits. TRANSCRIPT    Page 70 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  We started to do some of that in the neighborhoods, but we need to have low-income garage permits. There were some places in the study where we talked about we need to raise the price of the garages because they're so underpriced. At the same time, we need to have those low-income ones. That was clear to me. While we're raising the prices, we need to make sure everyone goes into the garages, so they have to be lower than the prices we're charging on the street if we're allowing people to stay all day. I realize that's why we're going back to the Planning and Transportation Commission, the Finance Committee. It seemed that there were a lot of contradictions or, at least, they weren't spelled out clearly for me to simply connect the dots in a vast amount of material. That made me somewhat concerned. I did want to ask why couldn't you get rid of the color zones and have one zone. Why would that be different than having parking meters? If revenue is not an issue. Mr. Mello: Before we answer that, there are a couple of points of clarification. The intercept survey is not purported to be a scientific survey. It was an intercept survey of people walking down the street. They were semi-self-selected; also selected by the consultant. There are some important takeaways, but I wouldn't read that as a scientific survey. The occupancy studies that were done were scientific documentation of how long people are staying, what the occupancy rates are. In regard to the permit pricing in the garages, I admit it is a little hard—we're talking about very different constituencies. We're talking about hourly parkers, daily parkers, and then monthly permit holders. The study does recommend increasing the monthly permit price in the garage. At the same time, offer a low- income permit for the garages. Right now, we're basically incentivizing low- income applicants to buy RPP permits because that's the only low-income option we have. Daily parking and hourly parking should be less expensive in the garage because we don't want daily parkers to occupy on-street spaces all day. That's the discussion around making sure that the hourly and the daily parkers are incentivized to move to the garages if it makes sense to them. There's kind of three different discussions occurring about three different constituents. Mayor Scharff: I worry that we conflate them. It struck me that a lot of these things we could do to make life better right now. I'll give you a simple example. It's clear to me if we sold a low-income permit or a moderate- income permit or however we want to call it, you could buy it and pay it monthly. What are we charging right now for our moderate or low-income? It's like (crosstalk). Mr. Mello: The low-income RPP permits are $100 a year. TRANSCRIPT    Page 71 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: It's $100 a year. That's less than $10 a month. If I started a retail job and you asked me to shell out $100, I'm going to say no. If you asked me if I wanted to pay $9 to not move my car between zones and do that, I think most people would say yes. In fact, most employers could come up with the $9. I don't want to wait for us to implement that while we go through this long process. I wanted you to address do I need to put that in the motion or are you going to come back to us. In fact, are these things you already have the authority to do and you're going to go out and do them? Mr. Mello: Some of the recommendations in the study we're already advancing. We're already moving forward with assembling an RFP for a new comprehensive permit system. Right now we still sell—people have to come into the front desk on the ground floor to buy daily permits for the garages and lots. There are two very outdated machines at two of our garages where people can also purchase permits, but they break about every 2 weeks. We have to go out there personally and add paper to them and refill them. People on Cal. Ave. have to come to Downtown to buy a daily permit for the Cal. Ave. lots and garages. Our goal is to roll out a new comprehensive permit system that will enable us to bring all of our permit sales under one system. It will be seamless, online. We'll be able to sell monthly low-income permits, quarterly permits. People won't have to come all the way Downtown; they'll be able to use their smart phone ideally if we also implement license plate enforcement. There are a lot of things we can move forward with. The paid parking aspect is not holding up other things that we are moving forward with. Mayor Scharff: I get to my last concern. It was something Jim said that made me very concerned, and something you did. You said it's going to take 2-3 years once we implement paid parking for us to be profitable. The funding for—I forget the term. Was it the AGS, which is the signs? Vice Mayor Kniss: Yeah. Mayor Scharff: Was going to be paid out of that paid parking. That puts it 5 years away. That's not acceptable. You just gave us a bunch of great things we're going to do. I'm concerned that—we have to get away from this notion that we're going to pay for that out of revenues of paid parking. Even if we get the paid parking, I don't think we should wait 5 years to get that stuff done. If Council wants to do that, that should be a choice. Right now, you just told us all these great things you're going to do in terms of the monthly parking, but those are going to cost money. You've sort of indicated you're out doing them, but do you have a budget? Are you planning on doing this in the next 6 months? Is