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Home My WebLink About2017-11-13 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 1 of 110 Special Meeting November 13, 2017 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 5:09 P.M. Present: DuBois, Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Absent: Special Orders of the Day 1. Appointment of two Candidates to the Architectural Review Board and Four Candidates to the Historic Resources Board for Terms Ending December 15, 2020; and two Candidates to the Planning and Transportation Commission for Terms Ending December 15, 2021. Mayor Scharff: Now, we have some Special Orders of the Day. I understand we have some ballots up here to vote. We'll be doing that as we go through the Special Orders of the Day. Go ahead and vote. Council Member Holman: Point of procedure here. We did not follow our regular procedure when it came to the ARB and the Planning and Transportation Commission because there was an incumbent in each of those bodies that did not reapply. Our typical procedure is that we extend the application period, and that did not happen on this particular occasion for those two bodies. What we have done in the past, whether that was the situation or not, we have had a Motion to go out again for new applicants. I just wanted to know that that is one of the options. Mayor Scharff: Duly noted. Council Member Holman: I would move that we vote for one on Architectural Review Board and go out again. Mayor Scharff: Why vote for one? Why not … Council Member Holman: Because there's one incumbent. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 2 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: That's your Motion. I'm happy to entertain that. Do we have a second? Seeing no … Council Member DuBois: I'll second. MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to vote for one position for the Architectural Review Board and go out for an additional recruitment to fill the second position. Mayor Scharff: Seeing a second, let's vote on the board. Council Member DuBois: Do you want to speak to it or … Mayor Scharff: If you guys want to speak to it, I'm not going to say you can't. We've been around a lot. Do you want to speak to it? I just want to avoid a whole debate over the whole issue. People are going to vote yes or going to vote no. I thought you made your point. Council Member Holman: I understand. Just really quickly, the incumbent, Wynne Furth, has proven herself as being a very outstanding applicant and participant and member of the Architectural Review Board, and would encourage her reappointment. The other applicants, I do not find as experienced in the realm of public participation and would, therefore, encourage going out again and still considering these two applicants as well. Mayor Scharff: I am going to let anyone speak since I've let it—now lost control of this. Council Member DuBois: I agree with Council Member Holman. For the ARB, it'd be worth seeing a few more candidates. Mayor Scharff: Does anyone else want to speak or not? Seeing no one, let's vote. That fails on a 5-4 vote with Council Members DuBois, Kou, Filseth, and Holman voting yes. MOTION FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou yes [The Council completed Item Numbers 2-4 and returned to this Item.] First Round of voting for two positions on the Architectural Review Board with terms ending December 15, 2020. Voting For: Wynne Furth DuBois, Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 3 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Voting For: Amie Neff Filseth Voting For: Osma Dossani Thompson DuBois, Fine, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Beth Minor, City Clerk: Wynne Furth with nine votes and Osma Thompson with eight votes are both elected to the Architectural Review Board. First Round of voting for four positions on the Historic Resources Board with terms ending December 15, 2020. Voting For: Martin Bernstein DuBois, Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Voting For: Carl Darling Tanaka Voting For: Rita French DuBois, Kou Voting For: Gogo Heinrich DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou Voting For: Roger Kohler Fine, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Voting For: Michael Makinen Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Voting For: Margaret Wimmer DuBois, Filseth, Fine, Holman, Kniss, Kou, Scharff, Wolbach Ms. Minor: Martin Bernstein 9 votes, Roger Kohler 5 votes, Michael Makinen 7 votes, and Margaret Wimmer 8 votes, have all been selected to serve on the Historic Resources Board. First Round of voting for two positions on the Planning and Transportation Commission with terms ending December 15, 2021. Voting For: Michael Alcheck Fine, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Voting For: Rebecca Eisenberg Voting For: David Hirsch Holman, Kou Voting For: Rebecca Parker Mankey DuBois, Holman, Kou Voting For: Lisa Peschcke-Koedt Filseth Voting For: Rishiraj Pravahan DuBois, Filseth FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 4 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Voting For: William Riggs Fine, Kniss, Scharff, Tanaka, Wolbach Ms. Minor: Michael Alcheck 5 votes and William Riggs 5 votes, have both been selected to serve on the Planning and Transportation Commission. Congratulations to everybody. 2. Special Recognition for Police and Fire Personnel who Responded to the Wildfires in Napa, Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties in October 2017. Mayor Scharff: We now have a Special Recognition for Police and Fire personnel who responded to the wildfires in Napa, Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties in October 2017. Chief Nickel, take it away. Eric Nickel, Fire Chief: Good evening. Eric Nickel, Fire Chief. I'm really excited to share some great people that served the communities up in the North Bay, incredibly admirably. As you recall—really to give the Council credit, I really appreciate you wanting to recognize the firefighters and police officers and animal control officers in person. It just took us some time to get everybody organized and here between all the different shift schedules. What you'll be seeing up here on the PowerPoint is a small sample of the thank-you letters that have been coming in by the ones and twos and dozens in some cases from residents, community members, high school kids. What high school kid writes a letter? Not a text message, but a legitimate letter addressed to the Palo Alto Fire Department and Palo Alto Police Department. You're seeing some of the hard copies of the letters that have shown up in the Fire Chief and Police Chief's office. I get these letters back at the end so I can make sure they get in the employees' personnel files just so they have a record of this. As you recall, On October 8 and 9 the North Bay communities were hit with wildland urban interface fires really not seen in the modern history of California. In the middle of the night that night, Sunday into Monday, while most residents were asleep our crews were up and moving up into Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino Counties. On subsequent days, many Palo Alto Fire, Police, Animal Services crews responded to the City of Santa Rosa in Mendocino County. Crews worked for days supporting our neighbors in need. In fact, some of our crews worked 36 hours straight and literally didn't come up for air or real food until that following Wednesday. Tonight we recognize our City Staff that dropped everything and traveled to the North Bay. Before our Chiefs introduce their Staff, I just want to thank you and to thank them on behalf of an appreciative Council and community. I'd ask that Chief Ron Watson join me down here at the podium while we introduce our Fire, Police, and Animal Services personnel that responded to this. As Chief Watson is making his FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 5 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 way down, I'd like to—our Fire folks who are here tonight, not all of them are able to attend tonight. As I read your name, would you please come down so we can give you a certificate and acknowledge you in front of this lovely group? I'm sure you're all here tonight to recognize the firefighters and police officers. Captain Toby McDonell, Apparatus Operator Carlos Gracia, Apparatus Operator Sheila Donovan, Firefighter/Paramedic Chris Pombo. This was the crew that was up on the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa. We're actually courting the call gods right now by not having calls while we're trying to recognize them for their fantastic work. Captain Barry Marchisio, Apparatus Operator Anthony Sozio, Firefighter Manny Macias, and Firefighter/Paramedic Evan Johnson. Chief Watson, come on down. Ron Watson, Interim Police Chief: Unfortunately, your folks get to get tortured while I say a few things. Mayor Scharff, Council Members, Ron Watson on behalf of the Police Department. We'd like to recognize some of the men and women of the Palo Alto Police Department that also responded to the major fires in Northern California. During the week of October 10, we sent 12 police officers, 2 dispatchers, and 1 animal control officer up to the North Bay. The officers deployed into neighborhoods preventing looting, evacuated homes. They provided security, a regional evacuation center. They assisted with emergency evacuations as the fire continued to be unpredictable and quickly spreading through the region. They provided traffic control at road closures, and they responded to calls for service in the City of Santa Rosa. Our dispatchers provided relief assistance to the Dispatch Centers in the counties for fellow dispatchers who had been at work for days without any time off. Our animal control officer worked numerous days hauling much needed supplies as well as donations into the region. While he was there, he also helped with numerous animal rescue calls as well as providing food for stranded and stray animals that were now in the area. All of our personnel worked 12-hour shifts with hours of travel on either end, making their day 17-18 hours each day. Some of the Staff that assisted in the fire are here today. We'd like to recognize them and the ones that aren't here. Here tonight is Sergeant Alex Afanasiev, Agent T.J. DeStefano, Agent Michael Foley, Reserve Officer Eric Jenson, Dispatch Manager Mark Chase. Did Animal Control Officer Kent Cunningham make it in yet? We will be providing the recognition at a later time for the folks who couldn't make it here. Lieutenant April Wagner, Sergeant Tony Becker, Agent Chris Correia, Agent Anjanette Holler, Officer Cole Ghilarducci, Officer Cameron Wright, Officer Kevin Mullarkey, and Officer Paul Burgio as well as Public Safety Dispatcher Brianna Quezada. Mr. Nickel: It's really hard for people in Public Safety to stand up and get this type of public recognition, but it's very, very important. The work that our folks do day in and day out—this just highlights an example of one of FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 6 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 the fortunate things of living in California. We have the most robust mutual aid system. It's the envy of the world. To think that we could muster literally thousands of Public Safety personnel from all across the State within 12 hours to put them into multiple communities, this just doesn't happen. We've been fortunate. The fire side, we do it quite often. What was unique and interesting and really speaks to the severity of these sets of fires is having law enforcement mobilize and public safety dispatchers that quickly. They did it just as if they'd been doing it every single summer just like the Fire Service. Thank you for the opportunity to share that and share the work of our crews. 3. Meritorious Awards Recognizing the Cardiac Lifesaving Skills of Two Individuals at the 2017 Annual Moonlight Run & Walk. Eric Nickel, Fire Chief: I want to shift gears and move onto Item Number 3 in the Special Order and share with you an instance of citizen rescuer and a City Ranger rescuer that occurred last month at the Moonlight Run. Before I get into that, this is another opportunity for those of us in Public Safety to thank you on the Council for your financial support of the Automated External Defibrillator (AED) program, automatic external defibrillator. I want there to come a time where we come in front of you and this is not a big deal because it happens all the time. We're getting more and more cases where we've had citizens and City employees who are not paramedics or emergency medical technicians deploy these automatic external defibrillators and literally save someone's life. There are a few people I want to thank as well besides the Council. We've got Stephanie Martinson here from Racing Hearts. Although I didn't see him, Bill Johnson from the Palo Alto Weekly, this was their big fall event. In talking with Stephanie, she was able to make sure that an AED was present at the running event. Certainly Bill deserves some recognition. I don't know if he's in here or not, but we'll give him a hand anyway. Here's how this works. There are four links in the chain of survival. The first link is early access to 9-1-1. If something—an event has occurred, call 9-1-1 immediately. The next and really what's turning out to be one of the more important ones is early citizen Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). No mouth-to-mouth, just press on the chest, early CPR. We also have a Pulse Point system here that, on your smartphone, the app that alerts you that CPR and AED is needed, if you're nearby where this event takes place. There were Pulse Point notifications there that evening because people had it downloaded. Early defibrillation. We're trying to get hundreds and hundreds of defibrillators placed in the community. They're easy to use. A lot of credit goes to you, Council, with the funds and to Stephanie for her tenacity to get these defibrillators into the community. The last link is where the professional rescuers come in. That is early advanced life support with paramedics. Next, I'd like to FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 7 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 introduce Captain Bill Dale, who will brief you on the event and present Fire Department Meritorious Awards recognizing one City employee and one citizen rescuer who saved a person's life. Captain Dale. Bill Dale, Fire Captain: Good evening, Council. My name's William Dale; I'm a Captain here in the Palo Alto Fire Department. I'm here on behalf of the Meritorious Awards program. This program was established in 2011 to recognize department members and citizens who perform distinct acts of bravery, heroism, and who provide devoted service to the Department and to the overall public safety to our community. Tonight, we are honored to recognize two citizen heroes. A citizen hero award is made to a person outside the Fire Department who has been involved in a lifesaving effort at an emergency scene before the arrival of the Fire Department or who has provided extraordinary assistance to Fire Department members in a lifesaving effort. On October 10, 2017, at the City of Palo Alto's Moonlight Run, Park Ranger Robbie Parry and volunteer Kate Peters were notified that a man had fallen at the finish line and needed help. Ranger Parry and Kate quickly responded to the location and found a 30-year-old male pulseless and not breathing. They immediately began CPR and applied an AED that ultimately defibrillated the patient. Ranger Parry notified dispatch, and a full 9-1-1 response was activated. Ranger Parry and Kate continued CPR and treatment until the arrival of the Palo Alto Fire Department paramedics. As our paramedics were arriving, the patient's heart had just started, and he began breathing on his own. The Palo Alto Fire Department paramedics stabilized the patient and transported him to the Stanford emergency room for further evaluation. If it were not for Ranger Parry and Kate's quick and selfless response, this story would certainly had a different ending. Please join me in welcoming Ranger Robbie Parry and Kate Peters to accept the Palo Alto Fire Department's citizen hero award. As you saw, joining them in the front was Fire Chief Eric Nickel, Deputy Fire Chief Catherine Capriles, and the man's life they certainly changed forever, Mr. Carlo Rodis. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Does that conclude the … Mr. Nickel: You want some more? Mayor Scharff: Sure, bring it on. Mr. Nickel: No, that concludes. Thank you so much. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss has something she'd like to ask you. Vice Mayor Kniss: Eric, could you stay back at the mic. In the midst of good news even though this is about bad news that happened before that. I think now maybe a month ago, Council Member Holman mentioned that we have FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 8 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 a fund for this kind of occurrence. Greg put a Committee together that included Lydia Kou, him, and I was included as well. I went to Santa Rosa about 10 days ago and met with Shirlee Zane, who is the Supervisor from that region. We discussed where this $25,000 would go from our City. It's going to go to an organization called the Redwood Credit Union, which has raised at that point, 10 days ago, $7 million. It will go for the very most rudiment of needs for the people who are there. It will go for food, clothing, and shelter. Long term, the credit union hopes to begin to make loans so that people can rebuild homes or buy a mobile home, whatever it may be. I know you were all up there. I was up there, of course, long after the fact. I would say it's probably the most devastating thing I have seen. It was just astonishing. The hardest part was watching people still searching through the ruins for we don't know what, but certainly things that were of great value to them. I don't think it's an enormous amount of money, but it certainly indicates that Palo Alto is very concerned and certainly wants to do what we can to make a difference. That check will be sent off to the Redwood Credit Union. Mr. Nickel: Thank you. Very kind, thank you. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks again for all you guys did. Mayor Scharff: I think we should just clarify some procedural housekeeping. What Council Member Holman suggested is we take $25,000 out of the Council Contingency Fund to support—how best we could support the people that have suffered in the fires. Vice Mayor Kniss, as she said, went up there and determined that seemed to be the best course of action. We can't just say write a check. What has to happen next is the City Manager needs to bring it forward, if Council's fine, on Consent. Then, we need to vote for it at the next Council meeting, if that's acceptable to everyone. I think that'll be the approach. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Just as the Mayor indicated, this is the Council Contingency Fund. It's a fund that is quite frankly rarely tapped. The last time I can think of that it was used was—the last two times I can think of it was used over the last several years, one was to support the return of a resident donkey after the passing of—one of the resident donkeys was to help them and fundraising to cover expenses. The other was a few years ago when there was an earthquake in Oaxaca, one of our Sister Cities. We sent $25,000 there as well. It's rarely tapped, just so the public knows. It is for occasions such as this, where there is an emerging need. Thank you all. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 9 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Thank you to all of our first responders for everything they do for the City. We really appreciate it. Thanks for coming out tonight to show your support. Thank you to Stephanie Martinson. I thought I saw Stephanie somewhere. Thank you. 4. Proclamation Honoring Pickleball in Palo Alto. Mayor Scharff: Next, I think we're moving on to a Proclamation honoring Pickleball in Palo Alto, which I'll read. He read the Proclamation into the record. I would encourage everyone, if you haven't been down there, to go play Pickleball. You could just show up, and they will teach you in 10 minutes. It is a fun thing to do. Do we have any …? Beth Minor, City Clerk: I do have the results. AT THIS TIME THE CITY CLERK READ THE BALLOTS Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions Mayor Scharff: Agenda Changes, Additions, and Deletions, I don't believe we have any. City Manager Comments Mayor Scharff: Now, City Manager Comments. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council. First item that I do want to report is that earlier this afternoon we announced that Robert Jonsen—there is his picture—who currently serves as a Menlo Park Chief of Police has been selected by me to be our next Chief of Police for Palo Alto. Following Council's confirmation of his appointment on December 11 and finalizing some of the background requirements that are especially applied to folks in Public Safety, Bob is expected to join the City officially on January 9. Chief Jonsen has been with Menlo Park since 2013, has more than 30 years of experience in law enforcement and Public Safety. He's well regarded by both the community as well as department personnel and was chosen after a very competitive, very thorough national search process involving a lot of citizen participation, experts from outside our organization, and our own executive Staff. We really look forward to Chief Jonsen joining us in 2018. I want to also express my appreciation to Interim Chief Ron Watson and the entire Palo Alto Police Department for the smooth transition in operations in the Department over the past year, since Chief Burns retired. Lastly, I just want to publicly acknowledge here the class of my friend and Colleague, City Manager Alex McIntyre, from the City of Menlo Park, who is surrendering his beloved and well-respected Chief to us and our FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 10 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 City. I appreciate the conversations that Alex and I have had about that change and transition. We'll work to have Chief Jonsen here in person on your meeting on December 11. Next, we have a number of community meetings this current week starting on Tuesday, November 14, at the Mitchell Park Community Center. From 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., we're holding the first in a series of community roundtables to further help evaluate potential grade separation options at each of Palo Alto's four Caltrain rail crossings. This particular meeting will be to discuss options for the Charleston Road and Meadow crossings. On Thursday, November 16th, again 6:00-8:00 P.M., at the Palo Alto Unified School District headquarters at 25 Churchill Avenue, we'll be holding a second roundtable to talk about options for the Churchill crossing. More information is on the City's website at cityofpaloalto.org/connectingpaloalto. There will be two subsequent roundtables before the year is out on the other locations. Secondly, we wanted to share that there is a special series of what are called On the Table housing conversations this week. The City will be participating in this regional effort that will take place on Wednesday, November 15th. Locally, the 1-day event is sponsored by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as a way for communities to come together around the table to have a conversation about housing issues and challenges. We will be at coffee shops including Coupa Downtown, Philz on Middlefield, and Printer's Café on California Avenue. Folks from the Human Relations Commission (HRC), our Human Relations Commission, will be at Hobee's on El Camino. All between about 8:30 and 10:30 A.M. We encourage interested folks to stop by, have a cup of coffee, join the conversation. More information can be found on the City's website. I should point out that this is not a City-sponsored event in itself. We're participants among many, many other entities. There are others within Palo Alto groups. I think the League of Women voters and some others are sponsoring other conversations at different times of the day and in the evening. Folks can visit our website for more information. Also, Wednesday evening, November 15, our Public Works Engineering Services Division is hosting a community meeting in our Community Meeting Room on the first floor at City Hall to gather public input on proposed designs for the Downtown parking structure, garage, at 375 Hamilton Avenue. That's at the intersection of Hamilton and Waverley across from the Post Office. The proposed garage is five levels above ground and one level below ground located at that existing parking lot. Again, Wednesday in the Community Meeting Room this week, 6:30 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. With some genuine pride, we're glad to announce that our Mayor was just recently elected to serve as Vice President of the Executive Board of the Association of Bay Area Governments, otherwise known as Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). ABAG was created by local governments to meet our planning and research needs in the region related to land use, environmental and water resource protections, disaster resilience, energy efficiency, and hazardous FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 11 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 waste mitigation and to provide risk management, financial services, and staff training to local counties, cities, and town in the nine-county Bay Area. We'll be well represented. Again, congratulations to our Mayor Scharff. With the holiday season approaching, we just wanted to mention that the Downtown Streets Team's Life Moves program is having this year's Thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving Day from 12:00 to 2:00 P.M. at All Saints Episcopal Church at 555 Waverley Street and a leftover meal the following day, Friday November 24, from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Everyone is welcome to attend that event. Lastly, I just thought that the special recognition of the day at the Council meeting were quite memorable. I thought Pickleball, which I knew nothing about before today—I was just thinking about all the difficult issues that come to you as a Council, and yet we still find time to honor things like Pickleball. I was just thinking when I find myself in times of trouble, thoughts of Pickleball will come to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much for that. I actually did want to say I really appreciate the support from this Council on the vote for ABAG. I don't know if the community knows, but actually it's a vote where every City Council Member in the nine Bay Area counties votes and every Supervisor votes. I was pleased to say that I actually beat my opponents; there were two of them. I had more votes than all of them combined. I felt really good about that. Thank you all for your support, again. Oral Communications Mayor Scharff: Now, we move on to Oral Communications. Our first speaker is Herb Borock, to be followed by Dan Charman. Herb Borock: Mayor Scharff and Council Members, this week the Board of the High Speed Rail Authority will be receiving an update on the Authority's application to take over responsibility for the Federal Government responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws. If their application is approved, there will be no separate Federal review of the Environmental Impact Report and environmental impact statement for the High Speed Rail project. The Authority is soliciting comments on its application until December 11, but it doesn't provide any statement about the way to make comments to the Federal Railroad Administration to influence its decision about whether to approve the application. In view of the fact that the City Council is on record as opposed to the High Speed Rail project, I believe the Council should go on record as opposing the Authority's application to become the only agency to review the completeness and adequacy of the environmental review of the project. I urge the Council to take action to express its opinion FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 12 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and the United States Department of Transportation, that the City is against the application that would remove Federal environmental oversight of the project as well as expressing your opinion to the High Speed Rail Authority by its December 11th deadline. I'm providing the Clerk with a copy of the Authority's press release on this subject and the links to the Agenda Packet documents related to the subject for this week's meeting of the Authority. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Dan Chapman to be followed by Carolyn Schmarzo. Dan Chapman: Good evening, Mayor Scharff, Vice Mayor Kniss, and Honorable Council Members. My name is Dan Chapman; I'm the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds at Castilleja and have been there for almost 27 years. There's been a lot of—I would like to speak in support of Castilleja's Conditional Use Permit (CUP) Master Plan application. There's been a lot of disheartening talk lately about Castilleja's unwillingness to compromise, but that could not be farther from the truth. We spent 3 years prior to submitting our application soliciting feedback in both small and large-group settings and incorporating that feedback into our proposal. The master plan for which we applied is dramatically different than the master plan at the start of the 3-year process. Still, we recognize that there is more compromise to go. The City process is founded on that principle. We cannot be more aligned with recent speakers that we should work together as a community towards a solution. We also have heard some neighbors make a series of comments about how traffic is the overriding concern rather than the actual number of students. Again, we couldn't agree more. As Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, I took a lead role in implementing our Transportation Demand Management (TDM) program, a program that has reduced car trips by nearly 20 percent. These reductions have been achieved by requiring teachers and staff to commute at least 3 days a week in non-single occupancy vehicle modes of transportation; providing free bus service to other communities; (inaudible) shuttles to and from Caltrain; and promoting a carpool program. With this demonstrated success in reducing car trips, Castilleja has committed to no net new car trips and has offered to make the growth of our student body dependent on the success of our TDM program. In fact, 540 students was proposed because that was the enrollment limit at which we could maintain car trips at recent levels. Castilleja has been here for 110 years and has been an active part of Palo Alto history and the community. We look forward to being part of the community for the next 100 years and serving more families. Thank you for your time. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 13 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much. Carolyn Schmarzo to be followed by Al Kenrick. Carolyn Schmarzo: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the City Council. I would like to express my opposition to the Castilleja expansion for the following reasons. Number 1, traffic. Traffic threatens the safety of all Palo Altans, school children in route to school, people bicycling or skateboarding to work, as Greg Tanaka does, and really frustrated drivers in gridlocked routes. Number 2, air pollution. The demolition of buildings and heavy construction equipment will introduce vast amounts of unknown and dangerous particulate into the air we breathe. Number 3, noise pollution. The destruction of 100 trees with wood chippers and chainsaws will create a deafening, war-zone-like environment. Number 4, diminished property values. This massive construction zone will result in a once desirable neighborhood transformed into an undesirable neighborhood, one filled with noise, traffic, and air pollution. Number 5, emotional duress. To witness the physical and financial destruction of one's home, neighborhood, and City is a soul-bludgeoning experience. Number 6, lack of public benefit. This school is a private, exclusive school and serves only about 100 girls in Palo Alto, 0 boys. It provides zero services to taxpaying Palo Altans. Number 7, loss of revenue to Palo Alto. The school pays neither property nor Income Taxes. It plans to remove two homes and, thus, will lose the income from those Property Taxes. The damage to the roads from such a Godzilla of a project will be costly as well. As taxpaying residents of Palo Alto, we should not be expected to sacrifice our very expensive quality of life for Castilleja's profit. Number 8, diminished integrity. If this expansion proceeds, it will diminish the integrity of our City and its Zoning Code. The project would result in a school/business with 700 students/employees in a neighborhood with an R-1 residential code. This is considered a medium-sized business, the same size as Cliff Bar, Serious Logic, or Etsy. The City of Palo Alto is not against Castilleja; however, at times it seems Castilleja's against the City of Palo Alto. Evidence of this can be found in its willful violation of CUP and its desire to destroy an old, established neighborhood and the financial and emotional health and welfare of its residents. City Council, please protect our City from this ill-conceived and inappropriate expansion project. In the words of President Obama, if people cannot trust the government to do the job for which it exists, to protect them and to promote their common welfare, all else is lost. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Al Kenrick to be followed by Sea Reddy. Al Kenrick: Hi. My name's Al Kenrick. I live at 134 Melville. I'm very much for women's education. I've got four daughters, and I want them well education, but I'm very, very much against this project. I don't get active FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 14 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 very often, but I came out tonight because Castilleja, if it wants to expand, it can't. There's not room. The traffic is terrible. I appreciate they've worked very hard to reduce commute trips. I'm not confident that's going to last. They have a hard enough time at the current enrollment. They've never met the agreements they had with the City in the past. It makes me think of when the clinic, which was a great Palo Alto institution that had been here for a long time, wanted to expand in its old footprint just south of Downtown. The neighbors fought back, and the City Council supported that. The clinic found a better place. You can imagine how bad Downtown Palo Alto would be and south of Downtown would be if the clinic had expanded there. I remember when Harker Military Academy was in town. They were in Community Park. They had a whole block, and it was a fantastic military school for boys. They wanted to expand, and now they have lots of students. They took a strategic approach and found a facility that allowed them to really grow. You could imagine if they had continued to grow or double their—back at the same time Castilleja probably had about 130 live- in girls. I remember that. It's grown tremendously since then. At a point, you have outgrown your footprint. I ride my bike Downtown to work when I commute, and I see near misses all the time with people darting across Churchill to make the left-hand turn to wait on Bryant. I do the right-hand turn out of Emerson onto Embarcadero all the time, and that's a dangerous corner. More traffic is just more trouble. I have low confidence they're going to continue their carpooling programs. I know they're trying, and that's great. I don't trust them with this expansion. I hope you hear the neighbors and you make them really work with the neighbors to slow down this project and right-size it for the neighborhood. We all knew the school was there when we bought our homes, and we're okay with that. There's a point when it just can't grow on that footprint. Thank you very much. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Sea Reddy to be followed by Stephanie Muñoz. Sea Reddy: Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and the City Council and the citizens of Palo Alto and the neighborhoods. Congratulations, Mayor, for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) leadership. I'm sure you'll represent us well and these communities we know. In regards to Castilleja, I totally agree with the community that the school should expand but not where they are. They should do Castilleja 2 somewhere else. I'll propose a site in Concordia University in Irvine has 3,500 people. I totally like the privateness of the school, and we need leaders, but not here. There is absolutely no reason to go and add another 100 students and keep making all these things, changes, adjustments with the unhappy neighbors. I also commend the selecting, picking the right Police Chief. We've had in the last 4 or 5 years a lot of drama about police chiefs. I think the gentleman, Robert Johnsen, from next door—I commend Menlo Park for its diversity. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 15 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 We don't ever see their name, anything about them in the newspapers, local or national newspapers. Mr. Jonsen will bring more diversity because he has dealt with diversity. You need to have some experience. That's a very good choice, and I congratulate the City Hall for doing that. One other thing is that we are at a crisis at College Terrace Market. It is not doing well. We need your support. We've worked on it for the last 4 or 5 years, to get that market going. We need your support. Lastly, I offer my condolences to the community of Iranians and Iraqis that have experienced a huge earthquake, 7.0 earthquake, that lost families as well as structures. I hope we are prepared for our day when we know we have issues with earthquakes. We have seen it. We need to be more prepared. Thank you all. Bye. Mayor Scharff: Stephanie Muñoz to be followed by Chris Dibona. Stephanie Muñoz: Good evening, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. As you prepare to finalize the Comprehensive Plan, I'd like you to think back to Mrs. Stanford and her friends and the kind of town that they thought Palo Alto should be. It was not a really richy-rich town but certainly not a class- divided town. It was a town with everybody's house pretty, a little garden, nicely painted. You've seen Lucie Stern's house. There are 100 houses in Palo Alto that are as large or as wealthy as that house. It wasn't looking for pretentiousness or conspicuous consumption. Now, we're at a situation in which unfortunately somewhere along the line, the sensible idea of a town of middle-class people went by the boards. We went to get more and more and more valuable properties. Guess what? The workers for the businesses that have come to town have been left out of the planning. You have to start planning now and figure out what a worker or a retired person could afford. Do what you can with the City's assets to make that possible. One of the assets that I don't think you're looking at—it's a big asset—is your power to increase density by going up and to increase the number of people by—with the same amount of construction, having more people fit in the same conspicuous space in a way that's not difficult to live with and a way that's acceptable and nice looking. I think you can do that. May I ask you please to try? Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Chris Dibona. Chris Dibona: Good evening, Mayor Scharff, Vice Mayor Kniss, and Honorable Council Members. My name's Chris Dibona. I live on North California Street near Embarcadero and have been a Palo Alto resident for about 3 years. I had to speak in support of Castilleja's CUP and master plan application. My daughter's a student at Casti, and we actually moved to Palo Alto to be closer to the school. Casti's a unique school, a true jewel in Palo Alto's crown, recognized across America as one of the premier girls' schools. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 16 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 My own daughter's experience there has been stellar, has helped shape her into the confident, strong, smart, young Palo Altan that she is today. Since my daughter's a junior, we're not going to see any benefit from the expansion of the campus and, yet, I'm very much in favor of the school's plan to modernize and moderately expand the enrollment to benefit my daughter's younger classmates and those who would not be able to attend if we were not expanding. First, modernizing Castilleja's buildings is of paramount importance. Most of the buildings on campus are very old, and safely maintaining them is coming at a higher cost each year. To modernize through remodeling would cost more, take longer, and cause more traffic and construction hassle for the neighborhood than would the plan before the Council. The plan would (inaudible) many of the buildings on campus, brings them up to date with modern architecture and building practices, and incorporates cutting-edge sustainability features, and will redirect traffic out of the neighborhood and towards Embarcadero. The plan wasn't created in a vacuum either. Working with the surrounding neighbors, Casti drew up the plan for the underground garage and recently moved one of the accessory garage outlets in the plan to align with Melville directly rather than be in front of the neighbor's houses. Casti's traffic calming program has dramatically reduced car traffic, increased bicycling, and minimizes parent traffic during campus events. Like many Palo Alto residents, I experience firsthand the issue of traffic on Embarcadero. There are many days where I cannot even turn left out of my house, and the waits on Middlefield and Newell can seem really long. To blame Casti for this is misguided. As the Council's aware, we Palo Altans deal with an explosion of population during the day, and Casti traffic is barely a blip compared to those heading to businesses and schools and the rest on University and Page Mill. Given the school was founded in 1907 and seeing the City grow up around it, it's now time for Casti to grown and modernize to preserve itself as a great place for young women. Thanks for listening. I support the plan. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Neva Yarkin to be followed by Shani Kleinhaus. Neva Yarkin: Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Neva Yarkin, and I live on Churchill Avenue. As I said last week, Castilleja's educating young women has nothing to do with the quality of education that it provides. It has to do with the major expansion plans that Castilleja is pushing forward. This has been said many times before. We have been asking for over a year what is Castilleja's 10 and 20-year plan. Why can't they answer this question? Shouldn't they know what their vision will be in the future? If they truly have no plan, then they need a plan for the future. If enrollment continues to grow from 415 to 540 to 700 to 1,000 students, when will it stop? This is only 6 acres in an R-1 neighborhood. Traffic is already over the limit on Embarcadero Road and surrounding streets. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 17 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Students will be graduating; administrators and staff will eventually leave. We, the neighbors, don't plan on moving. We love our homes and our friends in this neighborhood. It is time for Castilleja to carry on their legacy of educating young women in another area so they will have room to expand as much as they want. Thank you for your time this evening. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Shani Kleinhaus to be followed by Rita Vrhel. Shani Kleinhaus: Good evening, Mayor Scharff, City Council Members. I speak tonight as a resident about a couple of things. One is that I want to invite all of you to drive on Ross Road and look at what is happening with the new speed bumps or trying to make things safer for bicycles. I think it's doing the opposite. There's not a lot of room now for a car and a bicycle on some of the area, especially near Corina Way, to get through. I think somebody is going to get hurt there. I would really appreciate you coming to look at it before that happens. That's one thing. The other thing is for the last 6 months or so, I've been taking pictures of what is in the composting bins in gas stations. That's part of our policy, to have compost bins everywhere, I guess. In gas stations, what you get in there is really contaminating the whole load. People in gas stations go by—they're not really thinking too much if it's a banana or a can of motor oil that they put in there. I have really nice pictures for you, if you're interested. Please, take care of that. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Rita Vrhel. Rita Vrhel: Good evening. Downtown Streets Team is having their Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving. Donations are still needed. This is a wonderful organization, and you can either volunteer your time or you can go on—actually almost all the volunteer time spots are filled up except for the deep clean of the church on the last day. A lot of donations are still needed. You can go onto Downtown Streets Team Thanksgiving Dinner and sign up for something. Also, they have the food bank right next door. If you have any extra cans—I go through my cans once a year. I look to see what I haven't used, what I'm not going to use, and why did I buy that and what is nearing expiration. I take it down to the Food Closet and donate it. It goes to someone right away where it can be used. Like all volunteer jobs, one always gets so much more than one gives, no matter how much one gives. I would really encourage everyone listening to consider doing something for the Downtown Streets Team Thanksgiving Dinner. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 18 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Minutes Approval 5. Approval of Action Minutes for the October 30, 2017 Council Meeting Mayor Scharff: Now, I need 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 from October 30, 2017. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Consent Calendar Mayor Scharff: Now, we're at the Consent Calendar. We have Bob Moss, who wants to speak on Item Number 9. Bob, you want to come forward? Seeing no Bob … There you are. Bob Moss, speaking regarding Agenda Item Number 9: Thank you, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. On Item 9, there are a lot of topics that are being reviewed and discussed. There are some that, I think, should be given a little more attention than others. I've been very interested in earthquake safety for decades. We had our house tied down to the foundation to make it earthquake proof over 30 years ago. I've gone to a number of United States Geological Survey (USGS) talks on earthquake safety and potential problems. I've been following this for quite a while. One of the ones I'd like to see given a little more attention is Option 5, increase the number of building types you're looking at and to require some of the lower-level options be upgraded so that we minimize the amount of damage and the amount of potential hazards. On the types of disclosure, the four that are the most important are the mandatory disclosure at time of sale, public listing of affected properties, notify tenants, and have earthquake performance rating systems so people know how well the building will stand up. On types of incentives, I think expedited planning, expedited building permitting, permission to add units especially in smaller lots, and giving technical assistance to people who want to upgrade is an important topic, and I don't think we should just pass it by. Earthquake safety is something we should be worrying about. El grande is coming. The USGS now thinks it's a high probability before 2030. I think we should do whatever we can to make the City safer. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 19 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Thank you, Bob. Can I have a Motion on the Consent Calendar? Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I want to register a no vote. Mayor Scharff: On? Council Member Tanaka: Item 8. Mayor Scharff: Item 8, fair enough. I'll move the Consent Calendar. Council Member Wolbach: Second. Mayor Scharff: Seconded by Council Member Wolbach. MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to approve Agenda Item Numbers 6-9. 6. Resolution 9719 Entitled, “Resolution of the Council of the City of Palo Alto Declaring Weeds to be a Public Nuisance and Setting January 22, 2018 for a Public Hearing for Objections to Proposed Weed Abatement. 7. Ordinance 5419 Entitled, “Ordinance of the Council of the City of Palo Alto of the Council of the City of Palo Alto Repealing Chapter 9.17 (Personal Cultivation of Marijuana) of Title 9 (Public Peace, Morals and Safety) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code; Repealing Ordinance No. 4422; and Amending Chapters 18.04 (Definitions) and 18.42 (Standards for Special Uses) of Title 18 (Zoning) to Prohibit Medical Cannabis Dispensaries and Prohibit Commercial Cannabis Activities, Except for Deliveries. Environmental Assessment: The Ordinance is Exempt in Accordance With Section 15061(b)(3) of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines (FIRST READING: October 30, 2017 PASSED: 9-0). 8. Ordinance 5420 Entitled, “Ordinance of the Council of the City of Palo Alto Updating the Fiscal Year 2018 Municipal Fee Schedule to Adjust Development Services Department Fees (FIRST READING: October 2, 2017 PASSED: 7-1 Tanaka no, Scharff Absent). 9. Direct Staff to Return to Policy and Services Committee With Amendments to the Municipal Code for the Regulation of Seismic Vulnerable Buildings (Continued From October 16, 2017). Mayor Scharff: That passes unanimously with Council Member Tanaka registering a no vote on Item Number 8. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 20 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 MOTION FOR AGENDA ITEM NUMBERS 6, 7, 9 PASSED: 9-0 MOTION FOR AGENDA ITEM NUMBER 8 PASSED: 8-1 Tanaka no Mayor Scharff: Do you wish to speak? Council Member Tanaka: I spoke on it before. Basically, I don't agree with the fees. Mayor Scharff: Fair enough. Action Items 10. PUBLIC HEARING: Adoption of a Resolution Certifying the Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Comprehensive Plan Update; a Resolution Adopting Findings Pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Related to Significant Environmental Impacts, Mitigation Measures and Alternatives; a Statement of Overriding Considerations and a Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program; and a Resolution Adopting the Updated Comprehensive Plan Dated June 30, 2017 With Desired Corrections and Amendments, Which Comprehensively Updates and Supersedes the City's 1998-2010 Comprehensive Plan, Except for the Housing Element Adopted in November 2014. (This is the Third Public Hearing; the First Hearing was on October 23, 2017, Continued to October 30, 2017 and Further Continued to November 13, 2017.). Mayor Scharff: Now, we move to Item Number 10. Do we have a Staff presentation? James Keene, City Manager: Yes, we do. Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you, Mayor Scharff and Council Members. I'm Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. I'm joined this evening once again by Elaine Costello and Joanna Jansen to my right and Elena Lee, who's in the audience. This is the third meeting that we've held on the Comprehensive Plan (Comp. Plan) in recent days. We wanted to review for you briefly what's available in your Packet this evening and talk a little bit about the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), which is going to be the subject of your deliberations tonight, and then set the stage for the remaining actions to adopt the Comprehensive Plan Update. The materials that are available in your Packet this evening include Attachment A, which consolidates all of the changes that this Council has worked through in the last couple of meetings and would like to make to the text of the Comprehensive Plan Update draft that you have before you. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 21 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 We've also included or sent you today an at-Places memo with some additional changes. This includes a response to your request that Staff recommend three additional community indicators. We've also included in that at-places m0emo some recommendations regarding additional text changes in response to comments we received from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the Santa Clara Valley Water District as well as some additional explanatory text about the City's utilities. We have in Attachments B, C, and D the three Resolutions that you'll be considering this evening. Also not listed here in Attachment E, you have a copy of the SFPUC's letter. There's some additional public comments attached in Attachment F. In Attachment G, we drafted some responses to comments we heard on the EIR at one of your earlier meetings. Just to look at the subject of community indicators. If you recall, the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) recommended a whole list of community indicators, and we included that complete list in your Staff Report. At the last meeting, the City Council decided to include five of these in the Comprehensive Plan Update, those related to greenhouse gas emissions, Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) or vehicle miles traveled per capita, jobs/housing balance, below market rate units, and progress towards Housing Element goals. You asked us to recommend three more, and we are doing that tonight. We're recommending traffic volumes on City streets, specifically volumes at ten representative local intersections. We're recommending availability of parks measured as a percent of residents who live within 1/2 mile of a City park, and school enrollment, which is something we've been talking about collectively through this process. We can talk about those more later on this evening. Tonight's goals are really to continue the public hearing, taking testimony from anyone who has not already addressed you on this subject; then, we're asking you to certify the EIR, and then make the required findings and adopt the Comprehensive Plan Update. Just to step back a minute and talk about the role of an EIR generally. You all know these get to be weighty tomes by the time they're finished. They're complicated documents. It's important to recognize, however, that they're not decision documents. EIRs don't make a decision or force a decision one way or the other. They're meant to be informative and to help you make a decision that must weigh the contents of the EIR but also all of the community input and other sources of information that have been available to you throughout the process. There are specific standards of adequacy for an EIR. I'm not going to read this whole thing. Suffice it to say there's a whole body of law and case law around EIRs and their adequacy. We believe as Staff and the consultants that what we're presenting to you this evening for certification is an EIR that meets all of these tests. If we had to summarize the big picture and what the EIR is telling us, it's a document that's been developed concurrently with the Plan to identify and mitigate environmental impacts. The Plan itself includes a number of mitigation measures that grew out of FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 22 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 the EIR; we'll talk about that a little more in a minute. We've analyzed the cumulative impacts in the year 2030. The conclusion is really that all the impacts can be mitigated save four of them, and we'll talk about those again in a minute as well. In terms of the mitigation measures, it's really Attachment C where you find the roadmap to how the mitigation measures we've identified in the EIR are being implemented in the Plan. Most of them are being implemented through the Plan itself. This is very common with projects like adoption of a General Plan because General Plans are intended to be used. They are intended to inform decision-making for years to come about development projects, about capital investments, and other things that the City does in the course of its business. It's very typical to have the Plan include policies that mitigate potential environmental impacts, and that's what is happening here. In terms of cumulative impacts, we've been asked in a number of comments and a number of hearings about how the EIR considers the General Use Permit (GUP) and how can you move forward with an EIR that was started before the GUP was on the table and how does this all work. The bottom line is that we looked carefully at this issue when it was raised and analyzed it in detail in the Final EIR (FEIR). Basically, what we've done is base the EIR on growth projections rather than on any list of projects. If we'd done it on a list of projects, that list would have been created back in 2014, and it would be out of date. What we did, instead, is look at regional projections, and we've confirmed in our review in the Final EIR that those regional projections are large enough to encompass the growth that is currently planned in Palo Alto and the surrounding communities, including the GUP application. Again, we can talk about that further after receiving your questions if you like. The significant and unavoidable impacts we've identified are all due really to Palo Alto's place in a growing region. They relate to air quality, traffic and transit. I'd like to make the point that we're not throwing our hands up at these and saying, "Nothing can be done." All of these are mitigated to the extent we can mitigate them with what we think are pretty aggressive and far-reaching measures that will improve to the extent we can the issues and the impacts that have been identified. There are also a number of issues that cross the line from California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) issues and EIR issues to more policy concerns and issues that are appropriate for consideration in the Comprehensive Plan Update itself. We wanted to share with you some information about a few of these and talk about how they're addressed in the EIR versus how they're addressed in the Plan. This came up in some of the testimony we've heard over the last few meetings. Noise is a good example, airport noise. The EIR looked carefully at the Palo Alto airport and operations at that airport and also at land use compatibility and has mitigation related to controlling the land uses around the airport to make sure that we don't create inadvertently an incompatibility down the line. The Plan is broader than that, and the Plan talks about overflights from the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 23 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 regional airports and is much broader and, we think, responds to many of the concerns that the Council has been hearing over the last year or two. Dewatering, similarly we have an analysis and mitigation measures in the EIR that are necessarily constrained by the significance threshold that we used for our analysis. They focus on impacts to groundwater resources, but that's not our only concern here in Palo Alto. We're also concerned about impacts on adjacent properties when dewatering happens. There's a policy in the Comprehensive Plan to address that impact. Schools in the EIR and the Plan is another example. We address schools and school enrollments in the EIR to the extent we can. There is a State law that governs mitigation of school enrollment impacts, so we're constrained in that regard. At your direction, we've included in the Plan a policy that directly addresses this issue. Overall, all of us, the Council, Staff, consultants, the CAC members, the Planning & Transportation Commission (PTC) members, have listened carefully to the community concerns, both those that made it into the technical EIR analysis and those that made it into the Plan policies. We've analyzed the potential CEQA impacts in-depth and presented the data and analysis in the EIR that will support the Council's decision. We recognize that that decision will not be informed only by the EIR, but by all the testimony you've received. We think the updated Comprehensive Plan tightens the current limit on office development, strengthens the City's commitment to housing, adds new policies to address impacts like the concerns we just talked about, and actually improves the no-project scenario that was analyzed as Scenario 1. Adopting the Plan this evening will do more to advance the policy objectives that we've been talking about over these many months, actually many years, than would just to stay still and do nothing and take no action. This evening, our recommendation is to adopt a Motion that effectively will adopt the three Resolutions before you tonight, the one certifying the Final EIR, one making required CEQA findings, and one adopting the Comprehensive Plan Update itself. In the course of that, we hope you'll acknowledge and adopt Attachment A, which includes all the changes that you've asked to make into the Plan as well as the At-Places Memo with some additional changes we're recommending this evening, and any final changes that this Council would like to make to the Plan. With that, we're available to answer all of your questions. Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much for that. We're now going to have public comment. I want to remind people that if you've spoken already, you can't speak again. We said that at the last Council meeting, and I think we said it at the Council meeting before that on this. I just wanted to reiterate that. If you've put in but you spoke before, you can't speak again tonight. Do we have any public speakers that have not spoken before? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 24 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Beth Minor, City Clerk: Not at this time. Most have been heard at the 23rd or the 30th. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, you have a concern? Council Member Holman: Just a point of order and clarification. This is not a continuation. This was a separately noticed meeting. I had not understood that people who'd spoken before couldn't speak again because … Mayor Scharff: We did announce it both times. Council Member Holman: Not everybody was here to hear that announcement. Could the City Attorney clarify? Molly Stump, City Attorney: We had a meeting that was continued, but it doesn't require the continuation function. The item was the same. It was placed on the Agenda twice. The public was notified they'd have a full opportunity to speak to the item, and they could choose which night they wanted to do so. Council Member Holman: That was the two prior meetings. This is a different meeting. Ms. Stump: It's the same item, and it was announced at the opening of the public hearing on the first item that there would be one opportunity to speak. Many people did, and that was their opportunity to speak. The Council should consider what they heard all three of those nights. Mayor Scharff: Joe Hirsch has not spoken. Public Hearing continued at 6:24 P.M. Joe Hirsch: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll try to make these brief. How much time do I have? Mayor Scharff: Three minutes. Sorry, Joe. Two minutes because I gave everyone else 2 minutes in the other hearings. It's 2 minutes. Mr. Hirsch: There is language in the current Comprehensive Plan that states it encourages commercial enterprise but not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods. That language is not included in the draft Plan before you tonight. I urge you to put it back in. If I understand it, the Comp. Plan supports the development if implemented of roughly 3 million square feet of nonresidential development. At the old rate of 250 square feet per employee, that would mean 12,000 new employees. If at the new rate of 150 square feet per employee, that would mean 20,000 additional FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 25 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 employees in our area. That seems like absolute craziness. We can't tolerate that. There's no infrastructure to support that. The worst problem we have is traffic, traffic, traffic. I drove over to Oakland the other night. It was supposed to be 50 minutes; it turned out to be 75 minutes. Coming here tonight, coming up El Camino in the south direction, we had stop-and- go traffic from Arastradero Road all the way up Hansen Way, solid, blocked cars. The EIR doesn't mitigate that. I believe it said it can't mitigate that. How can you as responsible leaders of our community allow this area to be degraded in that particular manner without any mitigations? We want bold leaders. Leaders have to say that we will protect the residential and nature and character of Palo Alto. Why don't you do that? That is what people want. That is what people want throughout the Bay Area. Everyone is talking about it. Every residential area is complaining about it. We are over-built. We are taking one of the most beautiful areas in the United States and degrading it. Please don't do that by approving the Draft EIR (DEIR) and the Comprehensive Plan. Mayor Scharff: That's it for speakers. As we go through the process, I thought we should talk a little bit about how we'll proceed tonight. The first decision we have to make is about certification of the EIR. That's legally required that we take that up first. We're going to have to take that up first, and that's Item 2 in the recommendation section of the Staff Report. What we're basically saying with that is, as Staff said, the EIR has been prepared in accordance with the law. I thought maybe, Sandy, you would like to explain a little bit about what people are doing for the audience and for Council Members so that we have a clear picture of what this means. Sandy Lee, Assistant City Attorney: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Sandy Lee, City Attorney's Office. CEQA requires that prior to approval of a project for which an EIR has been prepared the decision-making body has to certify three things. One of which, as you noted, is that the EIR has been completed in compliance with CEQA. Second, that the decision-making body has reviewed and considered the document. Third, the document reflects the independent judgment and analysis of the lead agency in the City of Palo Alto. Now, addressing the first of those requirements, that the EIR has been completed in compliance with CEQA, what that essentially means is to confirm that the EIR has been prepared in compliance with the procedural and substantive requirements of CEQA. There are a number of procedural requirements including the issuance of a Notice of Preparation to begin the process; providing that notice to responsible agencies and other stakeholders; to hold a scoping meeting; to issue a Draft EIR with a Notice of Availability and a public circulation period of 45 days; and then to prepare a Final EIR that responds to all comments received during the circulation period and provides any needed clarifications and text changes to the Draft FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 26 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 EIR. There are also substantive requirements. That includes that the EIR must describe the environmental setting or the baseline, the existing conditions essentially at the time that the Notice of Preparation is issued. The EIR must describe the project that's proposed, and it must analyze all of the potential environmental effects of the project, identify mitigation measures that could potentially feasibly mitigate any of those impacts. Another requirement is that a reasonable range of alternatives to the proposed project be evaluated. Mayor Scharff: Thank you very much for that. Do you all know Sandy Lee? Sandy works in the City Attorney's Office. Ms. Stump: Sandy's an Assistant City Attorney in the City Attorney's Office. She came to us from the City of San Jose, where she was their lead CEQA and environmental lawyer. We're very happy to have her here in that same capacity in our office. Mayor Scharff: I am going to allow it. Shani Kleinhaus, you haven't spoken to this. You did just put in a card. I'm going to break and let you speak. Shani Kleinhaus: Appreciate it. Thank you. Shani Kleinhaus. I was on the CAC for the General Plan. I wanted to talk about the EIR because I felt it was pretty much too complicated, too difficult to comment on. The time for commenting closed more or less at the same time that the Plan was published, which means that the people who really wanted to put comments in didn't have the full information. I feel that the Stanford GUP should have been analyzed in the EIR, not as original thing but as a specific thing to Palo Alto and should have been included in the cumulative impacts in the EIR. I also just want to say that when an EIR has unmitigable impacts to air quality, for you to approve that, there is something that the community should be very concerned with. I know it's a problem everywhere. Every project has overriding considerations on air quality, but we see this continuously in the entire region. I know it's not just us, but I would implore you don't approve anything that has significant and unavoidable impacts to our air quality. Thank you. Public Hearing closed at 6:32 P.M. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. After we do Item Number 2, we would take up Items 3 and 4 in the recommendations together. After that we'll basically be done. No, no, wrong. We'll take up Items 3 and 4, at which point that contains the decisions to adopt the CEQA findings based on the EIR with the Resolutions in Attachment C and the decision to adopt the Comp. Plan itself with a Resolution in Attachment D. Attachment D references all the changes we've already agreed on, that are listed in Attachment A. Plus Staff is FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 27 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 asking us to also include the changes recommended in our At-Places Memo. What I was thinking to kick this off is because Council Members may have questions that overlap these items and since we have to take Item 2 first, I thought it would be a good idea if we basically had a round of questions where Council Members can ask questions regarding any of these items that they feel they need answered right up front. I think that might be helpful that we do that. I'm going to ask that we limit those questions, if Council Members can limit their time to roughly 5 minutes. We need to … Vice Mayor Kniss: Questions and comments or … Mayor Scharff: No, just questions. I think it's really just questions. Once we've got the questions, we'll take up the certification of the EIR. As I said, then we'll turn our attention to the CEQA findings and the Comp. Plan adoption, and we'll consider those two actions together. That will be the time for any Council Members to propose final Amendments or additions to the list of Comp. Plan changes in Attachment A. In the event that we can get through all of that by, say, 10:30 P.M., then we can take up Item 6, which is the Implementation Plan and direction to Staff on that. If not, we'll defer this discussion to another time. Item 6, just Item 6. That's correct. Tom. Council Member DuBois: When are we going to come back to the community indicator discussion? Mayor Scharff: That's part of Number A, so that would be as part of 3 and 4 together. That's when that comes in. Do you have a question about the process? Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: What I want to ask is two things. What exactly does it mean for Item 2, what falls within the certification of the EIR and what doesn't? The next question I want to ask is what exactly happens if either the EIR or the CEQA findings fail to pass. I don't know if this is the right time to ask that or should I ask it later. Mayor Scharff: Go ahead. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Filseth. We will not be able to proceed with consideration of the Comp. Plan adoption if we can't certify the EIR and the CEQA findings likewise. It's part of the decision to move forward with the Comp. Plan, to adopt mitigation measures and a mitigation monitoring program. We really need to do both of those things before we can consider Comp. Plan adoption. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 28 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Filseth: What would then happen if they didn't pass? You say we need to move forward, but we wouldn't be able to move forward. What would then happen? Ms. Gitelman: I think we would request the Council to specify what deficiencies they wanted us to remedy. We'd have to go off and do that additional analysis or create that remedy and come back to you at a later date. As we mentioned in the Staff Report, if that exercise would extend past January 1, there's a new State law, so there's a whole new section of the Comp. Plan itself that we would have to prepare for your consideration at a later date. That law does not apply if the Comp. Plan is adopted before December 31st. Council Member Filseth: Essentially, what you're saying, if I understood it, is the adoption of the new Comp. Plan would be dramatically delayed. What are the ramifications associated with that, other than we all obviously spent a lot of time on it? Would we default … Ms. Gitelman: That's the primary ramification. We would spend more time on it. Council Member Filseth: Would we revert to the old one? Mr. Keene: We default to the existing Plan, which we've stated we think the work we've done, the community and the Council and Staff has done, is an improvement over the existing Plan. We'd have a poorer Plan, and we would potentially have a whole new round of additional work that we would then need to do in that post-January 1st timeframe. Council Member Filseth: Do we run afoul of legal problems with the State if that happens? Ms. Gitelman: I don't think we're in greater risk than we are right now. Our Plan is outdated. It was intended to sunset in the year 2010. The longer it takes, the more out of date we are. I don't know that it's more than that. I should say that—this is in direct response to Mr. Hirsch's comments. He implied that there was no mitigation for traffic and that traffic would get worse if the Council adopted this Plan. The reverse is really true on both things. The Plan is full of mitigation measures that attempt to address traffic and related impacts. We think the traffic ultimately will be better with adoption of this Plan than it would be if we just let the current Plan bumble along to the year 2030. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 29 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Filseth: If the EIR or the CEQA findings fail to pass, can we even revert to the old one because doesn't it require an environmental impact review? Ms. Gitelman: No. The old one—the current Comp. Plan is currently in effect, and it would remain in effect until replaced. Council Member Filseth: Because it has one already that was done many years ago. It's just way out of date. What we would be in violation of is our City Charter or something like that that says we're going to do one every however many years it's been. Is that right? Mr. Keene: It wouldn't be in the City Charter. The expectation under the State law and direction would be that we would routinely update it on the cycle that would have met if we had done it initially in 2010. Mayor Scharff: Just to clarify, Council Member Filseth's question, what you're not saying, though, is we could just say, "Why don't we just go with the old Comp. Plan?" If we don't certify it, we just give up and we're back to that. We have a duty under State law, don't we, to pass a new Comp. Plan at some point. Ms. Gitelman: The State envisions that you will update your General Plan on a regular basis. We do have an obligation to do that at some point. There is no law that says exactly when you have to do it. The longer and more out of date our Plan gets, the greater risk we run that we make a decision on a capital improvement or on a project, and someone uses the current Comp. Plan and its status as a way to challenge a decision. Mayor Scharff: Let Sandra jump in. Ms. Lee: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. State law does require that every City maintain an updated General Plan. To the extent that our General Plan horizon date was 2010, it would behoove the City to move forward with a General Plan in the nearer term if the City believes that the circumstances have changed since 1998 to 2010, which is the timeframe of the existing General Plan. Mayor Scharff: Sandra, there was some confusion, I think, when Council Member Filseth asked the question about not having to do a new Comp. Plan for the current Comp. Plan. If we were to instead vote to adopt the existing Comp. Plan for the next 10 years, wouldn't you have to do an EIR for that? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 30 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Ms. Lee: I don't think the City—we would re-adopt the existing Comp. Plan. It would just continue to exist. Do you mean to reaffirm or extend the horizon date of the existing Comp. Plan? Mayor Scharff: No. That was what Council Member Filseth—say we decided we like the old Comp. Plan. I would assume we would have to do a new EIR to see what the effects of adopting basically a new Comp. Plan that's the same as the old Comp. Plan. Ms. Lee: Most likely you would just let the existing Comp. Plan remain in effect. Council Member Filseth: I understand. The main two downsides of that would be, first of all, we'd be stuck with the old Plan instead of the newer one and, second, we would be out of—we'd have a really old one and the State says we're not supposed to have a really old. It's unclear exactly what the ramifications of that are. We would be sort of out of compliance with the State. Did I say that right? Ms. Lee: If the circumstances haven't changed, then I would say that we would not be out of compliance with the State mandate. The State does expect that cities evaluate their General Plans and determine whether or not they are out of date periodically. I think the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, (OPR), advises that the period 15-20 years or so. Ms. Gitelman: OPR says every community should update their General Plan every 5 years, which is completely unbelievable and needs to be changed. That's their expectation; it's not a law. This Council and the Councils that have preceded you did identify a number of circumstances that have changed in the community. Climate change wasn't even on the radar screen when the current Comp. Plan was adopted. That's one example. Any number of other examples. There have been some changes in circumstances. We feel, given the energy and the attention focused on this project for many, many years now, it is incumbent on the Council to move forward with the Plan. I hope we can address any questions or concerns you have on the environmental document and the findings this evening so you feel free to do that. Council Member Filseth: I understand that. I think we need to understand what the solution space is here. If the answer is we just have to do it, then why are we bothering to vote on the EIR and the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR)? Thank you very much. Mayor Scharff: Continuing on with questions Council Members may have. I have lights from Council Member Kou. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 31 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Kou: I'm just trying to understand whether the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR)—at this point, what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is if we don't adopt and certify—if we don't certify the FEIR and adopt the Comp. Plan tonight, we have to revert back to the current, 1998 Comp. Plan and we can't move forward—we have to adopt it for the next 10 years or 15 years or we can still go back and review the draft one that we're looking at? Ms. Gitelman: If you don't take action this evening, the existing Comprehensive Plan would remain in effect until we brought back a revised version that you could reconsider and adopt. Council Member Kou: We're not stuck with the current 1998 outdated Plan? Ms. Gitelman: That's right. You'd have to tell us what additional changes or remedies you were looking for, and we would have to bring those back. Council Member Filseth: If that were to happen, if we were to do what Council Member Kou just said, on the other hand, wouldn't we have to do another EIR? If we did that, is there any reason to think it wouldn't be any different coming back this next time around? Ms. Gitelman: I think my colleagues and I think this EIR reaches conclusions that any EIR on a Plan of this nature would reach, given the thresholds that have been adopted and that are used in Palo Alto. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Staff, for the presentation, and to all the speakers we've had over the past three meetings. Two quick questions just staying focused on Item Number 2, certifying the Final EIR. Does Staff believe we've done all of the procedural requirements, the Notice of Preparation, the scoping, the availability of the Draft EIR, and written responses to our questions? Ms. Gitelman: Yes, we do. Just responding to Ms. Kleinhaus' comment—she talked about the public review period. We actually exceeded the requirement in the law by quite a bit. We had a 124-day review period on the Draft EIR and a 49-day period, maybe more, on the supplement to the Draft. We've been engaging in a lot of review, and matter exceeded all of the State procedural requirements. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Second question. On the substantive requirements, does Staff believe we have met those requirements in terms of describing the existing infrastructure, describing the Plan, the proposed FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 32 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Plan, significant environmental effects, and the contents of the EIR include things such as commenters, comment letters, text changes, mitigations, and an analysis of those mitigations? Ms. Gitelman: Yes, we've done all of those things. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Those are all my questions, Mr. Mayor. I would be ready to certify this. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm not sure how to ask a question when I know the answer. Let me explore it. Could you discuss air quality a little and the fact that someone has alluded to the fact that it's pretty terrible and that there's no mitigation planned? Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Vice Mayor Kniss. To your last point, we do include in the EIR and in one of the Resolutions before you this evening mitigation measures to address air quality impacts. It's not that there's no mitigation there. We did find a significant and unavoidable impact really because our region is in nonconformance or noncompliance—nonattainment for a couple of the pollutants of concern. Because the region is in nonattainment and we're doing a Plan and the way we interpret the guidelines from the Air District, we have to find that we're contributing to a significant impact. There's just no way around it. We are proposing mitigation. We do think this is a responsible Plan in the ways that it addresses air pollutants from City activities. Vice Mayor Kniss: Thanks. Although it gets into the comment phase, I have seldom seen a group work as hard as the Air Board does to maintain that level and has particularly struggled with it over the past year. Thanks for your answer. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: To follow onto that, that's the regional impacts. Palo Alto does, however, contribute to the regional impact when it comes to air quality. How do other entities address in terms of impacts and mitigations their contributions to air quality in this case since that's what we're talking about? It is acknowledged that we are contributing to it. Yet, there are things that it seems like we're not doing that we could be doing that could at least lessen that impact. How do other entities do that? Ms. Gitelman: We should make a distinction here between plans and projects. The Air District disseminates guidelines for how CEQA review FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 33 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 should be conducted, and there's a way that agencies are required to review projects. In the case of projects, you apply a whole suite of mitigation measures, and you general get to the point where you can mitigate all the impacts. The way the Air District requires you review plans—this issue of regional attainment comes into effect, and you play all the same mitigation measures. We're putting in place policies that will require all of the same measures be implemented whether it's for a city's capital improvement project or for a development project that comes before the Council for review or any decision-maker for review. In the case of plans, it's this regional nonattainment status that results in the significant and unavoidable impact. I don't know whether Joanna has anything to add. Joanna Jansen, PlaceWorks: Sure. Thank you, Hillary. I'm Joanna Jansen from PlaceWorks, the City's Comp. Plan consultant. We helped prepare both the Comp. Plan and the EIR. We do a lot of General Plan work throughout the Bay Area and California. I would say the mitigation measures here in the Bay Area tend to be relatively consistent across jurisdictions because of the Air District's work to promulgate an appropriate range of mitigation measures. On the General Plan EIRs that I work on, it is quite common to conclude that any additional growth in this region because of the existing nonattainment would result in a significant and unavoidable impact despite including the range of mitigation measures that we have here in Palo Alto, which again are very much consistent with what we see in a lot of other particularly urbanized, built-out communities that don't have a lot of space to expand into greenfield areas. Ms. Gitelman: If I can just add one more thought. All of the air quality mitigations are available for your review on Packet Page 256 through 262. There are several pages there of mitigation measures related to air quality. They result in adoption or inclusion in the Plan itself of any number of policies to address this particular issue. Council Member Holman: Trying not to get into comments. Even though the measure is by the Board, if there are mitigations we would like to add this evening that are absent, that could at least lessen our contribution to the regional impact, what would Staff respond to that? Ms. Gitelman: At the time we discuss the Resolutions in Attachment C and D, the CEQA findings and the Plan itself, if Council Members have suggested amendments to the Plan that would implement additional mitigation measure, we would be happy to hear those. Mr. Keene: We'd take that up under Recommendation 3 and 4. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 34 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Holman: I'm talking about mitigations. Obviously there are things listed as mitigations that are things in the Plan. If I wanted to add mitigations, they would obviously have to be reflected in the Plan as well as the EIR or they could be referenced in both of those. Why not as additional mitigations to the FEIR? Ms. Gitelman: I'm saying that we would be happy to consider any mitigation measures that the Council wishes to add to the documents. Because the EIR is before us as a document, they would probably be included in one of the Resolutions, either the Resolution about the CEQA findings or the Plan itself. Council Member Holman: That's helpful. I was understanding there for a moment that it meant we'd have to go back and make changes to the Plan in order to get the mitigations in the FEIR. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: It's been a long process. I just want to ensure I understand it. The Final EIR was available at the end of August, August 30th. Do you know how many paper copies of that were given out? Ms. Gitelman: Off the top of my head, I don't know the answer to that. I can probably find out. It's been available as a link on our website, and we've made hard copies for Council Members and PTC members, libraries, our public counters. Council Member DuBois: Do you know how many people accessed it online? Did I understand you right that there were 49 days to comment on essentially that preferred scenario at that point with the Final EIR? Ms. Gitelman: No. The Final EIR was available from August 30th—I haven't counted up the days to today. Essentially, the law only provides for a 10- day period between dissemination of a Final EIR and the decision. In this case, we've far exceeded what the law would require. Council Member DuBois: I saw there was a letter from the Water District with some modifications. Does Staff think those are good modifications? Ms. Gitelman: You're asking specifically about the modifications to the EIR itself? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. There's a letter from the Santa Clara Water District. Ms. Gitelman: We looked at those earlier today. Let me get back to you in a minute. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 35 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Elaine Costello, Management Partners Consultant: Elaine Costello. I've been working on the Comp. Plan with the City Staff. We did go over the letter from—and responded to it. In the At-Places, we included some changes to the policies to respond to their comments. In terms of the EIR, they just had a question about how we generated the forecasting for water supply. We got back to them and answered that we used a model that sometimes there was a difference in the numbers because we were responding to the different scenarios, but they were based on the same numbers. We responded to them on that comment. They were not asking for a change; they just had a question. Council Member DuBois: These changes to natural environment are from their letter? Ms. Costello: From their request for policies. They were entirely consistent with—there were wording changes that are entirely consistent with the policies as they came out of the CAC and the Planning Commission, so we just incorporated them. Council Member DuBois: Thanks. Reading through this Cumulative Impact Report. How do we think about the Stanford GUP? How much of the 2030 forecast does the Stanford GUP use up? We're forecasting 460 jobs increase by 2030 at Stanford. Does that match up with the GUP? Ms. Gitelman: The best way to think about this issue is to look at the projections we've used for Palo Alto and the surrounding communities that I showed on the slide. It's hard to—we always find this challenging in EIRs. Some people use a list of projects and are vulnerable immediately to challenge because they forgot something on their list or something changes on their list. When you're doing an EIR like this EIR, you tend to use regional projections. You're using what Association of Bay Area Government (ABAG) produces, what you as an agency produce, and projecting jobs and households out to the horizon year. You hopefully do that big enough that any new projects that come along will fall under that umbrella. What we looked at here—this is drawn, I think, from the Final EIR master response— is that we have assumed an amount of growth in Palo Alto and surrounding communities sufficiently large enough in 2030 to encompass what is proposed in the GUP as well as other projects that are proposed in the region. As you know, the GUP is proposing 2.3 million square feet of academic space, any number of new housing units. We got big enough numbers here that we think that is sufficiently addressed. Council Member DuBois: If I read this right, we are already over the housing unit allocation before the Comp. Plan is adopted? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 36 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Ms. Gitelman: Yeah. I wouldn't look at housing alone. I would look at housing and jobs. I think the one compensates for the other quite a bit here. We overestimated in terms of jobs in the analysis by quite a bit. Council Member DuBois: Though Stanford's in the middle of Palo Alto, it seems like we way underestimated jobs. We were forecasting 460 jobs for Stanford. Ms. Gitelman: If you're looking at that table that was in the master response, that's what was in the original analysis. We're basically being totally transparent. Here's what we had originally assumed, but then we went on to do this analysis of the projections. We found that they're large enough to encompass what is now proposed by Stanford. I should say that Stanford has an obligation here too. Their Draft EIR is on the street, and we're reviewing that Draft EIR to make sure they included our stuff. They knew about what we were doing when they started their analysis. We didn't know what they were going to propose when we started ours. Council Member DuBois: Again, we're already seeing more housing units than the Plan assumed in 2030. We're talking about trying to increase housing even more beyond that. Doesn't it seem significantly beyond what's in the EIR in terms of housing units? Ms. Gitelman: What we're looking at is the regional projections of households and jobs together, kind of a level of activity that we expect to be occurring in 2030. We think that level of activity is sufficiently large enough to encompass what is currently on the table at Stanford and in all the surrounding communities and Palo Alto. Council Member DuBois: I'm looking at the 22,000 versus the 25. It says 25 proposed as of today. By 2030, we're saying there's 22. Ms. Gitelman: I'm suggesting that you look at both columns, housing and jobs together. Combined, that's what creates the level of activity that we analyze in traffic analysis, in air quality analysis, in noise analysis. Together, combined, jobs and housing are sufficiently large enough to encompass what is currently proposed. Council Member DuBois: I'm not sure if I understand that conclusion. Maybe you could help me understand it a little bit better. Ms. Gitelman: Intensity of use—we could have just translated both of those numbers into an intensity of use measurement of some kind. The intensity of use we assumed and analyzed is larger than what we think the intensity of use that's currently proposed. Another thing you should know—we point FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 37 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 this out in the Final EIR—is that the GUP horizon year goes to 2035. A lot of the plans and projects we're seeing proposed in adjacent communities right now, we think, may not build out entirely until well after the horizon year of this Comp. Plan. Council Member DuBois: I understand that. On the transportation impacts, what options weren't considered to mitigate—what else could we do? Were there mitigations that were just rejected? Ms. Gitelman: We didn't reject any mitigation measures as infeasible as far as I recall. We put a lot of effort into crafting that mitigation measure Trans 1A. It's actually shown on Packet Page 278. It basically establishes a quantitative threshold for trip reduction, Transportation Demand Management (TDM) plans, based on what geographic area of the City you're in, and calls on the City to update its traffic impact fees so that developers are paying an impact fee for any trips that they can't eliminate through those TDM plans. We're trying to really emphasize and improve on our TDM plans, their goals, their performance measures, monitoring, and penalties, and then update our impact fees for any trips that are not reduced. Council Member DuBois: We don't really say where those fees go, right? Is there a point when the impact is so large that you would have to consider building new roads or widening roads? Ms. Gitelman: Impact fees by definition are used for new capital facilities, so we'll be looking at what facilities could aid and address some of the congestion and delay-related impacts that we've identified. We will do that and, in fact, we've been working on a nexus study that we'll be bringing forward to the Finance Committee and the Council as soon as we can. Council Member DuBois: Was redoing the road network considered as a mitigation in any way? Ms. Gitelman: What we would include is any specific capital improvements at the intersections where we found there would be significant impacts. If you look at the intersections we analyzed, if there was an intersection where adding a turn lane or doing something specific could address the impact, that would be addressed. We haven't proposed generally any massive increases in roadway capacity because there are plan policies that tend to discourage that. Council Member DuBois: I asked this last time, and I wanted a more thorough response. I understand the State CEQA discussion around school impacts. Could the City have a policy that plans for school expansion that FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 38 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 goes in excess of the State CEQA requirement? I know we have the one policy that says we'll talk to the School District. Ms. Gitelman: I think the Council could add to that policy, either add a supporting program or add another policy that talks about working with the School District on school siting criteria and identifying additional sites when that's necessary. We can definitely talk about those things. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Now, we return to Council. I need a Motion to approve the— that's how we're going to start it; let me do this right—adopt a Resolution, Attachment B. I know, Adrian, you wanted to make that Motion. Council Member Fine: So moved, Mr. Mayor. This is Number 2, adopting Resolution, Attachment B, certifying that Council has reviewed and considered the Comp. Plan Final Environmental Impact Report, and the Final EIR has been completed in compliance with the CEQA Act, and the Final EIR reflects the independent judgment and analysis of the City of Palo Alto. Vice Mayor Kniss: Second. MOTION: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to adopt a Resolution certifying that the Council has reviewed and considered the Comprehensive Plan Update Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) dated August 30, 2017; the Final EIR has been completed in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA); and the Final EIR reflects the independent judgment and analysis of the City of Palo Alto. Mayor Scharff: Would you like to speak to your Motion? Council Member Fine: Just a reminder. This is not talking about the Comp. Plan yet. This is just saying that we have done the Final EIR according to the CEQA guidelines. My questions earlier were completely focused on the substantive and procedural issues there. I'm convinced that we have done this. I'd like to see us get this issue done and move onto the meat of tonight's discussion. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Instead of commenting on that, I'd like to comment on the work that Staff has done, that everyone else has put into this including the CAC. I know there are PTC members here tonight. This has been an extraordinarily long process. I very much hope that we will vote on this, on Number 2, so that we can move forward. Even though we would revert back FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 39 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 to the original Plan from 1998 that was started in 1990, the new Plan reflects far more comprehensively what this Council has espoused over the last 2 or 3 years. I would urge us as a body to vote for this. I hope we'll vote for it unanimously. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I'm struggling to do this. I do want to acknowledge the long and diligent efforts of Staff and the CAC and everybody who's worked on this. It has been a long project. I have some concerns that there just seem to be some things not considered and, in some areas, actually some vagaries. One of the phrases that's used, just as an example, in a number of places—one was just given on Packet Page 278 for Program T-1.2.2, formalize TDM requirements by Ordinance and require new developments above a certain size threshold. I know that that's the— excuse me. The FEIR isn't doing that, but it gives no guidance really as to what a threshold would be. There are other mitigations that talk about monitoring and reporting plans for construction noise levels of larger development projects. Again, there's no guidance on that. One of the mitigations talks about—I didn't find it here; I've got a lot of stuff marked here—diesel vehicles arriving at a project site at the 100-trip level. I asked what was the basis for that, and it was using the Stanford Medical Center as the basis for that. That's a really, really large project. That's what I understood anyway in terms of how that was considered. It seems like a really high one. Having to do with—I'll just cherry pick a few things here. Air quality, I don't know if—people have talked about the air quality and how it's a regional impact and it is. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, you're talking to items in Item Number 3, the mitigations, I think. Now, we're looking at whether or not we have the legal sufficiency in terms of the process. I feel like you're going into items in the next section. I just thought we should bring the discussion back to whether or not we have the legal sufficiency here and whether or not they followed the procedures required by law. Not whether or not the mitigations are correct. Council Member Holman: What we have to do in order to do this is to determine the efficacy of the FEIR. What I'm saying is that I'm not sure … Mayor Scharff: No, I believe that's in Number 3, the efficacy. In Number 2, we're just basically looking to see whether or not we have met the—you can say it better than me, Sandy. Council Member Fine: The procedural and substantive. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 40 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Yes, the procedural and substantive of following the rules of the State law. Council Member Holman: Let me speak to one that has already been brought up and is, by what you're saying, a part of this. We do talk about the Stanford GUP and whether the Stanford GUP should have been considered here. I listened to—I've asked previously about the Stanford GUP and its consideration as part of this. What I think is different is we talk about the regional growth. What is different though with the Stanford GUP that maybe isn't known until more recently is the housing appears to be focused in Palo Alto. The 3,150 units, I think it is, I can't say that all of those are focused in Palo Alto, but the presenter for Stanford, the representative for Stanford, has said that rather than what was previously considered, that that housing would be created within a 6-mile radius of the plan area. Now, it's focused at transit areas, transit stations that service the plan area, which to me seems like Palo Alto. I think that's different than what has been considered. Ms. Gitelman: Through the Mayor, I think what Council Member Holman is referring to is the County's offer of Housing Mitigation Funds or funds to help with the development of housing off-campus. Of course, all of the housing that they're proposing as part of the GUP is in the unincorporated County on the Stanford campus. They are proposing, just as they did last time, to make funds available for housing construction off-campus. They're actually proposing to draw the limits of where those funds could be used wider than they were the last time, not making it a radius around the campus but allowing those funds to be used farther afield next to Caltrain stations and other transit-accessible areas, quite beyond Palo Alto. Council Member Holman: Maybe we heard that different. That wasn't how I understood it. I'll stop there for the moment. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I've said multiple times during this process that I wasn't really comfortable with the scenario process. I thought it was very confusing to the public. I don't think we really had a clear project and a preferred scenario until very late in the process. Through the Draft EIR, we continued to add scenarios and change scenarios. My concern is mainly around the definition of the project under CEQA. I do also have concerns about the Stanford GUP. The way I look at it, we've all exceeded what we forecast for them just with that one project. My concern around this is a clear definition of project. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 41 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: I'll speak briefly to it. Again, I want to reiterate that what we're doing here is we're doing two things. We are asking whether or not the EIR is sufficient as a matter of law, not as a matter of do we like this mitigation, do we like that mitigation, but as a matter of law. If you look on Page 6 of the Staff slides, that's really helpful. When you look at the California Code of Regulations and the CEQA Guidelines, it basically says the courts have looked not for perfection but for adequacy, completeness, and a good faith effort at full disclosure. I also think if you look at the procedural requirements, what you need to meet is—Sandy, if I say anything wrong, please correct me because not my area of expertise necessarily. We need to say we have a Notice of Preparation of the EIR describing the project, location, and probable environmental effects. That goes a little bit to Council Member DuBois' concern about what is the project. I want to ensure that we actually did that. That's a question. Can you answer yes or no? Ms. Lee: I was looking at our consultant, and she said yes, we had. Mayor Scharff: You need to have a scoping meeting, my understanding when you do this. Do we have a scoping meeting? You need to have the Notice of the availability of the Draft EIR and public notice and review period. Circulation is a minimum of 30-45 days. Did we meet that requirement? We did it twice, so we more than met that requirement. We need to prepare written responses to significant environmental issues raised in comments provided to agencies at least 10 days before the certification. Did we do that? That's my understanding of what the procedural requirements are. Therefore, it's my understanding that we met all the procedural requirements. There's some substantive requirements, which basically describe existing local and regional physical, environmental, describe the existing infrastructure, describe the Plan, describe any inconsistencies between the proposed Plan and regional plan. Did we do all of that? We did, right? The contents of the filing are the Draft EIR lists of commentators, comment letters, responses, and text changes and clarifications. I know I've seen that in there. I believe that doing those things is what we're asked to vote on, whether or not we met the bare requirements of the law. That's what this vote is, did we do that. With that, I am going to definitely support this. I would hope we all would. If we don't support this, what we're really saying is that our Staff did an inadequate job in preparing an EIR from a legal perspective, not from a policy perspective. This is not that vote. This is a vote on did they do their job correctly. I just saw Council Member Kou's light come on. Council Member Kou: I appreciate that, Mayor, explaining. I do want to say that even if there was a no vote, it's got nothing to do with saying that I don't have confidence in you. I know about the amount of work that you've FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 42 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 put into this as well as, for myself, when I first joined the CAC and all my colleagues on the CAC have spent a lot of time on it. I do have to say that I do have concerns similar to what Council Member DuBois has said. In terms of the scenarios, it was always very difficult to understand that. When I look at this, I hear a lot of the member of the public and letters written in and also Council colleagues who have said that we need to push this through. It almost sounds like whether it is the right thing to do or not. In full consciousness, when I look at this, I am not comfortable with it. I feel that there's the segmentation in terms of—I can't believe that the elements are actually linked because I don't see that. Also, the segmentation of the implementation element is not handled at the same time. It's going to be pushing it out. I do have concerns about that too. In addition to all of that, all the audience have come forward and said that we have substantial—also it was mentioned tonight by Staff—I forget who—if we go into a new year and push this out into a new year, it means that we have to take into consideration of a whole bunch of housing laws that is going to come effective January 1st. Isn't that concerning that we're not taking—to push this through and not to take that into consideration, we could be greatly impacted without knowing what the mitigations are for us, what the impacts are going to be for us. I think we've mentioned already many times the GUP. It's substantial; it's very significant. The ADU law, that Ordinance that we have just passed, we really don't know what is the significance, impact on that as well. Last but not least—there's a lot more—is our Caltrain grade separation that we're going to be discussing very soon. There's so much impact in that. I don't see it really addressed in this FEIR. I do have great concerns about it. I just wanted to make sure that I do mention that. I do want to say I'm grateful for all the work, and thank you. It's deserved. Ms. Gitelman: Mr. Mayor, if I could respond on the … Mayor Scharff: Staff, I think you need to respond. Ms. Gitelman: … record to a few of those things. First of all, I wanted to clarify for Council Member Kou that we're not proposing to segment or defer adoption of the implementation chapter. That's included in the action we proposed when you adopt the Comprehensive Plan. The only thing that we're suggesting the Council could defer to a later date is prioritizing among all of the actions there. Currently, that chapter reflects the CAC's priorities, the order in which they're presented. This Council has already signed off on a lot of the—on all of the implementation actions themselves. We can bring both the Planning Commission and the Council in the new year the time and space to do the prioritization of those individual actions. That is not something—adoption of that chapter is not something we're suggesting we defer. Secondly, I didn't mean to suggest that the housing package, the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 43 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 new housing bills, was a reason that we would have to amend this Comprehensive Plan. This Comprehensive Plan has and is based on an environmental analysis of a significant projection of additional housing by the year 2030. That would not change with the housing bills. That projection of housing is sufficiently large enough to encompass the changes to the ADU Ordinance this Council adopted. There's nothing about housing that should cause you any concern when reviewing or acting on the EIR or the Plan. The law that I was referring to that will become effective January 1 and require changes if this decision is pushed past the end of the year relates to environmental justice. The Legislature now believes that every jurisdiction should have a section on environmental justice in their Comprehensive Plans. We would have to do that if this decision was deferred past the end of the year. Finally on the issue of Caltrain grade separations, this Comprehensive Plan Update for the first time prioritizes separation of Caltrain grade crossings, and we've included that in the scenario discussion. Getting to Council Member DuBois' comment about the preferred scenario and how the scenarios have been built on and changed over time, we included a chapter in the Final EIR, Chapter 2, about the preferred scenario, where we spent quite a bit of time talking about how that scenario built on the prior scenarios and the different elements of that scenario that were consistent with the other scenarios really demonstrating how that scenario, which is now the outgrowth of this Council's action and your direction to us, represents an amalgam of the policies and priorities in some of the other scenarios. We're confident that this has been an effective process in terms of allowing the Council and the community to weigh various priorities and ultimately come up with a Plan and a preferred scenario that makes sense, given the Council's policy direction over the last 6-12 months. Mayor Scharff: Would the City Attorney's Office—you don't have to—have any further comments to Council Member Kou's comments? Ms. Lee: Not to Council Member Kou, but I did want to—if I could briefly comment on Council Member DuBois' concern about the project description. What's important under CEQA is that the Draft EIR have a project description with information that's sufficient to evaluate and review the project's environmental effects. As shown in the documents as well—I know it's a lot of pages there. There were a number of alternatives. There were the six scenarios, but there was also the no project alternative that was evaluated as well as the no growth alternative that was evaluated as well and a hybrid alternative. There were a number of different scenarios looked at to determine the range of impacts depending on the amount of growth and other infrastructure improvements, other policies, and parameters that might be included in the ultimate preferred scenario. There was a range of analysis provided. At the end of the process when the Council identified a FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 44 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 preferred scenario, it was important to look at whether the outer box of what was evaluated was sufficiently large to encompass what the preferred scenario was. The determination was that the impacts were within that outer box. I would note that even for projects you don't have to be at 100 percent project design in order to prepare an EIR. There were some elements of the Plan that hadn't been determined, but the parameters were sufficient to do the required environmental analysis. Mayor Scharff: One more question. Council Member Kou: Hillary, in regards to the housing that you're talking about in the new year, I wasn't specifically speaking just to the housing that is going to be built. I'm also speaking to the cumulative impacts that's going to come along with all the building. Furthermore, I really didn't see in this FEIR there was any recommendation as to reducing the numbers of office space, for example, in order to accommodate the housing since there's going to be … Mayor Scharff: That goes to Item Number 3 again, the mitigations. That's not … Council Member Kou: That's fine. With that said, how does it work since I think you're all on board with this FEIR? Obviously, you're confident about it. Would you be comfortable with—in order for me to be able to do my due diligence and to be fully comfortable and confident about that, would it be possible to do a peer review on this? This is a big item. We're moving forward with all sorts of development coming at us. We're told to be bold even with all the building that's going to happen. We're going to be impacted with whatever kind of mitigations we have. As it is, there's significant unavoidable impacts here, which I'm not supposed to speak to right now. It's a big thing for me to say I am willing to certify this and put my name on it. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou, all you're doing if you certify this is saying that it meets the legal sufficiency. Council Member Kou: That's a problem. That's the problem. Mr. Keene: As far as a process, you're not precluded from feeling differently about the findings or the impacts, the mitigation measures. I would just say one thing finally on this. I don't want to turn this thing into something about the Staff because this isn't just about the Staff. It's about the whole process we've gone through. I personally don't see the reason not to vote for this if you agree we basically have followed due process. To do otherwise, in a sense says to us we did not do that and we have not been striving to do that FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 45 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 for years and years. I don't see what public benefit is provided to us as a City at this point to do that. I certainly could understand when you get to the next part of the section that there could be real difference about whether or not the impacts are sufficiently mitigated in one area or not. People could weigh in on that. I would just come back to the last thing. We love to talk about kicking the can down the road in Palo Alto. Failure to ultimately move ahead—forget this piece, even on the other parts, de facto does leave us with what we have right now. I would just ask that we think about how we close the gap between just living with the existing Comp. Plan and in a meaningful way being actually to have a new and better Comprehensive Plan. That's the implications that we're being faced with. There's nothing to preclude you from making subsequent modifications or amendments to this new adopted Comp. Plan in the future without having to redo everything if a project or issue comes along, and you want to do that. I would just ask that you think about it. The Mayor has clearly identified the difference between Recommendation 2, which is the only thing before the Council right now, as far as your decision, and what it signals to support it or not to support it. I would just argue that folks who have concerns about the extent of the EIR itself as far as the findings and the impacts and the mitigations will have ample opportunity to raise those issues and even potentially vote no in the next actions after even voting yes on the certification. That could be done. I don't think that's inconsistent. Ms. Gitelman: If I could just add one thing. Council Member Kou's question really gives me an opportunity to say how much the Planning Staff is enjoying working with Sandy Lee. Sandy replaced Cara Silver and, in a sense, has offered a peer review of this process because she came in after this process was 80 percent complete and has helped us get over the finish line. She was skeptical, and we sat down and worked with her through the Final EIR and convinced Sandy—I think Sandy can testify—that what we have is a document that meets all the requirements of the law. We've described a project in a meaningful way. We have analyzed alternatives at an equal level of detail. We've linked our Plan and our EIR mitigation in an effective and—I lost my sentence. We have gotten the kind of peer review that Council Member Kou was asking about thanks to Sandy. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for letting me speak again. I didn't think I would have to speak again on this. I thought this wouldn't be terribly contentious. We speak a lot on this Council about process and about consensus. I think this decision is quite important for the City, one, in recognizing the process that multiple Councils, multiple Planning Commissions, the CAC, and our community have gone through to reach this FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 46 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 point. On consensus, all of us work hard on this stuff. We all take a lot of time to read these documents, go through, come up with questions and ideas. We have also followed that process. It's still an incredibly complicated document and a difficult task to go through with. Staff and others have worked tirelessly on this. As I'm convinced through my reading, my work, and questions to Staff, we have met the procedural and substantive needs here, the requirements from CEQA. Additionally, the alternatives of not passing this tonight are worse. We're talking about a Plan that was started in 1990. I was 4 years old in 1990. I don't think that Plan is relevant to us going forward. I would really encourage my colleagues to support this Motion. It is simply to certify the Final EIR. In the next round, Numbers 3 and 4, we can certainly hash it out on what we all think is an insufficient Plan. Not everyone's getting everything they want, but everybody's getting something. I think it's important for us to move the community forward. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I thought this would be noncontroversial too. I'm going to vote for it. There's a legitimate discussion in the next item, which has to do with the intersection of values and tradeoffs. This one seems very procedural to me. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Just briefly, it sort of goes to what Council Member DuBois was mentioning earlier. I've been pretty vocal and several times talked about the process for this. The final scenario wasn't identified until March 20 of this year. I understand the explanation that City Attorney Sandra Lee gives. In a way it makes sense, but it's still an uncomfortable thing for me. That and the GUP lack of inclusion both, I wish it wasn't controversial. I wish I could just in my gut 100 percent say yeah. I do have those two reservations. Mayor Scharff: If we could vote on the board. That passes on a 6-3 vote. We're going to take a 5-minute break, and then we'll come back. MOTION PASSED: 6-3 DuBois, Holman, Kou no Council took a break from 7:32 P.M. to 7:43 P.M. Mayor Scharff: Now we're on Items Number 3, 4, and 5. I'm going to take them altogether. I will move Items 3, 4, and 5. Vice Mayor Kniss: Second. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 47 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 MOTION: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to: A. Adopt a Resolution making required CEQA findings, including findings related to significant environmental impacts, mitigation measures and alternatives, adoption of a statement of overriding considerations, and adoption of a mitigation monitoring and reporting program (MMRP); and B. Adopt a Resolution adopting the updated Comprehensive Plan dated June 30, 2017 with the specific corrections and changes included in Attachment A and the at places memo, comprehensively updating and superseding the 1998-2010 Comprehensive Plan in its entirety, except for the Housing Element adopted in 2014 which will remain part of the Comprehensive Plan; and C. Direct Staff to prepare and disseminate electronic and paper copies of the updated Comprehensive Plan with appropriate formatting, illustrations, and acknowledgements. Mayor Scharff: Briefly, I'm just going to basically say that I think we've done—we've had a really long process here. We went through the CAC. This process started—I don't remember. When did this process start? Like 2008, 2006. Mr. Keene: 2006. It was a little slow getting going. Mayor Scharff: The PTC has had extensive comments on this. We've all weighed in. We've had extensive meetings on all of this. We've all made compromises. I don't think this Plan has anything everybody wants. I think it's a huge improvement over our 1998 Comp. Plan. It's relevant for today. There was something that Director Gitelman said that caught my attention. At some point, your Comp. Plan needs to be updated because, otherwise, it's no longer relevant and people could actually challenge decisions based on having a Comp. Plan that's not relevant if items have changed in the community. Everyone here would agree that this is not 1998. When they started that Comp. Plan and looking at their EIR, when did they start doing that? Vice Mayor Kniss: '92. Mayor Scharff: In '92. When did they go through their EIR process? Do we know? Was it '96, '97? It's so lost to the mists of antiquity that no one can tell us the answers to these questions. I am going to support the Motion the way it is. We should be—when we think about the required CEQA findings, one of the most important things to keep in mind is given where the Bay FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 48 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Area is, what would any plan look like with this. What I heard from Staff was any Plan we were likely to come up with on any of the scenarios would show that we would need to have some overriding considerations. A lot of these Plans are really around the edges. That's something that's really important to keep in mind when we think about this. What are we trying to achieve here? What's the purpose of this? This has been a really long process. I hope you will all be supportive of the Plan that we've actually worked as a group over many times to put together. Vice Mayor Kniss, you seconded. Vice Mayor Kniss: Are we making comments now to all three? Mayor Scharff: Yes, to 3, 4, and 5. Vice Mayor Kniss: Five is, if we get through 3 and 4, then that's to direct Staff to prepare something that's final. Mayor Scharff: Yes. I'm very concerned about Item 5. It could be the most controversial issue here. Vice Mayor Kniss: Let's hope not. I seconded this, and I would hope that people do vote for it. I've certainly been hearing comments that would indicate this is probably not going to be a 9-0 vote. A couple of things that I want to address. I'm probably feeling a little defensive about it because I do Chair the Air Board. The Air Board represents nine counties. We are the third largest Air Board in the State. There are 35 Air Boards. Other than South Coast and one other in the middle part of the State, we are one of the largest. WE have worked on the air quality—I have been on this Board for quite some time—throughout our region, but our air quality and much of what happens is controlled by California Air Resource Board (CARB), which is the California Air Board. Many of you are familiar with CARB. You've heard what their goals are. Part of my concern is that there is no question that across the State they have worked with diligence to improve the air quality. They've also worked at controlling traffic given that diesel in particular is one of our most dangerous engines and certainly does contribute to air quality problems and also to the kinds of health issues that go along with problems with the air quality. As I look at this, I think what were the mitigations. The mitigations aren't just going on with something that we do here in the City. The mitigations are going on with places like the Air Board. Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) looks at this same issue. We have pushed using electric cars. Tonight there was an electric refuse vehicle. We are making some progress. It may not be as fast as people would hope, but there is a continuum on this process. A great many of those things have been addressed here tonight. I can assure this group with certainty that, if FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 49 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 there's one thing being looked at with serious concern, it's definitely the air quality in the State of California. Very hard when you've got this many vehicles on the road. You still have diesel trucks. You have diesel engines of many kinds. That does contribute to bad air. There's no question. This group is working with great intensity to improve the air quality, to improve the health. At the end of any meeting, we always say we are absolutely committed to public health. That's just one of the issues; there are many others that someone may want to address. While I have the floor, I also want to say that it's very interesting to have both Adrian and Greg Tanaka here. Greg Tanaka went through this for 8 years. Adrian went through it for 2 years. I know they have a very clear idea of where this was headed. Even though, as Greg said, it's kind of like—I'll put words in your mouth, Greg—it's a little like Groundhog Day. I think it's time for us to move forward on this. I realize we haven't mitigated every possible problem that exists in here. In particular in air quality and transportation, we've made great strides. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: It's been a long, winding road. It's been a very interesting process getting this Comprehensive Plan to this point. It's been a lot of compromise. It's been a struggle to find consensus, and it's really been a collective learning exercise. We've all learned together. I'm really referring to the process as it was essentially rebooted in 2014 and further developed in 2015 when we created the Citizens Advisory Committee. After the Our Palo Alto meetings in 2013 about the Comprehensive Plan, that was a big impetus for me getting more directly involved in City events and City government, which ultimately landed me here. The creation of the Citizens Advisory Committee was something that was not initially supported by everybody on Council. I was one of the early supporters of that. Council Member DuBois, if I remember correctly, was also. It was an important step building off the Our Palo Alto meetings to create a body that would work with real focus over time to develop themselves a level of expertise as citizens who came from a broad variety of the community to study these issues, to hash them out together and find compromise and find consensus. They brought stuff to Council with the support of Staff and consultants piecemeal over time. I've been involved as much as anyone in sometimes looking critically at their work but ultimately accepting the vast majority of what the CAC recommended. We learned through this process how important the programs are to support the policies. We also learned that there are opportunities in the future—I'm not recommending it right now—to make tweaks to our Comprehensive Plan if we find sometime between now and 2030 that we missed something or things have radically changed in some way that was unanticipated. There are opportunities to make those FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 50 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 amendments periodically. That's okay under State law. I emphasize that now because the perfect is the enemy of the good. This Plan is probably not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. There are a lot of things that I would have liked to have seen different. I'm personally willing to accept some pretty significant compromises to move this forward. It's important to remember that the default, the no project option, if we do not adopt the Comprehensive Plan, the results when it comes to traffic and impacts on the community like that that we are also concerned about, the impacts will be worse than if we adopt this Plan. This is better than the status quo. It is an improvement. There are a couple of things I'd like to suggest as minor Amendments. I don't think either of them will be controversial. I'm hoping that my colleagues, if they're considering adding other Amendments, this is our last chance to do that for this Plan. I hope that others will follow that lead of not proposing things at this point, which they anticipate will be controversial. I've sent to the City Clerk a couple of Amendments. The first one is to add a new program, L-2.11.1, that would go under Policy L-2.11, which was mentioned in the Staff slides today. That has to do with working with Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD). This would say "collaborate"—as a new program—"with Palo Alto Unified School District to plan for space to accommodate future school expansions or new school sites." Vice Mayor Kniss: Second. AMENDMENT: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to add to the Comprehensive Plan new Program L2.11.1 (under Policy L2.11), to read: "Collaborate with PAUSD to plan for space to accommodate future school expansions or new school sites." Council Member Wolbach: I have another one, but maybe we should take them one at a time, if that's all right. Mayor Scharff: That was seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss. I'll just clarify. Even if I support your Amendment—I actually do support this one—I have no intention of incorporating any of them without a vote frankly. I think that would be a bad process. Council Member Wolbach: I accept and respect that choice by the maker of the main Motion. I'll just speak to this briefly. This has been an area of some controversy. I have stepped into it a bit sometimes, perhaps inadvertently or too much myself. There are limits under State law to what we can do in CEQA planning, etc., as a City when it comes to schools. The importance of schools in Palo Alto is something none of us denies. The importance of working collaboratively with Palo Alto Unified School District is FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 51 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 something none of us denies. That's why I hope this will be noncontroversial. The truth is as Palo Alto grows and changes in a pretty— again compromise in a modest way as this Comprehensive Plan envisions and allows. It is possible that we will need another school site or more or we may need to—or that Palo Alto Unified may decide to expand some of their school sites. It's important that we sit down with them early on, figure out how to do that, and really come to the table with them to say if we're expecting more population growth in North Ventura or in Downtown or wherever or Stanford Research Park, let's figure out what the school needs for that should be and work together to find the space to do that. The program that I'm suggesting here really supports the policy under which it would be nested. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I don't think I could say it any better than Cory did. It's very important. I'm glad you mentioned the Ventura area. That's going to be critical. Mayor Scharff: Does anyone wish to speak to the Amendment? I have lights from Holman and DuBois before this. You want to speak to the Amendment? Go ahead. Council Member Holman: It was something different, not to the Amendment. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois, if you want to speak to the Amendment. Council Member DuBois: I was trying to get a Substitute Motion sent. I appreciate this Motion. It's on some important aspects, but I do want to propose a Substitute Motion that would … Mayor Scharff: We're on the Amendment. Do you want to amend the Amendment? Council Member DuBois: Could I do a Substitute Amendment? Mayor Scharff: You can amend an Amendment. Why don't you call it amending an Amendment, then I'll be fine. Council Member DuBois: I thought I'd give a Substitute Amendment. I would keep this first part, which is collaborate on space. I think we should evaluate zoning for space to accommodate new schools. It would be a FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 52 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 comma at the end of the sentence and continuing. Three, we would focus transportation planning on school-related impacts. Council Member Wolbach: Let me see the language. I think the second portion would probably be best served as a separate Amendment. Actually my second Amendment—I'm still going on with my comments—that I'll be bringing up in a minute might reflect what you're hoping to see there. After my two Amendments—this is on the transportation stuff. Council Member DuBois: This is specifically tied to schools. Council Member Wolbach: My other one is also tied to schools and transportation. I would suggest keeping them separate just so that the programs can be clean. Council Member Wolbach: I would accept that. AMENDMENT TO THE AMENDMENT: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to amend the Amendment to add to the Comprehensive Plan new Program L2.11.1 (under Policy L2.11), the language: “Collaborate with PAUSD to plan for space to accommodate future school expansions or new school sites, and evaluate zoning space to accommodate new schools.” Council Member DuBois: The last one was focus transportation planning on school-related impacts. Council Member Wolbach: I would not accept that part because that's best served in a separate—I don't think it goes to the point of this Amendment, but I would be interested in entertaining it in my second proposed Amendment, which may address your concern on that. Mayor Scharff: We just basically have to understand something. Evaluate zoning space to accommodate new schools. We don't zone for schools. That would be a taking to evaluate, I think. Mr. Keene: We can designate zoning (crosstalk) accommodate public facilities or those sorts of uses. Council Member DuBois: It'd just be a Parking Facility (PF) zone somewhere. Mayor Scharff: I believe it's a taking to designate someone's zone as a PF zone on their property. That would be my sense. If not, I could be wrong. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 53 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Wolbach: I think people might be open to it if it was part of a coordinated area plan or something. I'm comfortable with it. Mayor Scharff: If the City Attorney's Office and Staff's comfortable, I'm comfortable. Council Member Wolbach: Would you be okay with that, Liz? Vice Mayor Kniss: Fine. Mayor Scharff: Are you fine with that, Council Member DuBois? Council Member DuBois: Mm hmm. Mayor Scharff: That's been accepted as the Amendment to the Amendment. It's been accepted. I see no other lights on. Shall we vote on the board on the Amendment? That passes. AMENDMENT TO THE AMENDMENT PASSED: 9-0 Council Member Wolbach: I have one more that I've also sent to the City Clerk. This goes maybe not entirely to Council Member DuBois' suggestion but is related. Perhaps it will find support. This would be to modify Goal T-4 to just add five words to it. Goal T-4 reads protect local streets that contribute to neighborhood character and provide a range of transportation options. This would add five words to read protect local streets and adopted school commute corridors that contribute to neighborhood character and provide a range of transportation options. Council Member DuBois: I'll second that. Mayor Scharff: You seconded that? Council Member DuBois: Sure. AMENDMENT: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to modify Goal T-4 of the Comprehensive Plan to read, “Protect streets and adopted school commute corridors that contribute to neighborhood character and provide a range of transportation options.” Council Member Wolbach: Again, I hope it's not controversial. I think it speaks for itself. I won't speak to anymore. I hope you'll support it. Council Member DuBois: I appreciate both these Amendments. You probably heard me earlier. I don't think we went far enough with impacts to schools. We stopped at the State limit. This is a family-oriented FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 54 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 community. Even the IR says that the School District is going to be completely full, and the School District says they can't operate with completely full buildings. This is really important, the previous Amendment as well as this Amendment. Mayor Scharff: Seeing no further lights, let's vote on the Amendment. Wait, before you vote. Ms. Gitelman: I am so sorry. In one of the Items in Attachment A, we took out the word "local," so it no longer says "protect local streets and adopted school." It just says "protect streets." I think there was a concern by Ms. Ellson that we may have inadvertently excluded some arterials. She didn't want local streets. Council Member Wolbach: I did not mean to add the word "local" to the … Mayor Scharff: Are you willing to take out the word "local"? Council Member Wolbach: I'm willing to take out the word "local" because that wasn't the point of the Amendment. Mayor Scharff: Is the seconder willing to take out "local"? Vice Mayor Kniss: He said yes. Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on it without the word "local." We're almost there. We have a vote of 8 with Council Member Filseth choosing not to vote. There he is. AMENDMENT PASSED: 9-0 Council Member Wolbach: Those are it for my Amendments. I actually just wanted to ask a quick question of Staff. Level of Service (LOS) is talked about in this Comprehensive Plan. Because of changes at the State level, we're moving towards LOS being an Informational Item more than a real metric for measuring projects. Is that correct? Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Filseth. This is also addressed … Council Member Wolbach: Actually it's Wolbach. Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry, Wolbach. This is also addressed in Attachment A, the list of changes. It's Item Number 33. We've clarified this because there was a bit of confusion about this at the Planning Commission. It says now when adopting new CEQA significance criteria for VMT for compliance with Senate Bill (SB) 743, adopt standards for vehicular LOS analysis for use in FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 55 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 evaluating the consistency of a proposed project with the Comprehensive Plan and goes on from there. That's the context in which LOS will still be used. Council Member Wolbach: It will be in the context of multimodal level of service? Ms. Gitelman: In the context of reviewing plans for conformance with the Comprehensive Plan, we'll be looking at LOS. For environmental review and mitigations, CEQA purposes under the State law, we have to use VMT. I think this reflects the Council's last direction on this. We just tried to clarify it because we got—there was a lot of confusion at the Commission level. Council Member Fine: Can you cite the Page again, Packet Page? Ms. Gitelman: It's Item Number 33 in Attachment A. Council Member Wolbach: I'm really glad that multimodal level of service is in there. If a change to an intersection helps it be better for bicyclists or pedestrians, that's an important thing to keep track of. I definitely think we want to keep supporting the development of multimodal level of service as an important metric for our community. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Since we're in the mode of making Amendments, just would like to add one along the lines of what Council Member Wolbach has done. I'm not sure either in email, personal comment, or comments brought to the Council that we've heard anything more important to the community and to neighborhoods than a policy that was taken out. It said, "Encourage commercial enterprise but not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods." I would move that that be restored to the Comprehensive Plan. It's really important to the community, to the residents, to the neighborhoods. I would ask that that be restored to the Comprehensive Plan. Mayor Scharff: There is language that deals with this issue in the Comprehensive Plan. Could you point … Council Member Holman: It's not the same. Mayor Scharff: We need to look at it. Do you know where it is? Council Member Holman: I don't offhand. I've lost track of it. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 56 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Ms. Costello: Elaine Costello. I just want to clarify this issue. That language that says but not at the expense of residential neighborhoods was actually in the introduction to the previous Plan. In this Plan at both the CAC and the Planning Commission, there was language added to the policies to make the protection of neighborhoods a priority. If we look at Policy— you're going to have to bear with me a little bit because I've got to run around the Plan a little. It's in both the Business Element in Policy B-2.3. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it says, "In preserving Palo Alto's livability" and "need to work together with a priority on neighborhood quality of life." The Planning Commission, which the Council looked at it at a previous meeting, added language—that was Policy B-2.3. There's language added to the Land Use Element, which is now Policy L-1.1, to maintain and prioritize Palo Alto's varied residential neighborhoods while sustaining the vitality of its commercial areas and public facilities. The previous had been in the text, which is not used to evaluate projects. By putting it into the policy and putting a priority on the neighborhoods, it actually—by both the CAC and the Planning Commission, there was an effort to clarify the importance of neighborhood protections. I just wanted to clarify that. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Council Member Holman: I do hear those, and I appreciate the efforts. Thank you very much. I'm impressed that you can find things so quickly. I do appreciate those. I do hear especially the one in the business chapter. I don't hear that one as incorporating this priority. The one in the land use comes closer, but I still hear from—as we have in these Chambers on a number of occasions—people who still miss that language. I'm just wondering if we can find a place to supplement what exists in the current Plan to incorporate this language, not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, you need to make a Motion if you're going to make a Motion. Council Member Holman: I move that we reinstate the language “encourage commercial enterprise but not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods”. Mayor Scharff: That would be reinstated where it was before, which would … Council Member Holman: Yes. Ms. Costello: In the introduction? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 57 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Holman: Yes. Council Member DuBois: I'll second that. AMENDMENT: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to reinstate the language in the introduction of the Comprehensive Plan to read “encourage commercial enterprise, but not at the expense of the city’s residential neighborhoods.” Ms. Costello: That was in the introduction to the Plan as a whole. You would add that sentence back in? Council Member Holman: Yes. Mayor Scharff: Do you want to speak to your Motion? Council Member Holman: There's a lot of coverage of things in the Comprehensive Plan. Just while I have the floor for a second just to say I think there are some really good things in here. I don't agree with all of it. We're not going to all agree to all of it. There are some really good things in here. This is something I've heard so many times that's so important to people. There is no harm in putting this back in where it was previously. It's really important to people, and I'd like for people to have it that have been so concerned about tis removal. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: This is in the narrative. It's not a policy or program. Again, we've heard from a lot of people that they care about this language. It's appropriate, and I would urge my fellow Council Members to support it. The sentiment, it's hard to find objection with it. Again, it's in the narrative. It's not a policy or program. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I'm going to be supporting this Amendment. It's reasonable. Placing it in the introduction is a reasonable place to put it as well. This is not very controversial especially in that way. It's reflected already by policies that are elsewhere in the Plan. Make sure that somebody starting their reading of the Comprehensive Plan sees this early on. Just a quick question for the maker. With this Amendment, is it your intention to support the main Motion? Mayor Scharff: I think there's a lot of good things in this. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 58 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Holman: I'll be darned. I didn't anticipate that question. We'll see. I do have some concerns about mitigations, so we'll see. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I wanted to ask the maker and the seconder if I could make an Amendment. I just sent it to Jessica and Beth as an attachment. Essentially, it would use the new language in the narrative for the meeting residential and commercial needs. It would continue to say it encourages a thriving business community that provides services to local residents and revenue to the City but not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods by vigorously working to protect neighborhoods and the environment. Council Member Holman: I need some clarity. I'm not sure what's going on here. Council Member Kou: It would be the red bold one. That's from my notes. Ms. Gitelman: This is a paragraph in the narrative introduction on Page i4. Council Member DuBois: All the rest of it is the current language except for the red? Council Member Kou: It's mostly the current language. The last sentence after the comma "and attracting quality businesses" versus the current language says "innovative, small, and independent." Council Member DuBois: I'd prefer to stick with the original language. Mayor Scharff: That fails. I need a second for it. That fails to be incorporated. You need a second at that point. Going once, going twice, going three times. That fails for lack of a second. SUBSTITUTE AMENDMENT: Council Member Kou moved, seconded by Council Member XX to amend the wording in the Meeting Residential and Commercial Needs section of the Comprehensive Plan Introduction to state, “It encourages a thriving business community that provides services to local residents and revenue to the City, but not at the expense of the City’s residential neighborhoods by vigorously working to protect neighborhoods and the environment. The City is committed to retaining existing businesses, maintaining vibrant commercial areas, and attracting quality businesses.” SUBSTITUTE AMENDMENT FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 59 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Filseth: I think this is a good add. It'll make a lot of people happy. I've been walking around all week asking people that know about it, "Which do you like better, the new one or the old one?" To the extent that I hear criticism of the new one, one of a very small number of main ones is it seems to weaken neighborhood protections. This will make a lot of people happy. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Just a question for Staff on this one. When we say "not at the expense of the City's residential neighborhoods," two questions. What weight does the narrative carry? Ms. Costello: When people are reviewing projects, they generally don't look at—the narrative is background information. It's really the policies that are going to be used day to day to evaluate new projects. There's no big harm in putting something like this into the narrative either. Ms. Gitelman: If policies are unclear, you can look to the narrative for some guidance on how to interpret those policies. Council Member Fine: That's helpful. The second question is maybe more for the City Attorney. When we say "not at the expense of," could this be interpreted as don't do this business because people are going to walk by a neighborhood or because there's going to be a little bit more parking or because people might have lunch on the sidewalk in front? I'm just trying to get a read on what "not at the expense of" means. Does that preclude any of these? Ms. Gitelman: It could be interpreted multiple ways. As Elaine just indicated, most people are going to turn to the policies and say, "Does an action we're considering conform to the policies?" They may read the narrative to help them with that inquiry, but I don't think you should be concerned that this has unintended consequences. Council Member Fine: Thank you. I guess I'll support this. At the same time, this is the final stretch of our Comprehensive Plan. I would encourage us all to consider the work that the PTC and the CAC did on this in terms of implementing some of the policies. It's an enormous Plan already. Adding new language, especially like—who's going to vote against this, right? The headlines are going to go, "Council Member Fine hates neighborhoods." Does it add anything? From Staff, it's not clear it does. Let's be judicious with our time and our amendments to this Plan. I would just encourage that. Thank you. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 60 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm going to reluctantly vote against it, and not because I don't agree with it. We are already wordsmithing again. This is really the message within this. I'm very aware of how the Comp. Plan gets used. It's getting used primarily by the policies and by the Ls and the Ts and Is and so forth. As important as this is, this is—glancing again at this intro, this includes it again and again. I'm concerned that we are—if we are going to look at everything this carefully, especially the intro, we're really going back again to ground zero. Mayor Scharff: I'm going to vote for it based on two things. What Council Member Filseth said was good. It gives people comfort out there. That's really helpful and important. I too have heard people come and complain about that. The second reason is on my part hope springs eternal. Council Member Holman has now said she will consider voting for the Comp. Plan. Sure, go ahead. Council Member Wolbach: Just a quick question for Staff. Do you need us to identify exactly where this goes in the introduction? Mr. Keene: It goes on the cover. Council Member Wolbach: We will leave it to your expert hands. Thanks again to Holman and DuBois for this one. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman, you still have the floor. Are you done? Council Member Holman: We have to vote on this, but then I still have the floor. Mayor Scharff: That's correct. Let's vote on this. That passes on an 8-1 vote with Vice Mayor Kniss voting no. AMENDMENT PASSED: 8-1 Kniss no Vice Mayor Kniss: I'll get the terrible headlines. Don't worry, Adrian. I'll take the blow. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: A procedural point here. I have some comments about mitigations. Do you want us to do these round-robin or do you want me to attack all of them now? How do you want to do this? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 61 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: I want you to attack all of them now, Council Member Holman. I'm hoping it's not—at some point I'm going to have to ask for a cloture vote if it's too extreme. Council Member Holman: I would say none of them are unimportant. Going back to air quality. Before I ask about some mitigations, I want to point out what the World Health Organization says. It says that 5-10 percent of deaths in the United States are attributed to air pollution. It contributes to factors that lead to stroke, heart attack, and lung disease. When I talk about mitigations, I know that we are part of the larger whole. If we do anything to add to that whole, we're not doing one of our primary responsibilities. You're not carrying out that responsibility. Health and life safety are two of government's primary responsibilities. There are some things, it seems to me, we don't consider. Some of them are, of course, linked with transportation mitigations because the vehicle is where we get a lot of air impacts. I don't think I need to point out to anybody that we have had more Spare the Air days this year sans the fires than any other year. We're getting progressively more and more Spare the Air days. The things that I find missing or lacking. Maybe I should also say this is with absolutely no disrespect for Staff. It may be hard to understand it that way because I know you've worked very hard on that, and you have great expertise. It's certainly not in that vein. These are my focus points that, for me to feel comfortable, they need to be addressed. Some of these are "for examples." I mentioned one earlier that Staff has commented on, about projects of a certain size. That language is used on a number of occasions in the FEIR. I don't expect it to say 50,000-square-foot project or 100,000-square-foot project, but I would expect it to have some kind of quantification to it. Otherwise, this is so open-ended that it is meaningless. I would expect that any place it does say "projects of a certain size," it would say "projects that generate X number of trips during the construction cycle" or that sort of thing, so there's a way to understand what a mitigation could be to help protect our air quality. There are a couple of other occasions where 100 diesel vehicle trips are used as the threshold for a mitigation to take hold. A hundred diesel trips a day is an enormous project. That's a very, very high threshold. My understanding is that was based on the Stanford Medical Center project, an enormous, as we all know, project, well over 1 million square feet. How many of those are we going to have? How often would the mitigations related to 100 diesel vehicle trips a day kick in? There are other air quality things. Those relate to both transportation and air quality. Other air quality things that we do not include even though we touch on them in our Code and other Ordinances and one that we actually removed. We removed a program or policy, I've forgotten which, that talks about promoting adaptive reuse of existing buildings. There is no project that is more environmentally friendly than retaining an existing building. All know FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 62 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 or should know that existing buildings can be made very environmentally sound and seismically sound. We do not require salvage. Salvage is a much more air quality sensitive procedure than is demolition. Yet, salvage is not even mentioned in the Comprehensive Plan or in mitigations. I don't find it in the Comprehensive Plan; I certainly don't find it in the mitigations. Deconstruction and salvage do not create the dust, do not create the vehicle trips that it takes to manufacture new materials. Nor does it take the energy to create these new materials that then get transported up to seven times before they reach their destination point. We've talked about that at some points in time on this dais. We don't consider the level of demolition and construction in Palo Alto is higher than most other communities. I don't go to any other community and see the streetscape so much defined by construction fences as I do in this community. I'll just say we are irresponsible if we don't address some of the vehicle trips, demolition, salvage, construction impacts that we're foisting upon our residents and our employees. I'll go to noise for just a moment. In the Plan and in the FEIR that identifies the impacts, we go from 60 dB to 65 dB. Let me explain what that means. A change from 60 to 70 dB, for instance, is a tenfold increase in noise. We don't perceive it as tenfold; we perceive it as two or three times an increase in noise. It's anticipated that our noise thresholds will go from 60 to 65 dB. Yet, a mitigation was struck out of the FEIR that said we would update our—I don't have the exact language written right here, but I can find it if need be. We take out the language that says we will update for clarity and enforcement our Noise Ordinance. That is struck out of the mitigations. Noise is insidious. When we have a project that exceeds the Noise Ordinance and adds to the ambient noise level, we are raising the threshold for other projects because they are graded against the ambient noise level. It's an insidious impact we are foisting on our community. Again, noise is a health factor. We have a Healthy City—I don't need to remind any of us—Healthy Community Priority. We're anticipating and not mitigating to my satisfaction noise. I'm sorry I left one out when it came to air quality. We don't as a mitigation talk about increasing our urban forest. We all know that our urban forest and trees clear the air, but that's not mentioned as looking for ways to increase our urban forest. When it comes to the aesthetics impacts, we do something similar to what we did in the noise. We took out the specific criteria that would be used to determine whether something was compatible or not and kind of gutting what the review process would be. When it comes to cultural resources, we do something that's actually an improvement in that we identify when something is going to happen to a potential California Register property, but all we do is identify that an impact is going to happen. What I read as being taken out is adopting mitigations that would see that bad things don't happen. We're just identifying what the impact is. When it comes to aesthetics also, it wasn't clear to me because it happened fairly late in the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 63 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 process—maybe Staff can respond to this—that the impact of 3.0 hotels Downtown and 2.5 hotel impacts elsewhere were evaluated in terms of their aesthetic impacts. I point to that one in particular because we right now allow 2.0 hotels in the Commercial Service (CS) zone. Every hotel project that I'm aware of has been a point of consternation with neighbors and in the community and a struggle at the Architectural Review Board. Yet, we're looking to increase that to 3.0 in the Downtown where, by the way, we have an assemblage of historic resources and 2.5 in other areas. I don't know that that was considered in terms of aesthetic impacts. Maybe Staff could respond to that. Ms. Gitelman: Council Member Holman, I'd like an opportunity to respond, if we could, to all of your comments. Have you gotten to the end of your list? Council Member Holman: Those get you to the—another one. I think this one is worth reading because I was distressed at reading it. There was a question asked—this has to do with traffic and transportation. I do have a couple more about that. The one that I was especially distressed at reading was in response to Sean Charpentier, Assistant City Manager of the City of East Palo Alto, Community Economic Development Department in the Planning Division. The comment is about Table 4.13-15, that's used for four of the scenarios. It seems like it has highly optimistic assumptions about traffic impacts. The response is that as traffic congestion and travel delays increase throughout the Bay Area, modes other than driving will become relatively more attractive. I was a little distressed at reading that. How I read that is it's going to get so bad that we will look to ways to make it better by reverting to or changing to alternative forms of transportation. That was a concern. The other part of that is what other forms of alternative transportation. It seemed to me that some of the transportation mitigations that reduce some of the impacts from potentially significant to less than significant rely on potential and future means of transportation that are unproven and some not even in place. Along those lines, it seems to me that a missing—I won't catch them all here, but these will give you a random sampling—mitigation, given that our employment numbers will increase even if we didn't add any square footage for office is because our existing offices would become more densely occupied, is why didn't we consider or evaluate an Employee Transportation Tax for employee densities over 4 per 1,000, which is how we determine traffic impacts, parking ratios and use those funds to create expanded shuttle systems and business shuttles. Those are several things to put out there. I've given you a laundry list to respond to. I appreciate your forbearance. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Holman. It sounds like we're perhaps not going to be able to convince you on all of these points, but I do FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 64 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 appreciate the opportunity to respond on the record. I hope that my colleagues will chime in. First, with regard to your questions about the air quality mitigation. The numbers you see and the mitigation measures you see are drawn from the Air District's CEQA Guidelines. The reference to 100 diesel trips is in a measure that identifies projects that are subject to preparation of health risk assessments for toxic air contaminants. This is not your run of the mill development project where you're trying to mitigate for emissions of carbon monoxide or particulate emissions during construction. This is when you have a large project with the potential for toxic air contaminants, and the requirement under the Air District Guidelines is to prepare a health risk assessment. We feel that the measures, all of them combined, effectively implement what the Air District has put forward as best practices, requirements for CEQA documents, and that's what you see reflected in these measures. We don't have a specific air quality measure about increasing the footprint of the urban forest, but we do have policies about the urban forest. Ms. Costello: This was a big emphasis of the CAC. They put in—if you look at Goal N-2 starting with Policy N-21, they recognize the importance of the urban forest as a vital part of the City's natural and green infrastructure network. Council Member Holman: Could you give us a Page number please? Ms. Costello: This in the Plan, Page N-16. It's Policy N-2.1, and it’s the role of the urban forest. It starts off with recognizing—it's a new policy that was added by the CAC. To recognize the importance of the urban forest as a vital part of the City's natural and green infrastructure network that contributes to public health, resiliency, habitat value, appreciation of natural systems, and an attractive visual character, which must be protected and enhanced. It goes on to include a lot of policies to deal with not just trees as an aesthetic. That was one of the big changes in this Plan, much more of a focus on public health and that trees play a public health role. The trees play an aesthetic, but in this Plan they play a public health role. That was recognized in the Plan with a number of policies to keep plans to enhance ecological resistance by diversifying native species, protecting soils. There was quite—the CAC spent a lot of time on this section with just that objective in mind of bringing into this Plan the value of trees for public health as well as aesthetics. They didn't ignore aesthetics, but they did want to really recognize the public health role of that, including the air quality role of that. We're happy to answer any others, but I did—I'm going to turn salvage over to someone else. I'm more familiar with trees than salvage. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 65 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Ms. Gitelman: Let me continue with noise. I need to do a little more digging in the current Plan, but I don't believe we changed any of the policy framework with regard to decibel limits or land use compatibility, thresholds. All of that is the same. The mitigation measures had some changes between the draft and the final in part because there was a change in how the State law looks at impacts of the environment on new development. If you think about what an EIR does, it's look at the impacts of a project on the environment. Over the years, CEQA practitioners like the City had started to consider the impacts of the environment on the project. You have a quiet neighborhood or a noisy neighborhood; what would the impacts on the project be? There was a recent court decision that said we can't do that. We had to make some changes in the Final EIR to reflect that change in how the law is being interpreted. I don't know if that specifically gets to the issue you were raising, Council Member Holman. It would take me a while to dig into the exact language that you cited. We are confident that the noise policies in this Plan have not changed from the current Plan and that the mitigation measures are effective at addressing any new noise or vibration sources that could occur as a result of this Plan's implementation. Council Member Holman: Before you go on, let me point you to it. It's in the FEIR on Page 3-16. It is under Mitigation Noise 1-a, 1-b, 1-c. It is the seventh mitigation down. What is struck out is updating for clarity the Noise Ordinance to make enforcement easier. We had a chat about this one. It's something that—even if it isn't a change, what we're doing here isn't a change from what the current Comp. Plan is. I have had I don't know how many neighbors contact me over the years and say they called Code enforcement about a noise issue, ongoing and 24-hours a day, and especially nighttime noise. What struck me about this language is "to make enforcement easier" because the response that these people get is the City Staff responds to these noise complaints saying, "We have no way to measure the impact." I was really distressed at this language going out as a mitigation. Our Noise Ordinance has been recognized for a long time as being out of date too. Ms. Gitelman: A couple of things on that. First of all, the Noise Ordinance is enforced by the Police Department, not by our Code enforcement Staff. They do have a way to measure noise impacts, but they also have a lot of other things on their plate, including the safety and security of this community. It could be that they just aren't able to prioritize every exceedance or complaint that they receive. With regard to this mitigation measure, the changes you're seeing in this mitigation measure reflect the fact that we're trying to make this Plan implement measures over time to ensure that the impact will not occur. The lead into that measure, Noise 1- a, talks about how we're going to include policies to achieve the following. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 66 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 In eliminating that need to clarify the Noise Ordinance, that was a to-do item we didn't feel was necessary to update the policies in the Plan. It's really this policy commitment that the City would be making in adoption of the Plan. We do have a program in the Comp. Plan itself that says update the Noise Ordinance as needed to provide for clear interpretation of the regulations, etc. That's Program Number 6.3.3. We didn't feel it rose to the level of an EIR mitigation, but it is a program in the Plan. This is similar to the community concerns we showed in our presentation on airplane noise and dewatering, where it didn't rise to the level of mitigation, but it is a concern and it is included in the Plan. Council Member Holman: Just one clarification. I do know that police enforce noise violations. As has been reported to me on a number of occasions by different people, police go out and say we have no way to measure. Ms. Gitelman: Just moving on to some of your other concerns. Salvage. Ms. Jansen: The EIR mentions salvage and reuse in impact and Mitigation Measure Util 15, which has to do with impacts to solid waste. It's on Page 1- 27 of the Final EIR. This is an impact and mitigation measure that's been in the Draft EIR, in the supplemental EIR, and in the Final EIR. It, of course, has different page numbers. It shows up in the summary table, but it also shows up in a chapter. That's one place that you can look at it. This is about reducing solid waste generation and encouraging salvage and reuse. You can see the mitigation measure here, Util 15 on Page, for example, 1-27 and 1-28 of the Final EIR. Those correspond to policies in the Comp. Plan including Policy S-3.8 in the Safety Element, which talks about 95 percent landfill diversion including through enhancing policies and programs for reuse, and Policy S-3.9 which is to reduce solid waste generation through requiring salvage and reuse of building materials including architecturally and historically significant materials. Of course, as you have observed before, we have a related and consistent policy in the Land Use Element to promote adaptive reuse of old buildings. That's a policy that's carried forward from your existing Comp. Plan, and it's now Policy L-7.8 on Page L- 42 of the Comp. Plan. Council Member Holman: My apologies on that one. I thought that had been taken out. That was my last reading of that. It's curious that under Utilities—I'll just make this a brief comment. I'm glad the word salvage is included somewhere that has escaped my attention. The mitigation under Util-15 on Page I-27 talks about landfill diversion and those sorts of things that, from my experience of many years being on the Council and my frustration, it just really never addresses adaptive reuse, salvage, or FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 67 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 deconstruction. It's landfill diversion is, if you can recycle it, it's diverted. Recycling is very different than salvage. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Holman. This might be an appropriate time for me to again reiterate what I think we brought forward in our original presentation on October 23rd to the Council, which is really a thank you to all of the sitting Council Members. What you have in the draft Plan is really a reflection of all of the input we've received from all of you over these many months. I know that we received your comments on the salvage issue. I know that they're reflected in the Plan. Thank you for bringing forward that issue and to your colleagues for the issues that are important to them. It's a little hard right now to track all of these things through the document. Again, with regard to your comments on the mitigation, we may have taken out some wording in a mitigation measure related to compatibility, but the Plan is chock-a-block with compatibility policies. When you look at the Land Use Element under Goal 6, it's all about compatibility. We can point out specific policies if you like. In cultural resources, we've done what I think—you recognized and contributed to a very responsible job in taking this Plan farther than the existing Plan in terms of identifying potential historic resources so they can be fully evaluated before any decision is made about their demolition or substantial alteration. That's quite a strong mitigation measure in the current document. With regard to your comments on transportation, that traffic comment and response you referred to, perhaps our response to the commenter was a little in-artful, but we were trying to convey the complexity of a travel forecast model that looks at origins and destinations throughout the region and makes assumptions about what's happening in future conditions, about mode shares and where people are going by which modes. To open up the hood in a model like that and cherry pick out one particular assumption or another is very difficult to do. We have spent a lot of time, energy, and money on the travel forecasting and traffic analysis that you see presented in these environmental documents. This Council has had an opportunity to review those results multiple times. We're very confident in them and, through your review cycles, you've offered comments and seen them improve over time. Maybe we'll stop there. If there are additional specific changes that the Council is looking for in the mitigation measures or the policies that implement them, we'd be happy to contribute our thoughts to those suggestions. Council Member Holman: Just one more comment on these things. In the FEIR on 3-12, this is something I didn't mention, but it's mentioned in regard to something else. I wish I could remember what. It says in the first paragraph, about midway on that page, the proposed Plan would not directly result in the demolition of any structure, and it would be speculative to try to FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 68 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 predict which listed historic structures may be proposed for demolition or substantial alteration as future developments occur under the proposed Plan. That same approach is used regarding another impact that escapes me at the moment. What it gets to for me is because we don't know what—let's just say we don't know that the University Arts Building is going to be demolished, so we can't identify that as an impact. It's also true that we don't know which specific trees are going to be removed. We don't know what specific development projects are going to be coming forward; yet, we manage to analyze in a comprehensive way, in a holistic way, what the impacts are and put mitigations in place that forestall or eliminate that impact. It's just an example of language that I don't find comforting. It's on Page 3-12, first paragraph, in the FEIR. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Holman. Just a couple of things. First of all, the nature of a program EIR on a Plan like this is that we can't possibly tell the future, that someone might come in with a proposal to demolish any specific building. Our obligation is to develop mitigation measures and policies that would protect the City from a real loss of significant resources. We have that in the mitigation regime and in Policy L- 7-2 on Page L-41 of the Plan. This is the policy that implements the mitigation measure that talks about if any project would substantially affect the exterior of a potential historic resource, it needs to be evaluated for significance. That would automatically trigger an EIR if a significant resource was proposed for demolition. We'd be sitting right back here having this conversation with a lot more site-specific, resource-specific information. We feel like this program EIR has done exactly what it needs to do in terms of setting a mitigation regime that will be protective of cultural resources in the future. Council Member Holman: Let me be clear. I do understand that this is a program EIR, not a project EIR. I do understand that. It just seemed like there should be better mitigations for addressing those broader impacts as opposed to saying we don't know which ones. Do you want to speak to any of the transportation mitigations? Ms. Gitelman: Again, we did identify some transportation measures along the lines that you talked about, that would encourage trip reductions and that would address traffic congestion and delays through trip reduction measures. We didn't identify the specific measure that you suggested, but we have TDM plans with—the mitigation requires TDM plans with quantitative thresholds. We talk about performance measures, monitoring, and enforcement. It's about new development. We don't really have the ability to impose—it would be very difficult to impose mitigation on existing uses because there's not a discretionary decision upon which to base the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 69 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 application of conditions of approval or mitigation. We do have a program in the transportation section that says as part of the effort to reduce traffic congestion, regularly evaluate the City's current impact fee and modify as needed. It goes on from there. This is on Page T-32 of the document. We've looked at funding improvements of various different types as well as trip reduction measures of various types. Council Member Holman: I do understand that we can't mitigate existing buildings. My approach was through policy to evaluate ways to mitigate existing building impacts. I look to see what my other colleagues have to say. Mayor Scharff: I see no other lights. There we go. Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I think these are quick. Overall, the Comp. Plan looks pretty good. One comment on T-29 on bicycling and walking. As the Vice Mayor mentioned, I started working on this Comp. Plan back when I first started on the Planning and Transportation Commission. I'm kind of surprised to still see it now. Given that, it might take a while for the updated version of the Comp. Plan next time to come around. One thing we should think about is—right now bicycling is definitely a preferred mode in this policy. There's been a lot of innovation recently in the area of personal transportation vehicles. What I mean by that is not just bicycles but skateboards, scooters. There's even one wheels. There's a bunch of new lightweight transportation vehicles that are out there. Bicycles were invented in 1817, a long time ago. Especially with the advent of lithium ion batteries and (inaudible) less motors, there's been a lot more innovation in this area. I'd like to make an Amendment that—what's intended here is not just promote bicycles because maybe in 5 years bicycles will be—there will be other things besides bicycles that people will be using. I'd like to say promote personal transportation vehicles, for example bicycles, skateboards, etc., used as an alternative way to get to work, school, shopping, etc. That's my proposal. Council Member DuBois: I'll second that. AMENDMENT: Council Member Tanaka moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to add to the Comprehensive Plan Policy T-1.16 the language “promote personal transportation vehicles as an alternative to cars (e.g. bicycles, skateboards, roller blades)”. Mayor Scharff: Where would that go? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 70 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Tanaka: On T-29, on Policy T-1.16. What this is trying to say is not just bicycles, it's also saying roller blades or skateboards or electric skateboards. Mayor Scharff: You seconded that, Council Member DuBois. Do you want to speak further to your Motion? Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I do think we need to be careful about Amendments tonight. I hope this one's not controversial. I think we would defer to Staff about the appropriate place for these things. I commend Council Member Tanaka. There has been a lot of innovation. You're primarily talking about electric types of devices that could help people travel much further without using the vehicular road. Do you want to clarify as well electric personal vehicles? Council Member Tanaka: We could, sure. It would be electric or non- electric, either way. Just coming here, you see a whole bunch of ways people move in an eco-friendly way. On T-37 … Mayor Scharff: We've got to deal with this first. We've got to finish this Amendment. I have lights from everyone else now. Does anybody want to speak to this just quickly? Nope. Let's vote on the Amendment. You want to speak to it, Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Sorry to slow this one down. I was just wondering if we want to say something like reduced traffic impact personal transportation vehicles. Isn't a car a personal transportation vehicle? Council Member Tanaka: I'm fine. Usually under 50 pounds. I wasn't trying to be overly specific here. Council Member Wolbach: I'm not looking to be specific. What I'm trying to do is have some clarity for people who are reading this in 2030 and saying what exactly qualifies when something new is invented. I'm looking to Staff if they would be okay with something that said promote personal transportation vehicles which reduce traffic and parking impact as an alternative to cars. Mayor Scharff: Why don't you say as an alternative to cars. Council Member Wolbach: Just to show that you don't mean cars. Council Member Tanaka: I'm fine with that. My main point is it's more than just bicycles these days. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 71 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Wolbach: I agree. That's why I'm trying to provide some general clarity rather than specificity. Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on the board. That passes 9-0. AMENDMENT PASSED: 9-0 Council Member Tanaka: I have one other, which is on T-37, Policy T-3.15. I've been hearing from a lot of different neighborhoods along the rail corridor about how to do the grade crossings. One of the fears I've heard from a lot of residents—it's something we should try to address here—is eminent domain. If it turns out we're moving the roads and we have to take people's houses to take the roads, that's not necessarily a good thing. What I'd like to propose is that we pursue grade separation of rail crossings, as it says now, and try to minimize eminent domain. That's it. It's basically to minimize eminent domain at the end of the sentence. I've seen some figures of 40-80 houses. In general, we want to try to be conscientious about the impacts this would have on folks. I hope this is not very controversial because I don't think anyone here wants to take people's … Mayor Scharff: I think it will be controversial. Council Member Tanaka: I'd like to propose it anyway. We should not be taking people's houses to provide the grade separation. Council Member Kou: I'll second that. AMENDMENT: Council Member Tanaka moved, seconded by Council Member Kou to add to Comprehensive Plan Policy T-3.15 the language “and to try to minimize residential property loss.” Mayor Scharff: You want to speak to your Motion? Council Member Tanaka: Grade separations are critically important; I do support that. How we do it is also important. There's a pretty big fear among a lot of folks, especially as we're doing more outreach to the community about what happens if this becomes a road project instead of a train project. That means we're moving the roads instead of the trains. If you move the roads, one implication of that is you need ramps to get onto and off the roads, like what happens at Page Mill or at the other grade crossings. That has implications of potentially taking residential property near these intersections. The City should try to minimize that kind of impact on our residents. That's why I suggested this language. Vice Mayor Kniss: Could I ask a question? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 72 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Go ahead. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm a little concerned about the word "eminent domain." I would be more comfortable if you spell out what you mean. You mean try to minimize the taking of houses because it might be other property that they need to use for eminent domain. Council Member Tanaka: I think the Vice Mayor has a good suggestion. What language would you suggest? Vice Mayor Kniss: I would simply say to minimize—the word usually is "taking," but it would minimize taking houses, whatever other word happens to … We could say minimize housing loss. That's even better. All we mean to talk about is we don't them to take houses. They may take some vacant land here and there, but I think housing is what you're talking about. Council Member Tanaka: Let's make it simple. Let's say "property loss." I was listening to fellow Council Member Fine. I'm trying to keep it simple. Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm not sure it's as clear as housing, but that's all right. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou, you want to speak to your second? Council Member Kou: I was thinking in terms of changing the language. It is what it is. It's eminent domain. Why not just say that? I'm okay with the change. Property can apply to land too if that's what you're trying to avoid. I would actually suggest residential property loss, if the maker will accept that. Council Member Tanaka: Mainly that's what I'm concerned about. I'm fine with that. Mr. Keene: Just to clarify, these are cases where the words really do matter. Technically, residential property loss could mean the project needed 1 foot of somebody's land and not touch their house, take their house. There is a difference between losing your home and some residential property loss. That's one issue. There is a second issue of there's a whole bunch of criteria that the Rail Committee is working through on evaluating. I just say I understand the intent of this, but this would be pulling out one of the criteria that are being looked at as funnels or sieves that we would process some choices. This would be a departure from that conversation we're having right now to inject this here. I understand the intent of it, but it does have some bearing on the other process that you do have. There are two points. One, you would want to clarify that it's a home or something more than just property. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 73 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Have you spoken yet, Council Member Kou? Council Member Kou: Not yet. Mayor Scharff: Let Council Member Kou speak. Council Member Kou: I was just going to say I hope the word "minimize the loss" might help out, but I can also see your point. The whole thing is housing here in Palo Alto is already quite not affordable. No matter how you compensate somebody for taking their home, it's not going to be replaceable. I do have great concerns about the loss of somebody's home, but also moving forward on the Caltrain situation we want to look at very long-term, strategic planning for and implementation for generations to come. I hope that we can certainly minimize this and the losses for people. Mayor Scharff: I just want to speak to this briefly. We have a process at the Rail Committee. This undermines that process. I don't think there's anyone on this Council that thinks it's a good thing to take homes. We all oppose that. I don't think any of us support that. However, if we are going to do grade separations, that is something that may need to happen depending on which grade separation it is, depending on where we go. We're in the early stages here. We've been talking as a Council about having a process where we go out to the community, we discuss these issues, we come up with a preferred scenario. We are looking at the trench scenario at the moment. In fact, we're doing a trenching study. All those things may or may not be feasible. As we go through this process, to put this in the Comprehensive Plan either means nothing, in which case we can feel good about it and just vote for it. If it actually means anything, then we have a problem. Therefore, I don't think we should put this in here. It is going against what we as a Council have been saying for the last couple of years about the right process on these grade separations. Without much thought and discussion by the Rail Committee, if we just go ahead and throw this in, it undermines the entire process in terms of getting grade separations. I know Staff wanted to make some comments on this as well. I watched them jump out of their seat. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: A slightly different take but similar comments from the Rail Committee perspective. Again, we've defined criteria to evaluate. One of the criteria is minimizing eminent domain. That's one that I weigh quite highly. What Mayor Scharff said is nobody wants to do it. My main consideration is, is this something that really belongs in the Comp. Plan itself. You could argue that it does. I feel like it's at the Rail Committee, and our criteria for judging projects seems to be the right place. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 74 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I was pretty much going where the last two speakers went. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mayor. As Council Member DuBois mentioned, one of our priorities is to minimize the use of eminent domain. I'm not sure this belongs in the Comprehensive Plan. I'd also add we have the responsibility to our businesses as well. Some businesses may be impacted by eminent domain of this use. I think it's important to consider both of those. I won't be supporting this. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Given that every member of the Rail Committee says that they are not supportive of this, not because they feel it undermines the process that's happening at the Rail Committee but that they're all sympathetic to the language and they think it's an important priority and it is already one of their considerations, I will be joining them in not supporting this Amendment. I just wanted to ask if the maker might want to withdraw it just because it's not going to pass. Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on the board. That fails on a 6-3 vote with Kou, Tanaka and Kniss voting yes. AMENDMENT FAILED: 3-6 Kniss, Kou, Tanaka yes Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka, are you … Council Member Tanaka: I'm done. Mayor Scharff: You're done. Council Member DuBois, you haven't spoken to the main. Council Member DuBois: It's been a long night. This is a compromise document. It's great we're near completion. I thought we started off strong. I appreciated Council Member Wolbach's comments about going for noncontroversial tweaks. I don't think we're going for perfect, but we made some improvements tonight. I actually wanted to split my comments into two sections. Last meeting, you said we'd have an opportunity to talk about the community indicators. Nobody's really spoken to those yet. I'd like to do that first and make a Motion on that and then come back and talk about mitigations. Not to take too long, but the reason the community indicators were such a big discussion at CAC is we're seeing impacts. They're showing FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 75 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 up in the National Citizens Survey. Palo Alto as a place to raise children dropped 8 percent. Quality of life dropped 8 percent. We've talked about the office caps. We used to average about 38,000 square feet of commercial office a year. Starting in 2008, that jumped up to over 100,000 per year on average. We've weakened those restrictions. I think the caps we have left are going to have minimal effect. We added a rollover. We turned hard caps into speed bumps. To compensate for that, having some key performance indicators, some community metrics makes sense. Appreciate the support for adding those back in at the last meeting. When it came to us, there was broad consensus on the CAC. All three Staff options had community indicators in them. If you look at Packet Page 224, where they list the full list, there are a few specific ones it would make sense to add, specifically, the percentage of commute trips to employment centers by single occupancy vehicles; commercial parking overflow into neighborhoods; on 226, unoccupied homes; the park acreage per capita; and the urban tree canopy. The reason I picked those five is that none of those are reported currently. They're key metrics to give us a measure of how we're doing in the impacts of the Comp. Plan. Percent trips to employment centers, the Transportation Management Association (TMA) is reporting on some of that. There are some issues with their baseline and the way they're reporting for the small part of the City they're tracking. There is something in here about measuring the distance to parks, but that doesn't tell us how many people those parks are servicing. That's my pitch for those five. I'll make a Motion that summarizes that, that we add those community indicators to the existing change. Mayor Scharff: Could you just say which ones—park average per capita, commercial district parking overflow (crosstalk). Council Member DuBois: They're on the board. Council Member Holman: Second that. AMENDMENT: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to add the following to the list of Community Indicators included in the Comprehensive Plan: A. Percentage of commute trips to Employment Centers by Single Occupancy Vehicles (SOV); B. Commercial District Parking overflow into neighborhoods; C. Park acreage per capita; and D. Urban tree canopy coverage. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 76 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: You want to speak to your Motion? Council Member DuBois: I think I just did. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: These are really important ones, and important ones to the community based on the kind of feedback we get on the community including, as Council Member DuBois mentioned, in our Citizens Survey. There was one that I wondered if you would be interested in adding. It could be one of two different things. It could either be affordability of housing stock or economic diversity, either one of those. Would you be interested in adding one of the two of those? They're on Page 225. Council Member DuBois: What I tried to do is look at—those are being reported as part of the Housing Element. I was preferring to add ones that we're not getting reports on. Council Member Holman: Would you want to step up how often they're reported or maybe it's a question for Hillary. They're only reported every 8 years. Ms. Gitelman: What I'd add is we had understood the Council's direction at the last meeting was to find indicators that we did have data and we could report on without a lot of extra effort. Some of these really would take a significant effort. The Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) trips, we have the TMA Downtown and Stanford Research Park does a survey. We would have to pay for a statistically valid survey of other employment centers on a regular basis to generate that. The parking overflow is another one where we would have significant cost to employ that data collection effort. Unoccupied homes, I don't know how we would do that. In park acreage per capita, we've suggested in lieu of that the percent of residents who live within 1/2-mile of a City park. It gets to accessibility to the parks. This is really a measure—we had a long conversation with our colleagues in Community Services about this issue. They really think that is a blunt instrument, and this percent accessible to neighborhood parks is far more appropriate in terms of assessing how many people can access easily our neighborhood park system. It's something they're going to want to measure on an ongoing basis. Council Member DuBois: Just to clarify. Commercial district overflow into neighborhoods, you took that as beyond Residential Preferential Parking (RPP) districts? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 77 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Ms. Gitelman: We currently collect data on Downtown, now Evergreen, Southgate, Mayfield. There are commercial districts along other sections of El Camino and other parts of the City that we would have to survey with similar effort and cost. Council Member DuBois: I think that one's important. I can see removing the unoccupied homes if there's no easy way to do that. Park acreage per capita is really getting to the intensity of use of a park, how many people not just if everybody's close to the same park. That measure doesn't really tell you anything. Ms. Gitelman: I'm regretting that I didn't bring the map that they've prepared, that is really evocative. It shows concentric circles around neighborhood parks with people who are within a 1/4-mile walking distance and a 1/2 mile … Council Member DuBois: My point is as density increases, you're adding more and more people to that park without adding park … Ms. Gitelman: There are spaces where they're not within a 1/2 mile, and those are areas where you wouldn't want to increase population. You can't see it, but it's a beautiful map. Council Member DuBois: I think I've seen it before. It seems like a very different measure to me. This question is really do you have enough parks for how many people you have versus … Ms. Gitelman: Whether the people you have, have access to neighborhood parks. Council Member DuBois: What about the last, urban tree canopy coverage? Ms. Gitelman: Our Colleagues in Public Works have indicated that they can do this. Every time there's a new Geographic Information System (GIS) layer, they can have it calculate the urban tree—they can estimate the canopy. I think we could do that. I don't know whether that would be— maybe it's every 4 years. We didn't ask them. Ms. Costello: I think it would be every 4 years because it is extra work. It's not just a straight up number. Ms. Gitelman: We could do that every 4 years. Council Member DuBois: Council Member Holman, are you okay deleting the unoccupied homes? FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 78 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Holman: Yes. That was something I was going to ask for. While I do want to have something happen to monitor those or limit them, I don't think it belongs in the metrics. The urban tree canopy, yes, Public Works does do that. The organization Canopy also does that and monitors it. I'm supportive of the others. Mayor Scharff: I'll make a Substitute Motion that we go with the Staff recommendation, which was to add the 3 that Staff came up with, which was traffic volumes on City streets, availability of parks, and PAUSD school enrollments. I know Staff put a lot of time into thinking about this. I believe our direction from Council was we wanted to have a limited number. We decided on eight. We wanted Staff to use ones that weren't going to burden Staff with too much extra work. Council Member Fine: I'll second that. Mayor Scharff: I think Staff did a good job coming up with this stuff. Council Member Fine: I'll second that, Mr. Mayor. SUBSTITUTE AMENDMENT: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Fine to add the following to the list of Community Indicators included in the Comprehensive Plan: A. Traffic volumes on city streets; B. Availability of parks; and C. Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) school enrollments. Mayor Scharff: This is the At-Places Memo, where Staff came up with the three. I actually think Staff's right about the availability of parks. It's a much better metric. That's what you want to look at. We want to make sure everyone lives with a 1/2 mile of a City park. That's what we should do. Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you. When we last dealt with this, we did ask Staff to come back and bubble up what they felt were the three major ones that we were missing. I thought these hit the nail on the head. One problem with metrics is when you begin measuring everything, you essentially diffuse your effort over everything. It is important for us to stay focused. What I did like about these metrics is they're high level, they're quick indicators, but they're not so specific that they will be able to push a policy or a building decision or something else one way or another. That's really important if we're looking at community indicators because if we are FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 79 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 going to use them as essentially policy tools, I want to include stuff such as air pollution levels, such as economic diversity. We can get into that discussion if we really want, but Staff has done a good job of generalizing some measures which will allow us to see how some of the policies in the Comp. Plan are or are not working. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I was going to ask about traffic volumes and congestion because people really care about that stuff. We had a discussion about VMT and so forth, which is good from a regional environmental perspective, but people care about traffic. I'm glad to see that here. School enrollment is already calculated by the School District every September. Are we adding a lot of value doing it by the City here or could we add something else that would make sense? Ms. Gitelman: You're right. Someone is collecting this data on an annual basis. I thought the Council's direction was to report on things that had some bearing to the land use policies in the Plan and whether we think they're working in the way we anticipated or not. We could certainly substitute something else there. Council Member Filseth: Do you think that adds a lot more? I was asking your advice. Do you think it adds value to do it like this? Ms. Gitelman: We thought it did add some value here. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I was actually going to speak to something else. Mayor Scharff: That's fine. I'm just trying to make sure. Council Member DuBois, did you want to speak to … Council Member DuBois: Just to speak to the Substitute Motion. Having metrics that don't let us make decisions doesn't seem very useful. The traffic volume measure here is at ten intersections for the City. With modern technology, we should be able within the life of this Comp. Plan to measure traffic throughout the City. Companies are doing it today with smartphone data. I just felt we could do a lot better. With these indicators, we're going to get a report every 2 years on ten intersections. A huge part of our mitigations are based on TDM, and we don't want a report on the percentage of commute trips with single occupancy vehicles. That just doesn't seem to make sense. I really would urge you guys—I was hoping this wouldn't be that controversial. I'm open to Amendments to the original FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 80 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Motion, but we should be looking at data that we can use to track some of the key parts of the Comp. Plan and the mitigations in the Comp. Plan. I would agree I'm not sure what value we add in reporting the PAUSD school enrollments that the School District reports already. Mayor Scharff: I wanted to go back to the percentage of commute trips to employment centers by single occupancy vehicles. We do Downtown currently, right? Tom, my concern with this is right now—this is one of the weaknesses of the Comp. Plan in some ways. I thought it would be too controversial to reopen it. Downtown is not an employment center. Right now our employment centers are … Mr. Keene: Research Park, hospital area, East Bayshore. Mayor Scharff: How much work would it be for Staff to do this? This seemed like a lot of work to me, but I'm open to revisiting that one. Ms. Gitelman: We would have to hire a survey firm like the TMA does when they get their Downtown firm to do a statistically valid … Mayor Scharff: Any sense what it would cost to do Downtown? Do we know? Ms. Gitelman: That number was in my budget for several years. For the life of me, I can't remember. Mayor Scharff: This is my concern about putting this in the Comp. Plan. It embeds these costs forever. It's really hard to take stuff out once it's in the Comp. Plan like that. That's really my concern. There might be years when we need this data, we want Staff to get it. We're getting Downtown. We may want to do the Research Park. To Staff, I might support that for a while. I'm just saying that's really my concern with that. I disagree with you on the park acreage per capita. The commercial district parking overflow, I heard it would be difficult for Staff to get that data outside of what we're doing in the neighborhoods, which we already get. That was really why I felt it was important to—Staff suggested these. The PAUSD school enrollment is helpful to continue to point out given the community's sensitivity. Half the time someone comes up here and is talking about how we're going to impact the schools negatively. Having that data handy and quickly available is useful. That's why I went with it. Council Member DuBois: One thing we could ask is—I don't think Stanford necessarily—they do a count a couple of times a year. That's another way to do it. When the TMA presented their data, they actually—if you looked at their data, they actually had fewer SOVs this year than last year, when you FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 81 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 account for growth. We need good data to be able to make decisions on these TDMs. It's worth it. I'm not sure if we could have more creative ways to get that data. Do you know Stanford's … Ms. Gitelman: Stanford does the exact same thing. They take a survey of the commuters in their Research Park around April or May. There's some sort of standard industry practice where there's a spring month where everybody does their surveys. Everyone does it the exact same way. Mr. Keene: If I could just add a comment that could help in this regard. I do appreciate the relationship of this last measure as it relates to growth management and that sort of thing. Separate from the Comp. Plan itself, which I'd prefer to call the General Plan for reasons I'll get into later, we have another whole initiative that we've been talking about at Finance and elsewhere about how we review all of our performance indicators, what we do as it relates to the National Citizens Survey, what we have in our budget. We really have the need for, in our view, a comprehensive review of all the factors that deal with livability and how we perform as a City. I would think revisiting a lot of these in the context of that will be something that we need to do. It will be an important conversation for us to be able to look at what things we could add without it necessarily having to be part of the Comp. Plan itself, but they would be meaningful indicators or measures for us as a City. I'm not committing to we would do this one or that one. We've made it very clear that we have a hodge-podge ad hoc collection of performance and quality of life indicators that we use, that we have committed to as a Staff—I have—to working with our Staff team across departments. Even when Planning says, "What can we do," it actually impacts more functions than just one Staff department for us to know how effectively we could collect data on a routine basis. I would just offer that there are other bites at this application that we're going to pursue in other initiatives. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I did second this Amendment. I do agree with Council Member DuBois about measuring ten representative local intersections is not very helpful. There's something we don't hear very much about, and that's our Business Registry. If our Business Registry was a little robust, it seems like we could use the Business Registry—yes, it would have to be analyzed—as the data collection point for determining how many trips are by single occupancy vehicles. One of the questions is, I do believe, where do you live, how do you get to work. Like I say, we don't talk about our Business Registry much, but we are missing something by not utilizing it and making best use of it. I would still support the original Amendment and suggest we use the Business Registry to help identify the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 82 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 percent of commute trips to employment centers. I'm a little confused because I thought just a couple or three weeks ago that our Mayor said Downtown was an employment center in regard to something else. Mayor Scharff: You just said it is an employment center. I thought in our Comprehensive Plan it's not an employment center. That's why we had the confusion over the software stuff, and that's why software ended up in Town and Country and all that. I was going to try and fix that in the Comp. Plan, but it just seemed too difficult at this stage. Council Member Holman: I was just saying I thought you had said Downtown was an employment center. Mayor Scharff: It clearly is an employment center just not called out as one in our Comp. Plan, and it should be. Council Member Holman: Not designated as one, that's what you're saying. Mayor Scharff: It should be. Maybe I should say that I just hadn't thought through—we'll get there. Maybe I'll make that Motion to designate it as an employment center. Council Member DuBois, you've spoken. Has everyone spoken to the Amendment? Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: As Council Member DuBois pointed out, we started this section of this evening really trying to focus on things that were consensus items, something I emphasized in my comments at the start of this conversation a couple of hours ago. Obviously, we've had a couple of things that have not been consensus votes. I was really hoping this is one where we could get there. It was pretty controversial when we reduced the number of community indicators several months ago. I think there is broad recognition that we wanted to return some of those. We saw that a couple of weeks ago, a broad recognition on the Council that we really do want some of those community indicators in this Comprehensive Plan, that they're important, that it's important to have those metrics. We pretty enthusiastically re-added those that we did add 2 weeks ago, and we're interested in taking a look at which other ones had been considered previously, even if they hadn't been as broadly supported, and also interested in which ones of those Staff was most interested in. I'm actually not really excited about either of them. Some of the stuff in the original Amendment by DuBois and Holman is redundant of stuff we're already collecting or is not focused where I would put the focus. The Substitute Amendment, Palo Alto Unified School District's enrollment, on one hand that is supportive of the Amendment that I added earlier about working with Palo Alto Unified to identify school sites. Knowing what the enrollment is might help inform that. That's the job of the School District to say what's FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 83 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 happening with their enrollment and where are we planning on growth. If we're planning growth here, here's what's expected to be a need for school sites. I don't know why we need to do School District enrollment surveys for Palo Alto Unified School District, which includes Stanford, which is outside of our control, which includes Los Altos Hills, which is outside our control. Mayor Scharff: I don't think we're doing the surveys. I thought we'd just get the information from them. Council Member Wolbach: We would just get it from them? Mayor Scharff: I thought they'd just give it to us. Thank you for clarifying. It's getting late. It's fine to—in the interest of collaboration, I'm okay with that one then. That was in the Staff recommendation. Thank you for clarifying that. What I'm trying to avoid is creating unnecessary Staff work. Us doing the work of Palo Alto Unified would be unnecessary Staff work. If they're doing it and they sharing it with us and we're making sure to get it from them, great. On availability of parks, I actually think Council Member DuBois was right that these are two different metrics that are being talked about. They each have some value. I do lean towards the importance of people being able to walk to one. I'd rather share a park with a neighbor than not be able to get to a park. In picking between those two different metrics, being able to get to a park is more important than how many people I'm going to have to share it with. I'm not saying they're not both important. I'm just saying that being able to get to one is more important. That's what the Substitute Motion does. Traffic volumes on City streets, some people are worried that ten isn't enough. I think it's just more emphasis of level of service. I thought we were trying to move away from that. I'm not enthusiastic about it. I'm reluctantly going to support the Substitute Motion, but I'm not excited about it. I don't think it makes that big a difference. Mayor Scharff: (Inaudible) 5-3 with Council Member Tanaka having stepped out. SUBSTITUTE AMENDMENT PASSED: 5-3 DuBois, Holman, Kou no, Tanaka not participating Council Member DuBois: I wanted to continue. That was meant to be a quick Motion. Mayor Scharff: Any more quick Motions and we'll be here 'til midnight. Council Member DuBois: I wanted to speak to the mitigations. I'm not happy that we're planning for severe impacts that are not mitigatable. The FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 84 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Stanford GUP, 3 1/2 million square feet in total surrounded by Palo Alto should be called out. It's an extremely large project. It's not just any project. The Final EIR forecasts 1,000 housing units and 460 jobs at Stanford by 2030. The GUP far exceeds both of those, plus we previously had a housing request for about 1,000 units, if I remember right, from Stanford. That's a big concern. The other ones are really the transportation impacts. The mitigations rely on the future SOV trip reduction. That's not something we've seen work yet. I think we could do more in terms of mitigations. I agree with Council Member Holman's comments that one mitigation we should really consider has to tie density of commercial buildings to traffic impacts. That should be included. Overall, I think we're being asked do the benefits outweigh the impacts. It's not clear that they do. We have some very large unavoidable impacts, and most of them were covered by Council Member Holman. The other areas that weren't really mentioned. The response to sea level rise didn't seem sufficient. I don't think we analyzed upping the hotel FAR to 3.0 and 2.5. I'm struggling with the unavoidable impacts. I'd really like to see us do more. As I stated before, the public found the multiple scenario process confusing. It was difficult for Council and the CAC, but it was really difficult for the general public. Mayor Scharff: I have no other lights speaking to the main Motion. Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I just had a couple of small changes I wanted to request. Let me see here. One of them is I'd like to make a Motion for Comp. Plan Page T-40, Policy T-5.1. It reads "all new development projects should meet parking demand generated by the project" instead of the word "manage." At CAC when we were going through the transportation, it was recommended to go with "meet." My understanding was at CAC that it was a mistake when you put in "manage" instead of "meet," and it would be changed. I see that it's still going forth in the Comp. Plan on this draft as "manage." I would really like to see that it's "meet." Mayor Scharff: Is there a second to that? AMENDMENT: Council Member Kou moved, seconded by Council Member Filseth to amend the Comprehensive Plan Policy T-5.1 to read “All new development projects should meet parking demand generated …” Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou, would you like to speak to your M option? Council Member Kou: If we're going to meet parking demands and TDMs and all that, we should really meet it. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 85 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Not Kou, Council Member Holman, speak to your second. Council Member Holman: I was ceding to Council Member Filseth, given I've seconded a couple others. Mayor Scharff: Go ahead. Council Member Filseth: I'm not sure exactly how it got changed. "Manage" is vague as has been pointed out. There's been a bunch of discussion about where should parking be, does it need to be onsite, or can it be around the corner in the garage if you made a deal like that. I don't think the word "meet" specifically necessitates it be onsite, which I know is a sticking point for folks. It leaves latitude for other kinds of strategies as well. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: I remember when we changed this, because I made the Motion to change it from "manage" to "meet." We did make that change. Mayor Scharff: We've already voted on this once (crosstalk). Council Member Fine: We've already voted on this, yes. I'll just explain myself again. Going forward, all of us are interested in reducing traffic impacts. Building parking garages and building parking is not the way to manage those traffic impacts. We need to still build some parking for new buildings and new housing projects, but we also need to look at ways where we can encourage folks to take other methods, whether it's biking, walking, electric skateboards, the train. Meeting parking demand time after time just means we're going to build a lot of parking. Furthermore, with the shift that is happening right here in Silicon Valley around things like self-driving cars and self-driving trucks, I really believe and a lot of the leading research shows that parking garages are going to be a white elephant in 10 or 15 years. It's important to manage parking demand. That may mean a combination of building some of it, of doing trip reduction strategies, of providing incentives for workers to take transit, but I don't believe a going forward strategy in terms of addressing parking and traffic impacts is just to build more parking. It's just concrete. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach, you wanted to speak to this? Council Member Wolbach: I guess I wasn't clear about the last speaker's sense about this Motion. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 86 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Fine: I'm voting against this. Mayor Scharff: He made the original Motion (crosstalk). Council Member Fine: Motion to change it. Months ago. Council Member Wolbach: From "meet" to "manage" or from "manage" to "meet"? Council Member Fine: I made the change from "meet" to "manage." Council Member Wolbach: I think you misspoke earlier or I might have misheard you. Council Member Fine: I'm not going to be supporting the Amendment. Council Member Wolbach: The only way I would support this Amendment is if it was amended to say "all new office development projects should meet parking demand." Would the maker and seconder be comfortable with that Amendment? Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach, we have already voted on this once before. Are you thinking of changing it, opening these things up? You've been talking all night about not doing that; now you're going the other way. Council Member Wolbach: I'm also looking for consensus. Mayor Scharff: You're not going to get consensus. Council Member Wolbach: It doesn't look like it's supported anyway. Mayor Scharff: Let's vote on the Motion. That fails on a 5-4 vote. AMENDMENT FAILED: 4-5 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou yes Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou, you still have the floor. Council Member Kou: There's also Comp. Plan Page L-40, Policy 6.7. At this point it reads "where possible avoid abrupt changes." I would like to eliminate "where possible" and just go with "avoid abrupt changes in scale and density between residential and nonresidential areas." Council Member Holman: I'll second that. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 87 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 AMENDMENT: Council Member Kou moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to amend the Comprehensive Plan Policy L-6.7 to eliminate the language “where possible.” Mayor Scharff: Policy what? Council Member Kou: Policy 6.7. Mayor Scharff: What did you want to change? Council Member Kou: To eliminate "where possible" and just to … Mayor Scharff: We already voted on this too, didn't we? Can anyone remember? We already voted on this once before. I would ask that you— I'm going to let you do it if you want. We've already taken one vote on this before. I don't really want us to take votes on stuff we've already voted on. Council Member Kou: I'd like to take a vote, record. Thank you for the opportunity. Mayor Scharff: The next time, I'm not going to allow it. Go ahead. You need a second. Council Member Holman: I seconded. Mayor Scharff: You want to speak to it? Council Member Kou: If we're going to really protect neighborhoods and not let in commerce at the expense of protecting neighborhoods, then this would be one way of doing so and not impact them. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: There are occasions where, I think, adding wording like "where possible" really dilutes good land use planning principles. This is one of those occasions. It is good land use practice and good principle to avoid abrupt changes in scale and density between residential and nonresidential uses. It's also why we don't do this very much anymore because it's a little bit lost on us. We used to do transition zoning, which hasn't come up in quite some time. We used to respect it so much that we did that as well. I support this. Again, it just supports good policy. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: Leaving the "where possible" in is just the discussion we had before precisely. We frequently have this discussion about where FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 88 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 possible avoid abrupt changes in scale and density. If we drive down University Avenue, which I had to do today—if we had avoided all abrupt changes, you would have a totally different look on University Avenue. It goes from one to two to five to six. I think there are simply times when abrupt changes are going to happen. Where possible, yes. It doesn't seem to me as though you can actually put that in the Comp. Plan and have it stick. Mayor Scharff: I'm really glad Council Member Kou raised this. Now that I've looked at this, we never voted on the mid-block. I'll make an Amendment to this that we just delete—that we keep the original language and we delete "to promote compatibility and gradual transitions between land use, place zoning, district boundaries at mid-block locations rather than wherever feasible." Council Member Fine: Second. AMENDMENT TO THE AMENDMENT: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Fine to amend the Comprehensive Plan Policy L-6.7 to remove the language “to promote compatibility and gradual transitions between land uses, place zoning district boundaries at mid-block locations rather than along streets wherever possible” and make conforming changes to the finding regarding Mitigation Measure Land-1 in Attachment C. Council Member DuBois: Could we see the whole thing? Council Member Fine: It would read "where possible avoid abrupt changes in scale and density between residential and nonresidential areas and between residential areas of different densities." Mr. Mayor, I believe you're just striking the second sentence. Mayor Scharff: That's correct. I would speak to it. The "whereas" part is really good. Mid-block transitions are silly. Would that change any mitigations in the EIR? Ms. Gitelman: We just confirmed that's not in the mitigations. Mayor Scharff: I wanted to make sure because obviously I don't want to do anything that changes that. When you do these transitions, I don't think it's necessary to do a mid-block transition. That screws up developments and makes them less aesthetic. It's not a good approach. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for making this. Earlier I had actually spoken to the Planning Director about striking this entire policy because I don't think it's based on good land use policy and principles. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 89 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 There are some places in Palo Alto and other cities where abrupt changes in scale and density are actually quite delightful. In Downtown, I walked through Ramona Plaza today, and there's actually quite a big difference between as you come in and come out on different sides. That's kind of fun in our City. Additionally, placing land use transitions at mid-block does not necessarily get us the outcomes we want. As the Mayor mentioned, that may impact individual development projects in a way that is not predictable. Furthermore, sometimes as the Vice Mayor mentioned, it is actually quite interesting to have a change Downtown from one story to three or from three to one or two to two, whatever it may be. There's nothing special about the mid-block. Sometimes you get some fun when you have one side of the street with one story and across the road with four stories. I don't think this is promoting good land use policy in our City nor does it contribute to any specific aesthetic benefit. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss, did you want to speak to this? You have your light on for the previous thing. I'm just going to clear the lights. Council Member Wolbach, you want to speak. Go ahead. Council Member Wolbach: So much for finding consensus on everything. A couple of things here. I know some people think the mid-block transition is the better land use policy. I'm not an urban planning expert. I didn't study it. One person on this Council did as a major in college, actually has a degree in it. I'm not convinced that it's always the best thing. I'd ask people to envision—if you were going to have a transition, would you rather it be next door to you or across the street from you? Frankly, I'd rather it be across the street rather than right next door. Having it be mid-block suggests it would be next door. Different people will have differences of opinion. I'd be okay with the removal of that second sentence. I am concerned—if Staff could help clarify. It does say right there in the Comp. Plan that this does relate to an EIR mitigation measure. Was that relating to the first sentence of this program, not the second? Ms. Gitelman: Yes, that's correct. We have found a location in the Resolution in Attachment C where we'd have to take out the same language about mid-block locations. It's not in the mitigation, but it's in the finding about the mitigation. If this passes, we would ask that you take out the conforming language in the … Mayor Scharff: What language do I need to say? What language would you like to add? Ms. Gitelman: It would just take out that same phrase on Packet Page 266, the rationale for the finding related to mitigation measure Land-1. Land-1 FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 90 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 doesn't include that phrase about mid-block, but it's carried forward in the finding. Mayor Scharff: What language would you like in the Amendment to accomplish that? Ms. Gitelman: Make conforming changes to the findings regarding mitigation measure Land-1. Council Member Wolbach: I'd like to finish my comments. I'm not going to support the original Amendment, and I'm open to persuasion on the Amendment to the Amendment. I am a little uncomfortable with the Amendment to the Amendment. I'm very uncomfortable with the original Amendment. I'm inclined to vote against both, but I'm open to persuasion from Mayor Scharff or Council Member Fine. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: There's a little confusion or misunderstanding about what the language that's been proposed to be struck means for some. It doesn't mean a transition next door. We're talking about—we're doing it mid-block meaning at the back property lines and not at the street. What zoning does in a perfect world and ideally—it is based on principles. What zoning does is it creates environments. What you strive for is to have development buildings that are somewhat compatible with each other across the street from each other. In order to accomplish that, a basic planning principle is you change the zoning mid-block meaning at the back of the parcels and not at the street. Eliminating this changes that, which is a basic planning principle. We talked about this or at least I referenced it not long ago in reference to something else. I don't think the community is wanting to see one-story buildings or two-story buildings across from four or five- story buildings. That's not where you make the change. It's not a comfortable environment that's being created. I disagree that this is—I'll just say it this way. Keeping this in promotes good land use planning and supports zoning principles that are pretty basic. By the way, it's exactly what we did in the South of Forest Avenue (SOFA) plan, which is so highly touted. It's exactly what we did there. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I'm actually with Council Member Wolbach on this one. I'd probably vote against both of them. It's too late at night and the wrong venue to argue about whether boundaries should be mid-block or on streets or not. The language in the Comp. Plan is identical to the language FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 91 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 in the original Comp. Plan, and that's good enough for me. I'd probably vote against both of them. Mayor Scharff: Listening to Council Member Filseth, I'm going to withdraw my Amendment. Hopefully we won't have any more votes on things that we've already voted on. I would ask Council Member Kou to withdraw her Amendment as well. AMENDMENT TO THE AMENDMENT WITHDRAWN BY THE MAKER. Council Member Kou: I'll withdraw it. AMENDMENT WITHDRAWN BY THE MAKER. Mayor Scharff: Do you have anything else, Council Member Kou? Council Member Kou: No, that was all. Mayor Scharff: Thank you. I'm trying to figure out who hasn't spoken yet. If you haven't spoken to this, put on your light. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: I've spoken to it. It was a very long time ago. I have very little to say now except one Amendment that may seem somewhat frivolous in asking for it. I have found that every time I go through this, unless I have an acronym made up, I don't know what Page I'm looking at. I've got to flip through until I find S or I or L or something. Can we Page this? Was there some reason we didn't? Just to make us really learn what was following what. Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. It was just too many moving parts. When we produce the final document, we can paginate it. Vice Mayor Kniss: I don't really think I need to make that Amendment. I have a feeling most of the Council would support the Pages being numbered. It's just hard to find it otherwise. You go through this and you're putting an attachment number and a Page number, and it's a pain. It's really hard for us to find it otherwise, especially when someone starts referencing it and we can't locate it quickly. That would be not an Amendment, not even a Motion, but a suggestion that the Pages be—I think there's actually a word like paginate. Thanks. Mayor Scharff: I believe the only people that haven't spoken to this are Filseth and Fine. Filseth. Fine. To the main Motion. Council Member Fine: Thank you very much. One or two questions for Staff, and then a quick two Motions, I think. One, on Policy S-2.9, Page S- FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 92 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 21, is "prohibit new habitable basements in the development of single-family residential properties within the 100-year flood zones." Do we currently have any prohibitions on the books about habitable basements within the flood zone? What are those restrictions? Ms. Gitelman: I believe this policy is consistent with our existing restrictions. Council Member Fine: They're currently prohibited, and we've got a policy to prohibit them? Ms. Gitelman: I believe that's true. There's a way that people can elevate their parcel out of the 100-year flood zone, but this is an accurate reflection of our current restriction. Council Member Fine: A quick question about one of the changes in—let me find it. It's T-2.3.1; this is about CEQA, VMT, and LOS. I'm just reading it; this is Packet Page 243, line Item 33. As I read this, I'm just trying to figure out with this program as it stands, what role will LOS play in our City going forward? What does this mean actually? It's quite complicated. "When adopting new CEQA significant thresholds for VMT for compliance with SB 743," the law which moves us towards VMT, "also adopt standards for vehicular LOS analysis for use in evaluating the consistency of a proposed project with the Comp. Plan." What does that mean in effect? Is that saying we're going to do VMT and LOS or we're going to do VMT for the Senate Bill and we're going to do LOS for proposed project in the Comp. Plan? Ms. Gitelman: There's actually a related policy, Policy T-2.3 that says use motor vehicle LOS at signalized intersections to evaluate the potential impact of proposed projects. The intention is to say that, while we're required under State law to use VMT for CEQA purposes, we're going to continue to use and report LOS for projects so we understand what relationship they bear to our adopted standards. Currently we have those adopted standards of LOS D or E depending on which intersections and if you're above the standard or if you meet that standard, you need mitigation. What this is saying is when we adopt VMT, adopt the standards for LOS and use them for plan consistency reviews. Council Member Fine: At what point did this adopt standards for vehicular LOS get put into this? Ms. Gitelman: What we were trying to do is clarify the wording of this Program T-2.3.1. You see the changes we made. There was a lot of confusion at the Planning Commission about whether we were trying to subvert the State law somehow. We tried to make it clear that we think the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 93 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council's intent was to do both things, VMT for CEQA purposes and LOS for plan consistency analysis. Council Member Fine I'm just going to make one Amendment here. Adopt advisory or—how could I put this? What I'm intending to do here is clarify that LOS should only be used for informational purposes. I'm wondering if the Planning Director has any suggestions there. Ms. Gitelman: You could do that a variety of ways. This really grew out of a prior Council discussion. I can't remember exactly. Council Member Fine: It's been through a few discussions. How about if we say "adopt informational standards for vehicular LOS"? "Informational" is one word to get inserted into this Program T-2.3.1. Ms. Gitelman: That would be fine with us. I don't know that it accomplishes much in terms of a substantive change. Council Member Fine: What would you advise here? As our audience member has shown, this is quite a … Council Member DuBois: We did vote on this before. Council Member Fine: We've voted on multiple things that have been brought up before tonight. Mayor Scharff: Did we vote on this before? Council Member Fine: We have. We voted on it in the errata. We voted on striking the last line. We voted on adding another line. Council Member DuBois: We had a big discussion 2 years ago and agreed that we would use both. Council voted, and that's why it is the way it is. Mayor Scharff: We didn't do it as part of this—we voted 2 years ago on this. Ms. Gitelman: Just 2 weeks ago, you voted to include this in your list of changes. It was on the list that you received from the Staff, the errata. Council Member Fine: What I'm trying to do here is … LOS is falling by the wayside, and that's reinforced by Senate Bill 743. It essentially incentivizes you to build bigger roads when a project has an impact. That's not necessarily something we can do in Palo Alto. Furthermore, it doesn't get to the heart of what we're trying to do in some of these measurements with VMT, which is to reduce overall trip mileage from origins to destinations. VMT has a better network effect. What I don't want us to put in the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 94 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Comprehensive Plan essentially is a bygone standard, vehicular LOS, which really is saying if you build a building and there are impacts, you're supposed to build bigger roads. That comes at the detriment of cyclists and bicyclists. Maybe we could add to Program T-2.3.1 to clarify that LOS shall be used for informational purposes only. Sorry to be doing this on the dais, guys. Mayor Scharff: That's the Motion. Do we have a second? Vice Mayor Kniss: I'll second it. Mayor Scharff: Seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss. AMENDMENT: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to add to the Comprehensive Plan Policy T-2.3 the language “LOS shall be retained for informational purposes.” Council Member Fine: Thank you, Vice Mayor. As I've just mentioned, Senate Bill 743 exists for a reason. It really is linking our future planning activities to more of a regional and climate change approach. LOS has proven to be a metric that really pushes cities to build more roads at the expense of pedestrians and bicyclists. When you build a big road, you're going to get more traffic on that site. I don't think that's a good policy for us going forward. LOS can be informative, but I want us to use it in an advisory capacity, not in a decision-making capacity. Ms. Gitelman: Mr. Mayor, if I can interject. I think we should take a look at Policy T-2.3 because it's the policy that really says use vehicle LOS to evaluate potential impacts of proposed projects. Council Member Fine: Thank you. Actually, let's move it to Policy T-2.3. Thank you, Hillary. Council Member Wolbach: This is probably best to look at Packet Page 243, Item 33. That's the most recent language. What Council Member Fine is pointing to is on Page 243 in our Packet for tonight, Item 33. Ms. Lee: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to note that this Motion would essentially reverse the existing Policy T-2.3. It's essentially do not use LOS to evaluate the impacts of the project. We may collect information about congestion impacts, but do not use it to evaluate the project's impacts. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 95 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Fine: That's true. I think it can be used for informational aspects at intersection-level stuff. We are actually still collecting traffic impacts through VMT. Mayor Scharff: Are there any CEQA concerns? Ms. Lee: No, because LOS will no longer be a CEQA impact. This was an attempt to capture LOS to evaluate the project still outside of CEQA. Mayor Scharff: I'm going to clear the board. I'm going to clear the board, and then put your lights on. Vice Mayor Kniss. Vice Mayor Kniss: We've discussed this a number of times before. As you move toward VMT, that's the most important part of this. LOS doesn't get totally left in the dust, but we need to be moving toward VMT on a really long-term basis. That's exactly where you're heading with this, isn't it, Council Member Fine? Council Member Fine: Yes. Mayor Scharff: Is that your … Vice Mayor Kniss: I'm supporting it, yes. Ms. Lee: Excuse me, Mr. Mayor. The City will be moving towards VMT as required by State law to evaluate CEQA impacts. Regardless of what happens with this policy, we will be moving towards evaluating VMT and using it as the CEQA threshold of significance. I just wanted to note that it probably makes more sense, if we are amending this policy, it's do not use motor vehicle LOS at signalized intersections to evaluate the potential impact of proposed projects, including contributions to cumulative congestion, or collect that information for informational purposes only. Council Member Fine: I like the language about collect it for informational purposes only. I don't want to prohibit us from using LOS. That's not the purpose here. What I don't want to happen is LOS to be used in the same level as VMT. Increasingly for air quality concerns and for regional transportation concerns, VMT really is the measure the State's moving towards and all the research points to as well. Vice Mayor Kniss: It's also what we do at the Air Quality Board. We've pretty much moved in the direction of VMT. It's a completely different kind of measurement than LOS. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 96 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Filseth: I really don't think this is a good idea. If we do this, we're going to read about it in the papers tomorrow. We're going to be back in here in a couple of weeks going, "We shouldn't have done that." Notwithstanding that, we've discussed it a number of times before and actually PTC has discussed it. PTC tried to get rid of it, and that was voted down too in the last session on this. Essentially, the argument we just heard tonight is we don't want to use LOS because we're afraid that people will use it as an excuse to build wider roads. That means it's a don't-ask-don't-tell thing. Basically what we're saying is, "We don't want to measure congestion because people don't like congestion. We're afraid if they knew what the congestion was, they might try to do something about it. Some of those things we don't like." I would argue that that kind of thinking is not public service to our constituents. It may be public service to Sacramento. It may be public service to the region. If there's anything we've learned, people in Palo Alto care about traffic congestion. Obviously, we should conform to State law, but people care about this. They didn't send us here to say, "We don't want you to know what the congestion is." We say, "We'll just measure it, but we won't use it to evaluate projects." Come on. Of course, they want to use it. Every time we put up a big project here, the neighbors all come out and say, "Is this going to make traffic worse?" LOS is the closest measure we have to that. Now, we're going back and saying, "We're not going to use LOS. It doesn't count." We're going straight back into this business of we're tired of seeing no impact on traffic studies. Here what we're saying is we don't want to do a traffic study because we're afraid of what the answer would be. To use VMT to satisfy State regulations, that's State law, and it makes sense. LOS and congestion is foundational to what people care about in this town. I think we need to recognize that. That's our constituents, the people we serve here. They want it. I'd have a tough time going back and telling them, "I know you want it, but you're wrong." Mayor Scharff: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Council Member Filseth said a lot of good things that I 100 percent concur with. This is a big deal. We've discussed it many times. Not only did the Planning Commission discuss it and not go this direction, but the CAC also did this at the Council direction because we said we want to go with VMT. It's a State requirement, but we also want to have LOS as a consideration. We're not going to widen streets here. We're not going to widen roadways. We talked earlier about not impacting residential property. The only way we could widen streets here is basically impacting residential property. Our Comprehensive Plan also talks about not widening streets to accommodate traffic. That's not someplace I'm worried that we're going to go. It's never been how we've used LOS. There is a saying that we all know. It's think globally, act locally. One is not at the expense of the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 97 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 other. What we're doing with VMT is we are thinking regionally. What we're doing by acting locally is also in combination with that considering LOS. One of the primary polluters from cars is not only just the miles traveled but sitting in traffic and idling. If we don't measure LOS, we don't have a way to understand how long are people going to be in queue at an intersection. How long are cars going to be polluting the air next to our multifamily housing? I think this is a really big deal. It would be really bad to be making this change at almost 10:30 P.M. at night. To say that this won't play well in Peoria would be an understatement. This would be a really, really big deal with the public and the community. I cannot support this and encourage my colleagues to also not support this one. