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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2019-02-26 Parks & Recreation Agenda PacketADA. The City of Palo Alto does not discriminate against individuals with disabilities. To request accommodations, auxiliary aids or services to access City facilities, services or programs, to participate at public meetings, or to learn about the City's compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, may contact 650-329-2550 (voice), or e-mail ada@cityofpaloalto.org This agenda is posted in accordance with government code section 54954.2(a) or section 54956. Members ofthe public are welcome to attend this public meeting. AGENDA IS POSTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH GOVERNMENT CODE SECTION 54954.2(a) OR SECTION 54956 PARKS AND RECREATION COMMISSION February 26th, 2019 AGENDA City Hall Chambers 250 Hamilton 7pm *In accordance with SB 343 materials related to an item on this Agenda submitted to the Commission after distribution of the agenda packet are available for public inspection at the Lucie Stern Community Center at 1305 Middlefield Road during normal business hours. Please call 650-463-4912. Attention Speakers: If you wish to address the Commission during oral communications or on an item on the agenda, please complete a speaker’s card and give it to City staff. By submitting the speaker’s card, the Chair will recognize you at the appropriate time. I.ROLL CALL II.AGENDA CHANGES, REQUESTS, DELETIONS III.ORAL COMMUNICATIONS Members of the public may address the Commission on any subject not on the agenda. A reasonable timerestriction may be imposed at the discretion of the Chair. The Commission reserves the right to limit oralcommunications period to 3 minutes. IV. DEPARTMENT REPORT V.BUSINESS1. Approval of Draft Minutes from the January 22nd, 2019 Parks and Recreation Commission Meeting – PRC Chair McDougall – Action (10 min) ATTACHMENT 2. Approval of Draft Minutes from February 7th, 2019 Parks and Recreation Annual Retreat – Action (10 min) ATTACHMENT 3. Update on Dedicated Courts for Pickleball – Adam Howard – Discussion (30 min) ATTACHMENT 4. Rinconada Park Improvement Project Overview – Peter Jensen - Discussion (45 min) ATTACHMENT 5.Review Parks and Open Space 5 Year Capital Improvement Plan – Daren Anderson – Discussion (45 min) ATTACHMENT 6. Other Ad Hoc Committee and Liaison Updates – Chair – Discussion (15 min) VI. TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR MARCH 26th, 2019 MEETING VII.COMMENTS AND ANNOUCEMENTS VIII.ADJOURNMENT PUBLIC LETTERS DRAFT Draft Minutes 1 1 2 3 4 MINUTES 5 PARKS & RECREATION COMMISSION 6 SPECIAL MEETING 7 January 22, 2019 8 CITY HALL 9 250 Hamilton Avenue 10 Palo Alto, California 11 12 Commissioners Present: Anne Cribbs, Jeff Greenfield, Jeff LaMere, Ryan McCauley, Don 13 McDougall, David Moss 14 Commissioners Absent: Keith Reckdahl 15 Others Present: 16 Staff Present: Kristen O'Kane, Natalie Khwaja 17 I. ROLL CALL 18 II. AGENDA CHANGES, REQUESTS, and DELETIONS 19 Chair McDougall: Does anybody have comments, agenda changes, requests, deletions? 20 III. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS 21 Chair McDougall: The next thing on the agenda would be any oral communications. 22 Anybody from the public who'd like to speak on topics not on the agenda? If not, then, 23 I'll invite the Department Report. 24 IV. DEPARTMENT REPORT 25 Kristen O'Kane: Thank you, Chair. Good evening. Kristen O'Kane, Community 26 Services. I do have some reports from Daren Anderson, who is unable to make it to the 27 meeting tonight. As soon as I find them, I'll be happy to share them with you. I will have 28 to hold off on those because I don't see them now. My only thing to report right now is 29 yesterday. I'd like to thank everyone who came to our Martin Luther King Day of 30 Celebration at Mitchell Park. It was a joint effort put on by Youth Community Service 31 and Community Services. It's really the communities of East Palo Alto and Palo Alto 32 coming together to celebrate the day of Martin Luther King and his commitment to 33 service and promoting service within the community. Both the Mayor of East Palo Alto 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 2 and Palo Alto spoke. It was very well attended. It's always a great event. A lot of youth 1 is there and do performances. It's a nice recognition day. The other item I wanted to 2 mention was this Thursday is our Cubberley Community Co-Design meeting, the third 3 meeting. We do have that on the agenda today, so you'll be hearing a lot more about it 4 later on in the meeting. I wanted to remind everyone that's this Thursday at 7:00 p.m. at 5 the Cubberley Pavilion. That's all I have until I find Daren's report. 6 Vice Chair Greenfield: There's an online RSVP for that. 7 Ms. O'Kane: There is an online RSVP to give us an idea of how many people are 8 coming. It's not required. We will also have a table dedicated for Spanish speakers and a 9 table dedicated for Mandarin speakers and translated materials as well. 10 Chair McDougall: Commissioner Moss. 11 Commissioner Moss: I was hoping to hear from Daren that the new Renzel pond has 12 been filled for the first time. I just wanted to make people aware that it's really big. The 13 birds are already there. Hopefully, in the Baylands Comprehensive Plan we can get some 14 observation decks so that people can actually see what we've done. I also wanted to find 15 out a little bit more about security around the pond. There are no fences yet or anything 16 like that. I just wanted to know what that was about. 17 Ms. O'Kane: The person to report on that would be Karin, who happens to be here. 18 Chair, would you like a brief response? 19 Chair McDougall: I would invite Karin to talk to us briefly. 20 Karin North: Karin North, Public Works. The pond was completed between Christmas 21 and New Year's. We turned the water on. It took quite a few days to fill the northern 22 pond, and then it did spill over to the southern pond. The northern pond will be the area 23 that's shallower, that hopefully will have the cattails. The southern pond is going to be 24 open water with the islands that were part of the existing pond. Actually, the footprint is 25 pretty similar to the existing footprint. It was just so overgrown previously that you 26 didn't notice how big it was. In terms of the security, Daren and the Public Works team 27 are working on a plan for securing the site with some rocks and a swing gate. It's also 28 part of the Baylands Comprehensive Plan in terms of the trail access, and that's still in the 29 works. Daren is working on that. 30 Ms. O'Kane: Chair, I found Daren's report. 31 Chair McDougall: It appears Daren has arrived late and now can speak. 32 Ms. O'Kane: Actually, I accidentally deleted his email. One is on the Baylands 33 Boardwalk project. It is on schedule to be completed by January 31. Staff is planning a 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 3 ribbon-cutting event and will share with the Parks and Rec Commission once a date is 1 set. The second is an Urban Forester update. Walter Passmore would like to confirm if 2 you would like him to come to the February meeting. Walter is our City Arborist, and he 3 has been asked to give an update on the Urban Forest Master Plan. We can talk a little bit 4 more about that in agenda topics. Something to think about as we get through this 5 meeting and see what else we might have in February. The last thing that Commissioner 6 Greenfield will be very happy to hear is that a new golf course bike rack will be installed 7 by the end of this week. 8 Vice Chair Greenfield: Daren made a point of notifying me about that. I'm very excited, 9 yes. Now, I'll have to make good on meeting people for lunch there. 10 Commissioner Moss: I also wanted to mention that the Cubberley lights are no longer a 11 trial basis. I was surprised that they were going—they started up again January 7. I 12 thought they were going to start up a month before Daylight Savings Time, February 15. 13 I guess that was just for the trial. There are very few kids using the field in the middle of 14 January. I'd like to revisit that if possible. It seems like a waste if there are very few 15 kids. 16 Ms. O'Kane: I will speak with Adam Howard tomorrow and see if he has any data on 17 how many are using it. I can't recall the exact dates that we said the lights would be on. 18 I'll look at that as well. We might just bring the item next month for an update. 19 Vice Chair Greenfield: If I could comment as the turf liaison in working with the soccer 20 community. When we approved the seasonal lighting plan, we did set aside specific 21 dates. My recollection is we allowed the lights to be anytime during normal non-22 Daylight Savings Time, when it gets dark earlier. I understand at the very beginning of 23 January there may not be a lot of usage of the youth teams, but that gradually increases 24 over time. The teams will be practicing out there. If we bring this issue back to the 25 Commission, I'm interested in hearing what potential issues are with the plan we have 26 agreed on and why we wouldn't allow the plan to run through the seasonal period that we 27 agreed on. 28 Chair McDougall: I think we should plan on having that back on the agenda. My guess 29 is that part of the problem is there has been so much rain recently that, even if there are 30 lights, no one wants to practice. All my grandchildren have had their soccer practice 31 canceled. We could look at that. People are adding things. I'd like to announce that all 32 the signs that have been not there on Byxbee are now in place. There are maps and 33 informational signs. I have profusely thanked Daren. More about Byxbee might be 34 useful on the agenda too. If there are no other comments? We have one speaker card, 35 Griffin Willard, if you'd like to speak for a couple of minutes. 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 4 Griffin Willard: Griffin Willard, resident. Using the Rinconada Park light system where 1 you can turn it on for an allotted amount of time, is there any way that we could input this 2 in the Cubberley field so there is not an excess of waste but there is an amount of light 3 that would be provided for people when they like to use it during the season, that it 4 wouldn't already be on? 5 Chair McDougall: I'm going to suggest that staff can look into that. To clarify what you 6 said, you're looking for an on-off switch so it's only on when it's being used. That would 7 be a tradeoff with the amount you'd have to pay staff in order to do that in terms of 8 staffing. We'll have staff respond to it, but we'll take the input. Thank you very much for 9 offering the input. 10 Commissioner Cribbs: Those lights aren't (inaudible). 11 Chair McDougall: It's a timer now, I believe. Isn't it, Commissioner Greenfield? 12 Vice Chair Greenfield: No, there is a means of turning lights on and off via a remote app. 13 I'm not sure how easily this can be done. They are accessible in some manner. We'll 14 have to get more details. 15 Chair McDougall: We'll have to get more details so we understand exactly what the … 16 We have your contact information here. 17 Commissioner Cribbs: If we could look into those lights electronically because it is an 18 app that can be on people's cell phones. You probably know that. The golf course and 19 the golf course website, how does that get updated and brought into 2019? Who's 20 responsible for that? 21 Ms. O'Kane: Are you referring to the—through the City or the Baylands Golf Links? 22 Commissioner Cribbs: When you go to the Baylands Golf website. 23 Ms. O'Kane: It's the contractor. 24 Commissioner Cribbs: I'll talk to you about it later. 25 Chair McDougall: If there are no other questions or comments, we can get on with the 26 business. 27 DRAFT Draft Minutes 5 V. BUSINESS 1 1. Approval of Draft Minutes from the December 18, 2018 Parks and 2 Recreation Commission meeting. 3 Approval of the draft December 18, 2018 Minutes was moved by Commissioner Cribbs 4 and seconded by Commissioner Moss. Passed 6-0 Reckdahl absent 5 2. Election of Chair for 2019 6 Chair McDougall: The next item on the agenda is the election of the Chair for 2019. In 7 front of you is two ballots. The first thing we need to do is have nominations. I would 8 open the floor for nominations for the position of Chair. 9 Ms. O'Kane: Chair, could I ask you to briefly describe the time commitment each month 10 for being the Chair and the duties and responsibilities? 11 Chair McDougall: I'd be happy to. The major responsibility is actually chairing the 12 meeting. That involves meeting and spending time with Kristen and the Vice Chair. The 13 Vice Chair this year, Commissioner Greenfield, has been really helpful relative to 14 establishing what the agenda might be. There are some other not so much obligations, 15 but the position of Chair should also be more actively involved in some of the other City 16 functions and make sure that the Commission is being properly represented. I do believe 17 that the position of Chair—not that all the other positions aren't challenging relative to 18 topics—needs to make sure that they have a handle on what the various topics are so that 19 they can manage and control the conversations as they go on. I'm not going to pretend 20 that this is substantially more than many of the ad hocs. Many of the Commission 21 members are on really interesting ad hoc committees, and those ad hoc committees can 22 take an awful lot of time. It's a very rewarding position. I have enjoyed it. I've enjoyed 23 my relationship with Kristen, and I've enjoyed sitting here with all of you. I hope it's 24 been a good and rewarding year for everybody as well. 25 Ms. O'Kane: Thank you. I have just a couple of procedural things, if you don't mind, 26 Chair. 27 Chair McDougall: Please. 28 Ms. O'Kane: Commissioners can nominate one Commissioner at a time for Chair. The 29 Commissioners must be present to be nominated. Commissioner Reckdahl is not able to 30 be nominated. You may enter your own name if you choose to. If you're nominating 31 someone, you can also explain why you feel he or she would be qualified to be Chair. 32 Chair McDougall, you'll ask if they accept the nomination. Once all nominations are in, 33 you'll ask for a motion to close the nominations. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 6 Chair McDougall: I'd like to suggest that we ask for nominations, anybody who would 1 like to offer a nomination simply offers the name without an explanation. Once we have 2 all nominations, then we'll go back through the list and let people comment on their 3 nominations, if that works. If there are no other procedural questions, it's open 4 nominations for Chair for 2019. Do I have any nominations? 5 Commissioner Moss: Commissioner McDougall. 6 Chair McDougall: Do I have any other nominations? In response to the question of 7 would I accept the nomination, yes, I would accept the nomination. Commissioner Moss, 8 would you like to comment? 9 Commissioner Moss: I've been on the Commission for over three years. Commissioner 10 Reckdahl has been several years. Before him, Commissioner Lauing has been Chair for 11 three or four years, I think. Three years. It takes a while to get into it, and Commissioner 12 McDougall has done a very good job so far of engaging the staff and running the 13 meetings so they're not too long, but they have plenty of substance. That's why I 14 nominated him. 15 Chair McDougall: Thank you. Are there any other nominations? I would like to 16 nominate Commissioner Greenfield. I will ask him if he would accept the nomination. 17 Vice Chair Greenfield: I would accept the nomination. I would be comfortable in the 18 Chair position. I'd also be comfortable with you continuing for another year. I've 19 appreciated the tone and organization that you've set for the group and working with you. 20 I also appreciate that working as the Chair might be a little less fun than working on some 21 of the ad hocs. I'm really open to whatever is best for the Commission. 22 Chair McDougall: In terms of actively thinking about the City, thinking about the parks, 23 thinking about the Foothills and the Baylands, Commissioner Greenfield puts an 24 incredible amount of both emotional and intellectual energy into that. I respect that and 25 have enjoyed having him as my Vice Chair. If there are no other nominations, I would 26 call for—do we vote on closing nominations? I call for a vote on closing nominations. 27 Do I need a motion? Please. 28 Motion to close nominations for the office of Chair was moved by Commissioner 29 McCauley and seconded by Commissioner Cribbs. 30 Chair McDougall: You have two pieces of paper in front of you if you've torn them 31 properly. The smaller piece has the ballot for Chair. I don't know why we have a Euro 32 symbol. I would assume we fill in the whole box. 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 7 Natalie Khwaja: That box did not print properly. Circle the Euro that works best for 1 you. 2 Vice Chair Greenfield: I'm interested to hear from Chair McDougall if you're interested 3 in another term. I'm not sure I heard you actually say you accept the nomination. 4 Chair McDougall: I think I did respond to Commissioner Moss and say yes. I miss being 5 on some of the ad hocs, but it's the responsibility of the Chair to allocate the good ad hocs 6 to the people who are really qualified to do that. Other than that, I'm happy to continue 7 for another year. Yes, I accept the nomination. I would suggest we continue with the 8 voting. We should simply fill in the box, and Natalie will collect them one-by-one. 9 Ms. O'Kane: Natalie will tally the votes. 