this a 5-year plan where it's TRANSCRIPT    Page 72 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  going to be great in 5 years? That's a decision that Council needs to make as a clear decision that they make choices. I thought you could address that. Mr. Keene: There are so many components to this, and it's interactive. What I've heard so far tonight is in one sense the biggest question mark is around the on-street paid parking. Everything from do we do it, how do we price it, what kind of technology do we deploy. The need for maximizing the use of our parking garages by increasing what it costs so that people, one, don't waste it and misuse it, two, getting parking guidance systems to hopefully a little bit more understanding for why wayfinding may be an important component. I'd like to feel those are things that can proceed on a faster track even in the decisions on paid parking. In order to do this, we're going to have to say that's what we want to do. We're going to have to advance money, in my view, somehow from the General Fund, whether we commit some from Reserve with this idea that we'll have revenue streams from the enhanced price of paid parking in the garages. We'll have to cost out what that would look like and mean. I'm probably way outside of my element here. Even if the Council wanted to test some of these things in advance by us raising the paid parking fees and the parking garage fees, we'll see whether we sell permits as long as there is free on-street parking. We could look at that and not feel we've got to do everything simultaneously. I'm in the camp that would say once we price the parking where it should be in the garages, we will see people want to try to park on the street. We may have to do that interactively. We are going to have to advance ourselves some money. We can't wait 5 years. In truth, we've got to be able to advance and start implementing these systems as they go on. The second thing is that while all these moving pieces make it sound like how do we know what we want to do or how do we want to adjust or how dynamic is it, we should take some comfort that we're already in that situation. We're already in a situation where we clearly don't have the garages priced right. We don't even know why we're not getting enough uptake. We just tried to fix the bleed-over in the neighborhoods with RPP. A really good question was raised of we actually don't know how many people don't bother to come into Downtown Palo Alto because the parking actually seems to be a problem. We're already dealing with the fact that there are all these moving pieces and we don't quite know what to do. I don't think it's like everything is perfect now, and now we're going to try to run all these experiments. We're running experiments right now, some of which are already telling us we've got to change our ways. We should get more comfortable with being able to incrementally move along. We are trying to bring the Council up to speed, and then we're talking about going through these processes with the PTC and Finance while we're concurrently pushing these things with the Staff. I think we'll keep you informed all the TRANSCRIPT    Page 73 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  way. Right now, the biggest thing that seems to be the hang-up is how fast we're going to proceed with the on-street paid parking piece. If we could walk away feeling most of everything else we've talked about clearly we're there, that would help us know how we could put together the timeline and the funding needed to be sure we're advancing that. We could also deal with the other piece. Mayor Scharff: Could you repeat that? What I heard you say is you want to know we're there on everything else but the on-street paid parking. Mr. Keene: That's what I'm trying … Mayor Scharff: I'm totally with you on that. I feel that way. I don't know how everyone else feels. I'm not sure the Motion captures that to be honest. Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) Mayor Scharff: Sure. Since I blew it up, why not? Go ahead, Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I agree with a lot of your comments, particularly on the staffing costs versus revenue. I look at the Motion, and I see a request for a finance plan. When we say we're agreeing with everything except for on-street parking, I don't think I'm quite there. I'm more with what I heard the Mayor was. I want to see how the financing plays out. Reading the report, it looked like it could be a substantial amount of revenue that could pay for a lot of impacts. Maybe people aren't entirely clear on that. Seeing that finance plan with the whole integrated system would provide a lot of clarity. I think that's what the motion says. The report was really long. There was a lot of good info there about substantial increases, tiered parking. A lot of it made sense, but it was a lot to digest. The way I'm interpreting this motion is I support what's in that report, and you're going to refine it and come back. Being really clear on the finance piece will be helpful when you do come back. Mr. Mello: I think we could bring back a financing plan with a free period. We could bring back a financing plan with no paid on-street parking. We could bring one that has the recommendations for paid parking from the report. Mayor Scharff: To interrupt, Council Member DuBois, which is probably unfortunate. I wanted to clarify, if we leave the motion that way—I was going to wordsmith it to tell you to do that, to come back with options. I don't read the motion that way. What happens is the next time we look at