4/9/2013 Council Preview

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Gonna be another busy night.  Part of this is because we have spring break next week, and most of the items on our agenda can’t be delayed, so we’re doing a lot this night.

We start the evening with a study session regarding funding city infrastructure.  This is the next step in an item from a few weeks ago, when we looked at how we fund major infrastructure replacement.  The answer at that meeting was that we already set aside sufficient money to replace all major infrastructure items in the city, except for the civic center buildings.  And we’re currently setting aside $1.5 million per year for the civic buildings.  That’s not enough to deal with the replacement of those buildings before they need to be replaced.  So staff will be discussing options to fully fund the remaining infrastructure costs, and what it would mean to our operating budget.

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3/19/2013 Council Summary

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A very long night, made even longer when a couple of our items got unexpectedly complicated.  We started the evening with a closed session involving our ongoing negotiations with the Sunnyvale Employees Association (SEA).  This was followed by a joint study session with council and the planning commission to discuss the MidPen low-income housing project on the Armory site.  The study session was a pretty good one, as there was some misinformation and confusion about the proposed project, and the discussion cleared up a lot of issues and questions.

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ABAG Grants Sunnyvale Appeal Of RHNA Allocation

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You may recall that I previously reported that the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) had assigned Sunnyvale its latest Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) number, which the city found to be significantly higher than we believed was warranted.  ABAG is responsible for ensuring that cities plan for population growth, and it assigns numbers to individual cities (and entire counties in some cases), and those cities are expected to then zone for that much additional housing.  There are legal and funding implications if cities don’t make a good faith effort to achieve the housing planning which ABAG requires.  In looking into the latest assignments, staff determined that ABAG had based its calculation on a faulty number for the amount of housing that has been built in Sunnyvale going back to 1999.  Sunnyvale appealed its allotment, pointing out the error that we believed had happened.

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Seeking Public Input On Dog Parks

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The City is studying the topic of dog parks and off-leash alternatives to dog parks, to examine how well Sunnyvale is serving both dog owners and non-owners when it comes to park services. As part of the study, the City will hold nine different outreach meetings throughout the city over the next three weeks. You can get all of the details from the city’s outreach flyer. I encourage you to attend one and let your feelings be known, whatever they may be.

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