Remarks by Nick Richardson
106 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 5
- Play at 6:04:08
“is tight, if that number were slashed down to a more realistic, reasonable number like 5,000 homes per that size, it would still, the number being 5,000 wouldn't drag us down out of surplus range?”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:04:24
“Okay. Now with the 20 homes per acre, those are small. Any of the math will show you, however, We have urban neighborhood, which I understand that low density, medium density, and urban neighborhood, these are not single family or multifamily necessarily. It's just a density of domicile units. Is that correct?”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:05:18
“Okay, and for the urban neighborhood, capacity that we have in most of the planning documents that we receive, it shows 16 to 30 units per acre as that density. Yeah, 16 to 30 right here in urban neighborhood. and it's characterized in most of the land use maps as brown. I don't see a, and tell me if maybe this isn't the right step, I don't see in the proposed land use map that was shown by Bernard a few minutes ago on slide four or on the printed copies we have here, it's hard to draw that line to see which is what And again, maybe it's not time for that yet. I don't know. You can speak to…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:07:34
“Okay. With the median home price in Fresno right now, most recently calculated, I'd imagine you're coming in somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000. Single family home.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:07:54
“Yes, just your median home price in the city.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:07:58
“If you have numbers for new builds, I would take that as well. That's...”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:09:45
“Got it. With that, We talked about the builder having to go and get the loan in the first place from the bank to be able to sell these homes. What analysis have we done as far as the price point? How cheap, in theory, could those homes be? Because we've got a lot of demographics in the city, and you can ask the housing element. They're telling us you've got to have medium high income, medium income, medium low income, low income. You've got to have the spread. So what is the average home price that it could drop to, in essence, instead of that $550,000 number, that it could drop to to still…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:10:41
“Okay. And a builder is not selling a house, a new home for $350,000. It's going to be higher than that. So in theory, again, fingers crossed, in theory... a realistic price that a builder is going to sell a house, which would be over 400 kids, not going to be 350,000, you know, be honest. Not you. I'm not saying you're not. So if they're going to sell that for 400,000 or more, whatever else, as long as they're above that $350,000 per home median average, that would still land us in a surplus as well.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:11:11
“Okay. Alrighty. The, We talked about that. We talked about the plan changing, talked about the density, how that density could alter itself. What outside of the 10,000 number that we were given, what are the realistic densities are we planning for in there? And here's the reason I ask, and I don't know this. So teach me when something comes to, when an application comes to the city and nominally probably makes it onto some agenda during the consent calendar and And someone says, I want to build these homes out here. It's a lower density than the average we're trying to maintain for the…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:12:32
“Okay. And the reason I ask is because 16 years from now, when there's a council comprised of entirely different faces up here, except George Ann will still be here. Yeah. I want to make sure that they're not here for this conversation. They're not having this, right? They don't have this concern about the density and the home prices and how many lots per acre. I want to make sure that instead of something slipping by that drops us below the density that's been promised and thereby not maintaining that surplus, that we're able to hold that honestly, that we're honestly able to hold that number…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:13:41
“Got it. So that density is based on specifically how it's zoned and is not really up to the interpretation of a future council or a future this or that, or a future planning department employee. They are bound by the zoning and any breaking of that is going to require a significant votes choices recommendations things of that nature yes okay um that was a concern so i appreciate that um at least knowing that that there are elected officials or appointed officials who can be held responsible for that in the future um i think we've covered the update and the absorption um i just want to make…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:14:49
“By Clarity, that was the name I was missing. Okay, do we continue to work with Clarity?”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:15:07
“Got it, okay. That was one of the answers I was looking for. Okay, Council President, I think for now those are all the questions that I had. Thank you to the three of you for coming up and answering the questions.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:15:35
