Jim's Council Blog

Relatively quick and surprisingly uneventful.

First up was a study session on the reuse of Onizuka.  I’m a little hesitant to characterize the meeting, since no votes were cast.  But the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the idea of turning it into an auto mall is now a non-starter.  There was real opposition to the physical aspects of it, now that the VA has expressed a desire to occupy the center of the property, plus skepticism about its viability (and about there being sufficient interest from auto dealers).  This will be coming before Council in a few weeks for a vote on the next steps.

We started out the general meeting with a special presentation from the US Census’ Seattle bureau, which is the region that covered Santa Clara County during the 2010 Census work. That bureau stretches from Alaska all the way south to Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. They reported that our return rate for mailed census forms was 4% above the state and national averages. And every form that was returned by mail meant a household visit that didn’t need to take place, so they were very appreciative.

Two items were pulled from the consent calendar. One of my colleagues pulled the item regarding the NOVA job classifications to vote against it, but it passed 6-1. I made my first consent pull to remove the item regarding the newly-proposed interim councilmemember appointment process. The proposed application form didn’t actually ask applicants if they had previous Council experience, and I wanted that fixed (and it passed 7-0).

We then had some public comments, one on the upcoming Sunnyvale Democratic Club meeting, one a criticism of some comments that were made at the last meeting regarding public employee benefits and salary (the methodology for determining them, mostly). Then it was on to general business.

Item 2 was potentially the most contentious – the city’s response to the Grand Jury finding that council’s actions lacked transparency when appointing Dean Chu to serve as interim councilmember while Otto Lee was deployed to Iraq. This had the potential to be much more contentious than it was, because 1) we had a number of speakers express loud opinions when the appointment was originally made, and 2) there was clearly a bit of a divide on Council between those who saw some problems but thought what happened was generally OK and those who saw some real problems with how things went down last year. I was in an odd position, in that I’m the only councilmember who wasn’t actually on Council when the vote was held (although I was present for both meetings as a member of the public, and I spoke at the first meeting).

So I’ll start by outlining in general terms what the Grand Jury said, and how Staff responded.

1) There wasn’t an existing process for this situation, and there should be. Staff agreed, and in fact we created one a few weeks ago.

2) There wasn’t proper noticing that an appointment would be made at the Dec. 16th meeting. Staff disagreed – the appointment didn’t happen until Jan 6th, at which meeting many members of the public showed up and expressed opinions.

3) Staff’s report on the fiscal impact of appointing Dean while Otto was serving wasn’t complete. Staff partially agreed (the cost for Otto’s deployment was provided), partially disagreed (the PERS cost for Dean wasn’t provided).

4) Council gave Otto benefits not available to other employees called up to serve. Staff strongly disagreed with this, and Staff was pretty critical of the Grand Jury for saying so.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single member of the public that wanted to speak on this issue. I think this shocked everyone, given the furor that was expressed back during the original vote on Jan 6th of last year.

We divided the vote into two pieces, because Otto wanted to recuse himself from the vote involving his benefits (finding 4). Technically, he didn’t need to do so, but he wanted to avoid the appearance of a conflict. The first vote on the first three findings was to accept staff’s recommendation, with two modifications. I moved to amend the response to Finding 3 to simply “agree”. I made the point that since we’re conceding that the information was not “complete”, why were we partially disagreeing? “Completeness” is a black-and-white question, we agree it wasn’t complete, let’s just agree with the Grand Jury. That amendment was accepted.

There was an additional amendment to finding 2, where we disagreed with the claim that there was an appointment made at the Dec. 16th meeting – it didn’t change the overall response, but it was a change to the wording of the response. And it went through. Then the vote on the first three findings was 6-1 to approve the response as amended. The dissenter offered no reasons for dissent.

Then Otto recused himself and we voted on Finding 4. Staff made a very detailed explanation about what benefits were available to all employees, exactly what Otto got, and the evidence that he got what everyone else got was pretty clear-cut and unambiguous. I know many people have said to me that they think Council gave him extra benefits, and all I can say is – read the city’s response. It didn’t happen.

Anyway, I also made some pointed comments about what happened overall, what went wrong, what should have been done better, and my reaction to the overall Grand Jury response. One of my colleagues took exception to my comments, and then one of my colleagues took exception to that exception. And we then voted 6-0 on that finding. Those comments were the only contentious part of the meeting, surprisingly.

