HomeMy WebLinkAboutStaff Report 6594
City of Palo Alto (ID # 6594)
City Council Staff Report
Report Type: Action Items Meeting Date: 6/6/2016
City of Palo Alto Page 1
Summary Title: Comp Plan Draft EIR Comments
Title: PUBLIC HEARING: Request for City Council and Public Comments on a
Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) and Fiscal Study Prepared for the
Comprehensive Plan Update. The Draft Environmental Impact Report was
Published on February 5, 2016 for a Public Comment Period That will end on
June 8, 2016
From: City Manager
Lead Department: Planning and Community Environment
RECOMMENDATION
Staff recommends that the City Council conduct a public hearing on the Draft Environmental
Impact Report (DEIR) for the Comprehensive Plan Update and provide questions and comments
regarding environmental impacts, mitigation measures, and alternatives for inclusion in the
Final EIR. Comments on the draft fiscal study are also welcome. The DEIR can be found at the
following link: (http://www.paloaltocompplan.org/eir/). Reviewers are directed to the
Executive Summary in Chapter One for an overview. The draft fiscal study can be reviewed at
the following location: (http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/51329).
Please Note: On May 16, 2016, the City Council provided direction regarding development of a
fifth and sixth scenario for analysis as part of the EIR. The staff’s understanding of Council’s
direction is summarized in Attachment F and the Council may offer additional thoughts and
clarifications as part of their comments on the Draft EIR. Public comments are also welcome.
The analysis of the additional EIR scenarios will be circulated for public review and comment
prior to preparation of the Final EIR.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The City is the “lead agency” under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and has
prepared a Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) to assess potential impacts of the
Comprehensive Plan Update.
CEQA provides for public review of Draft EIRs, and the City Council is requested to conduct a
public hearing for the purpose of soliciting public comments regarding the Draft EIR. Written
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comments are also being accepted until the close of business on June 8, 2016. All substantive
comments received, whether at the public hearing or in writing, will be responded to in the
Final EIR rather than at the public hearing this evening.
As the Council is aware, the DEIR analyzes four high level alternatives or “scenarios” at an equal
level of detail in order to assess potential impacts of the Comp Plan Update. The four scenarios
were designed to test the potential policy choices that will have to be made as the
Comprehensive Plan Update planning process moves forward. The City Council has requested
that additional scenarios be analyzed and circulated for public comments as a supplement to
the DEIR before a Final EIR is prepared. These additional scenarios have been defined by the
City Council and will be further informed by Council comments on the summary in Attachment
F, as well as public comments received on the Draft EIR.
The Final EIR that will be prepared will incorporate written responses to all substantive
comments received on both the DEIR and the supplemental analysis of the additional scenarios.
The Final EIR must be prepared and certified prior to any final decision on the Comprehensive
Plan Update.
CEQA does not require an analysis of fiscal impacts; however, the City Council requested a
separate analysis of potential impacts of the Comp Plan Update on the City’s fiscal health. As a
result, a draft fiscal study was prepared and reviewed by the Finance Committee on March 15,
2016. (See http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/51329 for the Draft
Fiscal Study and see Attachment C for minutes of the Finance Committee meeting.) Staff will
update the Fiscal Study to address policy level comments received from the Finance Committee
and Council and will review and incorporate relevant technical comments received from the
public this evening.
BACKGROUND
The 1998-2010 Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan) contains the City’s official policies on
land use and community design, transportation, housing, the natural environment, business
and economics, community services, and governance. Its policies apply to both public and
private properties. Its focus is on the physical form of the City. The Plan is used by the City
Council and PTC to evaluate land use changes and to inform funding and budget decisions. It is
used by City Staff to regulate building and development and to make recommendations on
projects. It is used by citizens and neighborhood groups to understand the City’s long-range
plans and proposals for different geographic areas. The Plan provides the basis for the City’s
development regulations and the foundation for its capital improvement program.
A Comprehensive Plan update was initiated by the City Council in 2006 to focus on preservation
of commercial land uses, preservation of retail and community services to support new
residential growth, incorporate sustainability concepts, update the housing element and
prepare concept area plans for East Meadow Circle and California Avenue/Fry’s areas. In 2014
the Council endorsed a new framework for the planning process to include broad community
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engagement, discussion and analysis of alternative futures, cumulative impacts, and mitigation
strategies. A community “summit” was held in mid-2015, and a Citizens Advisory Committee
(CAC) was formed to make recommendations to the City Council on policies and programs for
inclusion in the update.
Purpose of the June 6, 2016 Public Hearing
The purpose of this public hearing is to receive public testimony and to allow the community
and the Council, individually and/or as a group, to provide comments and questions regarding
environmental impacts, mitigation measures, and alternatives presented in the Draft EIR. It
also provides an opportunity for further input on the additional scenarios that the Council has
requested be analyzed prior to preparation of a Final EIR.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a State law that requires California agencies
to identify the significant environmental impacts of their actions and describe feasible
measures that can be taken to avoid or mitigate those impacts. An Environmental Impact
Report (EIR) is required by CEQA when an agency determines that a project may have a
significant effect on the environment. An EIR evaluates a proposed project’s potential impacts
on the environment, and recommends mitigation measures or alternatives to reduce or
eliminate those impacts. Decision-makers use information in an EIR to help determine whether
or not to approve a project. The most common type of EIR assesses potential impacts
associated with a specific development project. The Comprehensive Plan Update is not a
specific development project, and instead constitutes an effort by the City of Palo Alto to
determine comprehensive land uses, policies, and programs that will guide public and private
decision making regarding land use and development issues over the next 15 years.
The City has prepared what is referred to as a program-level Draft EIR, which assesses the
potential cumulative impacts of development that may occur during the life of the plan,
considers potential alternatives, and identifies mitigation measures that should be adopted to
reduce or avoid significant impacts. This is the same level of environmental analysis that was
prepared for the exiting Palo Alto 1998-2010 Comprehensive Plan. Preparing a program level
EIR for citywide growth allows the City to better identify –and mitigate—cumulative impacts of
overall growth that may otherwise be missed in a more focused project specific environmental
analysis.
CEQA specifically requires that a program EIR be prepared for plans that govern a continuing
program. Although the legally required contents of a program EIR are the same as project
specific EIR, such as the one prepared for the golf course project, a program EIR is more
conceptual, with a more general discussion of impacts, alternatives and mitigations. CEQA
clearance for subsequent projects can provide more specifics by “tiering” off the program EIR.
Depending on the complexity of the project, such CEQA clearances can include Negative
Declarations and Supplement EIRs.
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An EIR describes the objectives for a proposed project, the location of the project and actions
proposed. It evaluates how the existing environment would be changed if the project was
approved and provides feasible mitigation measures or alternatives to avoid or reduce
significant adverse changes to existing conditions.
The Draft EIR was prepared for the Comprehensive Plan Update to examine four alternatives at
an equal level of detail, allowing for an informed decision to adopt one of these alternatives at
the end of the process, or potentially a blend of the alternatives if desired. The EIR describes
and defines the alternatives in sufficient detail to permit an analysis of their potential impacts,
and to permit meaningful public input. The alternatives assess a variety of land use and
infrastructure options, and collectively present a range of possible outcomes to inform a final
decision about the future of Palo Alto. A fiscal study on the impacts of the Comp Plan Update
has also been prepared.
As noted earlier, the City Council has requested that additional alternatives or “scenarios” be
defined, analyzed, and circulated for public review prior to preparation and certification of a
Final EIR. See below for more information on the four scenarios in the Draft EIR and the
Council’s request for additional scenarios.
Notice of Preparation and Notice of Availability
A Notice of Preparation (NOP) was circulated for the Comprehensive Plan Update on May 30,
2014; see http://www.paloaltocompplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AppendixA_NOP-
NOPComments.pdf. The end of the NOP public review period was specified as June 30 for
public agencies and August 6, 2014 for the general public. All of the input received during the
NOP period was considered during the preparation of the EIR. Five public scoping meetings
were held in the form of three public workshops, one PTC meeting and a City Council hearing.
Staff received multiple scoping comments from the public via letters and comments during
public hearings, and also received three agency comment letters from the Valley Transportation
Agency (VTA), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) and the California
Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
The City prepared the DEIR to provide the public and responsible agencies information about
potential adverse effects on the local and regional environment associated with the proposed
project. A Notice of Availability/Completion (Attachment A) was prepared and published on
February 5, 2016. The DEIR is provided was previously provided to the Council in an earlier
packet and is available online on the project website (http://www.paloaltocompplan.org/eir/).
The extended public comment period on the DEIR began on February 5, 2016 and now runs
through June 8, 2016. The public is invited to comment on the DEIR at this time. All
substantive comments received during the comment period will be responded to in a Final EIR.
PTC, ARB and LAC Hearings
The Planning and Transportation Commission (PTC) held a hearing on the DEIR on April 13 and
will hold a second hearing on May 25. The Architectural Review Board (ARB) and the Historic
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Resources Board (HRB) discussed the DEIR at a joint meeting on April 21. Staff also introduced
the DEIR to the Library Advisory Commission (LAC) for their input on April 28. Minutes for the
PTC and ARB/HRB meeting are provided as Attachment E. A video link to LAC meeting can be
found at this following webpage: http://midpenmedia.org/library-advisory-commission-12/.
(Other boards and commissions were offered an opportunity to schedule a hearing on the Draft
EIR, but did not do so.)
DISCUSSION
As noted above, public agencies are required by CEQA to conduct environmental review to
identify significant environmental impacts and adopt feasible mitigation prior to making a final
decision on a proposed project. This law ensures that decision-makers and the public
understand the implications of agency decisions in advance. CEQA was recently referred to as
“the tail that wags the planning dog in California”1 and is an important part of any complex,
long-range planning project. Knowing this, the City Council agreed to use the CEQA process to
help advance the Comprehensive Plan Update by assessing high-level planning scenarios that
illustrate or test various possible policy decisions in the DEIR as described further below.
Like other EIR’s, the Comprehensive Plan DEIR is required to provide detailed analysis for the
environmental resources defined in Appendix G of the State CEQA Guidelines. The topics range
from aesthetics and cultural resources to greenhouse gas emissions and transportation. Each of
these resource topics is evaluated against significance thresholds to judge the severity of the
impact on a scale from no impact to significant unavoidable impact, and to determine when
mitigation measures are needed to reduce the severity of the impact.
The Comp Plan Update DEIR differs from most EIR’s in that it assesses four alternatives or
“scenarios” at an equal level of detail. The four scenarios are intended to illustrate potential
impacts of policy decisions that will have to be made as the Comprehensive Plan Update
planning process is completed. By using this approach, the Draft EIR is intended to advance and
inform the planning process, and not to dictate what its outcome will be.
The Four Scenarios in the Draft EIR
At the core of the Draft EIR’s analysis are four high level planning scenarios that were designed
to test a range of possible land-use, transportation, jobs and housing choices that must be
made before the Comprehensive Plan Update is completed, and to the show what the impacts
of those possible choices would be.
The four scenarios are:
1Page 14 of ”CEQA at 45; Will California Reform its Unique – and Entrenched – Environmental Review Law?” In
Planning Magazine, Volume 81, Number 9, October 2015, by William Fulton. Mr. Fulton, who has written the book
on planning in California, also notes that CEQA “is wound around every planning process and every planning
decision” that is made in the State.
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1. “Business As Usual” – the “business as usual” scenario shows the results if the City
continued to operate under the existing Comprehensive Plan with no changes to goals,
policies and programs. Any new housing built would be constructed under existing
zoning and no innovations in housing or new approaches to address the high cost of
housing would be explored. No new growth management measures are anticipated, and
any transit or traffic improvements would come from the existing infrastructure plan for
the City. This scenario uses a local forecast of housing growth based on the City’s past
performance (a long term average of about 150 new dwelling units per year), and
ABAG’s 2013 projection of job growth.2
2. Scenario Two, or the “Growth Slowed” Scenario, would slow the pace of job growth
when compared with Scenario One by moderating the pace of office/R&D development
throughout the city. Scenario Two would also ensure that the modest amount of
housing growth expected under Scenario One would be built-out as small units and
other housing types appropriate for seniors and the Palo Alto workforce.
Transportation investments in this scenario would include implementation of the
County’s expressway plan.
3. Scenario Three, or the “Housing Reconsidered” Scenario, would implement a growth
management regime similar to the interim annual limit on office/R&D adopted by the
City Council in 2015 for the fastest changing areas of the City and would eliminate
housing sites along San Antonio and South El Camino. In place of these housing sites,
Scenario 3 would increase housing densities on sites Downtown, near California Avenue,
and in other locations in the City close to transit and services. Policies, regulations, and
incentives would be designed to ensure smaller units for the working professional and
senior populations of the City. Transportation investments would include grade
separating the Caltrain crossings at Meadow and Charleston by placing the railroad
tracks in a trench.
4. Scenario Four, or the “Sustainability Tested” Scenario, assumes the most growth in
housing and employment, consistent with ABAG projections. Rather than moderating
the pace of development, this scenario would seek to limit the impacts of development.
Potential policies and regulations would be enacted to advance sustainability objectives,
including free transit passes for residents in transit-served areas, achieving LEED
platinum certification for new development, maximizing local solar energy production,
foregoing new natural gas hookups, and utilizing drought-tolerant landscaping.
Transportation investments would include grade separating the Caltrain crossings at
Meadow and Charleston by placing the railroad tracks in a trench, and incorporating
mix flow bus rapid transit on El Camino Real (with curbside stations and queue jumping
for transit vehicles).
2 The City does not have the basis for a local forecast of job growth, and will have to rely on ABAG’s forecast until
the new business registry provides useful trend data.
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In keeping with the requirements of CEQA, the Draft EIR assesses potential environmental
impacts and mitigation measures for the four scenarios addressing:
Aesthetics
Air Quality and Community Health Risk
Biological Resources
Cultural Resources
Geology, Soils, and Seismicity
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Hazards and Hazardous Materials
Hydrology and Water Quality
Land Use and Planning
Noise
Population, Housing and Employment
Public Services
Parks and Recreation
Transportation and Traffic
Utilities and Service Systems
A separate, fiscal study looks at potential impacts the four scenarios on the City’s finances.
(This is a separate study because CEQA does not require an assessment of fiscal impacts.)
Additional Scenarios for Analysis Prior to the Final EIR
The Draft EIR anticipated that the City Council might ultimately want to mix and match
components of the four scenarios, or pursue a hybrid of two or more. On January 19, 2016, and
February 22, 2016, the City Council discussed their desire to define a fifth scenario for analysis
and public review prior to proceeding to a Final EIR and on May 16, 2016, the City Council
requested that staff analyze two new scenarios as described in Attachment F. The Council may
provide additional guidance on these scenarios or their analysis this evening. A full description
and analysis of the additional scenarios will be published as a supplement to the Draft EIR and
circulated for public review and comments before a Final EIR is prepared.
NEXT STEPS
The public comment period on the Draft EIR will close on June 8, 2016 and at that time all of
the public comments received will be posted on the City’s website and be provided to the City
Council.
Analysis of the additional scenarios described in Attachment F is expected to be completed in
the late fall, after which time the analysis will be circulated for public review and comment as a
supplement to the Draft EIR. (Note: this work is contingent on an additional amendment to the
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consultant contract, which is currently being developed.)
The City will prepare formal written responses to all substantive comments received on the
Draft EIR and on the analysis of the additional scenarios in the form of a Final EIR. The City
Council is required to review and certify the FEIR prior to taking action on the Comprehensive
Plan Update. Certification of the Final EIR and consideration of the Comprehensive Plan Update
is currently scheduled for mid-2017.
Attachments:
Attachment A: Notice of Availability/Completion (PDF)
Attachment B: EIR Orientation Brochure (PDF)
Attachment C: March 15, 2016 Finance Committee Minutes (PDF)
Attachment D: April 13, 2016 PTC Draft Verbatim Minutes and April 21, 2016 ARB/HRB
Minutes (PDF)
Attachment E: Comp Plan Update DEIR comment letters (PDF)
Attachment F: Summary of New Scenarios for Analysis in the EIR (DOCX)
NOTICE OF AVAILABILITY AND COMPLETION
OF A DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT FOR THE
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN UPDATE (SCH#2014052101)
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that a Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) has been prepared to assess
the environmental impacts of the following project:
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN UPDATE
LEAD AGENCY: City of Palo Alto, 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Project Description:
The Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan is the City's governing document for land use and development
decisions. The City is undertaking a Comprehensive Plan Update in order to establish a shared vision for the
future of the community through to the year 2030. The Project will update goals, policies, programs,
narrative, maps and diagrams throughout the Comprehensive Plan. Given the long-term horizon of the
proposed Plan and the permitting, planning and development actions that are related both geographically and
as logical parts in the chain of contemplated actions for implementation, this draft EIR has been prepared as a
program EIR, pursuant to the CEQA Guidelines.
This Program EIR analyzes four planning scenarios at an equal level of detail within the body of the Draft
EIR, thereby illuminating potential environmental impacts of a range of alternatives designed to address the
proposed Plan objectives. Scenario 1 is a “Business as Usual” scenario and assumes the proposed Plan
would not be adopted, and change and development in Palo Alto through 2030 would occur under the
existing Comp Plan. Scenarios 2, 3, and 4 each include different strategies related to the pace of non-
residential development and job growth, the placement of housing sites and densities, desired transportation
investments, and sustainability measures.
Probable Environmental Effects of the Project: The EIR will evaluate potentially significant environmental impacts associated with the adoption and
implementation of the Comprehensive Plan Update, consistent with the State California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The proposed project will have potentially significant environmental effects with regard to Air Quality, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change, Land Use, Transportation and Traffic,
Population and Housing, Noise, Utilities and Service Systems, Cultural Resources, and Hydrology and Water Quality. CEQA requires this notice to disclose whether any listed toxic sites are present at the project location.
This is a citywide project, and there are sites within the city that are contained in the Cortese List of toxic sites.
The Draft EIR is on file and may be reviewed at the Palo Alto Planning Division, 250 Hamilton Avenue, 5th floor, during business hours. The EIR will also be available for review on the City’s project website--
http://www.paloaltocompplan.org, and at the following public libraries: Rinconada Library, 1213 Newell Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94303, and Palo Alto Downtown Library, 270 Forest Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301.
The public review for this Draft EIR begins on February 5, 2016 and ends on May 5, 2016. If you wish to provide written comments on the EIR, please submit these to Elena Lee, Department of Planning and
Community Environment, 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301, or Elena.Lee@CityofPaloAlto.org, no
later than May 5, 2016, at 5:00 p.m. During the public review period, both the Planning & Transportation Commission and the City Council will hold public meetings to take public testimony on the Draft EIR. The
public meetings are tentatively scheduled for April 13, 2016 at 6:00 p.m. (Planning & Transportation Commission) and April 25, 2016 at 7:00 p.m. (City Council). Both meetings will occur in the Council Chambers, 1st Floor City Hall, 250 Hamilton Avenue and all persons may appear and be heard at these
meetings. Substantive public comments received at these meetings and in writing will be responded to in a Final EIR before there is any decision to adopt The Comprehensive Plan Update. Members of the public are also encouraged to attend meetings of the Citizens Advisory Committee to offer their comments and
Attachment A
suggestions regarding the development of policy language for the updated plan. Visit PaloAltoCompPlan.org
for more information.
If any person challenges this item in court, that person may be limited to raising only those issues the person or
someone else raised at the public hearings described in this notice, or in written correspondence delivered at,
or prior to, the public hearings. In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, those requiring accommodation for these meetings should notify the City of Palo Alto 24 hours prior to the meetings at (650)
329-2496.
HILLARY GITELMAN, DIRECTOR OF PLANNING AND COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENT
Attachment B
FINANCE COMMITTEE
FINAL MINUTES
Page 1 of 64
Regular Meeting
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Chairperson Filseth called the meeting to order at 7:03 P.M. in the
Community Meeting Room, 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, California.
Present: Filseth (Chair), Holman, Schmid, Wolbach:
Absent:
Oral Communications
Chair Filseth: We have one item on our agenda tonight, but before that we have
oral communications. Are there any members of the public here?
None.
Agenda Items
1. Introduction and Discussion of the Draft Fiscal Analysis of the City of
Palo Alto 2030 Comprehensive Plan Update (Continued From March 1,
2016)
Chair Filseth: In that case, why don’t we proceed to our list of action items
this evening, which is Introduction and Discussion of the Draft Fiscal Analysis
Comp Plan. With that, thank you for joining us and you have the floor.
Hillary Gitelman, Director of Planning and Community Environment:
(Crosstalk). Chair Filseth and Council Members, I am Hillary Gitelman, the
Planning Director. I am joined by Roland Rivera on our staff and Benjamin
Sigman from EPS Consultants. They have done this fiscal study for us. We
also expect Joanna Jansen, the prime consultant from Placeworks to join us.
She is in traffic. The discussion this evening is about a draft study to look at
the fiscal impacts of the Comp Plan update. It is meant to compliment the
draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR). I think the Council rightfully
recognized that under the the Calrifornia Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)
we don’t have to analyze the fiscal impacts of a project, but it makes good
ATTACHMENT C
FINAL MINUTES
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Finance Committee Draft Action Minutes March 15, 2016
sense governance-wise to do so. This is a supplement to that exercise and
like a draft EIR, we are welcoming comments and questions and we hope to
build a stronger and better final report to ultimately aid in the Council’s
decision-making process. We are certainly going to need to supplement the
study. We already know the Council has directed us to develop, with your
help, I hope, the fifth scenario or quality-of-life scenario, and we will have to
add that to this study at some point. Just so you know, in fact, Council
Member Schmid just heard this at the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC)
meeting, our plan on that fifth scenario is to get the Council’s input on
housing issues next Monday, to get input on sustainability-related issues on
April 18, when you will hear our presentation on Earth Day and the
Sustainability and Climate Action Plan (S/CAP) to get input from the Council
on mitigation measures when we have the hearing on the draft EIR April 25,
and then to come back to Council in mid-May for that discussion about the
fifth scenario and to bring you the information and options that you
requested when we talked on February 22. We are expecting quite a
dialogue this evening. We have a brief presentation, Ben has a brief
presentation. We intentionally have left a lot of time for questions and
comments. We understand that the results of this study don’t necessarily
match the narrative that some Council Members have adopted based on
prior studies, so we are going to have to talk about the data and results here
and we are not really requesting a formal action. What we would like are
your comments and questions and we will bring those forward to the full
Council. We will probably put this on the same agenda as the draft DIR and
get Council questions and comments to respond to and address in a final
document. With that I will hand it over to Ben.
Ben Sigman, Executive Vice President for Economic & Planning Systems,
Inc.: Thank you for having me. It is really an honor to be working on this
assignment with the City of Palo Alto. I am Ben Sigman, Economic and
Planning Systems. I am an Executive Vice-President and I have about 15
years of experience in this kind of work. We have done fiscal studies for
specific projects, specific plans, general plans all over the State of California.
This reflects sort of the standard in practice in our area and I think we have
also built on that a bit, given the direction from Staff and from the City as to
what you are looking for, and so we have about a 20-minute presentation. I
am happy to make this as conversational as you would like, if you would like
to ask questions along with it, that is just fine. I think we have plenty of
time to get through the material, no matter which way we do it. I am going
to walk you through the alternatives, I should say, we build off the
Comprehensive Plan scenarios, and so we will review those really briefly. I
am going to show you the findings of this study. I think everyone has had
FINAL MINUTES
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Finance Committee Draft Action Minutes March 15, 2016
the hard copy of the report, so you are familiar with that, so we can move
through that, but I want to make sure we are all sort of on the same page
about the order of magnitude of the findings. Then I will walk you through
the methodology and some of the data assumptions, and then we will talk
about where we go from here. This study has a very focused scope. We are
looking exclusively at your General Plan or General Fund and we are looking
at the operational cost factors, right, so what we are not looking at are the
capital expenditures the City may need to make as part of the
Comprehensive Plan scenarios. We are not quantifying the cost of any
mitigations associated with quality-of-life here in Palo Alto. I know there is a
lot of sort of uproar about traffic and other quality-of-life affects that come
with growth. This is purely a financial look at the General Fund, so it does
not capture all these things, and that is really important to state right off the
bat. It is consistent in a lot of ways with the study you all had done in 2009,
the Applied Development Economics (ADE) Study, a very similar look at the
General Fund. We focused more on the revenue and cost drivers by land
use, so where as they would have assigned sales tax to commercial uses
because that is the point of sale, we try to break out where that spending
that generates the sales tax is actually coming from in terms of households
versus workers and I’ll walk you through those methodologies momentarily.
We also, as compared with the ADE Study, are looking at the margin. We
had the benefit of having these comprehensive plan scenarios and we are
saying, “What happens from here going forward,” not, “What is the sort-of
fiscal makeup of the General Fund today on average overall.” The other
thing I would point out about our work compared to the ADE work is we had
the benefit of time. It has taken a while to get this study in front of you, and
that is largely because we spent a lot of time meeting with City Department
Staff, working through some of their cost data to understand the cost
implications of growth at the department level for the major departments. I
also note from some of your preliminary comments, you might have been
hoping for some taxation policy analysis, and that is not something we have
done here, but could be something certainly in the future. On this Slide it is
important to note we did look back 15 years at some of the trends, so we
are not operating in a sort of bubble. We are looking at sort of long-term
trends in the City and it is important for me to point out that there are a
whole bunch of things that might go on externally and in the world that we
are not able to guess about and we don’t try to guess about, so regional
growth, technology, environmental changes, we are not adjusting anything
to reflect what we think some of those categories might have in terms of
effects on the City. I just want to give you a sense of the process we have
been going through. It has been more than a year, extensive review of
documents and data from the City, a lot of meetings with City Staff, as I
FINAL MINUTES
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Finance Committee Draft Action Minutes March 15, 2016
mentioned. We have done two major presentations to City Staff already, so
we have gotten a lot of input from the Finance Department, a lot of input
from Planning and Community Environment, input from the City Manager’s
Office, so this reflects a sort of collaboration between our firm and Staff on
this analysis, and as Hillary said, I think we are interested in hearing where
we’re right or where you have questions. There is definitely a lot of
opportunity for sensitivity analysis around some of the assumptions or
deeper research where we had to go with available data sources, but
perhaps you are interested in primary research. I am going to move right to
the scenarios. I think you are all familiar with these from having studied the
Comprehensive Plan draft that is out. We are looking at between 10 and 16
percent growth in population and housing and 10 to 16 percent growth in
jobs, so that is the range. We have, I don’t know if we need to get into all
the detail, but Scenario One is sort of a business-as-usual scenario; Scenario
Two, business-as-usual with a jobs reduction; Scenario Three is sort of a
modest-growth scenario where we explore different options for the office
cap; Scenario Four is our high-growth scenario. Flipping to the sort of
bottom line, if you will, the findings of the study are that from a General
Fund perspective, just at the margin looking out at this 10 to 15, 10 to 16
percent growth in the next 15 years, today’s dollars, excluding any trends
that you might have in health care costs or pensions, those types of affects
are sort of held constant, we see that the growth scenarios would yield
between $5 and $7.4 million, 2015 dollars in additional net revenue accruing
to the General Fund. It is really relatively modest, right, that is between
three and four percent essentially of your current General Fund.
Chair Filseth: And that’s over 15 years?
Mr. Sigman: Over 15 years, yup.
Chair Filseth: This is fascinating, and I am glad we are going to do all this,
but the short answer is the net financial fiscal impact of all the scenarios is
based on (inaudible).
Mr. Sigman: Yup. And I think this is, in Palo Alto…
Chair Filseth: Tremendously valuable right.
Mr. Sigman: We are not answering every question that people have, but it is
important to put this to bed, right. It is important to have studied this and
be confident that you understand the effects of growth on your General
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Fund, so it is not going to please all the people and it doesn’t, there is more
work to be done, but I think, I don’t want to suggest that this wasn’t
necessary. So what is going on here is, this is a mature city, right, with a
mature City Government that at the margin can expand services without a
lot of cost affect. I will get into the details of that on a department-by-
department basis as needed, but that is the sort of headline. When we ran
around to various departments, maybe with the exception as you’ll see of
your Public Safety, many of them can scale up and accommodate additional
population and employment levels in the City without adding a lot of cost.
Then similar to some of the other studies you had done, I did want to report
these costs and revenues to the General Fund on a per capita or per job
basis. As you can see, what we are showing is the residents actually net
provide a little bit more revenue to your General Fund than the workers, so
that is sort of an interesting finding, a little bit out of the ordinary as
compared with other cities. Usually we see residential as being a bit of a
drain on the General Fund, but in this case again, because for instance, your
Parks Department is so well established and so sizable, they can
accommodate these additional residents without a lot of additional cost
burden. It took a lot of digging with them to kind of get to that conclusion.
Chair Filseth: I don’t want to derail this, but since at this point it is really
basic, one of the results from this is basically for both additional residents
and additional employees, basically they contribute twice as much revenue
as the cost?
Mr. Sigman: Yea, roughly.
Chair Filseth: However, every year the General Fund basically breaks even.
How is that possible, from 90,000 (inaudible).
Mr. Sigman: Yea.
Chair Filseth: Not including our unfunded long-term (inaudible).
Mr. Sigman: Right, well, you may be better positioned to answer this.
(crosstalk). You fill the spending to meet the budget in a lot of cases. I think
it is also sort of departmental habit, this is speaking broadly, I don’t know if
it is a Palo Alto culture or not, but to always seek to grow your budget, to do
more, and I think that in this community where high-quality services are so
valued and City Staff try so hard to deliver good quality services, they are
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always looking for more resources to do that. There is always more that can
be done.
Chair Filseth: Yet if that is the case, because the General Fund expenses are
basically head count which correlates to services, so if we expand services to
fit the available revenue, you would think that would show up in the costs.
Mr. Sigman: Right, so the methodology we use locks current services. We
assume that the current service levels remain perfectly unchanged. It is as if
we said, “These additional 15 percent …
Chair Filseth: So the next person is different from the last person.
Mr. Sigman: Incrementally.
Chair Filseth: Right.
Mr. Sigman: We do costs at the margin and the costs are not the average
costs. That is a distinction between our work and the ADE work and
eventually I think it can be argued that all costs revert to the average, so if
we were projecting a 75 percent growth, I think at that point you start to hit
some cost thresholds and you need the new police station or the new fire
station, which may be a better example here, so those costs do kind of come
back to the average as you expand, even at the margin, to meet dramatic
growth, but because we are talking about 10 or 15 percent, some of those
fixed costs are not changing, so this increment is modest and when we
worked with the departments to talk about what this kind of incremental
grown meant to them, they all felt they could accommodate it with minimal
affects.
Council Member Holman: Can I ask a question too, which is if we are talking
about incremental change at the same time, if you look at the difference
between Scenario Two and Scenario Four, the next to last row on there is
adding three million to four million square feet of additional workspace, so
that, we might call that incremental, but it is wow, so that much square
footage to be considered incremental is just…
Mr. Sigman: Right, it is just, so we have pretty good data about square feet
in the City and you know it is still on the same order of 12 to 15 percent
growth in work space, so the growth in employment space is similar to the
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overall growth in jobs, it is not out of whack. It is not as if we are going to
have to increase work space by 50 percent to get 15 percent more jobs.
