City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our study session. The city clerk will take attendance by roll call.

Council Member Hicks? Here. Council Member Kamei? Here. Council Member McAllister?

Yep.

Council Member Ramirez?

Here.

Council Member Showalter? Here. Mayor Ramos? Here. We have a quorum with Vice Mayor Clark absent.

All right.

Thank you.

All right, so now we'll begin with our study session. The purpose of this study session is to receive city council input on the proposed legislative program priority issues to guide the city's regional, state, and federal legislative advocacy during the 2026 session. Reviewing and updating the legislative platform at the beginning of each legislative session is an essential component of the city's legislative program. This helps to ensure that the city council's current priorities are reflected in the platform and provide direction to staff and the city's legislative advocacy firms to enable efficient and effective engagement on the regional, state, and federal issues and initiatives that affect the city's priorities, programs, and operations. We're gonna skip that presentation part right now and go straight to our Intergovernmental Relations Manager, Christina Gilmore. Following Ms. Gilmore's presentation, we will receive a presentation from our state legislative advocacy firm, California Public Policy Group, and our federal legislative advocacy firm, MMO Partners, followed by public comment. If you would like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now. Following public comment, the item will come back to council for discussion and feedback on the state and federal platforms. There will be a short break during which staff will compile major themes from the council's feedback, Following the break, the staff will present the themes to help determine areas of council consensus. We are also anticipating a visit from State Senator Josh Becker, but he is running a little late, so when he appears, we will break from our usual scheduled program to have him join us for his presentation. So, Intergovernmental Relations Manager Christina Gilmore, shall we?

Okay, good evening, mayors and council. Christina Gilmore, assistant to the city manager. The purpose of the study session item this evening is to receive city council input on the proposed legislative program priority issues to guide the city's regional and state legislative advocacy during the 2026 legislative session. Joining me this evening is Dane Hutchings, founder and CEO, and Jake Whitaker, director of grant services from California Public Policy Group. who are the city state's legislative advocacy consultant, and Kiriakos Pagonas, vice president of policy and government affairs from MMO Partners, who is the city's federal legislative advocacy consultant. Dane J. Kiriakos and I will present the proposed legislative program priorities to the city council for discussion and input. Afterwards, staff, CPPG, and MMO will be available to answer questions about the proposed platform. As part of the fiscal years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 Strategic Action Plan, Council reaffirmed their commitment to implementing an enhanced legislative program and maintaining effective intergovernmental partnerships under the organizational strength and good governance strategic priority. In 2021, the city engaged the services of California Public Policy Group, CPPG, to assist the council and staff on the city's regional and state legislative advocacy efforts. And in 2024, the city engaged MMO partners to provide federal legislative advocacy services to support the expanded federal legislative program. The purpose of the legislative platform is to serve as a guiding document for the city to promote and preserve its interests at the regional, state, and federal levels. It provides direction for city staff and the legislative consultants to engage on a variety of legislative issues. It allows staff and the legislative consultant to quickly triage and assess legislative matters because as we all know, there are hundreds of bills that usually are introduced every legislative cycle and advance very quickly through the legislative process. And finally, it provides focus and supports proactive council member engagement to help advance the city's priorities. So for a summary of our legislative engagement for 2025, we were very active. With the assistance of CPPG, the city engaged on eight measures, achieving favorable outcomes on all eight measures. Additionally, our federal legislative platform was very robust this last year. The city, with the assistance of MMO, engaged on eight measures seven pieces of federal legislation during the 119th session of Congress, achieving favorable outcomes on four of those bills. I will note that the Unlock Housing Act, which was introduced in the House and the Senate and authored by our Congressman, Congressman Liccardo, was the result of city input to him on housing legislation. And then the Housing for the 21st Century Act was recently passed as of yesterday in the House. So we're very pleased that the city has had some very good and favorable input on current legislation in the 119th Congress. And in addition to state and federal legislative engagement, we've also engaged in federal earmarks, obtaining federal earmarks, and then state and federal intergovernmental affairs. So our 2026 regional and state legislative platform that we are here to discuss tonight is based on the adopted 2025 platform We receive feedback from each of the city departments on the platform. It does carry forward 11 policy issues that the council has prioritized. It modifies 16, adds five, and deletes one policy statement across six issue areas, and it lists a total of 147 policy statements. I believe the staff report erroneously wrote 141, and so I'm updating that tonight. It's 147, so apologies for that error. Our federal platform is also based on our adopted 2025 platform. Again, we receive feedback from each city department. It carries forward four issue areas that were identified in the 2025 platform and it includes the addition of one and the modification of two policy statements in one issue area and lists a total of 52 policy statements. So after the presentations from our state and federal legislative advocates, we'll return to the council to provide input on the study session item. I'll read the question here and we can revisit it later on if the council requires us to or asks us to. But are there any policy issues, priorities, or policy statements that council would like to discuss seek further clarification on, modify, add, or remove from the proposed regional, state, and federal 2026 legislative platforms. With that, that concludes staff presentation, and I will hand it back to the mayor.

Thank you, Intergovernmental Relations Manager Christina Gilmore. I guess what we'll do Oh, Senator Becker's not here yet, so we can move on to CPPG.

Welcome.

Hello, hello. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Dane Hutchings with the California Public Policy Group here to give you a little look back on 2025, provide some trends on what we think are going to be happening in 2026 so far, and then dive into the platform discussion at the appropriate time. I also brought with me today Jake Whitaker. PROVIDE, WE'RE GOING TO DO A LITTLE SWAP HERE AND HELP PROVIDE A LITTLE BIT OF INSIGHTS ON MUNICIPAL FUNDING LOOKING INTO THIS YEAR AS WELL. NEXT SLIDE. YEAH, LET'S JUST ROLL THAT NEXT SLIDE. Looking at the 2025 City of Mountain View look back, as Christina mentioned, we did have some fairly remarkable success this year on the legislative front. I would say we highlighted a few. The one I really wanted to highlight is Senate Bill 423. This was really a last-minute gut and amend really towards the very end of session that would have When you look at it, it had a really profound impact to the city of Mountain View in particular because it would have suspended all commercial real estate transfer taxes for 12 years, multifamily for 12 years, and single family for five under certain conditions. A CRITICAL FUNDING SOURCE FOR THE CITY TO PROVIDE CRITICAL SERVICES AND SO WE'RE ABLE TO STOP THAT BILL. I WILL TELL YOU THAT THERE'S A VERY HIGH LIKELIHOOD THAT THIS ISSUE IS GOING TO BE INTRODUCED AGAIN. WE'VE SEEN ONE BILL INTRODUCED ALREADY SPECIFIC TO THE CITY OF L.A. BUT WE DO ANTICIPATE THIS BEING BROADENED OR AT LEAST ATTEMPTS TO PROPOSE IT IN THE COMING YEAR. A COUPLE OF OTHERS. AB 382 by our Assemblymember Berman. It took a couple of years for him to get this done, but instituting pedestrian safety school zones for speed limits. And then, again, another, this one, even though it's Petrie-Norris, this is really kind of a joint effort with Senator Becker when he was the Chair of Energy Committee, which helps FINANCING OPTIONS, PERMITTING ASSISTANCE AND RATEPAYER SAVINGS AND AB 825, ALL THINGS THAT WE CURRENTLY SUPPORT AND REALLY HAD A GREAT CONVERSATION AND DIALOGUE BACK AND FORTH WITH YOUR SUSTAINABILITY DEPARTMENT ON THE TECHNICALITIES OF THAT. SO REALLY, REALLY SHARP TEAM THAT YOU ALL HAVE HERE. NEXT SLIDE. So looking forward to sort of like the policy trends that we see, and again, we're early on in the first year, the second year of the two-year session. The bill introduction deadline is until February 20th. We probably will see another thousand or so more bills be introduced really in the next couple of weeks. A lot of spot bills, but from what we've been able to see, and then some bills that advance out of their first house in January, you know... Local revenues, parks, infrastructure, transportation impacts, mitigation fee acts, real estate transfer tax, all of those things are really going to be front and center this year with respect to local revenues. One of the outcomes that came from a select committee on housing construction, which is chaired by Assemblymember Wicks, is, you know, the goal of that select committee was to try to find ways to speed up housing construction. One of the takeaways that I think is germane to local agencies is folks in the panel talked about more uniform code standards. And so as we know, Last year, reach codes were essentially suspended for six years. And what we're already starting to hear is that they want to make this permanent. They want to have more regionalized code standards, thus to allow for larger multi-regional projects. Okay. We're looking at Senate Bill 79, which was a fairly controversial bill with respect to transit-oriented development. Not so much on the aspect of wanting to increase density around transit, but one of the critical issues in SB 79 is the inability to comply with some of those provisions, particularly the alternative plan for transportation. There's an SB 79 cleanup bill underway. It's Senate Bill 908. Our team has pulled together, I just saw it actually as I was walking in, a fairly detailed analysis of some of the challenges that the city could face and actually had a really good conversation with your planning team and Assemblymember Berman's office in the fall to really try to understand some of those implementation challenges. So, we'll be giving you a detailed memo with respect to what we're looking to try and perhaps modify. There was a bill that was just announced from a Southern California lawmaker to try and expand HAP funding to smaller cities. So, this is a good thing, but it doesn't take away from the allocations to the Big Ten or Big 13. but, moreover, allows the COCs or requires the COCs to really disperse those monies to local agencies. And so, again, you know, fairly helpful tool to get dollars out locally to help with, you know, our unhoused population. Governor Newsom, in his State of the State address, specifically targeted The private equity sort of taking and purchasing the single-family homes is something that the state legislature has tried to accomplish for some time, even just trying to get transparency around the issue. Those bills have been stopped, but the governor, you know, kind of called for it this year. And so there's Evan—I'm sorry, Assemblymember Lee. has taken, Alex Lee has taken the charge on this one. And so we anticipate some bills happening in that space. You know, I think, you know, more broadly, election year politics, we're going to see a lot of, you know, sort of election year things driving sort of policy narratives, particularly around contracting issues and things like that. And then, of course, we've already seen pieces of legislation that are in response to some of the things that we're gonna be, that I'm sure Kiriakis and team will be talking about on the federal immigration tactics. And so lots in store in 2026. Next slide. And on the budget side, looking a little bit better than we had initially anticipated. Last year, we projected a structural deficit somewhere north of $13 billion. We've seen additional revenues come in over projections, and so about $6.2 billion just in January, numbers alone over expected revenues. overall performance of 22% revenues coming in over than expected. Now, that's fantastic news. Unfortunately, well, I shouldn't say unfortunately, but Prop 98, some of the education obligations, a lot of those dollars are just sort of siphoned off the top and are constitutionally obligated to go to public education. Nonetheless, that budget gap is considerably smaller, so we do think that this is an opportunity to present with our state lawmakers potentially some priority projects to see if we can try and buy for a state budget allocation. And so keeping our fingers crossed on that and working with your team to assess what those projects are. And then lastly, before I kick it over to Jake, next slide, just wanted to just go over some real quick key dates. And so February 20th is that bill introduction deadline. I anticipate seeing about a thousand more bills being introduced. A lot of them, unfortunately, are these spot bills where it just says it's the intent of the legislature to modify, you know, X, Y, Z in the government code. And so we have to then really kind of do some sleuthing and figure out what's going on there and triage those bills. When March hits, we start really, you know, rolling into policy committee season. Mid-May, we'll have the governor's May revise. And then that'll roll us through budget season, so May to June 15th. And then we adjourn to summer recess on July 2nd. And then really that last mad dash, August 3rd to August 31st, is the last month of the session, which would conclude the second year of the two-year session. So if a bill does not advance in this two-year cycle, it is officially stopped and halted and won't be proceeding. And then, of course, September 30th being the last day for the governor to sign or veto legislation. So I'm going to step aside and let Jake talk a little bit about funding, and then I'll wrap us up.

ALL RIGHT. GOOD EVENING. SO AGAIN I'M JAKE WHITAKER DIRECTOR OF GRANT SERVICES. I WORK WITH INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS MANAGER CHRISTINA GILMORE AND STAFF TO IDENTIFY AND SUPPORT THE CITY'S EFFORTS TO APPLY FOR DISCRETIONARY GRANT FUNDING PROGRAMS AND TWO MAJOR THEMES THAT I JUST WANTED TO TALK ABOUT TONIGHT AS FAR AS FUNDING OUTLOOK FOR 2026 GOES AND I KNOW ON THE FEDERAL SIDE MMO PARTNERS WILL HAVE MORE ON THAT. SERVICE TRANSPORTATION BILL REAUTHORIZATION IS TOP OF MIND AS PART OF YOUR FEDERAL AGENDA. BUT LOOKING AT FY26 IS THE LAST YEAR OF PROGRAMMED FUNDING TO THE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND JOBS ACT. And so one thing that we've been looking at that's top of mind for us, we met with staff earlier today to talk about getting an update on the Rangstorf grade separation project efforts to potentially bring federal funding in to support closing that budget shortfall, and then looking at other opportunities for transportation investments in the city of Mountain View. So there's a number of different programs authorized under IIJA that we're tracking with the railroad crossing elimination, the safe streets and roads for all. And also looking at funding through California Transportation Commission that's gonna be coming down later this year. Couple different programs around active transportation, around larger scale investments to address congestion and goods movement deficiency. And also upcoming through the MTC, the One Bay Area Grant is gonna have its fourth round coming up this year at the regional level and making sure that we're supporting the city's efforts to bring those regional dollars into Mountain View. as well. Next slide. And then the other major thing that's top of mind, so this is year one of the rollout of the proposition for climate bond. And so what we're seeing is there was, in the last legislative session, the legislature did not exempt the climate bond from the Administrative Procedures Act, which has added several months of delay to the rollout of that funding. There's an effort and a bill currently working its way through the legislature to address and apply that exemption. But I know that at the agency level, there's a lot of pressure to get these funds out and to, so we've started seeing draft guidelines published by California National Resource Agency, Strategic Growth Council, et cetera. to begin moving these grant programs into the competitive stage. And so they published the draft guidelines, they're open for public comment, and then we'll open up for applications. We're gonna see a lot of things starting to move as we head into spring of this year and into the fall and what that all entails. you know, funding around sea level rise adaptation through the Ocean Protection Council, also funding that was allocated, expedited in the last legislative session to the Coastal Conservancy. There's gonna be funding for the statewide park development community revitalization program through Oh gals That's kind of the 200 million dollar allocation the climate bond for parks It's gonna be coming out this year and it's that that's all the money for parks and the climate bond so we want to make sure that we're staying on top of these things because a lot of it's gonna be it's only gonna be one competition for a lot of these programs under the climate bond resilience centers, urban greening, environmental enhancement mitigation, number of different things that we're monitoring and working with staff to assess. One of the challenges that we have, is that there is a requirement that at least 40% of the funds be allocated to disadvantaged communities for anything that's funded under the climate bond. Mountain View does have a hard time meeting a lot of those statutory definitions and agency defined methodologies for determining disadvantaged status, but looking for ways to find competitive, where we can a competitive edge, where we have strong projects to put forward. So that is my update on funding.

Thank you. Next slide. So moving to the legislative platform, I will spare you the reading of going through all of the slides. The full platform is provided in attachment A. But as a reminder, next slide, how we typically engage on your behalf. We use the platform once it is formally adopted to consistently engage with the state legislature throughout the process, not just the state legislature, but the executive branch and administrative agencies as needed. Just sort of outlining some of these examples. So it's YOU KNOW, IT'S GOING BACK NOT ONLY SUBMITTING OUR INITIAL COMMENT LETTER OR POSITION LETTERS BUT RESUBMITTING THOSE AS THEY ARE AMENDED SO LONG AS THEY CONTINUE TO ALIGN WITH THE PLATFORM. TESTIFYING AND POLICY COMMITTEES ADVANCING LEGISLATION, MEETING WITH LEGISLATORS, THEIR STAFF, COMMITTEE STAFF, NEGOTIATING AMENDMENTS ON THE CITY'S BEHALF WITH RESPECT TO, YOU KNOW, having a really good feedback loop with your technical staff here, you know, seeking funding for key programs, meeting with stakeholders. So really all of the above. This platform really allows us to be able to screen out what's important versus what's not important, you know, because there are about 2,000 bills every year that are active and moving. And because full-service cities, you know, from police and fire to housing, homelessness, planning, public works, you know, and everything and beyond, you know, we're actively tracking about 900 measures each year. And, you know, we really want to pick our spots on where the things are the most important. And this legislative platform allows us to do that and I think do it at a very effective level. So very much looking forward to your engagement and feedback. And I think from that point on, oh, next steps. Again, how can we be in support of the city and its advocacy efforts? Are there critical funding priorities from your vantage point that we haven't heard from staff that we should be keeping in mind? Major policy areas of importance that we need to be keeping a special eye on that isn't touched on in the platform. Should we be assessing any major issues or projects or initiatives that we haven't heard from your departmental staff? you know, things that really have an impact on your departments and, you know, the residents that you represent. These are all things that we're sort of hoping to, you know, glean from you in this conversation and looking forward to hearing that. And from there, I will kick it back over to Christina. Thank you.

Thank you very much. We are, I believe the state senator just confirmed for 5.30. So we have like three minutes. Hopefully he'll hop on. I'm nodding. Did you want to start? And then when he comes in, we'll just.

However you want us to proceed.

We can go if you want us to go. And then as soon as he comes in, we can swap in the senator. All right, thank you.

So, you want me to go? Well, thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. My name is Kiriakos Pagonas, Vice President, MMO Partners. I appreciate the invitation to be here and anytime I can leave Washington, I'll take it. So, appreciate the courtesy and thank you for allowing us to represent the city in D.C. We really appreciate the trust and look forward to continuing to work with you. Next slide. So as Christina highlighted, and she did a wonderful job going over some of the issues we've worked on, some of the funding, but I'll just do a quick synopsis here of those things. So FY26 appropriations advocacy, actually first, let me just step back for a second. I think last year we were here, this is February of this time, 2025, new administration, First time you all had done a platform, a lot of questions about what the administration was going to do, and a lot of chaos, I think, a lot of uncertainty. We've certainly seen that play out. There were about 200-plus executive orders, cancellation and pausing of federal funding, so a lot of uncertainty at the time. I think stepping forward a year, I think if you had asked me at the time, would we have passed appropriations bills with earmarks? Would the courts have stepped in to sort of take control a little bit back from some of the steps that the administration's taken, local governments stepping up? And so I want to say that I think while things have certainly a lot of chaos still, a lot of uncertainty, Congress did pass 11 of the 12 appropriations bills, a major step. Last year we had a CR, no earmarks. So there has been some progress made, I think. Congressman Liccardo, the two senators have stepped up, secured about 3.1 million in federal funding for the city's projects, both housing and on climate, the Charleston Slough title gate project. That's still pending, but certainly advocated for. The council came back and made the plea for these things. So appreciate your involvement. On the legislative side, we have major housing legislation that's just passed yesterday.

All right. Thank you so much. We're going to do a temporary break on you, Mr. Kiriakis, to welcome our state senator. Thank you so much. We will get back to you as soon as we... Move him from the attendee list to our panelists. He is virtual. There we go. Hi, Senator Becker.

Hello. How are you?

Good. Can you hear us?

I can. Can you hear me okay?

We can hear you. Thank you for joining us.

okay i'm in my car because i'm out at an event uh thank you for uh fitting me in here in the schedule i'm really um excited to kind of give an update and you know if we have time for a few questions tell me however you want to um uh you know use the time but first to give a little bit of an update um from the legislative perspective uh from sacramento for my legislation and then we can talk more generally first i always start with the budget The budget this year is a little bit of a discrepancy between the governor's projections and the LAO, Legislative Accounting Office projections. Right now it's trending more towards the governor's projections. He projects a smaller deficit than the LAO had projected. So we obviously continue to monitor that while we go through to the end of the fiscal year. I wanted to talk about a number of things. Number one, really to make sure everyone knows and I think many already do about some of the implementation from previous bills. So, I was thinking about doing a blog called Year Six because I feel like in my year six year, a lot of things are coming to fruition. In 2023, I passed a bill called the Delete Act to let folks delete their information from data brokers. We have over 545 registered data brokers in California. These are people who buy and sell information about every one of us. By definition, you have no relationship with them. And they collect hundreds of pieces of information about each one of us, where we've lived, where roommates have been, what we've purchased, even our health history. And we wanted to give people a chance. I've been working on this for a long time. How can we really tackle this? So we set up a button called the Drop Button. You go to privacy.ca.gov. And you can fill this out now. The first deletion doesn't happen until August 1st, and then it happens every 45 days after. So it's a permanent deletion, one-stop shop, deleting information from all data brokers. Already we've had 225,000-plus people sign up, which is quite remarkable and way ahead of our projections. Happy to answer any questions about that. We continue to add to that, and I'll have some more privacy bills this year as well. This year brings about new committee assignments with our new pro tem. I will be chairing two committees. I'm one of the very few people that are chairing two committees. I think there's only one other in the legislature. So I'm chairing both natural resources, which is everything water, wildfire, and of course, you know, forest resources and, you know, sea level rise, all those issues, as well as human services. And human services really are safety net. So at a time when the safety net, I think you're probably hearing a little bit about that, it's time when the safety net is really threatened from the Trump administration. I'm excited to jump in and chair human services. And I'll talk a little bit about a child care bill I'm doing in a moment. So my uh bill package is focused on a few areas uh energy cost reductions building on uh last year uh continue to serve on energy by the way and still be quite involved in that and uh we passed what many people said was the kind of most substantial energy policy in 20 years out of Sacramento. And a piece of that was a bill to really tackle rate the rising costs of utilities, particularly energy utilities. And we did a lot of great work. I'm happy to talk about that. And but, you know, there's still more to do, I believe. And we're going to follow on that this year. Wildfire resilience, criminal justice issues, access to patient care, child care subsidy reform, and then Then there's a computer science standards update that we've been looking at as well around how do you incorporate AI concepts in that. i wanted to say first of all i'm really glad that to see the lot 12 housing project is moving forward uh i appreciate that the council reallocated funds to ensure that groundbreaking can move forward so i was really um excited to obtain money i think it was 10 million a number of years ago um but it's really taken all of you to push it over the finish line and um tremendous effort there i continue to chair the bay area caucus this will be my last year as chair And we've continued to focus on affordable housing, among other issues. And I know that funding for affordable housing continues to be a huge issue. And it's something I believe we need to prioritize this year with bypassing a housing bond in the legislature. And then I want to thank the Mountain View Police Department and the council for taking quick action around the ALPRs upon discovering that unauthorized law enforcement agencies were able to search information captured by those cameras. It's more important than ever to protect ourselves from federal overreach as well as core privacy issues. So commend that quick action. And I want to congratulate the city for being recognized for its excellence in financial planning and transparency. with the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Financial Officers Association. That is a recognition of a job well done. So with that, happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Senator Becker. I'm just going to look at my colleagues to see if anyone has any questions or comments to you in this session. Council Member Hicks.

first I'm gonna say just thank you so much for taking time out of your event to come and just the one area that you said you could expand on you said you made significant progress expanding I think it was energy and sustainability so if you could tell us just a little bit more about that that was the the piece that I wanted to hear a little more about sure well last year we did a couple things number one

I had a bill that was sort of unusual for Sacramento in that it was many bills in one, about 10 bills in one, that was SB 254. And because we know there's not one silver bullet for reducing electricity rates. So among other things, number one, we extended the wildfire fund, which we had to do because ultimately wildfire victims are otherwise the ones who suffer. So that was a big part of it. And we'll be back this year. My bill also called for a report by April 1st to look at liability reform. So right now we have something called strict liability. So that means for utilities. So even if I happen to be driving a truck and I run into a utility pole and it causes a fire, the utility is still responsible for it. ultimately we're we're sort of paying for these fires on the backs of repairs which isn't really a very um equitable way to sort of go about it so looking at this whole topic of liability reform is an important one but number one we send a lot the wildfire fund so that was important but we also put in language around bang for the buck for wildfire spend the reason if you look at the rise in rates over the last 14 years the generation a cost which is actually solar, wind, all that stuff has risen at just really about the rate of inflation. Even transmission costs have gone over 14 years from about a billion to two billion. If you look at the utilities there with the request for their rates, which really increases the distribution costs. So that's the last mile of poles and wires. And that also includes all the wildfire spend, all the money we've had to spend now to lessen the risk of wildfires. Now, we want to spend that money. We want to lessen the risk of wildfires, but we've got to make sure we're getting bang for the buck. For example, we can't underground all 100,000 miles of wires that PG&E alone has, right? Even 10,000 miles would would be prohibitively expensive. So there's language in there around bang for the buck for wildfire spend. There's the beginning of public funding of infrastructure. So estimates from TURN, the Utility Reform Network, we could save up to $3 billion a year if we did public funding of infrastructure, about 50% of the cost. So we start that in this bill. We required that the utility spend $6 billion of the wildfire spend They do with securitized debt instead of equity. If they do with securitized debt, they don't get that guaranteed rate of return. They don't get the 10% return and they don't get to rate base it. So $6 billion of that spend we want them to do, we said you're going to do that with securitized debt. You don't get to rate base that. There are a lot of other provisions or provisions around streamlining, making it faster, which is one of their complaints as well. But it does add to costs if we have unnecessary bureaucracy, as Wade Crawford says, cutting the green tape, essentially, to get things built faster. And then there's other additional scrutiny around the rate of return itself. So that's my relatively short explanation of what was in that bill. So that was a big piece. The other thing that we did, of course, we extended our cap-and-trade system, and that will return $60 billion directly to ratepayers via the climate credit over between now and 2045. um i took on the task of something that they've been working on for sort of 10 plus years which is to establish a regional um energy grid across the west and people are very excited for that this is only for um that marginal those you know we're really our greatest strain between 40 and 100 hours a year um and we have a lot increased amounts of excess solar most the rest of the time so we'll let a seller excess solar and then in those times we have those extreme heat events better share resources across the west so those are those were sort of three big things um that we did last year thank you that's that's exactly what i wanted to hear a little more from you about yeah it's get it gets into the the wonky territory but hopefully that was helpful oh that's okay senator becker we're a very wonky council good i like that's why i like you guys yes

All right, next we have Council Member McAllister.

Senator, good to see you. Are you still on the Transportation Committee?

I am not. We just had a shift, so I'll be on Revenue Tax, which some of the stuff we talked about. But I'll still be quite involved in those issues as Chair of the Bay Area Caucus.

Okay, another couple of questions on energy. We were talking about it. With the refineries closing up in Benicia and those areas and the potential of our price of gasoline going up, is there anything that can be done to try to temper that large increase? I've heard some people are saying $7, $8. And, you know, there's big environmental concerns, but then there's the reality of we need fuel to run many different things. So where are we on that with you?