10 Ms. Khwaja: Chair McDougall has won the election. 11 Chair McDougall: Thank you all very much for your confidence. I look forward to 12 taking advantage of what I learned last year and making this into a really outstanding 13 year for the Palo Alto Parks and Recreation Commission. Thank you. 14 3. Election of Vice Chair for 2019 15 Chair McDougall: Now, I'd like to open nominations for Vice Chair. 16 Commissioner Cribbs: I'll nominate Commissioner Greenfield, please. 17 Chair McDougall: Commissioner Greenfield, do you accept the nomination? 18 Vice Chair Greenfield: I accept the nomination. 19 Chair McDougall: Do we have any other nominations? 20 Commissioner McCauley: I'd like to nominate Anne Cribbs, please. 21 Chair McDougall: Do you accept the nomination? 22 Commissioner Cribbs: I think we have such a great candidate in Commissioner 23 Greenfield. I appreciate the compliment, but I would love to defer to him. 24 Chair McDougall: Do we have any other nominations. Do I have a motion to close 25 nominations? 26 Motion to close nominations for the office of Vice Chair was moved by Commissioner 27 Moss and seconded by Commissioner McCauley. 6-0 Reckdahl absent 28 DRAFT Draft Minutes 8 Chair McDougall: I'd like to congratulate Commissioner Greenfield on his new position 1 as Vice Chair. 2 Ms. O'Kane: I think we still have to vote. 3 Ms. Khwaja: Commissioner Greenfield has won the election. 4 Chair McDougall: Now I can congratulate you. 5 Ms. O'Kane: I would like to thank both of you not only for the work you did this past 6 year. It has been a pleasure working with both of you. You've both challenged me, and I 7 appreciate that. I look forward to another year of working with the both of you. 8 Chair McDougall: I'm sure we're excited to work with you. 9 Vice Chair Greenfield: Absolutely. I look forward to continuing another year and 10 growing our relationship further. 11 Commissioner Cribbs: I wanted to thank you and Commissioner Greenfield for serving 12 again and all of what you have learned. I'd also like to thank the other Commissioners at 13 the table because everybody has done a fine job this year. We appreciate working with 14 you and the Department. It's going to be a good year again. 15 Chair McDougall: I hesitate to use the word team, but I really do like the complementary 16 nature of all of the people here and the work they've done. Commissioner Cribbs, wait 17 until you find what ad hocs we find for you. 18 4. Green Stormwater Infrastructure Plan 19 Chair McDougall: The next item is the Green Stormwater Infrastructure Plan. This is an 20 update from the November meeting, where we had a really interesting meeting and an 21 awful lot of comments and questions. I very much appreciate the fact that you're coming 22 back with a response. I've seen the presentation you have, and I think it deliberately, 23 directly addresses the questions that were raised at the time. Thank you. 24 Pam Boyle Rodriguez: Good evening, Commissioners. Thank you for having us back. 25 Yes, we did try to address a lot of the concerns and questions. Please feel free to question 26 us again and challenge us to do even better. We just finished recently our 85-percent 27 draft version of what we call our GSI Plan or Green Stormwater Infrastructure Plan. 28 We'll be making it available to the public this week, sending it out to various 29 stakeholders, and also putting it on our website. We are going to address some of the 30 concerns from last time. We wanted to provide a detailed summary of the plan. 31 Unfortunately, the agenda is pretty packed, so we have some limited time. We wanted to 32 go over a couple of things and hopefully in the context of providing some information 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 9 about the plan also address your questions. When we were here in November, we wanted 1 to tell you a little bit about the progress we had done in developing the plan. We gave 2 broad strokes over the challenges that we had identified and the proposed solutions that 3 we had included in the plan. You wanted more specifics. We're here to provide more 4 specifics, to provide a little bit more about our funding ideas. You mentioned habitat and 5 trees, so I wanted to tell you a little bit more about that. One item about the plan is out of 6 the 15 chapters there is one chapter that goes in detail over how we've prioritized project 7 locations for potential GSI projects or green stormwater infrastructure. These are 8 locations that the City owns, so we only focused on City-owned projects. The first step 9 that helped us prioritize project locations was the SWRP or Stormwater Resource Plan. It 10 was done by the Santa Clara Valley Water District and SCVURPP, which is a long 11 acronym for the Santa Clara County stormwater program basically. They helped to 12 create one for each municipality in the planning region. There was a prioritized list for 13 each city for both parcels and streets. We used the parcel list and started with that and 14 built upon that to have a pretty lengthy list of parcels that the City owns, very small to 15 pretty large like City Hall. We came up with some criteria that we thought would work 16 well for the City, using some of what was used for the Stormwater Resource Plan and 17 also some that came from staff conversations of other important criteria. We allocated 18 values to that criteria, and then we were able to assign priorities to each project location 19 after assigning criteria, allocating the values, and then totaling those values. What does 20 that mean? We wanted to give you an example of a couple of criteria. One criteria is 21 project status. Basically, we divided it into two different categories. One is whether 22 there's a planned project at this location and whether it's included in the adopted capital 23 budget. If so, if it's already planned and there's already interest from another department, 24 we gave it higher value than if there's no project planned at this location. Another criteria 25 was if there's a proximity to an existing bikeway or a Safe Route to School per the 26 bike/ped plan. We're really focusing on trying to bring connectivity to the City. If there 27 was a project location that already had a bikeway or a Safe Route to School, we gave it 28 less value because we want to have more bikeways. GSI brings a lot of safety features as 29 well, as we talked about last time, so we gave it a higher value to give it a higher priority. 30 Those are examples of two criteria. When you look at the plan, you can see the other 31 criteria that we used. What resulted was this list of parcels that we gave a priority to. 32 Just to let you know, some we just pulled out of the whole list because it didn't make 33 sense to put a project there. It was just too small or there were some other reasons that 34 didn't work. For that 85th percentile, we assigned it a high priority. There are 29 35 locations where we think projects can happen. Out of those 29, there are three that are 36 parks. The 25th percentile, we gave it a low priority. In between, we gave it the medium 37 priority. As you can see, most parks align with the medium priority. That's because 38 some of the criteria that we looked at—for example, areas that tend to generate more 39 trash got a higher value because we want to put projects there so we can collect more 40 trash. Parks don't tend to have as much trash. They are considered medium-generating 41 or moderate-generating areas. We looked at groundwater recharge areas. Project 42 DRAFT Draft Minutes 10 locations that were in groundwater recharge areas received a higher score. We looked at 1 those that were in what we call key development areas, Downtown, the Cal. Ave. area, 2 the South of Forest Avenue. Those that were within those areas received a higher value. 3 In terms of how the criteria played out, a lot of the parks ended up having medium 4 priority. This is based on—one thing I really wanted to stress is that it's based on 5 unbiased criteria because we want to present that to both staff and the public for 6 comments, and we also want to present this to the Water Board to show them that we 7 have an unbiased process in place that we might be able to use in the future as well. This 8 is Phase I. Phase II will be after we receive comment from staff, public as well, but in 9 particular as staff because then we'll find out what staff might have in mind that's not 10 explicit in the CIP budget book, for example. We might change some of those priorities 11 around. We've gotten some comments already about a couple that are in the medium 12 priority that will probably be moving up to high. Just to give you a sense of how these 13 projects are—this is a very broad-scale map. Red is high priority. Orange is medium. 14 Green is low. When you look at the plan, in the appendix, there's a lot of different maps 15 that we've created, GIS-based maps, that show all the different criteria in map base. You 16 can zoom into these different quadrants and see which locations have been assigned a 17 particular priority based on this Phase I vetting process. I think we talked a little bit 18 regarding the requirement that we have to integrate GSI language and a method to 19 identify GSI project potential in all our planning documents for the City. We've 20 identified two that we consider higher priority that we want to focus on first. One is the 21 Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Plan, and the other is the Storm Drain Master Plan. 22 The Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Plan really provides a lot of opportunities for 23 us to create more green streets as I mentioned last time, such as the Charleston-24 Arastradero Corridor project, when we can really get more bang for our buck, for our 25 budget, where we can create safety features and bring multiple benefits by bringing GSI 26 to streets. We think highly considering GSI when there's a bike/ped project that's being 27 considered is really important. Because there is no set date for the next update, we 28 suggest doing some kind of interim policy that will direct staff to consider GSI during the 29 project scoping process. The same thing for the Storm Drain Master Plan. It identifies 30 priorities for updates to the traditional storm drain infrastructure. We think we should be 31 considering GSI at the same level that we're considering traditional infrastructure so that 32 we can treat smaller storms with GSI and not just focus on putting in more pipes. I think 33 there's a way we can look at both. There are going to be times where all we can do is put 34 in pipes because that would be the best solution, but we think we should encourage 35 everyone to look at the system a little bit different. As we mentioned before, we're trying 36 to create a change throughout the City of getting folks to have GSI at the forefront. 37 That's one way. We have some great opportunities right now because there are two 38 plans, one of which you're about to hear about and the other is going to be done next 39 year. Both of these areas provide an amazing amount of opportunity for us to integrate 40 GSI throughout the property. The North Ventura planning area, there is Matadero Creek 41 right there. There's a park right there. Both of those need improvements. It provides an 42 DRAFT Draft Minutes 11 opportunity for the public to give comments, to provide feedback. What we do at staff is 1 participate in meetings and try to talk to staff to get the scope broadened and consider 2 GSI. The sea level rise policy is going to go to Council this year. We've integrated GSI 3 language in there. There will be a plan coming up in the next couple of years, and we'll 4 be looking at how to address sea level rise with various solutions including GSI. The last 5 is the Tree and Landscape Technical Manual that you may have heard about. That's 6 being updated and will hopefully be finalized this year. We're working very closely with 7 Urban Forestry to address how we cannot just integrate GSI into these manuals but how 8 to start considering tree plantings as another way to bring GSI to streets. There was a 9 comment made last time about lack of the City measuring performance at GSI facilities. 10 We agree; we need to do better. We're going to start doing that, one, with our 11 maintenance and monitoring plan. We're going to go out to all of our GSI facilities and 12 assess how effective they are, how well they're performing and change the way we do 13 maintenance so they can be more effective. We're going to have software to track these 14 sites, to track how often they're being maintained and how effective they're being over 15 time. We're going to provide a lot more project oversight. In the plan, we're proposing a 16 performance rating tool so we can track how well these sites are performing over time 17 based on the information that we're going to start collecting with our monitoring 18 techniques. We can then provide some information to the public. When we're trying to 19 get grants, we can show how well these sites are performing. In terms of funding, we 20 have a lot of work to do. I did want to present some of what we're doing so far. This pie 21 chart shows how the current stormwater fee is allocated. Other includes staffing, the 22 storm drain system maintenance, emergency response, debt service. Twenty-four percent 23 is the upgrades to the traditional storm drain system, and 7 percent is for GSI. That 7 24 percent is intended for construction or for programs but not for maintenance. The great 25 news is that we have some money to leverage getting more funds. We need to get 26 funding for more GSI facilities and definitely to be able to maintain them. It doesn't 27 make sense to construct them and then ignore them or not appropriately maintain them. 28 We need more funding for that. We've identified the need. We have currently a contract 29 in place, and hopefully by May we'll have an initial assessment done. That's intended to 30 help us look at what kind of fees are in place right now, how they were set up, what kind 31 of nexus study was done. That'll help us determine what our long-term plan will be. A 32 long-term plan may involve surveys, maybe a nexus study for our own fee. That's to be 33 determined. Just to let you know what's in the works, and we can provide updates as we 34 go along. For implementation, there was—I just wanted to share what our staff is doing 35 because in reality our team of two is working hard on GSI planning. That's why we need 36 support from consultants, but that's why we're also working really hard to try to foster a 37 culture change throughout the City so that we can get support from all the departments. 38 When we update our plans, when we have different policies in place, and when we help 39 educate everyone to understand the multiple benefits of this GSI, we'll have additional 40 support. We are also building our skills. Staff created a lot of the maps that are in the 41 plan. We're having a lot of meetings, and we're trying to facilitate a lot of different 42 DRAFT Draft Minutes 12 conversations between departments to make sure when plans are being reviewed and 1 when we're scoping projects that the different departments are really talking to each 2 other. In terms of increasing habitat, one thing I don't think we addressed was, when 3 we're doing the stormwater code update that's going to go to Council in April, we're also 4 requiring—all new projects and redeveloped projects or projects that require a building 5 permit have to meet a lot of different requirements. One of those is have Bay-friendly 6 landscaping practices. That means they have to use integrated pest management. They 7 can't use pesticides or herbicides. They have to focus on using a lot of mulch and 8 compost, use drought-tolerant and native plants. Not only do they have to do that for the 9 initial design, but they're supposed to be doing that from that point on. When we do 10 inspections of businesses, we can check on what's happening with those. We're going to 11 relook at the plant palette internally so we can consider how we can increase habitat as 12 well. This plan focuses on public property, City-owned property, but we are going to 13 look further once this plan is accepted at how we can create more GSI on private 14 property. Some things that we're considering and putting forth as ideas in the plan are 15 perhaps to decrease the size threshold that triggers requirement for GSI on private 16 property, creating an alternative compliance program. If there's going to be a 17 development and it's built lot line to lot line and stormwater treatment can't fit onsite, 18 perhaps that applicant either pays a fee toward a fund that helps construct or maintain 19 public GSI or perhaps they construct GSI on our public right-of-way next to their project. 20 That could come about in different ways. We need to dig in and figure out how to make 21 that happen. Another thing is there are requirements from Public Works, from Utilities, 22 from Transportation a lot of times for private projects to have improvements in the street 23 and sidewalks and sometimes with infrastructure. If those improvements are already 24 happening, then we should look at how we can also require GSI installations. It does 25 bring in some questions of who will maintain those features. That's why we're not 26 jumping into making those requirements. We need to dig into it deeper. Finally, January 27 2019, we're here. We're meeting with the Planning and Transportation Commission next 28 week. We're meeting with the Stormwater Oversight Committee. As I said, we're 29 making the 85-percent plan public. We're hoping to receive comments next month. 