Jim's Council Blog

Here’s an interesting Forbes article which identifies Sunnyvale as one of the top ten nationwide real estate markets showing steep supply decreases and price increases. Sunnyvale came in at #3, showing a 31% price increase and 31% supply decrease in the past year.

This is going to be one of the more significant Council meetings this year, because of one of the issues on the agenda.

First up for the Council is another closed session regarding the Downtown. We’re going to be having a lot of these over the next couple of months, I suspect.

Then we’ll be swearing in three new Commissioners. Well, two new commissioners and one trouble-maker who’s already a commissioner and who simply has too much free time on his hands (hi Pat!). We’ll be also acknowledging a resolution in support of the Children’s Bill of Rights.

Then we’ve got a lengthy consent calendar, mostly contractual items and the second readings of the two ordinances we passed at our last meeting. Then we get into the real business.

Item 2 is an examination of the City’s pension plans, one of the most important pieces of work we’ll be doing this year. Staff is recommending that we pursue significant changes to the employee pension plans currently in place, but as a “two tier” system. Note that we will not actually be changing the pension plans at this meeting. We’ll only be directing staff on what strategy to pursue going forward. Subsequent planning and labor negotiations may return a completely different result from what direction is given. Or not. I expect this to be a long discussion, because it’s such an important topic.

Then we’ll be revisiting the decision to authorize staff to sell property near Orchard Gardens. A couple of us on Council have been pushing for this to happen for a while, and I’m glad to see this coming forward.

Next up is consideration of changes to the joint powers agreement governing the Silicon Valley Regional Interoperability Authority, an intergovernmental body tasked with organizing joint public safety communication systems and processes in Santa Clara County. This effort was identified as a priority in the aftermath of 9/11, in light of public safety communication failures that occurred and the need for better disaster preparedness.

Next up, always fun, is an appeal of a Planning Commission denial of a use permit for microwave dishes and related equipment at 602 Weddell. Interestingly, Staff is recommending granting the appeal, although the applicant has made significant changes to the proposal since the Planning Commission originally denied the use permit.

Last on the agenda, Council will be considering ratifying committee appointments to the upcoming National League of Cities conference. I’m looking forward to this, because I was appointed to two committees, the Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee and the Information Technology and Communication Committee. It’s going to be a busy trip for me…

Finally, we have a quick (probably) Financing Authority meeting.

After that, I’ll be off to Washington, DC for the National League of Cities conference. I’ll try to post some updates while I’m there.

Just tweeted from @CityOfSunnyvale, Sunnyvale’s Serious Materials has been hired to retrofit every window in the Empire State Building with double-paned energy efficient windows. Read the article to learn exactly how they’re doing it, which includes setting up an on-site window factory and reusing the existing panes. Really cool stuff.

Came across an interesting article about the CaliforniaFirst program. This is a program where CaliforniaFirst loans money to individual homeowners for solar installations, grey water equipment, geothermal heating systems, and other home energy improvements, and the homeowners pay it back through individual assessments on their property taxes. This is a really great idea that Scientific American called one of 20 ideas that will change the world (December 2009 issue – look it up).

The reason why this is so important is this: we can pass all of the ordinances we want and force builders to build incredibly efficient housing until the cows come home, but that does nothing for the more than 95% of housing that already exists and that will continue to make up the vast majority of residential housing in Sunnyvale over the next century. Energy efficiency upgrades to existing homes is going to be increasingly important to communities like ours. And they’re win-win – they repay themselves over time, and then some. The only down side is the high start-up cost – which CaliforniaFirst solves.

Sunnyvale voted to take part in this back at my very first meeting on January 5th (in fact, this was the first motion I made after being elected). So once CaliforniaFirst figures its procedures, Sunnyvale residents will be able to participate.

Expect me to make a big deal out of it when it becomes available. I want the City to make a big publicity splash as well. The program won’t mean much if people don’t know about it…

As I’ve said a couple of times, Google is launching an initiative to pilot installation of high-speed fiber optic lines in several communities.  To give you a sense of what we’re talking about here, Comcast is advertising speeds of 15 mbps (megabits per second)., while AT&T is advertising DSL up to 6 mbps.  Google’s pilot network will be 1 gigabit/second – more than 66 times the speed that either of these companies are offering.  This is huge, and they’d be building up Sunnyvale’s infrastructure in the process.

Google will base its decision on a number of factors, including the availability of developers to make use of the pilot project to develop new and interesting applications.  That’s a qualification that is extremely relevant to Sunnyvale.  But another criteria is the amount of interest expressed by residents.  In other words, if they get a lot of people nominating a city, they’ll take it seriously.