Yeah, great question. Another thing we spent a lot of time on last year, and I don't think we're in danger of hitting nearly those prices, but something we very much had to tackle. So, number one, I'm certainly very involved in efforts to ramp down demand. We need to ramp down demand, and we're not ramping down fast enough. So that means, you know, transition electric vehicles, which also means charging infrastructure. And that means charging infrastructure also in low-income neighborhoods. That means charging infrastructure for renters. It means a lot of things. It means figuring out ways to tackle medium and heavy-duty trucks, despite, you know, the Trump administration blocking some of our attempts to do so. So we need to ramp down demand, and we need to ramp down demand faster, because we're still importing. millions of barrels every month into California. I think probably every day actually. And so one of the things is we have the tightest environmental standards in the world. So in an area like Kern County, in areas that does not threaten public health or is not in anyone's backyard or near a health facility, we said, yeah, we gotta go ahead and we gotta make it easier actually And I sit right in front of the Republican senator from Bakersfield, Senator Shannon Grove. She was quite happy with that piece of legislation that we passed through. So we're in this kind of mid-transition period, as the CEC put it. So as we ramp down demand, as we ramp down, we've got to make sure that we provide and we don't have the escalating gas price. That also means things like we'll be importing more finished product. And we want to look increasingly this year at that issue as well. How can we maybe trade with other states? Right now we have our own blend of gasoline, which makes us unable to do that. Maybe that's something we need to re-look at. We did that because of air pollution, especially in places like Los Angeles. well you know as with the transition electric vehicles and much more efficient cars uh that's still an issue but less of an issue so how do we um consider this those issues going forward i also spent time in the amazon as you know with um as you may know uh representing our state in our country in brazil uh first ever um uh first ever uh cop uh council parties that was held in the amazon region and uh did resolution last year we want to get off of oil from the importer from the Amazon. Fifty percent of the oil that's extractively, that's sort of harmfully mined from the Amazon that's exported comes to California. So with all those reasons, we need more of a comprehensive strategy. And that's another reason I'm excited to chair natural resources. Natural resources, all those issues that you raised and that I just talked about are squarely in the squarely in the realm of the National Resources Committee. So I think we took some bold action last year that I think across the board people are excited about. And we'll need to do more this year, too.

My last question is about roads. There is talk about doing some equity ways of raising funds for our roads because they're getting pretty deteriorated and some of it could be for the EV cars that the incentives that they're not paying their fair share. How do you address that issue?

Yeah, well, there's an assembly bill that I don't know all the specifics of, but basically it really calls for a study of that issue. And I think it kind of got reported in a way that scared a lot of people that there's going to be another tax on people who are already paying the gas tax. And no, that's not the case. I think it was looking exactly at this issue that you talked about, right, which is with the declining gas tax, what are the other alternatives for us to raise revenue? We already did put a fee on. for electric vehicles drivers a number of years ago. But we do expect the gas tax to keep going down. It is going to keep going down and we have to figure out a way otherwise to pay for the roads. So that's something we will continue to look at this year.

Thank you, Senator.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Showalter.

Hi, Senator Becker, thanks so much for taking time to be with us. And also, yes, your gang, your blockbuster legislation last year on the environment was just music to so many people's ears around here. We were really delighted at Silicon Valley Clean Energy in particular. about allowing the marketplace, the energy marketplace that we can use, it will be very, right, it will be very, very valuable. But on the affordable housing front, or building more housing front, one of the things that we want to promote in Mountain View is condos. And we hear again and again and again that construction liability is a real barrier to that. Is there any progress on changing those construction liability laws?

Yeah, thank you. First of all, thanks for the kind words. Yeah, we will. So we did, Senator Steve Glazer did take that on a couple of years ago and I voted for it. And I was on the BNP committee, but it didn't move forward. And it ties into some deals in the past, some struggles in the past, some compromises in the past. But I've said myself that I'm willing to take it on. And I actually offered to carry something this year. I was told that Buffy Wicks, who is a strong housing voice, And I've talked to her. She's my vice chair of the Bay Area caucus. She said she was going to take it on. So and she's well positioned to do that, giving her other housing work. So I'll check in with her on that. But I told her I will support it in any way. I know it's a controversial issue, but it's one we absolutely have to address. So thanks for the reminder. I'll check in with my team and I'll check in with Assemblymember Wicks. But she did tell me she was going to take it on. And I said I'll be fully in support.

Oh, that's fabulous. Well, another thing I just want to do is brag. And that is, it's in the natural resources, area, we are finishing a sea level rise protection project. And what we are, it is also a habitat restoration project. It's the construction on Pond A2W. And we've done all the construction to fortify the area the tongue of the landfill that sticks out so that it's well protected. We've built the horizontal levee. There have been two breaches on Permanente Creek and Stevens Creek so tide water is coming in to raise the level of dirt there and we hope that in about 10 years we will see a marsh But another aspect of this that I think is gonna be great fun for all of us is the Stevens Creek Trail is going to be extended 1.2 miles out into the bay on top of the Stevens Creek Levee on that side. And we're gonna have our grand opening on February 20th. So I don't know if you can make it to that. It would be wonderful if you could, but someday I know you will wanna ride your bike out there.

Well, that's fantastic. Thank you for your leadership on water. And thanks to the council. And I'll make sure my team gets these. We want to be able to lift up those kinds of projects. And as you know, I secured a lot of money in the budget last year for coastal resilience and sea level rise. But projects, and it's a huge priority up and down the bay. So thank you to your council and to Mountain View for your leadership. And look forward to helping promote that. That's super exciting.

Yeah, it is. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Ramirez, you had a question?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Senator. We appreciate the update and the generosity of your time with us, and I don't want to take too much more of it. I did want to ask if you could share a little bit more information about the child care legislation that you described earlier. I don't know if it has a number or if there's any way we can learn a little bit more about it and how we can support that work that you're doing.

Thank you. It doesn't have a number yet, but it's going to revamp the child care subsidy system to, among other things, ensure a stable and equitable reimbursement of child care contractors. So that's the focus we'll be working with a lot of the advocates on that. And I'll let you know as soon as we have a... as soon as we have a number. And I'll just say also, you know, I've told Senator Aguiar-Curry from the Women's Caucus, who's been a leader, that she's the full support of the Bay Area Caucus in really focusing on child care this year. We know that's something that's an area of great need. I served on the Child Care Partnerships Council of San Mateo County before I was elected, so I got involved in all the facilities, the workforce, you know, as well as sort of the policy side. So... We have done some good things since I was there around rate reform and around TK, but I know TK also provides additional burdens for some of our basic aid districts. But anyway, the point being that we know we need to do more on childcare and looking forward to working with folks locally, as well as I know the San Jose City Council is also focused on it. So we'll work with them as well. I'll get you the number of that bill once we have it. Great. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. Council Member Kamei, do you have some questions for our dear Senator?

Hi, Senator. Hello from Washington, D.C. I'm in a different screen. I don't know if you can see me on your phone. But thanks so much for being with us. Just like two quick questions. So I know you held like a select committee hearing on economic development and innovation. And being that we're Mountain View, it'd be really interesting to hear like any findings or things that we should be thinking about. I don't know any feedback that might impact the bills that you're going to be putting forward by next Friday. Just thought I'd ask. Thanks.

Yes. Well, thank you for asking because that's something I am very excited. uh super super passionate about kind of give my background i was also on the state workforce board and i actually had you know i really want to continue to bridge the gap between the valley and sacramento i had irvine foundation in my office today the ceo of irvine as well as many are in remotely those are two organizations are focused uh a lot on funding um from the nonprofit side the workforce development efforts here in the state. Also talk to them about AI workforce is something we need to be in front of, given all the advances on AI in the Valley. And particularly, you know, I did a roundtable first during the break last year, and then we had this hearing and we had Wisk Arrow, for example, at the roundtable I did in the district. And, you know, that's an example of an industry that vertical takeoff AIRCRAFT INDUSTRY, ALL THREE OF THOSE COMPANIES WERE FOUNDED IN CALIFORNIA. TWO ARE ALREADY MANUFACTURING OUTSIDE OF CALIFORNIA. THEY'VE ALREADY MADE THE DECISION. CAN'T UNFORTUNATELY DO IT IN CALIFORNIA. WE'RE GOING TO MANUFACTURE ELSEWHERE. AND WISC HAS NOT DECIDED. WISC IS NOW AT MOFFET FIELD. And so that's just an example. We don't want to lose those jobs. Those are good jobs, and we want those folks to stay in California. We also had in my roundtable and in the hearing Josh Richmond, who led the site selection for PsyQuantum to build the world's first quantum computer. They ended up picking Illinois. It's not a low-tax state. It's not a low-union state. In fact, it's high-tax and high-union. But They went there for various reasons that we heard about. And so I think this is going to be an ongoing effort. I think it will probably may lead to some stuff this year, but really probably more likely next year as we think more about doing strategic economic development here in California. And I guess that's sort of what I'll say about it for now, but we're working on the write-ups from last week and I'll share those with you. We did hear from cities and like to, you know, Fremont, for example, I think has done a lot And we heard from the city of Fremont there. And it would be good to compare notes with, say, Fremont and Mountain View and some other cities in our district on what more can be done to, again, I mean, it sounds small, but a lot of times it's just feeling wanted, honestly, for these companies. They want to feel wanted, and they feel wanted by their states, and they don't always feel wanted by California.

um uh thank you for asking it's certainly a passion of mine and something we're again we'll do some work this year but i think it's going to be probably to your effort great thank you so much and then just last just want to say thank you on your leadership for sp 747 i'm assuming you don't need any advocacy from the city but if you if you do um please let us know thanks so much those are my questions mayor thank you council member kamei and those are our questions from our city council senator becker so

Thank you so much for joining us. We know that you're your favorite, we're your favorite city, you don't have to confirm or deny that. Do you have any other questions or comments for us before we let you go to what's most likely your next event that you probably have to run to?

Yes, I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me join here remotely. I'm not in the Witness Protection Program. Just calling from my car. But I do appreciate being able to join remotely. No, thanks. You covered a lot of the big issues. You know, I'll just say that we continue, you know, a big part of our job is constituent services. And we have, I think we closed 580 cases just towards the last half of last year. So we are here for your residents for all those issues. And then, you know, a lot of the focus this year is also just going to be dealing with H.R.1 and the fallout of that around health care and other human services. So, again, I'm excited to chair human services. I know it's going to be a big challenge this year, but I'm excited to work with you as we try to keep the safety net as strong as possible here in California. So thank you.

Thank you again Senator Becker and thank you to your staff as well. Alex, Isabel and Joan are always very helpful for us and you're always welcome to join us here in your favorite city.

Well, good and looking forward. And I also want to work with you, you know, as we talk about, you know, additional housing and talk about, you know, some of our corporate partners, for example, I know Google that had committed various housing and I've sort of been trying to stay on them as well, uh, to make sure that that land's going to get either developed or turned over developer, um, to, um, to, to make sure that, cause that's a significant amount of housing that I know we're all counting on. So look forward to working with you on that as well.

Thank you so much.

All right, thanks all.

All right, bye, Senator Becker.

Bye.

All right, thank you so much, Mr. Kiriakis. I'm sorry we had to go to our, now we're back to her general programming.

Thank you. Okay, so I think we were talking about just the highlights for 2025. We talked about the earmarks, legislative advocacy on housing, transportation and climate, formula funding, and then development of grant program development, and then your actual federal program development. So next slide, please. So as I was saying, as far as the community project funding, so with your guidance and direction, the excellent work of your staff, the support from both senators and Congressman Liccardo, 2 million was just signed into law for the Evelyn Housing Affordable Housing Project. We have 1.145 million for the Charleston Slough Tide Gates to deal with some potential flooding. That's pending final approval of the Homeland Security Appropriations Bill. But again, this wouldn't have been possible without your direction and city staff and the delegation's support. So crossing our fingers that the Homeland Security Bill with the funding gets through, but that's pending. On federal programs, with your advocacy and direction, CDBG program was funded at FY25 levels. So $3.3 billion, even though I think the president's budget eliminated the funding. Congress funded it at 25 levels. That's about $618,000 that the city receives annually from the program on home. The House bill had zeroed it out, as did the president's budget. The final bill includes $1.25 billion. FOR THE HOME PROGRAM, AGAIN, SOME FORMULA FUNDING THAT THE CITY RECEIVES ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING. HOMELESS ASSISTANCE WAS FUNDED AT 4.1 BILLION. THAT'S 500 MILLION MORE THAN FY25. SO SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN HOMELESS ASSISTANCE. YES, IN MY BACKYARD PRO HOUSING THERE WAS 50 MILLION INCLUDED IN THE BILL. AGAIN, IT WAS ZEROED OUT IN THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET AND IN THE HOUSE BUDGET REQUEST AS WELL. FTA formula funding at $14.3 billion, which is the authorized level, and then discretionary funding for CRISI as $1.1 billion. Those funds, like for CRISI, that we expect grant notices to be coming out in the next quarter. Next slide. And then, as was mentioned earlier, H.R. 1, the one big beautiful bill act, was passed back in July. It's obviously a mix of various items. And a couple of things to highlight, though, that were also on the platform and included in the bill. There was an increase in the low-income housing tax credit. It does protect and did not eliminate the tax exemption from municipal bonds, which I know this council pushed hard against them cutting. It does cut, significantly cut, Medicaid and SNAP, and it does rescind significant energy credits that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. It does also include an adjustment to the SALT benefit, and so that will take place this year. A COUPLE OTHER THINGS THAT WE WORKED ON ON LEGISLATION THAT WILL CARRY OVER INTO 2026, SURFACE TRANSPORTATION AUTHORIZATION, ALSO KNOWN AS THE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND JOBS ACT. THAT WILL EXPIRE AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER. CONGRESS IS IN THE PROCESS OF RELEASING A NEW BILL. THE HOUSE TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE COMMITTEE WE EXPECT WILL RELEASE A BILL SOMETIME IN THE SPRING. The city did submit some comments to the delegation, one around the CRISI and RCE program, so the Railroad Crossing Elimination Program, to prioritize those projects like Rank Store if that are further ahead in design. So those are comments that we submitted for consideration and also to ensure that future funding is provided. more directed at the local level like the surface transportation block grant program does. So a couple of those things we're pushing for and we'll find out how we do it once this bill is introduced. On the housing front, affordable housing front, as Christina mentioned, Representative Liccardo introduced the Unlocked Act. That came from your city staff directly talking about you know, ways in which there can be tweaks to the CDBG program to make, you know, that program more flexible to allow for some funding to be used for affordable housing. And then we recently saw, as of yesterday, the Road to Housing Act comprehensive bill. It's comprised of 36 other bills, two of which are Representative Liccardo's bills that would streamline some environmental NEPA requirements and also to provide some other incentives to reduce barriers to zoning. That passed, and again, your staff is looking at the bill, and we're expecting the House and Senate to come together at some point and pass a final bill probably towards the end of this year is my guess. On climate, the council weighed in on the Groundwater Rise and Infrastructure Preparedness Act. We're also watching a bill that has passed the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It's the FEMA Act. It's to reform FEMA, also to create a new mitigation program that's formula-based as opposed to a competitive program like the BRIC program. So that's got some momentum. It passed with significant bipartisan support. And we're watching to see how that plays out this go around. Next slide. So this session of Congress, we're here to talk about your platform. As Christina mentioned, there are a couple of tweaks that were made to it, but setting the stage for what's on the congressional agenda, FY27 budget. The president will probably release the administration's budget request in the next few weeks. We expect Congress to do earmarks again. In fact, we were just earlier today talking with Representative Liccardo's staff about his process. The senators are hosting a webinar on Thursday to talk about their process and guidelines for earmark requests or community project funding requests. We talked to staff today about a potential project idea. So the city is getting ready and it will be in a good position to submit projects when called for. As I mentioned, the surface transportation reauthorization bill, that's a major piece of legislation that either has to get REAUTHORIZED OR WHAT PROBABLY IS MORE LIKELY IS THEY DO A ONE YEAR EXTENSION OF THE BILL. I KNOW A COUPLE COMMENTS WERE MADE ABOUT EVS EARLIER. JUST TO POINT OUT THAT WHEN THEY WERE LOOKING AT H.R. TAXING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WAS ON TAXING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WAS ON TAXING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WAS ON THE TABLE. TAXING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WAS ON THE TABLE. TAXING ELECTRIC VEHICLES WAS ON THE TABLE. THE HOUSE HAD INCLUDED IN ITS THE TABLE. THE HOUSE HAD INCLUDED IN ITS THE TABLE. THE HOUSE HAD INCLUDED IN ITS VERSION OF THE RECONCILIATION THE HOUSE HAD INCLUDED IN ITS VERSION OF THE RECONCILIATION THE HOUSE HAD INCLUDED IN ITS VERSION OF THE RECONCILIATION BILL. VERSION OF THE RECONCILIATION BILL. VERSION OF THE RECONCILIATION BILL. THE SENATE We've got two bills, both passed in the Senate and the House with tremendous bipartisan support. So we think that this is a good year for housing. Certainly they're talking about affordability with elections coming up. So we see some momentum around that. The Water Resources Development Act primarily funds the Corps of Engineers. We do see Congress moving ahead on a biannual basis doing that bill. So that's going to be marked up, again, probably sometime in the first or second quarter of this year. Last, you know, we're certainly watching, as Jake mentioned, you know, some of the federal grant opportunities on CRISI and RCE. We're talking to staff today about potentially looking at the next round. There should be about $1.1 billion in CRISI money available. I think some of you are planning to come back to Washington during the National League of Cities Conference. It would be a good opportunity to go by and talk to DOT about Rengstorf. and pitch the project before any sort of grant notice is released. Next slide. So that sort of ends our presentation. I just want to say again, you know, advocacy, as you all know, is a team sport. You know, we wouldn't be able to do any of this without your direction, your involvement, your staff is tremendous, and your delegation is just doing a great job. So appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Kiriakis. Because it's a study session, we will first go to public comment before we start with council questions. So would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes.

All right.

Are you speaking on the side of Mr. Scarborough? Yes, all right, go ahead.

Hello, City Council. Nice to be back and see you all again. As I was looking through the the things that you're going to be looking at for the federal agencies and for the federal legislation. I was thinking about how we want to have a community for all and how we have federal agencies that are very hostile for many people in our community due to however they've decided to focus on them. So I was surprised not to see anything on their addressing pushing back against federal overreach or protecting our communities and our vulnerable populations and all of us. So that's just my comment, thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Scarborough. We will now move on to our virtual speakers. Mr. Cox.

Thank you, can you hear me? We can. Okay, great. I'm speaking for Livable Mountain View tonight, and we appreciate the city has prioritized many items for federal and state legislation that align with our city values, particularly that of being a community for all. We do urge the council also to prioritize items that affect Mountain View most urgently, in particular two that we want to bring up. One is to support the introduction of legislation to clear up and extend the timelines for SB 79 local alternative plans. We thank you for the discussion that we had last time on this. The state is doing a good job in cleaning up the definitions, but the timelines are still unclear and the maps for each of the zones have still not been delivered to all municipalities. And so since the council has decided to start work on the local alternative plan next year, getting some clarity on the timelines is of utmost importance. So please advocate for that. I was glad to hear that SB may deal with that. I looked it up on the legislative portal. It's just a placeholder bill right now. So let's get some real stuff in that bill and get this done. The second thing is we want to echo a comment that Vice Mayor Clark made about supporting legislation that gives cities like Mountain View that have a pro-housing designation more flexibility in determining where new housing will be built. Right now, Mountain View and Campbell, maybe there's a few others, are the rarities in Santa Clara County in terms of being pro-housing cities. And we really believe that if there were more flexibility in doing this, more cities in our county would want to jump on the idea of being pro-housing cities. And then that would be a much better path toward getting the housing problem solved which is a regional issue, something we've heard very much. So anyway, those are the two things we wanted to talk about. Thank you very much. I'll yield the rest of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Cox. We now, that was all our speakers. So council will now have the opportunity to ask questions and discuss and provide feedback on the study session question. Does any member of the council have questions? All right, Council Member Hicks.

Well, I do have one question. I think this would be federally. There was my fellow council member asked about taxes on EVs. I'm wondering, I've also... I read this, and it was some time ago, so maybe you can clarify. I read about taxes by weight of vehicle, which, of course, car use. I mean, I have a tiny, very light car, and there are others much heavier. Mine is not using the road very much. Do you know of any legislation federally on that? I believe this was a tax tied to registration. which is not the biggest tax you pay, but anyway. So do you know anything about taxes tied to weight?

So there's probably several bills around that issue. I don't have an answer on the specific. And we'll come back to you with an answer on that. As I said earlier, there was language in that HR1, the House version, that would have taxed EVs, specifically electric vehicles. So I don't think it was necessarily around weight. And that would have, I think, generated about $15 to $20 billion for the bill for that five-year period. So we'll come back to you and do some research on specific legislation around the weight.

OK. Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Council Member McAllister.

While you're up there, thank you for getting out here. I'm sure you said, oh, warm weather, I'm out of here. I can drive a car. Help me understand the process between the city, how you interact with Sam Liccardo. Does it start with the city and then it filters through him, or do you sort of go parallel with him, or does... Christine, say, hey, get ahold of SAM, we want this. Just give us a sense of how things work.

Yeah, I think it's, I don't think there's one clear answer. I think, you know, for example, I was talking about the, you know, FY27 community project funding requests. You know, the senators have local representatives as Congressman Liccardo. In some cases, they'll reach out to the city before we interact with them and, you know, vice versa. It's sometimes us interacting with them and then coming back to the city with information. So I think it really depends on the issue. You know, again, I think on like the appropriations side, if that's what you're specifically talking about. You know, because we know the cycle starts and sort of when it starts, we proactively will engage the delegation about getting their guidelines and guidance. You know, they all will send out information sort of at one time to their constituents. And sometimes, you know, Christina will get information before we do and she'll report it back to us and we'll work, you know, with the delegation per direction.

So like with the money that the one point or $3 million or so forth.

Yeah.

So do we get it and then you sort of do you work with Sam and his to go advocate or to and get votes for it?

So yeah, on that particular issue, we had worked with you all city staff last year to sort of identify projects ahead of time. And so when the process opened up, the city working with us developed an application, sort of a grant application that was submitted to their offices. their offices will review all of the projects that come in. So on the House side, they're limited to 15 projects that they can submit to the committee. On the Senate side, before last year, they could submit as many as they wanted. This year, under Republican control, they limited you know, to about, I'd say, I think, 400 or 500 projects overall. So, in that case, you know, the senators will rack and stack and so will the congressman because, you know, he's going to have a number of projects that are submitted to him. And so, I think, again, your advocacy coming back, talking to him, talking to his staff here, I know the mayor, Mayor Kamei at that time, you know, was talking to his staff about the priorities of the city. And again, I don't think you can take any of it for granted. I think you have to continuously update and educate. And I think you all did that last year. And I think that's why you got two out of his 15 requests submitted.

And since we have you here, go to the crystal ball. What do you see in the midterms?

You know, I think, you know, it's hard to, listen, if I were to make predictions, I'd lose a lot of money. So I think what you can say is looking at history, right? I think history tells us that the president's party typically loses during the midterms. I don't see any reason to sort of go against that sort of historical trend. But, you know, I don't know how voters, you know, will react in November. But, you know, I do think, you know, history is a guide here. And so that's kind of where I'll stand. Thank you.

Mayor, are we able to ask to the state or are we just going to do the federal then go to the state?

Oh, this was all questions, Earl.

Okay, so if I had some questions for the state.

Yes, go right ahead.

Unless Chris has some federal, then I'll follow up with the state afterwards. He's standing there, might as well get him. He's all warmed up.

I think he wanted to ask federal questions anyway, so go ahead.

It's just piggybacking on the prior question. Should we just assume the reauthorization for the anything tied to HOV lanes, whether it's the EV decals or anything like that, should we just assume that's dead and not going to be probably not going to make it into any of the reauthorizations. Because I know it hasn't made it in thus far and expired. I just didn't know if there were any efforts to save it or if it's just gone.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that anything is off the table at this point. I mean, we haven't seen any bill text. And so I think, like I said earlier, I think if you were looking at what the House did during reconciliation on EVs, I would expect to see that come up again. I don't see why they would not take advantage of their majority. And if if they wanted to get it done previously I still think that's going to be on the table as a revenue raiser for sure. The Senate you know will maybe take a different approach but I think they're going to be looking for ways to raise revenue and EVs you know under the current climate I think are ripe for that type of action.

Thank you for your time. Can I ask somebody from the state? Yes. Okay, so you were talking about park fees and I'm really reading through some of our items that were coming up today and that we're gonna have, there's a contradiction in park fees and housing development. So the housing development, the YIMBYs and all that, they're trying to make it less affordable. I mean, it costs less to build. And so they're restricting our ability to charge fees for parks. And yet on the other side, you're saying, okay, well, we want parks, so we're going to get fee. So why is there any change that there could be a swing in the pendulum of, you know, restrictions so that we can actually afford to, you know, charge developers to get things done in the city?

So I think that... I think it's a case-by-case basis with respect to the jurisdiction. From a statewide perspective, there was a recent study that's getting a lot of traction from the Turner Center, which attributes less than 5% of total construction costs attributed to local government fees. I think for folks like us who represent city government, I think that's a pretty good, being pretty good stewards of those dollars that are coming in. When you look at the dollars that come in, they are highly regulated, highly transparent. We have to have direct dollars that go right to those services. There are other aspects that drive housing costs considerably more than less than 5% on average. So speaking to it as a whole, I think that's one of the messages that a lot of folks who represent local agencies are trying to convey. And I think that at least having the authority for the local agency to negotiate on those fees versus them being you know, eliminated, capped, reduced, or otherwise unable to collect puts us in a position where we're not able to negotiate in good faith with developers on specific projects. And so, you know, I THINK THAT EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE THIS YEAR WITH RESPECT TO TRYING TO DEFEND OUR ABILITY TO ASSESS REASONABLE FEES. THIS CITY IS DOING A REMARKABLE JOB, WHETHER IT'S THROUGH LAND EDUCATIONS AND UPZONING POLICIES, A PRO-HOUSING DESIGNATED CITY. YOU'LL HAVE A REALLY, REALLY INCREDIBLE STORY TO TELL THAT WE ARE CONVEYING TO THE LEGISLATURE. we have to be able to assess fees to provide those critical services or maintain that infrastructure. And so that's the sort of the grappling that we're dealing with. I don't know if that sort of answers your question.

Open space, parks, quality of life are very important to the residents of Mountain View. And yet as we continue to do this development and being, you know, sort of, Restricted by these outside groups saying you got to do this so you can get housing for it We're not we're building more but we're taking away from the quality of life. So that's why I'm saying this there

Oh, okay, I see. Well, and so, and I will say, I don't think it's mutually exclusive. I think that a lot of the legislature, legislation is really trying to focus on infill development, you know, converting infill sites. But I do think to a certain extent, in talking with your planning folks and your park folks, you know, parks are important. They're not just an amenity. I mean, they reduce, you know, there's all sorts of statistics that talk about overall community health, accessibility, walkability, you know, these are all things that get folks outside, builds a sense of community, you know, you want to provide amenities to those folks, you know, not just build high-density housing with no amenities, right? And so, you know, there are trade-offs, but yes, I do think that there is a narrative that continues to advance that that local fees are the barrier to addressing the affordability crisis. And I would say communities like Mountain View that are doing really phenomenal work, I think may have a different narrative.

How do you define small cities? Yeah, you mentioned earlier small cities are getting into this thing, and I just wonder how you view a small city.

So, well, that particular bill is opening up HAP dollars to cities under $300,000. So, you know, in that case, we would be a small city. Really... I can't really define what's a small city and what's not. The legislature does that for us. A lot of times I hear, depending on the issue, if you're a population of 30,000 or less, oftentimes we've been seeing lately, even if you are a population of 30,000 or less, but you're in a county that has a higher county population, then you're not a small city. We saw that with SB 707 last year with some of the Brown Act stuff. It's not for me to define it, but it's, I suppose, a term of art with respect to who's a small city or not. Thank you.

