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more contentious than it was, because 1) we had a number of speakers express loud opinions when the appointment was originally made, and 2) there was clearly a bit of a divide on Council between those who saw some problems but thought what happened was generally OK and those who saw some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.

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.

Wow. This meeting was so uneventful I almost forgot to post a summary. Sorry about that.

We started with our closed session regarding pending litigation, where, as usual, direction was given but no action was taken. Then we had a presentation from the Public Safety Officers Association (PSOA) to the Muscular Dystrophy Association of the proceeds from its annual “Pass the Boot” fundraiser. They stake out various Sunnyvale intersections during one day, then go from car to car with a firefighter’s boot, asking for donations to MDA. This year, they raised $31,395 for MDA. Nice job, guys.

After that, we had a presentation from the Leadership Sunnyvale Class of 2010. Every Leadership Sunnyvale class is required to do some sort of presentation or event as part of their commencement, and this year’s class created a presentation on their view of what Sunnyvale might be like 50 years from now. My favorite part was the “Rosenblum Public Library”…

Next, the consent calendar passed without comment, and there were no public announcements. During public comments, one speaker made rather pointed remarks about our previous action regarding the directly-elected mayor issue. Then it was on to the general business.

Item 2 looked at rezoning certain parcels on Mathilda between Maude and Central from industrial and service (M-S) to industrial and service/places of assembly (M-S/POA). The issue here was created when Council (before me!) rezoned a single parcel in that area to be M-S/POA in order to accommodate Trinity Church. Once that was done, it made the surrounding parcels much less viable as industrial spaces, due to concerns such as sensitive receptor issues. So the proposal was to rezone some of the adjacent properties to M-S/POA. But the City has on its plate a broad examination of all of the zoning in the Peery Park area, something that’s been delayed due to budget concerns. So there was a clear split between one faction saying “this should be examined as part of the big picture” and another faction saying “yeah, but it’s probably going to end up this way, and the study is delayed, let’s just pull the trigger”. Staff obviously saw both points of view, and the Planning Commission split 4-3 in favor of waiting for the Peery Park study. I’m very much in the “let’s plan this out” mindset, so I opposed the motion to rezone four parcels to M-S/POA, and I wasn’t alone. But the immediate rezoning passed 4-3.

I’m not particularly heartbroken to have lost – it was something of a coin flip for me, since I’m pretty sure those parcels would have ended up M-S/POA in the long run anyway. But it wasn’t good process, which always disappoints me.

Item 3 looked at rezoning a parcel on De Guigne from industrial (IND) to industrial-to-residential (ITRMED), at the request of the current owner, Spansion, who is probably looking to unload the property to a home developer. But prior to the meeting, Spansion asked to delay this until August 10th, so that the appropriate Spansion spokespeople could be there, and we agreed, on a 7-0 vote.

Item 4 involved placing three delinquent utility bills on the responsible parties’ tax rolls, which went through with virtually no pause on a 7-0 vote. Item 5 likewise involved placing delinquencies for those outside of the city limits who nevertheless use Sunnyvale’s utility services, on their tax rolls, and it went through on a 7-0 vote as well. And that was pretty much it.

We were in and out in about an hour and 10 minutes.

Just a note in closing. It may seem like I’m obsessed by time in all of these previews and summaries, but this has nothing to do with trying to get this done quickly. I’m a night owl by upbringing, and other than being uncomfortable with the burden on staff, I’m fine running into the late hours if that’s what’s needed to do the job right. But what I’ve found over the past many years of attending multiple cities’ council meetings is that with a well-run council meeting, time spent is a good gauge of the public interest in topics, the relative importance of topics to the city, or both. So for me, a long meeting indicates “something matters” and a short meeting indicates “housekeeping items”, and that’s what I’m trying to convey. That’s all.

Well.

That was interesting.

I’m still a bit grumpy from a long night, a contentious debate, and not much sleep recently, so I apologize in advance if that comes through in my post.

We started with a closed session regarding potential litigation, and all I can say is what was officially said – “direction was given but no action was taken”. More on this at a later date (maybe, maybe not). Councilmember Swegles attended both the closed session and subsequent Council meeting via teleconference (he’s in Michigan, still recuperating, but he’s starting to sound really good, and a lot better than he was at our last meeting).

Then we had a presentation on the 2-1-1 system and efforts to broaden its scope. 2-1-1 provides non-emergency information to callers, in an attempt to lessen the number of non-emergency calls that 9-1-1 gets, as well as to try and centralize available information as a public resource. There is a bill in Congress, HR211, sponsored by our own Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, that would expand the scope of 2-1-1 service, and the presentation made the convincing case that this is a necessary and good thing.

Then we had the general business. One item was pulled from the consent calendar – discussion of the City’s purchase of Director Lewis’ home. He will be retiring in February, he has a home loan through the city, he’s required to make good on the loan within 6 months of leaving, and his home is and will be under water. So he wants to simply have the city foreclose on it. Given the financial options available to us, doing so is actually the most fiscally sound approach, and we voted 7-0 to do so. The rest of the consent calendar passed without concerns, although Councilmember Whittum had to abstain on one item that involved property within 500′ of his home.

The first item of general business was yet another discussion of putting a directly-elected mayor initiative on the ballot. And the resulting discussion occupied the vast majority of the meeting. Nothing new was presented, although again there were multiple speakers opposing the notion and not a single speaker advocating for it. We then had three rounds of voting. In the first round, a motion was made to put forth a directly-elected mayor with 2 four-year terms and no timeout between time on Council and as Mayor. That was defeated 3-4, in part by people who don’t want to pursue this, in part by people uncomfortable with the notion of it being an end-run around term limits with the possibility of 16 years of continuous service.

So then a second motion was made to again have a two-term, 4-year term directly elected mayor, with some timeouts in between mayor and council service to prevent the argument of “end run around term limits” from applying. This again was defeated 3-4, again in part by people who don’t like the issue at all, and in part by people who didn’t like the specifics of the proposal. This one was even more difficult, because up until the last minute, there was a lot of tinkering with the specifics of the term limits and the timeout between service and so on, and I think it failed in no small part because the eventual proposal wasn’t really clear to everyone.

At this point, we seemed sort of deadlocked, with three members really wanting to pass something, three members really wanting to oppose this, and one member willing to support under certain circumstances. I didn’t see four votes to kill it, and it seemed like it was going to be impossible to get four members to agree on specifics to go forward. And it was increasingly clear to me that having seven of us up there trying to craft specifics of a charter amendment on the dais was either not going to work or was going to result in something bad. So I moved to place an item on an upcoming agenda to create a Charter Review Committee to look at this again and come back with specific proposals. And that passed after a little discussion 7-0.

This was extremely frustrating to me. Through three meetings, there was no support for this expressed by any member of the public – not a single person came to a meeting to say “this is a good thing”. This has been soundly and repeatedly rejected by the voters. This has been soundly and repeatedly rejected by Charter Review committees – as recently as three years ago. There is no reason to believe that voters want this and no evidence that putting this on the ballot is anything but a complete waste of time. In fact, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.  And yet, we were still trying to advance the issue,   for no good reason (in my opinion) that was expressed by my colleagues. And the best I could do to resolve the situation was to kick it down the road even further. In this instance, we failed to govern well, and we’re not even done yet. I’m disappointed in the result, and I’m disappointed that I didn’t do a better job of trying to persuade my colleagues. But it is what it is.

