City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the joint meeting of the Mountain View City Council and Shoreline Regional Park community of March 24, 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. The city clerk will take attendance by roll call.

Council Member Hicks. Here. Council Member Kamei. Council Member McAllister. Here. Council Member Ramirez. Here. Council Member Showalter. Here. Vice Mayor Clark.

Here.

Mayor Ramos. Here. You have a quorum with Council Member Kamei absent. Thank you.

So in recent weeks, the city along with a few of our neighboring elected decision making bodies have been subjected to disruptive racist verbal attacks by anonymous callers during virtual public comments. The city of Mountain View is fully committed to racial, religious, and cultural equity and justice as we strive to create a welcoming, safe, and inclusive community for all. The council welcomes respectful, non-threatening public comments on matters within our jurisdiction. Comments deemed otherwise pursuant to the council code of conduct and the government code may be grounds for terminating a speaker's comment period. We will now 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 3.1, we have the American Red Cross month proclamation. We are happy to be joined this evening by Mike Kasperczak, Board Chair Neal Mehta, Volunteer Diane Cho, Board Member Annie Chang, and Chapter Staff Jordan Chang on behalf of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Red Cross to accept this proclamation. Would you all join me at the lectern?

All you get is me, Mayor. Hello, Mayor Ross.

Hello, former Mayor Kaspersack. You are all we need. All right, so the proclamation reads, let's find the right proclamation here. Ah, whereas this March we celebrate American Red Cross Month by recognizing the compassionate acts of people in Mountain View and by renewing our commitment to lend a helping hand to our neighbors in need. Since Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross more than 140 years ago, generation after generation has stepped up to deliver relief and care across our country and around the world, bringing out the best of humanity in times of crisis. Advancing this noble mission, the volunteers, blood and platelet donors, and supporters who now give back through the Silicon Valley Red Cross, unwavering in their commitment to prevent and alleviate human suffering in the face of today's emergencies and... whereas their voluntary and generous contributions shine a beacon of hope in people's darkest hours, whether it's delivering shelter, food, and comfort during disasters, providing critical blood donations for hospital patients, supporting service members, veterans and their families, saving lives with first aid, CPR, AED, and other skills, or delivering international aid and reconnecting loved ones separated by global crisis, and whereas this work to uplift our community is truly made possible by those who selflessly answer the call for help, whenever and wherever it's needed. We hereby recognize this month of March in honor of their remarkable service, and we ask everyone to join in their commitment to care for one another. 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 March as Red Cross Month in the City of Mountain View, and encourage all residents of Mountain View to reach out and support its humanitarian mission.

Yay. Thank you.

Now would you like to say a few words?

Of course. Thank you, and thank you, everyone in the audience. My name is Mike Kasperczak, and I don't really need a vest in here, but I thought I'd wear some of our swag. So I did want to thank you again for recognizing March is Red Cross Month. This has been going on for a very long time, and I think it's been 80 years since the Red Cross has been recognizing the volunteers that really make our organization what it is. And we are one of over 160 societies around the world that are associated with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. 90% of our work is made possible by volunteers who step forward in moments of need, literally on a call. Can you be there tonight to open a shelter? Can you get on a plane tomorrow morning to get off to a disaster? And that sort of thing. Every day our volunteers bring comfort from disasters, supporting our military families, and of course we have a lot of military families here in Mountain View and associated with Moffett Field, and help ensure that patients receive life-saving blood and blood products. Personally, I am a blood platelet donor, and once a month at 7 a.m. in the morning, I go down to the chapter and sit there for three hours taking blood out and putting it back in. Here in Santa Clara Valley, that impact is real. We responded to more than 100 local disasters throughout the county this year, delivered over 1,700 services to military families. And what you may not know, if a member of the military is overseas and needs to come home for a family emergency, that has to be routed to the Red Cross for the on-site commander to let that soldier go. and we've helped collect nearly 17,000 blood donations during the course of the year. We have over 2,100 volunteers in Santa Clara County and 100 here in Mountain View, which is really amazing. I was really hoping to meet the people here tonight because with that many people, I haven't met them before. They all had something come up today. So just let Mike do it. But these people are your neighbors, your colleagues, and your friends, and they are helping to make a difference in our community. We believe that everyone has a role to play, either in volunteering, donating blood, learning CPR and first aid, which is how I got to know Mr. McAllister here, sorry, Councilmember McAllister, and preparing for emergencies. So the Red Cross is all about people helping people. And so I just wanted to, again, thank you for this recognition. If you have any questions, which I know none of you does, I'd be happy to answer them. But again, thank you very much. And thank you, Mayor, for this proclamation. This is my proclamation, right?

You're getting ahead of yourself.

There we go. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, former Mayor Kasperczak. All right, so the next proclamation we have is the Youth Arts Month Proclamation. We are happy to be joined this evening by Dr. Sofia Fojas, Arts Coordinator with the Santa Clara County Office of Education to accept this proclamation. Dr. Fojas, would you join me at the lectern? Did I pronounce that right? Yes. Wonderful, yay. Here, you can join me right here. Da da da da. All right, whereas March is nationally recognized as Arts Education Month, which is an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of teaching the arts to students, as well as to recognize their contributions to art educators in our community, and whereas the 2026 National Youth Art Month theme is The World Needs Art, highlighting the essential role of visual arts in education and daily life, and whereas through well-planned instruction and activities in the arts, children develop initiative, creative ability, self-expression, self-reflection, thinking skills, discipline, a heightened appreciation of beauty, and cross-cultural understanding, and whereas the celebration of Youth Art Month encourages community engagement in supporting the arts education for all students. 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 March as Youth Arts Month in the City of Mountain View and encourage all residents to support and celebrate the arts in our school. Would you like to say a few words? Yes.

Thank you Mayor Ramos and members of the Mountain View City Council for recognizing March as Youth Arts Month. I'm Dr. Sophia Fojas, the Arts Coordinator for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, and I lead Artspiration, the Hewlett Foundation-funded arts initiative of SCCOE. Hard act to follow Mike Kasperczak. He's given me a few hints about what to say. We're about, we serve about 240,000 public school students in 406 schools across 31 school districts, 32 if you count the county office as well. Each of us, I'm one of 58 county arts leads, and all of us of the 58, 24 of us are dedicated leads around, specifically around arts education. In Santa Clara County, I support districts in implementing arts education, particularly most recently around Proposition 28. In implementing robust arts education program, provide mini grants to teachers with SV Creates. in the Arts at Connect grant, conduct the Young Artist Showcase, which this year, its theme is My Superpower, the Power to Imagine, the Passion to Create. In celebration of Youth Arts Month this month, we hosted two sold-out events. The first one at Raft, for arts educators the arts education uh resource fair on march 7th from nine to one with panel discussions tabling of arts organizations and a hands-on session with armando castellano from the from quinteto latino and then this last friday we had a sold out event um the 2026 Vivo Mariachi Showcase, our fourth year in presenting mariachi and ballet folklorico for free at the Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater on March 20th. So on behalf of the Santa Clara County Office of Education, thank you for recognizing March as Youth Arts Month.

Thank you, would any member of the council like to say a few words? Seeing none, I'll use this as an opportunity for your mayor call to action, call to service, call to community. As we celebrate American Red Cross Month, I would like to encourage members of our community to donate blood. There is always a high need to donate blood. I am a proud blood donor myself, over the course of my lifetime, I've donated three gallons of blood. I've donated since I was 17, so I was very excited. But I understand that there's opportunities to donate with the Red Cross, there's also opportunities to donate with the Stanford Blood Center, so I highly encourage, if you can, I understand that there are also limitations due to health, weight, height, age, where you are unable to donate, but if you can, take the opportunity to do so. I know in 2023, there was a recent ruling, a regulation change to allow those in the LGBTQ community to donate blood, finally, and that was a great victory for inclusion and the need for blood. So if you can donate and you have the capacity to donate, it's something I highly encourage people to do. Council Member Hicks.

Well, since you've given a shout out to Mr. Kasprzak and the American Red Cross, I think Ms. Fokas may have left the room, but I was going to give a shout out to her and just say that for many children, arts at school is what allows them to get up and want to go to school in the morning, my children included. So a shout out to her and her work as well.

That's wonderful.

All right, we will now take public comment for the presentation items. Would 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 am seeing none. We will now take virtual speakers. And I am also seeing none. So now we will 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 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. Council Member Hicks, do you have an announcement to make?

I do have an announcement. I will be recusing myself from agenda item 4.3, the notice of intention to vacate Public Street and Easement at 881 Castro Street due to the proximity of my personal residence to the project site, although I will remain on the dais while recused.

No worries. All right, would any member of the council like to pull an item? I see Council Member McAllister.

Yes, I'd like to pull 4.1 and 4.4 and make a, and yes, pull those and then a comment on 4.3.

All right, Council Member Showalter.

I just wanted to make some comments on 4.4 and 4.5, but if we've pulled 4.4, I can make my comments then, I suppose. But I just would like to make a comment on the Housing Element Progress Report. We get this every year. And that's good because it allows us to keep tabs on how things are going. And we have a really, really challenging housing element because we were given such a big number. We have done the zoning that's needed for it and we're working on the programs. But we did find out that We haven't really constructed as many units as we would like yet. So the city doesn't do the construction, but we do do the zoning and we do provide housing. And I just wanted to thank the the staff for all the work that's been done on this because I know that it's a very complex item and we'll just keep doing the best we can and we do have some development items tonight.

All right, thank you Council Member Showalter. What we're going to do, Council Member McAllister, do you mind speaking to 4.3 since it's not being pulled?

Sure. I will be voting no on 4.3. I've always believed that real estate is irreplaceable and that the city can use that as a continual, sustainable source of income. So when I see these things, I say, if somebody wants to, we'll lease it to them and maintain control of the property. And so I think that's why I'm saying no to it, because being consistent, I voted on no on this last time when it came up. We have limited land and if we keep, you know, occasion comes along and somebody wants to buy it, just lease it. Make sure that we have a structurally balanced budget. So that's where I'm coming from on that 4.3.

All right, thank you, Council Member McAllister. All right, what we're going to do, so far we only have two items pulled. We're gonna go to public comment. 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 person, each speaker. We'll have three minutes. So I see one speaker for item 4.1, Eli Robles.

Good evening council members. My name is Eli Robles representing North Coast State Carpenters and I'm here to speak about the proposed development at 490 East Millfield Road. This major project is in a rapidly growing part of Mountain View and with that skill comes responsibility to ensure the work is done safely, efficiently, and in a way that benefits the community. That starts with requiring accredited apprenticeship programs. These programs create real pathways into middle-class careers for local residents, especially young people, veterans, and those looking for stable, long-term work. When apprentices are trained to industry standards, the project benefits from higher productivity, fewer delays, and safer work sites. Equally important is ensuring we select a responsible general contractor, one with a proven record of compliance, fair labor practices, and the capacity to manage a project of this size. Without these standards, we risk cost overruns, unsafe conditions, and low-road contractors who cut corners at the expense of workers. 490 East Meadowfield is an opportunity to set the tone for responsible development in this corridor. So my ask tonight would be to adopt strong labor standards to ensure this project delivers not just buildings, but good jobs, community investment, and long-term value for Mountain View. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, and that seems like the end of our speakers. Oh, we have one virtual speaker, Brian Griggs.

Hi, it's Brian Griggs. I spoke two weeks ago at the hearing.

I just wanted to make sure that council knew I was available to answer any questions that may arise in this issue.

All right, thank you. Now that we have ended our speakers for public comment on consent calendar, we'll go back to the council. Council Member McAllister.

Okay, so I have some questions on 4.1. I know that you discussed it on March the 10th, but I was advocating in Washington, D.C. for small businesses at that time, but I just want to, there was a couple of questions that I think flow through a lot of the stuff that we're going to see.

Council Member McAllister, sorry to interrupt, but do we want to do the balance of the consent calendar?

Oh, I thought that's what you were asking me to start.

Oh, no, I was just going in order because I don't know if anyone else wants to.

That was for comments.

Okay, all right, so let's look at the balance first. I see Council Member Showalter, are you talking about one of the items or the balance?

I would like to talk about 4.3 when we get to that, but the balance, I'll withdraw for now. Oh, 4.3 is not pulled.

So do you want to talk about 4.3 now? No, 4.4.

You said you wanted to talk about 4.4. 4.4 is the one I want to talk about. Okay, perfect.

Council Member Kamei.

Great, thank you. So the balance, I see the motion for the balance of the consent calendar and 4.3 is still on it. So I'm just going to register my no vote, which is consistent with how I voted when it came out of closed session. Thanks, Mayor.

No worries. Council Member Ramirez. Yes.

Thank you, Mayor. I move to approve the balance of the consent calendar, including item 4.2, adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View authorizing the city manager or designee to submit an application for an award of pro-housing incentive program funds in an amount not to exceed $890,000 to execute and deliver on behalf of the city any and all documents, including amendments necessary to receive an award of pro-housing incentive PROGRAM FUNDS AND CERTIFYING TO PROGRAM FUNDS AND CERTIFYING TO THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND COMMUNITY HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COMPLIANCE WITH THE DEVELOPMENT COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROHOUSING AND SENATE PROGRAM PROHOUSING AND SENATE PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS TO BE READ IN REQUIREMENTS TO BE READ IN TITLE ONLY FURTHER READING TITLE ONLY FURTHER READING WAIVED. WAIVED. ITEM 4.3 ADOPT A RESOLUTION OF ITEM 4.3 ADOPT A RESOLUTION OF INTENTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL INTENTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF MOUNTAIN V 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 APRIL 28, 2026, REGISTERING THE NO VOTES AND THE RECUSAL. VERY QUICKLY, I ALSO WANTED TO PROVIDE A BRIEF TALK ABOUT THE Mostly thank you to staff on the responses to the questions I submitted on item five, the housing element annual progress report. There's a lot of really good information in here and some very encouraging information. I especially appreciated the update on the development projects page on the city website, which I think is a very useful resource for the community to see what's going on. And I think the commitment here to updating or providing development update map once we've met the federal regulations, I think will be a great service for the community. And I also appreciated the updates provided on several of the housing element programs. And in particular for project 1.6 on the subdivisions, that was encouraging to hear that you're looking at other jurisdictions that have already allowed subdividing ADUs. and program 1.4 related to the affirmatively furthering fair housing obligations and the affordable housing commitments south of El Camino. I know that's going to be an issue that the future council will have to take on, but I did want to flag for the candidates who are here and for the community at large that This is it's going to be a challenging item to To ultimately implement and then also I like to read these because it's a reminder that our charter requires us to read the title of the resolution in full But we don't have to do that. We can update our charter so we no longer have to read all of the resolutions in full. Thank you

Thank you for the soapbox, Council Member Ramirez. That item was a consent calendar with items 4.1 and 4.4 pulled by Council Member McAllister. We are also registering a no vote in 4.3 for Council Member McAllister and Council Member Kamei and an abstention, a recusal for Council Member Hicks on 4.3. It has been seconded by Pat Showalter, so we are ready to vote. Motion passes unanimously, yay. And now we will take up item 4.1, Council Member McAllister.

Okay, we'll do a quick recap again. So you guys discussed this, but there was a couple of items that, as I say, were reoccurring throughout, since we have three development projects on tonight's calendar agenda. So I just wanted to get clarity for myself and potentially for others and get a better understanding of staff. I apologize that I maybe had a briefing available to me, but I was not available to do it. So I will start off with some questions and whoever's going to answer those would be great. Who from staff might answer these? Oh.

Good evening, honorable mayor, vice mayor, council members, Christian Murdock, community development director. I was holding back because there was a mix of community development focused and public works focused questions. And so I was waiting to listen to the public works related questions. So I was waiting to listen to the questions before coming forward.

Okay. So you're there, but okay. So I had about three questions that I want to bring up. This new project is going to be putting in a retail space. And I asked the question, how much retail space has been required over the last four years? And you were able to pull up some numbers, but it seems the majority of it has not been leased, but you say it's sort of under, there's been a total of 16,000 square feet of new retail space in Mountain View based on two projects that are coming on board. And of this, 3,500 is currently leased to tenants and somewhere's gonna do it. So in this project, there's a lot of new retail space coming along. And this says since 2022, and this is 26. That's a long time to lease these spaces out. I hate seeing something built and being vacant for a very long time. I know there's a project over on Ferguson that's still somewhat vacant. What is the city doing to encourage that this retail space is being rented out and not sitting vacant?

Sure, thank you for the question. I'd say the first thing that the city's done is negotiate in the development agreement $1.2 million renovation contribution from the developer to minimize the costs and barriers for businesses and particularly small businesses to open in the space. So I think that's a really unique opportunity for this project as compared to other projects to try to minimize that time from construction to occupancy for retail tenants. More broadly, we've reinvigorated the broker breakfast that we have a couple times a year with the commercial broker community in Mountain View. And we feature opportunities such as new projects coming online or key vacancies that are of interest to the broader broker community to make sure they're getting marketed, they're getting attention, and that we can try to minimize the time these spaces are vacant.

Do you think any of these new locations are going to pull any businesses away from downtown?

My sense is that this project at 490 East Middlefield is a different market and is probably more localized neighborhood serving retail services that are not likely to pull businesses away from the downtown.

Okay. My next question is I know we've had some trouble getting our fixed fees and schedules going along. They've been sitting there for a long time before we got them updated. So I asked about the extension of the $100,000 for the first two years and $250,000 in the second extension years. And so when you – and thank you for the whole staff in the city taking on my – few questions that I asked, but they were very helpful to me. As you probably indicated that you saw that I read a lot, I read everything. So my questions are sometimes detailed. So you're putting 100,000. So the staff evaluated extension amounts from other developments for reference. Now, are those, when you look at other development agreements, do you take in consideration inflation of the current cost of doing money or the current cost of our new fee structure when you put in these extensions instead of looking at other developments which could be three, four, five years old?

I mean, not for this particular aspect of the extension fee. That's a relatively small amount of money in the broader context of this development agreement and with most development agreements the city has executed. Figuring in some sort of inflation factor is something we could keep in mind in the future to try to retain the value of money. Over the time range that we're talking about here, which is four years before the first extension would be needed, there's not likely to be a significant devaluation as compared to a development agreement with 15 or 20-year term where that's probably more relevant.

Okay. Also, I understand that this was some discussion at the meeting, but I've noticed several projects where staff is allowing the applicant to do street-loading duck-outs. And, you know, starting at Chase, we're going forward like that. Was this a Public Works one?

Yes, it is.

Okay. Let me see if I can follow up any more questions with you before we bring on the distinguished director from public works. So there was a question about the, and this was something that sort of saw me that there was a discussion about the city was going to do rent guarantee options. It was where the city subsidized the rents. And I hadn't seen this in all my years on council that we're baking in that we will, rent units and guarantee their rent. So what's the premise for us doing this, and where's this money going to come from?

Sure, so this is not a model that the city of Mountain View has pursued previously. To be clear, it's an option in the development agreement. It doesn't bind the city in any way to pursue this and there's no financial obligation associated with the option. Should the city be interested in pursuing the option in the future, it would be entitled to rent or guarantee the rents for between 30 and 60 units within the project. The thinking is essentially the city would guarantee the rent at a given amount, perhaps 90% of the area median income, and either put direct funds in to subsidize those rents to push the rents to lower area median income levels for deeper affordability for lower income households, or potentially could rent some of those units at market rate, which might be up to 100% or more of area median income, thus generating excess revenue that could be used to subsidize lower rents for lower area median income levels. So the particular mechanics and what makes sense at a point in time given the market and other factors remains to be determined. But we thought it was an innovative opportunity where there's no upfront outlay for establishment of these units. The developer's constructing them, so the significant capital cost to deliver below market rate units is foregone. And there's an option then to tailor the block of units, the 30 to 60 units, to meet the specific needs at that point in time. And so it's just another tool in the city's affordable housing toolbox if and when the city's interested in exercising the option.

So you just decided this, was this part of any of the housing element? Or are you just saying here's some way we can secure low income housing?

So this was a concept brought forward by the developer in this case. My understanding is they've pursued a similar model in another jurisdiction, not exactly an apples to apples comparison. But it's something that was interesting but very, very nuanced and it's novel. And so we didn't have the time in this process to figure out all of the details. But we did want to preserve the opportunity to figure this out in the future and take advantage of it if we find out that it's likely to be beneficial.

So where would this money be funded from?