Council Member Holman: I guess what I am getting at is, you know,
incremental, of course it does depend on what your base is, but three million
to four million square feet of additional work space is not incidental. It might
be incrementally small, but it is not incidental, and that is what I was trying
to…
Ms. Gitelman: Council Member Holman, you are absolutely right. It is not an
inconsequential amount of new development that would happen. The
interesting thing for me in how we have analyzed both the fiscal impacts and
the environmental impacts, is it is really based on the number of jobs, it is
not based on the amount of square footage, so a lot of the analysis is based
on the job number and the different scenarios assume different employment
densities, different amounts of new development, to look at those impacts
that come from building footprints, aesthetics, land use, but most of the
impacts that we think of as quality-of-life, traffic, noise, the fiscal impacts
come from the job number, not the square footage number. I think that
interaction is fascinating.
Council Member Holman: Except, of course, they are so absolutely directly
related.
Ms. Gitelman: They are related, (crosstalk) but are not proportional. So the
economic cycles really determine the employees per square foot and it is not
always a direct relationship, new development to new employees. We saw,
for example, after the recession, it took us a long time to start adding
square footage, but we added jobs like crazy, so it is not a directly
proportional relationship, so these scenarios are trying to show and test
various amounts of employment and various amounts of square footage,
recognizing that relationship is not always proportional.
Council Member Holman: I guess the other point I would make, pardon me
for not going through you, Chair, the other point I was trying to make too is
that once the building is built, we only have so much control, so the
fluctuations that we almost can’t monitor in terms of changing markets at
least, is whether it is two per thousand or 12 per thousand. That fluctuation
exists in reality if the amount of square footage is added that we are
contemplating.
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Mr. Sigman: You are just speaking of that employment density in the space,
so you build the space and then you could end up with a lot more jobs than
you anticipated.
Council Member Holman: Yes.
Mr. Sigman: Right, that is a fair point and we have keyed in exactly to the
assumptions within the Comprehensive Plan update and so there are fixed
ratios for each scenario, but (crosstalk) the net new square footage of work
space.
Chair Filseth: The scenarios state a ratio of jobs per square foot, and you
just used that.
Mr. Sigman: They state the square feet, do they not?
Chair Filseth: And they state the number of jobs.
Ms. Gitelman: That’s right, but some of the job growth may be in existing
building square footage, not in new square footage, so that’s the complexity.
Mr. Sigman: Okay, thanks. I’ll keep moving (crosstalk), I don’t have, that’s
okay, we have the time, but we don’t have too many slides to get through.
So this is the revenue side. Property Taxes are far and away the largest
source of revenue to the General Fund under these growth scenarios. They
make up 50 to 56 percent of the total revenue. Sales Tax is also quite
significant in terms of the magnitude. Just to keep moving, I wanted to
make a point here about Property Tax, it is, because it is such an important
category of revenue…
Council Member Wolbach: I’m sorry, can we just go back. You said, I didn’t
crunch the numbers myself, but you said Property Taxes account for 50 to
56 percent of the new revenue or of total revenue?
Mr. Sigman: Of the revenue we are generating in these scenarios, so it is
the new revenue, so in this table here it is the top line, Property Taxes, over
the total revenue associated with each of these scenarios.
Council Member Wolbach: That’s what I thought but I just wanted to check.
Thank you.
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Mr. Sigman: Yes, I think to answer the other point though, it makes up
about one-fifth, about 20 percent, Property Tax, of your total General Fund
revenue and actually residential is about three times commercial in terms of
the assessed value contribution to that. One of the things we wanted to sort
of be clear about, and there is a lot going on in this slide, but the upper left-
hand corner is assessed value, residential versus non-residential in the City
of Palo Alto over roughly a five-year period that we had data for, and it has
been pointed out, I think, in some of the Council meetings, that this
residential value is increasing as a share of the total. It has gone up about
five points over this period. We wanted to just sort of be clear that we
believe this is a baseline condition. That sort of no matter what you build
new in Palo Alto, you are probably going to see this trend continue. We
pulled some data from the County Assessor’s Office and what we found that
for recent years the new construction actually accounted for only 15 percent
of the change in assessed value year over year. So really what you are
seeing is dynamic in assessed value is a result of your existing housing
stock, so that’s one note we wanted to make, just going in. We did quite a
bit of research looking at the real estate market to arrive at the assumptions
we used in this study. Here is the sort of schedule of new product pricing
that we are using. The for-sale residential, it is important to note, is
essentially representative of multi-family, condominium product. We are not
assuming a whole lot, if really any, in the analysis new single family
detached homes. We are assuming it is in fill multi-family attached. We do
include the housing element policy for affordable housing. We follow Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines for pricing that housing. We also
did quite a bit of work using data from Costar Group, which tracks with all
the brokerage houses in terms of retail, office, industrial and some of the
other land uses out there. Other includes things like hospitality, so hotels as
well as health care uses. Because we wanted to be realistic about the effects
of Proposition (Prop) 13 and appreciation in the market, we did create a sort
of separate model that looks at turnover in the property markets. We have
some sort of assumed whole periods that reflect the market data we have,
as well as appreciation factors, so the long and short of this is that by 2030
the real value of affordable housing will be slightly lower than it is today,
and the real value of the market rate products, both residential and
commercial will be slightly higher because of the real appreciation in the
market place.
Council Member Wolbach: Even with Prop 13?
Chair Filseth: Is this a 2030 number, or is this a today number?
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Mr. Sigman: So you are looking at our assumption from today’s on the left-
hand column there, the assessed value column, that is where we start.
Chair Filseth: Okay.
Mr. Sigman: And it is not in this slide, but in the report I can direct you, we
have this sort of market adjustment factor that comes from this turnover
model that we built. So I want to say something like the for-sale residential
goes up about 40 percent in real terms by 2030.
Chair Filseth: Got it. So office space at $700 square foot?
Mr. Sigman: That’s right, and you have to remember that…
Chair Filseth: So that is like $30 million an acre, is that accurate?
Mr. Sigman: I’m sorry, per square foot of built space.
Chair Filseth: Of built space.
Mr. Sigman: Built space, so Floor Area Ratio (FAR) space, yeah. So not
acreage, all of this is per unit, I should be more clear.
Chair Filseth: That’s within constructed building on top of it with plumbing,
heating, electricity and so forth, not just a lot.
Mr. Sigman: So for the office, if you bought a 1,000 square foot office, it is
$700,000. So we can come back to some of these assumptions. A lot of this
presentation is just walking you through the data, so moving on to the retail
sales, we rely on, since this data concerning the income levels in Palo Alto
for the households and their spending, their retail spending pattern comes
from a survey provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer
Expenditure Survey, a very common source for this kind of work. Then the
capture rate, how much of that spending actually happens in Palo Alto, is an
assumption we make. We are justified by that being the fair share of retail
space in the market area of Palo Alto versus the broader, roughly five-mile
radius of retail, so a pretty reasonable capture assumption. Then on the
worker’s side, very similarly we used the best available survey data, same
survey that ADE used in their prior work, and it is International Council of
Shopping Centers Survey on workers’ spending and we are able to make
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adjustments for the type of retail that is available in Palo Alto, so based on
that we are assuming $9,300 in spending, and this is spending that workers
make to and from their place of work, in the vicinity of work, so it is not just
lunch, it is also groceries on the way home, also shopping they might do at
the Stanford Shopping Center after work or before work or at lunchtime, so
it is sort of all-encompassing in that regard. We are careful to adjust for
double counting, so any workers that also live in Palo Alto are counted as
households and excluded from the worker spend here. Then we also capture
a variety of business spending types, so business-to-business, particularly in
the technology industry is a significant source of retail tax revenue. In Palo
Alto we have seen it vary greatly over the years, up to 30 percent of total
sales tax down at 12 percent, so we found middle ground at about 15
percent of your total retail sales tax revenue from Business to Business (B-
to-B) is kind of a stabilized number, and what we did was divide it by the
real estate that we think produces that type of sales tax in town and came
up with this $20 a foot, which corresponds very closely to some survey work
that we have access to from Menlo Park in one of their business parks, so I
think we are pretty comfortable that this reflects a sort of typical B-to-B
sales tax generation.
Chair Filseth: So what is a typical example of a transaction that you are
talking about?
Mr. Sigman: Yeah, so…
Chair Filseth: Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Research Park sells a logic analyzer to
somebody.
Mr. Sigman: Yes, servers and other technology where they make the point
of sale the office headquarters. I don’t have a lot of very specific examples,
but we see it in aggregated sales tax data for all kinds of cities. We have
done a lot of this work recently in Cupertino and there where they have
Apple as a significant generator of B-to-B I think it is like 100 times, you
know, so this is pretty modest, but they are a special case too. I think in
their case, I think they are basically accounting for a lot of the on-line music
sales and device sales that they sell over the internet, point-of-sale is
registered in Cupertino.
Chair Filseth: That would be retail wouldn’t it, not the B-to-B?
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Mr. Sigman: I believe because it is, that is a good point, but because it is
not coming from a retail outlet, it is registered at a headquarters location, I
think it gets counted as B-to-B.
Chair Filseth: So Tesla sells somebody a car here, is that B-to-B?
Mr. Sigman: If Tesla sells, so do they have an office location here? So if they
have designated this as the point-of-sale, and I know there is some
flexibility in that because where…
Council Member Schmid: They did that for 18 months, then they ruled to
move that over to the East Bay, so that was…
Mr. Sigman: I know Cupertino made a deal a number of years back where
they compelled Apple to move point-of-sale for a variety of transactions to
the Cupertino location and in return the City gave them a sales tax kickback,
so there is, you know, it can move.
Council Member Wolbach: That is interesting, because basically what we are
saying here is that we actually got sales tax dollars from office space
sometimes.
Mr. Sigman: Oh yeah.
Council Member Wolbach: It is interesting to know that.
Mr. Sigman: And like I say, it (crosstalk) 27 percent of your total Retail Tax
has been from B-to-B which is presumably from office locations or similar
industrial locations.
Lalo Perez, Chief Financial Officer: Industrial locations, probably the
(crosstalk) and the HP example.
Chair Filseth: Clearly so, I mean that is the difference between HP and
Flipboard. Flipboard doesn’t make any money so they don’t pay any tax.
Actually, I don’t know if we get sales tax from Flipboard, I doubt it. Actually,
I’m sure we don’t. I’m sure their point-of-sales is in Ireland or someplace
like that.
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Mr. Sigman: The other category of business spending that we have, and we
can come back to B-to-B if we want to talk about those, it is fine. The
spending a business will make on its employees on a day-to-day basis, so
food they might bring in from local restaurants, stationery, other business
supplies, incidentals that they bring in. We made a pretty simple assumption
of $500 a head for employees spending.
Council Member Holman: Is there any way, a wild question here, is there
any way at all to understand what the spending for businesses persons is for
restaurants versus other retail?
Mr. Sigman: Yes, so in the International Council of Shopping Centers
Survey, they asked workers, they go around the country, they ask workers a
sample, how do they spend their money on their way to and from work, and
they have a number of categories. They may leave you wanting, but it is
more than a total number. For instance, they tell us about transportation
spending, which we don’t believe is taxable so we take that out, and we
were able to make some adjustments to try to capture the portion of their
spending we think is taxable, and I believe they do a pretty good job of
breaking out restaurant spending or food spending. I don’t have it off the
top of my head. I can certainly follow up.
Chair Filseth: Sorry to dwell on this briefly, but this is sort of a major, one of
the small number of significant divergences between where you guys did and
some of my colleagues’ analyses here before, but it has to do with, sort of,
the household spending. So if I understand, you made an estimate for what
the average household in Palo Alto spends on stuff per year, and that is the
$32,000?
Mr. Sigman: Taxable retail items, yeah.
Chair Filseth: And how do you get that number?
Mr. Sigman: We have again survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Chair Filseth: So that is a nationwide…
Mr. Sigman: It is a national survey, but what it allows you to do is categorize
household spending by income, so we select the bracket of spending profile
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that most closely matches the average household income in Palo Alto, so
while it doesn’t reflect even a California household, it does reflect a
household with $150,000 and more annually.
Chair Filseth: Right, so you said if you are in this income bracket you
probably spend this much and if you are in that income bracket you will
probably spend that much and so forth on a national basis.
Mr. Sigman: Correct. And so we take the profile, which is essentially a
distribution of spending across retail types and we apply it to your specific
household income average.
Council Member Wolbach: In that capture rate, that means of that $32,000
that they are spending, 30 percent of it would be here in Palo Alto, the other
70 percent would be in other communities.
Mr. Sigman: Exactly right.
Council Member Wolbach: (inaudible).
Chair Filseth: And you said you have a formula based on sort of the amount
of retail space in Palo Alto as a proportion of the amount of retail space
within a five-mile radius.
Mr. Sigman: Yes, which we would consider to be the trade area, correct.
Chair Filseth: And you assume that some percentage is, you did something,
you said there is a combination of the amount of area and how close it is to
you, whereas the amount of area elsewhere, 4.9 miles away?
Mr. Sigman: Actually, it may be even simpler than you are thinking. It
literally is that the City of Palo Alto has 30 percent of the retail square
footage in a five-mile radius.
Chair Filseth: So you assume that, okay, so it is a straight ratio.
Mr. Sigman: I know you have had quite a bit of retail work done in the past,
you could get very sophisticated on this and I am not sure if it would make
the answer any more accurate or not.
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(crosstalk)
Joe Saccio, Assistant Director of Administrative Services: I was just going to
say (crosstalk), this percentage which shows a fair amount of, this
percentage of 30 percent shows a fair amount of like leakage to other
surrounding areas, and that is supported by sales tax data that we get
quarterly from our sales tax consultant, and it is basically, you know, there
is a Wal-Mart out there, there is a Costco out there and the big box stores.
Chair Filseth: I shop at (crosstalk).
Mr. Saccio: I just thought I would add that.
Council Member Wolbach: I also wanted to ask, so in the end we are looking
at, according to this model, $9,700 of retail spent by a household in Palo
Alto, it is actually spent here.
Mr. Sigman: Spent here on taxable items.
Council Member Wolbach: On taxable items. Okay, per year.
Mr. Sigman: So prescription drugs wouldn’t be in there, transportation might
not be in there.
Council Member Wolbach: Right, so then the next question is, how much
money do we actually end up getting from them, and what percentage of
that goes to, where? Can I see it broken down? How much goes to County
versus State versus City.
Mr. Sigman: So that is detailed in the Appendix and we do not estimate any
tax revenue that accrues to the County in our study. It is completely outside
the analysis. So…
Mr. Saccio: Here we got $97, out of that $9700. If someone spends $9700 in
Palo Alto we get 1 percent.
Mr. Sigman: Right. So the Appendix figure, A9 is where you want to look. So
each of these Appendix tables is for one of the scenarios, so Scenario One
for example, the residential uses provide $26.5 million almost in taxable
spending, $265,000 a year in Sales Tax revenue accruing to the General
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Fund and in that particular scenario, because you have quite a bit more
employment relative to households, it is $150 million in spending and $1.5
million in sales tax revenue accruing to the General Fund.
Council Member Wolbach: Thank you.
Mr. Sigman: Of course. So we will keep going. We can come back to any of
this, of course. Transient Occupancy Tax is our next category of revenue. We
use a firm called Smith Travel Research, which is the most reputable hotel
data available. (inaudible) A full percentage points of the study costs, but
$240 was your average room rate at the time of the study, so at the middle
of last year. That part is easy. The tax rate is easy at 14 percent, that all
accrues to your General Fund. We did a couple of things to break it out and
this is where we are focusing here on the demand drivers rather than just
calling that commercial tax revenue. The residential we did a pretty
extensive literature search on what households attract in terms of visitors
from out of town and what share of those visitors stay overnight in paid
lodging and we arrived at this two nights per household estimate or
assumption, and then in terms of the worker-driven demand, so this is folks
coming from out of town on business to meet with Palo Alto firms, an
informal survey in Menlo Park had us at about three room nights per worker,
so we sort of stress tested that a few different ways, and so those are the
assumptions we ended up with here. Similar to the Sales Tax, we do have a
capture rate that we apply, so these households may attract overnight
guests and these businesses may attract overnight business, but we are
assuming there is a 10 percent leakage that some folks to over the Menlo
Park or go elsewhere to stay and so that are the assumptions that go into
that piece of the analysis.
Chair Filseth: So those numbers are marginal numbers, right?
Mr. Sigman: Correct.
Chair Filseth: Are they the same as the average numbers?
Mr. Sigman: We applied it to the current composition of the City and
compared it to your Transiet Occupancy Tax (TOT) revenue now and it made
sense, so it is probably pretty similar to the average. This was, quite
honestly, very challenging. There is not a lot of data about this. We did some
interviews with the hoteliers. You know, they tell us it is a very business-
driven hotel market.
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Chair Filseth: But I thought it was all business actually, my guess here.
Mr. Sigman: Yes, and you know, so we went to the literature which is not
exactly robust and did a little bit of this informal survey work and we fell like
this is a pretty strong estimate, given the level of effort we put in.
Chair Filseth: So Stanford must account for a chunk of this too.
Mr. Sigman: Yeah, so I don’t present it here but in the report, on both the
Sales Tax and the TOT, I try to put our model results in the context of the
City today and so, let’s see TOT.
Chair Filseth: It’s this one, right?
Mr. Sigman: Yeah, there you go.
Council Member Wolbach: Which (inaudible).
Mr. Sigman: No, this is in the body, this is Page 28, Estimated Transient
Occupancy Tax Generation By Demand Source, so I basically take the model
and run it through your current households, current businesses. We have a
survey from Stanford that they did. It is a few years old, but it still gives us
a sense of their level of visitors to both the hospital and the campus. So
what we get, I think, at least past the lab tests with business supporting
about, this is sort of today, right, rather than at the margin to your
distinction, about 45 percent, 44 percent of TOT coming from businesses,
about 9 percent coming from households, a little over 20 percent coming
from Stanford, 30 percent other visitors.
Chair Filseth: I know what I wanted, I should have asked it before, I’m
sorry. So this one I understood, but I wanted to ask you about the same
breakdown in sales tax, because you sort of say, “Okay, half of it comes
from visitors,” so that is a big bucket. So does the visitors, this is on Page
25. Does it map to the same proportions as the TOT? Is some of this
visitors-to-residents and some is visitors-to-businesses and some of it
visitors-to-Stanford?
Mr. Sigman: Right, so in this instance it could be visitors to any of those
things. And I think our explanation here for why this other visitors is such a
huge share of the pie is because the Stanford Shopping Center is a regional
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mall, so it attracts lots of shoppers from outside the City and similarly the
downtown is a regional attraction as well.
Council Member Holman: So does this track, what’s on Page 25, business
spending at retail establishments, does that really track with what we had on
one of the earlier slides, business spending at retail establishments is $2. Is
that, (crosstalk).
Mr. Sigman: The business spending at retail establishments, the 1 percent,
yes.
Council Member Holman: So the two do…
Mr. Sigman: We are using the same assumption of $2 a foot.
Chair Filseth: I’ll let you finish, then I’ll ask my question.
Council Member Holman: Well, the only other question I had about the
presentation on Page 11 is, I don’t know how many hotels we have in Palo
Alto, but any time I checked, room rates $240 seems low, even as an
average.
Mr. Sigman: Right, but there is a distinction between what is called the rack
rate and the average daily rate, and the average daily rate takes into
account vacancies in the hotel room, so any unfilled rooms are zeros and
then the rack rate is whatever they sell the rooms at. So you look up a
bunch of room rates on line, it is going to look a lot higher than this,
because you are not seeing all the zeros that go into the average.
Council Member Holman: It is an interesting term, rack rate.
Mr. Sigman: I’m not really a hotel guy, I’m sorry, but that’s what I believe
they call them.
Council Member Holman: So what’s our, maybe Lalo knows this, what’s our
hotel vacancy rate?
Mr. Perez: Go ahead Joe.
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Mr. Saccio: The occupancy rate?
Council Member Holman: Yeah.
Mr. Saccio: Right now because of the addition of rooms, it is between 75 and
80 percent, roughly. You know that 80 percent and a little bit above it could
represent full occupancy, but it has gone a little bit lower recently because of
the expansion of the room base. The $240 is accurate in terms of what we
are getting even right now, the $240 per day.
Mr. Perez: One of the things that we discussed internally with Ben, but we
knew that we had to pick a point in time and move on to finish this is that
our experience has been since then, that the TOT revenue has come in at a
much different pace, and so there are adjustments to these numbers based
on that experience of the expansion in terms of the average daily rate, but
as Joe mentioned, the occupancy has gone down a little bit, and you know,
we still have another hotel coming on line that hasn’t had a full year, so this
is developing.
Chair Filseth: So back on this one, for purposes of allocating to households
or to businesses, how did you allocate the, or did you allocate all the
businesses?
Mr. Sigman: That is a great question. The visitors in both the TOT and the
Sales Tax model are what we call the residual, it is the leftover portion of the
pie, so what we are able to estimate using the model is the household
spend, the employee spend, the Stanford visitors, the B-to-B and this
business spending at retail establishments. Everything else is what’s left
over is this other visitors.
Chair Filseth: I understand. So you said okay, because you have your model
for how much households spend money by income times 30 percent and that
is how much these people who live here spend. And then you’ve got your
employees spend that you went through your process, and they said, “Okay,
anybody that is left over must be a visitor,” right, but some of those visitors,
if somebody comes to visit Karen from out of town and goes shopping at the
shopping center, right, they would be part of the visitors, because they
wouldn’t be part of the household, right, because that only included Karen.
So some portion of these must be households, some portion must be
(crosstalk) you know I have my East Coast sales team come in for the week
or something, and they eat in restaurants while they are here, so that would
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be a business expense and that is not in visitors, right? Some of it is people
that want to shop at the shopping center and drive here from San Jose
because it is closer than (inaudible) than it is from the City, right? I’m asking
how they allocated visitors between businesses and households.
Council Member Wolbach: Like you did for TOT.
Chair Filseth: TOT you broke it out very explicitly.
Council Member Wolbach: So you didn’t do a breakdown?
Mr. Sigman: This is a good point. We don’t, it is not assigned either.
Chair Filseth: It is not assigned to either.
Mr. Sigman: It is outside the model. So we do count (crosstalk).
Chair Filseth: Why to the 229 or the, it’s not even in here at all.
Mr. Sigman: That’s right.
Chair Filseth: Okay.
Mr. Sigman: But I think it is an astute point, because we certainly could
start to take our assumptions about visitors that we do apply to the TOT and
break up this orange piece of the pie.
Chair Filseth: I actually took a whack at it and allocated it by the same
portions as you did the TOT.
Council Member Holman: You are doing very well, by the way. Our astute
Chair hasn’t thrown you yet.
Mr. Sigman: Wait, we are still at the beginning, right?
Chair Filseth: I just want to say, for the record, okay, we haven’t heard from
Greg yet. Sorry, please proceed.
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Mr. Sigman: Okay, moving on from TOT, let’s move to costs. So those are
the big, we have gone through all the big revenue items. We did take a close
look at the Utility User’s Tax as well. We went and actually obtained the data
from your department, splitting out Utility User Tax generated by businesses
versus households, so that is pretty good data from you, and in that
instance we do just assume the average, so the average Utility User’s Tax
that comes from households and businesses on a per-head basis is what we
use. That is the other category, not getting into detail on this presentation.
Okay, on the cost side, Public Safety is far and away the big item and this is
true of most cities we work in. We have seen most of these numbers before
I am going to go into detail, but here they are arrayed for you. We started
off, I should say, everything is based in our 2015 Budget. We sort of locked
in that and I think, while there are more recent budget data available, I
think we sort of took our snapshot and stuck with it. It dovetails nicely with
the horizon for the Comp Plan analysis and I don’t think, you all tell me if
you see issues, but we felt like it was fairly representative of Palo Alto today.
Here it is important that we tried to focus on the big ticket items, so Police,
Fire, Community Services, there were others, Library, Public Works. We did
detailed interview work with a number of the other sort of lesser cost
departments, we didn’t spend as much time on. We didn’t do multiple
interview process and data collection exercises with, so this was sort of
helping us sort through the wheat from the chaff. Like I said, we did look at
the trends over time.
Council Member Holman: Before you go to that, a question about Public
Works. In your interviews with Public Works, so at what point, you know, we
have sewer lines, we have water lines, we have some improvements are
being made that at what point do we, what did you include in here? Just
delivery of services or infrastructure costs, or what’s included in Public
Works?
Mr. Sigman: Yes, so this goes back to my comment at the beginning that
there is no infrastructure investment that…
Council Member Holman: I missed that, sorry.
Mr. Sigman: Okay, that is included. This is really an operational view where,
and you know we really probed the departments, are you going to need new
facilities to carry out your mission with 10 to 15 percent growth. And what
we heard from Public Works was, “We are not going to build any new roads,
so no. What we are going to experience is a greater degree of depreciation
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on the existing roadways,” and so we worked through with them essentially
an increased cost of road maintenance that accounts for higher vehicular
traffic on the City’s roadways. And that was the extent of the Public Works
costs.
Council Member Holman: The roads are kind of the least of my concerns.
Mr. Sigman: Yeah. I understand and I think that (crosstalk)
Chair Filseth: I thought that was a major component of what you looked at
in Public Works.
(crosstalk)
Council Member Schmid: Why didn’t you use (inaudible) tax allocate since
business uses much more utilities, the commuters use much more of the
roads, wouldn’t it be natural to allocate the Public Works on the same basis
as the (inaudible).
Mr. Sigman: So we actually used the Comprehensive Plan’s traffic consultant
to give us worker trip versus household trip generation factors, and that was
the weighting we used, so it reflects the traffic engineer who is supplying the
analysis to the Comprehensive Plan, that firm’s professional judgement and
their assumption for your Comprehensive Plan and the EIR, the roadway
usage by use category. So I understand your point, but that is what we went
with.
Mr. Perez: Let me see if I can add a little bit. Just so we are on the same
page, because as you know, other work as you mentioned, storm drains,
refuse, airport, water treatment, so none of that stuff was included. It was
mostly the administration and the engineering factors, and even with some
of the engineering, some of it is in the capital side as well of the General
Fund, so it is a smaller piece of the Public Works. Because, like I said, we
had the same question for him, like, why is that number so low. Because it
is really, we have pulled most of the other items out. They were on the
Enterprise Fund side.
Council Member Holman: Some of those were Enterprise, a lot of them
weren’t.
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Mr. Perez: We did it based on the fund expense and revenues. Whatever
belonged on those funds, they stayed in those funds, so they focused on the
General Fund side and that’s how we looked at it.
Chair Filseth: So for example, the digester, a big ticket item. That’s going to
fall on the Enterprise Funds, so it doesn’t appear here?
Mr. Perez: A portion of the administration would because we allocate the
administrative costs of the plan, so the administrative functions of it does,
so the Director and his support.
Chair Filseth: And that shows up in City Administration.
Mr. Perez: Correct, and the Public Works.
Chair Filseth: Okay, because I would guess.
Mr. Sigman: It would show up under Public Works then, not under that
administration plan, I don’t think.
Mr. Perez: I’m sorry, administration of Public Works, not administration
over… (crosstalk)
Mr. Saccio: Can I ask a question? What proportion are the trips that are
generated for residential versus commercial, I mean versus business.
Mr. Sigman: It’s in the report (crosstalk). Let’s double check because I can’t
remember well enough to be on the mike.
Chair Filseth: It’s 60/40 or something like that.
(inaudible)
Mr. Sigman: Thank you. So household trips 44 percent, worker trips 56
percent of total trips generated.
Council Member Wolbach: What page was that?
Mr. Sigman: We are on Page 43.
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Chair Filseth: It’s almost half and half actually.
Mr. Sigman: It’s in the last paragraph, under cost attribution.
(inaudible)
Mr. Sigman: Alright, keep going? So we did look at these trends over time
and what you are looking at here is the same General Fund expense trend,
one adjusted for inflation, one not. The flatter one has been adjusted for
inflation in this chart. When you look at real, so adjusting for inflation, we
have seen over the past 14 years or so, about 1.5 percent real increase in
your expense budget. This kind of goes to your point about rates. I think a
lot of that is attributable, again, correct me if I am wrong, this isn’t
something we got into great detail on, but health care costs, pension costs,
those kinds of things moving up in excess of inflation, but as you can see,
we have this sort of steep line 2000 to 2003. It is pretty flat after that in real
terms, and that, I think, is what is noted. So now here, how do we think
about costs at the margin? How do we talk to the departments about it? It is
pretty tricky. Do you want to… Okay, so in a mature city like this, as I said,
most of these departments aren’t going to scale up dramatically to meet
additional service demands from 15 percent more population and
employees. Some departments maybe a little bit. We put Plan A and
Community Environment in, for instance, they take care of your
Transportation Demand Management (TDM) Planning, right, so we are
expecting with increased population, Transportation Demand Management,
transportation solutions, they are going to be working hard to accommodate
this growth, so they may scale up a modest amount. Public Safety really
does have to increase its activities in lock step with people. You know, more
people, more problems, and so and that is what we heard from them. Then I
just wanted to reiterate here, you know, there are factors, regional growth,
density around you, might increase costs, we are not including that here.
Technology may make things cheaper for you in the future. You may find
cost savings along the way. We are not factoring in that kind of potential
benefit. We took great care to focus on the net costs of providing services.
You have a number of departments that do generate revenue, Community
Services, the Recreation Programs for instance, revenue there, those kinds
of things. We looked at cost recovery factors and then looked at net of that
cost recovery, the real cost to the taxpayer in the General Fund of providing
services, and that’s what we focused on in doing our cost estimating, so we
are assuming that your cost recovery, the revenues that you take in as a
share of the costs of running this department stays constant going forward. I
mentioned doing this sort of detailed, deep dive with various departments.
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Here is the list. We spent a lot of time with Police, Fire, Community Services
in particular, your Library Staff and your Public Works Staff, as I mentioned,
involved two to three interviews, in some cases Community Services, more,
and some unique analyses. So I think this is the right place to talk about,
yes, so we worked with each of these departments to determine basically
their service populations. You know, to what degree are they serving
residents versus employees. In some cases, Community Services, we had
some survey work. When you guys did your Parks Fee Nexus Study, you
went out and interviewed park users and figured out were they residents or
were they workers or were they from elsewhere with no relation to the City.
So we used those data where we could. Police did a custom calls-for-service
or incident reporting analysis for us and did their attribution of the expense
of Police services to commercial districts and to businesses versus residential
areas, and a very similar analysis from Fire. For Library we used your
circulations data, so we actually know, based on the library cards, people
taking out books, if they are residents or they are from elsewhere. In Public
Works I sort of had the discussion already with the data from the
Transportation consultant. I wanted to give you an example here so you can
sort of follow along, how we allocate out the costs. So in the Police calls-for-
services analysis, they arrive at attributing about 70 percent of their service
burden to commercial and 30 percent of their service burden to residential. I
can get into that a little bit more, but just moving on from that, we have
their 2015 Budget. We net out the cost recovery and we get this sort of what
we call variable effect on the General Fund. We divide that by the service
population, you know, the 30 percent of the net effect divided out by the
population gets us $112 a head to serve a resident in town. Then
employment, 70 percent of the cost divided by 95,000 employees gets us
about $180 a head to provide Police services to an employee in town. That is
a snapshot of the math. We go through this exercise with each and every
department. I should also mention that for the departments we didn’t
interview, we used an assumption that is very typical of this type of work,
where we assume that basically a worker creates 50 percent of the burden
of a resident. It is kind of based loosely on the hours spent in town, the full
basis for cost allocation in the ADE where they didn’t do the detailed
department interviews, so I think we have sort of gotten a richer answer for
you on that point, but for some of the smaller ticket items we did use this
kind of stock assumption.