Item 3 was consideration of an interim council appointment process. This was triggered from the experiences with appointing a replacement for Otto Lee when he was called up to active duty. I have to confess that I completely flipped on this issue over the past month, and I said as much last night. During Otto’s appointment, the statement was made repeatedly that Council could only appoint a replacement in the case of a reservist being called up. That’s never going to happen again, so I thought it was a complete waste of time to build a process around a non-event. So I opposed this study issue at every turn.  But in the past month, I took the time to more carefully look over the Charter, and it turns out that this is not the only time that Council may appoint an interim replacement. If a councilmember is involuntarily removed (death or removal from office) within six months of his term ending, the Charter requires Council to appoint a replacement within 60 days. And while another reservist being called up is extremely unlikely, there is a good chance that the involuntary removal case may happen in my lifetime. As soon as I realized that, I agreed that this needed to be fixed, so I tried to craft something that met everyone’s concerns, to make up for my past opposition. The biggest concern, expressed by members of the public repeatedly since Otto’s departure, was the need for an open and transparent process, so that’s what I focused on.

My colleagues let me take the lead on this one, and I proposed that we adopt an appointment process as close as possible to the appointment process for board and commission members, but with some specific differences. First, the Council interview process for interim councilmember candidates will include an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions of individual candidates, something that doesn’t happen with B&C appointees. Second, in the event that we have more than five applicants for a vacancy (something that’s extremely likely – I’d expect to have ten or twenty applicants for a Council vacancy), Council won’t use the normal voting process, but will instead use instant run-off voting, simply because resolving ties between ten or twenty votes is a nightmare, and it’s trivial with IRV. The direction was then for staff to return with a draft questionnaire for Council candidates, so that we’ve prepared that up front. Additionally, the situation will not be referred to as a “vacant seat” (which has a specific meaning in the charter) but rather as an interim appointment (I think that’s the term we used). And this passed with a little bit of discussion, 7-0.

One of the other considerations when this happens is the need to resolve the appointment quickly.  In the reserve case, there is no time limit, but in the involuntary removal case, we only have 60 days.  So as much as possible, we need to be able to pull the trigger on an appointment process as soon as it’s obvious one is needed.  I think we accomplished that.

I have to point out one thing here, which I pointed out before the vote.  In a way, the entire exercise was still pointless.  From a legal standpoint, for any Council policy, Council is free to change the policy, or simply disregard it, whenever it feels it is appropriate to do so.  So even though we created a policy, there’s nothing that prevents some council 20 years from now from completely ignoring it when the issue comes up.  But openness and transparency is best served when there is a policy in place, and, more important, when Council follows existing policy.  So even if some subsequent Council ignores what we did, we did the right thing in acknowledging that a problem exists and creating a policy to solve the problem.  So I’m happy with the result.

Item 4 was consideration of a monopine installation on Lockheed property.  This came to Council because the request was to exceed the 100′ limit by 12′ – something that’s OK to do, but which requires Council approval. There were some concerns expressed about health safety (not from RF, but from lead in the monopine materials) and about the testing of the emissions, and after they were answered, Council approved it on a 7-0 vote.

Item 5 involved approving a contract for an asset manager for our retiree medical trust.  That sailed through with almost no discussion on a 7-0 vote.

Item 6 involved approving the placement of outstanding administrative citations on the property tax rolls.  The need for this is fairly uncommon.  Most of the time, when the city issues citations, the recipients pay them, either immediately or after some discussion.  But occasionally we get someone who is just determined to ignore the citations.  And the alternative is to use a collection agency.  This is better for the city, so it passed on a 7-0 vote.

That’s mostly it.  We closed the meeting in memory of Nadine Malone, who was very involved in Sunnyvale’s history and who did a lot to help get the Heritage Park Museum up and running.  She passed away a couple of weeks ago.

Another long one, and we’ve hopefully gotten a lot of the work out of the way.

Before the meeting, we had a closed session regarding ongoing negotiations with the Sunnyvale Management Association (direction was given, no action taken), followed by a study session on improving the efficiency of Council meetings. The study session didn’t result in any concrete suggestions, as everyone seemed to have their own ideas on what was wrong and how to fix it. However, there was general agreement that whatever the situation now, it’s much better than it was years ago, when meetings often ran past midnight. Then we went with the Council meeting.

First up was recognition of July as National Parks and Rec Month. We had the usual public announcements, including one for this year’s State of the City, on July 4th in Washington Park. Next came the consent calendar.

But this time, we had four items pulled from the calendar by members of the public. One speaker pulled the issues regarding modifications to the agreements with the City Manager and the City Attorney. It wasn’t obvious from the RTCs that the modifications really reflected aspects of the original agreements with both, which they both were. After a little discussion, both passed 7-0. Two speakers pulled the contract amendment for the environmental study of the proposed Morse Avenue Park, but they wanted to speak in favor of the issue or to compliment Mark Rogge, the DPW staff member who gave a presentation on the issue to the Morse Park Neighborhood Association to explain the situation and the possible courses of action. So that one also passed 7-0.

The final item pulled was the request for additional funding for outside counsel for the Mary Avenue lawsuit, and the speaker questioned why the city was proposing spending an additional $100k for continuation of legal challenges regarding this, instead of spending that money on other city services. Since this involves ongoing litigation, none of the seven of us can say anything substantive on the issue. But to be honest, I was visibly annoyed that the speaker made her points – since she is one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. So in short, one of the plaintiffs came to tell us, the defendants, that we shouldn’t be spending money to defend against her own lawsuit. “Inappropriate” was the mildest description that came to mind at that moment, which is what I said. And the additional funds were approved 6-1.

Then it was on to the general business.

First item for discussion was consideration of declaring Raynor Activity Center available for long term leases.  This was really a procedural issue.  Council previously directed staff to investigate finding long-term tenants for the property, which would result in revenue-neutral maintenance of it.  But one of the challenges is that the buildings are at the end of their lifespans, some of them no longer habitable and only suitable for equipment storage.  So whoever commits to a long-term lease will also need to commit to providing the upkeep for the facilities, which will not be insignificant.  The first legal step in choosing a long-term tenant is to declare the property surplus, after which we can entertain proposals for prospective tenants – who may very well be the current tenants.  But the current tenants are obviously nervous about the process, and they wanted to make their case that they should be allowed to maintain occupation of the property.  In the end, we voted 7-0 to declare the property surplus and to move forward with the process, maintaining the current month-to-month arrangements with the current tenants, and being open to commitments longer than month-to-month, if the current tenants are amenable and if the longer agreements don’t hinder the City’s ability to conclude the process in a timely fashion.  In short, remain calm, all is well…

Item 3 was consideration of an extension to the existing emergency moratorium against medical marijuana facilities in Sunnyvale.  The existing moratorium is only good for 45 days, after which we can extend it once by 10 months 15 days, after which we can extend it an additional 1 year.  Staff asked us to approve the full 10 months 15 days, although their plan for finishing the study issue has it returning for a vote in December.  But Staff wanted the full time, in the event something unexpected should happen.  There were many proponents who came to speak on behalf of an expedited process, with the comments ranging from “you should just make the decision in the 45-day period” to “we support the extension as long as staff  can meet the proposed timeline.  When it went for Council discussion, things got a bit contentious, and it was complicated by the fact that it legally requires a 4/5 vote to pass an extension (which means 6 out of 7 councilmembers had to approve it).  With one councilmember fairly set upon not granting a significant extension, that gave every remaining councilmember an effective veto on any proposal.  And indeed, members exercised that veto.  The first motion was to approve staff’s request for 10 months 15 days, but it failed on a 5-2 vote.  The second motion was to approve an extension until January 31st, which failed on a 3-4 vote.  The third (made by me) was to approve an extension for 10 months, 14 days (the motion couldn’t match a previously-failed motion), and it again failed 5-2.  The final motion was to grant an extension through March 31st 2011, and it finally passed on a 6-1 vote.  That was a little contentious.