That's one of the many details that would need to be worked out. If there's an appropriate funding source and the city council was willing to make such an expenditure to achieve this targeted affordable housing goal, then that would be a decision for the council at that time. Alternatively, as I mentioned, there could be an internal subsidy among the units, depending on the market conditions, that could actually not require a direct subsidy from the city.

Would this take some money away from CSA? Don't we use that money for them to subsidize the units and so forth?

The ultimate funding decision and eligibility for use of different funds is something the council would have to vote on in the future.

And let's see if I have one more question for you. Again, your answers or your staff's answers are very insightful, so I do appreciate that. The duck outs I will do. Yes. Thank you. I'll ask about the duck outs and the sidewalks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, everybody. I'm Jennifer Ng, Public Works Director. Ready for your questions.

Okay, so duck outs, they came up under Chase, and now we see it here, and we see it in some other areas where we're not requiring the developer to do these spaces for loading and unloading, and they're taking a public space and public streets. So how is this evolving that we are allowing developers to use the public streets to do what should be, in my opinion, what they should be doing on their own property.

Yes, so we do require developments to provide loading on-site where there is on-site availability. So for example, the Chase Bank situation that you brought up as an example, there is provisions on-site on the first ground level parking for loading. The duck out that is being provided on El Camino Real is a bus Island situation in which we went to move the bus out of the way of the oncoming traffic on El Camino Real. Bus islands are relatively new, relatively speaking, kind of technology with respect to how we load and offload bus passengers as well as how we sequence the bike lanes around the bus islands so that it's safe for all in that vicinity.

Well, I understand the buses. That makes sense. But on the chase, there was some, well, where the... third party delivery food that people are going to be parking and they were taken up. Well, we'll do something on the backside.

So yeah, there was a request by the developer to look for the city to evaluate additional loading opportunities on street.

So am I misunderstanding this when they're looking for street loading of duck outs and not for the bus, but this for their own property for people to do that?

So in this particular situation for 490 Middlefield, there is onsite loading that is available, but there are very limited opportunities for a driver. There's only two driveways that access this site. There's one on Middlefield and there's one on Ellis. In today's rapidly changing environment of how we do a lot of quick pickups and quick drop-offs kind of situation, and with bike lanes being on Middlefield Avenue, you know, we really want to create a situation where a... I mean, we've all seen it, right? Like an Amazon driver pulls up. They don't really... They think they're going to stop for 30 seconds, and they... obstruct a bike lane. It happens all over everywhere in this area and so by creating a duck out for those kind of quick drop off, quick pick up situations, we are eliminating the conflict between the drop off vehicles and the vehicles in the travel lane as well as the bike lane.

Will that be used potentially for parks, street parking?

It's not for street parking. It's intended for a quick, like a five minute or less loading zone.

Thank you. You're welcome. Well, is that going to be a current thing or direction that the city staff is thinking about is allowing these duck outs as we progress along in most projects?

It's case-by-case basis, right, depending on what the situation is with the actual vehicle or travel lane, how much right-of-way we have, bike lanes on the street. But knowing how our society operates and the demand for this type of quick service, I'd imagine you might see more moving forward as we move our development projects through the permitting process.

Okay, thank you.

You're welcome.

And I have one last question. I see the chief of the fire department here. And so this is one for maybe the community at large, since we are putting an eight story building now and fire safety and standards is gonna be something new that's gonna participate. So how we're gonna handle an eight building as we see maybe a 15 story building come along. And so you can give us a look into the future.

Good evening, honorable mayor, vice mayor, council members. For this one, since it's new construction, we'll have our fire protection engineer from community development speak to it.

Good evening, council members. Anish Murthy, principal fire protection engineer. I'm sorry? Principal fire protection engineer. Okay.

So are you going to add, the question was, we're getting an eight-story building here. We're potentially going to get a 15-story building there. What kind of impact is it going to have on our fire department and how the Will they have the capability to respond to evacuation of these problems, putting out the fires at these buildings? So what is the fire department requesting or requiring on buildings of this sort?

Well, once you get over three stories, there are certain requirements for aerial truck ladder access. And so that's pretty standard. And that's we have a lot of buildings, obviously, that are greater than three stories in the city. So we would require that we have those in our conditions of approval. So that means that the access roads go from 20 feet wide to 26 feet wide. There are certain requirements for aerial access trucks that they need to have at least one full side of the building has to be a certain distance away from The street has to be a certain distance away so that we can use the aerial trucks for firefighting access. In terms of fire protection, it's pretty standard. All the new buildings, of course, will have full fire sprinkler systems and fire alarm systems. Once they get to a high rise, there are increased fire protection that comes straight from the code, from the California Building Code, from the California Fire Code. and also from our Mountain View City Code. So those are all taken into account, and they're all part of the conditions of approval.

Does this particular project have, how many staircases does it have?

Offhand, I don't know, but it will meet the code requirements for the staircase.

And just a general question, how would our ladder trucks be affected on this one? How high can they go?

Actually, Chief Chiles may be able to tell you a little bit better about that. But we, you know, the ladder access requirements, there are actually multiple reasons we would use the ladder. So we would either try to get to the top of the buildings or use them for firefighting purposes to actually spray water. We use them for rescue operations if needed. Those are all taken into account, but if you want to know the exact height, I think Chief Chiles might be able to tell you exactly.

He's eager to tell us about his new equipment. Thank you.

Okay.

Good evening. To answer your question on the aerial apparatus, our ladder trucks are 105 feet tall and with a setback can reach stories up to eight to nine stories.

Okay so we're getting there. I mean we're prepared for this.

Yeah we're confident in fighting a fire in a building of this size.

Thank you. That answers my question 4.1 and if we wanted to I would make a motion to pass on that one or we could do it when 4.4 comes at the same time.

I see Councilmember Hicks has her name in the queue.

I was just going to say very briefly, Council Member McAllister, we missed you when we discussed this item in full. And some of the items you brought up are ones that we discussed as well. I had concerns about the duck outs in public spaces. I think there, and that was something that apparently staff had gone, staff and the developer had discussions about as well before Council did. I think it's something that, My personal opinion is that there are strengths and weaknesses. And so I agree with some of your questions. And as some of us term out and you stay on council, I hope you keep your eye on that particular issue and make sure it doesn't carve out too much of our street trees and sidewalks, so I'm depending on you for that in the future. And then also, you know, I welcome your questions on whether the ground floor retail will be rentable, but I think in East Wiseman in particular, as we densify, people there deserve some They deserve to not be car bound and to have some neighborhood serving retail. And if my memory serves me right, Council Member Kamei spoke eloquently about that and in more detail than I will right now or will be here for a very long time. But I think that, you know, I think you are always balancing, you know, is this too much? Is it not enough? I don't think If we do our downtown right, I think that neighborhoods serving retail in places like San Antonio and East Wiseman, as we densify, will not. I think our downtown is different. We need to make sure it keeps its sense of place, its historic nature, its sort of entertainment district. But I think these areas, as they densify, need some urban form, too. And people need to be able to get out of their car and do various things. So I welcome your questions and that's a snapshot of what we talked about while you were away.

Seeing no other names in the docket, we have a motion by Councilmember Clark and a second by Councilmember Ramirez. Councilmember Clark, would you like to speak to your motion?

I move that we approve consent calendar item 4.1 to adopt an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Mountain View approving a development agreement between the City of Mountain View and WTA Middlefield LLC for an eight-story mixed-use building with 460 apartments utilizing state bonus law and approximately 9,371 square feet of ground floor commercial replacing an existing office building, and the removal of 29 heritage trees on a 2.86 acre site located at 490 East Middlefield Road, APN 160-53-004, to be read and titled only for the reading waived.

Thank you, Vice Mayor Clark. Sorry, I misspoke earlier. We are now ready to vote. Motion passes unanimously. We will now move to consent calendar item 4.4. Council Member McAllister, would you like to speak to your poll?

Thank you. So, safe parking started, I started this program when I was mayor in 2015, and it was to be a transitional, it was designed to be transitional to help those who want help to get from a vehicle or an RV into a more permanent housing and I'm looking as this project now is seems to be just growing a little bit more than I anticipated and since I've been gone for four years it just concerns me how it's is it how effective is or is the best use of cities funds and And I noticed the ongoing operating costs, one of my questions was, it's almost $1.4 million for a program that was supposed to be temporary and for people to transition out. And it seems to be growing and using more funds. And I'm wondering from the staff, is there, but I did see something in this. I'm concerned about this ongoing cost. And there is the core functions of the city that's like, public works, public safety, water, streets, and so forth. And then we have these other items that come along that seem to be moving higher and higher and a cost for per person seems to be getting higher and higher. And I was wondering if there's ways that we can mitigate some of this or do it more efficiently. Now, I appreciate one of the questions was there any time restrictions first established in the creation of safe parking And when I was here, there was. And now I notice, and thank you for the staff for the detailed information background, very helpful, that the average stay now is 599 days. And this was supposed to design for transition, people to get them into permanent housing. So is it, the question for staff, is it that we have more people, are we less effective on what we're doing with this stay, or we're just allowing the safe parking lot to become a de facto park for those folks. And I also noticed on the side that the county is also putting 120-day length of stay policy with extension available for participants. And it was always designed for those people who want help, we'll give it to them. And the programming, those who don't, they'll be parking out in the streets or wherever they do. So to staff, is this ongoing of funds escalating Is it gonna be paid? Because it just seems to be escalating. So first of all, ask how this day of 599 days, does that seem acceptable to staff or is it just the way it is? Now, how can we move people out of that transaction quicker?

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and City Council Members. Kimberly Thomas, Deputy City Manager. Thank you for your question and the nuances that you're raising regarding safe parking. Safe parking has been an ongoing program since 2019. On the order of $700,000 during that time period has been contributed by the City. The county has come aboard and provided $1.6 million for the existing program scope. And then you're right, as we're looking at this item for 4.4, we are looking at an increase up to nearly $3 million. So there is an increase. There is an increase in scope. I think one of the things that was very hopeful, and I remember your time back in those years days many years ago on safe parking is that it would really be a short-term thing. It would be 18 to 24 months total for the project itself. And unfortunately, what's happened throughout our region, and not just our region, but throughout the state of California, in fact, is that homelessness is extended. It is becoming chronic homelessness. And for our area of the peninsula, what that's indicative of is living in a vehicle, either a passenger vehicle or an RV. I can let Parnit Dinsa, our human services manager, talk more about the data and what the throughput is that's coming out of the county, but I can speak to it in a general way and share that we are not meeting the county benchmarks. We did post-COVID, so the program itself is not able to attain the county's benchmark, but it's very close. very close. And these types of temporary emergency programs do have longer stays. Another example of that would be interim or temporary housing like our Life Moves program here in the City of Mountain View. And these stays are indicative for Mountain View as well as cities throughout the region. Placement and permanent housing is incredibly difficult and it takes years.

You said the city's putting $700,000 in, but isn't the city also putting in money from the Shoreline Community Fund?

Yes. Council Member, what I was referring to was our figure going back since 2019, and then what I advised is, yes, we're asking to put in additional funding for this increase at Shoreline Lot B. Plus the shoreline, yes, correct. So the total for the current operations, if the item is approved tonight with the increase, will be just under $3 million, including the city and county contribution.

Okay, so with this information about the city saying 120 days, or the county, how are you going to, help me understand, are they related? Are we going to have to meet their standards of 120 days?

This is actually very new and I might ask Parnit to jump in on this but I'll share what I know about it. It is actually new and the county is working through some operational guidance on it and how they will do it. It's similar to what they've done for programs like the cold weather shelter. The goal is to transition folks quickly. It keeps the emphasis for the family unit that you're trying to stabilize on on trying to get out of that current situation once they are stabilized. But there is a provision to allow as long as they are meeting certain benchmarks and engaging in case management to continue with that program. So it's not just a one and done. Parneet, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Parnit Dinsa, Human Services Manager. To add on to what Deputy City Manager Kimberly Thomas shared, the County of Santa Clara uses the State Housing—Department of Housing and Urban Development's performance measures for its homeless response programs, and currently HUD does not have a category for safe parking. Therefore, the County of Santa Clara uses the category for street outreach to essentially set a similar benchmark for safe parking. For the past fiscal year, there were 30% of program participants exited into a temporary or permanent housing destination. And the calendar year, excuse me, 2025 benchmark for exits was 45%. So the county was a little bit lower than that threshold. And then in comparison to the prior fiscal year, 59% went on to exit to a permanent or stable housing destination. And in calendar year 2024, the benchmark was 50%.

Will you be able to answer the question about the 120 days?

Yes. Currently, county-funded homeless response programs like Safe Parking and Life Moves Mountain View do not have length of stays. However, over the course of the last year, the county has been working with all of their COUNTY FUNDED PROVIDERS TO ESTABLISH A LENGTH OF STAY LIMIT AS PART OF THEIR PROGRAMS. AND SO THAT IS SOMETHING THAT THE PROVIDER AT OUR SAFE PARKING SITE MOVE MOUNTAIN VIEW HAS BEEN ACTIVELY WORKING ON AND THAT WILL ENTAIL FOR ALL PROVIDERS 120 DAYS WITH POTENTIAL EXTENSIONS OF THREE TO FOUR FURTHER EXTENSIONS DEPENDING ON WHETHER OR NOT THAT INDIVIDUAL IS ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING IN CASE MANAGEMENT. and actively working on a housing plan with their case manager.

They pull their funding or limit their funding then? If that state doesn't exist?

I would think that's unlikely, but we've not encountered that situation or raised that issue with the county, so we don't have a definitive answer, but I would think that would be unlikely.

Okay. Well, thank you. So thank you for the clarity. That was very helpful. One other question that I asked about this one is about since we're a renegotiation with Live Nation, they rent from us and we're giving up the parking, and it says staff have not been calculated as this was done as part of various staff workloads. So do we Is there a way to figure out how much potential lost revenue we are giving up from renting the parking from Live Nation?

I think we had interpreted that question at a staff level perhaps incorrectly, that you were focused on staff resources, not revenue that might be going to Live Nation. That might be a question for probably our community services team, and I'm not sure that we have that information available. It did not come up in the sessions that I was engaged on on those negotiations. We can certainly get you a follow-up answer though if that's helpful.

Oh, thank you.

Well, now you've got the full team. Audrey Seymour, Assistant City Manager. If your question is, is the city losing revenue from Live Nation because they are not having access to those parking spaces, the answer is no. The only cost that we are incurring is the staff time required to work through these agreements.

So they're giving us back the land and not needing to require it?

That's correct.

OK.

Thank you. That was helpful. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Showalter.

Well, I am very pleased to move this. As you know, I've been... working on safe parking as long as John has. And we really have found in Mountain View that safe parking is something that works well for our community. It's a project that... people who are very compassionate about homeless support, and people who are very upset about having RVs on the public streets support. So there's just really broad support in our community about this, and you can't say that about many programs. So when we talk about the costs of this, of course we have to worry about the costs. But I think even more with this, we have to think about what's the value? What's the value of this program to our community and to the people that get to really get their lives in a much better place because of it? And so that's one of the reasons why I really think that this is a great thing for the City of Mountain View to be doing. And I wanna thank the staff for the incredible amount of work you've done, and for all the partners, because we don't do this alone. We have a whole laundry list of nonprofit organizations that support these efforts as well, and thank you to all of them. I'd just like to say too that over the years we've hoped that some public parking lot owners would step up and help us out and that just hasn't come to pass. So we need to take advantage of the land that we control and that's what we're doing here and I think that's very smart and I'm glad to see it happen. Now should I go ahead and read this or somebody else wanna talk, you wanna talk first?

You can read in and we can go to the next speakers.

Okay, all right. I have to take a breath first because it's quite lengthy. Adopt a resolution of the Board of Directors of the Shoreline Regional Park Community approving a mid-year 2025-26 Capital Improvement Program project to increase capacity for safe parking at Shoreline Lot B Lot B project to appropriating $490,859 from the Shoreline Regional Park Community Fund to fund the mid-year Lot B project appropriating $1,191,703 from the Shoreline Regional Park Community Fund to the City of Mountain View City Manager fiscal year 2026-27, Lot B Community, Lot B Safe Parking Program budget to fund $1,065,368 for the City of Mountain View in ongoing operating costs and $126,335 in one-time site preparation costs for the Lot B Safe Parking Program. Four, authorizing the community manager or designee to amend the shoreline amphitheater ground lease with Live Nation to extend the term for use of the Shoreline Amphitheater lot B for safe parking through December 31st, 2030, and to increase the capacity for safe parking at lot B, and five, finding these actions to be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act to be read in title only, further reading waived. Then we want to adopt a resolution of the city council, the city of Mountain View, authorizing the city manager or designee to amend the shoreline amphitheater ground lease. This is the exact same thing, isn't it?

Do I have to read it?

Crown Lease with Live Nation to extend the term for use of Shoreline Amphitheater lot B for safe parking through December 31, 2030 and to increase the capacity for safe parking at lot B. Two, enter into a lease agreement with the County of Santa Clara for safe parking at lot B through June 30th, 2028. Three, amend the cooperative use agreement with the County of Santa Clara for safe parking at 79 East Evelyn and 87 East Evelyn Avenue to extend the term through August 31st, 2026. Four, enter into a fiscal year 2026-27 funding agreement with the County of Santa Clara for the provision of homelessness prevention services and programs in an amount not to exceed $1,648,703, and five, finding these actions to be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act to be read in title only, further reading waived.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. I see that has been seconded by Council Member Ramirez. Next, we have Council Member Kamei. Great.

Thanks, Mayor. I'll be supporting the motion. I just had a question for staff. So since you had mentioned that the length of stay and there's some new kind of requirements coming from the county, I'd be interested if you could pass on that information as it becomes available to the council. In particular, you mentioned that there are potential extensions and then like, what's the process for the extension? How long are the extensions? What's the final, final extension? I think as those come forward, I'm sure all my colleagues and I would be interested in understanding that and perhaps an off agenda memo or an email to us would be most beneficial. Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. Council Member Hicks.

So I again wanted to thank Council Member McAllister for pulling this item. I think it's something that's important to a lot of people in the city, so a little discussion is worth our time. And I agree with Council Member Showalter that this program is broadly popular. I mean, people who are, like she said, both those who are very compassionate and passionate on this issue, and also people who just want the RVs off the street, have both asked me, you know, when are we going to do more spaces? So I think it is popular. I think that the cost coming from being paid through the Shoreline community is, to me, really appropriate, because I think it's the fact that we have, because there's an industrial park there, and the fact that We're bringing, we have over the past several decades brought more tech jobs to the community. That is one of the things that's making our housing less affordable and helping cause homelessness. So I think that community should pay for that. I also am glad that you brought up the length of stay issue and that Council Member Kamei did. I think that is an issue and something that Council again, I'm leaving, that means you, will have to work on because I think it is, I think we saw it as an opportunity to engage with people and help them move on, not long-term camping. And I think that also, ultimately, this is a program that we want to go away. Ultimately, we want people to be housed in housing. But I think with the situation, I think people can see there's not enough money going towards it and other things, so the housing emergency continues, and as long as that continues, I think we'll probably have some not ideal programs like this. And so I will be voting for, I will be supporting the motion.

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Council Member McAllister.

Okay, my comments now. As I say, I remember Dr. Love in here always asking us to do stuff. And I said, why don't you step up and give us some parking spaces? Pat will remember that. And they finally, they tried and they couldn't do it. So the city came along and started doing it. I believe in the program then. I still believe in the program now. I will support the motion. but we still need to look at the physical consequences on the city. Are we doing a good job with the taxpayer dollar to get the people efficiently into relocated properties? And so I understand I was also involved in getting the VTA lot. I remember speaking with the city manager then and helping get that. So I'm actively working to get these programs working, but we still need to, I wanna see the success and I'm sure the people that are sitting there for five, nine, almost 600 days would like it too. So I believe in the project, I'm gonna support the motion, but we need to keep an eye going forward that the escalation of costs, the shoreline community fund is to me, could be used maybe for something else right now. It's not a blank check, even though, and I don't want that to happen, but I agree with you, hopefully someday, that this program will help people transition into more sustainable housing. And that's my comments.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. I'll just add a few of my own comments. I don't view safe parking as a solution to our housing crisis. I think homelessness is one of the most tragic and visible symptoms of our housing crisis. Safe parking is merely a management tool as we deal with it. The answer is building housing at all levels of affordability and with focusing on those of the lowest income. I think about friends who have been in either safe parking or in our temporary, I forgot what they were called, but like our Life Moves program, that they struggled getting out of it, not through any fault of their own, it's just that there's not housing that they can afford to move out of so um it is one day it's it's not a ideal situation for people to be living in their vehicles but at this point this is the tools that we have um until we get the housing that they need and that they can move into i think about as someone who is is is low income and a renter myself, I am more likely to be someone who would be in the situation more likely to be there than a homeowner at this point. And so I'm in support of this motion because we do need the tools that we can have to help our residents get back on their feet while we find a way to solve our housing crisis. So thank you Council Member McAllister for opening up the discussion for us and I believe we are ready for a vote. All right, and it's unanimous. We will now move on to item five, oral communications. 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 a 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 one speaker in the queue, Monica Faria. I'm sorry if I pronounced your name wrong. Please come to the dais and you have three minutes.