Small city, but big heart.

That's right. That's right.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, you mentioned that there was some effort to suspend reach codes permanently. So can you discuss that a little bit?

So what I, and to be clear, there is not a piece of legislation that we have seen right now that will suspend reach codes permanently. We saw what happened with AB 361, which was then effectively rolled into the budget. So it put legislators in a very tough position to either not vote for the state budget or or not. They put policy in the budget, which we don't like to see. But there are, when you look at some of the findings coming out of the select committee on housing construction, one of the findings coming out, which really these select committees are a pretext to introduce a host of bills, right? So for example, Assemblywoman Wicks hosted or was the chair of the select committee on permit reform. And then right at the February deadline, there was a press release with 25 bills on permit reform. So we're waiting for these bills to start coming, but one of the big sort of takeaways that we grabbed onto, we wrote memos and provided to staff, was this sort of theme about, well, it's good that we've got the suspension of these codes. We need to think about longer term you know, more, you know, uniform codes and really usurping local codes is what the theme we kept hearing because that was another impediment to rapid construction. And so, again, it's a trend. We haven't yet seen anything in print, but, you know, to answer your question, that's what we're seeing.

Okay, well, please keep us informed. That's really a very negative trend.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I'll try and be quick because we still have to discuss the item. But I wanted to get a better sense of we were talking about trends and risks. What are the risks associated with some of the real property transfer tax preemptions that you've described? It seemed like there was some good news coming out of L.A., which I think is sort of the ground zero for a lot of this effort. So is there still a threat to Mountain View? What are you observing?

Yeah. So Isaac Bryant just introduced a bill and it's in the 1000s. And so I don't have it off the top of my head, but the bill was introduced, I believe it was yesterday, specific to LA and LA County with respect to the mansion taxes they're referring to down there. I can tell you in in this forum, that there are a contingent of Bay Area lawmakers that are looking to try and expand this statewide. And you look at what was not what the end result was last year with 423, but the RNs, the nonpublic versions of the bill that were circulating. And they were really talking about two things. Number one, the document transfer taxes that are assessed at the county level that trickle down to the cities and then the real estate transfer taxes which apps which in theory undermine the locally voter approved you know statutes that you have but the impacts of that provision particularly for mountain view on the commercial side was the most I've seen even from much larger cities with respect to your unique commercial population. And so the policy framework that we've been seeing is this 12-year suspension of real estate transfer taxes for commercial, 12-year suspension for multifamily, and then five years for single-family homes, but that's if... there was a disaster in that region, right? So when we were running the numbers, and again, this was like back of the napkin with your team in the wee hours of the session, some of these transactions were in the billions and even a 1% or 1.5% fee on that was substantial to provide those city services. And so it is, I see a major threat and an opportunity for us to really provide that education to your delegation. I actually had the opportunity to connect with your housing and planning director earlier today. We're going to be working with city manager's office too to really try and find ways to tell the narrative, tell the story, what those impacts would mean for city services and be more proactive because this will be a very, very tough issue. And frankly, those big tough issues, they like to... you know, work into the very, very end of session or try to work into the budget, which would be, frankly, the worst case scenario, because then again, it puts those legislators in those tough positions. And so really trying to drive awareness on that issue now.

Thank you. So it sounds like priority one for us, perhaps. Yeah. The other question, I had other questions, but I'll just limit myself to one more. I know, I think this month was the deadline for, I guess, the conclusion of some single stair reform work that Assemblymember Alex Lee had introduced years ago. Do you happen to know where that's landing? Is the state legislature continuing to look at single stair, or is that sort of not, no longer under consideration?

I am not familiar with that term. You said single stair reform? I'm sorry, I wasn't...

That's okay. I don't want to pretend to be an expert, but it sounds like something you can look into and come back later.

Yes, I will. Yep, I'm writing it down, and I can talk to his chief of staff and get the download on that for you and get back to you. Thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Any other questions from council? Um, it's interesting. Um, this is a question for Ms. Christina. So I'll be ready to take your seat. We'll probably have more discussion. That will be fun. Um, but Ms. Christina, um, as I'm looking through, uh, the, um, the platform right now and, um, There are some things that some members of council may support or want to push to support, but it's kind of under like certain buckets of things. We don't explicitly call it out. Is it helpful for you to have things explicitly called out or like language would be just, the existing language would be just fine?

So just to make sure I'm understanding your question, you're talking about adding specific policy statements to either platform and you're asking if staff would like you to provide specific language or if you would just like themes or buckets and that staff can go back, develop the language and bring it back to the council for approval and adoption, is that what you're asking?

Yeah, so like Council Member Ramirez mentioned single stair reform, it's not explicitly called out in our thing, but I was also thinking about how Council Member Showalter mentioned to Senator Becker about the condo liability bill kind of thing, and those seem, could be under our buckets of like item, eight and 10 of support legislation that would incentivize production of missing middle or like support legislation that allows for middle income and affordable home ownership opportunities. Those kind of fall into that bucket, but I don't know how staff would interpret that in order for us to move forward on essentially specific legislation should it come up.

Sure, so I think probably the best path forward would be for council to provide us with the themes. So single story, or sorry, single stair legislation is something that the council is interested in. The staff would, with our legislative advocates, develop some platform statements, vet it through our internal departments, and then bring it back to council for adoption. And then we also recommend what bucket within the platform that we think that would best fit.

All right, thank you so much. That's helpful. I see a hand from Council Member McAllister.

Yeah, I'm gonna go straight to your question. It says, are there any policies issue? I mean, Council Member Showalter took my, one of my policies I wanted to talk about was the condo liability. I've been pushing that for, I don't know, since 2014. And when someone said it was a sticky issue, I'm going, Hey, you do it or you don't. So I would think that would be a high priority because if we're talking about middle income, and this is where our former mayor, she likes that. So that's specific. I'd like to see that. And the other, with my businessman hat on, the frivolous lawsuits that are coming through, that have been coming through, I don't understand why there hasn't been progress on it. Because if you have an issue and you're not in compliance and somebody gives you six months, to say get it done and you're getting sued the whole time. It just doesn't, I've seen businesses in downtown Mountview go out of business because the lawsuits are tens of thousands of dollars where we just said, hey, give me six months, I can correct it. So I would like to see that two specific issues brought to the attention of our distinguished gentleman from Sacramento.

Okay, thank you, Council Member Couser. Council Member Showalter, and I guess now we are moving on, is this a question or are we moving on to answering the question?

Okay, let's go. Okay, I put in a little bit of a laundry list in the questions. It's on page two of the questions, question five. Are there any policy statements to add? And one is support legislation that rewards pro-housing cities with funding incentives and permitting, flexibility to create great neighborhoods. Anyway, you mentioned in your answer that there was a little bit related to that, but I personally think we should buff it up. So I'd be interested in how other people feel. Then the other one is support funding for soft story retrofits. That's a thing that Gosh, it's fallen through every crack it could possibly fall through, but it should still be on the list, it's important. Support construction liability reform under environmental sustainability. Now, under CEQA, we have to get consultation from tribes, and I'm just wondering if the tribes really have the capacity to do that consultation, or if they need some sort of assistance training, et cetera, to better do that. So that's not so much a local thing as it is more of a statewide thing. And then support stormwater management implementation with funding and technical assistance. I know some of this is done by the regional board, but again, a blanket thing that I think is very important, particularly as our stormwater management requirements get more and more rigorous. And then should we be adding something related to regulations of ALPRs? I didn't see that on the list, but it could have been there. But anyway, I'm concerned about that. And then, as our consultant brought up, I wasn't aware that reach codes are conceivably on the chopping block. As a civil engineer, I just have to say that a disaster is a terrible thing to waste. And the way that civil engineers are, I mean, I'm sort of outgoing, but a lot of civil engineers typically aren't. They're working in their labs and they solve problems and they don't really get a chance to tell people about what they're doing very often. And then there's a disaster that comes forward And somebody says, well, how can we do this? And these researchers raise their hand and say, well, by the way, I've been working on this for 15 years. This is what we could do. And they're able to bring forward their research and it can be implemented. That's been very important from time to time with earthquake requirements. It's been very important with hardening against wildfires and I don't know what the next disaster is gonna be, but I just feel like I wanna share that, you know, that idea that that's what REACH codes are for. And we don't want to freeze the building code. We want it to be a living document. So that's my last one, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter, Council Member Clark.

I'm fine with most, if not all of those. The one thing that I would emphasize is the, it sounds like there might be legislative vehicles in this session that we can utilize for a Pro Housing City designation is hard to get and it should be. And I think one of the things that we're hearing from the community is we're putting up with a lot of change in order to effectuate and build additional housing and I think a lot of folks are uncomfortable with that but at the end of the day are proud that we're moving in that direction. And I think the approach of the state so far has been more of a stick approach where it's, whether it's SB 79 or other things, it's kind of a, everyone is treated the same or the housing element process where everyone has the same deadline. And we've learned a lot about how maybe to change all these things going forward. But I think the biggest thing for me is just saying, look, if you've gone to the effort of getting a pro-housing designation, maybe in terms of processing housing element applications in the future, maybe there are different buckets, right? So HCD isn't inundated and maybe the non-pro-housing cities go first and they have a deadline by which they need something certified. Maybe the pro-housing cities are in a second bucket and you know, or when they submit, as long as they submit something that's substantially complete, they're assumed to have submitted a compliant housing element and the clock stops unless HCD later says, no, you need to make these other additions, but you're not stuck in that window of time where builder's remedy applies. There's an assumption that if you're a pro-housing city that you're a good actor, right? And I think that carrot approach would really go a long way toward incentivizing other cities to take that approach. I know there are funding benefits now, but I think some relief in terms of the housing element application process, SB 79 set a really quick deadline for us to adopt a local alternative. If pro-housing cities had an extra six months or a year, that would be an enormous benefit to us because we can still produce the housing, or at least zone for the housing that we need to zone for and comply. But we also have, we're given the grace to do it appropriately and not just on a quick shot clock. And I think the only other thing that I would say is to the extent that some of the other jurisdictions that have that pro-housing designation, San Francisco, maybe San Jose soon, those are powerhouses in terms of lobbying, and so to the extent that we can, instead of just saying, hi, we're Mountain View, we want this thing, if I think the, we're a wonderful, if not the best city, very close to it, but we would have, I think, a lot more lobbying power and clout, thank you, if we were to partner with some of the other cities that are either already housing designated or are going for that, and if we, I just think that's a better approach. So the really big one for me is just figuring out some way in the next year or two to kind of change that dynamic so that we're getting a little bit more credit for all the effort that we're taking. And frankly, some of the pain, the political pain that we're suffering as a city because of that, I think it will help. It will help. Actually, it'll help us move housing, our housing goals along. Softer retrofits. As Council Member Showalter pointed out, we don't wanna let any crisis go to waste and I feel like in this particular circumstance, we're waiting for the crisis to occur and I guarantee you when we have the next big one, there will be all sorts of political momentum to retrofit soft storage structures that haven't fallen down and I worry that we're going to lose lives if we don't act sooner than later and I would really prefer not to act after we have some sort of crisis that forces folks to act. And then the other big one is just, I know it's a hornet's nest, but there has to be construction liability reform for condominiums at some point. I don't know what the right answer is, but we're dealing with that in my current complex because we're approaching year 10. all the litigators come out of the woodwork and the insurance, it really affects the insurance right now and the HOA dues because it's almost impossible to insure condo complexes. Anyway, that's a whole nother can of worms. And the other items that were mentioned were fine with me. The only other thing that I would mention is to the extent that if there is any sort of legislation, I know I don't want to get into ALPRs, that's a totally separate bucket, but I am heartened by I didn't think it would be very successful, but I'm really impressed by the data that's coming out of San Francisco and the speed cameras and safety, especially in school zones and other areas. And so I think right now they've only authorized a certain number of jurisdictions to do that. And I think that any jurisdiction should have the option to at least try those. I think there are far fewer privacy implications associated with that. But especially if you set the thresholds high enough for speed and other things. But it's really hard and expensive for us to have the number of officers doing traffic enforcement constantly in those areas. And if some of that could be automated, I think we would end up with much, much safer streets. And I think the data is proving out that it's actually an effective way to really reduce fatalities and accidents and have an impact. So. That's the only other thing that I would add.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. there are a lot of new ideas and i think one of the things that we don't necessarily have to do with this platform but but over uh over time it might be good to think about a prioritization this the document over time risks becoming so sprawling that we'll have 400 000 different statements and it's not really clear what we care most about um when I think there are some themes that are emerging, I think, as clear priorities, including protecting our ability to impose a real property transfer tax, for instance. So I think that's something I won't be around for much longer, but maybe the next council could think about. There were a couple of things I wanted to suggest. So I appreciate Council Member Showalter bringing up the soft story retrofitting, seismic retrofitting issue. I was surprised that we've talked about this a few times and that wasn't in the list when that's been a concern for the city for a long time. I WANTED TO FLAG C33, WHICH IS A VERY LONG STATEMENT THAT, IN MY OPINION, IS A LITTLE BIT HARD TO PARSE. AND I WANTED TO SUGGEST A Having staff think through Sort of revisiting that to make it clearer about what we want to achieve and what I would suggest in particular is We were starting to see some in my opinion bad actor developers use the state density bonus law to reduce or eliminate our inclusionary housing requirements, and in particular, reducing either the number of affordable units that we would otherwise require or reducing the affordability of those units, which in my mind is just clearly antithetical to what the state density bonus law is supposed to do, which is provide incentives to provide affordable housing. So my suggestion or request would be for staff to think through this and suggest some language to basically say that we would support legislation that would enhance or strengthen the city's ability to impose inclusionary housing requirements and oppose efforts that allow developers to reduce the number of affordable units or the affordability of those units through the state density bonus law or through other mechanisms. And we'll see potentially one of those projects pretty soon. And actually, so I asked the question, I appreciate staff reminding us about the state density bonus law bill that the city of Mountain View ran with then assembly member Evan Lowe. I'm grateful to him for carrying the bill, and it's unfortunate it didn't go very far. But I think this is... especially if we start seeing this more and more i think this is a bill that we should uh think about running again um and and maybe you know scoping it where it's it's it's clearer what we're trying to achieve which is preserving affordability or creating affordable units so that would be and that personally that's my top priority um although there are a lot of really good ideas that my colleagues are suggesting um you know i i don't oppose treating pro-housing designated cities differently, but I do think we should be thoughtful in our advocacy. I don't, you know, there could be a time and a place when Cupertino becomes a pro-housing designated city and, you know, yes, I agree. So yes, hard to get, we have it, and it should mean, you know, it provides value for our city. So thinking through that, I think, is important. The last thing I would suggest is, you know, There's a statement regarding e-bikes, and we got a little bit of feedback from the community. I don't know what the statement should be, but I do think that we should advance safety and ensure protections for riders, but without discouraging or deterring the use of that technology. There are many people who will use an e-bike because it's convenient and easy, right? And if it becomes too onerous, then instead of using the e-bike, they might drive, right? So it would have the opposite impact if we over-regulate that technology. So again, sort of thinking through that language and In the supporting efforts, we want more people to use e-bikes. It's better than if they drive, but we also wanna make sure that they are safe to use, right? And that they're not causing challenges with multimodal facilities. So those are my suggestions. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. Council Member Hicks.

So in case, Mayor, you're keeping track, I agree with all the items that have been brought up by council members before. Okay. So I think that my bigger things are, I assume that we will be tracking all legislation related to SB 79, but I wanted to call out a few things that in particular that I would like us to pay attention to. Like Council Member Ramirez said before, all of these things Basically, each thing we bring up, you do thoughtfully, but I assume that that's, for example, you had said incentives for cities with pro-housing designation. I assume that applies to everything we lobby for, that we do it thoughtfully, that if it's bad legislation, even though it's under one of our rubrics, we won't go for it. But so that said, track all legislation related to SB 79 and particularly alternative plan implementation challenges. You know, I think from the previous... Previous meeting when this was on our agenda, we saw that our city was affected more than a lot of Bay Area cities, over 20% of our land mass. But also when I've looked up what cities are affected, a lot of them, even though their land mass is affected around BART stations, for example, the only thing really affected is a very giant parking lot. And that's really different than our situation where it's the heart of our economic vitality plan. So because we're so impacted, I think anything that might give us, anything that might intersect with our pro-housing designation, anything that might give us an extended timeline, to implement SB 79, and in particular, possibly allowing a statutory CEQA exemption, which is any legislation around that. That, you know, is one of the more time-consuming parts of the alternative plan implementation, in my understanding. And let's see if I had any others. Yeah, and anything protecting, I think transportation-oriented development works best if it's mixed use, not purely housing. So anything that protects a mixture of uses, any legislation that speaks to that in a thoughtful way. So that's one. a bunch of things under the rubric of tracking legislation related to SB 79 and the alternative plan. A second one is there's been a lot of changes in how homelessness is addressed, both statewide and federally. And I'm hearing some talk of how it might be, I know this is a ways out, but Better to talk early and also I will not be on council when it's closer. Any talk about how homelessness is covered in the housing element? I've heard rumors that, how do I say this politely, seem like they might just dump solutions on some cities. I think everybody needs to pitch in on this one. So I would like to be a part of this discussion. I think that people of all income groups have family members who have drug, alcohol, and mental health problems and end up homeless. And so I think all of us need to do our fair share. And I want to make sure that the next housing element has everyone do their fair share and has ways of doing that. In particular, maybe adding a 15% AMI designation might be one way, but again, do it thoughtfully, look at all different approaches. The rest of mine are kind of minor, so I think I'm going to skip. You want to hear them? I don't mind. Okay. So I would like to see legislation that allows or encourages addition of worker housing to offices and other, so not to disallow that. If an area is zoned for office, I have seen certain offices allow people to park their people who are doing cleaning for the office park their RV there in the parking lot and use the restrooms, I think there might be better solutions. I've seen public storage, including bedrooms for people who are managing them, I think there's an opportunity for workers who are having trouble finding affordable housing to have that sort of carved out of various places, offices and public storage and so forth. And I would hate to disallow that or have people doing it in secret. So any legislation around that? I would also like any legislation that facilitates offices used as homeless transitional housing. I know there's talk of, in San Jose in particular and other cities, of turning offices to housing, to apartments basically. That's pretty hard to do. because of some of the infrastructural changes that are needed. But to use them as transitional housing, I think could be a pretty quick fix for a lot of people and kind of a game changer in the way that, do I call it retrofitting hotels, has sometimes been. So that's another thing I would be interested to see. That's it.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you Council Member Hicks. Council Member Kamei, did you have anything you wanted to add to the platforms?

Thanks, Mayor. No, I think colleagues have been good about adding. I just want to take the opportunity to thank staff, as well as our state and federal lobbyists who've been helping us achieve some of our goals. I mean, over $3 million of federal earmarks during this administration, I think is a really huge win for our city, our community, our residents. as well as you know things that we're monitoring um in the state level being able to work and i know advocate for um in in our in our capital so i want to take a moment because our you know state platform we've only had for what is it four years going into year five and then just one year with our federal advocacy and i think we've really made momentum so i also want to like thank colleagues for moving in this direction i think We had discussed it for a while and then took the plunge in this direction. And I think we're seeing all our hard work and forward thinking pay off. So I just wanted to take that opportunity. And in that vein, really hoping that we can educate our residents on these accomplishments that we've been able to make. I don't know if staff has an idea of how we're going to be able to roll that out and educate our community about these exciting new funds that we'll be able to use for our community, but would love to be able to make sure that we're connecting the dots on the direct, we're hearing directly from the community, we're using that to inform our legislative platform. And we're translating that into resources into our city. And so I think that would be a really great thing for us to be able to elevate. So thanks.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. I'll finish up before we take our five to 10 minute break so that staff can capture major themes and then read it back to us. I agree with pretty much most of what my colleagues have asked for. I'll do a heavy emphasis on condo liability reform. I think that is one of the, We're at a time where I think it's a strike iron now that's hot kind of thing, because I do believe that there's a lot of action going towards it. And we really, it's not that we don't, it's not anything against renters. We just, it's, we want that option to be homeowners to be available. Like you can't have barriers to it kind of thing. I also support the single stairway reform as well. The big thing is I'm thinking about like, is this a good idea, is this not? But I mean, I'm just gonna go for it. In the federal platform, someone from public comment mentioned about immigration. And I did notice that we didn't mention, and I know it's something that's actually kind of scary for our partners helping us lobby to the federal government. It is a very antagonistic relationship on certain policies, but I do think we should still hold certain policies. As we mentioned, we are a community And so we care for our residents, all our residents, regardless of immigration status. And so we should support legislation or oppose legislation that causes harm to them. I guess that, I don't know how we would address that. Our federal advocacy program is still so new, and so it's hard for us to navigate through that. And this is a very unprecedented times when it comes to our federal government. So I know that we need to approach that very carefully, but I would love us to at least find a way to address it. I see Council Member McAllister.

Yeah, I just want to add a question about the condo. So there's also the ability to condo conversions to take existing apartments and do that. So I don't know if it's that legislative thing or is that something internal that the city can do? I'm not totally... privy to that idea. So if that's any part of that, that would be helpful too, so that we get them to build them or that if they're taking a building and they want to convert it, that that's also taken care of too.

So just to get both ends of that going.

And I did also want to comment on, Council Member Ramirez, I agree with him that this is rather robust of number of items. And if there's some way that you can, and I'm sure you could consolidate it to really get the meatier items in there so that when we do talk about it, we don't lose the, I've started reading so many of them, they started blending together seriously how they were very common in a lot of respects. And so if that's possible to consolidate and beef up the ones that we really want to get done, then I think that will be good for the community, for our advisors, and for the council.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. I see your hand up, Council Member Kamei.

Thank you. I'm sorry, Mayor. The time difference is already getting to me. So I agree with you on how we can double tap on our community for all. And I was thinking about that because Senator Becker co-sponsored Senator Wiener's bill on the No Kings Act. And so I actually don't think it's just a part of a legislative or sorry, a state or federal side. It's also for the state. Sorry. So I'd love to be able to adopt it for both our state and federal advocacy. I was looking through our list of priorities. I don't know if it can something that can fit under, you know, bucket D, or bucket J. But I think maybe a statement kind of similar to what we've done before just supporting legislation that reaffirms communities for all or something like that and get something super broad and then kind of gives us the ability to be supportive would be something that we could add that would just be a suggestion. But thank you for bringing that up. I had meant to say that as well. But thanks.

Thank you, Councilmember Kamea. I didn't even think about adding it in the state legislation.

I was like, Oh, that's actually I think there's gonna be a lot at the state. So

probably more impactful at the state actually, so then kind of just yelling at cloud kind of feeling. All right, so with that, do we have any other comments or, oh, go ahead, Council Member Clark.

Just very quick, in terms of prioritization, I mean, I think you've heard some themes. In terms of prioritization for this year, especially at the state, if there are legislative vehicles that we can, that exists, those are the conversations that we should, it sounds like Buffy Wicks has something around maybe condo liability reform based on what Senator Becker said. I don't know if there is a legislative vehicle for software arrests, it's important to me, but if there doesn't exist a vehicle, then maybe this year unfortunately isn't the right time. But it sounds like there might be a legislative vehicle some of the pro-housing city items that we talked about. So I think that's just a given that we'll prioritize the ones that we will actually sort of move, maybe move forward this year at the state level and the others are more just themes, at least that's my opinion.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. And with that, we will take our five to 10 minute break. So we will, it is 19.02 now, so we'll take a 10 minute break and we'll come back at 19.12. All right, welcome back everyone. I call this meeting back to order at 19.20. So now we have our staff bringing us back up to what we all came up with.

Thank you, Mayor. So staff took notes from council's feedback and based on what we heard mentioned by two or more council members, we have seven items or seven themes that we heard that the council would like to have added to the regional and state legislative platform. So I will read out the themes and then we will confirm that we have a council consensus for these themes. So the first would be pro-housing city flexibility. This is an added statement and edit to item C33 within the existing or the proposed legislative platform. Funding for soft story retrofits. condo liability barriers, property transfer tax, which is an existing proposed statement for A17, community for all, SB 79 alternative plan timelines, which is also an existing proposed statement for C32, and finally, single stair reform.

Sounds great, Councilmember Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I know these are themes, but I feel like for the first item, it may be worth breaking it up into two separate things. Pro-housing city flexibility is important, and I agree is one of the themes that emerged from the discussion. But I think that's different from state density bonus law reform or revision to ensure that cities can continue to enforce local inclusionary housing ordinances. So maybe clarifying that first one to differentiate the two. Thank you.

Council Member Showalter.

Yeah I think I was the one who talked the most about the reach codes but no one objected and I wondered if there was any other interest in adding protecting reach codes.

Yeah I see a lot of nodding heads on my colleagues. So should we how would we treat items that only one council member mentioned therefore not on the thing but

So we have another slide, excuse me, we have another slide that shows the other items that we captured that was only mentioned by one council member. I can go through those as well if you would like.

Okay, so there's a separate slide. There's a second slide. So for, moving on from this slide, do you want us to have like a straw poll being like, yes, this one, okay.

That would be great, thank you.

So... Are we good? All right, everyone in favor of these added legislative items, please raise your hand. Unanimous, wait, yes, I see Council Member McKay. Unanimous, all right, shall we move on to the next slide?

Okay, and so the next slide shows several items that were mentioned by one council member. So starting with reach codes, stormwater management, automated license plate readers, speed camera pilot programs, ADA frivolous lawsuits, which is an existing statement in E8, CEQA tribal consults, e-bike safety without over-regulation, which is an existing proposed statement in K-20, TOD mixed use, homelessness and housing element, housing as part of office and public storage use, and office conversions to transitional housing.

Thank you. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna treat this like a consent calendar. and if people want to withdraw any of those items, we can vote on it separately, but then everything else that stays on there, we could do a straw poll on that. Does that sound like a plan? Okay, okay, so does anyone want to pull anything from these items? I see Councilmember Clark.

It's less to pull and just, I don't know which of those, even have, I keep saying legislative vehicles, sorry, but have anything in the hopper this year, because if they don't, then it's fine for us to identify themes, but I don't think they really rise to the level of priority this year for me. So like automated license plate readers, I don't know if there's any legislation coming this year or any of the other stuff, but some of these vehicles, Some of these things are just empty, so who knows what they'll be. But anyway, I just wanted to point that out. These are all great, but I don't want to focus time and energy on things that probably aren't even going to move forward in this session.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I don't want to pull anything either. I agree. They're all important. Maybe a slightly different spin from the way the Vice Mayor placed it, but COUNCILMEMBER MCALISTER SAID IT'S GOOD TO PRIORITIZE AND MAYBE THIS IS WHY I THINK IT DIDN'T SHOW UP IN EITHER SLIDE BUT MAYBE IT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR THE COUNCIL IF WE AGREE TO GIVE STAFF DIRECTION TO THINK ABOUT MAYBE HAVING SORT OF LIKE HERE ARE OUR HIGHER PRIORITY ITEMS AND HERE'S IN CASE SOMETHING COMES UP SERENDIPITOUSLY OR SOME OTHER WAY OF DIFFERENTIATING THE THINGS THAT WE WANT TO FOCUS ON FROM Like, this is good to have in our program, but it's not the priority for today.

