City Council - Regular Meeting

now we good evening let's call to order the special council meeting closed session of march 24th 2026 at five o'clock pm uh the city does not tolerate disruptive behavior in our meetings this council meeting is considered a limited public forum which means the council can regulate the time place and manner of speech speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by the council the speaker's comments are not related to an agenda item the presiding officer will rule the speaker out of order A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of disagreement with the content of their speech. Location and online meeting details are available on the council agenda. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. Following the closed session, the regular council meeting will begin at 7 p.m. We encourage the public to stay tuned and participate in the regular meetings. Mr. City Clerk, may we have the roll call, please?

Mayor Klein. Present. Vice Mayor Mellinger. Present. Council Member Cisneros.

Present.

Council Member Cerny-Vazen.

Present.

Council Member Sell.

Present.

Council Member Chang.

Present.

Council Member Lay. Six present with Council Member Lay absent.

All right, members of the public will now have an opportunity to address council on the closed session items. I see, let the record state that I see that council member Lay has just arrived. Members of the public will now have an opportunity to address council on the closed session items. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial star nine on his telephone. To indicate you wish to speak, I will call on members of the public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. Mr. City Clerk, are there any speaker cards or anyone online wishing to speak on either of these items?

No, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much. I'm going to close the public hearing now. Council will now adjourn to close session. See you back here at 7 p.m.

Yeah.

Good evening.

Let's call to order the council meeting of March 24th, 2026 at 7.05 PM. The city does not tolerate disruptive behavior in our meetings. Sunnyvale prides itself on the rich diversity of our residents. We are committed to creating a culture of belonging where members of our diverse community feel included, safe, and respected. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means the council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by council for a consent calendar or public hearing items. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited to matters within council's authority, generally referred to as council's subject matter jurisdiction. If a speaker's comments are not related to an agenda item, the presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of a disagreement with the content of their speech. Location and online meeting details are available on the council agenda. Scan the QR code on the screen or click the language access and translation link on the council agenda to read or listen along in more than 60 different languages. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. Comments on matters not on the agenda or presentation item must be submitted prior to the time I call for oral communications. Comments on agenda items must be submitted prior to the time I close the public hearing on that agenda item. Speakers are requested to keep their comments to the time period set for that specific item. and time limits will be strictly enforced. Guidelines are posted on the city's website and on the council meeting agenda. First, please join me in a salute to the flag. 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. Next, City Clerk, may we please have roll call?

mayor klein president vice mayor mellinger president council member cisneros president council member serene vasin president council member cell president council member chang president council member lay president seven president thank you very much vice mayor may we please have the closed session report thank you very much mr mayor um

City Council met and closed session on the following item, California Government Code Section 54956.8, Conference with Real Property Negotiators, Property Street Address 425 South Matilda Avenue, APN number 16503003, Sunnyvale Agency Negotiators, Tim Kirby, City Manager, Ramana Chinnakotla, Interim Director of Public Works, Shireen Nafi, City Property Administrator, Negotiating Parties, First National Bank of Northern California, under negotiation price in terms of payment, nothing to report. And the City Council met in closed session on the following item, California Government Code Section 54957, Public Employee Performance Evaluation, title City Manager, nothing to report.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next, we have several special orders of the day. Let me come to the lectern. Before we begin tonight's meeting, we have two special recognitions. First, we have a special guest present in honor of Women's History Month. Joining us tonight is Margaret Lawson, a longtime resident member of the Sunnyvale Historical Society and the California Assembly District 26 Women of the Year for 2026. Come on forward. Since 1987, March has been nationally recognized as Women's History Month. And it is only fitting that the city of Sunnyvale recognize it as well. This year, the theme of Women's History Month is Leading the Change, Women Shaping a Sustainable Future. This theme expands our understanding of sustainability beyond just environmental concerns. It encompasses financial sustainability, community resilience, leadership succession, and intergenerational equity. Whether developing green technologies, advancing economic justice, strengthening education and health systems, or building civic power, women are designing blueprints for sustainable transformation. This theme affirms that shaping a sustainable future means fostering systems that support both people and our planet. Margaret, would you like to say a few words?

Hi, good evening, everyone. Some of you have heard this before, but it bears worth repeating. In celebrating Women's Her Story Month, I'd like to share a Sunnyvale story about three remarkable women who all happened to share the same first name, Pat, Patricia, Pat. Pat Miller of Stanford, and council members Pat Verrider and Pat Castillo. In 1973, the US Supreme Court handed down the Roe versus Wade decision. Before that, abortion access was extremely limited, typically requiring hospital approval and the sign off of two psychiatrists. Immediately after that decision, a forward-thinking feminist, Pat Miller, took action. She founded Family Planning Alternatives, FPA, a freestanding clinic here in Sunnyvale, just across the street in the buildings that have been torn down at 505 West Olive. The clinic provided comprehensive care for both women and men, contraception, STD testing and treatment, vasectomies, prenatal care, education, and abortion services. It was staffed by a dedicated team of a physician, nurses, nurse practitioners, and a support staff. I know this well. For 25 years, I had the privilege of working for the clinic as a women's health nurse practitioner. For a time, things went along relatively smoothly, but in the late 70s and early 80s, all that changed. Protesters began gathering outside the clinic, sometimes as many as 200 people, were out there causing serious disruptions. They blocked entrances and harassed patients. So much mischief. They put glue in the locks of the clinic doors. They flooded the building with water through a mail slot. The anti-abortion literature would just appear in the waiting room. Fake patients filled up the schedule. We were trained on what to do if followed. Our physician wore a bulletproof vest and occasionally stayed at our house after protesters found out where he lived. Volunteers, many of them women, would meet the patients at their cars and escort them into the clinic. It would be and was a frightening and scary time. Sunnyvale public safety officers were called to protect the clinic. Sunnyvale's first female public safety officer, is it right? Her name is Ranelle Deitch, who was hired in 1975, may well have been among those who were there helping to keep order during those tense days. The protests went on for months. It was difficult and stressful, a really hostile environment. But here's what the protesters didn't count on. Tough women, courageous women, women who did not quit, the professional staff and the support staff. In the 1980s, two members of the Sunnyvale City Council, Pat Castillo and Pat Veriter stepped forward. They helped pass an ordinance, sometimes called the bubble law, which required protesters to keep a set distance, about 200 feet, from the patients and from the clinic entrance. The council meeting was not easy. The room was packed with deeply passionate people on both sides of the issue and the tension was palpable. But the council stood firm and passed the ordinance. The clinic was deeply grateful for the courage shown by these two Pats and the other members of the council at that time. The patients could finally get into the clinic safely. In 1990, FPA was absorbed into Planned Parenthood Maramonte, whose present headquarters are in San Jose. Over time, the nature of the opposition shifted, protest activity diminished, and efforts were moved toward influencing elections locally and nationally, ultimately shaping a more conservative Supreme Court. So in 2022, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, which rolled back reproductive rights throughout the country, a huge step backward. But we're fortunate here in California that has laws who do protect reproductive rights for women. This year, the state legislature allocated $90 million to Planned Parenthood as a one-time emergency funding following the federal cuts. Let me make it clear, women's reproductive rights is a forever issue. So we remember these three women, the three Pats, Pat Miller, Pat Castillo, Pat Verrider, who showed the courage and changed this area forever. Thank you.

Thank you, Margaret, for those words. Although Sunnyvale was the first city in California to have a full-term female mayor, This is only the fourth calendar year since 1912 that women have been the majority on our dais. We appreciate and honor the commitment and achievement of council members Linda Sell, Alyssa Cisneros, Charles C. Chang, and Eileen Leigh. We further recognize the hundreds of women who lead, create, design, and work in the administration of the city. as well as all the women who contribute greatly to the advancement and prosperity of Sunnyvale and all other communities around. On behalf of the City Council, it is my honor to proclaim March 2028, 2028, 2026 as Women's History Month. And I call upon Sunnyvale to work towards ensuring equal opportunities for women and girls in every aspect of their life. Thank you. And thank you.

Thank you.

And for our second recognition of the night, I would like to take a moment to recognize our finance department and its 62 professional staff. In honor of Government Finance Professionals Week, we have some of our dedicated finance staff joining us tonight. Matt Pollen, finance director. Dennis Jha, assistant finance director. Come on forward. Don't be shy. Steven Napier, utility building manager. Nancy Grove, finance manager. And Tran Nguyen, account manager. Matt, would you like to say a few words?