Hi, good evening, mayor, council members, and city manager.

Sorry, a little nervous.

My name is Monica Faria, and I'm your local government affairs representative for PG&E. I'd like to acknowledge my colleague, Sergio Jimenez, who previously served as your representative. I appreciate his work and partnership with the city of Mountain View, and I'm grateful for his support during this transition. Moving forward, I will be your primary point of contact for all PG&E related matters. If you have questions, concerns, or need information regarding PG&E, I'm here to help either by finding the answers directly or connecting you with the appropriate subject matters experts. I value strong partnerships with our local government leaders and I'm committed to being responsive and collaborative resource for you all. I will be reaching out to each of you individually to schedule a meeting so I can better understand your priorities, your concerns, and provide with information of interest. I look forward to meeting you all soon and working together. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, and we look forward to complaining to you. All right, we will now take virtual speakers. I see none. Therefore, we will now go to item six, public hearings. So we are starting with item 6.1, economic development subsidy report and amended and restated disposition and development agreement and amended and restated ground leases for Hope Street lots four and eight. Assistant City Managers Don Cameron and Arne Andrews 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. We're ready for you.

Thank you very much. So good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. I am Don Cameron, Assistant City Manager, and joining me tonight on the dais is Assistant City Manager Arne Andrews. What, did I miss something?

All right, thank you.

So we're here tonight to present recommended amendments to the disposition and development agreement and ground leases for Hope Street lots four and eight, located in downtown between West Evelyn Avenue and Villa Street. Any action Council takes tonight will be in the Council's role as the property owner, not as the land use authority. Council will consider potential entitlements in its regulatory capacity at a later date. The council selected Robert Green Company or RGC to develop a hotel in lot four and an office building in lot eight in 2016. By 2021, the city was prepared to issue the building permits. However, the pandemic's impact on the hotel industry and construction loan costs made proceeding into construction infeasible and the project was paused under the financing extension clause in the disposition development agreement, also known as the DDA. Last June, Council approved amending the DDA to extend the financing extension to March 31, 2026, in order to provide time to negotiate further amendments to the DDA and ground leases. The recommended amendments incorporate three key modifications to address the changed conditions and to position the city to receive revenue and economic benefits from the development. First, allow the hotel to proceed prior to the office building development rather than being constructed concurrently as originally required. Second, change the parking plans to allow the hotel to be built at grade with hotel parking provided via valet parking model utilizing shared parking with nearby properties. And replace lot four public parking in the planned lot five parking structure. The lot eight office building would continue to include on-site parking for office needs and to replace its public parking spaces. Third, change the city's financial participation in the hotel to be transit occupancy tax or TOT rebates and reduced rent with no upfront capital funding. This approach minimizes the city's financial risks and eliminates the obligation to use any city funds on the project. Exhibit A to the resolution lists the recommended business terms for the amended DDA and ground leases. Based on these terms, the size and scale of the hotel building will be the same as the one that was approved in 2018, with the exception of the new parking plans already presented. The city will participate financially through a reduced rent structure that begins at no rent for first five years of hotel operations and increases incrementally to 100% of rent annually by year 21. Extra rent will be due starting in year 31 to partially pay back the earlier rent reductions. RGC will receive a rebate of 100% of the current 10% TOT rate for up to 15 years. A net present value limit has been set to allow the TOT rebate to end sooner if hotel room revenue exceed current projections. RGC will pay bonus rent in the event the hotel's revenues exceed the pro forma projections and participation rent should the hotel be sold or refinanced. As part of other financial terms, RGC will pay 6.6 million to the city for the replacement of the lot for public parking spaces, unless the council has approved an alternative method to replace these spaces. RGC will also pay past due permit fees and city will defer payment of certain impact fees until the hotel is completed. The city's financial participation in the form of reduced rent and TOT rebates is an economic development subsidy according to state government code. The total economic development subsidy is estimated to be $47.5 million over the 55-year initial lease term. Based on the hotel pro forma for the initial 55 years, it is projected that the city will receive over 433 million in ground rent, TOT, sales taxes, and possessory interest taxes. This is a conservative estimate that does not include any bonus participation rents received, any future increases in the TOT rate, or sales taxes generated by hotel guests visiting other Mountain View businesses. In addition to revenue for the city, a hotel will also provide significant economic benefits with more foot traffic for downtown restaurants, shops, and entertainment, as well as jobs creation. The amended DDA includes, excuse me, The amended DDA includes timeline performance requirements starting with the planning permit application for the hotel being submitted no later than the end of this July. Based on these performance requirements, the hotel could open for business as early as mid-2029, but no later than spring 2031. Based on the recommended business terms, the size and scale of the office building on lot eight will be the same as the one that was approved in 2018. The DDA does allow RGC to propose changes to the building size, how parking is provided, and lease rates subject to council approval when they are ready to move forward with the planning permit application. The city will not be providing an economic development subsidy for the office building. RGC will pay the greater of a minimum base rent or a rent based on a percentage of gross revenues. Similar to the hotel, RGC will also pay bonus rent and participation rent when appropriate. The amended DDA includes timeline performance requirements for the office building as well, starting with a notice of intent to submit a planning permit application no later than the end of 2028. In conclusion, staff recommends council hold a public hearing on the economic development subsidy for the lot four hotel development and adopt a resolution approving the business terms for the amended DDA and leases, authorizing the city manager to execute the documents and make the necessary findings for these actions. Thank you.

Thank you. Does any member of the council have questions? All right, Council Member McAllister.

Okay, I just have two questions. One, why does there need to be a public hearing for that particular item?

It is a requirement of the state government code about the economic development subsidy that the city council must hold a public hearing about the subsidy.

And what would be discussed? The public, that might mean, so what?

So the requirements included that the city post the economic development subsidy report which is attachment one to your council report on our website in advance of this meeting and that we post a notice in a newspaper about the public hearing and informing the public of where they can preview the economic development subsidy report in advance of the meeting. SO THE PURPOSE OF THE HEARING TONIGHT IS TO HEAR WHETHER THERE'S ANY PUBLIC COMMENT ON THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT SUBSIDY THAT YOU ARE CONSIDERING GRANTING TO THE HOTEL BEFORE YOU TAKE ACTION ON AMENDING THE DDA AND LEASES THAT WOULD GRANT THIS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT SUBSIDY.

So if you're asked to approve it tonight, but then we have to do the meeting before we can have a final approval of it?

Tonight is your public hearing. When you open up for public comment, that's your public hearing.

And the other question I have since, Pat and council member Showalter and I were here when we first approved it. So it seems like deja vu or we're not doing a lot of things happened during COVID. So I would, my motto this time on council is GSD for those who want to figure it out, get stuff done. So for us to get this done, what can staff do to expedite the permitting process for this project?

I think it would be most appropriate for the Community Development Director to help respond to that question.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, Christian Murdock, Community Development Director. So there are a couple things that I think are likely to help with efficient processing of the permits, should Council support moving forward with the proposal tonight. The first is that we've offered to the developer the opportunity to submit what's called an at-risk application. And what that means is they can submit for the building permit review prior to obtaining city approval of the planning or zoning permits. That can save several months typically, if not more off of the building permit review process. As the name suggests, there is risk in doing so because something could change in the planning permit review and approval process. But nevertheless, most of the time consuming aspects of structural detail review and so forth, those aspects can be completed earlier in the process. The other piece here that's helpful is the overall hotel project is largely the same as what was reviewed previously. And so we aren't likely to have to do extensive ground up review of the project in the same way we did when it was a new submittal. So that is something that should be able to help us more efficiently get through the planning and zoning process.

Is there staff capacity to help get this project reviewed efficiently?

So we do have staff that remain that are familiar with the project in its prior iteration and that have spent some time working on this item currently. And so I'm not concerned about a staff capacity issue at this point.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Seeing no other council questions, 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 two minutes. I am seeing no speakers. We will now take virtual speakers. I'm seeing no hands. So we will take it back to the council. Thank you. I will bring the item back for council questions and deliberation. Please note that a motion to approve the recommendation should also include reading the title of the resolution attached to the report. I see there is a motion by Council Member Clark, seconded by Council Member McAllister. Council Member Clark, would you like to speak to your motion first?

Yes, so we've held the public hearing. So I move that we adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View approving business terms and authorizing the city manager or designee to execute an amended and restated disposition and development agreement and amended and restated ground leases between the City of Mountain View and RGC Mountain View 1, LLC for the development of Hope Street Slots 4 and 8, making findings for the amended and restated ground leases to exceed 55 years and finding that the approval does not constitute a project pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act to be read in title only for the reading wave.

Thank you, Vice Mayor Clark. We now will go to Council, Council Member Fitts.

So Mayor, I don't know if you want us to declare whether we met with the developer, but I don't know if we do that during public hearings, but I did meet with him at one point. And seems like maybe that's neither here nor there. I will be supporting the motion, and I just wanted to say a couple things that are important to me about this economic development opportunity. First, maybe the more, the minor one is that for people who listened carefully or read the report, there's valet parking involved with this proposal, and that's something that I really like, that I think that we are losing parking downtown with our lot 12 affordable housing and various other things going on downtown, but We actually have a tremendous amount of parking downtown. It's just underneath the offices and is not used a lot. So I like the idea of the hotel using it. I hope that can be sort of a pilot project for, call it that, for possibly other business people downtown using that unused space as well valuable unused space as well that resource and then the other thing I was going to say is that You know this hotel will be really a great step forward for our I believe for our economic vitality plan It should help us with you know more foot traffic it should help us reduce vacancies downtown help our existing restaurants and other businesses thrive, add to the diversity of the city's revenue sources, and also make our downtown an even better entertainment zone, community gathering space, urban park, or as Councilmember McAllister says, maybe a community building opportunity. But in order for that to work, we have to maintain the other things that we need to make the downtown work, namely, making sure it has a sense of place, preserve the key historic features, make sure we keep a mix of uses on the ground floor, that's what we're, ground floors on Castro Street in particular, and do a good job on an SB 79 alternative plan. So I think there are a number of things that we need to do It's not just approving this tonight, but a number of other ingredients we need to add to the mix to make sure that this is a success. And with that, I will be supporting the motion.

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Before we go to my other colleagues, Assistant City Attorney, I don't have a trigger here to ask for disclosures. Is this something that our colleagues need to disclose, whether or not we have met with the applicant or not?

Mayor, since you've basically asked the Council if they would like to make any disclosures, I think you can do so now.

Okay. I guess, so we have most of our colleagues in the docket. If not, feel free to add yourself in. Oh, okay. Has anyone met with the applicant? You can raise your hand. All right. Consider yourselves disclosed. Council Member Showalter.

Thank you, yeah, we have been working on this a long time, as Council Member McAllister mentioned, and the reason we've been working on it a long time is we think that having a hotel in downtown will really be a wonderful feature for our community, that there'll be all sorts of economic vitality, it'll be a wonderful meeting place, I mean, that there's just a lot of benefits for it. But the economics of hotels are very difficult. They ebb and flow. And we're not responsible for that, but we're obviously subject to that. And currently this developer thinks that the economics are a go. So we need to take advantage of that now while we have this opportunity. And then the other thing I wanted to mention is the creative way that the... The DA has been written up so that we're not out any current money with this arrangement. The credits that we are giving for this hotel are essentially credits for future taxes that we won't be collecting, like the TOT tax, the hotel tax. And I think that's... You know, that's a very good way to do it and certainly much less of a problem to our current budget. So I wanna thank the, whoever came up with that. And I think it's a really good idea. So yes, I will be supporting it.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member McAllister.

Yeah, I met with the developer in 2016, and so I'll disclose that way back when. My apologies to the vice mayor. He was right there with me on all these other projects that I've been talking about that we've seen since we've come back. So we're trying to get those done. But this particular project, now that... We have a vehicle, light rail, to the Levi's Stadium. It's a great opportunity to bring downtown. We missed the Super Bowl. We're gonna miss the World Cup. So the sooner we get this done, the city's gonna see, to me, a significant economic opportunity there to tie in with what's happening in Santa Clara because we have that simple, easy way to come to Mountain View, park, get on light rail and get to that stadium without having major congestion and maybe we might even be able to attract a Somebody that's doing a concert there to come down Mountain View and stay at our new hotel, but I'm excited about getting this done Enthusiastic from the get-go and there's nothing but positive for this project

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Kamei. Great. Thanks, Mayor.

So I think colleagues have talked a lot about the benefits. So I just want to take an opportunity to thank staff. This is obviously, as some mentioned, a long time in the making, but I think that there was representatives from every department that we have in the city talking about this, bringing this forward to be as creative as possible. Most of all, I want to thank the applicant. You've made yourself readily available time and time again over this last decade to continue the conversation, ask for feedback. And I think that's what's led to today and what we're seeing and hopefully, and we're gonna see another project where we've had a decade in the making after this. I think what I truly appreciate is the collaborative nature and how it's been so solution-oriented, both on the applicant side, but also on the city and the staff side. And as Councilmember Showalter mentioned, there's some sacrifices we need to make now, but we will be able to, through the hard work of staff, be able to recoup and hopefully gain some financial benefits on the other end for some of the things we need to do now. And so I hope that as... as we are thinking about not only economic vitality but the future of our city, we continue to keep this spirit going and then be thinking about and appreciate as we're discussing economic vitality, a mixture of uses and I appreciate that conversation. It's not just we're talking about retail, we're talking about maybe maker spaces or child care something to make sure that we're filling um and and truly addressing economic vitality in all the different buckets with which that could be and i know we talked about it in this space as well so thank you very much thank you council member kamei does anyone else have any comments on council seeing none i think we're ready for a vote yay

Motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Congratulations to that development. Now we will move on to item 6.2, residential development at 555 West Middlefield, which I think is going to be the big docket tonight. Would any council members like to make disclosures? Council member? Oh, no, no, no, we're gonna... All right, Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I'll disclose that I met with the applicant some time ago.

Thank you. Council Member Hicks. I also met with the applicant some time ago. Council Member Showalter.

I met with the applicant some time ago and just a couple days ago.

Council Member Kamei. I met with the applicant. Thank you, Council Member Kamei.

And I did too.

Thank you, Vice Mayor Clark. We will now move on to our presentation. Planning Manager George Schroeder, I'm so sorry, was that right? And Assistant Community Development Director Amber Bleszinski 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.

Go right ahead. Okay. Good evening, Mayor Ramos and Council. My name is George Schroeder, Planning Manager. I'm joined by Amber Bleszinski, Assistant Director of Community Development for this project, located at 555 West Middlefield Road. Staff has prepared a brief presentation outlining the project, and I'll begin by providing some context regarding the project location. The approximately 14.5 acre project site is located in the Peay or Plant Community Zoning District. It has a general plan land use designation of high, low density residential. And the existing development consists of an apartment community with service parking. To the north and south are condominium communities. To the east is Highway 85 and Stevens Creek. To the west is a service station and across Moffett Boulevard, a mobile home park and shopping center. There is an active approval for mixed youth development on the shopping center site but the timing for construction is unknown at this point as no building permits have been submitted yet. The applicant Avalon Bay Communities would demolish the existing parking areas and amenity spaces at the existing apartment complex and construct three new multifamily buildings ranging from three to five stories, totaling 323 units, including amenity spaces and structured parking for two of the buildings, along with a new surface parking lot for the other. There will be a 1.34-acre parkland dedication for a future city park. And the applicant requests a heritage tree removal permit to remove, transplant, and replace heritage trees on site. Lastly, the project requests a vesting tentative map to create three lots for the project site. Building A would consist of demolishing the existing amenity building and constructing a new 30-unit apartment building with above-ground structured parking. Building B would demolish carport parking, construct a new 97 unit residential condominium or stacked flats building, including 10 row house style units with attached two car garages along Cypress Point Drive and surface parking spaces for the stacked flats. Building C would demolish surface parking, constructing a new 196 unit apartment building with above ground structured parking. And the applicant would demolish the tennis courts to dedicate a 1.34 acre future city park. The parkland provided exceeds the requirement by 0.75 acres. And in recognition of the surplus, staff is recommending a deferral in the timing of the parkland acceptance, as it would provide flexibility for the applicant and help better manage construction logistics. There was a previous approval at the site in 2022, where the city approved a general plan amendment to high-low density residential, as well as a similar project to add 323 units with the dedication of a 1.34 acre park in the same location. The applicant is no longer pursuing that 2022 project due to changing economic conditions. And the proposed project differs from the 2022 project through increased building heights on two buildings and proposing above ground parking instead of below grade. Additionally, eight fewer tree removals are proposed. The new buildings are oriented towards the pedestrian realm along all three street frontages. Parking areas are minimized from public view by either being located behind or within buildings. Various onsite amenities are proposed throughout the project site, including open space areas, private residential balconies, a rooftop pool deck, bicycle parking, and fitness rooms. Additionally, a new publicly accessible pedestrian bicycle path, as shown in orange, runs along the future city park and would connect Middlefield Road with Cypress Point Drive. The applicant will provide 48 deed restricted below market rate units at varying income levels, which will be dispersed throughout the new buildings, including both ownership and rental units. The applicant will also pay an in lieu fee for the resulting fractional unit. Overall, the project's affordable housing proposal complies with the city's affordable housing ordinance. The project is eligible for a 20% density bonus because it provides more than 10% of the units for low income households. However, the applicant is not proposing any density bonus units above what the general plan allows. The applicant does not request any concessions under the state density bonus law, but requests six waivers that would otherwise preclude the construction of the development, and these will be for floor area ratio, setbacks, height, open area, personal storage, and bicycle parking. The frontages of building A and B can be seen here. The proposed architectural design is well articulated with high quality of building elements as well as breaks and massing, which complement adjoining land uses. Along streetscape frontages, durable, cohesive materials, as well as stooped entry porches and active interior spaces, create a strong connection to the pedestrian realm. Here's the proposed vesting tentative map, which includes the creation of three lots, one for condominium purposes to accommodate 97 condominium units, one for the existing and proposed apartment units, and one for the future city park. Also, the publicly accessible pedestrian and bicycle path is shown in blue on the map. The project contains 442 existing trees, including 251 heritage-sized trees, And the applicant would preserve 163 of these heritage trees and remove 88 trees with 39 of those trees to be relocated on site. The heritage trees to be removed are either in poor condition or in the development footprint, or in the case of the trees along the freeway, require removal due to regrading. The tree removals will be replaced by 212 new trees on site. And the applicant would preserve 20 of the 21 existing trees, street trees along the project frontages. Here is the project circulation plan that shows pedestrian and vehicular access. There would remain two vehicular access points along West Middlefield Road, and the seven existing vehicular access points would be reduced to three along Cypress Point Drive. A multimodal transportation assessment was conducted, which demonstrates compliance with the VTA's guidelines, as well as no adverse traffic operational impacts on any nearby intersection. The project is not subject to any minimum parking requirements due to the site's location within a half mile of major transit stops. The project includes a transportation demand management plan with various programs aimed to achieve a 10% peak hour reduction. The project is statutorily exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA under the recent AB 130 as it meets all the qualifying criteria for the exemption. The applicant also held two neighborhood meetings last year with residents of the existing apartment community and with the neighboring condominium communities. We also received numerous emails from members of the community and advocacy groups throughout the project review. The subdivision committee also reviewed the vesting tentative map on March 4th of this year and recommended its approval to the city council. Here is the full staff recommendation on each permit requested as well as the CEQA findings. And this concludes staff's presentation, and community development and public works staff, including the project planner, Sam Hughes, senior planner, are available to answer any questions, as well as the city's environmental consultant. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now have a presentation from the applicant, and I'm so sorry if I'm getting these names really wrong. Charlie Koch, development director from Avalon Bay Communities, and Joe Kirchhofer? Feel free to correct me on those names when you get up here. Senior Vice President Northern California Development of Avalon Bay Communities. You will see seven minutes on the clock.