30 We'll follow up with a 100-percent draft. After that's out for review, we're going to have 31 a public meeting and then hope to have some final comments and in May release the final 32 plan. We're hoping to go to Council at the end of May for acceptance of the plan by City 33 Council. Hopefully, it won't go past the end of June or so. We've added some extra time 34 in case we need to go back. That's it. 35 Chair McDougall: I think you did a nice job of addressing many of the questions we 36 brought up. I'm going to open the floor to the Commission relative to anybody who has 37 questions. I'll start with Ryan. 38 Commissioner McCauley: Do you mind going back briefly to the slide that showed the 39 percentiles and the number of projects? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It seems as 40 DRAFT Draft Minutes 13 though the percentile number doesn't relate to the number of projects column. Is that 1 right? 2 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: The percentile column relates to some information we're not 3 providing, but it is in the plan. It relates to the total value that each project location 4 receives. Let's say the highest value was 35 points because for each of those criteria there 5 was a point allocated, and we had 10 or 12 types of criteria. We added those values, gave 6 a value to each of those project locations, and then we looked at the 85th percentile out of 7 that range of values. 8 Commissioner McCauley: You had more than 15 percent of the projects in the 85-100 9 percentile, right? 10 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Right. 11 Commissioner McCauley: Which are the three parks that fall into that high priority? Do 12 you know? 13 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: That is a good question. I will be asking my teammate over here. 14 She'll look it up, and we can provide that to you. 15 Commissioner McCauley: We can come back to that. 16 Commissioner LaMere: Do you have readily available information for private property 17 owners or will there be information available to them if they want to pursue some GSI 18 projects on their own, not through redevelopment, not through any sort of force from the 19 City or fear of penalty, but just through their good-natured citizenship and wanting to 20 help the Baylands and so forth? 21 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: I'm assuming you're talking about commercial, industrial, or any? 22 Commissioner LaMere: I'm actually referring more to existing private property owners 23 who want to pursue a project for GSI. Will you have available resources or ability to 24 direct them or recommend native plants or whatever might be appropriate? 25 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: We do have some resources that we provide. They're County-26 level resources that are provided to folks who need to meet the requirements. It would 27 make sense that those same resources be shared so that we can have consistency for 28 design and construction. If it's something more simple, like just wanting to keep runoff 29 onsite, we do have some other resources that don't have to meet engineering 30 specifications. We do have a rebate program for—I don't know the actual rebate amount. 31 I think it depends on the type of green infrastructure that is installed. It's for rain cisterns, 32 pervious pavement. Karin, do you know? I know there's one other item, but I don't 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 14 remember what it is. Currently, we don't fund rebates for bioretention areas. That's 1 something that we're going to look further into. 2 Ms. North: It's also rain barrels and green roofs. 3 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: I don't believe we've ever provided a rebate for a green roof. I 4 think that's a good idea to provide additional support. We do have a new landscape 5 architect in Urban Forestry. She'll be working with us to inspect GSI features during 6 construction. I'll provide that feedback to them to see if they might be able to help out 7 with that too. 8 Commissioner Cribbs: Thank you very much. I'm glad you left that slide up because I 9 had a question about it as well. Could we find out what are the 22 parks on that list? 10 That would be really interesting. I wasn't able to come to the meeting in November, so I 11 missed the whole thing. I'm trying to catch up. If you went into one of those parks, 12 either the one in the top tier or the medium tier, what would happen at the park when you 13 decided to utilize this program? 14 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: To address those top three parks, since I have those right here. 15 They are Greer Park, Mitchell Park, and Peers Park. In terms of the 22 parks, maybe I 16 can have Isabel put it up on the computer if you want to see the list of 22 parks. 17 Commissioner Cribbs: That would be great or if you could show us where to get to that 18 map that was there. It's not in the attachment for our agenda. At least, I didn't find it. 19 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: It's in the plan itself. 20 Commissioner Cribbs: If we find the plan, we'll see the map? 21 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: I'm not sure if we provided a link to you, but we can provide a 22 link. Can we send a link to them? 23 Commissioner Cribbs: You don't have to do anything for all the parks. Take one park 24 and say, "this is what happens to this park." 25 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: It would really depend on the type of park and the location. It 26 could be anywhere from a small project—for example, if a parking lot is being replaced, 27 we could consider putting some kind of green stormwater infrastructure, maybe a 28 bioretention area, maybe adjusting the way it drains so that it all drains to a bioretention 29 area. We could even adjust the way it drains so that it drains to landscaping instead of 30 the street. That's not as engineered as a bioretention area, but in a sense it meets a lot of 31 the same requirements. It could be a larger project. If there's enough room and enough 32 public support, maybe we capture rainwater and reuse it for irrigation. That would have 33 to be a pretty large project where we would put underground tanks. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 15 Vice Chair Greenfield: Thank you for the updated presentation. I had a question 1 regarding the priority for near bikeways versus not near bikeways. The GSI gets higher 2 priority if it's not near a current bikeway or Safe Route to School. Is that because of the 3 inherent conflicts in the paths? I'm trying to understand the reasoning there. 4 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: If we wanted to put additional bioretention like at Middlefield and 5 Kellogg, it's a perfect example because it was put in as a bike/ped safety project. I'm not 6 sure if you're familiar with that. 7 Vice Chair Greenfield: I'm not sure about that one, but go ahead. 8 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: They put in some safety features. They put in some bulb-outs or 9 bump-outs, but they're also bioretention areas. Before, that was not a safe biking area. If 10 we had considered it in terms of priority, we would have given it a higher priority 11 because it didn't have a safe bike area, but it was in the bike/ped plan as a planned bike 12 project. If it's a park for example, a lot of parks already have bikeways or bike lanes 13 around the park, so we consider that very positive. In terms of putting it on a priority list, 14 we want to put it lower on the priority list because there are already bikeways there. 15 Whereas, a park that doesn't have any bikeways or any location that doesn't have any 16 bikeways, we might want to use GSI and also bring a bike safety feature and add more 17 connectivity to the City. 18 Vice Chair Greenfield: The prioritization is really based on expanding the overall 19 network of bikeways. 20 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Yes. 21 Vice Chair Greenfield: My next question, which you've sort of answered and which 22 dovetails on Anne's questioning, is I'm still struggling to see the big picture, to see what 23 these examples are, in particular for the bikeways and the Safe Routes to School. Could 24 you just describe some of the GSI techniques or methods or what the infrastructure 25 changes would be and what it would look like for bikeways? 26 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: I apologize; I don't have more examples. We only have 20 27 minutes on the agenda, so we couldn't bring too much more. I'm trying to think. 28 Mitchell Park, as you already know, has a lot of GSI. What we call GSI at that park is it 29 has a green roof. That's a pretty typical type of green stormwater infrastructure. It is, 30 however, pretty expensive to maintain, and that's something I mentioned before. In terms 31 of projects we're dying to do, we're not dying to do that one. It is a type of GSI, and it's 32 something we'll consider when there's appropriate funding. That site also has some 33 pervious pavement, not where the driving lanes are because that tends to get clogged 34 pretty fast, and that's harder to maintain. In some of the parking stalls right across from 35 the café, you'll notice there's a different kind of pavement. That's because it's pervious. 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 16 Those stalls are pervious, and underneath are what's called suspended pavement systems. 1 They hold soil. They also allow the water to infiltrate through that pavement, go into the 2 suspended pavement systems, and go into that bioretention area in the median. That 3 median as a bioretention area is capturing all the runoff from not the roof but the parking 4 lot and any other hardscape including the sidewalks. That's pervious pavement and a 5 green roof and a bioretention area. Those are three types. That's a very large project. I'm 6 not necessarily suggesting that we would put that at all parks because that's pretty 7 expensive. The reason they did that was because initially they were required and then 8 they went above and beyond. Now it's a pilot project. It's a great project. There's a 9 smaller example at Rinconada where there's a small bioretention area by the library. It 10 receives rainwater from the parking lot and pumped groundwater from the basement of 11 the Art Center. That provides two different benefits. 12 Vice Chair Greenfield: Could you elaborate on some of the bikeway GSI? 13 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Sure. Aside from Middlefield/Kellogg, there are some 14 improvements we need to make in terms of bikeways. 15 Vice Chair Greenfield: What ideas are not necessarily what's implemented right now but 16 what could be implemented? 17 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: The best thing is to put bulb-outs. Let's say there is a parking 18 lane. You would build out an area to help slow down traffic. We actually showed it … 19 Vice Chair Greenfield: You're reducing the pavement. 20 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Reducing the pavement, slowing down traffic, allowing area for a 21 pedestrian walkway. Schools are great areas for that. 22 Vice Chair Greenfield: You mentioned GSI currently is getting 7 percent of the storm 23 drain fees from the City. What kind of number are we talking about overall for the 24 budget? 25 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: For GSI construction, it's $380,000 a year. For that rebate 26 program we discussed and any other fees that can go maybe toward helping us hire a 27 consultant to do additional work on a funding analysis, for example, is $125,000. 28 Commissioner Moss: I would hope that you could work on the private side as quickly as 29 possible. I understand you've got a lot to do for the City side. It seems like you have 30 more control over the City side and less control over the private side. It's going to take 31 longer and be more of a hassle, if you could start on that a little bit. I know the City side 32 will get done, but the private side is so important and there's so much more. Is there a 33 chance that we won't have any stormwater reaching the Baylands when you're all done? I 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 17 rode my bike by there today, and there's a beautiful lake now because of all that rain. It's 1 always much lower or none existent in the summer. 2 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: There's a chance to greatly decrease that stormwater runoff. 3 Anything is possible, but it comes at such a great cost, it's probably not going to happen. 4 We can do a lot to keep runoff onsite. If everyone can get their neighbors to disconnect 5 their downspouts, we could just make little changes along the way. 6 Commissioner Moss: I love the pervious pavement at Mitchell Park. You're saying the 7 priority is more like Cal. Ave., which has a whole lot of parking spaces. You would be 8 able someday to punch holes underneath all of those parking spaces to allow more water 9 to go below there without having to tear up all the concrete and replace it with pervious 10 pavers. Is that doable? 11 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: To punch holes in pavement? 12 Commissioner Moss: Yeah. 13 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: It depends on what kind of soil is underneath and how permeable 14 it is. It probably wouldn't go over well with the engineers. I doubt it will help pavement 15 last very long. I understand your idea of trying to be creative and doing the most we can 16 with a small budget. 17 Commissioner Moss: That's your priority, those areas like Cal. Ave. and University Ave. 18 Is that what I heard you say? 19 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: That tends to come out as higher priority. The City owns a lot of 20 uncovered parking lots. Those came up really high in the list of priorities. Of course, 21 that's not based on feedback but based on our unbiased criteria. They're hollering for us 22 to come and put some GSI. That was North Carolina coming out there. 23 Commissioner Moss: As opposed to paved ones like Cubberley parking lot. Hopefully, 24 as you mentioned, in the Cubberley Master Plan, when you redo Cubberley you'll put 25 pervious pavement in all the parking areas that remain. Is that the plan? 26 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: We don't have a plan for any specific type of GSI feature. 27 Pervious would be one of the items we would consider. 28 Commissioner Moss: The elephant in the room is the groundwater pumping when you 29 have construction. Does your plan address that at all or is that totally separate? 30 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: It is totally separate. 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 18 Commissioner Moss: We just have to keep working that other side to keep them from 1 pumping all the water that they're pumping now because that's counterproductive to 2 everything you're doing. 3 Ms. North: Can I comment on that? That's one of our many hats, groundwater pumping, 4 within the Environmental Services Division. We are working on that. If you have 5 noticed, the dewatering rules and regulations got changed significantly. At least for 6 residential, we're seeing a decline in the amount of groundwater that's being pumped 7 during residential basement construction because they're utilizing groundwater cutoff 8 walls or secant walls now. We are working on that by restricting and strongly 9 encouraging reuse of that water. We will still be dealing with that for time to come. 10 Commissioner Moss: That's all I have. 11 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Chair, am I allowed to ask a question? 12 Chair McDougall: Of course. 13 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: You mentioned the private project opportunities, and you wanted 14 us to move forward on that. I was just wondering if you had any specific type? 15 Commissioner Moss: No. I just know that we have a tremendous amount of construction 16 going on right now. It sure would be nice if they had some of these in mind even if they 17 were forced to do it. You're saying that those kinds of regulations are not in place yet. 18 Therefore, they have to do it out of the goodness of their heart. I noticed an abbreviation 19 in your report that had no description, LID. It says low-impact design. If you could spell 20 that out, I would appreciate it. I'm assuming developers know about these things even if 21 it's not required. 22 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: Private properties are required to meet some of our stormwater 23 permit requirements if they develop at least 10,000 square feet of impervious surface or a 24 restaurant or a parking lot or shopping center that's 5,000 square feet or more impervious 25 surface. Both of those types of categories have to put in stormwater treatment or what's 26 called GSI. There are some requirements in place. We would like to see if we can create 27 more opportunities. 28 Commissioner Moss: I have one more question. Where can a homeowner go to learn 29 about these things? We spent a whole lot of money taking the water off our roof and 30 away from the walls so we didn't get cracking and shifting. It went out to the street 31 because that's where you put it. It would have been better if we had spread it out to the 32 rest of our property and away from the buildings, but nobody knows about those things. 