Thank you may appreciate the recognition for government finance professionals week on behalf of our finance team I'm honored to accept the proclamation to highlight the important work that public finance professionals do every day to safeguard public resources maintain transparency and support the services our community relies on in sunnyvale our finance staff is committed to responsible stewardship long-term planning and ensuring that every public dollar is managed with integrity and care i'm proud of the dedication and professionalism our team brings to serving the community and i appreciate the opportunity to recognize their contributions this week thank you thank you

Every day our finance professionals ensure public dollars are managed responsibly, transparently, and in full compliance with California's complex regulations. Their work includes budget development, which they're very busy into right now, financial reporting, revenue management, debt and grant administration, payroll procurement, treasury functions, and support for strategic decision making. Much of this work happens behind the scenes, but it is absolutely essential to every service that our city provides. Thanks to the expertise and dedication, our community benefits from stable operations, accurate financial information, and strong long-term planning. They help us maintain public trust and ensure that taxpayer dollars are used wisely within our city. On behalf of the City Council, it is my honor to hereby proclaim March 23rd through March 27th, 2026 as Government Finance Professionals Week and extend sincere gratitude and commendation to our finance department here and all working behind the scenes. Thank you very much. And next up, we have a special presentation from Sergio Jimenez, government relations representative from PG&E.

Thank you, Mayor. Let me just get adjusted here.

And you should have a clicker right there next to you.

