Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-09-05 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 107 Special Meeting September 5, 2017 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 5:08 P.M. Present: DuBois arrived at 5:24 P.M.; Filseth, Fine, Holman; Kniss arrived at 5:15 P.M.; Kou, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Absent: Closed Session 1. CONFERENCE WITH LABOR NEGOTIATORS. This Item has Been Removed and Will be Heard at a Later Date. Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs 1A. Support for SB 797 (Hill), a Senate Bill Allowing Regional Entities and Residents of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties to Vote to Increase the Sales Tax by 1/8 Cent for Caltrain Operations and Capital Purposes (CONTINUED FROM AUGUST 28, 2017). Mayor Scharff: Our first item is the declaration of possible support for SB 797 (hill). Does Staff have anything further? Do they want to give us an update? James Keene, City Manager: Yes. Ed can give you a quick update on the status of the legislation right now. Then, I'll add some comments. Ed Shikada, Assistant City Manager: Thank you, Mayor and members of the Council. It was our understanding that the bill was up potentially for action on the Senate floor today. We did receive an update that the bill, SB 797, was not heard on the Senate floor. Instead, it was referred to the Rules Committee for referral to another committee. This was a unique action apparently taken because it was originally introduced in the Senate as an entirely different topic related to nurse and psychiatric technicians. While it passed the Senate last week … Mr. Keene: No bearing on our conversation. TRANSCRIPT Page 2 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mr. Shikada: … the change will bring it back to the Senate committee. It will be heard by Policy Committee and then brought back most likely later this week. If it passes the committee, it will then return to the Senate floor. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. We have a number of public speakers on this. You'll each have 3 minutes. First, Jessica Epstein representing Caltrain. Jessica Epstein, Caltrain: Thank you, Council Members, for giving us an opportunity to speak today. On behalf of the Peninsula Joint Powers Board, also known as Caltrain, I'm here today to ask for your support for SB 797. Caltrain is the only passenger rail service in the country without a dedicated, permanent source of funding. Caltrain moves the Peninsula, and our ridership demand is past capacity and expected to continue to rise with electrification. It is essential that the agency be equipped with resources to both maintain and increase service throughout the Peninsula. Fare box recovery and member agency contributions is how we are funded, but this is not stable. Riderships can dip. Member agencies need their funds for their own transit uses. We need to grow to meet increasing demand. SB 797 will ensure that Caltrain is poised to secure voter-approved, dedicated funding in 2020. We know this is not an easy road. We need the bill to pass the Legislature, be signed by the Governor, be approved by seven different Boards including all three County Boards, the three transit agencies plus Caltrain, and finally pass with two-thirds of the voters. We are being extremely thoughtful in our approach and developing a Caltrain business plan. Through collaborative thinking and discussion with a breadth of interested parties as well as significant technical analysis, we are going to answer the critical questions about Caltrain's future. We're looking at everything, future service levels and patterns, infrastructure needs, fare policy, transit-oriented development, first and last-mile policies. We're going to build on the Caltrain Railroad's existing commitments as we develop into the future. We're asking for your help to let us make our case to the voters. I don't need to tell you how bad traffic is; you know. I don't need to tell you how overcrowded Caltrain is; you know. Our entire agency is focused on fixing these problems. We need your help to get there. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Roland LeBrun. Roland LeBrun: Good evening, Mayor and Council. As I see it, there are multiple problems with this bill. The first one has to do with equity because the proposal is to have a single pot with Santa Clara County potentially generating over 50 percent of the revenue and subsequently putting SamTrans essentially in charge of the proceeds. Our objective here should not be to bail out SamTrans. It should be to support Caltrain and make it grow. The next thing I want to touch on is Measure B. Santa Clara County TRANSCRIPT Page 3 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 passed Measure B. There's $1.1 billion for Caltrain. San Francisco tried and they failed. San Mateo County did not even try. The next thing I want to talk about is what's happening to Measure B. It's in serious trouble. As you've probably heard, it might be in the courts for years. As far as I know, it's what happened after we spent 3 years agreeing among ourselves as to exactly how we were going to be distributing these funds. Somebody who works with the VTA decided to introduce some language saying, "This is all well and good but, if three-quarters of the VTA Board says we're going to start shuffling funds around, this is what's going to happen." If you go back to 2014, that's exactly what happened to us. I live south of San Jose, near the Blossom Hill Caltrain station. We don't get any Caltrain service. We had to fully fund the double- tracking project between San Jose and Gilroy, and VTA relocated the entire thing to the Mountain View light rail double-tracking for Super Bowl. The last point I want to touch on is the governance. The discussion you had was past midnight, and it was a really good discussion. Vice Mayor Kniss brought up the issue of governance. It is quite correct that we do not have any control about who appoints the SamTrans Chief Executive. What we do have control— a 1996 agreement says who the managing agency should be for Caltrain, whether it should be SamTrans or not. Every year, we have got the opportunity at the Board-level to inform SamTrans we really appreciate their interest in Caltrain, but their services are no longer required. Thank you very much. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Jeannie Bruins, who is also a fellow Council Member in Los Altos, MTC Chair, on the Caltrain Board, and Chair of VTA. Jeannie Bruins: Just an MTC Commissioner. Yes, I serve on a number of the transportation agencies and, as you said, as a Council Member in Los Altos. I want to speak to you in terms of hopefully gaining your support. What's before you is a piece of enabling legislation. The enabling legislation is the first opportunity for us to look at truly securing dedicated funding for Caltrain. You can go back years and years and years, and Caltrain has always said that we need a dedicated revenue stream because we have not been served well by what we have in place, because it's a situation that sometimes is a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" scenario. When you have two organizations with deficit budgets, relying purely on partnership doesn't work. This enabling legislation, again, allows us to take the time to decide when we all want to put it forward. There's a lot of hoops and such. This is not something that's going to show up on the ballot tomorrow, the day after the legislation is passed. It will put us in a position to make sure we have met all the requirements that all of us are going to have in terms of how we're going to make sure we're expending the money in a most efficient way, etc. Governance was brought up. If I could take a moment. VTA, we agendized this to determine as a Board whether or not to support this legislation. We did as a Board decide with only TRANSCRIPT Page 4 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 one no vote to support the legislation. Again, from a VTA point of view, dedicated funding and dedicated funding that actually can produce more money than what the partnership agreements are going to be capable of doing really makes sense for us. If you listen to that meeting or if you look at the minutes, which are being approved this Thursday, you will see that as Board Members we also collectively had concerns regarding governance. That is something that we would like to also see addressed for us not only for this particular enabling legislation, but if you look at a broader point of view. I'm going to shift over to my Caltrain hat. We've got a lot of different forces that are going to be putting pressure on Caltrain as an agency and such. We've got our whole electrification, the whole Cal Mod projects, you've got High Speed Rail coming in. We've got a whole big situation with what's going to be happening in terms of the development of Diridon. We still have issues in terms of where Caltrain serves south to Gilroy on UP lines that really do have to be addressed. In order to deal with all of this, we really need to look at the overall governance structure. That is pulling out the JPB agreement, seeing how well that's serving us. It was great when it was invoked, but I think it's time. I think our Board and hopefully—one of the things as a Caltrain Board Member that I'm looking to try and do is to start as soon as possible to really look at the overall governance, from the JPB agreement all the way down, to make sure that when we have something in place. Even without this measure, we owe it to ourselves to really look at how we ensure a solid governance structure is in place. If there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Mayor Scharff: That'd be great. I was thinking I'd get through the next public speaker. If you could hang around, a lot of Council Members may actually have some questions. If you have a little bit of time and can hang around, that'd be great. Karen, I know you have a question for Jeannie. We'll get to that. Elizabeth Alexis. Elizabeth Alexis: Good evening. It's bright and early. I've never spoken this early at a Council meeting. I'm Elizabeth Alexis from CARRD. We are very excited about all this emphasis now on transit. We have almost too many people who want to raise money for this and that. It's such a great change from where we've been. We do want to add one more—I know that we've talked about governance as something that we'd like to see if we go ahead and give Caltrain a lot more money. The second thing is something that actually—I saw Jeannie Bruins is here from VTA. Its' really pointless to have more money for Caltrain unless Caltrain can run a lot more trains. They cannot run a lot more trains until all of the major crossings of Caltrain are grade-separated. We are looking at 2025 as a year by which either if High Speed Rail comes or the Trans Bay Terminal is done or if just life in Silicon Valley happens, that we will be begging to increase the number of Caltrain TRANSCRIPT Page 5 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 trains. We can go ahead and pass all this extra money, but we're going to just sit there frustrated because we will not be able to increase the number of trains if every city along the line is not able to make those upgrades to their road and bicycle infrastructure. That is why we are very concerned with the noises coming out of VTA that they're thinking of the grade separation program in Santa Clara County as a 30-year program. Thirty years from now is 2047. You cannot have anything that is a major crossing not grade- separated in the next 10 years. You cannot talk about 30 years. You say it's a 30-year tax measure; how are you going to possibly do that? There are many creative ways that people have to do this. You can bond against; you can borrow some of those monies; you can move around the order in which you do different kinds of projects because there's many different things under the Measure B umbrella. Whatever it is, everybody has got to get on the program that this has got to be done by 2025. The second thing is that right now VTA is almost—I don't know how it happened. It's like a gladiator environment where every city is pitted against each other. Who will be the first? Where is everybody else? It's good to get some sense of urgency, but you're getting people rushing in a way that's—you want to have a sense of purpose, but right now it's a really unhelpful environment. I think we should work with Caltrain, work with VTA and get everybody onto a joint program. I would just add along with governance issues some kind of program or commitment or vision or plan for how we're going to have enough at the line or all of the major crossings grade-separated. We can get this money, but every year you'll have to—Caltrain service will be cut in half for construction someplace else or you simply won't be able to increase the number of trains. We have to have all of our ducks in a row. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Do we have any more speakers or is that it? We'll return to Council. I know, Karen, you had your light on. Council Member Holman: It's a question for Jeannie, if you would. The question is you said the minutes were being prepared now from that last meeting. Ms. Bruins: The minutes are actually available. They're being approved in Thursday night's meeting. Council Member Holman: What as a group, what as an entity was decided about governance? What about what Elizabeth Alexis spoke about, which is critical too? It was about timing, concerted effort among and between cities. You can take those one at a time if you want. Ms. Bruins: In terms of the discussion that we had in our last meeting about this, we talked about need to look at the governance, the management, the TRANSCRIPT Page 6 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 organization, again how things are done. Caltrain is a big workhorse for all of us. It has the biggest potential for carrying more riders and having the biggest impact in terms of taking people off the roads. Because of that, there's a lot of pressures. This is why we said it's a good time. High Speed Rail comes into this. For me, it's a little hard because I have to blend from the VTA and being on Caltrain. The last speaker talked about service delivery. There's a lot of things we really need to dig into, to understand what's going to happen here. Like I said, we have to address—when I say address the governance, let me make sure I'm clear in terms of speaking for myself individually as a Board Member. Council Member Holman: What I'm looking for is what does that mean. What kind of timeframe, what kind of forum, who are the participants to try to look at the governance issues? What does it mean to say it's time to look at the governance? What does that mean? Ms. Bruins: For me, as one of the Board Members who is going to try and advance us, coming up with an approach to how we examine this. This is not a popularity contest. I can tell you in my own mind I'm looking at something that resembles what some people might call an audit. It's examination by an independent third party who can come in and look at what our current structure is, what's serving us well, what are our vulnerable points or weak points, and what do we need to think about as we look at High Speed Rail being a reality here, and everything else shifting over. I'm hoping in part of that analysis and examination that a third party would also be looking at what are other models, not only in the United States but around the world in terms of commuter rail. Caltrain is the—it's kind of in a league of its own in terms of commuter rail, which makes it a little bit hard. We need to look at what is the right structure. For me, I look at it—again, I'm speaking only for myself— that we need to put all things on the table to examine end-to-end, and then seeing what comes out of that analysis, that study. I don't want to presume anything because that really is … Council Member Holman: It sounds like a good start. I don't mean to put you on the hot seat; that's not my intention. It's like what was the group's position about looking at governance and how that might happen. Your audit notion is a good one. Who chooses the auditor? What are the criteria? Who develops the criteria? Again, I'm not trying to put you on the hot seat; I'm trying to understand. Ms. Bruins: Caltrain has not—this has not been before the Caltrain Board. I'm looking for what I see as an immediate window of opportunity. Now, I'm getting ahead of myself. We just formed two committees. I don't know if they've ever had subcommittees before. We have two committees; I happen TRANSCRIPT Page 7 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 to sit on one of them, which is our business plan and looking at the business plan with a colleague from San Francisco and a colleague from San Mateo. I'm hoping that the three of us will look at this in the context in the eyes of the business plan in terms of saying that's another catalyst for why I think it should be looked at now as we try and figure out what our business looks like going forward. It has not been brought to the Board. I'm hoping that we can get support so we can start this study. I think it's going to take a little bit of time to look at it. It's got to be something that we can agendize before the Board. I'm going to start by saying if the three members of our business plan are willing to look at advancing this and having it come up for discussion with the Board. Council Member Holman: Thank you, and thank you for being here as well. Ms. Bruins: I hope that answers your question. We're just at the start of this. From a VTA point of view, they really would like—let me see because I wear both. My colleagues on the VTA Board, speaking about us as the Caltrain Board, would like us to show a little bit of leadership and really say, "Let's look at this. If not now, when?" Particularly, the potential for a lot of money to come into play can really do a lot of positive things for us in terms of transit here in the Bay Area. It's important, and we don't want that to fail because we don't have confidence in the governance structure. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: My public apologies to Jeannie. My phone went dead as we were talking this afternoon. I shared with her a lot of my concerns. She may want to respond to these. I sat on VTA for a long time and was very concerned that the measure, which passed in 2000 and had stipulations in it for a whole variety of things as well, ended up primarily going to BART. It could go to BART because on a two-thirds vote—it probably still exists—the money can come from that source and can be used for another source. That really troubled me because it was too fast and loose for me. I think what's happening with this is—I admire that Jerry Hill has come forth with this. We've talked about it for years. There's absolutely no question. For me, until the governance is decided ahead of time and agreed upon, I'm going to have a hard time with this. Right now, the way it's constructed, it is pretty loose. It's enabling legislation. Unless there is a difference in how Caltrain is run, because it's run right now by SamTrans as we know. SamTrans has four heads to it. Jim Hartnett just heads up one of the heads. Maybe you can make some comments back. I'm going to listen to the other discussions tonight, but I am not sure that I feel comfortable yet supporting this. TRANSCRIPT Page 8 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Ms. Bruins: Let me see if I can make a couple of comments. In terms of— you brought up VTA Measure B as an example. I don't want to comment too much because, as you all know, we were sued. The case was dropped as having no merits, and now it's in appeal. We were trying to be very, very careful when we crafted the language for the ballot. In there, we have a cap that no more than 25 percent, if my memory serves me right, would go to BART. That was a … Vice Mayor Kniss: That is why. Ms. Bruins: That is a conscious decision, fought long and hard. I was part of the battle on that one as we were trying to deal with some of this language and commitment. As you pointed out, anybody but San Jose. Probably we all were feeling like too much money out of Measure A went to BART. We thought it was very important. Joe Simitian played a key role in that as well and making sure no more than 25 percent of Measure B proceeds would ever go to BART. If everything goes up, BART goes up with it. If everything goes down, BART goes down with it. It's 25 percent that we put into that. In terms of making any changes … Vice Mayor Kniss: You're speaking of our most recent measure. Ms. Bruins: Measure B. Also in Measure B, we put in language. It's not a majority; it's not a two-thirds majority; it is a super majority in terms of three- quarters of the Board to make any changes within any of the program areas. We did that as well because we were trying to make sure that balancing, in my mind, two elements. One is how good our crystal ball is 30 years out and with changes in technology. Even in a particular program area, it might be to do X. If X is not the greatest thing by the time we're ready to move forward with it, the measure language should not have prevented us from doing the right thing versus doing old technology type of thing. That's what we were looking at. It is to end up with the right investment of our taxpayer dollars. In terms of the concerns, again, I can only speak for myself on this particular one. The concerns that you have definitely are valid concerns. They're your concerns. I'm not going to dismiss them at all. The questions is, is that a matter of this enabling legislation or is that something that needs to be addressed between when we have the enabling legislation and when we actually are looking at proposing to go out on the ballot. This particular legislation, what Senator Hill has done, which I actually very much appreciate—there's a heck of a lot of hurdles. Some of that is just knowing that you've got something that's got multiple heads on it. Having to go through and have all three County Boards of Supervisors have to support it, having to go to the three transit agencies, and then the Caltrain Board, that's seven agencies that have to do that. That's a lot of ducks that have to line TRANSCRIPT Page 9 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 up. Failure in any one prevents it from moving forward. That says to me there's going to be ample opportunity based on conversations. If this wanted to go forward, let's say, in June 2018, if we had the legislation passed, can we solve some of the issues that the VTA Board Members brought up between now and then? If not, I can tell you VTA will not have the votes to support it going on that ballot. There's still some safety mechanisms to deal with this, so that we can make sure, again, that we all feel like we have a vote. Again, as a Council, we don't have that vote at the Council level. It is our County Supervisors, our transit organizations, and then the Caltrain Board that all have to approve this before it can go on the ballot, which means we have to fine tune the language. Vice Mayor Kniss: Which is summary assurance. At the same time, knowing the constitution of the VTA Board which is heavy on San Jose, very heavy—I don't know the construct of the other two. I'm simply not aware of that. Knowing the construct of that Board, unless that were to change so there's a more equal distribution of power and how the money could be spent, I'm still uncomfortable with it. Ms. Bruins: Are we talking about Caltrain money or are we talking about Measure B money? Which one are we talking about? VTA Board does not spend the Caltrain money. Caltrain will spend the Caltrain money. Vice Mayor Kniss: The people who are on Caltrain come from the Board of Supervisors. They're not separately elected. Unless they changed the governance, it is the Board of Supervisors who appoint the people who sit on Caltrain. Ms. Bruins: No, that's not true. For each of the three counties, Board of Supes have one seat. San Jose has one seat, and VTA as the transit agency and congestion management agency has the third seat. Vice Mayor Kniss: All appointed by VTA. Ms. Bruins: No. Vice Mayor Kniss: They're selected, but then we, as I recall, had to vote. Ms. Bruins: For example, the San Jose seat last year was held by Raul Peralez. The Mayor changed that to Dev Davis. We do make sure the VTA Board understands that the three representatives were Ken Yeager, Dev Davis, and myself, which is a good distribution across. Vice Mayor Kniss: I hear how it happens, but you can hear me say I remember and know what the San Jose influence is. I'm at this awful stage of fool me TRANSCRIPT Page 10 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 once in 2000. It's beginning to look like fool us twice last year, now that we're all fighting over the rail money. Are we ready for a third time? That's why until this gets much more revised, lined up, agendized, whatever the words may be, that I can trust the governance and how it will be different, I don't think I can support it yet. I certainly heard what Elizabeth said earlier, if she's still here, about when we will actually be needing this money for Caltrain. Jeannie, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. I know you have a tough job. I'm very sympathetic. Ms. Bruins: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I want to thank Council Member Bruins from Los Altos for being here. It's always nice to have a colleague from a neighboring city, especially one we work with so closely, here with us. Just a reminder for members of the public and also colleagues, just to make sure everybody understands the way our representation on VTA works. I agree it is not friendly to Palo Alto or all of North County. Between Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills combined, we have one representative on the VTA Board. The four cities have our … Vice Mayor Kniss: (inaudible) serves once every 8 years. Council Member Wolbach: Vice Mayor Kniss and myself, we're the representative and alternate to this group of four cities. From those four, we pick one person. We've picked Council Member Bruins from Los Altos to be our representative from the whole North County to the VTA Board. I know being on that VTA Board is a tough place for a North County person to be. That you're able to serve as Chair is remarkable because the VTA Board, as others have pointed out, is not very friendly to North County interests and is very dominated by the largest city in the county, San Jose. I really appreciate the tough job you're navigating, trying to represent all four of our cities including Palo Alto as our representative to the VTA Board and as Chair of the VTA Board and also through that our representative to the Caltrain Board. Those are tough jobs. I know you get a lot of competing interests that you have to balance. I just want to commend you for the job you've tried to do. Whenever you're representing the four cities, I know that you're not just representing Los Altos. You're doing a very fair job representing Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. I for one really appreciate it. Ms. Bruins: Thank you. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you for being here. As far as the discussion that we started last week and are continuing tonight and will continue over TRANSCRIPT Page 11 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 the next couple of years about governance at Caltrain. Again, I really appreciate Council Member Bruins from Los Altos discussing how she and, it sounds like, others on the VTA Board and maybe others on the Caltrain Board and certainly a lot of people on this dais are interested in seeing the governance of Caltrain at some point reformed, improved, at least looking at the options. Just like we're going to talk later about looking at the options for a significant change and taking the time to put everything on the table and consider it, I appreciate that that sounds like that's still an option for the future of Caltrain. What we heard from the representative from Caltrain, Jessica Epstein, also indicates that Caltrain on the staff side is open to having real discussions about what the future looks like. In order to spur those conversations, there needs to be a light at the—there has to be not necessarily a light at the end of the tunnel, but there has to be an indication that there might be a tunnel. For me, that's what this legislation represents. It represents an opening, an opening to a tunnel that we could choose in the future to go down to talk about funding and to talk about governance and to start really reevaluating what the future of Caltrain looks like and how it serves our communities up and down the Peninsula effectively. Of course, I was supportive last week of this legislation. I'll be supportive of us passing a statement of support for this legislation. If it does pass the Legislature and gets signed by the Governor, then we can start really talking about what it's going to take to get us and our county and our representatives in support of raising more money for Caltrain and how do we also make sure that Caltrain continues to serve us and represent us and serves and represents us better in the future than it does today. I want to emphasize that if we are concerned that VTA is not responsive to Palo Alto and not interested in North County interests, shifting the power of the purse away from VTA would be a positive step. Right now, VTA could decide any year they're going to slash funding to Caltrain. I don't think that's a good thing. I'd like to take the power of the purse for Caltrain away from VTA. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: You're going to get a number of themes here this evening. First of all, Council Member Bruins, thank you very much for representing us with the VTA Board. I also want to say how much I appreciate Senator Hill for taking the initiative to drive this. This is a tricky one, and it shouldn't be. Caltrain is of huge importance to the Peninsula. The value of a dedicated funding source and, if possible, some steps on government would benefit everybody on the mid-Peninsula. There's a couple of challenges. One we discussed the government. To be candid, the loopy finances between the VTA and Palo Alto are also going to be a stumbling block here. Palo Alto residents already fund VTA. VTA is in the process of cutting services to Palo Alto, and we're still paying for those services even though we're not getting TRANSCRIPT Page 12 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 them. If Senator Hill's bill proceeds and passes, it seems pretty likely that the VTA will divert—it won't be additive. The VTA will divert its existing funding off to other sources, off to other uses of Caltrain. The track record is those other uses won't involve the North County. You made an analogy earlier about Peter and Paul. It seems like in Palo Alto and in the North County we're Peter an awful lot and hardly ever Paul. The challenge is you're asking us to support something that's good for the Peninsula but bad for Palo Altans. That's a very tricky one for us. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Do you want her to respond to anything or do you want to … Jeannie, you're welcome to respond if you want to. I feel a little bad about putting you on the hot seat here, but how often do we get you to come down here? Council Member Filseth: It's not you. Thank you for representing us on the VTA. Ms. Bruins: Understand what VTA—I'm going to put my VTA hat on first. What we are looking for—if this goes forward and the day comes when this measure is crafted to be on the ballot, we are looking to—it is the sole, outside funding for Caltrain. We are looking to want to change so that the three transit agencies don't have to continue to take our General Fund money and put it toward Caltrain. If you look at the sum of the three Counties' contributions and you look at what you're going to get out of this 1/8-cent sales tax measure, it's more than what you get if we stay in the old way. VTA, when we take that money, that will allow us to focus service, transit service dollars inside of our county with our services. That would be toward the bus services, toward the light rail services, etc. Again, on the whole, it does not mean—the Board is behind this whole thing about capping the BART thing. There's a lot of us that will be fighting to make sure that this money, when this money happens, when this money that is coming out of our General Fund, is allowing us to spend them for our own residents. We are very selfish about this. We would rather do that where we have direct control and we can provide the services. When you talk about things like bus being cut and like this, I understand there's a lot of pain and all. Hopefully, they'll sustain the model that we've put in place in terms of West Valley trying to fill in some of the gaps in trying to come up with this. We are in a deficit budget year. It was a hard year going through our budget. It was a hard year for Caltrain going through their budget as well. That's what makes it very, very challenging. Council Member Filseth: I understand. Thank you very much for supporting the efforts of the North County. As Vice Mayor Kniss put it fairly aptly, the track record is not of how the VTA spends money relative to where it provides TRANSCRIPT Page 13 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 services. It's not promising relative to the North County and especially Palo Alto. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: If you could stay, I have a couple of questions. First of all, I also want to say thank you for your work on VTA. Thank you very much for coming tonight. I did arrive late, so you might have already covered this. I'd like to hear your opinion if Council were to support SB 797, but we also ask Staff to work on a letter that we would send to the Caltrain Board and the VTA Board that our ongoing support would be based on progress made on some of these governance issues. What do you think of that approach? Ms. Bruins: I think that's what the Caltrain Board is there to do. I would encourage you to do that. I think these things—if they're really important, we need to address them. As a Board Member, I would welcome that type of letter that helps us understand what the concerns are. Again, I've disclosed that as a Board Member I am going to try and work with my colleagues to try and move something forward so that we can start addressing this and not just talk about it. I've been on the Board since January. It's the number one thing that people want to talk to me about. It's time for us to listen and to look at this. That's why a third party, in my humble opinion, looking at this and seeing where we can go is the right approach for all of us. Council Member DuBois: Measure B has come up a little bit. I just wondered if you could shed any light. There's been some question about whether those funds could be bonded, not bonded, if all or a portion of them. We're talking about grade separations later tonight. Can you shed any light on the Measure B plan? Ms. Bruins: The VTA Board still needs to approve our guidelines and all for how we're programming all the dollars and such because it is a 30-year measure. We cannot bond against 30 years' worth of revenue. We have to pick and choose our spots in terms of how we go and do all of this. The framework that staff is going to be putting before the Council is supposed to lay out some of these things. We're trying to avoid this rush to be the first in line. This is not about he who's first gets to be the BART of grade-seps and consume all the money, and then anybody who's at the end gets nothing. We're trying to look at all of that. We're looking at, once we start understanding some of these and as we get to real projects versus projects that are in our thought process, when we get down to some real projects, we will be looking at how we're going to be able to fund, whether it's bonding against it, whether there are other mechanisms. We will look at—our Finance Department is committed to looking at it. I think it's in all of our best interests TRANSCRIPT Page 14 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 to advance things as much as possible. Yes, I would say—is it being looked at right now? Absolutely not because we don't have any real projects. We have to look at it in the context of having real projects before us. Other than that, I really can't speak to where they are. Council Member DuBois: I suspect you won't be here later tonight when we're talking about this. Ms. Bruins: No, because I'm going to go a Los Altos Council special meeting. Council Member DuBois: Just so you know, we're looking at our grade seps and bonding … Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois, it's not agendized. Council Member DuBois: It's kind of a visit, so I wanted to get it in. It's going to be critical. Ms. Bruins: Just talk to your friends in Mountain View. Council Member DuBois: I do want to say I appreciate the comments of Council Member Filseth. This is an important measure. It's important to fund Caltrain. It's critical mass transit. Getting it on a stable financial footing is something we should support. I would like to attempt a Motion if it's a good time for it. Mayor Scharff: Sure, go for it. Council Member DuBois: I would move that we support SB 797 and that we also ask Staff to write a letter to the Caltrain and VTA Boards that our ongoing support of this measure in the future will be dependent on progress in a discussion about Caltrain governance, bring that letter back to City Council for review. We have a little more time on actually getting that letter out. Council Member Wolbach: Second. MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to declare support for SB 797 (Hill), a bill allowing the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board to petition regional entities and the voters of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties, to increase the sales tax by 1/8 cent to fund Caltrain operations and capital expenditures, and direct the Staff to return to Council with a letter to the boards of Caltrain and VTA, stating that our ongoing support of SB 797 will be dependent on progress in a discussion about Caltrain governance. Mayor Scharff: Would you like to speak further to your Motion? TRANSCRIPT Page 15 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: Just quickly. It's important that we support the motion now. It has a lot of hurdles to jump through, and it's going to take some time. If we can support the measure directly but let the Boards know that that support is conditional in a separate letter, that's a good way forward. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach, would you like to speak to your second? Council Member Wolbach: Council Member DuBois has hit the two key points here. Well done. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I think I turned on my light for the earlier comment, but I'll also comment on this. I cannot support this Motion or even supporting the bill. I agree with everything Vice Mayor Kniss said as well as Council Member Filseth. There has been a lot of mistrust and accountability issues from the past, from the VTA Board as well as—now with Measure B, there's uncertainties. With this SB 797, there's really nothing to say what we can expect. It's just early. As Ms. Alexis had said, I would really like to see the Boards, all these agencies, actually come together and actually talk about a plan before we even start looking at supporting bills. Not only that, a lot of this with Measure B and the sales tax already approved, it shows that the public has the interest in ensuring that our mass transit is sufficient and efficient and ongoing and sustained. However, with the Caltrain tax now, it's going to be a double hit on Santa Clara residents. I want to be assured that we're going to be getting our fair share before we go ahead and support anything. I want to know that there is a plan in place and that there is communication within all the parties. At this point, I am very sorry. It's very nice to meet you, Councilwoman Bruins. Thank you for being here. At this point, I'm not ready to support this Senate Bill. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Holman: Mr. Mayor, before we go further, can we get the Motion correct on the board? I ask Council Member DuBois to work with the staff to get his Motion correct. Mayor Scharff: I think they just need to add the part about the letter. I was waiting for that to occur. Go on, Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I have a question for our VTA rep. My question is you mentioned that there's one person that didn't vote for this. I was wondering if you could talk about why they didn't vote and what was the rationale behind it, so we can have a better understanding. TRANSCRIPT Page 16 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Ms. Bruins: You're going to test my memory. The member who did not vote in support was our West Valley representative. It was based on—I think the primary driver was based on an erroneous piece of information. That is in West Valley some of the cities were concerned about hitting the cap in terms of sales tax cap. By doing this 1/8-cent sales tax, it would prevent them from being able to do something in the future. If you've read the legislation, the legislation actually waives that cap. That cap does not apply. If as a city you were going to be doing a 1/2-cent sales tax, if you had enough head room, this would not—it's not like you have to now notch that down a 1/8-cent. If you had enough head room for your half, you could still do your half because this 1/8 does not impact that. It was a misunderstanding. Again, that was my understanding. It was Board Member Vaidhyanathan, who is Mayor of Cupertino and represents the West Valley cities. Council Member Tanaka: Just to be clear. For Palo Alto, you're saying that we wouldn't be affected by this? Ms. Bruins: The legislation is written—there's a cap. This does not contribute toward that cap. It does not take away from your ability to do what you want to do in some ways. Think about the cap still being where it is or think about it notching up another 1/8-cent. You still have that head room. It does not come out of your pocket. Council Member Tanaka: I see. I heard the discussion earlier about how we should support it now, and then down the road we'll figure out this governance issue later on. Given all your experience on VTA, can you maybe play it out for us how that could happen? Right now, we're the second busiest station on the whole line. How does the lack of representation that we get today change in the future? Let's say we support this. We do what's on the board up there. How does this actually change? Can you play it out for us? What steps do we take? What happens where we eventually get better representation for what happens? Ms. Bruins: I'm a little confused by some of your conversation because this is a conversation about a piece of legislation. There's been a lot of conversation about VTA, and I'm taking back feedback in terms of your displeasure with VTA. VTA has nothing to do with this bill. We're not the one who is the sponsor of the bill. It's actually Silicon Valley Leadership Group that is the sponsor with Jerry Hill. In terms of when I look at the financial side—trying to address some of the underlying concern here. Today, the agencies all put a flat sum toward capital costs, and then we have a proportional share of the operational costs. Santa Clara County today pays more because of our ridership. It's done by the ridership, the morning boardings. VTA, out of our coffers comes more money than what you would TRANSCRIPT Page 17 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 see out of San Mateo or San Francisco. What this is going to do is displace— all the money that we put forward, we are no longer going to do it. That money stays with VTA and now is used against our programs, our Master Plans, etc., that are all developed with all the cities. It produces more revenue for VTA's use. It doesn't produce more revenue; it produces less costs, so there's less money going out and we have more money to spend on our priorities within the county. In terms of the sales tax measure, one way of looking at this is Santa Clara will be paying more; our residents will pay more in this. Again, we have the higher boardings in our county as well, so it in some ways still does the same thing that's already in place and has been in place since the beginning of time. Council Member Tanaka: Just to be more clear is how do you—the Vice Mayor talked about some governance issues in terms—you spoke about how there's seven agencies that have to approve this, so there's many chances for us to fix this down the road. I was just wondering could you talk about how that would happen. When would be the right time to actually try to assert some reasonable governance for Palo Alto? Ms. Bruins: Again, I don't know if the question is getting better representation on the Caltrain Board. If you're talking about that, then VTA has one seat on that Board. San Jose has one seat on that Board and the County Supervisors. If you look at the County Supervisors first, we had exactly one County Supervisor that does not come from San Jose, and that's Joe Simitian. Ken Yeager will term out next year. Who the County Supervisors put on there I don't know, even if you look at who's in that race. I can't predict who's going to be replacing Ken Yeager on the County Supervisors, and I can't tell you what they're going to do and whether or not Joe's going to say it's his turn in the seat. I don't know. I haven't looked at historically what the County Supervisors have done. With VTA, the Board Chair is the one who actually ends up putting forward a name. Yes, this is the year I put my name forward because of Mountain View and Palo Alto, two of the cities that I represent. Sunnyvale had just come into a seat, and it was a brand new Board Member who's only going to be there for one year, so I did not put Sunnyvale. The three cities I'm most concerned with in a lot of ways is Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. I chose to put my name forward; I did not put somebody who's—even though I'm a Council Member who's not on the corridor, my seat is representing you and Mountain View. That is why I put myself forward and why I would hope that I can still be on that as well, so we can move the needle on this. Next year, one of your colleagues has the power of one of the votes in terms of whether or not I will stay on the Caltrain Board. Because my term is a 2-year term on the VTA Board, I would need to stay on the VTA Board, I think, in order to stay on the Caltrain Board as well. I'm in this fight for the TRANSCRIPT Page 18 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 long haul here, I'm hoping. Again, we all have similar concerns. I agree the concerns need to be addressed. Mayor Scharff: Are you done? Ms. Bruins: In terms of time table—let me do one more thing. Again, this is the legislation. Your Motion said to send it to the Caltrain and to the VTA. I think it's important to do it to both of those Boards. When somebody decides to move the measure forward, when Caltrain decides to put a ballot measure on, those two Boards have to approve it. At least you're addressing two of the Boards. Depending on how this goes, you can take your letter and go to the other Boards as well. If you want to add the County Supervisors on your list here and not just make it the two transit agencies, I would consider doing that as well. Mayor Scharff: Tom, you want to add that? Jeannie's suggesting you add the Board of Supervisors. Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to amend the Motion to state “… with a letter to the boards of Caltrain, VTA and Board of Supervisors.” Ms. Bruins: I don't have a crystal ball. All I can tell you is it's going to take us a while assuming we get the legislation passed and the Governor signing that. It'll take some time. Like I said, all the support that we need—if you don't know, San Mateo County is working very actively trying to put a 1/2- cent sales tax measure on the ballot in 2018. The left hand has to talk to the right hand. We'll see how we all come out on this. Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much, Jeannie. I appreciate it. Ms. Bruins: Sorry for taking too much time. Mayor Scharff: No, no, it was great. It was like having a Study Session with you without having to schedule it. Council Member Holman, did you want to speak again? Council Member Holman: I had it on earlier. I was just trying to get the Motion right earlier. I did have a question. Mayor Scharff: That's what I thought. Council Member Holman: Now if I can remember my question. I've forgotten my question. TRANSCRIPT Page 19 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: We don't have to speak. Council Member Holman: There's not a timeliness aspect of this, and that's one of the things I was wanting to understand better. Council Member DuBois, it just says will be dependent on progress in a discussion about Caltrain governance. If that comes up at the last minute or the eleventh hours, then we still don't have an opportunity to influence that. When is this? Is the vote really—last week we were told the vote on a final measure would be in 2020. What is the actual date of that? I guess that's a question for Jeannie. Mayor Scharff: Jeannie, you don't have to play Staff if you don't want to. Jessica's here too. Ms. Bruins: There have been no decisions in terms of when we would be putting forward the Caltrain Board—unless they talked about it in July, which is the only meeting I missed. I don't think we've actually had a conversation in terms of when we would want to tee this up. The earliest would be in '18. Otherwise, it'll be in '20. Council Member Holman: Thank you for that. Offering an Amendment to Council Member DuBois because of the concern about delays, for what it's worth, "will be dependent on timely progress." If you'd add the word "timely." Council Member DuBois: That's fine. The whole point is we're letting them know that our support is conditional. Council Member Wolbach: Actually, I don't think that I would support that. I would suggest a slight alteration. The point is this isn't just about SB 797. This is about a multiyear discussion of future funding measures for independent Caltrain funding and the governance changes at Caltrain, which we want to be able to discuss. I would actually suggest rather than adding the word "timely," we should add "support for SB 797 and additional funding measures for Caltrain." Would you be comfortable with that? If the cost of getting that added is we have to include "timely," I'm okay with that too. Council Member DuBois: If we'd include "timely," I don't see anything wrong with timely. Council Member Wolbach: Let's throw it all in there then. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to amend the Motion to state “… will be dependent on timely progress in a discussion.” Council Member Holman: Thank you. TRANSCRIPT Page 20 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor? Mayor Scharff: Yes. Mr. Keene: One clarification in the Motion. The way it's drafted right now, I'm assuming that returning to the Council doesn't mean just putting it as an information item on the Council's agenda. It would actually come back on Consent. Obviously you always have the chance to pull it if you wanted. Mayor Scharff: I think we should put it on Consent too. If three people are unhappy with it, they can pull it. Mr. Keene: Just so we're clear, if the Motion passes, you're identifying your intent tonight. You'll be subsequently approving the specific language of the letter itself. Mayor Scharff: Fair enough. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks, Jessica and Jeannie, for both showing up tonight. Once again, this is one of those measures I'd like to support. I know how long Jerry has worked on something like this. We've talked about it for years. This is based on hope, hope that governance will change, hope that something different happens with VTA's selection. It's based on any number of hope and hopeful assumptions that I'm just not ready to buy into tonight. If there's a time when we really feel that we have some budget power as well as some governance and so forth, I might feel very differently. We are not looking at this rationally. I'm troubled that we're looking at voting a lot more money to SamTrans essentially. SamTrans is still running this. Until the governance changes, it goes to SamTrans, and SamTrans decides how it gets spent. Jeannie is absolutely right. The amount of money that each County gives to us is absolutely dependent on good will. There is nothing in writing anywhere that puts this out there. You just hope that each County will come through every year. With some regret and knowing also that the public by now must have taxation fatigue, if we are going again when we've gone out very recently, I can't support it at this time. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I will support this Motion, but conditional is the right word and is actually a very soft word for what the conditionality really is. There's an excellent chance that it won't get support in its current form if indeed it goes to voters. In addition to the SamTrans issue, there's a real VTA issue here too. I hope the rest of your colleagues on the VTA understand that what you're going to ask us to do is go back to our constituents and say, "Here. Please pay a lot more money. If you get anything for it, that really TRANSCRIPT Page 21 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 depends on the good will of the VTA and to some extent SamTrans." That's a tricky one. Mayor Scharff: Everyone's had a round to the motion. I don't really want to start this again, if that's okay. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm ready to vote. Mayor Scharff: I just wanted to say, Council Member Bruins, thank you so much for coming. We really do appreciate it. I will be supporting the motion. I think it's well craft and appreciate the job you guys did on it. MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to declare support for SB 797 (Hill), a bill allowing the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board to petition regional entities and the voters of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties, to increase the sales tax by 1/8 cent to fund Caltrain operations and capital expenditures, and direct Staff to return to Council with a letter to the boards of Caltrain, VTA and Board of Supervisors stating that our ongoing support of SB 797 and additional funding measures for Caltrain will be dependent on timely progress in a discussion about Caltrain governance. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes on a 7-2 with Council Members Kou and Kniss voting no. I'll just note that we went 45 minutes over on that item. MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED : 7-2 Kniss, Kou no Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions Mayor Scharff: On to the next item, which would be Agenda Changes, Additions, and Deletions. I don't think we have any. City Manager Comments Mayor Scharff: City Manager Comments. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for your decision on the prior item. That was the right decision. Let's see. Next week, September 9th-17th, is National Drive Electric Week. The celebrations will be taking place across the United States and in other countries. On Sunday, September 17th, a ride and drive event will take place at Acterra in Palo Alto from 1:00 to 4:00. Vehicles scheduled to participate are BMW i3, Chevy Volt, Fiat 500E, Ford Focus EV, Honda Clarity EV, Kia Soul EV, Nissan Leaf, Tesla S, and the VW E Golf. Quite a proliferation of different companies with electric vehicles out there. Ride and drive events are a great way for folks in our TRANSCRIPT Page 22 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 community to be able to ask questions, see many EV models at once without having to schlep all over the place to different dealerships. For more information, you can go to the Acterra website at www.acterra.org/events. Additionally, on October 12 at 5:30 p.m. Stanford Health Improvement Program in conjunction with Charge Point, Project Green Home, and Plug In America will be putting on the workshop Is An Electric Vehicle Right For You? This workshop will have EVs onsite, and the panel will answer questions related to EV adoptions such as differences between all electric and plug-in hybrid EVs, EV charging at home, work, and public space, range anxiety misconceptions—didn't know there was an actual phrase there yet—and battery longevity, buying versus leasing, and the environmental, economic, and personal benefits of EV. For more information there, the website is events.stanford.edu/events. Those of you interested in maintaining your personal mobility as opposed to EVs might want to consider attending one of the free dance fitness series this month featuring fitness instructors from three Palo Alto studios. The Get Fit! Downtown series begins this Sunday, September 10th, with a Zumba class at 3:00 P.M. on King Plaza. The series continues the following Sunday, September 17th, with belly dancing, and concludes on Sunday, September 24th, with hip hop. Each of the events will take place from 3:00-4:00 P.M. on King Plaza. The first 20 participants at each event will receive a free water bottle. Think Healthy City Healthy Community. September is National Preparedness Month, also includes our annual Airport Day, and special CERT classes that will be offered this September. Obviously, Hurricane Harvey is still fresh on our minds. September is National Preparedness Month. As a reminder, our Office of Emergency Services encourages people to take steps now to prepare for potential disasters by visiting our City website, cityofpaloalto.org/preparedness. Also, Palo Alto Airport Day is this Sunday, September 9th, from 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. Our Public Safety Departments will have various demonstrations, equipment on display such as the Mobile Emergency Operations Center better known as the MEOC. Don't miss this great opportunity to meet some of our first responders and learn about emergency preparedness as well as spending some time out at the airport. You can find more information at paloaltoairport.aero/airportday. Finally, our upcoming Community Emergency Response Team or CERT class starts next Tuesday, September 12th. It is almost full. We encourage all members of our community to consider becoming one of our emergency services volunteers. Learn more at cityofpaloalto.org/emergencyvolunteers. I'm sure Council Member Kou can put in a plug for why that's so valuable and important also. Finally, an update on our Comprehensive Plan Final EIR, Environmental Impact Report. The Planning Commission is scheduled to make a recommendation on the Comp Plan Update and related Final EIR by the end of September. Both items can be heard by the City Council in October and November. To facilitate these hearings, Staff is distributing the Final EIR this TRANSCRIPT Page 23 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Wednesday and will be making hard copies available to the Commission, the Council, and for the public at local libraries. Electronic copies will be available online, and we encourage folks to read through the documents. It says here "at their leisure." I'm not sure that's appropriate. At the cost of their leisure perhaps. The Final EIR contains responses to all of the substantive comments on the February 2016 Draft EIR and the February 2017 supplement to the Draft EIR as well as a description of the Council's preferred EIR scenario. Staff wants to thank all who provided comments on the earlier documents and will be happy to answer questions that come up prior to public hearings at the Commission and the City Council. That's all I have to report. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Oral Communications Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll move on to Oral Communications. Wait, maybe not. There may be something else I've got to do here. Yep, Oral Communications. Our first speaker is Sea Reddy, to be followed by Roland LeBrun. You'll each have 3 minutes. Sea Reddy: Good evening, Mayor and the City Council and the City Hall. Thanks for the air conditioning. They're working very well. I feel very comfortable. Thank you. I would like us to take a minute to remember 9/11. Seventeen years ago, we were shocked, surprised, embarrassed, hurt by the evil elements in the world. We also experience similar situation now. We need to be vigilant. Like City Manager just said, we need to be prepared. We have many evil elements. I want the citizens of the 17th and 18th Districts and Palo Alto and our sister cities to be prepared and tell when you see something evil is going to occur. We cannot let this happen again. I'm back to the City activities. There is a Jack in the Box; there's only one Jack in the Box in Palo Alto. Luckily, it's close to my walking distance. There's a pothole for the last 3 years that's right in front of the exit if you're driving out. I wonder how I could get some help, somebody to look at it. We are a wealthy City, wealthy State. We seem to have a little bit more than others, like Irvine and Newport Beach, potholes. Also, the right-hand on University Avenue also uneven pavement. I would like to know how to request someone to look at this. The second thing is I would really like you to help support the College Terrace Market. We've all (inaudible) to open. They need some help. I think the City Hall could look at some of these lunch meetings and all that and catering with Isabella. She's very ready for you. Please look at her as your lunch provider. The last thing is I'm going to talk about the Korea, North Korea. I think we should take him out. UN should occupy and depose him and rebuild like we did the other places. I think it's well worth it. He doesn't deserve to threaten us with the nuclear bomb. Nobody deserves to do that. TRANSCRIPT Page 24 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 We need to confront it, face it, and attack, and do whatever we have to do to remove him from power and unite Korea as one Korea. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. James Keene, City Manager: Mr. Mayor? Mayor Scharff: Yes. Mr. Keene: May I make just a quick comment? Just as it relates to the reporting pothole issue—it's just for the public also as a whole—the City does have a mobile app, Palo Alto 311. You can go to the Apple Store or Android; you can download the app. It's actually very, very simple. When you're out, take a picture. It's got GPS, so it'll geographically identify where it is. You'll be kept posted. Those of you who are really concerned or interested about that or other problems around town, I'd suggest you download the app as an easy way to address that. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Roland LeBrun to be followed by Mary Sylvester. Roland LeBrun: Good evening. Thank you, again. I'd like to do (inaudible) talk about the Caltrain business plan. Not Caltrain's business plan, which is essentially give more money to SamTrans. It's actually a business that's going to at least double Caltrain capacity. Before I go there, I'll give you a typical example of a governance issue. As Director Bruins mentioned earlier, for the first time ever they have actually agreed to have subcommittees to discuss some specific items. One of them was for the business plan. Right off the bat, I asked the question, "Are you going to allow public participation?" They said no. I right there cited them with a violation of the Brown Act. The response I got from them that the decision was not made by the Board not to involve the public. It was made by the Chair and, therefore, the Brown Act did not apply. The proposal is actually on the thesis that somebody just wrote that actually talks about Caltrain. They're talking about the competitiveness of baby bullets versus car. This axis here has the time that it takes, which for a baby bullet right now is 1 hours, and then the time of the day. You see cars going up that way. For 2 hours at this time of the morning, 9:45, this is between San Jose and San Francisco, and then over (inaudible). In other words, baby bullets are only competitive with cars for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening. Now, as Elizabeth said earlier, talking about capacity, running more trains is not an option until we've got full grade- separation. As she correctly mentioned, this may take 30 years. What I and others have come up with is an alternative which focuses purely on baby bullets in two ways. The first one is to double the length of the baby bullet platforms from 700 to 1,400 feet. If we do that, we will be able to carry 2,000 passengers per train during peak and then potentially 1,000 off-peak. The TRANSCRIPT Page 25 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 other thing we propose to address is line speed. It's to increase the speed of the line to 110 miles an hours, which would then take this time down between San Jose and San Francisco to 40 minutes. At this point in time, Caltrain would be competitive with cars during every single hour of the day, whether you're in peak or not. I just put that out there. Obviously, Diridon was taken care of a long time ago. We already put proposals for Mountain View and Sunnyvale, and very soon we hope to put forward a proposal for Palo Alto. Thank you very much. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Mary Sylvester. Mary Sylvester: Hello. I'm Mary Sylvester, a 40-year resident of Palo Alto. I'm actually here to speak tonight briefly on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act. As I'm sure most of you are, I was very saddened to hear President Trump in his great wisdom decline continuation of the Obama era program, sending it back to Congress to pass a replacement Act before he begins to phase out its protections in 6 months. We know that President Obama had to sign an executive action in 2012 because Congress was unable to come up with a solution to this very important and critical issue regarding the humanity of Latino and other foreign-born youth. Tonight at 7:30 in Mountain View at El Camino and Castro Street, there's a vigil on behalf of those affected by DACA. I know the Council won't be able to attend. For anyone in the Chambers or in the viewing audience who can make it tonight, I encourage you to be there. I also urge the City of Palo Alto to take an official stand on behalf of those impacted by DACA and urge Congress to pass legislation that continues this much-needed legislation. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. I believe that concludes Oral Communications. Minutes Approval 2. Approval of Action Minutes for the August 21, 2017 Council Meeting. Mayor Scharff: Do I have a Motion to approve the Minutes? Vice Mayor Kniss: So moved. Mayor Scharff: Second. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Mayor Scharff to approve the Action Minutes for the August 21, 2017 Council Meeting. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 TRANSCRIPT Page 26 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Action Items 3. PUBLIC HEARING. Adoption of an Ordinance for an Extension of Interim Ordinance Number 5357 Imposing an Annual Limit of 50,000 net new Square Feet of Office/R&D Uses in Designated Areas of the City to June 30, 2018 as Recommended by the Planning and Transportation Commission on July 26, 2017; and Direction Regarding a Replacement Ordinance. The Proposed Ordinance is Exempt From the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in Accordance With CEQA Guidelines Section 15061(b)(3). Mayor Scharff: Now, on to our first action item, which is the adoption of an ordinance for an extension of Interim Ordinance Number 5357 imposing annual limit of 50,000 net square feet of office/R&D use in designated areas. You want to take it away? Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council. Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. While Claire is getting the presentation teed up, let me introduce her. This is Claire Campbell on our Staff, who I am sure you know already. The purpose of this item this evening is two-fold. One, we want to get the Council's action on an extension ordinance to extend the annual office limit ordinance a little longer to give us time to prepare a replacement ordinance. Then, secondly, we want the Council's direction on that replacement ordinance. Claire is going to go into the details here about the ordinance as it currently exists and what our proposals are. Claire Campbell, Senior Planner: Thank you. For a little bit of background, the—in the summer of 2014, during the Comprehensive Plan Update workshops, a concern was identified regarding the overall use of the development cap for regulating growth in the City. From these early discussions, focus shifted to a growth management policy that metered the rate of development rather than focused on the overall amount. By metering development, the associated impacts such as increased employment, traffic congestion, and parking, etc., could also be better controlled. As a result of multiple Council discussions, the Office Limit Ordinance was adopted in September of 2015. It applied to two fiscal years, 2016 and '17. It currently will expire about halfway through fiscal year '18. The ordinance established a competitive process for evaluating office development including R&D within defined areas where office use is allowed. It also identified the annual development limit as 50,000 square feet of net new area. Soon after the ordinance was adopted, we established some administrative guidelines to facilitate the implementation of the ordinance. This map identifies the affected areas of the existing ordinance. We have the Downtown area including SOFA TRANSCRIPT Page 27 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 I. We have the California Avenue area and the El Camino Real Corridor. The current exemptions include small office projects that are less than 2,000 square feet and accessory office space, small medical office less than or equal to 5,000 square feet, and self-mitigating projects that provide rental housing to accommodate more workers than would be employed by the project and also includes substantial TDM strategies to improve current parking and traffic conditions. Another item that's also exempt but not listed here are City office spaces. That's listed in the ordinance. For the current review process, projects are submitted throughout the year for review, but no approval action can take place until the following steps have been accomplished. Step 1 is to establish a project list. On March 31st of the year, Staff will determine which projects are eligible for action. Ready for action means that the project has completed the Staff-level review, the environmental analysis, and also completed all of the public hearings with the exception of the Council review. That's all been completed, and now it's ready for moving forward. Once we have the project list, then we determine what the square footage is for these projects. If the projects are less than or equal to 50,000 square feet, then those projects would follow the standard review process. If those projects exceed the 50,000-square-foot threshold, those projects are then evaluated and ranked based on the criteria that's been adopted in the ordinance. That would be forwarded to Council for review and for action. This table provides a list of all of the projects that we've looked at so far, that are subject to the office limit for fiscal year 2016 and '17. You'll see that we don't have too many. For 2016, we had three projects, one R&D and two mixed-use, with a total of 40,800 square feet. For 2017, we did not have any projects. As of this time, we haven't yet exceeded the 50,000-square-foot threshold or implemented the competitive review process. This table provides an overview of the development within the ordinance-affected areas for the past 17 years. This is data that the City has provided to the VTA for the congestion management program. The line items that are highlighted in red show the 6 years where the office development has gone over the 50,000 square feet. We do have a range from 0 development to a high of about 107,000 square feet. We have an average annual development of approximately 40,000 square feet. For those that may have noticed, there is a figure here for the 2016 development that's different from the previous slide. It's 45,326, and the previous slide had 40,863. It's roughly a 4,500-square-foot difference. This difference represents the net area of two projects. One of them was an approved pipeline project, and the second one was permanently removed office square footage. That is trying to hopefully explain that difference in the numbers. Now, we're moving on to the discussion for the replacement ordinance. The Planning and Transportation Commission conducted a study session earlier this year, in March 2017, and provided these comments. There was majority support for maintaining the competitive process for evaluating projects. There was a strong interest in establishing a rollover provision. TRANSCRIPT Page 28 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Generally, there was no concern about the 50,000-square-foot limit. For these other items, there was limited support or mixed support for some of these issues. It was suggested that traffic mitigation measure was a better approach than the office limit to address traffic and congestion concerns. There was discussion about not exempting small projects because they cumulatively add impacts. The boundary should be Citywide and include the Stanford Research Park. Examples of self-mitigating projects was requested for a better understanding of what these would look like. Just for information, Commissioner Summa is here tonight if you have any questions. She can help follow up with anything. To organize our discussion tonight, we've highlighted five items to focus on. We're looking for Council direction on the boundary, the square footage limit, the disposition of unused floor area allocation, project exemptions, and the review process. This map is provided to show you all of the areas within the City where office use is allowed. The red outlined areas, of course, are the areas that are affected by the existing ordinance. We have areas in the Baylands off Embarcadero. There's West Bayshore, East Meadow Circle, San Antonio, and then we have Midtown in the middle, and we have Stanford Research Park. The idea of this is to give you the big picture view of all areas in the City where office can occur. This slide shows all of the office and R&D development Citywide for the past 17 years. I'm just going to focus on these bottom figures to give a summary. The existing annual office limit area. Over these last 17 years, there's been about 700 [sic] square feet of new office developed with an average annual development of about 40,000 square feet. Citywide this includes the Research Park and all of the other areas shown in that previous map. We've got approximately 500,000 square feet of new office development with an annual average of about 30,000 square feet. The last figure, if you take out the Research Park, you've got total development of 100,000 square feet with an annual average of about 6,000 square feet. Now, we're moving on to our first item. The first one is should the boundary be modified. Option 1 is to maintain the existing boundary, which is limited to the Downtown, California Avenue, and the El Camino Real Corridor. Option 2 is to apply regulations Citywide, and this option would encompass the Research Park as well as other parts of the City. Option 3 is to exclude the Research Park from the Citywide total. The next issue is the 50,000-square-foot threshold. Option 1 is to maintain the existing 50,000- square foot limit. The second is to identify a new limit. The next item is the disposition of unused floor area allocation. Option 1 is to continue with the current process where the floor area does not roll over. Option 2 is to allow the unallocated floor area to roll over with a 3-year expiration. Option 3 is to allow the unallocated floor area to roll over without expiration but have a cap. Option 4 is to allow the unallocated floor area to roll over without expiration and continually add on to the yearly limit. The fourth item is whether or not the current project exemptions should be changed. Option 1 would be continue with the current exemptions for the small projects and the self- TRANSCRIPT Page 29 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 mitigating projects. Option 2 would be to modify the current list of exemptions. Lastly is the review process. Option 1 is to retain the current competitive process. Option 2 would be to use a first-come-first-serve process. This is Staff's recommendation. Option 3 is to consider an alternative process. For our next steps, the interim ordinance extension, if adopted, would be effective 31 days after the second reading, and it will expire on June 30, 2018. For the replacement ordinance, Staff will return to the Planning Commission with a draft ordinance in early spring next year and then return to Council shortly thereafter for review and action. We're going to summarize the motion here. Staff recommends that the Council find the proposed ordinance exempt from the provisions of CEQA; you adopt an ordinance to extend the existing interim office limit ordinance; and, three, provide direction to Staff regarding the contents of the replacement ordinance for consideration at a future hearing. That concludes the formal presentation. Staff has also developed five slides of the five discussion items along with the related options for you to reference during your discussion tonight. I can have those up as you do your talk. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much. That was a great presentation. Now, we have a couple of public speakers. The first speaker is Hamilton Hitchings, to be followed by Judy Kleinberg. You'll each have 3 minutes. Public Hearing opened at 6:39 P.M. Hamilton Hitchings: Job growth in Santa Clara is limited by the availability and affordability of housing. Ironically, I have seen a rapid building spree of office in Downtown Palo Alto. In fact, about 20 new office buildings have been completed recently and almost no apartment buildings. This is because the profit per square foot from building office space is higher than the profit from building multiunit housing. When housing is rarely built, the higher cost is passed on to those most needing the housing units. In addition, this rapid office development has significantly worsened traffic and parking Downtown. Has the office cap helped? According to the Staff Report, subsequent to the implementation of the ordinance there has not been any significant office development proposed in the ordinance-affected areas. Projects proposed in the ordinance areas of the City are either limiting their office use to less than 2,000 square feet to be exempt or choosing to pursue other commercial and housing uses. During the same period, I have seen a number of multiunit housing projects proposed in Palo Alto and am optimistic we are in the process of seeing more of those. When we look at the availability of housing types in Palo Alto, multiunit is disproportionately low relative to the anticipated need. I believe that the area of the ordinance should be expanded to all of Palo Alto except for Stanford Research Park. The existing exemptions for small office and self-mitigating projects should be retained. If a rollover is added, it should TRANSCRIPT Page 30 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 be combined with a reduction of the annual office limit. Otherwise, this effectively negates the purpose of the ordinance in the first place, which is to limit the rate of growth. The Architectural Review Board should be the ones who make the selection process. We should eventually implement a housing overlay for the affected areas. Thus, the ordinance effectively addresses many of Palo Alto's top concerns as measured by the Citizens Survey. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Judy Kleinberg to be followed by Tiffany Griego. Judy Kleinberg: Good evening, Council. I'm representing the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce. The fundamental reason for creating the annual office limit, to rein in office development, no longer applies. Office development did not reach the 50,000-square-foot number in either of the cap's 2 years of existence. It's unclear it was effective. Whether the cap reduced the appetite for building in Palo Alto or developers are looking at more receptive communities in which to invest or the market is softening, which developers have all reported, it's clear that there is no building boom here requiring a permanent cap. In addition, limiting office development creates added incentive to raise office rental rates on the existing supply. Three City- sponsored surveys confirm that the impacts on traffic are not from office workers, but rather retail and service workers. A cap won't solve this problem. Local housing of different sizes and affordability will. The business community and residents agree on this: we want more housing. Proposals for housing or mixed-use with housing near transit should be green lighted and put on a fast track for approval. These are the points I want to leave you with as you go through what the Staff has asked you to consider tonight. If you insist on a cap, leave the cap boundaries where they are now. There's no reason to extend it Citywide. Continue the exemption for small projects to encourage small property owners to upgrade their properties that serve small businesses. They shouldn't be put into the same basket with the big developments. Do rollover the unused development allocation. There should be no beauty contest or compatibility contest, however you want to put that. This is really not properly put into the hands of the Council or the ARB. It should just be first-come-first serve. Focus on mixed-use near transit. Multiunit housing with some office and retail incentivizes developers to invest in our community. The cap is the wrong tool to solve the traffic and parking problems. The TMA is working. Support and expand the TMA to deal with traffic and parking problems. Let it mature for a few more years and see how it mitigates our current problems. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Tiffany Griego to be followed by former Vice Mayor Greg Schmid. TRANSCRIPT Page 31 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Tiffany Griego: Good evening. My name is Tiffany Griego; I'm Managing Director of Stanford Research Park. Tonight, my goal is to give you a bit of background on why Council decided to exclude the Stanford Research Park from the annual office limit in 2015. I also want to make myself available to answer any questions about the Stanford Research Park. The first thing I noticed when I was looking at this chart is our numbers don't match. I'd like to sync up with you because I don't recognize the growth in the years 2014, 2016, or 2017. I'm speculating that that's maybe transferrable development rights from the Mayfield Agreement. I'd like to square away our numbers. Thank you. I wanted to say the pace of growth in the Research Park did not worry Council in 2015 because the growth had been so modest in the Research Park since the recovery of the dot com bust. The letter we provided you this evening shares our data that we have and demonstrates the growth trends that we've seen in the Research Park since about 2004. In 2015, when Council discussed the annual office limit, Council's primary interest was in seeing us serve as a catalyst to bring together the companies in the Research Park and develop a comprehensive, standard, ongoing TDM program. We've brought that to fruition. They also felt in 2015 that the annual office limit was not the right tool to address traffic congestion in the Research Park. Tonight, we respectfully urge that you maintain the existing boundaries of the annual office limit and continue to exclude Stanford Research Park. We continue to be equally concerned about traffic congestion in the Research Park, and our TMA is working together and privately funding a very robust TDM program. We have branded our program SRP Go. We have made huge strides over the last couple of years. I'd like to share some of these accomplishments with you. We have built up a direct-to-user marketing campaign in which we are now in regular contact with 10,000 commuters in the Research Park. In fact, we would like all of you to subscribe to our newsletter so that you can see real- time the activities that we are launching for people. To sign up, just go to srpgo.com and click on a link called subscribe to receive monthly SRP Go commuter news in the red banner at the top of that page. That's at srpgo. Our stanfordresearchpark.com website has also been updated on the transportation page with a video of commuters telling real stories about their commutes and why they're interested in the services we offer. I encourage you to check that out as well. WE are continuing to gather data. In August, we hit the 1 million miles saved mark with our carpool app alone. We have also distributed VTA passes to over 15,000 people in the Research Park. We have launched a long-distance shuttle that we're privately funding to the west side of San Francisco. We've launched a new Marguerite shuttle to serve the California Avenue Caltrain station and to support the Cal. Ave. businesses there. We also actively advocate. We feel that we worked hard to save the VTA 89 bus from the chopping block. We also advocate on behalf of Palo Alto and the Research Park with Caltrain, SamTrans, Silicon Valley Bicycling Coalition, MTC, and ATC. We are eager to report back to you in March 2018 TRANSCRIPT Page 32 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 on our ongoing efforts and accomplishments. I thank you again for valuing Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kniss has a question. Vice Mayor Kniss: Tiffany, before you go, you don't have to answer this, but we did discuss it at one other point. What is your vacancy rate running in the Park? Ms. Griego: Our vacancy rate has climbed in the past 12 months from 1.8 percent to about 9.3 percent. Vice Mayor Kniss: To what? Ms. Griego: 9.3 percent as of August 2017. Vice Mayor Kniss: 9.3 percent vacancy. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Former Vice Mayor Schmid to be followed by Bob Moss. Greg Schmid: Thank you. I would encourage the Council to vote to extend the 50,000-square-foot limit. I would also recommend that it be extended to all monitored areas in Palo Alto, allowing current approved exemptions to continue. Start with some data. Since 1989 when the City started monitoring all commercial areas in Palo Alto, the average growth rate in square footage over that time has been 57,000 square feet. By putting a 50,000 limit only in three areas, you're in essence increasing that dramatically. It's important to recognize that we have a current crisis in parking and traffic. If you look at your annual Citizens Survey, take the last 10 years, compare the last 2 years over the previous 8, questions on traffic concern has grown by 25 percent. Concern over public transportation has grown by over 50 percent. They've had a question on parking only 3 years. In those 3 years, concern has grown by 15 percent. In addition, we know that the Stanford Medical Center, exempted as it is, is going to add 1.3 million square feet of new workers commuting. It's going to start hitting us in 2018. Note also Stanford is negotiating with the County to add 2.3 million new square feet of buildings. Transportation mitigation must prove their worth dealing with existing traffic and parking problems before we add more. Vote for a 50K limit and vote to extend that limit to all monitored areas. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Bob Moss to be followed by Simon Cintz. Bob Moss: Thank you, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. I would like to see the ordinance extended and modified (inaudible) that are making some suggestions on changes. One of the ones I wanted to explain was I suggested TRANSCRIPT Page 33 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 reducing the exceptions for medical and office buildings slightly. The reason is the occupancy rates in those types of uses are higher now than they were a couple of years ago. You're going to have more intensive use if you have the same size building exempted. I suggest scaling it down slightly. In terms of development Citywide, this chart was interesting. In the last 16 years, if you only look at the three areas that are currently covered, El Camino, Downtown, and California Avenue, six times in 16 years we exceeded 50,000 square feet. If you add the Stanford Research Park in, that 50,000 square feet would have been exceeded 11 times, almost twice as often in 16 years, which is one of the reasons I think it's important to extend this Citywide and include the Research Park. Another thing I found interesting was over 500,000 square feet of office space was removed in other parts of the City. I was wondering where did that go to. My suggestion is that most of that went to housing. We're converting a lot of office space in other areas in the City into housing. Overall, the total office space, if you exclude Stanford, didn't increase that much in the last 16 years. Stanford plus the three areas that are covered was over 1 1/2 million square feet. That's quite a bit. Even after you reduce the 570,000 square feet that was removed all (inaudible) the City, we still added net about 650,000 square feet, which is a lot of office space. We have to start putting some controls on. We have to look at where we want to build offices. It's simpler and more rational to do it Citywide and not limit it to just those three areas. Particularly, excluding the Stanford Research Park is going to leave the door open for a lot more office development. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Simon Cintz. Simon Cintz: Good evening. My name is Simon Cintz. My family owns four small commercial properties in Palo Alto. These properties have been in our family since the 1950s. The largest building of these properties is two stories on El Camino with a total of 4,600 square feet. The bottom half is retail, and the top floor is office. It's been this way for over 50 years. The Council is considering removing the exemption for small office less than 2,000 square feet and the medical/dental exemption less than 5,000 square feet. I hope the Council will continue to preserve these exemptions for small projects. The Council sometimes forgets that not all commercial property owners who want to add office space are not developers or large corporations. There are a number of commercial property owners, much like our family, who own small properties that contribute to the Palo Alto community. To be clear, our family has no plans to convert any of our buildings to increase office space, but I felt it was important that someone speak for small commercial property owners like myself. Many small business owners and doctors and dentists in solo practice own their own buildings here in Palo Alto. By removing the exemption for small projects and throwing them into the same category as large projects, you have created an unfair burden on small property owners. Large TRANSCRIPT Page 34 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 developers may or may not find the office limit requirements economically bearable, but individual owners like our family would find them as insurmountable obstacles for small projects that don't have the economy of scale of large projects. I asked Ms. Claire Campbell what impact removing this exemption would have on small property owners. She answered that it's unclear at this point because the office limit ordinance is not final. However, I can guarantee that there will be no unfair impact on small property owners if these small projects continue to be exempt from the ordinance requirements. The Staff Report refers to people downsizing their projects to meet the small project exemption. If you want to limit office development, that's a good thing. Think about it. Also, do you really think the developer who wants to build 20,000 square feet of office is going to downsize to 2,000 square feet? It's more likely that those that chose to downsize were building projects that were slightly above 2,000 and decided to downsize to 2,000. Please remember that not all commercial property owners in Palo Alto are big developers. Please keep the current exemption for small projects. Thank you. Public Hearing closed at 6:57 P.M. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Now, we return to Council. The way I want to break this up is to actually take the first two items first, which is find the proposed ordinance exempt and extend the ordinance. Then, we take three. I wanted to break it up into four separate votes, which would be the A, B, C, D, and E. Is that four or five? It's five. Into five separate votes on each of those items, so we have a focused discussion as we go through the process. The first thing we'll talk about is Items 1 and 2. We can make Motions and have comments and ask questions. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: First, I just want to take the opportunity to thank Staff for a very excellent presentation. I thought the slides and the presentation really helped set us up for a good conversation tonight. The Mayor's suggestion of breaking up how we're going to go through this is a wise one. Thank you to everybody who came and spoke. I'd like to move the Staff recommendation for Items 1 and 2. Mayor Scharff: Do we have a second? I'll second it. Vice Mayor Kniss: Second. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss will second that. Would you like to speak to your Motion? MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to: TRANSCRIPT Page 35 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 A. Find the proposed Ordinance exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in accordance with CEQA Guidelines Section 15061(b)(3); and B. Adopt an Ordinance to extend the existing interim Annual Office Limit Ordinance Number 5357 for an additional seven months to expire on June 30, 2018, allowing time for development and adoption of a replacement Ordinance, as recommended by the Planning and Transportation Commission on July 26, 2017. Council Member Wolbach: I don't think there's a need. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'd echo what Council Member Wolbach just said. It's pretty self-explanatory. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I actually have some questions. Mayor Scharff: On those two items? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. On Slide Number 13, it's looking at the areas and the impacts. Could you explain the—right now, the Stanford … Vice Mayor Kniss: Can you tell us what pages you're going on? Council Member DuBois: It's 13 of the presentation. Right now, the current annual office limit area does not include Stanford Research Park. Correct? These totals you have at the bottom, are these incremental totals? It says Citywide without Stanford Research Park. Is that the AOL area plus 100,000, so it's actually 770,000? Is that how I read that? Ms. Campbell: If you would follow the column down for the subtotal for the annual office area limit, you'll see that there's 670,000 for that total. Council Member DuBois: My point is that these … Mayor Scharff: If you could speak up a little bit. Council Member DuBois: My point is this Citywide should be a greater total than the AOL area total, but it's less. Ms. Campbell: That's because of the—there's a significant amount of demolition. TRANSCRIPT Page 36 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: I see. Does that total include—it's 670 minus the 570, is what you're saying. Ms. Campbell: Yes, exactly. Council Member DuBois: The Stanford Research Park is not shown in—that's shown in the Citywide numbers, so that's also negative. When you look at the Stanford Research numbers, it's a positive total. Ms. Campbell: If you were to follow the total along the bottom, just don't look at the 670. When you add up the Cal. Ave. area, the Downtown, El Camino Real, Stanford Research Park and other areas, you're going to get a total of 504,000 square feet. Council Member DuBois: Got it. Thank you. Thanks for clarifying that. I just had a question, again, on impacts of the current ordinance. Have we seen submissions outside the boundary areas differing from inside the boundary areas in the last 2 years? Ms. Campbell: No, there hasn't been anything significant. Council Member DuBois: That's my question on these two items. I'll wait for the rest. Mayor Scharff: Anyone else want to comment on these two items? I see no other lights. I'm going to take a vote on it unless someone wants to talk on it. If we could vote on the—Tanaka. Sorry. Council Member Tanaka: Just a quick question. Does Staff know what the office rental rates are right now in terms of—we heard from Stanford it went from 1 percent to 9 percent vacancy. Do we know what the office vacancy rates have been in Palo Alto and how that's trended? Ms. Gitelman: We don't know offhand. We can certainly look that up. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board now. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll move on to Item Number 3. Vice Mayor Kniss: Mr. Mayor, might I just interrupt at this point? Mayor Scharff: Jump right in. TRANSCRIPT Page 37 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Vice Mayor Kniss: If I might ask Judy Kleinberg if she knows what the vacancy rate is as head of the Chamber of Commerce. If you don't, it's fine. It's a figure we should have. Ms. Kleinberg: I don't know, but I can tell you that it will be hard to figure it out because there are some empty office buildings where some of our corporate members have moved out, and they are not up for re-rent. It's hard to say what's really empty and what isn't. We don't have an actual count. Vice Mayor Kniss: No one's in them, but they are still paying rent. Ms. Kleinberg: That's right. They're empty; that's right. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks. Mayor Scharff: the next Item is Item Number 3.A, which is the boundaries of the area that should … Vice Mayor Kniss: Wait. Should we vote on that? Mayor Scharff: We did and that passed unanimously. Boundaries of the area that should be subject to the annual limit. Seeing no lights, I will just then say that I will move that we keep the existing boundaries in the City ordinance. Vice Mayor Kniss: Second Council Member DuBois: Second. Mayor Scharff: That's by Council Member DuBois. MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance that the boundaries in the existing Ordinance should be subject to the Annual Limit. Mayor Scharff: I just want to say that there's no reason really to extend it to the Stanford Research Park. These are the critical areas, so we should just keep them where they are. Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: We have our Planning Commission there to give us advice. I thought the Minutes were quite interesting. Appreciate the work the PTC did. I don't really see a reason not to follow their advice. One of the comments was interesting. If we have this apply to the current areas and we have Stanford Research Park not under this constraint, it gives us a real good kind of AB test comparison about the effects of an annual limit versus relying on TDM programs. I think it's a good comparison point, to actually keep them separate and see how it goes. TRANSCRIPT Page 38 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Related to this, the other areas that are on Slide 13—two things. One is could Staff respond to Tiffany Griego's comments about the development numbers in the SRP that are differing between their numbers and Staff's numbers in the chart. Ms. Gitelman: Yes. Thank you, Council Member Holman. I want to get together with Ms. Griego and make sure my assumption is correct. I think the numbers we're presenting reflect what we report to the VTA as the net increase in office/R&D. I think we've developed some kind of work-around for the square footage that was entitled through the Mayfield Development Agreement. What you're seeing is a difference based on how we do or don't report that square footage since it's already been entitled, but it's going to be metered out over time. I'll confirm that with Ms. Griego before we come back with a revised ordinance. Council Member Holman: Under other areas, the square footage that's been demolished, there are some pretty large numbers there. I'm not quite sure where that would be, if it's other areas. Some of it could be the SOFA area. In SOFA I which is not included in the Downtown. Is that where that would be? Ms. Campbell: The bulk of that was related—I'll just rattle them off for you. We had 900 East Meadow, where it demo'd 85,000 square feet. We've had a couple more at 101 East Meadow and on Bayshore, which had another 164,000, and on San Antonio. We've definitely had—that was almost 250,000 square feet of demolition. That's 901 San Antonio, 2300 East Bayshore. It's definitely not within the annual office limit boundaries. It's those areas near San Antonio and off on that side of town. They went to housing. Council Member Holman: What was that? Ms. Campbell: It went to housing. Council Member Holman: That's what I would have thought also about the SOFA area because there was some office that was demolished there, that went to housing. I can support this, but I would ask that when this comes back for a permanent office Staff provide us any updates on any bubbles that we're seeing popping up in these other outside areas, so we can have an updated analysis of what we need to be mindful of at the time that we're considering the permanent ordinance. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Holman. We prepared this report for every fiscal year, so we'll have data for the—I'm not sure we'll have TRANSCRIPT Page 39 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 updated data by the time we bring this back to you. We do this report and report to the VTA every August or something like that. Council Member Holman: If that's the case, then I'll give it a shot that we include Citywide—in other words, it'd be Option 3.3, that the ordinance would apply Citywide except Stanford Research Park. That would be my Substitute. Mayor Scharff: Is there a second or are we waiting for the … Seeing no second, we'll move on. SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member XX to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance that the Annual Limit should apply citywide, with the exception of the Stanford Research Park. SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I'd like to make a Substitute Motion too. I'd like the ordinance to apply Citywide with Stanford Research Park. Mayor Scharff: Say that again, Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: Make the ordinance apply Citywide including Stanford Research Park. Mayor Scharff: Do we have a second for that? Hearing no second, that fails as well for lack of a second. SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Kou moved, seconded by Council Member XX to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance that the Annual Limit should apply citywide, including Stanford Research Park. SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND Mayor Scharff: Now, if we could vote on the board on the original Motion. Do you want to read the original Motion? Council Member Kou: Yeah. Mayor Scharff: There it is. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 TRANSCRIPT Page 40 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: Can you clarify the process we're using here? We're taking this piecemeal, and I think it'd be good maybe—you said it very quickly. I'd like to understand how we're going to address the rest of this. Mayor Scharff: We're going to take each one of these and discuss them one- by-one and make a motion on each of them. Council Member DuBois: Some of these could be tradeoffs between components. Voting on them individually is a little tough. Mayor Scharff: Everyone thinks about it differently. I think it's better to have individual motions. If there's something at the end that you felt you want to come back and do it … Council Member DuBois: If we have a discussion of the overall ordinance at the end … Mayor Scharff: After we've had that vote, I don't want to re-vote it. If you wanted to make a Motion where there was a tradeoff or something, I would allow it. It seems like it's a much more focused discussion that way, and we get to the heart of the matter. The next one is the quantitative annual limit, which is B. Vice Mayor Kniss: I would move approval. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss, would you like to speak? Go ahead. Vice Mayor Kniss: Did you get a second? Council Member DuBois: Second. Mayor Scharff: Wait. You move approval of what? 50,000 square feet. Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes, the 50. Do you want me to read the whole thing? Continue to use the 50,000 gross square feet as the annual limit. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to direct Staff to continue to use 50,000 Gross Square Feet (GSF) as the Annual Limit. Vice Mayor Kniss: Frankly, given that there doesn't seem to be … Mayor Scharff: I think that's a second from Council Member DuBois. Is that correct? Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) TRANSCRIPT Page 41 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: I heard you first. You can withdraw your second if you want. Vice Mayor Kniss now. Vice Mayor Kniss: Given that we're looking back at the last 2 years and not seeing that we're even pushing up against the 50,000 square feet, it would seem—an odd word—sensible to leave it at this. I can't see any reason for altering it at this point. I don't see thousands of citizens in here looking for a different answer than the one I think we're headed for tonight. That's it. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: For the newer Council Members, we had extensive discussions about this. For me, a big part of it is making space for housing, trying to offset some of the competition between office construction and housing construction. I think Council Member Schmid brought up some older data. When we looked at the averages, several of us wanted to actually see a lower annual limit. 50,000 is quite high. The way this ordinance is structured now, it's really just a governor on massive spikes of construction, which have huge impacts. The intent was that it would probably not happen very often, and that's what we've seen. Just the fact that it hasn't been triggered I don't think is a knock against the ordinance. I actually think it was part of the point of the ordinance. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you. A quick question for Staff. I was a little struck by the demolition totals you have here, about half a million square feet over the 16 years. That's Citywide, including in the ordinance area to some cases. Just for my colleagues, a quick calculation. That's about 36,000 square feet on average being taken off the market each year in our City. I would make an amendment that we use 50,000 net new square feet as the annual limit. Mayor Scharff: I think it already is net new square feet. Council Member Fine: Is this gross instead of net new? Ms. Campbell: It's net new. Council Member Fine: We're treating it as net new. Mr. Keene: (inaudible) Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. TRANSCRIPT Page 42 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member Wolbach: I'll be supporting this Motion. Also, I just wanted to check. There was a line in the Staff Report about the Comprehensive Plan. I just wanted to seek clarity. I may as well ask it now; it seems as good a time as any. It's on the last page of the Staff Report, Page 12 of the Staff Report, Packet Page 23, the very top paragraph talking about the cumulative cap on nonresidential development Downtown. I think we had some back- and-forth on that. Does Staff remember—did we end up keeping that or scrapping that in the upcoming, revised Comprehensive Plan? Ms. Gitelman: The Council's direction with regard to these growth management measures were different, depending on which one you're talking about. About the cumulative cap Citywide? Council Member Wolbach: I'm looking again on Page 12 of the Staff Report. The cumulative cap on nonresidential development Downtown. Ms. Gitelman: I think the Council's direction was to eliminate that measure because we had this annual limit in its place. On the cumulative cap, even the cumulative cap Citywide we changed it to the office/R&D only, not all other nonresidential uses like retail and warehousing. Council Member Wolbach: That's one place where the Staff Report is maybe— I was just a little bit confused by it. Again, really good Staff Report all over. For me, that is one of the reasons among several why I'm really supportive of continuing the office cap. Just to speak on this project in general, it really is one of several tools that working in conjunction are designed to address multiple concerns. I agree with those who say that this isn't necessarily the best tool to address single occupancy vehicle trips, but this isn't the primary tool to address that. This is about addressing several concerns including spikes as Council Member DuBois pointed out, the challenges around the jobs/housing imbalance, and trying to encourage development of housing or retail and other things that our community is in more need of than office and R&D space. I wanted to point out—I think Hamilton pointed it out too. On Packet Page 17, page 6 of the Staff Report, Staff's interpretation of what we've seen in the last couple of years is developers are focusing on pursuing other commercial, such as retail—that's the implication—and housing uses. I would consider that a resounding success for this program. I'm very supportive of the office cap in general. As we go through this and we get onto the next couple of items within this, we maybe will discuss a couple of minor tweaks. I would just encourage that, as we are considering tweaks one way or another, we keep those tweaks judicious and moderate. I'm glad for this one, that we're sticking with what we have. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. TRANSCRIPT Page 43 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member Kou: As Vice Mayor Kniss said, we haven't really reached the 50,000 square feet in the last couple of years, since this interim ordinance went in. Obviously, it's being successful at what it's intended to do. I'd like to make a substitute motion here, which is to reduce the square footage to 40,000. That way we can ensure—the reason why we're doing this is to ensure that we produce more housing. Even at the 40K square feet, it still means that's about 160 more people that are going to be needing housing if we use the rule of thumb of four employees per 1,000 square feet. We still need to work on housing on that. If we reduce the number—even that is a great number at 160 people. I'd really like to see it reduced to 40 [sic] square feet and make it even more robust and work at housing even more. Can I get a second? Mayor Scharff: Do we have a second? Council Member Holman: I'd second it. Mayor Scharff: Seconded by Council Member Holman. Council Member Kou, would you like to speak further to your Motion? SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Kou moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to direct Staff to use 40,000 Gross Square Feet (GSF) as the Annual Limit. Council Member Kou: I think I spoke to it. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I would support this. If you look at the chart, there are only 2 additional years that would have been affected by this, 2002 and 2016, which were in the 40s. I agree with Council Member Kou. One of the purposes of this is to not have—there are a few purposes of this. Not to have spikes in office development that create housing demand and create more traffic and parking demand, but it's also to make way for more housing development. If we try to focus—use this tool to try to help focus our development community on creating housing, this is one tool that could help steer us in that direction. For that reason—as Council Member DuBois mentioned earlier, we did talk about having different numbers, and we landed at 50. Fifty was a compromise; that may be where we end up tonight too. As we look at the impacts of development and we look at the impacts of what kinds of development we want to support, it is housing over office. That's why I support the substitute motion. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. TRANSCRIPT Page 44 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member Filseth: I think I'll pass. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Just briefly, I appreciate the intent of the substitute motion. I'll be not supporting the substitute; I will support the main motion. On the question of how we can additionally incentivize housing, Hamilton— I'm giving him a lot of shout-outs today—mentioned the idea of maybe a housing overlay for those areas affected by the office cap. That's not really agendized tonight, so I don't think we can get too deeply into it. If we have a chance to take up something like that in the future, that would be a good supplement to this discussion. I think 50,000 has worked well for the last couple of years, and we can continue that for now. Mayor Scharff: Briefly, I'll be supporting the main Motion and not the Substitute Motion. If we could vote on the board. This is on the Substitute Motion. The Substitute Motion fails on a 5-4 vote with Council Member DuBois voting against his own Motion and Council Member Kou voting yes and Council Member Filseth voting yes and Council Member Holman voting yes. SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou yes Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the main Motion now. The main Motion passes on a 8-1 vote with Council Member Kou voting no. MOTION PASSED: 8-1 Kou no Mayor Scharff: Now, we'll move on to the fate of the unused allocations. Vice Mayor Kniss: You want to go first? Mayor Scharff: No, I want to go first. The fate of unused allocations is an interesting thing. The purpose of this ordinance is to meter the overall pace of development. We do have zeroes at times, and other times we've had 100,000 square feet. That's really what we want to do, meter it and spread it out. We should basically go ahead and rollover the unused allocations, but only roll it up for up to 2 years, which means you'd roll it up 1 more year. Roll it over, not roll it up. The most you'd have is 100,000 square feet in any 1 year. That would require a zero the year before, which is possible. On the whole, those kind of spikes are actually rare. That would be my Motion, that we rollover the unused allocation for up to 2 years before they expire. Council Member Wolbach: I'll second that. TRANSCRIPT Page 45 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance to roll-over unused allocations for up to two years before they expire. Mayor Scharff: I'll just briefly speak a little bit more to it. Having the flexibility of that is really important for people to have that, so we don't have these huge queues that could get backed up after you go through a recession where we have no office space developed, and then you have a large queue where it takes a long time to work through that. What you want to do is meter it over an average as opposed to one particular year or the other. We still meet the whole thing of only having no more than 100,000 square feet. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I'm going to support this. I'm interested in what my Colleagues think as well. What's the phrase we heard at our second retreat? I'll stay open to persuasion, but this is a good balance. If you look at the four options that Staff laid out on Page 2 of the Staff Report—we're in Item C now. Item 1 is essentially what we've been using for the pilot, and it's worked. It's definitely worked. Item 2 as it was originally suggested of 3 years is too permissive. This motion rolls that back from a 3-year rollover to a 2-year rollover. Item 3 would guarantee that you'd end up getting up to the 100,000 of leftover that could be used. I'm not a fan of that. This would just allow it occasionally. Item 4 is far too permissive. If we went with Option 4, it would frankly undermine the entire intent of the office cap. If there's 40,000 one year and 60,000 the next, that's still moderating the pace. This is the right balance, so I'll support it. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Since I seem to be the one who's usually willing to go a little further than a lot of you, I actually would have gone up to 3 years on this. I missed some of the comments that former Vice Mayor Schmid made. My recollection is, looking back over the period of time since '89, the average was about 50,000 square feet a year. Do you remember that at all, Hillary? I'm pretty sure it was right in that. I know what they started with was maybe 258, and we still hadn't hit the cap that was set in 1989. Am I correct? Ms. Gitelman: That's right. I'd have to go back and check those numbers, though. It's such a different data set than the one we've presented here (crosstalk). Vice Mayor Kniss: Trust me. I went over those a lot. I remember in the late '80s, either '86 or '89, they looked at the number of square feet Downtown and said when it hits an additional 10 percent—which is what you indicated to me last year; we thought we were getting close to that—then we would look TRANSCRIPT Page 46 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 at it again. That's a long period of time to add just 10 percent to the total Downtown. I'm going to support this. As I said, I would have gone up to three. There will be some point in the future where we may want to use this in a variety of different ways. For now, I'm happy supporting the 2 years that the Mayor moved. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Again, I'm going to offer a Substitute Motion. That would be to do C.1, which is not to roll over the unused allocations for future years. With a second, I'll explain why. Mayor Scharff: Do we have a second. Council Member Kou: Second. Mayor Scharff: Seconded by Council Member Kou. Speak to your Motion? SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member Kou to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance that unused allocations do not roll-over to future years. Council Member Holman: It really is counterintuitive to what we're trying to do here. What we're trying to do is eliminate the spikes and to moderate the impacts of development. Rolling over such that—as the Mayor had indicated, in 2019, for instance, there could basically be 105,000 square feet of development if the market continues to be soft, and we don't get applications this next year. That's exactly what we're trying to forestall. It also makes way for more office development when what we're supposed to be promoting is housing development to offset the amount of office square footage that we have now. If we're going to be promoting and supporting development, it should really be towards those kinds of development that serve the public and our quality of life, including housing, retail, and community services, not office. That's why the Substitute Motion. I see your support. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: The other purpose of this ordinance is also with the no rollover is to ensure that our transportation with traffic congestion as well as parking is mitigated. It has a little bit of success where the TMA was implemented. It's not in its full successful phase yet. I really think that we need to see more time dedicated to ensuring that this ordinance does do its full intent. Traffic, as you know, has been—there was the report that came out on one of the news media that said the TMA is working in Downtown. There's less people using their cars. That's not so for the entire City. I would TRANSCRIPT Page 47 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 really like to see a longer period to ensure that it is successful in what it's implemented to do. I also have a correction to make here with regards to the TMA. On one of the news media, it did indicate—the reporter is Alejandro Reyes Villardi [phonetic] with the San Francisco Time News. It says here the Chamber says that the TMA implemented the parking as well as the shuttles as well as the solutions for traffic and the parking RPPs. I don't think they did that. I think it was actually the City who implemented all of that. I just want to make sure that that correction is put in place where the right person gets the credit. That's my reasons for wanting to see this no rollover. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Just a question for Staff about these annual caps and how they may play out over different years. I'm looking to you, Hillary, and Jim as well. Do you have any examples of other cities implementing these multiyear caps and what timeframe they're using? Do they do it 1 year or are they trying to affect the curve over 2 of 3 years? I'm just wondering how we get that balance. Why did we choose 1 over 50 or 2 or 3 over 50 versus 40 over 3? Ms. Gitelman: We did look at a number of different cities when we first brought the idea of the annual limit forward and adopted the interim ordinance. I'm going by memory here. I think we looked at San Rafael. We looked at Walnut Creek or another city in that area. Then, we looked at San Francisco. San Francisco has a program that was adopted by the voters, I believe, and it has a small cap and an ADM cap. Those allocations do roll forward if unused. In the other cases, there were different constraints or different parameters around the limit. I'd have to research them again and get back to you on the details. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I think the other one was Mountain View. They have prioritization projects with performance metrics for large projects. I remember that carried a lot of weight with me when we had that discussion. I just want to clarify between the two motions. I think I would support the motion I heard you make, but I don't think it's reflected here. You said that it would roll over if it was zero (crosstalk). Mayor Scharff: No, I didn't. I was probably just being inarticulate for the moment. TRANSCRIPT Page 48 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: To me, that would make more sense if there was a recession and it was zero and we allowed it to roll over. If that's not your Motion, then … Mayor Scharff: That's my Motion. It's captured adequately. Council Member DuBois: I would support the Substitute Motion. Again, a question is what problem are you trying to solve here with this rollover. The point of the ordinance was to set a fairly high limit that we rarely hit, six times in the last 16 years, and just smooth out those spikes. If it just rolls over all the time, then we basically have just—the ordinance is really doing nothing at that point. This is not a cap; it's an annual growth limit. It's very different from a hard cap. It's kind of smart. We haven't really talked about the performance metrics, but to me those go hand-in-hand with this. The point of it was we have a list of projects in a year and we have a means to score those projects against criteria that we value. Otherwise, we'd just use our normal process. Adding the rollover really eliminates a large part of the point of the ordinance. I'd like to see us continue with no rollover. If we do get into a recession, Council can always adjust. It feels like we're trying to solve a nonexistent problem right now. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: One of the things that I'm struggling with because we haven't brought it up is—Hillary, describe the process. I am someone who wants to build a smallish building in the Downtown. I begin that process this year; this is now 2017 in the fall, heading toward fall. About when do you think that building is going to actually come to fruition? Ms. Gitelman: I think your point is a good one. It can take a while to get through the City's entitlement and permitting process. Then, a project applicant will typically, once they have approvals in hand, still have to go through financing and can take a while to get it into the ground and to complete construction. It's hard to predict with certainty exactly what all those timeframes are. They vary depending on the property in question and the developer and their expertise. Vice Mayor Kniss: We can be talking about a number of years. Ms. Gitelman: Yes. Vice Mayor Kniss: In fact, if I look at JJ&F, which finally opened, I think it was approved in—looking at Karen, who's got a good memory—2010 perhaps. Mayor Scharff: 2009 because I wasn't on the Council. TRANSCRIPT Page 49 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Vice Mayor Kniss: 2009. Council Member Holman: That sounds right, 2009. I believe it was before we … Mayor Scharff: We were not on the Council. Council Member Holman: It was before we were on Council, yes, or it would have been better. Vice Mayor Kniss: If it predates you two … It tells you how long it takes for this to actually get on paper, so that we're looking at it tonight. If you take a look at this, I thought initially it would be quite easy to tell when the recessions were, but even at that it's a little hard to tell, except maybe 2003, which was the bottom of the dot com boom. You can tell 2001 is the top of the dot com boom. Even at that, that doesn't make much sense because you can't simply decide in '01 that you're going to put that up. Probably a lot of those were approved in '96 and '97. Even at that, that would be moving it along pretty fast. As we look at this, one of my objections to not allowing rollover is that defies our economy. Our economy does go up and down. Case in point right now, I hear from some that there's a glut of apartments on the market because so many apartments have been built. As I think back through the years, I can think of when lots and lots of apartments were built, went on the market, and then the market fell. Putting up a building to begin with is really an act of faith going through our whole process. We're considered to be one of the hardest cities on the Peninsula to do that. Going through that entire process means that you're probably looking at, at least 5 years. By the end of that time, you must almost wonder if it's still worth it to do it. To not have the rollover really does defy us being able to look at the economy and see what a difference it makes as to whether we're in a recession or whether we're really in a boom time. I'm just not sure that we can have this as such a totally predictable outcome. Again, I'm staying with supporting the original Motion. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Like most of us here, I really think that the annual office growth limit looks like it's been effective at what it set out to do, which was slow down the pace of office growth. That was the objective, and it has not prevented any office expansion or anything like that. By and large, this is one of the more successful things that the Council's done in the last couple of years. Up to now, the motions we've made have been basically to recognize that and continue it because that's what we're here to do. However, much of what we're going to go into in the next two or three Motions, including this one, basically relaxes the ordinance that we have had up until now. As we talk about why would we want to dilute or relax the ordinance we have now, TRANSCRIPT Page 50 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 you need to look at this through the lens of what's good for residents because that's who we work for. One way to look at this is—I'm going to start from the Palo Alto view as opposed to the regional view, which I'll get to in a second. The Palo Alto view. The fact is the developers of these projects don't pay the full impact cost of bringing more jobs into the City in terms of housing, transportation, parking, and a whole host of further downstream and, in many cases, less tangible effects. Some people want to focus exclusively on mitigation, but you never get 100-percent mitigation on everything. Particularly some of the less tangible things you simply can't mitigate. We fixate a lot on traffic, but there's a lot of stuff. I can tell you that a lot of people ask for better traffic in town. Very few ask for worse traffic but not as bad as it could have been. Those costs get socialized to residents. Every time we do a nexus study on some impact or other—there are a lot of things we don't do nexus studies on, but some we do. Invariably, we don't set the impact fee at the true impact. Instead, we look around at all our neighboring cities, and they don't set it there either, so we don't either. The net-net is that the developers don't pay the full social costs of doing this. Any cost that doesn't get picked up by the developer gets socialized to residents. In that light, it's hard to argue how diluting or weakening the annual limit ordinance is good for Palo Altans. As Council Member DuBois said, doing the rollover defeats a lot of the purpose of doing that. That's the Palo Alto resident view. From the regional view because you have to look at these land use things in terms of regional issues, these kinds of costs, transportation, housing, parking, lots of intangibles and so forth, they are significantly lower in a place like Diridon Station, which has less expensive housing, a big local workforce, much richer transit infrastructure options than we do in the mid-Peninsula. It's hard to make a case to dilute or weaken the annual limit from a regional perspective as well. I don't think we have a clear explanation—it'd have to be really contorted—why going to a 2-year rollover or a more-year rollover is good for the overwhelming majority of Palo Alto residents who aren't directly financially interested in this. I'm going to support the Substitute Motion. We'll probably have a similar discussion when we come the competition and performance scoring issue as well. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Just really quickly. Before I forget it, I do want to thank Staff for what I consider to be a really superior Staff Report. It provides options. It lays it all out. It very clearly identifies what the Planning Commission positions were. I have to say I think it's one of the more excellent Staff Reports that I've seen in a very long time. Appreciate that very much. To speak to why not to do a rollover as consistent with the Motion, just one thing that Vice Mayor Kniss brought up. I appreciate the perspectives as this Council usually has at least two perspectives, at least. It's sort of like trying TRANSCRIPT Page 51 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 to time the stock market. Projects take a certain amount of time. Some take more than others depending on how complex, how contentious, that sort of thing. Council Member DuBois said if we have a real downturn every 15, 20 years, then we could go back and address this in the climate at the time. To do it ahead of time is premature and really playing the stock market, sort of roulette wheel. What we've had in place has been very helpful, very useful, and moderates our growth, which is the intention of this to begin with. Appreciate support for the substitute motion. Mayor Scharff: I just want to say it actually does help residents. It creates a moderate environment, which takes the swings from recession. It's most likely to do what Council Member Wolbach started with, which was in those years you could have 40 and in other years you could have 60. I was intrigued that Council Member DuBois liked the idea of going from zero and then rolling that over. That's the other. Those are the two cases that both argue for strong support of it. What we're looking to do here is say to people, "In these areas, you are not going to average more than 50,000 feet. At any one time, you're not going to have more than 100,000 square feet under development." That creates the right business environment, and it doesn't say we are so restrictive that if through a timing issue—Vice Mayor Kniss' point was really well articulated. These development projects take a really long time. You can miss the window; it's really easy. You could have an EIR issue that just knocks you over into the next one. If two people get knocked over into the EIR issue, you could have two people at the same time, and then one of their projects can go forward and one cannot. By having the window basically be a 2-year window, it allows more flexibility, and it will have a better outcome. We can blithely sit up here and say it's okay if someone's project gets delayed a year. The cost to that person and the uncertainty involved is huge dollars. By having that flexibility of a 2-year window roughly, I don't think hurts residents in the least. Traffic, parking, all those issues are not really relevant to it. We've said you could have up to 50,000 a year. What we're doing is mitigating the most difficult aspects of this ordinance, which is the timing, if you go through the process and you get stuck and can't have your project for a whole year. That's really what this does. It takes out the worst excesses. I would hope that we'd support the original motion and not the substitute motion. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: As seconder of the original Motion, I figured I'd weigh in. I'll try to keep it brief. On the Substitute Motion—I actually first want to recognize the questions and the ideas raised by those supporting the substitute motion are really strong. You can vote your conscience on either of these. I don't think the result of going in either direction of this will be radically different. Government regulation should not be more onerous than is necessary to achieve the goals of that regulation. As far as the goal of TRANSCRIPT Page 52 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 smoothing things out and having averages, we're saying over a 3-year—even if you go with the original motion—period—it'd be actually with either one. Over a 3-year period, you're not going to have 150,000 in development. Over a 4-year period, you're not going to have more than 200,000 square feet of development. That would be the same over a couple of years with either one. It does allow a little more flexibility. If Council Member DuBois is comfortable with one year having zero and the next year having 100, then that means we're comfortable with having 100 one year. Anything above that is an uncomfortable spike. Above that is an uncomfortable spike. If you look over the course—we're talking about the cumulative impacts. The average over 5 years, over 10 years is the other issue that we need to look at. With either of these motions, either the main or the substitute, you achieve those goals. I'm fine with everyone voting their conscience on this. I will be voting for the main Motion. They're both valid. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: Basically, in terms of the length of time for a project to be approved, it can be very easily approved very quickly within the timeframe if the developer didn't ask for extras, like over-developing on the lot or in zoning that it's not capable of doing, certainly with the mass and the compatibility, etc. Of course, if they provide sufficient parking, there will be no problem going through the pipeline and going through Planning and getting the permit. Also, with JJ&F, if I remember correctly, it was due to financing that they were taking a longer time in order to get to where they needed to be. With the rollover and extra square footage, the concern is for another 429 University to come through when it only provides three housing units with over 11,000 square feet of office space. Actually, it's 20,407 square feet of commercial space with only 34 parking spaces within the building, and the rest going to the Assessment District. This is what we're trying to avoid over here with the no rollover, so that we can actually mitigate our traffic problems and help the Transportation Management folks. They have a hard enough job. I'd really like to—I hope we'll get support for this Substitute Motion. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: If we could now vote on the Substitute Motion, not the main motion. The Substitute Motion fails on a 5-4 vote with Council Members DuBois, Kou, Filseth, and Holman voting yes. SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou, yes Mayor Scharff: Now, if we could vote on the main Motion. Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) TRANSCRIPT Page 53 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: Sure, go ahead. Council Member DuBois: I just want to understand this wording. We're saying it rolls over for up to 2 years. Is the intent that you could go … Mayor Scharff: The intent is really 1 year. Council Member DuBois: You don't mean 0-0-150? Mayor Scharff: No. Council Member DuBois: That's the way I read this. Mayor Scharff: That's the way Staff did it when they said 2 years. Council Member DuBois: Could we say it rolls over for up to 1 year? Mayor Scharff: I'm happy to clarify that. Shall we just say "up to 1 year"? would that give clarity to Staff and give clarity to you, Council Member DuBois? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to amend the Motion to state, “up to one year before they expire.” Council Member Wolbach: Thanks for catching that. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I understand the arguments in favor of the rollover that we're about to vote on. I think they're by and large developer-centric. We need to look at resident-centric. I'm going to vote no on the main motion. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Nope. MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance to roll-over unused allocations for up to one year before they expire. Mayor Scharff: Now, if we could vote on the main Motion. That passes on a 5-4 vote with Council Members Wolbach, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, and Fine voting yes. MOTION PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou no TRANSCRIPT Page 54 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: On we go. The next portion of this is the uses that are exempt from the annual limit. Does anyone want to address that issue? Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Just a quick question to Staff. How many of these exemptions have we given in these different categories over the past year and a half or so? Ms. Gitelman: I think we have had applicants take advantage at least in their conversations and in shaping applications of the small exemptions, the 2,000- square-foot and the 5,000-square-foot. I don't know if we've actually processed any to completion. Council Member Fine: So a couple of them. Ms. Gitelman: The development community is aware of them and making use of them. Council Member Fine: This may be more of a ballpark in your knowledge. For the medical office developments, what is the general size of those? Are they generally under 5,000 or do some of them … Ms. Gitelman: It really varies if you're talking about one sole proprietor, one dentist, one therapist. It could be 5,000 square feet or even less. Someone could be developing a building with a lot of medical office space that could be much larger. Council Member Fine: Do we have any data of the distribution of these medical offices, how large they are? Ms. Gitelman: We'd have to do some research. Council Member Fine: That would be helpful coming back here. The reason I'm bringing this up for my colleagues is I was just trying to think about what kind of offices are 2,000 square feet or less, what kind of medical offices are 5,000 or less. I can think of some that are. I can think of some that are above that. If the purpose is specifically to exempt medical offices, then 5,000 may be too low. If our purpose is that we specifically want smaller medical offices, then we may be getting that here. I would just put it to my colleagues. I wasn't exactly clear what the policy purpose was, whether it's the use or the size of these on these exemptions. Mayor Scharff: Was that a question? Council Member Fine: For Staff. TRANSCRIPT Page 55 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: I think we're looking at you. Ms. Gitelman: As I indicated to Council Member Fine, we'll have to research that issue and get back to him. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I was going to offer—I also have a couple of questions here. To address Council Member Fine's question, it really is the question of use and the question of size. If you build a big hospital, I don't think that's something we'd want to just make an exemption for. We'd want to have a conversation about that. The size of 5,000 was very intentional. I actually had a question for Staff about the definition of medical offices. We've known for several years and it's been exacerbated over the last couple of years, the concern about space in our community for sole practitioners who provide psychological services, therapists, psychologists. I was wondering are therapists and psychologists considered medical. If it's not clear, then we—if it's up to basically Staff interpretation or Council interpretation, then I'd suggest we clarify that they would be. I want to hear from Staff if it's clear one way or the other or if it's ambiguous. Ms. Campbell: The medical office use is what we have defined in our 18.04 section of the Zoning Code. Maybe I can just read you that first sentence or so. Medical office means a use providing consultation, diagnosis, therapeutic, preventative, or corrective personal treatment services by doctors, dentists, medical and dental laboratories, and similar practitioners of medical and healing arts for humans, licensed for such practice by the State of California. Council Member Wolbach: Would Staff say that clearly and unambiguously includes psychologists and therapist? Was that an affirmative yes? Looks like that was an affirmative yes from Staff. Ms. Campbell: Yes, yes. Council Member Wolbach: I want to get that on the record. Thank you. In that case, I'm comfortable with that definition not needing any modification. There is one thing I would like to suggest we add to this. I would suggest we actually just add one thing within "b." We're in Item D.1, subsection b. My Motion is to do that, but under "b" it would read "medical office and/or nonprofit." Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm glad to second it when you get done with it. Council Member Wolbach: I want to make sure it's clear. That's the Motion. I'll speak to it after I get a second. TRANSCRIPT Page 56 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Vice Mayor Kniss: I will second. MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to direct Staff to maintain the current list of exemptions for (a) Office/R&D development less than 2,000 GSF; (b) Medical office and/or deed restricted non-profit office development less than 5,000 GSF total; and (c) Self- mitigating projects that propose sufficient housing to meet the housing demand of additional employment. Mayor Scharff: You should clarify that it's not cumulative. You couldn't do 5,000 of medical office and 5,000 of nonprofit. It's within that 5,000. Council Member Wolbach: That is correct. Any changes we make to this, we should be gentle. That's why I want to be really clear with the language here. This would say that within that 5,000-square-foot exemption, if you're proposing a development, you're applying for that exemption, you could say, "We have 5,000 square feet of medical," or you could say, "We have 5,000 square feet of nonprofit space." That space can only be used for nonprofits or you could do some mix. You could say half of it's going to be for medical, and half of it's going to be nonprofit, or some other ratio. It wouldn't change the size. It wouldn't expand the size of the exemption. It would merely expand the allowed uses to include nonprofits. I hope that's very clear. I hope others will support it. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Yes, I support it. One thing I want to ask Staff is what is our definition of a nonprofit. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you for that question, Vice Mayor Kniss. I think we're going to have to work with the City Attorney's Office, if this is the Council's direction, to develop a definition and a way to frankly administer something like this. We'll have to give it quite a bit of thought. Vice Mayor Kniss: Sometimes it's somewhat complicated to really identify the nonprofit even with their status. That would be helpful. Ms. Gitelman: It might be one thing to identify it on Day 1 when the office space opens. Imagine 30 years from now evaluating future tenants. It could be a challenge. Vice Mayor Kniss: It can get messy, right. One other thing. I'm seconding this, so I'm really speaking to it at the same time. Self-mitigating projects that propose sufficient housing to meet the housing demand of additional employment, have we ever had anything like that apply? TRANSCRIPT Page 57 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Ms. Gitelman: We have not had any applications using this exemption. I have talked to one developer who was interested in trying it out, but we've never seen an application. Vice Mayor Kniss: I remember us having this very extensive discussion on this before and including that. It's always interesting when you visit something a year or so later to say did this ever come up, is this something that really is a need. I don't suggest taking it out, but it would be very interesting if one of these projects actually did come to us. With that, it has my support. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Again, the existing ordinance has generally worked pretty well including the current exemptions. I support those. I don't see anything wrong with the one that's here. My inclination is to support it. The only thing I would say is I hope we're not going to get a whole string of more exemptions that go on, so that by the end of the night we've got 20 of them or something like that. That's not how we should do that as a process here. My inclination is I'm happy to support this. If there's another dozen, I'm probably going to vote against them. Mayor Scharff: With that comment, can we vote? I'm just kidding. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I would like to offer an Amendment to this, Council Member Wolbach. Part of it is for clarity and part of it is out of a concern. "B," the way it reads currently is medical office and/or nonprofit development less than 5,000 square feet. I think the intention would be more clearly stated if it was "b, medical office," as previously stated, and add a "d" that is nonprofit development. Right now, it looks like it could be a combination of—I'm not quite sure what it means. I can't imagine a medical office and a nonprofit joining together. On this end of the dais, there was a little bit of confusion. Does that mean together they're going to be 10,000 square feet of a combination of medical office and nonprofit? The other thing I would suggest—for me, it would be to add a new part d that is for nonprofit space less than 3,000 square feet and amend "b" to be just medical office as it currently is. The reason for that is because I don't think what we want is to see new development projects—as much as I'm supportive of nonprofits and everybody up here and many people in the community understand that, I don't want to see development projects come forward and ask for an exemption for a very well-funded nonprofit as many in this community are and exempt the 5,000 square feet. What we're trying to support as a community and what needs our support are the smaller nonprofits that need TRANSCRIPT Page 58 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 smaller square footage and won't be "used" to make a development larger. That is why I'm asking to change "b" back to medical office of less than 5,000 square feet as it was, and to add a new part d that's for nonprofit development less than 3,000 square feet. I look to the maker to see if he would accept this for both purposes of clarity and also to help direct the nonprofit spaces to be smaller. Council Member Wolbach: A couple of thoughts. I'm not going to accept it as a friendly Amendment. I'd like to explain why. Your points are well taken, and I appreciate them very much. There are two reasons why I'm not going to accept the amendment. One is I did not want to expand the potential size of an exempt project where the overall size of an exempt project could be 5,000 square feet of medical plus 3,000 square feet of nonprofit. Then, you could add 2,000 square feet of office—1,999. You could have a 9,999-square- foot development that would be exempt if we were to move forward with that amendment. I don't want to do that. We are making a couple of changes here from the existing ordinance, including the last one which was pretty controversial. I just don't want to go that far. Just like the medical offices, if the development says this is going to be 5,000 square feet of nonprofit space, that doesn't mean it has to be all for one nonprofit. They could say this space is nonprofit space, and then have several suites within that to lease out to different nonprofits as need arises. I won't accept the amendment, but I do understand the intention behind it. It's not friendly, but you might get a second for it. Council Member Holman: Hearing what you're saying, maybe I could offer an Amendment that would be acceptable to you, and we can move on. To clarify "b," it would be a … Mayor Scharff: Wait. Are you withdrawing your Amendment? Council Member Holman: If he would accept this, I think I would. Mayor Scharff: Offer your Amendment, but it's not really a negotiation. Council Member Holman: It was after hearing him speak and what his intention is that's causing me to say this. "B" would read, if I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly, either medical office or nonprofit less than 5,000 square feet. That would capture what you just said. Either medical office or nonprofit development less than 5,000 square feet. It's one or the other. As you said, not to bloat a project, to make a project larger. Council Member Wolbach: The main Motion without the amendment captures that, but it does allow the potential if, say—if you're proposing a development, you could say, "We're going to have 5,000 square feet that's exempt, and TRANSCRIPT Page 59 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 2,500 of it we're going to make for therapists or psychologists or medical, and the other half we're going to make for nonprofits." I can see that actually being an appealing use that would be beneficial to the community. I won't accept the amendment because it's redundant. Council Member Holman: Perhaps this. In "B," if you take the word "and" out, then it also clarifies what your intention is and I would withdraw my amendment. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, your concern is unclear. Am I correct in believing that your concern is simply that you think it implies that it's additive and you could do 10,000 square feet? Council Member Holman: That's correct. I'm not the only one up here that thinks that. Mayor Scharff: We stated that it's not additive. Medical office and/or nonprofit development less than 5,000 square feet. You want to add something like "for both uses"? Would that … AMENDMENT: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member XX to add to the Motion a new Part D “non-profit development less than 3,000 GSF”; and to amend Part B to state “either medical office or non-profit development less than 5,000 GSF” Council Member Wolbach: You could add the word "total" after 5,000. Council Member Wolbach: That's clear to Staff, right? Ms. Gitelman: If I could offer a clarification here. We can certainly change this if it's the Council direction. Currently, the way the program is administered, you could have one exemption or the other. You can have the 2,000-square-foot office or the 5,000-square-foot medical office. You can't combine them. With the way you're writing this, that would remain the case. You could have 2,000 square feet of office and 5,000 square feet made up of either medical or nonprofit or a combination of both of them. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you for the clarification. Forgive me, colleagues and public, for misrepresenting. I misunderstood that. I'm fine with that clarification, and I'm fine with, just to be extra clear for colleagues, adding the word, if Vice Mayor Kniss will accept it, "total" after 5,000 in the motion. Ms. Gitelman: Mr. Mayor, if I … Council Member Holman: If you do that, then I'd withdraw the amendment. TRANSCRIPT Page 60 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 AMENDMENT WITHDRAWN BY THE MAKER Ms. Gitelman: Mr. Mayor, if I could ask for one more clarification. Currently it reads nonprofit development. I was hoping that we could say "nonprofit office development" because the ordinance is really about office uses. Nonprofits have a wide variety of … Council Member Wolbach: That's fine. Let's add that. I think we were just pulling the language from the Staff recommendation. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Holman, for seeking clarification. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: It's been a while since Council Member Fine started. I just wanted to clarify when we talk about size. This is net new square feet, so you could demolish a medical building that was 15,000 square feet and make it 20,000 square feet? In terms of using these exemptions, we haven't really seen much use of this ordinance in the last 2 years, so I don't think we have data points. I'm a little bit concerned about the comment about how we define a nonprofit. In our zoning, medical is defined. We want to support small nonprofits, but there are huge, big money nonprofits. More the issue of you develop a building and you say you have a nonprofit tenant, and then they move out, what happens? I wondered if you'd be open to—I'd like to hear if Staff has other ideas—saying "medical office and/or deed restricted nonprofit office development" or something to ensure it's actually being used for a nonprofit. Council Member Wolbach: I'd probably be comfortable with it. All of this is going to come back to us; we're just giving direction for Staff to investigate and draft something. I'll look to Council Member Kniss and see if she has any opposition to that. I'd be okay with changing that. Vice Mayor Kniss: I don't think it changes it substantially. Mayor Scharff: Staff, you're comfortable with that? Council Member Wolbach: Just like with the prior amendment offered by Council Member Holman, after the discussion I'm fine with that. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 TRANSCRIPT Page 61 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: Now, we're at "E," which is the process for reviewing projects. We have three choices: continue the current competitive process; use a first- come-first-serve process, which is the Staff recommendation; or consider some other alternative or modified process. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm going to make the Motion for Number 2. Just saying in advance that fair is fair. When you look at our current process, where we have a competitive process, the words we've usually used are a "beauty contest." I've given up over the years that I've served of trying to decide whether a building is attractive or unattractive. I swear, to somebody it's going to be absolutely gorgeous, and to somebody else it is going to be an unattractive elephant. For me, the fairest way to go about this, instead of somebody trying to decide which is the more beautiful building, is to do it on a first-come-first-serve basis. As I recall, we haven't had to do this because we haven't had enough projects in the pipeline. We don't know how a beauty contest would work. This is a fairer way to go. As I've read about it, other cities who have—I should have waited for a second. I apologize. Mayor Scharff: Do we have a second for … Cory, did you second it? No. Council Member Fine: I'll second. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. MOTION: Vice Mayor Kniss moved, seconded by Council Member Fine to direct Staff to include in the replacement Ordinance a first-come first-served process for reviewing projects subject to the Annual Limit. Vice Mayor Kniss: Was that a second? Mayor Scharff: Yes. Vice Mayor Kniss: I can continue. Other cities that have come up against this have ended up dropping their beauty contest. I know it was appealing to us initially. We thought of it as a—I don't know. Maybe we'd put together some sort of three-person committee that would decide whether or not it met the beauty contest rules and could they pass the ballet or whatever it was that they had to pass to qualify. This is easy, fair. First-come-first-serve really works. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you. I agree with what Vice Mayor Kniss said about the fact that no one, especially not us, is a good judge of buildings for this entire community. More importantly, there are other things here. TRANSCRIPT Page 62 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Currently, the qualification process does include things like housing contribution, transportation impact. Those are important for us to consider in terms of a new building project or development in this City. I don't believe this ordinance is the right place to do them. Instead of valuing these different buildings within this ordinance on their housing contributions or their transportation contributions, we should be looking at those more holistically at a City level. We should be looking at things like a housing overlay or figuring out is the TMA working for the City, where is it, where is it not working, and how do we reinforce that. To do that, I do believe it is more "fair" to have a first-come-first-serve process. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I'd like to make a Substitute Motion, that we continue the current competitive process. Council Member Filseth: Second. SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Filseth to direct Staff to continue the current competitive process for reviewing projects subject to the Annual Limit. Mayor Scharff: Would you like to speak to your Motion? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. I really think we're mischaracterizing it to say we're going to have a three-person panel of judges. I don't think that was the process at all. Staff can correct me if I'm wrong. Vice Mayor Kniss: I don't know if we even had a process. Council Member DuBois: We defined a set of scoring metrics. Calling it a beauty contest also denigrates it. It was really about, in years that we had a huge demand for development, being able to prioritize projects that met our policy objectives as a Council. We assigned points based on sustainability, which I don't understand why we wouldn't support that. We assigned points based on environmental quality, public benefit, the ability to mitigate any impacts to the neighborhood. There are a lot of cities that do this. Mountain View does it quite well. It only applies in those years where you have a lot of development. To me, this idea of performance metrics and having a competition in a year where you have a lot of development makes a lot of sense. Those metrics are important to us. If we have first-come-first-serve in those peak years, Council is giving up the ability to encourage the policies that we want to see implemented. Giving points for the inclusion of mixed- use with housing is a good lever for us. We have enormous housing pressures. I feel like we're completely diluting this ordinance where we're not going to TRANSCRIPT Page 63 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 get what we intended, which was to incentivize moving from office construction to housing construction. The overall purpose was not just single occupancy trips or parking. It was really about job growth and the impacts on the City. These metrics were designed to measure that and incentivize projects. By removing that, we're completely diluting the purpose of this ordinance. I would just strongly—I'd love to hear my colleagues' comments on this, but I'd really urge you guys to consider what we're left with if we take this out. Mayor Scharff: It already has a second from Council Member Filseth, I believe. Council Member Filseth: I pretty much concur with what the maker of the Motion just said. The performance metrics idea is a good idea. We haven't had any—it's been 18 months or something like that. We haven't really had enough time to see how it really works. We haven't had a year in which we had a lot more projects coming in than we could afford. I think it's premature to eliminate it after whatever it's been. On the discussion of fairness, the net- net today is—the producers of office developments don't pay the entire social cost of those. One of the ways to look at the scoring ordinance is that by producing higher quality projects, which is a good idea and premature to eliminate, we can reduce that gap a little bit. In terms of fair, who are we talking about being fair to? The current system is unfair to residents, and it's unfair to residents to dilute this ordinance after however long we've had it, less than 2 years. The Substitute Motion is the way to go. Mayor Scharff: I'm going to speak to this briefly too. First of all, it's a bit of hyperbole to say that we're diluting this ordinance dramatically. The ordinance is pretty much staying the way it is. The purpose of the ordinance is to meter the pace of growth. Whether or not we have a beauty contest or not has no effect on any of that. No one's come forward into the beauty contest. Part of that is because it is unfair, the ordinance. Staff recognizes that this is not a good process. That's why in their Staff Report it says Staff recommends the first-come-first-serve process. When you ask people in business what do they want most from a city, from their government, what they want most is certainty. It's hard to invest millions of dollars, go through a lengthy EIR process, and then have something as vague as the beauty contest. This is probably the most pernicious part of this ordinance. This is the part that investors and developers and residents really have problems with. When you say it's unfair to residents … Council Member Filseth: Residents don't have problems with it. Mayor Scharff: Sure they do. What residents also want is some certainty in the process. What we don't really want this to be is a political favoritism, TRANSCRIPT Page 64 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 choice where you don't know where it's going to go, where it depends on who's making the decision. When it comes to Council, you want some certainty. That doesn't get you there. When I look at most of the new buildings Downtown, most of them are an improvement over what's there. Yes, I have my pet peeves about some of the architecture, but we have an Architectural Review Board. I may not agree with the choices the Architectural Review Board makes, but I have no understanding of why, if we have this beauty contest, we will get better architecture. I don't believe we will. I don't quite see how that could change at all. We have incredibly strong green building ordinances and sustainability measures. If we want to continue to push on those, which we should, we should apply those to all buildings, which we continue to do. I don't think this helps residents in any way frankly, to keep this beauty contest in here. It creates all sorts of uncertainties, which is what our residents don't want. In fact, if anything it feels a bit like a PC process when we go through it. That's really what our residents were complaining about. What I've heard a lot of people on this Council say is we should have rules, and the rules should be followed, and we should have certainty in those rules. What this does is create a whole sense of uncertainty that hangs around this process. Not to mention the whole March thing. I went with extending the ordinance frankly, but I did ask myself the question—right now, you're stuck with a March date where we collect the stuff without moving forward. That also slows down the process in a way that was unnecessary when we know that we're not going to have more than 50,000 square feet this year. What this does is create delay and uncertainty, which are the two biggest things that create unfairness in the process. I am not going to support the Substitute Motion. Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I actually think that calling it a beauty contest is rather insulting. What we have right now, to continue the current process, provides for the performance measures. Staff has really put together and thought out very carefully what their criteria are. It's on Packet Page 38, and it has the review criteria and scoring. It has everything laid out. Staff, is this process given to the applicant to have them understand that this is the method that we'll be scoring when they go through this process? Ms. Campbell: This is something that's available to the public to review. The applicants would review this when they're putting their application together. Council Member Kou: It's not really sprung on the applicant. It's there for them to understand that this is what we're looking for in performance criteria to ensure that we have buildings that will fit into the community. Further, residents would like to know what to expect, as you say. Also, they would like to see less exceptions and variances, if anything, or using DEEs and so forth. TRANSCRIPT Page 65 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 That would expedite the process for the applicant too. There is a thought-out process for all of this already. I will be supporting the Substitute Motion. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Tom, I appreciate what you have said. I really do understand it. It's too bad we haven't had to use this process at all yet, which we haven't. I don't think we have. It looks very objective but, when we get into, we're going to find it's somewhat subjective. Certainly "c," which is the design, is once again—I'm on the same page, looking at design, which is "c" under Number 2. That once again gets into that area that I hope ARB has really weighed in on. Environmental quality, we absolutely demand that. I don't think that's a choice any more. Public benefit, I'd have to suggest that what the Mayor said was pretty straightforward. It does sound a little like an old PC, heading us down a bumpy road again. I am delighted that this is actually put in here, but I still don't see this as being an easy process to complete and one where you could come up with a numeric answer. I am continuing to support my own Motion. Thanks, Tom, for bringing that up. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: We're maybe not looking at this in the right framework. It's been referred to a few times as a beauty contest. That's absolutely a misnomer. If you look at the things that are on the list, either on Packet Page 16 or on Packet Page 38, it's not that. It's what project contributes most to the community and which project least negatively affects the community. That's what the criteria are, that are listed. I wish we had had a project to review at this point in time. Until we do use this, we won't know how it works. I wish we could finally get over a hurdle. With all due respect, it's like we have a pretty darned good Architectural Review Board. Until we can get over the hurdle of thinking of design criteria as being 100- percent subjective, we're not ever going to get anywhere with delivering better projects to this community, either in selecting who our ARB members are or if a project comes to the Council on appeal, looking at a project in preliminary screening, whatever. Compatibility is not just picking straws out of the air. There are specific, professional criteria that determine that. They are the charge of the ARB, our Planning Staff, and the Council. That's just one element of this. The impacts and the uses have great potential for adding very positively to the community. These criteria encourage the applicant, an applicant, a developer to come forward with their best effort, not trying to get in under a deadline but to bring forward their best effort. I would suggest that—I ended up voting for it—I can't remember for sure—the 1-year carryover. It makes this criteria even more important because it means we might have a larger project that goes over the 50,000-square-foot limit. If TRANSCRIPT Page 66 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 we're looking at a larger project, it makes these criteria so very, very important to the community, to the public. Before you vote on this substitute motion or make up your mind to vote for the original motion, think about what kinds of comments we hear from the public, what do they like and not like about our existing development. I dare say that these criteria address many of the objections that we hear from the community over and over and over again. I argue for your support for the Substitute Motion. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: First, I want to say this is a really good conversation. As with the prior items where we had controversy, people can really vote their conscience on this one and go either way. I'll be supporting the main motion, not the substitute. To share my reasons why, Council Member DuBois' points are well taken, so I would like to address them. He asked what are our thoughts on why we want to make this change, why we want to review the design criteria. I will not use the term beauty contest; I will refer to it as design criteria. I appreciate that. The review criteria or evaluation criteria are well intentioned. They're about as good as they could get. That's why I'm not going to support tweaking them. They're pretty good. The public benefit one bothers me. The biggest one that's central is not a criteria issue but the process issue. If you look at Packet Page 38, Page 5 of 3.C, Item 4 at the end, the City Council may accept the Director's recommendation—that's the Planning Director—or modify it based on its independent review of the criteria and shall determine which eligible applications will be approved, approved with modifications or denied, etc. That leaves a lot of leeway, whether you want to call it objective or subjective. It does leave a lot of leeway for this body to make determinations. Maybe we'll make good decisions; maybe we won't. We all have a great deal of confidence in our own ability to judge according to those criteria. To be honest, I'm not sure how much confidence I have in this body, based on who knows what the future makeup will be, to apply that review criteria and scoring in a fair way. To address the question of fairness that Council Member Filseth raised, it is important to be clear that the role of government in a constitutional democracy is not merely to be fair to the majority, but to be fair as the rule of law applies to all, even those we may have a bias against. It's important that our laws, our rules are fair. Just to address that question of why we use the word fair even if we're talking about a process for a group that we're not necessarily big fans of. We may agree that we're not big fans of them. We do have to have a fair process. That's a rule I will always try and apply. I hope we will all try and apply it no matter what topic we're talking about. If I had confidence that this body would be capable of doing this fairly and doing this well in the future, I'd feel more comfortable with it. Secondly, the right place to pursue reducing impacts, the right place to pursue design, TRANSCRIPT Page 67 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 environmental quality, etc. are, as others have mentioned, in other ordinances. We do a pretty darned good job of that. I would like to see us continue to improve upon those. I'd like to see us continue to improve our ARB and its processes and its criteria that it uses. I'd like to see us continue to improve and push the State and the country forward on our green building codes. The impacts, the design, the environmental quality are really important things, absolutely, but that's not what this ordinance is supposed to be about. I don't think government regulations should be broader or more complex than they need to be to get the job done. Lastly, Staff recommended the original motion, not the substitute. Because of my low confidence in this body's capabilities to be fair. Secondly because these things can and should be addressed other places. Third, because of the Staff recommendation, I will be supporting the main motion, not the substitute. Again, people can vote their conscience, and I'll respect them for that. Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on the Substitute Motion first. The Substitute Motion fails on a 5-4 vote with Council Members DuBois, Kou, Filseth, and Holman voting yes. SUBSTITUTE MOTION FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou yes Mayor Scharff: Still seeing no lights, let's vote on the main Motion. That passes on a 5-4 vote with Council Members Wolbach, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, and Fine voting yes. MOTION PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou no Mayor Scharff: Does that conclude the item? Council Member Filseth: (inaudible) Mayor Scharff: I was looking to see if we had any lights. Vice Mayor Kniss: That concludes the item. Mayor Scharff: I just wanted to make sure there was no one who wanted to say something further. Can we take a 5-minute break? Vice Mayor Kniss: Could I say one thing? I mean it teasingly. If Mountain View has criteria that are even similar or if we can make a comparison to, I would drive down San Antonio Road between … The part I like best is the purple building. Mayor Scharff: Let's come back in 5 minutes. We'll let Staff prepare for the next item. Thank you very much, Hillary. TRANSCRIPT Page 68 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council took a break at 8:35 P.M. and returned at 8:51 P.M. 4. Adoption of the Community Engagement Plan, Problem Statement, Objectives, and Evaluation Criteria to Support Development and Evaluation of Railroad Grade Separation Alternatives. Mayor Scharff: Are we ready for the Staff presentation on the next item? Josh Mello, Chief Transportation Official: Good evening, Mayor, members of Council. I'm Josh Mello, the City's Chief Transportation Official. This evening we're going to talk to you about the Connecting Palo Alto Rail program. Two key elements of that program that we're planning to discuss tonight are the Community Engagement Plan as well as the problem statement, objectives, and evaluation criteria. We've broken the presentation into two parts to allow all of the Council Members to participate in the first discussion regarding the Community Engagement Plan. The revised Community Engagement Plan is included in your Staff Report as Attachment A. This is a high-level outline of how Staff proposes to move forward with the implementation of the Context Sensitive Solutions process in order to enable us to move through the alternatives analysis process for our Connecting Palo Alto Rail program and eventually identify a preferred alternative or set of alternatives through the Context Sensitive Solutions process. Context sensitive solutions is a process that originated roughly in the later part of the 20th century after the National Environmental Policy Act was passed. Historically, state departments of transportation or highway departments did not really think about the context of the projects that they were delivering. Oftentimes, highways were built through communities without any consideration of surrounding land uses or how those would impact the surrounding neighborhoods. A new school of thought arose whereby communities were involved in a transparent process and were integrated into the decision-making process at the very early stages. Retroactively, there's been a lot of academic work around how these projects were advanced through the planning process and a toolbox of what are called Context Sensitive Solutions principles were developed. Some of these principles include striving towards a shared stakeholder vision; demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of context, and context being where the project lies and what are the specific elements of that community, and the values of the community that's around that particular project location; fostering continuing communication and collaboration. This is continually involving the community, not going into a back room and making decisions and then coming out and reporting the decisions to the community. It's bringing the community along on the decision-making process. Finally, exercising flexibility and creativity. You'll notice that the Community Engagement Plan is a little bit broad. This process is expected to evolve, and we need to be flexible throughout this process. There are certain key decisions TRANSCRIPT Page 69 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 that will need to be made along this alternatives analysis process, but we can't lock ourselves into a firm framework at the beginning because we need to be adaptable and we need to be able to change to the context depending on what kind of conversations the community ends up having around this particular program and projects. We've outlined a very broad, five-step process in the Context Sensitive Solutions alternatives analysis. These are milestones. In all likelihood, these will all lead to very important decisions that will need to be made by the community at large, by Council, and by the stakeholders in the community. First of all, program background is the first step. We held a meeting on May 20th at the Mitchell Park Community Center. We had about 160 attendees at that meeting. That meeting was primarily focused around the program background. We called that Community Workshop 1. We solicited contact information from all the attendees. We asked them how we could keep in contact with them. The goal of that meeting was to not only introduce the background of Palo Alto's rail program, some of the previous studies that have been done, but also start to convene a group of concerned stakeholders from across the community and bring them along throughout this entire decision-making process. The second step in the Context Sensitive Solutions alternatives analysis process is the problem definition and the evaluation framework. That's the point that we find ourselves at this evening. We'll talk more about this particular decision later in the second part of the presentation. This is where the community works together to define a problem. Historically, before Context Sensitive Solutions was developed, the State DOT or the