I'm not entirely sure how to put that in a straw poll. But as no one seems to be pulling any items, we can move forward on this slide. Oh, wait. Oh, Ms. Audrey? Or City, Acting City Attorney Audrey Seymour? City Manager. Why do I keep on mixing that up?

Thank you, Mayor, Council. I think that a prioritization of the entire platform would probably be a difficult achievement for a return adoption, and I'm not hearing that that's what's being suggested, but just perhaps some things get highlighted as being of a higher priority, in which case the prior slide of things that had more council members speaking to those things might be things that we would would note in that way and that would be an easier thing than trying to go through the entire platform to prioritize. There's alternative ways to address this list as well. Reach codes was one that I think maybe you had, I saw the nodding as you brought it up but not the people commenting towards it. and you may or may not feel that same way as a council for this entire list. It's certainly up to you to prioritize more within this list.

That sounds good. We will now go, before I go back to Council Member McAllister, I'll go to Council Member Kamei.

Thanks so much, Mayor. And through you, maybe I can just get clarity from staff. So I think the way I view our legislative platform and our priorities every year is talking about the different themes that fall into our seven priorities. And so with these different additions, I would suspect that staff would take these and put those under the different, you know, buckets. um through you know that are that are called out and listed out my understanding was rather than it being necessarily like a proactive exercise at this juncture it would be kind of like a monitoring and so for the different items that we adopt in our platform because it's so robust that both our state and federal partners are looking and flagging for us any legislation if we want to do letters of support or any advocacy or If they're seeing anything coming that might be a bill that we want to kind of weigh in on, similar to kind of what we saw with like the Unlock Act. So I would feel comfortable, and maybe I'm misinterpreting how we do our legislative process, but I would be comfortable adding everything that colleagues recommended because it kind of gives us this broad portfolio with which we can kind of track as different legislation comes in. I don't know that I would feel ready to prioritize it at this point. I would just kind of want to adopt and kind of see how things go throughout the legislative process this year. I mean, that's how I have envisioned our adoption of the legislative platform and priorities. And I think what has happened in the past is staff has also been, if they've heard certain things that we've said, or the community has brought certain bills that they want us to support, we've also done that. So it's also iterative. So I do, you know, I just wanted to share that because I feel comfortable adding, having them put them in the different kind of tranches and them keeping us apprised as the legislative cycle continues. And I don't know if staff wants to weigh in and comment, but that's been my understanding. Thanks.

Assistant City Manager.

Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor and Council Member Kamei. Yes, we certainly can have these items in and we have different types of actions that we take in the advocacy process and sometimes it's just a watch and monitor. Sometimes it goes all the way towards sponsoring legislation. So having these there as things that we can act on should there become an opportunity certainly is very possible.

Great, thank you. Council Member McAllister.

One way to prioritize things is, like the reasons that I brought up the ADA frivolous lawsuits, that was in legislation last year. They was trying to get that moving along. So there's some activity in the house. Same with e-bikes, that's being done. So one way to say, hey, let's prioritize things that are actually happening at the State Capitol that's hot topics and so that way. our consultants can say, okay, yeah, this is going, we actually have something to worry, working on, and let's get the momentum and push it forward. So that's one way to look at things, to get it going, if it's active on the house up there. And that's why I advocate for frivolous lawsuits, because we need it.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. So it looks like, No one's pulling anything away from this, it looks like. So on this list, does everyone feel comfortable including it into our platform? Please raise your hand if you are. Yay, unanimous. On to the next item. Or next slide.

Oh, no more slides? That concludes the council input. So with that, staff will take these themes back. We'll work with our legislative advocates and our department heads to develop policy statements and incorporate them into the platform and bring that back for council adoption on February 24th.

Wonderful, so that looks like that is our items. Thank you so much to our lobbyists who are doing those big works in our state and federal capital. I'm excited to move forward with our platform and seeing how we can push some weight in Sacramento to make things a lot easier for our city and our residents. I'll be excited to work with all of you. Put me in, coach, let's go. All right, we are now moving on to our regular session. We could do like a five minute break. Oh, that was sarcasm, okay. All right, so let's move on to our 6.30 regular session. We'll begin with a call to order. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the regular meeting of the Mountain View City Council of February 10, 2026. Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, and next, the city clerk will take attendance by roll call.

Council Member Hicks? Here. Council Member Comey? Here. Council Member McAllister.

Yep.

Council Member Ramirez. Here. Council Member Showalter.

Here. Vice Mayor Clark. Here.

Mayor Ramos. Here. Eva Quorum. Thank you. And as we have a council member participating remotely, all votes will be taken by roll call this evening. So now we move on to item three, presentations. Please note, these are presentations only. The city council will not take any action. Public comment will occur after the presentation items. If you would like to speak on these items in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now. So we are moving on to 3.1, Black History Month Proclamation. We are happy to be joined this evening by City Attorney Jennifer Logue to accept this proclamation. Jennifer, would you join me at the lectern? All right, the proclamation reads, whereas the city of Mountain View takes pride in recognizing February as Black History Month, celebrating the many notable contributions that the people of African descent have made to our community, state, and country. And whereas the theme for the 2026 Black History Month, designed by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is A Century of Black History Commemorations, and this theme marks the 100th anniversary of the first Negro History Week, established by Dr. Carter G. Woodson in 1926, And whereas inequity and injustice still lingers in our cities, state, and country, and it should be the aspiration and responsibility of every resident to advance the American ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. We honor the contributions of black residents who have enriched our community through their leadership, service, and cultural contributions. Now, therefore, I, Emily Ann Ramos, Mayor of the City of Mountain View, along with my colleagues on the City Council, do hereby proclaim the month of February as Black History Month in the City of Mountain View and call upon all residents to reflect on the significant achievements of black Americans. Would you like to say a few words?

Yes, please. Thank you. First, I'd just like to say thank you very much, Mayor, for the honor of asking me to accept this proclamation. It is very much appreciated. Black History Month is an opportunity to reflect on the enduring contributions, resilience, and leadership of Black Americans. Black History Month is not separate from American history. It is an essential part of the institution's laws, economy, culture, and democratic ideals we live with today. This month invites both celebration and reflection, while also challenging us to continue to work the work of building institutions and communities that are fair and inclusive and just. I accept this proclamation not on my own behalf, but in honor of the many organizations, leaders, educators, advocates, and community members who do the hard, often quiet work of advancing equity, inclusion, and opportunity every day. Their efforts strengthen our community and help ensure that everyone feels seen, valued, and respected. Thank you again for the recognition and for the city's continued commitment to being a community for all, a place where diversity is not only acknowledged, but is embraced as a source of strength.

All right, now for our next proclamation, Lunar New Year. We are happy to be joined this evening by one of our graduates of the Chinese Language Civic Leadership Academy to accept this proclamation. Will you join me at the lectern? Right here, and then I'll read it out. So the proclamation reads, whereas today we commemorate Lunar New Year and join families in Mountain View and around the world in welcoming the year of the horse, and whereas the Lunar New Year, predominantly celebrated by millions of Asian and Pacific Islander Californians, including people of Chinese, Korean, Singaporean, and Vietnamese heritage, among others, is a time of joy and renewal, On this special day, families gather to celebrate and prepare for the arrival of a new year of good health and prosperity. Across the state, parades, community events, and family meals illustrate the rich cultural history and diversity that define California. And whereas we look forward to a joyous new year, we proudly reflect on the contributions of Asian and Pacific Islander Californians who literally built California from America's first transcontinental railroad to the farms and small businesses foundational to our state's economy. We also recognize that discriminatory laws, xenophobic policies, and mistreatment suffered by Asian and Pacific Islander Californians are a blight on our state's history. And whereas today in rejecting past prejudice and embracing inclusion, let us join our Asian and Pacific Islander friends and neighbors in celebration. We also encourage California schools to take time to educate our students about the traditions of Lunar New Year and the past and present contributions of the Asian and Pacific Islander community in our state. And whereas, as the door to the year of the horse opens, we wish good fortune, health, and happiness to all those who celebrate. Now, therefore, I, Emily Ann Ramos, Mayor of the City of Mountain View, along with my colleagues on the City Council, do hereby proclaim February 17th as Lunar New Year. Would you like to say a few words?

Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you so much for this proclamation and for the city's continued support of our fourth Lunar New Year celebration on February 27th. Lunar New Year is an important cultural tradition for many feminists in our community. and we deeply appreciate the city's recognition of its value and its commitment to inclusion and cultural celebration. This support helps bring people together, strengthens community connections, and honors the diversity that makes our city so special. On behalf of our community, thank you again for your partnership and continuous support.

Thank you.

Would any member of the Council like to say a few words? Council Member Hicks.

Well, I just wanted to thank Jennifer for all her hard work, or City Attorney Logue, and point out that in celebration of your accepting it, you will be leading the next item on the agenda. Is that on our agenda? Is that true? Thank you.

Yes, I will be leading the next item.

The best way to celebrate a proclamation. So as I promised in my inaugural speech, I always lead one of the council meetings with a call to action and call to service and a call to community. And so with that, just a small announcement as we move mentioned with the Lunar New Year Proclamation. The applications for the 2026 Chinese Leadership Academy are now open. We recommend people to this free eight week long program that's now, the applications are now open through Friday, March 6th for Chinese Mountain View residents to apply. The city of Mountain View holds, it's the third Chinese language civic leadership academy in March 2026. The Chinese Leadership Academy is a free eight-week long program for Chinese-speaking Mountain View residents. The program is designed to improve participants' understanding of local government and city services. Through the program, participants are encouraged to increase their civic engagement, leadership, and volunteerism in the community. The academy also prepares individuals to serve on city council advisory bodies and committees, so we highly recommend people to sign up and join. It's a really good opportunity and one that a lot of neighboring cities are very jealous of our program. All right, I see no other hands from our council. We will now take public comment for presentation items. Will any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment? on the presentation items listed on the agenda. If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in-person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes. I see no hands up, so we will close public comment on our presentation items. We will now move on to item four, consent calendar. These items will be approved by one motion unless any member of the council wishes to pull an item for individual consideration. If an item is pulled from the consent calendar, it will be considered separately following an approval of the balance of the consent calendar. If you would like to speak on these items or the next item, oral communications on non-agenda items in person, Please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now. Would any member of the council like to pull an item? Council Member McAllister.

I have questions on 4.1 and 4.2.

Just questions or are you not pulling?

If I pull and ask a question, what's the difference? I'll just pull four questions.

Which one are you pulling?

4.1, 4.2. I'm not pulling them, I just have questions.

Okay, so yeah. Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, I would like to pull 4.2 so we can have a brief description of the project from the staff. I understand staff is here ready to do that and I see that this project, the transit center grade separation, it's something, an access project, it's something that is of interest to many people in the community and how we're gonna do this pedestrian, the pedestrian improvements and bike improvements. People just wanna hear about it. So I am not in any way opposed to it. I just would like to raise the awareness.

Council Member Clark.

If we want a presentation or something like that, do we need to pull the item for a separate vote or can we do the presentation and discussion just without actually doing a separate vote informally?

You do not need to pull the items for the information that's being requested or to ask a question. It's fine to have those questions answered and the information shared and then you can vote on both items together.

All right, so that's probably what we'll do. So we'll start with Council Member McAllister. Feel free to ask your questions for both 4.1 and 4.2.

Well, Council Member Showalter sort of explained I will follow up on once they give a presentation on 4.2. So that was one of my questions there. On 4.1, I just had one question. Had ever the thought, and I don't know if I brought this up before, was there any consideration to leasing the land, long-term lease? And was there a possibility of, and if we did, what kind of revenue could we generate for the city?

Good evening, Jennifer Ng, the Public Works Director here at the City. So this item before you for the notice of intention to vacate Fairmont Avenue was actually brought to the City Council last year in November of 2025. The reason why it's being brought forward again is because the public hearing date has changed. Originally, the project was going to be heard in December, but because the new date is now March, we need to re-notice the intention to vacate this piece of public street. So your question of did we discuss previously whether or not to do a long-term lease instead of selling the land, that question did come up previously. It was determined that the lease of the land would not provide what the developer needed in order to have a cohesive development project. This piece of street is bisecting their project, and in order for it to be a comprehensive project, it needs to be basically one block. one cohesive piece of land. To answer your question of what type of revenue could the city see if it were to be leased, it's pretty marginal. Estimates from our real estate group are putting this around $150,000 a year.

So over time, it would think so. Was there any talk about putting in arts at one time? This came along, some of this project was started before I came on board. Was there any? thought of an arch over that street?

I haven't been here that long. I've only been here 15, 16 months, so I don't have the full-on history. I have not heard of any mention of an arch going over Fairmont previous.

Okay. Well, thank you. You're welcome. Okay. To finish this one up, I'm going to register a no vote on 4.1.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Hicks.

I just have a question for City Attorney Logue. I've been recused in the past from this project. I think out of an abundance of caution, and because I have not even spoken about this in any way and always been recused, I will continue to recuse myself from this.

Yes, you can recuse, you don't have to leave. And I actually thought I heard that, but I guess we didn't get an email to you, but you can recuse without leaving since it's a consent. Yes, I will be doing that.

All right, thank you, Council Member Hicks. I guess the next thing is the presentation on 4.2 that staff has presented.

Or brief explanation, it might be. Brief explanation.

Not sure which. Yeah, my apologies. I don't have a formal presentation prepared, but a quick explanation of what the project is. Maybe I'll start similar to the other question and just start with a little bit of history and background. So once upon a time, we were moving forward as a city with two great separations in the city, one at Castro and one at Rangsdorf. About 2023, we got word published We got word that the cost estimates for both of those projects had grossly exceeded the amount of money that the city had put aside for both projects. And in early 2024, city council made a difficult decision to prioritize Rangsdorf as the grade separation project that we were going to move forward with. Good news for all of you. That one's proceeding on track. But we're here to talk about Castro tonight. And so when the city council made the difficult decision to prioritize Rengstorf, a simplified project to close off Castro Street to vehicular movements, at the rails was conceived and approved. And so the project in essence is to create some permanent improvements to close off vehicular access in the northbound and southbound movements crossing the rail tracks and to keep pedestrian and bicycle access across Central Expressway north to Moffett Boulevard and south to the downtown intact. Along the way, we'll be making some improvements, creating a plaza. We'll be creating some bike lanes along Evelyn. Evelyn from Hope to the west will be turned into a one-way westerly directional street with either class two or class four bike lanes along it. There'll be some traffic signal modifications, some ADA curb ramps. those kind of things that come with civil improvements.

Council Member Clark, do you have a question?

Just a quick follow-up. So if we were to, if infrastructure funding were to materialize in the next few years, how difficult would it be to revive the pedestrian and bicycle under crossing there? Or are we kind of just writing it off?

It's about $271 million was our estimate in 2023. So if a giant bucket of money fell from the sky and we found $271 million, I believe as a city we would, obviously you guys would have a vote in that, but I believe we would resurrect, is that the right word? Resurrect the Castro grade separation as fully originally envisioned.

Okay, but nothing we would do tonight would preclude us from doing that, or none of these improvements would preclude that? Correct, correct.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member McAllister.

So I had a couple questions. I always like to get data, and part of your plan here is to reroute traffic, and you're gonna take it from the main street through some of the smaller streets, Was there a traffic count done before or afters to see what kind of impact rerouting cars from Evelyn through Bryant and Franklin streets?

Traffic count in terms of number of vehicles that would have to reroute?

Yeah, because you're taking them off Villa. I mean, you're taking them off Villa and you're going to put them on Evelyn for those cars that are going westbound down Evelyn.

So this was envisioned as a long-term interim project. I guess it's sort of long-term permanent. Traffic counts were done original to the grades. The transit center project was the original master plan for this project. At that time, and when we were going to do the full grade separation, there was a connection envisioned from Evelyn up to Shoreline Boulevard. So there'd be a direct TN connection. Traffic counts were done back in 2019 for that. I don't have those exact numbers for you right now tonight, but I can follow up certainly if you would like that data.

This is related to figure 10, vehicle circulation. So that's where I was concerned. That was my question. Because you have them going down on... Okay, I mean, when we start redoing traffic, it helps to have some data to go with. So now when you said the 275, that was the full blown thing and it appears that our desire to do a full grade crossing is not realistic, but a pedestrian bike may be more realistic. So with that in mind, what are we trying to accomplish with all this bike lanes, this diagonals, are we trying to simplify it? Are we trying to make it simple? Or are we just, is it possible a case of over engineering where we got a class two lane, then it goes to class four, et cetera. And so what is the goal of this deal? Is to move bodies or, help me out here.

First and foremost, the goal is safety, right? So closing off the intersection between the rail and the vehicles is going to eliminate a point of conflict that is going to be a safety improvement for our community. Another piece of safety that we're looking at is having a wider and singular point of crossing of the rail crossing on the east side of the rail connection with Castro Street. And what that does is it provides a nice and comfortable 15-foot wide pedestrian walkway to get across the rail tracks. We'd be making the necessary ADA improvements, and we would be making sure that, once again, the number of conflicts between PEDs and bikes and potentially rail would be reduced to only one location.

So part of it, you start with a Class 2 bike lane, and then you upgrade it to a Class 4 along the Castro. Why is that programmed in like that?

Class four is generally seen as bicyclists as less stress of a bike facility because there is a separation of a vertical element between typically bicyclists and vehicles. So a class two regular bike lane is just a stripe on the street and it's really just a six inch stripe that's separating the bike lane from a vehicular lane. A class four bike lane typically will have some sort of width of buffer, along with some sort of vertical element, whether it's a channelizer or like the paddles that you see out on El Camino Real, or really in fancy cases, you could put up a vertical curb.

So on Evelyn, you're considering taking out 10 parking spaces to put in bike lanes. Do you anticipate what makes, what information makes you think that there's gonna be bicyclists going down Evelyn versus going down some other streets to take out those parking lanes and put in those bike lanes?

Well, Evelyn Avenue is part of the countywide VTA multimodal bike network. And so it is identified as one of those elements in a countywide plan, right? So it's more than just the city of Mountain View that is looking at Evelyn Avenue as a connector. So we would anticipate that based off of that and other plans and maps that we have for envisioned build out of our bike network that this would be a amenity that could be used in the community. We did talk a little bit about the loss of parking in the last CTC meeting that we had at the end of last year. Staff did take a commitment to take a look at how parking elimination could be really reduced. I know that's a double negative, but how we could retain parking. So we committed to taking a hard look at that design to seeing if there was any way to reconfigure to try to save some parking spaces. noting that there are businesses nearby.

Was there, were you, I think I had one of my last question was, is there possible if we can take, are we taking money from the Castro project and applying it to Ring Store?

Yeah, so back in 2024, when Council made the decision to move forward with the Rengstorf project, it was decided that we would retain the city's portion of the local match for Castro, which is roughly a little over six million for this simplified project. The rest of the Measure B money that was previously, 2016 Measure B money, I should clarify that, the rest of that money that was previously earmarked at that time for the Castro grade separation then was transferred over to the Rangsdorf grade separation project in order to make that project whole financially and continue on.

How much is this project costing?

Overall project is just a little over $6 million. Construction is anticipated at our estimate right now to be about $4.2 million.

$6 million to put in bike lanes and reconfigure the streets?

It's building quite a bit of civil improvements as the rail interface with Castro. We're planning on building a plaza. There are some stormwater improvements. We're putting in some trees along Evelyn to the west of the transit center. And so we're really trying to make this a nice project with the money that we have.

OK, thank you. Appreciate it.

You're welcome.

No, I was just understanding the process here.

So since it was pulled, we'll have a single vote on this because Council Member Showalter pulled it.

I clarified that if the purpose for pulling it was to ask questions and get information that it was not necessary to pull it and that the Council could still act on the consent calendar with one vote. If there are no votes for either item, Council Members can specify.

Okay, so I'll make my comment then and then we can do it. I'm also going to register a no vote on this one. I think I'm not still clear about the amount of money that we're spending on some of these projects. I hope as we go through these various processes of putting things in that we start looking at the data a little more. We're looking at is there a way to accomplish the same thing with a little less money. And some people say it's not a lot of money, but $6 million is quite a bit. And we're not generating a lot of revenue. I still believe in safety, but sometimes a second fresh eyes are important to take a look at something like that. So those are my comments and we'll go from there. Thank you.

Council Member Hicks.

Yeah, I just was going to briefly thank the council members who highlighted this because I think it is of great interest to the community. And when I first saw it on consent and read the title, which is Transit Center Grade Separation and Access Project, I was like, oh my gosh, they're bringing it back and they put it on consent? How did I miss that? I WANT TO SAY TO MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC WHO ARE INTERESTED, THE COUNCIL TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE DID TALK ABOUT THIS AT LENGTH AND THAT SHOULD BE RECORDED AND AVAILABLE IF YOU WANT MORE, EVEN MORE INFORMATION THAN IN THIS HIGHLIGHTED SESSION TONIGHT. AND IN ADDITION, A PART OF THIS, OF WHAT THE RECOMMENDATION TONIGHT IS TO AMEND THE TITLE NAME FROM GRADE, TRANSIT CENTER GRADE SEPARATION, ET CETERA, to Castro and Evelyn bike and pedestrian improvements project, which is appropriate given the changes that are happening. So I hope that further clarifies what's going on.

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on these items? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in-person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes. I see no one in the queue and I see no one's hands up. So we will now bring this back for council action and note that a motion to approve the consent calendar should also include reading the title of the resolution attached to consent calendar item 4.1. As a reminder, all votes will be taken by roll call this evening. And council member Hicks will be recusing herself on item 4.2. All right, I see a motion by Council Member Showalter, seconded by Council Member Ramirez. Take it away, Council Member, oh, wait.

I need to read it, right?

Yes.

Yes, okay, well, I would like to move the consent calendar, and that includes reading item 4.1, adopt resolution of intention of the City of Mountain View The City Council of the City of Mountain View to vacate a public street and easement at 881 Castro Street to be read in title only, further reading waived, and set a date for a public hearing to consider the vacation for March 10th, 2026.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. City, Assistant City Manager Audrey Seymour.

I was just noting that I saw a hand up with Council Member Kamei and I wanted to give her that opportunity to speak if she wished to. Yes, Council Member Kamei.

Thanks. Thanks so much, Mayor. Thanks, Mr. Remberg. So I just wanted to also vote no on item 4.1. And then for 4.2, thanks for the conversation about the transit center. That item actually came to CTC, I want to say, two or three times. And that might be the reason we've had ongoing discussion at CTC. So I think there will be quite a few meetings that people would be able to watch. But we got a lot of public comment at those meetings, both in person, virtually, as well as written. So hopefully all colleagues got that too. Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you. I guess now we will bring it to a vote. We have to do a roll call.

Did we have a motion and a second?

We did from Council Member Showalter and then seconded by Council Member Ramirez. Let's have the roll call vote.

Council Member Showalter?

Yes.

Council Member Ramirez?

Yes.

Council Member Hicks?

Yes, with recusal on 4.1.

Council Member Kamei? Yes, no on 4.1. Council Member McAllister?

No, no.

Vice Mayor Clark?

Yes.

Mayor Ramos? Yes. Motion carries.

All right. Before, we are now at item number five, oral communications. I would like to make an announcement before we move into public comment on non-agenda items. We understand that there has been significant interest in the city's automated license plate reader pilot program. Last week, Mountain View's automated license plate reader's cameras were turned off. Our police chief, Mike Canfield, decided to shut off the cameras after a police department initiated audit discovered that Mountain View's data has been accessed by federal and state law enforcement agencies in violation of our approved policies. Based on the information available, there is no indication that federal access was used to support immigration enforcement activity during the three-month period in 2024, where the Flock Safety nationwide search function was enabled on the first camera that was installed. In early January, as part of the police audit, staff also discovered and turned off a quote, statewide search function that had been enabled without their awareness. It is very concerning and disappointing that this happened. At the same time, we are aware of how this technology has helped our police department in their ability to investigate burglaries, home break-ins, and a reported kidnapping, which protects our community. We also recognize that the most important tool for public safety is the trust of our community. Thank you to the community members who have contacted the city council and me on this matter. At our next meeting on Tuesday, February 24th, my council colleagues and I will vote on whether to formally end the contract with Block Safety. Now onto item five, this portion of the meeting is reserved for persons wishing to address the Council on any matter not on the agenda. Speakers are allowed to speak on any topic within the City Council's subject matter jurisdiction for up to three minutes during this section. State law prohibits the Council from acting on non-agenda items. If you would like to speak on this item or the next item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now. Would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes. We will start with Greg Herrera. After Greg, we'll have John Scarborough and then Eva Tang, followed by Albert Jeans.

Good evening. First time here. My name's Bill Herrera, Greg Herrera. I'm owner of Family and Bills Towing. I tow a lot of motorhomes for you people, and they're very expensive. And you have a project in place, but it's confusing the way they want me to tow them and hold them. It's cost me like $14,000 per unit to keep for 30 days. and the city cuts it down where they only want to fund me $3,500 for disposal only, not for towing it, not for storing it, not for taking the garbage out, not getting rid of the stuff inside, the fuel. There's a lot of cost to it. I don't think the city knows, and I just want to bring it to your attention that we could try to address it to pay for this fee. Because I was able to do one a month, just do it for business-wise, but now I'm getting three or four a week, and they're getting to be expensive. It's costing the business money. We have to tell them for the city to stay on rotation. So I'm trying to see if we could talk about how we deal with the expense of getting rid of these motorhomes that you want us to get rid of. Any comments how we go forward with this?

We're not allowed to take action on items that are not on the agenda. This is open public comment, so this is your time to speak. And we might take action in a future meeting.

So where do I go from here? I talked to you, so now what happens? You can't talk?

Madam Mayor, our police chief is in the audience and would be happy to follow up with the speaker.

Thank you, so you could follow up with our police chief.

All right, thank you.

Thank you. All right, Mr. Scarborough. After Mr. Scarborough is Eva, and then after Eva is Albert.

Hello again. City council members, John Scarborough, as mentioned. And I thought it was really great that we had the party in downtown Mountain View on Saturday. It was great. I caught the last bit of it. The energy was great. Met some people I've not seen in a while. So that was really a good surprise. And I think it's really good that we have that space to bring our community together and just, you know, I don't think, I thank y'all enough for having that space there and for the other things we have. One thing that I don't think is building our community very well is having the surveillance data and having it get out and potentially be used by hostile agencies that are targeting people in our community, people in communities all over the country. So I'm really heartened when I got the announcement from the police chief saying that he was shutting them down. And I went out two days later and checked out the ones on Ringstorf. The one near Central had blue lights on. The one up near San Luis had the blue lights on. Plus, every time a car went by, the LED illuminators would just flicker like that as if it was still on. And I understand from the mayor that there was some delay turning it off. But... They're electronic. They're Internet of Things. They should be able to be turned off immediately, so I don't understand that. Anyway, I don't think we can trust that company, and I think that we need, I understand that there have been efforts to make sure that the data is not getting out anymore, that they are truly not being used, but I don't trust them. I think we should cover up the cameras and remove them as soon as we can. Thank you.

Thank you. Next we have Eva Tang followed by Albert Jeans. Mr. Jeans, feel free to make your way up so we don't have to wait for.

Mayor, I am requesting permission to move about the chambers during my comment. I, sorry, let's try that again. Mayor, I am requesting permission to move about the chambers during my comment.