Yeah, let me. Never actually used a clicker, so we'll see how it goes. All right, let me just make sure it works before. Okay, good. Well, Mayor, Council, City Manager's Office, thank you so much for allowing me to come and share a little bit of information about PG&E as it relates to the City of Sunnyvale. You know, as I'm up here, I'm thinking about, I was talking to Connie from the City Manager's Office before the meeting, and I think this may be the first time that PG&E has ever come to present at the Council. And so I think that it's... It's indicative of me being here, really, in the way I see it, the restart of a relationship that I know hasn't always been the best. I think the restart happened in November, May, when we met with some of the folks from PG&E, which I'll talk a little bit about. Over the last year in which I've been in this role, I've covered Sunnyvale. I realized that we hadn't been investing in the community. We weren't part of the chamber. And so one of the first things I did was change that. So we're now part of the chamber, active members on the policy committee. In addition to that, helped fund some of the downtown association events that go on throughout the year. And so that was done very purposefully to just re-engage. and be part of the community. And so in that spirit, I come to you today to share a little bit of information. One of the first things I would say, if it wasn't already abundantly clear, my charge at PG&E is to be the point of contact for elected officials and the city manager's office. So anything going on at PG&E, you see something in the news, there's an outage, complaint about a service connection, whatever it may be, you can reach out to me directly. And then it's my job to turn internally in the behemoth that is PG&E and figure out who the heck handles that particular issue. And so I've done that with a few of you with the mayor and other council members, but that is really my charge. The other thing I'd point out before we get into the presentation is there is an appendix at the end. I'm not going to go through those slides. Those are for your knowledge, cover some programs, some wildfire-related stuff. There's a lot of things we can cover today, and so this is but a snapshot of some of the stuff that I thought was relevant to what's happening in Sunnyvale. And the other thing that I commit to you as we go through this slide is I may not have all the answers. I'm certainly not an engineer, but I commit to you to circle back and get you all the answers to things I may not have an answer to. And so I want to express that commitment at the outset. So. So the agenda is just simply, we're gonna be talking about service planning, reliability performance, working together, and then I'll share with you some of the advocacy priorities that aren't necessarily tied to Sunnyvale, but just to give you a snapshot of some of the things that we're working on at a state level. So service planning. So this is an internal department at PG&E, which I often know folks have told me, PG&E seems like a black box. Who the heck do people call? So service planning is the internal department that fields all the applications for the start of new service, whether it be residential, commercial, whatever it may be, data centers. This department is a critical sort of link between the community, a lot of the important work that folks are doing here in the city, and what we do in PG&E. And so what happens is when you reach out to me, in the case that you do, and you say, X business is having an issue, there's Chinese New Year's happening, can we change the shutoff schedule? It's a real event. And so I turn internal and then we make adjustments and I get things done that way. And so that is the crux of that department. And so if you look at this slide, I thought it'd be interesting to see the new customer initiations happening in the Sunnyvale community. So as you can see, as of today, we have about 227 electric projects and about 98 gas projects. And the pie chart there, I know it's a little small to see, so some folks may not be able to see it, but it goes through the different project types. And as you can see, about 249 are purely residential projects that are coming through that pipeline. about 74 are commercial, and then you get 33 which are other, and then that may fall in a mixture of different buckets, then telecommunications, on and on. This is just to give you a sense as to the variety of projects that are coming through our service planning department. This next slide here actually talks a little bit about the intake process. So as projects enter our system, the service planning system, they go through different phases. And so some applicants, So what happens is internally, we have different folks that manage different types of projects. So we have folks that manage commercial projects, some folks that manage simply residential projects, which typically are the least experienced service planning representatives. So as you can see, we have intake at 108 to design. So these are the statuses of the projects I mentioned, where they currently sit within the city of Sunnyvale. when you see dependencies there at 130 that means 130 projects are waiting for things to be resolved and a good way to think about this is during this process things go back and forth like a ping pong between pg e we do things we send it back to the applicant they do things they send it back to us and this is where some of the things get a little murky at times as it relates to whose fault is it for things being delayed right and oftentimes we can certainly do a better job, sometimes it's the applicant, maybe they hired someone that isn't all that aware as to the PG&E processes, and so this is where some of the projects that you will likely call me about sort of reside. The other thing that's important to know is that the service planning local team. So I want to focus your attention to the left side of the slide. It's a San Jose De Anza team. In case you weren't aware, the city of Sunnyvale sits within the PG&E territory, the area of the territory that's called the De Anza Division. That encompasses everything from Palo Alto all the way down to Los Gatos and all the, as I sometimes dub them, West Valley cities. And that encompasses the De Anza division. So the second name there, Matt Fruidenberger, that's his phone number. That's an email. He's a supervisor for the west part of the county. And so part of the challenge sometimes that I hear about is, well, who do folks contact? I would say to you that you can certainly reach out to me. I'm your prime point of contact. But if you get outreach from any particular developer, any folks that feel like they've got tied up in the whole process, you can readily give this information and make sure that they reach out to the supervisor there. And I say that because if you reach out to me, I want to reach out to the supervisor anyway. And so we try to be very transparent about the information. I would encourage you to disseminate this information to anyone that you think needs it, so that way they can get a hold of the proper person within PG&E. Now, this next slide touches on reliability. Before I go through the slides, let me just say that I understand that the reliability of our system obviously is critical to the function of the city, to the economy of the city. And so we have the honor of providing you a lot of the energy or the energy that's used here in the city of San Jose. So we take the city of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale. So we take it very seriously. And so the following slides are raw numbers. So these numbers were taken from engineers that pull the data. They sent me the raw numbers. We created these pie charts. So I think there's a story to these numbers, which we have yet to get to. But I'll tell you what I think is an opportunity to dig into them a little bit more. And the other thing is important to know during, you know, as it relates to reliability performance, outages obviously occur on our system. And so one of the things that happens is you've probably seen emails from me alerting you to a particular outage. And so, internally, the way it happens for me is I get alerted via email saying there's an outage in the city of Sunnyvale. I go in there. I typically give it in about an hour because sometimes the outages are resolved. If it goes over an hour, I have a sense it's getting closer to an hour. That's when you'll hear from me. And it also depends on the customer count. So if it's 30 people after an hour, you probably won't hear from me. The customers are already getting notified via their the contact information we have in the system. And so that is sort of how I play into some of the reliability performance and the communication that's required as it relates to keeping you informed. So this slide here, I wanna point you to a few things before we go through the slide. One of them is sustained outages. What is a sustained outage? A sustained outage is any outage lasting more than five minutes. That's what we define internally as a sustained outage. So if you look at this pie chart, 53% were planned outages, 47% were unplanned outages, and there's different reasons for those. The average customer count impacted was about 226, and the average length of the outage is five hours. And this is where I'll just point out that, as a reminder, this was just raw data, so it's quite possible there was a long outage that sort of swayed the numbers, and we'll dig into that a little bit more. This next slide goes and it breaks down the planned outage causes and the unplanned outage causes. So as you can see, I'll just point out a few things. Maintenance is obviously 57% of the planned outages. That's where we send, there's a process internally, we send notification to folks so that way they're aware, they can plan as it relates to some of the planned outages that we're gonna have. Some of those are system upgrades, the other one is customer requests. The unplanned outages, as you can see, that 57% stands out. Obviously, that's equipment. That can be a transformer that's blown, a fuse that's blown. A lot of different things can happen to the system that contribute to the 57%. The other thing I'll point out is you see 11% animals. I remember a call, this may be a little less than a year ago, It was a Friday night. The mayor reached out to me. The lights had gone out for a short time, and they were still out when he reached out to me. We determined that it was some crows that got on the line that caused the outage. And so those are some of the things that feed into that 11%, as an example. Vegetation, trees, branches falling on the lines. Third party, that can be a crash. Someone's hitting a pole. Taking it down that obviously have an impact and then weather, of course, and mind you, this is just 2025. Now, you may ask yourself, well, how does this, how are we doing right? Is this bad? Is this good? 1 of the things I didn't have a chance to do is pull all the other data for 2024. and then maybe even some for 2026 but I can commit to you that we're going to do that we actively meet with the city administration one-on-one every month and I was talking to Connie that that would be a good sort of point of discussion to to ferret some of that out and figure out exactly where we've been and where we are and how that compares and then go from there on potential betterments and improvements so this next slide um is talking about reliability. Obviously, there's things we need to do as PG&E and have done to make the system more reliable. And if you look at the slide here, we took steps in 2025 to improve reliability on circuits serving your community. We installed 15 new devices along the Wolf 1113 circuit to minimize customer outages. And we also upgraded equipment along the Britain 1109 circuit to improve functionality and coordination. Now you may have a question, what are the new devices? The devices, essentially what they do is they segment the line so it reduces the amount of impact on the customer. So for example, the way it can play out is there's an outage. There's 1,000 people out. We send out troublemen to go scope out the line, make the necessary repairs. They determine it's going to take a little longer to make the repairs. They go out using these devices rerouting some of the energy effectively. maybe restoring 800 of those people and minimizing that impact on the broader community and trying to minimize as much as possible the impact of that outage. So that's what those devices do. Essentially, it allows us to reroute some of the energy. There's a mistake on this slide. The Britain, it should be Britain 1109. I think it says 1108 there. But this is just a map for the city of Sunnyvale. And in the pink, you see the Wolf 1113, Britain 1109. It's just to give you a sense as to where they're located. Now, one of the things we've talked about in one of the meetings that I think, I think the mayor might have been in this meeting, but we talked about the available capacity in the city of Sunnyville. These were some of the data points that the engineers, the transmission engineers were able to pull out. As you can see, there's different substation banks, Lockheed 2 substation, Lockheed 1, Lawrence, Mountain View, Britain, Stelling, Wolf. Just to point to a few of the notes on the side. So Lockheed substation 2, for example, the available capacity is 6.9 megawatts. And if you look at the notes, we're currently looking at easements for feeders. Substation can be upgraded to add 90 megawatts, approximately 90 megawatts. And the Lockheed substation 1, it's in the process of serving 70 megawatt new business load. And then you go down to Stelling substation, for example, and it says an additional 15 megawatts will be available after capacity job is completed in 2008, 2028, not 2008. Now, you may wonder, what is a megawatt? Sometimes it's challenging to sort of wrap your head around that. So a megawatt, think about a hospital. Providing energy to the hospital is about a megawatt. And to put it in further context, a mid-sized data center is about two megawatts or so. So this is a lot of energy that we're trying to get online and working through some of the issues. This next slide actually just goes through some of the locations of those projects. It shows you relative to where the city of Sunnyvale is. If you look at Lockheed number two and Lockheed number one, that's actually near the Moffett Park Business Park, where some of that anticipated growth is due to happen. Now, how, you know, I talked a little bit about the beginning about the relationship and how I think it's evolved in a positive way. And I would say to you that what's indicative of that to me is a meeting that we had in November. It was a meeting that, thank you to the mayor, he brought some things to our attention and he was able to get the interest of some of the higher ups in PG&E. In a meeting, the original meeting we had, mayor was present, some of the city manager staff was present. And we had a gentleman named Jason Glickman. He's the EVP, the Executive Vice President of Strategic Growth. And we talked through the relationship with Sunnyvale and recognizing, and I'll say it as a resident of San Jose and seeing everything that's happened there, right? Other cities are looking to what we've done in San Jose and asking, how about us, right? Where's our attention? You know, we need to... need that level of communication that level of commitment and so that meeting was really the kickoff to really restart the relationship and i think that's in fact what's happened And so in 2025, November was that first meeting. We didn't have a meeting in December, but January, February, and March, we had meetings. And so what are these meetings? They're meetings with the city administration, mainly just to give kudos to Connie Vercelis from the city manager's office. She's been an extraordinary partner, helping to bring forward folks from the city. I bring forward folks from PG&E to work through some of the issues, and we have those monthly. And so some of the things that we've talked about, just to give you a sense, is I know there's a particular, I think Vice Mayor Mellinger has mentioned to me the interest of a linear park under some power lines. The mayor has mentioned that. Other folks have mentioned that. So that's been a topic of the discussion. As a matter of fact, yesterday, our land team met with some folks from the city to discuss how we would formulate an agreement to allow the facilitation of that development of that park And so that's one topic that we've touched. Points of contact, like who does the city call when things go haywire, when you all have questions, we've touched on that. We've touched on service planning. So what I touched on earlier, we actually brought forward the manager for that department to go over the processes and the workflow for some of the intake that comes in. We've talked about large load capacity and some of that work. And so we brought in a woman named Madeline Silva, who's a senior director for commercial solutions. She joined us because she's been an integral part of the conversation with San Jose and thinking through that agreement. And so the idea is, and what's happening is she's standing up an economic development department within PG&E. And the idea is to bring similar type of approaches to other cities, right? And to make sure that we're walking in parallel hand in hand as it relates to the future growth of the city to make you all successful and deliver the capacity and the power that you all need. The last thing I would mention on this slide is I put an asterisk next to project tracking. We're not quite there yet, but we started having discussions about identifying key projects throughout the city of Sunnyville so we can track them on a monthly basis. And I think that's what we do with San Jose, by the way, and we're starting to do that with other cities. But I think that's a very important way to make sure we keep our pulse on what's happening on the ground and identify issues early so that way i'm not getting calls you're not getting calls late into the process saying pg e hasn't done anything you know this is happening or we're not getting a call back and so it's meant to to to eliminate that and so the idea is to identify uh projects in the city that you all really care about that we can track jointly and make sure that they're successful These last few slides are just simply advocacy priorities that we're lifting up as a company. One of them is the Wildfire Fund. It was SB 254, strengthen the Wildfire Fund to protect wildfire victims without raising the cost to customers. What have the fires that happen in Southern California? We, the sense is that it's going to, it's going to diminish the funds in that wildfire fund and that we generally think that the state needs a long term solution to this. And so that's something that we're, it's more happening at the state level, but we're pushing to get some clarity on that and some work done on that by the legislators. The other thing that's on our mind that we're working towards is the extension of the Diablo Cannon Power Plant. And so it generates nearly 20% of California's clean energy. And a few years ago, about a year ago, the Governor Newsom signed SB 846, extending its operation. through 2030 but we need a longer term sort of uh work on that and so a 20-year license renewal application has been submitted to the nuclear regulatory commission to provide flexibility beyond 2030. they're going to be hearing this item in the next few months and but we still need state legislation to get this passed and going past 2030 and i just want to give a shout out to the mayor along with some silicon valley clean energy folks came out a few weeks ago to get a tour of the diablo cannon nuclear power plant and i thought that they likely found it interesting as i have and so thank you so very much for the support and i think what also happened and what came from that is there was some cca folks that were also present statewide and i think silicon valley clean energy took position of support in extending that renewal of the power plant The last thing I'll mention is affordability. Obviously, we recognize that we're trying to do everything we can to bring the rates down. Electric rates are 11% lower than they were in 2024. And with the base services charge, customers, not all customers, but a lot of customers will see an additional bill reduction in March. And the upcoming GRC will include the smallest percentage increase rate in a decade. And so we're working towards that. We realize that many folks need some relief and we're doing all we can. And with that, I'll end my presentation. Hopefully I didn't go too long and open for questions. Thank you very much. Does council have any questions or comments?

Raise your hand. Council Member Srinivasan.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. My question is, we, how do we contact you? I have your cell number. Is that the best way to contact you?

Yes, you can call my cell phone number and I, and I try to be very responsive. You can ask people. So, yes, you can call me anytime.

And then I would you mentioned the supervisor.

yeah so that's the insert send us the contact information yeah so the service planning supervisor for your area is is the now mind you he's supervising folks that are working on the individual projects but he's a good starting point and he can dig in so i i hope and expect that i can certainly send it to you all but but this slide is for you to keep all the information i can send it to you as well and i'm not sure if the city manager's office can disseminate Yeah. But yeah, that's one of the reasons I added all those details is to make sure that you can take it away. And quite frankly, you can share it with people that reach out to you. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Most of the questions we get for PG&E is when residents have complaints, I guess, the delay on new projects or new connection or disruption of service, whether it's a unplanned or planned, mostly unplanned. Planned, they all get some kind of notification. So in those cases, are you the contact person?