Council Member Wolbach: And I just wanted to question here, on where you
list employment uses, that would probably include things like restaurants,
bars, etc. So if people are coming to visit, say had a few too many, there is
an altercation or tussle and the police are called in, that would probably fall
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under employment uses, even though it is not necessarily employees
misbehaving, it could be, it’s really business.
Chair Filseth: (crosstalk) the detail on this.
Mr. Sigman: That’s exactly right. So in our conversations with
representatives from the Police Department, that is the way they view it.
The commercial areas in the City are essentially an attractor for criminal
activity, and it’s the mix…
Chair Filseth: I thought it was just City Hall here. (laughter)
Mr. Sigman: So yes. It’s not as if their calls for service analysis went through
and said, “We picked up that guy, he was a resident, we picked up that guy,
he works here.” It is very much looking at areas in town that generate calls
for services by type of crime and allocating the types of crime out so they
basically said, “These are commercial zone crimes, these are residential zone
crimes.”
Council Member Wolbach: So this is really commercial, not necessarily the
employees.
Chair Filseth: Is it really that concentrated in the downtown core? Is it really
that disproportionate?
Mr. Sigman: Yes, that is the way it was described to me and I think we had
an actually pretty robust discussion in one of our meetings about could this
assumption be extrapolated to other areas of town. So, for instance, the
research park or the shopping center, and I think in both cases…
Council Member Wolbach: Or California Avenue.
Mr. Sigman: Mm-hmm, exactly. That one is, I think, a little easier to connect
but, you know, the stand-alone shopping center or the Research Park right
now don’t necessarily have that same conglomeration of mixed of uses…
Chair Filseth: Well (inaudible) private security right?
Mr. Sigman: Yes, you would know better, but I think down the road where
these places may evolve into mixed-use centers, they could have, the idea is
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that in our projection as we look forward with growth they could be vibrant
in the same way that Downtown is, so making that extrapolation seemed
pretty reasonable.
Council Member Wolbach: Thanks for spending some time on that.
Mr. Sigman: Sure. And then…
Council Member Holman: I just want to make sure I’m clear on something.
So you’ve got Police here that, I think it is Fire that actually has the much
higher demand then Police, and so the table here shows employment uses,
and this is Police, and it is broken out as 70 percent in marginal per capita
expense, so there is a difference between per capita expense, there is a per
capita expense, but there is also the proportional aspect during the day
certainly, demand. So did you do that for Fire as well as Police? I mean you
have Public Safety on next and you did Public Safety.
Mr. Sigman: Yeah, so let me be clear, because I can understand your
confusion. So this slide is illustrative of the calculations we used for every
department, or representative. So there is a table, and I apologize for the
font size, but it is the last table in the whole study on A17. It shows
essentially this map for every department and it shows it specifically for Fire
broken out in detail, so in their case the analysis showed 64 percent of their
cost burden going to residential uses and 36 going to employment, so
essentially the revers almost of this, largely because they are converting or
they are evolving into Emergency Medical Services Department more than
fire. Their story was, “We don’t really put out fires any more, there really
aren’t fires any more, or big fires, one a year maybe.” So they are spending
all their time, or the majority of their time providing emergency medical
services, which is, based on their analysis, much more due to households
than places of work, and so we end up with, so yes, we can see this cost
allocation, the percent variable we assigned to it and the same per capita
expense, specifically for Fire in this Appendix Table A21, and then here in
the presentation, yes, I have rolled Fire and Police into one for summary.
Council Member Holman: I guess I am misremembering that, because I was
thinking that, yes, we are using a lot more paramedics and I was thinking
especially in the Downtown and the work-day demand was so much greater
than the evening or even weekend. I was thinking it was much more out of
kilter than that in the other direction.
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Council Member Schmid: Yeah, if I could bring up some data by the
Utilization Study, City of Palo Alto, they did a map of the community with
intensity of responses and this shows exactly what Karen was saying. The
downtown is by far the place of the greatest number of responses for
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and the ones that come in after that are
the Stanford Shopping Center, Cal Lab and El Camino commercial.
Mr. Sigman: It sound like a similar story to the Police.
Council Member Schmid: That sounds like it should be the same as the
Police.
Mr. Sigman: Right.
Council Member Schmid: Now fire incident is a little more spread out, but
still clearly the downtown is the center of activity. So I don’t see why they
are any different than Police.
Mr. Sigman: So in both cases these are responses from these departments
and…
Council Member Schmid: Again, if you look at time of day most of them were
midday. They are not spread out over 24 hours so that would mean it’s the
daytime population that brings the demands.
Council Member Wolbach: Midday is the demand?
Mr. Sigman: Yeah, we can go back to the departments.
Mr. Perez: The only thing I can think of is, I think when that was done, I
think I am looking at the Report, it is the International City/County
Management Association (ICMA) Report 2009…
Council Member Schmid: 2011.
Mr. Perez: 2011, there was a recategorization of the calls and how they were
being captured was one of the recommendations I recall, so I think we can
have Ben discuss it with the Chief and specific to that to see that they
update the way they are classifying.
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Council Member Schmid: That is the only hard data we have. It says quite
the opposite here.
Chair Filseth: Thinking off the cuff here, so maybe this is completely wrong,
okay, but if you took that chart and overlaid it with a chart of where the
population is in the City, because the analysis here on Fire EMS, particularly
EMS, says basically it is primarily residential to mean household, right, and
therefore, it ought to follow where the households are. So if you found that
there was a big proportion difference in the ratio of calls to households
downtown is different from the ratio of calls…
Council Member Schmid: These are incidents that occurred per square mile
per person.
Chair Filseth: Incidents per person, so that is built in, the population density
is built in, so yeah, so if it were primarily residential you would expect a…
Council Member Schmid: (inaudible) a string of old peoples’ homes from San
Antonio, (inaudible), California Avenue, saying lots of old people here so it is
not just the distribution of old people.
Chair Filseth: So yeah, if it is normalized to population…
Council Member Holman: I’m getting sensitive to the term old people.
(crosstalk)
Chair Filseth: If it is normalized to population right, then you would expect it
to be flat if it is mostly residential, so to the extent that hot spots
(inaudible). Is there a correct train of thought?
Ms. Gitelman: The greater density is definitely North Palo Alto.
Chair Filseth: He says it is normalized to density though.
Ms. Gitelman: I’m not sure.
Council Member Schmid: No, it is normalized by square mile.
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Chair Filseth: Okay, so it would follow density, it would have to follow
density.
Ms. Gitelman: Greater residential that is North Palo Alto, near Downtown.
Chair Filseth: So you would have to normalize for that.
Council Member Wolbach: It is per square mile, not per, not normalized for
density or structure or population.
Mr. Sigman: So I summarized the costs here on just a per-head bases per
resident, per worker, and that is the end of the presentation. I am happy to
continue this discussion.
Chair Filseth: On the previous slide, maybe I was looking at one of the
attendant slides.
Mr. Sigman: You know, I have, maybe this was confusing you a little bit, but
I have rolled these up in a way that is really just for this presentation. The
City Administration category you are looking at here encompasses a lot of
things that are broken down.
Chair Filseth: Did you make any assumptions about the growth in City
expenses per worker. Did you assume they would follow inflation?
Mr. Sigman: Everything in the study is done in today’s dollars, 2015 dollars,
so it is really inflation neutral, so we are not making any, the only exception
to that is we took care to look at housing escalation, because we have seen
historically in California that outpace inflation. Really we are assuming that,
with the exception of that, housing pricing, everything perfectly keeps pace
with inflation.
Chair Filseth: So you said that City wages and benefits kept pace with
inflation?
Mr. Sigman: Yes.
Chair Filseth: And you did per capita costs.
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Council Member Wolbach: Right, so you didn’t include the per capita costs,
but as you mentioned earlier, you did account for greater strain on the City
resources and infrastructure that exists. For instance, the greater
expenditures on maintenance of roads, because of the assumption of greater
car travel.
Mr. Sigman: That’s right. And even the Fire Department, because we are
anticipating they are going to need to scale up a good bit. They indicated to
us they may need to make some modest capital improvements, but it would
be within the scope of their General Fund spending. So what we are not
capturing are, I have sort of categorized it as two distinct items. There is
mitigation, I think, for any quality-of-life issues you are suffering now. So
whether it is really significant investments in transportation that haven’t
occurred to date really aren’t captured in the budget we studied. Those
aren’t in here. (crosstalk).
Council Member Wolbach: (Crosstalk) last night.
Mr. Sigman: I didn’t watch the tape yet, but I knew that was on your
agenda.
Chair Filseth: They are all externalities.
Mr. Sigman: Then the other is the investments that are envisioned as part of
the scenarios in the Comprehensive Plan. There are some pretty significant
infrastructure investments in there and we believe those would be paid for in
other ways, through impact fees, through other sources of funds. It is a next
step for Fiscal Study.
Council Member Wolbach: And that is actually really useful for us. I
appreciate you just being really clear about what this Study does and
doesn’t try to do. There are certain variables you said we are going to look
at these variables and focus on that and, I think, it is actually very helpful to
not break it down across five or six different axes.
Mr. Sigman: We’ll take a reasonable first bite.
Council Member Wolbach: I think that is very useful so…
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Mr. Sigman: So the way I like to think about it is, to just sort of try to add a
little bit on is if these people were here today, if your 2030 projection were
here today and you were running the City the way you are now, this is how
it would affect your General Fund.
Chair Filseth: Great.
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, if I could ask a couple of basic questions.
The fiscal impact is very important for us. It grapples with the question of
who pays, who benefits and it is a key element in our dealing with the Comp
Plan and your report says that the new residents, new workers add more in
revenue than they cost and that the impact is modest, so it is all right. I
guess that is counter to what I would have thought. Now let me go back to
our Comprehensive Annual Financial Plan and you are only looking at the
margin. If you take the last five years of this plan on Property Tax, it says
that the change in Property Tax, to go a step backwards, changed in
assessed valuation at the County of residents has gone up by $5 billion. For
businesses it has gone up $460 million. A ratio of 11:1. Now that is a
marginal change, a change over time and there are reasons for that, as you
say is built into the system, but it also is measuring what we can anticipate
the last five years, the next five years, and that ratio of 11:1 is taking place
during a time period where the construction for nonresidential growth has
added three jobs for every employed resident. So there is a ratio of 3:1 of
commercial growth and yet the change in payment has been 11 times on the
other side. Now if I was looking at a Comp Plan and asking fiscal impact, I
guess I would start from that question, “What is going on, what has gone
on, what will be going on, and can we influence that number,” and it seems
out of balance on any cost analysis that the residents are paying. As a
matter of fact, if you look at Property Tax as the basis, not just the most
important tax for the City, but it is also for the County, the School District,
the special districts, it is local government. So it is very upsetting and the
question is, “How do the choices we make on jobs and housing and land use
affect that ratio?” Can we influence the future or are we stuck. So I go to
your numbers that you are looking at in here and it seems as though you
are using as the basis for your evaluation, real estate values. You are not
using the assessed value in the Count Assessor’s Office, you are using real
estate values. But the reason the County doesn’t get any upgrades on the
business is there are no sales, or the number of sales of business property is
so small that it doesn’t show up in these numbers. The implication is in the
next five years that ratio of sales between residential property and
commercial property will be as it has been. Now you make an assumption
that the sales rate of commercial property will be half that of residential
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properties and I guess I don’t believe that. You say it is the turnover ratio,
you had a slide, you showed a turnover ratio.
Mr. Sigman: I’ve got it up on the screen, sir. Slide Nine.
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I think the ratio is probably 1:20. That only a
dumb landowner developer would move out of Prop 13.
Chair Filseth: Do you understand what he is talking about?
Mr. Sigman: I believe I follow.
Chair Filseth: There is a loophole that allows you to transfer ownership of
commercial buildings without actually selling them and, therefore, it never
gets reassessed. Did you guys consider that?
Mr. Sigman: So it’s illegal to transfer the majority share of the property
without triggering a reassessment. You can have minority shares switching
in and out.
Council Member Schmid: It’s 90 percent.
Chair Filseth: That’s how it works in this town.
Mr. Sigman: So I’ll take a moment to comment. I understand where you are
coming from. I think we have heard you speak on this subject previously, so
we went, we felt, to great lengths to establish what the baseline condition is.
Say we turned off the tap, no more building. You are going to continue to
see the residential assessed value outpace commercial. So we agreed with
that and can you influence it? I think what we are showing is that at the
margin, as you say you have had this period of sort of relatively robust real
estate development in town and, at least this particular year we are looking
at, it is a small fraction of the total change in assessed value, so
redevelopment has a minimal influence I would say.
Council Member Schmid: I guess that is one of the things that we are
looking at in these alternative scenarios is, let’s look at a scenario in which
there is, say more housing built than residential. The problem is, these
scenarios you have looked at because we gave them to you, each continues
the 3:1 ratio of commercial to employed resident, so we don’t even get a
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chance to see, is it a 1 percent change or a 10 percent change if we vary
that ratio. That why it is essential that one of the things we look at is a
balance in jobs it has, just to see if as you say it would be insignificant or,
gee, it does make a change over the decades. Because what we are dealing
with now where the residents are carrying a $5 billion charge every five
years, and you are right, it’s not all the residents, just the new ones, and the
businesses that are growing much faster and earning much more money are
not contributing to local government finances.
Mr. Sigman: I understand your point. I think one thing that I could offer is
that on the turnover rate, so we are assuming on these commercial assets,
25 year holding period, which is three times the national average or
something like that. It is a long hold for any commercial investor. I
understand we have some extenuating circumstances here, so we can do
some sensitivity analysis around these hold periods.
Council Member Schmid: It is not unusual in California, or especially the Bay
Area where property values are rising so high (inaudible)
Mr. Sigman: So I think we can certainly explore the impact that very much
even lower than this turnover would have on these fiscal outputs.
Council Member Schmid: And again, the other one to look at is what
happens if you have a better jobs/housing balance. If you move toward
better…
Ms. Gitelman: Can I ask a question on that? Part of what we want to do is
understand what additional analysis is needed, so you are going to help us
at the Council in May define this quality-of-life scenario that will further
depress jobs below what we have in Scenario Two, and potentially have the
same housing numbers or more housing numbers, we don’t know that yet.
That, in our last discussion was I think the extent to which the Council
wanted us to address the jobs/housing imbalance. The Council was not
willing to go and test really aspiration goal, 2.4 or something like that. I am
just wondering whether the Committee, on the fiscal side, wants us to do a
sensitivity analysis that the Council was not willing to do on the land use
side, or whether you would be satisfied just doing this Fifth Scenario once it
is defined.
Chair Filseth: I just want to make sure I understand the explanation Ben just
gave, which is, there are two issues you are talking about. One is the
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jobs/housing ratio, the other is this business of how fast does the
commercial property turn over. If I understand what you said, you said,
“Aha, we include the fact that stuff doesn’t turn over very often, assuming a
very long…
Mr. Sigman: Right, so the…
Chair Filseth: A very long holding period. Is that what you said?
Mr. Sigman: Right. Everything that is commercial, 25 to 50 years, including
the rental residential. The condominiums or for-sale residential turns over
twice as much in this model.
Chair Filseth: So I might be interested in what happens if you assume a
lower turnover.
Council Member Schmid: I think there are two things, the lower turnover…
Mr. Sigman: Does it make a big impact or little impact, that’s what you
want, right?
(crosstalk)
Mr. Sigman: Let’s talk about it, but I’m not sure what we can do to study the
baseline condition. I think we establish that is the case, we acknowledge
that we have this sort of disproportionate contribution to Property Tax now,
but we are looking forward. A lot of this is really…
Chair Filseth: Your question is really, does it move the needle or not right,
basically?
Council Member Schmid: Yes, and we are doing the Comprehensive General
Plan that looks out 15 years, so we have to ask the question, if we started
doing something that had an impact over that time.
Chair Filseth: Notwithstanding, but none of this moves the needle very
much.
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Council Member Schmid: And it is not just looking at, “Gee, there is an
imbalance,” but there is a striking imbalance over all local governments. It is
not just us. The School District gets three times as much as we do out of
Property Tax, so it is our future of local government and it is an important
issue. I think one of the reasons Council didn’t get to that issue is because
we didn’t have the fiscal impact. We didn’t see the numbers and say, “Wow,
that’s a big number.”
Chair Filseth: So it shows up in Property Tax and Document Transfer Tax. Is
that what goes for that?
Mr. Sigman: Yes.
Council Member Schmid: Well the Document and Transfer Tax actually
(inaudible) but it is a 3:1 ratio, residents paying over, because that is a
better reflection of a number than what you come up with on the property
taxes.
Council Member Wolbach: I just wanted to ask, so a lot of this is caused,
frankly, by perversions to our real estate market caused by Prop 13, right?
And that is why no matter what scenario we pick, that’s not, like I said
before, you tried to study certain variables. You tried to limit the number of
variables in a reasonable way, because if you have too many variables then
it is apples and oranges and your study could take 100 Staff people and 100
years to put together and one of those variables is, “What if there is Prop 13
reform,” which would, maybe, be useful, but that is way beyond any of the
options (crosstalk).
Chair Filseth: No wait, when Mark gets to Sacramento, he is going to fix it.
Council Member Wolbach: I’m sure he will talk to his 119 colleagues and try
to do that.
Council Member Schmid: Last night we had a discussion at the Council of the
Business Tax, should we do that in November? We need to make a decision
in the next month or the next six weeks. So what we are talking about is
not, “Oh, we can’t do anything about that.” We do have options and they are
on the table.
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Council Member Wolbach: This also goes back to what Ben was saying
before, that beyond business – basically what we are looking at here is
business as usual with population of daytime and nighttime population
changes of four different options. But as you said before, the way we
conduct business, according to this study, is consistent with what we do
today. So all of those questions, all of those options about what happens in
Sacramento, or what happens if the economy completely tanks or if it turns
out everybody is driving self-driving cars win 15 years, which I think is very
overly optimistic, and what if we end up passing some kind of significant
taxes locally or have some other major windfalls by diverging from status
quo practices in order to fund major transportation issues or whatever. That
is all important stuff we can consider, but this actually provides, I think, a
useful baseline to overlay those discussions on top of. That’s how I look at
this. If I am wrong, somebody let me know.
Chair Filseth: I thought this was vastly valuable, especially the existing stuff.
I mean, the marginal stuff is very interesting, but it doesn’t add up to very
much in the grand scheme of things, but the assessment of structural stuff I
thought was tremendously valuable. Sorry, go ahead. I’m agreeing with you.
Council Member Wolbach: Great, again, I guess I was looking for either
agreement or if I was missing details.
Chair Filseth: Greg still has the floor too.
Council Member Wolbach: I thought it was conversational, but of course.
Council Member Schmid: One other point, on the Sales Tax, you have a
chart I believe you put up which shows a circle.
Mr. Sigman: It’s in the document, not the charts, sorry. We are on 25.
Council Member Schmid: Now you cite here the Stanford Study. The
Stanford Study is very nice. You don’t need decorated, top drawer
economists working on it, but it is Stanford. Stanford is saying, “We spend
money in all kinds of different places.” Now we have this ADE Study, you
mentioned it so you are familiar with it. It has quite different numbers on
that circle. You have households at 11 percent, they have households at 53
percent. You have local employees at 25, they have them at 17. Both have
the business-to-business at 15. You have other visitors 47, they have other
and Stanford at 15. Now they claim that this is a purely Palo Alto study.
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They went into the files of each of the local merchants and said, “Okay, what
is your revenue, where are your customers coming from?” They look at the
employment center around town to do the calculations. So they have some
credibility as a local study. I know you ultimately cite, they also cite, this
study from the national organization…
Mr. Sigman: International Council of Shopping Centers.
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, but this study is based on a national data
base of suburban shopping centers around the Country, 4,000 entries.
Mr. Sigman: Urban and suburban, yeah.
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, but there are 4,000 altogether so maybe
1500 suburban, maybe 150 suburban California, so it doesn’t sound, and the
questions they asked the workers, “Are you within four minutes of a
shopping center, of a department store, of a grocery store?” So the data
that they have attracted is not necessarily relevant to the Palo Alto, where
we have three commuters to every employee resident, we have tens of
thousands of people every day moving in and out of town. We have the
Stanford Industrial Park as the biggest unit. There are no stores there. I
don’t think there is anyone who by 5 or 5:30 is going to hop in their care
and drive half an hour to get to University Avenue to shop. I don’t think in
the Stanford Health Center, where they are touting the number of people on
Caltrain, who are going grocery shopping in Palo Alto carrying their groceries
onto the train. So the numbers you have of 80 percent spending of that
$9,000 by commuters doesn’t make sense in Palo Alto. I find it hard to
imagine someone facing a 45-minute commute saying, “I want to go
shopping.”
Council Member Wolbach: Can I, for anecdote in thinking about that, I used
to work in San Mateo while living in Palo Alto just until about, oh, less than a
year ago. I did that for a couple of years and that was counter commute,
and in order to avoid a commute, even that, I agree, you don’t want to sit in
all traffic, but while I was in San Mateo I would often stick around, have
dinner there, maybe do some shopping there, and wait until the end of rush
hour, so I would actually end up being longer…
(crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: But you were Downtown San Mateo.
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Council Member Wolbach: Not really. I could get there but in the same way,
Research Park, for instance, we heard last night that there are shuttles that
run from Research Park to our Downtown where people get on the Caltrain.
Council Member Schmid: She said it took 25 minutes to get to Caltrain’s
station.
Council Member Wolbach: That’s right. I’m not saying that every Stanford
Research Park employee is doing that, but I would not dismiss the possibility
that Palo Alto…
Council Member Schmid: Palo Alto is a little different. We’re unique. We’ve
got this 3:1 ratio. The only big cities in the Country that have that are
Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and so we are a little different from
California suburbs. It is hard to take the data you get from the suburban
business park and apply it to Palo Alto. So…
Mr. Sigman: I understand the point and I appreciate the anecdote. We are
using the same data that ADE used on this point, and actually ours is from a
more recent survey than theirs. It is just a more current year of a very
similar (inaudible). I take your point. It is not Palo Alto data and I would
certainly welcome the opportunity to bring better data to bear on this. So if
that is an issue and an intercept survey is appropriate, and we want to get
some Palo Alto data to make this stronger, because we are not convinced we
are getting the right answer here, that is totally within our power. We are
using the same household spend, the same worker data (crosstalk), so I
take your point about Stanford. It is their study. We are basically relying on
it to understand the number of visitors they report drawing to the
community. The spending profile looked pretty reasonable to us, given what
we know. On that point we might have differences on how that other piece
that isn’t even attributable to residents and workers in Palo Alto, we might
have differences there, but (crosstalk) I don’t think it is that different and I
would, again, welcome better data if it is available.
Council Member Schmid: The reason I bring it up is because we are thinking
of the impact of residents against workers, and in your data it shows local
employees are spending twice as much as households, 80 percent of their
discretionary money in Palo Alto.
Mr. Sigman: The way the survey asked the question was, “How much do you
spend in proximity to our place of work.” It is not their full retail budget.
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Council Member Schmid: And the earlier ADE data has a 3:1 share of
households over workers, so those are opposite directions.
Mr. Sigman: I’m sorry, could you repeat the last point. I apologize.
Council Member Schmid: The chart you have shows workers spending twice
as much as households. The data in the ADE states households are spending
three times what the workers are.
Mr. Sigman: I can certainly spend more time trying to dissect what they
have done, and I wasn’t aware that they may have interviewed local
businesses. I think our impression, our professional opinion, is that these
survey data are the best data available. You get into trouble with anecdotes,
you get in trouble by samples of businesses, so we used the published data
because these are the best available.
Ms. Gitelman: Can I ask a question. I wonder whether the capture rate is
where the difference between the two studies are. The gossip internal on the
ADE Study was the capture rates were overestimating the percentage of the
sales tax that was staying in Palo Alto. Maybe we could look at that.
Chair Filseth: Can I weigh in on this for just a second. I had some of the
same questions, so I took a whack at it because this meeting got delayed a
couple of weeks so nothing better to do, right. I tried to do a household
versus businesses versus Stanford breakdown of all this stuff, and the only
really material variance is sort of your approach for trying to calculate the
distribution allocation of Sales Tax versus your approach to try to calculate
allocation of Sales Tax. I did it both ways and, I actually did it three different
ways, and it looked to me like overall it actually didn’t make that much
difference whether you did it your way or Greg’s way. And the third way, by
the way, was where I went and took that orange piece and tried to allocate
it between. So my numbers for all of this were, in all three cases, Stanford
comes in at 6 to 8 percent of revenues and for the others, depending on
whether you use your method, Greg’s or one with this allocated in between,
it was pretty much an even split between businesses and households. Your
method, a little more businesses, your method a little more households, with
this allocated kind of in the middle. So either way you look at it, at least
what it looked to me like, was that pretty much, I mean, after Stanford’s 6
to 8 percent, probably about half and half. I liked that the ADE Study
actually did sort of bottom’s up locally, so if I had to weigh them, I would
probably weigh that one a little more than your approach, but they both
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seemed like viable approaches. This stuff is inexact. The way to do it is do it
three different ways and see if they are all clustered together. So that was
my conclusion from this. It didn’t actually make that big a difference. Again,
the dominant ones are property tax, some of the other kinds of things.
Utility User’s Tax (UUT), TOT were pretty big.
Council Member Holman: Can I go in a different direction? I don’t want to
interrupt that line of thinking, so can I go in a different direction? So the
Comprehensive Plan Scenarios assume no different land use designations
and if we are learning from this that it actually costs more to have an
employee than it does a resident, can we find out without a horrible amount
of effort, what some changes would indicate, since this is fiscal analysis, just
fiscally. So let’s just say, for instance, we changed our mixed-use
designations from 0.4 residential to 0.6 commercial, and at least flip those,
because, again if it is a better financial picture to have a resident than an
employee, so let’s flip those. Do you know what I am saying? It’s not a
different land-use designation, but it is a zoning change.
Ms. Gitelman: I do know what you mean, and we will talk about some of
these ideas on Monday, when we talk about housing sites and programs,
how you might modify our mixed-use categories to encourage more housing
and less employment. I just want to get back to your base assumption that
it costs more to have employees than residents (crosstalk).
Council Member Holman: Well, the revenue is greater from a resident. That’s
what it says in here, right?
Mr. Schmid: Yeah.
Ms. Gitelman: My takeaway from these results, these are such small
numbers, my takeaway is like, thank goodness, we are looking at over the
next 15 years not really having a negative drain on the General Fund
(crosstalk). We may have mitigation costs up the wazoo. We may have
infrastructure costs up the wazoo, but when you look at the big picture, we
are not going to have a significant negative drain for many of these
scenarios.
Council Member Holman: I don’t disagree. At the same time, we talked
about earlier how our density in commercial buildings varies over time. This
analysis is based on a four per thousand, correct?
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Ms. Gitelman: This analysis is looking at those four scenarios that vary in
terms of employment densities, so those four scenarios are testing a range
of options, because, as you pointed out, we don’t control the amount of
employees you can stuff in a building, so we looked at a range to be able to
test what the results would be.
Council Member Holman: Okay, so the housing we are going to talk about
Monday, I saw Corey kind of light up, and there are some other things, and I
don’t know how many of these will come up, but for instance, and it is a
little one but it kind of has a double whammy impact, we allow such things
as, and I don’t want to get in the weeds about this, but I just think there are
some things we ought to look at, at least, we allow businesses to have their
own on-site cafeterias if they are not really close to commercial areas, but
that includes areas like the California Avenue part of the Research Park. I
mean, we allow them that close, but that takes away from how much the
employees spend in our retail places. I don’t know if you happen to notice
any accumulation of those kinds of changes that we could or should make to
better enhance. No one thing is going to make an enormous difference, but
there is an accumulation factor in some of these just from a good business
practice, and some, at least, financial impact. So I don’t know if you happen
to notice any of those other…
Ms. Gitelman: This is not that kind of fine grained analysis, and I think the
Council knows inherently these are policy tradeoffs. You include an on-site
cafeteria and it means that a portion of the workers are not going to spend
their dollars in the neighborhood, but it also means a proportion of the
workers are not going to get in their cars and drive, so you are trading
income for…
Council Member Holman: That’s why proximity is important.
Ms. Gitelman: Which is why (crosstalk) direction we are really trying to be
more discriminating about when we let businesses take advantage of that
exception.
Council Member Schmid: Hillary, if I could make one follow up. You said the
scenarios shown would not make much difference. That implies that in each
of the scenarios we are looking at, continues the 3:1 ratio of jobs to
employed residents, and that sort of implies going along this path for
another 15 years is okay. I think some of the data coming out of our
(inaudible) is saying, “Wow, there is something fundamentally wrong going
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on to apply that to a model. If you do it for another 15 years, you might be
entering more serious problems than you have now.” So, I think the Fiscal
Analysis should at least open up that issue, address the issue that if you
acted differently it might have a longer-term impact.
Council Member Holman: That’s kind of what I was bringing up earlier about,
especially when we look at per employee or per resident, it doesn’t give, if
we are focusing on that, it doesn’t really give the full picture. And if you look
at the various scenarios that we have in front of us now, let’s just say at
scenario four, which is the highest amount of growth, four million square
feet, that is 16,000 residences that we are behind, but we are only building,
again, according to the scenarios, 4420, so that is almost a 4:1 ratio that we
are behind, so…
Ms. Gitelman: If I can jump in, I think Council Member Schmid is correct, as
everyone has pointed out and as we discussed on the 22nd of February, the
ratio of jobs to employed residents in all of these scenarios is pretty similar,
and so the Council has said, “Hey, we want to look at another scenario that
has a lower job growth, and potentially higher housing growth.” We are
going to talk about that on Monday, but I think the questions for you, I think
we would appreciate your input. We know we are going to update this study
to analyze whatever the Fifth Scenario is going to be, and you are going to
help us craft that scenario over the next 60 days or so, but do you want us
to also do some kind of hypothetical sensitivity analysis that goes farther
afield and towards a jobs/housing ratio that, frankly, all of us think is
probably not achievable in 15 years. That is the question.
Council Member Schmid: Right. I guess could we use Ben’s talents and
knowledge to just give us a simple…
Ms. Gitelman: Sensitivity analysis?
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, sensitivity analysis.
Council Member Wolbach: What do you mean by sensitivity analysis?
Mr. Sigman: When we say that, we just mean that we have made some
assumptions here, turnover rate is a good one, and it is not fact. That may
not be the right number, so a sensitivity analysis would say, “What if it goes
up or down 5 percent, what if it goes up or down 10 percent. What does that
do to the fiscal outputs that the model generates?” So it puts some brackets
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on the fiscal outcomes when we start looking at what if certain assumptions
we made were likely to be higher or lower.