I’ll try to repeat some of the points that I made. A lot of things went wrong during the appointment issue. The public didn’t bother to get involved during the original Dec. 16th vote – this was one of the most important issue in Sunnyvale in the past two years, and only two of us showed up to speak. That was wrong, and I think it kept Council from giving as much consideration to the issue as it should have. At the Jan 6th meeting, staff dropped the ball and didn’t provide the PERS cost associated with appointing Dean Chu. Even though the actual cost is very minimal, it needed to be properly disclosed, and that didn’t happen. And the Grand Jury did an extremely poor job of examining some of the issues. They got the benefits issue for Otto completely and provably wrong, for instance. And their glaring errors detracted from their other, perfectly valid criticisms of what happened.

But more than anything, I think Council achieved the right end result, but they did it in a way that failed to give the public confidence in the process, and that was something of a failure of leadership. And when many members of the public, Dean himself, and even two of my colleagues (Chris and Otto) expressed concerns about the process and suggested better approaches, Council chose to keep doing what it was doing, instead of acknowledging the concerns and trying to address them. The process matters as much as the end result, and getting the right end result doesn’t lessen the need to use a process in which the public can have confidence. I think this is a lesson Council learned the hard way.

I’ll add one other point.  I considered opposing staff’s recommendation on Finding 2.  The Grand Jury complained that an appointment was made on Dec. 16th, which wasn’t properly noticed.  The City’s response was that an appointment wasn’t made on Dec. 16th – instead, a process was proposed, and the appointment was made, properly noticed, on Jan 6th.  I wasn’t happy with this argument.  While this is all true, the “process” that was created could only result in one name being considered.  It was technically a “process”, but it was viewed by many people as a de facto appointment.  I thought that that point of view had merit.  However, Council scheduled the actual appointment for Jan 6th, which gave the public plenty of time to consider the issue and speak about this, which they did.  And Council gave itself the opportunity to change their mind about the process at that meeting (which, unfortunately, they didn’t).  For me, this was a serious gray area, with merit to both points of view.  In the end, I chose not to press that point, in no small part because it was clear to me that I didn’t have the votes to make a change.

Anyway. Item 3 was an appeal of a Planning Commission decision.  A property owner was proposing dividing one giant lot into three smaller lots, tearing down his monster home, and replacing it with three smaller homes that were nevertheless slightly larger than is permitted in that area without getting a variance.  And the division also requires removing three “protected” trees.  The PC granted the variances with some conditions, but a neighbor appealed the PC’s decision, not liking the size and nature of the houses, and not liking the removal of the protected trees.  The owner of this property has been trying to make it usable for some time, and it hasn’t happened because 1) he originally proposed something that was too much (four houses instead of three), 2) neighbors opposed what he was doing, and 3) he ran into a bad economy that killed the project.  He fixed 1 and 3.  So this became an issue of balancing the need to protect the community against the rights of an individual to fully enjoy the use of his property.  What the owner was asking for was a reasonable use of three very large property lots, all three houses fell well below the FAR (floor/area ratio) allowed in that area, and we voted 7-0 to deny the appeal and grant the variances.

Item 4 was to consider revisions to Council policy regarding the Arts Commission and the soon-to-be-formed Sustainability Commission.  This mattered to me, since I chaired the committee that created the recommendations in collaboration with Staff, the Arts Commission, and members of the public.  And Council voted 7-0 to approve the joint recommendation.  That was nice.

Item 5 was to vote for candidates for the Peninsula Division of the League of California Cities.  We voted for the listed candidates for the specific positions, and for Chris Moylan for the at-large position.

Then we went to oral comments.  Otto spoke to the fact that yesterday represented the end of combat operations in Iraq, something that is very personal to him.  I then proposed a study issue for consideration in January.  Ever since Murphy was closed down for renovation, then partially reopened, then fully reopened, a number of people have been advocating for closing Murphy to vehicular traffic and making it a pedestrian mall.  Even the merchants on Murphy have softened their stance – the restaurant operators still oppose it (they want curbside pick-up and drop-off, particularly for their senior clientele, which is a very valid concern), but the retailers like the idea.  So I proposed looking at possible reconfiguration options for partial or full closure of Murphy.  And it was co-sponsored, so it will be on the list for consideration in January.  I’ll say up front that if we approve this study issue, engaging the Murphy merchants in the process will have to be a high priority, and I’m confident that will happen.