I am the contact person. So in a situation in which you Get someone that says, you know, Hey, I've experienced too many outages. This is I mean, these are examples of things that I hear right? I've there's been five outages just this month. I'm making this up right? But they can reach out to you. You reach out to me, and what I do, I turn internally to. We have someone that's called the division operating specialist. I know too much information, but he then goes out and I tell them, look, the council members reaching out, the customer ask questions as to what caused these outages, right? Because I don't always know, right? And it's natural to want to know, well, why did these outages occur? And then the internal coworker of mine, my colleague, will give me the information and it will be the breakdown of exactly when the outage happened and why it happened. And I can share that information for you.

Very good. Most likely they are expecting ETA when the service will be back again or something.

Yeah. So one of the things that happens internally with outages, again, you may have seen emails from me in the past. I don't reach out to you about every outage because I'd be sitting at a desk. more often than not, just because what happens is when there's an outage, a significant outage of let's just say 2,000 people for an hour, I'll reach out to you and I'll let you know what's happening. Sometimes I have the information as to what caused it. Like I can tell you, oh, a car hit a pole. That's what happened. Sometimes we don't know until a little further down the line. But one of the key things it tells me internally is the ETOR, as we call it. It's the estimated time of restoration. And so I can give you a better sense as to when that's going to happen. With some of these outages that happen every now and again, you may call me and say, hey, what's the estimated time of restoration? By the time you call me and I get back to you, it's probably going to be back on already.

but but we but you can reach out anytime because i am your point of contact thank you very much and then i am also glad that you are planning for moffett park expansion that's really wonderful to know thank you very much thank you thank you council member next up is council member chang

Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for coming to Sunnyvale. I think you've been very responsive in the time that we've had this relationship with you, so I appreciate that. I wanted to ask you more if you could expand on grid reliability. Particularly, there were large outages in the Ponderosa Park area back in September and December. And with this new base charge change implementation, the infrastructure upgrades, are there going to be specific upgrades in Sunnyvale?

Yeah, you know, I looked into that. What I do know that's included in the base services charge are a few things that are included there. One of them is approved infrastructure. The other is maintenance costs to connect homes to the grid, energy programs, call center service billing, new system generation costs. That doesn't answer your exact question, but I think where your question resides, and I can get you the information, I don't have it now, Specifically, I don't know internally if, for example, the approved infrastructure, right, for better reliability, do we have that, the micro level, like, oh, we're investing this in Sunnyvale because these customers are paying that. And so I can get you that information. So I don't have specifically what the base service charge, as it relates to the charge here locally, is what that's going to fund, if you will, as it relates to specific infrastructure projects. But I can inquire internally and get back to you.

Thank you. And if you could also, when you bring that information, expand more on the impact for low usage customers and solar customers, because now they have that specific number that they have to pay that they might not have had to pay before.

Yeah, yeah. So the solar customers are going to have to pay into the base services charge. And for those of you that don't know, base services charges came out of legislation. It's PUC mandated. Essentially, it's going to be about a $24 a month It's not a new fee, but it's about a $24 a month addition to a bill. But what's happening is they pass this to gain a little bit more transparency on where some of the money goes. And so in the past, the money for infrastructure was sort of all commingled with the energy costs that you were paying for a kilowatt hour. They've now separated that out. So kilowatt hour,

we hope is going to go down for many people but some folks are going to be hit with this new with this what seems to be a new fee if you will so I I think those are good questions and I'll dig into that for you thank you and then just a follow-up for city staff if you could also work on providing more information about signing up for discounts like care or medical baseline and specifically for medical baseline so they can be alerted for public safety powers shut off notifications

Yeah, I appreciate that. I don't know if the challenge with PG&E is there's so much information about a lot of different programs. I'm not sure if I included in the appendix, but if it isn't there, I already have that information. I can certainly share it with the city administration.

Thank you. Next up is Council Member Sell.

Hi, and I'm also interested in the linear park, so I'm glad that was a tough bullet point. That's a feel good project and it'll help a lot of people in high density housing to have a park so thanks for working with staff on that um i have seen a lot more responsiveness since you've come on board so thank you um i'm also um well part of sunnyvale has a climate action plan and also serve on the air district and we're also wanting for there to be uh climate uh resilience in terms of more buildings that will become electrified and will have more in the future charging. How is PG&E envisioning keeping up with that movement towards electrification?

Yeah, I appreciate that. There's a lot of fact sheets that I have. So one of the things I wanted to share with you is, essentially, it's a fact sheet that talks about capacity and new service connections. So how are we or what have we been doing to increase capacity across our territory, which is massive? And so we've spent about $3.7 billion in electric distribution and transmission capacity upgrades. And this is 2020 to 2025, and then about $13 billion in distribution and transmission capacity upgrades over the next six years to increase the amount of power we can deliver to customers. And we recognize that in this new world in which we envision many, many things being electrified, we're obviously, you know, have these long-term plans to make sure that we're going to be prepared for the onslaught of just folks connecting to the grid. And so it's going to require a lot of work, and it's a long-term sort of piece of the work that we're doing, but we're trying to do everything we can to be thoughtful with the money and spend it in places that are going to give us the most bang for our buck.

And last thing, are you monitoring that? Like if there's more like need for electric hookups and stuff like that, are you, do you keep track of like, okay, that took us this amount of time to do this and you try to what's the time. And cause I know like as a service organization, that's what our city does. They watch the time, they watch the service. If the service is taking longer, then they try to add resources or try to, is that something to do too?

Yeah, I think some of that's, it's an iterative process within some of our departments. For example, the service planning department, who's charged with connecting folks to the grid, they've continuously revamped things. And as an example, the slide that I showed you that had the supervisor's number on there and stuff, that wasn't, I didn't have that like a few months ago. um so we're trying to be more transparent more open and more accessible to folks um and some of that is the recognition of what we haven't done well what we can do better and so they're consistent that department is consistently looking at as an example how to expedite some of these timelines a little quicker some of these are mandated timelines by the puc but we're trying to get ahead of that and we we're typically underneath those timelines but we're always trying to get better as an example i'll give you an example and this is probably too much information, but what I have found in coming to PG&E is we have what we call daily operating reviews, weekly operating reviews, and monthly operating reviews. What does that mean? And so that means that every day at 8.30, I have a meeting with my colleagues to elevate things that are happening in different cities every week we have a similar type of meeting and every month we have a meeting with the broader region the idea of that is to bring forward issues uh as quickly as possible and elevate them as quickly as possible so that way we are better at addressing them and so that is being infused that has been infused throughout the organization to eliminate waste to try to be more thoughtful and more lean as it relates to our approach to all the internal processes. And so that is sort of the culture that's been built within PG&E since I've been here. And I think it works to identify issues early on. Now, there's much more to do. And to your point, we're always recalibrating, figuring out, okay, that didn't work. This can work better. And so that is something that's happening in the organization every single day, every morning, quite frankly.

Yeah, and the positive input I get from people about our city is that our city in certain areas, where they do planning or something or permitting, they commit to certain timelines. And they, they get back to the residents, which the timeline they agreed to. And then in some of our annual reports, we list like this is our service timeline. And so that amount of transparency and that commitment seems like people appreciate that.

Yeah, you know, I try to model that and hopefully you've seen if you've reached out to me to try to model that communication. I think that every department is trying to do, you know, there's certainly things we can improve and so I try to lean on folks internally and I think my colleagues are all recognized that we need to be more responsive and just provide more, just be more responsive to the outside world, if you will. And so I strive to do that every day and, you know, lean on my colleagues to do the same. That's great.

And making it widely available and communicate to the public, that would be great. So thank you very much for your service.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Next up is Council Member Cisneros.

Hello, Sergio. Hello. It's really good to see you. As always, I've actually known you quite a long time since your time on, you were my mom's representative on San Jose City Council. And so I would talk to you about her issues and things and just knowing you from community things. So I can attest to your commitment. And I wanna say that your offer to provide your expertise in constituent services to help us serve our residents and really provide that level of service on something that can be frustrating but also critically important. It's really appreciated. It's generous. It's wonderful. Although I can't imagine having a Sergio. It's something that all of the communities in California can have as a long-term solution. So you've mentioned that it's being recognized internally that more responsiveness different, more efficient operations is called for. What does that organizational change look like? Because ideally we wouldn't need to do that. The customer service would be responsive enough to where residents wouldn't feel compelled to reach out to a council member or a council member wouldn't feel compelled to be like, even I can't get through. So what can people, when I talk to residents about PG&E, what can I say is changing to make it better behind the scenes and what kind of timelines are you looking at?