The problem is that we won't be able, the people who are on Zoom wouldn't be able to hear you.

Oh, no, that's fine. Because I'm just going to do this. Because I was right. I know it's obnoxious to rub it in your face like that, but I've spent years making public comment, meeting you personally, serving on PSAB itself, and enduring Envy Voice article comments, putting me as clueless with no grip on reality. I think I deserve to gloat and also scold you, at least a little bit, because as counsel, I've heard you brush us off countless times as young dumb activists. We've been educated professionals of all ages. Technical writers, researchers, educators, engineers and programmers who understand cybersecurity. We've had years of experience at the institutions you supposedly respect. And even if we didn't, you still should have listened to us because we are members of the community. My high school English teacher still lives here. She lives in Wiseman. She keeps asking me when I'll replace you. Lucky for you, I keep laughing at that. I was 13 when I spoke to a school board for the first time. In high school, I was playing a lobbyist in the California Youth and Government Program. I was the youth you would have patted yourself on the back for encouraging to participate in civics. I just grew up. I got less cute. i'm not that nice and have different values from you so your eyes glaze over whenever i speak so i hope you're actually ready to listen now chief you're going to want to hear this too because while the chief has been praised by the community for his quick action and turning the flock cameras off after supposedly discovering the data breach i have to point out what everyone's ignored the voice requested a record of all the requests from outside agencies for mountain views flock data in july 2025. You may or may not recall that is when I emailed counsel and chief about my concerns with flock which were largely ignored. My records request came in November and I was denied this information once again in violation of the Freedom of Information Act in December. If I hadn't mentioned this records request in my public comment on January 27th, when would the public have known about this data breach? When the chief said January 30th that he couldn't tell The Voice why the flock data breach happened, an agency statewide could search Mountain View's flock data supposedly unauthorized for over a year. Why is that? Where was the point of neglect? The denial of my records request in December? The denial of The Voice's record request in July? Or the very beginning when our policy stated the special operations division captain is supposed to approve every request from an outside agency. So we can blame flock all we want.

Thank you, Eva. Next, we have Albert Jeans. You have a presentation? Ah, okay.

Yeah, thank you very much Mayor and Council Members. I'd like to ask that you start thinking about the parkland dedication ordinance because this came up last week at the EPC meeting for row house development where staff presented a new formula for, next slide please, computing the parkland dedication fee that would be paid by a developer. And it's kind of summarized. I won't read all this, of course. You can read that. But basically this fee represents the project's proportional share of the cost of providing three acres of park and recreational space per 1,000 residents. And staff cited the Supreme Court ruling, this recent Supreme Court ruling, which seems to invalidate the current parkland ordinance, dedication ordinance. Next slide, please. So to try to understand this better, I put this into a formula. And basically, it's not that complicated. You have every, what do you call it, planning area has a certain amount of parkland, and that's generally, except for Miramonte, I think, it's less than the ideal, you know, in Quimby Act, which is three acres per 1,000 people, so there's a deficit. So in this equation here under the red, we have the Quimby Act amount of land is Q, you know, times the number of people in that area, minus the actual area parklands. That's a deficit. And then the new formula says, take that proportion, you know, based on the population of the new people in the development. For example, if there's 400 people, you take 400 divided by 80,000 people, and that's their share of that parkland deficit, and that's all the developer has to pay. So I simplified this equation to see if I could learn anything else, and you can see the next slide. And it turns out, you can rephrase it, this is exactly the same simplified equation, and so what this means is the amount of land that the developer should give is equal to the Quimby amount, which is just the population, the small n is the population new development times the quimby ratio 0.03 minus the current amount of parkland and its proportion of the population that's n over n plus n so in other words if the new population is four percent of the city's population they only have to they essentially get credit for four percent of the parkland all the parkland in um the city of mountain view and so It is essentially a credit because it takes away from the QMB amount that they should be paying, which is the three acres per 1,000 people. So next slide, please. So essentially, my question is, why should the developer be given credit for existing parkland, which somehow automatically the new residents get a share of? The new residents didn't pay anything. They haven't been paying taxes. It's true, the existing parkland is not the Quimby amount, but anyways, this leaves the city with a big deficit if this kind of calculation goes through, thank you.

Thank you, that seems to end our public comment.

I see no virtual speakers.

I see no virtual speakers. We will actually take a five minute break so that staff can set up for the next agenda item. It is now 20-23. We will reconvene in 20-28. Are we ready? All right, calling this meeting back to order 2031. We will now move on to item six, study sessions. 6.1, Charter Modernization, 2026, Ballot Measure. The purpose of this study session is to present proposed amendments to the city charter and to provide the city council with an opportunity to review, discuss, and provide feedback on those proposed amendments. The study session is intended to solicit city council direction and policy input to inform further refinement of the proposed charter amendments prior to any formal consideration or action. City Attorney Jennifer Logue will present the item. If you would like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now.

All right, ready for the staff presentation. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and council members. City Attorney Jennifer Logue presenting this item for you this evening. So although you just read it in the script, I will just briefly state that the purpose of this study session is to present some proposed charter amendments for council consideration and to get your feedback and policy direction before we take any formal action of bringing legislation back to place a ballot measure in 2026. So just to provide a little bit of background The Council 2025-27 work plan includes a project to place charter modernization amendments on the 2026 ballot. The proposed 2026 amendments are intended to be non-controversial and technical in nature. Substantive policy changes have been deferred to 2028. And the reason why we have deferred them to 2028 is because we want to minimize ballot complexity in a year that includes a city bond measure. And there's a risk of bundling non-substantive charter amendments with substantive amendments, because when you do so, you risk the entire measure failing, and that prevents the city from accomplishing even routine and necessary amendments. So it is typically a little bit better to separate them if you are trying to just get routine cleanup and necessary items passed. Otherwise you can just do multiple ballot questions, but that's financially expensive as well. So separating it into two election cycles is why we've recommended doing that for the substantive and non-substantive amendments. The other reason is because substantive amendments really should not occur without the benefit of a charter commission or a charter review committee. Such a body provides structure, public engagement, subject matter focus necessary to look at the charter holistically, and they assist in developing well-vetted recommendations for substantive changes and proceeding with major revisions in the absence of that increases the risks of a failure. And at the time that the 2025-27 work plan item was adopted, we did not have time to convene a charter commission or committee in order to do substantive amendments. So we're proceeding with just the minor amendments in 2026, if you so choose. Okay, in the development of the proposed amendments, the city attorney's office worked closely with the city manager and the city clerk to obtain feedback, but I also conducted extensive peer city benchmarking review of nine charter cities. The review included larger cities that regularly update their charters and therefore often reflect more current drafting standards as well as nearby jurisdictions to ensure that the proposed amendments are consistent with contemporary practices of Mountain View's neighboring cities. While the other charters reviewed varied significantly in structure, organization, and substantive requirements, and definitely do not contain identical language and provisions, the review definitely helped provide a general understanding of modern drafting approaches and commonly used requirements. I have split the proposed amendments into five categories to help facilitate a focused council review and feedback related to the amendments. The categories are generally arranged from least to most complex. These categories include typographical corrections, gender neutral language, state law and operational alignment, general modernization and clarification, and then one change for a municipal code reference update. The purposes of each of these proposed categories is stated. Typographical corrections is obvious. Cleaning up typographical errors makes the charter more readable. Gender neutral language would improve clarity and inclusivity and align with contemporary drafting standards. State law and operational alignment, the purposes to update provisions that no longer reflect current state law or the city's current operational framework. And then general modernization and clarification, the purposes to update outdated terminology and address specific areas where council has expressed an interest in modernization. And then finally, the municipal code reference update, is to update outdated municipal code references in the Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act. It will now take you through each of the categories. Again, typographical errors is pretty straightforward. During the comprehensive review of our current charter, we identified a typographical error in section 1107. And so basically staff is just recommending that we correct any typographical errors to the extent that we are already taking this to the electors, we might as well correct typographical errors in the process. Gender neutral language. Staff review, our review of the charter identified the use of gender specific terminology that is outdated and inconsistent with modern drafting practices. We recommend that the charter be amended to replace gender-specific terminology with gender-neutral language. Review of other city charters showed that nearly all peer jurisdictions use gender-neutral language. Throughout their charters, I think there was only one that did not, and I believe they're undergoing a charter cleanup currently and will likely make that change. If council supports this recommendation, the affected charter sections would be 602, 711, and 1603. 602 and 711 are the city manager's duties and responsibilities and the city attorney's duties and responsibilities respectively, which still contain gender-specific terminology, and 1603 is the construction of the charter and in that section we would just add a provision that provides a general statement that the charter is to be read as gender neutral, plural means singular, singular means plural and just sort of a general statement. So those would be the affected charter sections if you supported that recommendation. We'll now move on to the section related to state law and operational alignment. The first section that we're recommending a charter amendment is section 501. And this is for clarification of the term elector. Section 501 of the city charter uses the term qualified elector, which is not actually defined in the elections code. So this is a requirement for all council members to be a qualified elector. But, and in that same charter section, it says as defined in the California Elections Code. But because qualified elector is not defined there, it creates some confusion. The term that is actually defined in the California Elections Code is elector. And so we would just add a simple clarification that our use of the term qualified elector as used in the charter has the same meaning as elector under the California Elections Code. all comparable city charter cities require council members to be electors they handle how they describe that definition differently some just use the word elector and then some actually have the requirements directly in their charter such as you need to be a resident you need to be over the age of 18 and so i'm just recommending that we clean up ours to provide clarity on what qualified and mech elector means in our charter The next section is section 504, and this section governs how we handle council vacancies. Currently there is a 30-day deadline to fill a city council vacancy, and that creates a constrained timeline to complete the steps necessary to fill the vacancy by appointment or to call a a special election, particularly when vacancies arise unexpectedly. The recommendation is to extend the timeframe to either appoint or call a special election from 30 days to 60 days. In review of other city charters, there were varying approaches. Several of the jurisdictions do allow up to 60 days. Others had no specific deadline and had much more complex processes. Notably, California Government Code Section 36512, which governs general law cities, also provides general law cities up to 60 days. And so if we switch to 60 days, we would be aligning with state law and many other peer jurisdictions. Sections. 514 of the charter currently requires that ordinances and resolutions be read in full unless further reading is waived by unanimous vote after the title is read. Section 515 of the city charter currently requires roll call vote for adoption of ordinances. Staff recommends amending section 514 of the city charter to remove the requirement that title of ordinances and resolutions be read in full and amending section 515 of the city charter to revise the current roll call voting requirement so that roll call vote is required only if requested by a council member or required by law. of the nine charter cities I reviewed, only Sunnyvale requires the ordinance title to be read and only Santa Clara requires a roll call vote. State law does not require reading of a title if the title is included on a published agenda and a copy of the full ordinance is made available to the public both online and in print at the meetings prior to introduction or passage of the ordinance. The city of Mountain View already includes the title on the agenda and makes the full ordinance available to the public online in advance of council consideration. And the city could easily make a printed copy available at the meeting if it wished to fully align with the state law framework. However, It is not required that we align with the state law framework. I just wanted to let you know what state law allows and that it does not require, it provides a way out of reading a full title. And state law generally does not require a roll call vote except in specific circumstances such as this evening when we have a council member participating by teleconference. Section 709 of the city charter governing city clerk duties contains outdated references to maintaining books, which no longer reflects the city's current electronic record keeping practices. Therefore, staff just recommends amending section 709 to replace references to books with records to modernize the charter while preserving the substance of the city clerk's duties and responsibilities. Section 902, staff recommends amending Section 902 of the city charter, which governs appointments and terms for boards, commissions, and committees to clarify the requirement for staggered terms and to align the charter with the current city practices. Currently, Section 902 requires appointments and terms expirations to occur on January 1. However, several existing boards, commissions, and committees operate on appointment cycles that do not align with the January 1 schedule. For example, youth advisory committee typically makes appointments in June. So the proposed amendment would preserve the intent to ensure staggered terms and continuity of service while providing flexibility to accommodate different appointing cycles currently in use by the city. All right, section 900 is probably the one that is most complex. Section 900 of the city charter generally governs appointed boards and commissions. As part of the charter modernization effort, the city council expressed a desire to explore whether the charter requirement that all members of boards and commissions be residents and qualified electors of the city of Mountain View should be modified to instead authorize city council to establish membership qualifications for individual board, commission, and committee members by ordinance or resolution. Rather than provide a recommendation, I have provided three options for council's consideration. Option one would maintain status quo, which is all members have to be residents and qualified electors. Option two is a partial delegation, which would maintain the residency and qualified elector requirement for charter created bodies, but would not maintain that requirement for council created bodies. And option three would be a full delegation to city council to establish membership criteria for all boards, commissions and committees. To help council decide which option you prefer, I will share a peer city comparison chart and take you through the pros and cons of each option on the next several slides. So on the slide that's presented now, you can see that I've created a peer city comparison chart. In the first column, it shows the name of the city. In the second column, This is where they have charter created boards and commissions, meaning that within the charter, the body is created and the duties and responsibilities of the body is generally included in the charter. And for each of the cities, you can see most of them required the members of charter created bodies to be qualified electors and residents of the city. For Oakland, I said yes, most charter-created bodies, because there are some charter-created bodies that have very, very complex membership requirements, and so those didn't necessarily have residency requirements. They had other complex membership requirements, but they were spelled out in the charter. Los Angeles was an outlier. It's a very, very large city. and they had no general provisions governing boards and commissions in their charter. The provisions were just specific to each board and commission and often were in the ordinances rather than in the charter. And then San Francisco just said, yes, they all had to be residents and qualified electors unless otherwise provided in the charter, which would allow for a specific body to be created and have it called out what the membership qualifications would be. By contrast, all of most of the cities, if it was a council created body, IT DID NOT REQUIRE THE MEMBERS TO BE A QUALIFIED ELECTOR OR A RESIDENT IN THE CHARTER. SO WHEN THE COUNCIL CREATED THE BODY BY EITHER ORDINANCE OR RESOLUTION, WITHIN THAT ORDINANCE OR RESOLUTION, COUNCIL HAD THE FREEDOM TO DECIDE WHAT THE MEMBERSHIP QUALIFICATIONS WERE GOING TO BE. OKAY. OPTION ONE WOULD MAINTAIN And status quo, currently under the charter, members of all boards, commissions, and committees must be residents and qualified electors of the city unless otherwise provided in the charter. I can tell you that there is nothing in the charter, none of the boards, commissions, or committees created in the charter allow them not to be qualified electors. So everyone would have to be a qualified elector and a resident of the city if you maintain status quo. There are pros and cons to this. Obviously, it maintains clear and uniform eligibility standards for all bodies, ensures members have direct residency-based connections to the city, avoids the need for additional ordinances and resolutions to establish qualifications, The cons are, however, it limits flexibility to tailor membership qualifications for specific boards and committees, such as the downtown committee, where it might be beneficial to have small business owners as members of that committee who do not live within the city of Mountain View, given the duties and responsibilities of that committee. It may also unnecessarily restrict participation for advisory bodies where broader expertise is necessary. It does not reflect the approach used by many peer cities and when you have charter level rigidity, it makes future adjustments difficult because as you know, we have to take any amendments to the charter to the voters. Option two is a partial delegation. This is what most of the peer cities are doing. This option would mean members of boards and commissions created by the charter must be residents and qualified electors of the city, but the council may by ordinance or resolution establish qualifications for memberships on boards, commissions, and committees created by council. It preserves charter-level standards for core charter-created bodies, provides flexibility for council-created bodies, and aligns with approach of many peer cities. The cons are that it introduces different eligibility rules for different bodies, requires ongoing council action to establish and maintain qualifications. may create some administration complexity in tracking applicable requirements and could raise questions about consistency across advisory bodies. Option three is full delegation to the council. The qualifications for memberships on all boards, commissions and committees would be established by the city council by ordinance or resolution. It maximizes flexibility, allows qualifications to evolve without further charter amendments, simplifies the charter by delegating detailed requirements and legislative action. Cons, removes charter level residency and elector protections. may be perceived as reducing voter established standards, greater potential for frequent and inconsistent change over time, and requires careful policy discipline to ensure transparency and consistency. And this option would also require the most potential conforming edits to the other charter amendments in Article 9. If the affected charter sections would be sections 904, 905, 906, 909, and 911, they would all need to be adjusted in one form or another if council does not stay with status quo. For instance, clarifying whether section 904's presiding officer requirement applies only to the charter-created bodies or to all appointed bodies, or revising section 905's vacancy provisions if residency and a lecture requirements are modified or eliminated because right now a vacancy is immediately created if they are no longer a resident or qualified elector. So we would obviously need to delete that vacancy. The last recommended update is to the Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act There is a definition in that act of relocation assistance. And that definition references municipal code provisions that have been repealed or renumbered. So the reference literally refers to nowhere. It creates ambiguity and potential confusion in interpreting the CSFRA. So the recommendation is to amend that section to update the municipal code references I'm also recommending that council consider whether or not this particular charter amendment should be a separate ballot question given the controversy surrounding amendments to the CSFRA. Although this amendment is absolutely needed and it is just technical for clarity, I understand the sensitivity of touching the CSFRA and so to the extent that you agree that this amendment should be made, you may want to consider this as a separate ballot question. Next steps would be community outreach and education. I will work with members of the city manager's office to get information out to the public related to the purpose and the intent of these charter amendments. And then I would draft charter amendments and return to the council with the legislation to put the measure on the ballot. As you know, you have several council questions. There are 12 council questions, but I have grouped them. Group one are the questions that are basically yes or no questions. There really are no options. Whether it's either a yes, you want to do it, or no, you don't. There's kind of no in between, right? Either you want to correct typographical errors or you don't. You want to have gender neutral language or you don't. Group two are the questions where there is some flexibility, for instance, with regard to extending the deadline to fellow city council vacancy. You don't have to choose 30 days. You don't have to choose 60 days. You could choose something in between. You could choose something longer. You could choose something different. And so that ends my presentation, and we can now take questions.

Thank you, City Attorney Logue. Because this is a study session, we'll actually go to public comment first before going to council questions. So would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in person speakers first. Each person, each speaker, We'll have three minutes. I see one virtual public comment speaker, Edie Keating.

Thank you. So I massively support a lot of this, almost everything that's in this proposal, and I really hope I will be able to advocate for it. However, there is a little bit of a concern that I will become in opposition to this effort. It's around the Rental Housing Committee and the text or the choices you will make around Section 900. I don't see anything in the charter of which the CSFRA and all these other rules are included that says Section 900 does not talk about the Rental Housing Committee. So if that was clear to me, I wouldn't have this concern. If the Section 900 said this does not apply to the Rental Housing Committee eligibility and Section 1709 is the complete answer for the Rental Housing Committee eligibility, I would be satisfied. What's the difference? Well, the Rental 1709 says the housing committee comprised of Mountain View residents. You don't have to be an elector. And I think that's about right. I like that. And also, depending on your choices around Section 900, and if you leave in ambiguity around does Section 900 apply to the CSFRA, I mean, you guys aren't going to do any mischief with that. I'm grateful to have a council that is largely and majority supportive of the CSFRA. But what if someday we don't? So your decisions around changing the charter are important. And so please make it, you already have an ambiguity. Does section 900 apply or not apply to 1709? In all the conversation tonight is it sounds like you assume it doesn't, but I'm not sure that's clear in the language of the charter. So I hope that gets cleaned up and I have trouble with requiring a voter if it's not clean that the Rental Housing Committee eligibility doesn't stand as it is. A few other comments and I'm not I'm not seeing. Oh there's the timer. I can barely see it on my screen. You missed some of the sections where your gender neutral cleanup is needed. You got to get rid of the term chair man. Thank you. I really hope I'll end up supporting this. But I hope that you can do something to clean up around Section 900. Oh, and I have one other thing. Ask the housing committee if they have any other clean up small items in language from Measure D times.

Thank you, Edie. We no longer, we don't have any more public comments, so we will take it back to Council. Council will now have the opportunity to ask questions and then discuss and provide feedback on the following questions. Does any member of the Council have questions? All right, Council Member McAllister.

I'm gonna take this question away from my,

My neighbor here.

What's the cost of doing this election? Just to do this one ballot measure.

The county estimated that each ballot question would be $100,000. Okay.

And if we postponed it and combined it with 28, it'd still be $100,000?

The estimates for 28 are not something I can talk about.

Okay, so if we postpone it, we could save money. The second one, on the downtown committee, since we do, one part of the committee is made up of landlords who don't live in the city. How is that being allowed now? Sounds like you can't do that, but we're allowing it now.

Well, we made a slight modification to a council policy to carve out bodies that are called committees.

Oh, okay.

It is semantics, however, and you're better off changing your charter. So we did try to create something that allowed for that because we knew that it existed.

So are you going to? Remove those people that are property owners?

I don't have authority to remove anybody.

Okay. And last question. If we just, the motion came along to say just postpone this until 28, would that take care of your group one and group two questions? Or would you still want those answered tonight?

No. If you say postpone this to 2028, I think that ends the discussion. Okay. Thank you.

I'm seeing no other questions from council. I actually have a very dense question. What is the difference between a board commission and a committee?

So in reality, nothing. So committees, you have things like ad hoc committees. Committees in theory can be lesser in some ways. but you can also have a legislatively created body that is called a committee and is still subject to the Brown Act and is still subject to your charter, which makes it complicated. So it sort of depends on how you're using the context, the word committee. And so I think that you should think about it this way. When the council is creating a body, you are creating the same thing, a board commission, committee, whatever you call it, you have legislatively acted to create this body, and that sweeps in under these charter requirements. When you have other bodies, smaller bodies, temporary bodies, you know, limited jurisdiction bodies may be created by the city manager, those are ad hoc committees, they're not subject to Brown Act rules and they're typically called committees because of their temporary and limited nature. So really there's no difference when you're talking about council acting to create a body.

Should we think about, I don't know, making using that language essentially to distinguish them or is that a little too extra?

I'm not sure I understand the question. So if council were to vote to pick one of the options with regard to how you wanna handle the resident requirement and the qualified elector requirement, my recommendation would be to call out boards, commissions and committees. Right, so that there would never be any confusion about what you were talking about. And you would create these, the requirements, you would either make them all be qualified electors, some, you know, charter created only and not in legislative, you know, the body, council has the power to establish membership qualifications. or full delegation to the council, but you would just not treat boards, commissions, and committees differently. That is not something I've seen in any of the other charters. They do not carve out committees as some special separate thing. Everyone treats them, some say boards, commission, and committees, some just say boards and commissions with the understanding that that just means legislatively created bodies. but I have never seen committee carved out in a charter.

Okay, that's my questions. Council Member Ramirez, do you have a question, or are we going on to the?

I'm ready for comments.

All right, Council Member Callister, are you ready? Mayor?

Yes? Council Member Kamei.

Oh, I'm so sorry, Council Member Kamei. Go ahead.

Okay, no problem. So I just had a couple questions, if that's okay, Mayor? Yes, go right ahead. Okay. So, um, my 1st question is to the city attorney for the group 2 questions. So, um, like, for example, for question 2. I'd be interested, I feel like, um, should this proceed 1 of the next steps was going out into, like, a community meeting. And so for some of the questions in group 2, I might be interested in hearing from the public before. kind of putting any type of direction on it just thinking about question two as a question as one of those items because it says you know do we wish to retain the residency an electoral requirement or not and i'd be interested to hear from our community like how they feel about that so for some of these would that be something that we could you know direct to to take a pause on that question and be able to have that be further explored as one of the things that is part of the community outreach meeting or you need a definitive answer tonight.

So we can definitely get community feedback. We're running under a time crunch is all I would say. We wouldn't wanna come back on another study session. You'd probably want me to come back with legislation that maybe provides the alternative language with the staff report explaining what the community feedback was with regard to that and then you make a decision on which one you select with that information and I would have alternatives available to you. You could also, if that just feels too complex for now, we could also postpone that as a more substantive update to 2028. That is something that could be considered as well.

Well, I guess that kind of, dovetails into my second question, which I'm trying very best at past midnight over here to add to figure out how to formulate. Um, but it's, you know, is, is there a true, I feel like we've been discussing, or at least, you know, at least one guest member in particular has been talking about our charter amendment for a long time. And so does it really behoove us to continue to kind of wait on things or do we really, is there a, Yeah, that's the kind of question to staff. I don't know if there's really that much of a financial, I don't know if staff, any member, whether the clerk or the city attorney, I guess that's for council to debate.

Are you asking sort of the pros and cons of waiting generally?

Yeah, because I think, you know, related to a lot of other things that we've looked at, Costs can increase, right? And so I don't know if things would increase because the ROV takes into account like a Kohler. I don't, you know what I mean? Like, cause every year the costs go up for, I'm assuming elections and that with our register of voters. I don't know. Or maybe I, I, I, you know, so I just wanted to ask if there really is any type of benefit to continuing to not do these amendments that we've talked about for at least seven years.

I WOULD JUST SAY, AND THEN I CAN ALLOW THE CITY CLERK IF SHE HAS ANYTHING TO ADD TO IT, I WOULD JUST SAY THAT IF YOU POSTPONE EVERYTHING TO 2028, YOU KNOW, YOUR BALLOT MEASURE IS GOING TO BE MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE $100,000 NOW. THE COSTS GO UP EACH YEAR. RIGHT. The other thing you risk is spending whatever that amount of money is and potentially having it fail simply because there's one piece of it that members of the public don't like. And so the whole thing goes away and now the money was for nothing and you didn't even get the minor cleanup that you needed. Now with a charter commission or committee, that is definitely going to be more helpful, right? There will be a lot of public outreach. And so that can be very beneficial to charter amendments. And so maybe postponing things and having your committee take up everything, there's a benefit to that. I mean, I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. I think there's just pros and cons to both processes. Great, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. We will now move to council comments, which should include feedback on the questions staff proposed in the staff report. We will start off with Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. And first, I want to start by expressing my appreciation to the City Attorney's Office and everyone else who collaborated to put together, I think, a very strong set of, and this is important, non-controversial potential amendments. I SUPPORT ALL OF THE STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS, SO I THINK IT WOULD BE YES BASICALLY TO EVERYTHING. FOR QUESTION NINE, I WOULD SUPPORT OPTION TWO, WHICH IS THE PARTIAL DELEGATION, WHICH IS BASICALLY THE STATUS QUO. THAT'S WHAT WE CURRENTLY DO, BUT WE'RE CHEATING, RIGHT? WE'RE DOING SOMETHING THAT IS UNUSUAL AND WE'RE NOT probably not the best way to do it. So I think a proper and clearly defined partial delegation makes sense. And that's, I think the outcome that we want for now until we have the opportunity to talk with the public and consider a charter commission, which I strongly hope that the next council proceeds with, because I think there is more work to be done. I also support, there was, a member of the public shared a concern about potential ambiguity between Section 900 and the Rental Housing Committee, which is defined in a different part of the charter. I think clarifying that, I don't want to steal your thunder, Vice Mayor, but basically saying, you know, unless otherwise indicated in the charter, right? So it would basically be, acknowledging that the Rental Housing Committee is established in a different part of the charter and not subject to Section 900. So I think that's a good suggestion. Everything else is solid. I'm particularly enthusiastic about the change to Section 514 to remove the requirement that ordinances and resolutions be read. When we expire as elected officials, we get the nice resolution saying, here are the things we've accomplished. That's what I want in my resolution. I wanna respond. So I was very pleased to agree with Council Member McAllister at the start of the meeting. I think we disagree on this item. There are many reasons why it's worth pursuing today and not waiting until 2028. One reason is if the council does decide to pursue a more extensive set of amendments, it's probably not gonna be done with one ballot measure. Asking the voters to authorize a raise or an increase in council compensation is very different from asking the voters to approve major changes to contracting and procurement, which is very different from asking voters to consider potentially substantive modifications to the CSFRA, which is different from asking the voters to consider requiring an equity analysis, which is what the san jose charter commission asked several years ago right you don't want all of that in one measure you probably want a distinct measure for every single substantive amendment because they're very different things and as um our staff was was explaining you don't want one thing that is not not as popular as the others to tank everything else right the voters say you know what we're cool with everything but we don't want to give the council a raise then everything fails because you've put a poison pill so you're not actually saving money um we should we should still have even if we did a charter modernization you know commission and came back with substantive modifications the non-substantive things should still be its own ballot measure So I don't think we gain anything by waiting. I have waited eight years. So I'd like to do this before I die I don't think I have anything else to suggest I'm just grateful again for the work that was done And I hope that my colleagues will support the staff recommendations Will support a parcel delegation. That's option two for question nine and then I'll authorize the the city attorney and and and staff to consider other non-substantive changes, right? So I think the public speaker also mentioned references to chairman, right? Which is probably not a term we necessarily want to have if we're talking about, you know, gender neutral terminology. Those are my remarks for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. And now to Council Member McAllister.