Council Member Wolbach: Okay, so we are adding another variable or two.
Mr. Sigman: Same variable, just changing the assumption up or down.
Council Member Wolbach: Okay.
Chair Filseth: You’re looking at sensitivity study.
Mr. Sigman: Yeah. And then I just want to come back to this idea of, we are
on the wrong track and what does the (inaudible) tell us. We had sort of a
number of discussions with Staff about could we somehow integrate this
kind of relatively traditional land-use fiscal impact methodology, somehow
make it into a Long-Range Financial Forecast, and I don’t think we have
figured out a good way to do that. What if we did nothing or we just stayed
business as usual. You have a different model here in the City that analyzes
that, so that is another resource to bring to bear. I don’t think, it doesn’t
isolate the land-use changes or potential rate, and it is…
Council Member Schmid: The Long Range Financial Forecast doesn’t say
where the Property Tax money is coming from, it just says here’s it is.
Mr. Sigman: Right, so I don’t think we have, (crosstalk) without a lot of
complexity, a model that kind of bridges the two. We have something,
hopefully, relatively elegant here that sort of teases out some of the impacts
when you change land use and land use only and you have a long-range
financial forecast that says, “Are we on the right track, is this sustainable?”
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I was at a land use meeting earlier and I
listened to maybe 15 people, each had two minutes, on this committee, and
virtually every one of them said we have a housing issue. Just it is
unaffordable for anyone except the rich and the old people who are here.
That’s something we have got to address in our Comp Plan and the fiscal
impact is the major cause of what’s going on.
Chair Filseth: Are we drawing to getting through this, because I want to
circle back to the question you asked at the beginning. Thanks for coming
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here and doing all this and letting us like jump all over you. That’s why we
are doing this, because we are so interested in this.
Mr. Sigman: I am impressed with the level of effort on that side of the table.
Chair Filseth: So the thing that sort of struck me looking at this, and again,
in the context of this the numbers are not that big in the context of this,
especially between the scenarios, but I am still struck by the fact that the
bottoms-up analysis says that revenues are more than twice as much as
expenses for each additional employee, and yet here’s the history of the
General Fund revenues and expenses. I mean, that’s almost one line there,
it is the red and the green line. Sorry, never mind the green line, the red
and blue, our revenues and expenses from the General Fund. Guess what,
since the turn of the century our General Fund revenues and expenses are
almost identical. We break even every year. And you pointed out that it is
natural that as we see, “Gee, we got a few extra dollars, gee, we can do
some more services,” and so forth. But the implication is that actually it is
past. If you follow your number, the behavior you are talking about, then
yes, each new employee and each new resident has something small in the
overall context, but adds something to the finance of the City. On the other
hand, if we follow the track we have done for the last 15 years, then it is
going to be a zero net impact, or at least whatever impact is going to be
externalities, right, something we can’t measure, which brings me to the
other piece of this which is another externality, but very, very real for us.
The green line is actually the Unfunded Pension Liability to the City, just
pension I looked at in this case, and that has gone up dramatically. So the
implication is, in fact, if you consider that, we are actually not breaking even
in the General Fund. Actually we are losing money in the General Fund, but
a bunch of it is being deferred. So I thought about that in your analysis of
sort of revenue and expenses per person. I said, “Well, how much is that?”
We don’t have good ways of calculating that, so here is a really, really handy
way to calculate that. Right now the accumulated unfunded pension and
(inaudible) liability for the City is about $450 million if you believe CalPERS
assumptions on returns, and so forth, and it’s been 13 years because it was
zero in 2002. It was all since the Gray Davis era. Okay, so that is a little
over $30 million a year. If you look at General Fund expenses in that period
of time frame, you know, at the beginning of the century there were about
$115 million and now they are about $180 million, so on average $150
million, so $30 million a year as a percent of $150 million, on average our
costs are 20 percent higher. So if you take that and apply it to your numbers
of revenues versus expenses per employee and to say the expenses are 20
percent higher than yours, you still come out with a net positive contribution
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to the General Fund. But if you assume that we are going to be like that, the
historical pattern, then we are losing money on every resident and new
employee. So I don’t know how to account for that in a report like this, but it
is quite real. So a huge impact goes back to the question of, “Why does
yours say every resident and employee earns twice their keep,” but if you
look at our trajectory that hasn’t been our experience and that seems to be
a really fundamental question.
Mr. Sigman: Because we are looking at what you do fund, not what you
don’t fund. So this trend is a baseline condition and you raise a totally valid
point. It is outside this study, but it is an issue you have and it is going to
take some fiscal prudence to deal with it. Just as we come out with the
results that expenses are less than costs, yielding this net revenue, well, it
takes some fiscal discipline to realize that. You have to lock down that
spending because it is, balanced budget, I think in municipal finance, is the
norm. It could go the other way too. Stock market collapses, Property Taxes
readjust to lower levels, Sales Tax falls dramatically. We have seen this. You
cut some Full Time Equivalents (FTE’s), you have to balance the Budget. It
works both ways. I think you are right to point that out, but as I said, we
take a snapshot in time and hold everything constant. This pension liability
is one of those things. So just like these other mitigations, quality-of-life
mitigations, there is a fiscal mitigation that you have to develop to account
for this, to deal with it, and we can think about that. That is something that,
as we add in these other costs that are external to this analysis, if you direct
us to look at those, that would be appropriate, but because this is a static
model in essence it simply doesn’t capture that. It is a limitation of it.
Chair Filseth: I understand. I think the pension piece, unless you guys have
a way to calculate that, which we don’t, at least not an easy way, there is
probably not much you can do with it. I think the issue of the discrepancy
between revenues to actual costs in our actual experience is the one that
I’m not really sure we understand that one.
Mr. Sigman: And I think if we use this and we said you always balance your
budget, there would be no point in doing this, right?
Chair Filseth: Well, actually given the percentage and the scale of all these
(crosstalk)
Mr. Sigman: You make very good points.
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Chair Filseth: What you just said occurred to me. I think it is worth doing
this.
Mr. Sigman: Good.
Council Member Holman: So you’re not out of a job.
Chair Filseth: Absolutely not. I appreciate it.
Ms. Gitelman: Just because I feel like we are starting to wind down, I think
one of the things that we would really like is some input on the additional
analysis that you are seeking from us. You know, the blogs over the
weekend were, “Don’t spend another penny on this, it’s not worth it.” You
know, we do feel like this is adding something to the dialog. We want to do
the sensitivity analysis you talked about with the slower turnover rate for
commercial…
Chair Filseth: Yes, that one I would, sorry…
Ms. Gitelman: Then we have, obviously, the Fifth Scenario, the Quality-of-
Life Scenario. We are going to look into the Fire cost data from the ICMA
Study and try to come to some understanding about how that varied. Those
are the three big ones I have, and then potential ones are looking at
hypothetical aspirational jobs to housing ratio in 15 years.
Council Member Schmid: I think rather than that, just what happens if we
have a 1:1 for five years, what would be the impact.
Council Member Holman: Five years or 15?
Council Member Schmid: Well, 15, just sensitivity of a balance between jobs
and…
Ms. Gitelman: So the growth in jobs as 1:1 to the growth in employed
residents?
Council Member Holman: Yeah.
Ms. Gitelman: Okay.
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Mr. Sigman: I think another major point was the worker spending, so if
sensitivity analysis around that is appropriate?
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, workers, services.
Council Member Wolbach: If you haven’t already, may I recommend
touching base with Stanford Research Park and the Downtown
Transportation Management Association (TMA) for information about their
employee travel habits. They might have information about this question
raised earlier about when people leave town, do they stick around to buy
dinner at a restaurant, and give us sales tax revenue from that or not. They
might. I just throw it out there as a suggestion.
Ms. Gitelman: I bet we will have it for Downtown, probably not for the
Research Park for a couple of months.
Council Member Schmid: They will have it probably after their August
(crosstalk).
Ms. Gitelman: Okay, so anything else that you would like us to do. We are
developing a contract modification with a cost number that we will bring to
Council.
Council Member Wolbach: That is actually the question I was about to ask is,
we are not authorizing further expenditures that come.
Ms. Gitelman: No.
Council Member Wolbach: Just triple checking.
Ms. Gitelman: No. We are benefitting from your input to prepare a cost
proposal and a contract modification that will come to the full Council.
Council Member Wolbach: And do you need a Motion tonight or is this good?
(crosstalk)
Council Member Schmid: I guess not as far as contract, just part of Council
absorbing it would be good to have the contextual data of what is the
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current changes going on out of (inaudible) residents versus nonresidents
and the property values.
Council Member Holman: So I guess I had one other question that is
potentially something addition. We talked earlier about capital investment
and the department you talked to said that, and Lalo comments said that in
the capital investment, should it be required but mostly this seems like not,
would be in Enterprise Funds, but I would like to know what isn’t, what
might be required. I ‘m thinking park land in particular, what might not be
included in park lands infrastructure, but it is not Enterprise Funds, so what
isn’t captured in Enterprise Fund that could be some additional, and I am
particularly thinking about park land, that’s required in the Comp Plan.
Mr. Sigman: I can simply say that in our interviews with Community
Services Department, they described to us their capital investment strategy
for the coming years. It did not involve significant land acquisitions. It does
involve a new amenity or investment at the golf course. We discussed that in
pretty good detail with them and came to the conclusion that it was
essentially a baseline investment they were not making due to the new
population, but rather to enhance the overall suite of services and amenities
they have for the community as a whole.
Council Member Holman: We are currently behind on park land, so why
would we be looking to add to it with the population growth?
Ms. Gitelman: This is General Fund revenue and expenses. It doesn’t include
the Impact Fee revenue.
Council Member Holman: Yes, I understand, but if we…
Ms. Gitelman: So there are Impact Fees that would be generated and could
be used for park land acquisition.
Council Member Holman: It’s not going to measure up to…
Ms. Gitelman: I think all of us understand our park land goals are
aspirational in the extreme. Over 15 years I don’t think we are going to get
to the goals we have set, unless you disagree. To quantify what it would cost
to get there, that number would be astronomical.
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Council Member Holman: But maybe not in totality, but at least in part and
is there anything else besides park land that isn’t in an Enterprise Fund that
we might consider?
Mr. Perez: I think from the Enterprise Fund that should take care of itself
within its own rate structure. I think what we are talking about is more the
General Fund capital side, which is, I think, your point.
Council Member Holman: Yes.
Mr. Perez: So I agree with you that there is the base assumption here has us
transferring somewhere in the $14 million from the regular pot, and now the
new number, the total number there it is about $8 million in addition from
the TOT, the Hotel Tax, so it is about $22 million that is going to go towards
infrastructure. At some point we are going to finish the infrastructure
massive plan over 126, it has to be updated. The assumption that we would
make here with this view is that then you are going to have those funds
available to do something else, so what is not included in here, for example,
is the 7.7 acres of foothills…
Council Member Holman: The Animal Shelter.
Mr. Perez: The Animal Shelter, the…
Council Member Holman: The park land.
Mr. Perez: The three, I forget how many acres at the golf course that we
need to put fields in, the three fields, the massive plan update that has been
getting closer to completion. So there are going to be things that are not
going to be there that we are going to have to – and then this view we are
assuming if there is going to be something done and now something else is
going to have to go in, can we keep up with those revenues that are coming
in with the future costs of these items? That is something that we would
work on through the Capital and Operating Fund, five-year view of the
capital and then the ten-year Long-Range Forecast. I have some concerns I
am expressing to the Council about funding all of our needs because of the
escalating costs, so there is a tug there and we are going to be forced to
reprioritize, whether we want to spend less on operating and more on
capital, or finance more or defer more, which is obviously not desirable.
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Council Member Holman: To the extent that it is relevant to this study and
the growth scenarios, I would actually like what you just talked about and
what we have been talking about to be captured in some kind of fiscal
analysis. I know these are going to be captured elsewhere, but to the extent
that we can.
Mr. Perez: I guess what we are trying to distinguish is the view of this study
versus the going forward of these other things that we know need to be
addressed. I am kind of coming in for one piece of the wedge of this whole
view that you are looking at, so I may not make sense to you.
Chair Filseth: What you are asking for, Karen, that is Council’s job, not
Staff’s job, to decide, to make that kind of decision. What do you need from
Staff to facilitate that kind of decision?
Council Member Holman: I guess from an impact, we are changing – I don’t
know how I am going to be able to say this very well – but we are changing
from, if we are reducing our commercial growth especially, we are going to
be reducing to that extent, our Impact Fees, and so how does it make sense
to fund and what do we have to fund that we should look at in the
Comprehensive Plan Fiscal Analysis. So, should we use this vehicle to look
at, and I am particularly focused on park acquisition, where would we buy it,
so I am particularly focused on that one.
Ms. Gitelman: This actually raises an interesting question. In the original
scope of work we talked about doing some kind of analysis of infrastructure
funding options. You know, how might we fund park acquisition and
infrastructure costs during the life of the Comp Plan? What are the funding
mechanisms available? It is a little bit like what the Council is going to
undertake with regard to transportation funding. We didn’t end up doing that
as part of this study, but it is something we could add. It would, maybe,
inform additional discussions.
Mr. Sigman: Should it go here or should I go with the regular Comp Plan
Study?
Ms. Gitelman: Well, it would go in this Fiscal Study and we would look
specifically at infrastructure proposals that are included in these scenarios
and others that may be required over the 15-year period.
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Chair Filseth: You’re not going to ask those folks to design a revenue
enhancement?
Ms. Gitelman: No, no, no. It would simply be providing to us information
about the various funding mechanisms available for infrastructure, right?
Mr. Sigman: Right. So we would, for most of these capital improvements we
would start with fees and we would look at your fee programs and try to
understand the degree to which your park’s fee, for example, is capable of
funding the level of park amenities that is envisioned by the Comprehensive
Plan. If there is a gap, how do you fill that gap? Are there other revenue
sources, whether it could be an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District
(EIFD), it could be an Assessment District or a Community Facilities District,
one of many tools. I don’t think those are appropriate necessarily, but I am
just saying what are the tools available to Finance, would they be appealing
and are there regional or State sources that might also help you fill the gap.
It think it is important, as a next step and to satisfy, I think, some of the
comments I have been reading in some of these blogs that you have to look
at, after you establish, that there is a General Fund operational element to
this. There also is a very significant investment program that comes with the
Comprehensive Plan. How does that get paid for, and that is something that
has not been done yet. So I would advise that both pieces are
complementary and appropriate to have in hand when you start to decide or
narrow in on what the next 15 years are going to look like and what comes
with that.
Chair Filseth: So one of the takeaways from what we have concluded here is
that none of the four scenarios in the (inaudible) none of the four scenarios
generates significant amounts of capital in order to do that with, so we are
going to have to look at other places.
Council Member Holman: What I don’t want is to just because we have both
a shortage of land and because we are not going to generate, as you say,
funds here, and fund under any scenario, even the Fifth Scenario, the funds
to bring up to what the Comp Plan requirements are for park land, and
again, I am just kind of focusing on that one, we shouldn’t just ignore it.
Ms. Gitelman: I think this is going to come up when we ask for your input on
the mitigation measures in the EIR. That is associated with the scenarios.
You are going to look at them and some of them you are going to like and
some of them you are going to hate, but your first question is going to be,
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“What is it going to cost?” We haven’t done that and so we could see doing
that additional work at the end of this process once we have your feedback
on the mitigation and incorporate. My feeling is, once we get that feedback,
those will be incorporated into the Quality-of-Life Scenario, and so in the
course of that analysis we could do this kind of General Fund
revenue/expenses test, but we could also look at the costs inherent in those
mitigation measures.
Council Member Holman: Can I bring up two other issues here, and again, I
hope this doesn’t appear to be in the weeds, but the more residents we have
more than the more workers we have, we also have an effect, and I can’t
remember if in the animal shelter audit this was, I can’t remember if in that
audit there was any reference to per capita the animal shelter houses X
number of animals. So that’s kind of one, maybe I could ask Tina that.
That’s one, but the other one is, that I don’t want us to ignore, is our
canopy.
Mr. Sigman: Tree canopy.
Council Member Holman: Tree canopy, yes, our tree canopy, both in terms
of planting and replacement of trees that reach the end of their lifetime, and
also maintenance, because that is also, it is a different kind of infrastructure,
but I don’t know, I have no reason to know if that was captured in any of
this analysis.
Mr. Sigman: No, on the surface (crosstalk) that is one where I would
struggle, I do struggle to see the connection between a few more people and
the tree canopy. I guess maybe there is one, but it wasn’t expressed in the
interviews we had. You know, in other instances here I have referred to sort
of a baseline condition. It’s not one of the things that changes when we
think we are going to add 15 percent or 10 percent more people. Does that
make sense?
Council Member Holman: Yes, I could maybe come back to that at another
time.
Mr. Sigman: You know, these mitigations, these quality-of-life mitigations or
enhancements, if you are on the wrong track, if you are not doing the work
that needs to be done on tree maintenance and canopy, that is something
that we have to find a way to do, but it isn’t directly related, at least in our
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study, and you could make – I would be curious, maybe we could table it,
but it is not captured here.
Council Member Holman: It’s probably more related to our Urban Forest
Masterplan.
Chair Filseth: Head slap here. I figured out where you’re going, I think. So
one thing you could do and would fit in the context of an analysis like this, is
you could say, “Comp Plan says four acres per 1,000 residents, land 10
million an acre, if you can find it.” So each resident is going to cost, in this
case at four acres, $40,000 per resident over the next 15 years in terms of
park acquisition. So you could add that to the cost. (crosstalk)
Mr. Sigman: It kind of sounds like you just need a fee update.
Chair Filseth: But she is making a (crosstalk) it could be part of an analysis
that says here is how much it costs for each resident, right. Not necessarily
how you pay for it, but when you are looking at revenues brought in by each
resident versus cost brought in by each resident (crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: Right now you are ignoring it.
Mr. Sigman: You know, the fee act is there for you to charge new
development for its fair share of these types of things, and so if the fee is
insufficient…
Chair Filseth: So you’re saying it shouldn’t come out of the General Fund, it
should come out of fees, and therefore, it should be off this analysis,
because it is a General Fund focus?
Mr. Sigman: That I think sounds more strategic than I am trying to be. I
think when we look at funding shortfalls for parks and you have significant
development pressure in place and your fee is insufficient to do what you
need it to do…
Council Member Holman: Always.
Mr. Sigman: It is time to update it.
Council Member Holman: But we have been doing that and…
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(crosstalk)
Mr. Sigman: When we have a recession, you guys can get out there and buy
some land.
Chair Filseth: I think you’re right, because if you make the assumption that
there is not going to be millions of square feet in redevelopment in the next
15 years, then putting a fee on it isn’t going to yield any revenue and it’s
going to have to come out of the General Fund.
Council Member Holman: That’s right.
Chair Filseth: So at that point you’re using the General Fund to fund capital
expenditures. If you can’t fund it with fees, then that’s what you do.
Mr. Perez: Now you’re back to the points I was making, aren’t you? You look
at the fee recovery level, you saw some of those examples for (crosstalk)
Chair Filseth: Since the Comp Plan does say X many acres per thousand
residents, that seems like it ought to be in the (inaudible) maybe as a
footnote or something. That’s a footnote, so why couldn’t this be?
Mr. Perez: Absolutely, and I think then you task us to figure out how we
would make that work within your other priorities. That’s kind of where I
was going. You set up some base, we identify the issues and this drives
some of the policy and decisions, okay, strategically from a…
Chair Filseth: (Crosstalk) asking for something quite a bit less ambitious
than that, which is just shows up in the bottom line analysis.
Council Member Holman: Exactly, because like I say, right now it is ignored.
Mr. Perez: It shows up in the report.
Council Member Holman: It’s not even a reference, and I would say the
same thing with Animal Shelter, which surely there is with population
growth, there is additional pressure on animal services. We don’t charge an
Impact Fee for Animal Services, but there is an impact with additional
residential, and to some extent at least, commercial growth, certainly both
park land and Animal Services, which means we need a new Shelter.
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Chair Filseth: So if you amortize it over 40 years, amortize it over 30 years
and you discount interest costs then it is a couple thousand per new
resident. (crosstalk) It blows away his analysis because it is like 20 times
higher than it is now.
Council Member Holman: So however you want to capture that, and I am
not going to try to dictate that, but Greg.
Council Member Schmid: No, I was just going to wrap it up.
(crosstalk)
Chair Filseth: There would have to be an asterisk somewhere that says,
Policy sees (inaudible)
Council Member Holman: Well, more than a footnote, because a footnote
tends to be in that 4.5 to 5 (inaudible). I don’t want to (crosstalk)
Ms. Gitelman: I think we can talk about the fact that the City has an
infrastructure plan that is not addressed here, or capital costs that are not
addressed here, and those include your infrastructure plan, also includes the
acquisition and development of new park land. We can say that.
Council Member Holman: Let’s focus it on the things that are actually
referenced in the Comprehensive Plan. You know, not all the infrastructure
things are referenced in the Comprehensive Plan, not all of them are.
Chair Filseth: True.
Council Member Holman: But some of them very specifically are, especially
park land.
Ms. Gitelman: That’s true and I just wanted to say we have an existing
deficiency, a substantial existing deficiency in park land if you use that ratio,
and so I don’t want to pretend that over 15 years anyone could imagine we
would have the funds to resolve that.
Chair Filseth: I actually did it two ways, one with the aspiration ratio and
one with the existing ratio.
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Council Member Holman: Understanding a deficiency but we don’t want to
exacerbate, so I think Greg is trying to call us to a conclusion. But you’re a
park land fan, Greg, come on.
Council Member Schmid: Well, you could add schools to that as well.
Chair Filseth: Well, that’s not part of the Comp Plan.
Council Member Schmid: It is.
Chair Filseth: That’s true, it is. So are we reaching a point of wrap up here?
Council Member Schmid: Yes.
Chair Filseth: I think there is probably no further discussion from this side.
Ms. Gitelman: Thank you very much for your input.
(crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: Thank you for going from meeting to meeting.
Were you at the CAC as well, Roland?
Roland Rivera, Business Analyst for Planning & Community Environment: I
was not.
Council Member Holman: Well, thank you for being here anyway.
Mr. Sigman: Thank you all for our comments. I really appreciate it and I
appreciate your time.
Council Member Holman: Thank you Ben.
NO ACTION TAKEN
Future Meetings and Agendas
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Chair Filseth: Okay. Thank you guys for coming in. The next item on my list
is discussion of future meetings and agendas.
Lalo Perez, Chief Financial Officer: Yes, so we are coming to you then back
on April 5. We have the beginning somewhat of the budget process with the
Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), that’s (crosstalk) we have a
Federal deadline that we must meet so this starts a little bit earlier than the
regular process of the Budget. Then we have Mr. John Bartel coming in.
Chair Filseth: So is he here on April 5?
Mr. Perez: Yes. He is not available April 4. He is a very busy man and we
tried to see if we could switch him from the 5th to the 4th, so he could be
here for the Long Range with the whole Council, but unfortunately, he is in
Southern California, so you get him on the 5th.
Council Member Wolbach: How do you spell his last name?
Mr. Perez: Bartel, one l.
Council Member Wolbach: Thank you.
Mr. Perez: And then the pool car utilization. You have been waiting for this
one so it’s coming and that’s it for that night. I think we will probably have a
good agenda for that. Then on the 19th it gets a little more packed, but I
think a couple of those items are going to go quick, at least that’s what I
would expect given prior history with you. You have heard some of the early
warnings and proposals on the rates, so it’s the water and wastewater, and
they’re coming now because of a notice of 2/18, so that’s why you are only
seeing some of them. Storm drain is based on the Consumer Price Index
(CPI) so it is pretty straightforward. We will probably do that one first and
get it out of the way. Then, it’s not listed in here, but we have agendized the
refuse rates as well. Then the last item, Community Services Deparmtnet
(CSD) wants to give you an update on the Junior Museum and Zoo (JMZ)
and in regards to the construction of the new building, give you a status on
that. Then from there we go to the month of May which will be full of budget
hearings, as we gave you that schedule and for June we are working on
tentative items.
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Council Member Schmid: Supposedly again, the Budget would come to the
Council.
Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: April 25th.
Mr. Perez: April 25th is the levy of the budget document fees by the Council
and then the first hearing of the budget is the 3rd of May, that is a Tuesday,
but keep in mind that we segment it so you don’t have to read everything, I
mean, you could if you wanted to. You got it segmented so we’re not giving
you too much time it’s in trenches. I think that’s all we have.
Chair Filseth: So this is sort of a tentative schedule for May?
Mr. Perez: It’s still holding until you, the Committee tell us otherwise. We
arrange the Staff to be prepared for these nights based on the departments
and the listing of those. And I remember Council Member Wolbach is absent
on the 12th.
Chair Filseth: Which day, the 12th, that you’re not available?
Council Member Wolbach: I believe that is correct.
Chair Filseth: So you would miss Municipal Fee Schedule, Public Works.
Council Member Holman: If I am remembering right, the wrap up is kind of
that and potentially not very much, and the reason I am saying this is
because I may be out of town May 24th.
Chair Filseth: So my recollection of last year, if I get this right, the wrap up
session actually took multiple days, because as we went through it there
was stuff that we weren’t, we didn’t feel comfortable with (crosstalk) but it
was stuff that we had trouble making a firm decision on until we saw other
stuff, and so we had a bunch of stuff ended up in the parking lot and then
the last couple of days is when we went through that.
Mr. Perez: (crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: So does wrap up not start on the 19th, because I
look at “hold for additional discussion, if needed”. Is that not actually wrap
up?
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Mr. Perez: We have a problem. Jim’s out if my recollection is correct. We had
held it in there, but then he notified us that he is out.
Chair Filseth: So what does that mean?
Council Member Holman: So what do we do?
Mr. Perez: Well, his preference would be to be here with you on the 24th.
Chair Filseth: So what does that mean for the 19th?
Mr. Perez: I’m sorry, there would be no meeting at this point.
Council Member Wolbach: So should we cross it off the Agenda at this point,
or what.
Mr. Perez: Let us confirm, see if anything has changed, but given what we
just heard.
Council Member Holman: Is it just that night he is out?
Mr. Perez: No, he is out a couple of days that week. His thinking was that he
wanted to be here for the wrap up, to discuss it and the potential issues.
Council Member Schmid: Yeah, that’s reaching conclusions, right.
Chair Filseth: Which day was that? Was that the 24th or the 19th?
Mr. Perez: Right now the wrap up is on the 24th.
(crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: So does that mean if we don’t have the 19th, but
there is a 24th, does that mean the 24th might also be the 31st?
Mr. Perez: Let me correct myself. What we (crosstalk). We just don’t want to
do the wrap up on the 19th, so it could be a meeting to follow up on some
discussions, but we were trying not to hold the wrap up that night because
he’s not here. So, I’m sorry for not being clear earlier.
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Council Member Wolbach: Are parking lot items wrap up items, or is that
separate?
Mr. Perez: Yeah, typically because you want to make decisions on them and
it would probably be good for, you know.
Council Member Holman: So I guess my question is, if the 24th takes the
place of the 19th, or the 19th isn’t happening, so if we have the 24th, is the
24th actually going to be two meetings as opposed to the 19th and 24th, is it
going to be the 24th and something else? That was the question.
Mr. Perez: The wrap up should be all of the outstanding items, but if you
want us to look at an alternative night that week, we can look at that.
Council Member Schmid: But the goal is to have that one night.
Mr. Perez: If possible.
Council Member Holman: Just one night.
Mr. Perez: Because typically you’re just dealing with the outstanding items.
Council Member Holman: Then why did we have the 19th scheduled? I’m
confused.
Mr. Perez: That’s if some department hearing from earlier did not get
completed, there have been cases where we just don’t get to a department
because we got…
Council Member Holman: Doesn’t that then bump them to the 24th?
Mr. Perez: It would enough in this schedule because it is a backup.
Council Member Schmid: So that could be done without Jim?
Mr. Perez: Yeah.
Council Member Wolbach: So here’s my question, going back to where this
was kind of commencing Chair Filseth brought up, which is do we need an
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extra spot on here? Should we reserve on our own schedules the 26th, two
days later? Do we need a spillover? Do we need a back-up date and should
we start reserving that on our schedules? That’s my question.
Mr. Perez: Yeah, I was just going to say as a process we try to have all four
of you in the wrap up night. That’s been our goal.
Chair Filseth: So Cory’s question is, I think, is that if the wrap up takes more
than one day, should we have a tentative place holder, a tentative back up
day.
Ms. Mason: Why don’t we confer with Jim his schedule and then we will
come back and talk about that. I think last year we started a few in the
afternoon too, so that we would potentially have longer.
Council Member Holman: Can you suggest an e-mail.
Mr. Perez: Sure, we will e-mail the Committee and let you know the
confirmation of those dates and then if you want us to work on having a
back-up date to the wrap up, then we will check our dates and let you know.
Chair Filseth: It seems like now is the time we want to check.
Ms. Mason: (crosstalk)
Council Member Holman: And I’ll see if I can move the 24th.
Council Member Wolbach: And I’ll also say that the 26th and the 31st are
both currently free for me, so I’m happy to keep them reserved until we
have confirmation. Just based on what you were saying about past
experiences, it sounds like it might be a good idea to have.
Council Member Schmid: Karen, right now are you available on the 24th?
Council Member Holman: Well, right now I’m not, that’s why I’m saying I
can double check, but right now I’m not. I am on the 19th.
Council Member Schmid: So that’s an issue.
FINAL MINUTES
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Finance Committee Draft Action Minutes March 15, 2016
Ms. Mason: We’ll confirm and then we will check on the 26th as well, which is
a Thursday night, and the 31st.
Council Member Holman: So you will confirm the 19th and the 26th and the
31st?
Ms. Mason: We will confirm he is out on the 19th and then we will see about
the 26th as an alternative.
Mr. Perez: Could we say we will confirm the 19th, we will look at the 25th and
26th, just in case, because we are bumping into the Memorial Day weekend
and some here might have plans, I don’t know.
Council Member Holman: But you’re not going to take out the 24th? I’ll see if
I can…
Mr. Perez: Okay, we’ll hold onto that.
Chair Filseth: It is also High School Finals Week, so it’s hard to travel that
week. Before we break and leave completely the issue of the Agenda, I
wanted to ask, with respect to the City Auditor’s presentation and discussion
around that for the last couple of weeks, one of the issues that came up was
there is this whole issue of the Parking Assessment District, which the
finances seem very murky to all of us, and we just don’t understand, it’s like
a black hole. There is precedent for property owners claiming that their
membership, belonging to the Assessment District basically grants them
access to certain numbers of parking spaces and it isn’t clear whether those
are in any garages or not, whether the claim is valid or not, and particularly,
since we are talking about building more parking garages as part of the
infrastructure plan, right, are there claims against some of those spaces that
are not even built yet? Is that something that the Finance Committee ought
to look at and see what are the claims, what are the finances involved here
and is this something we are going to have to worry about. I think this sort
of came up, Karen ducked the issue last night, right, which is why it didn’t
come back here? She left when she knew it was coming up.
Council Member Holman: Oh, no.
Chair Filseth: That seems like something the Finance Committee might
consider taking a look at, because somebody should.