Yeah, I would say that you can tell them that the PG&E representative that you deal with is responsive and that you and that You recognize that the relationship that the city is having now with PG&E is uniquely different and I think headed on the right track. We're not quite there yet, but the other thing I would just, you know, the city as an example is a massive organization. I don't really know how many employees, but PG&E is an example. I was astounded by the number of employees. It was about 30,000 employees and about 25,000 contractors. So it's a lot of people, right? A lot of cats to herd. But what I've seen is that internally, for example, when I have our monthly one-on-ones with the city, When i'm talking to other cities or providing information for this or that, I have to turn it internal. I have to look internally and ask folks to step up to provide me the information. And I have to say that they recognize the importance of providing good, accurate, good, bad, good and accurate information to the community. And so I. So that's one of the ways that it's happening, them lending themselves to be part of some of these conversations. The other thing that I would say is I think our CEO, Patty Poppy, has done an excellent job infusing the organization with a lot of passion. This is very difficult work for many of us. Not for me, but the guys hanging the lines. It's dangerous work. you know, complicated work. And so it just, it requires, she's infused the organization with a lot of purpose and commitment. I know she often cites, you know, we got to lead with love. And I think in that statement is embedded this idea that we care about each of the communities that we are in serving. And so I see it internally. And I think, you know, there's some work to be done to make sure that that's reflected out to the broader folks. And as I tell folks, I understand that in the past maybe there's some shortcomings and things that we've done as a company, but I wouldn't be here. I feel confident that we're going in the right direction. And my intent, and I think the intent of many of my coworkers, is to change that sentiment that may exist in some folks one conversation at a time. And so that's what my commitment is and the commitment of the people I work with.

Thank you for your candid response. And I think that it's really refreshing to hear about like, yeah, this not been great all the time. And I think that builds a lot of trust too, because we start from a common understanding. I have another question. Can you talk about PG&E's engagement with the community colleges in terms of creating workforce pathways? Because you mentioned those, there's so many employees. There's also so much need for, well, like sustainable jobs.

Yeah.

And that, you know, and we have so many people in our community who I know would love to train to work at apprenticeships or get that. And I was wondering if being more community oriented and obviously being connected with the community colleges, if that's an avenue that is currently being explored or looking to deepen.

Yeah. What I would say is that there is some stuff that we're doing with, um, the name's escaping me but last year as a very concrete example i think we we gave approximately a hundred thousand dollars to the working partnerships usa and they use that money to help train up a lot of the apprentice apprentices going through the tops program and so we we hope to continue to do that and be a good partner in some of the work they're doing directly with the community colleges i um Off the top of my head, I don't know exactly what we've been doing, but I'm sure we have touched that space. There's obviously a lot of expertise within PG&E, but one thing as an example of things we do, there's going to be an organization at San Jose State University. It's the Latino Alumni Network, and we're joining forces with other organizations, sponsoring that wonderful group that helps promote engineers and other people of color within some of those spaces that oftentimes maybe don't get enough exposure. And so the idea is support organizations that way and then help infuse it with maybe some volunteers from PG&E. We have a lot of employee resource groups that do a lot of activities outside and I'm sure some of that has got to be tied to some of the colleges and schools around.

Yeah, our community college system here is just an incredible resource in growing local talent. And we also have within the city, NOVA workforce. So I'd encourage you to connect. Maybe I'll follow up with that to learn more about workforce. like different employment needs and how can we connect PG&E to local talent and local hiring opportunities to support people in that way who may be looking for jobs. It's a tough time out there. So I'm always looking out for those opportunities. And then I just had a quick question. So if a building that you mentioned, you have residential and commercial and different folks handle this, what if a building is mixed use?

Yeah, there are folks that specialize in that. So some of the folks, forget the exact title, some of the folks in service planning, especially if they're fairly new or maybe just new to the industry, they handle the more less complex projects. But we certainly have different levels of folks. I think one of them is called industrial engineer, power engineer, or something like that, that handle some of the more complex projects. So all that falls within, you know, with the appropriate person. And so they shepherd that through the process.

It is a smart person who knows all about that.

Correct. All right.

I really appreciate it, Sergio. Thank you for coming.

Appreciate it. And I'll echo that. Thank you for working on better communication with the city and starting monthly meetings. I appreciate the slide deck. City staff, will this be posted on our website?

Yes, the slide deck and the appendix to, Councilmember, the other question regarding the services. There's an appendix that talks about the additional services that PG&E provides, the contact information, as well as working with lower income residents, as well as medical baseline. So that the entire deck will be posted after the meeting. Thank you.

I appreciate Matt Frudenberger's info. Can that, I would appreciate if we could get some business cards, CDD, get some business cards as well as we can, I'm assuming, put that on the website. That's not changing anytime soon. So my city website from a communication standpoint, if you have a PG&E issue, this is your contact.

Yeah, I would say it's very yeah. Yeah. I don't think I don't anticipate that being a problem. This is this document. The information I shared is public information. We've shared it at meetings and they're okay with that. Um. Yeah, I don't I don't see an issue with that otherwise, but I don't think there's an issue with that.

Okay. And I appreciate the data. However, it was just a snapshot percentages and you did some numbers. I would love to see it how how it is historically. You know, that's what's currently as a. Whenever you created the slide deck, the actual numbers, is that up? Is that down? Looking at the number of issues, looking at the number of installations and initiations, the snapshot doesn't help us in any way other than, yes, this is what you're working on today. So a subsequent update to council would be useful. for just to compare real numbers and compare, kind of doing a little backward looking, because yes, I appreciate that PG&E is working on this, but all this started because I had been fed up with a lot of this. And I know that you're working with staff now, and trying to deal with distribution and all that to improve some of these issues. But whether or not it's residents or small business or large business, and definitely PG&E listens a little bit better to large business, but it's trying to make sure that you're listening to everybody from our standpoint.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I recognize the historical, some shortcomings there, and so we're going to work on that.

And that's what trends will help us better understand on what's actually happening. In general, reliability has been fairly good. I think it's more installation and upgrades, I think, are some of the biggest issues that we have. I would love to hear more about the economic development efforts that are happening you know this is what part of the initial discussions of san jose seems to have a wonderful relationship with pg e and pg investing in that city um how does that sit with the other 14 cities in in the county so you know as we'll talk about but but i appreciate your effort appreciate you being here today and providing that information so

yeah thank you and the economic development person i mentioned her the the plan is for her to join us during our monthly meetings and so she's going to keep an eye out on and i'm going to hold her to it obviously to keep an eye out for some of the stuff that's happening and help guide us through a better sort of approach fantastic great well thank you for being here tonight thank you thank you for having me thank you and with that uh we'll move on to oral communications

This is now the public's opportunity to address council on topics not listed on tonight's agenda or the presentation item. This section is limited to 15 minutes, may be extended or continued after a general business. Individuals can only speak once during oral communications. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, and council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited to matters within council's authority, generally referred to as council subject matter jurisdiction, If a speaker's comments are outside of council subject matter jurisdiction, presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. This allows council to conduct its business in a reasonably efficient manner and protects the rights of other speakers. A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of a disagreement with the content of their speech. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial starting on your telephone to indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak before I get to the public. However, Councilmember Srini Basin has several announcements.

Yes, Mayor. April is Earth Month. Sunnyvale is celebrating April as Earth Month. we invite you to join us in showing your love for the planet by attending Sunnyvale's Earth Day Festival. It will be on Saturday, April 11th, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Sunnyvale Civic Center. This event will feature family-friendly, sustainability-focused activities and information from local organizations. To learn more, visit sunnyvaleclimateaction.org or email green at sunnyvale.ca.gov or call 408-730-7717. The next announcement is our birthday. Sunnyvale is celebrating April 21st as Arbor Day. Arbor Day has been celebrated in the US since 1872. Sunnyvale has been honored as Tree City for decades, and we are proud of our efforts to promote and provide tree coverage. Last year Sunnyvale celebrated Arbor Day by planting cherry trees at our community center and this year we will be planting trees at Braley Elementary. We encourage those interested in tree planting at your home or in your neighborhood to contact our urban forestry division at 408-730-7506. Next announcement is boards and commission application deadline. Boards and commission recruitment is underway for following almost all the boards and commissions. I don't want to list all the things. Applications are due by 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 16th in order to be scheduled for an interview with council on Monday, April 27th. and Tuesday, April 28. General eligibility requirements include Sunnyvale Residency. For more information, visit Sunnyvale.ca.gov and search Boards and Commissions or call the Office of City Clerk at 408-730-7483 to request an application. applications to serve on a board and commissions are accepted on a continuous basis applications received after the deadline will be considered for future opening the next announcement is transgender flag raising transgender day of visibility flag raising ceremony we invite you to attend the transgender flag raising ceremony in recognition of the Transgender Day of Visibility. This special event honors and celebrates the strength, resilience, and contributions of transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive individuals in our community. Hear from our community leaders, show your support, and stand together in advancing equity, inclusion, and belonging for all. Everyone is welcome as we uplift visibility, solidarity, and stronger, more inclusive community. Pastries and coffee will be provided. The flag raising ceremony will take place on Tuesday, March 31st from 8.15 a.m. to 9 a.m. in person at City Hall, Olive Avenue side near flag post there. For questions, contact Equity Access and Inclusion Office at 408-730-7950. Thank you. Those are the announcements, Mayor.

