09/11/2018 Council Preview – Affordable Housing Grand Jury Report

Small agenda with some big items in it.  We start the evening with a study session to review the Civic Center Master Plan Final Environmental Impact Report.

For the general session, the consent calendar is pretty small. There are only two items of note – the quarterly investment report and the extension of an exclusive negotiating agreement involving the city’s property at Charles Street and Iowa. We’ve been working on a deal for developing an affordable housing project on that site, it’s taking longer than expected, so we’re being asked to extend the negotiating period.

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08/28/2018 Council Preview – Sale of Margarine Factory

We start the evening with no closed sessions, no study sessions, no presentations, no special orders. That’s fairly unusual.  Anyway, we get right to business. The consent calendar is fairly large. There’s a resolution which is required before the City can accept Measure B transit improvement funds (which we can’t accept right now anyway, because Measure B is blocked due to ongoing litigation).  There’s a $145k contract to inspect the coating of two water tanks at Mary and Carson (which, from memory, involves hiring divers to go into the tanks with SCUBA gear and check them out, but I could be wrong). There’s an extension/amendment of a contract to add $150k in additional temporary engineering services to our public works traffic efforts. There’s proposed rejection of a bid for sewer siphoning services – it was estimated at $100k and the low bid was $1.1m (due to a huge demand and no competition for services).  There’s a contract amendment to add $87k to fire protective clothing (we’re hiring officers faster than anticipated). There’s approval of this year’s slate of League of California Cities Peninsula Division officers (Councilmember Smith is on the slate).  And finally, there’s approval of Sunnyvale’s voting delegate for the September League of California Cities conference (Councilmember Smith is proposed).

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Rumor Control: Did the City Council “Pit Neighborhood Against Neighborhood” When Selling the RAC?

It’s election season, which means that once again, all sorts of stories and allegations get trotted out to advance candidates’ campaigns, some of which are just rehashes of old claims that simply aren’t true.  The latest one is the trope that the City Council “pitted neighborhoods against one another” when selling the Raynor Activity Center.  This points to the fact that the City Council ultimately decided to use the proceeds from the RAC sale to fund the new Lakewood Village branch library.  This is a particularly nasty piece of revisionist history that simply distorts the city’s true stated intentions, and ignores its attempts to actually respond to community concerns.  As one of the few people that was intimately involved in the decision process throughout, I’m apparently in the best position to provide the facts that contradict this nonsense.

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08/14/2018 Council Preview – Airplane Noise and LSAP

Lots of different stuff going on tonight.

We start the evening with a closed session to discuss what appear to be terms to sell the City’s property located at Charles/Iowa/Mathilda/McKinley to an affordable housing provider. For those of you who haven’t been following this, the City owned four detached parcels on that block, which we decided several years ago to finally resolve. We had the choice between simply selling those properties or trying to buy the properties in the center of the City’s parcels, forming one contiguous and potentially useful chunk of about 1.6 acres. We opted to try and buy, and we did manage to buy those parcels. The City has been trying to find an affordable housing provider interested in a project at that 1.6 acre site, and it looks like that may be what’s up for discussion.

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07/31/2018 Council Preview – Firearms and Minimum Wage

Another full agenda, and we start very early, to boot.

We start the evening with two separate closed sessions. One involves a potential land purchase by the city, the other involves the potential land sale of the margarine factory (an ongoing issue).  This is followed by a presentation regarding the El Camino Real Corridor Specific Plan.  I guess we’re looking at some examples of designs that we may incorporate into the plan. Finally, we’re getting a demonstration of sorts from Waymo regarding driverless cars.

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