33 Is there any kind of communication that's coming out of your group, your staff? 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 19 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: We do have a website, cityofpaloalto.org/GSI, on which we've 1 posted information about these requirements. The GSI Plan will be going on there this 2 week. We'll add some links; I think we already have some links on there to some other 3 resources that exist with information for residents. 4 Chair McDougall: I appreciate the fact that we rushed you in terms of content. I would 5 remind everybody that there were two presentations that came out. The first presentation 6 had an awful lot of information that would supplement some of the things you said. I 7 think that's valuable. Can you go to the one slide that had your timeline on it? You're 8 talking to PRC, Planning and Transportation, and the stormwater committee. I don't 9 know if the architectural board would help you relative to the kind of thing that 10 Commissioner Moss was asking about. I would think it would be worth at least talking to 11 them to find out. From the 11/27 meeting, you've answered a lot of questions. There was 12 an awful lot of conversation about trees at the time. I'm not sure that did come back as 13 much as might have, but I don't know that was necessary. There was a lot of talk about 14 rooftop. Your point is rooftops are good in terms of what they do initially. It's the cost of 15 maintaining them because you have to get water to them and everything. At the time, I 16 invited the Commission and I would invite you to visit the Facebook rooftops. 17 Commissioner Reckdahl went up with me last month, and that's a really interesting thing 18 to do. It's quite amazing how much natural structure there is up there and the size of the 19 trees. It's pretty impressive. Send me a message saying you want to go, and we'll arrange 20 that. The other conversation was about purple pipe. The other question from last time 21 was what can we do to help. I would repeat that question. This all sounds right, but it 22 sounds like you're doing a very difficult "pushing the ball up the hill" thing with the 23 amount of staff and money. It's going to depend on collaboration. Maybe that's the one 24 place we can be vocal about collaboration. You need collaboration with Urban Forestry 25 and Planning. You need collaboration all over the place because you can't do it alone. 26 We could commit to at least, when somebody comes before us—to bad for the Cubberley 27 people who come next—to ask about GSI. That would be the kind of contribution we 28 can make. Other than that, we should find a time in the future to invite you back and 29 continue the updates because this is important to the natural infrastructure of the City that 30 we're interested in. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for attempting the short 31 time. I know it was challenging for you to move that fast. 32 Ms. Boyle Rodriguez: I do have a question. I don't know how your ad hocs work. 33 Would it make sense to involve one of your ad hocs a little bit more in-depth with this 34 work? 35 Chair McDougall: We have a retreat coming up. One of the things we do at the retreat is 36 agree on the priorities for the next year and, therefore, what ad hocs we should have. I'll 37 commit that we'll add that to the conversation and come back to you on whether we can 38 put together an ad hoc that would work on that with you. Good idea. 39 DRAFT Draft Minutes 20 Ms. North: Chair McDougall, I can make another suggestion if you're really interested. 1 The Stormwater Oversight Committee is actually writing a letter to the City Council 2 supporting the Green Stormwater Infrastructure Plan. When you're going to your retreat, 3 maybe that's something the Parks and Rec Commission could do as well. That also helps 4 us get it through City Council. 5 Chair McDougall: Thank you for that suggestion. I think we would want to get full 6 Commission agreement on doing that. I'll put that forward. Thank you. If there's 7 nothing else. 8 Vice Chair Greenfield: I just have a quick question regarding the idea of an ad hoc for 9 GSI. That would require staff support and a liaison of some sort. I'm assuming that's 10 implicit with the suggestion. 11 Chair McDougall: Any other comments or questions? If not, thank you again, Pam. 12 We'll move on to the next conversation. I thought that was well done. 13 5. Cubberley Master Plan Update 14 Bobbie Hill: Good evening. Nice to see you all again. It's been a while. 15 Ms. O'Kane: I'd like to introduce our next item. To my left is Bobbie Hill. She's with 16 our consulting firm, Concordia. You've met Bobbie before. Since she's in town for our 17 community meeting Thursday, it would be a great opportunity for her to come and share 18 with you the progress we've made so far, a summary of our first two community 19 meetings, and what we have planned for the next phase of our master planning effort. I'm 20 going to turn it over to Bobbie for the presentation. 21 Ms. Hill: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here this evening and to give you a 22 detailed update of where we are with our planning thus far. One very important thing to 23 note is that in the beginning the project just covered the Cubberley site. At the first 24 meeting, there were a handful of people who specifically came up and mentioned would 25 it not be a good idea to also include the Greendell and 525 sites. We're happy to say that 26 the School District agreed that was a good idea. That has allowed us a bigger footprint 27 and an opportunity to address the ideas and concerns in a way that's going to be quite 28 wonderful. That's where we are with that. Our Co-Design process is well underway. We 29 have finished our programming phase. I will hand this to you when we're done. I have a 30 brief summary of a roughly 150-page document that is our programming document and 31 that I believe you have a link to. It's also on the project website. This highlights that 32 phase of the work. In Meeting 1, you see here from the activity the ideas that rose to the 33 top. You can see community garden, pool, wellness center, and on down the list. After 34 Meeting 1 and after that analysis, we brought that back to people. We also asked folks to 35 consider not only the programs that are there, that we know are very popular, but also 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 21 what opportunities there were for new programs. As a result of the second meeting, a 1 number of programs additionally rose to the top. This is one of the meetings where the 2 whole notion of the Greendell site and in particular the adult education, which is spread 3 amongst seven to nine different facilities all around. Not consolidated makes it a lot 4 harder to manage. It was a recommendation to bring that all on the Cubberley site. 5 Meeting 1 and 2, we focused on the programming aspect of it. This resulted in our 6 programming document—I will share that with you all—where we look at again existing 7 uses, what is there, and what people wanted and how they wanted to see some of these 8 expanded to the Greendell site. We looked at the new programs that people wanted. In 9 this particular slide, the blue designates the indoor spaces, and the gray designates the 10 outdoor spaces. I'll share more in detail a little bit about that later on. This is the 11 programming document that is now set. I want to note that the program that people say 12 they want now—we have to consider the life of this site for the next 50, 60, 70 years. 13 One of the key elements of this design process is to also consider maximum flexibility in 14 the design of those spaces and the adjacencies and things because we know that 15 something might be there for a few years, and 10, 20 years down the road it might be 16 something very different. Also, at those meetings, we had an aspect of trying to 17 understand people's tolerance for massing, for density, what that would mean in terms of 18 laying the site out and also considering the programs that are there and all of the footprint 19 they have and how we might be more creative in managing that square footage and also 20 bring greater green space back to the area. We heard very strongly from people about 21 maximizing green space, preserving the fields, using underground or structure parking, 22 and a tolerance for building heights between two and four stories and an interest in 23 courtyards and possibly occupiable roofs. In the second meeting, we took those ideas and 24 brought them to everybody in three concepts, if you will, independent campuses between 25 the City and the School District, a shared village, and a building in a park. People gave 26 us their ideas about that, their preferences, what they did like, what they didn't like about 27 that. We ranked those, and based on that ranking and all those comments the shared 28 village concept was really more preferable to everybody. That's where we are at this 29 point. While we've established the program, we are now going to bring this revised 30 shared village concept design to the meeting on Thursday. We'll be focusing in three 31 areas, the program, organization, and massing. We have considered many things in terms 32 of the program, organization, and massing. We've considered the property and the 33 programs that are strictly City-run and operated. We've considered properties that would 34 involve shared use between the City and the School District and then also future priorities 35 for the School District to potentially have a school and even potentially move the District 36 offices onto this site. Another thing that came up a lot in the conversations in the past 37 two meetings was also consideration for workforce housing for education staff. Here we 38 are with the plan as it stands right now. What you're seeing here would be what the site 39 would look like prior to any new school development on the site. The decision from the 40 School District, in particular for building a school on this site, would probably come 41 much farther down the road. What you see here in blue are what we would consider the 42 DRAFT Draft Minutes 22 City programs. The purple is the shared use. As we go into this, I'll share with you right 1 here. The health and wellness center is here, visual arts, two gyms, a maker space and 2 workshop, a performing arts and café, a redo of the Greendell Elementary School, and the 3 adult school. Right now, the adult school does have some programs at Greendell, but this 4 would allow them to move a lot of their programs there, a lot of their administrative staff 5 there, and also to utilize the shared facilities in Cubberley. For instance, the maker space 6 would be one they'd probably use. We also have a multiuse event space and kitchen. 7 There would be the school footprint in red. The long rectangular building that's farthest 8 to the left would be the relocation of the District offices. Over on San Antonio, the 9 yellow blocks could potentially be housing. We'll focus now on what we're talking about 10 for the outdoor spaces. In the plan thus far, we're able to preserve the existing soccer and 11 softball fields. We have a small skate park. There's lots of talk about bringing pickleball 12 courts there, so we have that. We have a playground, tennis courts, a small dog park, and 13 a pool. We have an outdoor exercise area that's also located very near the health 14 program, an amphitheater, flexible garden space, the childcare play area for the childcare 15 programs that now are functioning at Cubberley, a central promenade that runs through 16 the campus, a school quad, an outdoor café and seating, and a playground for the 17 Greendell program. If you look to the left, you'll see the existing site and what we have 18 in terms of parking and access roads and building footprint. With the design that we have 19 now, we have increased the green space significantly. We now have 59 percent more 20 green space than we did before. We have a smaller building footprint with more than 21 double the indoor area. We're able to potentially bring all the programs that exist at 22 Cubberley now and all the new programs that the community members want, a school, 23 District offices, and housing. What we're going to be focusing on in this next meeting in 24 three activities is we will have people spend the first part of the time looking at the 25 program, organization, and massing and then giving us their comments and feedback on 26 where we stand with that. We're going to really drill down and look at the circulation for 27 cars, bikes, and pedestrians, entries and egresses, and have people comment on that as 28 well. We have also engaged our traffic and parking consultant. We've had, I think, a 29 couple of meetings with them. We'll have one with them. We have 1,800 bike stalls, 800 30 for the community center and 1,000 for the future school use. We'll go through a 31 presentation and explain those different aspects up close, and then we'll have people at 32 tables give us their comments and concerns about the circulation and parking. For the 33 last part of the activity, we're going to start to talk about architectural style and 34 preferences. We've looked around Palo Alto and the surrounding area and gotten a sense 35 of what we see as most prominent in terms of architectural styles, Mid-Century Modern, 36 Arts and Crafts, Mission, Contemporary, and High Tech. We have examples of existing 37 buildings that are familiar to people. We will ask them to tell us what they like, rank 38 them individually, tell us the features they like about these different architectural 39 elements, and then rank them overall. We'll do the same thing for landscape style 40 preferences. We'll be looking at shapes and forms in landscape, hardscape, and paving 41 and color palette and get people's comments on the look and feel for that. To speak to the 42 DRAFT Draft Minutes 23 previous presentation—this is something that's a big concern of ours—consider the 1 sustainability, the environmental impact on the site, and to bring the best knowledge and 2 certainly collaboration amongst all City departments in this project to be sure that it can 3 be a stellar example for bringing some of these new ideas across the entire campus. We 4 have engaged our parking and traffic consultant, energy and sustainability consultants. 5 We've put some word out. They are still to be determined. The environmental impact 6 will be the City's CEQA consultant. We also are soliciting proposals from cost 7 estimating and phasing consultants as well. After the feedback from this meeting, we 8 will come back with three to six alternates that consider all of these different aspects. 9 They'll consider the look and feel, the biking, parking, and circulation, and the phasing, 10 which is something we've begun to look at internally and with staff. Once we get this last 11 round of information, we'll have much more information about how to best phase that 12 with the least amount of interruption as possible. Our next meeting is Thursday night. 13 We have a big chunk of work between that meeting and May. We are working on a 14 schedule with Kristen to look at all the different boards and commissions that need to be 15 updated and have their input. We'll be doing that over the next four months as we bring 16 in the consultants. On the 11th, we're meeting with the Commission and the Council. On 17 the 12th, we're meeting with the School Board to bring them up to speed. 18 Ms. O'Kane: Thank you, Bobbie. I did want to add just a couple of comments. While 19 this looks like we have a design, it's not a design. It's a starting point based on a 20 compilation of everything we've heard based on the shared village concept that was a 21 preference from the community. This is a starting point of getting feedback from the 22 community, from the Council, from the School Board, from the Parks and Rec 23 Commission. We'll be going to the Planning and Transportation Commission hopefully 24 in February as well. It looks like it's a design, but it's not. It's very conceptual and taking 25 all the pieces, putting them down on paper to see how it flows, to see how the adjacencies 26 work together to look at the circulation and traffic. I just wanted to be clear on that. As 27 Bobbie said, we are doing a City Council study session February 11th. The School Board 28 will be doing the same study session the next night. Thank you. 29 Chair McDougall: Thanks, Bobbie. That was really good. If you've been in any of the 30 sessions, you understand the design. When you end up with those big sheets laid out—31 there's three of them—you understand what that is. It's a cumulation of the thoughts. I 32 want to compliment you right now on the process. It's been particularly good in terms of 33 involvement. I'm going to start differently from the inside out. Commissioner Cribbs. 34 Commissioner Cribbs: Could you tell us again how many people attended both sessions? 35 Ms. Hill: I think we had around 257 in the first meeting and around 150-some odd in the 36 second meeting. 37 DRAFT Draft Minutes 24 Commissioner Cribbs: Do you know how many of the people who came to the second 1 were also at the first? Are they repeaters or new people? 