Charlie Koch, I'm a development director with Avalon Bay Communities. I'm here with Joe Kirchhofer and other members of our project team to speak to you about the proposed development project at 555 West Middlefield Road. I want to start by thanking council for considering our proposal and staff for the extensive amount of time that they've put into reviewing the project plans. This project is a new proposal at a site that has a previously approved project. Council approved it in 2022. That project was originally proposed back in 2016. And that project was proposed at a time that had significantly different economic conditions to the ones that we have today. Unfortunately, after a couple of years of hoping for those conditions to approve following that project approval, Joe and I went back to the drawing board and realized we needed to come up with a new design to be able to deliver new housing for Mountain View and for Avalon Bay. We went back to the drawing board and thought about how we could keep a project as close to the previously approved project as possible while improving project financial feasibility. Avalon Bay is a long-term owner of the project that it develops, and we've had a presence in Mountain View and the Bay Area for a long time. I'm going to keep this presentation pretty high level, but happy to answer any detailed questions during Q&A. On this slide, we have some project highlights. I think the fact that we are replacing surface parking lots in this proposal with attractive new housing and landscaping is really the primary benefit of this project for the city. We're creating 323 new homes without displacing any of the existing residences on site. We're also planning to provide 48 new affordable homes. and donating a 1.34 acres of land to the city for the creation of a new public park, which is a significant over-contribution relative to the city's current public park dedication requirements. In addition, we are offering a $2 million voluntary community benefit contribution. Next slide, please. Here's the site plan, which planning staff expertly walked us through. I do want to highlight that the primary change to make this project financially feasible has to do with bringing the parking, which in the previous proposal was to be underground. into the new configuration, which is in surface parking lots and above grade parking garages concealed from public view on the street. This new proposal also maintains as much of the tree preservation as was committed to in the previous proposal, including preservation of certain key stands of heritage redwood trees. Next slide, please. Here's a rendered view of building A, a four-story building with 30 units in it. This will be the amenities hub for the new property. And all of these amenities, including extensive ones on the ground floor, as well as a rooftop pool deck, will be available to the renters of the existing buildings, as well as the new ones. On the next slide. We can see building B. This corner of the property is the most prominent, and we spent a long time working with planning staff in the original approval on this design. We think it turned out really well. And in the updated project design, we have maintained the same aesthetic. There are also streetscape enhancements included with Building B on Moffett Boulevard. Those include a bus boarding island, a protected bike lane, as well as a widened sidewalk, and all of that aligns with the city's vision for Moffett. On the next slide. we have a view of building C. This view highlights a entry courtyard where the building steps back from the street. We think that this really helps create a differentiation in the building massing and helps to welcome residents and the community to the property. This particular building as well as building B include extensive stoop entries to units to help engage the street. The garage in this building has been configured to face Highway 85. On the next slide, I just want to highlight a few additional project benefits. There's going to be a new public access easement cutting through the site from Moffett or from Middlefield Road to Cypress Point Drive. That'll be available to pedestrians and cyclists on an otherwise very large block to go around. We also, as a part of the redesign of the parking have been able to reduce the planned overall construction duration. That construction duration, as well as the construction emissions in the previously approved project were major points of community concern. And by not needing to dig large pits for those parking garages, we think that this new project design effectively addresses that concern. On the final slide, Just to conclude, this is the kind of project that by providing new affordable units, avoiding displacement of existing renters, dedicating a large public park and providing high quality landscaping in a transit oriented location is the exact kind of project that Mountain View wants for its new housing. And the improvements made to the project design address some of the community concerns that were voiced in the previous approval. I appreciate the time and myself and our project team are here to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Does any member of the council have questions either for our staff or the applicant? I see one from Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. Two questions. The first is, what is the origin of the voluntary $2 million community benefit contribution? And a related question is, how do we intend to use that money?

So I can start with the origin and I think I would ask for some assistance from community development director on if there's potential to answer the second part of the question. So in the original approved project, the previous one, the community benefits contribution was 1.977. And so I think that the applicant has just stuck to that commitment of a community benefits payment to the city. and at that rate of $2 million.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, Christian Murdoch, Community Development Director. Most often those types of payments, community benefits payments, for example, are something that's prioritized with the Public Works Department in terms of capital improvements. So depending on the timing and needs in a particular area, it can go towards improvements like PARK DEVELOPMENT, PARK ENHANCEMENTS, BIKE PED INFRASTRUCTURE ENHANCEMENTS, OTHER SORTS OF TRANSPORTATION IMPROVEMENTS. AND SO IT REALLY DEPENDS WHEN THE TIMING BECOMES CLEARER ON RECEIPT OF THOSE FUNDS AND GOING THROUGH THE PROCESS WITH THE PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT TO TRY TO BRING FORWARD A PROJECT THAT MAKES SENSE AT THAT TIME.

THANK YOU, COUNCILMEMBER RAMIREZ. COUNCILMEMBER SHOWALTER. YEAH, I HAVE A COUPLE QUESTIONS.

I THINK THEY'RE FOR THE DEVELOPER BUT I'M NOT SURE. One is I understand that building B is being mapped for condos, which is excellent. And I'm just wondering what kind of experience Avalon Bay has with condos. I'm familiar with several of your projects in Mountain View and I don't think they include any. So I just wondered about that. And I also understand that you're not gonna, the plan is not to sell them as condos initially but to rent them.

Yeah, that's correct. So Joe Kirchhofer with Avalon Bay. Thank you, council members, for having us tonight. That's correct. So our core business is to own, develop, own, build, manage apartment buildings. And so our holdings in Mountain View, we own over 1,000 units in Mountain View. Those are all rental properties. We have... very sparingly in other projects, done a very small number of condo buildings ourselves. But for this project, as you explained, the plan is to build all the buildings, all 323 new units, operate them all as rentals, but have the option in the future that building B could be separated out, could be sold separately, and that could be something that could be converted to ownership housing in the future.

Great. Okay. Thank you. And then... Yeah, I guess that's it for right now.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Hicks.

So I have some questions about sidewalks. For people who don't come to council meetings on a regular basis, council members have the opportunity to ask questions in written form ahead of the meeting. are questions now. And there are a couple that council members submitted on sidewalks and I'm still not clear. So one of the questions noted that the setback has on Moffitt is four feet less than the previous project. And another question asks, does the city have a set standard for sidewalks? And that answer says something about five-foot detached sidewalks and five-foot landscape strip. So I'm left not understanding what the sidewalk along Moffett is here, and also a little concerned that it might be like a five-foot sidewalk with a, is the sidewalk minimum, frankly, and it's, I live in a single family home, and it's for people walking by single family homes, basically. And with so many more people on the street, it must be wider, so I just wanna know what the, I could not figure it out looking at the plans.

Sure, I think we'd ask our colleagues from Public Works if they can speak to the sidewalk. for the applicant?

So the sidewalk along Moffett is designed to be eight feet wide. The reduction in the setback is from the back of the sidewalk to the face of the building. And so that reduction in the setback did not affect the proposed sidewalk width.

Thank you very much. That's exactly what I wanted to know. And I imagine because this is more urban than The question here with the answer on the five foot sidewalk and the five foot planning strip is probably for less urban neighborhoods. I imagine here there's no planning strip adjacent to the street.

Yeah, so along Moffett Boulevard, that design is to include a protected bike lane. And so that's using up some of the width that, for example, along Cypress Point Drive is being used for a five foot planting strip and then a five foot sidewalk. So if you have a total of 10 feet to play with and you use eight feet for the eight foot sidewalk, you need a little bit of space for the protected bike lane, then really the landscaping for us ends up behind the sidewalk.

And on Moffitt, are there tree wells within the eight feet? There's no additional furniture strip is what people call it sometimes.

Right. There aren't additional tree plantings between the sidewalk and the curb.

So they're within that eight foot stretch.

We have tree plantings behind back of walk.

Okay.

Within the project site. Yeah. Closer to the building.

Not between the sidewalk and the bike liner street. Correct.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Council member Hicks, council member McAllister.

Okay. Yeah, thank you, Council Member Hicks, about the sidewalks. That was a concern of mine. But I was more concerned that going down further where the regulatory, I mean, I just got back from a week in Arizona and their sidewalks are very large. Washington, D.C. has very large, wide sidewalks. And I think everything I see around here makes it more enjoyable to have a wide sidewalk. It's more comfortable. And I think that should be the new standard as I see we're gonna do that. So following up, I asked the question, how can this standard be changed? And the staff responded with a formal regulatory action by the city. Is that something that seems that we could do sooner than later?

I think we'll let our colleagues from Public Works answer that one.

It would be nice to get it done before Council Member Hicks leaves the Council.

Good evening, Jennifer Ng, Public Works Director. One of the things that we'll be embarking upon soon with our friends in community development is the development of the citywide objective design standards. Now that's primarily targeted for multifamily and mixed use development, but we'll probably capitalize upon that opportunity to look at sidewalk standards just holistically rather than just for one particular type of development.

I can't say that word, I mean, okay, holistically. Okay, so that's sort of generic. Is there a way to be more definitive about, yes, we would like to require a lot of wider sidewalks?

Yeah, happy to take that feedback. I hear you guys loud and clear. I think that's also an objective that we'll be looking at as staff as we start the citywide objective design standards.

Okay, and my other, thank you.

You're welcome.

Since that was sort of sidetracked, but where is Joe and... Joe can take it or, Joe. Okay, so gentlemen, I met with them via Zoom. So now, here's the question I presented to you before and you have an opportunity. The question I asked those two gentlemen was, you're building a lot of housing. How are you building a community with all that housing?

Sure, thank you for asking that question. I think it's a great question. I'd go back to one of the things that Charlie mentioned in his remarks. We're not just a developer. Our company is, yes, we're on the front end of the process developing new buildings. We have our own contractor to build those buildings. But our business model is also to own these buildings over the long term, over decades. We purchased this property in 2013. The other buildings we've owned in Mountain View we've owned for decades. And so our success isn't really measured in just that first process. Hey, people are really excited to move into this building. We want people to be excited to move in and then excited to stay, and stay for a while. And so we create community as part of that process to help us be more successful. We do it in a few different ways. I'd point out some things as part of the design, the way the buildings have been laid out and designed. We have one sort of central amenity area in building A. That's the way the building is currently designed. There's a central amenity building. We've kept that concept with the new amenity building. All the amenities are shared amongst all the buildings, new and old. So there's not any sort of delineation between you live in one of the older buildings versus you live in one of the newer buildings. And then we've also expanded sort of that concept to the broader community. where you saw on the plan that bike ped connection that runs through the block, that's gonna be open to the public, that's gonna bring people from surrounding communities into and through the property. And then obviously the biggest thing we're doing is taking over an acre of space and it's currently private, mostly parking lot space and opening that to the public as a future public park, which will be a great way to bring both our residents and the surrounding community members together. And then because we are the long-term owner, We have our own Avalon-based staff that are operating these buildings, you know, doing maintenance in these buildings. So we do, you know, we do resident events. We try to get people together. You know, it's not like an everyday thing. People are busy. They're living their lives. But we try to do, you know, every few weeks there's, you know, something as small as, hey, there's donuts in the lobby on Fridays to sort of wine-tasting things, to, you know, get to know your neighbor things. And so that's sort of a regular part of our programming for the properties. And then we're also, one of the things that we pride ourselves on, and if you look at things like Google reviews and reviews of apartment buildings, we have our own staff on site. We try to make that part of the reason that people want to stay. And so you see a lot of comments about, oh, that maintenance person was so helpful and was so nice and was so friendly. That goes a really long way in making people feel like their home is a home that they want to stay in. And so those are the things that it's not, you know, it's not something that's on our slides or in our plan. But, you know, the person that greets you as you, you know, come in and out every day, that's our employee. And part of their job is to make sure you feel great when you're coming home. Okay.

Thank you. My other question is now for staff. The vehicle miles travel. Now, things have changed.

And

The reason I saw that on the one on Middlefield, I saw it here and with some other projects, and each one of these projects that come up that says this is gonna be a little impact, and I saw a letter from the residents of the Crescent, or Crespi?

Crescent, what? Yeah, the streets, yeah.

Cypress, yeah, that was not even close, Cypress.

Where they were concerned about the traffic.

and this is a broader question to staff. I'm concerned about the traffic, and it says assume or presume, and some of these questions come up that this is exempt, and yet this is a large development. Prometheus is developing on the other side of the street, and yet they say, well, we have to take these independently, but I'm concerned that there's a cumulative effect, and this concerns me when I was on council before, is that each of these cannot be looked upon as individual projects, they have to be looked at the total of all of them, the cumulative effect of all the other building that's going around, because that is gonna compound it. And so, staff, could you help me understand how you can sit there and say, right, that there is no impact of the traffic coming in, there's no impact from across the street with Prometheus, there's no impact over on Middlefield where Prometheus has their projects that they're gonna be building, that none of these have have an effect on the traffic. Because traffic causes, parking's gonna be potentially out in the street if there's not enough parking. There's congestion of people going all at one time. If you have a dead end street, they're gonna have all these cars coming out. So help me understand when they say VTM or because you're near a major transit center. And the people on this council, I probably have more experience with light rail and the lack of experience success of light rail. It's very expensive to run, and yet we're putting the people's quality of life based on a light rail system that is rarely used, and I thank the staff for looking into it, but I pretty familiar with our locations here, and they're very rarely used, and they don't go somewhere, and it takes you forever to get somewhere. So someone from staff, please help me understand how you do not include the cumulative, and more, not by the book, which says it's not a fact, but from reality.

Good evening. Ed Arango, assistant public works director. I'm going to start the response on this. I'll take a first pass at it. We have Lorenzo Lopez, the city's traffic engineer, also online. So if I can get him promoted so he can follow up on a response related to your question. I do think it's important to recognize, and we had put this in the response, that VMT, this is Vehicle Miles Traveled, is the metric that's being used for SQL analysis for traffic. It doesn't account for cumulative conditions. It's the trips from the site. As part of our evaluation for projects, particularly for projects of this size, we go through an additional analysis. It's called a multimodal transportation analysis that does this evaluation of sort of the operational impacts associated with a project. So previously, historically, you may remember CEQA processes involved a traffic analysis that was a level of service. So the level of service really did include this operational analysis. What is the degradation to intersections and roadways as a result of the project? in CEQA the regulations change now that is no longer a metric it's just vehicle miles traveled for a project but recognizing that there are operational and the city staff would want to know those operational impacts we have implemented a additional analysis on kind of these larger developments that identify that evaluation and we did do that for this project I also want to recognize that we also did it for the neighboring project considering the cumulative effect So this project doesn't have the cumulative effect, I believe. And I don't have the address in my head. But it's at the intersection of Cypress and Moffitt. And it's on the Moffitt side. 400 Moffitt, thank you. So 400 Moffitt, so the timing sequence was that the 555 Middlefield project, the background conditions didn't have 400 Moffitt included, but the 400 Moffitt project did have the background as there's a 555 Middlefield project that's coming, let's take a look at that cumulative effort. So at this point I'd like to have Lorenzo provide information on what that analysis showed and what staff saw from the results.

I see Mr. Lopez has been promoted to panelists. Go ahead.

Thank you, Ed. Lorenzo Lopez, city traffic engineer. Hopefully you can hear me well. As Ed mentioned, multimodal transportation analysis was done for the project. Originally in 2022, MTA was done. And then an addendum to that MTA was done later in 2022 after Council had requested the trees to be evaluated and number of parking spaces were decreased due to saving some of the redwood trees on site. And then recently in February of 2026, a supplemental MTA was done to compare the differences between that previously entitled project and the currently proposed project. What Ed was mentioning was vehicle miles traveled, but the actual level of service, which is what we still look at in traffic, the level of service at the intersection of Moffett Boulevard and Cypress Point Drive will still operate at level of service B, which is acceptable under our city standard, which is all the way down, I guess you could say, to level of service D. So that intersection will still operate at level of service B, which is the same as what was prepared for the previously approved project in 2022. I'm hoping that's answering some of your some of what you're asking. Um, I did mention the project 400 Moffitt across the street across Moffitt from this site and that did account for this 555 Middlefield project in the cumulative conditions. Uh, let's see if there's anything more to add. We did look at the number of trips that would be added in the peak hours and they're very minimal um very minimal that would be accessing cypress point drive so the difference really is the existing conditions traffic will be shifted from the the a and b areas of the site down to c and and that is not considered a significant impact. Hopefully that captured everything you asked.

So since the parking garage is at the very back, so all that traffic is going to go, they only have one way to get out on that street?

That's correct.

Okay. So, you know... Maybe this is more of a comment, so I should hold off on that. What happens if you do find out that your calculations underestimate what's happening? Do you have a plan B to correct the situation?

In this specific case, because of the configuration of Cypress Point being a cul-de-sac, again, we did evaluate the additional traffic that's gonna be planned on Cypress to minimal increase in service, so the kind of level of service of the street is gonna stay relatively consistent, and I'll need Lorenzo to kinda help me confirm that that's the case. But we would have to evaluate some options there. So as far as volume, again, we don't expect that the volume is going to be so significant that it's going to be difficult for the residents there. The new residents for the current application to be able to exit and access Cypress, as well as the residents that are on the south side of Cypress. These are the row homes and apartments on the south side of Cypress. There's several access points there. And again, it's the traffic volume that we expect, the increase is going to be not a significant level that is going to create a burden on the residents or impact to the traffic.

So I would add that the estimates that are used to look at the additional trips are used from the ITE, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, Trip generation manual manual and those are typically conservative numbers, so there is some wiggle room if if it is a little bit off, but it's it's it's looking at the numbers provided in the analysis we're talking about. Approximately 100 total trips in the AM. That's both in and out and the same in the PM in and out on on that for the project.

If I can have Lorenzo follow up on what sort of, what does that mean for 100 trips on a road like Cypress Point?

So that would mean, those additional trips are accessing all of the driveway access points on Cypress Point. So not just drive the C, building area C, or block C, I guess it's called. It's, again, it's minimal. I'm trying to find the detailed number, but I don't have that handy right now.

So I have a question to traffic, to Lorenzo. Lorenzo, you quoted a book. When was that book last updated, your reference guide?

2025. Okay.

Are you using the 2025? numbers or were you using some prior?

It was using the 2025 numbers. The consultant used the 2025 version.

So another question is if we have these 323 new units and most of the parking is going to be at the end of the cul-de-sac, how is that going to be a minimal impact for all those cars to be coming out? What do you consider minimal? Is it numbers or is it reality of people's perception?

So, again, I'm going to have Lorenzo Lopez, a traffic engineer, kind of provide a supplemental response. But the capacity of Cypress relative to the additional trips that are going to be added is what we look at. So it's actual metric of what the road can handle and what does that mean for the level of service once you introduce these new trips.

Is there going to be street parking on that?

I believe there's street parking available today, and that will remain.

So you're using numbers to indicate minimal or minor adjustments?

When we say minor, that there's a minor change in traffic amount. When you look at the street holistically on kind of level of service is when it degrades. The more traffic you add to a street, the further it degrades, it slows down an ability to, you know, move down the street. But again, this is a RELATIVELY LOW VOLUME STREET BECAUSE IT'S JUST RESIDENTS. YOU HEARD THE TRIPS THAT ARE GOING TO BE GENERATED FROM THE SITE, 100 A.M. TRIPS, 100 P.M. TRIPS. FOR RESIDENTIAL STREET LIKE CYPRESS, IT DOESN'T DEGRADE THE LEVEL OF SERVICE THERE AND TRAFFIC WILL FLOW CONTINUOUSLY.

Just to add, to give you some perspective, the additional trips that this project adds are less than 20 in the a.m. and the p.m. peak at the intersection of Cypress Point. So those numbers to me are very insignificant, very small numbers.

