City Council - Regular Meeting

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Good evening. Welcome to this, the July 27th meeting at the Livermore City Council. I call the meeting to order. Roll call, please.

Council Member Berriantos. Council Member Branning.

Here.

Council Member Dunbar.

Here.

Vice Mayor Wong. Here. Mayor Marchand.

Here. If you'll please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag Okay, question for the city clerk. Was there any action taken in the closed session?

It's no reportable action.

OK, very good. Thank you. OK, so we've come to the end of a long journey. No, I'm not talking about tonight's meeting. I'm talking about in September, we empaneled the September of 2021. I had actually termed out of office. And I was fortunate to be appointed to the General Plan Advisory Committee. And every 20 years or so, the city council goes through the general plan to update it. And so I had updated the plan in 2002 and figured since I had so much fun doing that, I'd come back and do it again. So we impaneled 19 people, and it was a wide cross-section of the community. Our first meeting was October 27, 2021, and we met until April 1, 2026. met 35 times listening to, and the amount of effort that the staff put into this, I've got to give a shout out to Jake Potter, Andy Ross, Brandon Cardwell, Debbie Davis, long time, tremendous staff support on this. We started out with 19 members. I got promoted and left to become the mayor. And Tracy Kronczak was appointed to the Planning Commission. Four other members ended up, they were busy with other things and ended up resigning. So we started with 19, ended up with 13. I think it's still remarkable that we had more members on the committee than we had comments on the EIR. So I think that just speaks to the tremendous job that this committee did, taking comments from the public, distilling an incredible incredible amount of data. And my sincere thanks to all of you for sticking with it and for coming in Every meeting prepared. Some of the meetings got a little bit contentious. There were differences of opinion. The fact that you all came together, I think was remarkable. And then we had consensus. The last go around, we had a minority opinion. There was such divisiveness on the general plan committee back in 2002 that there was a splinter faction that submitted their own, they said, their contrary position. So thank you for all the tremendous work that you've done. And so at that point, let me come down there and join you.

Thank you.

No.

Thank you. And I'd also like to recognize the three people who were on the committee but are not here. Krista Alexie, Arun Bhatia, and Ellen Peet also stuck out the whole five years here and sincerely appreciate the tremendous amount of work and commitment that everybody did. So once again, thank you so much. It's greatly appreciated. This is the blueprint for the next 25 years. So certainly appreciate the fact that they got it right. 748 pages in the final document. So thank you. Advisory body appointments, we don't have any. Next, moving on to the open forum. This is an opportunity to speak to the council on the item that is not on the agenda. The city clerk will explain how you can participate in the meeting.

To provide comments in person, please fill out and turn in a speaker card found at the entrance of the council chamber for each item. To submit a comment remotely, use the raise hand feature on Zoom when the item begins. To provide public comment over the phone, use the telephone number listed on the agenda and press star nine to raise your hand to speak when the item begins. For open forum, in-person speakers will have the opportunity to speak for up to 30 minutes. If there are additional in-person speakers who wish to speak at the conclusion of the 30 minute time period or any speakers participating remotely, they will have the opportunity to speak at the end of the meeting. For consent calendar, public hearings, and matters for consideration, in-person speakers will be called upon first, followed by speakers participating remotely. After public comment opens, each participant's name will be announced and their time will begin once at the lectern or remotely once unmuted. Please note, a speaker is not required to answer any questions from the city council, and the city council is not required to answer questions from the public. However, the mayor has the discretion to ask staff to address a speaker's comments when a council member believes it is relevant to a particular business item.

How many speakers do we have?

Yes, Mayor. We have five in-person speakers for open forum, The first speaker will be Bob tuck, not followed by and chicken, Jen Cola, followed by Greg Scott.

Hi, honorable mayor, Marshawn and city council people. Um, my name is Bob Tuck. I'm a 40 year volunteer to air squadron pilot, um, and past commander, past commander, Western state chair, fair squadron. And, um, I just got a 50-year award for continuous flying, the Lindbergh Award from the FAA. In any event, that's a little bit of my background. I'm a tenant, long time at Lindbergh Airport, one of the best airports I've ever flown into. It's a great airport. I'm here tonight to talk about something that's really hot, and that's kind of a pun. It's the fire. Cal Fire. Cal Fire. It's got a base 60 miles away in Hollister, 60 nautical miles away in Hollister. Takes them a while to get up here and get on fires. And fires can get a foothill, foothold before they get here. I want you to not just approve it, but promote it. Pete Sandhu, the FBO that we have out at Livermore, you're lucky to have him because he's got a lot of ambition, a lot of energy. And I've worked with him on building his hangars. and his FBO facility. And he's got a master plan that he's working on for public benefit, all public benefit. We got East Bay Regional there, but they're in a temporary hangar. We want CAL FIRE. California Highway Patrol once put a base here, also in Livermore. And Los Positas would like to do some teaching for mechanics, avionics, engine power plants, because we had the military used to do it all. Now they're just training drones. So we're really going to run out of mechanics, and we're going to get them trained, as well as pilots. They want to do a pilot program. So there's a lot of great public benefit going on. We've got 45 acres to put it on. He can build it, and we could have Cal Fire right there in our backyard. And I think those people of Ruby Hills would like that. The only reason it wasn't another Pacific Palisades disaster was the winds. We were lucky. We didn't have those bad winds. but they're coming and they can happen. So we can't bank on luck. We should have them here and they want to be here. And it'd be the great benefit for all the citizens, not just for, uh, Livermore, but for all the surrounding cities. It's funny. I saw the news coming over tonight that, uh, San Ramon has a fire going, a vegetation fire. So they're popping up more than we've seen in the past. So I really ask you to promote it and, uh, Listen to Pete Sandhu. He's got a great plan. And I really hope that you will get behind it to support him. He's working hard. And you're looking to have him. He's really an outstanding guy. Lots of energy. He's smart. And he can get things done. He got his stuff done in record time. And I was helping him. And he's working me to death. So I don't need to do any more job. But I'm going to wrap it up right there. So please, let's promote Cal Fire. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Bob.

The next speaker is Anne Giancola.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Madam Vice Mayor, and City Council. My name is Anne Giancola. I'm the Visual Arts and Education Manager for Livermore Valley Arts. And I'm sort of here to tell you about a really amazing project that's coming. And you might have heard a little buzz about it. I brought visuals because I'm a visual person. So these are elephants that are called the Great Elephant Migration. And I was in Rhode Island two years ago on a family trip and we went for a day trip to see these amazing elephants. They are life-size sculptures made from an invasive weed in India. And they were amazing to go see. They were family-friendly. Go up and touch them and Tons of people were walking around, having picnics, seeing the elephants and really learning the story that they're bringing is coexistence. So I've been chasing the organizers for two years to bring them to Livermore because I say, we're the Bay Area, come through. So I was lucky and got an opportunity for October and November of this year. We are, however, still fundraising and we've had wonderful support from the City Arts Commission. They are 100% behind us and have offered some money if we can continue to raise enough. So I'm here to ask the City Council to please help us with any business sponsorship or encouraging community participation for this wonderful project. The elephants will be downtown. with all that amazing parking that is there. And they have been shown as they've traveled across the country to raise foot traffic by 52% and retail sales by 20%. It's going to be amazing. We'll have them for two months and so many people will come out to see them. And their story is wonderful story of coexistence. They take out this invasive weed and thereby creating more open land in India. and allowing the villagers and the farms and the wildlife to all coexist. And they're paying the artisans to build these sculptures so that they can come on the great elephant migration. So it's this wonderful story of art, culture, and climate change and coexistence. So I'm here to sort of say, pay attention to the buzz because the elephants are coming. Thank you very much.

The next speaker will be Greg Scott, followed by Brian Swanson, followed by Jolie.

Good evening, I'm Greg Scott. This isn't an agenda item, but it was an agenda item several meetings ago on presentation from the city attorney on new rubber stamp, the adoption of California Senate Bill 707-2026 on the digital access for teleconferencing. I'm wondering if you know what you've done. As a person who spoke as a homeless person before the city council from the second meeting of September 2017 to the first meeting of March 2020, missing only two meetings and then facing the COVID lockdown in which I was locked out by the digital divide, I understand the intent of the bill. It's a good intent of the bill. The intent of the bill is not the problem. It's the implementation. It's the cybersecurity. You're opening up. This is 2026. This is a far different world than 2020 and it's a far different world in the cyber world. I have selfish intent here. If my community is vulnerable, then I'm vulnerable. If the governance of my community is vulnerable, then the community is vulnerable. That again makes me vulnerable. You're opening yourself up to certain vulnerabilities. And if you think you have a firewall to open up open these open zoom channels. Please tell hugging face hugging face recently was under attack from a test from frontier that open AI. They're doing a test and their Their new product. General general AI agents on got past the boundaries of the test and attacked Hugging Face. Hugging Face is a site, among other things, you can download open source, open weight, large language models. And they used, under the attack, they used one of those models. The models are mostly, the most popular models are from the People's Republic of China. They used one of those models to no effect. So if you have adequate, if you think you have adequate policy on your firewall to what you're doing here, please tell somebody like Hugging Face and the city could make a fortune It's quite a vulnerability in this age of swarms of the general artificial intelligence agents to combat this. And it's just, the bill is, the California legislature essentially is incompetent. I mean, you can tell that by what they did. They denied under the corrupt leadership of our Democratic governor, denying the regulation You've made yourself vulnerable, which again, has made me vulnerable and the community vulnerable. Thank you.

Next speaker is Brian Swanson, followed by Joe Lee.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Brian Swanson. I'm a Tri-Valley resident and AICP certified planner. I am speaking on meeting process issues that affects tonight's agenda as a whole. Tonight's meeting is simply too dense. There are too many substantive items, staff reports, attachments, presentations, interested parties and public comments competing for limited time and attention. When a meeting is structured this way, it risks turning into a battle of attrition between the agenda, staff, other presenters, applicants or interested parties and members of the public who are trying to follow, respond and participate meaningfully. That is not good public process. I am especially concerned by the city's treatment of written public comments and their compartmentalization in the supplemental materials section of the agenda. Agenda item 12 tonight. instead of being co-located with the agenda items they actually address. That may be administratively convenient, but it is not keeping with the spirit of the Ralph M. Brown Act or with needing full public access. The Brown Act is not only about whether a document technically exists somewhere. It is also about whether the public can understand what is before the legislative body, locate relevant materials, and participate in real time. Public comments should be posted with the agenda and items they address, next to the staff report, attachments, proposed resolutions, consultant materials, and any other documents, including presentation decks. That is important for continuity. It is important for accessibility. It is important for transparency, and it is important for administrative record integrity. When comments are separated into a general supplemental materials bucket, the public must reconstruct the record manually. A person reviewing agenda item 6.5, for example, should not have to know to leave that item, scroll elsewhere, open a separate supplemental section, and then guess which comments relate to which item. That creates unnecessary friction and weakens the public record. I'm not asking the city clerk's office to do anything unreasonable. I am asking for a simple record management rule. For each agenda item, place the public comments received for that item directly with the item's staff report, attachments, proposed resolutions, and supplemental materials. If the city also wants to consolidate some materials section fine, but item specific comments should be duplicated or linked under the relevant agenda item. That would make the record cleaner, more durable, more accessible, and easier for council staff and the public and future reserve reviewers to understand. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Jolie. That is our final speaker.

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of updates on case studies that I'm working on that I'm hoping will serve as possible inspirations for City of Livermore. So the first city I've looked at is City of Largo, Largos, Florida. They switched to GNU slash Linux with OpenOffice in 2001. Open Office later was for that was a project developed at Sun Microsystems. So here in California, that project when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, it was for to LibreOffice. So City of Largo's migrated to LibreOffice when that happened. The scene. So the free software stack that that was the new slash Linux with Libre office and the users, there were approximately 800. Computer using city employees with a total of 400 computers that were made available in 2001 2030 were in use concurrently during the day's heaviest usage period for the first year of adoption. That one journalist visited and he he. Notice that it was it was evident that users were satisfied with the system he described these tech support staff as. The least harassed least worried almost just admins we have ever met they have one of the smallest and least work help desks we have ever seen five people who support 400 plus client units and over 800 users. All done without a fuss, muss, or herm. The cost savings estimated by the sysadmin David Richards was at least $1 million per year. And that was in 2002 when he made that statement to a reporter. Then fast forward almost 20 years later, 2019, plans were made to migrate away from GNU slash Linux, going to Microsoft Windows. The initial estimate in 2019 was that the licenses would be between 250,000 to 450,000 annually. When the budget came out the next year, October 1st, 2020, the price came out to be actually $1,280,800, which was more than 300 greater than the prior year's proposal. That's money that could have been saved. had they not decided to switch. So the conclusion I drew from that was Microsoft sales teams are really aggressive. I've seen this at my work. When they come to the office, their pitches are really, they push really hard. So I think after 20 years, the city must have caved to the pressures. And I've been trying to reach out to the city. I've reached out twice and I'm waiting to hear back. Thanks.