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: I agree with both Council Member Holman and Council Member Filseth and what they said about this. This is a big thing to do, and it's going to be at the detriment for the City, not knowing locally what is happening on our streets and the impacts that's coming forward. I really have to say when it comes down to saying that the purpose of this is to widen streets and put more streets in Palo Alto, where? As a matter of fact, right now our policies in transportation have been completely to narrow streets and to put in safety features. It's contrary to so many things, in particular with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What you're saying is we don't want to know what is happening at our intersections and our local streets. Furthermore, I would have to go back to our 3 million number for the nonresidential growth. Yes, I can accept that 1.3 million has already been built over at the Stanford Hospital. However, we have no measurement over there of what's going to happen in terms of the impacts from vehicles that are going to be going over there. This is a huge, huge assumption. Going back to significant unavoidable impacts, traffic causes an intersection to operate below its motor vehicle level of service standard. That is a significant unavoidable impact. Yet, you want to take out LOS in order for less transparency to the people who are using those streets. In a way, I hate using the word, but it's fooling all the people by not actually placing it as a condition. We're here to do public service. This is not public service. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: A lot of it has been said. It's a big deal. We have talked about this extensively. Some of it may have been before you got on Council. There was some work done on the Comp. Plan before I got on Council. I accepted that work. Again, it's 10:00 P.M. hopefully on the last day. It's not time to be opening an issue this large. I'm surprised at the FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 98 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Vice Mayor actually, that she would support this because it's controversial, it's a major change at the last second. As people said, what we talked about, what we agreed was VMT makes sense for regional issues, for CEQA. LOS is for us in City measurement, in understanding what's going. We said we were going to use both and we were going to consider both. It's not just for information purposes. VMT makes total sense for air quality and regional planning, but LOS is important for us to understand what's happening. There were a lot of decisions made along the way. I think we started off tonight in a spirit of compromise. This really feels like cherry picking a big one at the last minute. I appreciate the removal of the previous two motions, and I'd ask you to consider doing that with this one. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Let's see if we can find some compromise here. I'm going to ask people to actually be open-minded about this, both those who are really appalled by this Motion and those who (crosstalk). Mayor Scharff: I was going to vote no anyway. Just so you know. No one actually has to compromise. Council Member Wolbach: Let's go for consensus. This is something I actually alluded to earlier in my questions. I was also bothered by this. Listening to this conversation, I think I've narrowed down where the problem is. It's the pitting of car users on the one hand against bicyclists and pedestrians on the other. That competition, I find really uncomfortable. If you look carefully at Program T-2.3.1—this is something I was mentioning earlier—it talks about multimodal level of service, which includes cars, includes people stuck in traffic idling their car, stuck at an intersection. It also includes an—it accounts for bike usage, pedestrian usage at intersections. It tries to balance those. We haven't created Multimodel Level of Service (MMLOS) yet. It's this idea that in the future rather than just moving from LOS to VMT—they don't really measure the same thing. The idea is that we'd go from LOS to a split, from LOS in the past to in the future doing VMT and MMLOS, Multimodal Level of Service. That's what Program T-2.3.1 is getting at. Where do we go from here? How do we support that transition without throwing out LOS and without doing a change tonight that is really controversial? My recommendation—I guess I can make it as an Amendment to the Amendment. I really hope that Council Member Fine and Vice Mayor Kniss will be open to it. Rather than say LOS shall be used for informational purposes only—actually say … Let me gather my thoughts. It would say "following the development and acceptance of MMLOS, then LOS shall be retained for informational purposes." That's actually saying we're going to keep using LOS for now. Once we have and FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 99 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 we accept MMLOS, then we'll use MMLOS. We'll also keep looking at LOS for informational purposes. Council Member Fine: I would accept that. I think that's fair. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER the language “Following the development and acceptance of MMLOS, LOS shall be …” Council Member Wolbach: What that would do is say—again, would not get rid of LOS, and we would even keep it for informational purposes once we have MMLOS and we've accepted it. We don't have it yet; we haven't accepted it. It's basically a hypothetical, but it still helps encourage us to move towards using MMLOS without just swapping LOS for VMT. VMT and LOS do measure different things. Council Member Filseth's points were well taken. I hope that with that Amendment more of us can get behind this. It is now really, really different from the original Amendment. Mayor Scharff: I feel like this is now really different than the original Amendment. If Council Members want to speak to this, please keep it brief. Does anyone want to speak to the—is there now anyone who would now be in favor of this, who spoke against it? You should speak up. I just asked if anyone wants to speak to this. Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: I think this is moving us towards compromise. Still, Mr. Mayor, as you mentioned you'll probably vote against it. I'm just going to reiterate, folks, that LOS essentially disincentivizes infill growth. We have policies in this Plan to promote infill because it is the most environmentally sustainable way for the City to grow. LOS is going to push stuff out to green fields. That's what the research shows. It also punishes bike and pedestrian improvements because they might have an impact on you sitting at an intersection in your car. If we really do care about building a City that supports multimodal service, this is an important change. If we really do care about focusing new development near transit, LOS is not going to get us there. I really hope we'll have your support on this. I understand it's controversial. Mayor Scharff: I see no other lights here, so I'll speak to it. I do think that it is 10:30 P.M. at night. I do think this is a pretty controversial issue of the LOS. I guess the question really is—I sort of feel we've made a commitment to not really do controversial things. That's why I was asking—I do think Council Member Wolbach has moved us in a direction of more—but I haven't seen a single person stand up and say, "That's more acceptable to me." I don't see any of that. I guess what I'm going to say is I hope at the end of the evening that you guys vote for the Comp. Plan, those of you who are FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 100 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 opposed to this. It would be sort of unfortunate. Maybe that's what I should use for the word. As we go through this and we try to keep consensus, we try to keep it "let's be in agreement," at the end of the day you turn around and vote no on the Comp. Plan, I guess I'll just be disappointed. As I started off, hope springs eternal. On that basis, I'm going to vote against the Amendment to the Amendment. AMENDMENT RESTATED: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to add to the Comprehensive Plan Policy T-2.3 the language “Following the development and acceptance of MMLOS, then LOS shall be retained for informational purposes.” Mayor Scharff: Let's vote. Council Member Wolbach: The Amendment or the Amendment to … Mayor Scharff: We're voting on the Amendment because you incorporated it into the thing. It's really one vote. AMENDMENT FAILED: 4-5 Fine, Kniss, Tanaka, Wolbach yes Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine, continue on. Council Member Fine: One last one. Thank you. Program L-2.4.6 on Page L-31, this is about Transfer of Development Rights, (TDR). Right now it reads "explore changing the TDR Ordinance for both buildings of historic significance and for seismic retrofits so that the transfer of development rights may only be used for residential capacity." I'd just like to strike the word "only" from Program L-2.4.6. The reason being I actually think it's reasonable that TDRs can be used for other purposes, whether it's commercial or retail, whatever it may be transferring for. I don't want to see them be only used for residential. Mayor Scharff: I'll second that. AMENDMENT: Council Member Fine moved, seconded by Mayor Scharff to strike “only” from Program L 2.4.6. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I believe I've spoken to it. I promise you all I'm done. Mayor Scharff: What I understand this does is it actually just makes the Comp. Plan a little less prescriptive and allows Council to look at things over the next 15 years as conditions change. I do think one of the things we've been doing in this Comp. Plan is giving it some flexibility. I don't view this at it in any way imposes anything on anybody. It just provides flexibility for FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 101 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 future Councils. I support flexibility for future Councils in things depending on (crosstalk). Vice Mayor Kniss: Can we vote on it? Mayor Scharff: Let's see. Council Member Fine made it. Holman, Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: This is something that we've also talked about, not as ad nauseum as the LOS matter. This is a way to promote residential development. When you look at how much TDR square footage there could be, it's an amount of square footage that could be significant in providing more housing. I'm really surprised that we wouldn't want to use TDRs just for residential development. Taking out the word "only" makes this a meaningless program because it can be used for residential now. It's really meaningless if you take the word "only" out. Again, I'm surprised that, as we're looking to create more housing, we would eliminate the creation of housing as part of an incentive to restore historic buildings. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Council Member Holman: I thought we were here to support housing. Council Member DuBois: I just wanted to clarify with the Mayor and Council Member Fine. Currently this is what exists in the Comp. Plan. You're basically … Mayor Scharff: No, it does not currently exist in the Comp. Plan. Right? Council Member DuBois: You can use TDRs for residential. You can use it for office. Mayor Scharff: Before you could only use TDRs for commercial. The idea was to allow TDRs for residential. Somehow we went from only allowing it to commercial to now only allowing it for residential. Council Member DuBois: It doesn't say "only." It says "explore changing it to encourage residential," which was a big discussion about how do we encourage additional residential. Mayor Scharff: Does it say explore? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. It's just … Mayor Scharff: Wait. If it said explore, I could be out. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 102 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Fine: It does say "explore." To the Mayor's point, right now it's for commercial. This is saying explore using it only for residential. I'm happy to use it for residential. I think that may be (crosstalk). Council Member DuBois: When Staff explores it, they'll consider options. Council Member Fine: … the word "only." Council Member DuBois: Again, it feels like we're getting way down in the weeds. It's late at night, and these changes are … Council Member Fine: They're not controversial because it's late at night. I spoke later in the meeting. Council Member DuBois: Again, the whole intent was how do we encourage more residential development. We said we should explore it. Council Member Holman: Just a clarification if I could. TDRs now don't have to be used for only commercial. They can be used for residential, commercial, office, retail. They can be used for anything. Mayor Scharff: That's not my understanding. Council Member Holman: What this … Look at Staff. TDRs can be used for other uses including residential. They aren't generally because office gives a better return. What this was trying to do was the focus the TDR square footage on residential. Ms. Gitelman: I believe they can only be used currently for commercial square footage. We'll confirm that. Mayor Scharff: I think that's the rule, Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I can be wrong, but I really don't think so. I think they've been used for both before. Vice Mayor Kniss: Karen, I don't ever remember one being used for a residential. Council Member Holman: That's right because commercial has a higher payback. Mayor Scharff: It doesn't always. I really do think that's our rule, but there's no point in arguing about it. If we say—we're looking at the following. How did the language read now? Council Member Fine, maybe you could just read it without the word "only." FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 103 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Fine: Without the word "only," it says "explore changing the Transfer of Development Rights Ordinance for both buildings of historic significance and for seismic retrofits so that transfer of development rights may be used for residential capacity." This is an additive thing. The program as we have with this Amendment will allow TDRs for residential. I think that is a good purpose. I don't think it should only be for that purpose. Mayor Scharff: Let me clarify. I strongly think we should go down the route of allowing it for residential. In certain places, we should in fact maybe only allow it for residential. That's possible in certain areas. I don't know. I don't want to put that in the Comp. Plan. I think this comes back with an Ordinance where we explore. I don't want to prejudge it. The way I would vote on an Ordinance is often very different than the way I'd vote on the Comp. Plan because the Comp. Plan is more significant and locks people in over the long term. I think we should have flexibility. That's why I support the whole idea of residential. I don't think we're doing that. I think what we're doing here is just providing flexibility in our Comprehensive Plan that may last us, given that half the people here didn't vote to certify the EIR virtually, may last us another 100 years at this rate. Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, I would just … I should probably just be quiet. I think the operative word is "explore" and not "only." You can say "explore" and leave "only" in there or "explore" and take it out. It still leaves us with the flexibility to come back and present different options to you. The easiest path is just to keep what we've got and move on. Mayor Scharff: Vice Mayor Kniss, did you have your light on? No. Council Member DuBois, you spoke to this already. Let's vote. That passes on a 5-4 vote. AMENDMENT PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou no Mayor Scharff: Are you done, Council Member Fine? I believe that everybody has now spoken to this. Am I correct, to the main Motion? You haven't spoken to the main Motion. Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I actually have some remarks on the FEIR. If I understand what we're supposed to do on the FEIR, the CEQA findings— we're going to accept a couple of things. One is that we've evaluated every relevant scenario. The second is that for the things that can't be mitigated, there are enough offsetting benefits that it's a good tradeoff. The things that bugged me about the minimum impact scenario—sorry, the EIR were the unmitigable—the still significant things were traffic, air quality. The other one, which I have a hard time with, is the whole school thing because of SB 50. On the scenarios, one of the things that we didn't do is a FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 104 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 minimum impact scenario. That's probably our fault. It's probably my fault as much as anybody. We did a zero growth one, but we didn't include mitigations on that, which of course we're already doing some of that kind of stuff. In retrospect, given the importance of some of these impacts, I wish we'd done that because I would have liked to know what it would take. On the other hand, I don't think we want to send the Staff back and everybody to do another scenario on the EIR. What follows here is a hand wave on what a minimum impact scenario would have looked like. The first one I'll comment on is the air quality one. Karen's going to hate me for this. Per the EIR, the whole range across all scenarios in just looking at Carbon Dioxide (CO2) goes from 200,000 megatons to 220,000 megatons. Let's say a true minimum impact scenario would knock 20,000 megatons off of that. The entire Bay Area annual CO2 emissions are about 100 million megatons. The difference between where we are and the absolute minimum we could have done is about 0.02 percent. Since we're talking about regional impacts as opposed to progress towards Palo Alto's Sustainability Climate Action Plan (S/CAP) Plan, you need to consider regional air quality. It looks to me like Staff's assertion that no matter what we do air quality is a push. I accept that one. The one I have a little more trouble with is traffic. I am not persuaded that our traffic's going to be the same because of what happens in Mountain View and Menlo Park. I think it has a lot to do with what happens in Palo Alto. To go from the existing condition to Scenario 5, I just picked an intersection, Page Mill and El Camino. To go from where we are in 2014 to Scenario 5, it's about 9,000 jobs and it's about 12 seconds increase from 52 to 64, which is about 20, 25 percent. Our job growth is 9,000 jobs, which half is in the med center, which we're locked into. That means in principle if you wave your hands ballpark, if we shut down all development in the City and the Stanford Research Park, we might get 11 or 12 percent reduction in delay at that intersection. A full moratorium on the whole City including Stanford Research Park would be extremely hard to implement, as you guys have said. Maybe we could get half of that. We're talking about a 6 percent improvement, more than 5 percent , less than 10 percent. The question is, is that a good tradeoff. I actually think there are a fair number of people in town who would look at that and say, "Shut down half the office development in the Research Park and the City in exchange for a 6 percent reduction in congestion and delays at intersections." I bet there's a lot of people who would take that tradeoff, and it's some of the same ones that would be really upset if we went away from LOS as a measure. On the other hand, we have a whole list of stuff in the Staff Report about here are all the things that are going to offset this. I thought most of it was pretty flimsy actually. The proposed Plan strengthens strategies to preserve retail. That's a benefit, sort of. Includes a cumulative cap on the new office/research development space. It's the same one as the old one, so that's not right. Allows the City to remain a competitive and innovative business destination. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 105 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 I don't think we're not going to be a competitive, innovative business destination. The one in here that actually is the benefit—I shudder to say it—is to allow us to put all this behind us and not drag us and the Staff and everybody in the City through another couple of iterations of that. Is that an acceptable tradeoff for a 6 percent congestion improvement? I don't know that it is, but in fact the policies that would lead to the 6 percent congestion improvement aren't in the Comp. Plan. It's the office cap and stuff like that. After a lot of thought, I'm going to agree with Staff on that. Having done a hand wave on what a true minimum impact scenario would look like, Staff's assertion that it's negligible is probably within the bounds of reason. The one that really bothers the heck out of me—if I don't vote for this thing, it'll be because of this. The Comp. Plan says we're going to overcrowd the schools. It also says they're fully mitigated by the fees, by SB 50. We're going to explore stuff with the School District; that's good. It's not a mitigation. Maybe it'll work, maybe not. If I accept the FEIR, I'm accepting that there's no impact on schools; that it's fully mitigated. That's not true. If I reject the FEIR, theoretically I'm breaking the law because Sacramento requires me to accept the mitigation. That's my big heartburn on the FEIR, my big remaining heartburn on the FEIR. The rest of it doesn't bother me. Mayor Scharff: I had lights for a second round from Council Members Holman, Kniss, and DuBois. What I am planning on doing is have Vice Mayor Kniss time everyone. Everyone here can get 2 minutes to give their final comments on the Comp. Plan before we vote. Hopefully whatever you wanted to say you can say it in 2 minutes. You've all had an opportunity to make motions, do all of that. I think we're good. I actually was just going to go down the line. I was going to start with Council Member Holman, if that's all right with Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you for doing that. I said earlier it's like there are a lot of things in this Plan that I really, really like. My problem is with the FEIR and some of the mitigations. I agree with Eric about the school impacts. That is a heartburn. What I would like to see and would allow me to vote for this is if we didn't make the assumptions about traffic mitigations that are in here. The ones that I stated earlier that rely on potential future and unproven transportation mitigations, that one's really bad. It's a hard one. If you look at any photos—we get them weekly at least—of residential streets that are backed up, bumper to bumper, and people talking about how it takes them to get from Crescent Park to 101 a half hour or longer, it's just unbelievable. The air quality impacts, we could do better there. I understand it's regional. Transportation's regional. I think we could do better there. For my thinking and for my vote, if we would just come back in 2 or 3 weeks with stepped up mitigations in the areas of transportation, air quality—I'd have to throw noise in there too. I FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 106 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 don't find that acceptable, and I don't think the community finds it acceptable where we are now. I'd be able to support this. It doesn't make me happy not to support this the way it is. It's been a lot of work. I haven't surprised anybody with my concerns. There they are, laid out. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Fine. Council Member Fine: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As Council Member Wolbach mentioned earlier, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I agree with that. In this Plan, I wanted to see more housing. I wanted to see funding commitments to transportation and mobility improvements. I wanted to see real initiatives which would foster retail business in our City that serve our residents and visitors. As we just saw, there are clearly some splits on this Council as the fight on LOS just happened. I also want to point out that there are eight chapters in this document. We spent all our time talking about land use and transportation. There's a lot in this Plan that will do great things for Public Safety, for our Community Services, for our parks, for our environment, and we need to honor those things as well. Only other comment I have is we started this Plan in 2008; it's almost 10 years later. We all up here as City Council are getting into little details about including this word or that word. As a City, we really need to find a way to iterate faster and cheaper. What's the in-between from a Comp. Plan to an actual effect on the ground? That's one of our challenges, how do incorporate and (inaudible) quickly so that we can make decisions that are lightweight and cheap and actually can be measured and we can see are we having a positive impact for our residents. I would say that's the challenge of this next Comp. Plan, so that we don't find ourselves in a similar situation in the next 15 or 20 years. I will be supporting this. I especially want to thank Staff. Thank you, guys. Hillary, I saw you brought that huge stack. Hopefully after tonight you won't have to lug it around as much. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Tanaka. Council Member Tanaka: I just also want to thank Staff, the CAC, the Planning Commission, all of you guys. This is certainly not a perfect Comp. Plan, but it's certainly better than what we have now mainly because it's updated. I actually agree with Council Member Fine that we should try to get this updated more frequently. Rather than trying to get an ultra-perfect one, which is really hard and took a long time, maybe we make updates more frequently. Ironically (inaudible) the goal was to do a short little update and get it out, but it never happened. Hopefully we can make it happen tonight. Thank you. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Filseth. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 107 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Council Member Filseth: I think the issue before us on the—I've already spoken to the FEIR. The issue before us on the Comp. Plan is which one is better, the new one or the old one. I think that's what we've got to base this on. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Earlier this year when I proposed moving a portion of the Comp. Plan to another portion of the Comp. Plan, I was accused by one of my colleagues of being a wolf in sheep's clothing. I was told that we were spitting in the face of the work of the CAC. A lot of other words were thrown around in op-eds by Council Members, on the dais, in the public, in comments I heard from others. At this point, we've restored those things that were proposed to be moved back to their original location. We've had much better compromise, consensus and collective learning. If any of my colleagues are still thinking about voting against this, you are spitting in the face of all the work that we have done. Think on your actions. Mayor Scharff: Council Member Kou. Council Member Kou: At the end of the day, today basically what had happened—I think action speaks a lot louder than words. When it comes to really being a trustee of the City and being elected by the residents and the folks over here in Palo Alto, the unavoidable significant impacts have to have some bearing on decisions. The mitigations are just not sufficient. Mayor Scharff: Council Member DuBois. Vice Mayor Kniss, would you like to speak? Vice Mayor Kniss: Actually, I'm going to be voting for this. I think that's obvious. There are a couple of other things I wanted to say. Once again, I don't know who's left in the audience. We are about to pass something we have been working on since 2006, and not a damn person is here. That always says something to me. No one is here. It's good to see Sylvia is still out there. Stephanie. It's really shocking to me that we could be voting on something that's this significant, and there's not a person here. The last thing I want to say is I think Staff has done a fabulous job on this, whether you vote up or down. You have found the answers quickly tonight. You've done it every other night. Molly and her team have been equally ready. Jim, you always jump in at the last minute with a great clarifying comment. This has been tough stuff, and we've gone over and over and over it. It's been—I think it's days if not weeks that we have spent on this. Thank you, Staff. It really does make a big difference. That's it. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 108 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 Mayor Scharff: I'll just basically say very briefly that I actually really appreciate all the effort that Staff's put into this. It has been I would say heroic, as Council Member Wolbach said a long and winding road and all of that. I'm glad we are finally here. I hope everyone will support the Comp. Plan. One of the things I'm thinking of doing is—could I see the top part of the thing? One of the things the Mayor gets to do is he could have us vote twice. I could have us vote three times. I think I'm going to break out Number 3 for a separate vote than Number 4. That allows you to vote on the CEQA findings, and then it allows you to vote on the Comp. Plan. I don't know if that's helpful to people. No? Is that not helpful to people? You want to do one vote? Does anyone want to have a separate vote? If they don't want to vote on the CEQA findings, they want to vote differently on the Comp. Plan, I want to give people that opportunity. MOTION AS AMENDED RESTATED: Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Vice Mayor Kniss to: A. Adopt a Resolution making required CEQA findings, including findings related to significant environmental impacts, mitigation measures and alternatives, adoption of a statement of overriding considerations, and adoption of a mitigation monitoring and reporting program (MMRP); and B. Adopt a Resolution adopting the updated Comprehensive Plan dated June 30, 2017 with the specific corrections and changes included in Attachment A and the at places memo, comprehensively updating and superseding the 1998-2010 Comprehensive Plan in its entirety, except for the Housing Element adopted in 2014 which will remain part of the Comprehensive Plan, including the following changes: i. Add new Program L2.11.1 (under Policy L2.11), to read: “Collaborate with PAUSD to plan for space to accommodate future school expansions or new school sites, and evaluate zoning space to accommodate new schools.” ii. Modify Goal T-4 to read: “Protect streets and adopted school commute corridors that contribute to neighborhood character and provide a range of transportation options.” iii. Reinstate the language in the introduction to read “encourage commercial enterprise, but not at the expense of the city’s residential neighborhoods.” FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 109 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 iv. Add to Policy T.1.16 “promote personal transportation vehicles as an alternative to cars (e.g. bicycles, skateboards, roller blades)” v. Add the following to the list of Community Indicators included in the Comprehensive Plan: a) Traffic volumes on city streets; and b) Availability of parks; and c) Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) school enrollments. vi. Strike the word “only” from Program L-2.4.6 C. Direct Staff to prepare and disseminate electronic and paper copies of the updated Comprehensive Plan with appropriate formatting, illustrations, and acknowledgments. Mayor Scharff: What we're going to do first is vote on the Number 3 portion, which was findings, which was "A," and then we're going to vote on "B." Actually we're going to vote on—anyone object to voting on "B" and "C" together? I didn't think they would. We'll vote on Number A, and then we'll vote on "B" and "C." Let's vote on "A." That passes on a 5-4 vote. MOTION FOR PART A PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kou no Mayor Scharff: Now, let's vote on the Comp. Plan itself, which is … Council Member Holman: Can I clarify something? It's laid out in the Staff Report too. If we're not able to vote for the FEIR or certify the FEIR, actually we have to be able to do that in order to vote for the Comp. Plan. Voting against the Comp. Plan isn't that I don't like a lot of the stuff in it. It's just that if you can't do one, you can't do the other. Mayor Scharff: I don't believe that to be true, Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: That's how I've read it on a number of … Mayor Scharff: I know you've said many times that CEQA training might be really helpful for Council. Who knows? No, we can actually go ahead and— we voted as a Council to certify the EIR, so the EIR is certified. You now have the full ability to vote for the Comp. Plan as a body. I would encourage you to do so. Let's now vote on the "B" and "C." That passes on a 7-2 vote with Council Members Holman and Kou voting no. FINAL TRANSCRIPT MINUTES Page 110 of 110 City Council Meeting Final Transcript Minutes: 11/13/17 MOTION FOR PARTS B and C PASSED: 7-2 Holman, Kou no Mayor Scharff: I am going to pop the champagne because Vice Mayor Kniss brought it. I'm not going to adjourn the meeting because we have one other thing we need to do. Now, we have the last item, which we're not going to take up, which is "6." Do I move that to a date uncertain or … A date uncertain unless people just want to vote yes without discussion, which I doubt. I know Council Member Wolbach does. Do I need a Motion to a date uncertain? No. Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs None. Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements Mayor Scharff: The next thing we do is Council Member Comments and Questions. I see no lights. With that, we will adjourn the meeting. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:02 P.M.