Good evening, I wanna add a little bit of additional perspective. So when a level of service at the intersection, the signalized intersection is at level of service B, like boy, it would take quite a bit of delay to get that intersection to operate at below a level of service D, like dog. D, A, B, C, and D are all acceptable thresholds level of service that the city uses. It's really when we fall into categories of level of service E or F. that we really worry. And again, at this point as a city, we're not really using level of service as a CEQA metric is really how we track it as city for operations of the traffic signal and how that intersection operates. When we're looking at the number of cars that would be accessing Cypress Point Drive, That's over a prolonged period of time. It's not like a school where there's an exact 15 or 20 minute drop off and pick up, right? These are spread throughout the morning hours and the evening hours and you're all very well aware that since COVID, all of those peak hour times where a.m. and p.m. are not clearly defined like they were before. With the hybrid situation, with people working at home, the peak hour in the morning is no longer defined as 7 to 9 in the morning. And the peak hour in the evening is no longer defined as 5 to 7 in the evening. It's much more spread out. And so when the concern is, how are the vehicles queuing or stacking? Are they potentially going to block driveways as they're coming down Cypress Drive and then turning the corner and trying to get into the driveways for building C, we don't see that as a concern because one, that time period in which all the vehicles are accessing are spread out and two, there are multiple driveways for this particular development for vehicles to be able to go in and out of further dissipating, if that's the right word, further dissipating how the traffic maneuver in and out of the site.

Can you help me understand the relationship of this project and your numbers with because they're a major transit system, the train station, how that affects your calculations, light rail and the train station? Because you said it's referenced to a major transportation hub.

Yeah, I'll start with our VMT screening threshold that our city has adopted. It's very similar to what other agencies in this area have also adopted and was worked out in conjunction with VTA, which is our congestion management agency. And so this particular project has met those screening thresholds, one of which is a residential development within a half mile of a high quality transit facility. In this case, that would be light rail. And that has brought us, I think there were a couple of others, screening metrics that this project met, but that has brought us into the category of why there's not a whole lot of analysis right now. State law.

State law. Okay, that answers my question. I do have one other question for the developer.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys. Thank you for your response, too. It was very helpful. Do you guys know the demographics of how many children are in your projects usually? Do you have a sense or is it?

I have a sense. I don't know if you have actual numbers for it. School-age children. School-age children, it is some. I'd say that the majority of units do not have school-age children, but we do have a sizable percentage, say probably less than 40%. But that varies depending on the type of apartments, depending on the location, depending on the community.

Oh, you have 500 units. Ballpark, do you have any idea how many school-aged children are there?

So the 400 units that are there today are heavily weighted towards studios and one bedrooms, just because that's the way this property was built. And so I say, I mean, this property may have as low as 10% children. So, you know, 40 kids, something like that. I said 40. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that's probably a high estimate for that property. The new, the 323 new units, we'll do some to balance that out. That's weighted more towards two bedrooms and three bedrooms. And so we would expect more kids, like as a percentage, more kids, but, you know, not hundreds, it would be.

So currently there's 40 and you haven't calculated potentially that they're in the new units.

Correct, yeah.

Thank you. That was helpful. Thank you. Sure.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Kamei.

Great, thanks. So I just had a quick question for staff and apologies for not submitting it earlier in advance. I had a discussion with the applicant when we met about the park. I was very excited to continue with the same acreage of the park and we were talking a little bit about park delivery. So in speaking with the applicant, they were talking about maybe the entire length of construction and completion would be about six years and working with staff on making sure that we expedite park delivery so that when they're on their last phase of building, we would be able to do that. I don't know if staff wanted to talk more about the park and what they're envisioning. I know we're gonna be adopting our person and rec strategic plan shortly. But there, I know this area is in desperate need of open space. So I don't know, I apologize. I didn't think of the question prior, so I don't know whom from staff feels comfortable answering this, but sounds like the timeline could be doing some initial work on before the project is fully complete. So looking at staff, if they have anything more that they wanna add about how we're gonna expedite open space in this. AREA, OKAY, APOLOGIES. I CAN TAKE THE, OKAY. THANKS, MR. ARRINGO.

Thank you for the question. Again, Ed Arango, Assistant Public Works Director. So if I'm understanding your question correctly, kind of looking at for what is the kind of park delivery process associated with the project while it's happening under construction?

Yes, well, in my discussion with the applicant, they said that they may be able to work with the city so that we can start some of our planning process instead of our outreach. as they are completing because they're gonna be using this space for the majority of staging. So just for the residents in the area who have been clamoring and asking for open space, when they will be able to kind of expect that outreach process and be able to feel like we can bring that online as fast as possible? That's what I'm asking.

Yeah, absolutely. So once we can do this in parallel, we've been talking to the applicant about, you know, expediting that process, how does that can work? They're motivated, we're motivated to kind of move it forward as fast as possible. So there's going to be in parallel an opportunity while they're using the site for kind of their last phase. And we're approaching that point where we're they're coming to the end of their project the city receives the actual parcel and it's time for us to to obtain the parcel they can still use it while we start that park development process which will include our standard very robust park delivery process multiple public meetings to engage the public to get that feedback again similar to what you've heard previously on our park development process, it's a clean slate. And we don't have any predetermined amenities on the site. So then at that point, we'd reach out to the public, go through a community development process. What amenities would you like to see? We come back again with some alternatives on some layouts. and then finally kind of a recommended alternative and then go through the Parks and Rec Commission process, City Council process as well. But we'd start that as early as possible while the site is being developed and the park site could still have some construction activity on it, recognizing that we can do this concept in parallel and then move it along faster.

Great, thanks.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. I'm seeing no other council questions in the docket. So now we will go to public comment. Yay. 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 on Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We will take in-person speakers first. And because we have a larger amount of speakers than anticipated, each speaker will have two minutes. So we will start with our in-person comments. Allie Saberman.

Good evening, Mayor Ramos and members of the City Council. My name is Allie Saberman, and I'm here on behalf of the Housing Action Coalition. We're a member-supported nonprofit that advocates for building housing at all income levels. HACC is here tonight in strong support of 555 West Middlefield Road, and we urge the Council to approve it. This pipeline project delivers 323 new homes, including 48 deed-restricted affordable units on underutilized surface parking in a transit-rich corridor without displacing a single resident. That combination is rare and worth recognizing. The redesign before you tonight is above ground rather than underground parking. This is a pragmatic adjustment to ensure financial viability, and it comes with a direct benefit. Less evacuation means fewer construction impacts for existing tenants and faster delivery of housing in this region that we urgently need. There was a lot of dialogue tonight about the housing element progress, and we appreciate the city's commitment and work to meeting its housing goals. Mountain View has committed to over 11,000 new homes by 2031, and in order to meet the need, the city should move forward its pipeline projects. The workforce that sustains the city deserves the opportunity to live here, and this project helps make sure that is possible. Tonight, you all have the opportunity to turn nearly a decade of planning into homes. We urge you to take it. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up, we have Daniel Shane.

Since I only have two minutes to talk, I think I'll read my statement to you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the council members on why they should soundly reject this proposed project as designed without substantial revision. City Council's approval of this project and cutting down hundreds of evergreen trees that form an effective dense vegetative barrier between the freeway, Highway 85, and our homes is tantamount to creating a significant public health hazard. human exposure to toxic tailpipe emissions are one of the leading cause causes of cancer chronic respiratory disease and heart disease and have been linked to dementia and alzheimer's disease scientific studies in the united states and other countries have shown how effective highway vegetation barriers can be to improving air quality, reducing high levels of noise and air pollution, and protecting public health in near roadway communities. The core mandate and primary responsibility above all else for any city council is the protection of public health, welfare, and the environment. Protecting property and housing are secondary to these higher goals, because without these, what good is the rest? Now, I'm not opposed to building more affordable housing. On the contrary, my daughter and her friends are in desperate need, in dire need of finding housing. but we can do better and smarter housing. And we can integrate the natural environment through better designs. And this is not a better design. All a person needs to do is stand in front of an impressive, wondrous, and continuous barrier. As I think it was handed out to you, you can see a photo of the barrier. It extends high above the sound wall and it's rows of tall evergreen trees, dense foliage and overlapping canopies that cannot be replaced.

Thank you. Next up we have Sayo Nomura and then it doesn't look like we have any more in-person comments and we'll go to the virtual public comment after this.

Are you going to hear? Good evening, Mayor.

Please speak into the microphone so we can hear you.

Good evening, Mayor and city council members. My name is Sayono Mura. I would like to raise the concern about the CEQA exemption about the public safety on this project. On March 4th, the builder stated that this project would have minimum impact. However, the construction conclusion has not been adequately verified under the current design. The product has significantly changed. The proxy increased from four to five stories. Over 500 parking spaces are concentrated. and the main access has been moved to the end of the long, narrow dead-end street. These changes directly affect safety and emergency access. Despite this, the project received the CEQA exemption, but the exemption assumes there are no significant impacts. If the assumption has not been properly tested, the basis for the exemption is no longer valid. This may also qualify quality as unusual circumstances under CEQA. Given the single access point on the constrained cul-de-sac, Finally, I was told the fire department reviewed and then approved this project, but the analysis has not been shared. Without it, we cannot verify that this project is truly safe. I respectfully ask the council to delay or deny approval until these issues are addressed. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next up we have Carol Mitchell followed by Alex Brown closing out in person comments Excuse me.

I've been a Mountain View resident resident for 50 years. I Moved to Northern California from Southern California in 1977 to take a job with National Semiconductor. I I Hold on I Brought my mother with me. We rented a townhouse on Cypress Point Drive, right across from where the intention is, is to build all of these apartments, condos, et cetera. I've said this before, you know, like Dan. Well, here's the real point. At the end of Cypress Point Drive, there's a hill, a hill, okay, on the left side. That hill is on the other side of Stevens Creek Trail. And as Dan said, he is an environmentalist. I can attest to that because of what he went through at Katrina in New Orleans, okay? So you dig into that hill with all of these cars going down in and out of Highway 85. All those gases are going to come into our development. That's another point here is that at the end of Cypress Point, we've got two driveways. Let's say the first one that goes into Cypress Point Woods, there's 20 garages. You go down a few feet, there's another driveway with 20 garages. Hypothetically, what if everybody went out at, I mean, you know. If you could address the council. They're indicating that, oh, the traffic won't be too heavy. They won't all go out at the same time. But 20 and 20 is 40 garages just within a few feet. So as you come out of those driveways, where's this construction going?

Thank you, your time is up. Your time is up. Everyone gets two minutes. Thank you.

All right, Alex Brown.

Hi, friends. I like it. Good project.

Thank you.

I would think it would be really fun to see every single car in all the garages all try to leave at once. I feel like if there's enough motivation for people to leave all at once, they'll probably figure it out. Thanks.

Thank you. We will now move on to virtual public speakers, starting with Matt Regan.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, Council Members. My name is Matt Regan. I'm here representing the Bay Area Council. We're a business-sponsored, employer-sponsored public policy advocacy organization representing about 400 of the largest employers in the Bay Area, including several in Mountain View. I was somewhat fascinated by the earlier conversation about homelessness and the problem that Mountain View is experiencing with with RVs. And so I did a little quick, quick research with my new best friend, Chet GBT, and discovered that in the last 20 years, Mountain View has created between 50 and 60,000 new jobs. Congratulations. You're the envy of the developed world. In that same period of time, you approved 4,900 new homes. Demographers, if you ask them, will tell you, in order to maintain housing affordability, for every 1.5 jobs you create, you need to approve a new home. Mountain View is at 12 to 1. So you ask why you have an RV problem, it's basic math. You're not approving enough housing commensurate to the job creation that is happening in your community and around your community. You have the opportunity tonight to start addressing that problem and reversing that problem. You have 323 new homes, 48 below market rate. It's a good project. We first looked at this in 2015. This is a poster child as to why projects are so expensive to build, so difficult to build in California and in this region. Please approve it tonight. This is an opportunity to start addressing the problem and stemming the flow of people into homelessness. So we are strongly in support of the project. Please vote yes. Thank you.

Thank you, next we have someone, I don't know, I don't see them in the virtual queue anymore, but it should be under Motorola, but it doesn't look like they're there anymore, so we're gonna move on to John Lindquist.

Hi, thank you very much. And I just wanted to add something to what Councilman McAllister was talking about and the congestion at the light. The light congestion isn't going to be the issue. The issue is going to be that the traffic will now be traveling almost the entire length of Cypress Point Drive because I live in the complex there, in the condo complex. And when I'm walking my dog over in that area, most people are turning into the first and second driveways. Very few go down towards the end where there really is nobody parking. So now all of a sudden you're gonna be transferring most of those residents all the way down to the end of Cypress Point. Also the end of Cypress Point has kind of a loop. So it's only one lane and it's kind of a narrow one lane. So people are going to be rounding that to be able to get into that five-story parking garage. I do understand the need. I just wanted to bring that up and make sure you were aware of it. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we have Rashmi.

Hi, can you hear me? Sorry, it took me a moment. We can hear you. okay great um yeah rashmi sahai speaking um as a member of green spaces mountain view i just wanted to kind of support the comments that um mr shane brought up about this project and the important need of um protecting it from the emissions from the freeway um it sounds like this is a project that's been in the works for a long time this is not a new concern and The residents, all the residents who live there and will be living there do deserve clean air just like the rest of us. And so it is a critical part of this development to maintain that urban forest. Also, we have a biodiversity and urban forestry plan coming up. And one big part of the plan is kind of protecting the very little remaining urban forests that we do have. So this is a great space to do that. I think it's a great project, by the way. This is the first time I saw the details with the bike path. I'm a biker and some of the the tree relocation that's going to be happening. But I do think if there's any way to take one last look at that, beautiful urban forest that's providing a protective barrier between the residents and the freeway emissions. I would highly, highly encourage you to do so. I would also say for any new plantings that are coming in, it sounds like you are going to be putting a lot of trees and other beautification plantings throughout. Please keep in mind, again, that we have this Biodiversity and Urban Forestry Plan almost approved, and we're looking to see native plantings and as much as possible native trees going into those spots. So that's just something to keep on your radar as you're making those plans. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Next speaker is Hala Ashwani.

Yes, good evening, Mayor, City Council, and city staff. My name is Hal Al-Shawani. I'm a longtime resident. Sorry, my voice is not all there tonight. I'm one of the people that have a family that lives on Cypress Point Drive, so I've been there almost... uh very very frequently weekly and more the last six seven years this project could have been a great project because it really does provide much needed housing it's near transit it's an infill project so it's wonderful that they're keeping all the people in there and adding to it The really two unfortunate things that stay in there is the disappearance of the green barrier at the end of the street where it protects all the residents, not just the ones on Avalon side, but on Cypress Point side, all the hundreds of people that live there to have cleaner air. I'm glad that the developer moved the garage to face the highway. That's a great idea. I think that's a fantastic thing to do so that the new residents don't have to directly be in view of the cars and the pollution that it emits. I wanted to mention something about the safety though of the residents, the bicyclists, the pedestrians. There are 500 parking spaces. Really the only exits and entrances to them is at the end of this substandard dead end street. And I'm really concerned about the safety. I know the reports keep saying it's okay, it's not a problem. Just go down the end of the street and imagine 500 cars going in and out in addition to the other hundreds of cars in there. That would be my answer.

Thank you. Next we have Kelly Stephens.

Hi, my name is Kelly and I was born and raised here in Mountain View. And now I'm an adult owning a condo on Cypress Point Drive. And I share some similar concerns. I plant trees in the community with canopy and taking away all of those heritage trees is something you can't just get back by planting new trees. It takes a long time. And I feel like it's counterproductive to all the work we've been putting in to create a bigger urban forest in our community. And also, yeah, I'm concerned about the issue of the traffic, the health, and also just having such a high rise building. I'm concerned about that. Maybe some solutions to this project would be maybe a two or three story building and taking away less of the heritage trees. I'm a little bit concerned about all the high rise buildings going into Mountain View. Like in a lot of places, I can't even see the mountains anymore, which is just, I guess that's a personal feeling. But yeah, that would just be my thoughts about this project. Thank you.

Thank you. And we have our last virtual speaker, Edie Heating.

Thank you. I support this project. My personal favorite feature is wide sidewalks. However, my reason for support, my main reason is that this is infill housing, which is almost universally and environmentally favorable situation. One of the long term outcomes of this project will be fewer cars on 85 commuting into the region. This benefits our whole community. Thank you.