That was our final speaker.

Okay, thank you. I'm going to close the public comment period for open forum. Moving on to the consent calendar. Is there anything that anybody wishes to pull on consent?

Not pulling items, but I wanted to give staff an opportunity to comment on 6.3, and then I have some comments on 6.5. Okay.

And I have some comments on the sewer proposal and then I'll be abstaining on 6.7. But if you want to go ahead and make your comments.

Yeah, if we could start with 6.3. I just think this is a really great program. This was kind of Amazing. The city was able to work it out. So I wanted to give staff a brief opportunity to kind of explain what we're doing with the cyber walk repair project and just to highlight it for the public on what we were able to do.

Sure, through the mayor. This is your city manager, Mariana Birch. Just very quickly, item 6.3, the essence of the item is to authorize a contract that would, in essence, allow the city to eliminate or repair sidewalk locations at 15,000 locations in the city. This is on top of 9,000 locations that we were able to repair in the last couple of years. And these 15,000 locations are privately managed. So this would allow those property owners to basically receive repaired sidewalks and manage them from here on. There is approximately 16,000 sidewalk lifts in the city that are left after the initial repair. And this program that is supposed to be one time will repair 15 out of 16,000. So staff are very, very excited about this investment in our community. And thank you, Council Member, for the opportunity to comment.

Thank you. Yeah, this is a really great program, really just showing the economies of scale that the city was able to figure out a way to really make do the sidewalk shaving for, like you said, 15,000 out of 16,000 of them for a very reasonable price over the course of the next year, the project's expected to complete in roughly a year's time. So that's, I think, pretty amazing. I just wanted to highlight that because it's really, it is, you know, it costs less than we thought it would. It's covering more of the sidewalk than we thought it would. It's making the city, you know, just a much nicer place for everyone. So I was really excited about that program.

Well, it's just a win for everybody. And the fact that, again, thanks to the staff for taking a lead on that and negotiating was a great benefit for everybody.

That's it on six.

Actually, did you have a, okay. With that, if there's no other comments on consent, I'll entertain a motion. We have one public comment.

There's also public comment. Do you want me to go first, or do you want to?

No, I don't have a comment. I got that myself.

On 6-5, I just want to comment. We received a really extensive letter on the airport project. I just wanted to make sure that staff was able to review that letter. And as we're looking forward to the implementation of this project, taking the advice under consideration, I think there was a number of items in there that were meaningful. I'm not going to go through item by item, but I think it's meaningful for staff to pay attention, address the concerns as we're moving forward and really incorporate those into our future planning.

Through the mayor, again, this is your city manager, Mariana Birch, Council Member Brenning. I think you're referring to the email from Mr. Swanson. It's a relatively lengthy email, I think about 15 pages. We did receive it right before the meeting. We will review it carefully as we move forward with the projects recommended under 6.5.

Perfect. Thank you. OK, so if that's the comments, then if there is, I'll accept a motion on the consent calendar.

We do have one public comment.

Oh, do we have public comment? I'm sorry.

One comment from Matt Monterio.

Hello, I have a comment on 63 the sidewalk two three yeah I just want to think that it's a brilliant idea and. To use the city resources to sort of grind down the sidewalk with the easiest cases and get them off the books to clear the deck for the really egregious cases i'll give you a little anecdote in my neighborhood I got tired of my friends tripping every time we went out. And eventually there was an older resident who actually tripped in front of my neighbor's home and fell and was bloody, which I may have spoken here before. looking around to see if my neighbors are here anyway, so I contacted the city who promptly gave out notices. And the neighbors that only had the grind down issue, you know that that could resolve it by grinding the sidewalk down promptly did so, but the most egregious case of the sidewalk being a literal ram. is not getting fixed right and it would be nice if the city had the capacity to basically encourage the owner to take care of that because you know if it's one of those things the sidewalk if 90 of it is fixed it doesn't really make a difference for anyone you know using a walker or or uh or a baby stroller or whatever um to go across right Um, yeah, that's about it. So it's a really good idea if you can focus your energy on the like really hard cases and convince the, you know, the property owners to take up their responsibility. I will say also another personal anecdote. None of the neighbors like the letter. I obviously kept my mouth shut. Um, they, they, they, they, this couple of them noted that Weasley language about opportunity you know the the actual responsibility of the owner versus the city and blah blah and the trees um so i don't know if you can rework that but i think it's easy to say that um most owners don't even recognize the responsibility they have over the sidewalk and maybe we should actually proactively inform homeowners that at the end of the day, this is their responsibility. And this is why because I think for a lot of them, when they get the notice, they're surprised that these are the rules. And that causes an obvious negative reaction, right. And I think if you're buying a home, if you knew that this was your responsibility to begin with, maybe you think twice or, you know, consider that into the price of the home. Anyway, that's all I got to say. Thank you very much.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, this has been, I think the state of California recognized that the homeowners were responsible for the site of Lubbock in, I think, 1947. So this is, as people move in and out of neighborhoods, there have been some cities that used to fund that. And with all of the other requirements on cities now, we just don't have the resources. And it's up to the homeowners to decide to mitigate that. So this is an opportunity to make a huge difference. And again, I applaud staff for taking the initiative to make that happen. Any other public comments?

No additional speakers.

Okay, I'm going to close the public comment period for consent calendar. Is there a motion to move consent? Do you want a motion on all items or was there one? I will just say that I will be abstaining on 6.7. Okay, then I'll move consent. Okay, that work?

I would recommend that you vote on all items except 6.7 and then come back and vote on 6.7.

Okay, so I'll amend my motion to move all items other than 6.7.

Okay, and I'll second.

Okay, seconded by Council Member Dunbar. Any discussion on the motion moving everything except 6.7? Oh, we have to do roll call, that's right. Type your meeting.

Council Member Berrientos? Aye. Council Member Branning?

Aye.

Council Member Dunbar?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Wong? Aye. Mayor Marchand?

Okay, moving on to zero motion from 66.7 almost 6.7 and I'll second. Much me by customer branding seconded by customer Dunbar any discussion on the motion. Will call please.

And so we're very intense yeah consumer branding I don't remember vice mayor long dive.

Okay, that quote moving on from consent. This is item 7.1, hearing to place delinquent sewer accounts on the property tax roll.

administrative service department. The city of Livermore provide wastewater service that protect public health and the environment. These services include collection, treatment, and disposal of wastewater. Funding of the cost of providing wastewater service relies solely on the payment of the sewer service bill. Any balance not paid 60 days after the building day is considered delinquent. The 1,100 sewer accounts referred on the slide are the ones that we bill monthly, and they are primarily commercial accounts. Residential sewer service are collected on the property tax roll. In Exhibit 8 that was submitted with the staff report, 19 accounts were identified as severely delinquent or at least 90 days past due. Since the report was submitted, our staff continues to contact the customers in attempt to collect the unpaid balance. Thanks to our staff effort, only five accounts remain delinquent for a total balance of $2,570 outstanding. For Livermore Municipal Code Chapter 13, the city may enforce payment of delinquent sewer charge by placing them on the property tax roll. Staff has sent a letter to the affected property owner notifying them of the city intent and of tonight's public hearing. Staff recommend the city council consider protests, adopt a resolution overruling protests, and direct staff to forward the delinquent list to the Alameda County tax assessor. Thank you.

Do we have any public comment?

We do not have any public comment for 7.1.

Okay, in that case, I'm going to close the public comment period, bring it back to the council. Do we have any questions, comments? Okay, seeing none, I'll accept a motion. Moved by Council Member Berrientos.

I'll second.

Seconded by Vice Mayor Wong. Any discussion on the motion? So since we are hybrid, we have to do the roll call in each one, correct? Okay.

That's correct. Council Member Berrientos?

Yes.

Council Member Branning?

Aye.

Council Member Dunbar?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Wong? Aye. Mayor Michon?

Aye. Okay, passed unanimously. Moving on to 7.2 is the hearing to adopt the fiscal year 2026-2027 sewer service and use charges. Presentation.

Hi, good evening, Honorable Mayor and City Council Member. Again, my name is Martin Wong. The City of Livermore provide wastewater services to the community that includes collection, treatment, and disposal of wastewater. Commercial accounts are billed monthly and residential sewer charge are collected on the property tax roll. Sewer rate for fiscal year 2026-27 were approved by the city council on June 9th, 2025 in resolution number 2025-092. The purpose of this hearing is to fulfill a California health and safety code requirement when sewer charge are collected on the property tax roll. For this requirement, a public hearing must be conducted on a report that contains a description and the amount of the sewer charge for each parcel. This written report was filed with the city clerk on July 10th, and it is also included as Exhibit A. The total number of partial included in this report is $27,260. And the total fiscal year 26-27 residential sewer revenue to be collected on the property tax roll is approximately $28 million. Staff recommend City Council consider protests, find that the protest was not made by majority or partials, adopt residential sewer service charge report, and authorize collection of charges on the property tax roll by the Alameda County Tax Assessor. Thank you.

Okay. Do we have any public comment?

Yes, we do, Mayor. We have one speaker, Greg Scott. So no public comment for 7.2.

Okay. In that case, I'm going to close the public hearing, bring it back to the council. Any questions or comments from the council? Okay, so we just did a repair on the sewer line. I saw that $28 million is the ballpark revenue. We just did a repair of 3,400 feet of sewer line, which came into about $3.5 million. And so... ballpark, we have about 300 miles of sewer line in the system. So doing the math, that comes out to about $1.6 billion to replace our sewer system. And this is bringing in $28 million. So hoping that the sewer system lasts for but 58 years based on that. But that doesn't include the operations and the salaries of the people that are running the system. The reason I'm bringing this up is we keep hearing, oh, well, there's all this money. This is an extraordinarily expensive asset that we have. So we're bringing in about $28 million this year. The system to replace is $1.6 billion. um i certainly applaud staff for uh working all the calculations to make sure that when these assets uh reach the end of their lives that we will have the money uh in in hand to replace them so uh well done thank you very much for uh for making that happen uh so with that i'm going to uh entertain a motion motion made by council member barrientos i'll second I'll say okay seconded by a customer Dunbar roll call please.

And so very into us.

And so we're branding I don't remember Dunbar I vice mayor Wong I remember Sean I passion amously moving on to the point 3. There are a few people who are sticking it out to the final final episode here.