Thank you, Councilmember. I will now go to in-person speakers. First up is Russ M followed by Mike K.

good evening mayor and council russ melton here ceo of the sunnyvale chamber of commerce thank you for the opportunity to speak and i just wanted to acknowledge your speaker before me sergio jimenez of pg e as one of my board members at the chamber of commerce and i really appreciate pg e and Sergio's leadership at the Chamber Board. I also see here in Council Chambers tonight Mike Klein, and Mike is the co-chairperson of our Business and Policy Commission at the Chamber of Commerce. I'll start off by going off script just very briefly. The photos I am seeing on social media of the Hangar 1 restoration thing on Friday are absolutely sparkling. And I don't know if hangar one restoration, supportive hangar one restoration is still a thing in the council policy manual. It was back in the day, but that's the thing that can gloriously be checked off of the council's advocacy list. The Chamber of Commerce was officially incorporated in 1947 and our mission today is still the same as it was nearly 80 years ago we help our member companies grow through marketing meeting the people you need to meet advocacy at city hall and professional development our chamber members employ nearly 60 000 individuals here in the city of sunnyvale a couple of um great things coming up the chamber of commerce welcomes one of our newest members shake shack sunnyvale and they'll be holding their grand opening I just got this notification in the last 24 hours the grand opening is going to be held Wednesday April 1st with a ribbon cutting at 9 30 a.m and their doors open at 10 a.m it's going to be a great event I hope all the Sunnyvale council members can make it as well as many of our members of the public Shake Shack Sunnyvale's location is in Redwood Square and their address is 275 South Murphy Avenue. That'll be a great ribbon cutting ceremony. And then I wanted to mention the Art and Wine Festival, which is June 6th and 7th. So that's about two and a half months away, council members. And everybody I talk to, they're looking forward to it. They know the history and how important this is to the city of Sunnyvale on Saturday, June 6th. The hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on June 7th from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. We are recruiting amazing volunteers. Perhaps even council members or city staff can volunteer for things like beer-pouring stations, wine-pouring stations, information centers. If you find yourself, members of the public, interested in volunteering, please go to this website, sunnyvaleartandwine.com. that's one word sunnyvale ardenwine.com navigate yourself over to the volunteer webpage and we have a great website set up to set yourself up for a volunteer position thanks again for the opportunity to speak thank you next up is mike k

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Vice Mayor and city council members. My name is Mike Klein, and I'm here today to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Sunnyvale Rotary Club, which is going to take place on March 31st. I want to share with the community that we intend to celebrate not only as a club, but as a community all year long. Rotary International is a international organization trying to do better. But here in Sunnyvale, we have been trying to do better for 100 years. While I've only been a member for 28 years, I know that we have made a difference for hundreds of high school seniors that have received scholarships from our organization. In addition, dozens of non-profit organizations that have benefited from our community grant programs. And that's why I'm here tonight. Occasionally Rotary and Rotary clubs have been accused of being the best kept secret service organizations in the world. We do lots of great things and sometimes forget to tell the world about it. And so part of the initiative we have this year is to write 100 stories about the great things that Sunnyvale Rotary has done for the city of Sunnyvale and our community. So if you are one of the seniors who have gotten our scholarship, if you are one of the organizations that have gotten our community grant program award, or just had a great time at a Rotary event, please reach out to sunnyvillerotary.org and let us know because we would love to hear your story because we're gonna put a book together and share it with the whole community by the end of the year. So, and don't worry, I'm gonna come back and tell Rotary stories throughout the year. More importantly, I'm going to encourage other Rotarians to come and tell stories so that you don't always have to see me. But I thank you for your time. And again, if you have a great story about Sunnyville Rotary, please share it and reach out at SunnyvilleRotary.org.

Thank you. Thank you. That was my last speaker card in the room. City Clerk, do we have any remote speakers wishing to speak under oral communications?

Yes, Mayor. First is Carrie H followed by Carlene. Carrie, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor and council members. Just want to ensure that you can hear me. Thank you. This is Carrie Haywood. I'm the executive director of the Moffitt Park Business Group. I'd like to thank PG&E for today's presentation and for the continued engagement on this important topic. We appreciate the overview of how PG&E is planning to increase energy capacity, as this is a critical issue for the Moffitt Park area and the broader Sunnyvale community. We also want to acknowledge that elements of this plan were discussed during a PG&E presentation to the Moffett Park Business Group Board last October. It's encouraging to see that PG&E's current plans continue to reflect the direction shared at that time. In the end, reliable and sufficient energy capacity is essential, not only to supporting existing businesses, but also to enable for future growth and economic development within Moffett Park and across Sunnyvale. We strongly encourage continued collaboration between PG&E and the city to provide greater clarity on capacity expansion, including what new infrastructure beyond upgrades may be required and how employers and developers can effectively engage in load forecasting and planning. We look forward to continued partnership with PG&E and the city to improve the exchange of information, strengthen coordination, and identify opportunities, collaborate on solutions that enhance reliability and increase capacity. Thank you for your time. And I thank Sergio Jimenez for his ongoing efforts on this issue. Thank you. Thank you.

next is Carlene Carlene you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the city council hi I'm Carlene um a good evening mayor and council members and staff and my name is Carlene and I'm here on behalf of Bay Area cats it's a volunteer run trap neuter return and rescue organization based here in Sunnyvale I spoke about them a couple weeks ago Thank you very much for proposing a community funding program for Sunnyvale nonprofits. We do plan to apply for one of those. But we would also like to ask that we be included in next year's budget cycle, the 2026-2027 budget cycle for $100,000. This was proposed by Councilmember Mellinger in October of 2025. Unmanaged cats are expensive for cities. The intake, housing, and euthanasia of unowned and feral cats are among the highest volume and most costly functions of many animal shelters in the Bay Area. And Bay Area Cats does things differently. We rely on private donations and volunteers to provide TNR resources, training, and direct assistance to Sunnyvale residents. In 2025, we spayed and neutered over five times as many owned Sunnyvale cats and TNR'd almost four times as many unowned Sunnyvale cats as the county shelter provider, Santa Clara County Animal Services. And we did that at less than half the cost per Sunnyvale resident. We focus on colonies, not one cat at a time, because SCCAS's policy of one cat per week is simply not effective for TNR. So we respectfully ask that you include Bay Area cats in next year's budget cycle. Currently, Sunnyvale spends the least per capita on animal services compared to neighboring cities such as Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Campbell, Cupertino, Mountain View, Milpitas, and Saratoga. Santa Clara, whose population is closest to Sunnyvale's of these cities, spends more than three times as much per capita as Sunnyvale on animal services. They spend over a million dollars per year, even if Sunnyvale were to invest $100,000 annually in Bay Area cats on top of the 416,000 already spent for SCCAS services, Santa Clara would still outspend Sunnyvale by more than two and a half times for animal services. For a relatively small investment, Sunnyvale can leverage an existing proven volunteer driven organization to reduce costs and humanely manage our community cats. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. Next up is Courtney J. Courtney, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Courtney Jansen, and tonight I'm speaking on my own behalf. I wasn't going to comment until the Lakewood Park one, but I just had to follow up on the previous speaker about Bay Area Cats. I've met them a couple of times. They are super fantastic. I am the owner of four shelter cats, mostly through Humane Society of Silicon Valley. But I think that Bay Area Cats is a wonderful solution for Sunnyvale and everything that she said about the importance of TNRing and addressing the frail cat populations that we have and low cost spay and neuter and so forth and so forth is so true. So I really support the partnership with them and I hope that it moves forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Mayor, that was the final remote public speaker for oral communications.

Thank you. I'll go ahead and close oral communications and move next to our consent calendar. I'll open up public comment on our consent calendar items. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now. or dial star nine and your telephone indicate that you wish to speak i will call on members of public participating in person first followed by remote participants speakers will have three minutes to speak i have no speaker cards in the room city clerk do we have any remote participants wishing to speak on consent no mayor okay i'll go ahead and close public comment and bring it back to council Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Move the consent calendar.