Thank you, and that seems to end public comment. So I will now bring the item back to council questions and deliberation. Please note that a motion to approve the recommendation should also include the reading of the title and resolutions attached to the report. Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I have several comments. OBSERVATIONS AND REMARKS, SO FEEL FREE TO TAKE A NAP OR WALK AROUND THE BLOCK IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ME DRONE ON. SO FIRST I'LL START WITH A PRACTICAL REALITY THAT STATE LAW HAS MADE SERVING ON A CITY COUNCIL BOTH EASIER AND HARDER. EASIER IN THE SENSE THAT WE HAVE VERY LITTLE DISCRETION. MANY OF THE DECISIONS ARE MADE FOR US AND THIS IS ONE OF THOSE uh examples harder because we still conduct public hearings and we have to hear um and reflect on and try and take action on the concerns and ideas from the community and it's a frustrating position to be in where there are many people who have spent a great deal of time learning about the projects reading the staff reports talking with city staff participating in community meetings, including public hearings, spending hours sitting in a room like this only to be given two minutes that we hear and then not feel heard because our ability to meaningfully modify any given housing proposal is constrained under state law. So I'll start by moving the staff recommendation, including adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View conditionally approving a planned community permit and development review permit to construct a 323-unit addition to an existing 404-unit residential apartment complex with new above-ground garages, a new amenity building leasing office, and a future 1.34-acre park. public park dedication to the city utilizing state density bonus law and the heritage tree removal permit to remove 88 heritage trees on a 14.5 acre site located at 555 west middlefield road apn 158-49-001 and finding that the project is statute statutorily exempt from the california environmental quality act pursuant to section 21080.66 urban infill exemption of the public resources code to be read entitled only further reading weight ADOPT A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF MOUNTAIN VIEW CONDITIONALLY APPROVING A VESTING TENTATIVE MAP TO CREATE THREE NEW LOTS INCLUDING ONE LOT FOR A FUTURE 1.34 ACRE PUBLIC PARK AND ONE LOT FOR CONDOMINIUM PURPOSES WITH 97 CONDOMINIUM UNITS ON A 14.5 ACRE PUBLIC SITE LOCATED AT 555 WEST MIDDLEFIELD ROAD APN 15849001 TO BE READ IN TITLE ONLY FURTHER READING WAIVED. I KNOW THAT IT IS A DISAPPOINTING AND FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE TO participate in good faith and then find that there's not a lot of leeway or latitude to make the modifications that I think many in the community have requested of the city council. So I'll share a few observations about things that I do like about the project. It is, as many members of the community have shared, fundamentally a good project. This is precisely where we want HOUSING THAT WE'RE GOING TO CONSTRUCT, WALKING DISTANCE FROM DOWNTOWN, FROM THE CAL TRAIN STATION. I KNOW COUNCIL MEMBER MCALISTER HATES THE LIGHT RAIL SYSTEM, BUT FOR THE FIVE PEOPLE WHO WILL USE LIGHT RAIL, IT IS WALKING DISTANCE NEARBY. There are five people too, right? Those five people are people too. And a lot of things that we wouldn't be able to require in other circumstances, right? It's actually remarkable to me that the applicant is voluntarily providing a $2 million community benefit. I think that's a, it's an acknowledgement of the COMMITMENT MADE TO THE COUNCIL THAT WORKED ON THE PRIOR ITERATION OF THIS PROJECT WHERE THERE WAS A DISCRETIONARY LEGISLATIVE ACTION. THE COUNCIL DID HAVE SOME MEANINGFUL ABILITY TO INFLUENCE THE PROJECT BECAUSE THERE WAS A GENERAL PLAN AMENDMENT AND A REZONING THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THIS APPLICATION. SO I PERSONALLY GREATLY APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT YOU'VE RETAINED THAT COMMITMENT AND THAT ALLOWS I THINK LIKELY THE FUTURE COUNCIL TO INVEST, I HOPE, IN THE COMMUNITY THAT IS HOSTING THE DEVELOPMENT. THE APPLICANT DOESN'T HAVE TO CONDO MAP AND THAT'S ACTUALLY REMARKABLE TOO, RIGHT? WITH THE CONDO MAPPING IS BECOMES A REQUIREMENT TO PROVIDE A PARK OR AN IN LIEU FEE PAYMENT IN LIEU OF A PARK. SO THE FACT THAT THERE IS A CONDO MAPPED BUILDING AND A DEDICATION OF LAND TO THE CITY FOR A PARK IS is a remarkable benefit. I don't know how many projects the next council, right, in potentially eight years will see that includes a dedication of over an acre of land. I think that will be increasingly rare. And I think that's a tremendous amenity for a park deficient neighborhood. So I think that's very commendable. The project actually includes fewer tree removals than the prior iteration. And again, I know it's not easy for our community, which has come out repeatedly in support of heritage tree preservation. So I know it's not sufficient, but I think it is also a testament to the work both of city staff and the applicant to hear the community and reduce the number of trees that will be removed from this project. This project also, I wish for every application that we review, we can have sort of a state law 101 for the community, because the number of state laws that are being passed Utilized for the benefit of this project is pretty extraordinary. One of the laws is a prohibition on cities from imposing minimum parking requirements. This project could provide zero parking spaces, but they're providing instead 851 voluntarily. I'm curious to know how the community would feel if the applicant were to provide zero parking spaces. We would probably hear a different set of concerns. but this applicant is providing 851 new parking spaces that come at a tremendous cost and I think that's noteworthy too right we will see I think most projects probably all projects notwithstanding the reality that we can't impose a minimum parking requirement still voluntarily provide the parking that is necessary to make the the project work so I think you know I'm I TEND TO BE GENERALLY SUPPORTIVE OF REDUCED PARKING, BUT I THINK MANY IN THE COMMUNITY DO APPRECIATE THAT THIS IS A PROJECT THAT WILL BE, I THINK, MORE THAN ADEQUATELY PARKED. AND INCIDENTALLY WITH THAT PARKING, I'M CONCERNED ABOUT THE DIVERGENCE OF OUR LOCAL REGULATIONS WITH STATE LAW, RIGHT, WHERE STATE LAW SAYS, AT LEAST SB 79, THAT PARKING is excluded in the FAR calculation, but Mountain View City Code says that parking is included in FAR. And I think that's a thing that I hope we do fix at some point. And speaking of SB 79, on July 1st, the effective date of SB 79, we can see even less discretion for this project and others like it. Much taller buildings, much more dense buildings without any community benefit obligation and potentially without even the dedication of land for a park. I think the project proposed does make an effort to INTEGRATE INTO THE EXISTING COMMUNITY. I THINK THERE ARE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY WHO WOULD DISAGREE STRONGLY WITH THAT BUT IT'S A FIVE STORY BUILDING IS DIFFERENT FROM AN EIGHT STORY BUILDING WHICH WOULD BE AVAILABLE TO THE APPLICANT BY RIGHT IF THEY USED SB 79 TO REDEVELOP THESE SITES AND BECAUSE THERE IS NO DEMOLITION OF EXISTING BUILDINGS THEY WOULD BE ABLE TO USE SB 79. A FEW MORE THINGS, THEN I'LL STOP. I ALSO REALLY APPRECIATE THE PROPORTIONALITY, THE COMPLIANCE WITH OUR BELOW MARKET RATE HOUSING ORDINANCE, RIGHT, AND ACTUALLY HAVING A BMR UNIT MIX THAT IS PROPORTIONAL TO THE MARKET RATE MIX. SO MANY PROJECTS THAT WE'VE SEEN IN THE PAST FEW YEARS HAVE USED THE STATE DENSITY BONUS LAW CONCESSIONS TO NOT HAVE PROPORTIONAL UNIT MIXES. we'll have the market rate units be the family size units, and then the affordable units be the studios, which means we're not creating housing that is affordable for families in Mountain View. So I appreciate and commend the applicant for not using the concession for that purpose. The last thing I want to speak to is I, met very frequently with Daniel Shane over the years. And I really do appreciate the work that you've done, not only on this project, but in a more holistic sense on the work to develop objective standards to protect trees generally, but the specific category of tree groves that you've educated the council on that has a public safety or public health nexus. And I think the way you did that is exactly the right way. I've seen you participate in PRC meetings and council meetings extensively on the biodiversity strategy, the Parks and Recreation Strategic Plan, and also the objective standards work that the staff are working on to develop objective standards in order to preserve this type of tree canopy. And my sadness is we haven't been able to do the work fast enough to actually make them, to create those objective standards and then to make them enforceable. And I really hope that with the biodiversity strategy adoption, which I think will happen very soon, and also with the work on objective standards that the city will continue to work with not only Daniel Shane, but also many others in our community who have been providing a lot of very valuable information for us to consider as we develop those objective standards so we don't have these types of outcomes in the future. I know that's hard work, and it's work that a music student i am not well suited to do that's why we have technical experts in our community help us that's why we have a great staff who can work on objective standards that we can enforce in the future it's not something that is enforceable now but i do want to recognize that we have received extensive community input on that and i i think all of us in the council would love to see objective standards that achieve these community goals developed as quickly as possible So a lot to like. I know that's not... It's not a perfect project for many in our community, but I do think it is a very good project. I think it is consistent with council priorities and community priorities. It's not like the 10 acre project we approved that has zero parks and very little to offer. I think this is the kind of project that we would want to encourage. And especially as we see state laws utilized in the future, I think many of us will miss working with an applicant who provides this type of project over the next several years. For the candidates in the audience, I'm not sure why you want this job. It is a thankless job. Good luck to you.

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. Council Member McAllister? Oh, you were up ahead on this queue and then you dropped down, but if... Oh, so the... Okay, so you prefer to just go last, is that what it is?

Okay, Council Member Showalter. All right, well, following up on what Council Member Ramirez said, we really are constrained by state legislation, and that's a big deal in this case. But I wanted to go over a couple of things. a little bit about what we heard from comments. I thought it's just fascinating how we have hyper local commenters. We have people, you live right there, you're experts on how that area works. And you've thought about it and you've come to us and you've said what's really left that isn't making you happy is this row of trees. And we hear you, as Council Member Ramirez said, but at this point, it's one of the things that's going to go by the by. New trees will be planted, but they will take a while to grow. But then I think the other thing that was so interesting in the comments is we had somebody who spoke on the regional level. And it was just, you know, here we are. We have had, in a sense, we're the envy of the world. We've created tens of thousands of jobs. And we've been building as quickly as we possibly can, or it seems to me we have. And that's just in no way, shape, or form keeping up with that job growth. Now, of course, everybody who works in Mountain View doesn't live in Mountain View. And everybody who lives in Mountain... I mean, you know, we move around. So it's not just us that needs to build a lot of housing. It's the whole region. And really... The whole region didn't respond and that's why these state regulations were passed because it's a critical problem for our entire state. But I wanted to go over a couple of things that have changed since we started on this project. We approved the first one and how this one is different and better. One of the things that everybody objected to, or many people objected to initially, was that beautiful grove of trees, of redwood trees, outside of where Building A is gonna be, were going to be demolished. And there was such a hue and cry about that that the project was redesigned to save those trees. And that is going to be a wonderful amenity for everyone who lives there now and in the future because they really are a beautiful ring of redwood trees. Then another thing was, this was of course before the CEQA, Regulations had changed a little bit. The air pollution associated with the construction led us to needing to adopt a statement of overriding consideration. That's basically saying there's gonna be pollution problems from this. And those pollution problems that we were talking about in that were really related to the construction. And that construction impact was related to digging, primarily related to digging those huge holes for the garages. Well, that's not being done any longer. We're not gonna build huge holes for the garages. They're gonna be above ground, which is going to mean that the construction is much cleaner, and it's also going to mean that it's much faster. And that also makes it cleaner because it means that the time that you're exposed to the air pollution that comes with construction is going to be shorter, which is important. And then, of course, the third thing that we've heard about a long time is the line of trees along Stevens Creek and the highway remains a concern. The redesign of Building B has the parking function as a protective barrier between the highway and residents. It's not as green, it's not as beautiful, but it does provide some kind of a barrier. And then, of course, we will be adding more trees. So I think that on the balance, this is an excellent project. But there's always a balance. And we are sad that we can't save absolutely all these trees that we would love to save, but at the same time, we're happy that we're going to be able to provide a lot more housing in an area that is really a very desirable place to live, and we know that Avalon Bay has, we have many, several of their communities in our area, so we know that they do a good job and we can expect them to continue to doing a good job. So I feel that on the balance, this is really an excellent project, but it is always a balance. And so with that, of course, I will be voting yes. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Hicks.

So this project has been going on for, as people have said, about a decade. There was a gentleman who spoke virtually and said that's a testament to how slow we are. I just want to remind everyone that we approved this project several years ago. So this is our, it did not take us 10 years to approve it. And it was also originally a gatekeeper project which we usually like to pay a lot of attention to and allow, you know, work on a bunch of changes because they're asking for either general plan or zoning changes from us. So that said, in many ways this is a great project, you know, housing build over surface parking near our largest, one of our large transit depots. What could be bad about that? And many changes and improvements have been made over the years. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy with a lot of the things that nearby residents have said. And ideally, I would like to make more changes. For a number of reasons which you've already heard, we're not going to do that. And we are living in the midst of a housing crisis. So instead of proposing changes, for me, this is an opportunity to name several objective standards that I wish we'd had when this project started and that I hope we can have for the future. I see Mountain View, with all the jobs that are created, becoming a denser, more urban place. And I want to make sure that we don't just become kind of a suburb on steroids. that instead we create good urbanism, places where people want to be. So my short list is, first, I'm wishing that we could have the people living within this area, within what we call the Moffitt Precise Plan, have said they would like Moffitt to be Generally, they've told me they would like Moffitt to be a little more like Castro Street, more walkable with tree-lined street and with some public spaces that they can partake in. I wish that the units facing Moffitt were live-work spaces, and I'm going to call people's attention to the next developer that we'll have up, Citi Ventures. has an excellent example of live work in one of their Southern California developments that could have been used in this area if we had had this objective standard in the past. And I will forward those on to the Community Development Director. So that's one thing I would like to have, live work standards for situations like Moffitt. Another is I'd like us to be a little more aware of, I'm concerned about the exit onto a small pedestrian-oriented street. I don't know if that in any way can be worked into objective standards. I would prefer more exits onto our larger, more car-oriented streets like Moffett and Middlefield. I also value urban forestry. I think this is on this slide. uh, the, the woods here, uh, that, uh, what are we referring it to a vegetation barrier? Um, I do think we should see whether there are ways that we can, uh, pay attention to those upfront, not at the last minute when we can't do anything about it. Uh, perhaps our council, our, uh, sustainability staff can highlight that as well. I'm interested in sidewalk standards, which I won't belabor because we've talked about those already, but when we have taller buildings, more than two stories, I think we need, as Council Member McAllister said, most cities then have much wider sidewalks. And I also, we've spoken about this in the past, I think that stoops in this area are not particularly appropriate, and that the frontage facing Moffitt could be better used. For example, using live work development instead of somebody's bedroom or living room facing an urban sidewalk where I don't want to walk by it, and if you're living there, you don't want me to walk by it. So that's my objective standard list. And with that, I will be supporting the motion.

Thank you, Council Member Hicks. Council Member McAllister.

Thanks.

Well, deja vu. I approved this project back in 2017, so things move quite quickly here as time goes. I had a nice chat with the developer, and we talked about a few things, and they were talking about, you know, jobs are coming, and then I got a kick out of the guy. He says, well, we generated a lot of new jobs, and then chat GPT is going to, come to town and eliminate thousands of jobs. So there's a balance to that. So that was interesting. The project, it does work. I know I feel Council Member Ramirez's pain that 79 didn't kick in sooner so we could get those eight story buildings, but I think this is a good transaction in the area. We talked about balconies and I learned something about balconies Can you, it costs money, who uses them and for? Again, I was in other parts of the United States, and they do a lot of balconies for outdoor space for people, and it costs some money, but I thought aesthetically, and I sent some pictures to our community development director about Scottsdale, has a lot of apartments with greenery on them, and I thought that was great. It gets awful hot there, but It adds some beauty to it, and it gives people personal space that they wouldn't have normally. So that was nice. Parking, you said it was voluntary. It's good business. If you don't have parking, you're not going to have people sticking around. So that was good that they realized that it was nice to have the parking there. Yes, they may have not required any, but it's helpful for them to put that in.

What else that was nice about it?

Overall it was you know as they say we have to do it, but I've I approved it Then I think it's been approved then the forestry at the end of the street. I do have a bit of a Sympathy for you because I live across from highway 85 I Hear the noise I feel the smoke. I mean I moved here when there was no 85 I was here when there was no 280 I was here when my street was a dead-end street and things have evolved since then so When we lose those trees, I hope that we can get the forestry coming back along the way, too, because that's, along with nature, it works as a sound barrier and it hopefully absorbs some of these things. I'm still gonna be at discussions points with VMT, what they consider VMT, and I appreciate Council Member Ramirez, the five people that use light rail, and I bring that up because that was also the one on Middlefield I'm working with some people now. I've been involved with that light rail since 2017, quite familiar with light rail. And back then, they were using it as a standard to say, well, there's light rail, so we can rebuild this. Well, the use of light rail is in theory. And all these things about How we're gonna determine it is, to me, is theoretical, because I know the reality of light rail is, and even VTA understands the reality of light rail. It's not as used as they had intended it. So as we go forward, I will always be asking staff to be, okay, you have the theory, but let's take a look at the reality, and ask for a plan B, and hopefully that will come along. So I'll support it. I do like the transition. from the one side of the street on Cypress instead of having a big, I think that was good because I saw some other projects that we had where it wasn't so overwhelming to the people on the south side of Cypress. That was nice. What else can I say that it's moving along nicely. I hope they get everything done sooner than possible because they say they use internal financing which is always tough and yet they say they can get this done I've seen a lot of projects where people promise, but they don't deliver because of whatever reasons. It sounds like these gentlemen are gonna be able to, well, it's been 10 years, so hopefully, I was gonna say you get things done, but it's been a while, so. Good luck with the project, and we'll get the support, and I'll vote for it.

Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Council Member Kamei.

Thanks, Mayor. Well, I feel like now's the time that I need to confess I'm one of the five people who take light rail. I live in Wisman, right next to the Loyal Rail Station, and it's me. I'm one of the five. But I feel, on the one hand, I feel fortunate that we get to talk about the Wisman area, my neighborhood, for the second meeting in a row. On the other hand, and I shared this with the applicant, having to see this project again, It is difficult for council because we know how difficult it would be for the residents in the community. And really appreciate the continued engagement of the residents as someone who lived across the street and was recused out for a long time. I felt fortunate to be able to move to a different part of the area to continue and to try to find ways to be part of the conversation. And so I'm not going to belabor the points that colleagues made about the constraints that we face by state law and other changes in these last four years since the project approval. So I'm going to look for the silver linings, which I know Council Member Ramirez will appreciate as our optimist on council, is that the community benefits side of things. As Councilmember Showalter mentioned, the significant environmental impacts to residents has been reduced. We are now going to be soon approving our Parks and Rec Strategic Plan. The Moffitt Precise Plan is moving forward. Our Streetscape Plan is going forward. So I think there are ways for us to use the other plans that are the biodiversity strategy. There'll be other tools and mechanisms, hopefully, that we will be able to use as tools, especially my question about the park that we can incorporate into the park. And perhaps that would be a great way to tap into Mr. Shane's great knowledge on what we can do in that space to make it honestly a community gem, ecological gem in that area for a space that really needs access to a park. So I wanna thank the applicant for this journey we've been on where you've kept your commitment to the $2 million. over one acre of park and have found a way to, I think, keep the design elements I thought were quite nice. We went through the renderings of what the original project looked like in 22 versus now and the articulations and kind of the points of interest. are much, I think, more in tune to where we are now and how to unify the entire property together. So I'll be supporting the project. Thanks.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. Back to Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. Very briefly, I'd just like, Council Member McAllister and I don't often agree, so when we do, I want to elevate and appreciate our collaboration. You said parking is good business, so I just want to let the staff know I'm looking at all of you and the city manager. that Councilmember McAllister and I agree that we should not have parking minimum requirements at all. They should be abolished because they're not necessary since parking will be voluntarily provided. Thank you.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. Because it's good business. Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. I'll close up with my comments before we get to a vote. I actually, on my way to downtown, I would pass by this general area. I am not a frequent user of VTA, so I would be like a .1 user of VTA, so I'm trying, I'm really trying to get out of my car more. But what I actually use the transit center more is for Caltrain, and Caltrain is a very utilized transit area. thing and like if I need to go to San Francisco or Redwood City that is I literally walk past where this development is going to be and take that get my steps in and everything so it is a good location to increase housing and It's been a long road, and I recall when it was last on council. I wasn't on council when it was last on council, and I was just thinking, like, man, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, and now it's back. So I hope it doesn't come back. I'm hoping that this is the final time. I'm seeing a head nod. We're going to agree. This is not coming back to us. So I will be supporting this project. I echo a lot of my colleagues' concerns push for as we do our objective design standards citywide that knowing what our community is pushing for things like protecting our our vegetation barrier to the freeways which Where I currently live I don't have that I'm like in between 85 and 101 so I'm probably gonna die but So I would You rub off on me, Council Member Ramirez. So I'm hoping that as we move forward and we look at our biodiversity plan, we can find ways to include in these objective standards. So when it comes time, when these developments come forth, that it's the first thing that they're looking at, not something that is over time as they're already moving in their development process, and it hits council, and then we're like, what about the trees? It's like, we should have thought of that at the start, which hopefully will make it better for the rest of us. So with that, let's get to a vote. Motion passes unanimously. We are going to take a five-minute break. I was trying to get a break every two hours. We went a little far, but we'll be back at 9.56. Yes. All right, we're going back in session at 9.57 p.m. Yes, I'm calling it out at 9.57 p.m. So we're going to head to the next item, 6.3, Row House Gatekeeper Project at 922 to 950 San Leandro Avenue. Would any council members like to make disclosures? Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. I met with the applicant.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. Thanks, Mayor, I met with the applicant. Thank you, Council Member Hicks.

I also met with the applicant.

Thank you, any other disclosures from our Council Members on this item? Okay, all right, so Deputy Zoning Administrator Rebecca Shapiro and Senior Planner Edgar Maravilla will present the... 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.