Then we adjourned to the Redevelopment Agency to perform some housekeeping, and that was it.

Starting September 1st (Wednesday), the Sunnyvale Public Library will offer a new “Text a Librarian” messaging service. You can text “asksun” to 66746 for instructions, then text your questions to a Sunnyvale librarian during normal hours of operation.

(As always, message and data rates may apply…)

This is gonna be a fun one.

We start the evening with a study session to review the consultants’ recommendations regarding reusing Onizuka as an auto mall. This includes a 250-page study. I imagine there will be some interesting public input.

No special orders, but we do have a special presentation on the 2010 Census, which should be interesting. I came very close to working for the Census’ GIS division, so I’m always interested by census-related stuff. The consent calendar has a number of contracts (including one with a “reject” recommendation) and some fiscal management items. Then it’s on to general business.

The first item is one that will probably involve a lot of discussion – the City’s response to the grand jury examination of Otto Lee’s interim replacement. The draft response has an “agree”, a couple of “we’ve already taken care of it” or “it’s not likely to happen again”, and a couple of fairly strong “disagree”s, plus a big slap at the Grand Jury at the end for getting a number of basic facts wrong. I imagine there will be a fair bit of public comment, and a number of the councilmembers will probably have extended comments. I’m in a very interesting position on this one, because I’m the only one of the seven who wasn’t on Council when the original decisions were made.

Next item is a planning commission appeal of a proposal to build three homes on Bobolink. This required review because two houses exceed the maximum square footage, and all three exceed the height limitation for a single-story overlay district. So the Planning Commission attached conditions, which the applicant clearly doesn’t like. [Update] – the appeal was filed by a neighbor, not by the applicant. My bad.

After that is considerations of revisions to Council policy regarding Boards and Commissions, specifically regarding Arts Commission membership and the new Sustainability Commission. The proposal is to tweak the membership requirements for the Arts Commission, and to set the requirements and mandate for the Sustainability Commission.

Next is consideration of Sunnyvale’s positions on officers for the League of California Cities Peninsula Division.

Then we adjourn to the Redevelopment Agency, and that’s it. There might be some fireworks, and I imagine the Planning Commission appeal will involve some discussion. We’ll see.

The hot topic in municipal circles (and amongst electeds’ constituents) is the criminal shenanigans in Bell, CA, and the almost daily disclosure of details outlining just how egregious the conduct really was. I’ve gotten emails and had conversations with people about the Bell situation, and everyone is asking “could it happen here?”. I started to write a long entry about what went wrong in Bell, how Sunnyvale is different, and what lessons we should take from the events in Bell. But the more I got into details, the more I realized that there’s no reason why the events in Bell couldn’t happen to any Santa Clara County city – if the residents let it happen. And any assurances I provide to the contrary are all based on my view of myself and my colleagues as honest electeds and administrators who only want to do the job well, and projecting that view on to every person Sunnyvale ever chooses to elect or hire.

So rather than try to go through the details of what happened in Bell, and what my thoughts are, I’ll instead point you to this op-ed piece on the Bell situation, which I found really summarizes my own reaction to what happened in Bell, and to what could happen in any other city. The five lessons that the author spells out really need to be taken to heart, by those of us who serve as electeds, by those who work in municipal government, and by those of us who simply want to live in a well-run city.

I believe Sunnyvale’s current crop of electeds and administrators understand those five lessons and sincerely take them to heart when they make decisions – even the decisions with which I disagree. And I believe Sunnyvale residents care enough about their city to put thought into their votes, to elect responsible representatives, and to stay involved and speak their minds when they see something happening that they don’t like. That gives me a lot of hope that we would never permit Sunnyvale to follow Bell’s example.

But it’s just hope.

There’s a Merc/Sun article talking about a recent rash of postal carrier dog bites in Sunnyvale. If you’ve got a dog (or even a very large cat…), give it a once-over. Treating our postal carriers well would be a good thing, after all…

Largely uneventful, but still with a couple of interesting moments.

We started with a proclamation recognizing Lakewood and Cherry Chase, which were designated California Distinguished Schools. It’s nice to see our schools being recognized for their accomplishments.

Then came the consent calendar. A colleague pulled 1H from the calendar, and the rest was passed 7-0. 1H was ratification of a labor agreement with the newly-formed Public Safety Managers Association (PSMA), and despite being pulled, there was no staff report and no council comments. It passed 6-1.