Good evening, Mayor Marchand, members of the City Council. I'm Andy Ross, Principal Planner in the Community Development Department. We're excited to be here this evening to present the General Plan 2045 update. And we'll go through a quick overview of that, some implementation actions we're recommending, as well as the General Plan Environmental Impact Report for your consideration. So as a reminder, the General Plan or General Plan 2045 is a comprehensive 20-year roadmap that establishes a community vision, addresses key issues through goals and policies, and meets all state requirements for general plans, including the required elements, and also includes an implementation chapter that identifies specific actions to carry out goals and policies and guide future decision-making. On May 11th, Council reviewed the draft general plan and provided staff direction to clarify certain policy language and also make minor land use adjustments. Those changes are captured in the errata sheet dated July 7th. Earlier this month, in July, Planning Commission reviewed the draft general plan as well as the errata sheet. and staff and planning commission have additional recommended land use adjustments. These additional land use map updates respond to council's direction. property owner requests and corrections to the map, correcting errors to align land use with existing conditions. So starting in the top left, the South Roscoe Road area, this is three and a half acre vacant parcel. It's currently designated as neighborhood commercial. It's been designated neighborhood commercial for quite some time. And based on property owner requests, it doesn't appear that that's a viable land use at that location. given the size and its location. Explored residential land uses on that site as well, but there's deed restrictions that prohibit that. So the city would not be able to count those towards state obligations, nor would the property owner be able to exercise those rights. And so the property owner is recommending a general industrial designation which is consistent with the surrounding area and also our economic development goals. The site to the left, the Camden Coal Commons, that was a mapping error that we're recommending be corrected. It was designated as neighborhood mixed use high density. There's an existing townhome development on that site built at medium density residential three range, and so we're recommending cleaning that up. As far as the Midtown specific plan area, Consistent with council's February 2025 direction, staff worked with the property owner to balance continued business operations at this site, consistent with the city's long-term land use vision for Midtown. And so as part of that, those conversations, staff's recommending a service commercial designation for approximately 40-acre portion of this site. That would support the property was long term viability and their long term planning efforts, as well as supports the general plan vision which contemplated non residential land uses adjacent to I 580. And then, lastly, if we look at the last cleanest road map on the bottom right side of the screen again following council's direction from February 2025. Staff work with the property owner to explore a range of housing densities at this location as part of the general plan update, but also in conjunction with a development agreement. Proposed range offers flexibility in delivering different housing types. The final mix and site layout will be refined more precisely as part of a future neighborhood plan. That's required by general plan 2045. And that neighborhood plan will ensure compatibility with the natural topography as well as surrounding neighborhoods. So looking at implementation actions, staff's recommending zoning map amendment to implement the general plan land use map, which was authorized by city council in February, 2025. Those amendments also include the sites just discussed on the previous slide. This will ensure that the zoning map is consistent with the general plan upon general plan adoption. In addition, we were looking at scenic resources policies and retaining our existing scenic corridor policies for now until a scenic overlay regulation is adopted. So there are scenic resources policies in the general plan 2045. They balance scenic protection and community and economic development goals. And they call for the development of specific regulations based on context. Those have not been developed yet. So we're recommending retaining the current scenic corridor policies under separate cover until such time as they are adopted. Moving on to the environmental impact report. This is a summary snapshot of the impacts of our general plan EIR. So on the left side, you'll see that majority of the topic areas evaluated are less than significant. On the right side, you'll notice that there are two topic areas that are considered less than significant with mitigation applied. And there's a handful of topic areas that are considered significant and avoidable at the programmatic level or the general plan level. So the project team circulated the draft environmental impact report for a 53-day comment period from March 3rd to April 24th. received a variety of comments from public agencies and private parties. Your final environmental impact report includes all the comments received during that public comment period, plus responses to those comments, and then any changes or corrections to the text of the draft environmental impact report. Your final environmental impact report also addresses concerns regarding population growth by clarifying that the population numbers identified in the draft environmental impact report are calculations based on a maximum theoretical build-out that were used to evaluate potential impacts. They're not forecasts and they're not projections. Your full environmental impact report will consist of two volumes, one, your draft environmental impact report, and then your final environmental impact report. It's worth noting that significant unavoidable impacts, again, are occurring at the program level, so that does not preclude finding less than significant impacts at the project level for future development in Livermore. However, because there are significant unavoidable impacts identified in the environmental impact report, staffs are recommending adopting a statement of overriding considerations consistent with CEQA. The project's significant long-term benefits, so the general plan's long-term benefits include meeting future housing needs, supporting sustainable growth, strengthening the local economy and implementing the community vision through 2045. All those outweigh potential environmental impacts. And so with that, your staff, Your general plan advisory committee and planning commission are recommending that the council certify the general plan 2045 environmental impact report, adopt Livermore general plan 2045 subject to the revisions identified in the RATA sheet, introduce an ordinance to approve amendments to Livermore zoning map, and retain existing general plan scenic corridor policies under a separate cover until new scenic resource standards are considered and adopted at a future date. And that concludes staff's presentation. We're available for any questions.

Okay, thank you. Do you have any public comment?

Yes, we do, Mayor. We have five speakers. Our first speaker is Richard Andrews, followed by Trish Monroe, followed by Matt Montreal. So our first speaker is Richard Andrews.

First of all, I would like to thank the people who spent all these years putting together this plan, 748 pages. And the only problem I've got is not getting words. So congratulations. Thank you. And thank you, Mayor, and everybody for having this meeting and allowing us to make comments. The only problem I have with this, because I'm sticking with the details, and in essence, on the urban growth boundary, we have the section east of Greenville Road listed for future study area. My problem with that is this. We don't have anything else listed as that. When you get a document like this, quite often someone down the road decides to take advantage of it and say, well, we've got this directive and therefore we will go after this. It kind of pinpoints a potential move of direction rather than just saying it's going to happen. Because all of it's going to be studied. I mean, that's only reasonable. You can't have another one coming out in 2045 that is going to not have any study done on it. I would just like to have that particular phrase removed before the rest. Everything else is fantastic work, and I commend everybody. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Trish Monroe, followed by Matt Montreal, followed by Greg Scott.

Good evening, mayors, council members, staff. I was not going to miss this. This is, and I'm just going to say this because I got to, this is my 46th wedding anniversary. I'm here.

Mazel tov.

I was here at the beginning of this process. I've seen the work that took place um mayor you already said thank you to some of the people i have been so impressed with all the work that's been done by everyone um so that was one thing um the other is that what this represents in the way of what local government needs in order to function the underlying foundation is huge i don't think we appreciate that often enough until we're doing this kind of work And I wanted to take the opportunity to say that. This is incredible. And finally, what this gives is a statement of hope for the future. You have put together, all of you have put together a statement that is about who we're going to be in 20 years. Included in it, and I've seen, you know, I saw it along the way, not read all, 700 and what, 46 pages? 48. 48. I read some. But along the way, what this represents is who we want to be, who we want to include, what we want to look like 20 years down the road in a time of polarization and division that's really pretty scary. I think that's incredible. I think we should all be proud. We should all be able to look at ourselves and say this is where we're going and then make it so. Thank you all.

Next speaker is Matt Montreal, followed by Greg Scott, followed by Brian Swanson.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and members. I'm a resident of Livermore and no, I did not read the whole 745 pages. So I'll start off by saying what everyone else has said, that it's tremendous work. It inspired me to come out here when I opened the PDF. I'm like, I have to see this. and at least comment on it and to say, I think Trish kind of took my wording, which I think is, I do view this plan as kind of a hope for the future. Like I'm really afraid of change. And usually when you hear that from this bias, you hear people complaining about development, but I'm actually afraid of Livermore changing over time if we don't allow opportunities for young professionals and young families to actually move in and kind of rejuvenate the city. I think the city is on a trajectory of getting older and less dynamic. And there's nothing wrong with getting older. I'm getting older. We're all getting older. That's the inevitable fact of life. But I'll leave you with a little anecdote that just made me a little sad. I am a customer for someone who has a small business here in Livermore for personal care. And she's actually very successful. She's going to expand and hire another person. And you would think that a small business owner with a booming business would be able to live here. And no, she moved out. She was a lifelong Livermore resident. She's lived in other parts of the country and thinks Livermore is just the best place to be and recently came back a few years ago, but just cannot find an affordable place where she lives now 45 minutes away. And You know, we can debate about know what we want what we don't want but i think we can maybe all agree that one successful metric of this plan or any anything that we do going forward would allow especially people that were born here an opportunity to stay and raise their families in the city and the community that they love and um unfortunately that's the not the case because again housing costs are exploding and there are things in this specific plan that i think will address that um so i commend you on it And I'll have one, since I have a little time, specific comment on the Midtown plan, which I really like. It's near a Safeway, and I would say we should concentrate on making it possible for people that live near a grocery store to actually walk to the grocery store. And if people that live one minute away from the grocery store are driving to the grocery store, that is a policy failure. uh just another you know i can i can drown with anecdotes but i live near the other first street safeway and i will get one run over one day i know i will um but hopefully not uh thank you very much thank you our next speaker is greg scott followed by brian swanson

Good evening. I'm Greg Scott. 2045 Livermore plan update needs to specifically state that Livermore's urban growth boundary will not be broken. But the voting public has overwhelmingly supported the maintenance of the urban growth boundary. There is no reasonable justification in the public's interest for breaking Livermore's urban growth boundary. Livermore city staff has stated that capacity and prediction are separate entities when it comes to future housing numbers. By the way, an estimate of future capacity is prediction or projection. Whether this methodology is to meet state of California mandates or not, this is illogical and absurd. Capacity projections without viable, informed, educated, and probable prediction are a fatuous exercise. How would a business person formulate a credible, viable, and sustainable business without a well-informed and research-probable prediction of capacity? How would they assess how much capital and expenditure to make, how many to hire, and what to account for without having a probable estimate of demand? Not doing so would be a recipe for failure and bankruptcy. Is dealing with taxpayer monies and public interest so different when it comes to predicting capacity? California lost 229,000 individuals to net outward migration last year for the third year of loss in a row. Housing inventory has been growing in the region with historically low sales and looming price devaluations. The macroeconomic conditions continue to be less favorable. This is not new or ephemeral. This is structural and it's been years in the making. City of Littlemore housing capacity estimates with 2045 general plan update make no sense unless they're being used to break the urban growth boundary along with other shenanigans like rezoning industrial lands within the current urban growth boundary to residential. Neither should occur nor should precious resources be spent on any study outside of the current urban growth boundary by the City of Littlemore. What purpose would such a city study serve? Who would benefit? Recent year purchasers of properties outside of the current urban growth boundary What kind of strategic investment plan is it to buy lands that cannot redevelop? If the city of Livermore can commit to a climate action plan, the city of Livermore could commit to not breaking the urban growth boundary in the 2045 general plan update. In fact, it may be imperative to do so. How will we sequester radiated reactive gases, specifically carbon dioxide, other than by methods on undeveloped lands that are more efficient and use less energy than other methods of different land use statuses? The Livermore City Council needs to have City Council Chambers, 2045 general plan update state that the urban growth boundary will not be broken, there will be no study conducted outside of the. City Council Chambers, current growth boundary using precious city resources and that the industrial zoning within the current urban growth boundary is not to be rezoned and residential. Also. You make no plan for what's coming in the artificial intelligence and it's not i'm not talking about policy of us i'm talking about policy of effects as in jobs growth energy water and capital money, thank you.

Our next speaker is Brian swanson followed by one raised hand gene K. Brian swanson trial resident and the IPC certified planner. Here on this item stating my concern to the lack of attention and time spent on the statement of overriding considerations. Especially in the context of state housing mandates, jurisdictional focus on green production, the ILR's own mitigation monitoring program, and the city's climate action plan. All of the state housing mandates require more due diligence, not less. I would urge you strongly to rework what you guys consider your objective design and development standards to include all the requirements that the city has in all the coordinated and overlapping documents so that the design elements or the design requirements and the mitigation and the statement of all variety considerations are all baked in into your objective design standards so that we're not here checking boxes after the fact or trying to play catch up with mitigation monitoring or trying to play catch up with enforcement. But do the work with your objective design standards. BMT is a huge issue. And if you look at the state's new recommended guidance and HED's guidance on transit-oriented development, it's there black and white. I can attest to with this Hunter-Costco County Transportation Authority, it's there in black and white. Put it in your objective design standards, not after the fact box checking enforcement. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Jane King. Jane, please unmute yourself.

Yes, this is Jane King. I am a Livermore resident. I apologize. I wish I were there tonight, but I came back from a vacation in Montana with a really cruddy cold and cough. So if I start coughing, I will quit. Okay. Can you hear me? Hello? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I think I have unmuted myself. Can you hear me? OK. We're not able to hear you, Jean. You're not able to hear me? Oh, dear. I thought I unmuted myself. Hear me. OK. You still can't hear me? OK. I guess I haven't gotten this thing right.

So I cannot be hurting soon.

I'm on zoom and I've tried to unmute myself but you don't hear me do you recess for technology. No, I don't know.

Hopefully our last

I have tried to unmute myself removal select same a system built in microphone. Nope. We removal. Okay, audio settings. No, it's not working. Don't hear it. No.

One break.

Okay, so we're going to take a brief recess while we work the technology. Sort of see heads nodding. Okay, we're going to take a brief recess. So we will be back shortly as we work through the technology.

Just a microphone. Oh, God.

No.

We call it YouTube.

Hi, Donna. I'm trying to hear myself but I can't get my thing unmuted. Bye. Hi Donna, I can't hear myself. Gene, can you hear us?

Hi, I can't hear you. I couldn't unmute myself.

I don't know. It's too bad. OK. Yes, I hear it. Yes, I hear that. OK.

Okay.

Don't do that.

Hi, Donna.

Jean, is that? Are we speaking with Jean Kaye?

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you now. One moment. Please wait just a moment while we call back the council.

Oh, well, I'm sorry. Could you hear me before?

We could not hear you before, but we can now. If you could wait just one moment, we are going to call the council back. So just one moment, please.

Yeah.

Was that Olivia's thing? I can hear you.