This is where you come in, right now!

We need Sunnyvale residents to go to the Google nomination form and nominate Sunnyvale!  Make noise!  Be creative!  But make the case that Sunnyvale is a city that Google should select!  This is your opportunity to make a big difference to the city of Sunnyvale, and we should take it!

If you look at the application, you’ll see they encourage creative and out-of-the-box thinking for the applications. While I can’t speak for my colleagues, I’m completely willing to make a fool out of myself as one of Sunnyvale’s council members in the interest of getting Google’s attention. My domain is dweeb.org, for God’s sake. I doubt there are many council members in contention that are geekier than I am, and that’s got to appeal to Google. So think about what we can do to make this happen!

Well, not as long as I expected, but still three hours.

First up was a salute to the flag presented by the brand new Lakewood Village Color Guard, nicely done. Then we had recognition of returning Councilmember Otto Lee and outgoing interim Councilmember Dean Chu. Then it was on to business.

The consent calendar went through without any items pulled. That surprised me. The scope of the consent calendar convinced me that a couple of items would get pulled, but that didn’t happen. So much the better.

Item 2, the taxicab franchise, went through without comment.

Item 3 took some time. This was an appeal of a decision by staff and the planning commission to require changes to a fence on Devonshire. I went out beforehand, looked over the fence and neighborhood, and chatted with the applicant, and I’m really glad I did, because it gave me context I wouldn’t otherwise have had. In short, the guy had a neighbor who put up a really nice-looking fence, all with the city’s approval. So the guy decided to do the same. He designed it with future home expansions in mind, went to city staff and filed his papers – and then he built it. Without waiting. Staff (and the PC) came back with several options, but their basic complaints were that it was too close to the street and too tall.

Anyway, in the end, Council voted 5-2 to support Staff’s recommendation. I voted against it, even though I agreed with Staff’s recommendation in all but one way – the requirement that the fence be dropped 6″ in height. The guy’s fence is identical in height (at grade) to his neighbor’s fence, and at grade, it’s just to the top of my head. And I’m short. I felt that requiring the fence to be dropped down was an unnecessary reduction in his privacy and that he should get the same consideration that his neighbor did. But I did feel that the additional setback was necessary, and that upholding the rest of the Eichler guidelines and preserving the look and feel of the neighborhood was important. I just didn’t believe the additional 6″ made a difference. Nevertheless, I can’t argue with my colleagues’ decision to uphold the findings of staff and the PC – the guidelines exist for a reason, they describe a general vision for neighborhoods’ look and feel, and adhering to them is, in theory, adhering to the vision. And I was not happy with the applicant’s decision to build the fence prior to approval.

Item 4, a revision to the Municipal Code regarding Areas of Special Flood Hazard, went through almost without comment.

Item 5, coordinated zoning between neighboring cities, had a bit of discussion. There was general consensus that staff’s recommendation to deal with it at the administrative level was the right approach, so we were fine with staff’s recommendation. But there was also an interest in trying to develop individual agreements with neighborhood cities for council-level agreements, possibly even ceding some authority on matters within 1000′ of boundaries. Staff expressed concerns that it was pointless (one city has already told us “thanks but no thanks”) and possibly even prohibited by the Charter. But I supported it because talking is good, and in the worst case, nothing comes of it. And it passed, although not unanimously. I think it was 5-2, maybe 6-1. Sorry – long night.

Item 6, creation of a LUTE/CAP advisory committee, was mostly straightforward. I expressed some concerns that we’re going to have four or five committees or commissions weighing in on the LUTE and CAP, which seems like a lot. But that didn’t stop us from supporting staff’s recommendation, and we created a subcommittee of Mayor Hamilton, Councilmember Lee, and Councilmember Spitaleri to appoint people to the committee, up to 15 total.

Item 7, the Council Work Plan, was surprisingly contentious. A member of the public raised concerns that we would not be doing the medical marijuana dispensary study this year (it ended up ranked, but below the line of available staff items), which prompted an effort to revisit the results, look at staff’s available hours, and see about shifting staff priorities to allow the 6th and 7th items on that list (political signs and medical marijuana dispensaries) to be studied this year. After some heated debate, the effort was rejected 1-5 with an abstention, and the work plan was passed with some tweaks. I had two objections to the revisiting issue. One, better expressed by Councilmember Moylan, was that I didn’t like re-opening the floodgates to revisit all of our study issue decisions and tinker with the results to achieve a different outcome.