Thank you, okay. I think I'm gonna cut to the chase a little bit here. So I'm going to make a motion that we postpone to 28. And my thought process on that was one, the cost, even though we don't know what it's gonna be down the road, it's still gonna be a cost to do it. Second, we're gonna be doing a double effort on the staff to do public outreach. So we're gonna do that twice, costs money. And then also a potential confusion with the other ballot measure that we're trying to get on the council people vote on. And in fact, there's gonna be so much, there's gonna be tax measures there for people to vote on. And so I don't want ours to be in jeopardy. And I agree that a lot of these things are non-confrontational and we could do them, but I make the motion that we postpone this through 1928 and we'll see where it goes, or 2028.

I see I'm confusing everyone with my 24-hour clock. Do we have a second? All right, I'm seeing no second. How long are we doing the Jeopardy theme? I don't know. I don't know. All right, do you have any other comments other than that? Okay, all right, we're gonna move on to Council Member Showalter.

Thank you, yeah, I'm going down to group one. I agree with the staff recommendations for group one. It's gonna be a little more specific about the group two ones. I think that we should extend the time to fill a vacancy to 60 days. The reason I think that, Well, while I've been watching Mountain View politics, I've observed a couple. And they've always been sort of known. So there's been time for people in the community to think about, oh, I might like to do that, before the actual vacancy occurred. But if there were to be a really sudden, unfortunate death where somebody was just gone, then I, you know, people would be taken by surprise. And I think the additional time would be valuable. So that would be mine. I'd go for 60. The one that's the most important to me, though, is this one. Does the Council wish to retain the residency and elector requirements of all boards and commissions? I think that we should go with option two, which is to have the ones that are currently in the charter. That is, if I understand it correctly, it's the library board, the planning commission, and parks and rec, right? Okay, and rental housing. to be as described in the charter. And so that means the first three are electors and the rental housing is residents, right? Okay, I think that's good. And then I feel like for the other committees or commissions or advisory boards, I think we should figure out what's appropriate for each of them. Like you mentioned for the downtown committee, it is appropriate to have people who are non-residents that are business owners on it. And I can imagine that there's been some times when we've had somebody on the Performing Arts Committee who had special knowledge and wanted to be involved. So I just, I think that option two is much better. I don't really know what the sections are for three, so I'm sure it's fine. Does the council support amending section to update the municipal code references? Oh, I don't think we should touch the CSFRA. I just think it's... I mean, I suppose if the Rental Housing Committee, no, I'll change that. I think we should ask the Rental Housing Committee if they want any changes to be considered. Right now, we're not voting on the ballot language. We're just saying these are the things we want to consider. So I would send that one back to the Rental Housing Committee. I don't feel competent to really weigh in on that. Then do I have additional direction? Yes, I do. I think that we should direct staff to bring back a plan to establish a charter commission. You know, when you backtrack from when we will need this in 2028, it's not really that long. We will have to have final language to go on the 2028 ballot when we recess in 2028. And it will take 12 months to 18 months to have a commission go through the charter. It's a complex document. Do the public outreach, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's time to get on with that. So I think that as part of tonight's meeting, I would really like us to to add that, to ask staff to come back. I don't know if it would be in the next month or so, but in a reasonable amount of time with a plan for that. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Clark.

Thank you. Mostly very similar comments with a few nuances. So group one, yes. The answer is yes, and staff recommendation to those.

For the group two, this is one nuance.

So I do think that we should extend the period beyond 30 days that the Council has to figure out what to do about a vacancy. especially in two scenarios. One is, as Council Member Showalter pointed out, in a lot of cases we have some sense that something's coming, but that hasn't always been true throughout our history. You know, get hit by the 22 tonight and hopefully not, but things happen. And I think we need more than 30 days. And that brings me to, I think there are a couple edge case scenarios that we need to consider when we figure out what the right number of days is. and there's a big difference between calendar days and business days. So I don't know if we wanna pick a number of calendar days that maybe might be a little bit more than 60 to account for whatever period of the year might have a number of holidays, or if we wanna pick a number that makes sense in terms of business days. I just think that we should think a little bit harder about that, and I don't know what the right number is. But there is one scenario that I was thinking about where Some of the some vacancies that occur people get elected to a different office and if you if you look at the calendar Let's say we have a really early date of an election like November 2nd If it's a close race for whoever they're whatever they're running for and it isn't certified until the very last minute Or they get really busy with something. I don't know they might end up resigning prior to the certification of election to deal with whatever they have to deal with. And in that case, 60 days from that date might not get to the seating of, maybe I'm not thinking about this correctly. I'm thinking about this world where there's 60 days isn't quite enough to cover a gap. And I don't know what exactly that scenario is, but I think something closer to, if we're talking calendar days, something closer to 75 or 90 is probably a safer bet. There's another world where maybe the charter says a number of days not to exceed a certain amount.

We can always change it by ordinance if we want or through our own procedures.

But I just wanna think through those scenarios where maybe 60 days puts us in a weird spot where we're just one or two weeks shy of of someone being seated through an election and we actually have, the charter requires us to take some formal action to appoint or call a special election. Maybe I'm just thinking about this incorrectly, but I just think we should think more about the right number of days and whether it's calendar days or business days. That's my only comment on that. So I just don't know what the right number of days is. The... THE RESIDENCY ELECTRIC REQUIREMENTS, I THINK AS COUNCILMEMBER RAMIREZ POINTED OUT, I THINK WE CAN JUST DO WHAT SAN FRANCISCO DOES. AND THIS ALSO ADDRESSES THE PUBLIC COMMENT FROM MS. KEEDING. I THINK SAN FRANCISCO, I DON'T HAVE IT IN FRONT OF ME, BUT SAN FRANCISCO STATES IT'S WHATEVER IT IS UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED IN THE CHARTER. AND THE CHARTER ALREADY SPECIFIES WHAT THE CSFRA MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENTS ARE, SO I THINK THE SAN FRANCISCO LANGUAGE COVERS THAT. SO I WOULD SAY THAT WE GO WITH THAT. AND IT SORT OF IS A SPECIFIC, I THINK IT'S THE SECOND OPTION, BUT IT'S SLIGHTLY MODIFIED. IT'S BASICALLY SAYING WE SHOULD USE THE SAN FRANCISCO LANGUAGE. IT'S THE PARTIAL OPTION THAT COUNCILMEMBER RAMIREZ AND COUNCILMEMBER SHOWALTER SUPPORTED. That in and of itself answers question three. Placing the amendment on the ballot is, I don't want to do anything that requires two measures. So I'm happy to receive input from the RHC, but if I'm just previewing, if whatever their input is, the cleanup items that they want end up resulting in a separate measure, basically two ballot questions, I just think if we want this to be, this is technical cleanup, it's very clean and simple. The moment you have more than one ballot question, people start to think, why are you asking me two questions if it's really that simple? So hopefully we can, whatever we wanna do, and if we get input from them that can fit within the one measure, that's fine with me, depending on what it is, of course. But I just, I don't really wanna go beyond, I'll be, it will be very low to go beyond one measure on the ballot. And then the only other direction, a charter commission makes sense, I think, for the larger, if we want to move forward with that in 2028. But I think it's fine to plant the seed with staff, but I don't think, well, I will support it. I don't think this council should be the one to formally vote to establish the charter commission. I think the next council should decide whether they want that on their work plan. Hopefully they do, but I think it should be their decision. And we can plant the seed, but I don't think we should start expending resources on the 2028 item yet. I think it should be, something that we add to the work plan next year and get the future council's input on. But planting the seed I think makes sense, because you're absolutely right, it's gonna take 12, 18 months to go through that process. So I think I covered everything.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Hicks.

Okay, I'll start with what you finished with. I agree that the next council should make that decision. We can plant the seed, but, you know, when you run for office and there'll be three new people, you run on things, and I don't think we should fill, you know, hand them a bunch of projects. I mean, you always hand, there's some projects that are in process. But people should be able to run on something and accomplish some of those things. And if this is not one they want to do or not one the majority wants to do. So yes, I agree. Next council, not me. And So in addition to that, okay, and then second thing to start with the end, I have no idea what you were talking about when you said that the Rental Housing Committee should and should not, I thought the only thing that the Rental Housing Committee would be talking about was what the public speaker Ms. Keating brought up. I think that's super important that the Rental Housing Committee Question number nine does not refer to the RHC. I thought it was what she brought up. Question number nine being, does the city council want to retain the residency and elector requirement? That does not, she said that does not refer to the RHC. I agree with her on that. You would have to explain to me maybe when I'm done with the rest of this, which is pretty easy, what else you think the RHC should be weighing in on, or should not be. But basically to sum up what everyone else has said, yes to group one, yes to number two with gender neutral language, yes make sure to find all the chairmen and change them to chair. And any other gender related language that might be out there that you didn't catch. uh... question number four thirty or sixty days my memory of this was that our current mayor was selected before she was elected uh... over the holidays and that the thirty days was definitely too short but that the sixty days Since we've done it in 30 days over the holidays, it seems to me that 60 days is probably enough. But I am generally on these things a someone else decides kind of person. So if you want to say something else, I'm more an objective design standards person, which we'll get to soon. But so I'm kind of down with the 60 days. But if you really want to change it to something else, that's fine. Question nine, oh, it's nine on one page and it has another number on another page. But I would go with the Board's Commission, pursue a partial, what everybody else has been choosing, what you said about the San Francisco language. I don't know what that is, I don't know what you were talking about. And so maybe, But a bunch of people spoke before me. They didn't weigh in on that, so I suppose we'll come back for that. So are there any questions that I didn't base on residency?

I said that one.

Oh, that's the one that you're referring to, the rental housing agency? I don't know. 1702. 1702. Okay, you didn't want to refer much to them. Oh yeah, question 11, but I thought that was, okay, so those are my answers for now. And we can get back to the ones that I'm leaning on other people for.

Okay, so Council Member Kamei, do you have your answers for the Council questions?

Thanks, Mayor. So we're just taking them in the groupings, correct?

Yes. You can either go by the presentation here or some of them listed the questions based on the council script. So whichever is easier for you.

I was trying to track. I think I'm just going to go with the questions that they are on the screen so I don't have to toggle between if that's all right with folks. So for Group 1, yes to all seven. Oh, let me echo the thanks that Council Member Ramirez started off the conversation with. I think as a council, we've been talking about this for a very long time. And as we enter year eight, I think that it's something hopefully that is not new news to our community. And to be able to take this step, I think will be really great. So for group one, yes to all seven of those questions. For group two, I'm comfortable with the 60 days. For question two, the partial is what I think we're currently doing. And I feel comfortable with that, but I do feel like that's something, as I was asking my questions earlier, that I'd love for the community to be able to weigh in on and get their input. And then three, yes. Four, yes. I agree with the comments of not having something separate, but I also agree with colleagues about the sensitivity on the topic of not confusing our community about If we're quote unquote, changing something. Um, so I think that kind of. Dovetails into 5, which is, I think that, um. Communication is going to be really critical, um, for. Being successful in in the ballot measure. Um. And it'll be incumbent, I think, on all of us as council members and the city on doing robust community outreach, be able to tell the story about how this is, kind of clean up, something we've been talking on council for eight years, kind of very kind of administerial, and connect communities. and say how there's you know more to be done um and that might be something that the the future council might want to take so i think just like the storytelling of what we're doing i wouldn't want to continue to not move forward with addressing the charter amendment issue i think um it feels almost you know not to draw Total comparison, but it feels kind of like deferred maintenance on a policy level. And I feel like the more that we continue to do it, the more it's going to get more and more difficult to just even do the minor cleanup aspect. So really want to see that go forward. So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. So I will go for my council questions. For all of group one, we're just gonna go straight down with a yes for those one through seven on the screen. And then now for group two, I support shifting it to 60 days. As someone who is very familiar with the vacancy and appointment process, one thing to, It was something that was also kind of interesting. Technically, I got appointed on the 31st day. So that was also really kind of interesting because it landed on a Sunday, the 30th day. So we did the appointment process on Monday. Now, we didn't go past midnight. So technically, it could have almost been 32 days. 60 days i do feel like it's more than enough time um and it does uh god forbid like with with the last um with the last vacancy we we had a sense that that it was going to happen although there was some wiggle room there that we were wondering about um that i didn't really know uh because i wasn't inside the closed sessions or whatever. But we knew, we knew that there was that possibility ahead of time. So having a scenario where we didn't know would provide a different kind of outcome. So 60 days I think is sufficient. It's literally double what we had before. But I do know that it was really stressful for staff, the very stressful 30 days. So, two, the elector requirements. I would like to keep what we have, essentially, which is option two, which is, I think, what most other of my colleagues are saying. based on the residency and, oh yes, and I support making corresponding and clarifying amendments for that. For four in the Council, for group two, I understand the volatile nature of touching the CSFRA, The last time that it was attempted, I was neutral, but I do recall when I was knocking on doors, it was a very volatile topic. I do agree with some of my colleagues asking, just bringing it forth to the RHC, It kind of stunned me when the previous attempt to adjust the CSFRA, the RHC wasn't even looped in. And sometimes it could be like, you could just ask them. And so I don't think that these possible changes are controversial, especially if we're gonna keep the electoral requirements for the Rental Housing Committee and make that clear. And then section 1702 is kind of a dead section anyway, but it allows the public to have a direct public comment. It's essentially like another meeting that will allow for public engagement on it. so that it kind of diffuses that volatile nature of adjusting the CSFRA. Next, and I don't have any additional direction other than what was mentioned by colleagues before about, I actually do support taking a look and what it would take for a Charter Review Committee, just so that we kind of know.

I also support the fact that

Sorry, I lost thought. I agree with what Council Member Kamei said about this is kind of like deferred maintenance. It's like walking through a boiler room and you're seeing a ton of stuff that is being held together by duct tape and prayer. And so we're just going in and actually making the proper repairs on the structure of our ship. And the goal of that is not to add any controversial things. So if we send this off to the RHC and the Section 1702 is controversial, even though it's a dead thing, I'm not touching it. So that is generally how I view it. I feel like if we wanted to do additional changes after that, which I do think that there might be an appetite for it, I think that is something for next year to think through. But in the meantime, let's get rid of the duct tape. All right, Councilmember Clark.

IT'S JUST TO CLARIFY AND RESPOND TO COUNCIL MEMBER HICKS. FIRST OF ALL I HAVE NO INTEREST IN TOUCHING THE CSFRA AND THE SAN FRANCISCO LANGUAGE WAS COUNCIL MEMBER RAMIREZ CAN CONFIRM IT'S REALLY JUST I POINTED THAT OUT IT'S AN ELEGANT WAY TO BASICALLY LEAVE THE HR OR THE TRHC REQUIREMENTS AS IS WHILE ADDRESSING THIS. SO IT SAYS THE RESIDENCY AND ELECTOR REQUIREMENTS ARE basically what the charter says, except the RHC, which is otherwise provided in the charter in a different section. So it's basically an elegant way of saying we're not touching the RHD route.

So if I can respond, the only, I was partially joking, but the only, no, no, but it's good to explain it. I just hope it's not too elegant a way and that it confuses people. It might be good to say outright what you mean, but you can mull that over.

I think hopefully the city attorney knows what I mean. We don't have to use the exact San Francisco language, but you get what we're trying to do. Don't mess with the RHC language. That's basically what I would like. Yeah, exactly.

I want that to be clear to people because we just voted on it.

The thing with one measure, a few folks mentioned getting the RHC's input about, you know, is there anything in the CSFRA that might need very basic technical cleanup? And if there is, that's fine. And I'm happy to include it. I guess I just wanted to preview my line in the sand is like if we can fit it in one measure, I'm more than happy to do it. What I don't want is multiple questions on the ballot because I think that sort of starts to defeat the purpose. But that's probably just me. I'm fine. 60 days as a default is perfectly fine for me. It aligns with state law. The reason I brought up thinking about it just a little bit more is it is the charter. It has to cover all eventualities. I remember sitting here at this dais and declaring a public emergency with a pandemic. If, heaven forbid, one of us had passed away from COVID right before, right after, would 60 days have been enough? Maybe, probably, I don't know. Maybe it's different in the event of a declared state of emergency.

I just want to make sure we're

thinking through all eventualities, because the charter is the charter and it's, we just, I just want to make, if we decide that 60 days is it, then I'm perfectly fine with it. I just want to make sure that we thought about all those edge case scenarios. Yeah, all the edge cases and worst case scenarios. Yeah.

Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I'll be quick. First, Council Member or Vice Mayor Clark has persuaded me about having one ballot question and not two. I do think that the muni code reference is trivial enough that it's safe to include in ONE MEASURE RATHER THAN A SEPARATE MEASURE. I AGREE. IT MAKES SENSE THAT IF WE HAVE IT AS A SECOND QUESTION IT FEELS LIKE IT'S A BIGGER DEAL THAN IT REALLY IS. SO THAT MAKES SENSE. AND THEN I ALSO WANTED TO AGREE, IT SOUNDS LIKE WITH THE MAJORITY OF THE COUNCIL, BUT CLARIFYING, YES, WE SHOULD PLANT THE SEED AND PREPARE WHATEVER STEPS ARE NECESSARY TO BEGIN A CHARTER REVIEW COMMISSION, BUT LEAVING THE BULK OF THOSE DECISIONS TO THE NEXT COUNCIL. SO IT'S NOT QUITE LETTING THE NEXT COUNCIL PUT IT ON THEIR WORK PLAN, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, THAT MEANS THE SOONEST THEY CAN START THAT WORK IS SEPTEMBER, WHICH MEANS THEY HAVE LOST A LOT OF TIME. you know, leaving, giving staff flexibility to think through what that plan might look like. Totally comfortable with, but I do think it's important to, you know, put that plan together. Thank you.

Assistant City Manager Seymour.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Regarding the planting the seed for a charter commission, I think that that is a really good idea and is well established in City Attorney Logue's report around that being a potentially wise practice for any substantive items that might be put on the ballot in 2028. The challenge with beginning that work now is that there's both the work to develop a plan, even if it's not acted upon by this council, but is acted upon by the upcoming council. And then obviously the work to start and establish and support a commission. And the staff would need to really take a look at where the ability to do that work fits in with existing workloads and council priorities. in particular up through when the revenue measure gets placed on the ballot, I don't see staff having the capacity to do much thinking around what a plan would be for developing a charter commission. So I think we'll need to think about the timing both for working on the plan and for providing any kind of update to council or for council decision on establishing the commission.

Council Member Showalter.

In response to that, if the ballot measure for this ballot, the 26th ballot, will go on the, we'll have to finalize that in June, right? So that would mean you would conceivably have the rest of the year that there might be a little bit of time to do it. So I don't think that's, I mean, that seems like an appropriate timeline. You know, you wouldn't need to start it before then.

Well, I gave the revenue measure as one example of things that impact work capacity, staff capacity in the context of the entire council work plan. There are very many of those that are led out of the city manager's office and also all of them require support from the city attorney's office.

No, I guess I think what I'm getting at is that This isn't something that we need a memo about in the next three weeks. We're just planting the seed. That's how I feel. It's more we're planting the seed, not that we feel like it needs to be done immediately. Pronto.

I guess I would want to define what not pronto is and I might have a different perspective of that than what you're commenting on as being after June when the revenue measure starts. I don't know that I'd be prepared to commit staff's work on that following June.

Mayor, if I may, City Manager McCarthy has joined as a panelist.

City Manager McCarthy, do you have something to add?

Thank you, Mayor. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, thank you. Hello, everyone. Just at a conference, so I've been watching and just wanted to weigh in on the reality of what the workload is and the heavy lifting right now that's involved in the revenue measure alone. So the way that the revenue measure works right now is we have the staff committee working with the ad hoc committee. And yes, it is accurate to say that if council chooses to put it on the ballot, you all would likely vote about that in June. Then what happens after that staff process? basically bows out. But then there is a whole campaign committee that would work on that that is not necessarily aided by staff. But we also have significant council transitions that are coming at that time. A lot of other housing element and work plan programs. And I don't see a path where we would be able to start the phase two for a charter amendment in 2026. Now that doesn't mean that, you know, I point taken about planting the seed. We know that there was interest in doing a phase two in 2028, but the way timing works for revenue measures, and charter amendments is you're typically starting, even with the commission, it's typically like a year before. So I just wanna kind of caution everyone about the significant workload that we have now and the major, major policy issues that we're bringing to council this calendar year. I don't see us fitting it in this year. That doesn't mean we wouldn't start in 2027, and certainly if Council's interested in that, we would, but I don't see a path forward for that in 2026.

Thank you, City Manager McCarthy. I see Council Member Ramirez is still in the queue.

Okay.

I think one way to think about this is because we're not the ones making the decision, rather than ask the question of the next Council during basically the priority setting process, it might be a question in quarter one hey, the previous council thought it might be a good idea to pursue more substantive amendments to the charter. Do you want to do that? And then they could say no, or they could say yes, right? So nothing really has to come back to this council necessarily, but like planting the seed maybe rather than a council member next year saying in February during the priority setting process, I think we should amend the charter. It's a question that staff is already primed to ask early on in order to make sure that there's enough time to have a thoughtful review of the charter. Is that a more realistic timeframe?

You're saying quarter one of 2027? Yeah.

To like ask the question, hey, new council, do you want to do this?

What I'd like to do and that we do have updates to the council on the work plan and the potential for council input on the existing two-year work plan that we look at the timing for that in 2027. That might fall within the quarter one.

I'm not going to be here. So I mean, I don't want to fight too hard for this. I'm kind of getting a soft impression that this is not going to happen. And that's fine. I won't be here. But I mean, like, we're thinking more than two years in advance, right? And if there isn't capacity to do it, then there isn't capacity to do it. But if we can't do it more than two years in advance, it feels like it will probably never get done. That's fine.

Just remember when you shuffle off the mortal coil was council, you could always respond in two years. All right, the staff have what they need.

Yes, I have what I need except for I have one clarification with regard to the RHC weighing in on the CSFRA amendments. I heard two things. One I heard, just go to the RHC and ask them about the recommended amendment. which would be correcting the references to the municipal code and just getting their buy-in to that and keep it in one ballot measure. Then I heard a statement about going to them and asking about other potential amendments to the CSFRA, which I think creates a problem because I've got 75 words for one ballot measure question, and I can't have them list numerous things they want touched in the CSFRA, and then I run out of space. So I'm already tight on the words. So I just wanted to get clarification that I will definitely go to the RHC. I'm just getting their buy-in on the one recommended change to the CSFRA.

Okay, yeah, so I am okay with making sure that we have the buy-in from the RHC. If there was any, Is that okay with everyone on council? All right, I'm seeing nods, all right. It's fine. It's fine, okay.

It's not that, if they would like to opine on that specific question, I'm happy to take their input, whether I'll change my mind or not about what, I mean, it's empty, it doesn't belong there, it's very confusing, but if we wanna ask their input on that specific thing, I'm perfectly happy to get their input.

All right, sounds good.

Is that clear for you?

Yes, I'm clear. All right, thank you. Now, thank goodness that we can go on to our next item. Yay us. Yep, it is a study session, so we didn't have to take any motions. All right, we will now move on to item seven, 7.1, R3 zoning district update, development standards and strategies. Given the need for council member recruitals due to conflicts of interest, this item will proceed. Thank you. This item will proceed using a modified deliberation process. This item will begin with staff presentation, then the council will have an opportunity to ask general questions of staff, followed by public comment. After public comment is closed, the council will then deliberate and ask questions on individual topic areas, first addressing those affected by council member conflicts of interest, and then proceeding to the remaining topics where no conflicts exist. Advanced Planning Manager Eric Anderson will present the item. If you would like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now.

Take it away.