At this point, Councilmember Swegles had to leave, because he’s been recovering from some medical difficulties, and he ran out of gas.  It was actually a pretty touching thing – he had some comments, and then he got a standing ovation.

Item 4 was adoption of the FY 2010/2011 budget, fee schedule, and appropriations limit.  There was no public hearing on this, since the public hearing for this was held 2 weeks ago. There was surprisingly little discussion – some concern about the public safety changes, some concern about a couple of the fee changes, and concern over money for training Planning Commissioners (particularly since we have three new ones this year and at least one new one next year).  Then we passed the budget 6-0.  I took the opportunity to repeat some of the comments I made here – how staff did a really good job of devising a budget that met our criteria, that the pain is minimized to a great extent (particularly compared to other cities), but that the tenuousness of the budget was somewhat hidden by how well staff spread out the pain.  We’ve got a budget that keeps us in the black, but which has us reducing our reserves over six or seven years to a low point of one month’s worth of money in the budget stabilization fund.  And that means we have no margin of error – over six or seven years.  And all of us need to keep that in mind and act accordingly.

Item 5 involved the awarding of a non-exclusive taxicab franchise, which went through with no comments.

After some closing comments, we adjourned to the Redevelopment Agency, where we passed the consent calendar and proposed RDA budget on 6-0 votes.

That’s about it  We’re off for three weeks, other than State of the City.

Another very long night.

First, Councilmember Swegles was absent last night – he stayed home to recover from surgery he recently underwent. He’s doing fine, and he’s expected to return for the meeting on 6/29. Get well soon, Ron.

We started off by swearing in of the Boardmembers and Commissioners, which is always fun. We had a couple who were re-elected to their commissions, and a couple of brand new ones. Then it was on to business.

The consent calendar passed without discussion. First up was the annual public hearing on the proposed budget, and a number of speakers wanted to express their opinions on various topics. One speaker expressed concerns about employee pensions. A number of people expressed concerns about the proposed reduction in tree maintenance. I didn’t fully realize how devoted to trees Sunnyvale residents are until I walked precincts before the election, and it was in evidence again tonight. For the most part, however, the speakers all said that they recognized the difficult situation we’re in and hoped we would restore tree maintenance funding as soon as is reasonable to do so. That’s certainly my goal, and I’m grateful for the reasonable opinions they expressed.  A number of educators came to speak on behalf of the Neighborhood Resource Officer (NRO) program at the various Sunnyvale schools. Somehow, the message was out there that staff is proposing to cut that program, which is not the case. I believe we’re proposing to civilianize one or more of the positions for the lowest levels of education, but keep uniformed officers in the middle schools and high schools. Mike Andrade, president of the Sunnyvale Public Safety Officers Association, expressed concerns about the continuing drawing down of public safety resources.  Bob Obrey, Chair of the Arts Commission, provided their commission’s unanimous recommendation to approve the budget.

I’ll highlight one set of speakers. Ray Su, chair of the Board of Library Trustees, and Narendra Pathak, recently re-appointed to the Board, came to support the proposed budget and speak about the library’s funding and library services. Here are some stats that they provided:

• Over the past three years, circulation in our library has increased 31.2%, with a 7% decrease in staff during that time.
• Visitors have increased 19.9% in the past three years.
• Computer usage has increased 25.6% in the past year.  40% of computer users are doing job searches.

After the hearing was done, we did hold some votes on some issues. We voted 5-1 to have staff bring back information on creating landscape and lighting assessment districts in Sunnyvale, to raise revenue for those services (which is an action Council can take without a ballot vote).  We voted 6-0 to do the same with possibly establishing public safety impact fees and traffic impact fees.

We then got into the proposed budget supplements, and in the end, we  voted 5-1 to approve staff’s recommendation on all budget supplements without changes.  But before getting there, an attempt to do away with neighborhood grants and move the money into citywide event funding failed on a 2-4 vote.  A motion to attach conditions to the proposed Junior Achievement grant failed to get a second.  The proposed budget includes elimination of detailed Council minutes in favor of “action minutes” (much more abbreviated).  An attempt to preserve detailed Council minutes failed on a 2-4 vote, which was a little more contentious.  This isn’t a cut-and-dried issue, because there are real benefits to having text-based detailed minutes.  They’re searchable, they’re cheap and easy to maintain, and they’re convenient.  But few cities in the County provide them because of the cost and manpower required to create them.  In the end, Council decided that the manpower requirements couldn’t be justified in this climate.

Item 3 was the public hearing on the city’s fee schedule.  Our discussion was mostly focused on two specific topics.  One was staff’s recommendation that we waive fees for PG&E to take down trees when it needs to (PG&E routinely removes and replaces around 35 trees per year, in order to protect power lines and other equipment).  Another was a proposed fee to be attached to large events or hazard situations whenever public safety is required to be deployed for extended periods of time.  This isn’t a fee that would be charged if, for instance, someone’s house catches fire and Public Safety shows up.  It’s if, for instance, there’s a downed power line that requires streets to be blocked off (charged to PG&E), or if some large civic event requires excessive and/or unexpected Public Safety response.  In terms of the public hearing itself, a spokesperson from PG&E asked us to waive the fee and answered questions we had.  Another speaker, a bicycle proponent, encouraged the city to better advertise and enforce bicycle registrations and helmet use.

We considered whether or not to waive fees for PG&E’s tree removal applications (we currently waive them).  There was talk about imposing the fee, and I suspect some of it came from reactions to Proposition 16.  But the end, a member of the public pointed out that if we impose the fee, the cost will just be passed on to customers, so taxpayers would pay for it one way or the other.  One of my theories of how to approach Council meetings is the belief that on any topic, at any time, no matter what I may believe or how I may be leaning, some member of the public may put forth a “killer argument” – that one idea or one sentence that makes me think “of course that’s the case, I have to vote this way”.  And this was the first time since being elected that I’ve encountered one.  So thanks, Werner (I think it was you who said this).  We then chose to continue to waive the fee.

Finally, on a 6-0 vote, we approved instituting a $33 fee for residents who have Sunnyvale Public Safety deal with their fix-it tickets. At one time, we did this for free, and a change was recently made to charge $33 only for non-residents. Council ended up voting 6-0 to impose the fee on residents as well, in part because we’re recovering costs incurred for the work the city has to do, in part because it doesn’t make sense to subsidize people who need our services because they broke the law.

Item 4 was consideration of the water, waste water, and solid waste fees.  Staff is proposing increases in these fees by 7.5% for water and solid waste, and 4.5% for wastewater.  Unsurprisingly, a number of people spoke against the increases, primarily citing the economic situation and the burden on seniors that the increases would pose.  In the end, Council voted 6-0 to approve the increases, primarily because the increases are being driven almost exclusively by costs imposed on us from the outside.  One of the two water districts that serves us is imposing a hefty increase in water costs on us.  Diesel costs are driving up the cost of solid waste pickups.  So the only alternative for us is to subsidize everyone’s bills – and therefore cut other city services (parks, library, public safety, whatever).  We weren’t willing to subsidize residents, in the end.  Additionally, Councilmembers Lee and Spitaleri co-sponsored a study issue to potentially subsidize or otherwise lower rates for seniors, disabled, and other fixed income customers.