Not us. Yeah, that's good.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, if you could please take your seats. It looks like we've worked through the technical details and the meeting is going to resume shortly. So if you please take your seats. We will get back to we are in the middle of taking a public comment on 7.3, the general plan. And we had just promoted Jean King to speak. So with that, I'm going to call the meeting back to order. And we will hear from Ms. King.

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. I'm getting a feedback of my own voice. Okay. All right. Speak. I don't know whether you can hear me or not. Yes, we can hear you.

We can hear you.

Okay. Well, I'm getting a feedback of my own voice, so I find it very confusing. Anyway, I am Jean King. I live in Livermore, California. Okay, and I did attend.

Can you, Jean, can you mute your volume, not your speaking volume, not your microphone, but your speakers on your end so you can't hear yourself from your computer?

Okay, I can hear my speech is coming back to me. I can hear it all the time too, so which I find very confusing, but you don't. But you don't hear a feedback.

No, we do not.

OK. I'm going to try to make this really quick. I thank the committee and the city council for going through this long process for the update. And I do appreciate it. The one thing that I did want to bring up again was what I had brought up with all the other meetings

I came to is the fact about moving the urban growth boundary.

I want, as some of the other speakers this evening had said, it is very important to the citizens of Livermore not to change our urban growth boundary unless it is absolutely needed. And I don't think it is needed in the case of this thing from the Greenville North. And I do want to make sure that you do not exchange a lot of the commercial, industrial properties to residential, that you keep enough so that we have a good balance of population and jobs for the next 20 years. And so And the environment in California has been so upset ever since the COVID. And it's very hard to make an estimate about what the population is going to be and where the population is going to go. And so I think we need to study that very carefully and make sure what is going on. Livermore is a great place to live. I think this... This program will make Livermore be good in the future, too. But people are very worried about having too much traffic, too much traffic in different places. And to keep our open space and our surrounding open space and that we keep our vineyards, we keep our agricultural area and keep our wonderful open space. So thank you very much and definitely keep our urban growth boundary the way it is now unless there's a great need to make a change in how to do it. So I thank you very much for allowing me to speak, but I find it very disconcerting and somebody will have to tell me why I'm getting the feedback all the time. Okay, thank you very much.

Good night. Our next speaker is Carol S. Carol, please unmute yourself. Hi, can you hear me? Okay.

Yes. Oh, great. Um, I want to thank, um, the mayor, the city council and city staff for procuring some parcels such as Hartford Hills and parcels in the Greenville area to conserve them as open space. Um, during meetings about the general plan 2045, I know that the General Plan Advisory Committee members and the City Council has heard from me and others expressing our concerns about not breaking the urban growth boundary east of Greenville. And I'm aware of the Livermore City Council's responses to that. What I want to express is that it has been determined that the Greenville area around Highway 580 is an excellent place for a wildlife crossing. It would be wonderful if wildlife would be able to migrate from north of Highway 580 and go along the Diablo Range east of Greenville Road without having vehicles driving on Highway 580 possibly hitting and ending their life. With having a wildlife crossing either over or under Highway 580, it is even more important to assist wildlife's migration by not breaking the urban growth boundary east of Greenville. I appreciate the hard work that the General Plan Advisory Committee members have put in over a five-year period of term. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Donna. Donna, please unmute yourself.

Good evening, city council members. Thank you so much for this opportunity to address you. I want to thank you for all of your time on the general plan vision for 2045. There was a lot of work done by the community and stakeholders, and I'd like to Thank everyone who participated so diligently and repeatedly to make sure that our community stays the Livermore that we are so happy to live in this community. I want to echo the comments of Jean King and Carol that it's most important that we protect the urban growth boundary and that not be changed east of Greenville. This area, again, could be a wildlife crossing. It could support other wildlife in the area. So please be very cautious about that area. And secondly, I hope the council will again support the community that wants to save our agriculture, that wants to save our vineyards, that wants to do everything possible to protect the urban growth boundary as it is now. Please do not consider changing that urban growth boundary. And I'd like to end by again, thanking all that were involved in this very long process to come up with a vision and a plan that will serve the community with a good balance between growth, commercial development, and again, protecting our wineries and our agriculture, our wildlife, et cetera. Again, thank you so much for the opportunity to comment tonight.

That was our last speaker.

Any questions to start with the council? Moving, no, seeing no questions, comments. Council Member Dunbar, take it away.

I mean, it's not the first time we've been here. We've seen drafts. We've been through this. It is quite something to come to the end of the line and go, all right, this is the end of the line that we've been working towards this whole time.

Five years.

Five years. I'll maybe start with the small thing that needs addressing more so than anything else I could find. The report as it stands today does not have hyperlinks within the PDF and does not have chapters in its PDF. I'm able to get through it because it's my job to get through it. But in order for it to be a useful document for staff in the future and for any public to come in in the future, those need to be tightened up and put in on the final. I know we have an online version of this thing as well, so it is accessible in different ways, but some people like to look at the PDF. So that's the one real recommendation I had in this entire thing. Obviously, we've seen recommendations and provided recommendations before. Maybe to go to discuss some of the public comments that I heard in the last few minutes. Staff, could you speak to the work that we're doing or the implementation plan that comes next after this? I thought said that might have been a slide, but it isn't a slide, but it's definitely in the report of all the next things that come and one in particular that I had in my mind was VMP mitigation estimates and process.

If we get through the general plan adoption, we're anticipating a whole host of work programs to start implementing those goals and policies, starting with conforming amendments to the development code, new scenic resources overlay, looking at missing middle housing standards and incentives, active transportation plan updates, a whole host of items, development fee updates, et cetera.

And it's fair to say that we're constantly trying to integrate all those together to be easy to follow, not just for the applicants, but for staff's own review.

Absolutely.

Yes. In terms of the, you know, we talked about the purpose of the override considerations. You spoke a little bit to the impacts that are significant and unavoidable and them being programmatic in nature. Can you expand on that a little bit for the

audience because the general plan is a policy document. It's long reaching and it covers all aspects of the city. It's extremely high level. And so when we evaluate each of the topic areas for impacts, we've identified a few that are considered just significant and unavoidable. But as I mentioned previously, At a more granular level at a project specific level one could find that the project does not have those same level of impacts that they can be mitigated or they're just don't raise the level of significance. In addition, part of the statement of overriding considerations was to highlight that, because the general plan is a long range high level policy document it sets out certain objectives and those objectives.

will be met through the general plan and that those benefits outweigh the potential significant impacts associated with it so for example in the document it talks about noise potentially being significant and unavoidable as if all the projects get built at the same time with loud construction equipment with no mitigation but that's not what we're expecting at the project level obviously but we have to analyze it in this way for the purposes of the eir exactly yes I heard a lot of the word balance. That's the word that I am looking for in this plan as well. That's really all you can do at such a high level is balance these competing objectives and be open, which has been the recommendation of this entire council to future changes and things that happen so that we're not locked in and wasting a lot of staff time on reprocessing a general plan. John Potter, So that is also a balance that this Council is taking into consideration. John Potter, So I just want to put that out there, based on what I heard from the public comments. John Potter, Thank you. And we do have projections. I mean, we have a financial centerline projection in addition to just the capacity projections that we're talking about here. So it is fair to say we have an estimate of what will actually be produced because we have to account for the financials of what will actually be produced and the cost for services of those real units, as you might say. Is that fair to say?

Yes, it's fair to say.

I think that covers most of what I wanted to cover in terms of public comments.

We are doing our best at conserving all of these wildlife corridors. I'm sure that we will look at the connectivity of those relative to our other plans as those continue, but we're not really taking any action on the places where those might occur or propose. I know we had some sort of grant application in the recent past about those sorts of crossings, so we wouldn't want to be conflicting with ourselves, our own grant application anyways. Yeah. I think those are my questions for the things that I wanted to bring up more specifically other than that I was very happy to see the additions to the level of traffic stress and things that we talked about at this at this dais before I've seen all the work that has gone into the various levels of this program from top to bottom I'm very thoroughly impressed with the ability to take the direction that we were talking about here while balancing all the goals and objectives that we have to meet while balancing the EIR requirements at large. And I am very thankful to the people of the General Plan Committee who spent their diligent time getting it to so that we could review such a great document at this point and be able to pass it in this sort of two-stage process because the revisions that we were looking for from the prior review were fairly minor and easily accomplishable. Thanks.

Great. Council Member Brenning.

Sure. I'm actually going to break my comments in two parts, because I think one we need to talk about as a council. So first, I want to start with a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in this. I particularly want to start by thanking the GPAC committee members. You guys were volunteering your time for five years for a lot of meetings. I don't know how many hours you spent on this, plus reviewing packets and all that. That's a big volunteer commitment, and this didn't happen without you. So I really want to thank the GPAC members. In addition, of course, I do want to thank staff, past and present. We actually have some staff in the audience who have come back Uh, who had been working on this for four years and didn't quite make it to the end, but you know, are here to see it. Uh, so that's a great thing to see. Um, you know, really the commitment our staff has to making sure the city is an amazing place and all they've done, uh, to thank all of the current council, the past councils, the current planning commission, the past planning commissions. This has gone through quite a number of elected and appointed officials. So thank all of them for their time. And then really to thank the community, we've got, I forget exactly how many, but a lot of comments that have come in throughout the years on this. There was a chart that broke it down. Many, many of you came out, said how you feel about different parts of it. Without the community's input, we wouldn't be able to do this. So huge thank yous to so many people who were involved in this. This is literally countless man hours have gone into this, making sure this is an amazing product. And in the end, it really is an amazing product. I want to commend staff for once again making a government document that is readable and accessible. It's something that I think our city really prides itself on. And I, you know, compared to other cities and our documents are fantastic. Far clearer far more Community focused much easier for the general popular populace to access them. But still have the density of information in them, and so I think that's a really, really big ask actually it's. Something people spend their whole careers working on and our staff has done an amazing job, you can for anyone in the Community, you can pick up the general plan. go to the chapter that is about whatever it is you care about. And then there are bullet pointed items that are going to explain the details of what you want. So whatever it is about our city, its character, it's, you know, built space, its future, you can find basically all of it in our general plan and find a couple of sentences that describe where we are or where we're going. And I think that's incredible work. I don't, I don't, I don't know how much I can say how difficult I know it is to do that well. And I think our staff has done an incredible job of doing, doing just that. Additionally, like I want to brag a little bit about Livermore where a lot of cities are facing, you know, real serious challenges right now and trying to fix problems of the past. And we do have some of those, you know, there are going to be infrastructure challenges, things like that, but, This document, the city's planning, the general guidance of this city, this council, past councils, and the work that all of us have done together has put Livermore in a place where we are thinking about what the future of Livermore looks like. And that's a cool place to be for us as a council, for staff, and for the residents in that you can really ask the questions of what do we want the city to look like in 2045 and even beyond that. And our council... has had a long history and our staff has had a long history of not shifting winds along the way where two years ago, we're in one direction. Now we're going a different direction. We've had multiple councils in a row that have really looked at what is best for the city and not what is best during my term. Not the question of what can I accomplish to brag about on the campaign trail, but what can we do that maybe no one will even see while I'm on council but for my future in the city for your future in the city for our children's future in the city is going to be there and so that is also in this document there are many things that won't be realized in you know my time up here for sure and uh you know many staff will be gone by the time they're implemented so I want to brag a little bit about that. It is a really great place to be as a city. It's a really great position for us to be in. And it's all of the hard work of countless people getting us there. With that, I just wanted to get a small clarification. We are going to be bringing back an update to our development codes, correct?

That's correct, yes.

Yeah. So we'll actually be reviewing those. So I do appreciate the feedback on that. We need to get those in line and make sure they're updated. Also, it came up on access to the midtown area, walkable, bikeable neighborhood. And that's actually one of the reasons we switched it over to a neighborhood plan instead of trying to finish it. I suppose I'll brag that was actually, I think that was my idea originally to switch it over there because of the exact concerns you had, the coventry had. which was that I wanted to make sure it's a cohesive neighborhood plan, not just piecemeal bits put together. So I think it's going to be really cool when it's done, but it would have held up the entire general plan for us to figure everything out ahead of time. So that was the shift there. I think it's great. Lastly, I'll say that there is no plan or contemplation in the general plan currently about breaking the UGB. We are looking to grow within our borders. However, I do think there is a genuine and real concern about what the future of Livermore looks like within our current borders. And we need to, you know, discuss and think about How do we make sure that we have a jobs and housing balance? How do we make sure we're able to meet our arena goals? How do we make sure we're able to meet our industrial needs? That could be building up. It could be building out. It could be building, replacing old infrastructure with new infrastructure. I don't know what that looks like, but I think that it is important that we study what the future of industry and the future of the combination of industry, commercial and housing looks like in the city. And I think our general plan does contemplate studying and thinking about that, but does not prescribe any solution or even hint at any solution that might be there until we know what the problem looks like. And what are potential solutions? We can't put that into our general plan. So, uh, I think it's disingenuous to say that, you know, there's talk of the UGB in the general plan or a contemplation of what to do with it. The last item that I want to come back to, and I'll let other people speak, um, before we come back to this is I do want to have a conversation about the Las Colinas property specifically. But I think there might be some back and forth between council members there. So I'll let everyone else get their general comments up first.