Fantastic. Good evening, Mayor Ramos and council members. As was just noted, I'm Rebecca Shapiro, Deputy Zoning Administrator, and I'm joined on the dais by Senior Planner Edgar Maravilla, who is the project manager on this item. The project before you is a 38-unit row house project, which requires legislative land use changes. The project is located on an approximately 1.69 acre site, which is comprised of two existing parcels that are on the west side of San Leandro Avenue between San Pablo Drive and Tarabella Avenue. The property is currently in the General Industrial or MM, as we refer to it, zoning district and also has a general plan land use designation of General Industrial. The site is surrounded by industrial uses to the north. It has State Route 85 and Highway 101 to the east, single family homes located to the south that are fronting on San Pablo Drive and a future city park to the west. The existing general plan designation and zoning for the project site does not allow for residential uses. And so as such, the applicant is requesting a general plan amendment and a zoning map amendment to allow residential redevelopment of the property. The project also requires planned unit development and development review permits. It includes 10 balloon market rate units and it utilizes provisions of state density bonus law. In addition, the application includes a vesting tentative map to facilitate individual sale of the row house units. And for your reference, the state density bonus request includes one concession and four waivers, which I'll discuss in more detail later in this presentation. The requested general plan map amendment from general industrial to medium density residential and the zoning map amendment from MM to R3-1.5, which is one of our multiple family residential zoning districts are subject to city discretion and are necessary for residential development to proceed. If approved, the row house project is consistent with the densities and uses allowed through the proposed legislative land use changes, and more specifically under the proposed rezoning, the R3 zoning district allows row house developments at the proposed density through the PUD permit process, and the project is consistent with the applicable row house standards and guidelines which are referenced in the R3 standards and pursuant to their state density bonus request. The 38 units would be constructed in four three-story row house buildings that are shown here on the site plan as buildings A through D, with the units roughly split evenly between the buildings. Building A is oriented towards San Leandro Avenue on the right side of the site plan, buildings B and C front on the project's central common open space, and building D will face the future city park off the plan left. Pedestrian and vehicle access into the property is provided from San Leandro Avenue, and this vehicle drive provides access to 14 guest parking spaces as well as the garages for each of the units and provides for city emergency vehicle and solid waste vehicle access. In addition, the project proposes a 10-foot wide publicly accessible pathway along the southern property line, which is the bottom of the site plan. And that will provide access to the future city park and includes amenities such as benches, a row of California native trees, a bike fix-it station, and it will have a temporary fence or gate that will block access to the city property until the city park is developed. The proposed buildings share a simple craftsman bungalow style inspired design with a mix of three primary exterior materials, including stucco, board and batten, and lap siding. The building design features fairly straightforward, hipped and intersecting gabled roof forms. And as proposed, each row house unit will have three bedrooms, one private balcony, a small front yard area on all of the front yard is anchored by a porch and drought tolerant landscaping. As noted earlier, the 38-unit project will provide 10 below-market rate units, which is equivalent to 25% of the total project units. Three of those BMR units will be available to low-income households, earning up to 80% of area median income. Five units will be affordable to moderate-income households, earning up to 120% of AMI. And two units will be affordable at above-moderate income levels, up to 150% AMI. All of the units in the development including the BMR units are three bedrooms and the eight low to moderate income units qualify the project to utilize state density bonus law. The proposal meets the city's BMR requirements inclusive of the one requested concession. Pursuant to state density bonus law, this project would qualify for a 16% density bonus up to two concessions or incentives and unlimited waivers of development standards that are necessary to construct the project. The applicant is not requesting any bonus density but is requesting one concession and four waivers. As shown on screen now and discussed in more detail within the council report and in the project findings, Ultimately, staff's analysis found that the concession and waivers are necessary for cost reduction and physical construction of the project pursuant to provisions of state density bonus law. The project proposes to remove 31 onsite trees, five of which are heritage trees, and will plant 94 new trees, which is approximately three times the number of trees to be removed and is, coincident to that, expected to provide roughly three times the existing tree canopy at tree maturity after 10 years. Overall, the landscape plan complies with the city's water conservation and landscaping regulations and includes a strong focus on California native species. The project proposal also exceeds the objective design requirements for private and common open spaces. The vesting tentative map would create 38 residential condominium units via a one lot subdivision allowing individual sale of the units and common ownership of the shared improvements. Staff reviewed the subdivision and found the project is consistent with the requirements of the subdivision map act, city subdivision standards and the general plan. A draft initial study was prepared for this project, which found that the project would not result in any potentially significant environmental impacts with implementation of city code requirements, standard city conditions of approval, and mitigation measures that are disclosed in the initial study, mitigated negative declaration, and the mitigation monitoring and reporting program for the project. The city did not receive any comments on the initial study during the document's 30-day public comment period. The applicant hosted two community outreach meetings, one prior to submitting their planning application and a December 2025 community meeting where the six attendees expressed appreciation for the design, including that the revised site plan created a larger buffer to the adjacent homes to the south and that the applicant had revised the project to address prior community feedback. As part of the city's collaborative design review process, the applicant also voluntarily attended one design review consultation meeting and worked with staff to refine the project to address design review feedback as also discussed in more detail within the council report. At the EPC hearing in February, commissioner and public input on the project was positive with particular notes of appreciation on the project design and the outreach efforts by the applicant. One public comment expressed concern with the city's parkland and Luffy methodology. The EPC unanimously recommended that the city council approve the project, including the legislative land use changes. In conclusion, city staff and the APC recommend that the city council adopts the initial study and mitigated declaration pursuant to the CEQA guidelines and approve the proposed project, including each of the project recommendations shown on screen and in the staff report. These actions include the introduction of an ordinance to amend the zoning map for the project site, which requires a second reading if the recommended actions are passed tonight. In addition, staff has identified a late breaking correction to the Parkland identification fee calculation that's identified in both the project investing tentative map resolutions, which requires some minor revisions to two recitals and one condition of approval in both of the resolutions. The language of those changes is shown on screen now and in the desk item that was provided to Council on the dais. Staff recommends that these changes be included with any council motion to approve the project per the EPC recommendation. And that concludes staff's presentation. City staff from multiple departments are here tonight, and the applicant team is also available for questions. The applicant does also have a presentation for you tonight. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now have a presentation from the applicant, Kian Malik, Vice President of Development, City Ventures. You will see seven minutes on the clock.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Kian Malik, and I'm honored to be here tonight to present to you the Arbor Square project on San Leandro Avenue. Next slide, please. for those that don't know city ventures we are an infill developer so we focus on developing underutilized parcels in existing urban areas to meet the large demand for missing middle ownership housing we love working in the city of mountain view and this will be our third project here in the city what you'll see on the next slide is not the site plan we are proposing tonight but it is a site plan that we started with five years ago. As an infill developer, it's important for us to join the fabric of the community and not work in a vacuum. So at the onset of the project, we met with the community, and as you'll see on the next slide. We gained some really valuable feedback that really focused around creating a larger separation between our proposed buildings and the existing single-family homes to the project south. On a future slide, I'll go over how we incorporated those comments into the design. Next slide, please. Like I previously mentioned, this project was kicked off five years ago. It's a complicated site. It's a land use assemblage with multiple property owners and a land use change. So at the onset of the project, we met with council members, we met with city staff really to understand the vision for this site. We then had our first community meeting in October, 2023. After multiple submittals to the city, I think we had about 15 to 20 site plan changes. We then were at a point where staff felt comfortable with our plans and we were then agendized for the DRC and the Airport Land Use Commission where we received unanimous recommendations of approval from both bodies. We then incorporated those comments into our final submittal, which we shared with the community just this last December. And then we had our February EPC meeting last month. We're very grateful to receive all positive comments from the community during the public comment period. And that brings us here tonight to respectfully request your approval of the Arbor Square project. Next slide, please. Most of you are already familiar with the project site, but I wanted to restate that this is a 1.69 acre site that today is mostly a vacant industrial building, an empty surface parking lot, and an empty dirt lot. So as you'll see on the next slide, this is a fantastic infill site, and it's a great opportunity for more housing, more ownership housing here in the City of Mountain View. Next slide, please. So we are proposing 38 homes that will be marketed towards first-time homebuyers, small families, families looking to downsize, and below-market-rate buyers. Next slide, please. We heard through the grapevine that not many projects have been able to incorporate the 25% affordability requirement. And we learned that this is a very important factor, important policy for the city. So from the onset of the project, we incorporated this into the project plans and we're proud to say we're planning for 10 out of the 38 homes to be deed restricted affordable units. Next slide, please. The goal of the design of the project was to create a strong street pedestrian experience by orienting our front doors to face the future city park to the west and the San Leandro Avenue right of way to the east, really to embrace both public ways as opposed to turn our backs towards them with garages. Next slide, please. Most importantly, we incorporated the community's feedback into the project design by orienting the project driveway, a row of canopy trees and shared use path all along the south property line to create a significant buffer between our proposed homes and the existing single family neighbors to our south. So as we'll see on the next slide, In our December community meeting, we received all positive comment cards. Getting looks great and good job is very much appreciated, but I'd like to read the top card that says, unlike many other developers, City Ventures actually listened. That means a lot to City Ventures. It means a lot to staff who've worked on this project for over five years. So that comment is very much appreciated. Next slide, please. The goal of the design of our shared use path on the south property line was simple. It's for everyone to feel welcome to use it. So if you're looking to go on a walk with your family to the future city park or looking to walk your dog or looking to tune up your bike at the fix it station, there's a safe place to do that, whether it's during the day under the shaded canopy trees or at night under a well lit pathway. Next slide. We're also very excited about the St. Leandro Avenue right of way expansion. We're proposing a seven foot new sidewalk, as well as an eight foot landscape strip that will include a double row of trees that will not only soften the architecture along the project frontage, but also create a more enjoyable pedestrian experience along St. Leandro Avenue. Next slide, please. And we're also very excited to be proposing 94 new trees on site. The majority of the planting on site is native species. And at full maturity, about a quarter of the site will be under a tree canopy. So we're very excited to be proposing a very green lush site. Next slide, please. Mayor and council members, thank you so much for your time, and we really appreciate your consideration to join the fabric of this community. We hope you put together a proposal that you and the community would love to see built. And I do want to give a special thank you to staff, especially project planner Edgar Maravilla, who's been an absolute pleasure to work with over the last five years. So thank you, Mayor, thank you, council members, and thank you, staff.

Okay, thank you. Does any member of the Council have questions? I see Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. First, I really appreciated your presentation. It's really nice seeing actual comment cards from the public referenced in the presentation to Council and that evolution I think is very valuable for us to consider. I wish Albert Jeans were in the audience, because he would ask the question that I'm going to ask, which is, I thought I understood the calculation for the Park and Luffys, but now I definitely don't, right? adding two new units right 20 the the park fee is based on 28 net new units um when it was only 26 the in lieu fee was 86 000 uh 200 sorry uh yeah 86 that 86 000 No, wait a second. Well, that's the cost. Oh, here it is. Okay, so $862,784. Now with 28 units, the in lieu fee is $864,032. It's a trivial increase, right? If I were to reverse engineer it and subtract two units each time, it would not go to zero, right? So I'm really struggling to understand that calculation.

Absolutely. Thank you for asking that question. I agree that we were also a little surprised in planning to see the delta, but I would like to invite my colleagues from Public Works up to provide a more detailed answer. My overarching understanding is that the reason for the kind of nominal increase is because the parkland fee dedication fee calculation is determined roughly on the basis of the proportion of the residents added to the neighborhood area rather than like number of units specifically and so because adding two units doesn't substantially change the proportion of residents being introduced to the neighborhood, which is a proportionality that gets carried over to the responsibility of the project towards the parkland deficit in the neighborhood. That's why there's not a substantial increase because adding two units to a project is a fairly small change in terms of the size of the project as a proportion of the neighborhood area. Public works staff may be able to provide a better explanation to that question though.

I think that it would actually be beneficial if you were to graph it, right? So the number of units, right? So if it's one unit, it's probably not gonna be $800,000, right? At what point in that graph would there be a spike to get us to 800,000? Would it be going from 15 to 60?

Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on the size of the neighborhood area and the size of the park deficit in that area, but it would probably have to be much larger than two units to see a significant change to the calculation. That doesn't make sense to me, but okay.

I don't know if you want to help explain. It is far less than intuitive.

Good evening council members. I'm gonna try to explain this. So it is a complex method of calculation and I actually had to build out a spreadsheet. You mind introducing yourself? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Quinn Beyer, Principal Civil Engineer for Public Works. So I'm going to try to explain this. It's a bit of a complex formula. And basically, we take a look at each planning area. And within the planning area, we look at the number of residents. And with the project, based on the number of units, there is a factor for how many additional residents would be added. And the project would be paying, under this new methodology, the project would be paying its proportional share. So with a development such as this that is providing just 38 gross units, subtracting out the credit when you go from 10 to 8, it really has a minimal effect because within the planning area there's about 9,700 residents with the planning area. So the project's proportional share of that is really minimal. It's actually just 1%. So as you drop by two units, at a factor of, I think it's two person per unit, it just reduces it to get credit for four less people over 97 people within that population. So the proportional share, it becomes, it's very minimal.

So I think what I'm struggling with is the non-linearity of that graph, right? When you use a term like proportional, it- Intuitively, it would suggest to me that there would be some kind of linearity in the in lieu fee based on the number of units or the number of people that we're adding. I would love to know at what point you go from $20,000 to $600,000. It's a mystery to me. I'm not going to make you spend too much time explaining it. Maybe I'll have Council Member Clark explain it to me because it sounds like he understands. But thank you for the effort. And I hope Albert Jeans, who may be listening and can provide a comment in Zoom, can help me understand that math too. I have a completely unrelated question for community development staff. And it's informed by a very thoughtful set of questions that Council Member McAllister has asked over the years Is staff concerned at all about the erosion of the industrial base? We're losing a lot of blue, and we're getting a lot of orange. At what point should we be concerned about that?

I think I heard two questions asked there. One speaks to staff's cognizance of this potential issue, and the second being, where is the line of concern? The short answer to the first question is absolutely. It's something that has come up regularly and it definitely came up when city staff was working on the Terra Bella visioning project within this very neighborhood area. And so I think it is something that's front and center on the minds of staff. At the same time, we have frequently looked at our non-residential land in the city as an opportunity to create housing sites with zero displacement. There are, in any of these scenarios, pros and cons to our attention and the attention of the market on existing non-residential properties in the city. I think I don't have a simple answer for you on the second part of the question, and there may be people in this room who have experience with sort of planning efforts in this neighborhood or in other locations that are similar to this that may have a metric for you. The simplest answer I can give at this time is it's sort of the balance of residential and non-residential land in the city is something that planners spend time thinking about. It's something that I spent time thinking about when I've worked on long-range projects in the city in the past, but I don't have a figure for you that I can give as far as sort of is there a point at which we need to be concerned about the erosion of industrial land in the city.

Okay, thank you.

Councilman McAllister.

There's two items we agree on. Mayor, since I'm a boomer and I'm used to seeing these projects before that we talked about, this erosion, it is a concern because there's a big push to do a lot of housing, but we need the small industrial base for the car repair, the plumber, the electrician, those kind of people that come through our lives. So that's a statement, not a question. So let me get to the question. So I asked, this was more of a question of policy or just, not policy, but interesting. I asked the question, what is the average cost of an acre in Mountain View? And then they came up with 7.8, and I know there's a lot of variables. And then I asked the, sort of following up on your in lieu question, in lieu of the, and that was probably a little more money, $862,000. It's equal to 0.16 land. How does that number equal the cost of an acre? And it came out to $5.4 million. So it's a question is if we're trying to get a deficit, we're always gonna be in a deficit because the amount of money that we collect never equals the cost of a land, to actually buy land in Mountain View. Is that a true statement or help me understand the correlation between what we charge is below what the cost of land is. Is there any way to get the correlation that what we charge will get us to the point of what land's worth? And don't say state law, please.

Good evening, honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council. Christian Murdock, Community Development Director. I'll take the first part of this, and if there are further questions about calculations, Public Works staff will probably need to address them. The fundamental premise of the methodology we're talking about is proportionality. And so I won't say state law, I'll say federal law or U.S. Constitution instead, which limits... Murphy's Law. which limits the ways in which the city can require a specific development project to address existing conditions. And so we've identified there's an existing deficit in many of the city's park planning areas, and it's not the burden of a given development to rectify that existing deficit. It's their responsibility to address their proportionate impact to that deficit. And so this calculation methodology yields a less than full cost to address the deficit. Hence, you're seeing a $5.4 million per acre equivalent valuation for a $7 or $8 million actual cost of land. And that's driven by this proportionality of the impact.

So it is what it is.

That's not what I said, but what I'm saying is there's a proportionality to the contribution from this project given its particular circumstances in this park planning area. And so that will deviate depending on the circumstances in different park planning areas, different scales of projects that may have more or less proportionate impacts on that existing condition.

Okay, thanks. Also, going back, was this property owned by Prometheus at one time when we were looking at I thought they were talking about because I know it was somewhere in that property line They were pushing properties right next higher buildings right next to the property line. That's why it looks sort of familiar Well, that was before their time I can take a stab at that question.

Yeah, I've been around for a little while To my knowledge Prometheus has not owned this specific property they do have an active project of a similar type just over on San Rafael and

So in the same block, but a block to the west. Which backed up to houses.

Which does have adjacency to single family homes to the south. Not quite as much adjacency, but.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member McAllister. Any other questions? Seeing none, 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. It looks like we only have one, we have, oh, great. We have two speakers. Each speaker will have three minutes. So we'll start out with Travis Bowie. Yeah, he just appeared.

Well, good late evening, Mayor, council members. I'm Travis Bowie. I own and manage the property just on the north side of this development. My business partner and I developed that in 1985. And believe it or not, that is the newest development in that area. So when City Ventures came along, we were pretty thrilled that there was something new happening in the area. The idea that it's an opportunity for first-time homeowners is something that's really needed. The community is behind it. It's good for my business, well, except for the construction time, you know, I'll be looking at dust and noise and I don't know how many construction pickups parked in my parking lot, but I'll be glad to deal with that because I think it's really a good project. And I think the City Ventures should be congratulated on doing a really nice job of listening to the neighborhood. And the City of Mountain View and their park on the west side is gonna make this really, really nice. And I hope you all approve that tonight. It's something we really need, so thank you.

you all right as if he was summoned we have a virtual public comment from albert jeans can you hear me we can hear you great yeah i wasn't planning to comment because i am in favor of this project but i couldn't resist councilman ramirez's invitation to speak it's true i mean yeah in fact the formula is non-linear in terms of the number of residents in that extensive explanation that I emailed to you a few weeks ago that explained my interpretation of the formula. You can see that it is nonlinear and it's actually quadratic. I'm not sure you know exactly how that graphs out, but that could explain as Ms. Shapiro said, why the incremental change due to those two extra units is so minimal. probably the thing starts off steep and then kind of levels off as the number of people increases or whatever like that. So anyways, that's all I have to say. Yeah, I'm all in favor of the project. They really listened to the residents and it's the least impactful three-story development that I could imagine for that plot. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Jeans. All right, now we will bring it back to Council. So for questions and deliberation, please note that a motion to approve the recommendation should also include reading the title of the resolution and attached to the report. Council Member Kamei.

Great. Thanks, Mayor. So I made the motion. I'll read it first and then I'll make some comments. So adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View adopting an initial study mitigated negative declaration for 922-950 San Leandro Avenue residential project pursuant to sections 15064F3 and 15070... of the California Environmental Quality Act being read in title only, further reading waived. Adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View adopting a general plan amendment to modify the general plan land use map to change the land use designation for the properties at 922-950 San Leandro Avenue from the general industrial to medium density residential as recommended by the Environmental Planning Commission to be read in title only, further reading waived. Oh, I didn't know there was a hold back. Okay. Introducing ordinance of the City Council of the City of Mountain View approving a zoning map amendment of the properties located at 922-950 San Leandro Avenue from the MM General Industrial Zoning District to the R3-1.5 Multifamily Residential Zoning District to be recommended by the Environmental Planning Commission to be read in title only, further reading waived, and set a second reading for April 14th, 2026. Adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View conditionally approving a planned unit development permit and development review permit to construct a 38-unit row house development and related site improvements utilizing state density bonus law, replacing a multi-tenant industrial building and two single-family homes and a heritage tree removal permit. to remove five heritage trees on a 1.69 acre site located at 922-950 San Leandro Avenue to be read in title only, further reading waived. Adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View conditionally approving a vesting tentative map for condominium purposes with one common lot on a 1.69 acre site located at 922-950 San Leandro Avenue to be read in title only, further reading waived. that's that's everything and so I think I'll do my best to keep my comments brief which is just Mr. Malik I think you're the happiest developer we've ever had come and present at our council so we really appreciate that especially given the the late hour and I think you have every reason to be thrilled to present this project I'm thrilled to make the motion for it and I know it's been a five-year journey that we've been on. We've had whole lives. I know you're expecting a family. My family's grown in that time. But I think that lens has really led to the product type and the approach that you bring to what you're having forward here in Mountain View. And so we have been talking about missing middle, how we can create home ownership. But what I really appreciate about your comments tonight was talking about Opportunities for people who want to be kind of on the beginning entryway, first-time homebuyers, or those who want to downsize, how many of our seniors would love to be able to move in something else. And I think the different BMR ranges allow for our seniors who may be on a fixed income to be able to move in. You're meeting that 25%, which is thrilling, and it will be a testament that we'll be able to share with all other future developers. that it is possible to get no matter what the economic drivers are or conditions. Citi Ventures made it happen, so we can ask them to make it happen too. And then the... It's also just so great as a member of council to be able to look at a project earlier that has a city park and this one to have a city park. I mean, how fortunate are we to be having our new homes and new parks for our residents? Really appreciate the Share Youth Path. I think you'll probably hear some comments about how you did that, the different materials, but I think this is something I have spent my entire time on EPC and council talking about, working on, and to be able to see this come into fruition is very exciting. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kamei. Assistant City Attorney

Yes, Council Member Kamea, I just wanted to make sure for the record we noted that your motion includes the corrections that staff has put on screen.

Do I need to read those too?

No, just as noted in the record and resolution.

As noted by staff, we have the recommended revisions to attachment four and attachment five. Thank you.

Is that acceptable to the seconder of the motion? No. Okay. All right, thank you. Next, Councilmember Hicks.

So I will be supporting the motion, and I will, for many of the reasons that Councilmember May mentioned, and I will not be repeating them tonight, just understand that I agree. And there were a couple of additional things that I thought were great about this project that you didn't mention. One is that, as a person on the Council Sustainability Committee, I really noted that it's an all-electric project with solar panels, but also the design allows for the mechanical and solar to be met without public views of the equipment, that's actually pretty nice. And something I haven't seen before. Also a wide sidewalk, I appreciate that. And so I appreciate all of that, we'll be supporting the motion. I also of course have my objective design standards, which I wish we had in the beginning, that this brings up for me. One is that we're getting a lot of craftsman-based row home architecture, and I'm wishing that we could move on from that in some ways, and some more varied architecture. And your City Ventures website, which I spent some time on, has some great examples of some other I particularly like the architecture in Sebastopol. It had some kind of simple, classic, timeless. You're nodding your head. You know that. You've looked at your website. Anyway, architecture that I would like. I hear you work in Mountain View frequently.