FINAL MINUTES
Page 64 of 64
Finance Committee Draft Action Minutes March 15, 2016
Council Member Holman: I’d second that, for whatever it’s worth.
Council Member Wolbach: I’d be open to that.
Mr. Perez: So I think the question is, is that within your prevue to assign or
is that something that needs to be assigned through the Council. So let us
check into that because it may tie into other discussions that you have and
that could be brought up at that point and referred. I’m thinking out loud
here, but off the top of my head, but let us check on that.
Chair Filseth: Okay.
Council Member Holman: So you got the issue, right?
Ms. Mason: Right.
Council Member Holman: Okay, thank you.
Chair Filseth: Okay, in that case we are adjourned. Thank you very much.
Thanks for staying late guys.
NO ACTION TAKEN
ADJOURNMENT: The meeting was adjourned at 9:37 P.M.
City of Palo Alto Page 1
Planning and Transportation Commission 1
Draft Verbatim Minutes 2
April 13, 2016 3 4 EXCERPT 5 6
2.Comprehensive Plan Update: Public Hearing to Accept Comments on the Draft7
Environmental Impact Report Prepared for the Comprehensive Plan Update.8
9
Acting Chair Gardias: Let’s reconvene. It’s about 7:26. We have the second item on the agenda, 10
which is Comprehensive Plan Update, public hearing to accept comments on the Draft 11
Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) prepared for the Comprehensive Plan Update. 12 13
Elena: Thank you. We’re here tonight to request public and Commission feedback on the DEIR 14
prepared for the Comprehensive Plan update. Basically the question to you is: did we get it 15
right and is there anything else that we need to be analyzed? The Environmental Impact Report 16
(EIR) was published on February the 5th and the public circulation review period of an extended 17
90 days. Typical California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirement is for 45 day review 18
period. This is the first of several public hearings on the EIR, this was the first and there will be 19
hearings on April the 21st before the Architectural Review Board (ARB) as well as the Historic 20
Resources Board (HRB) and will also be going to the Library Commission at the end of the 21
month to obtain their feedback. The EIR was also posted online and notices have been 22
disseminated both to agencies and to the public and is also part of the Comp Plan Update 23
Project website. 24 25
Tonight, we also have Joanna Jansen, Associate Principle of PlaceWorks, which is the City’s 26
Comp Plan Update consultant as well as the EIR preparer. And also to stipulate questions and 27
comments received during this public review period will be responded to in the final EIR. 28
Joanna will be providing an introduction to the EIR and the process and also this item was 29
tentatively scheduled for Council review on April the 25th. That has been deferred to June the 30
6th, and so that will affect our schedule. 31
32
But I also just wanted to just to stipulate also that these hearings are an opportunity to provide 33
a public forum for feedback from not only the boards, commissions and council, but also the 34
public. But the public and anyone else is also welcome to submit written comments to my 35
attention during the public comment review period. Although the public review comment 36
period is scheduled to end on May the 5th, because the Council date was extended to June 6, 37
we will be revisiting exactly to end that comment period. And with that I will turn this to 38
Joanna. 39
40
Joanna Jansen, PlaceWorks: Thank you, Elena. Thank you Commissioners for your time. 41
Tonight, as Elena said we are here to discuss the DEIR or EIR, on the Comp Plan update and 42
specifically we want to hear from you and from any members of the public about your 43
questions or comments or concerns on the EIR, because down the road we are going to be 44
coming back to you and asking for a recommendation for the Council action on this EIR. And 45
the Council will need to certify this EIR or make a decision about certifying the EIR and they are 46
ATTACHMENT D
City of Palo Alto Page 2
going to do that in part based on your recommendations. So we want to make sure that you 1
feel equipped to make that recommendation when we come back to you. And so as part of 2
that, tonight is your opportunity to help us understand what kind of questions or concerns you 3
might want to see resolved before you feel ready to do that. And I am going to explain in much 4
more detail kind of the steps and the process between here and there to help you understand. 5
6
So the kinds of questions you might have that are about the EIR specifically are questions about 7
the methodology that we used, questions about our impact conclusions, questions about the 8
mitigation measures that the EIR includes, for example. Just to be clear, the in terms of the 9
CEQA process, what’s not part of the CEQA process necessarily per se are the policy decisions 10
that are going to be made as part of the Comp Plan update. So a decision about whether or not 11
to change a particular policy or to adopt a particular policy is not part of what the EIR looks at, 12
but the potential physical impacts of adopting or not adopting that policy is really what the 13
EIR’s focus is and what our focus is here tonight. And as Elena already mentioned, in 14
accordance with CEQA, part of our task in the future will be to respond to each one of the 15
comments that we receive on the EIR that address those types of questions about the EIR and 16
its analysis and its conclusions. 17
18
So let me just go over briefly what the EIR process is. Elena outlined some of these important 19
dates for you. On the left‐hand side we start out with the Notice of Preparation, meaning that 20
we publish a notice to the public and to state agencies and to other local agencies that we are 21
going to be doing this EIR. We give them a chance to tell us what kinds of issues we need to be 22
aware of and what kinds of issues the EIR needs to consider during what’s called the scoping 23
period. And that happened back in 2014, in the during the summer of 2014. Then we shut 24
ourselves up and worked very hard on the environmental review section of the document and 25
we published our DEIR back in February. 26
27
So right now we are in the public review period for the DEIR, so as Elena mentioned we actually 28
have doubled the public review period from what its requirement would be under the law. So 29
we are having a 90 day, at least a 90‐day period instead of a 45‐day period. And after we 30
conclude that period we are going to be, as I said, responding to all of the comments in a final 31
EIR. And then we will come back to you and then to Council for hearings to certify the EIR. And 32
certifying the EIR will then put the City in a position to adopt an updated Comprehensive Plan. 33
34
So I want to spend a couple of slides now just going over what an EIR is. I know some of you are 35
very familiar with this. We may have members of the audience or watching at home who are 36
less familiar so I want to just go over some of the basics. An EIR, or an Environmental Impact 37
Report is required by the California Environmental Act, we usually call it CEQA. And it’s an 38
informational document, so the EIR is not a policy document. It doesn’t regulate land use or 39
any other part of City operations, but it informs the City decision makers like yourselves and 40
members of the community and other agencies what the physical environmental impacts might 41
be of a given project or a plan. 42
43
This EIR is a programmatic document and we talked a little bit about that in your staff report, 44
the difference between a program level EIR and the kind of EIR that you might be more used to 45
seeing, which is probably a project EIR. And I have another slide on that in just a second. So for 46
City of Palo Alto Page 3
program level EIR’s we are really looking at more long‐term big‐picture effects of adopting or 1
not adopting a certain set of policies or a certain set of transportation improvements or a 2
certain set of land‐use designations rather than looking at a particular building on the ground. 3
So in the Comp Plan EIR we are going to be looking citywide and we are going to be looking 4
long‐term at the horizon year of 2030. So we are going to be quite at a different scale than 5
what the project EIR looks at when you have you know where buildings are going to be, you 6
know where sidewalks are going to be, you know how many parking spaces there are going to 7
be and how many stories tall it is going to be. We don’t have that specific information for any 8
given project under the Comp Plan. So we are going to be focusing on a much more citywide 9
and much more long‐term level in a programmatic EIR. It’s a different level of detail than you 10
find in a project document. 11
12
So, how do we look at a Comp Plan then in an EIR? We consider the policies and the actions of 13
the Comp Plan and then think about how those policies and actions might, or policies and 14
programs might avoid or lessen impacts, or might create impacts based on how they would 15
allow or guide future growth. And as I said, the EIR is an informational document so an 16
important role here is to consider the analysis and conclusions of the EIR and then think about 17
how you would change, you might want to change the Comp Plan accordingly to reflect what 18
you learned from the EIR. 19
20
So and one final important note here about what an EIR is and what it does is that the law 21
requires an EIR to compare to existing conditions. So we are comparing how things would 22
change under the proposed Comp Plan or under the different scenarios that we analyzed versus 23
how things are on the ground today as opposed to, for example a comparison to the existing 24
Comp Plan. So that’s an important distinction. We would make our impact findings based on 25
potential physical impacts to existing conditions not whether or not things would be better or 26
worse than your existing Comp Plan. 27
28
Let’s go over the project description of the EIR and talk a little bit more about what we 29
analyzed. In order to move this Comp Plan process for the EIR looks at four simplified planning 30
scenarios and I’m going to talk about each one of the planning scenarios. The project 31
description defines the housing, population, and job numbers for each of those scenarios, 32
which differ, of course, in each scenario, and then land‐use policies, transportation 33
investments, growth management strategies, potential zoning code amendments, and a set of 34
sustainability measures. 35
36
So each of the four scenarios has some differences in each one of those categories and the 37
reason we wanted to do it this way, which is not the typical way of doing a Comp Plan or a 38
General Plan EIR, is to really help you and the Council and the community understand the 39
potential impacts of a range of policy decisions. Because as you are well aware there are still a 40
number of policy discussions that are ongoing and a number of ideas that have been 41
contributed into the process from the community, from the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC), 42
from yourselves and from Council members. So we wanted a way to test and compare this 43
range of options and give you information about the potential outcomes of each. That’s why 44
we have chosen to compare these four scenarios. I think it is important to note, it’s not on this 45
slide, but I want to be clear that none of the scenarios includes changes to the Comp Plan Land 46
City of Palo Alto Page 4
Use Map, so these are really policy and program changes that would, that are being compared 1
and all of the scenarios have similar, the same protection for preserving existing single‐family 2
neighborhoods in Palo Alto. So those are two important ways in which the scenarios are the 3
same. 4
5
Right, Elena is reminding me that there is a possible change to the Fry’s site considered in the 6
scenarios. So some, a potential for housing, increased housing on that site as part of Scenario 7
4, for example. So these scenarios really came out of a public workshop series that we did in 8
the middle of 2014. And we got ideas that those are workshops about kind of where are some 9
of the areas of Palo Alto that are most likely to change over the next 20 years or so and where… 10
15 to 20 years, and where, what kinds of changes might happen. And as you can imagine we 11
got a real diversity of opinions and so we translated that diversity into this range of four 12
scenarios to test. So the EIR now you, that you now have before you really is intended to 13
provide you and the public with some very quantitative very specific information about the 14
possible outcomes comparing among those different four scenarios. 15
16
In addition to the four scenarios that we developed through the public process so far on 17
January 19th at a Council meeting, Council requested a fifth scenario that would improve Palo 18
Alto’s jobs/housing ratio specifically. So we are currently in the process of crafting that fifth 19
scenario and the Council is going to have a hearing to discuss that coming up I believe on May 20
16th. So we’re still in the process of developing that. That scenario is anticipated to be analyzed 21
at the same level as the four scenarios that you have in your EIR right now, in a supplemental 22
document that we are planning to publish this fall. 23
24
And then once you have the fifth scenario and its additional analysis then the next phase of the 25
process will be identifying a preferred scenario. So just to make sure you understand, we don’t 26
expect that anybody is going to pick one of the scenarios whole cloth and that will be what is 27
adopted. The way that these kinds of processes usually work are picking kind of the best pieces 28
from each one of the scenarios, the things that make the most sense for Palo Alto, that 29
preserve quality of life, that mitigate impacts, that achieve the goals that the City wants to 30
achieve. So we anticipate that that will likely represent some sort of hybrid with components 31
of one or excuse me of two or more of the scenarios. 32
33
And then once we have that preferred alternative there will need to be a step of some 34
sensitivity testing, figuring out whether or not the preferred scenario is really covered under 35
the environmental analysis that’s already been done. Certainly, it’s been our hope with this EIR 36
to present what we have been describing as kind of book ends or an envelope within which a 37
scenario could be crafted that would be covered by this EIR, but that’s going to be an important 38
future step once we have that scenario, to make sure the analysis still is valid for that preferred 39
scenario to move forward and be adopted. 40
41
So with that explanation of what the scenarios are, I want to then just take a moment to go 42
through each one of the scenarios and again you have this within your Staff report and also in 43
the orientation document. So this just summarizes some of the information you have already 44
been presented with. So Scenario 1 is a business as usual scenario. This is a pretty typical CEQA 45
alternative just that is required by CEQA to question well, what would happen if we did 46
City of Palo Alto Page 5
nothing? So in this case doing nothing means leaving your existing Comp Plan in place. The 1
amount of housing that’s assumed under this alternative, excuse me, this scenario and the 2
amount of population is based on past development trends in Palo Alto. And the amount of 3
jobs in this scenario is based on the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) jobs 4
projection, so it has the lower end of housing and the higher end of jobs among the four 5
scenarios. 6
7
By comparison Scenario 2 slows both housing and jobs. So it has the same lower end of growth 8
and housing and population as did Scenario 1, but it slows jobs through an annual limit on office 9
and Research and Development (R&D). In terms of transportation, this one would consider a 10
relatively limited number of continuing existing investments and then also making the 11
investments that are called for under the County Expressway Plan. 12
13
Scenario 3 is a different way of looking at housing. It increases the amount of housing growth 14
or the rate of housing and population growth and it also would consider a shift on where that 15
housing is located. So the current adopted Housing Element has housing sites identified kind of 16
all the way down the length of El Camino Real and this would really move some of those 17
housing sites from the south and from the San Antonio area to farther north and increase 18
densities in Downtown and the California Avenue area. So that is one scenario that tests the 19
slightly higher amount of housing and it has kind of the midpoint of jobs. So lower than 20
Scenario 1, but higher than the job numbers in Scenario 2; and another important feature of 21
Scenario 3 is testing the idea of Caltrain in a trench, so grade separating the Charleston and 22
Meadow Caltrain crossings. 23
24
Then Scenario 4 is the scenario that includes both the highest end of the housing growth as well 25
as the highest end of the job growth. In Scenario 4 the amount of housing growth is consistent 26
with ABAG projections as well as the job projections from ABAG. And so rather than focus on 27
limiting housing growth quantitatively, this scenario would focus on addressing the potential 28
negative impacts of that housing through the most robust and extensive suite of sustainability 29
strategies and measures, things like transit passes and alternative energy measures. So this 30
would really seek to address the impacts of housing rather than just limit the numbers of 31
housing. Again, the focus on housing would be in the Downtown area and the California 32
Avenue area around existing and planned transit stops and even possible Bus Rapid Transit 33
(BRT). BRT would be, mixed flow BRT would be considered on El Camino Real as part of this 34
scenario as well as the grade separate of Caltrain that also is in Scenario 3. And by that 35
combination of measures we want to test whether or not or how those, that assembly of 36
measures can mitigate the effects of even a higher amount of growth than would be 37
anticipated given Palo Alto’s past development history. 38
39
This slide is just a side‐by‐side comparison of the four scenarios. We can come back to that 40
later if that’s useful. So for each one of these scenarios we analyzed these topics at the same 41
level of detail. These topics come to us from CEQA, from what we call the Appendix G checklist. 42
So CEQA helps us identify what topics to analyze. The City has actually adopted its own 43
thresholds of significance. So the specific kinds of questions that we answer about each one of 44
these topics is set by the City, given your specific list that’s tailored for Palo Alto and specifically 45
for the Comp Plan analysis. So you can see here that there’s really a broad range of topics. And 46
City of Palo Alto Page 6
an important point for folks that are less familiar with CEQA that I mentioned before is that 1
CEQA really focuses on the physical environment, so what you don’t see here are economic or 2
social topics. That’s not part of CEQA, but this analysis is really focused on the physical 3
environment itself. 4
5
So when we look at these impacts, let me just take a minute to orient you to this table here, 6
this table is trying to show a side‐by‐side comparison of where the impacts were different. So 7
less than significant is a CEQA term of art, meaning that the impact would not be so severe that 8
mitigation measures are required or specific changes to the plan or to the project to make its 9
impacts less severe; potentially mitigatable or significant and mitigatable means that there 10
could be an impact, but we think that we have an idea about a mitigation measure that will 11
resolve the impact or reduce it to a level where it’s not so severe. And then significant and 12
unavoidable impacts are those where the impact is going to cross a certain threshold that’s 13
usually identified by CEQA, by the threshold of significance, and even if the City does everything 14
that we think is feasibly in its power that would not reduce the impact to below that threshold. 15
So the impact would still occur even if the City attempts to mitigate it. And I can talk a little bit 16
more about some of those specifically and why they occur, but that’s an explanation of the 17
abbreviations you see here on this table. 18
19
So I think that an important takeaway from this table is that even though the numbers that you 20
saw on this table might be seen quite dramatically different to you kind of in your daily 21
experience of Palo Alto and how much growth and change this represents, the degree of 22
difference in the physical environmental impacts between these scenarios is really not extreme. 23
You can see that in all of the topics that are included on this slide they actually had the same all 24
four scenarios actually had the same level of impact. And then when we go to the next set of 25
topics there are some differences in terms of the noise impacts and there are some differences 26
in terms of the utility demands, but even there in both of those categories the impacts can be 27
mitigated. So the differences are important and I think the EIR provides a lot of valuable 28
information on the difference of degree, but the ultimate kind of level of impact is not 29
dramatically different among the four scenarios. 30
31
So just briefly I want to go through how the topics slotted out into those different categories of 32
less than significant or versus mitigatable versus significant and unavoidable. Less than 33
significant impacts meaning no mitigation measures are needed. We found would happen in 34
the topics of biological resources, geology and soils, hazards and hazardous materials, and 35
population and housing. There is a larger group of topics that would where we did identify 36
impacts, but we decided that those impacts probably can be feasibly mitigated. And so that’s 37
this list, aesthetics, air quality, cultural resources, hydrology and water quality, land use, noise, 38
public services, transportation and utilities. So those, for each one of those topic areas then we 39
have in the presentation the mitigation measures themselves because I anticipated that you 40
may have some questions or we might have some discussion about these mitigation measures. 41
I’m not going to read each one of these mitigation measures to you or attempt to summarize 42
them, but I just want to let you know that they’re here and we can come back to any of these 43
that you want to go into in more depth, and of course, you have these in your packet as well. 44
45
City of Palo Alto Page 7
And then finally there is a set of impacts that I mentioned earlier that were called significant 1
and unavoidable. And these impacts are in the categories of air quality, greenhouse gasses and 2
transportation. So for each one of these impacts we did identify and discuss a potential 3
mitigation measure, but ultimately we concluded that the level of the impact would be beyond 4
the threshold of significance even with the mitigation measure and so we cannot conclude that 5
the impact would be able to be mitigated to a less than significant level. 6
7
And I want to point out as you can probably tell that all of the impacts in this Category A are 8
types of analysis that are very quantitative analysis in the EIR. Some types of the analysis that 9
we do are more spacial. For example, questions about whether or not there would be 10
development in a flood plain or a very high fire hazard severity zone, that really depends on 11
where the development is located or where the Comp Plan would identify different types of 12
development to occur. Other types of the analysis that we do in the EIR is really pretty 13
qualitative, like whether we think about impacts on aesthetics, for example. But these 14
categories are all very quantitative and they are based really on the numbers that you saw in 15
that table for future development as well as the numbers for growth in the region. So when we 16
think about traffic in Palo Alto and when we think about the associated air quality emissions 17
and greenhouse gas emissions we can’t just take the trips that are part of Palo Alto, we have to 18
take all of the trips coming into and going out of Palo Alto, including trips that are using your 19
roadways, even if they’re not stopping in Palo Alto, that’s not part of the greenhouse gas 20
analysis, but for transportation, for example. So we really have to look at Palo Alto in a regional 21
context and because of that we find that the amount of, for example, greenhouse gas emissions 22
and the amount of needed reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when we think about Palo 23
Alto as well as the region is going to be higher than we can feasibly say that we can bring down 24
to levels that are consistent with the thresholds of significance. So I think that’s the reason why 25
some of these are significant and unavoidable that even if you include all of the mitigation 26
measures that are proposed and do as much as you can to, for example, ensure that the City’s 27
actions are going to be consistent with state goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we 28
still can’t necessarily demonstrate through the quantitative modeling that the City would be 29
able to achieve those goals. 30
31
And it’s similar with the transportation, so when you have standards for increase in BMT or 32
impacts related to Level of Service (LOS), for example, even if the City does a very extensive 33
suite of measures it may not be adequate to reduce these impacts to a less than significant 34
level. So we conclude that those are significant and unavoidable and what that means for you 35
and for your Council is that there are a certain type of findings, a statement of overriding 36
considerations that would need to be made to adopt a Comp Plan, even acknowledging that it 37
would cause significant and unavoidable impacts. 38
39
So just before we move on to the discussion I want to remind folks of the timeline. We’ve 40
talked already about the earlier phases of this project and when they were completed. The 41
public review period we are still as Elena said considering when the appropriate final date of 42
that is based on when the Council hearing is going to be. So right now that is, right now the 43
most current thing that’s been published is the comment period will go through May 5th, but 44
we are considering whether or not that may be extended in light of the Council hearing. And 45
then we are going to be publishing the scenario analysis this fall and then a final EIR that 46
City of Palo Alto Page 8
includes responses to comments on both the fifth scenario and the DEIR in May, and that will 1
tee up the Planning Commission and the Council to consider adoption of the Comp Plan in the 2
second half of 2017. 3
4
So just in the, the most immediate next steps the Council, the next upcoming Council meetings 5
are discussion of the fifth scenario on May 16th, as we mentioned. And they are going to have a 6
hearing very similar to this one on June 6, another opportunity for them and for the public to 7
comment on the DEIR. And then hopefully having a public hearing on the fifth scenario again 8
sometime this fall; it’s currently scheduled for November 14th. And we’ll be coming back to 9
you, of course, before that for your chance to talk to us about the fifth scenario in November, 10
November 9th. And again, all of this is towards publishing a final EIR in May and then going 11
towards adoption from there. 12
13
So just as a reminder tonight what we are really hoping to get is comments and questions that 14
are focused on the EIR itself, on its methodology or findings or the mitigation measures that 15
we’ve touched on briefly here. And we will do our best to respond here tonight, especially if 16
the questions are factual or relatively brief, but the real place for the responses is going to be in 17
the final EIR that will be published after the fifth scenario is out and after its had its chance at 18
public review, so that’s where you’ll get your real point‐by‐point in‐depth responses. But again, 19
certainly we will do our best tonight as well to the extent possible. 20
21
So written comments are welcome and encouraged and Elena is going to be the point person 22
for those comments. So anyone who has written comments please submit those to Elena. Her 23
address and email address is on the screen. Email is perfectly acceptable. So we welcome and 24
encourage any comments. Thank you. 25
26
Cara Silver, Senior Assistant City Attorney: Chair Gardias, just to wrap things up, if I could just 27
add a few brief comments on this. So we did want to let you know that this is your first 28
opportunity to review this EIR. There will be other opportunities throughout the process, so 29
don’t feel that you need to get all of your comments out at this session. 30
31
Also, I just wanted to kind of point you to sections of the EIR that are particularly relevant when 32
reviewing it. Sometimes when you are given a big, thick document like this with lots of 33
technical appendices and tables, etcetera, it is a little bit difficult to figure out what you should 34
focus on. And we typically advise that reviewing the executive summary is really a very good 35
starting point. The executive summary lists all of the impacts. It lists all of the mitigation 36
measures and whether the impact can be mitigated or not. If as you read through that 37
summary section, you will find other issues that you may want to drill down on more 38
completely and so you can then refer to other pieces of the EIR and other chapters for more in‐39
depth review. 40
41
Another place to focus on, as Joanna mentioned, is the impact methodology and the mitigation 42
measures. Those are very important. We would like to get your input on whether the 43
mitigation measures that have largely been developed by the City staff and the consultant team 44
do adequately mitigate the impacts that we have identified and if there are any additional 45
City of Palo Alto Page 9
mitigation measures or if you do not think that the mitigation measures we’ve suggested are 1
adequate we would love to receive your feedback on those. 2
3
And then finally, I did want to point you to Appendix B, which is contained in Volume 2 of the 4
EIR, and that is a very good memo that discusses the evolution and the analysis that we have 5
prepared in connection with the thresholds of significance that the EIR uses. And so it shows 6
the kind of the historical background on those thresholds and then describes in detail what 7
thresholds are being used for this particular EIR. So that’s also a good reference for you all. 8
Thank you. 9
10
Acting Chair Gardias: Thank you very much. It’s a good comment so just before we move on 11
with public hearing I want to just touch bases on this because we discussed this at the pre‐12
Commission meeting that given the breadth and importance of this document it is impossible 13
for the Commission just to review it at tonight’s meeting. So what we discussed to already 14
reserve a time following the Commission meeting for another review and limit this just review 15
and just do the portion of this document. So that’s what we discussed and with thanking 16
Joanna for the review, I would like to just give the voice to the public. So let’s review the 17
comments from the public and then let’s discuss what we can achieve today and what we will 18
not achieve today so we have some clear delineation. So with saying this, thank you very much 19
for the review and let’s see if we have any comments from the public. 20
21
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Our first public comment is from Mr. Stephen Levy, five minutes. 22
Do you need 25? 23
24
Stephen Levy: No, I mean you know. A document like the one that Joanna prepared can be 25
completely accurate, professionally done and not respond fully to the information needs that 26
this community deserves, and I believe that’s the case. I think there is one striking omission 27
and basically I’m urging you to urge everyone in the new alternative to correct the omission. I 28
think there are two thorny problems that may be a result of the way the EIR is structured. Not 29
anyone’s fault, but omissions. As Joanna said, they crafted the alternatives based on a series of 30
community meetings. I went to all of them; you went to some of them in 2004. The housing 31
alternatives, even the high one in 4, do not reflect my oral communication to you at the 32
beginning that there are no regional population numbers, new regional job numbers, new 33
regional household numbers. They are all higher for two or three reasons, but more than that 34
the EIR alternatives do not reflect the May Summit that most of you went to, and the enormous 35
public comments before this body, before the CAC on which I serve, and before the Council 36
about housing. So I encourage you to encourage Joanne and the staff to go big on housing in 37
alternative 5. The Council will ultimately decide. We are not talking about decisions now; we 38
are talking about a community getting the information to understand what it is to really 39
contribute to the regional housing shortage. We’ve had 280,000 new jobs, 170,000 new people 40
since this alternative was crafted, so go big. 41
42
The two technical points are, and you know more about this than we do, that the community in 43
the EIR is transfixed with identifying and mitigating what Joanne has correctly said are 44
differences, but small differences among growth alternatives. But we all know that if you want 45
to reduce the impacts on the air, on the environment, on traffic and parking, we need to be 46
City of Palo Alto Page 10
talking about mitigation measures that change the behavior not of the new residents or 1
whether it is 5 or 10 percent, but of the 100 percent of existing residents who are here. If the 2
EIR and the Comp Plan and my committee and your Commission are going to move the needle 3
we need to be talking about not mitigating primarily new growth, but mitigating and changing 4
the behavior of the parking and traffic and environment of existing people. 5
6
And the last point, and it’s just a fixation of how CEQA is done or city councils and planning 7
commissions work, the EIR and Joanna correct me if I’m wrong, because I think you did a 8
completely wonderful job, but the EIR when it looks at the impacts on a city pretends that if it 9
doesn’t happen here, it doesn’t happen nearby, and that’s demonstrably false. And so if you 10
are a regional thinker and Joanne mentioned that we are doing this in the regional context, 11
then this community deserves to know so at least they can make the decision about whether a 12
little bit of growth here has fewer impacts than that same growth in Sunnyvale or Menlo Park 13
or Redwood City because we are the most mitigating, environmental sensitive community and I 14
can’t believe that growth anywhere else is better for the regional environment, for the global 15
climate than here. I know that the EIR and the CEQA process forces us to think of us as an 16
island, but we’re not. So encourage the Staff and the consultant and you all to think about 17
whether it’s better to limit growth here and push it elsewhere if we really are regional 18
environmentalists or whether we should just be an island. And thank you for five minutes. 19
That’s refreshing. 20
21
Acting Chair Gardias: Thank you. This concludes the public hearing, but per our practice we 22
would like staff to respond to the issues that Mr. Levy brought up. So if you could just spend a 23
couple of minutes just to review all this items that he brought to the table. Thank you. 24
25
Ms. Jansen: Sure, I’m happy to take a stab at that. So the first point was about thinking about 26
an additional fifth scenario that really goes big on housing and there’s one comment that Mr. 27
Levy made that I’m not sure whether you misspoke or misunderstood what I said, but the 28
meetings that these are based on were from 2014. And so they are based on ABAG’s 29
Projections 2013, so I’m certainly not disputing that since the summer of 2014 there’s been 30
additional growth and additional change. That’s certainly true. As far as I’m aware, there’s not 31
another set of ABAG projections that’s been released, since Projections 2013. 32
33
Acting Chair Gardias: No, it’s time for the staff to respond so… 34
35
Ms. Jansen: So I, again, the point is certainly taken that conditions have changed. We didn’t 36
finalize these scenarios until after the Summit, so we really did our best to take into account the 37
input that we heard at the Summit although we had already started forming the ideas about 38
that there would be four scenarios and that they would test a range. So I wouldn’t say that 39
they don’t take into account the input of the Summit, although the Summit, as you probably 40
recall, was really kind of more focused on policies and issues rather than on specific land use 41
discussions and the more land use focused discussions were really the ones that we had in the 42
summer, the previous summer of 2014. But I think we did particularly when we talk about the 43
range of growth management strategies, the range of sustainability strategies, the range of 44
transportation investments, not just the pure numbers, but other types of characteristics that 45
City of Palo Alto Page 11
are considered in the scenarios those very much come directly from the Summit. So we did 1
make a very strong effort to incorporate that input. 2
3
That said, certainly the fifth scenario is an opportunity to add another bookend to this process. 4
We have heard voices that one way of addressing the jobs/housing imbalance that the Council, 5
that would really seem to spur the Council to want to add a fifth scenario is not just to decrease 6
jobs, but also to increase housing. So we have heard that message and I’m sure that’s 7
something that’s going to be an ongoing part of the discussion. As Mr. Levy accurately said, no 8
decisions have been made about that and we are going to be talking about that more with the 9
Council on May 16th. 10
11
Another point that was made was about mitigation measures changing the behavior of existing 12
residents and I think that is a really important and intriguing question, and it’s also, as Mr. Levy 13
noted, somewhat awkward to address under CEQA. In terms of statute and case law, really we 14
can’t write an EIR or a mitigation measure that requires a project to mitigate existing 15
deficiencies. And in terms of thinking about a mechanism for doing that such as funding for a 16
particular transportation improvement or a particular mitigation, really the best mechanism we 17
have are things like development impact fees and, of course, as you are aware, those are 18
charged to new development. So, while I think it’s absolutely vital to change behaviors or 19
address problems that are happening now, today, even in the absence of any growth, it may be 20
a little bit challenging to do that through your EIR and its mitigation measures specifically. I 21
think the Comp Plan and its policies and programs are a great venue for considering those kinds 22
of attempts, but I think it is, again, a very valid point that we need to keep in mind the 23
increment of new growth compared to what’s already here is not solely responsible for the 24
types of impacts that you see when you read the EIR. 25
26
And then finally, the question about how the EIR conceptualizes where growth might happen or 27
what might be the impacts of deflecting growth away from Palo Alto. It’s accurate to say that in 28
terms of the traffic modeling, just to take one quantitative example, the traffic model is a 29
regional traffic model. It’s the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) model, which 30
looks not just at the nine county Bay Area, but even beyond those borders. We kind of plug 31
numbers, the numbers that you saw for the scenarios into that traffic model and when we 32
decrease housing in Palo Alto it is accurate to say that we didn’t then look into the model and 33
increase housing in Tracy or in Sunnyvale or in other places, so I think that’s a valid point. We 34
did, I think, touch on this in some other maybe less model‐based sections of the EIR. For 35
example, in the section on population and housing the discussion of Scenarios 1 and 2 does 36
bring up the question of well what will happen in terms of housing affordability or displacement 37