First off, I'd like to thank GPAC for all the work you've done and the staff. And we get briefings throughout the years. Here's where we got planned here for Midtown. And we get to see all that and all the plans we have input at that time, too. And our concern is right up there. So you get this document. It's kind of cleaned up a little bit. Some of the edges have been knocked off. And I appreciate for the work you've done. The other thing is, I would, if you heard a couple years ago, I voted against the EIR on the Greenville area. And my concern was Mission Creek. And I felt like if we do the EIR there, it might open the can of worms. But it still comes down to the people. You have to vote whether we break that urban growth boundary or not. So it's not going to be us that breaks it. It's going to be the people who vote on it. And the other thing is, don't we have an animal migration area under 580 right now? I remember the staff looking at it and amazed how many animals crossed underneath that. You may comment, but I'm not finished yet. Go ahead.

Yes, there's known existing crossings under 580, and there's plans to enhance them to improve connectivity for wildlife.

I think you're keeping the count, head count. Anyway, squirrels, raccoons, chipmunks. Anyway, the other thing is... One of my friends drove down. I was born in San Francisco, and I lived in South San Francisco. If you drive from South San Francisco down south on the El Camino, you cannot tell when one city switches to another. You can't tell when you cross from Burlingame to Millbrae to San Mateo. You can't. And that's what impresses some people that come to Livermore. They're impressed. with our town and the way we were set up. And we are concerned about encroaching from our neighbor cities that they might try to come up too close to our boundary. So we are being aware of that and watching that. And again, we're trying to get a good mix of housing. I know housing is terrible. I went to look at the ones over by Portola, $850,000. they should charge you less for every floor because if you had to climb to the top, go to the bed, you'd be tired and ready to go to bed in some of those houses. So anyway, I know housing is expensive and I think it's not just Livermore, it's the nation and the state, the way they approach and the regulations they put on some of these buildings. So I appreciate it again for the effort and thank you.

um this makes me a little nostalgic thinking back to the early meetings of this process which i attended and because i wanted to see how a plan like this gets put together how does a city go about putting together a plan like this and what i saw until i was elected and not really welcomed at those meetings anymore was just community members coming together to serve officially on the General Plan Advisory Committee, and also to the ones who came and attended every single meeting and sat through the meetings as long as they went and made thoughtful comments. And Both the people sitting around the table as community members and people sitting in the audience spent a lot of time really delving into those packets and thinking thoughtfully about what questions they had to raise. And they got into these very important conversations about the future of Livermore and what they all wanted. And it was really great to see. And, you know, we were saying earlier, we started with 19 people in the committee, ended with 13. 10 came tonight. We're down to the fearless two. I feel like they should get a prize or something. But, you know, this sort of diligence and just perseverance I saw throughout the whole process. I mean, there were times in the audience I just felt like my brain is fried. I can't take even one more sentence. But they were sitting there listening to everything and fully engaging. And this is the product. So I'm super thankful and thankful for all the time and effort you all put into this. And then also with the staff, I would look at them sometimes and see them also fully engaged at times where my brain sort of shut off. But yeah. And I believe they were told at the start it would be a two-year process. So the fact that they've really stuck this out is even more impressive. One of the things I noted was in the meetings, some of the comments that people made, and even some made tonight, make it seem more contentious than it really is, make it seem like... there really is a huge difference of opinions in the city. But having had the opportunity to communicate one on one with all kinds of different people in the city and some of the people who spoke and sounded like they have very different opinions, we're actually all a lot closer than those comments would make it seem. I think we all came to Livermore looking for what Livermore has to offer and the character of Livermore, and I don't think anyone's here to try to, you know, break that apart and completely change the character. It's what drew us here to Livermore. And so I'm actually very, through the process, feel very gratified and certain, fairly certain that we came here for the same thing, and we're all a lot more alike than... it would seem from different comments that are made, especially if it's in a public setting. And then the last thing I want to mention is just that I represent Livermore on the Altamont Open Space Committee. And we talk and where we direct funds to conserve parcels of land in this area for open space. And we study wildlife conservation. conservation to create these wildlife corridors. And this is a real concerted effort. A lot of money is invested into this process. So some of the speakers are concerned about that. That is happening and has been happening for a long time. So it's something Livermore is also very engaged with and very committed to.

Well, it's been a great privilege for me to have started on this plan back in October of 21 and moving ahead with it. And now here we are five years later. When I did the plan in 2002, it was a two-year plan. And again, we had a large group of folks. As I mentioned before, it was very contentious. I have to congratulate everybody for going through a tremendous amount of information. And again, the staff for providing all that information and feeding it to everybody in a way that they could digest it because we're not all urban planners, but we represent the community. And we had 19 people speaking for 85,000 people. and trying to figure out, well, what do 85,000 people want? Because they're not here. So we have to go out into the community, talk to the people, and then bring that back. And everyone on the committee did exactly that. They engaged with the community, and they came back and related what they had learned back into the committee. to your point about people making it sound like it was much more contentious. There was great consensus coming in here, but one gets a little bit cynical when you hear things like, oh, the traffic is getting worse. Well, one of the reasons the traffic is getting worse is because people are living on the east of the Altamont and they're driving through our commute shed to get to work because there is not enough housing. So that's part of the problem. Another thing is that people are concerned. They're saying that, you know, why are we planning for this many people? Well, in hindsight, you know, when I did this in 2002, the population of Livermore was about 74,000 people. And the projection that we were working with was that the population was going to be somewhere between 95,000 and 105,000. So that works out to a population increase of between 28 and 42%. So looking in that crystal ball, and here we are 24 years later, and Bless you. Our population is 85,000. So in the grand scheme of things, people were upset about, oh, the population is going up 42%. Actually, we went up 15%. 15% in 20 years. That's not even 1% a year. So this sets up a process to allow us to plan in an orderly fashion so that we ensure that we have the resources that we need when we need them. And again, the mantra, those who benefit pay. The current residents are not going to be subsidizing new growth. And that's why we have this plan is so that we have these projections, so we know what we need to charge to replace the infrastructure or to build the infrastructure that the new development is going to require. Again, one can get cynical in this business. There have been letters to the editor on social media and even headlines, and there are people commenting tonight about this council shattering the urban growth boundary. This council, let me be very clear, this council does not have the authority to break the urban growth boundary. The only entity that can do that are the voters of Livermore. This council, any future council, we cannot break the urban growth boundary. So when people keep coming up and saying, you're gonna break the urban growth boundary. No, we're not. We cannot do that. That is up to the voters. If there's talk about studying that, if there's a need, then that will be studied. But the council does not have the authority to break the urban growth boundary. Only the voters can do that. And the voters here in Livermore are very smart. They're very sharp people. And I put my faith and trust in them. So with that, again, I think that there's a tremendous amount of work that's gone into this. And I sincerely appreciate the work that everybody did. and looking forward to bringing it back. And this plan is intentionally flexible so that it does allow to be nimble as we continue to grow. But again, recognizing that this is, as Mr. Ross pointed out, it's a living document and we will continue to work on this. And this is, One of the overriding considerations of the general plan is quality of life and maintaining the infrastructure. So those are all very important considerations, but the number one is quality of life. And I sincerely appreciate everybody working toward that effort. You had some additional comments. Oh, go ahead.

Just a few things to add. One, on the connection with our neighbor, we added a policy LU 2-8 policy Newland Canyon Open Space Greenbelt for maintaining the greenbelt between us. I wanted to add a little bit to a public comment I heard, which was about metrics. There is in the implementation chapter, a specific breakdown of the housing production and affordability, jobs, housing balance and match, economic vitality, environmental sustainability, multimodal safety and quality of life metrics. That is exactly the highlight of where we're going with that implementation chapter. The last thing I wanted to add, based on what I heard, was a thank you. And I'm going to go from sort of all the way from the bottom is to the GPAC, to the Planning Commission, to the council members here and in the past, Planning Commissioners here in the past. But I wanted to also call out that to our city manager who has been hyper focused on making sure that staff has the resources and time to get stuff done. And I saw it tonight in that city sidewalk ordinance, which is about saving staff time and money. And I see it here where we are saving our staff time, not just today, but going forward over the next 20 years in setting up this document to be nimble and flexible where it needs to be. So we can react to stuff happens without wasting the time of going back through process, even though we know we need to be nimble from this point. So thank you for all that.

I'm going to get us way into the weeds on something right now. So I have some concerns about the Las Colinas amendment to the general plan. And so this is something that's come up and it put me in a little bit of a weird position. And a lot of it has to do with the ordering of how things are going to be on the agenda. And so... With the development agreement that is coming up next on the agenda, the development agreement includes, it's not for the specific plan. It goes into the broad suite of it. But unfortunately, along the way in developing that, I don't think there was a proper conversation with some of our partners in labor who are going to hopefully be the ones who are building this project. And so those conversations didn't happen on what that would look like. What is such a big project going to have? And the way that it's been ordered is that this during our general plan amendment process, we're going to update the zoning for Las Colinas, which is one of the main things that the client is really looking for. then during the DA portion, we're gonna be getting the community benefit back from that. And so that's why these are on the same agenda together, and that's why they're ordered in this way. But because of that, it leaves us with less wiggle room in negotiating for any changes to the development agreement at this point. There is going to be a second development agreement that comes forward with the neighborhood plan. So there's going to be a neighborhood plan and a development agreement. So there is going to be an additional time when we negotiate this. But of course, as we move forward in projects, it becomes harder for us to arrange agreements with the different developers. It's easier if we have them early on, like we've done with the Isabel neighborhood plan. And so it's kind of left us with two options right now. One of which is to pull out Las Colinas entirely and leave it with its original zoning. So to pull that out and ask for staff and the applicant to go back to the drawing board and begin negotiations pretty much from nothing if I'm I don't know, staff can nod on. It would be starting from scratch if we did that, correct? Yeah. So it would be starting from scratch in the negotiations, which currently there is some good benefit for the city. There's some good benefit for the client, for the developer. So it's a little tricky. I'm open to the idea. That's why I wanted to bring it to council at this point before the DA. I'm not convinced it's the right way to move or not the right way to move. The other option we have is something that I've circulated and we'll talk about on the next item if we decide that that's not the way to go forward, which is to add in some language into the resolution. So it wouldn't actually be in the development agreement, but it would be in the resolution approving the development agreement. which does give future planning commissions and future councils the option to reference back to that language and say, you're not meeting our goals. You could have findings directed around the language and the resolution. And so the reason I'm bringing it up now instead of on the next one is because if we wanted to start the negotiations over, that is a council decision we could make. Again, I'm not, sure on which way I would wanna go. So I wanted to hear if people have thoughts about that on council or if we wanted to move forward with the general plan and then talk about it in the next item, understanding that if we go to the next item, we've already made the gives basically in this, and then we can talk about our asks, but we've made the give already, if that makes sense. So I know that's a lot of really getting into the weeds, but this is where I've been kind of struggling. And I've talked to staff quite a bit. I've talked to our friends in labor and the trades. We've had conversations with the developer. So it's been a long road getting here.

Well, it sounds like the cleanest way would be to... move this item and then finalize that in the language that you're talking about in the resolution in the next item, 7.4. Remember, any project that comes to us, we still have the ability to approve or disapprove it. So I think that's where most of our strength is, is as a project comes in, we can still disapprove it. But it sounds like from what you've described, the cleanest way is to, and the easiest would be to go ahead and move this and then ensure that we have that language in the resolution in 7.4. Anybody else?

Mayor Marchand, if I, I'm sorry, if I could, the problem with doing that is that you could potentially approve a development agreement that is not consistent with your general plan. So consistency is required. So there was a reason that staff put the general plan first and then the development agreement second. But you do have the choice, if you so choose, to modify the zoning for this particular parcel. But there was a reason for putting this first and then the development agreements after.