implementing agency would define the problem on its own and decide what the problem was and then design to address that. CSS takes this a little bit differently. The community drives the decision-making process and, thereby, drafts the problem statement and then the evaluation framework that will be used to evaluate the different alternatives. Steps further along in the process include the alternatives development and then evaluating and refining the alternatives. This will culminate in the identification of a preferred alternative or alternatives. We're aiming to do that in the second quarter of 2018. The chart below in green shows the decision-making process for our CSS alternatives analysis as we are currently recommending in the Community Engagement Plan. What we're showing here is a five-step decision-making process starting with focus groups and then moving into community workshops. Those would be the all-inclusive, anyone who's willing to attend could attend and participate in the decision-making process. Then, decisions would be brought to the Planning and Transportation Commission, followed by the Rail Committee, and then ultimately to City Council. That unshaded box at the end is a gut check where we would go back to the community and hold possibly a second community workshop to help them understand what decision was made by City Council, and then get reaction from the community on that to help better refine the decision, if necessary. The Technical Advisory Committee, which is shown in the second TRANSCRIPT Page 70 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 row, serves as an advisory group only. They will not be actively participating in the decision-making process. That is intended to be a technical group of agency staff members, primarily from transportation agencies in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. We would also invite various City departments, the Palo Alto Unified School District, Santa Clara Valley Water District because some of their channels cross our rail corridor, and any other technical staff or agency representatives that may have some knowledge about some of the constraints that we may face as we move forward on alternatives. Again, they are not a decision-making partner; they are simply advisory to the decision- making process. As we currently have this Context Sensitive Solutions alternatives analysis process scoped out, we are hoping to select a preferred alternative sometime before the second quarter of 2018. That's a fairly accelerated schedule. The chart in front of you shows where some of our peer cities along the Peninsula lie in the development of their grade separations, their planning and design. What we should mostly concern ourselves with is where Mountain View and Sunnyvale lie in the schedule. Mountain View has already completed final design for Rengstorff Avenue. They're a little bit ahead of us on the planning for the Castro Street grade separation. Sunnyvale is currently advancing with the planning efforts for the Mary Avenue grade crossing. We're on about the same schedule as Sunnyvale for Mary Avenue. They're particularly relevant because Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto will need to share that $700 million in Measure B funding that's been allocated through the County Transportation Measure from 2016. The presentation you're seeing tonight was presented to the PTC on August 9th, and we received some recommendations from PTC on how to modify the Community Engagement Plan. PTC actually passed a motion that recommends Palo Alto follow a CSS process for evaluation of rail grade separation including the creation of a dedicated, expert stakeholder group in parallel with neighborhood stakeholders. There was quite a bit of discussion in PTC. Commissioner Summa is here this evening too if you want to hear more about their discussion. The motion is fairly strongly recommending that we create an additional stakeholder group that is outside of the structure that I presented earlier, the decision-making structure. This would be a stakeholder group of experts and neighborhood stakeholders who would help make the decisions as we move through this process. On August 16th, we made this presentation to the Rail Committee. The Rail Committee also had a very robust decision about whether or not to convene a separate stakeholder group or to modify what was in the draft Community Engagement Plan. Ultimately, the Rail Committee directed Staff to propose adding members to the Technical Advisory Committee, provide additional expertise in areas not currently represented, define those roles and responsibilities, and then suggest potential subcommittees and to consider adding focus groups. Taking the recommendations of the Planning and Transportation Commission and the Rail Committee, we did modify and revise the Community Engagement Plan. The TRANSCRIPT Page 71 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 original Community Engagement Plan and the revised version are included in your packet. The revised version is Attachment A. Some of the modifications that we made to the Community Engagement Plan based on the feedback from PTC and the Rail Committee include adding focus groups as part of the CSS decision-making process. While the community workshops are a great way to bring in all interested parties and allow as many people to participate as possible, there's a feeling that the community workshops are not a great place to delve deep into the details and talk about some of the technical components of alternatives, and have the kind of robust decisions that you'll need to have to start to develop alternatives and make decisions. The focus groups were seen as a way to get a good sampling of the community and different viewpoints, but also give people time to delve deeply into the details and get into a little bit of a more technical analysis. We also revised the Community Engagement Plan to propose modifying the Rail Committee public comment format. The Rail Committee could be a really great forum for some of our more active advocates and community stakeholders to participate in the decision at a higher level than they currently can if that Rail committee public and advocate engagement process was structured a little bit differently. Finally, at the recommendation of the Rail Committee we added some additional members to the Technical Advisory Committee. These include the Palo Alto Unified School District. We would also ask select school site administrators, like Paly, the schools that are very close to the rail corridor, if they wanted to participate in the TAC as well. The Utilities Department is a very important partner because there are a lot of utility corridors that directly abut or cross the rail corridor. We expect there will be quite a bit more discussion on this particular page and some of the ins and outs of the Technical Advisory Committee, the Rail Committee, and the remainder of the Community Engagement Plan. We did want to offer a Staff recommendation, which is to review the revised Community Engagement Plan, which I said is included in Attachment A, and the recommendations from the PTC and the Rail Committee, and direct Staff to continue moving forward with the Context Sensitive Solutions alternatives analysis process as described in the revised Community Engagement Plan. With that, I'll hand it over to Jim. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you. Thank you for that. Josh has taken us up to the Staff recommendation on this first portion of the Rail Committee report, which will engage the whole Council. If we would Stipulated Award on that slide that you have up there, the main one. You guys all probably haven't memorized Attachment A yet, which is the review of this. One of the best ways to think about it is it's almost more of a primer or compendium of a whole range of community engagement approaches that the City could use. The plan doesn't try to spell out what would happen at every step. It does identify the potential to use a lot of different approaches so that we achieve the first goal of CSS, which is how do you create a shared stakeholder vision. TRANSCRIPT Page 72 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 It seems that you can't achieve that goal with any one, single approach. A shared stakeholder vision is potentially a large group of folks. The Staff recommendation is that the Council ultimately get here today on this discussion to move forward as described in the revised Community Engagement Plan or as further revised by any directions from the Council as a whole tonight. The Rail Committee has been working here. The Staff Report that we put together for this is a little—it's not our typical report in the fact that we have a recommendation from the PTC that the Staff Report, particularly as it relates to the stakeholder group, doesn't bring forward and continue to recommend. At the last Rail Committee meeting, the Rail Committee had a lot of discussion about that. In a lot of ways, we were in line with what the Rail Committee was in their discussion. However, at the same time, this whole issue of adding some folks to the Technical Advisory Committee was first and foremost on the mind of some of the speakers who were there and then the Rail Committee themselves. We brought up some potential problems or concerns at that Rail meeting that the kind of folks who were—they're really other agency people and staffs who would be in essentially technical staff meetings. The potential impact of bringing in citizens or other stakeholder reps from just our community actually can really work against the ability for those meetings to take place. It's our folks; it's not the other communities' folks in the same way. As we went back and really talked about it, we saw that it could be ultimately counterproductive. Our recommendation really was to limit these to folks like PAUSD and the Utilities Department. If you look at the decision-making process that is on the bottom with focus groups, community workshops, PTC, etc., I've heard from some of you where the lack of clarity with all these different fingers in the pie raised some questions about who's doing what, where, when, and how. At the same time, we could argue, though, that this is engagement and this is hearing from people in a lot of different venues already. The question always gets to be how orderly is it or what are we doing with what it is we hear or how do we know where we're going to next. That's worth identifying that and pointing this out. It's safe to say that, in one sense, when we were at the Rail Committee the idea of maybe adding key folks, citizen reps, people who might be on an engaged stakeholder committee to the Tech Advisory Committee would be a way to satisfy that request for an engaged stakeholder group. We're really here to say that it would undermine what we get out of the Technical Advisory Committee. We'd argue against it. We also still would point out that having an appointed, ongoing, engaged expert committee is going to generate some of its own problems, given the potential conflict issues. Molly can speak to this more if we need to. To appoint people to a committee that would be ongoing and would have real decision-making capacity as far as recommendations to the Council could put us in a situation where, for example, neighbors who live right next to the grade crossings, neighbors who could have their property taken if there were designs being TRANSCRIPT Page 73 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 pursued that involved takings could very well be in a situation in that format where they would be precluded from participating. We run into some challenges about do we have fully engaged stakeholders with folks who can't participate. That's why our feeling is we need to be thinking about being more fluid and nimble about being able to access as needed or set up some subcommittees at times to work with the Staff on bringing forward issues, which brings us to the last compelling recommendation we want to make more on-the spot here. How is all of that organized, managed, and transparent and in the public realm? It comes back to something that we've talked about with the Rail Committee. Really, the Rail Committee has to function, in one sense, as the hub on the engagement as a locale for folks to—not every meeting has to be taking place with the Rail committee with different stakeholders, but there has to be a way where there's a coming together before the Council's reps at the Rail Committee to share information and be able to move things along. That's a burden potentially on the Rail Committee, the idea that they're going to need to have meetings that will have real decision-making recommendations from the Rail Committee that will come to the Council. At the same time, that could mean that there are just special—either parts of meetings are special meetings that are just hearings where the public is invited, specific stakeholder groups are invited to talk, there's a lot of exchange with the Rail Committee. In one sense, these ideas are coming out to the wider community faster than they would with a somewhat more sequestered group. That is the thinking. Lastly, I would say two things. One is we are not starting from zero with this issue of the Caltrain corridor, High Speed Rail, what are we going to do with grade separations. We've had almost 10 years of Council, community issues and discussions, studies. The Council's already adopted some guiding policies as it relates to things. Our community's pretty literate right now on a lot of the issues. This is more about, as the Council identifies really moving towards preferred recommendations, how we really sharpen and make sure you engage the community. Ultimately, that decision is going to come back to the Council. Why doesn't it start coming back to the Rail Committee periodically? We'll have to talk with you about that. That's in essence our recommendation. We think the most effective shared stakeholder participation is through a range of engagement approaches with the Rail Committee sitting as the hub, out of which maybe different spokes would go out on some of the stakeholder work. They come back and report, and the Rail Committee ultimately has to report to the Council. That would be, in a sense, our recommendations in the aftermath of both the PTC discussion and the Rail Committee discussion. I'll end there, and we'll be ready for questions after you hear from the public or whenever you want to do that. Mayor Scharff: I wanted to say that was a really good summary of where we were. I really appreciate the fact that Staff took these recommendations and TRANSCRIPT Page 74 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 thought it through and have come up with some solutions to this. It's a really important point of the conflicts out. If we were to have that stakeholders committee—that's part of the issue—they would be conflicted out of anyone who lived 500 feet roughly within that. Is that roughly right? Molly Stump, City Attorney: Thank you, Mayor Scharff. The State rule is a little more complicated than that now, certainly within 500 feet. If you have a designated committee that has been tasked with providing substantive recommendations, which will substantially be followed, we would apply these State law rules to them and look at that. Within 500 feet, there's no ability to participate. Outside of that, there also may be restrictions on participation depending on the potential impact of what would be happening. When you're talking about major infrastructure construction, the construction alone will take many years, and the infrastructure is a very substantial change in the built environment, I would expect the FPPC to apply a distance that's quite a bit further than 500 feet. Exactly how far that would go is going to depend on the lay of the land, if you will, between the real property that's owned and the potential infrastructure item. Mayor Scharff: That's really helpful and a very important point. What the City Manager said is sobering. If we did have a committee, anybody who's house would potentially be taken could clearly not participate on that committee. In fact, if it was much further than 500 feet, the entire Southgate neighborhood probably couldn't participate. It seems like huge swaths of the community would be removed from that. I don't know how far that goes. It's fairly large. Ms. Stump: It's very fact dependent, and it would depend on the circumstances. With Southgate, for example, there are some unique circumstances potentially about various possibilities and not only noise and change in the infrastructure but change in access that would affect the neighborhood potentially. Very fact specific. I had another point, and I forgot what it was. Mr. Keene: Could I just jump in on one other thing? It's important that we distinguish this doesn't preclude opinion sharing, perspectives, engagement with the Council by citizens across our community in different settings. It's partly related to the formality of the formation of the group, the charge that the Council would be giving to them in many ways to dive deep into lots of details and work through, over time, and make recommendations to the Council that is very different than if we have some freer flowing things, which actually not only does that but, rather than hearing from a stakeholder group of 10 or 15 people, you want to hear from a lot more folks than just that also. TRANSCRIPT Page 75 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Ms. Stump: Thank you. That was my point, and the central one. Please, people should not misunderstand. Full input and participation is welcome. Folks can be heard from repeatedly and in great detail. Their views can be fully considered and taken into account. The issue from a legal standpoint is when the person crosses over from that role, and the way I would describe it from a legal standpoint is to you becoming a public official, which would potentially happen if there was, in a sense, an ad hoc committee that had some delegation of substantial authority and became a part of the governmental decision-making process. Mayor Scharff: It's important to be clear. What Staff is suggesting is the Rail Committee play that vital role as part of the community engagement. We have the focus groups, we have the community meetings. There's a couple of other things you mentioned. The Rail Committee would basically expand its Charter and take a more active role in listening to all citizens who wish to come before it. That would become one of the central roles of the Rail Committee. Am I understanding it correctly? Mr. Keene: I would take it further. I don't think the Rail Committee would be precluded from specifically inviting participation from different parts of our community as opposed to just saying, "We'll listen to whoever wants to come." You could be saying, "There are some big perspectives or concerns we're not hearing here. We really want to hear from folks here." I hear we've got some experts. We've got folks at Stanford or other locations who really know a lot. They could come and talk to the Committee and to the public. Mayor Scharff: Why don't we do a round of questions and comments if you want it? I saw a couple of lights go on. I'll start with Chair DuBois who's Chair of the Rail Committee and let him (crosstalk). Council Member DuBois: That was my first question, what are we doing right now. I guess we're doing questions. This issue is stakeholder conflict never came up with the PTC. It never came up in the Rail meeting. Why is it coming up tonight? Ms. Stump: It didn't come up. We were prepared to discuss it at Rail. It didn't come up because of the way the conversation progressed. It didn't appear to be relevant to the direction that the Committee focused on and the motion that was made. Council Member DuBois: I'll save it for my comments, but I thought we were pretty clear about adding community stakeholders to the TAC. I'd be really interested in how CSS handles this with major infrastructure. They wouldn't have authority. They wouldn't be elected officials. They'd be making TRANSCRIPT Page 76 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 recommendations like our other stakeholder groups. Would that cause a conflict if all decision-making is being made by elected officials? Ms. Stump: For example, when elected officials appoint folks to the Planning Commission, and the Planning Commission makes recommendations to Council, Planning doesn't have final decision-making authority on any item. Planning Commissioners are still subject to the conflict of interest rules. If you set up a formal body, it would depend on the way the body was set up and its function. I believe the Community Engagement Plan has a chart that shows different ways that government can work with community members on a scale. If you look far over to the right where government is essentially convening a group of community folks, it's described as substantially making a decision, looking at an issue and bringing forward a recommendation that the government has an intention to implement. That is clearly in the category of you need to apply the conflict rules to those folks. We're highlighting this today without any particular individuals in mind. We also don't know really what might be contemplated in terms of a format or a type of participation. As the conversation progressed in Committee, I didn't feel that the issue was immediately there. To the extent that individuals would—the Technical Advisory Committee isn't actually going to be in the category of need the conflicts rules to be applied to them. They very clearly as the TAC is set up now are there to provide information and technical input. They're not going to be looking at policy issues or making recommendations to the Staff. Expanding the TAC—I believe the motion wasn't specific to citizens; although, there was some discussion about that—doesn't necessarily create that issue. For full disclosure in terms of how the conversations have occurred since then and the kinds of ideas that folks have had, we did think it was important to highlight that, if you were interested in setting up a dedicated citizens stakeholder group to make substantial recommendations and participate on that far end of the scale of substantially engaging and looking at and making recommendations that the Council has a stated intention to substantially adopt—the Council will be making the final decision of course. Those types of structures are probably going to need to have the conflicts rules applied to them. Council Member DuBois: It's clearly what the PTC discussed and recommended. It wasn't brought up then either. Ms. Stump: The conflicts rules are always a part of State law. It's always the case whenever the Council sets up a body. I take your point. It may have been that I didn't personally staff that meeting. I'll talk with the folks who do that staffing about maybe proactively highlighting those issues with those recommendations as well. TRANSCRIPT Page 77 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: How much Measure B money for grade seps is going to be released in 2018? Mr. Mello: Measure B funding is currently on hold. There's an appeal that's been filed. They are collecting it in escrow, but I don't think I've seen any projections on what the distribution will be for this fiscal year yet. Council Member DuBois: I've heard that even if they release, they're talking about $2 million total in 2018 for all grade seps. Mr. Mello: I think the first place they're going to put the money is the Implementation Plan. VTA is going to develop an Implementation Plan cooperatively with Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto. They're going to have to hire a consultant and use some of the Measure B money initially to develop that Implementation Plan. That's probably where the first disbursement will be routed. Council Member DuBois: In Attachment A you list the workshops and the focus groups. You list the benefit as consult, engage, decide. How do you see focus groups and workshops making decisions? Mr. Mello: The second phase of our presentation, we're actually going to talk about the first decision that needs to be made and the path we took to bring that recommended decision to you this evening. If we go back to the chart, it'd be a continuum. The decision-making process would be a continuum that move from left to right starting with focus groups, community workshops, a recommendation from the PTC. If you elect to move forward with our enhanced Rail Committee structure, the Rail Committee would serve as that hub, receiving the recommendations from the focus groups, the community workshops, and the PTC, facilitating additional discussion, hearing from groups that may disagree with the outcome of the PTC and the community workshops. The Rail Committee would make a recommendation to Council. That final step is what I said earlier, a gut check where we would go back to the community and say, "This is what Council decided after hearing from you in focus groups and at community workshops and at Rail Committee." Council Member DuBois: Are you suggesting that a focus group is going to make a decision, eliminate options, and then pass it onto a workshop? Mr. Mello: There are going to be some very complicated discussions around the evaluation of alternatives, the development of alternatives, tradeoffs, financial planning, things that can't necessarily be discussed very easily in a large community workshop. Focus groups could be a good place to get into some of the details and give the Rail Committee the tools that it may need to make a decision or make a recommendation (crosstalk). TRANSCRIPT Page 78 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: (crosstalk) little misleading. Maybe engaging but not really deciding in a focus group or even in a workshop. Mr. Keene: I don't think deciding but clearly consultation and involvement will be very much the part of a focus group. Council Member DuBois: We've listed the six groups as making decisions. Mr. Keene: Having been through this before, empower is obviously on the far side of all of this, which is really the complete delegation of the governing body or whoever to the citizens group to ultimately say, "Whatever you guys decide we're going to do as long as it's legal." Clearly we're not in that particular situation. There will be pieces of it. I'm hoping we'll be able to do with the Rail Committee is regularly talk about this. Are we getting enough depth of direction and feedback from our community. We don't want to be in the inform mode of telling people what we're going to do. That's completely contrary to CSS. Mr. Mello: The reason they are labeled decide is we see them as part of a long decision-making process that's going to involve all of the bodies that are shown up there. The decisions aren't going to be made in one night or at one meeting. These are going to be very complex discussions, a month or two of community-wide discussion with newspaper articles, opinion pieces, community newsletters. There's going to be a very long and in-depth discussion about some of these, particularly when we start to get down to alternatives and evaluating the different alternatives. They're part of a broader decision-making process that's going to involve all of these different parties shown up here. Council Member DuBois: We're just doing questions. My last question. It's for the benefit of people not on the Rail Committee. You list all of these agencies under the Technical Advisory Committee. The last I saw, very few had accepted. Do we have an idea of how many will actually accept or participate? Mr. Mello: We had about a third of these already accept, but that was a tentative invitation. We didn't give them an exact date of a meeting. I have personal relationships with staff at the bulk of these agencies. I think we can get them to participate once we have some firm discussion points and a more firm discussion as to where we're going. Council Member DuBois: Again, these would just be not regular meetings. These would be people that just participate in the process when asked. TRANSCRIPT Page 79 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mr. Mello: We'll convene them relatively quickly after we receive direction from you to move forward on this process to give them a briefing as to where we are in the process, explain our schedule. The next check-in with them would probably be when we start to develop some of the constraints that we'll need to help develop alternatives with the community. When we move into the alternatives development stage, there's probably going to be a back-and- forth. The community and the focus groups and some of the other decision- making bodies are going to start to develop alternatives. We're going to need to check those from a technical perspective and see what may be feasible with some changes in policies or other things. That's where the TAC is going to come in. Mr. Keene: Can I just say one other thing on this? It's an important point. Based on our experience with other technical groups, whether they're ad hoc— sometimes we've had systematic regular meetings. One of the examples I like to use the most of late has been the San Francisquito Creek project on the development of the actual plans. We ultimately were involved in what was going to happen on land acquisition, funding issues. What would happen a lot out of those Technical Advisory Committee meetings is we could surface issues between our jurisdictions or between one of the other agencies that ultimately goes beyond the TAC. We'd have to come back maybe to the Rail Committee and say, "Some of the things we've learned is we've got some issues with VTA, which is going to require some engagement at the political level of the Council or other folks." We only learn about it because we're working through a lot of these issues. It would be a mistake for us to think the TAC works off here in complete isolation just with the Staff without it at times surfacing things that are going to need your active involvement or even the sense to say, "This is something we need to get some community members' feedback on and involvement in." A real community engagement process is a mash-up of a lot of different folks participating, coming and going. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Let me go down a different track. Who have you talked to from other cities, who have gone through this recently? Not Sunnyvale or Mountain View. Mr. Mello: We have been in communication with Burlingame, who's currently in the planning phase for their Broadway grade separation. I work fairly closely with my counterpart in Menlo Park. They're looking at the Ravenswood/Oak Grove crossing right now. Vice Mayor Kniss: Those are both in the planning stages, right? Mr. Mello: Yes. TRANSCRIPT Page 80 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Vice Mayor Kniss: How about someone who's done it? I think Belmont is one of them. How about talking to some of the places who have actually done it, how they made it through that, what it did to the community long term? The reason that I'm concerned is that we're going to be talking about some pretty dramatic stuff. We're going to talk about disrupting Alma Street for 2 years or more. We're going to be talking about asking people if they'd mind leaving their homes. We're really embarking on an incredible process. Even though we're talking about this in terms that are sterile and practical at this point, at some point we need to have that discussion about this could tear up our community. I don't have any expertise in that whatsoever, but I have heard so much about it in other cities. My question to you, Josh, is should some of us go and talk to them, should some of the Rail Committee do that. I'm trying to think where else they've recently done one. Maybe San Bruno. Mr. Mello: I did talk to the gentleman who managed the Millbrae Avenue grade crossing, which was done a little while ago. He's retired now. Vice Mayor Kniss: Did that force his retirement? Mr. Mello: No, he had a great time. He brought it all the way from planning to construction under budget, a pretty successful project. At the last Rail Committee, we talked about inviting Burlingame officials to come and present at Rail Committee. Inviting someone who worked on one that was constructed and could talk about some of the impacts and the constraints would be a great idea as well. Vice Mayor Kniss: Did any of them solve it by trenching? Mr. Mello: The San Bruno one is an elevated railway. San Carlos is what's called the hybrid, where the rail corridor is elevated a little bit. Millbrae Avenue is just a traditional road overcrossing. I think the San Mateo ones that are beginning construction this year are traditional roadway over- crossings as well. The Burlingame is moving towards the hybrid option. They looked at a trench initially. Apparently they were concerned about the impacts of the trench. They landed on a hybrid similar to what San Carlos constructed. Vice Mayor Kniss: The bottom line is no one you know in this area is trenching. Am I right? Mr. Mello: I'm not aware of any trenching projects on the Peninsula on the Caltrain corridor, no. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm not either. I've asked about it many times in the past. The closest to that is some BART trenching just before you get into the City. I don't know if that's a legitimate trench or not. I really do have some TRANSCRIPT Page 81 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 concerns. The City is fascinated. We love our rail. We love our Peninsula service; there's no question. If we really are going to go to more trains and we're really going to high speed at some point in the future, this is a hard bullet to bite. If you were in an area where the discussion begins about whose houses will be in this mix—they certainly have been in those other communities—how do we deal with that and how do we deal with what could be a very divisive process in the future. I'm really just sounding the first alarm and saying, "I hope we are thinking of how to go about this in that very personalized way as well here's how it's going to work out the best and this is what we're going to choose and so forth. It's going to be a hard one. If somebody knocked on my door and said, "We're going to have to take your house, but we'll certainly compensate you, I think I'd be very happy. This is sounding maybe a bit extreme, but I really think this is one of those areas we have to look at. Mr. Keene: I don't think it's extreme at all. This is real. No matter how delayed it potentially is, as Elizabeth was talking earlier, changes are going to come. If nothing is done, nothing changes in our status quo, the impacts on our community are going to be really, really gray. One of the first things we've talked about in the Rail Committee is how we develop pretty quickly not just a bunch of data, but visual narratives that show the future state in a way that our public as a whole can start to see and really understand. If we do nothing, what changes? We will have to do something, and almost anything we choose to do is going to be exactly what you said. It's going to have tremendous impact. Without a doubt, this is the biggest infrastructure project the City has had in generations. Vice Mayor Kniss: That was my question, are we looking at the PR aspect of it, are we thinking about the real people who are going to have lives that are disrupted. What's your alternative to driving Alma? El Camino, I guess, Middlefield.; It's going to alter our traffic patterns a lot. I don't sit on that Committee, but that would certainly be one of the areas that I'd want to be taking up. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: A few things at the moment. I'm a little confused by how the conflicts issue comes up at this juncture and not prior ones. Council Member DuBois raised that question too. I'm just not clear why it wouldn't have come up at the Planning Commission meeting, why it hasn't come up in discussions at the Rail Committee when talking about a group and adding citizens or residents to the technically advisory committee. This goes back not that many years but a few years. When we did the SOFA working group, it was a working group that was comprised of residents and business TRANSCRIPT Page 82 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 owners and workers that lived in the neighborhood of SOFA I and then SOFA II, who were determining the future of that community. Following this as a model, nobody in the neighborhood would have been able to participate in the working group that affected that neighborhood. I'm a little confused here. Is I just because of the "authority" that such a group would have? What's the threshold here? I'm really confused. Ms. Stump: You're asking exactly the right question. It does have to do with governmental authority. To direct your attention to this engagement pan, there's a spectrum of various type of engagement that have been laid out on Page 3. Council Member Holman: We don't have Packet Pages in this item. Ms. Stump: No, we don't. It's very near the end of the Staff Report, a few pages after the end of the Staff Report. It says IAP2's public participation spectrum. If you look over to the far right, what Jim was referring to as empower, that type of citizen involvement where the governmental body is placing final decision-making authority in the hands of the public. The promise to the public is "We will implement what you decide." If the Council were to structure public participation like that and create a body with that charge, to go out and look at the alternatives and make a recommendation, and "we will do what you decide." Those folks are public officials under the conflicts rules, just the way your PTC or your ARB is. We would apply the conflicts rules. We don't have any particular conflicts in mind here, by the way. For example, we've looked at conflicts on this body and on the Rail Committee, and there is one. Because the locations of these infrastructure projects are so significant, there may be. We're raising this now. If we should have or could have raised it earlier and didn't, I apologize for that lack of noting this as an informational item. We might be a little bit over-emphasizing it in our conversation tonight. We have to respond to whatever structure it is that you set up, and then we have to look at folks who may be serving. There may be no issues under either of those facts. You're asking for more clarity about exactly how it works. It's difficult to provide that because we don't know what it is you want to do. At the Rail Committee, there were lots of different conversations about different types of things that might be done. The citizen involvement wasn't even on the agenda or in the Staff Report. That was a set of issues and conversation that developed as the Committee was preparing to convene. There was some discussion at that Committee meeting, but there were various aspects to it. We talked about an enhanced role for the Rail Committee itself, for example. Doesn't raise any of those issues. We have to make decisions about what we both you all to think about. If it would have been helpful to know about this one and we failed to raise, I apologize for that. TRANSCRIPT Page 83 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member Holman: It's only the empower column? Ms. Stump: No. It's somewhere between that. It's somewhere between the third and the fourth. Council Member Holman, I cannot speculate about exactly where that might be without knowing more about what it is that the Council wants to do. These issues are very fact-specific. We cannot look into the future and imagine a whole series of hypotheticals and tell you exactly where that line is. We're merely highlighting the issues, telling you what the standard is. WE will continue to advise you as you say, "What about this? We'd like to do it this way." We can give you more information about how these rules would apply. Council Member Holman: The Technical Advisory Committee, are the conflict rules applying to that or because of the level of advice that they are providing the conflicts would not apply to that group? Ms. Stump: The Technical Advisory Committee is made up of a lot of government agency officials, so they're following these rules in their own jurisdictions. We've been focusing on the real property aspects of the conflicts rules, but you'll remember from your AB 1234 training that there are many other types of rules. For example, if any of those governmental representatives own stock or is an employee of a group that is actually involved in doing some of this work, they may have conflicts issues under their own governmental rules. As far as Palo Alto is concerned, the Technical Advisory Committee, as it's been set up to give Staff information on engineering, financing, governmental rules and processes of other agencies that are relevant, that is not making those folks a part of the governmental decision. They're not becoming public officials in Palo Alto. If that role changes or evolves, we'll have to look at that again. Council Member Holman: I'm sorry to take a little bit here, but it's really important to understand this. On the Technical Advisory Committee on page 9 of the Staff Report or Attachment A, PABAC is on here. They're obviously not public officials. Will the conflict rules then apply or not apply to them for a little added clarity? Mr. Keene: If we had somebody who is a resident of the neighborhood who is there, that would clearly be the case. More often than not, we're going to be informing and consulting with TAC, for the most part, enhancing our Staff's knowledge and perspectives about the technical issues that allow them to better represent recommendations to the Rail Committee or PTC. This is much more a research realm. Not simple research but different than saying, "Let's get a bunch of people together who are going to formulate the recommendations on our policies about what we're going to do." TRANSCRIPT Page 84 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Ms. Stump: If the PABAC person happened to own property very close to our crossing but they're giving technical advice about how a certain alternative or idea might impact bicycle transit, that's not going to make that person a public official for conflicts purposes. In the same way that a comprehensive involvement in that empower column on major policy decisions, that very well might. Council Member Holman: Having to do with the TAC again, there's no one here—there is a Santa Clara Valley Water District person. I don't notice anybody here with environmental expertise. Would the Santa Clara Valley Water District—is it just anybody or is it somebody who would understand—is it a staff member? Is it a Board Member? What is it? There are issues that have come up about—Let's just say, for instance, we trenched or tunneled or whatever we do there. It could create a real water flow issue. We could create a dam from east to west Palo Alto. It's helpful to know what the role is of these representatives. I don't see anybody in the environmental realm. I don't see anybody here to represent trees. Vegetation and trees are going to be really significant, especially when it comes to El Palo Alto. Mr. Mello: We're certainly open to modifications to the makeup of the TAC. We were envisioning having somebody from the Water District that could speak to the creeks that pass underneath the rail corridor and the constraints that those creeks may present for different alternatives. Council Member Holman: Can I suggest it's more than creeks? It's just ground water flow. Mr. Mello: We can definitely take that into account and modify the makeup of the TAC to respond to that. Mr. Keene: A couple of things. This isn't going to be completely rigid. We may have an agency and we may end up having five different staff people who get tapped. We may be pushing along on one level of the issue, and then the Council or the Rail Committee says, "We really need a deeper dive on water table issues." Then, we say, "We've got connections with folks. We're going to sit down with folks on the TAC and start to get their perspective on that, so we can bring that information back." It's a way for us to have this committee set so we can respond to requests for more information or alternatives and that sort of thing. Ed Shikada, Assistant City Manager: Whether it's the Water District or potentially Caltrans or any of the other agencies, to your point Council Member, with respect to environmental involvement, these are the responsibility agencies that would typically respond in an environmental document often on questions of jurisdiction. It starts with do they have TRANSCRIPT Page 85 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 jurisdiction on an issue of ground water, to use your example, biologic resources as the case may be. Much of the discussion will likely start at the level of who has jurisdiction, which of the agencies have a particular issue of concern that leads to more specific, whether it's technical, jurisdictional, approval process questions, those kinds of issues that will inevitable come into play as we get deeper into the alternatives. Council Member Holman: I think those are my questions. I'll have some comments later. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I have a bigger picture question about what we're trying to do here. Can Staff tell me at a high level what are the main options possible in terms of grade separation? I'd like to hear Staff's opinion. Is it keeping the train where it is, move the roads; underground the trains, keep the roads where they are; or raise it? Are those the main options or is there something more to it that I'm missing? Mr. Mello: We haven't quite moved into the alternatives development phase of this process. That would be the next step, which we're hoping to quick off at a public meeting on September 16th. We can talk about what other cities have done along the Peninsula. Council Member Tanaka: In terms of broad categories, are there more than those three? Mr. Mello: We have a slide that shows quite a few of the potential options. This is what we've thrown together as the most typical types. With each of these types, we're going to talk a lot more about this when we get later in the process. In a couple of months from now, we're going to have a fairly detailed discussion about the alternatives that we've come up with, with the community. With each of these, there are variations. Council Member Kniss mentioned Alma Street earlier. That's going to be a big discussion point. Does Alma Street get raised with the railroad tracks? Does it get depressed to meet the roadway underneath the tracks. There's also the option to close or leave some of the grade crossings at-grade. All of these will come out during the alternatives development process. Council Member Tanaka: I saw that you guys did a survey of 791 recipients or unique responses. Mayor Scharff: I think that's the next part. Council Member Tanaka: I'm jumping the gun then. TRANSCRIPT Page 86 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: We actually have to segregate this for Council Member Filseth as part of the conflict rules. That's what we're doing. Let's go to the public. Richard Brand to be followed by Nadia Naik. You'll have 3 minutes. Richard Brand: Good evening, Council Members. This is a really complicated issue because railroads are dealing with local, regional, state, federal jurisdictions. Then, we've got the High Speed Rail which doesn't know from month-to-month what they're going to do. They were supposed to tell us whether we're going to get two tracks, three tracks, four tracks in Palo Alto. It's all on hold. This is a challenge for Staff. I know this is a tough one. We've got to factor in this is a very complicated equation that we as analyticals have to solve. I know that work is going on. After listening to the discussion tonight and the Staff Report—first of all, yesterday morning, I picked up the packet. In my packet Attachment A is not even identified as Attachment A. I had to go over and ask Ed. There are some changes from the slides that are not in yesterday's staff packet. This technical advisory board with the arrows going back up to the process are not in this. I think you put this on hold right now. There are too many things that are unsettled. The Rail Committee is doing a job, and I appreciate the four of you who come to these meetings. I recommend and it's a good idea to have the Rail Committee take this on in a bigger fashion with the public. 8:00 A.M. is a tough time for people to come. We're laid back Palo Alto. I know, Tom, that's tough for you. It's a good idea, but the meetings are going to have to happen at a different time. It's a great place to do it. I went to the May community meeting. Those were rigidly meetings scheduled by the consultant for information out. When several of us sat at those tables and said, "We've got some ideas." They said, "No. This is not a time to take your ideas." It really wasn't a true CSS, taking information from the public. While those community meetings are important, they need to be structured so that people with ideas—this was at the end of the meeting. Tom, you were there. Lydia, you were there. People said, "Wait a minute. We didn't get a chance to comment on what's going on here." It was structured to be strictly out from the Staff to the residents. I'm saying you don't take an action tonight. There's a lot of things up in the air. Tomorrow morning we can talk about it. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Nadia Naik to be followed by Stephen Rosenblum. Nadia Naik: Good evening, everyone. I'm speaking on behalf of CARRD tonight. We have been longtime, strong advocates for Context Sensitive Solutions approach to developing a strategy for our grade separations that is feasible, can achieve consensus, and can leave our community better than it was before the project. While we appreciate the efforts that Staff have made to increase public awareness, the proposed approach does not include the feature of a CSS process that made us such strong advocates for it. WE TRANSCRIPT Page 87 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 obviously hope that the current efforts work and are available to help in anyway. It is important to distinguish it from the process that we have been advocating for the last 8 years. CSS includes both laymen and technical experts in the same panel. It specifically does not have multiple groups reviewing the same decisions. The current vision includes the PTC, the City Council, the Rail Committee, a technical panel, and focus groups along with large public forums to update the community on progress. We regret tonight that we don't seem to have the support from Staff or a majority of the City Council to formally adopt a stakeholder group. The one request we have is that you do not call it CSS. Call it community engagement strategy or whatever you want, but don't call it CSS. CSS lite is not 80 percent of the CSS benefits. It's the difference between butter and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, and people can tell. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Stephen Rosenblum. Stephen Rosenblum: My name's Stephen Rosenblum. I've lived in Palo Alto since 1985. We all realize that the decision about the rail crossings in Palo Alto are going to affect the City for the next 100 years. As Vice Mayor Kniss pointed out, this decision is coming on us whether we do nothing or we do something. If we do nothing, we're going to have a lot more noise, and we won't be able to cross the tracks at all. It'll be totally untenable, especially with High Speed Rail when trains are going by at 110 miles an hour. We have no choice; we have to do something. I think we're all agreed on that. As Vice Mayor Kniss pointed out, we need to look at issues like taking up houses as a possible result of whatever decisions we make. That's all the more reason to have a very strong community involvement. When people understand why they're being asked to sacrifice, they don't like it, but they're much more willing to do it rather than have somebody knock on a door and say you have to leave. I don't think that's what we want. That's what Palo Alto deserves, to have a say in the decision and come up with a process that allows all the stakeholders to have their voices heard. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Now, we return to Council. I'd start off a little bit and talk about it. Again, I thought Staff did a really good job in the presentation today to framing the problem. The problem is how do we get the most community involvement in this process while moving it forward in a reasonable timeframe. The Community Engagement Plan that you've developed is really good actually. It hits it on many different levels. I was particularly impressed with Mr. Brand's comments about wanting to have that opportunity to feed information back. I think Staff's correct by throwing in the Rail Committee, that we provide that forum. I actually am sensitive to the issue of 8:00. What we're going to need to do obviously talk to Chair DuBois about how that would work in the Rail Committee. It seems to me TRANSCRIPT Page 88 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 that we would have to change the Charter of the Rail Committee a little bit and have much more of that back-and-forth. Some meetings might be a more traditional meeting. Other meetings would be let's hear from the public, let's have open engagement, let's let the public ask questions, people respond, Staff responds, and you have much more of that open dialog. These meetings may in fact last—need to start a little later for a meeting like that and maybe last a little bit longer. We may need to hold them at different times too, so that people with different schedules can participate. All of those are details that we can work out as we do this process. Tasking the Rail Committee with hosting enhanced stakeholder involvement solves the conflict issue. It solves getting everyone involved in the process, and it provides frankly direct access to at least four of the decision makers as you go through the process. That's a real advantage for citizens. What you're getting is the people that will ultimately make the decision. I realize that there's been some talk about outsourcing this decision. It's a really big decision about how this goes down. We're the elected officials, and the buck stops with us. We need to ultimately make that decision. What we need to do is hear from the community as much as possible as a Council. The Rail Committee can provide that more—I was going to say intimate ability, where we can't have a Council meeting frankly on a regular basis and have citizens where we have back-and-forth for 20, 30 minutes. It's already 10:00, for instance, tonight. The Rail Committee can provide. I'm actually going to propose that we adopt the revised Community Engagement Plan, Attachment A, and we return to Council with an addendum to the Rail Committee Charter. When I say return, that's Staff returns to Council with an addendum to the Rail Committee Charter and Guiding Principles that support implementation of the Context Sensitive Solutions by providing regular opportunities during Rail Committee meetings for open dialog, questions, and interaction between the Committee, stakeholders, and members of the public, and Staff, and consultants. That would be the Motion. Council Member Wolbach: That's all just part 1? Mayor Scharff: Right. We can only do part 1 until, and then Council Member Filseth needs to excuse himself. Council Member Filseth: Got a second? Mayor Scharff: No, not yet. Council Member Filseth: Second. Mayor Scharff: That's seconded by Council Member Filseth. MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Filseth to adopt the revised Community Engagement Plan and direct Staff to return to TRANSCRIPT Page 89 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council with an addendum to the Rail Committee Charter and Guiding Principles that supports implementation of Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) by providing regular opportunities during Rail Committee meetings for open dialogue, questions and interaction between the Committee, stakeholders and members of the public, and Staff and consultants. Mayor Scharff: I'll just briefly speak to it. Engaging the public on this is really important. As Vice Mayor Kniss said, there are some difficult questions that need to be answered. What we don't want to have happen is we want people to realize what we're doing and the implications of things, so that they don't suddenly wake up one day after we go through a long stakeholder engagement, after we go through a process, and say, "Wait a minute. You're taking my house?" That's really important that people get involved early, and that we work through this process. On the other hand, this process can't take forever. We do need to come to a conclusion, and we do need to have a sense of, I would say, timing on this. We can't just have it go on forever. This does this. It provides lots of opportunities for the public to be involved, but it also has that ability to move things forward as Josh's schedule shows. This is a good approach. As we go through this approach, we should be flexible in our minds. If it's not working or we don't think it's going the way we want it to go, we can always come back to the Rail Committee and to Council to review the process as we go through it. I would ask my colleagues to support this and support Staff on this and move forward. Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: The discussion from the Rail Committee and before that the PTC was how do we make sure that we've got adequate community involvement in this decision. As the City Manager said, this is the largest Public Works project in a long, long time. There are multiple ways we could try to do that. They all have their pros and cons. None of them is perfect, and they all have some risks. Doing a reset—there's risk with dragging out this process. The important thing is we need to pick one and do our level best in order to make it work. I think that's what we're trying to do tonight. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I do want to start just thanking Staff for this report and for all your work on the Rail Committee supporting this. I will just say to my colleagues up here, since we've started on the Rail Committee, there has been a lot more focus on Staff's part. The level of technical acuity has grown, which has been helpful. Before I get to a couple of comments and questions about this motion, one of the tensions I'm starting to notice on the Rail Committee is a bit between the tension between Staff, our consultants, the public, sometimes as represented by us or other groups, and then also this idea of us working on this CSS process. With that in mind, TRANSCRIPT Page 90 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 there's two questions I have for the maker and seconder of this. One is do we want Staff to return to the Council with an addendum to the Charter or to the Rail Committee as we did earlier this year. That's more of a technical question. If we pass it back to Council, I don't know. The second one is I think there is a good point made by CARRD here. If we're going to move away from a stakeholders group, a pure stakeholders group, we need to be sensitive to the labels here. There may be something here. Do we want to continue calling this a CSS process? Are we stuck with that? Are we beholden to it? Is it just cover for something else? That's a question I have in my mind. You've outlined here, Mr. Mayor, a pretty good process for getting valuable feedback. Staff will continue to work on that and revise and reiterate. There's a question of a label here for me. I don't know if anybody else has any comments there. Just bringing it up. Mayor Scharff: I'll just briefly respond a little bit. Your concern was using the term Context Sensitive Solutions? Council Member Fine: Sure. Mayor Scharff: I've been convinced by Staff, and yes there is a disagreement on the Rail Committee and in the community a little bit about this. Context Sensitive Solutions is really a brand name chosen by—maybe, Josh, you have the history and can give it. I'm convinced that what we're doing is Context Sensitive Solutions here. I'm really not hung up on the label frankly. The issue is that we need to get the involvement of the community, and that's what matters. That's how I feel about it. Josh. Mr. Mello: A Context Sensitive Solution is the product that's ultimately delivered. DOTs started delivering these context sensitive projects, and then there was a lot of academic work done to figure out how they got to that place. The process that is described as Context Sensitive Solutions is the process that was generally followed to get to these Context Sensitive Solutions. There is a lot of debate about what that means. It was a retroactive look at how these agencies were able to deliver these projects. Mayor Scharff: As to your second question, I actually don't really mind if it comes here. The Council has to be the one who ultimately expands the Charter. We could have an interim step of going to the Rail Committee to make sure the Rail Committee's onboard with what Staff comes up. That would be perfectly fine, and I'm open to that amendment. I actually wanted to ask Staff what they thought about that. Ms. Stump: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Actually, what you've described here is really a set of operational rules, so it's as you wish. If the Council wants to look at those and approve them, that would be fine. If the Council wants to TRANSCRIPT Page 91 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 authorize the Committee to craft its own operational rules and not come back, that would also be permissible. You're going to be describing things like how this is going to work, this more free-flowing and interactive participation with the public. It's really a set of working rules for the Committee. Mayor Scharff: Does Staff have a preference? Mr. Keene: I feel it's more in your wheelhouse as to which you think's better (crosstalk). Mayor Scharff: I'm good with either. I'll let the discussion go. Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: As Chair of the Rail Committee, I'm going to have some strong words tonight. Clearly, there's some disagreement here. From my perspective, the Staff recommendation didn't fulfill the intent of the Motion we made at the Rail Committee. The issue about community engagement has been discussed at the Rail Committee this last several meetings. Clearly, we have a difference of opinion. The press incorrectly reported that we didn't support community involvement. My take at the last meeting was we were talking extensively about how we get more community involvement. It was really a kind of compromise to suggest that we put some neighborhood association people, School District. We talked about environmentalists. That we add those people to the TAC. We passed that motion unanimously precisely to add community involvement. There was some concern from Staff about being able to talk to agencies, so we talked about defining some subcommittees and roles and responsibilities. I just don't think that's what we got back tonight in this recommendation. If you look at the transcripts, we talked about adding potentially people from Research Park, people with VTA experience like former Council Member Gail Price. I just want to be clear. No one's saying that a stakeholder group is the sole way to engage the public. Whatever we do, we should do workshops. Focus groups are great. The issue is on a really complex issue like this how do we get deep, sustained community involvement on some very technical issues. Unfortunately, I feel like we're far from the right process. I just want to make it clear that I don't view this as consistent. I don't view it as CSS. How we handle grade separations is clearly a policy discussion. We're going to be the decision-makers. It's not an attempt to not be the decision-maker. I think we really need to represent the values of the community and the populace. What we shouldn't do is go down a primarily Staff-driven process. That's where we're headed. We're going to have limited engagement; we're going to get recommendations; and the Council's going to either tweak those, but the community's not going to be intimately involved. We have had successful citizen participation in the past. I don't think we should ignore that. People talk about SOFA II. I think TRANSCRIPT Page 92 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 the previous Comp Plan was a good example, the infrastructure committee. In those cases, Council retained decision authority. These groups made recommendations; Council made some minor tweaks. I don't really view forming a stakeholder group as delegating authority in any way. This is a big decision. We talked about this is probably the biggest decision the City's going to make. To me, that's precisely a time when we should take the time to involve the community in a stakeholder group. It's going to be as Council Member Kniss said. This is going to be a tough decision. There's going to be some zero sum decisions. There's going to be winners, and there's going to be losers. We need to involve the community beyond surface participation. Focus groups and workshops don't allow citizens to engage at a deep level in a very technical area. I understand the majority of the Council may not support a multi-stakeholder group tonight. I want to make it clear that I do. Our Planning Commission debated it, and they supported it. We heard several people request it at the end of the workshop. We may reach different conclusions tonight, but I also want to make sure that we're working off the same set of premises and facts. One of the issues we heard at the very beginning on the Rail Committee was the need for speed. As we've progressed, it's become clear that there is not such a pressing need. We're really in line with other cities. Cities like Burlingame took 2 years to get two detailed plans. This idea that the money's going to disappear if we don't rush to a decision I don't think is true. We also heard from Jeannie Bruins tonight. We got feedback at the Rail Committee that the VTA is not interested in making this a competitive process. They really want to see it be a cooperative process. It only makes sense if we can all get grade separations, so the money is not going to all go to Sunnyvale and no money for Palo Alto. An issue we haven't talked about yet is that Measure B is not going to pay for this. We need to be talking about other sources of funding. This is a case where it's a key policy issue. We shouldn't , with all respect to Staff, defer to Staff on an issue like this. We really need to think about the impacts to the community. Past Councils and Rail Committees have made a commitment to CSS. I don't think we're going down that path. In the Rail Committee, we had Projects for Public Spaces come and talk to us early on. Projects for Public Spaces is a nationally prominent organization. They specialize in CSS transportation projects. They do work for Stanford. They basically document CSS for the Department of Transportation. Caltrans uses CSS. This is not a crazy idea. It's really a best practice, and it handles exactly the types of really difficult decisions that this is going to be. We have never really done a strict CSS process in Palo Alto. I believe an empowered multi-stakeholder group is core to that process. I would echo the concerns from the public and Council Member Fine that words do matter. If we proceed without a stakeholder group, I really do think we should stop calling this CSS. We keep saying this is a big project; I think we're severely underestimating how big this is. It's going to be bigger than the Oregon Expressway in terms of its impact on the TRANSCRIPT Page 93 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 City. The impacts of the construction phase alone is going to impact the community in a huge way. Personally, I'm already hearing concerns from the community about the process. I worry that, if we continue in this way, it's going to blow up on us. Similar to the way the current Comp Plan process started with workshops, that ended up blowing up. We had to do a re-start. It ended up taking a lot more time at the end of the day. With that said, I will make a Substitute Motion that we direct Staff to form and empower a multi- stakeholder group as the backbone of a CSS process to report recommendations to the Rail Committee and the City Council. The stakeholder group will make at least one recommendation for a preferred alternative; they could possibly make more. Mayor Scharff: He's looking for a second. Council Member Holman: I'll second. Mayor Scharff: That's seconded by Council Member Holman. SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to direct Staff to form and empower a multi- stakeholder group as a backbone of the CSS process, to report recommendations to the Rail Committee and the City Council, and that the Stakeholder Group will propose at least one recommendation as a preferred alternative. Council Member DuBois: I don't think I need to speak much more to this other than to say as Council this is really a policy issue. We really need to involve the community. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, would you like to speak to your second? Council Member Holman: Yes. I have one question for Council Member DuBois. Empower a multi-stakeholder group. Do you want to put any clarification around that? Apparently, we have some potential at least conflicts of interest here, potentially. Do you want to put any framework around what level of empowerment they have? Do you think it's covered by making at least one recommendation as a preferred alternative? They're not a decision- making body certainly. Council Member DuBois: I think we would be asking Staff to do this and to take those things into consideration. Council Member Holman: I'm happy to support this and glad that you made a Substitute Motion. I was a little bit concerned you were going to make all TRANSCRIPT Page 94 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 these wonderful comments and then not make a Motion. I'm glad that you did. I think you were point on, spot on, on your comments. SOFA II gets mentioned a lot. That was something like a 9-square-block area, something like that. It was important. It was important that the people who were going to be affected had a part in that. It was collaborative with Staff and consultants who were there and came regularly to the meetings. People were dedicated from the community who came to these meetings. The outcome was so much better because of that input. People were the stakeholders, and they had buy-in to the process and an outcome. What you've outlined here is something that will also identify at the end a better process. It isn't a rush to judgment. This is not just the biggest project in a long, long time. It's probably the biggest project that Palo Alto will ever see, certainly that it ever has seen. The impacts it will have on people both during implementation and afterwards are also monumental. I'm glad that you put this together. One clarification here. I wouldn't say to direct Staff to form and empower a multi- stakeholder group. Best if the Council appoints that because it's going to be Brown Acted anyway probably. It's better if the Staff bring recommendations for a stakeholder group to the Council for confirmation. Are you good with that? Council Member DuBois: Yeah (inaudible). INCORPORATED INTO THE SUBSTITUTE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to amend the Motion to state “direct Staff to bring to Council recommendations for the formation and empowerment of a Multi-Stakeholder Group … .” Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, may I make a comment? Mayor Scharff: Are you done? Council Member Holman: Yes. Mr. Keene: Just a couple of clarifying comments. I want, first of all, to be clear that the Staff—what we've been groping with is and we haven't settled on precisely what the engagement approach is. We aren't underestimating the challenge. I'm really hesitant to say at any point in time we will know exactly what we need to be doing to engage the public. This isn't ultimately just engagement. This is having a politically, community-based, acceptable solution in the end. It doesn't matter how good the process was if it doesn't work for the community largely as a whole. We're talking about this being maybe the biggest, most disruptive thing that happens in town. This is not like the IBRC, which was even 18 months. How many meetings, Greg? Twenty-some meetings, multiple subcommittees, five Staff people supporting it. In the end, it was a good solution. The worst thing that happened is we TRANSCRIPT Page 95 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 said, "There's some projects we'd really like to do we're not going to put on the list." Everything else was "let's do this." I wasn't here in SOFA, but I can't imagine that the construction of SOFA is going to be anything like what this project is going to be or the fact that we may ultimately have to ask the community for lots of money. Our recommendation isn't for this to be Staff- driven; it's for it to be Council-driven; for the Rail Committee to be actively engaged as a subset of the Council as the elected representatives for you all to decide are we really hearing from people enough or not. If we staff the committee, we're in a diminished role. If we do this, I think we need to have a lot more detail about what it means to have an empowered stakeholder. How big is it? How often do they meet? How long? They make even one recommendation, what happens if that's the wrong recommendation? They're really good concepts, all of these things, but we need to really think through what they are. I apologize for the adaptations that we have. It's going to be like this the whole rest of the time we're working on this issue. It's going to be as big and impactful and, as people become even more aware, critical. We're going to have to accept the fact that at the last minute we sort of said we have a little bit of a different perspective or we didn't have the report, something on a page. This is going to be one of the biggest, most intense efforts for the ccl, our Staff, and our community. We're acting like "if we just do this one thing"—I know that's not what we're doing. We're thinking that we can design it all right now rather than even having a process that allows for adaptation and design. That's all we were trying to recommend about putting it back in the Rail Committee's lap for now. It could very well be. I'm not saying this is true. There's nothing that keeps a group of Palo Alto citizens on their own creating, self-generating their own empowered expert group to dive deep into the issues and say, "Here's what we've found. Here's what we think you ought to do." I'm worried that we're in this moment trying to make the ultimate choice in designing what we're going to do, and it's going to all automatically run. I think there's going to be a lot of twists and turns on this. I don't think there's going to be a solution that we hit on that everyone's going to go, "Perfect. This is great." As a matter of fact, it's going to be more "what are the mitigations that are most acceptable, and how much can we bare in order to make the changes. We're not underestimating the issue at all. We're trying to find our way with you all as to the best way to do it. We'll do whatever you want to do. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I found the discussion quite interesting. I'm hearing my colleagues, Staff, the public saying that this is probably going to be one of the biggest projects in Palo Alto history. I believe it. It definitely feels like it, seems like it. I hear a lot of talk about the process. Because this project's so big, my feeling here is that I don't think at the end Council should be the TRANSCRIPT Page 96 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 decision-maker. What would be better is for us to boil it down to maybe two to three choices, and let the public decide, let the voters decide, make it a ballot initiative. That way you really get community buy-in. What happens a lot is we have the Palo Alto 500 that attend the Council meetings, speak at our meetings, these stakeholder groups, but they represent a small fraction of the actual population of Palo Alto. What we should look to do as a Council is try to boil it down to a handful of choices, maybe three choices max, and give it up to the voters. Let the voters decide what is the fate of Palo Alto. This is a big enough decision that—it's something which no matter what decision we make, there's going to be some really hard tradeoffs. The best way to get community buy-in is to get it validated by the voters. All this talk about the process, I get it. We want the best process possible. In the end, if we think about what the end results should be, it should be giving voters a choice. What are the best options we have? Here are the pros and cons of each. Which one do you want? That way there's no question about whether the community bought-in or not because they voted. With that said, I do think that it's better to be faster than slower, in my opinion, which is one of the reasons why I think the Motion that the Mayor made seems to be the more expedient choice. I do believe that we want a tremendous amount of community involvement. In the end, we'll let the voters decide. That's what the proper choice is. We'll try our best to figure out what are the best options because there are going to be hard tradeoffs no matter what we do. For instance, if we keep the train where it is, maybe we won't have to bulldoze many houses near intersections. Nobody's going to like that. If we underground, maybe that means that we have to find very creative ways to pay for all of this. People are not going to like that either. For me, the first motion seems to be the more preferred motion just because it will be more expedient. Also, it's going to be able to generate more coherent choices for the community. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Let me just ask you a couple of questions, Tom. About how many people do you think would be on the stakeholder group? Council Member DuBois: Probably on the order of ten. Vice Mayor Kniss: Ten? Council Member DuBois: Yeah, 10-15. I had sent Staff an email suggesting business owners, people from Stanford, some neighborhood associations, the School District. It was about 12 people. Vice Mayor Kniss: It's a pretty small group you're talking about, small and professional. TRANSCRIPT Page 97 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Council Member DuBois: The idea is that they're a conduit for the larger community. People can participate. We could still do workshops and larger outreach. If you have your representative from your neighborhood, they're meant to be the person you go talk to. Vice Mayor Kniss: You suggest that Jim would be the person who appoints them? Council Member DuBois: The Motion is that Staff would bring back (crosstalk) to us. Vice Mayor Kniss: This would be after … Council Member Holman: The Motion says that Staff would bring to Council the list, not that the Staff would appoint the group. That's what my intention of the amendment was. Council Member DuBois: I'm interested to hear what you think. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm always in favor of involving the public. I went through this process with the Comp Plan many years ago; that took 6 years. We've just gone through the one now that took 10 maybe all told by the time it'll be voted on. I worry whenever we appoint a group that the group becomes almost its own function. I'm hesitant to do that yet with another group. As Greg Tanaka just said, speed is important at this point. The only way I could support that is if it was going to be a quick and easy stakeholder group and very professional and met two or three times. I have a feeling it would grow like Topsy, and before long there would be 25 people on it, and it would be meeting on a regular basis and be staffed. That would get complicated. Having said all that, I appreciate your bringing it up. I can view it's complexity as we get toward the future, so I'm staying with the first Motion. It's a good thought. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I'm looking at CSS as explained in the Staff Report. It's community-based planning to gather information and to provide an input prior to making decisions. When I look at this and what Vice Mayor Kniss said about how lengthy it was for the Comp Plan to come together, if I remember correctly, by the time that we were appointed to be on the CAC back then, it took 2 years to finish up the Comp Plan. The time prior to it was mostly Council trying to decide on a process, which is what we're doing right now. Hopefully, this doesn't take forever because then it does become that lengthy process. At the end of the day, everything we're going to be doing is going to affect the community. Like many of you have said, this is a big project. TRANSCRIPT Page 98 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 It's a big infrastructure project. Molly, you seem to have something to say about the legalities and so forth. What would make it work? Ms. Stump: The Council just needs to decide how you wish to proceed and structure the public involvement. Then, we'll apply the rules. It may be that, even if we are in a situation where we need to apply the conflicts rules, there are no conflicts and there's full participation. If there are conflicts, then they're handled in the same way that the Council is familiar with, which is that people do have to step aside for those issues that involve their conflict area. Council Member Kou: The applicant will understand why they have to step aside because there is the legalities. I don't think that poses a big problem. At the end of the day, I really think this community needs to be involved in it. Most of the community members also know that we do need to expedite this. This is something that does need to happen in order to make sure that we do have the mass transportation. I don't think they're trying to push it for a longer time. I am going to support the Substitute Motion. Thank you, Molly. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: If we do nothing with rail, it's going to have the biggest impact on our City of anything we can imagine. Whatever we do with—I mean regarding grade separation. Whatever we do with grade separation is going to have a huge impact on our community. Inaction is a huge impact. Any action is a huge impact. Everyone up here understands that. I don't think any of us doubts the importance of that. I just want to caution against, whether it's this or frankly any other topic that we discuss, suggesting that if somebody disagrees or if we have differing views about the best way to engage the community or the best way to make a decision to resolve a challenging issue facing the community, the disagreement doesn't mean that we don't appreciate the gravity of the problem or that the other person doesn't appreciate the severity of the issue. I don't know how the vote's going to come down on this. Everybody on the Council is really struggling, and it's a tough decision. We're struggling to identify the best way to engage the community. It's tough. None of us have crystal balls, and Staff doesn't. People in the community advocating for different approaches, same situation. I guess it's been my theme tonight. I hope that we'll respect each other for our choices. I'll be honest. There are strong arguments on both sides of this. I've been on the fence. I think I'm going to support the main motion over the substitute motion. Staff has made a cogent, clear, strong, and convincing argument. It's not that often that our Staff is—looking at the City Manager in particular—so adamant about some of the concerns. I don't think we should necessarily defer to Staff. There are times when I disagree with the City Manager, and he knows it. One of the things that having an TRANSCRIPT Page 99 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 experienced City Manager brings is somebody with some experience, even longer than we have, in gathering community input. Ultimately, we have to trust our own judgment. We have to trust each other, and we have to make sure the community's involved. I don't get the sense that the substitute motion is going to be successful. When it comes back to the main motion, I'm still open to whether we change the terminology. I don't think we should get hung up on the terminology. I do think that Context Sensitive Solutions is good. It's important. It's important that we utilize it. Both of these approaches are compatible with context Sensitive Solutions. Reasonable people can disagree about that and have. That's why we have these two motions. If that's a major sticking point, then maybe we use different terminology. I do think that you can do context Sensitive Solutions by having places like the Rail Committee be a place where a broad swath of the community can come, where different stakeholders can come and work through issues together. The main Motion does that. I will not be supporting the Substitute Motion. Mayor Scharff: I briefly want to thank my colleagues for their comments. I actually believe the main Motion gets broader and deeper public involvement than the substitute motion. The reason I say that is each grade crossing is very different. In fact, there's a strong argument that we should look at each grade sep separately unless we're looking at a trench. There's a south Palo Alto trench possibility and a full trench possibility. When you narrow those options down, the people that come out and have concerns about Churchill may very well not be the same people that have concerns about Charleston or Meadow. A small stakeholder is not going to represent the community in the same way. This gives the flexibility to the Rail Committee to say, "Today, we're talking about Churchill. These are the five options that we're talking about Churchill with." You could get broad and deep discussion about the people that care about Churchill. You can also have the people that follow it all the way through. The same with Meadow, the same with Charleston. To the extent frankly that we're looking at Alma, which is completely unclear to me—Alma has a huge set of challenges. I haven't seen us really look at Alma, so we have to make that. When I say Alma, I mean the one with Paly. I don't know what we call it. What is really important, at least from my perspective, is to get deep, abiding, and the whole community involved and to get people who have a particular interest in a particular grade crossing—for them to be able to come out when we're talking about the grade crossing that matters to them, and they don't have to follow everything else if they don't want to. I also have given some thought to what Council Member Tanaka said, which I thought was quite wise. We may very well end up with a decision where we say this is the recommendation of Council or these are the options Council puts forward, and we may very well go to the voters. It's a little premature frankly to make that decision, to see through this process. This is a process. TRANSCRIPT Page 100 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Hearing from the public is really, really important on this. It's not just a small segment of the population. This is not like the Comp Plan. This is not like the IBRC. What we need to do is get the whole community thinking about this and processing it. What I've noticed in Palo Alto is until it becomes immediate—how many times have we sat here with a development project, and people will say, "I had no notice of this." We've been talking about it for a year. It's been in the papers. Yet, I truly believe that the people that come there and tell us that they had notice of it, it wasn't on their radar until they realized that it may affect them. This is an important process. I believe that the main motion does engage the community deeper and broader than having a small stakeholder group. We as representatives of the community, by coming to us the decision-makers, you have more impact than you would speaking to a small stakeholder group and making those points. I actually think the main motion achieves more of those objectives and is frankly more CSS-like in that it gets that broad and deep community engagement that we want as opposed to having a stakeholder group that cannot perform that function on four disparate, possible projects or one large project. We still don't know the answer to that yet. I would encourage you to support the main motion. SUBSTITUTE MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to direct Staff to bring to Council recommendations for the formation and empowerment of a Multi-Stakeholder Group as a backbone of the CSS process, to report recommendations to the Rail Committee and the City Council, and that the Stakeholder Group will propose at least one recommendation as a preferred alternative. Mayor Scharff: We have to vote on the Substitute Motion first. The Substitute Motion fails on a 6-3 vote with Council Members DuBois, Kou, and Holman voting yes. SUBSTITUTE MOTION AS AMENDED FAILED: 3-6 DuBois, Holman, Kou yes Mayor Scharff: Now, we're back to the main Motion. The only light I have for the main Motion is Council Member Kou. Council Member DuBois. Council Member Kou: I do have a problem with the terminology, Context Sensitive Solutions if it is going to be a modified one. If it's not going to be the true Context Sensitive Solutions, then it does need to be changed to something else. Otherwise, it feels like it's almost deceiving the community in some way, having them believe that it is the Context Sensitive Solutions, and then having an alternative or a modified one. I would support this Motion if that is changed. TRANSCRIPT Page 101 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: First of all, it's not clear to me why we need to revise the Charter. A question for City Attorney. Can I just decide to allow more interaction with the public? Ms. Stump: You can, yes. More interaction would be legal. There are some questions about—there are different options for how to structure that. You could decide that as the Chair or you could have a discussion with the Committee or the Council could be involved in that discussion. Council Member DuBois: I would suggest we delete the bit about revising the Charter. It just seems overly—we can discuss it at Rail Committee and come up with a way to do it. Mayor Scharff: I would not agree to that. It's really important that we lay out to the community in a clear and cogent manner that we want them to come to the Rail Committee, that this is an opportunity to have a back-and- forth. In fact, I want the Rail Committee to realize that's their Charter. We need to engage the public, and we need to have that as one of our focuses. That's not what it says right now. That's really important. Community engagement is what we've been talking about. We've all talked about how important it is. We need to basically be clear on the process for the community. Part of that is having that in the Charter. Council Member DuBois: We can be clear. I don't think members of the public go and look up the Rail Charter. It gets me to my second point. We need to manage this engagement process professionally. Relying on Council Members or Rail Committee members to engage the public in a project this big doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We should certainly invite them. Getting the whole community involved in the process the way you described it feels like it's not going to be done by us. It's not going to be done by revising the Charter. This really involves professional communication. We're essentially community volunteers. I view this as community service. We need a professional process with a dedicated professional community engagement. I'm not disagreeing with you that we should allow more communications at the Rail Committee. It's just not a substitute for the kind of engagement we need. I don't think we need to modify the Charter; it just seems to be taking more time. It's going to have to come back to Council. I'm not going to fight with that one; I'm not going to make a motion on that. That's where I am. I really do support Council Member Kou's idea. I've read a lot about CSS. This is not the CSS process. We shouldn't be talking about CSS-like flows. I think we're violating several of the key tenets of CSS. I wouldn't support this, keeping the CSS in. I would make a friendly Amendment that we remove the TRANSCRIPT Page 102 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 references to CSS from the Engagement Plan and the materials for Connecting Palo Alto, and we just call it community engagement. Mayor Scharff: Staff has stood by us at the Rail Committee on several occasions—I (inaudible) words in your mouth if you don't speak up. Staff says this is CSS, and this meets the criteria of CSS and moves us forward. I don't really like getting hung up on the semantics of this. On the other hand, I don't want to send the message to the community that we're not following a CSS process. I think we are. I'm happy to let Staff address that. Mr. Keene: I was almost feeling religious here on what's what and the definitions of things. A couple of things. Words do matter. Personally, at the stage where we are right now, if describing what we do as CSS creates problems for folks, I don't feel as Staff that we need to insist that that's what we're doing and use that language. On the other hand, it also hasn't been clearly articulated, other than the established stakeholder group, why this isn't essentially CSS and/or why some modification to this really is a loss for us. If it's the words, it's the words. That's sort of like the Mayor's point about the addendum. The addendum is more like just announcing to the community formally that the Council is envisioning a modified role also for the Rail Committee in one sense. That's why you're doing that; it's more that they hear that. If there's a concern that right now saying CSS—I think it would be a mistake if that really becomes something like "we're just doing a lite version of engagement." I don't think we are. I don't think we've even fully defined the engagement. There's nothing here that in 6 months it somehow said if things were not working right, that you didn't somehow say we want to get an expert panel to come in and really—we just don't know. What we are saying is the objective here is to really try to have a really engaged and as wide and as deep as possible process that can unfold over time. The ultimate goal is what will be acceptable to the community. That's the ultimate litmus test. What's the best possible decision that our community will embrace? I come back to it. I don't think you could set up in motion right now what that process should be and let it run on auto pilot. You're going to have to have the Rail Committee do it. The last thing I would say is—if it's okay, Mr. Mayor. I would agree that it would be unreasonable to think that the Committee staffs all of the work related to how we would do the engagement. Clearly, we have to staff it and with the right consultant assistance. I agree on the communication side. This is not something for just the voice on the Committee. I would think there would be a key role for us including getting feedback from the community about what's working and not working and making modifications and bringing it to the Committee. Council Member DuBois: Did you not accept the Amendment? TRANSCRIPT Page 103 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: No, I did not. Council Member DuBois: Then, I'll make it as a Motion that we remove references to CSS from the Engagement Plan and the materials for Connecting Palo Alto. Council Member Kou: Second. Mayor Scharff: That's seconded by Council Member Kou. Would you like to speak to your Motion? AMENDMENT: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Kou to remove from the Motion the references to CSS from the Engagement Plan and rename it Community Engagement. Council Member DuBois: I would. I thought it was clear why we're saying this is not CSS. In addition to having an empowered stakeholder group, part of CSS is you avoid having multiple recommendation bodies. In this case, we have the Planning Commission, the Rail Committee, the TAC. It's really the opposite of CSS. I do think words matter. If you go online and read the literature, there's a fairly defined process. I wasn't necessarily saying CSS- lite. I was saying CSS-like. That's not the same thing. It's important, and I would hope the Council Members would support the language. I'm not sure why we're insisting on calling it CSS if it's not that solution. Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, can I just say one last? Just for the record, whatever way this vote goes, I did want to share the language in CSS that applies to either of the recommendations. That doesn't change the fact that if having an empowered expert group isn't included, that precludes it from being CSS. That's one thing. There are four things that we got with outside input. One, it strives towards a shared stakeholder vision to provide a basis for decisions. Two, it demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of contexts. Three, it fosters continuing communication and collaboration to achieve consensus. Four, it exercises flexibility and creativity to shape effective transportation solutions while preserving and enhancing community and natural environments. I don't see anything in those principles that is not present in what either of the two recommendations were. That doesn't mean that that meets the test for labeling it CSS for everybody. Council Member DuBois: There are a lot of things that can meet the description. That's not a description of the process itself. We've seen it at the Rail Committee. We've seen definitions with very clearly defined roles, decision-making processes. My point is we're just not doing that. I would like not to call it that. TRANSCRIPT Page 104 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I think I've said it before. I don't want the public to feel that we are going through that process, and we're not fully doing that whole process of the CSS. Ms. Naik said also that it's a community-based stakeholder groups that would include laymen as well as experts in this. There's just too many goings on with one meeting with a focus group to come back to the technical group. It's just too much movement. When everybody's speaking in the same room, more of what needs to be understood is a simpler form of getting it decided upon. As I said earlier, I do oppose the language in there. Like Council Member DuBois said, words do matter. In this one here, I just want the community to know that we're going with a modified method, and we should not use this language in our motion. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: What we need to do tonight is pick one of these processes and move forward with it. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses. If we pick one, then we're going to put extra focus on some places. If we pick a different one, we're going to put extra focus on some other places. At the end of the day, the City Manager has been particularly eloquent. We need to get to the right answer. As Council Member Tanaka has suggested, maybe there are actually a handful of right answers that we'll have a complicated process to choose between. It sounds like we're going to go with the main motion. That's what it sounds like will happen to me tonight. I can tell you if we went with the substitute motion, I will get behind that, and we'll try to make that work. That's where we are. What's important is we stop arguing about which process we're going to do. Make a final decision and move forward and make it work. Council Member DuBois: Just to be clear, there's no Substitute Motion. There's just deleting a reference to language. It would be the main Motion. Council Member Filseth: Understand. Thank you for the correction. On the issue of CSS and are we going to confuse the community. First of all, hardly anybody in the community has any idea what CSS means. It's a really, really small number of people that actually know what CSS means. I'm on the Rail Committee and, until 3 months ago, I didn't know what CSS meant. The number of people who understand whether the nuance of what we're going to go down the path meets CSS or not, the number of people that can distinguish between that nuance is even smaller than the number of people who have actually … We just heard what the City Manager read. I hope that after this and after we vote on the language, all that disagreement will get put to bed, behind us, and we'll just move forward. What I hope doesn't happen is that TRANSCRIPT Page 105 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 the language becomes a sticking point and people are going, "We're still arguing about whether it's CSS or not." The path that we're headed down is too important for that to happen. I hope we're going to make a decision one way or another on CSS. Then, it's going to be done, and we'll all line up and try to make it work as best we can. None of these things is perfect. None of them will work if we don't put our whole weight behind it. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Having listened to my colleagues and done a little bit more reading on the side and reviewing definitions and listening to Staff, having heard from the public as well about this earlier, and putting it altogether, I am convinced that we can move forward with this motion without the amendment and call it CSS and actually think it's important. I think CSS is important. The details of this process are still not defined. As we continue to iterate and continue to develop this, I do want us and Staff and consultants to be driven, to have a sense of obligation to follow CSS. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can't do CSS by this process. Maybe the earlier substitute motion was absolutely imperative in order to do CSS. I'm not convinced of that. I still think we can do CSS. I think it's important. I'm not going to support the amendment. I don't want to strip out CSS at this point. We need to keep the focus on abiding by the goals, principles, processes involved in CSS. That will continue to support this process going forward. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: It's about something else. Mayor Scharff: I'm going to say I share the sentiments of Council Member Wolbach. The greater truth is that we are following CSS. What we are trying to do here is get deep and broad community engagement. That's what we're doing. There's a concern that if we take out Context Sensitive Solutions, we send a message that is untrue. What we really want to do is be clear to the public that we are. We are listening to the public. We are developing solutions with broad community input. We as Council Members are not the stakeholders but are really that empowered group. We're the Council Members who are going to make recommendations and either put it to a vote or make decision ourselves. We can't outsource that. We've all agreed on that. That's why I think this amendment is confusing to the community for a lot of the reasons that Council Member Filseth said. What Council Member Filseth said was this is too important for us to be fighting over language like that. Let's go make this the best possible process we can. If we could vote on the Amendment. Not the main Motion, the Amendment. That fails on a 6-3 vote with Council Members DuBois, Kou, and Holman voting yes. TRANSCRIPT Page 106 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 AMENDMENT FAILED: 3-6 DuBois, Holman, Kou yes Mayor Scharff: Now, if we can vote on the main Motion. That's why you have your light on. Council Member Holman: I just want to clarify something. The Mayor made some comments about having specific—I don't remember the exact words you used—and focused input from stakeholders having to do with this intersection and that intersection and this grade crossing and that grade crossing. I just want to put out there that while people would have most interest in the crossing nearest them, it really doesn't work from having—in CEQA, it's called segmenting. It really doesn't work to have a group do one crossing, and another group do their own crossing, and another group do their own crossing. Let's just say there's been discussion about this that some people in the community think we ought to close the Churchill crossing. If the neighbors get together in that area, those stakeholders, and say "great idea, we're going to close the Churchill crossing," the traffic has to go somewhere. The cross- town traffic has to go somewhere. That's going to impact Meadow, Alma. We can't just do a process that we have a group for Churchill and a group for Meadow and a group for Alma, a group for Charleston. We can't do that. Again, it's a reason why in CEQA it's called segmenting, which is not allowed under CEQA. You can't do it that way. You have to look at the package as a whole. I just want to put it out there. I don't want to see us go down that path and pit neighborhoods against neighborhoods. It just won't work. I just didn't want that to stand without some comment to offer another view of how that might raise a lot of concern in the community. MOTION RESTATED: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Filseth to adopt the revised Community Engagement Plan and direct Staff to return to Council with an addendum to the Rail Committee Charter and Guiding Principles that supports implementation of Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) by providing regular opportunities during Rail Committee meetings for open dialogue, questions and interaction between the Committee, stakeholders and members of the public, and Staff and consultants. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes on a 7-2 Motion with Council Members Kou and Holman voting no. MOTION PASSED: 7-2 Holman, Kou no Mayor Scharff: We have a second part of this, but it is now past 11:00. I believe we have some room on one of our other—we do. I'm going to move that we continue this item to a date uncertain. TRANSCRIPT Page 107 of 107 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/5/17 Mr. Keene: It is in a September meeting. One of the September meetings we have … Mayor Scharff: One of the ones coming up, I know we have time. I just can't remember which one. Council Member DuBois: Is that before the workshop? Mr. Keene: It might be the 18th. I'll have to check. Mr. Mello, we were planning on presenting the Council decision on this next item at the September 16th community workshop. Mayor Scharff: Just do it? Do we have room on September 11th? Mr. Keene: We have the 11th. If we had to, we could move something of the 11th to that meeting on the 18th. Mayor Scharff: I suggest we move it to the 11th. Council Member Fine: Second. MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Fine to continue this item to September 11, 2017. Mr. Keene: We'll work on that tomorrow morning. Mayor Scharff: We'll move it to a date certain on the 11th. We need to vote on that. All in favor. That passes on a 7-2 motion. MOTION PASSED: 7-2 Filseth, Wolbach no Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements Mayor Scharff: we have Council Member Questions, Comments, and Announcements. I see no lights. With that, the meeting's adjourned. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:10 P.M.