First regular item was formation of a response to the Santa Clara County Grand Jury regarding employee costs.  Staff’s proposed response largely agreed with the Grand Jury’s assertions, and the responses to their recommended courses of action range from “we’ve already done that” to “we’re considering it” to “we disagree that that can/should be done”.  One public speaker took issue with the staff claim that public employee compensation should be compared against private sector employee compensation, and this seemed to be the main item of contention for Council too.  There was some disagreement with staff’s assertion that private sector salary surveys are available (I believe they are for many jobs), while also supporting the point that many public sector jobs simply don’t exist in the private sector.  There isn’t really a police or fire private sector industry, nor is there one for city planners.  But in the end, Council voted 6-1 to support staff’s recommended response, with one change that I suggested – including greater use of the word “already”, to indicate that all of the Grand suggested courses of action that we currently do are things that we were doing long before the Grand Jury report came along.

Item 3 was a bit of fun – early consideration of city positions on four statewide ballot initiatives in November.  We had a little discussion about them, and we had two public speakers who advocated to oppose Proposition 23 (both of them) and to support Proposition 25 (one of them).  In the end, we voted 6-1 to take the following positions:

• Proposition 22 (closing loopholes to prevent the state from taking funds from cities or counties): SUPPORT.
• Proposition 23 (rolling back AB 32, air pollution and greenhouse gas emission laws): OPPOSE.
• Proposition 25 (lower requirement for statewide budget votes from 2/3 to 50%, while maintaining 2/3 vote requirement for new taxes): SUPPORT.
• Proposition 26 (raise voting requirement for state and local levies and charges from 50% to 2/3): OPPOSE.

Proposition 22 and 26 were straightforward – they both directly affect cities like ours.

Proposition 23 was easy for me.  As I said at the meeting, back in June, I didn’t think I’d ever find an initiative that offended me more than PG&E’s self-serving Proposition 16.  That lasted all of a month, when Texas oil companies Valero and Tesoro came along with November’s Proposition 23, which essentially ends environmental air and emission protections.  Technically, it suspends them until and unless California experiences less than 5.5% unemployment for four quarters in a row.  I don’t think that’s occurred even once in the past 30 years.  It’s a blatantly self-serving initiative proposed by out-of-state oil interests looking to protect their markets at the expense of our environment and, in particular, our cleantech industries – something very important to Sunnyvale.  Bad, bad initiative.

The final one is Proposition 25, which lowers the legislative requirement to pass a budget from 2/3 to 50%.  I firmly believe this is responsible for a significant part of California’s budget woes, and cities and counties are bearing the brunt of the result.  I believe there are only three states with a 2/3 requirement (us, Rhode Island, and Arkansas, I think), and it creates a situation where a determined minority rules the issue.  As the Mayor put it, we’re not supposed to have minority rule.  For me, it makes it much more difficult for our legislators to make hard decisions, since only those legislators in “safe” districts can freely make such hard decisions, of which there aren’t nearly enough to pass a 2/3 vote.  So it creates budgets where everyone with some pet issue or a divided voting district has the power to hold up the budget until they get whatever they want, rather than letting the majority tell those legislators to go take a flying leap.  That’s bad legislating.

Anyway, enough of that.  As one of my colleagues put it, you probably don’t really need us to tell you how to vote anyway.  (But I hope you’ll listen…)

Item 4 proposed doing a rezoning study of property currently owned by Spansion (possibly rezoning it from industrial to industrial-to-residential).  We had the applicant, who said “rezone it ASAP, please”, and one member of the public saying “don’t rezone it ever”.  But in reality, both were protecting their own interests, since the applicant wants to sell the property to developers ASAP (apparently), while the member of the public wants to buy the land cheap for a data center (apparently), and the land is cheaper if not rezoned.  In the end, we voted 6-1 to do the study, wrapping it plus consideration of rezoning of two adjacent properties (which we agreed to study back in May) up as part of the Horizon 2035 process.  This should finish in about a year.  I made the motion, based on long-term planning.  Former Santa Clara County planner Don Weden tells elected officials that when making land use decisions, you should imagine for every decision that someone from 100 years in the future comes back and asks you “exactly what were you thinking?”.  So for me, we couldn’t let the immediate desires of the current property owner or a potential buyer drive a decision that will affect Sunnyvale for decades to come.  Changing the character, use, and economic impact of a large area of the city should only be done as part of a careful, overall plan.  And rolling it up as part of Horizon 2035 does exactly that.