Item 5 was the most contentious one, as we considered putting a directly-elected mayor initiative on the ballot.  There was immediate pushback on the item, because Councilmember Swegles has strong feelings about the issue, and he wasn’t able to be present.   So an attempt was made to move the issue to the July 20th meeting.  There was resistance to this, out of a concern that the ballot deadline is only a couple of weeks after that, and if an attempt is made to put a measure on the November 2010 ballot at that meeting, it gives us no room to maneuver and no room for public input.  In light of that, and in light of staff’s report that a November 2010 ballot measure would cost the city $167k, while a November 2011 ballot measure would cost only $42k, an amendment was made to forego consideration of placing this issue on the November 2010 ballot, unless one or more other measures are placed on that ballot.  The amendment passed 5-1, then the overall motion to delay the issue until July 20th passed 4-2.

Item 6 was a second reading of an ordinance that had a dissenter, and it passed 5-1 without comment.  And that was it.

We had some intergovernmental relations reports, and then we closed the meeting in memory of Vince Cala, who passed away on May 30th.

Just an initial note on these summaries.  I’m usually too busy paying attention during the actual Council meetings to take detailed notes, so I write these summaries from memory, without the benefit of minutes or video playback.  And this often happens the morning after a particularly late-night meeting.  As a result, there will occasionally be mistakes, I usually do not remember names well (it’s a problem for me), and I won’t get numbers exactly right in all cases.  Please take this into account when reading these summaries.

Another long night, which was preceded by two hours of closed session for our semi-annual performance reviews for the City Manager and City Attorney. I’m not allowed to comment on the content, but as was mentioned at the Council meeting, you can infer what you want from the fact that they were both still present and employed at the Council meeting that followed…

We started with the annual Public Safety awards, at which the City recognized officers and individuals for extraordinary efforts. Three specific events were recognized.  The first was one in which a resident collapsed and had to be resuscitated by her family, with direction given by an emergency dispatcher, until DPS arrived and revived the victim with a defibrillator. The victim was at the awards, and she presented DPS with a hand-made blanket, for use in one of the fire stations. Very nice. The three DPS officers involved received life-saving ribbons, and it was mentioned that this was the third such ribbon received by one of the officers.  The two family members who started the resuscitation also received commendations.  It was very touching.

The second award was for two detectives who racked up an impressive burglary clearance rate last year.  Typical burglary clearance rates are 20-40%, but these two detectives cleared over 60% of their cases last year (I think the number was 61%). A clearance rate like this is unheard of.  One of the cases in particular was a string of multi-city armed robberies of cabbies, and it required the detectives to perform stake-outs, pull cell phone warrants, and do some undercover work.  For this and their impressive clearance rate, the two detectives were awarded the Distinguished Service Award.

The third award was for three officers who were involved in a hostage situation last year. They responded to an incident of a man with a gun who was held up with six other people, and they managed to rescue a woman and her child from an upstairs room moments before the man entered the room. For that, the three officers received Silver Stars.

After those presentations, the City recognized Fry’s Electronics for 25 years of business in Sunnyvale. I mentioned at the time that it was fitting we were doing so last night, since May 25th is International Geek Pride Day. So I pointed out that 1) I am a geek, 2) I’m proud of it, and 3) I’m grateful to Fry’s for enabling me to be the geek that I am today.

Then it was on to the real issues. Item 1K was pulled off of the consent calendar, to discuss the scope of ballot issues that Staff considers to be relevant to city business. An attempt was made to widen the scope, but it failed. I didn’t like the idea of Staff having to second-guess what issues, beyond the obvious ones, that Council may be inclined to take a position on, and we weren’t able to give them broader but still unambiguous direction. And Council can always expand the list of issues itself. So Council passed the proposed staff wording, which leaves things as is, mostly, on a 6-1 vote. The rest of the consent calendar passed without comment.

Item 2 was appointing new commissioners. I won’t comment on why I voted for or against applicants, other than to say that we had limited spots and lots of applicants in some cases, and I consistently voted for only the number of seats that were available. I’m not keen to vote for “all people that are qualified” – that seems like kicking the decision to my colleagues. So I vote for the specific people I think would best serve the city’s needs, to fill the available seats (or fewer, if I feel there aren’t enough qualified people). That sometimes means not voting for someone that is very qualified when we have too many applicants, and that was the case with one applicant in particular last night.

I also disclosed that one of the applicants, Glenn Hendricks for Planning Commission, was my campaign treasurer and a supporter.  That vote was a tough vote, and for the past several weeks, I wrestled with whether or not to abstain from his vote or from all of the PC votes.  I was advised early on that there was no legal conflict of interest.  The FPPC recognizes that people who engage in civic activity also tend to support candidates for office, and it is unreasonable and impractical to consider such relationships a conflict of interest.  But it still smelled a little bad to me.  And I felt that if I did recuse myself, I should recuse myself from all PC votes.  Even if I didn’t vote on Glenn, I could have just as easily cast the rest of my votes to favor him, and everyone knows that.  I had one colleague tell me it might be good to recuse myself.  But I also had one colleague and one other person say that PC is a vital city entity, that I was elected to make hard choices, and that this was one I should make if I was legally allowed to.  In the end, I agreed with that sentiment.  And in the end, the result would have been exactly the same, even if I’d recused myself on Glenn or on all of the PC votes.

Anyway, the appointments were

BPAC

• David Gandrud (category 1)
• James Manitakos (category 1) (incumbent, reappointed)
• Angela Rausch (category 2)
• Cathy Switzer (category 2) (incumbent, reappointed)

Planning Commission

• Maria Dohadwala (full term)
• Gustav Larsson (full term)
• Glenn Hendricks (2-year partial term)

Housing and Human Services

• Anna Ko

Board of Library Trustees

• Narendra Pathak (incumbent, reappointed)

Heritage Preservation

• Ted Ringel (incumbent, reappointed)
• Nirmala Vaidyanathan (incumbent, reappointed)

Parks and Rec

• Robert Harms (incumbent, reappointed)

Congratulations to the new and reappointed commissioners.  And thanks to everyone who spent the time to take an interest in Sunnyvale and apply.

Item 3 was consideration of an emergency 45-day ordinance preventing the establishment of medical marijuana cooperatives or dispensaries in Sunnyvale.  This was largely driven by recent events in the county.  Multiple cities have encountered problems with unlicensed facilities sprouting unexpectedly.  But I think it was really Mountain View’s experience that drove Sunnyvale’s actions.  Mountain View believed their existing ordinances implicitly prohibited new facilities.  But an entity set up shop, then sued to challenge MV’s staff’s interpretation of the existing ordinances.  This caused MV to likewise pass an emergency ordinance to make the prohibition explicit.  Sunnyvale found itself in the same situation, when 1) an entity applied for a business license, was denied, questioned Staff’s interpretation of existing ordinances, and mentioned the hiring of a lawyer, and 2) the same entity which is engaged in the Mountain View litigation expressed an interest in starting up something in Sunnyvale.  For both reasons, Staff suggested that the implicitness of our existing ordinances wasn’t strong enough, and that we should make it explicit, until we can complete our study issue on whether or not we should permit dispensaries.  The discussion was dominated by pro-dispensary speakers, and interestingly, almost all of them favored the emergency ordinance, provided it led to completion of the study issue in a timely manner.

For me, this was easy.  This wasn’t an issue of “should we or shouldn’t we have dispensaries?”.  It was an issue of “should any decision be made in a deliberate way, or should we allow for the possibility of entities going rogue due to possible loopholes in existing ordinances?”.  That’s not a tough call at all.