2 Ms. Hill: I want to say we did have quite a few new people at the second meeting. I 3 don't know if I have those numbers exactly. I want to say half the people were new in the 4 second meeting. 5 Commissioner Cribbs: You've done this for a long time with a lot of different 6 communities. Are we a community of 60,000 people now, about? Sixty-five now, 66, so 7 we're growing. Is it troubling that we have 257 people? 8 Ms. Hill: Not at all. To be perfectly honest, if you have above 100 people who 9 consistently come and if you're drawing new people to the table, we've found that we 10 have the most creative input. When we get to the end of the project, we also have the 11 greatest acceptance of the plan. 12 Commissioner Cribbs: That's encouraging. Is there a way or a time that the staff 13 comments and observations about this plan at different times in the planning process get 14 somehow weighted or thrown into the mix? You all know when people say, "we don't 15 have this; we'd like to have this; this doesn't work; this works and I really love this; I 16 wish I had this." Staff has a real sense of those things. 17 Ms. O'Kane: Staff's been providing input all along. As a matter of fact, I shared this 18 presentation with Daren and Peter Jensen earlier today to get their feedback as 19 experienced park planners and knowing the community and how things are laid out in the 20 City. We're also meeting with our Transportation Department, Public Works, Planning, 21 Sustainability to get everyone's feedback along the way. Staff is definitely weighing in 22 on is that realistic, will this work. It is happening. 23 Ms. Hill: If I could just add one more thing that I want to reiterate. While we think about 24 the specifics about the programs and those kinds of things and we know enough from 25 what we're learning from community members in these meetings, we also know how to 26 take that information and create the most flexible space that can be a lot of different 27 things. What's really important is knowing what kind of square footage you need, 28 knowing what kind of adjacencies are going to make sense over time that will allow you 29 to share anything from infrastructure to outdoor space to any number of things. When 30 you have over 100 people doing this—they'll have two more opportunities—you're pretty 31 safe. 32 Commissioner Cribbs: Just a few more questions please, Chair. What's the size of the 33 pool? 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 25 Ms. Hill: I don't know. I would have to ask Connor. I don't know the answer to that. I 1 think it is big enough to be a lap pool. 2 Ms. O'Kane: It shows two. One is a lap pool, but I don't know if it's 25 or 50 meters. 3 Commissioner Cribbs: I'm assuming from looking at the pictures that it's not 50. 4 Hopefully, it's 25, but I can't tell how many lanes it is. 5 Ms. O'Kane: It's not that detailed. 6 Ms. Hill: We haven't gotten to that point yet. 7 Ms. O'Kane: We're not quite there yet. The other one is more recreational. There were 8 two pools shown. 9 Commissioner Cribbs: Are you convinced that the two gyms are enough or should there 10 be a push to do a bigger gym to make sure we can accommodate—gym space seems to be 11 the thing that's really necessary in all communities now that girls are playing sports as 12 much as boys. I just wondered if you felt like there was enough space for gyms based on 13 usage. 14 Ms. Hill: I don't know if I know the answer to that. It's certainly an important 15 consideration. The balance is understanding the not so clear picture of what the future 16 would be for the school, if there is a school there, and what that might be. That's one 17 thing that would factor into that. If I'm not mistaken, one gym is considerably bigger 18 than the other. We'll certain take that back to the team. 19 Commissioner Cribbs: I'd be interested in knowing that. At some point along the way, it 20 seems like you're going to be able to put a price tag and a phasing on this so that 21 everybody has that understanding of this beautiful picture that you've done with all the 22 phasing and green space and everything. I'm sure you can't have an answer to this 23 because it's really more about the City's space and an Option B since the School District 24 has an obligation to provide for the future and a possible future school. At some point 25 along the way, will staff consider what they might do with eight acres of City land? 26 Ms. O'Kane: We haven't discussed that. We're committed to doing a Master Plan 27 (crosstalk) lease agreement. There was the Cubberley Compact that was signed a couple 28 of years ago. We're not at a point where we would … 29 Commissioner Cribbs: I understand that, and I understand both the School District and 30 the City are paying for the study. We hope to have a big community effort out of this. 31 The fact remains that we've been doing this for a really long time, and we still have 32 Cubberley the way it was 30 years ago. It seems like with all these beautiful pictures and 33 this thoughtfulness that perhaps there should be some thinking privately or publicly about 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 26 Plan B. If the School District needs to go forward and protect their space for a potential 1 school, what would the City then do? 2 Ms. O'Kane: It would be a very different design because, like you said, gym space is—3 we need more gym space. The City doesn't have any. It's all on School District property. 4 Ms. Hill: In this plan—let me see if I can pull it up. The way we've done this in 5 consideration of what you're talking about is to put the programs that we know are City-6 specific within the City's footprint. The blue is the City. The purple would be shared. 7 Let's play it out. If everything were there, there's still no reason you can't have the school 8 and you can't have the shared space. Maybe the City doesn't get as much of that shared 9 space as much of the time as they typically do. We did this in Emeryville, and it's really 10 a matter of there's going to have be a land use conversation. There's going to have to be 11 how do you own and operate this together and separately, what do you own together, and 12 scheduling. It can be done. It's being done on eight acres in Emeryville in some much 13 more challenging ways and constraints. 14 Commissioner LaMere: I appreciate all your work on this. Do we have any idea of the 15 demographics of the people who are attending the meetings? 16 Ms. Hill: I think we do. We have been collecting at least ZIP codes. I don't have that 17 analysis for you, but we can certainly get that for you. 18 Commissioner LaMere: I'm also asking about age of participants. I attended the first 19 meeting, but I wasn't able to get to the second one. Being able to make sure who we're 20 gathering input from is extremely important. I didn't know if we had an idea of age 21 ranges or anything like that. 22 Ms. Hill: We can come back with some more detailed information on that. I wasn't able 23 to make it, but we did have a session at Gunn High School today. We're trying to do one 24 at Paly as well. The kids are so busy. We wanted to have extra time to reach out to them. 25 These are young kids who will use the space much more than you all sitting here. We did 26 want to get some input from them. 27 Commissioner LaMere: Sometimes people who have more time right now, if they're 28 retired, are able to attend more meetings and end up with a bigger voice than other people 29 who aren't able to participate in the process. Keep that in mind. Flexibility, as you have 30 underscored, is extremely important. We don't know the future of where we're going. 31 When you're speaking with the younger kids, it's extremely important. Maybe we need a 32 small venue that can become an e-sports venue, for example. No one's really thinking 33 about e-sports or we weren't thinking about that a few years ago. All of a sudden, that's 34 becoming very popular. There are college campuses sponsoring it. It's becoming 35 something. There are a lot of things out there that we don't even know about. Keep that 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 27 in mind. Is City staff able to get out and tour other facilities similar to what we're trying 1 to do so that we have other ideas? We could see something and say, "This would be 2 something we would want for the City." Sometimes having a menu or being able to 3 travel places and see things is important as well. 4 Ms. O'Kane: We did tour the Emeryville Center for Community Life. The School 5 District and City staff did that together. We haven't physically gone to other similar 6 projects, but we've done a lot of online research to see what is out there. 7 Commissioner LaMere: Sometimes without seeing something, you don't know about it. 8 Ms. Hill: You don't know what you don't know. 9 Commissioner LaMere: That's one thing I like with the menus you showed, in terms of 10 architectural styles or landscaping styles. You're giving people something to choose from 11 as opposed to them trying to generate their ideas when they're not experts. Keep in mind, 12 when we look at what type of programming is important, what we're not thinking of 13 based on generations to come that will be using this and with changes. I really appreciate 14 all the time put into this and what's being generated and the ideas that can come from it. 15 Commissioner McCauley: This is really cool stuff. I envy you that you get to spend your 16 day … 17 Ms. Hill: It's super fun. 18 Commissioner McCauley: … all day with this sort of thing. Definitely try to reach out to 19 a wide variety of groups to receive feedback. I'm sure that's part of the plan. Go beyond 20 those who are able to attend meetings and try to obtain feedback and also buy-in to the 21 broader vision. This is amazing. My primary concern is that it seems as though it will be 22 incredibly expensive. This comes back to Anne's point. We've been talking for a very 23 long while, certainly longer than I've lived in Palo Alto, about what to do with Cubberley. 24 It's been a big conundrum. This is a huge step forward. From my perspective, if there's a 25 $1 billion or more campus, it's going to be incredibly difficult to ever build momentum to 26 get something like that done. This looks like an amazing vision. How do you get to this 27 vision with a price tag that's probably really large at the moment and only going up in 28 view of the different constituencies in play between the School District and the City of 29 Palo Alto and the recognition of limited resources? That's a huge question, and I don't 30 expect you to tackle it. I am curious for you to allay the fear a little bit and also talk 31 about the phasing to the extent you can of how you would actually think about doing this 32 in phases, again without any commitment that it would be where things actually go. Give 33 some perspective on how you might do this in phases in a way that would be digestible. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 28 Ms. Hill: Part of what we will do in this analysis going forward, especially when it looks 1 at the phasing, is to consider—you have to consider so many things at once. In looking at 2 the phasing, considering what does the phasing look like, how long will that take, then 3 what is the increase in cost the longer you wait. Trying to find a balance will be part of 4 our cost estimating analysis. We'll bring that analysis back to you to consider. When it 5 comes to these kinds of projects and the design, to me it's a balance of you want to be as 6 creative as you possibly can and have the biggest vision that you possibly can in order to 7 get people excited and want to do it, at the same time with not a blank checkbook. It's 8 really a balance of trying to find a way to put those two things together. You can create 9 these spaces in a way that can be exciting. There's a lot that can happen outside. We've 10 done a lot of schools, and schools don't have unlimited budgets certainly in most of the 11 places that we work. You have to find ways to be really creative without having it be 12 cost prohibitive. I don't know what to say except you really have to blend being very 13 visionary and very creative, at the same time understanding that there are cost constraints. 14 Something like this is also an opportunity to, especially with the City and the School 15 District collaboration and how that moves forward and how you develop certain 16 agreements, attract additional resources. That's not done in a lot of places, and it's not 17 necessarily easily done, but that's something outside funders would find very attractive. 18 You have to look at all those things. 19 Commissioner McCauley: That's as good a response as you probably can provide to my 20 very broad question. Maybe this will be a way to target the question more. Could you 21 provide a couple of examples of how you would phase this so that it would be digestible? 22 Ms. Hill: We actually have a phasing plan that we've kept under wraps until we get to 23 this next round. 24 Commissioner McCauley: I don't mean to push you to disclose things you're not ready to 25 disclose. Would a phase be where you do the blue buildings, for example, and then move 26 to the next ones? 27 Ms. Hill: There are two things to consider in the phasing. One is how do you maintain 28 the programs at Cubberley and have as little disruption as possible. The other is what's 29 operating right now is what the community wants to see. The phasing from the School 30 District, they don't have enough clear answers or directions yet, so it would make sense 31 that the blue buildings would likely be first. Again, we could share that with you. I don't 32 have it right now, but we do have at least a notion of what we think that might look like. 33 Whenever the next appropriate time to share that is, we can certainly do that. It's 34 something we've been thinking about from the beginning. It's so complicated that you 35 have to consider it from the beginning. 36 Ms. O'Kane: There are opportunities. The pavilion, the gyms, the theatre are already 37 situated opposite of where the blue buildings are, so ideally you would never lose use of a 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 29 particular building as something else was being built. The point being that phasing 1 would be very specific as to when this is being built, everything would go here, so we 2 wouldn't lose use and function of the facility. 3 Vice Chair Greenfield: Thank you for walking our community through this thoughtful 4 process. It's a challenging project and a challenging community and a challenging 5 dynamic. The ability to take the feedback and listen and respond, for example adding the 6 Greendell and 525 San Antonio sites to the project, is great. That goes a long way to 7 engendering trust within the community because it's a skeptical community, particularly 8 in a project that's been moving along as it has. I'm looking forward to hearing more 9 about the circulation plan from the transportation consultant. That's great that someone's 10 been engaged for that. The increases in overall usable space while also increasing the 11 green space are big wins that the community would support. Obviously, you can 12 accomplish that by going up, and that's a great mechanism to be able to employ. The 13 pool location and the dog park, my sense is they're filling space that isn't otherwise used. 14 I'm concerned that they're noisy features that are in close proximity to residences. That 15 seems like (crosstalk). 16 Ms. Hill: I suspect we'll get those comments from people on Thursday. 17 Vice Chair Greenfield: On the gym space, do you have a number of … I'm curious if we 18 know the square footage of current gym space versus the plan for the new gym space. 19 What is the increase? 20 Ms. Hill: We do know that. I can't tell you the answer right now, but we know that. Our 21 original analysis is detailed on existing square footage and what the addition is. We can 22 share that with you. 23 Vice Chair Greenfield: Is the white square building a parking structure? 24 Ms. Hill: Yes. 25 Vice Chair Greenfield: Is that a four-story parking structure? 26 Ms. Hill: I think it's a three-story parking structure. We made it three stories by bumping 27 it out when the Greendell site was there. Otherwise, it would have had to be taller. Also, 28 we have parking under the tennis courts that's not fully underground so it doesn't require 29 air circulation. 30 Vice Chair Greenfield: I want to encourage all the Commission members to make it to 31 the meeting Thursday if they can, particularly if you haven't been to one. It's a unique 32 approach, and the City has seen a number of different approaches. Everyone attending 33 has an equal voice in a small-table setting, and it seems to be working well. My last 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 30 comment is to understand how the Parks and Rec Commission can help not only in the 1 current Co-Design process but moving forward beyond the Co-Design process into the 2 implementation phase and understand what role and assistance we can provide. We have 3 an ad hoc dedicated to assisting with the Cubberley design process and considering how 4 this ad hoc can be used more effectively or efficiently to help. 5 Ms. O'Kane: One of the big things that the Commission could do is advocate for the 6 project, not that you have to agree with everything, but to get the word out that we're 7 going through this process, that we have these community meetings where we want 8 people to sit at the table and do the activities. If you hear of people's reluctance, you 9 dispel the beliefs. This is a different process; it's unique and intended to be a co-design 10 process. Of course, share your feedback as much as you can. If you're hearing anything 11 else from the community on concerns people have, we would like to hear that as well. 12 Because it is a co-design with the whole community, we're not meeting necessarily with 13 individual groups. We don't have a stakeholder advisory group. Anyone and everyone 14 can come and share. We're hoping the Commission does that and also spreads the word 15 and helps us get people involved. There is an avenue for people to provide input online if 16 they are unable to attend a meeting. That's important information to have as well. 17 Commissioner Cribbs: Where do those comments go? 18 Ms. Hill: We review the site regularly. We're in constant review of it. We get emails, 19 and we stay on top of that and comment to people directly. 