06/09/2015 Council Preview – Budget Public Hearing

Lots on this agenda. We start the evening with two closed sessions, the first involving ongoing labor negotiations, the second being the City Manager’s semi-annual performance review.

We have two special orders of the day.  First, we’re recognizing Judi Nickey, who is leaving the Personnel Board after 8 years of service.  We normally recognize outgoing boardmembers and commissioners at a May or June meeting, but the Personnel Board doesn’t meet in a predictable fashion.  So we’re doing this at this meeting.  The second special order is the swearing in of the new commissioners that we recently appointed.

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What Does The Recent Town Center Ruling Mean?

As many of you may have heard, the 6th District Appellate Court issued an opinion Tuesday on the final of three appeals from various Town Center lawsuits involving Wells Fargo and Sand Hill (Peter Pau).  The opinion favors Wells Fargo in all respects and orders the lower court to dismiss all five of the causes of action in the lawsuit filed by Sand Hill against Wells Fargo. This is significant, and residents are rightly wondering what the ruling means.  I’ll try to set it in perspective.

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05/19/2015 Council Preview

Looks like yet another long night.  We start the evening with another closed session on labor negotiations.  This is followed by an important joint study session with the Planning Commission on the upcoming update to the  Land Use and Transportation Element (LUTE) of the General Plan.  This is a major undertaking that will take up a lot of our attention in future months.

The general session starts with not one but two special orders.  The first is a presentation on the “Schools Goin’ Green” grant program.  The second recognizes Public Works Week.

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05/12/2015 Council Preview – Water

Long, long night.

We start the evening with a joint study session with the Planning Commission regarding possible regulations of short-term rentals such as AirBnB.  There have been a number of incidents in recent months where neighborhoods have been disrupted by the appearance of de facto hotele opening via AirBnB or similar services.  So we’re looking at what options we have to better protect the neighborhoods.  This is followed by a second study session to look at Caltrain’s plans for both electrification and high speed rail.

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