Thank you. Council Member Srinivasan. Second. Thank you. City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote? motion for the consent calendar passes seven zero thank you uh moving on to our first item item 20 may i suggest a brief recess before we begin that first time we bring in staff uh yeah so let's go ahead and take a six minute recess and come back at 8 30. Moving on to our first item, item 26-0359. Is there a staff report? Good evening, members of the council.

I'm really excited to have this in front of you today. We have our public work staff here. I just want to make the introduction and then Nate will do the presentation. I have Dennis Eng, who is our assistant public works director. Bennett Chan, he's our engineer who actually is working on this project. He's our project manager for this project. Nate Scribner, our assistant city engineer, and also Pat Healy from Verde, who is our design consultant. With that, I'm going to have Nate come down. And of course, I forgot Jim Stark, who is going to be taking care of the park once it's all done.

Nate Scribner, Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Nate Scribner. I'm an assistant city engineer with the Department of Public Works, and I'm here tonight to present the award of construction contract for the Lakewood Park renovation project. So Lakewood Park is an 11-acre park with an outer space theme. It was constructed in 1960. We had an approved capital improvement project. The goals included replacing the multi-use athletic field, adding a dog park, renovating the concession shack and restrooms that are there. There is a park building at the park which will be removed with this project. The space that was provided for the community will be replaced at the Lakewood Branch Library and Learning Center. We have a community room there. We're also updating landscaping, irrigation and other park fixtures, and we are building a new inclusive playground with this project. The County of Santa Clara has an all inclusive playground grant program. The city was awarded a matching reimbursement grant of $1.5 million to design a playground where the design goes above and beyond the minimum standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure that seniors, children, and parents with disabilities can truly make use of the playground. The design that we have meets all the requirements for the grant. playground as part of this one of the requirements is that the playground must be constructed completed and open to the public by the end of july of of 2026. so that's coming up pretty quick the city we've actually taken some significant steps to have construction completed by that deadline we've pre pre-ordered the play equipment so it's it's going to arrive in april and and be ready for the contractor to install. We've already worked through the building permit and We've included requirements in the contract documents that the playground must be completed and constructed by the contractor as the first order of business. So that will be done. There will be access for the public to the playground while the contractor continues to build the rest of the park renovation project. So the overall project will take about 13 months to build, but they'll work on this first as a priority. And then this is a look at the timeline for the project. We started design in late 2022 by hiring Verde Design, our design consultant. In 2023, we started off with a community outreach process, which included three community meetings. We had pop-up events at the park. We did online surveys. And then we brought the recommended concept plan to city council. The first time was in September of 2023. We went to the Parks and Rec Commission, and then we took that concept to city council in October of 2023. We were asked to remove synthetic turf from the concept plan. So we spent some time looking at different field construction and grass options for that. And then we came back to council in November of 2024 with a concept plan that was then approved And then we moved into finalizing the construction documents and going through the permitting process. And so that lasted until the end of 2025. Earlier this year, we put the project out to bid and we're asking for a word of construction contract tonight. Construction is expected to take approximately 13 months. So if there's no delays with weather or other issues, the project should be complete. The entire project should be complete by spring of 2027. For bidding, we received two bids on February 18th. Our engineer's estimate was just under $12.8 million for the base bid improvements. We included two additive bid alternates that were a little over $700,000. So our total estimated construction cost was just over $13.5 million. We received two bids. The lowest bid was from Suarez and Munoz Construction. They are actually the contractor that's finalizing construction of the community center grounds renovation project. So they've been really good to work with. Their base bid came in just really very close to our estimate. The additive bid alternate items were a little higher, but the grand total was 13.6 million. The second bid was from Robert A. Bothman, who's another good contractor that we've worked with. Their total bid, including the alternate bid items, was over 14.8 million. So we feel that the bid from Suarez and Munoz is a good value and a good bid. I mentioned there were two additive alternate bid items. The first was a cricket batting cage. The bid price there was $630,000. This includes two 12 foot wide by 120 foot long batting cages. This was actually added in November of 2024 when the concept plan was approved by council. So we listed it as an alternate bid item. And then the existing picnic area improvements, we included that as an alternate bid item to give us some flexibility depending on the bid pricing. That includes refurbishment of the 16 picnic tables that are there and then the decomposed granite surfacing. The City Council has an option with these alternate bid items. You can choose to award both of the items, either of them or neither of the alternates. And then for the staff recommendation, staff is recommending that council award the contract with both additive bid alternates to Suarez and Munoz Construction. Also recommending that you make a finding of that the project is is categorically exempt from CEQA and approve a 10 construction contingency and then accept the all-inclusive playground grant funding from the county of Santa Clara in the amount of 1.5 million and then approve a budget modification for that for that grant and that concludes the presentation thank you very much we'll bring it to council for questions uh first up is council member lay

Thank you so much. I'm curious if there's going to be photos or conceptual renderings of the playground before it's done or if we will be able to see that.

Well, everything has been completely designed. We're at the point now where we're ready for, you know, we've put out the project for construction bids and we're ready to award a construction contract and just have it built. I think the grant requirement is that to to receive the $1.5 million matching grant from the county. We have to have the park constructed and open by this July, by the end of the month of July.

Sure. I'm just wondering if in a past council meeting you guys have given us renderings? Oh, sorry.

I'm sorry. Yeah. As part of the overall park presentation, we did include some renderings of portions of the playground. I don't know that we included, you know, it's an 11-acre park, so we talked a lot about other portions of it, but I do believe we showed some information about the playground itself.

Okay, I will have to go back and look at that. So I'm just going to pepper you with some questions. I'm sorry, because I don't have those in front of me. I'm curious about the shade at the playground. It's getting to the point where we have, for example, 90 degree days in March, and those hot days are getting more frequent and more early in the year. Generally, all inclusive playgrounds tend to have port in place rubber, which can get very hot in sunlight. And the Lakewood Park playground in the past has not been covered in shade. Can you talk about that?

We do include two shade canopies in the project. One's closer to the tot lot, and then the other is near the slide area.

Okay. And then also the slide, because it's an all-inclusive playground, is probably going to be metal, right?

Yeah. Yeah, correct.

Yeah, so for the benefit of the public, metal playgrounds are generally the default for all inclusive playgrounds because they don't interfere with hearing aids for people who might need that. It would be of interest to me to ensure that those are shaded or can be shaded by growth or something in the future. is my observation that at other inclusive playgrounds, including Fair Oaks Park and Muwekma, that those are functionally unusable during the summertime. It gets too hot to use them, and that's not something that we want for our playgrounds, especially for all inclusive playgrounds. We want those to be usable as often as possible. That's the extent of my questions for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member. Next up is Council Member Chang.

Thank you. So the total overall project will take, you said, about 13 months. So the full project would be completed next spring, but the playground itself would be open around July?

Correct.

So does that align with the Lakewood Branch Library opening, and could that kind of coincide with one another?

Potentially. Yeah, I don't have the latest schedule on the Lakewood Branch library opening, but I believe that that's the goal is to have it completed around that time, at least the construction portion. And if there's other things with LRS and having, you know, the circulation materials and other other moving things, I'm not sure exactly what the latest on the on the move in date and opening is. But for the playground, the playground is actually being moved to the it's It's almost on the opposite corner of the park from the Branch Library and Learning Center. So it would, you know, oh, sorry. Yeah, the playground, I think completion would be about the same time, right?

John Potter, council member, I think we can consider that, but the branch library opening itself is going to be pretty extensive. John Potter, So we'll certainly if we can point people in that direction, we will, but I don't know that we can incorporate it in the same event, but we will do something to announce the opening of the inclusive playground as well.

Just for clarification, for the Lakewood Branch Library, we're anticipating finishing construction later part of the summer, in the middle of summer, and then LRS will take some time to prep the building and outfit the building. So then that probably won't happen until closer towards the fall when school restarts.

Okay, thank you for that clarification. When the playground opens, will it have kind of protections from the rest of the construction site so the kids don't kind of try to get into the construction areas?

Yes, it will be open to the public. The access will be from the John W. Christian Greenbelt pathway there. In that area, we're not doing any construction on the SFPUC, the right-of-way there. So there will be access. We will have construction fencing, which separates the playground from the rest of the park. So it will be separated, and there will be protection.

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next up is Council Member Srinivasan.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I had a question about the additive alternatives, alternates one and two, especially one batting cage. It's $6,300, $630,000. First of all, did the community preferred that park or I thought they preferred Fair Oaks or some other park. Do you know whether that's finalized?

So the batting cages was added to this park when city council approved the concept plan. So we designed it and included it as an additive bid alternate. We do also have a separate project where we're designing multi-use batting cages, including cricket, at Fair Oaks Park. So that process is underway. It's in design. It should be complete around July.

oh okay the design yeah oh two are different projects yes okay so this is right yeah and then the amount of 13 million whatever does it include the additions or uh no uh yes the amount that we've asked for uh to award the contract includes everything everything that was uh included in the plans Once again, the batting cages will be ready by July, or is it a separate project?