“I gave an on-the-spot homework assignment. That was on me.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:16:05
“Okay. I think that's fair. And again, all of these things are contingent upon whether or not the person who lives there wants to stay there. Correct. Correct. Okay. Thank you for crunching those numbers. No problem. There probably, I'd imagine there wasn't, so... Math for Marines here. Acre foot of water, roughly what, 336,000 gallons? 326,000 gallons. 326,000? Yeah. Okay. So let's break this down. We're going to go 326,000 gallons divided by 365, so that's per day. Okay, so that's 890, it's one acre foot of water. That's 893 gallons a day, which is about a third of this. However, if my…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:17:38
“I was mostly looking at the gentleman behind him just to give me a little north, south, or east, west.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 6:17:46
“Just comparatively. I just wanted to see, hey, comparatively, what's this going to do in water requirements versus something else? So, okay, that was the clarity I was looking for. No pun intended. Council President, that concludes my questions for now.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 8:42:46
“All right, Council President Anderson, over the floor. Okay, this is going to be pretty brief. If I have any questions, it's going to be one or two. So the intent here, I want to be pretty clear with what my intent is. And if anybody's seen any of the news coverage over the last few days, this is exactly what I've said to everybody. Throughout my time on the council, I've been very... I wouldn't even say conciliatory. I've been very dedicated when it comes to studying the effects that decisions have on business. And the intent here is not to cripple or tell any sort of business we don't want…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 8:51:52
“Okay. Mayor, did you, were you pitching something in over there? Yeah, if you're done with the questions. One more, then we'll let you have it. This may be for you, it may be for the city attorney. In your professional analysis, on the record, would this meet the requirements or the immediacy for a quote-unquote emergency ban right now? Does it meet the imminency threshold requirements? And I'm looking at a representative from the city attorney's office who has an opinion on this. Because this was brought up as well.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 8:53:03
“Okay. So to that point, and to put a cap on this... Not sure to what extent you can speak to this. Are there any pending applications before the planning commission for a use of this type that you deem likely to pass the director's determination thresholds?”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 8:53:26
“Okay. So it seems like we're not meeting the emergency ban threshold. I'm comfortable with those answers. Thank you for the professional analysis. Mayor?”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 8:59:04
“I appreciate it. We spoke earlier to the, to the one zero of binary code, which especially applicable with data centers. I feel like what we've reached here is a good 0.5 right in the middle of the two. Um, And I'm glad that my other colleagues have also had similar ideas. We obviously can't discuss these things given Brown Act restrictions with each other whenever we'd like. So this conversation is taking place here. I'm not gonna go to detail about the water consumption, but director with this tasking, I don't know if this would require an amendment to it or not, but I think it's worth our…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 9:02:14
“So it doesn't specify just AI from the legislation text. It says AI or cloud. And what cloud is, we're all familiar with the cloud. It's not actually in the air. It's actually servers somewhere. So it's not necessarily just AI generation. We do have hospitals. We do have manufacturing facilities and other things that use some sort of data store. I mean, we use it here in City Hall. Yeah, we all have a server room.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 9:03:09
“half, so half of that would fall above the threshold here. It talks about specifically 20,000 square feet and over, which isn't huge, especially when you're compared to the rest of the footprint of an Amazon center. We can speak, maybe Director Clark, you want to speak to this? We could talk about perhaps putting verbiage in there that talks about a percentage of a business or some sort of commercial uses footprint. If you want to talk about, hey, no more than 25% of it can be for X, Y, Z. In here, there is a definition which is sufficiently specific, I think.”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026
- Play at 9:08:45
“Well, I think the differentiation there is in the description and the definition of written on page two and four, the supplemental packet portion, when it talks about hyperscale. Hyperscale, you know, you don't need, pardon me for nerding out here, you don't need petabytes or exabytes of information generation for the maintenance or logistics of an individual company. That is more along the lines of what you're talking about with a multinational corporation or this or that or a The other purposes mentioned here, like data mining, cryptocurrency validation, high-performance computing, it…”
City Council · Sep 3, 2026