<soapbox>But my big objection, and it’s one I’ve thought a lot about over the past year, was that I thought the whole thing violated the basic principle of open government. To me, this came way out of left field, and there was no way that anyone reading that RTC could reasonably have expected that we would be discussing it, much less voting on it. “Open government” has two goals. One is providing stakeholders with a transparent process that gives them confidence that the process is best serving their interests (or evidence that it isn’t, as the case may be). The other is to afford stakeholders with every opportunity to participate in the process. And when we on Council make proposals that couldn’t reasonably be inferred from the RTC and that weren’t discussed before public comments are held, we’re failing to maintain open government. It doesn’t matter if we think nobody will care about the vote – it’s not our place to second-guess what members of the public will care about. So when I think a proposal is just too far removed from what was placed on the agenda, and particularly when it isn’t raised before public comments, I won’t support it. And I didn’t, in this case.</soapbox>

Anyway. On to item 8 – potential Sunnyvale participation in the Google high speed bandwidth initiative. I’ll be following up on this one with its own post, but there was extreme enthusiasm in being a candidate city for this initiative, and we’re moving forward with this, aggressively. We’re going to need your help, more on this to follow.

Item 9 was to appoint members to three commission vacancies. Pat Walz and Roger Ludlow were appointed to the Board of Building Code Appeals, and Younil Jeong was appointed to Housing and Human Services. I meant no slight on the fourth candidate with my vote – she was well qualified, but we had two candidates for one slot, and that’s what had to happen, I thought.

After that, we had IGR reports and other comments. I got a study issue put on the list for next year – exploring requirements for new housing construction to provide wiring for electric car chargers. This was suggested in email by a resident, and it’s a good idea to at least find out what would be involved.

That’s about it.  Long meeting, but a good one.  It’s good to have Otto back, too.

You may have caught this week’s 60 Minutes, which featured a piece on Bloom Energy, a start-up that has some really interesting fuel cell technology, which they’re piloting at eBay and other big tech companies. They’re still in stealth mode (which is obvious from their website), but they came out of it enough to show off their technology in a big way. Really interesting and promising stuff.

Glossed over in the 60 Minutes piece is that this is a Sunnyvale company. I even know one of the guys working on the technology. Really cool.

Boy, this is going to be a long one.

For starters, we have a 90-minute closed session regarding the Downtown, always fun, but I’m hoping for good news. We’ll see (not that I can tell you anything about the results, mind you).

Then we have the regular meeting. It starts with ceremonial stuff as Otto Lee returns and we say goodbye (for now) to Dean Chu. It’ll be nice to have Otto back, and I’m interested to see what serving with him will be like. Still, we’ll spend some time on the ceremonial stuff.

Then we have a consent calendar with no less than 14 items. Hopefully, they’ll all go through, but there is some substantial stuff on the consent calendar – approval of a $400k contract for outside consultants to help us with the Climate Action Plan, money for emergency preparedness planning, $1.8 million for downtown streetscape improvements, a couple of Sunnyvale Works! contracts, and so on.

Then we get into the regular business, with no less than eight items on the agenda.

First, we have approval of a taxicab franchise, which tends to be a pretty straightforward and simple issue one way or the other. Then we have an appeal of a Planning Commission denial of a residential fence, which seems small, but which will probably involve some discussion.

Next up is an issue which sounds boring but which is quite serious – a study issue regarding coordinating zoning with neighboring cities. We’ve had some real problems in past years with other cities promoting questionable projects that have a serious impact on Sunnyvale. Some we’ve gotten shot down, some went through anyway. While we work hard to be good neighbors, the same isn’t always true of our neighbors. So ways of reducing the conflicts that can arise when border developments are proposed will be a good thing to study. It’ll also be useful to hear from the public about their experiences with where the process failed them, or where it worked well (hint, hint).

Then we get into an important one. Staff is proposing creating a staff advisory committee for the LUTE/Climate Action Plan development, which is ongoing. You may recall that Staff held three LUTE outreach meetings regarding the LUTE update. After those meetings, Staff decided “we really need to do something more”, and they’re recommending creating this committee to get direct resident feedback on these issues.

The final three are probably simpler items. One is to adopt the Council’s work plan for the year. Second is to discuss pursuing participation in Google’s high speed bandwidth project. I’ve received a number of emails on that topic. Finally, we’ll be appointing up to three new commissioners, for one spot on the Health & Human Services Commission and for two spots on the Board of Building Code Appeals Commission.

Like I said, probably a long night. But an interesting one.

I’ve received a number of emails, both directed at me and at the full Council, saying that Sunnyvale should try to become one of the cities participating in its high-speed fiber optic trial. I agree (big surprise), and I’m not the only councilmember who does. We’re actively pursuing it, never fear.