In case you missed the news, we approved the second reading of the cyclist anti-harassment ordinance on Tuesday. That means that it will take effect 30 days from now. For the vast majority of you who don’t behave like jerks to cyclists, it doesn’t mean much. But for those of you who do, it means that the cyclists will have additional recourse in civil court if you harass them for simply being a cyclist.
FollowWe’ve spent a lot of time examining the city’s pension benefits in light of the difficult budget situation of the past few years, the varying performance levels of CalPERS, and just as part of the long-term budget planning that we do as a matter of practice. There have been some questions raised about exactly how the city plans for its long-term obligations and what those obligations mean. That’s not an easy question to answer, since we have career actuarials on staff and under contract to us that we rely upon to advise us. Certain issues we face can be explained in sound bites, but pensions and the actuarial calculations that form the basis of our long-term planning can’t be easily or quickly explained.
So the City is holding an outreach meeting this Tuesday, July 24th at 5:00 p.m. in Council Chambers, to be run by the actuarial we use to calculate the city’s obligations. I’m not positive, but I believe it will be recorded and rebroadcast for people who cannot attend. If you are concerned about where we stand and what challenges we face, I encourage you to attend.
You may have read or heard that we’ve budgeted a significant amount of money for repaving and resurfacing roads, to raise the overall road quality back to the desired level. From memory, we’re spending an additional $2.5 million per year last year, this year, and in the next three years until we address the backlog and reach the desired Pavement Condition Indicator (PCI) level of 80. At that point, we’ll return to a “maintain the status quo” state and keep things at that level. We just started a new project like this to address tree maintenance as well, you may recall.
With the start of the new fiscal year, staff is getting that roadwork done, with a vengeance. The City Manager has published information about specific street closures that are involved this time out. You can find the spreadsheet of residential roads here. These are chip and slurry seals, which are very cheap processes that can be done on roads in moderate condition (an extremely cost-effective way to add a decade to a road’s good conditions). The city is additionally doing full-on repaving (grinding and paving) on several major routes:
- Evelyn Avenue from Sunnyvale-Saratoga to Reed
- Mathilda and the approaches to the Mathilda bridge
- Hollenbeck from ECR to Fremont
- Maria Lane from Wolfe to ECR
This work will also include replacement of some damaged sidewalks and curbs along the affected routes.
It sounds like a joke, but from what I’ve read here and here and elsewhere, one largely-unnoticed aspect of the state’s new budget is that key provisions of the Brown Act have been effectively suspended. As I understand it, the Brown Act requires local jurisdictions to provide 72 hours notice before meetings, and to publish closed session reports (among many other requirements). The state then reimburses the jurisdiction for some of the cost associated with that noticing. The state eliminated that reimbursement funding from this year’s budget, and as an unfunded mandate, cities supposedly aren’t required by law to abide by those Brown Act provisions as a consequence. This move will save the state a whopping $96 million (sarcasm intended), at the potential cost of significant amounts of public disclosure that have served residents extremely well over the past several decades.
So jurisdictions are scrambling to figure out what that means (those that have noticed and which care about this). In Sunnyvale, this should be a non-issue. Our Council Policy actually requires us to provide the same noticing that the Brown Act requiresused to require as a matter of law. So even if we’re not subject to the Brown Act, we will still follow our own policy. And as a matter of process, we’ve been deliberately providing 96 hours of advance meeting notice instead of the required 72 hours for several years now.
It’s a pretty diverse agenda, with some land use issues, a policy decision regarding BMR housing, and a lot of housekeeping issues (as is to be expected after almost a month off).
We start the evening with a closed session involving the City Attorney recruitment process (I assume). That’s it this time, then we get to the meeting.
The meeting starts off with a presentation regarding the El Camino Hospital District. This has been in the news a fair bit lately, so I’m not quite sure what the specific presentation involves. The District’s Board of Directors just placed a measure on the November ballot to limit executive compensation in response to a union voter initiative. There is also some talk about changes to some community programs that the District supports. It could be related to one of those two issues or something else.
The consent calendar is pretty big, including four contracts, a couple of inter-agency agreement issues, and a couple of housekeeping issues.
Item 2 involves a proposed general plan amendment study to possibly change the zoning of property at Fair Oaks and 101 from industrial to residential very high density. In short, most of that neighborhood has already been converted to from industrial to high-density housing as a planned ITR area, with two notable exceptions – a portion surrounded by Karlstad/Toyama/Morse/Tasman, and this corner of the area surrounded by Weddell, Fair Oaks, and 101. That area seems to be split into a north and a south half, and this study involves a proposal for the southern half, somewhat linked to the northern half.
Item 3 involves the second reading of the ordinances (first, second, and third) initiating the rezoning involved in the DiNapoli development project at Mathilda and Maude. Normally, this would be a consent item, but second readings are placed on the general business calendar when the original vote includes dissenters (the assumption being that they’ll want to dissent again, of course).
Item 4 is an item that has been hinted at in a couple of past meetings – small proposed changes to the community event and neighborhood grant distributions for this year. I think they’re talking about allocating an additional $3k for a couple of specific proposals.
Item 5 is the second reading of the cyclist anti-harrassment ordinance. See above about dissenting votes.
Item 6 is a new one – consideration of adding background checks as a requirement for the city’s Below Market Rate qualifications. The city requires a certain percentage of housing to be made available at below market rates, and the city has some involvement in identifying qualified applicants for the BMR program. Unfortunately, a BMR resident was recently convicted of murder after a somewhat long history of problems at that address (I don’t know all of the details), which raised questions about the extent to which the city does, can, and should screen applicants for the BMR program. This study looked at that. Interestingly, staff is presenting a single recommendation – take no action because the city cannot legally perform criminal background checks for this purpose.
Item 7 is another tax rolls issue – placing charges for certain delinquent administrative citations on property tax rolls. Basically, we issue a certain number of citations every year for various code infractions, usually quality-of-life issues like unsafe or blighted neighborhood conditions that property owners are responsible for addressing. This is our recourse when those citations aren’t paid – we place them on the property tax rolls, which converts them to liens if unpaid. There’s an interesting staff note here that I don’t remember having seen before – the likelihood that some people may show up to the meeting to contest the fines. I don’t think I’ve seen that in the past. It isn’t uncommon to have someone resolve their past due balance shortly before the meeting (that happened a few weeks ago), but I can’t recall someone having shown up before. We’ll see.
And that’s about it.