Of course, we would trust staff to ensure that as those negotiations progressed, that they would maintain their consistency with the general plan.

Correct, but if you did this after and you approved the development agreement with a changed zoning, at that time, it would not be consistent with the current general plan.

Yeah, I don't think you were talking about changing the zoning.

So that would be if we wanted to start over on negotiations, we would change back to the current zoning. If we wanted to move forward, we would approve the entirety of the general plan as is. Or if there were other modifications outside of Las Colinas, we would approve it as is and then make discussions during 7.4. So we couldn't, just to rephrase it, we can't continue 7.3, have the discussion in 7.4, and then go back to 7.3.

But I said trusting staff that they would maintain the consistency with the general plan. Because I don't think the issues that you're talking about PB, John Gerstle:" Are we are we getting far feel are we discussing 7.4 or but it sounds like we can trust staff to ensure that we have a consistent agreement consistent development agreement without changing the zoning because I don't think zoning is the issue it's the benefit package.

The zoning is part of the issue. But if we move forward and we had the additional language, it does give us some support. So it is stronger. We could get stronger language if we pulled Las Colinas, left it at the original zoning, and then modified the DA or sent the staff back to negotiate the DA. We could get stronger language. I have spoken with staff and staff does believe we have enforceable language. It's not as strong as had we renegotiated, but it is still enforceable language that we would be able to get if we move forward on 7.3 and then do a modification to the ordinance in 7.4.

But we still have the ability to deny the project.

We would, but if we deny in 7.4 after approving seven, if we improve 7.3 and then deny that, the DA and 7.4, we wouldn't have any real bargaining leverage anymore. If we move forward, we would be able to deny the specific project based on objective criteria, which modifying the ordinance gives us an objective criteria to work with. Again, like I said, this is getting very deep in the weeds. We've had a lot of conversations.

Again, my sense is if that were to happen, if you were to You can move forward with the general plan as stated. That is a theoretical possibility, but the site is so complex that doing it without a development agreement and the city playing hardball by not having the previous development agreement agreed to would be very hard for the developer to actually get through, even under objective standards. I don't necessarily see that as the biggest risk. Is that fair? It sounds reasonable.

Any other thoughts? I mean, like I said, I can go either way. I just wanted to address this as a very, it is a large concern I have.

I think that we can get through it. I think that staff has shown themselves to be very, very adept at addressing Mayor Mrakas, Working through a lot of these issues that, especially with 748 pages, the general plan, I think that this. Mayor Mrakas, That this is doable and I would trust staff to ensure that the the plans are compatible. Mayor Mrakas, Okay, it looks like we have consensus that customer into.

And I move approval 7.3.

Mayor Mrakas, Sure absolutely. So move. Okay, moved by Council Member Barrientos. Is there a second?

I'll second.

Okay, seconded by Council Member Dunbar. Is there any discussion on the motion? Roll call, please.

Council Member Barrientos.

Aye.

Council Member Branning.

Aye.

Council Member Dunbar.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Wong. Aye. Mayor Marchand.

Aye. PB Harmon Zuckerman. Okay, moving on to 7.4. This is the hearing to introduce an ordinance and wave the first reading of the less cleanest road. PB Harmon Zuckerman. Development.

Good evening, Mayor Marchand and members of the City Council. I'm Shannon Pagan. I'm a senior planner in the Community Development Department. And tonight I will be presenting the proposed development agreement with Adventus for the Las Colinas Road property. The agreement establishes a framework to guide future development on the property and implements the policy direction of the General Plan 2045. For background, a prior development agreement approved in 2005 allowed for a private high school to be developed on a portion of the site. That DA was not implemented and has since expired. So as part of the general plan update process, the property owner requested land use designation, requested residential land use designations on a portion of the site. In February 2025 the City Council directed staff to negotiate a new development agreement with the property owner to proceed concurrently with the general plan update for consistency. On the revised land use designations and to evaluate a range of residential densities on the site, as well as secure Community benefits. Turning to the site itself, the agreement applies to a 122 acre undeveloped property north of Interstate 580 on Las Colinas Road near Springtown. And the property has approximately 50 developable acres and is adjacent to existing land and future existing and planned residential neighborhoods and county agricultural and open space lands. So, as I said, the development agreement establishes a framework for future development, but does not approve a specific project it sets development obligations invest certain rights and secures long term Community benefits. Because the property owner is not a developer, the property is anticipated to be sold before any future development occurs. A future developer would need to submit a project application to the city consistent with the framework in the development agreement. That would initiate a subsequent approval process, including the preparation of a neighborhood plan, which would establish the vision for the neighborhood, setting goals and policies, coupled with the planned development zoning that would translate that vision into site-specific development standards and design requirements. Also, the subdivision and design review would evaluate the detailed site plan, architecture, landscaping improvements and such, as well as site specific environmental review and technical studies that would analyze potential environmental impacts. These include traffic studies, biological and cultural resource studies, etc. This process would include opportunities for community engagement and would require public hearings before the Planning Commission and City Council before any construction could be approved on the project. I'm sorry, before a project approval or construction. The agreement establishes several key commitments to guide future development, including providing between 600 and 900 housing units through a mix of housing types and densities ranging between 8 to 30 dwelling units per acre. This supports the city's mandated housing obligations, state mandated obligations. And the agreement also outlines affordable housing strategies, parkland and open space provisions, including the dedication of a publicly accessible park, and infrastructure commitments, including roadway improvements connecting Las Colinas Road to Redwood Road, conceptually illustrated with that gray dashed line shown on the image, trail improvements consistent with the active transportation plan, including offsite Connections to complement future on-site trails and connect with the existing trail system. Those are shown in the pink dashed line. And lastly, the agreement requires a $6 million contribution to the city's community benefit fund to support community serving programs and improvements. Finally, the agreement implements policy direction established through the general plan 2045 and is consistent with the land use designations for the property. The property is designated as a transitional area in the general plan where future change is anticipated. So consistent with that designation, the agreement framework is guided by general plan policies That call for providing a range of housing opportunities, planning for context-sensitive neighborhood transitions, and preserving natural features and open space. As a final note, the development agreement is consistent with the environmental analysis completed for the general plan 2045 update. Because the agreement does not approve any physical development, it falls within the scope of the general plan environmental impact report and also qualifies for the common sense exemption under CEQA. So with that, the planning commission and staff recommends city council find the development is, the development agreement is exempt from CEQA and introduce an ordinance and wait the first reading, authorizing the city manager to execute the development agreement. That concludes staff's presentation. We're available for questions. However, we would first like to introduce Mr. Paul Bongiovanni, who is here to offer a few brief remarks on behalf of the Adventist movement.

Good evening, Mayor Marchand and members of the City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to address you briefly. First, I want to congratulate you as well as so many have for all involved in the creation and adoption of the General Plan Update 2045. I am certain it is an immensely gratifying and joyful accomplishment to take time to celebrate It's time to celebrate, then get back to work. Secondly, thank you on behalf of Adventus for thoughtful consideration of our development agreement negotiated in clear alignment with the general plan. This development agreement, as just reported by staff, will provide in part the following. A significant infill property as a value component of the city's future. Significant roadway improvements and connectors. Highly desired trails, a park, and purposeful open space. $6 million in community benefit fund contributions with cost of living escalators. And the resources realized from inventors in the sale of this property to the ultimate builder developer will be an integral part of the diocese of Oakland plan of reorganization. Lastly, I must acknowledge with deep appreciation. professional collaborative. patient and understanding city planning staff. And I am going to give special resignation to the people right here, Shannon and Andy. I am thankful for all of them, their efforts, and the unique gifts they have brought to this project. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. With that, we'll open the public hearing. Do we have anybody who wishes to speak?

Yes, we do, Mayor. Our first speakers are Matt Vining, Will Machado, and followed by Greg Scott.

Sorry.

No, it's Matt Vining.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the City Council. I'm Matt Vining. I'm here on behalf of myself and my wife Maria. We live at 1602 Automope Drive, immediately adjacent to the proposed project site. Tonight's vote is the city's first formal commitment toward transforming the open space behind our home into a neighborhood of up to 900 dwelling units. Once this agreement is approved, every future conversation begins with the assumption that this project is moving forward. That is why tonight matters. Tonight, you are being asked to decide whether to begin a process that places our neighborhood at risk. Over the last several weeks, I have read extensive discussion about housing production, state mandates, and what this project means for future residents. I have heard remarkably little discussion about the families who will bear the greatest impacts of this decision. It is easy to advocate for people who have not yet moved here. Tonight, I'm asking you to advocate just as strongly for the residents who already call this neighborhood home. do not believe the burden of meeting livermore's housing goals should fall disproportionately on the families who already live adjacent to this property tonight you are being asked to commit the city to a development framework affecting hundreds of existing residents before the public has had an opportunity to evaluate the actual impacts of those residents those impacts include years of massive construction that will bring noise dust and expose current residents to health concerns that come along with this type of development see isabel avenue We appreciate that Livermore has not become like other Tri-Valley cities. If you vote yes to this agreement today, you will start the transition of Livermore becoming like other Tri-Valley cities and exports Livermore residents to higher traffic, litter, noise, and a possible elevation in crime. 900 dwelling units and 50 acres of land is extreme. This is not moderate density in the eyes of current residents. In the eyes of current residents, this is heavy population in a small area. This is poor planning in our opinion. Squishing 900 dwelling units on 50 acres just to satisfy housing requirements is not the right thing to do for current residents. For those reasons, my wife and I respectfully ask that you vote no on this development agreement. We are the existing neighborhood that will live with the consequences of the decisions made in this room long after tonight's meeting has ended. Thank you.

We have eight additional in-person speakers. Next was Wilma shadow, followed by Greg Scott, followed by Brian Warner.

I'm a 55 year resident 40 years in spring town. I can see this property from my home. My kids, grandkids, were all graduating from Livermore schools. Been around a long time. For the last nine years, I've been on the Citizens Bond Oversight Committee for the local school district, watching over their $250 million bonds, what they're doing construction. For the last 15 years, I've been supervising bonds for the colleges. Their current bond is $950 million worth of construction. About 400 million of that had Las Positas. I also spent two years serving as a trustee for the school district. I've been involved, passionately involved, with the environment for my kids and my family for 50 years. But more relevantly, As I mentioned, I'm going to be a very close neighbor to this project, whatever goes in. I've read the documents. I know that there's amenities guaranteed, a substantial amount of cash for the city to decide what it wants to do with. The trail system for East Bay Regional Parks, that's guaranteed in this. That's my understanding as I read it. The more important issue is we really do need more housing. To address your issue about costs, you've got to increase the supply or you'll have no chance of lowering prices. I'm here with representing my wife to recommend that you approve this and move forward. I'd like to see some new neighbors. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Greg Scott, followed by Brian Werner, followed by Kimberly Grudel.

Greg Scott, what you're seeing here in Livermore is the destruction of the city corridor. It's Mission Creek, going to drive up 680. You're trying to make part of Livermore look like San Ramon. And what you're going to do is build housing in the bottom of Livermore's bathtub. That's where the, it's where the, Arroyo Las Placidas and the Arroyo Seco confluences. It's a low area. It's a floodplain. Indigenous people hunted there. It was a floodplain. It didn't have oak trees, but they lived in Las Colinas. It means hills. The hills were covered with oak trees. There's archaeological evidence all over the place. It's probably being hidden as we speak. I'm wondering what the tribes are. There's so much archaeological evidence out there. Robert, the history of the place, Robert Livermore Jr. built a house really close by. He knew where to build it because he watched the rains in 1861, December 1861. It rained here from Christmas of 1861 to early February of 1862. It rained probably about eight feet here, about 100 inches. What do you think that's gonna do to the housing development out there? It's a low area. It's one of the lowest areas in Livermore. This is much more severe than you're ignoring the hydrologic data for the egress Um, emergency access to, uh, the Aravinta Hills is much more serious. I don't see how you can ignore that. It's a cultural area. It's a sacred area. There's Williamson Act land in the area. This is the heart of Livermore's history that's being destroyed here. It's the last of the Las Positas Mexican land grant that, um, Robert Livermore and Jose Noriega bought from the Mexican government. It's the last of it. And you want to destroy it. And by the way, saying this is infill, that's total bunk. Go out and look at the land, people. Go out and look at the map. Infill, that's complete bunk. Okay, let's do something straight here. And by the way, the Las Colinas overpass is misaligned. You're going to have to rebuild it. Who's going to pay for that? Is the developer going to pay for that? Really? Or is it... privatize the profits and socialize the expenses as it usually goes. That whole overpass will have to be rebuilt for how many, what, 20 million or more? If you have a development in there, you've got to redevelop and rebuild the overpass. You know, you should ask why the Catholic high school wasn't built and litigation going on in the time. Independent news, you need to do some investigative reporting on that. Why wasn't the high school built? What's going on there? what's going on with the summit to the developer and what are they going to do, channel the profits through the nonprofit to surround the profits? You know, this is, this is bunk.