TRANSCRIPT    Page 74 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  this is a year later, and we forget it. I'm open to suggestions that you would have to make those changes. I'll finish with Council Member DuBois. That's really what I wanted to get to. Council Member DuBois: I just wanted to clarify my thoughts on free parking. I'm actually fairly comfortable with paid on-street parking. My thought on free parking was, if it's possible using the technology—I was personally just looking at University Avenue itself and having like 30 or 60 minutes of free parking (inaudible) in the core retail area. A lot of what's free today would become paid. That is a difference. It wasn't free everywhere for 2 hours. That's the way I was thinking about it. Other people were talking about 1 or 2 hours free. I just wanted to clarify that I was mostly onboard with the report. Mr. Keene: Can I, Mr. Mayor? I think the Motion actually does direct us. One suggestion that Josh made to me. In the first paragraph, the second to last sentence where we are saying "and return," we're going to refine recommendations related to the introduction of paid parking in Downtown Palo Alto and to return—not with anything—with various phasing, finance, and implementation plans. Not that it's just one single one. When I said I think you're mostly there on these things except for the on-street paid parking, that doesn't mean in every detail. That seems like the area where there's the most, one, variability and, two, if we were to try to get a clarification from you guys tonight, we could not get that. There's a lot more what ifs. I'd like us to be able to nail down some of these other components. We're going to be coming back to Finance to talk about this. They can ultimately spit that out to the Council, so it's not a year from now where you see and hear this again. I don't think we want to do that. We want to be moving along, and we've got to make sure we have your okay. We want to put it in some manageable pieces. I think our biggest challenge is going to be how do we communicate how these different things relate to the on-street paid parking, where do we do it, what's the pricing, and those things. Mr. Mello: Paid parking should be changed to Parking Management Strategies (inaudible). Mr. Keene: Josh also suggests that just above the line where we've put the insert, rather than saying paid parking itself, just various parking management strategies. Mayor Scharff: Okay? Council Member Fine: I think those are both okay. We're referring to the report you've just given us. TRANSCRIPT    Page 75 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mr. Keene: Which obviously includes paid parking. Mayor Scharff: I think that's good. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to replace in the Motion, “a phasing, finance, and implementation plan” with “various phasing, finance, and implementation plans.” INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to replace in the Motion, “paid parking” with “various parking management strategies.” Mr. Keene: I think we're good. We're not going to wait a year to come back to you guys, promise. Mayor Scharff: If you do have things you can come back to us in piecemeal, it's a lot easier for us to digest them when they're not … Council Member Wolbach, you still want to speak? Council Member Wolbach: I actually just want a clarification. There's been a lot of stuff raised since the last time I weighed in. I won't take a lot of time. I want to make sure I'm crystal clear on this. Is it your understanding that there is not technology available now so that I could park in a space with a meter that takes a credit card, I put in my credit card, and it charges me only after—it says first hour free but put in your credit card because you're going to be here for 3 hours, and we'll charge you for hours 2 and 3? Mr. Mello: I think with a credit card, that may be doable. The California Vehicle Code also requires that we accept cash. You would have to have a way to refund a cash deposit if you were … Council Member Wolbach: You could do it the same way. You say, "I'm going to be here for 3 hours." It says the first hour is free, and so put in the coins for hours 2 and 3. Mr. Mello: I think that's doable as well, to have a—if you're buying multiple hours, you could have a reduced 1-hour fee. Council Member Wolbach: I think that's what a lot of us were getting at. Ms. Dickson: If I could just give an example. There are cities that have—I don't even want to put this idea out there, but I want to tell you about the abuse of this. It's called a 20-minute free button. Some of the technology provides this 20-minute free button to address exactly what you're talking about. The intent was providing a courtesy 20 minutes, and then you pay TRANSCRIPT    Page 76 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  for your parking and everything happens from there. People park in that space, come out, and press the 20-minute button every 19 minutes. We have a jurisdiction—I won't identify it—losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in parking revenue because of that. Council Member Wolbach: That says that's where you need the enforcement. Ms. Dickson: Now, there's other technologies that come into play. When you talk about the amount of personnel required to manage that and if you're talking about a location like your Downtown where, let's say, there's 1,000 parking spaces, how many parking enforcement officers do you need even with LPR to manage something like that? Council Member Wolbach: I guess I'll just say my last thing on this for