02/24/2015 Council Preview – BRT

Lotsa big issues being discussed tonight.

We start the evening with a study session to review the draft Lawrence Station Area Plan.  This was a long time in development, overseen by a citizen committee made up of business owners, neighborhood members, and other residents.  After this is a study session to review progress on the Peery Park Specific Plan.  This has had a lot of community outreach  over the past several months.

The general meeting starts with our annual proclamation recognizing Arbor Day.  The consent calendar is a good-sized one with some big contracts. One is for designing the rehabilitation of the park buildings at Washington, Raynor, De Anza, and Ponderosa Parks.  There’s a contract to buy pipe parts for our water/sewer system, a contract for a city VOIP system, and a contract amendment for rehabilitating a storm pump. We have to renew our NOVA agreement.  There’s an agreement involving a sewer pipeline on Onizuka that involves both the City and Foothill/De Anza.  There’s our quarterly investment report.  And there’s second reading of a taxicab franchise ordinance.

Item 2 is the big item for the night – taking a policy position on VTA’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposals.  This is a little different from the decision that we made a couple of years ago.  Back then, VTA was just asking us to express support for doing a study of the impacts of dedicated lanes.  Now, we’ll be talking about taking a position on the actual implementation of the various alternatives.

Item 3 proposes a community engagement plan for investigating the various alternatives in the Civic Center renovation plan.

Item 4 has us looking at tandem and stacker parking spaces.  We have certain parking requirements when developments and even single-family homes are proposed.  A recent development proposed meeting those requirements through the use of stacker parking spaces – using a mechanical lift to stack cars on top of each other. Our existing policies don’t support such implementations, but we approved the project after looking at the facts and provisions of the project.  After doing so, we approved a study issue to look at both these stacker spaces and tandem parking spaces – parking two cars end-to-end in vertical spaces where one space is only accessible if the other is empty.

And item 5 has us picking our vote for officers of the Peninsula Division of the League of California Cities

Comments are closed.