The results are in for this year’s Study Issue Survey, and I’ve typed up a report, which you can read here. Thank you to everyone who responded. There was a great response, and once again, you folks surprised me in at least one way with your specific responses.
FollowIt’s both a long and a short night, I suspect – long for us councilmembers, short for most of the rest.
We start the evening with not one but two closed session, the first dealing with our City Manager recruitment, the second involving labor negotiations with the Sunnyvale Managers Association. This is followed by a series of Board and Commission interviews (3 candidates – we interviewed the others last night). Then we get to business.
The consent calendar is pretty straightforward – the usual items plus an issue involving VTA funding of projects, rejection of the bids for rebuilding our sanitary sewer lift stations, a grant, and a contract.
The general business calendar has only two items, mostly due to the short-staffed Planning Commission. We were originally going to have other items, but we put the Planning Commission on hiatus when it dropped to three members. I expect this to be resolved by the end of the month.
Item 2 is the conclusion of an approved study item to look at possible design guidelines to favor construction of bird-safe buildings. Staff is presenting us with an aggressive set of guidelines used elsewhere that we could adopt and a more conservative approach that may still have the effect we desire, with the staff recommendation being to go with the more conservative approach.
And item 3 involves a trash reduction plan that we need to submit to the regional water quality board very quickly.
That’s it. Not much here.
It’s that time of year again, when the Sunnyvale City Council reviews the past year’s proposed study issues and decides which ones to pursue in the year to come. This is the primary way in which we decide the direction that the city will take in the upcoming year.
Every year, I run an unofficial study issues survey for residents to express their opinions. Residents may go through the exact same process that Council will go through – drop disliked issues, defer issues until a future year, and rank those issues that remain. At the end of the survey period, I will summarize and publish the results, as well as making them available to my colleagues prior to our votes during the all-day Study and Budget Issues Workshop on February 7th.
Please note that seven of the proposed study issues have not been written up by staff yet. As the write-ups become available, I will update the survey. You may take the survey as many times as you like, and only the final submission will be counted.
The link to the survey can be found on the main menu above. The deadline for submitting your opinion is 11:59 p.m. Sunday February 2nd. Thanks for taking the time to participate!
Movato Real Estate has issued its list of the ten safest mid-sized cities, and they have ranked Sunnyvale #3, behind only Glendale and Santa Clarita. The rankings seem to have been derived entirely from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, normalized to per-100k statistics. Sunnyvale scored so well because half of the ranking was attributed to the chance of a resident being a victim of a violent crime. While Sunnyvale has experienced the same property crime surge that is sweeping the state, our violent crime rate has continued to decline to very low levels, hence our high ranking as a safe city.
I always hesitate to play up these sort of accolades, because too often, the rankings are determined in a fashion that is largely arbitrary. The most prominent of these, CQ Press, is notorious for such arbitrariness, to the point where the FBI has even published a warning on their UCR site about these sorts of comparisons. Invariably, some list arbitrarily ranks us high, which some people then trumpet, only to be followed by a subsequent lower ranking, forcing us to explain why the rankings had no significance to begin with.
Still, this is a high ranking, so I’ll trumpet it… 🙂
Tuesday’s meeting should be a quick one, since it’s almost entirely ceremonial in nature.
We start the evening with what’s actually the meat of the evening – special orders for the swearing in of Councilmember Larsson, the new Vice Mayor Jim Davis, and myself as Mayor. Councilmember Larsson couldn’t be (ceremonially) sworn in last week because his mother’s flight was hindered by the bad weather that struck the rest of the country. So he’s doing it this week.
After that, we have a small consent calendar (bills and a contract for golf cart rentals), and that’s it. This should be a record short meeting (at least in recent years), depending on how loquacious the three of us get. Expect a jam-packed evening on the 28th.