01/07/2014 Council Preview – Changing of the Guard

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This is a largely ceremonial and usually emotional evening – the two-year changing of the guard.  Expect a packed house.  I’ll describe what I believe will happen as part of the ceremony, but it’s from memory, so I may be off on some details.

First, an administrative note.  Starting in 2014, the city is transitioning to a new agenda system called iLegislate.  As a result, you will immediately see differences in the way the agendas appear on the city’s website, as well as differences in the formatting of the individual RTCs.  I’m still getting used to it, but I’ve played with the new iPad iLegislate app, and it’s a marked improvement from paging through a single huge PDF file, which was the old way for those of us who go paperless.  So I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be an improvement.

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12/17/2013 Council Preview – Last Meeting of the Year

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Very busy night.

We start the evening with two study sessions.  The first is our annual study session on council leadership for the next year, in which councilmembers (and councilmembers-elect this year) may express an interest in the Mayor and Vice Mayor positions.  We enacted this several years ago to reduce the danger of Brown Act violations and to openly discuss leadership in advance of the formal vote.  The second has us discussing the status of shuttle bus services in Sunnyvale.

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Goodbye, Gary

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I just said goodbye to our City Manager, Gary Luebbers.  His last official day is Saturday, but today is his last day in the office.  He heads from here to his retirement in Utah.

There are a lot of things I could say here, and I’m not quite sure where to go.  Gary has affected the lives of everyone in Sunnyvale over the past five years, whether or not they realize it.  He’s been the City Manager through perhaps the toughest times in Sunnyvale’s history.  He had to lead us through an unprecedented economic crash, and he had to do it handicapped by a particularly contentious council.  But he brought us out of it with services intact, major improvements to our infrastructure, two new parks, the beginnings of a new branch library, and a budget that is now structurally balanced and the foundation for stable services in years to come.  He did this while the state was trashing redevelopment agencies and plundering city coffers to solve its own revenue problems.  And he did this without going to war with our bargaining units, without incurring debt, and without the need to raise taxes.  It’s an amazing accomplishment under very bad conditions.

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12/10/2013 Council Preview – City Manager, Financial Report, Land Use

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Diverse night.  We start with two closed sessions.  The first is the annual City Attorney performance evaluation, and the second involves the appointment of an Interim City Manager (followed by an open session item on the same topic).

No presentations or special orders, and the consent calendar is pretty simple – minutes, the list of bills, and the second reading of the ordinances from last week’s meeting.  And that’s it.

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12/3/2013 Council Preview – Moffett Place and Raynor Park/RAC

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This is perhaps the busiest agenda I’ve seen in a very long time.  It’s going to be a big one.

We start the evening with a closed session regarding City Manager appointment.  Just an educated guess, but it’s probably a precursor to our all-day candidate interviews on the 13th.  We’ll see (although I won’t be able to say anything).  We then have a study session regarding the 49ers Stadium traffic, parking and security plan (my study issue).  That should be interesting.

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