if the supply of housing is lower rather than higher. So that I think maybe gets to some of that 38
question. It may not be a complete answer, but those are my responses. 39
40
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. Thank you very much. So let’s then focus for a moment on 41
what we may accomplish today. So any proposal from you? Are there any sections we can 42
review today and some that we may leave for the next time? 43
44
Elena: Thank you Chair. Staff would suggest that we follow the format of the slide right here to 45
focus the discussion on the EIR methodology, the impact findings and mitigation measures, and 46
City of Palo Alto Page 12
specific attention to mitigation measures that maybe you have some comments on and also 1
specifically probably the significant and unavoidable impacts. 2
3
Acting Chair Gardias: Ok, so that would be the agenda for today, right? 4
5
Jonathan Lait, Assistant Director: If the Commission feels, again it’s your… we are here to 6
receive your comments so if you can do it today, great. If you want us to come back, just tell us 7
the areas that you want us to focus on when we come back as well. That would be great. 8
9
Acting Chair Gardias: Yeah, well I mean for sure we would like to have a follow up session. That 10
we, we already know this, right? Because there will be some learning curve, some after 11
thoughts, so we would like to already put it on our calendar and then we will not be able to 12
review everything. 13
14
Mr. Lait: Ok, so when we get to the calendar, I don’t think our consultant is available for the 15
next meeting, but we can find some time in I guess May where we can come back before the 16
Council meeting? Ok? 17
18
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. 19
20
Mr. Lait: Thank you. 21
22
Acting Chair Gardias: Ok, thank you. So let’s get started with EIR methodology. Would you like 23
to take us into it, just to give a summary of the methodology within a couple of minutes? So it 24
would just put us into the mood. 25
Mr. Lait: So yeah, if I could suggest, maybe… so I, I don’t know how much the Commission has 26
read. I mean, it’s a big document and I don’t think we are expecting… we actually had this 27
conversation late in the afternoon. I mean it could be a little bit intimidating because there is a 28
lot of technical information in here, a lot of details, and as a Commissioner that might be a little 29
bit, could be a little bit off putting because how are we to know about all these different 30
detailed aspects of the code? And so that extent we do have, we can respond to some of those 31
questions if something strikes you as not being right or you want some more information we 32
can talk about that. But I would suggest that as community members I would look at the 33
document from that lens and as Commissioners, to you know… if you’ve read the document 34
and Cara kind of spoke to some of the key areas to pay attention to. If you’re reading 35
something that doesn’t quite sound right those are the things we kind of want to hear about. If 36
we were to launch into a discussion about methodology we would be here into tomorrow 37
sometime. 38
39
Acting Chair Gardias: Ok. 40
41
Mr. Lait: But I guess I would ask maybe amongst the Commissioners if there’s any specific 42
questions that Commissioners have, maybe that would be a way that we can kind of tease out 43
(interrupted) 44
45
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. Ok, I know. We’ll get there. So good, thank you. Please. 46
City of Palo Alto Page 13
1
Ms. Jansen: I just want to reassure you that it’s been my experience at hearings like these with 2
planning commissioners on a big document like that, that the questions are kind of all over the 3
place. So certainly from my point of view it’s fine if we jump around from parks to air quality to 4
traffic and that’s however you guys want to dive in is totally fine. 5
6
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. We’ll do. 7
8
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Framing question, another framing question. 9
10
Acting Chair Gardias: Yes, so yeah, Commissioner Waldfogel. 11
12
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Yeah, thank you. I mean there’s clearly a huge amount of work 13
has gone into this over more than just a few days, so it’s impressive. Just another question for 14
staff is, do you want us to try to weigh in on the scenarios, preferencing scenarios versus the 15
question of, say, mitigation that may apply across multiple scenarios? I mean what I am struck 16
by in this document is that there are very few categories where the impacts differ between the 17
scenarios. There are just a few and I’m just wondering are we looking for some focus on that 18
question? I mean you commented earlier that this is an unusual EIR in that it contains multiple 19
scenarios. You know, I’m surprised you didn’t do a little job descript, interactive calculator for 20
us. Maybe that will be the next version of this. But it’s not a serious request. But I just wonder 21
if you want us to think about that question at all tonight? 22
23
Ms. Jansen: I think the main goal in my mind for tonight is to hear any questions or concerns 24
that you have really about the analysis of the scenarios and the approach to how they were 25
analyzed or the conclusions that we came to. So to speak to your point, for example, if you 26
would have thought that by reading a particular threshold of significance you just kind of at a 27
gut level would have said, “Oh, well, Scenario 4 is going to be way worse than Scenario 1 on this 28
threshold,” and then you read the discussion and it said “Oh, I have exactly the same impacts.” 29
That’s the kind of question you might raise tonight and say, “Well, why is this? And I don’t see 30
how that can be, or did you take this into account?” and that would be fine. As opposed to just 31
a discussion of what we in CEQA parlance call kind of the merits of Scenario 1 versus Scenario 4, 32
if that’s helpful. 33
34
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: And just a suggestion as you present this you might want to 35
present the baseline numbers for these categories of housing, jobs, and because it’s, again it’s 36
hard to assess whether we are talking about 3 percent changes or 30 percent changes without 37
seeing the baseline numbers presented in this, in this (interrupted) 38
39
Ms. Jansen: Ok, great point. Yeah and those certainly are in the EIR, but I can see how that 40
would be helpful to have it on here. 41
42
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you. Commissioner Downing. 43
44
Commissioner Downing: So I do have kind of a preliminary question, probably a question for 45
Cara. But so the first two scenarios look at housing growth or looking at the average amount of 46
City of Palo Alto Page 14
housing we’ve added per year, so a little over 100 units, so my question is: how does that work 1
when we’re supposed to put together a Comp Plan that’s also consistent with our Housing 2
Element? Because in our Housing Element we’ve committed to 1,998 housing units by 2023 3
and so the EIR you’re doing here is looking at significantly less than the impact you would have 4
had to look at for the Housing Element. So how do these two things jive together? 5
6
Ms. Silver: Thank you. That’s a good question. So the Housing Element requires that the City 7
zoned for a certain number of units and so it’s really a theoretical number. It’s not the actual 8
number that is going to be built; whereas, the growth scenarios sort of estimate what we, it’s 9
not even a belief, it’s just kind of testing what happens if X number of units get built. So the 10
Housing Element looks at theoretical sites and then these growth scenarios look at the actual 11
units that will be built and what the environmental impacts of that particular level of growth 12
will be. 13
14
Commissioner Downing: So I think what I have difficulty in understanding is that when people 15
go ahead and they do development in line with the housing sites that we selected in the 16
Housing Element, people are relying on this EIR to cover themselves for that development, 17
right? Because we’ve already looked at what that looks like. That’s what they are relying on 18
when they go to build out their specific project. So what I don’t understand is let’s say for 19
whatever reason one year instead of 175 something units or whatever, someone grows at 500 20
units. How are they covered from an EIR perspective if the EIR looked at far fewer units than 21
they are allowed to build? How does that work? 22
23
Ms. Silver: Well, this EIR looks at the full range and so actually you will see in this document the 24
environmental impacts of that 500 unit development. It’s analyzed. I think what you’re asking 25
though is what happens if the Council were to select a Comp Plan policy that was targeted at 26
that particular number of units and that’s kind of a different issue. That’s not the CEQA 27
coverage aspect of the issue. That is if somebody, if the Council selected a growth option that 28
anticipates say 100 units and then a project for 500 units came on line that would be 29
inconsistent with the Comp Plan and would require a Comp Plan amendment. 30
31
Commissioner Downing: Right, so I guess what I’m getting at is I don’t even know why we’re 32
looking at an EIR with two possible options neither of which they could actually select for the 33
new Comp Plan update because it wouldn’t be in line with our Housing Element. 34
35
Ms. Jansen: I just want to go back to that because these are in line with the Housing Element. 36
But all of the scenarios include at least the minimum amount of housing that’s called for in the 37
Housing Element. Scenarios 1 and 2 anticipate the continuation of the existing adopted 38
Housing Element, and then in 3 and 4 we look at additional housing or a change in the housing 39
sites. 40
41
Commissioner Downing: But I don’t follow that because you’re… the number of housing units 42
you’ve targeted, I mean it’s for 100 something units, and that’s far less than what would 43
actually be allowed to be built under the Housing Element. That’s less than the target. 44
45
Man off microphone: It’s 151 per year. 46
City of Palo Alto Page 15
1
Commissioner Downing: Yeah, 151 per year and yet we’re supposed to build almost 2,000, the 2
target is 2,000 by 2023, so I don’t understand because the two option (interrupted) 3
4
Ms. Jansen: Oh, I see what you’re saying, in terms of the rate. 5
6
Commissioner Downing: Yeah. 7
8
Ms. Jansen: So the total amount is greater, right. So this won’t do anything to prevent the 9
housing from being built that’s called for in your Housing Element. I guess the point that I’m 10
making is the total amount, I’m trying to go back to the table here, the total amount under 11
Scenario 1 and Scenario 2, which are the two lowest ones, are still above what’s called for in 12
your current Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA); so in your current Housing Element. 13
14
Commissioner Downing: Well, so I mean to get really technical about it, right, our target for 15
2023 is almost 2,000 units. 16
17
Ms. Jansen: Right. 18
19
Commissioner Downing: Almost certainly for the next 7 year period after that it’s going to be 20
much more than 2,000 units, so I count a minimum of 4,000 units just based on RHNA 21
allocation. So that’s not even like oh, we want to fix our housing problem. That’s just plain 22
RHNA allocation. So the only scenario that even comes close to that is Scenario 4. So my 23
question is, I’m just… I don’t understand why we are studying scenarios that are not in line with 24
our Housing Element, which would be, if selected for the Comp Plan, immediately inconsistent 25
with the Housing Element. That’s what I don’t understand. 26
27
Ms. Jansen: I guess, it seems like my concept here that we’re… the total number is larger than 28
your total RHNA is not an adequate response. So I apologize for that. I think what we wanted 29
to, your question really is: why are we considering this? I think you have a two‐part question is 30
one, why are we considering this, and two, could we really even adopt this? 31
32
Commissioner Downing: Right, right. 33
34
Ms. Jansen: And I would say the reason you’re considering this is because it’s consistent with 35
the past, I think it’s 40 years of development history in Palo Alto. So in terms of identifying a 36
range of scenarios I think there is some validity for considering, and again, what we’re testing 37
here is what would happen if, right, we’re not saying this is what you should do or this is the 38
one you have to pick, but part of the question, and I think it is valid to ask is: what would 39
happen if we just continued that pattern? And so that’s why this Scenario 1 as well as Scenario 40
2 are on the table is because this is the average of the rate you have been doing for the past 40 41
years and because we did hear a lot of voices in the community that say, “I don’t want to grow 42
any faster than that.” So that’s why these scenarios are among the range of what was tested. 43
44
So then I think the second part of your question is, could we really even really feasibly adopt 45
these? I think that you could adopt these, and again, the modeling that we’ve done for these 46
City of Palo Alto Page 16
scenarios, the 2 lowest growth Scenarios 1 and 2, does take into account the existing housing 1
sites. So the housing sites from your adopted Housing Element are in what was modeled for 2
Scenarios 1 and 2 and that’s assumed that those housing sites are going to build out and in 3
addition there would be some more room for additional growth. What about your future 4
RHNA? Is it reasonable to say that you would be able to meet those? I think that’s a more 5
speculative question and I don’t really think there’s necessarily a yes or no answer that anybody 6
could give you today. 7
8
The way that ABAG derives those RHNA projections is based in part on local regulations so you 9
might say that if Palo Alto like had a particularly restrictive growth regime than ABAG might 10
take that into account when assigning you your RHNA and assign you a lower RHNA than we’re 11
guessing today that you’ll get. Of course, the other thing that ABAG takes into account when 12
it’s making its RHNA assignments is Plan Bay Area and the RTP and the sustainable community 13
strategy and thinking about kind of a larger regional idea of concentrating growth, for example, 14
around transit. Of course, Palo Alto has some really important transit resources that ABAG 15
would probably be looking really closely at as a great place for more housing. So, would 16
adopting Scenario 1 or Scenario 2 as the preferred scenario make it more difficult for you to 17
meet your RHNA in the future? I think that’s a very valid question and the City may well find 18
itself in that position. But I think that’s an important part of what we’re trying to surface here 19
with looking at this range of four scenarios. 20
21
Commissioner Downing: So I just want to make sure that I understand what we’re looking at. 22
So if we did adopt Scenario 1 and 2, and there comes a year where we’re not adding 151 units, 23
we’re adding 500 units, 600 units, are those developers then out of luck? Do we have to go and 24
redo our EIR if we are, in fact, building out the units that we said we would in our Housing 25
Element? Would we have to go back and redo the EIR? 26
27
Ms. Silver: In general, probably not. What we would do is we would look at where those 28
housing units are built. Assuming they are built in the areas that have been analyzed in the EIR, 29
there wouldn’t be a need for additional analysis. Although there might be some sort of project 30
level impact analysis, so once you know exactly what the… this is kind of a very general program 31
level EIR. Once a project is identified, a housing project, there might be some additional shade 32
and shadow impacts and aesthetic impacts and groundwater contamination issues or things like 33
that associated with the particular project that is proposed that would require some additional 34
environmental analysis. 35
36
Commissioner Downing: Ok, but they wouldn’t have to go do a separate EIR is what you’re 37
saying? If they were, if we were over that limit? If we were over these projections? 38
39
Ms. Silver: If we were… I’m sorry. 40
41
Commissioner Downing: So these EIR’s right, so this projects 151 units per year. If we had a 42
year where we were building 600 units, would the projects that are over 151 units, would they 43
have to go and do their own separate EIR because this one does not cover them? 44
45
City of Palo Alto Page 17
Ms. Silver: Right, as I explained as long as the sites in this EIR have been analyzed and those are 1
the sites that are being proposed, they wouldn’t have to do program level EIR, but there might 2
be some project specific issues that would be studied in more detail. It may not be an EIR, it 3
may be Negative Declaration, just some lesser environmental review. 4
5
Commissioner Downing: Ok, and if we had chosen a scenario that covered that number of units, 6
then would that be avoided? 7
8
Ms. Silver: Yeah, it’s really the same answer. 9
10
Commissioner Downing: Ok. Alright. 11
12
Acting Chair Gardias: So I think Commissioner Alcheck would like to speak to the same subject. 13
14
Commissioner Alcheck: Well actually, ok well first I want to just sort of formally acknowledge 15
that I really appreciate your contributions, Mr. Levy. I find them particularly informative and 16
inspiring and I hope that you continue to communicate your knowledge to the leadership in this 17
City and to its residents. 18
19
I think it’s hard to imagine like that we will continue for decades this process the way it 20
currently is, because I couldn’t agree more about the issue that we are addressing, this 21
environmental impact as an island. I’m on a high horse here when I say this, but I think that the 22
solution, the road out of here, is a visionary… there’s a home in Leland Manor this week that’s 23
being listed for $2,000 a square foot. We have, in my opinion, the only impact that I find 24
problematic at this point is the housing shortage, and I find… It’s my impression that the fifth 25
scenario is a reaction, that all the scenarios are incorporating too much growth. That was my 26
impression. I may be wrong, but my impression that this Council and the leadership was not 27
satisfied that any of these scenarios were sufficiently slow enough and that is, I believe, I won’t 28
speak for everyone on the Commission, but I think I am, we are of one mind, Commissioner 29
Downing and I. And I imagine there are other peers here that feel the same way, that this is 30
just… we need some visionary leadership that inspires this community to address the housing 31
crisis instead of encouraging the sort of fears that are being perpetuated particularly among our 32
residentialist community members who want to sort of turn a blind eye to this problem. And I 33
think that this notion that the Housing Element, all we have to do in the Housing Element to 34
sort of make it legally adequate is to suggest that we could build this many homes, but we have 35
absolutely no responsibility to really encourage that. In fact, we’re just going to pretend like 36
that’s an option, but we are never going to allow a process that would build more than 140 37
units, which is what we have. And you’re right, it’s a very restrictive approach to housing 38
development. And I just can’t imagine that RHNA moving forward will go oh, you have such a 39
restrictive housing policy in place so we’re going to continue to allocate you less units simply 40
because you prefer to live in a $2,000 a square foot residential market. None of our peers, 41
none my peers of capable of affording housing in this area and it’s just… it’s so hard to imagine 42
that there won’t be some significant just like slap in the face moment over the next decade 43
where we just… I find it problematic. 44
45
City of Palo Alto Page 18
I find this exercise, it’s such an important exercise and I’m so discouraged because I feel like, I 1
don’t feel like our efforts to encourage a fifth scenario that would be in line with the go big 2
approach of Mr. Levy has any likelihood of occurring. And I think that’s really problematic and I 3
appreciate that the EIR is not the place where we sort of define how we solve every problem, 4
but I do think that this concept of what… maybe the EIR doesn’t have to address the regional 5
and environmental impacts, but why wouldn’t our leadership encourage a draft of an EIR that 6
did accept or define those impacts with more information? I think this is going to fall on deaf 7
ears. I think it’s going to go to City Council, I think when it goes to City Council they’re going to 8
be much happier when they see a Scenario 5 that is less than Scenario 4, which is woefully 9
inadequate. 10
11
So I don’t know in hearing your sort of dialog with our City Attorney I think that every project 12
that sort of… any project in our current scenario that would create 500 units of housing would 13
absolutely probably affect elements of the community that would probably necessitate if not a 14
Negative Declaration some sort of the EIR approach on a project based specific level, and I 15
don’t know that there would be a conflict. I kind of think that her answer that it would be the 16
same answer is probably accurate. I don’t think that… I think the more important point that 17
you’re highlighting is just, what an inconsistency that the City would approach this from a 18
scenario that is wholly disconnected from… highly sophisticated suggestion of how many units 19
we need. It just feels like we are participating in an effort to provide inaccurate information. 20
And so by suggesting that we don’t actually have to build those units and that 145 is really what 21
we’ve done for the last 40 years; the last 40 years have resulted in what I would call an housing 22
disaster, and so the… and I don’t know that the RHNA allocation even if we did accomplish it 23
would actually get us out of this disaster so quickly. Because it probably won’t, but I just think 24
there has to be more emphasis placed on the notion that we should aspire for a regional… 25
26
Our City should aspire to impact the region in an overall positive way, as opposed to how can 27
we essentially ignore the regional situation? And really it’s funny that comment about 28
addressing the changes that would be required for 100 percent of the existing residential 29
population it’s… the residents of this community that’s not, you would not think that that is the 30
kind of information people want to hear, you know? We might need to change the way we 31
want to live so that our community could benefit, for our region to benefit, for our earth to 32
benefit. But, if I, if it was my choice, that’s the sort of information I would like us to consider. 33
What mitigation efforts does the whole community could possibly take on in an effort to 34
improve the negative impacts? And so I think I’ll end there, but I’m discouraged with the, with 35
my anticipated belief of what Scenario 5 will be, and that’s it. 36
37
Acting Chair Gardias: Thank you. Commissioner Rosenblum. 38
39
Commissioner Rosenblum: Hi. So I take the advice to heart to try to concentrate on the analysis 40
and possibly how you came to certain conclusions; however, I think you can’t really do that 41
without looking at the scenario ranges. And so a couple things that I think would be helpful: 42
what is our number for 2030 in terms of RHNA and ABAG allocation? So if we hit our minimum 43
from the numbers that you were using from 2013 what is our minimum threshold in terms of 44
household formation that we are expected to hit? 45
46
City of Palo Alto Page 19
Ms. Jansen: You’re asking about if you projected the RHNA, your current RHNA which goes 1
through 2023 (interrupted) 2
3
Commissioner Rosenblum: Correct. 4
5
Ms. Jansen: To 2030. 6
7
Commissioner Rosenblum: Correct. 8
9
Ms. Jansen: What that would be? 10
11
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yeah, because in [unintelligible] Commissioner Downing you said 12
you believe that all of them would meet this. What is the number we had to meet? 13
14
Ms. Jansen: Well, what I was referring to is just the like I said, the overall total and I understand 15
the point about the rate. So I certainly don’t have that calculation going forward at my 16
fingertips. 17
18
Commissioner Rosenblum: Ok. I think that’s a really important number and my guess is that 19
these, all the scenarios except Scenario 4 will be short and that when the new numbers are 20
calculated that even that will be short. Because I believe the analysis that Dr. Levy brought 21
around there are forces that are moving that number upward. And furthermore it doesn’t even 22
take into account an existing gap when this started, which as you correctly point out are 40 23
years of housing policy. So you started in the hole. We were given an allocation that is based 24
upon 3 percent of the County population, but we have 9 percent of the jobs, 25 percent of 25
Caltrain boardings. We’re an important regional hub, but we got off light in some ways in the 26
RHNA calculations, but that doesn’t even account for the deficit we started with. So if we’re 27
trying to address the jobs/housing imbalance I understand there’s a denominator issue you can 28
just get rid of jobs and that might be an answer, but I think the solution is really around 29
housing, particularly if you’re thinking about sustainability and regional planning. 30
31
The second thing I wanted to bring or first question, but also to bring in… I just did, I agreed 32
with Commissioner Waldfogel that it’s very helpful to actually have the baselines. So I put the 33
baselines in to just calculate the range of growth that you’re anticipating. And it’s between I 34
think .54 and .88 percent growth per year in housing. And that is I believe below the regional 35
estimate in every case. And so I think that even our most aggressive scenario we’re still slipping 36
behind. And so I echo my Commissioner’s ask to make sure the baseline is there. Put that 37
baseline against the region. I think that would be really helpful. It must be in this document 38
somewhere and I just, again, I read the executive summary. I went to individual exhibits, but I 39
couldn’t find it myself. 40
41
The final comment I’ll make is Dr. Levy also referenced the Our Palo Alto Summit that took 42
place this last year. And I remember our Mayor at the time, Holman, made a great speech at 43
the beginning. Said, “This is the Constitutional Convention for this document, for the 44
Comprehensive Plan” and that that’s what we’re doing is trying to come up with exactly these 45
things. How much growth do we want in housing? What is our policy towards job growth? 46
City of Palo Alto Page 20
What is our transportation policy? And the interesting thing is that they tabulated this. So 1
every table had to submit their answers by phone and the City captured all this. So you can just 2
go and download it and I did that. And so it’s quite revealing. You have a very high 3
preponderance of answers that were for much higher density, even to the extent of saying we 4
should get rid of our height limits and the people that showed up and it’s a very large set of 5
people, it was like 400 something people, and under each category you have more than 80 6
answers for each of these things. So you actually have a fairly good set of results and what I’m 7
getting to here is none of the scenarios reflect that. 8
9
All the scenarios are low growth scenarios defined as lower than the County, lower than what 10
would make a dent in the jobs/housing imbalance. And certainly when you look at certain goals 11
like reducing vehicle miles traveled covering emissions the scenarios really all very similar. I 12
mean you’re absolutely correct when you said the impacts are all the same. It’s because the 13
scenarios are almost the same. And so my point on the analysis is in some ways they’re all kind 14
of the same. And what I’m asking for is you’re doing Scenario 5 is there should be a bold 15
scenario particularly around housing. And housing is the root of a lot of the goodness that 16
particularly when you look for sustainability goals, but also to help with affordability and other 17
things that we saw the last time we met, which was around the Citizen’s Survey, the great 18
dissatisfaction was all around affordability of housing, diversity of housing. Those were the 19
most notable things by far. 20
21
So anyway, so my comment is when I look at the scenarios they feel although you give them 22
different titles the numbers are all within a fairly narrow range. And that’s why the impacts are 23
all the same. And so put that aside in terms of the crafting of the document itself, baselines 24
plus our compliance requirements regionally would be super helpful right up front and to see 25
where we are under those would be, would be useful. 26
27
Ms. Jansen: Elena was kind enough to find the current RHNA for me from your current Housing 28
Element. It’s 1,988 units as Commissioner Downing said. So I think over eight years that’s 248 29
units a year times 15 years from 2015 to 2030 would be 3,720 units. I think if I can remember 30
how to do math by hand. So that would be beyond Scenarios 1 and 2 as you pointed out, 31
slightly beyond Scenario 3, then Scenario 4 would exceed that. 32
33
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yeah, so again I concur with Commissioner Downing. It’s odd that 34
three of our four scenarios are below what the conservative RHNA estimate is and if Dr. Levy 35
who is a regional economist is correct about this, those numbers are only going up, and we 36
started in a hole. So I, that reflects my comment that if housing is our main, is one of the main 37
issues as reflected in the Citizen’s Survey, as reflected in the Our Palo Alto Summit, as reflected 38
in just about daily life and the cost of housing, it’s just odd that three of our four scenarios 39
don’t even meet our kind of statutory requirement. So I think it’s important and I’m glad you’re 40
doing a fifth scenario because it gives us an opportunity to really put the hammer down. 41
42
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you. It looks like that’s the material that we would 43
appreciate at the following, at the follow up meeting and probably you should just spend first 44
hour just on reviewing the relationship to the RHNA numbers and scenarios that we have on 45
the table. Can we do this? 46
City of Palo Alto Page 21
1
Ms. Jansen: Yes, that’s fine. 2
3
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you. So (interrupted) 4
5
Ms. Jansen: We’re happy to do that. I guess, I’m sorry, could I just ask for a clarification on your 6
point about comparing… what I wrote down was put the baseline against the region. Could you 7
just say again what metrics you’re thinking of there to make sure we’re (interrupted) 8
9
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yes. Two baselines; the first is your summary tables. I’ll say net 10
new. Net new housing, net new population, net new jobs, but don’t give the current. So two of 11
those numbers are quite easy to find; it’s very easy to find the total number of current 12
households and the total current population. It’s difficult to find the number of current 13
estimated jobs. All of them are findable and, but it would be good instead of us trying to find 14
our own numbers, working off different rates you just had the official City numbers that you 15
used when you did the scenarios. 16
17
Ms. Jansen: Ok. 18
19
Commissioner Rosenblum: The second is regional policy estimates, so the latest numbers from 20
ABAG, RHNA, what we’re expected to do. And so use that as like here’s the hurdle we need to 21
try to hit and if you have a policy if we decide we don’t want to hit it for whatever reason that 22
should be explicit. 23
24
Ms. Jansen: Ok. And we are happy to provide that and I will since you mentioned looking for it 25
in the EIR just note that at least some of that is in the Population and Housing Chapter which 26
has comparisons to the Current ABAG projects, but I’m happy to put in the, what you’re asking 27
for here, but it is in the EIR. 28
29
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you. Commissioner Downing. 30
31
Commissioner Downing: So a little bit out of the box thinking here, but there are certain 32
elements of our Comprehensive Plan for example that are required by law. We’re required to 33
provide them, we’re required to have Land Use, we’re required to have Housing, but I would 34
suggest a conversation for staff and for Council about other elements that are not necessarily 35
required which other cities undertake because they view them as valuable for assessing the 36
quality of life of the city and where it’s going. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about these 37
kind of core things, but sort of missing a little bit of the side things. 38
39
So to the point of ok, this is like the one percent of growth, what about the other 99 percent I 40
mean there are Comprehensive Plans that do address those things. There are Comprehensive 41
Plans that look at economic vitality, right? That [unintelligible] any number of things that a 42
community finds valuable to itself and for us I mean I certainly think that looking at 43
displacement, looking at housing affordability, just looking at what the quality of life is, what 44
the diversity of the housing stock is. Not just the numbers, but how many people can actually 45
find what they need? What actually matches their household size, what actually matches their 46
City of Palo Alto Page 22
incomes, right? I don’t know that we’re necessarily doing a very good job of coving that and if 1
this is a top priority for us and I don’t know. I’d like to explore that option for the future 2
because it’s clear that this community has priorities and when other communities come up with 3
priorities that aren’t statutory they still had them in the Comp Plan. 4
5
Ms. Silver: Just one clarification on that. I think that’s an excellent point. So and again we have 6
to separate the Comp Plan from the Comp Plan EIR so some of that discussion is actually in the 7
Comp Plan itself in the Housing Element. And then if your comment is that you would like to 8
see what the environmental impacts of that displacement is and that would be an appropriate 9
comment for the EIR. 10
11
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. Cara, thank you very much for reminding us about the 12
objective of this session and all those comments are truly good, right? We need to just verify 13
the math and I heard we will do it, right? At the follow up session, but if we may just start 14
refocusing on the EIR because there is another big book that we need to review so I would like 15
to ask my colleagues just to do this. Commissioner Waldfogel. 16
17
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Thank you. And perhaps to just amplify on some of the comments 18
that have just been made and by the way my preference is to get this done in a finite amount of 19
time. So that would be a good thing. 20
21
How coupled are the various aspects or how coupled are the impacts from the various aspects? 22
So I mean if we were to think about I’ll probably be pilloried for putting a number out, but if we 23
were to think about say, a 10,000 housing unit objective, but without substantially changing the 24
jobs number I mean how would we even think that one though? I mean would we have to, I 25
mean are all these things coupled together that the cultural impacts, aesthetic impacts, the air 26
quality impacts are all wrapped around each of these pieces or are they fairly separable? 27
28
Ms. Jansen: It’s a great question and it’s, it’s really something we struggled in both constructing 29
the scenarios and in analyzing the scenarios because at a certain point you really have to look at 30
something as a piece. It’s very difficult to just analyze an isolated component of a scenario by 31
itself. So just to take an example kind of a micro‐example of the transportation measures I’ll 32
have you look in the project description and you’ll see that the different scenarios include 33
different sets of transportation measures so like these are summarized in Table 3‐7 and they 34
include different ideas about sustainability for example. And so when you measure Scenario 4 35
just as an example that really looks at the entire kind of package of a sustainability initiatives 36
and transportation infrastructure improvements and those numbers, the jobs and housing 37
numbers coupled with that set of improvements and that set of sustainability initiatives. 38
39
So just thinking about the job for example of our traffic modelers they can’t really model the 40
effects of only giving employer incentives for carpooling and bicycling separate from giving free 41
transit passes. Or they could, but what that would mean would be remodeling the scenario 42
kind of for each one of what our five different sustainability initiatives for example that are 43
listed under Scenario 4. So the approach to the analysis is really to consider these kind of as a 44
package and for that reason it can be somewhat difficult to disentangle whether a given level of 45
impact is due to or a lack of an impact is really due more to the employer incentives or is it due 46
City of Palo Alto Page 23
more to the free transit passes and kind of what, what’s the magnitude of those different 1
measures (interrupted) 2
3
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Right, but relative to that can you disentangle housing from jobs? 4
I mean at least at that level. Is that a, are those separable threads? 5
6
Ms. Jansen: I want to make sure that I’m trying to respond in a helpful way. The way that the 7
quantitative analysis was done considers both of those things as a package. To think about the 8
differing impacts I think you’d be really talking about those two topics kind of conceptually. So 9
does housing generate more trips or do jobs generate more trips or at what times of day do 10
those trips occur? And you could kind of talk qualitatively about what you might expect to see 11
from an increase in housing or a decrease in jobs, but when we, if we want to do specific 12
quantitative modeling that actually looks at developing different parts of Palo Alto in different 13
ways then we need to assign specific numbers to specific locations and then do that, that 14
modeling and that analysis of that particular scenario. So to consider a change in one aspect of 15
that scenario whether through a fifth scenario or some modification of one of the scenarios 16
would really mean kind of going back and changing the numbers and doing the model again. 17
18
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Well and just to finish this thread and is that a, is that process 19
statutory? I mean I guess what I’m looking for is: is there a way that we can answer some of 20
these questions? I mean I’ve heard some requests which I support for scenarios that have 21
more housing. I don’t think I’ve heard any demands here for scenarios that support more jobs, 22
but people may have viewpoints on that here. I bet it’d be great if there was a quick way to get 23
to that so that we don’t draw this out into a Scenario 5 followed by Scenarios 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. 24
25
Ms. Jansen: Sure. Sure, sure. Yeah. 26
27
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: That would just be my ask. 28
29
Ms. Jansen: Right. And I think that was part of the goal in the scenarios and I definitely have 30
heard that for some of you or maybe all of you the scenarios don’t really seem to represent a 31
range. For other people they seem very dramatically different. So, but that was the goal of the 32
four scenarios just to kind of provide like a low and a high so that then once we do that, those 33
analyses we can make some educated guesses about how changing the numbers or the 34
locations of growth might, might make an (interrupted) 35
36
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: So to that point then I think there would be a lot of value in 37
perhaps following some of the suggestions here and looking at some, looking at some stretch 38
numbers (interrupted) 39
40
Ms. Jansen: Beyond the range we have (interrupted) 41
42
Acting Vice‐Chair Waldfogel: Right, beyond the ranges that we have because at least that way 43
we can, at least we’ll have some seat of the pants analysis. So I mean we may say 10,000, 44