Since this was an emergency ordinance, it required at least a 6-1 vote to pass.  And it passed, 6-1.  It allows us to later vote to extend the ordinance by up to 10 months, 15 days (or less), and Council seemed inclined to do just that – but only for as long as was needed to complete the study issue in a timely manner and consider whether or not to open the City to dispensaries.

Item 4 was consideration of moving Sunnyvale from a council-appointed mayor to a directly-elected mayor.  This is an issue that Sunnyvale has considered and rejected multiple times over the past few decades, the last time being the Charter Review Committee of 2006-07.  The benefits of a directly-elected mayor are that 1) the mayor represents the will of the voters, and 2) particularly with a 4-year mayor, the mayor has longevity that makes him or her more effective when dealing with outside agencies.  The drawbacks are that 1) it can end up being an end-run around term limits, with people serving 8 years as a councilmember, then serving another 8 years as mayor, and 2) it’s possible for a mayor representing a minority opinion to be elected, meaning he or she doesn’t have support for issues from a majority of the Council.

I view this as 1) nothing more than an end-run around term limits, as demonstrated repeatedly in San Jose, Santa Clara, and Milpitas, 2) a solution in search of a problem, and 3) something that’s been considered and soundly defeated repeatedly.  So I saw no value in pursuing this again, particularly not at the cost of $40k in services during the worst economic situation in Sunnyvale’s history.  But the vote passed 5-2.  This will be returning to Council in the next month with possible options, including a 2-year and a 4-year mayor, and we will be pursuing putting this on the November ballot (meaning we’ve got a hard August deadline to get this finished).

At this point, Councilmember Swegles had to leave, because he wasn’t feeling well.

The rest of the items were far less controversial.  We passed changes to the Murphy Avenue sidewalk policy, which governs how Murphy businesses can make use of the sidewalks to promote their businesses.  This didn’t involve consideration of changing Murphy Avenue to pedestrian only, but that will likely be coming back for consideration soon.  The vote was 6-0.

We then amended our zoning code to bring it into line with the Precise Plan for El Camino.  There were some small areas where the code said one thing and the plan said another.  The vote was 5-1.

Finally, we authorized issuance of water bonds to 1) refinance remaining water bonds that were issued in 2001, and 2) pay for water-related infrastructure improvements over the next several years.  The bonds will be repaid out of water revenue.  The vote was either 5-1 or 6-0, and I didn’t note which it was.  This additionally required us to approve the issue as the Financing Authority, which we did 6-0.

And that’s it.   We take a 3-week break, then return with back-to-back meetings on the 15th and 22nd.  We’ve also got the Sprouts grand opening on June 1st, the grand reopening of Murphy Avenue on June 4th, and the Sunnyvale Art and Wine Festival on June 5-6.  Hope to see you there!

Very long evening. We finished about 12:30. And after all was said and done, we did indeed vote to endorse Prop. 15.

Some other stuff happened as well…

Seriously, it was a good evening, with frank discussion and a lot of stuff finally put out on the table after months of closed session meetings and a legal prohibition on public comment. It’s a big relief to be able to talk about a lot of it, starting with the Nokia news yesterday. So this entry is probably going to be pretty long.

We started with a special order of the day to recognize National Public Works Week. And we passed the consent calendar with no items pulled (although I had to abstain on the previous RDA minutes, which were for a meeting that took place before I was sworn in). Then it was on to discussion of the Downtown agreement.

We had a presentation from the City Attorney about the history of the project, the legal standing, the way we arrived at the proposed agreement, and the details of the agreement. We then had some pointed and not-so-pointed questions. Some of them (including mine) were not so much to inform ourselves, as to inform the public about subtle points that may not have been clear. Remember that we’ve been discussing this in closed session for weeks, leading up to this, so in most cases, the seven of us understand the high-level details inside and out. But it’s a complicated enough topic that most of the questions were genuine.

Let me start by providing an Cliff’s Notes overview and a description of the players in this. The previous development team was a joint venture between Sand Hill (the “developer” – the bulldozer people) and RREEF (the “financer” – the guys providing the money). The venture was named DSMU – Downtown Sunnyvale Mixed Use. They started the project, with hard deadlines and penalties, and they were actually a year ahead of schedule, before the economic disaster hit. At that point, RREEF didn’t have the money to keep paying Sand Hill to do work, so they said “OK, we’re done” and walked away, leaving a $108 million loan from Wachovia unpaid. As a minority member of DSMU, Sand Hill had little say. So Wachovia started a “friendly (uncontested) foreclosure”, and the court appointed Jerry Hunt and another gentleman whose name escapes me to be the Receiver – in charge of protecting the value of the asset. A company called Wilson Meany was chosen to provide industry advice to the Receiver. Since going into foreclosure, the Receiver has authorized some $30 million of additional improvements to the project, paid for by Wachovia, mostly to finish facades and seal up the project. They didn’t have to do this – they could have slapped a giant plastic bag over the thing and left it at that. But they chose to keep working on the project.

The Receiver wants to take the project out of foreclosure, so that Wachovia can sell the project and recoup some of its lost investment in the loan that is in default. But no development team will buy the project until an updated agreement with the City is in place – they would be blindly accepting unknown terms that the City may try to impose, and that’s just not going to happen. So the Receiver wanted a signed agreement before taking the project out of foreclosure. The City, on the other hand, wants to know who will be doing the work and when they will finish it. Competing interests. That’s what got us to the tentative agreement last night.

First. we had a presentation from Jerry Hunt, the court-appointed Receiver of the project. He talked about the status of the project (much of what I just said), what they wanted, and what pressures they were operating under. The elephant in the room is Nokia. They want to make the new Downtown their consolidated home, moving people from multiple cities in Northern California (Mountain View, Redwood City, and others) all into the Sunnyvale Downtown. The challenge is that they want to do this by December of this year, and while they have signed a lease, they won’t start the moving process, and the Receiver won’t authorize the final work on Nokia’s office building, until there’s a signed development agreement in place. And without something in place very quickly, they’re prepared to walk away – possibly to Moffett Towers, possibly to a different city altogether.

So Council was left with three choices:

• Accept the deal immediately, clearing the way for the Receiver to sell the project to a developer, work to potentially start at any time, and for Nokia to come in.
• Accept the deal later, doing the above but probably torpedoing the Nokia relocation to Sunnyvale.
• Reject the deal, definitely killing the Nokia relocation, and returning the agreement to closed-session negotiations for rework and possible additional concessions.

That was the framework of last night’s discussion.  While we could have accepted a modified agreement (and there was an attempt to do exactly that), the Receiver was under no obligation to agree to it, and the end result would probably have been the same as rejecting the deal and returning to negotiations.

There were two additional points worth noting.  First off, we were not selecting a developer.  While we have a veto in the ultimate choice, the bank will get to select who makes the most attractive offer, and it will put that developer forward for our approval.  It’s their loan and their property.  Second, the modified agreement included virtually no changes to the actual layout and physical appearance of the proposed Downtown.  There are some minor changes.  “Block 6″, which was going to be a multi-story parking lot, will initially be a ground-level parking lot, and its final disposition is still TBD.  And the movie theater, which was initially going to be a second-story facility, is now a first-story facility.   Those were the only really noteworthy physical changes to the project.

It’s also worth noting the process for this.  Litigation and contractual negotiations are legally required to be done in closed session, simply because the City cannot hurt its own interests by discussing negotiating strategy in public – where the other side can listen in.  So we’ve spent months going back and forth with the Receiver over deal points and contractual issues.  It only came to the public hearing once we resolved all sticking points.  So to an extent, this was nothing more than a public ratification of what we’d already agreed to – although we weren’t bound by anything yet.  But the seven of us could have freely backed out of the deal, if that’s what we decided was best for the City.