now. One thing I'm certainly open to when you bring back options is University Avenue and the side streets immediately adjacent to it, maybe what you have listed as Zone 1, be free but with a time limit of say 30 minutes or 1 hour. You want to do your quick errand to the core of Downtown, you could run in, it's free, you park, you grab your coffee, you go back out. If you decide to stick around Downtown longer, you move it somewhere else where you can pay for longer. Just something else I'd be open to as a potential option. Ms. Dickson: Council Member, one of the items we talked about in the stakeholder meeting is actually the opposite of that. You actually charge on University and your core area where you have your density, and potentially have your time zones surrounding that. That's where your draw is, so you put your paid parking potentially there, and then you do your surrounding. That was discussed at length with the stakeholders as well. Again, that could be one of the items we bring back in terms of an option for consideration. To your point, I would suggest you invert that. Council Member Wolbach: Which is why I'm glad we're not making final decisions tonight. I look forward to seeing what the PTC comes up with. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth, and we need to wrap this up. Council Member Filseth: One hour free with credit card only. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: I would just encourage Staff—I haven't spoken to this yet—to take these comments pretty seriously. There is an issue about this TRANSCRIPT    Page 77 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  1-hour free. I would suggest to my colleagues it's not that we actually want 1-hour free for our residents where they're parking 3 hours. It's that we're trying to provide convenient parking spaces for folks doing short retail trips to our local businesses. I don't think it's that we're trying to give away the first hour free because that actually ruins the whole incentive system. The second part of this is I would encourage us to keep all technological flexibility as possibilities. You say right now the LPRs are 85 percent, and the sensors are needed for some of that. We should make sure we have maximum flexibility in the future. If there were some new vendor that comes along and figures out some way to give away this first 30 minutes free in front of businesses, it happens. Ms. Dickson: I want to clarify that I said the LPRs are about 95 percent. I don't want to go on record so that vendors came after and said I defamed them. 95 percent-ish. Thanks. MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to direct Staff to conduct public outreach and work with the Planning and Transportation Commission and the Finance Committee to refine recommendations related to the introduction of various parking management strategies in Downtown Palo Alto, and return with various phasing, finance, and implementation plans for the Council’s consideration in the fall of 2017; and A. Direct Staff to coordinate paid parking in Downtown Palo Alto pricing with Residential Preferential Permit Parking (RPP) Programs, garage permit pricing, and lot permit pricing. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That pass unanimously. I'm happy to report Council Member Kou whose no light wasn't working tonight didn't have to use it once. MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 9-0 Mr. Keene: I thought the public speaker commentators tonight were especially helpful on the discussion. Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs 12. Staff Recommendation to Approve Sending a Letter Supporting the State's Latest Regional Traffic Relief Plan. Mayor Scharff: We do have one more item. Council Member DuBois: I'll make a Motion. TRANSCRIPT    Page 78 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: I'm fine with that. Council Member DuBois: I'll move the Item 12 Staff Motion. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'll second it. MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to: A. Authorize the Mayor to sign a letter to the state legislative Bay Area Caucus supporting the most recent iteration of the Regional Measure supporting a Regional Traffic Relief Plan; and B. Authorize the Mayor to sign future letters to elected officials, as needed and after City Manager approval, concerning this Reginal Measure. Mayor Scharff: I see no lights, unless you have to speak to your motion? Can we vote on the board? That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements Mayor Scharff: Any Council Member Questions or Comments? I see none. I see some now. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Just one. I was wondering if City Staff could—I guess they have commented back—give further consideration to extending the Castilleja scoping comments period, consistent with the comments of the speaker this evening? Mayor Scharff: Council Member … James Keene, City Manager: I'll discuss that with the Staff. We've been communicating back. Mayor Scharff: Didn't mean to cut you off. Council Member Wolbach, did you have something to say? Council Member Wolbach: Judging by the unanimity of our votes this evening, maybe we should have a Retreat every weekend. I am of course just kidding. I did want to say thank you to the Mayor, City Manager, and our guest coaches who helped lead us through what I thought was a very productive Retreat on Friday and Saturday. TRANSCRIPT    Page 79 of 79  City Council Meeting  Transcript:  4/11/17  Mayor Scharff: Meeting adjourned. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:07 P.M.