Just a quick note to inform you about a public meeting regarding the Stevens Creek Trail this Wednesday, November 14th. Or, as the email blast put it,
First, a big thanks to everyone who attended my Town Hall Meeting tonight in Lakewood Park. Great crowd, really good discussion, and you didn’t stick me with too much leftover junk food that I now have to eat all by myself.
We start the evening with quite a bit of closed session stuff – the ongoing SEA negotiations and more on the ongoing Downtown litigation. Pretty long closed session, too. But no study sessions, so we go to the general meeting next.
Very interesting night.
We started the evening with a discussion about our non-residential parking requirements. When a commercial or industrial development is proposed, the city requires the developer to provide a certain amount of on-site parking, based on the square footage. Staff is looking into our standards to see if they need some adjustments. And they are considering lowering the requirements for certain types of businesses, raising them for others, and making some other changes. For instance, large-scale commercial day care centers don’t have the day-long parking demands that a retail establishment does. I don’t think I can adequately describe all of the various proposed changes. But in addition to the above, there was discussion about establishing maximum parking space limits in addition to the existing minimum requirements, as well as talk about paid/metered parking. There was also some time spent considering “seasonal” parking requirements (such as holiday shopping at larger retail centers).
We’ve been notified that a company called “American Water Resources Insurance Services” is going to send out a mailing to all Sunnyvale residents shortly, and I wanted to clear it up and frame it properly. This company, based in New Jersey, seems to have noticed that like most cities, Sunnyvale assigns responsibility of sewer maintenance to homeowners for the portion of the sewers that fall on private property. So they are offering some sort of insurance package to homeowners, to protect homeowners against expenses caused by backups, tree roots, whatever.
This commercial offer has nothing to do with the City of Sunnyvale, and the City does not partner or participate in the offering in any way. I could not tell you if it is a valuable service or a total scam, and you should do your own homework and draw your own conclusions based on whatever you discover. As a member of a homeowners association that takes on responsibility for all such things, I doubt this will even be an issue for me personally.
This company has contacted those of us on the Council, presumably because their mailings have caused problems in the past in cities where residents mistakenly believed it was somehow a city-run program, which it is not.
I wrote the following to a neighborhood association leader, in response to a question about why the civic center buildings need to be replaced. It might be interesting to a wider audience. Let me be clear about this, though – I’m not advocating for any specific fix (yet). A bond measure, a private/public partnership, something else that we haven’t discussed yet, the actual solution should be discussed and debated and carefully considered. I certainly have some opinions, but I’m only trying to explain the problem that needs to be solved. I don’t have enough information about possible fixes to actually make a call on what the best fix is, yet. That’s why we’re gathering information now.
Follow