Personally, I came into this listening for three things.  1) Have circumstances changed since we started this process, in such a way that the deal needs to be changed?  2) Did our negotiators strike a tentative deal that fell within the parameters we defined?  And 3) did any member of the public point out any aspect, any detail, or any consideration that I hadn’t considered well enough and that warranted further consideration?  Most of the aspects of the deal points had been discussed to death, and regardless of what concerns I may have expressed in the closed session, this is the direction that Council had chosen in closed session.

Anyway, more discussion.  There was really only two types of feedback we received.  One was from a number of Murphy merchants who felt blindsided by the lack of warning and opportunity for discussion.  Some said they’d only had two days notice.  I really regretted this, but it was somewhat the nature of the process.  We couldn’t make them a part of the closed sessions.  And Nokia’s schedule gave us a choice between seizing the Nokia opportunity or losing it and giving the Downtown merchants more involvement in the process.  Given that Nokia will be providing the merchants with some 800 captive customers daily, I thought we were accommodating the Downtown merchants best by moving swiftly in this case.  Additionally, since the amended agreement includes no real physical changes to the project, this is really just approving a project that they should already be familiar with.  And we’re going to be working hard to walk the merchants through the amended agreement and make sure they understand all of it, going forward now.  Under the circumstances, that’s the best we could hope for.

The second group was labor, who showed up to inform us that the construction industry is suffering 30-40% unemployment right now, and to tell us that it was important to them that we move forward on this quickly, to get people back to work.  I knew things were particularly bad for that industry, but even so, the 30-40% number was a shock.  My reaction to this was still somewhat mixed.  I agreed with their sentiment that we need to move forward.  Not only are they out of work, but existing merchants are in jeopardy of going under, the City isn’t receiving expected sales tax revenue, and City services are being cut.  So there are many reasons to get the Downtown up and running as quickly as possible.

But the goal isn’t “finish the Downtown quickly” – it’s “get the Downtown up and successful as quickly as possible”.  A completed but empty Downtown certainly helps the construction industry, but it doesn’t help the existing merchants, and it doesn’t help the City.  So there’s a balance that we’re aiming for.

There was a third speaker element present – Peter Pau and representatives from Sand Hill, the former developer.  They still want to finish the job they started, and it’s clear they feel strongly about this.  They were worried that the City or the Receiver would craft an agreement that puts them at a disadvantage in some way.  They believe their greatest asset is their ability to start and finish the job quickly.  That’s probably appealing to the City, but it may be a non-factor for the Receiver, whose goal is to get the best possible offer for the project.  I and others asked some pointed questions of the Receiver about this – what happens when the best offer is from a developer who is going to sit on the project for quite a while, as compared to the second-best offer?  And I still don’t think we got good answers to this.  It’s one area where the City’s interest and the Receiver’s interest are not aligned.

The public comment period closed after about two hours, and we then had more questions.  Here were the real issues that we faced:

• Could we live with a somewhat restricted veto over any proposed developer?
• Could we live with uncertainty about not having dates certain for the start or completion?
• Were there sufficient incentives and penalties in place to motivate any developer to work quickly?
• Did we miss something?

There was an attempt to change the agreement to increase the importance of selecting a developer who can finish quickly – to make “timeliness” an even more important criteria than it already was.  But that vote failed 2-5, largely because most of us felt that this was a breach of negotiating faith, plus a likely non-starter for the Receiver.

Then we had the final vote.  And on a 6-1 vote, we agreed to the modified agreement.

As a result, the Receiver will start work on Nokia’s office space (which is already about 80% completed) quite literally today. I believe they said they expect to do about $6 million in additional work beyond the “interim improvements”, starting immediately. So downtown construction has already started. To be fair, since the bank has already done $30 million in work since beginning foreclosure, work really has been ongoing since this mess all started.

Let me try to describe how all of the pieces come together on this.  We want the buildings finished and occupied by retail tenants ASAP.  But retailers won’t sign leases in this market, certainly not “pre-leases” (leases for buildings that haven’t been finished).  So we have incentivized this by placing a $5 million penalty for failing to meet a completion date, plus requiring quarterly progress reports.  Any developer who comes in gets TIF (tax incentive money) for meeting certain milestones.  We’ve required the new movie theater to be top priority, being finished by next year.  And we’ve now brought in Nokia and its 800 workers, all of whom will need places nearby to eat, and all of whom would certainly shop right next to their offices more often than not.  I believe we’ve created the strongest possible incentives for a developer to finish quickly, and the strongest possible incentives for a retailer to want to do business in the Downtown, given the economic conditions we’re in.  And along the way, we’ve still got the exact same physical layout that we’ve already approved.

I feel very positive about this agreement.  And I’m ecstatic that Nokia has chosen to move into the Downtown.  I came out of this more optimistic about the Downtown than I’ve been in the past ten years.

Let me take a moment to say here that we have a really great team with our City Manager and City Attorney, and they did a very impressive job of bringing together three parties with different and sometimes competing goals. They put in very long hours over the past several months to make this happen, and I suspect more than anything, they’re responsible for Nokia being a player at all (which is a huge win and which I believe is a key element for the project being successful). It’s too early to start celebrating – we’re early in the process still. But we owe them a lot for the job they did on this.

We did have some other business…

At this point, Councilmember Swegles had to leave, because he wasn’t feeling well.  Get better soon, Ron.

For item 2, we voted 4-2 to create a 5-person Sustainability Commission, meeting every other month, to advise council on best sustainability policy.  Eligibility will be open to registered Sunnyvale voters, to holders of Sunnyvale business licenses, or to designated representatives from Sunnyvale companies with more than 200 employees, with at least one of the five seats occupied by a business representative.  And Council will review the commission in two years to determine if the number of commissioners, the frequency of meetings, or other factors should be modified.    There was some debate about whether we need a commission (policy advice) or a committee (operational advice).  I’ve always believed that we need policy advice, because 1) the City’s operations only affect about 5% of the City’s resources and carbon footprint, 2) Staff does a pretty good job at finding best practices – once they’ve been given the direction, and 3) what is really missing is policy advocacy.  Policy has to come from Council or commissions, and lacking a commission, policy has so far occurred only when someone’s managed to put a bug in a councilmember’s ear.  By creating a commission, we institutionalize sustainability policy advocacy, which I think is the most important goal.

Item 3 was to conduct a required protest hearing to reauthorize the Sunnyvale Downtown Business Improvement District (BID).  It sailed through with few comments or questions on a 6-0 vote.

Item 4 was to study changing the general plan to rezone property on De Guigne from industrial to industrial-to-residential with some unknown density.  There was a fair bit of discussion about Sunnyvale’s housing needs, the appropriateness of the density (and housing) in this location, and other planning concerns.  In the end, we approved the study, on a 5-1 vote (I think).

Item 5 was related, to rezone property on Duane from high-density to medium density.  Not as much discussion, because 4 and 5 were linked, and most of the discussion happened earlier.  This one was approved on a 6-0 vote.

At this point, it was after 11:00, and we rearranged the agenda, postponing 6 until the next meeting, and taking 9 next (because we had speaker cards for it).