Next speaker is Brian Werner, followed by Kimberly Griddle, followed by Attila Bardos.

Good evening, folks. Thank you for taking the time. also have our training center here in livermore i'm here tonight representing uh as a group we actively monitor general plans throughout the bay area to make sure they're sustainable and equitable for our folks to have have a chance at building in the local community and seeing the community benefits through the general plans uh we get involved for that reason uh the general plan here is very unique kind of the trade-offs that mr brannon uh stated are in the general plan, and then the development agreement makes up on the other hand. So it's really odd. It's the first time we've ever seen it. We've monitored dozens of these in the Bay Area going around. When the council approved the Isabel neighborhood plan, you guys included specific language encouraging and having goals for the use of state-approved apprentices and encouraging then folks that are the workers that are on there receive health care. As you may know, we've reached out to the diocese. They don't want to have any of these standards. They won't engage with us. Without your help tonight, the future workforce of this site will likely not see those standards. We won't see folks help here out there. So I know you guys have put some good language in here in the ordinance. I'm hoping we can strengthen that and get some more language like we had in the Isabel neighborhood plan that promotes that so we can see know state approved apprentices on their health care standards and some other good standards that we have in the isabel neighborhood plan uh nothing in this language nothing else putting this in that language make it more difficult for the diocese to sell or you know move the property on uh we're hopeful you guys can make that happen tonight and we appreciate everybody's time tonight thank you

Next speaker is Kimberly Grudel, followed by Attila Bardos, followed by Jason Camara.

Good evening, members of the City Council. My name is Kimberly Grudel, and I'm a lifelong resident of Livermore. This is the community where my husband and I were raised and where we raised our family. I've spent my life investing in our community, and I've had the privilege of serving in many ways, including through the help make Livermore such a special place to live, work, and thrive. i'm here tonight as a resident to express my support for the proposed development agreement i believe this project reflects the thoughtful vision outlined in the general plan update of 2045 by planning for responsible growth while preserving the qualities that make livermore unique this is an important infill opportunity that allows our city to grow in a balanced and intentional way I appreciate that the proposal includes not only future housing, but also open space, trails, and community amenities that will benefit residents for generations. I also want to recognize the significant Community Benefit Fund commitment from Adventus. Investments like these demonstrate a willingness to partner with our community and contribute beyond the boundaries of the project itself. Finally, I have confidence in the city's thorough review process.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and the state members of the City Council. My name is Attila Bardos, and I serve as president of Adventus, the property owner, as well as the chief financial officer for the Diocese of Oakland. Thank you for the opportunity to work with us over the past several years. The development agreement before you tonight reflects a great deal of collaboration, thoughtful discussion, and compromise. We believe it represents a balanced outcome that serves both the city of Livermore and the dentist. Our objective has always been to work within the city's long-term vision for responsible growth. The agreement provides certainty for both parties and creates a framework for future residential development that is consistent with the general plan update. It allows this property to move forward in a thoughtful, predictable, and well-planned manner while ensuring that the community's interests remain protected. For Adventus, approval of this agreement is an important milestone. It provides the certainty needed for the property's future and allows us to move forward to an eventual sale of the land to a qualified developer who can bring the city's vision to life. We respectfully ask for your approval of the development agreement this evening so the property can be incorporated into the updated general plan and move forward to part of Livermore's future. Thank you for your time, your thoughtful consideration, and your service to the residents of Livermore. Just a couple of comments, respectfully. Mr. Brandy, you brought up some issues, brief comments on that. As I said, the development agreement before you tonight is a product of years of collaboration among city staff, the planning commission, and Ventus. It reflects a carefully negotiated balance of obligations and benefits, including a new substantive condition, trying to put a new substantive condition on this project, on the development agreement at this stage is just simply unacceptable and would fundamentally alter that balance. Again, years of work, years of trust, years of compromise, years of good faith, and I don't want to see that thrown out the window. Thank you very much.

Our next speaker is Jason Kamara, followed by Brian Swanson, followed by Matt Mattel.

City Council. My name is Jason. I live here in the forum. I'm also an apprentice with the Plumbers Union, which has been a life changing event for me and many other residents. I'm here because the general plan is being used to help get a huge project built that the Archdiocese wants to get approved. that project will not likely have people like me help building it. I'm going to be able to complete my apprenticeship because almost all the developers have done the right thing by committing to have apprentices build their projects, including here in Livermore. My union has tried to get an understanding with the architecture that they have with every major developer over the last 15 years in the tribal area. but they would not do anything to make sure the workers who build these projects would have basic things like healthcare coverage, which is a huge national issue. They refuse to commit to having apprentices like me on the project. That means other Livermore residents won't get the opportunity that I've had, and that's not fair. I encourage you to using apprentices as part of the development agreement and that they get healthcare coverage as well.

Next speaker is Brian Swanson, followed by Matt Mattel.

To stress the importance of the need for objective development and design standards, either project specific or an update of the city objective standards. These objective standards would help or could help memorialize the details of the community benefit fund contribution. The specific design standards, again, in a project specific or an update of the citywide standards could even help with smaller projects that may be approved under housing and community developments Second, the fiscal analysis section in the staff report is woefully undetailed. The 6 million is great and should be worked through in detail, but it should not stand as a smokescreen to transparent, detailed fiscal analysis.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Matt Matteo.

I put my name in the hat because I thought all the speakers would oppose this project, but it was for me to hear a couple of my neighbors say that they would like to welcome more neighbors to the neighborhood. So I want the leader to point on that to say I certainly support this project, but specifically I support the opportunity it gives to actually find Springtown and the rest of Livermore together. it's kind of an odd oddity springtime is kind of an oddity in livermore where it almost feels like a separate town and it's i mean unless you have a car there's just no way to get over there um so i'm hoping that this development will um uh give us an opportunity to address that long-standing issue um given that and i had second part is i wanted um Council member Evan to maybe expand more on his concerns. I think in the previous section you were discussing pulling the agreement and rezoning it, which seemed like a very drastic step that as the previous speaker spoke, would really set back the developer. And I hearing your comments, I didn't I didn't hear what what was The urgency for such a drastic step that would, I think, probably set this development back a number of years, it sounds like. Thank you.

We have four raised hands for remote speakers. The first is in the in these unmute yourself. Ian, please unmute yourself.

Hi there. Can you hear me? Here we go.

Yes.

Yes.

Please turn your camera off.

Turn it off.

Yes.

I think it's a Q&A mode. I'm not sure if you guys have a, I think you guys control that setting. But I'll go ahead and start reading if you want to start my time. All right. Okay, thanks. Mayor and Council, my name is Ian Bidellin. The project proposal by Adventist Corp is located in the city of Livermore at 3658 Las Colinas Road. My father and his brother live on a ranch nearby. We are concerned about the safety of this project for the following reasons. Documents for the project show access to this property at Redwood Road and another access point at the Alameda County border near Las Colinas Road. Las Colinas Road is a dirt farm path owned by Alameda County. We are concerned about the safety of routing thousands of cars, fire trucks and emergency vehicles over a steeply inclined dirt path. There is only a 20 foot wide access point to this path from the 805 freeway. Our family owns ranch land on either side of this path. Any traffic studies would need to account for the safety of 900 plus future residents. Additionally, converting the path into a major roadway would be a significant nuisance to my elderly father, who currently lives on the neighboring ranch and would substantially grade his quality of life. If Adventist Corp., the development company that owns 3658 Las Colinas Road, wants to use this narrow dirt path as a road, it should be aware that this is not a road. It is a dirt path suitable for walking or occasional tractor use, but entirely unfit for high volumes of cars or fire trucks to drive on routinely. We have objected to its use on these safety grounds, and we have been pursuing help from county officials to conduct a rigorous review and shut this down before someone gets hurt. Additionally, we have concerns for encroachment. We are concerned about encroachment for the following reasons. The county has already allowed unpermitted grading on this dirt path. Monte Vista Memorial Gardens and BMG, the cemetery owner at 3656 Las Colinas Road, graded this path potentially illegally 10 years ago without securing any encroachment permits and installed an unsafe, unpermitted berm on county property. The county... turned a blind eye then and county enforcement still has not acted on this ongoing issue. These actions have caused a wide range of environmental problems now involving multiple county and state agencies. So the project should be aware of these ongoing issues. MVMG also installed plastic fencing on either side of the dirt path to make it appear significantly wider than it actually is. We are currently in the process of restoring our fence to mark the actual property boundaries in accordance with our 2026 record of service. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Jill V. Please unmute yourself.

Hello. Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Jill Vidalen. My father and his brother live on a ranch near the proposed project. If the city permits this proposed project by Adventist Corps, we are concerned about the destruction of the original county road that Adventist Corps' project might use for reasons of traffic and safety. The 900-unit dwelling project Adventist Corp is proposing has one of its two access points going through Las Colinas Road. This means thousands of cars are proposed to reach their housing via a 23-foot wide dirt path running through the middle of agricultural land. It also shares this path with a large-scale cemetery nearby and would become a pinch point for traffic. Will there be an extensive traffic study conducted taking all this into account? Is it practical and safe to accommodate thousands of vehicles multiple times per day using Las Colinas Road, a narrow dirt path? There used to exist a small two-lane road to access this proposed dwelling location in a different spot nearby. However, in 2015, Monta Vista Memorial Gardens, known as MVMG, the nearby cemetery company, destroyed the original paved county road. The county has not restored this road and has left it in its current state for the last 10 years. Please refer to Record of Survey 4055 filed with the Alameda County Planning Department for the actual parcel width. It will be plain to see that there only exists a 23-foot wide access point, nowhere near wide enough to support the volume of vehicles for this proposed development, plus the existing large-scale cemetery project nearby. Thank you for your attention to this matter. There are still safety and access issues that need to be ironed out before approving a development of this size. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Donna. Donna, please unmute yourself.

Good evening, city council members. I understand that this is just a framework for development However, I respectfully ask that the development agreement be postponed or denied for the following reasons. One, the range of densities. 900 units is simply too high on 50 acres. 600 should be the maximum allowed on the 50 acres. Number two. There needs to be a very close look at safety and traffic issues as mentioned by the two previous speakers. The current dirt road 23 feet wide is not acceptable and it would be very dangerous for choke point, for circulation, et cetera. And I don't see a lot of neighborhood transition amenities here. Where would the new elementary schools go? Where are they being planned, et cetera? Next, will the remaining 72 acres be put in open space and trails in perpetuity? Or will these be open to more development later, commercial or other development? Language, keeping the remaining 72 acres in open space in perpetuity is essential. The 6 million that has been noted as a community donation should be restricted only to the neighborhoods that will be affected and to the remaining 2072 acres. It should not be used in the general fund for parks amenities in other parts of the city. It should be only restricted for this area. And I agree with Councilman Brenning that by approving this, it's not consistent with the general plan that you just approved of. And I think that will cause many legal headaches in the future, as well as problems with safety. and safety as well as quality of life are essential. Safety needs to come first. So I urge you to postpone, table these development agreements. The owner is not the developer. It will be sold. So there is time. Please table these development agreements until these critical issues can be resolved. Thank you.

Our last speaker is Carol Silva. Carol S., please unmute yourself.

Thank you. I agree with Greg Scott and Donna. This is in a very low-lying area along Arroyo Las Positas. This area is just south of Hartford Hills. I live in the Spring Valley development on its most northern street. In January, and I can't remember the year, but it seemed like it's about three to five years ago, it rained in Livermore for 24 hours straight. The entire Hartford Hills area was so flooded that it looked like a sea of water. The level of water... was approximately six to eight feet above the walkway that's along the Arroyo. And it was inches away of cresting the high point of my backyard and having water pour into my backyard and into my home. Even Galloway Street was flooded. City workers had to come out and spend hours trying to have the water drained from Galloway Street. The end of Springtown Boulevard was closed due to this two to three feet of flooding on Galloway Street. Besides flooding, safety issues, traffic impacts, air pollution, impacts to roads, etc., I ask that you not approve the development agreement. Thank you.

That was our last speaker.