15,000 units clearly unacceptable impact, but at least we have something to base that 45
discussion on rather than pure speculation. 46
City of Palo Alto Page 24
1
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. We have Commissioner Alcheck waiting for his time. 2
3
Commissioner Alcheck: Yeah, actually I just… this might be a question for Assistant Director 4
Jonathan Lait. Do you have the impression that Scenario 5 is supposed to be a slower growth 5
model than Scenario 4? I know that it’s not being presented tonight, but I assume that it’s 6
being worked on and before we get too far ahead of ourselves I’m just curious if you have any 7
information to share sort of regarding what… is it still open for? We had a community member 8
today that suggested we should go big. Is that an option or is it, has there been Council 9
direction as to what they’re hoping it should be that you can sort of specify today? 10
11
Mr. Lait: So I’m going to ask Elena who has been working with the consultant team and staff to 12
develop that Scenario 5, but I again just want to take the opportunity to redirect us to the 13
document. We’re not here about, we’re not here tonight to talk about the Scenario 5, but 14
there will be opportunities to have this discussion. What we’re here prepared to talk about is 15
the document, but with that in mind I’ll ask Elena just to kind of briefly update the Commission 16
on that Scenario 5. 17
18
Elena: So we have requested direction and feedback from the City Council on what Scenario 5 19
should be analyzing. We had a meeting about housing in February where we asked should we 20
consider significant housing changes that would result in changes to some of these policies or 21
even the Housing Element and we didn’t receive as much feedback as we had hoped. We did 22
receive a lot of good information, but I think that’s what we’re anticipating to be hearing back 23
from May 16th, on May 16th. Our impression is not that they’re looking more for significant 24
increase of housing. The direction seems to be more looking at the quality of life. To finding 25
that balance between jobs and housing that would help support existing and future residents of 26
what they expect from the City of Palo Alto. 27
28
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. Ok, thank you for the update. I have two Commissioners 29
waiting for their [unintelligible], but in order just to shape the discussion toward the document 30
I will start asking questions myself. So hopefully it’s going to just trigger the switch. So if you 31
don’t mind I will just go through the impacts and mitigation measures and I will refer to the 32
specific sheets so please just follow me and I will just do a couple of them at the time because I 33
know that the others may want to continue on the scenario numbers. 34
35
So if you just let’s go to the Page 1.8 that is the first from the impacts series and just talks about 36
the aesthetics. And this refers to the, refers to the discussion that was at the Council level 37
about how should Palo Alto look like. And I think that there will be probably a specific Council 38
direction about how truly architecture and aesthetics of Palo Alto should be derived and I’m 39
sure that they will provide some sort of pointers and guidance in that perspective, but there 40
should be some policy or mitigations because of the changes. And some of the mitigation 41
measures that address the first aesthetic points talk about variety of the different of promotion 42
of quality design and some other items. It is always a question what is a quality design. And 43
then there will be many parties just arguing about this. 44
45
City of Palo Alto Page 25
There is from perspective of the aesthetics and architecture and visual resources there is a 1
concept of vernacular design that pretty much addresses everything that’s [rated to] the 2
environment because that’s the design that just takes the resources that are in, the local 3
resources and builds locally, right? So there is no transportation, no environmental impact and 4
so forth. And then pretty much there is a certain aesthetic look that is derived from the local 5
environment. So this is how adobe buildings were built at a certain point of time because they 6
were natural. They built out of natural resources; clay and straw and whatever was available. 7
That pretty much gave the old missions their look and then that is a possibility or opportunity 8
for Palo Alto. So I would if I, I would suggest to insert vernacular definition into this document 9
that would maybe be more appropriate. So that’s comment number one. 10
11
Then if you turn to Page 1.17 and before I just go to the specific item I would like to just also 12
know that this that was kind of obvious during this discussion, but when you look at that 13
significance of different scenarios as my colleague observes, observed, all of them are pretty 14
much the same for all the, for all impacts which is truly to believe. There are some differences, 15
like for example for Culture‐3 item, but throughout all of them those scenarios they pretty 16
much they have the same impact. And I would recommend that you just go and review them 17
again because when I was just looking myself and I can give you maybe couple of comments 18
after the meeting I find that some of them were truly to be, were not really… they should vary 19
among themselves. That was my perception. So on Page (interrupted) 20
21
Ms. Jansen: Sorry, couldn’t I just ask about that? Are you saying that what’s in the table doesn’t 22
match the conclusion that’s in the text or are you saying that you disagree with the conclusion 23
(interrupted) 24
25
Acting Chair Gardias: I disagree with the significance (interrupted) 26
27
Ms. Jansen: Ok. 28
29
Acting Chair Gardias: Of the impact for different scenarios. 30
31
Ms. Jansen: Ok, thank you. 32
33
Acting Chair Gardias: And I just don’t want to just use too much time on this, right? So there is 34
like for example when I go to Page 117 and that’s a good, I’m going to give you an example on 35
the that relates to a Culture‐1C item, a mitigation measure, and this talks about archeological 36
resources, but pretty much take this comments throughout. There is number of the state level 37
policy requirements which I believe that are not necessary to be in this document. They just 38
put a haze and lots of verbiage in this documentation that may not be necessary. If there is 39
already a policy, state policy measure that we need to comply with this doesn’t have to be in 40
this document. This is just an obvious reference. 41
42
Ms. Jansen: I agree. 43
44
Acting Chair Gardias: So if there is a possibility and then pretty much this was a bullet point 45
within this mitigation about protection of Palo Alto’s archeological resources; this is governed 46
City of Palo Alto Page 26
with state level documentation so I don’t believe that we need to pretty much repeat what’s 1
governed with the state measures. And I may find more examples like this. 2
3
So now I’m going to just go back to my colleagues and I know that Commissioner Rosenblum 4
has a comment. 5
6
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yeah so going back to a couple of the specific items under the plan, 7
so assuming the scenarios are what they are a few things I think would be significant. I think 8
that the biggest lever you have for mitigations so the of the four plans as presented or the four 9
scenarios as presented Scenario 4 seems to be the most thoughtful within the community input 10
that I’ve seen. Meaning it’s attempting to use various mitigation measures to manage growth 11
versus hard caps. It anticipates a larger proportion of housing, etcetera. So if I concentrate on 12
that one I find that the most useful of the scenarios and it seems compliant and it’s the only 13
one that seems compliant with our regional allocation. 14
15
I think that there is language that seems so Transportation 3A, require Transportation Demand 16
Management (TDM) programs, for example, and so my question is how granular do we get at 17
this level? So do we try to advocate for specific mode shares through more aggressive TDM 18
programming? So the thing I’m thinking of specifically we just launched our Transportation 19
Management Association (TMA). They’re beginning to acquire funding. They are, they have 20
their own goals for trying to work on mode shift. And so under Scenario 4, under all the 21
scenarios actually, probably the biggest lever in managing impacts is changing people’s 22
behaviors in mode shift. Should this EIR anticipate the level of funding or the kind of TDM’s 23
that may be required? Because right now it just says “require TDM,” but is that something 24
that’s going to be anticipated by the Comp Plan or as part of the EIR? So that’s the question. 25
The comment would be I want this probably to be the biggest lever that we could use 26
particularly under Scenario 4. 27
28
Ms. Jansen: I think that the EIR mitigation measures really have a responsibility to be specific, 29
feasible, and enforceable. So if we were to just kind of throw out there that oh, the City should 30
start a TMA and do some TDM stuff and we didn’t really have any evidence that you had the 31
resources to do that or you had any intention of doing that then it would be very difficult to 32
kind of propose that as a mitigation measure with a straight face. But given the fact that you do 33
have a TMA in place and some, [unintelligible] some programs are beginning and the City is 34
funding the early stages of this process I think it can defensively be included as a mitigation 35
measure. So you might see other for example transportation improvements where we say well, 36
if you’ve built this then that would mitigate the impact, but you don’t have any funding 37
identified to build it so we can’t really rely on that mitigation measure to mitigate the impact. 38
39
Commissioner Rosenblum: In your experience do well crafted EIRs that are related to 40
Comprehensive Plans have specific targets for things like TDM? So for example, this has targets 41
for number of housing units, number of jobs created, and those are all things that will be 42
achieved through policies and this doesn’t have any zoning implications, but for example, 43
zoning. Things like that. And then someone actually has to go and build those housing units. 44
Similarly for TDM right now it’s, it just says and TDM is a mitigation measure. Is there ever an 45
attempt to say and as part of the scenario mode of Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) needs to 46
City of Palo Alto Page 27
drop to this level which implies fairly aggressive TDM probably doubling the frequency of 1
shuttles plus… just curious if this is normally not part of the Comp Plan because in my view this 2
is a very appropriate thing in this kind of Comp Plan where you’re planning housing, jobs, and 3
transportation together. 4
5
Ms. Jansen: I think that you are seeing some communities in California moving in that direction 6
at the Comp Plan or the General Plan level. I would not necessarily say that it’s widespread at 7
this point particularly in the example that you’re pointing out as TDM. I’m sure obviously as 8
you’re aware that we’re [unintelligible] see that a lot more. These days it is tied to specific 9
development proposals and EIRs or specific plans and EIRs in Mountain View, in Menlo Park, 10
etcetera where they’re tied to these kind of larger developments or specific plan areas and they 11
have those kinds of targets or metrics for trips or trip reductions. 12
13
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yeah, so I’ll just make one comment then and then let it go back to 14
my colleagues. A couple of things to consider; so one, this may be just my personal view, but 15
it’s fairly strongly held which is TMA/TDM is one of the most effective mitigating factors that we 16
have and given that Palo Alto just started one if there’s an area to spend more time on on the 17
mitigation side this would be a good one to dig into, set targets and those would probably be 18
tied eventually to budgets. But Council would be able to see that and say oh, if this is what has 19
to happen then there’s some implications. 20
21
The second you just mentioned larger developments so I would imagine like North Bayshore 22
and Mountain View or other major developments would have to have more specific plan. So 23
on that note Palo Alto has a couple of specific plans so Downtown, Cal Ave., and eventually 24
Fry’s. And I don’t know if this is outside of the scope of this or not, but to have 25
recommendation for specific area plans for those sites if that’s something that… yeah, so? Is 26
appropriate? Ok. Like those sites probably, those three areas have such a disparate effect on 27
really everything, transportation, jobs, and housing sites that those probably need a specific 28
plan. And other communities in our vicinity have done that through use of specific plans in 29
addition to their comprehensive plan. So those would be the comments of things that I would 30
see outside of the scenarios that would be useful. 31
32
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you. Commissioner Downing. 33
34
Commissioner Downing: I think what I would be interested in knowing is sort of in your expert 35
opinion what are the things that, what are the policies, what are the considerations that when 36
you’re doing these EIR analysis you’re like oh, that shifted the needle. That made something 37
much better or that made something much worse. So I think the problem that we’re having in 38
kind of even beginning to kind of look at this analysis in an analytical way is that because every 39
scenario came up with more or less the same impacts it’s really hard for us to even kind of drill 40
into something and say to you oh, well, why is this so much better under this scenario than that 41
one, right? We can’t even ask you that question because there’s nothing for us to sink our 42
teeth into. And so in the absence of that I guess I’m asking in other EIRs that you’ve done in 43
other places where you worked what are the things that you saw made a big impact in these 44
kind of analyses? 45
46
City of Palo Alto Page 28
Ms. Jansen: It’s a, that’s a great question. It’s a tough question to answer because in my 1
experience I mean I’m kind of thinking ahead here and I’m realizing this may sound like I’m 2
trying to weasel out of something and I’m truly not. Every community is different and the kind 3
of issues that are most important to every community are just so different that the things that 4
they’re trying to grapple with are so divergent. In some communities it’s schools and school 5
capacity. That’s the main issue and solving that problem is the thing that they spend the most 6
time on and in other communities it’s [ag] land preservation and in other communities it’s 7
traffic congestion. So it’s there’s really there’s truly not kind of a one size fits all answer. 8
9
So I think here in Palo Alto I totally agree with Commissioner Alcheck that the thing we’ve 10
probably heard the most about is housing and the need for affordable housing and the need for 11
people to be able to stay in Palo Alto that are already here. And so I do, I do think you, you 12
already have a robust set of programs in your adopted Housing Element. Certainly this Comp 13
Plan looks at other ways of, or the Comp Plan scenarios look at other ways of addressing that 14
problem whether through providing more housing and I know there’s as Elena mentioned at 15
the February Council meeting they talked about still more ideas for housing and really kind of 16
housing affordability and preserving affordable housing not just building more housing. So not 17
all of these solutions are going to necessarily come through your Comp Plan process either as 18
policies or programs or even through EIR mitigation measures. 19
20
Another issue that we’ve heard a lot about here in Palo Alto has been traffic congestion. And I 21
think we’ve heard from people who both really want to make sure that there continues to be a 22
focus on transit use and access to transit and making transit more accessible and putting more 23
people on transit and also people who say, look regardless of how workers get in and out of 24
Palo Alto I have two kids to get to soccer games and grocery stores and etcetera and we also 25
need to think about ways of getting around Palo Alto that work and where we’re not at total 26
gridlock. 27
28
So those are two different sets of problems with two different sets of solutions and in the latter 29
I think what this EIR shows is one of the biggest differences it could happen from trenching 30
Caltrain. And that’s one of the EIR’s, excuse me, one of the mitigation measures or one of the I 31
guess scenario components in this EIR that’s really shown to make one of the most kind of 32
dramatic differences that we see between the scenarios just as one example. So to go back to 33
Commissioner Rosenblum’s comment that’s a component of the scenario where making that 34
happen would clearly be a significant investment for the City and it would also require some 35
regional level of effort likely and not just for Palo Alto by itself. It’s kind of difficult to tell you 36
here’s the list of the mitigation measures you should adopt because it, I think the problems that 37
you see as the most pressing and that you individually or as a group want to solve may not be 38
the same as the problems that other community members or decision makers see as the most 39
pressing and the most in need of solution. 40
41
Commissioner Downing: Well let me ask you a different question. I’ve noticed that on both 42
sides [here] we’ve sort of interchanged these two concepts between what’s a policy in a 43
scenario and what’s a mitigation? And so I guess my question is how do we decide what we’re 44
going to call it and then on the mitigation front are we more or less doing the same mitigations 45
across all scenarios or how do we… how are we picking and choosing those things? 46
City of Palo Alto Page 29
1
Ms. Jansen: It’s another excellent question. The especially when we look at a programmatic EIR 2
like this the line between what’s kind of a project component and what is tacked on as a 3
mitigation measure can get a little bit blurry. And I realize that I probably should have touched 4
on this in my presentation. Typically when we would do a Comp Plan and a Comp Plan EIR the 5
way we handle mitigation measures is an assumption that what we identify as a mitigation will 6
be incorporated into the plan itself as a policy or a program. So you see that language in some 7
of the mitigation measures like the aesthetics one that Chair Gardias was mentioning earlier 8
where it says the Comp Plan should add these policies to strengthen the protection for visual 9
resources. So in that case right now actually some of the policies that we reference are current 10
Comp Plan policies, but because of their significance in helping to mitigate that impact we want 11
to make sure and call them out in the mitigation measure so that we say these are really some 12
policies that the Comp Plan needs to include if you want to avoid this potential impact. So the 13
policies could get, the mitigation measures could become part of the project when the Comp 14
Plan is adopted. So you might end up with a relatively short what we call Mitigation Monitoring 15
and Reporting Program and instead fold these mitigations into the Comp Plan itself. 16
17
Commissioner Downing: So with respect to this EIR and with respect to kind of 18
transportation/traffic issues of the mitigation measures that you’ve proposed which ones do 19
you think have the most significant impact? 20
21
Ms. Jansen: The most significant ability to reduce impacts? You know I would have to go back 22
and look at each one individually to give you a good answer and I’m happy to do that. Of 23
course, the level of impact that you’re trying to mitigate varies between the different scenarios 24
so I think another important question is going to be where do we end up on the preferred 25
scenario and then as I mentioned in the presentation there’s going to have to be a very 26
important step of comparing that preferred scenario to the list of mitigation measures that 27
we’ve identified and either confirming that those mitigation measures would effectively reduce 28
the impacts of the preferred scenario or if necessary identifying additional mitigation measures 29
or tweaking the mitigation measures we have here so that we know that they’re responsive. 30
31
But to go back to your earlier question about kind of how do we, I know which mitigation 32
measure we’re applying to which scenario. The EIR does say that, but I mean for each 33
mitigation measure. But to the extent that the City has identified in this EIR a mitigation 34
measure that’s feasible and implementable and effective to some extent it kind of has an 35
obligation under CEQA to make sure that that mitigation measure is adopted and enforced if 36
that impact is going to occur under the preferred scenario. 37
38
Commissioner Downing: It would just be helpful to know what, what are the biggest levers for 39
us to press? Where are areas that presumably in looking at these mitigation measures you’ve 40
looked at the reality, you’ve looked at budgets, you’ve looked at what you think is feasible, but 41
if there’s a particular mitigation measure that you’re like hey, if we had twice the funding we 42
could quadruple the impact we have here. Like those are things that would be really helpful for 43
us to know and I feel like I’m not really getting that out of the EIR. I’m sure it’s in your heads, 44
but I don’t know what those things are. I don’t know what you guys seem to find as most 45
helpful mitigation measures. 46
City of Palo Alto Page 30
1
Ms. Jansen: Right. Well, I mean I guess two responses. I think really where those kind of big 2
ticket wins would come from in my mind is less in the mitigation measures because I kind of 3
think of the mitigation measures as cleaning up after the fact. Like we’ve come up with these 4
scenarios and then these scenarios have these little pitfalls or problems and we’re trying to fix 5
those with the mitigation measures. I think more effective is to look at the components of the 6
scenarios themselves like you guys have already been talking about. And I know we’ve been 7
saying that we’re here to talk about the EIR so I’m not trying to get you back off course, but in 8
terms of effecting the greatest change in response to your question I think that really comes in 9
the scenarios rather than in the mitigation measures. Not that the, the mitigation measures are 10
important, absolutely. But in terms of making the greatest difference and having just said that I 11
think what we’ve all acknowledged is that among the scenarios and I think this is important, 12
you’re just from the increment of new growth and given the situation that you have on the 13
ground I think it is important to acknowledge that a change like shifting housing sites from 14
south to north and concentrating more density in Downtown or California Avenue just does not 15
have a different universe of impacts, positive or negative necessarily. It may have some 16
benefits or it may have some smaller negative impacts, but it’s not a different order of 17
magnitude from the other scenarios. 18
19
Acting Chair Gardias: [To what to] discussion about mitigations and measures and policies. We 20
talk about this at the pre‐Commission meeting and I had a comment that there is number of the 21
policies and programs that are being inserted by CAC group, but possibility by Council to the 22
Comprehensive Plan and then also there is this list, right? So we may need to just take a look at 23
this comprehensively, understand all this policies and just make sense out of them not only 24
from EIR perspective, but latter on from the Comprehensive Plan perspective. 25
26
Ms. Jansen: Yeah, and we are trying as we’re working with the CAC through their process of 27
working on the elements to make sure that when there are policies that are specifically 28
mentioned that should be in the Comp Plan that we’re putting those in to the elements for 29
discussion by the CAC and those include a note that say “EIR mitigation measures” so they 30
realize the role that they’re playing in the EIR side of the process. But yes, that step is 31
important and definitely will need to happen. 32
33
Acting Chair Gardias: Ok, very good. Thank you. So let me just take a couple of minutes myself. 34
So I would like to just refer you to Page 123. That is about, that is about greenhouse gas 35
emissions and climate change and because of the draught that’s hopefully just ending I have 36
couple of thoughts that I would like to add to this and specifically on the Page 123 there is 37
verbiage about flooding. So in some countries, for example, Germany, planning focuses on 38
1,000 flooding zone. We still just take into the consideration 100 years flood zone. And also 39
this is the flooding. The same may be flopped and we can say there should be also impact from 40
the draught perspective. So my question to you is like this: what would be the impact if we 41
changed the language from 100 to more restrictive 1,000? 42
43
Ms. Jansen: If we… which language are you referring to specifically? 44
45
Acting Chair Gardias: There is within that bullet point there is… 46
City of Palo Alto Page 31
1
Ms. Jansen: That, that Page 123 has, it does have flooding related mitigation measures on it. 2
They had to do mostly with sea level rise rather than the 100 year flood plain. 3
4
Acting Chair Gardias: Right, exactly. So (interrupted) 5
6
Ms. Jansen: Hydrology (interrupted) 7
8
Acting Chair Gardias: Yeah so instead of 100, right? Mitigation should just focus on the larger 9
disasters that should be of related to the 1,000 flood zones. 10
11
Ms. Jansen: So the, an example of some specific thresholds of significance that talk about the 12
100 year flood hazard area are Hydrology 7 and 8. Those are on Page 127. So just looking at 13
those thresholds and the way they’re currently worded we didn’t identify significant impacts. 14
To your question of what would happen if that, I think the question you’re asking is: what 15
would happen if that threshold was changed to look at 1,000 year (interrupted) 16
17
Acting Chair Gardias: Yes, exactly. 18
19
Ms. Jansen: Flood or a more comprehensive area. And so I guess there’s kind of a technical 20
question about whether or not that data exists. I know there’s data for 500 year flood plains, 21
but I think it would be a question of looking at the mapping or the data that exists to say well, 22
where are those impacted areas? And I would anticipate as I’m sure you would too that that’s 23
kind of a much larger area. And so we would find more of the City and sphere of influence to 24
be effected by the 1,000 year flood. 25
26
Acting Chair Gardias: Yes, of course. Yes. Yes. 27
28
Ms. Jansen: So then you’d be in the position of thinking of either making land use changes or 29
policy and program changes here as mitigation measures (interrupted) 30
31
Acting Chair Gardias: It would definitely cost us more, right? I mean if we’re going to just adopt 32
1,000, right, it would be just… it would be quite a potential [out place], right, to mitigate this. 33
Right? But what I am suggesting is just to reconsider this (interrupted) 34
35
Ms. Jansen: I guess another option could be for I think to get at the point you’re making is less 36
of a CEQA impact and mitigation measure question and more of kind of a policy level in the 37
amended Comp Plan to include a policy to examine this or include some information disclosing 38
what those different kind of levels of flood plain are and not just the 100 year flood plain. 39
40
Acting Chair Gardias: Yeah, maybe we should start with the disclosure. Maybe that should be 41
the first step, right? Because of course it would be harder for us [that adopt] something more 42
stricter than everybody else is doing. 43
44
Ms. Jansen: Right. 45
46
City of Palo Alto Page 32
Acting Chair Gardias: But at a certain point of time we may get there, right? So maybe 1
disclosure should be the first step toward this stricter rules. 2
3
Ms. Jansen: Ok. 4
5
Acting Chair Gardias: So then (interrupted) 6
7
Ms. Silver: Excuse, Commissioner Gardias one point to add to the issue of sea level rise when 8
you do get deeper into the discussion of that particular chapter it was interesting from our 9
perspective where in the middle of the analysis an important Supreme Court case decision 10
came down that said that you no longer need to analyze sea level rise under CEQA. It’s not 11
considered an environmental impact under CEQA. We chose to move forward with that 12
analysis anyway. We can analyze more than what’s required at minimum and so you will see a 13
detailed description of or analysis of sea level rise in this document. 14
15
Acting Chair Gardias: Ok, very good. Thank you. So if I may just give another example. So on 16
Page 125 there is a hydrology and water quality and then it just there is couple of risks that 17
talks about the watering of the basement construction, which of course was the subject of 18
various articles. And then just I found that and then this in addition to the severe draught that 19
we had this year and some tree loss that we had in the, in Palo Alto which maybe we can 20
somehow connect those three items together. Of course I know that would be hard to argue 21
that the watering of the basement would impact it, but it would just could add to the 22
conditions, to the impact on the lack of trees if you do water certain construction site for 23
basement. 24
25
I think that what we should do we should make sure that we have a specific mitigation measure 26
that spells out that pumped water is belongs to the local, belongs locally. Otherwise what is 27
happening is just pretty much [unintelligible] it flushes back to the bay and I know that under 28
pressure it comes back later on a couple of months later, but still this water, right, it’s not the 29
bay, the water from the bay, but the water from that vicinity where the construction is 30
occurring. So I believe that there should be a specific mitigation measure that would require 31
somehow to distribute this water locally as opposed to just doing analysis. Of course analysis 32
would be one of the parts, right, but then specific requirement to distribute this water locally as 33
opposed to flush it to the bay, which of course is easy. 34
35
So that was another comment. So now let’s I’m going to go back to my colleague’s comments. 36
No other lights? 37
38
Elena: Chair Gardias if I could just add? Staff has clearly heard that there’s definite concerns 39
about the breadth of the scenarios and the fact that most of the scenarios are very similar. We 40
just wanted to add that these scenarios are in the EIR based on Council direction, based on 41
multiple hearings and that’s why they’re framed the way they are. But there is the fifth 42
scenario that’s coming up as we said on May 16th which is an opportunity to provide a different, 43
a different perspective. And that item will go to Council and it will also come back to you for 44
further discussion and for further feedback. 45
46
City of Palo Alto Page 33
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you very much. So since I don’t see any other lights I’m 1
going to just take another three minutes. I promise I’ll be brief. I have a couple of other red 2
lines so I’m going to just give it to you. It will be ammunition that you can use. 3
4
So Page 129 there is a program to maintain and periodically review height and density limits to 5
discourage single uses. I’m not really sure if we need such a program. It’s just pretty much it’s 6
just a part of ongoing operations, right? It just goes back to my comment that we should not 7
just making certain, we should not be just reinventing this what already is in place. 8
9
Then there is another comment as to the noise level, Page 131. It just talks about and this is 10
Noise‐1A. It just talks about exterior noise level. And one second… and I’m sorry I think that it’s 11
just, I would just take you to Page 132 as opposed to 131. That when it talks about interior 12
noise level, but pretty much it’s within the same logic, right? So we have a noise ordinance 13
which is 9.10 that already just specifies a certain standard. I would like to ask you just to review 14
this, this certain numbers because I think that we have stricter. I think that our 9.10 just talks 15
about 30 decibels for the, for residential rooms and then 40 decibels for others. So pretty much 16
making reference to the standards that are not as strict as ours, it’s not necessary here. Please 17
double check on this. 18
19
Ms. Jansen: I will be happy to double check on that. I feel fairly confident that this mitigation 20
measure was crafted with reference to the noise ordinance, but I’m happy to double check on 21
that. 22
23
Acting Chair Gardias: Yes, please double check, right? I just you know I may be mistaken, but I 24
looked at this and I thought that we have a stricter standard. 25
26
Ms. Jansen: Ok. 27
28
Acting Chair Gardias: So and then there was a discussion within the community about the 29
airplane passing over Palo Alto. I couldn’t find anything in the document. Maybe there is 30
something, I don’t know, but please take a look at this as well. 31
32
Ms. Jansen: That is touched on in the Noise Element. If you want me to take a second I’d be 33
happy to give you the, or excuse me, Noise Chapter. Some specific page numbers, but basically 34
just to summarize the thresholds of significance that we look at when we look at a 35
programmatic document like this really have to do with long term ambient noise increases 36
rather than periodic events. So it’s again not to say that the airplane over flights are not an 37
important factor in quality of life, but just in terms of which specific quantitative thresholds are 38
looked at those kind of isolated noise events aren’t really captured in the 24 hour ambient 39
noise levels that are the subject of this analysis. 40
41
Acting Chair Gardias: Understand. Thank you very much for responding. So that’s we can take 42
it off the table right then? So then just going to the population and housing 141 and we it also 43
relates to the scenario discussion in a certain way, right? Because it just it talks here about 44
balance between if you look at the impact Pop‐4 on Page 141 it just talks about that there will 45
be possible imbalance or not imbalance between residents and jobs. I think that this specific 46
City of Palo Alto Page 34
issue that needs to be studied farther and there needs to be a specific as opposed to comment 1
that no mitigation necessary that’s what this, well, I’m sorry, no. This says Pop‐3 has no 2
mitigation necessary. There needs to be you’re just referring to the study that needs to be 3
done and I think the study should be, would be good if that study would be accomplished 4
within the perimeter of the Comprehensive Plan. It may be too late. 5
6
Because we talk about different, we have different sides about one argues for more housing, 7
the other side argues about the bonds, but to be honest I’m not really sure if we truly know 8
mathematically what this balance is, right? And we can just if you think about the jobs, right, 9
you can say that there is, there are different, there is a different structure of jobs. So like for 10
example there are County related jobs, there are original jobs, right, there are different [haps] 11
there are local jobs as well, right? So it would be nice if somebody just looked at this, truly 12
conducted the study as quickly as possible and just provide us with some perspective which 13
jobs we can just support with the housing in Palo Alto, which jobs we will not be able to support 14
in Palo Alto because regardless what we do those jobs would be pretty much or just the 15
employees would be coming from the outside. So I think this is important distinction so that is 16
maybe not the correction, but some action item that could be accomplished. And also 17
(interrupted) 18
19
Ms. Jansen: I just want to make sure that you and all the Commissioners are aware because I 20
think Cara was quite correct in encouraging you to kind of at least focus first on the executive 21
summary, but I just do want to make sure that you’re aware that when you see a little sentence 22
like “no mitigation necessary” I realize that in the table that might sound a little bit dismissive 23
so I want to make sure you know that in the chapter itself if you go to the discussion of that 24
impact you will find a more, much more detailed explanation and in many cases lots of tables 25
and math to support the conclusion. So I just want to make sure you know that’s there and it’s 26
not just tossed off with one sentence. 27
28
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good, thank you; I will look at this. And then finally this will be my 29
last comment, on Page 145 you talk about TDM what my colleague Rosenblum talk about. And 30
this has specific reduction percentages and I would like to and those are coming from the 31
transportation engineer’s manual. 32
33
Ms. Jansen: Right. 34
35
Acting Chair Gardias: Which differ from, which differ I believe from the objectives in the 36
reductions that we had. 37
38
Ms. Jansen: Oh, these are reductions that are based on the rates in the Institute of 39
Transportation Engineers (ITE) trip generation manual. So that’s kind of a nationwide standard 40
of how many trips you might expect an office park to generate. And so what this is saying is 41
using that as a benchmark reduce from there. not to use that standard, but to use that 42
standard as a starting place for then doing a pretty substantial 45 to 30 to 20 percent reduction. 43
44
Acting Chair Gardias: I see, ok. So that was the point. Ok. Very good. Ok. So that clarifies this 45
item. 46
City of Palo Alto Page 35
1
Ms. Jansen: Yeah. 2
3
Acting Chair Gardias: Thank you. So those were my comments. So just going back to my 4
colleagues; Commissioner Rosenblum. 5
6
Commissioner Rosenblum: Yeah, just a very brief comment. So I just wanted to respond to Ms. 7
Lee. I appreciate that you have a range that was given to you by Council and so some of this 8
exercise is us giving feedback to Council that it would be equally odd if we were considering 9
four scenarios that each anticipate adding 50,000 units of housing and there’s community 10
outrage and we didn’t question say why are all these scenarios on the very high side? And so I 11
think we understand that you’re doing this at Council direction. The comment to put in the 12
record is they’re all kind of the same. They’re all lower… I looked up actually you have a table in 13
there so I apologize that actually has your ABAG projection. It’s 4,420. It was your projection 14
for 2030 so only Scenario 4 meets it, does not exceed it. But I think that is how you actually did 15
Scenario 4. And so you have one barely compliant scenario under those projections and so the 16
message back to Council is we probably need a range here especially if housing is that 17
important. But otherwise I really thank you for the time. I understand the constraints that you 18
guys are operating under. 19
20
Acting Chair Gardias: Very good. I think this concludes our review and we’re going to come 21
back to this at a later time again. So thank you again for all this work and all this knowledge 22
that you brought to us. Thank you. 23
24
Ms. Jansen: Thank you very much. 25
26
Commission Action: No action taken, Commissioners provided comment only 27
Call to Order
Roll Call Present: ARB: Chair Robert Gooyer Vice Chair Alexander Lew, Board Members Peter Baltay, Wynne Furth, Kyu Kim
Absent: None
Present: HRB: Chair Martin Bernstein, Board Members David Bower, Beth Bunnenberg, Roger
Kohler
Absent: Vice Chair Margaret Wimmer, Board Members Patricia DiCicco, Michael Makinen
Action Items The following item was heard by the Architectural Review Board and Historic Resources Board jointly. 3. Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Comprehensive Plan Update: Request for
Architectural Review Board, Historic Resources Board and Public Comments on a Draft
Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) prepared for the Comprehensive Plan Update. The Draft
Environmental Impact Report was published on February 5, 2016 for a 90-day public comment
period that will end on May 5, 2016. For more information, contact Elena Lee at
elena.lee@cityofpaloalto.org
[This item was heard following Oral Communications.]