Item 9 was to consider the City’s position on June ballot measures, with staff recommending the city support Prop 13 (seismic retrofit issues) and oppose Prop 16 (PG&E’s attempt to create a power monopoly by forcing jurisdictions to get 2/3 approval before doing their own power).  The rest were deemed to not be city business.  We did vote to support 13 and oppose 16, with virtually no discussion.  They’re slam-dunks, and in particular, 16 is just evil.  Worse for me personally, PG&E is trying to sell 16 by telling voters “you can’t trust elected officials to do their jobs right!”, which is just personally offensive – as if instead, we should trust a company that can’t even bill their customers properly.

But the real discussion was whether or not to endorse Prop. 15, which is a two-election trial of public financing of the Secretary of State race.  Council was divided, in part whether it was a good idea and in part whether it’s City business.  The vote ended up being 3-2 with 1 abstention, which created a 15-minute discussion about whether or not the vote had passed.  The “3″ said “an abstention means ‘not even a body present for voting’, therefore there was majority approval”, and the “2″ said “an abstention still counts towards the voting body, therefore there wasn’t a majority approval”.  After some research, the City Attorney confirmed that abstaining members do not count towards the voting body – it’s as if they left the dais and weren’t present.  Therefore, the vote passed.

That was a tough one for me.  I’ve personally endorsed 15.  I think it’s a good experiment, it’s only for one statewide race for two elections, and it’s designed to be revenue-neutral.  The question for me was whether 15 is city business.  In the end, I decided that as a city, we’re increasingly hurt by the Sacramento gridlock that creates really bad budget decisions.  And that gridlock is largely because special interest tends to foster safe, partisan seats (on both side) and discourage moderates who are willing to compromise.  And Sunnyvale is better served (and, more important, harmed less) by a more effective Sacramento.  So I supported it, and I suspect I was the swing vote, since the other two were firmly committed to it.

Item 7 involved approving a consolidated plan and action plan for CDBG and related expenditures, which passed 6-0 with little or no discussion.

Item 8 was to appoint someone to a Santa Clara County Cities’ Association spot, and we voted 6-0 to authorize Mayor Mel to make the appointment, which she promptly did (Otto).

That’s mostly it. Very long meeting with some interesting points. Really good news on the Downtown, I believe.

A very long meeting, although the time wasn’t really spent on the issues of wide city importance. We started out with two special recognitions, the first being for the Santa Clara University women’s basketball team for their contribution to the Sunnyvale basketball shootout event hosted by our DPS. The second was to recognize National Volunteer Week, which is particularly important to Sunnyvale, since we rely so heavily on volunteers, in our Senior Center, in Public Safety, in our Library, and elsewhere.

Next, we had a presentation by staff of the all-new City of Sunnyvale web site, which was really nice, even more so now that I’ve had time to get my hands on it. PLEASE NOTE that some sections of the web site may not be working yet, because portions of it could not be fixed until after the site went live. So staff may be working through the bugs for the next few weeks. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the new web site, so I won’t repeat them now. Then it was on to real business.

The consent calendar passed without comment, except that Staff pulled 1J for further work and future consideration. There were three announcement, then one public comment about continued bad practice at the Walgreens in the southern portion of the city.

First item of general business was an appeal of a Planning Commission decision regarding a remodel design review for a house on Grackle. The owner wants to add a second story to his house. It’s an interesting situation, because the owner is the first one-bedroom house on the boundary between an older, single-story neighborhood and a newer, 2-story development. So there were issues of size, encroachment on the newer neighborhood, and so on. The primary issue was the owner’s appeal of two conditions that the PC attached to its approval, plus an appeal by the next-door neighbor, whose kitchen window would be shaded four hours of the day during the winter months if the second story were to be built. There were no speakers beyond the owner and his neighbor.

This was a tough one, and there were different opinions expressed. In the end, Council voted 5-2 (with me seconding Vice Mayor Moylan’s motion) to grant the applicant’s appeal, provided the design reduced the number of hours of additional shading by 25%, per the neighbor’s request, and to deny the appeal if the owner could not change the design to reduce the shading as we indicated. My concern on this was simple – the owner was proposing a really big expansion. The guidelines say that you can do pretty much whatever you want with your house, provided it doesn’t exceed a 45% “floor area ratio” (the amount of floor space relative to the property’s square footage). The owner was asking for 54%, when most of the houses in the area don’t exceed 50%. When I inspected the neighborhood, it looked to me like none of the other 2-story houses shaded neighbors’ windows, and it looked to me like that was a deliberate design feature of the new houses. So I was sympathetic to the neighbor, I thought the owner was being inflexible (he put us in an “all or nothing” situation, which I said), and I thought the proposed design was just way too big. On principle, I support two-story expansions when they are appropriate for the neighborhood and don’t impact neighbors unreasonably, and this one just crossed my “unreasonable” threshold.

There’s an important lesson here, which I’ve seen applicants ignore over and over again. When you appeal something like this to the City Council, everything is on the table, and we can revisit and modify any aspect of the proposal. I’ve seen people get bitten by this in the past. There was one commercial developer who appealed one small aspect of a PC decision last year. And when it came before Council, it was clear from their initial questions that Council didn’t like a lot of the aspects of the project and was likely to change a lot of things. So when the developer got up, he immediately said “we’re willing to abide by the PC’s decision and end it here”, but it was too late. Once the public hearing has begun, it has to conclude normally.

Item 3 involved turning Braly Park into a flood detention area. In short, Braly Park is next to a flood channel. When Sunnyvale floods, the water has to go somewhere. So the proposal is to lower the park and turn it into a flood detention area in those “once every 30 years” floods that may happen. About 3 feet would be scooped out of all of Braly Park, surrounded by a ring of slope. The grass and fields would be dug up and replaced. And a connection between the park and the flood channel would be built, so that water could be diverted into the park when flooding is in danger of occuring. The down side is that the flood water would damage the park and have to be repaired, but the up-side is that several hundred homes and businesses would not be flooded, which is significantly more important. It also saves us additional flood prevention work in other parts of the city (like construction of retention walls). The proposal would not cost the city or school any money. It was all up side, so it passed on a 7-0 vote.

Item 4 was consideration of a water-efficient landscaping ordinance. The state has required stricter water efficient landscaping ordinances, and they have passed one that is intended to achieve 20% savings, which takes effect in all cities, unless a city passes one that achieves the same result or better. We’re already operating under the state’s ordinance. The Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency has drafted a model ordinance that its member cities can consider in taking action beyond the state requirements, and the proposal that Staff put forward started with that model ordinance. We discussed some of the potential impacts of the new ordinance, specifically regarding local gardens (which we were concerned might not be exempted from this ordinance – they are). In the end, we accepted staff’s recommendation on a 7-0 vote, with one change. Staff recommended differentiating between multi-family and single-family requirements – 2500 square feet or more for single-family and 1000 square feet or more for multi-family. Council supported the original BAWSCA recommendation of 1000 square feet for both, on a 7-0 vote.

Item 5 dealt with using grant money to create a Lawrence Station Work Plan. There was a little discussion, specifically about the relevance of such a plan given the challenges that CalTrain faces. But after a little discussion, we passed this 7-0.

Item 6 was the fun one. We had an extended discussion about the Council policy regarding annual selection of the Vice Mayor and biannual selection of the Mayor. Some of my colleagues felt that some difficulties that came up this year needed to be addressed. We started with a list of “consent” changes – changes that were just typos and clean-up, and we passed all but one of them unanimously (the one regarding prohibiting abstention votes was removed). Then we got into the more challenging ones.