20 Vice Chair Greenfield: One final comment in response to concerns that Ryan and Jeff 21 have voiced. In terms of demographics, it's great to see the fellows include a number of 22 high school students from Gunn and Paly and that you're doing some outreach to the 23 younger age groups. The attendance is limited in that age group, not surprisingly. It's 24 great to get some voice. 25 Ms. Hill: To your question before, the fact that the School District and the City have 26 taken this on very publicly—we're meeting with different staff, departments, and 27 commissions, and we will continue to do that. In fact, we have a meeting to plan exactly 28 which commissions and councils we need to meet with in this next four-month period. A 29 lot can be said for very public, collaborative support and transparency with commissions 30 and councils speaking up and saying, "We're informed; we're doing this together; we're 31 listening; we're all in this; we're contributing our piece to it." That makes a big 32 difference. 33 Vice Chair Greenfield: There could be a place for a letter from the Commission to 34 Council at the appropriate point when there's a final plan for approval. That should be 35 something we ought to consider. 36 DRAFT Draft Minutes 31 Ms. Hill: I suggest you also write one to the School Board. 1 Ms. O'Kane: That's a great suggestion. 2 Vice Chair Greenfield: It would be great for the School Board to see both sides of us. 3 Commissioner Moss: Thank you very much for all this work so far. This is a huge 4 amount of work. Talking about demographics, I'll be perfectly honest. I've been sending 5 out notes to the Greendell community and the Green Meadow community, which are my 6 communities, encouraging them to come. I hope there's a number of 94306s in that 7 population. They do represent a significant part of the variety of demographics, school 8 kids and older people. I haven't reached out to the Ventura community, which has a 9 tremendous number of apartment buildings. I haven't reached out to North Palo Alto. 10 The existing programs, I'm assuming you have representatives from the various people 11 who are there today, and they poll their clients or customers because I'm not doing that. 12 Ms. Hill: They are doing that. In fact, one of the first meetings we had, before we had 13 our first public meeting, was with the Cubberley tenants. They've attended the meetings. 14 They've been very vocal about their programs, as they should. 15 Commissioner Moss: I am not surprised by the rankings and the sheer number of items 16 that you have on there. You've done an outstanding job of identifying the stakeholders. 17 There must be 40 or 50 different stakeholder groups that are using it in some way, shape, 18 or form. I'm not seeing many missing ones in that huge list. Is the priority correct? I 19 don't know. Is the priority going to change? I don't know. Having them on the list and 20 having a representative is half the battle. I want to talk about this picture for this minute. 21 I echo Commissioner Greenfield's concern about the pools being so close to the houses. 22 Maybe some of those tennis courts and pickleball courts could be on the roof of some of 23 these buildings. 24 Ms. Hill: They're actually on a raised structure. They could be on some of the buildings 25 as well. 26 Commissioner Moss: If we could move the pool in closer and put something between the 27 pool and the houses, that might be better. I don't know how you can do it. On the 28 opposite end, the purple building that looks like a "C," that's on the Greendell site, is very 29 close to the houses behind. I wonder if you could make it an "I" instead of a "C" so 30 there's less footprint close to the houses. You'd have the same square footage in the 31 purple building, but it would look more like an "I" instead of an "C." That way you have 32 more of a buffer against those houses. 33 Ms. Hill: What exists right now is the flip of that. This is part of the phasing, how do 34 you keep something there, which is a greatly needed space. In order to build something 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 32 new, you have to build something new and then tear down the old. What Greendell looks 1 like right now is the opposite, but it is a "C" in the other direction. 2 Commissioner Moss: You'd build that so you could keep the old building there as long 3 as possible and the old programs untouched while you're building the new building. 4 Ms. Hill: The point is what's there now is not different than what's proposed. It's the 5 reverse image of itself. 6 Commissioner Moss: No, no, no. It's much closer to the housing. Do you see the green 7 space where Greendell is, that huge green space? You've filled that huge green space 8 with a purple "C" that is right up against those houses. I was just thinking, if there were 9 some green space remaining between … 10 Ms. Hill: Between the houses and the thing. 11 Commissioner Moss: I don't know if you can change this picture before Thursday or if 12 you can make a note of it. 13 Ms. Hill: We'll make a note of it certainly. Again, these are the kind of comments that 14 we'll get from everybody. We'll take all that into consideration. 15 Commissioner Moss: Going back to what Commissioner McCauley was saying about 16 phasing, there's no question that this is a much bigger project because you added the 525 17 and the Greendell sites. I had brought that up at the very beginning, that you should 18 include it, only because of access. People need access to Greendell. I didn't realize they 19 were going to go do this incredible addition. I'm hoping that the phasing—first of all, the 20 School District has to be acutely aware of their needs. I had no idea that they would need 21 a school in the same timeframe that you do some of the other stuff. I would suspect that a 22 new middle school or a new high school would be the very last thing they would do. 23 They'd probably do the … 24 Ms. Hill: They'd probably do their offices before they'd do that. They would probably 25 do Greendell because there's need there. They could move the adult school. 26 Commissioner Moss: The phasing will happen through osmosis. It'll happen because 27 there are certain things that are higher priority to the School District and to us. Even with 28 all that prioritization, it's going to still be a huge cost. It'll be interesting to see what we 29 can do to get that. On the far right, the housing, there is far less pressure on height limit 30 and size pointing out towards San Antonio. If you made that a four-story building, 31 nobody would complain. If you made the back ones four-story, that are butted against 32 housing, that may be an issue. It's just for three houses on that side. The other side is 33 apartment buildings all facing into each other. There's nobody looking out that direction. 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 33 Nobody's looking out that direction the way the apartment buildings are set. You have 1 more flexibility with that. 2 Ms. Hill: Thank you for the input. We will remember that. As we've done this and 3 we've had conversations with the staff, we anticipate some of those same questions and 4 concerns. 5 Commissioner Moss: Anything you can put on roofs would be greatly appreciated 6 because then you'd have more room. 7 Chair McDougall: Do I dare ask if anybody has any burning issues based on the 8 conversation we've had? If not, I'd like to close by thanking you, hoping you get well 9 enough to be there on Thursday. 10 Ms. Hill: I'll be there on Thursday. 11 Chair McDougall: In terms of people asking about participation, having been to these 12 meetings, your success in getting participation is really good, considering we've done 13 outreach and the only people who showed up got there by accident. The fact that you had 14 250 and then—you might say why less in the second one. I hope you have really good 15 attendance at the Thursday meeting. I want to thank Commissioner Moss for his 16 outreach on that. On your final slide, it talked about the whole plan, the basis, and a list 17 of items on basis. I don't think there's any question that you've taken some GSI things 18 into account, but it would be interesting on your list of things. GSI sort of applies to all 19 of those, but it might be interesting to have another bullet that says the GSI. You've got a 20 great opportunity with all the space and the rooftops to do that. The concern about 21 outreach, sometimes in Palo Alto we're at risk of the vocal minority being the ones that 22 dictate what happens. The list of different projects and programs says that you've at least 23 touched the majority of the ones available. You reached out to the existing tenants. 24 When you said you were not talking to groups, I was going to correct you and say, "I 25 believe you are talking to at least the tenants," which is a legitimate interest group. I 26 appreciate that. Everybody's made the right comments. I look forward to seeing you on 27 Thursday. I hope the rest of us come and bring our friends. 28 Ms. Hill: Please do. It should be fun. 29 Chair McDougall: That would be my comment. Let's not let her have all the fun. Let's 30 go have some fun with her. She brings blocks and everything else to play with. Kristen, 31 do you want to make any comments to wrap that up? 32 Ms. O'Kane: It's been an interesting process. I've been really pleased with how it's 33 going. Sometimes, it's a whirlwind, where I think, "Oh, my gosh, this is happening so 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 34 quickly." As Bobbie shared in their first presentation, they did the Katrina recovery plan 1 in like nine months. If they can do that in nine months, we can do this. 2 Commissioner Moss: I was going to make that comment. The fact that you promised us 3 a plan by the end of the year is just mindboggling. It's moving. A lot of people have 4 been working on this or talking about this for decades. 5 Ms. Hill: The efficiency is having everybody in the room doing it instead of a lot of 6 subcommittees. We've learned that over the years. 7 6. Aspen Institute Palo Alto Dialogue on Libraries and Community Services 8 Chair McDougall: The next item on the agenda, I get the privilege of introducing 9 Monique to speak about the Aspen technology work that went on. It was a dialog about 10 libraries and Community Services. The outcome was very good. I appreciate Monique 11 being here to talk about it. 12 Monique le Conge Ziesenhenne: Thank you. I'm Monique Ziesenhenne, Director of 13 Library and Community Services. At the time that I was appointed to this role, Jim 14 Keene tasked me with looking for ways that Community Services and Library could 15 work more efficiently together, collaborate on more of our work without returning to the 16 time when libraries were part of Community Services, keeping the two departments 17 separate but thinking about the strategies or needs around having the staff work more 18 closely together. As it turned out, about a week later the State Library had this grant 19 possibility from the Aspen Institute, which we applied for. We were one of three 20 libraries in the state to receive it. Before I applied, I talked to the State Librarian and 21 Amy Garmer at Aspen and said, "I don't want it just to be the Library. Here's what's 22 going on in Palo Alto. Can this work?" It was a new experiment for them as well. The 23 way the Aspen Dialogues work. You're awarded the grant, and then they go away and do 24 their own research on what's going on in your community, what might be happening with 25 libraries, with community wellness, with health, with other issues. They get the 26 leadership from both Library and Community Services together to make 27 recommendations on who might be an advisory group, sort of an advisory council for a 28 half-day meeting to help distill what those topics might be, what they might want to think 29 about both before the actual Dialogue day and into the future. Don was nice enough to 30 represent the PRC along with many other community members. We had a group of about 31 20 people to give Aspen and the staff that feedback. From there, we looked at other 32 community leaders who might contribute to the Dialogue, and Aspen made some 33 recommendations based on what they had learned. Could we have perhaps some more 34 health representation or more representation for older adults, things like that, to create 35 some balance, education, college representation. It's a full day of a couple of speakers 36 introducing concepts and ideas and then the group talking about it altogether, breaking 37 into groups to discuss particular topics, and then making recommendations going 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 35 forward. I hope you all read the report. It's also been distributed to the Library 1 Commission and the City Council. It was an interesting day and productive from the 2 standpoint that it was hard for some of the participants to think about Community 3 Services in the same way that they thought about libraries. Maybe they had a better idea 4 of what libraries were. Not all the people were internal necessarily to the City. Even 5 though they were either working in the City or living in the City, they were maybe not as 6 involved with CSD as they might be with the Library. That had some effect on the 7 outcome as well. We did invite people from the School District. That was one of the 8 comments the Library Commission made. They said, "I noticed no one was representing 9 PAUSD." No one was available for that. It was during the transition of Don Austin 10 beginning with PAUSD. I just wanted to put it out that we did invite them to participate. 11 For the Library Commission, one of the things that Commissioner McDougall will be 12 happy about is the idea of platform. People, place, and platform as the assets that could 13 be leveraged. I would argue that it's not only libraries but also the strength for CSD in 14 the time that I've been involved with this department and thinking about the things that 15 we do together. They both have that element. Human capital being critical. The actual 16 infrastructure that we have available. Palo Alto, in my opinion, is quite amazing in terms 17 of the libraries and the parks and the recreational resources. It's unlike most places that 18 I've ever worked and certainly very few that I've ever visited. Again, that idea of the civil 19 society institutions being a platform for community improvement, community wellness, 20 and learning and leisure. I hope you have some questions for me. I'm here to answer 21 them. 22 Commissioner Moss: This is timely, right after the discussion of the Cubberley Master 23 Plan. Reading the report, it never occurred to me how much of a community center each 24 library is. All the libraries together are essentially an extension of the Cubberley 25 Community Center or the Cubberley Community Center is an extension of the libraries. 26 When I went to Mitchell Park Library recently, you have at least two rooms in the library 27 that are used for multipurpose. It's not just a place to get a book. It's not just a place to 28 get internet access. You do have these rooms. I'm not even talking about the community 29 rooms outside of the library, but inside the library. The fact that you have identified how 30 many different stakeholder groups use the library—it's not just people who are checking 31 out books. That was very beneficial in that report. If there's any way that at the entrance 32 of every library you could show all the things that are happening in the Library that have 33 nothing to do with checking out books, it would be an extremely valuable extension of 34 this study. It goes back to platform. You've got the place and the people, but what are all 35 the things that you can do there that people aren't aware of? 36 Ms. Ziesenhenne: It's a great comment. It's true of both departments. There is a lot 37 going on that—most people have their path, the thing that they use the City for. They're 38 in parks for hiking or they're in aquatics, or they come to the Library to pick up their 39 things. When somebody comes to volunteer at the Library, we give them a tour. They 40 DRAFT Draft Minutes 36 say, "I had no idea you had this." Usually, the volunteers are the superusers. You're 1 absolutely right. There's a couple of things that—we're thinking about using CSD's 2 facility rentals to highlight what rooms are available and make reservations for Library 3 rooms. In the past we have offered programs that were a teaser for the CSD programs. 