Thank you very much Mayor Ramos, City Council. This item is regarding the R3 zoning district update. My name is Eric Anderson and I'm joined by Christian Murdoch, the Community Development Director. This project started back in 2020 and since then it's gone through several rounds of outreach and study sessions. In addition, the project has been put on hold several times to address other city priorities, such as the displacement response strategy and the housing element. Most recently, the Council provided direction on the project's densities in March and June of last year. On January 7th, the EPC provided recommendations to the City Council on the topics presented in this meeting. This slide provides an overview of the topics we're discussing tonight. The first topic is regarding the general plan designations. The general plan must be updated to accommodate the new densities in the R3 zone. These changes include updating designation names, removing the previous ranges, and adding allowances for commercial uses where they would be allowed in the R3 zoning district. This slide shows staff's recommended general plan designations. The EPC agreed with these recommendations. The next topic is the draft R3 standards. which were generated based on outreach, council goals, housing element direction, and the need for more clarity and objectivity in standards and design outcomes. Attachment four to the report, the design handbook was prepared to communicate and confirm the general approach to the development standards. This document provides clear visual of the outcomes and the standards are intended to achieve. It should be noted that the handbook illustrates the standards as written, not necessarily the outcome of any project that may use state density bonus law or other statute that supersedes the city's development standards. This slide shows the staff recommended major development standards, illustrating how they would change the existing standards. These standards are updated to improve the feasibility of development, especially by providing the ability to build more habitable floor area on a given area of land. For example, heights and FARs would be increased, and setbacks in open area would be decreased. These standards would ensure that development is able to physically accommodate the number of units they are allowed. Note that R3A is an update to R2 zone sites, so may not be more permissive than R3 is today. On January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendation for these standards. Staff recommends adopting minimum density standards to help ensure that projects build close to the number of units they are allowed and do not simply build large low density units. These recommended standards are based on the intended character of districts. The percent is higher for the R3D zone since this percentage would still tend to generate stacked units while allowing for larger units within the construction type building envelope studied in the feasibility analysis. And on January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendation. In addition, various new standards are recommended. These standards implement various council goals, outreach, and other issues that frequently arise in the development review process. The habitable ground floor space standard requires buildings to have units, lobbies, or other habitable space facing the street. Parking placement standards limit the location of parking to the rear of the lot. Building footprint standards set the maximum depth and width of buildings, New standards create onsite circulation and open area requirements. Other standards address various aesthetic and other impact issues. The standards also include an exception section, which allows developments to reduce standards based on existing conditions, such as the presence of heritage trees. And on January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendations. In addition to typical development standards that control the building envelope, the project team has developed design standards that control the shape and variation of building facades. These standards regulate entry types, bay composition, which is the pattern of windows on a facade, base middle top design, and massing features like tower elements and recesses. And on January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendations. The next major topic is regarding the approach to including ground floor commercial and live work units in the R3 district. Live work is a type of unit that fills a gap between home occupations and dedicated commercial tenant spaces. Typically, there are dwelling units that also contain a flexible area that can be used for various commercial activities, storefront, and the opportunity for signage. These factors make them more visible than home occupations. Staff recommends allowing live work throughout the R3, but limiting dedicated commercial spaces to the R3D sub-district only. The other R3 sub-districts are envisioned for more limited change than the R3D, which may be inconsistent with the additional activity, noise, traffic, odors, deliveries, and so on, that may be associated with commercial development. In addition, the R3 standards address various nuisance issues and consider best practices for the dimensions to accommodate successful commercial uses. On January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendation except that more areas than just R3D except for R3A should allow ground floor commercial spaces. If the ground council agrees with the APC, they may wish to consider allowing commercial on major arterials or larger lots in the R3B or C sub-districts. One development standard with a major effect on development feasibility is parking. Staff recommends updating the multifamily minimum parking standards to address feasibility, consistency with the state density bonus law, which frequently supersedes the city standards, and typical developer provision of parking. If directed by City Council, these standards would not be limited to the R3 zoning district. They would be updated for multifamily development in all standard zoning districts or precise plans that utilize the city code. The standards would only apply to multifamily, not to row houses, single family, or other uses, or precise plans with their own parking standards. On January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendations. The next topic is regarding a council goal for this project to create an incentive for the consolidation of small lots. The R3D sub-district is where lot consolidation is most critical. The higher densities in R3D are most feasibly developed on larger sites. Staff recommends focusing on parcels less than 20,000 square feet in the R3D sub-district and only allowing them to reach their maximum density if they combine with an adjacent site. This incentive has not yet been drafted, and if Council agrees with this approach, it'll be integrated into the R3 standards. On January 7th, the EPC did not support this. They were skeptical about how the incentive would function, with some commissioners seeing it as a punitive measure rather than an encouraging measure. The EPC recommended that other incentives be evaluated. As described in the staff report, staff has not identified other incentives that would withstand state density bonus and other state laws. As a result, if the council does not support this incentive, staff recommends moving forward without an explicit incentive at this time. The housing element requires the city to update its non-conforming standards to allow the redevelopment of sites with non-conforming density. In addition, the city's non-conforming ordinance is poorly organized and difficult to understand and can be updated for consistency with several state laws. This update will focus on existing residential uses and staff recommends it to cover the topics shown on this slide. These recommendations increase the permissiveness of our non-conforming code in several ways beyond the housing element. And on January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendation. The last topic is regarding the R4 zone. If the R3 zone is adopted with the current draft densities, it will include densities both below and above the allowed density in the R4 zone. Therefore, staff recommends integrating the R4 zone into the R3 project. On January 7th, the EPC recommended the staff recommendation. After the City Council meeting, we will continue to develop other code sections for the R3 zone, state laws, and R2 amendments per the housing element. In addition, a draft EIR will be available for public review shortly. Finally, here's a summary of the staff recommendation. This concludes the presentation. We're happy to answer any questions you may have. Also joining us are Amber Bleszinski, the Assistant Community Development Director, Renee Gunn, Senior Civil Engineer, Cecilia Kim with Optikos, and David Bergman with Lisa Wise Consulting. Thank you.

Thank you. Does any member of the council have general questions related to this item? Questions related to individual recommendations and topic areas must be held later in the meeting due to conflict of interest. I have a hand from Council Member Kamei.

Thank you. Thanks, colleagues. I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is it's 1.06 AM and I need to log off. But the good news is you won't have to worry about my recusal and I agree with the staff recommendation. I leave it all in your capable hands. There is no one with me in the library here. Have a great night, thank you.

Thank you. All right, moving on to other council questions.

I don't see any.

Oh, oh, Council Member McAllister.

Thanks, so I was reading in the council questions about the California street market at 1595, and you're saying That could not happen again? The standards would not be allowed, so this walkable project would not be allowed to be built?

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, Christian Murdoch, Community Development Director. I think what we were trying to point out is that market is actually of a scale that differs from the types of commercial uses that would be described in the R3 zoning standards. Something comparable conceivably could occur, but it would need to be in the context of a larger project. The site and the scale of the project is too small to be relatable to the R3 standards was the main point.

Huh, so since that is a perfect example of walkable and convenient, if somebody wanted to open something like that, not necessarily an existing neighborhood, they couldn't do it. So we're not gonna see any more type developments allowed like that? Regardless of the R3, if somebody wanted to put something in, would they be allowed to do it?

I think the issue here is just that that's a site with a single family residence and I think one unit perhaps in the commercial building. The proportion of the commercial area of the site is disproportionately large to the residential proportion of the site. And so there are three standards as they are proposed in contemplating commercial use, require that proportion of commercial use to be much smaller or the residential use to be much larger. And so it's really that latter example where Much more of the site would need to be residential use, but a commercial use of that size, it would be allowable under the proposed R3 commercial standards.

As long as somebody built a larger residential complex there.

Correct.

Okay. On page nine, table five, it says reduce the minimal open space from 55 to less. How does that align with how the city is trying to increase open space and park, yet here you're saying we want to make it smaller?

So the standard affects the provision of private open area and landscaping, and it doesn't affect the provision of public parks or open space. Also, I'll just say that this standard is one of the more critical standards for creating feasible development at the allowed densities that are already allowed at these sites under the general plan.

Okay, so we're gonna have policies that say we want open space, but we're gonna also have policies say we're not gonna provide that open space. That open space doesn't have to be provided.

I think council member what you're hitting on is a difficult policy trade off to make housing development more feasible in the R3 zoning district by reducing those kinds of standards that take up buildable area and do not allow densities to be achieved as directed in the general plan and zoning versus the broader public policy interest of providing parkland In this case, the housing element requirement to look at feasibility of R3 has required us in this R3 zoning update to put the focus on balancing towards housing feasibility. Other efforts underway by the city, including the nexus study update and eventual park fee update offer different policy options to resource the acquisition and development of parkland. So that's something that would need to be tackled in a different policy conversation by the council.

How does the minimum distance requirement being reduced affect how sunlight is being projected on buildings? Is that a consideration? In the past it has, so how will that affect how light comes onto a property?

Well, like how Director Murdoch said, the focus of this project is on standards that improve the feasibility and buildability of projects at their allowed density. The previous setbacks were large, especially for taller buildings, and so those were another major source of constraint on being able to build at densities that you're allowed. And so, yes, reducing these setbacks could increase shadows on adjacent properties, and especially for taller buildings, and of course this all could depend on orientation time of year. Okay.

You had studies that were concerning evaluating opportunities for commercial integration with the R3 zoning. So how are your, you're projecting high density as a major criteria for success of putting something, how has that worked along San Antonio which has some pretty high density?

Sure, yeah, our economic consultant estimated the new population from R3 development and determined if that demand was sufficient to support retail activity. They did find that with anticipated growth in R3, it was sufficient to support additional retail. And there are population and income assumptions that can be used to estimate these demands.

So yes, there are some vacant commercial spaces on San Antonio Road.

It may be difficult to apply that scenario to R3 because San Antonio Road is within a large regional commercial center and these R3 sites are expected to be more within more predominantly residential neighborhoods. Further, there are some businesses within these newer developments, even though there may be some vacancies, there are some successful businesses in these developments as well. And those businesses would have fewer location opportunities if the ground floor commercial space weren't there. So, yeah, does that answer your question?

Well, okay, so Prometheus has a building, and they have vacancies, and that's been there for years. The Gray Star in California... has vacancies and that's been here or there. So how much more is it able to prepare? How much more density has before those properties have businesses that the density will support them?

Well, I think another critical difference in the San Antonio area is that those are required ground floor commercial areas. We are not contemplating R3 having any required ground floor commercial areas. So it really is up to the developer to decide if the location is marketable for ground floor commercial activity. And so it really is really on the developer to decide understand their market and understand the opportunities there. And with that kind of flexibility, we hope there could be more knowledge and awareness and planning for successful retail uses in these developments.

So there is no requirement in any of these R3 to put in commercial?

It's permissive only. It's not mandated.

So you determined that a critical mass is necessary for a success of a small business. If you look at Ava's downtown market, do you consider that success? Is that a true representation of a business surviving in these potential R3 areas?

I think without... perhaps calling out the success or lack thereof of particular businesses. The downtown environment is very different than the higher density types of R3 environments contemplated with this update. The downtown just doesn't have the same housing densities that would be resultant of the commercial development in this case. So I think it's sort of an apples to oranges comparison.

And then one question on the parking. There was a condominium complex in San Jose, the Fay, that recently went into bankruptcy. And one of the things they said was the lack of parking. Have you seen any other indications that the lack of parking for some residentials could cause some economic stress?

So I looked at the particular project that you cited in San Jose. That project had a parking ratio something along the lines of one space for every three units. We are a long way from that in the R3 parking ratio proposal. And so developments in the R3 scenario would have two to three times more parking spaces potentially than the cited example. So that development was extremely constrained on off-street parking provision as compared to the R3 standards.

Could a developer use those same numbers? Are they required, since parking is not really required, but could a developer say, like lot 12 is gonna really cut back on the parking. Could a developer say, hey, you know, for me to make this, I gotta cut out parking?

Conceivably they could, particularly in areas within a half mile of one of the rail stations or in one of the precise plans where the city's eliminated a residential minimum parking requirement. So the potential exists, but ultimately the developers in those cases would have the ability to choose the ratio they think the market would demand.

Okay, and so, okay. Those are my questions, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister.

We will now

Okay, so that was council questions. Would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide public comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in-person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes. So the first one is Olga Bright, followed by James Kusmal, and then Alex Brown, and that's the in-person. So feel free to make your way down so we don't have to wait for you to walk down.

Well, hi. I want to just say that I live in Monteloma.

If you could speak into the mic so everyone can hear you.

I live in Monteloma and so I'm severely impacted by your proposals along San Antonio. And the whole idea of the quality of life of existing residents and existing voters, I might add, is something that should be considered here. We live in Mountain View, but I think we no longer see the mountains. If I drive up Rangstorf, I now look at these two huge buildings. It was so nice when they weren't there. And this relates to SB 79, which I'm very, very concerned about because we live in a, I think we have approximately four houses to an acre in Monteloma. And now we're proposing all these massive apartments and so forth all along San Antonio. I don't know if anybody's actually given any consideration because San Antonio is already very, very busy road. And if you're gonna put all these other houses with all these other cars, I don't know what, it's just gonna be like a road jam. I don't know if SB 79 and all these proposed changes in zoning densities is something that's gonna come up to the public. I don't think anybody in Monteloma except for a handful of people know about these proposed changes. And I think we should have some city input, I mean community input into this. I don't think that developers really have existing people in mind, existing community members in mind. They're in it for profit. And they're not concerned about voters. And... You know, I basically think that they're destroying the quality of life of Mountain View, whether you're talking about changes in downtown Mountain View. And I don't think that anybody seems to have a sense of history, any sense of, you know, everything's sort of disposable. And I take John McAllister's point, I had that on my list too, was this idea that the city has this ostensible belief that we need more partners.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Olga, your time is up. All right, James.

Thank you. I'm James Kuzma. I'm a 27-year resident of Mountain View. I live in a ring-controlled R3 complex that was built before modern earthquake standards and would, in an ideal world, have already been rebuilt. I see the R3 zoning update as an important piece of making it so that these sorts of redevelopments can be feasible while still providing appropriate displacement protections for those who need it. In general, I'm supportive of the proposed standards. I want to call out a few opportunities for improvement as called out in the Mount V and B letter that you all received. Firstly, I think it's important to reduce setbacks so that more developments can be feasible while providing a more pedestrian friendly environment. A lot of setbacks go pretty much unused and largely on landscaped and our most lively and successful retail area in downtown has zero setbacks and makes it nice and easy to get from the sidewalk to the businesses. So we should see more of that. We should remove some of the arbitrary standards around massing breaks. These sorts of breaks don't seem to actually result in aesthetic improvement to the buildings and at least my opinion and to the extent they might do so, it's not worth the significant cost that corresponds for the new buildings. We should allow ground floor retail everywhere. I don't expect it to be feasible in many of the lower density R3 areas, but there's no reason to not just allow it on all those areas. And if it's feasible, great, developer will do it. And as always, I would like to see reduced parking minimums for both residential and retail areas. Developers can assess whether they think it's appropriate to provide less parking when they need it. I also wanted to comment that from an active transportation perspective, I do appreciate the inclusion of plans and provision for future Paseos through areas that need it. I do think the setback requirements on those are a bit unnecessary since we're already saying we want 16 foot wide paths and then the setbacks are 15 feet from the center line of the path. And so I'm not sure that we need quite that much space for the Paseos, but I appreciate the accommodation of them. And I wanted to also say I appreciate the inclusion of standards around how many driveways there are on developments and encouraging those to be placed on side streets rather than thoroughfares where you'll have higher numbers of cyclists and pedestrians that may be in conflict with the use of those driveways. And in general, how driveways interface with our streets is an actually important thing to be having standards for. And thank you to council and to staff for your time and effort on this matter. And I look forward to seeing these standards take effect and welcoming more neighbors and businesses into our city. Thank you.

Thank you. Alex Brown.

Hi, friends. I also look forward to having more neighbors in our city as a result of this, maybe like 2050, 55. Yeah, this has been fun. I'm going to continue commenting on it three because I enjoy it. I like coming to hang out with you guys. We... We need to account for the lack of housing. We need more housing. That's the goal of this is to try to fix the harms that were caused with zoning that prohibited growth in areas that otherwise would account for people that would make the land usable to not just the residents within the denser apartments, but also to the businesses and things that would sustain those that need a critical mass of people to be able to have a vibrant area. You end up getting a lot of blight and Just go with blight. When you have not enough people to patron things, you don't have an ecosystem. And I think that this is the opportunity we have as a city to build that ecosystem, to let things develop better. But also, I think, okay, I've said this so many times, we need simpler rules. I think that a lot of the... THE R3 STANDARDS THAT HAVE BEEN PROPOSED INTRODUCE COMPLEXITY THAT IS GOING TO BE A COST TO THE CITY STAFF AND ALSO TO DEVELOPERS AND TO THE COUNCIL MEMBERS AND COMMITTEE MEMBERS THAT IT COMES BEFORE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IS VALID, WHAT NEEDS EXCEPTIONS, WHAT NEEDS, WHAT RULES HAVE TO APPLY IN ANY GIVEN SITUATION. I wasn't just stalling for time so that he had an opportunity to come in person. Totally was not my goal. Okay, yeah, no, as I had everything, R3D, all of it, all D, R4 should be R3D, R3B should be R3D, the rest of it. Thank you.

Thank you, Alex. David Watson.

Hello. I was going to continue to reiterate items from our letter that you all received. The other items not mentioned by James, There's, I believe, at some point during this process, a significant part of this process, part of the goal was form-based zoning. The idea is to determine what's allowed based on the physical shape of the building, and we still have, we've included density limits in the proposed standard for R3 here, and there are significant parts of Mountain View that don't actually use density limits. So it's clear that the city is capable of not having density limits in some areas. So it doesn't make sense to have density limits as part of a zoning update that has form-based code as part of the goal. I also was going to mention there's some description of of areas with a walkway on the front of buildings in the development standards that I really like. The only thing that's a little confusing is, again, with the very large setbacks, it's gonna be sort of hard for anyone, members of the public to be able to actually take advantage of that, whether you actually move the sidewalk back to be within the sort of covered area in front of the building or or not. Either way, it would be nice for people to be able to use that, so that's another reason to reduce front setbacks in situations where the building is providing cover from either rain or sun or either one. The other item that we mentioned was, again, James mentioned it a little bit, but an option to have an alternative to massing features, to instead have decorative features, I think would be really interesting. There are other cities that have done things like that in the Bay Area and throughout the United States. And I think that you can get really beautiful looking buildings from that. And that's it for me. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now move on to our virtual comments. Manuel Salazar.

Hello.

Good evening Mayor Ramos and council members. My name is Manuel Salazar and I'm going to be speaking tonight on behalf of MSV at home. Also bear with me, I've been listening in for a little while so I might be a little sleepy. I want to start by thanking city staff for their continued work on R3 zoning district update and for incorporating thoughtful refinements in the most recent iteration of the ordinance. You know, this has been a very, very, very long and complex effort and we really appreciate the city's commitment to getting it right. With that said, I do want to highlight some of the key things that SVA-Helm really appreciates about this current iteration. First of all, the improved feasibility, you know, adjustments to the floor area ratios, height, setback, etc. I understand that it's doing this to ideally, you know, make the projects more viable and make it more likely for the housing to actually get built. And we do appreciate that. Clear and flexible standards, you know, design standards with a clear process for exceptions helps reduce barriers and delays, which we love. And, you know, unlocking sites, you know, simplified rules for non-conforming parcels opens the door for redevelopment of underutilized sites. So all that gets two thumbs up. Where we're kind of concerned, but, you know, this is just us flagging things, is the parking minimums, you know, requirements of 1 to 1.25 stalls per unit may still be too high in certain areas near transit, which could impact affordability and feasibility. So just being cautious of that. Lot consolidation incentives. I understand that this is to incentivize that, but could unintentionally also penalize smaller infill parcels. So just being cautious. And then the minimum density rules could be too rigid for smaller or regular lots. So just please be careful when you're doing those calibrations. Honestly, so yeah. So in closing, we're really glad to see the continued momentum of this zoning update and remain optimistic about the path forward. We also want to uplift and echo many of the thoughtful comments shared by folks from Mount Uyembe today. While we may approach things differently or from slightly different angles, we're really aligned in our shared commitment to unlocking more housing opportunities. So please continue listening to them when they come forward. They're wonderful folks. And yeah, we encourage Council to keep collaborating with the community partners to build consensus around a version of this update that works. And thank you again to staff and Council for all your work on this item. And yeah, let's get it to the finish line. Thank you.

Thank you, Cliff Chambers.

Hi, this is Cliff Chambers. I've been a resident of Mountain View for 20 years and I live in an R3 zone. I think it's really important that the Council get this right, particularly since there's interest in using these performance and design standards in the SB 79 TOZ zone alternatives. i really overall i agree with the great majority of the staff recommendations but like others i feel there are a few changes that could be made to make the uh standards better i agree with what was said earlier about uh allowing the commercial zones and other sub districts and If a developer pencils out that they can make retail work as part of a residential development on the ground floor, we should allow them to do it. It should be permissive. We shouldn't prohibit it. I think the market really is the guiding force here. And I think others have commented on the setbacks. Part of the goal of this was to really make walkable neighborhoods where we're really engaging at the commercial ground floor and the residential level. I think the setbacks at 15 feet are too large. I'd really like to see something more like 5 to 10 feet. I'm a strong believer in the minimum densities that are being proposed. I do think one of the key goals that we had as part of this process, which I've been involved with since the very beginning, was more diverse unit types. The standards that the staff has been proposing, I think, really work towards that. I just want a little bit more clarification to 66% the right figure. I know that comes from another state law, but I think it's really important. I do feel that the pedestrian connections, the two examples that are in the staff report are great. I think it's right on. I think we need to do look at the right right away and somebody else commented on that, so I won't repeat it. but it's really important and if there's other areas in the city that should have that it should be allowable i did look at the response to council questions and i hope you really bring that through i do feel that lock consolidation is going to be very important but i do agree with the epc that i'm not sure that these are the right so If you're not going to go revisit it, then I would suggest you do jettison that for right now. I do feel, again, that the market is really going to guide whether the lot consolidation is going to happen. I'm running out of time, but the newest EPC member has really great suggestions about design standards, including the depth of habitable space and massing. And I hope it didn't get carried forward in the EPC, but I hope you consider it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next we have Robert Cox.

Hey, can you hear me? We can hear you. I'll take that as a yes. Thanks for the opportunity to comment on this item. Livable Mountain View supports the staff recommendation. We appreciate the zoning changes and related items are necessary to meet the city's obligations on the current housing element. However, we urge the council not to go beyond what staff has recommended, as this will add to our city's already stressed traffic and parking situation. I consider myself personally fortunate that I don't have to go out driving much anymore. Since I'm in post-COVID retirement, I usually only get out to get groceries twice a week. But, I mean, I'm distressed by the idea that every time I go out, I see double parking violations. To me, that's a sign of incorrect planning. And some of that's put on us by the state, and some of that's just our own doing, but I don't think making it worse makes a more livable city. And, you know, as far as, you know, reducing setbacks and all this kind of thing, you know, I do believe that there's some desirability of being a good neighbor when you're a good builder and not unduly impinging upon your neighboring buildings and the residents there. So in any case, that's why we're only going to support the staff recommendation and not anything else. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Danielle Hulse.

Oh, yeah. Hi. Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

All right. Great. So my name is Daniel Hulse. I live in an R3 area at the end of California, rent control building. And, you know... I'm here supporting this effort. I think that, you know, it's going to be great for us to build a lot of new housing in our city. You know, I love the view of the buildings that I see on San Antonio. And I think we can have more of them in our city and we can have more people in it. And More people are going to go to retail and we're going to have a lot more vibrancy. One thing I wanted to kind of pull out of this is kind of this idea of a setback, which as far as I could tell is just like government mandated waste of like, here's space you can't build. And I think we should kind of do something about this, which is, you know, we have allowable densities or whatever, but maybe we should let this setback area be buildable for pedestrian infrastructure. So maybe we want a bike path that is far separated from a road. If we could build on the setback area, that would be providing a actually useful thing to us as a city while also not creating a problem in terms of developability. So that's one thing I think is let's actually use the setback. Let's not just mandate you may not use this area for anything. Another thing that I kind of brought out in my comment to EPC was we should think a lot more about where we want these cut-through areas for pedestrians and actually try to master plan it. And that doesn't have to be done in the R3 process itself. I think we should spin it off to the active. transportation plan, but simply having a process to do that and getting all of those cut-throughs specified up front is going to be a much better condition for a developer than saying, I want to build this, and then having city staff say, oh, But we want all of this stuff. If we provide it up front, that gives clarity to developers. And it also lets us master plan what we want our future pedestrian network to look like. So thank you and have a good evening. I hope we all get some sleep tonight.

Thank you. Last speaker, Kevin Ma.

Evening, Council. My name is Kevin Ma. I'm speaking in my individual capacity tonight as a resident in the San Antonio Precise Plan right across from the R3 around Latham and Ortega. I am concerned with the design standards as written in the draft. As was mentioned in the last Council meeting, there has been concerns about staff workload. And I'm concerned that the prescriptive standards in it bang for buck, not a benefit for the city. It is adding more complexity on all sides, on the developer and on staff, to make sure that we're fitting these rules that don't really show an indication that they address what the community wants from the ASX of any new building. The goal of this is to encourage innovative designs, but in the past DRC style, the biggest criticism was they made giant glass boxes, which you know, just don't make anyone happy. It also would affect other innovative strategies such as modular housing, because inherently, as soon as you introduce any breaks, it is not exactly easily constructible offsite. I'd also like to come back to the purpose of the R3 update is to encourage more feasible building because for a city that talks about community for all, that means we need to make sure we have places for people to live in and rents are still high and most people cannot afford a $2 to $3 million single family home in the area. As such, we still need to keep our focus on will this create the housing we desire? Will this create the stacked flats that many on council really like? Will this create... you know, cheaper apartments or more affordable starter homes, you know, whether by state law or whether by our own initiatives, we need to keep that on the focus. Mountain View will continue to change. And at the end of the day, a community is its people, not the buildings that we need to make sure we are able to keep our people rather than leading our way into an open air retirement community. As such, I thank the council and the city for continuing to work on R3 and hope that this truly unlocks more housing opportunities with the city.

Thank you. That is it for public comment. I will now bring the item back for council questions, deliberation and action. As a reminder, all votes will be taken by roll call this evening. I'm actually going to move the item where Council Member Kamei was going to be recused to the end, and then we're going to now have, so Council will now ask questions, deliberate and take action relating to general plan use, designation, residential, 1-1-0, discussion of this topic requires a council member recusal due to a conflict of interest. Could the council member with the conflict of interest please make your recusal statement now? Council Member McAllister.

Where the language is. I am recusing myself from the discussion about the general plan land use designation residential 110 due to the proximity of my personal residence to sites affected by this land use designation.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. We'll call you back soon. The staff recommendation for the residential 110 designation is shown on the screen. Do we have any council members? Oh, OK. All right, I see Councilmember Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I move to approve the staff recommendation for the residential 110 land use designation.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. The motion has been made and seconded by Council Member Showalter. Do we still need to do our roll call vote? Yes, we do, okay, sorry. All right, let's do the roll call vote. Oh, wait, wait, oh, I'm sorry. Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, I was just gonna say real briefly, I think this is a good idea because it's much clearer. So I'm glad you came up with that idea, thank you.

All right, let's go. Okay. Council Member Ramirez? Yes. Council Member Showalter? Yes. Council Member Hicks?

Yes.

Vice Mayor Clark?

Yes.

Mayor Ramos? Yes. Motion carries.

Can someone grab Council Member McAllister so he can come back for the next item? It looks like Okay, it's both of you. The council will now ask questions, deliberate and take action related to the general plan land use designations, residential 12 and residential 20 and draft development standards applicable only to the R3-A and R3-C sub-districts. Discussion of these topics require council member recusals due to conflicts of interest. Could the council members with a conflict of interest please make your recusal statements now.

I am recusing myself from the discussion about general plan land use designation residential dash 20 and draft development standards applicable to the R3A and R3C sub-districts due to the proximity of my personal residence to sites affected by these designations and standards.

Go ahead, Council Member Hicks.

And I'm also recusing myself from discussion about GP land use designations residential 12 and residential 20 and draft development standards applicable to the R3A subdistrict due to the proximity of my personal residence to sites affected by these designations and standards.