I would like you to bring that here at some point.

Also, I really appreciated the live work design, which I don't think would be appropriate here. But to see you bring that. streets that would be appropriate or other developers bring that here I thought that city ventures did an excellent job of executing that in addition to that I find almost all of our row homes very kind of driveway bound with you know bedrooms and so forth that look out over a lot of concrete and I've been seeing a East Coast developers doing sort of shared driveways, different, I guess in this development you've done, you're doing stamped concrete, so different pavement types, greenery integrated in, you know, people are not going to be driving on that driveway very much. So more shared streets, Woonerfs, I'm hoping we can have for our row homes some of those sort of,

Objective design standards, but otherwise, you know, I I love everything you're doing Thank You councilmember Hicks councilmember Ramirez Thank You mayor, I agree very strongly with the remarks from councilmember Kamei and councilmember Hicks But I am going to repeat some of them because they merit I think elevation and praise. The reason I'm supporting this project is because of the compliance with the 25% BMR requirement. It's been extremely challenging to make available ownership opportunities for moderate income people. And you provide that. You're not asking for a deviation from our standards. And I think that's not only commendable and important, but as Council Member Kamei was saying, something that we want to showcase so other future developers will emulate what you're doing. That's extremely important, and one of the reasons why, even though I have a history of being fairly negative towards this particular housing typology, I think this project is an important example of compliance with our local regulations is achievable, and it helps us achieve important community goals. I ALSO WANT TO SPEAK TO WHAT IS POSSIBLE BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT THAT THIS IS A GATEKEEPER. WE HAVE ACTUALLY SOME DISCRETION. THIS IS A PROJECT THAT FUTURE COUNCILMEMBER DONAHUE WILL BE ABLE TO MAKE CHANGES TO. BUT AS A CONSEQUENCE, WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO WORK IN GOOD FAITH WITH THE APPLICANT TO DO THINGS THAT WE WOULD ORDINARILY NOT BE ABLE TO REQUIRE LIKE ALLOW FOR AN ALL ELECTRIC PROJECT OR I THINK ACHIEVE SOME OF THE OTHER GOALS THAT YOU'VE DONE THROUGH DESIGN WORKING WITH CITY STAFF. I THINK THAT'S ALSO IMPORTANT AND WHY IT'S IMPORTANT FOR US TO THINK ABOUT OTHER OPPORTUNITIES WHERE THE GATE KEEPER PROCESS AND THE DISCRETION THAT IT ALLOWS FOR IS WORTHWHILE, RIGHT? IT ALLOWS US TO DO THINGS THAT WE CAN'T DO WITH CONVENTIONAL ZONING, ESPECIALLY UNDER THE NEW STATE LAWS. I WANT TO SPEAK TO SOME OF THE CONCERNS I HAVE ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY COST. I THINK THE EROSION OF THE INDUSTRIAL BASE IS CONCERNING TO ME AND MAYBE THAT GRAPH AT WHICH WE SHOULD BE CONCERNED LOOKS KIND OF LIKE THE GRAPH FOR THE PARK AND LOO FEES WHERE IT'S NOT REALLY CLEAR AT WHAT POINT THERE IS A SUBSTANTIAL ENOUGH IMPACT THAT WE NEED TO BE alarmed but I'm trusting the staff that in your evaluation of this project this is not that tipping point and the merits of the project are so strong and encouraging that notwithstanding that industrial to residential conversion we should support the project. The last thing, I would love to ask the applicant if he'd be amenable to a voluntary additional condition. This is something that we talked about in our meeting. I'm fully expecting you to construct the project, but in the event something goes catastrophically wrong, would you be amenable to a condition where the city would have the first right of refusal to explore purchasing the property? And the reason I ask is, we're assembling a community park immediately adjacent to your strategically located properties, and if for some reason the project doesn't proceed, I think the city would love the opportunity to work with you potentially to acquire those properties for an even larger community park. Is that something that you'd be amenable to?

Thank you for that question. You know, when you asked that question early on and previously, you know, it was something that what I previously mentioned was we are a developer and home builder. When we develop these projects, we know all the costs that go into them. We know what makes them tick. We know what conditions will and won't make them work. And staff is well aware of all the conditions that we had to work with to make sure this is a constructible project. This is a project we are 100% building. We have multiple active projects in the Bay Area right now. We have a project in Los Gatos that we're pulling the site costs for to plug in for this. uh so all that is to say uh we are 100 building this project uh we don't believe a condition of approval to to mandate the first right of refusal is necessary because we're committed to making this happen and i think uh our our the uh neighbors the south are also committed to seeing this housing happen too so i would respectfully decline uh your request there's a lot of words to say no but i couldn't couldn't you know help but make the the attempt thank you thank you thank you everyone for your work on the project

Thank you, Council Member Ramirez. Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, I'm just gonna add a couple of things. I'm actually personally very fond of row houses because I spent the first nine years of my life in a row house in Baltimore and the reason that it was such a great place to live was because there were lots of kids to play with and there was great places to play. And that's what I see in this development because there will be relatively more families there and they can go play right next to the park. So I think that this is just a great site in combination. So I'd like to, I mean I'm looking forward to going to the groundbreaking and the ribbon cutting. That said, another thing I want to thank you for is the land assemblage. One of the things I've been promoting with Gatekeeper all these years is the idea that there are places where we have two zone kinds of zoning and you can put them together and make a good project and that's what the Gatekeeper is for and the Gatekeeper process allows for some innovation to do that. So thank you for doing that and for taking advantage of that. And also, along with those row houses on the East Coast, they didn't have garages, but they had basements. And I know those of us who've moved from the East Coast miss our basements because where do we put all of our stuff? We put it in the... Yeah, we put it in the garage, exactly. You don't even know. And then another thing that I've observed from viewing some elder people in my family who live in townhouses is If you can have a built-in elevator as an extra, it is really a wonderful amenity. The ones I've seen are like, they're just big enough to put a person in a suitcase. They're like... you know, three feet square. But they do allow people to live there for about 10 years longer. And that's, you know, that's important. So I'm just going to drop that concept out there as somebody who does this kind of, you know, development. Maybe you can't do it here, but you can do it in another one. I've seen it really make a difference. But anyway, this is wonderful. Thank you very much for your great work. And we look forward to getting it constructed.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member McAllister, would you like to speak to your second?

Sure, why not? Well, yes. But I have a question first. When you guys say the middle income, what kind of income are we talking about? Anybody want to take a stab at that one? No, but I was curious what the chart, was there a chart in there, Mr.?

Thank you.

Well, as he looks for that, the reason, but I like the project, and that's when I mentioned the previous project before, they were building next to the property line, and I appreciate to take a lot of the stress from us by moving at the property line, moving the buildings to the other side, and not impeding on the neighbors and the people looking down and all that, so that was a great benefit to me, because then we heard, but you guys also realize, you listen to the neighbors there, and this project does not impact them, which is nice. Which I also liked, and this is for Councilmember Ramirez, the two-car garage. So many of these projects have a one-car garage. They have three bedrooms, so you know sooner or later there's gonna be more cars than there are bedrooms and there's gonna be people driving around. So this impact was good to see that it's gonna minimize parking, even though the parking's a little bit, but it will be nice to see that you have a two-car garage. That is nice. and then also you have guest parking. Were you gonna answer my question? Oh, please, answer it.

Good evening, Mayor and Council, Wayne Shen, Housing Director. Yes, so the project will include affordable housing at three levels, at the 80%, the 120%, and the 150% AMI levels. all in compliance with the BMR requirements. So at the 80% level, it's about $317,000. At the 120% level, about $715,000. And at the 150% AMI level, about $160,000 per unit. Actually, I was looking for the income, not the cost. That's what they're going to sell the properties for.

Well, what was the income level expected?

I don't have the chart in front of me, but I know for the three-bedroom units, they imply a four-person household, and a four-person household at the 120% AMI level, I believe it's about $225,000. So the 80% AMI level will be a little bit below that, and of course the 150% will be a little bit above that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Christian. So okay, so Santa Clara County, the 120% level is 234,000. At the 80% level, it's about 160,000. So at the 150% level, which HCD doesn't calculate, we work with the developer to interpolate that. That should be around probably about the $270,000 level or so. Okay, thank you. Yeah.

The reason I ask is because my daughter just bought a townhouse in San Jose Campbell. And so when I was looking through the incomes, and it was a million dollars plus for the property, but the fact that it was a townhouse, it was affordable, it met her requirements, goes to the fact that I've been always liking ownership of the townhouses is at entry level other than a condo conversion. And so this is, I'm glad that you have this in I didn't ask the asking price of the higher ones, though, so we'll let that go. But it was just I can appreciate what's being done in the way of townhouses and getting those people in and getting around the house. But don't hear that. But so thank you for that. And that's all I have to say about the motion. I appreciate it. It's great putting it in. I would like to see more row houses because it does allow people to get in. I know it's not. to some of the people's liking on the council, but it's the start of ownership and that makes somebody who owns something to me is gonna be more committed to the community. And that's what I like to see is people committed to the community, willing to help out. Doesn't mean other people aren't, but I think they just have a start going that way. So I support the motion. I was glad to second it with my colleague.

All right, seeing no other comments, I am just going to say yay more housing and let's vote. Motion passes unanimously, woohoo. All right, so now we move on to council, staff and committee reports. Does anyone have any council, staff and committee reports? Council Member Showalter.

You know, I really have a long one that I wrote up, but I'm going to spare everybody. I'm passing out two graphs. And you have been forwarded by the clerk with the presentation from Bosca. And, you know, BASCA is our Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Act. And we get this report every other month from the San Francisco PUC about what are the water conditions in the area. And I wanted to share this one with you because I think it's very telling. The one I wanted to show with you is the upcountry snowpack. You can see the line for this year is the red one. The stars were not quite to the end yet. And you can see the lines for the previous few years. 2015 was a very dry year. That was the year when you flew over the Sierra, you saw sort of nothing but open areas. You didn't see hardly any snow. Then in 2015, In 2023, it was a gangbuster year. We just got huge amounts of snowpack and then you see this black line as very, very standard. But the reason I wanted to show you this is because you see how this line, this red line is turning down? That means that we're expecting it to intersect with the other lines. We're expecting it to get much closer to the 2015 line than it is to the blue line above it. And what that means is, although we have plenty of water in our reservoirs for water supply for us to drink and irrigate our lawns and flush our toilets and take showers and all the things we do with our water supply, it does mean that the fire danger is going to be worse this year. So that's why I wanted to share this snowpack with you just to say that these things are all connected, and we'll just have to wait and see what happens. You never know. And then, sadly, we also always have to talk about rates. Everybody is concerned about rates. And the other page I took out from this presentation shows how the rates have gone up, and that is, largely because we use less water. The system costs approximately the same thing to run, but we buy less water because we're all doing such a good job at conservation. And so that means that the rates per unit have gone up a little bit. So I wanted to share those things with you and if anybody wants to talk about it more, I'd be glad to. The presentation, I sent you the presentation because it really does have a lot of really pretty graphs, which I think are fun to look at and I thought some of you might think was fun too. And I'll let Emily, you can talk about us going to NLC.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter. Council Member Kamei.

I JUST WANTED TO REPORT THAT I ATTENDED THE CITIES ASSOCIATION MEETING ON MARCH 12TH WHERE WE HELD A STUDY SESSION ON AUTOMATED LICENSE PLATE READERS.

THANKS. HOW EXCITING. ALL RIGHT. COUNCIL MEMBER MCALISTER.

I JUST WANT TO SAY I HAVE SOMETHING FOR A SECTION 8. SO THAT'S SECTION 8. THAT'S ME. AGENDA ITEM 8.

DOES ANYONE ELSE HAVE

Just to clarify, section seven as in future new buildings?

Oh yeah, it's seven right today. Oh, it's seven in this one?

Okay. Yeah. So wait until you're done with your comments.

Okay, all right, so does anyone else have anything? Because I'll just report out my things. Thank you to Vice Mayor Clark for handling the last meeting because I was at the Yale School of Management Mayor's Caucus, which was really exciting, and you're gonna really love it next year. I'm so excited to see how you're gonna

I really hope they invite you because like they invited me because how well Council Member Kamei did.

And so I'm just like, please, I promise Vice Mayor Clark is really good. So I went there and we had really interesting conversations on the national level. It was very mind-blowing. Next, after that, I went to the VTA PAC meeting where they went over, the big item was talking about what the lessons learned from Super Bowl and how they're going to take that lessons to FIFA. Then I also, FIFA, FIFA. World Cup, soccer or football, depending on what country you're in. Then I also attended the State of the County. I threw the first pitch for the Mountain View Girls Softball opening day. It made it over the plate, but a little bit to the left. I also opened the town hall for Congressman Liccardo shortly after that. And then as Council Member Clark, not Council Member Clark, Council Member Showalter mentioned we had our adventure in Washington, D.C. for the National League of Cities Congressional Summit where we also spent some time with our federal lobbyists lobbying for federal funding so that we can do really good stuff in Mountain View. and continuing to evangelize our wonderful city and explaining to DC that we are the best city and that's why they should give us the most money. And so it was hopefully a productive trip. We met with the Department of Transportation to ask, see if we can get some money for our grade separations. That's a big one, we're opening that. They'll be opening up that grant soon. We have three appropriation requests, $2 million each that we are hoping to get money for. I feel very good about how we were received and hopefully that will translate to money to our city, so yay us. Now Council Member McAllister, what item seven would you like to bring us forth?

Well, I'll just make a, I did attend the VTA meeting. So the main meeting, the board meeting. So I did attend that and we discussed, it was interesting that they were doing an auditor's report and how, again, they're going over items that we did four years ago. And that's one of the concerns about VTA is the board changes all the time. So no one remembers what they'd done before and they're repeating the same problems again. It was interesting. They had 28 issues to resolve. So they had 28 action items, and this could relate to our city. They had 28 action items. 16 of the action items would only change things by 2%. So I mentioned to them, you're spending all this time on two items to make minimal amount. And so we have issues with VTA, but they're still going along. So to number seven, and this goes for efficacy. I think the city, which we've been leading in the past, needs to take some of our stance and lead the charge on legislation about the condos, the Liability Act. I think we should not wait for somebody to come to us. I think we should be proactive. And I would like to see our representative on the city association say, Mountview wants to lead on this, be proactive and say, let's get this legislation going. Let's get our legislators doing it. And I know there's some work on it. We could have frivolous lawsuits that are still affecting our small businesses. We should lead this instead of waiting for other people to come to us. There's some concerns about the Brown Act that it's got to be more current or more applicable than what they have done. And so we need to say, you know, especially Zoom meetings where they're saying, well, you can't do it well. Technology's changed and people are changing. We gotta be more flexible. And so I think the city manager had an item that we were talking about. Maybe I missed it. But I would like to see us be that leading force and drive legislation and not waiting for people to do it for us. So that's what I was talking about. Can we get an ad hoc? Can we get some people to do it? How we go about doing it? And if council is behind doing that where we will be getting other people together, because we have lobbyists, but I think we have a great person at City Association right now that could advocate for these types of things. And so that's what my section seven, item seven is about.

I think Council Member Ramirez has a response to that, because I know that he was talking about a bill recently.

I don't want to put words in Councilmember McAllister's mouth, but if you mentioned the condo liability law, there actually is a bill that was introduced AB 1903 that addresses that very issue. And I'll trust the staff who helped assemble our legislative platform, but I think we actually have a policy position So if it makes sense, and I think I agree with what you're suggesting, and if we wanted to say take a formal position in support of AB 1903, I would be very comfortable supporting that.

Yeah, no, that's what I mean. Instead of, yeah, it's coming to us. Yes, the city should write a letter, should go to the city association and say support this. Anything to move the project to say this is important to us, Let's get it done. That's why you're being proactive about getting stuff to legislators and letting them know how we feel versus waiting for something.

I'm going to let the city manager reply to that.

Thank you, Mayor, Council Members. So this is on our radar, and our Intergovernmental Affairs Manager, Christina Gilmore, will be working with Dane Hutchins, our California Public Policy Group, our state lobbyists essentially on this item. And we are happy to work with Council Member Kamei to bring this forward in a way that would generate regional support. And so I think staff is aware of this. And so we are working on it. And I think there will be opportunities for us to advocate in a more, strategic way than than just sending a letter in which I think is what you're getting at councilmember McAllister and I will say we have initiated and led legislation over the past several years and we've been pretty successful in those efforts too and we work really well with not only our own legislative delegation, but we've also had some past wins with delegates or legislative delegates that are in our region and not necessarily our own assembly members. So we do have a good track record, so I will certainly take note of that, and we are on top of it.

Thank you, City Manager McCarthy. Council Member Kamei.

Yeah, I'm happy to answer this question. So a couple different things. So I sit on the board for the League of California Cities statewide and today they held a briefing for 90 minutes going over every single bill and every single position. So I can, my understanding is that everyone gets those invitations on council that comes from CalCities. So, but I'm happy to kind of push that through our city clerk to kind of highlight, but where they go through and they do a breakdown, CalCities takes their own position. So they email that out. I think when it comes to cities association, so cities association of San Clara County with the 15 cities, I sit on the legislative advocacy committee. I have for multiple years, we go over bills. And as soon as there are bills that are proposed, I, forward them to the city manager and our intergovernmental relations manager to ask them, have we taken a position? Is this on our radar? We go back and forth because my understanding is when I'm there, I'm representing the entire city. So if we have taken a position, we share that. if there are bills that we wanna bring to the Legislative Advocacy Committee for the greater board to vote on, we can also do that. So we have that discussion. And so whether it's AB 1903 or others, we do do that. So perhaps there's a way, I know that our current state lobbyist also does a recap that Ms. Gilmore forwards to us on the bills. And so, perhaps there's a mechanism with which we can work via our city manager on if there's, you know, anything else we want to call out. But I would say there's different processes in place with which we're trying to advocate the strongest for the city. And hopefully that helps answer a little bit.

No, that's what I want. I want us to be proactive versus wait and see. And I've seen a couple of times where we wait and see versus, hey, this is important to us. Let's get it done.

Thank you, Council Member Showalter.

Yeah, I just wanted to bring up that Silicon Valley Clean Energy is also very active on the advocacy front. We don't necessarily advocate independently, although sometimes we do. Primarily we do it through the Trade Association. I think it's called LEAN. I can't remember what the acronym stands for. But anyway, I'm on the Legislative Action Committee. In fact, I just got to be the chair of it. So that's good. But we, of course, concentrate at Silicon Valley Clean Energy primarily on sustainability issues. But I think Councilmember McAllister, everybody agrees with you. And when we had, for instance, when we had Josh Becker come, we asked him, can you work on condo liability? And he was like, oh, yes, I can. So I think our, you know, our legislators are very amenable to hearing from us. And Sam Liccardo, who we met in Washington, was thanking us for, because he had worked with our housing department for providing suggestions for the Disclose, is it the Disclose? What, Unlock, Unlock, the Unlock Act that was rolled into another housing back that actually has bipartisan, one of the few things that has bipartisan agreement. So yeah, I think we really, to me, that's one of the most important things we can do under the innovation category that we all think is so important here.

Do you think that covers what you need, Council Member McAllister?

I just like to have discussions and get people thinking that, okay, let's, you know, it hasn't happened in a long time, and I just say, hey, I know we do these things, but we... Let's be, again, be proactive, but I'm glad to hear that there's avenues, and I always like to bring certain things up just to make us aware.

Yep, so.

And I can work to, sorry to jump in. I can work to forward, usually they do the recordings of the Cal cities when they present all the legislative bills, so I can forward that to the city clerk to forward on to folks, because it's just interesting to see, and sometimes they do the summary with an attached PDF, which I find helpful, so.

We also do have the Cal City Summit coming in April where we can go and lobby. Yay. Are you signed up? Are you signed up? Oh, so April 21, 22, 23, I think. It will be fun. You should all join us. And so I guess on concluding that item, put me in coach, let's go. So with that, and I see no other speakers, the next city council meeting will be held on April 14th, 2026. This meeting is adjourned at 2309.