4 We would bring the yoga instructor to the Library, do the one-off freebie, but have 5 somebody there to sign them up for the class, not that there's ever space in anybody's 6 classes because they're all so popular. At the same time, just to create an awareness of 7 those kinds of things. Looking at who else we can partner with as a third party for both 8 departments to either help offer paid classes or free to create greater awareness. 9 Commissioner Moss: You have the Enjoy! catalog, which shows classes, courses, adult 10 ed, events. If you had events that were in the Library and, just like you said, they're 11 teasers for the rest of the programs in the Enjoy! catalog, then you could use them 12 together. 13 Chair McDougall: Anybody else have any comments or questions? Monique, you and I 14 have talked about this before. The challenge is when you talk about the Library, the 15 history is that it's the library structure. It's the building, the warehouse. People are 16 learning it's not just the structure; it's all the services that go with it, the programs that are 17 really part of it. When you talk about CSD, I think you think about the services, and you 18 don't think about the infrastructure. What you and I have talked about is the idea that the 19 Library is a platform on which you put stuff, and CSD is a platform on which you put 20 stuff. The opportunity for Palo Alto is to add one and one and make an even bigger 21 platform out of the whole thing. That really is the ambition. It has to be one big platform 22 that has all these services. That doesn't mean they have to be one organization. Do you 23 think we're moving in that direction successfully or at least thinking about it? Five years 24 ago, in order to get on the Library Commission, I said I didn't think the Library was 25 anything about books. They were about bicycle repair stations. 26 Ms. Ziesenhenne: It's why we have the Walk and Roll bike maps to the libraries. One of 27 the things that we've done as the manager groups, the two sets of managers, is meet and 28 talk about who are our community partners, who do we share in common. I may have 29 mentioned this to you. We mapped who we are all partnering with, whether you were in 30 the theatre or Art Center or recreation or Library. We went through and had the different 31 names, whether it was Avenidas or YMCA, and a different color coding for each 32 division. Some had like eight circles around them because different divisions were all 33 partnering with the YMCA, but none of us knew the others were doing it. It was really 34 interesting to us to see how many community partners we're already working with. 35 Thinking about that platform, how can we leverage that better? We are working towards 36 a fuller report of who we're working with right now and also thinking about how we can, 37 given that there are challenges—we never have enough staff; we never have enough 38 DRAFT Draft Minutes 37 money—work with them most effectively and leverage everyone to do a little bit more or 1 a lot more. 2 Chair McDougall: If we could figure out how to have an integrated platform and the 3 Library has things on it and CSD has things on it and then X, Y, and Z, the partners—4 you're doing the right thing by exploring the partnerships. You and I have talked about 5 that before as partnerships. 6 Vice Chair Greenfield: Thank you for sharing this Dialogue. It is interesting to try to 7 pursue the collaboration between the Library and CSD. As you just mentioned, the staff 8 limitations and the workload are a big challenge. I look at this as trying to establish 9 synergies between Library and CSD. A couple of things come to mind. One is the 10 Enjoy! catalog, which was mentioned, but that seems like an opportunity to advertise 11 resources of the Library more broadly to the group that's looking more directly at 12 recreation. It could be used to have some full-page ads to list the resources in the Library 13 and Community Services that might not be explicitly listed as classes in the Enjoy! 14 catalog. Something else that came to mind is Library technology was emphasized. 15 Understanding how the technology acumen could be used within Community Services, a 16 couple of things specifically are the Foothills Park Interpretive Center is in great need of 17 a facelift and perhaps some of the Library staff could be used in a cross-pollination to 18 come up with some ideas on how to implement something a little more 21st century. 19 Ms. Ziesenhenne: That's a great idea. 20 Vice Chair Greenfield: I know the Junior Museum plans are well underway, but there 21 may be some sort of branching that could be useful there as well. 22 Commissioner Moss: Commissioner Greenfield mentioned Foothills. There's also the 23 Palo Alto Historical Society. They really don't have a home. They have a home in 24 Cubberley, but they really should be part of the Library in some way or at least … 25 Ms. Ziesenhenne: They are. 26 Commissioner Moss: I don't know where. Anyway, if there was some way to enhance 27 their presence. 28 Ms. Ziesenhenne: I can give you a little bit of the history of that. They were co-located 29 in the Main Library before Main Library was renovated and became Rinconada. The 30 Palo Alto Historical Association maintains the Guy Miller Archives, which are City-31 owned archives. When we had to move out of Main Library, I found them space at 32 Cubberley, which was great, so we got Real Estate to give them a room at a very 33 reasonable rate. The intention was actually for those documents, which many of them are 34 historical in nature and need to be stored in an appropriate temperature with the right kind 35 DRAFT Draft Minutes 38 of light, to be in a room at the Roth Building when it is converted to a museum. They 1 will be near City Hall, more accessible to Library and other things. They are still the key 2 resource digitally for a lot of local information. We work with them to digitize 3 photographs, documents, and resources and make them available. They are available 4 through the Library catalog and their own catalog. We continue to work with them on 5 that project because there is a lot of information available. Part of the Library Impact Fee 6 is earmarked. Because this collection did reside in the Library at one time, moving it to 7 the Roth Building can expand access and meets the criteria. While it's not in a Library 8 building at the moment, it does get Library support. When genealogists contact the 9 Library, we go to PAHA to look for obituaries and other databases. There's a lot of 10 actual interaction with the Library staff because we get a lot of those calls from all over 11 the world. All roads lead to Palo Alto we've decided. 12 Chair McDougall: There is a white board in the Main Library that says, "here's the 13 cooking class, here's the Chinese language class." There's a whole list of classes. 14 Ms. Ziesenhenne: They have the electronic boards as well. The whiteboards have 15 worked out better. 16 Chair McDougall: It jumps right at you. 17 Ms. Ziesenhenne: You don't have to stand there and wait for things to flip by. 18 Chair McDougall: I don't see any other questions. I would encourage everybody, if they 19 didn't really study the report relative to the future of what CSD and the Library can do 20 together in Palo Alto, this whole idea of integrating platform and partnerships is really 21 important. I would encourage you to continue the Dialogue. Maybe we should have a 22 joint session with the Library Commission to have some of these conversations as well. 23 Ms. Ziesenhenne: That's a great idea. I'll be happy to coordinate dates. The LAC meets 24 less frequently than you do. We'll poll you for some available dates. How about that? 25 Chair McDougall: We'd like to invite them on a night when we have pickleball on the 26 agenda or something like that. 27 Ms. Ziesenhenne: If you go back and read or you take a look at this in the interest of 28 community engagement, please feel free to send me any thoughts that come or if you 29 think of something we can do. We do have Library activities in Enjoy!, but the idea of 30 highlighting some of the collections and things like that and maybe more than just the 31 basic programming would be an interesting tool. Thank you for that. 32 Chair McDougall: Although we're called Parks and Recreation, maybe we ought to be 33 called Parks and Community Services to reinforce the fact that when we put together 34 DRAFT Draft Minutes 39 agendas and questions and topics, we need to be supporting the Community Services part 1 of what Kristen's team does. Monique, thank you. Thank you for attending all our 2 meetings and persevering with us. 3 Ms. Ziesenhenne: It's great. 4 7. Other Ad Hoc Committee and Liaison Updates 5 Chair McDougall: The next item is whether there have been any other ad hoc committee 6 meetings or topics that anybody wants to talk about. 7 Vice Chair Greenfield: One brief announcement. The Mayor's planting hosted by 8 Canopy at Cubberley will be 5:15 on Thursday—at Mitchell Park at 5:15 this Thursday. 9 Canopy will be planting a Mayor's tree for Mayor Filseth. Everyone's invited to attend 10 before they head to the Cubberley Co-Design meeting. 11 Commissioner Moss: I wanted to make sure that the Renzel pond effort is part of the 12 Baylands Comprehensive Plan and that we will have another opportunity to add more to 13 it now that it's finished. Maybe we could have another meeting of the comprehensive 14 plan subcommittee or steering group. 15 Ms. O'Kane: I'll pass that along to Daren. 16 Commissioner Moss: As far as open space, there was some discussion about bald eagles 17 showing up at Arastradero Preserve. Conversations with the Rangers confirmed that we 18 do have some. I was a little concerned that we might have traffic from birders, but they 19 assure us that it's not a problem right now. Just to know that we have them in our City is 20 pretty amazing. The Magical Bridge Playground is still drawing huge crowds. I've never 21 seen it so crowded as yesterday, Monday. I did have an opportunity to meet with the co-22 founder of the Magical Bridge. When we talk about a tentative agenda for next meeting, 23 I'd like to bring up the possibility of having them come. Just like the Library, the 24 Magical Bridge can be enhanced and expanded in our City. 25 VI. TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR FEBRUARY 26, 2019 MEETING 26 Chair McDougall: Let's move to the next topic of next agendas. I'll put down Magical 27 Bridge as a potential topic. Are there any other burning issues? 28 Commissioner Cribbs: Pickleball. It doesn't have to be a whole agenda item, but a report 29 about the outreach to the different groups and where we are with that and the construction 30 coming up. The same thing with the restrooms in the parks and the community outreach 31 that's being done to Daren's choice of parks. Can I add something for the agenda too? 32 Chair McDougall: Yes. 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 40 Commissioner Cribbs: Were we going to do a CIP 101 update about what money is 1 coming up? 2 Chair McDougall: Put CIP on the agenda. We should have it at the next meeting. 3 Ms. O'Kane: It's been on the last two meetings, but it keeps getting bumped for other 4 things. 5 Commissioner Cribbs: Fund development as we're talking about potential Cubberley 6 funding on down the line. Maybe we should have a discussion again about fund 7 development. 8 Vice Chair Greenfield: Maybe that's a good retreat topic. There was mention of the 9 Urban Forest Master Plan as well. 10 Ms. O'Kane: You had requested, Commissioner Moss, an update on the Renzel Wetland. 11 Chair McDougall: If we looked at it as an update on the Baylands Comprehensive Plan 12 or Byxbee. I think there's an open question of trucks on top of Byxbee. I think we were 13 told that would be done by the end of October. 14 Commissioner Moss: I'm not sure if this is an agenda item or for retreat. The 10.5 acres 15 has been totally used for the San Francisquito Creek project, which is now done. When I 16 rode by there today, it's empty of equipment for the first time in nine years. It's a flat, 17 mud field. This year we should be addressing that 10.5 acres. Do you want to have that 18 as a PRC retreat issue or something to come … 19 Chair McDougall: Let's put all this stuff on the list, and then we'll figure out which of the 20 ones that we … 21 Commissioner Moss: I have about eight items for the PRC retreat agenda. Do you want 22 to deal with those now? Do you want me to list them now or list them in a minute? Are 23 we talking about both agendas right now? 24 Chair McDougall: We're combining it and sorting out which would be … Why don't 25 you go ahead and list them? 26 Commissioner Moss: The North Ventura comprehensive plan, it says March 2020, but 27 we have to start working on that this year. Is Fry's … 28 Ms. O'Kane: It's already underway. Commissioner Reckdahl is the liaison to that group. 29 Commissioner Moss: Can we have an update on that either in the PRC retreat or as an 30 agenda item? That's huge. 31 DRAFT Draft Minutes 41 Vice Chair Greenfield: I think that could be addressed in the liaison and ad hoc updates. 1 Commissioner Moss: We talked about the Boardwalk. When will we have an opening 2 for the Boardwalk? 3 Ms. O'Kane: We are looking at dates. We don't have the date yet, but we'll let the … 4 Commissioner Moss: It won't be the 30th of this month. That's when you're done with 5 the construction. Right? 6 Ms. O'Kane: Daren's planning that, so I don't know what dates he's considering. We'll 7 let you know as soon as we have it. 8 Commissioner Moss: Another area that we should probably look at is—the question is 9 when can we deal with Buckeye Creek. It's a very expensive thing. In the PRC retreat, 10 do we spend any more time on it this calendar year or do we have to shove it off to next 11 year? 12 Vice Chair Greenfield: We have a lot of priorities to weigh as a Commission. We would 13 do well to use the Comprehensive Plan as a guiding document to inform our actions and 14 prioritize our actions. To that end, we need to take into consideration staff and financial 15 resources that are available. We need to look realistically at what we can hope to 16 accomplish this year as part of the retreat. Would it be easier for you to email a list of 17 items to consider for the retreat to Kristen? She can share it with Don and me. 18 Ms. O'Kane: For Buckeye Creek, there was an informational item that went to Council 19 that described our current plan. I can send you that link if you want to look at it. I don't 20 think anything will have changed since then. 21 Chair McDougall: I would invite any other Commissioners to do exactly the same thing, 22 particularly for the retreat. Give us any input, send it directly to Kristen. 23 Vice Chair Greenfield: Leading up to the retreat, it would be good for all Commissioners 24 to look at the existing ad hoc committees and liaison roles as we look to assign the roles 25 for the coming year. We need to consider the ad hoc committees. Does it make sense to 26 keep the committees we have? Are there new committees we should be adding such as 27 the GSI? Are there any committees that we can merge to increase efficiency? These are 28 all questions to consider leading up to the meeting. Feel free to forward any direct input 29 that you think would be useful to Kristen before the meeting. Otherwise, we can dig into 30 it at the retreat. 31 Ms. O'Kane: It's in the minutes from the retreat, but we can send that out so everyone has 32 the liaison and ad hoc assignments. 33 DRAFT Draft Minutes 42 Chair McDougall: If we send that out, maybe we could send it out in the format of 1 questions to consider before you show up. 2 Vice Chair Greenfield: A friendly reminder for everybody to get their lunch order in so 3 staff resources don't need to remind us. 4 Chair McDougall: Another friendly reminder to show up at Cubberley on Thursday 5 night. 6 VII. COMMENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 7 None 8 VIII. ADJOURNMENT 9 Meeting adjourned on motion by Vice Chair Greenfield and second by Commissioner 10 Cribbs at 9:52 p.m. 11 1 City of Palo Alto Parks and Recreation Commission (PRC) 2019 Annual Retreat Meeting Minutes PRC Commissioners Present: David Moss, Don McDougall, Keith Reckdahl, Jeff Greenfield, Anne Cribbs, Ryan McCauley, Jeff LaMere Councilmember Alison Cormack Present Staff Present: Kristen O’Kane, Daren Anderson, Monique LeConge Ziesenhenne, Peter Jensen, Natalie Khwaja Confirmation of agenda by Chair McDougall 1.) Introduction of Councilmember Alison Cormack – New City Council liaison to PRC •Proposed Council Priorities that relate to the PRC o Climate change Start identifying areas in which we can improve o Cubberley Master Plan Proposed by Councilmembers Cormack and Dubois at the Council retreat •Final 2019 Council Priorities 1.Climate/Sustainability and Climate Action Plan; 2.Grade Separations; 3.Transportation and Traffic; and 4.Fiscal Sustainability 2.) 2018 National Citizen Survey Results •Chair McDougall reported on the results of the survey related to Parks, Recreation and Open Space. The Chair noted that residents continue to give parks high ratings. There was some discussion as to why “Recreational Opportunities” declined by 6% from 2017 to 2018. 