Elena Lee reported the purpose of the item was to solicit feedback. The Final Environmental Impact
Report would contain responses to all public comments. The Planning and Transportation Commission
heard the item on April 13, 2016, and a second hearing was scheduled for May 11, 2016. The City Council was scheduled to hear the item on June 6, 2016. The comment period would end at the close of business on June 6, 2016. Ms. Lee reviewed the process for the DEIR. The City Council was the body
responsible for certifying the EIR. The EIR studied long-term policies and programs; it did not set policy.
Decision makers could consider revisions based on analyses and conclusions contained in the EIR. As
required by CEQA, the document analyzed change from existing conditions rather than the existing Comp
Plan. For each scenario, project descriptions summarized the differing impacts or results from housing,
population and job projections, land use policies, transportation and infrastructure improvements, growth
management strategies, Zoning Code amendments, and sustainability measures. The City Council had
expressed a desire to understand all ramifications before selecting a preferred scenario. For the current
document, staff prepared a range of potential scenarios. The EIR illustrated potential impacts of
potential decisions and programs. The final preferred alternative could be a combination of scenarios.
Once the City Council selected the final scenario, Staff would perform additional sensitivity testing to
determine whether the EIR covered all topics. The four scenarios did not propose any significant land
JOINT ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW BOARD AND
HISTORIC RESOURCES BOARD MEETING
DRAFT EXCERPT MINUTES: April 21, 2016
City Hall/City Council Chambers
City of Palo Alto Page 1
use changes. Scenario 4 proposed changing the zoning designation of the Fry's site from multifamily
residential to mixed use. The first scenario was the "business as usual" or the no project scenario as
required by CEQA. Scenario 2 proposed the slowest growth of all the scenarios. The third scenario,
housing reconsidered, proposed slower growth but not as slow as Scenario 2. Scenario 4 was a
sustainability-tested scenario. Areas of significant unavoidable impacts were greenhouse gas and
transportation. Areas of less than significant impacts were biological resources, geology, soils, hazards
and population and housing. All other areas were determined to have impacts that could be successfully mitigated. In terms of aesthetics, the goal was to ensure visual character was not degraded. For cultural resources, it was important to ensure historic resources were not demolished or altered. A fifth scenario would be published as a supplement to the EIR in approximately October 2016. Staff anticipated providing a Final EIR covering all five scenarios in May 2017.
Board Member Bunnenberg inquired whether Board Members could submit personal comments and
comments made in public. Ms. Lee replied yes. Board Member Bunnenberg asked if declaring a
preference for a scenario constituted taking a position. Ms. Lee advised that Board Members could
comment on both the update of the Comprehensive Plan and scenarios.
Chair Bernstein inquired whether a definition of compatible had been published and whether creative
design had been identified. Ms. Lee explained that the EIR identified additional things that needed to be
accomplished after adoption of the EIR. Identification of methods to implement projects would occur
after adoption of the EIR. Board Member Bunnenberg indicated the main threats to historic structures were transportation projects, large redevelopment projects and land values. She suggested the Comp Plan recognize the threats of transportation projects and redevelopment projects and include a sphere, perhaps 150 feet, of potential
effect around historic properties that would allow the HRB to comment early in the process. She
proposed staff submit comments from the HRB to the ARB and to the City Council. She preferred the
slow or very slow growth scenarios.
Board Member Baltay wanted the EIR to address the potential impact of reducing parking requirements
for some higher-density residential developments. Allowing only one parking unit per development was
worth study and could have the impact of making it easier for builders and architects to develop units,
which could encourage or force people to use alternate means of transportation. The EIR should study in
detail the impact of changing parking requirements in a non-obvious way to promote greater densities of
housing. Board Member Bower noted San Francisco had adopted a limited parking requirement for buildings which resulted in vast amounts of cars parking on the street. Therefore, he would be hesitant to do the same. The HRB was constantly faced with destruction of historic resources without a means to stop the
destruction. He hoped that would be recognized in the new Comp Plan, and that the new Comp Plan
would contain better tools to deal with destruction of historic resources. The DEIR discussed potential
shade and shadow impacts as it impacted open public spaces. That should be broadened to surrounding
structures.
Vice Chair Lew inquired whether the EIR could evaluate proposals contained in other cities' general plans
and perhaps incorporate some proposals in the new Comprehensive Plan. Ms. Lee reported some
proposals were being evaluated in the Comp Plan update process. In addition, staff was following
Comprehensive Plan updates in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The EIR studied impacts from traffic,
population and greenhouse gas emissions in the cumulative analysis. Vice Chair Lew was struck by the
similar numbers of the four scenarios, but the aesthetics of the four scenarios were potentially very different.. He suggested the four scenarios contain illustrations of the aesthetics for each scenario. He also suggested traffic data be illustrated with graphics. He liked the shadow studies for public open space and was interested in the standards for shading impacts.
City of Palo Alto Page 2
Board Member Kohler requested a list of accomplishments resulting from the Comprehensive Plan. He
had reviewed several Comprehensive Plans over the years of his service on the HRB; however, conditions
in the City never seemed to improve.
Board Member Furth suggested the ARB schedule a study session to discuss the Comprehensive Plan.
Baseline numbers in the DEIR would be helpful to determine the percentage of change. An important
point of the EIR was that it circumscribed the outer limit of possible policy changes that would not require further environmental review. However, the document did not go far enough. Small changes in vehicle miles traveled per capita meant an overall increase in vehicles mile traveled, which suggested decreased mobility. The Transportation Element seemed to have inadequate measures to address mobility. Based on her cycling experiences, onsite bicycle parking requirements did not support a more aggressive and intensive use of bicycles for short trips. That should be addressed in the Transportation Element. She
suggested the document include a table of acronyms. With respect to Scenario 3, she was unsure how
focusing on working professionals and ignoring lower-income groups was admirable or consistent with
federal and state housing policy. She did not feel they had adequate tools to think about that. She
suggested more discussion of the environmental effects of demolition of existing buildings. In analyzing
the "business as usual" scenario, staff should assume that all sites would be built to maximum FAR with
underground parking. She expressed concern regarding the effects of that in terms of intensity of
development and in terms of greenhouse gas and other pollution issues. It was now possible to have a
light-industry software factory in any space except a retail space. Actually, it could even occur in a retail
space. That issue should be addressed. She expressed concern that small professional offices were being replaced with larger uses and that urban greenery was being lost. They needed analytic tools to indicate whether redevelopment would increase greenery and to determine whether development would result in heat islands. She did not find an analysis of heat islands in the DEIR. She hoped proposed demolition regulations for historic resources and evaluation of potential historic resources were tied
together. She expressed concerns regarding loss of views of the Foothills and the skyline changing from
greenery to buildings. Perhaps the definition of scenic highways should be expanded.
Board Member Kim agreed that illustrations and drawings and that a study session would be helpful. In
addition, summaries indicating Comprehensive Plan and EIR components subject to ARB review would be
helpful. They needed better definitions of high quality and creative design as they could be subjective.
He asked if another draft would be reviewed after the City Council reviewed it on June 6th. Ms. Lee
explained that ff the EIR included all the analysis the Council felt was necessary and identified all
mitigation measures, then that piece would be packaged in the form of a Final EIR. An environmental
analysis of the fifth scenario would be a separate companion document to the Draft EIR. At the end of the process, both documents would be addressed in the Final EIR. If the City Council identified a new scenario or other items that had not been fully analyzed in the EIR, then staff would prepare a full analysis of that in a second supplement to the EIR, which would be subject to the full review process. Board Member Kim inquired whether a draft of the Final EIR would be reviewed or submitted to Council
for certification. Ms. Lee reported the Final EIR was required to be circulated for a minimum of 10 days
for public comment. If no further comments were received or changes needed, then the Final EIR would
be certified by the City Council.
Chair Bernstein concurred with comments regarding a study session. The HRB was encouraging
applicants to request a study session with the HRB prior to submitting an application. Perhaps the EIR
could include encouragement of study sessions with the HRB. With respect to POP-4A, page 8,
affordable housing should be placed on the site being considered rather than elsewhere. A study session
regarding a historic resource should be required and should include review of an area of potential effect.
Perhaps the DEIR could analyze a central district where cars were prohibited. Scenario 3 should include
analysis of lower-income households in areas of increased housing densities. Chair Gooyer felt the priority had been housing, which resulted in housing being placed in commercial or R&D areas. Scenario 3 was the most practical scenario. TOD was the future and the most practical
approach.
City of Palo Alto Page 3
Board Member Questions, Comments, Announcements
Board Member Furth requested a study session regarding the Draft EIR for the Comprehensive Plan. Vice
Chair Lew felt there were two items: the DEIR and the Comprehensive Plan. Board Member Furth
wished to discuss the aesthetics section. It seemed to omit some important elements. If Board Members
agreed that the ARB wasn't or couldn't evaluate aspects of projects, then shaping mitigation measures in the Comprehensive Plan EIR was a good way to make that happen. Chair Gooyer inquired whether Board Member Furth was interested in a discussion or having someone present to review the finer points. Board Member Furth was more interested in Board Members' views. The criteria for aesthetic evaluation and proposed mitigation measures and level of significance drove what happened in the Comp Plan. Public comments regarding neglected aesthetic aspects were interesting. If it was properly mitigated, the
City would be better looking in the future. Board Member Baltay would support scheduling a study
session if the goal was for the Board to speak as a unified voice and impact the process. Board Member
Furth concurred. Board Member Baltay stated it would be appropriate for the Chair to appoint a
subcommittee to develop a plan. Board Member Furth wished to consider the important as well as the
urgent.
Board Member Furth was willing to serve on a subcommittee. Chair Gooyer requested a second Board
Member volunteer for the subcommittee. Vice Chair Lew did so. Board Member Baltay suggested all
Board Members submit written comments. Board Member Furth stated that would violate the Brown Act. MOTION: Board Member Furth moved, seconded by Vice Chair Lew, to form a subcommittee to review the Comprehensive Plan DEIR.
City of Palo Alto Page 4
ATTACHMENT E
Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan Update
Summary of Additional Scenarios Proposed for Analysis
in a Supplement to the Draft EIR
May 23, 2016
This attachment summarizes the City Council’s direction to analyze additional scenarios in a
supplement to the Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the City’s Comprehensive Plan
Update prior to proceeding to a Final EIR. As described further below, two new scenarios
would supplement those included in the Draft EIR as follows:
Table 1. Summary of EIR Scenarios: Population & Employment Parameters (1)
Net Change 2015-2030
(City of Palo Alto Only) Resulting
Jobs/Housing Balance
in 20303 Population/
Housing
Non-Res
Sq. Ft.2 Jobs
1. Business as Usual 6,600/2,720 3.3M 15,480 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 3.20
2. Slowing Growth 6,600/2,720 3M 9,850 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 3.04
3. Housing Tested I 8,435/3,545 3.5M 12,755 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 3.03
4. Sustainability Tested I 10,455/4,420 4.M 15,480 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 3.04
5. [NEW]
Sustainability Tested II 8435/3,546 2.7M 8,868 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 2.93
6. [NEW]
Housing Tested II 13,737/6,000 2.7M 8,868 Jobs/Employed
Residents Ratio of 2.71
(1) The scenarios also include different ideas for zoning/implementation actions,
transportation investments, and sustainability measures as discussed further
below.
(2) This number includes 1.3M sq. ft. that has already been approved at the Stanford
Medical Center. The balance of the new nonresidential square footage would be
located in areas both inside and outside of the “monitored areas” referenced in
Policy L-8 and Map L-6 in the Comp Plan and in areas both inside and outside of
the area subject to the interim annual limit of 50,000 square feet new office/R&D
space.
(3) The number of employed residents in 2030 is estimated at approximately 48% of
total population based on ABAG Projections 2013. The ratio of jobs to employed
residents in this column assumes a 2014 base of 65,685 people and 95,460 jobs.
Source: Palo Alto Department of Planning & Community Environment, May 2016
The City of Palo Alto has been working on an update to its Comprehensive Plan since 2008 and
ATTACHMENT F
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 2
published a Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in February 2016 assessing four
“scenarios” or alternatives at an equal level of detail, hoping to inform policy direction
regarding the location and amount of growth desired by 2030, as well as policies and programs
needed to mitigate the impacts of that growth.
On January 19 and February 22, the City Council indicated their desire to analyze an additional
scenario in a supplement to the Draft EIR and on May 16, the City Council provided basic
parameters of two new scenarios (scenarios number 5 & 6), as shown in Table 1.
The first new scenario, Scenario 5, Sustainability Tested II, proposes 10% fewer jobs than
Scenario 2, Slowing Growth, and the same number of housing units as Scenario 3,
Housing Tested I. This new scenario is intended to test the efficacy of mitigation and
sustainability measures when applied to relatively slow growth over the 15 year
planning period.
The second new scenario, Scenario 6, Housing Tested II, proposes 10% fewer jobs than
Scenario 2, Slowing Growth, and 36% more housing than Scenario 4, Sustainability I.
This new scenario is intended to test policies and programs to accelerate the production
of housing over the 15 year planning period, while applying mitigation and sustainability
measures to address the impacts of growth.
In both of the new scenarios, Comprehensive Plan programs and zoning changes would be
developed to provide for a mix of housing for Palo Alto residents, including affordable housing,
senior housing, housing for special needs populations, micro units, housing with preferences for
members of the local workforce, and housing with reduced parking and traffic impacts, reduced
air emissions, and reduced energy and water use when compared with conventional units.
Housing locations and characteristics for each scenario are summarized in Table 2, below.
Table 2. Summary of Housing-Related Policies & Programsa
Summary of Housing Policies & & Programs Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5 6
Maintain All Existing Housing Sites √ √ √
Eliminate Housing Sites on San Antonio and South El
Camino √ √ √
Increase residential densities on sites in Downtown,
the California Ave Area and along El Camino Real √ √ √ √
Add new housing sites to the El Camino frontage of
the Research Park and the Shopping Center √ √
Consider additional sites near SUMC or in western
portion of the Research Park √
Convert some commercial development potential
(FAR) to residential FAR √ √ √ √ √
Remove constraints on the addition of Accessory
Dwelling Units √ √ √ √ √
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 3
Summary of Housing Policies & & Programs Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5 6
Adopt policies to avoid the loss of existing housing
and displacement √ √ √ √ √
Adopt regulations and incentives to create smaller
units √ √ √ √ √
(a)This list is not a complete listing of possible policy and zoning changes, but includes major initiatives required to
reach the housing projections of each scenario. There is some overlap between these and the zoning changes
summarized later.
Source: Palo Alto Department of Planning & Community Environment, May 2016
Brief Description of the Six Scenarios
1. “Business As Usual” – the “business as usual” scenario shows the results if the City
continued to operate under the existing Comprehensive Plan with no changes to goals,
policies and programs. Any new housing built would be constructed under existing
zoning and no innovations in housing or new approaches to address the high cost of
housing would be explored. No new growth management measures are anticipated, and
any transit or traffic improvements would come from the existing infrastructure plan for
the City. This scenario uses a local forecast of housing growth based on the City’s past
performance (a long term average of about 150-160 new dwelling units per year), and
ABAG’s 2013 projection of job growth.
2. Scenario Two, or the “Growth Slowed” Scenario, would slow the pace of job growth
when compared with Scenario One by moderating the pace of office/R&D development
throughout the city. Scenario Two would also ensure that the modest amount of
housing growth expected under Scenario One would be built-out as small units and
other housing types appropriate for seniors and the Palo Alto workforce.
Transportation investments in this scenario would include implementation of the
County’s expressway plan.
3. Scenario Three, or the “Housing Tested I” Scenario, would implement a growth
management regime similar to the interim annual limit on office/R&D adopted by the
City Council in 2015 for the fastest changing areas of the City and would eliminate
housing sites along San Antonio and South El Camino. In place of these housing sites,
Scenario 3 would increase housing densities on other housing sites Downtown, near
California Avenue, and in other locations in the City close to transit and services.
Policies, regulations, and incentives would be designed to ensure smaller units for the
working professional and senior populations of the City. Transportation investments
would include grade separating the Caltrain crossings at Meadow and Charleston by
placing the railroad tracks in a trench.
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 4
4. Scenario Four, or the “Sustainability Tested I” Scenario, assumes the most growth in
housing and employment, consistent with ABAG projections. Rather than moderating
the pace of development, this scenario would seek to limit the impacts of development.
Housing sites along San Antonio and South El Camino would be eliminated and replaced
by both increased densities on other housing sites and by the addition of new sites
along the El Camino Real frontage of the Stanford Research Park and the Stanford
Shopping Center. Potential policies and regulations would be enacted to advance
sustainability objectives, including free transit passes for residents in transit-served
areas, achieving LEED platinum certification for new development, maximizing local
solar energy production, foregoing new natural gas hookups, and utilizing drought-
tolerant landscaping. Transportation investments would include grade separating the
Caltrain crossings at Meadow and Charleston by placing the railroad tracks in a trench,
and incorporating mix flow bus rapid transit on El Camino Real (with curbside stations
and queue jumping for transit vehicles).
5. Scenario Five, or the “Sustainability Tested II” Scenario, would implement a growth
management program to limit the pace of office/R&D development and convert some
commercial development potential (Floor Area Ratio or FAR) to residential FAR in
Downtown and the California Avenue area. Scenario 5 would eliminate housing sites
along San Antonio and South El Camino and in place of these sites, would increase
housing densities on sites Downtown and in the California Avenue area close to transit
and services. Policies, regulations, and incentives would be designed to ensure smaller
units for the working professional and senior populations of the City. Potential policies
and regulations would be enacted to advance sustainability objectives, including free
transit passes for residents in transit-served areas, achieving LEED platinum certification
for new development, maximizing local solar energy production, foregoing new natural
gas hookups, and utilizing drought-tolerant landscaping. Transportation investments
would include grade separating the Caltrain crossings at Meadow and Charleston by
placing the railroad tracks in a trench.
6. Scenario Six, or the “Housing Tested II” Scenario, would also implement a growth
management program to limit the pace of office/R&D development and would convert
some commercial development potential (Floor Area Ratio or FAR) to residential FAR in
Downtown, the California Avenue area, and along the El Camino Real corridor. Scenario
Six would eliminate housing sites along San Antonio and South El Camino and in place of
these sites, would both increase housing densities in other areas of the City close to
transit and services, and add new housing sites along the El Camino Real frontage of the
Stanford Research Park and the Stanford Shopping Center. Additional housing sites in
the Research Park could also be considered. Policies, regulations, and incentives would
be designed to ensure smaller units for the working professional and senior populations
of the City. Potential policies and regulations would be enacted to advance
sustainability objectives, including free transit passes for residents in transit-served
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 5
areas, achieving LEED platinum certification for new development, maximizing local
solar energy production, foregoing new natural gas hookups, and utilizing drought-
tolerant landscaping. Transportation investments would include grade separating the
Caltrain crossings at Meadow and Charleston by placing the railroad tracks in a trench,
and incorporating mix flow bus rapid transit on El Camino Real (with curbside stations
and queue jumping for transit vehicles).
Under all scenarios, goals and policies of the Comprehensive Plan Update will be implemented
through programs, some of which will support specific changes in the City’s zoning ordinance.
The four EIR scenarios recognize this fact by suggesting and evaluating zoning code
amendments that could accompany the Comp Plan Update. These suggested amendments are
not meant to be prescriptive, but generally outline actions that could be taken to implement
the policy parameters of each scenario.
Similarly, the evaluation of Scenarios 5 & 6 can test a variety of zoning amendments to achieve
the population/housing and employment/square footage numbers included in Table 1.
Suggestions are included in Table 3, below.
Table 3. Zoning Code Amendments for the EIR Scenarios
Proposed Zoning Code Amendmentsa Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5a 6a
Planned Community (PC) zoning district provisions
would be reformed. √ √ √ √ √ √
Strategies to preserve retail would be enhanced for
the city’s neighborhoods. √ √ √ √ √ √
Incentives would be considered for small lot
consolidation along El Camino Real. √ √ √ √ √ √
A Conditional Use Permit (CUP) would be required
for new office and R&D uses in order to regulate
employment densities.
√ √ √
An alternate mechanism would be explored for
moderating employment densities, either through
regulation or revenue collection.
√ √
Allowable commercial densities would be reduced
and replaced with residential densities. √ √ √ √ √
Modest exceptions to the City’s 50-foot height limit
would be permitted for projects with ground floor
retail and residences above.
√ √ √
Allowable residential densities would be increased
downtown and near California Avenue, possibly by
adding the PTODb zoning designation to downtown
and streamlining the permitting process to allow for
residential development in the PTOD zone by right.
Another possibility would be to eliminate maximum
dwelling unit densities and use minimum densities
and FAR to encourage more, smaller units.
√ √ √ √
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 6
Proposed Zoning Code Amendmentsa Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5a 6a
Allowable residential densities would be increased
on the El Camino Corridor, possibly by adding the
PTODb zoning designation to pedestrian “nodes”
along the corridor with modified regulations to
encourage use of the designation. Another
possibility would be to eliminate maximum dwelling
unit densities and use minimum densities and FAR to
encourage more, smaller units.
√ √
Mitigation and sustainability measures would be
adopted to minimize impacts of new market rate
housing and new non-residential development by
requiring mitigation, monitoring, and enforcement.
√ √
(a)The suggested zoning changes listed here do not include all of the sustainability measures or mitigation
measures which could be applied to the scenarios.
(b) The Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Development (PTOD) combining zoning district is intended to allow higher
density residential dwellings on commercial, industrial, and multi-family parcels within a walkable distance of
Caltrain stations, while protecting low density residential parcels and parcels with historical resources.
Source: Comp Plan Update Draft EIR, February 2016 and Palo Alto Department of Planning & Community
Environment, May 2016
The Comprehensive Plan Update will identify infrastructure investments expected to occur over
the next 15 years to the extent feasible and will rely on the City’s adopted infrastructure plan as
a base document. The planning scenarios evaluated in the program-level EIR provide an
opportunity to evaluate other potential transportation infrastructure projects, and these are
included in Table 4, below.
Table 4. Infrastructure Investments for the EIR Scenarios
Summary of Infrastructure Investmentsa Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5 6
New Public Safety Building √ √ √ √ √ √
Bicycle Bridge over US 101 √ √ √ √ √ √
Bicycle/Pedestrian Plan Implementation Projects √ √ √ √ √ √
Byxbee Park √ √ √ √ √ √
California Avenue Parking Garage √ √ √ √ √ √
Downtown Parking Garage √ √ √ √ √ √
Fire Stations √ √ √ √ √ √
County Expressway Plan Implementation √
Grade separation of Caltrain in a trench below
Charleston and Meadow; other improvements along
the corridor.
√ √ √ √
Bus Rapid Transit on El Camino Real in mixed-flow
lanes with the addition of queue jumping and
curbside stations.
√ √
(a)This list is not a complete listing of the City’s infrastructure plan, but includes those investments highlighted in
Draft EIR Scenarios 1-4 as well as others that may be appropriate for highlighting in Scenarios 5&6. There may be
some overlap between the suggested investments listed here and the sustainability measures and
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 7
performance/mitigation measures referenced later.
Source: Comp Plan Update Draft EIR, February 2016 and Palo Alto Department of Planning & Community
Environment, May 2016
On April 18, 2016, the City Council indicated their support for the draft SCAP goal of reducing
GHG Emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2030 (twenty years ahead of the State’s goal) and
requested clarity on how the Comp Plan Update and the SCAP will be integrated. The two plans
are intended to be coordinated and complimentary, and while SCAP principles and strategies
have not been fully defined as of yet, Table 5 acknowledges the relationship between the two
plans, and indicates some of the sustainability measures that are common to both for
evaluation as part of the EIR scenarios.
Table 5. Sustainability Measures for the EIR Scenarios
Summary of Sustainability Measuresa Scenarios
1 2 3 4 5 6
Mobility
Paid transit passes for employees in workplaces with
over 50 employees (portion of SCAP Strategy F-INC-
1)
√ √ √ √ √ √
Employer incentives for carpooling and bicycling
(SCAP Strategy F-FAC-3.4) √ √ √ √ √
Unbundled parking costs for multi-family units
(portion of SCAP Strategy T-INC-2) √ √ √ √
Parking charge program for existing workplaces with
over 50 employees (portion of SCAP Strategy T-INC-
2)
√ √ √
Paid parking in Downtown and California Avenue
areas (portion of SCAP Strategy T-INC-2) √ √ √
Free transit passes for all Palo Alto residents in
transit-accessible areas (portion of SCAP Strategy F-
INC-1)
√ √ √
Adoption of the SCAP goal of a 80% reduction in
GHG emissions by 2030 and alignment of the
Comprehensive Plan Update with SCAP principles.
Inclusion of Comprehensive Plan policies and
programs supportive of the refinement and
furtherance of SCAP strategies.
√ √
(a)The suggested sustainability measures listed here do not include every strategy from the draft SCAP, which is
still a work in progress. This list also does not include mitigation measures which are listed separately below, even
though many address topics related to sustainability (for example, transportation mitigation to limit and off-set
new trips).
Source: Comp Plan Update Draft EIR, February 2016; Draft SCAP, April 2016, and Palo Alto Department of Planning
& Community Environment, May 2016
All of the EIR scenarios will require mitigation measures to address significant environmental
impacts and consistent with the Council’s direction, these will be analyzed as part of Scenarios
5 and 6. For example, the analysis will assess the effectiveness of Mitigation Measure
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 8
TRANS1a, which establishes a framework for imposing a “no net new trips” requirement on
market rate housing, office/R&D development, and other uses. The measure reads:
TRANS-1a: Adopt a programmatic approach to reducing traffic with the goal of achieving no
net increase in peak period motor vehicle trips from new development, with an exception
for uses that directly contribute to the neighborhood character and diversity of Palo Alto
(such as ground floor retail and below market rate housing). The program should, at a
minimum:
Require new development projects to prepare and implement a Transportation Demand
Management (TDM) Plan to achieve the following reduction in peak period motor
vehicle trips from the rates included in the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Trip
Generation Manual for the appropriate land use category. These reductions are
deemed aggressive, yet feasible, for the districts indicated.
o 45 percent reduction in the Downtown district
o 35 percent reduction in the California Avenue area
o 30 percent reduction in the Stanford Research Park
o 30 percent reduction in the El Camino Real Corridor
o 20 percent reduction in other areas of the city
TDM Plans must be approved by the City and monitored by the property owner on an
annual basis. The Plans must contain enforcement mechanisms or penalties that accrue
if targets are not met.
Require new development projects to offset remaining peak period motor vehicle trips
through one of the following methods:
o By directly contracting with another property owner or organization to reduce
trips generated from another site; or
o By paying an annual fee to the City for use in reducing motor vehicle trips to
the extent feasible through the provision of transit services, carpool/rideshare
incentives, bicycle lanes, and other similar programs and improvements.
A full list of EIR mitigation measures needed for Scenarios 2-4 is included in the Executive
Summary (Chapter 1) of the Draft EIR and potential modifications or additions to this list will be
considered during the analysis of Scenarios 5-6.
Next Steps
Once the Draft EIR comment period has concluded and final direction on the new scenarios is
provided, staff will post written comments on the website and make them available to the
Council, the Planning & Transportation Commission, and the public. Staff will also work with
the City’s consultants, Placeworks, to modify the scope of work included in the contract
amendment approved on May 16, 2016 to allow for analysis of a sixth scenario. (The
May 23, 2016
Summary of EIR Scenarios
Page 9
amendment assumed only five scenarios.) Some efficiencies may be possible given that the
new scenario five is very similar to those already analyzed in the Draft EIR, but it’s expected
that an additional contract amendment will be required.