Item 5 was second reading of the ordinance rezoning part of the Peery Park area, which passed 4-3 last meeting.  This passed 6-1.  Despite voting against it last time, I supported it this time.  The previous vote was the one where Council decided its course of action, and having made that decision, I supported moving forward.  Likewise, I will usually support any Council ratification of a closed session decision, even if I voted against it in the closed session – I support the Council decision once it’s made, even if I lost.  That’s the way this should work – we make a decision, then we get it done and move on to deal with the next thing.

That’s about it.  Ran about an hour and a half, in and out, with some interesting discussions but general agreement about the right approach.  I expected a little more debate over the grand jury response, but Council’s contention seemed to be that a) staff mostly got it right, and b) while there was an interest in wordsmithing, doing so on the dais was bad process.  But we may adopt a different process for the other Grand Jury response on August 31st – we may appoint a subcommittee to help revise staff’s initial response.  Or we may deal with it in a study session.  That’s still to be determined.

We’re off for three weeks, back on August 31st.

The City will be deciding whether or not to allow medical marijuana dispensaries to operate in Sunnyvale, probably in December. As part of the process, the City is conducting outreach, to gauge resident reactions and identify concerns. There will be two outreach meetings this month to discuss the topic. The first is Thursday August 19th at 3:00 in the Library program room. The second is Thursday August 26th at 7:00 p.m. in the Community Center Ballroom. And there is also an online survey which you can take here, as well as learning about the entire process.

And, of course, you can always send me email to express your thoughts.

In the meantime, Council enacted a moratorium preventing any dispensaries from operating (which expires at the end of March).

Sorry this is late.  But I was actually on vacation for a change, so deal with it.

We seem to have no closed session or study session this week, so we’re starting with the actual meeting for a change. First up is a special order of the day, proclaiming Lakewood and Cherry Chase elementary schools to be California Distinguished Schools. We have a bunch of consent items, mostly involving Sunnyvale Works! contracts, but also dealing with a sticky issue with public safety buildings, the quarterly investment report, and the first ever memorandum of understanding with the newly-formed Public Safety Managers Association (PSMA). Oh, and we’re actually considering rejecting one contract – we didn’t spec it out properly, so all of the bids we got were much more than we expected.

Item 2 is a biggie – our response to the grand jury report on county employee costs. Staff’s position is that we generally agree with the points they raise, but not with all of their recommendations. I expect this may become a lengthy discussion of the city’s long-term fiscal plan, and it’s one that would really benefit from a lot of public input, so I hope lots of you will show up and speak your minds, whatever you’re thinking.

Item 3 has us possibly taking early positions on state propositions 22, 23, 25, and 26. A couple of them have very direct impact to us, and a couple had interest from individual councilmembers. Again, lots of public input would be really good.

But saying that suggests that there are topics where lots of public input woudn’t be good. Hmmm. Not what I intended.

Item 4 is a continuation of an item from last meeting (and since I’m lazy, I’ll copy-and-paste my description from last meeting’s preview here):

Next up is a request to look into rezoning Spansion property from Industry (IND) to Industrial-to-Residential Medium Density (ITRMED), so the industrial property can be converted to residential. I don’t yet have a sense of this one, although we recently approved doing this to three other parcels in the immediate vicinity with some discussion and little dissent. It’ll all depend on the specifics of this particular one, I’m sure. It’d be nice to hear from some residents in the area to see what they think about this, one way or the other.

Item 4 is the second reading of the ordinance rezoning parts of Peery Park. Hey, what do you know – here’s a topic where public input probably won’t be that important. Go figure…

And that’s it. We’ll see, but I expect item 2 to attract a lot of our attention.

You may notice all city flags being flown at half-staff on Sunday.  In its history, Sunnyvale has lost five officers in the line of duty, and we recognize their sacrifices individually every year.  Sunday commemorates the loss of PSO Charles Fraker, who died in a flashover during an apartment fire on August 1, 1976.  He was 25 years old with a wife and two children.

Sunnyvale has a memorial to all five fallen officers just outside the entrance to the Public Safety building, as well as a display in the building lobby.  If you’ve never seen them, I encourage you to stop by and visit them.