That was our last speaker. Okay. I'm going to close the public hearing then and bring it back to the council. Questions, comments from the council?

Clearly, but if you want me to go last.

Okay. Council Member Dunbar.

I will start. Staff, can you speak to, I was trying to pull it up on my computer. I'm looking at Exhibit B for the roadway alignment relative to the where the trail was proposed as part of the earlier items in the evening it looks like it's sort of an immediate left turn once you hit the overpass as proposed for the roadway alignment so it would not extend very far onto the section that i know is dirt if i go over there sometimes um is that and and even if it is dirt today they would be needed to be improved as part of this development agreement right

Sorry, I have the slide up in case we want to go back there to show the alignment. It is a conceptual alignment. It would be engineered and refined during the subsequent approval process. It's more of an illustrative process.

But it would need to meet our fire access standards. And they would need to find a purchase. Yes. The developer, whoever they may be in the future, would need to find a way to actually meet those for us to get approval in the first place. And that would be just an objective standard that they do or do not meet. And if they do not meet it, it would be our purview to block the project at that point. But we're not going to block it at this point because it's their prerogative to go search for that. Can you speak to why the range of densities are the way that they are?

Yes, the property owner conducted some preliminary analysis of the development potential on the site, taking into account the elevations and identified the areas that could be developed and looking at what the market could actually bear. And that was how the number of units was determined.

i i think the concerns about water flooding are the same as the roadway concerns there to be analyzed it's too early to analyze them um i hear the concern but i don't know how to react to it right now given that just don't have a report of what the design actually looks like is that fair okay um i think we've both been over before uh you know school impacts given the declining school attendance these days um but i do think it's fair to say that there are amenities with this project um israel being one of them having another roadway to springtown is very important um i am somewhat concerned about the amount of cut through traffic as we already have a cut through traffic problem in springtown i expect that that will be part of the total analysis both in terms of what the roadway design even needs to look like not just on las colinas but all the approaches on redwood road and springtown boulevard and las pesitas road it may need a left a left turn lane it may need a signalized intersection that's all the same to be analyzed and we have objective standards about those already so we'll just see if they meet them and that would also tend to set the density limit if there is a problem with traffic that cannot be mitigated by a rider road then it's just going to set a ceiling on the density that is actually approvable is that fair to say i see nods okay um those were sort of the things that i had written down at this point i'm going to let it go around from there okay uh councilmember barrientos questions comments

Well, I haven't heard too much from my constituents. That's my district. Where were they? I heard them here. I do have concerns about the whole thing anyway. I see that little blue thing go through there, the creek. But right now, I just want to hold my comments until later. All right.

I'll leave the labor issues to Council Member King to address. Is it fair to say that some of the issues that particularly neighbors of this property, some of the concerns that they've brought up are things that will be considered and addressed as the development of the project goes on, but this is not the stage at which we would address those. I mean, right now we just don't have, I don't have the information to vote up or down on those kinds of concerns.

That's correct. Through the neighborhood plan process and plan development zoning process, that would be the time.

Okay, and so they're not adequately addressed at that point. That's the point where we can vote yes or no.

When an actual project application comes forward.

Okay, okay, that's it.

Okay, so again, just as I understand it, this development agreement is not a final plan, but it sets up a process to develop a plan. Because obviously nobody's going to be building a development supplied by a 23-foot dirt path. So this sets up the process to develop a final plan. And this is within the city limits of Livermore.

Yes, it is.

Because somebody said, well, this isn't infill development. Well, it's infill because it's filling in within the city limits of Livermore. It's not extending going into greenfield development. So this is definitely green infill development. So, uh, this, this area was under, uh, the ownership of, uh, the Livermore Robert Livermore and family, uh, apparently, uh, as was stated previously. It was also stated that this was sacred ground. Do we have any record of this being sacred ground for the Muwekma, the Miwuk, the Ohlone, the Futsus, any of the indigenous peoples that we have here?

Staff does not have, we're not aware of any designation identifying the property as a sacred site.

Okay, thank you. And again, when there's a final development application, that's when the project-specific traffic study and those types of things will be coming in. That's correct. This just, again, sets up a process. Okay, I got my questions answered. Take it away, Council Member Brannon.

All right. So first of all, I do really want to start by thanking the Archdiocese in Aventis for coming to us with this project. This was... land that had a different designation 45 minutes ago and now is actually zoned for housing. So this was something that is giving Livermore an opportunity to get some really good community benefits here. I really do appreciate the negotiations, the conversations. I know there's concerns from neighbors. And as the plan develops, you know, follow along, continue to get specific concerns, but, uh, any of the concerns that have been brought up should be mitigated as we get to a real project. So, um, I, I really want to thank the Archdiocese and thank Aventis for coming to us with this, uh, framework with this project. For me, um, PB, Jorge Boone & It wasn't it is important that we do have the conversation about Labor and so we've had some conversation before coming to this meeting and so i've given each Member of Council and staff some proposed language in our ordinance and to be clear with everyone. PB, Jorge Boone & Since I laid out a lot of real weird technical stuff before what this is is now we've approved the zoning. Now we're in the phase of approving the DA. And as part of the DA, we're making a modification to the ordinance to make a request that as we get to the project phase of the DA, that we see certain workplace benefits provided that I will say personally, and this is my personal opinion. This is not necessarily from, you know, staff or council. I don't want to speak for others, but my personal opinion is these sorts of requirements. providing healthcare for our workforce, providing an appropriate wage, providing appropriate safety standards, and on projects like this, providing apprenticeship. Those are just core values of Livermore, in my opinion, that those are core values of our city, core values that I hold deeply and dearly. And so this isn't something we're adding to the project. It's not something new, something additional. And as I said, it's a project PB, John Gerstle PB, Jorge Boone & It's a addition into the ordinance not actually modifying the da itself. PB, Jorge Boone & But I want to make it clear that this is very important to me going forward as we do get to the project phase, and so what I would like to propose is a modification to the ordinance. PB, Jorge Boone & When we are ready to move it home to include this or. PB, Jorge Boone & If there's no further questions i'll move it at this point but. The language I would like to add is to replace section five, where it currently says section five approval. I'm not going to read the current text because it'll be a lot of reading if I do both. To change the wording to say, and you should have a paper to follow along with. Based upon the City Council's own independent review of the record of evidence and considerations, it hereby adopts this ordinance approving the development agreement attached hereto as Exhibit B. The City Council further encourages any future developer of the Las Galinas Road property to engage with relevant labor organizations during project planning and construction promote construction workforce outcomes that may include, but are not limited to, local hiring, the use of state of California approved apprenticeship programs, payment of area standard wages, and access to employer-supported health care benefits, consistent with the city's economic development policies, which support local hiring, workforce investment, high-wage employment, jobs and housing balance, and economic vitality. have a few extra copies if anyone wants to look at that also, but I believe staff has copies already and I gave one to every council member if anyone needs that. So I would personally at this point, again, I am appreciative of the archdiocese, I'm appreciative of our partners in labor and the trades coming out. I'm very appreciative of staff getting us a deal that is good for the city. I would be prepared to move with that adjustment to section five.

Any comments on the proposed provision? I think this does speak to quality of life. And that's something that we already talked about is one of the primary drivers of our general plan is quality of life. And I think that encouraging local workers and encouraging apprenticeship programs, because that's going to be contributing to the growing workforce. So I could certainly support all of those. and using the term encourages. So I would be willing to support that. So if you're willing to make the motion.

If I may add just a few more things. OK. I'm OK with that. I think it expands upon the intent of the ordinance as it was proposed, but more specifically, I just wanted to add a few more things. One, on emergency access, I wrote down there is proposed another emergency access easement via the trail, via the item that we approved earlier in the evening. So that is another consideration here that is addressed, at least at a concept level at this point. i i wanted to make the point that we've talked about this many times before we have a housing element and it's not just the housing element that we have to keep up with but as stuff actively develops we may come in at a number that's lower we've seen this before number that's lower than our expectation number and so we're having this buffer between the you know the staff report says that the This isn't necessary for the purposes of the housing element right now, but it could be any day. And so that's why we have to keep sort of finding new places. We have to be careful because other state or other cities have recently gotten their housing element revoked by the state. And so now any developer can come in and build anything they want practically with no labor standards and no development agreements. This is the way that we are maintaining control by carefully going through this process as you see it today. So that is sort of the why here and why this density and why relative to the thing that was proposed here before, this could work. That was what I wanted to add. Thanks.

Okay. Sorry. Any further comments? Council Member Variantos?

Every time we go through these developments, I understood that we always encourage developers to hire union workers. And the word encourage is like, when I teach, I encourage my kids to do their homework. Some did, some didn't. Anyway, that's the only thing that bothers me, encourage it. But, you know, I'm a union worker. I'm a union man all my life. U.S. Steel to post office to teachers. And so I support the idea that we need union workers. And they've been destroyed, basically, in the last, since Reagan, the union movement. And that's what made our country better and the middle class stronger. So I support your amendment or your ordinance.

Yeah, I had the same thought that encourage and engage. And those aren't the strongest. We're not saying requiring anything. And so it's very easy to support.

OK, so you've made the motion. Oh, well, now I can make the motion, or officially make the motion.

I would move staff's recommendation with the amendment to section 5 that I stated earlier. Is that phrased correctly? That's fine.

All right. Is there a second?

I'll second.

Okay, seconded by Vice Mayor Wong. Any discussion on the motion? Roll call, please.

Council Member Barrientos. Council Member Branning.

Aye.

Council Member Dunbar. Aye. Vice Mayor Wong. Aye. Mayor Marchand.

Aye. Okay, we're rolling up to 10 o'clock, but we're real close. Does anybody want to take a five-minute break? We're good? Okay, we'll continue to roll on through here. Okay, 7.5. This is McGrath Rent Corp. Thank you all very much for your comments tonight. Thank you. All right, 7.5.

Good evening, Mayor, members of the City Council. My name is Jake Potter, Economic Development Manager in the Innovation and Economic Development Department. This evening, we wanted to discuss the proposed McGrath Rent Corp Development Agreement Amendment, which is the second of two general plan implementing DAs for the council's consideration this evening. This particular amendment would implement the general plan's midtown policies. So by way of background, McGrath is an existing industrial commercial user out on Las Positas Road. They have about 130 acres of property indicated in the red box on the screen. McGrath also has an existing development agreement with the city that's shown by the black dotted line. And in general, the existing development agreement extends McGrath's industrial rights through 2029 in exchange for BART right of way along the freeway frontage. Now, McGrath is located in the Midtown area. And in 2021, city staff reached out to the McGrath team regarding the general plan. However, the parties were unable to come to agreement as to McGrath being located in the Midtown area or McGrath receiving residential densities on site. And that ultimately led the City Council in February of 2025 to direct staff to work with McGrath to find a solution regarding Midtown and residential densities. So since that time, staff has negotiated with McGrath and proposes to amend the existing development agreement as described on the screen today. The McGrath obligations are listed at the top, and McGrath would be required to accept MDR4 HGR1 residential densities on the site. You can see the densities on the screen. And this would provide the city with flexibility for its regional housing needs allocation or state housing mandates. In addition, McGrath would be required to sell the northern 40 acres of property that's outlined in the blue area on the map to a high-value commercial user. McGrath is currently engaged in negotiations with a high-value commercial user that it's estimated would generate around $1 million in annual tax revenue and provide between 400 and 600 jobs. City staff is supportive of such a user given its jobs and fiscal production. So in exchange for that, the city would be required to extend the development agreement term by 30 years to 2059 and adjust the development agreement boundary. This would provide McGrath with more operational certainty and flexibility that they need to continue their operations. The resulting development agreement would be shown in the black dotted line on the screen, which would be contiguous with their new property boundaries in red. So in order for the city council to recommend approval of this development agreement amendments, it would need to make two series of findings. The first is that the proposed amendment is consistent with the 2045 general plan policies. And the second is that the amendment provides public benefit. The planning commission unanimously found and staff finds that the amendment would provide or would be consistent with the 2045 general plan policies. We've included some on the screen here and you can find the rest in your packet. but in general terms, supports creating Midtown, supports job opportunities, a mix of residential, commercial, industrial uses in Midtown, and supports land uses that generate stable long-term revenues. In addition, Planning Commission and staff found that the amendment would provide public benefit, specifically, as we discussed, the housing flexibility at Midtown, in addition to the estimated revenues and jobs. Now the proposed development agreement amendment is similar to the last development agreement, a framework. So there's no physical development proposed as part of the project.