3.) Review of 2018 Accomplishments (ATTACHMENT) 2 4.) Staff Priorities for 2019 • Master Plan Projects (P. Jensen), projects set within a 5-year time frame o Rinconada Park and Junior Museum and Zoo plan o Boulware Park o Ramos Park o Pickleball o Dog Park o Parks Restroom o Cubberley Restroom • Parks Projects (D. Anderson) o Baylands Sailing Station/Dock o Trail Projects o Palo Alto Christian Church community garden partnership o 10.5 Acre outreach and planning  Baylands Sport Complex  Finalized preliminary steps  Working on conceptual design  Potential for revenue o Wildlife Habitat Preservation o Park Rules and Regulations o 7.7 Open to the public, working now on outreach • CSD Projects (K. O’Kane) o Cubberley Master Plan  Currently working on public feedback/community meetings  Ad Hocs can eventually assist with narrowing down features/ working through plan  No funding beyond master plan at this time • Council Projects (Councilmember Cormack) o Climate Change Mitigation 3  Early on in the planning process, open to feedback from PRC 5.) Identifying PRC 2019 Priorities • Priorities o Baylands 10.5 Acres Use and Development o Cubberley Master Plan o Baylands Comprehensive Conservation Plan (BCCP) o Recreation Opportunity Analysis o Identify Funding Needs, Opportunities, and Strategies  Capital and Operating • Guiding Principles o Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) o Climate Change o Recreation Diversity Focus o Park Amenities Maintenance and Improvements o Policy Rules and Regulations o Partnerships (Public and Private) 4 AD HOC Greenfield McCauley LeMere Reckdahl Moss Cribbs McDougall Foothills Park X X X BCCP X X X CIP X X 10.5 Acres X X X Cubberley Master Plan X X X Field and Facility Use Policy X X X Park Amenities X X X Recreation Opportunities X X X Park Rules and Regulations X X LIAISON AND OUTREACH Greenfield McCauley LeMere Reckdahl Moss Cribbs McDougall Funding X Community Gardens X Stanford X X Ventura Coordinated Area Plan X Youth Council X Turf Management X Aquatics X Safe Routes X PA Rec Foundation X PAUSD X Friends of PA Parks X Friends of the Foothills Parks X Health and Wellness X GSI X TO: Parks and Recreation Commission FROM: Public Works DATE: 2/26/19 SUBJECT: Rinconada Park Improvement Project RECOMMENDATION Staff will present the proposed improvements for the Rinconada Park Improvement Project. No action will be taken. BACKGROUND Capital improvement funding of $1.7 million was approved by City Council to address current park improvement needs for fiscal year 2020. The improvements include infrastructure, accessibility and maintenance needs of the park. The proposed improvements were identified and supported by the community as part of the Rinconada Park Long Range Plan, which was adopted by City Council in the summer of 2017. The improvements of the existing two playgrounds and replacement of the existing asphalt walkways with concrete comprise the major budget items being addressed by the project scope. Park improvements are anticipated to begin in the fall of 2019 to coincide with the construction of the new Junior Museum and Zoo, which is anticipated to open in the summer of 2020.. Community outreach, bid plan development, bidding and permitting process are currently underway. The first community meeting was held on February 21, 2019 to review the proposed improvement items with input provided by the community members in attendance. For more information regarding the current Rinconada Park Improvement project please visit the project web page at: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/rinconadaplan For more information regarding the Rinconada Park Long Range Plan and process please visit the project web page at: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/depts/pwd/rinconadaplan.asp Renovation Items Proposed for Rinconada Park Include: • Playground & Tot Lot Renovation • Relocate Tot Lot Closer to Main Playground • All New Playground Equipment, Fencing, Rubber surfacing • New Pathways • 12’ wide main connection pathway • 8’ wide connection pathways • Site Furnishing Replacement • Picnic Tables, Benches, Water Fountain, BBQ’s, Trash/Recycle Receptacles • Picnic Areas • Renovate existing group picnic area • Create new picnic area at rear of JMZ at Playground • Expansion of main turf area • New irrigation • Install drainage • Renovate planting areas • Reduce small turf areas • Native/Habitat Planting • Pollinator Garden • Bid Alternate Scope • Restroom • Decomposed Granite Pathway • Ramp & Crosswalk Alignment at Wilson Street DISCUSSION Staff will present the proposed park improvement plan and community feed back to the commission for discussion and input on plan. NEXT STEPS • Community Meeting #1: 2.21.19 • Parks & Recreation Commission (PRC) Meeting #1: 2.26.19 • Community Meeting #2: March/April 2019 • Parks & Recreation Commission Meeting #2: March/April 2019 • PRC Meeting #3 – Adoption of Park Improvement Ordinance (PIO): May/June 2019 • Bid Document Preparation & Project Bidding: Spring/Summer 2019 • Council to Adopt (PIO) and Approve Contract: Fall 2019 • Construction Begins: Fall 2019 POLICY IMPLICATIONS The proposed recommendations are consistent with Policy C-26 of the Community Services element of the Comprehensive Plan that encourages maintaining park facilities as safe and healthy community assets; and Policy C-22 that encourages new community facilities to have flexible functions to ensure adaptability to the changing needs of the community. ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW An initial CEQA Study was prepared as an aspect of the Rinconada Park Long Range Plan. None of the proposed new improvement require further study and are exempt from a full CEQA review. ATTACHMENTS Attachment A: Proposed Renovation Review Plan Attachment B: Presentation PREPARED BY Peter Jensen Landscape Architect City of Palo Alto 1 Rinconada Park Improvement  Project Parks and Recreation Commission Meeting February 26, 2019 2 Rinconada Park Existing Conditions 3 Rinconada Park Scope of Work 4 Existing Site Photos 5 Existing Site Photos 6 Rinconada Park Long Range Plan Long Range Plan Adopted by council in 2017 Project Goals •Maintain existing character of the park •Create better connection and awareness to all the community facilities that exists around and within the park. •Coordination and update of Park resources and amenities to reflect current and future needs of park users and guests. •Respond to park usage as it relates to surrounding uses and neighborhood. •Accessibility and infrastructural improvements •Coordination of user group objectives 7 Rinconada Park Long Range Plan 8 Rinconada Park Long Range Plan 9 Junior Museum and Zoo Project  10 Project Improvement Scope  •Project Budget $1.7 Million •Improvement Scope  •Playground & Tot  Lot  Renovation •Relocate  Tot  Lot Closer to Main Playground  •All New Playground Equipment, Fencing, Rubber  surfacing •New Pathways  •12’ wide main connection pathway •8’ wide connection pathways •Site Furnishing Replacement •Picnic Tables, Benches, Water Fountain, BBQ’s,  Trash/Recycle Receptacles  11 Project Improvement Scope  •Improvement Scope Continued •Picnic Areas  •Renovate existing group picnic area •Create new picnic area at rear of JMZ at Playground •Expansion of Main Turf  •New irrigation  •Install drainage  •Renovate Planting Areas •Reduce small turf areas •Native/Habitat Planting •Pollinator Garden  12 Project Improvement  Bid Alternate Scope  •Bid Alternate Scope  •Restroom Room  •Decomposed Granite Loop Pathway  •Ramp & Crosswalk Alignment at Wilson Street •Playground Playhouse  13 Improvement Reference Plan 14 Improvement Reference Plan Improvement Items 1.New Park Entry Paving        Connection to JMZ 2.Bike Rack 3.New Picnic Area 4.12’ Wide Main Park Walkway  (color concrete) 5.Swing Zone  6.Fitness Equipment 7.Tot  lot Play Zone 8.Slide/Climbing Zone 9.Spin Zone 10.Renovated Existing Group Picnic  Area  11.8’ Wide Walkway 12.Habitat/Pollinator Garden 13.Landscape Improvements at Rear  of Girl Scout House 14.New Walkway to Rear of Walter  Hayes  15.Existing Open Turf Area with New  Irrigation & Drainage  Bid Alternative Items 1.Restroom  2.Playhouse  3.Decomposed Loop Path  4.Realign Cross Walk at Wilson St. 15 Improvement Reference Plan Improvement Items 4.12’ Wide Main Park Walkway  (color concrete) 11.   8’ Wide Walkway 12.Habitat/Pollinator Garden 16.Mulch Area Under Existing Oak Tree 17.New Concrete Paving at  Existing Restroom Bid Alternative Items 3.Decomposed Loop Path  5.Future Location of Covered Group  Picnic Structure/Tennis Field House  16 Playground Equipment 17 Proposed Materials  18 Questions & Comments 19 Project Schedule •Community Meeting #1:  2.21.19 •Parks & Recreation Commission (PRC) Meeting #1: 2.26.19 •Community Meeting #2: March/April 2019 •Parks & Recreation Commission Meeting #2: March/April 2019 •PRC  Meeting #3 –Adoption of Park Improvement Ordinance  (PIO): May/June 2019 •Bid Document Preparation &  Project Bidding: Spring/Summer  2019 •Council to Adopt (PIO) and Approve Contract: Fall 2019 •Construction Begins: Fall 2019 20 Project Status  www.cityofpaloalto.org/rinconadapark 21 Rinconada Park  Improvement Project 1 TO: PARKS AND RECREATION COMMISSION FROM: LAM DO DEPARTMENT: COMMUNITY SERVICES DATE: FEBRUARY 26, 2019 SUBJECT: REVIEW OF THE PROPOSED FY 2020‐2024 CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM PLAN RECOMMENDATION This is an informational report. No action is recommended. BACKGROUND The FY 2020‐2024 Capital Improvement Program (CIP) Plan will guide the City in the planning and scheduling of infrastructure improvement projects over the next five years. It is being developed in coordination with all City departments responsible for capital projects. As required by the City Municipal Code, the Planning and Transportation Commission (PTC) will review the CIP Plan in April or May 2019 to evaluate the program’s compliance with the City’s Comprehensive Plan. The PTC will then forward its recommendations to the Finance Committee and City Council. Council adoption of the CIP Plan is anticipated in June 2019.   The FY 2020 Proposed Capital Budget includes the Capital Improvement Funds, Enterprise Funds, and Internal Service Funds. It should be noted that the Council only approves the budget for the first year of any five year CIP Plan and the remaining four years are to be used for forecasting and planning. Every CIP has a project page that provides details regarding the project description, justification, significant changes, schedule, funding, budget source, and other details. The following is an example of a project page: 2 3 DISCUSSION In July 2018, the Commission reviewed the capital projects approved for FY 2019. The status of FY 2019 projects are as follows: The following FY 2020 projects are proposed for Council approval in June 2019: During FY 2020, staff will work on incomplete projects carried over from FY 2019 and FY 2020 projects approved by Council. In addition to the projects listed above, annually there is $810,000 for on‐going projects for trail and pond maintenance, emergency repairs, court re‐surfacing, and replacement or repair of benches, signage, fencing, walkways, and landscaping. In June 2019, Council will review and approve the FY 2020‐2024 capital plan. Council approves the budget for the first year of the five‐year CIP Plan, and the remaining four years are used for forecasting and planning. Attachment A lists all projects under consideration for the five‐year CIP Plan, FY 2020 – 2024. The attachment also includes a total by Fiscal Year and area of expenditure. 4 Funding The funding for the projects comes from a variety of different funds. The majority of the CIPs are funded through the General Fund. Projects that meet the criteria of Impact Fees (which include amenities that increase the capacity of a park) may utilize Park Development Impact Fee funding (e.g. new park restroom). Projects at Cubberley Community Center may be able to use Cubberley Funds, which is an account that the City contributes the funds that were previously paid to the Palo Alto School District under the Covenant not to Develop Agreement. Prioritization The method for prioritizing projects has evolved through the years. In the past staff was asked to fill out priority matrix forms and rank projects based on the following criteria:  Council Direction  Leverage Funding (Private/Public/Grants/Impact Fees)  Health and Safety Requirements  Code/Legal Requirements  Operational Needs and Efficiency  Sustainability  Community Priorities  Revenue Generating Potential Over the last several years, projects have been prioritized based on a combination of the criteria listed above, as well as feedback from the Parks and Recreation Commission, the Parks Master Plan, and addressing the Catch‐up/Keep‐up projects as a priority. Catch‐up and Keep‐up are terms used by the City’s Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Committee that evaluated the City’s infrastructure in 2011. The Catch‐up projects are ones that were identified previously as a priority need for repair or replacement, but were never implemented. Erosion repairs to Buckeye Creek is a good example of a Catch‐up project because it was identified many years ago as a need, but wasn’t addressed. Keep‐up projects are the ones that are forecasted to be necessary for repair or replacement in a coming year. A good example of a Keep‐up project would be a park playground that will have reached the end of its anticipated useful life. CIP Process Timeline  October/November—Staff begin planning for the next capital budget and meet with the Parks and Recreation Commission Ad Hoc Committee to discuss prioritizing the projects.  December/January—Staff submit the proposed five-year capital budget to Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Administrative Services Department. 5  April/May—Planning and Transportation Commission review the Capital Plan to ensure that the projects comply with the Comprehensive Plan.  May—Finance Committee reviews capital plan  June— Council reviews and adopts capital budget PREPARED BY:__________________________________________________________ LAM DO Superintendent, Open Space, Parks, and Golf Attachment A  ‐  Proposed FY 2020 ‐ 2024 CIP Projects * FY 2020 Proposed CIP projects  Project Source of Funds Budget Status Ramos Park Improvements General Fund $ 244,000 Pending Council Approval Cameron Park Improvements General Fund $ 200,000 Pending Council Approval Golf Course Artificial Turf Replacement General Fund $ 821,000 Pending Council Approval Dog Park Renovation General Fund $ 150,000 Pending Council Approval Boulware Park Construction General Fund $ 442,000 Pending Council Approval Cubberley Synthetic Turf and Track Construction Cubberley Fund $ 1,830,000 Pending Council Approval Rinconada Park Improvements Construction General Fund $ 2,200,000 Pending Council Approval Foothills Park Dam Seepage Study General Fund $ 33,000 Pending Council Approval Pearson Arastradero Improvements Design General Fund $ 28,000 Pending Council Approval On-Going CIPs General Fund $ 810,000 Pending Council Approval Total 6,758,000$ FY 2021 Proposed CIP projects  Project Source of Funds Budget Status Hoover Park Improvements Design General Fund $ 85,000 For Forecasting and Planning Johnson Park Improvements Design General Fund $ 111,000 For Forecasting and Planning Park Restroom Installation Park Development Impact Fee Fund $ 383,000 For Forecasting and Planning Robles Park Improvements Design General Fund $ 104,000 For Forecasting and Planning Seale Park Improvements General Fund $ 361,000 For Forecasting and Planning Byxbee Park Completion Construction Park Development Impact Fee Fund $ 2,450,000 For Forecasting and Planning Foothills Park Boronda Lake Dock Replacement General Fund $ 148,000 For Forecasting and Planning Foothills Park Improvement Project General Fund $ 455,000 For Forecasting and Planning Pearson Arastradero Preserve Improvements General Fund $ 325,000 For Forecasting and Planning Pearson Arastradero Preserve Parking Lot Improvements General Fund $ 170,000 For Forecasting and Planning Cubberley Roof Replacement Cubberley Fund $ 551,000 For Forecasting and Planning On-Going CIPs General Fund $ 810,000 For Forecasting and Planning Total 5,953,000$ FY 2022 Proposed CIP projects  Project Source of Funds Budget Status Hoover Park Improvements Construction General Fund $ 676,000 For Forecasting and Planning Johnson Park Improvements Construction General Fund $ 1,352,000 For Forecasting and Planning Dog Park Renovation General Fund $ 171,000 For Forecasting and Planning Robles Park Improvements Construction General Fund $ 946,000 For Forecasting and Planning Werry Park Improvements General Fund $ 114,000 For Forecasting and Planning Cubberley Roof Replacement Cubberley Fund $ 573,000 For Forecasting and Planning On-Going CIPs General Fund $ 810,000 For Forecasting and Planning Total 4,642,000$ FY 2023 Proposed CIP projects  Project Source of Funds Budget Status Heritage Park Site Amenities Replacement General Fund $ 114,000 For Forecasting and Planning Mitchell Park Improvements Design General Fund $ 318,000 For Forecasting and Planning Park Restroom Installation Park Development Impact Fee Fund $ 397,000 For Forecasting and Planning Peers Park Improvements General Fund $ 232,000 For Forecasting and Planning Cubberley Roof Replacement Cubberley Fund $ 305,000 For Forecasting and Planning On-Going CIPs General Fund $ 810,000 For Forecasting and Planning Total 2,176,000$ FY 2024 Proposed CIP projects  Project Source of Funds Budget Status Bol Park Improvements General Fund $ 232,000 For Forecasting and Planning Magical Bridge Playground Surfacing General Fund $ 300,000 For Forecasting and Planning Mitchell Park Improvements Construction General Fund $ 1,888,000 For Forecasting and Planning Dog Park Renovation General Fund $ 171,000 For Forecasting and Planning On-Going CIPs General Fund $ 810,000 For Forecasting and Planning Total 3,401,000$ * NOTE:  Proposed projects and budget are subject to change