The existing rules say that 1) only one nomination per councilmember, and 2) we use ranked-choice voting if there are more than two nominees. After a lot of debate, we changed the rules, so that 1) there is still only one nomination per councilmember, 2) we eliminated ranked-choice voting, and 3) we will have a study session between the November election and the first January council meeting, in which candidates for Mayor or Vice Mayor can put themselves forward and make their case, in a public setting. If we have three or more candidates, we will have straight up-or-down votes to break ties until we can have a straight up-or-down vote on the top two candidates.

I came into this with some strong inclinations. First off, while ranked-choice (or instant run-off) voting is terrific for general elections or when you have a lot of candidates to choose from, it doesn’t work well with a small number of voters and a small number of candidates (in our case, 7 voters, 3 candidates). There’s a lot of opportunity for game-playing, plus a good chance of an end result that many members of the public simply won’t understand. Neither of those serve the public good, so I wanted to get rid of the ranked-choice option. Second, there was interest expressed in allowing a councilmember to nominate multiple candidates. I also thought that didn’t serve the public good – we should choose who we support for mayor, then support that candidate, plain and simple.

I was much iffier on the notion of a study session, and I said as much. On the one hand, more discussion is good. On the other, it’s easy for Council to use study session to say things that are technically “in public”, but not really – there aren’t any cameras in a study session, there aren’t detailed minutes, and it’s only attended by people who make a conscious effort to learn about them and show up early. As much as possible, I want Council to conduct its business from the dais. So I wasn’t thrilled with the study session approach, because I was concerned that it is sort of a “wink wink” nod to public involvement. My concern is probably overblown, though, and Council clearly disagreed with me, because I lost that one, I think on a 5-2 vote. And honestly, I’m fine losing that one, because I really was on the fence on that issue.

In general, all of the focus was on trying to make sure that whatever process we follow, it’s all above-board and done in public, avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. We just disagreed in some places about how to best do that.

That’s mostly it. Nothing earthshaking, unless you live on Grackle… But a good, if long, meeting.

Interesting night. Before the meeting, we had a closed session on three topics – a litigation issue, a property negotiation issue, and ongoing Downtown negotiations.

We started with the annual fire safety poster contest awards, in which we present first, second, and third place awards to students from K-5 classes throughout Sunnyvale. This is always a fun event, and tonight was no different. The contest is organized by DPS and the Kiwanis, and my friend and Leadership Sunnyvale classmate Norm Betts presented the awards along with two DPS representatives. The first place prize was a fire extinguisher, and in some cases, the prize was larger than the prizewinner… The winners then all got to go outside and get their photo taken in front of a fire rig. The kids really love this event, and it’s a lot of fun for the parents, too.

Then we had a presentation to the city’s arborist for Arbor Day. This was followed by public announcements, and we had a couple. There were two events scheduled for April 24th, one being an event at Fremont Union High School, the other being a series of tea parties being held by the Sunnyvale Historical Society with the first on the 24th. There was a third announcement of an event, which simply slipped my mind, sorry.

Then it was on to the real business. The consent calendar went through unmolested (which surprised me a little – I expected there to be at least a couple of concerns, but it went through).

The first item of general business was an appeal of a planning commission decision. Windsor Academy, a day care facility being run in a residence on Mary near Washington, wants to expand from 14 students to 24 students, and Staff and the PC initially said no, due to concerns about the neighborhood and the impact on traffic. But the PC was split 3-3 with an abstention, so the “no” wasn’t a particularly ringing “no”. So Staff thought about it and proposed phasing in an increase, starting with an increase to 18 children for a year, after which staff could drop it back to 14, leave it at 18, or increase it to 24, depending on how things go over that year. The applicant wanted to go straight to 24 students, because of the cost of building improvements and other concerns. A number of current and potential future parent customers came to speak on behalf of Windsor, and one speaker advocated against the change to the neighborhood that would be created. In addition, one next-door neighbor sent in a letter supporting the change, while the other next-door neighbor sent in a letter opposing the change.

This was a very tough call. There are some serious concerns with doing this, because of traffic on Mary and the fact that the house is mid-block. There were concerns about creating an effectively permanent commercial property in the middle of a residential area. There is a real need for more child care in Sunnyvale. And I liked that this improved the walkability of the neighborhood by improving an amenity within walking distance of many of the center’s customers. But personally, given all of the concerns about what might happen, I couldn’t just grant a use permit with no checks or safeguards against all of the things that could go wrong – revoking a use permit is a pretty serious endeavor. Anyway, the initial motion was to grant the appeal and permit up to 24 children, with no conditions. I felt like I had to oppose the lack of safeguards, given the uncertainties, and it went down 4-3. The follow-up motion was to go with staff’s recommendation of allowing 18 children immediately, possibly increasing to 24 in a year after Staff review, if things go well (or going back to 14 if not). That one passed 5-3.

This is still half a loaf, because the money situation with permitting 18 children is difficult for the applicant. Permitting 24 actually makes the business a lot more viable, wile permitting 18 is a bit more problematic. And I’m disappointed that that couldn’t have happened. In retrospect, we could maybe have granted a conditional increase to 24 with a one-year review, but for some reason, I got the impression from Staff that that wasn’t permitted, so I didn’t attempt that. I’m kind of kicking myself over that. But even if we’d done a conditional increase to 24, that would have posed problems for the applicant, if she’d gone and made the expensive improvements, only to have us change our minds a year from now. This was just difficult all the way around, and it took us two hours, with us simply accepting Staff’s recommendation in the end. I wish the applicant well – it sounds like a pretty great child care center, and we need more of them.

Item #3 involved the annual review of the business improvement district in the downtown area, and it was mostly a slam-dunk, passing 7-0.

Item 4 was consideration of a city position on Measure B, the FUHSD parcel tax renewal. There was a speaker opposed and a speaker in favor, and then it was mostly Council discussion. Again, it was mostly a slam-dunk, and Council voted to endorse Measure B on a 6-0 vote with one abstention. For me, it was a simple question of whether or not Sunnyvale is better off with Measure B passing or failing, and it’s clear that Sunnyvale is much better off with a more effective public school district. Particularly since this is a renewal of an existing parcel tax, and since it includes an exemption for seniors, it’s a good thing, and I’m glad we voted to support it.

Item 5 was a bit difficult. We were considering minor and substantive changes to the Council policy regarding election of the Mayor and Vice Mayor. Some of the proposed changes were cosmetic, fixing typos and unnecessary language. Some of it was substantive – do we use ranked-choice voting, do we allow someone to make multiple nominations, that sort of thing. In the end, the changes were so extensive, and the proposal was sort of dumped on us with short notice, so people weren’t sure they understood some of the changes well enough to decide. Personally, I thought this whole thing was much ado about nothing, at a time when we’re trying to deal with the budget and the Downtown, and I’d rather have seen it pushed off until August or later, when those issues will largely be resolved, and Staff won’t have such extreme time constraints. We’re really understaffed right now, and Staff is overworked, what with the budget and Downtown. Dumping this task on them seems to me like we’re not keeping our eyes on the ball. But I was a minority of one on this one, and the rest felt that the impact on Staff was so minimal that we should just get it out of the way as soon as we can. So the vote was 4-2 with one abstention to revisit this at our next meeting, on April 27th, and I lost on that one. I believe the other dissenter wants a study session before it goes to Council again. Eh, so be it, and we’ll resolve this once and for all (hopefully) in three weeks.

Then we had a very brief Finance Authority meeting, in which we effectively just approved the consent calendar, and that was about it.

In general, nothing earthshaking in the end. No significant impact to the city as a whole, although the Windsor Academy issue meant a lot to that neighborhood and to the people who work at or use the day care center.