Thank you, hopefully we will get you back soon. Staff recommendations for general plan land use designations residential 12 and residential 20 and development standards applicable to the R3-A sub-district are shown on the screen. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. Similarly, so first, thank you, Councilmember Showalter. I also want to share my support for the staff recommendations related to clarifying the general plan land use designation naming. It's confusing when you have things like high-low land residential you know or whatever um i you know i appreciate the intent but i think this this does clarify um what what we really mean with these designations um so i i'll move to approve the staff recommendations for general plan land use designations are residential 12 and residential 20 and the staff recommendations for the development standards applicable to the r3a sub district with one exception and that's um We'll talk more about this, but this is to allow, not require, but allow commercial uses in R3A with appropriate standards as recommended by staff, including objective live work design standards to activate streets. And I think the staff report had included the kinds of standards that we might want to consider, including frontage on an arterial road or A LARGE LOT SIZE. I DON'T THINK WE HAVE TO STIPULATE WHAT THOSE HAVE TO BE TONIGHT, BUT I THINK STAFF IS ON THE RIGHT TRACK IN IDENTIFYING WHERE IT MIGHT BE APPROPRIATE. BUT I WANT TO SHARE, COUNCIL MEMBER MCALISTER, I APPRECIATE YOUR QUESTIONS AT THE START OF THE MEETING. I GREW UP NEAR THAT MARKET, AND WE WOULD WALK THERE ALL THE TIME. AND IT'S KIND OF BAFFLING TO ME THAT THAT'S NOT SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN, THAT'S NOT LEGAL ANYMORE, RIGHT? We're not saying you have to do it, but if you want to, if you're an aspiring small business owner and you've got the space and you've got the ability, you should be able to provide a small grocery store walking distance from your neighborhood. And I'm looking at the R3 zoning district map that staff had prepared, and where we see R3A, a lot of it is... in areas where there's like a commercial desert, right? So there's not a lot of, you have to go somewhere else to go to like a small grocery or something like that, or they're on arterials. So I think this is a potentially valuable addition. And again, it may not happen FOR A LITTLE WHILE BUT WHY PROHIBIT THE ABILITY FOR SOMEONE TO PROVIDE NEIGHBORHOOD SERVING RETAIL OR A NEIGHBORHOOD SERVING AMENITY IN AN AREA WHERE IT'S CURRENTLY NOT LEGAL. SO THAT'S THE ONE CHANGE I WOULD RECOMMEND IN ADDITION TO THE STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS. THANK YOU.

I DON'T SEE ANYONE ELSE IN THE Is that current? That's current? Oh, okay. Council Member McAllister.

I want to have a question that I want to present. I don't know if it's appropriate at this time, but again, from the small business person's perspective, and we were talking about this at the last council meeting, we were talking about where we were upgrading potential developments and the developer could come along and say, you're out. Santa's a has a is developing a commercial anti-displacement strategy and they've been working on it since the first of last year and I think the city of Mountview Council says they support small businesses so I Is this appropriate time, can this be something that would be incorporated into what you're doing with the R3 or is this totally separate where we want to protect the existing small businesses in the area?

So the R3 zoning district is a primarily residential district. There are some non-conforming non-residential uses like that market on Mariposa and California. But it is a primarily residential district. This has come up in the past with council discussion around commercial rezonings, rezoning from a commercial district to a mixed use district, for example. And I think that would maybe be a more appropriate venue for that kind of conversation because relatively few existing businesses are in the R3 district.

So with the businesses on Calderon, they're not in that R3 district?

Which businesses on Calderon?

Well, the chicken place, the laundry place, the small restaurant there, the Calderon and Church.

Calderon and Church. No, those are in the CN zoning district, so the neighborhood commercial zoning district, not R3.

So this might be better applied at a separate time for the whole city to when we were talking about. Okay, I just wanted to get clarity on that.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. We have a motion on the floor by Council Member Ramirez, seconded by Council Member Showalter, and we are ready for a vote. Oh, wait, what? Oh, I'm sorry, yes, feel free to do your comments. It's just for this portion, though.

What portion are we looking, again?

This is recusal, we have it on the screen, recusal topic number three, which is the updated residential 12 and 20, and then R3A sub-district. Okay, so...

Is there an overall, so everything that we're voting on is segmented? Is there any one vote for a big picture item? The last one?

Oh, okay.

Then I'll see, well, I have comments for the overall, but I'll just wait until the last chance to make a general comment.

Thanks.

Oh, I have a question for Council Member Ramirez. Was this list, part of this from the YIMBY group that you came out with? Was this some of their letters that they sent to you? I'm just curious.

No, I am capable of independent thought. So I'll get to this later in the meeting.

Oh, okay, just clarifying. Okay, thanks.

You're good? Yeah. All right. We are now ready for the roll call vote.

Council Member Ramirez? Yes. Council Member Showalter?

Yes.

Council Member McAllister?

No.

And Mayor Ramos?

Yes.

So what happens now? It's three, one, two, one. So three yes, one no.

Does that mean, oh, the motion passes, okay. I was worried that we might need, okay. All right, now we can get Council Member Hicks. Yes, we can have Council Member Hicks return to the dais. So now we will, not you yet. Yes. Staff recommendation for development standards applicable to R3-C sub-district is shown on the screen. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. And I'll speak more once we get to the last set of actions. But first, for this portion of the recusals, I will also move to approve the staff recommendations with two changes. The first is to support the EPC recommendation to allow commercial uses in R3C. WITH APPROPRIATE STANDARDS AS RECOMMENDED BY STAFF INCLUDING OBJECTIVE LIVED WORK DESIGN STANDARDS TO ACTIVATE STREETS. SO JUST AS WE DID WITH R3A. Also, to direct the staff to evaluate increasing the FAR in the R3C sub-district to facilitate development of stacked flats. So I'll just share a little bit. The piece of paper, I think hopefully all of you have, I had the opportunity to share it. speak with the Community Development Director earlier today. It was a very helpful, productive conversation. And one of the things that we talked about was how we could signal through development standards our intent to create housing typologies that we don't typically see in R3. Most of the R3 redevelopments that we've seen have been row home or townhome developments. And that's not to say that they're bad, but one of the considerations early on when the Council prioritized the R3 update was to see stacked flats and other entry-level ownership opportunities. And as staff had shared in their responses to the Council questions, The FARs that we've seen for condo developments, stack flat developments in Mountain View tend to be a little bit higher than the staff recommendation. So we're not necessarily saying that you should increase the FAR, but rather evaluate whether it might be send a stronger signal to the development community reviewing these standards once we approve them that our intent really is to facilitate the development of stacked flats and one way to do that might be through a slightly increased far i think you had shared in our conversation it might be like 0.25 you know beyond what the staff recommendation is but i don't want to you know, suggest that we direct a particular number. Just that I think, you know, if a developer were to look at the standards, they would say, oh, really the intent is stacked flats. Really the intent is condos. And I think we would welcome your guidance on how to achieve that. So those are the, it's the staff recommendations with allowing, not requiring, but allowing commercial uses in R3C. with appropriate standards as recommended by staff, including objective live work design standards to activate streets, and evaluating increasing FAR in R3C to facilitate development of stacked flats. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. Council Member Hicks.

I don't know whether the seconder wants to speak, but... No, I'm fine. So I will be supporting the motion and I just wanted to call out, I think this is, the primary place among the motions we'll be making that mention live work, so I just wanted to call that out as something that we haven't done and that I'm, you know, as you said, excited about it. I've seen it in other places as sort of a hybrid between complete commercial and complete residential, something that's a little of both and is one way to activate the streets, although certainly not the only way. I think that, you know, shady shade on sidewalks wider sidewalks ample green space those things activate the kinds of places we're talking about which will be largely residential um but yes i think live work would be will be hopefully an important new element in the city and i like the picture you had on that

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Council Member Ramirez, is that?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. So I'm looking at, it's, I guess two and four. I just wanted, so, deferring to the Community Development Director, we talked about possible ways to segment this, and I'm seeing a reference to habitable ground floor space and maybe some other standards that we had talked about. They're not segmented out according to your recommendation, but I just wanted to clarify one of the things we talked about was eliminating the depth of habitable ground floor space from the front building facade standard. Is that something that we should include in this direction now because it appears to be segmented out?

Right. So I think this reveals a little bit of evolution in thinking, and it depends on the council's direction. So if the intent is for all of the R3 subdistricts to have that modified, then it's permissible for the council to talk about it in the main item at the end. If it's intended to be singular to the R3C subdistrict, then it needs to occur now during the segmented discussion.

I think the intent is to apply to all subdivisions.

That was our understanding after further reflection, yes.

That is very helpful. Okay, thank you very much.

All right, with no other speakers in the queue, can we do a roll call vote?

Council Member Ramirez? Yes. Council Member Showalter? Yes. Council Member Hicks?

Yes.

Council Member McAllister?

No.

Mayor Ramos? Yes. Motion carries 4-1.

Thank you. Council Member Clark, you can return now. All right, as he's making his way, I'm going to go off. We will now continue with the discussion of the remaining 10 items relating to the R3 zoning district update. As the council considers each item, the corresponding staff recommendations will be displayed on the screen. So do we go by one item at a time or?

So we actually have two slides that have all of the remaining discussion points. If we can just briefly preview that second slide. It depends in part on whether any council members have input on some of these. We don't have to go through them one by one. But if council members want to point out the ones of interest, we can go to that slide.

All right. So I'm going to actually carry it on to City Attorney Jennifer Logue.

I just wanted to remind you that you actually have 11 remaining items because you skipped the one for Council Member Kamei. So when you read the script, it said 10, but because she didn't recuse, you have 11. Just don't forget that item.

Oh, because I thought I would just cross out. So I thought it was all part of item one and I would just cross out 35.

Right, through the Mayor. We actually added 35 back into number one where the general plan land use designation discussion was.

Yay, I did right. Okay, with that, Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, I'd like to take this opportunity to make some general comments. You know, when you near the end of a process like this, I think it's always really valuable to kind of revisit what why you're doing this and why you're doing it in the first place and also are those reasons still valid and are there more reasons that have been added? And in this case, all of those things are true. We started with the goal of adopting form-based zoning in order to get more housing and to be able to make the designs easier. We want to produce more housing, and not just because of our arena numbers, but because we understand that the lack of adequate housing is one of the major issues of our region, and we wanna step up and do our part. That's why we're a pro-housing community, right? Pardon, parcel to it. We also want to promote more ownership housing, as has been mentioned, particularly stacked flats. We haven't had luck with getting them built in the past, and we felt that this was a way with form-based housing to make that much more likely. Form-based flats, I mean stacked flats, allow a much more dense type of entry-level ownership, so a better use of our land. Even though the entry level ownership houses we have, row houses and townhouses, have been very popular. But then, I think what's changed is over the last few years, restrictions from state laws that have passed to produce more housing throughout the state have provided another important goal for this project. And that's that many of these state laws that we've been talking about for the last two years, really, have the common feature that they want to apply objective standards. And so that's what we're doing with this process. We're developing objective standards for R3. And what that essentially means is these are written down in plain language so everybody can understand them. That's the idea. And we've got this wonderful design handbook that has beautiful pictures and sort of that show demonstrations of it. And I mean, you put together a whole set of documents to make this work well. And I mean, that's great. I think you really should be proud of that. And then the other thing that's changed with the state legislation is the time that we have to evaluate process proposals. And that means that there isn't time for as much of the back and forth that there used to be with developers. And so it's really, really important that these objective standards are out front, available, so that everybody can use them before they design their building, not kind of in the process. So those reasons to me, they've made this whole thing much more important than we really thought it was at the beginning in 2019 when we got started. And then another thing I want to go back and say, and I say this a lot of times when I talk to people in the community, what is it that the city really controls when it comes to building? Because to me, there's two big things. We control whether the city is well designed. We do that with zoning and this is making it a little more difficult to take on that neighborhood view. It's making things a little bit more of a building view. And I hope that maybe there'll be some changes in the future that'll help to that. But that's what we can do. We can make it well designed. And then the second thing we can do is we can make it safe. And we make it safe through our inspection process. And this isn't about that, but we have a very strong inspection process. So I just think that this is a, you know, part of our design process going forward. And it's a big deal. And I just wanna thank everybody that's been involved in it. And particularly the staff for your perseverance. I know you've probably had nightmares about this more than once. But I think that we've really come to a good place. And I just, I want to thank you for that. And just make that context of where does this fit into the big picture? Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. And I'll start first by expressing my appreciation for Council Member Showalter's remarks. Introducing the sort of the why behind much of the work that we're doing. And a lot of those points, I think we can't emphasize enough, right? When we think about some members of the public brought up SB 79, there are no objective standards or there are very few right within the law but we do have the ability to impose objective standards and we've already provided direction earlier to use the R3 development standards as the baseline for SB 79 development so it's really important that we spend a lot of time thinking about how not only the R3 areas but also the areas subject to SB 79 how we want the physical evolution of those neighborhoods to to be guided by local standards and not just relying on height, FAR, and density, which are at the bare minimum that exists in state law. So important to have objective standards. I'm grateful to staff for, I think perseverance is the right word. We prioritized this in June 2019. after a series of really challenging redevelopment proposals involving the demolition of existing housing, the displacement of hundreds of community members, many of whom were lower income, and the replacement with often FEWER HOMES THAT WERE GENERALLY INACCESSIBLE TO MANY IN OUR COMMUNITY. NO PARKS BECAUSE PARK LAND CAN ONLY BE REQUIRED WHEN YOU HAVE A NET INCREASE IN UNITS SO WE DIDN'T GET THAT BENEFIT AND NO PARK FEES AND ALSO THIS WAS IN A Different time with our inclusionary housing ordinance, most of those developers feed out, so there were zero affordable units. We ended up with like 1555 West Middlefield is probably my favorite boogeyman, five and a half acres of row homes, 115 row homes, zero park space, zero affordability. That's one of the important reasons for me that we're doing this work. That happens, redevelopment occurs, and we want to make sure that when redevelopment occurs, it occurs in a way that is guided by community and council objectives and vision. So it's a long-winded way of saying thank you. I know I have been somewhat challenging over the past several years, Christian and I, more recently, but your predecessors can attest to how much of a thorn in everyone's side I can be. We've come a long way after extensive outreach, literally neighborhood by neighborhood outreach. Eric, you probably remember those days well. But we're landing in a really good place. The staff recommendations I think are very strong. It's a great foundation. And I think we also should be grateful to Opticos, the consultant who has worked with the city for many years on this. So lots of praise to go around. We're not done yet, but this is a really important milestone in the work that we're doing. So I'm going to go through the piece of paper. and actually just make the motion, you know, there may be other modifications as we come around, but it will start with approving the staff recommendations. Again, they're very good. There are some modifications and I'm gonna speak to several of these, but before I do, I did wanna acknowledge the incredible thought partnership of two of my colleagues, council members, Hicks and Showalter. We have our little, you know, you could talk to, no more than two others, and over the years, we've talked a lot about R3, and I've learned a lot from each of you, and I think my opinion is better for your thought partnership and work over the years in helping you know, get us to the point where we are. So I will move to approve the staff recommendations with the following additional direction. The first is completing the remaining sub-districts include the EPC recommendation to allow commercial uses in R3D and R3B with appropriate standards as recommended by staff, including objective live work design standards to activate streets. The second is to include the EPC recommendation to omit the lot consolidation incentive. Instead, and this is where the intent is to provide staff flexibility and to be creative, if you decide this is not Possible or you know if there are other ways of achieving the school. I think we would welcome your guidance, but instead of having a lot consolidation incentive we would Encourage lot consolidation using guidelines as a way to better meet city goals and that might be as simple as When a developer looks at the development standards they might see some guidance saying we acknowledge that there might be parcels that are adjacent to your property where they're oddly shaped, but we really want you to try and incorporate them to help us achieve city goals like adding new parks or adding new essential infrastructure. The third recommendation is, and this one I benefited a lot from guidance from the Community Development Director, as part of the SB 79 Objective Standards Implementation Ordinance develop objective design standards and guidelines for treatment of and within front setbacks to support neighborhood-serving commercial uses and promote walkable environments. This should include streetscape standards for wider sidewalks and protected bike lanes, as well as design standards and guidelines for shade, stormwater, landscaping, and or public plazas, and not simply strict front setbacks without pedestrian-oriented design. And in the interim, because it will take some time, I think, to think through that, and we wanna make sure that staff has the opportunity to develop thoughtful SB 79 objective standards. We should, at least in the interim, have some guidelines using should, not shall language to guide the treatment of front setbacks. And I'm gonna let other colleagues speak to this a little bit more, but really the intent is, The front setback has or should have some utility, right? It should be a place to help facilitate the pedestrian interface with the building. It should have functional uses like stormwater treatment. It should provide generous tree canopy. Those are the kinds of things we expect. But right now, all we have is a number, right? The building has to be set back 20 feet. And we don't actually want sterile vacant space. We want that that front setback to be programmed in some way. So the intent here, and again, right, we were hoping for some creativity from staff, trying to give staff flexibility. The intent is not just to have the strict setback, but for the design guidelines, the development standards to help convey to the development community how we expect those setbacks to be used. The fourth recommendation is to include ornamentation and alternative options in Section 36.17.25, massing features and specifically additional treatments such as change in materials, change in ornamentation, change in percentage of windows or percentage of transparency and landscaping. This is one of the recommendations that Commissioner Subramanian had suggested in the EPC discussion that I I think merits some consideration. And again, I think that's one where we should give staff some latitude to figure out how best to allow for ornamentation rather than some of the standards that may result in funky looking building sort of aesthetics. I think of them as sort of like blocks that sort of protrude out and it's not necessarily, I think there are different aesthetic preferences here, it's not necessarily beautiful and also I've learned makes it harder to use technologies like modular construction. So number five, eliminate the depth of habitable ground floor space from the front building facade standard noted in Table 36.10.70 , 36.10.70 , 36.10.70 . and Table 36.10.70 and instead evaluate alternative standards such as requiring at least 75% of a front facade to have habitable space behind it. Again, this is another recommendation from Commissioner Subramanian that I think provides some flexibility and allows for alternative ways of thinking about this standard. Six, allow a height exception if it facilitates the dedication of land for a new public park or preserves heritage trees. I know these are things that are often hard to achieve, getting dedicated land for a public park or preserving a valuable grove of heritage trees. This is an exception that we think could help facilitate those community goals. Seven, eliminate stoops from the building entry types in section 36.17.02. I live in the San Antonio Shopping Center area. I've lived almost my entire life around the crossings. There are a lot of stoops there and it's a dead zone. I don't think that's what we really intend to create, and I would also welcome colleague feedback on that. Eight, this one I'm going to rely on you, Councilmember Hicks, but evaluate the role of arcades, loggias, and cantilevered second stories or ground floor clear stories to act as public spaces, specifically on private property, so we're not talking about encroaching on public right-of-way, and develop objective design standards. Almost done. Nine, evaluate additional required pedestrian connections, figure 36.10.73.1, based on community input and staff analysis. So we're not saying go out to the community and get a lot of input, but we have received input already with some suggestions for potential required pedestrian connections. And so I think staff can take a quick look and say, these ones have merit, we can incorporate them, or if they don't have merit and dispense with them. But really providing staff a lot of latitude in determining whether the additional required pedestrian connections are valuable. There are only two right now. IN THE DEVELOPMENT STANDARDS AND I THINK THEY'RE WONDERFUL. I'M GRATEFUL TO YOU FOR THINKING ABOUT THIS BUT FACILITATING PEDESTRIAN CONNECTIONS IN AREAS LIKE AS ONE PUBLIC SPEAKER HAD EMAILED CLIP CHAMBERS IN THE ROCK STREET AREA ALSO COULD BE VERY VALUABLE. THOSE ARE VERY LONG BLOCKS AND FOR PEOPLE WHO TYPICALLY GET AROUND ON FOOT THAT WOULD BE A VERY VALUABLE CONNECTION TO FACILITATE. We talked a little bit about this one earlier, evaluate increasing FAR and R3B to facilitate development of stacked flats. 11, explore incorporation of development standards related to repairing corridors, referencing Valley Water Guidelines. And then I'll turn to Councilmember Showalter on. And the final one is evaluate a process for periodically adding and modifying objective standards, including review by EPC and City Council with opportunities for public input. Initially, focus on section 36.17.25, massing features and street wall or base treatment. We don't want to get into the habit of waiting 30 years between zoning code updates. Part of the reason we're here is the R3 standards may have worked for a long time, but then they stopped working. And what we've learned is because there was an extended period of time between council review, community review of the standards, this project became a beast. Both of my terms have been sort of oriented around trying to make progress on this, and we're here. But we really shouldn't get into that habit. We should instead try and find a way to periodically evaluate our objective standards because, as Councilmember Showalter was alluding to, state law changes, and state law is changing rapidly. and also community needs and goals change. So again, not telling staff exactly how to do this. We do have, I think in the zoning ordinance, something along the lines of we should update precise plans every five years. Maybe that's a thing we could review and see if it still makes sense STAFF WOULD RECOMMEND BUT THE STAFF WOULD RECOMMEND BUT THE POINT IS THIS SHOULDN'T BE POINT IS THIS SHOULDN'T BE PRESERVED IN AMBER. PRESERVED IN AMBER. SOMEBODY USED THE TERM LIVING SOMEBODY USED THE TERM LIVING DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT. SO THOSE ARE THE CHANGES. SO THOSE ARE THE CHANGES. THE INTENT IS NOT TO BE TERRIBLY THE INTENT IS NOT TO BE TERRIBLY PRESCRIPTIVE. PRESCRIPTIVE. THERE'S A LOT OF EVALUATES AND THERE'S A LOT OF EVALUATES AND RELYING ON THE PROFESSIONAL RELYING ON THE PROFESSIONAL RELYING ON THE PROFESSIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS OF CITY STAFF. RECOMMENDATIONS OF CITY STAFF. BUT you know, as close to where we want them to be in time for the SB 79 implementation ordinance and making sure that as our three properties redevelop over the next 10, 20, 30 years, we get the outcomes that we're actually hoping for. So I think I've spoken for about four hours now. I should probably stop, but I see Community Development Director Murdoch.

Go ahead, Community Development Director Murdoch.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. The one other item I would ask you to potentially consider in the motion is to direct staff to pursue these items to the maximum extent practicable, but without jeopardizing adoption of the R3 process in 2026 as currently intended.

I am happy to accept that.

Thank you.

Council Member Hicks.

So... I've seconded the motion. And I guess the comments I've added. First, I want to, first, this is a very dry agenda item. While we were rotating in and out, recusing ourselves, with the exception of your questions and comments, Council Member McAllister, of course, they were not dry. So I particularly appreciate Council Member Showalter and Ramirez's adding some color to this. I was going to make additional remarks but honestly you guys have added a lot of color and I'm not sure how much else I have to add. I'll just add a few things. You know, I particularly support this going forward because we're beginning on the objective design standards that I put on our council work plan earlier. I think that Those are things that we really need, given the changing legislative situation and kind of the loss of the ability to design our city in any way. I also appreciate the design handbook, which I think is, that's from, how much of that is from Opticos? That's mostly their work, or please clarify for me.

Yeah, no, that's Opticosa's work.

Yeah, you didn't draw it yourself. Okay, yes, I've long valued their work. I knew of them before the city hired them and I think they do a good job and I hope we can continue to work on standards in the fashion that they do. I'll say you know I think good design is what makes the difference between a city as a car dominated concrete jungle where everyone prefers to stay indoors because outdoors is bad and a welcoming city with hopefully if we do it right with wider sidewalks if we go up, green space, shade trees, small businesses. Although I do wanna say the areas we're talking about are mostly residential. We may get some live work here and there and a corner business maybe if you encourage people to do that. John, but we're mostly talking residential here. And so we do need green space. We don't need, I would not want residential buildings to come up next to our current five foot sidewalks. That is not gonna be a vital, a vibrant place for anyone to live. So I support more what, for example, Mr. Hulse said, multiple uses of the setbacks rather than eliminating. The other things here that maybe I will comment on are eliminating stoops from building entry types. I'm actually very... very enthusiastic about this because not only where you live, Lucas, but also where I live, stoops are everywhere. They seem to have become the only, or at least the predominant entry type to, um, to a lot of the apartments, and they're completely unused. And honestly, they look like they've been kind of forced on the developers, and they don't even want to do them. So the design handbook lays out a number of other entry types, and I think we should lean into those for a while. And then arcades, cantilevered second stories, clear stories. These give you the ability as a developer to widen the sidewalk, doing them only on private property, not over our current sidewalks. Give the developer the ability to widen the sidewalks while still having a larger buildable space. And I've seen them, probably the most common place I've seen them executed well is in Santana Row where there's certainly a lot of people walking around. And I wish we would use them actually more on El Camino to widen those sidewalks. And then I'm also enthusiastic about evaluating a process for periodically adding and modifying objective standards. focusing on the massing and so forth. I do think that's where we should start.

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, just briefly, I want to talk a little bit about the riparian corridor guidelines. Riparian corridors are basically streams and, you know, the streams and sort of the area around streams. And a number of years ago, the cities were gotten together, representatives for the cities were gotten together with the Water District to put together riparian corridor guidelines. These had two primary purposes. And from our point of view, it's probably basically a setback requirement from the top of bank of the creek. One is stability. You know, creeks meander. And so over time, the location of the bank isn't the same. You know, I mean, in 25 years it could move. So having a setback is protective. You don't want to build a house right on top of the bank. It might fall in the creek. That's a bad idea, right? So that's one of the major ideas. And then another major idea for these riparian setbacks, is habitat. Riparian corridors are very, very important for the environment for all sorts of species. There's many species who live in riparian corridors and on a regular basis and then sort of visit us outside of them. And riparian corridors are used to provide as a transport area for species run up and down them. It's kind of their road. And so for those two reasons, the setback is really important to consider. And it's one of those things, once you build into it, it's kind of gone. So bringing it up, that's why I wanted to bring it up now for us to consider. And again, I think the other thing I wanted to say is I was glad you brought up the concept of you're going to go as far with these changes as is practicable in the time. That's just excellent, excellent advice.

Council Member Clark.

Thanks. So I wasn't in the cool Brown Act group apparently. I don't really know what's going on at this point. I came into this meeting expecting to support the staff recommendation and my line in the sand was I'm not gonna support anything that extends this beyond the end of this year. So I guess what I, and some of these are wonderful things. I remember long, long ago, my first tour on EPC when stoops were like the coolest thing on the planet and we wanted to put them on El Camino and everywhere. Now I, you're right, they're all unused and that was probably not the best idea that we ever had. But my question is to staff or maybe my colleague, can someone help me understand how this, there's a lot of evaluates and do these nebulous things that are all sound lovely, but I have, if I were staff, would think would take like two years. So I'm just, how do I square the, how do we, it was mentioned that we could probably, I think Director Murdoch, you talked about getting some of this done by the end of the year, but I don't know what extends beyond that and what the implication is for the next council in their plan their goals and usage of staff time. So just help me understand what I'm maybe voting on beyond the staff recommendation and how it works.

Yes, thank you, Vice Mayor. I agree. These recommendations make a lot of policy sense. The challenge, as it often is, is time and resources. And so, You know, receiving this type of input today, we need to look at are there any sort of on the shelf examples we can pull from that would be sort of light effort, we can plug into this process, do a little bit of stress testing and make sure they can fit into the R3 construct, and then they can carry forward in this process. There's some of these that are probably gonna be sort of medium level effort that will mostly get done or get several of them but not all of them done and probably can catch up in this process between now and the end of this year. And then some of these will take more time and they won't be able to be completed. And they'll then need to sort of waterfall into another ongoing effort. The next logical opportunity is the SB 79 implementation standards work, which is meant to build off of the R3 standards. So whatever we don't get done that has relevance for that work, we would be able to undertake at that time. So beginning in early 2027 and carrying forward until completion Whatever's not done then potentially can waterfall into the objective design standards, depending on the nature of the item. The last thing I'll say is, I think as I contemplated it on January 27th, the R3 would inform the SB 79 implementation work, but having thought about it more, there's probably some things that will come out of that that also feed back into R3 zoning update amendments as well at some point. So there's a little bit of an iterative planning process ahead of us for probably the next one to two years as we carry out R3 to conclusion in 2026, carry forward SB 79 in 2027, and objective design standards in 2027 and potentially into 2028 as currently envisioned in the work plan.