So the batting cages is going to be part of the larger project, which would take 13 months to complete. So that would not be done by July. That would be done with the rest of the park when it opens up, which we're anticipating it would be by the end of spring of 2027. Okay. Thank you very much.

Those are my questions.

Thank you, Councilmember. Next is Councilmember Sal.

Hi. Thank you for providing this information. So I also agree that as the climate gets warmer, that we need to relook at shade areas. So I support looking into more shade where possible for these parks. Otherwise, we're making these really nice parks. And as it is 90 degree weather, it's hard to use. So I think that's my main point. And I think we got letters related to plastics on the playground. But just like the artificial turf, in order to deviate from that, we would probably need to have like a council priority project to deviate from our current process. Is that correct?

Right. For this playground, we actually, a lot of our playgrounds, we use another product for the surfacing that is ADA accessible. it's the engineered wood fiber, or Fibar is kind of a brand name for it, but it's the wood chips that you see in playgrounds and it technically meets the ADA requirements and we do use that in certain parks. We've seen the preference and a lot of, there's more consistent accessibility and access to all of the play features and play equipment. So that's why we've gone above and beyond for this playground and done the port in place rubber surfacing. But it is something that we do look at and we consider for other playgrounds.

Okay. In general, I just think rubber is hotter. So if on the other playgrounds we had wood and this is rubber, then you got to assume it's going to be hotter. So it needs more shade. That's just my only comment. Thank you very much for your work on this. Looking forward to it.

Thank you. Next is Council Member Cisneros.

Thank you so much. This is one of the fun things you do when you work for a city or at least on city councils. You get to talk about what a new park looks like, something that people are going to enjoy, something. I have a young child whose birthday is in July. So I was just thinking, like, look what I did for your birthday. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Joking, but we will enjoy it very much. And I want to second the comment about the shade, any features. And I understand if the entire thing can't be shaded with the design parameters or cost or anything like that, but focusing on surfaces like metal or where there would be a lot of skin contact if it's a hard surface is to have that in. My other question about that, is there any water feature or water access in the playground?

So for the inclusive playground, we don't have a water feature. We will be replacing a water play feature in the broader park. So there will be one there kind of halfway from the playground to the dog park. So there's one kind of in that area. There will be a water splash pad.

Cool. And so even if it can't be put on the playground itself, having some kind of accessible water fountain or access to clean water, especially if kids are playing in direct sun for a long period of time, they dry up so fast and like parents too. And having that, I think, especially if it's not completely shaded, will make it more usable in the warmer months, which is now most of our months. Two other questions here. For the picnic tables, Would replacing the picnic tables be part of a routine maintenance of the park? And if so, when would that take place? And is it just kind of speeding up that process?

Yeah, so with this alternate bid item, actually, it includes refurbishment of the tables that are there. They're really sturdy wood tables with metal. So this bid alternate includes re-sanding. But the refurbishment is something that our parks team does periodically. If a piece of the wood tabletop, for instance, is rotted, they'll go out and they'll replace that and make sure it's safe so people don't get splinters and things. And There's occasional vandalism and things that they address and deal with. But yeah, this is just an opportunity to make the whole picnic area really look nice, replace the ground surface, freshen up the tabletops and make it nice.

Great. Thank you. That's very helpful. For the cricket batting cages, would those be lit with external lighting or would that be what the electrical outlets are for?

I'm looking at Pat. So, yeah, it sounds like there will not be lighting installed directly within the batting cage, but it's adjacent to the multi-use sports field, which has the sports field lighting. So there will be lighting in the area, which should make it safe for people to use that in the evenings.

Okay. And would the cages be reservable or first-come, first-served?

I'm I think that's a question for our library and recreation services team. I think they work at other parks. We have other batting cages through that, you know, is reservable through the little leagues or. Right.

I guess I was wondering if it's going to be part of that network or because we're adding it on or if it's going to be its own separate thing. Thank you.

Deputy Director of Recreation Services. So we have not specifically talked about the batting cages and how we're going to utilize those, but I would assume that we would have some sort of reservation system where people can reserve the space. But if it's not reserved, then obviously it would be first come first serve in that case too. So there'd probably be a two approach phase on how to use it so we can just utilize it as much as possible.

okay fantastic uh thank you you both uh those are all my questions thank you thank you council member next is vice mayor mellinger thank you very much mr mayor a couple questions uh the batting cages will they be i guess i'll call them dual use as in suitable for baseball as well as cricket

Yes, these will be multi-use. Most batting cages are approximately 60 feet long or 60 to 80 feet long. These are 120 feet long, so that includes the run-up area that is desired by the cricket community for batting cages.

OK, excellent. Echoing the question about lighting on the cages, especially during the winter months, the days are quite short. I imagine that in the evening hours, people will be wanting to use those. batting cages, you're having a projectile flung at you at some substantial velocity, it is important to ensure that we're going to have adequate lighting. What can staff say to confirm that the lighting will be adequate for operation of these batting cages at night?

You know, we can just double check the photometric study that was done for the field lighting and confirm that the batting cage is adjacent to the fence behind the home plate area. like the dugout area. So we'll look and confirm that it would be, you know, equal to what's on the field of play.

Right. The other thing I will say is it'll be important to make sure that those very bright lights are not shining directly from the same direction that the ball is coming from so that people are not blinded while they're trying to swing. Other question. We have, in the time I've been on council, we've had many, many concerns and complaints about shade at new playgrounds. I remember this being a distinct topic of conversation with the Corn Palace. My colleague brought up Fair Oaks Park, Muwekma Park. Does the city have shade standards for our playgrounds? This seems to keep coming up. Is the city doing something on this front, on this question, especially since, as my colleagues have noted, the days are getting warmer? Admittedly, the people who know me know that I have a skewed perception because I grew up in Southern California on metal playgrounds, but even so, what are we doing on this sort of repeating topic?

Each playground, each park project is considered, you know, based on the location, other things on the site, like trees and things like that. So we're looking at them individually. We're trying to provide a good playground. We also, you know, oftentimes there's budget constraints, but if shade and making sure that the playground stays usable as a priority, then we'll, that'll be a topic that we'll emphasize with the consultants during the design process.

Fantastic. Thank you. And no further questions.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. That's all the questions for council. So let's go ahead and open the public hearing on this item. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial star nine on your new telephone to indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of the public in person that are participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have no speaker cards in the room. City Clerk, do we have any remote participants wishing to speak on this item?

Yes, Mayor. First up is Courtney J. Courtney, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council.

Good evening, everyone. Courtney Jansen, again, still speaking on my own behalf. Thank you very much for the work on bringing the park renovation to our community. I am excited to see it happen and can't wait to start using it, well, late this summer, at least when it cools off a little bit. I do have a couple of things that I wanted to highlight. First, I went onto the city website page for the Lakewood Park renovation and there was no information on there that this agenda item would be happening tonight. I know staff is super busy and it's hard to keep track of the hundreds of projects that you've got going on. So perhaps a simple way to do this would be to put like a last updated note on the website so that at least someone can look at it and say, oh, this hasn't been updated in six months versus this was updated like two weeks ago. So I'd appreciate if you could do that. I am going to echo the comments about the shade. I think that is super important and definitely needs to happen. The heat is a big concern. I've gone by Fair Oaks many times, especially like last week, for example, and the playground was empty because it was hot. I would love to see signs that talk about the need to be aware of the heat that can come from the playground. There are signs like that at the Magical Bridges Park in Morgan Hill and other places.

And so yeah, please make sure that there are signs that caution families to look out for the heat.

The other thing I would like to do is request that the port in place rubber come from virgin rubber, not recycled tire rubber as an example. You know my opinion on port in place rubber and that engineered wood fiber is a better alternative. I understand the city is not going to spend the time to argue with the county about this and risk a $1.5 million grant. So please make sure that that port in place rubber is virgin rubber and not from, like I said, recycled rubber at all. I think the last thing, oh, two other things, sorry. The slides tonight said that the playground design meets the requirements of the grant. To Council Member Ley's point, I can't find a current copy of what the playground is gonna look like. So I've had a very hard time visualizing that. It'd be great if that could go up on the website so that people can see. And then the final note, just on the timing, given that the park won't finish until next year, I'm hoping that you guys can leverage the findings of the artificial turf study issue when you figure out how you're going to do the grass at the park. It's not just do you do cool weather, cool season grass or warm season grass. It's not just do you do native soil type or slip sand or whatever. It's about how you maintain the grass. And I know that study issue is going to look into that, moving away from the traditional, you know, synthetic, I guess I'll call it like point spot treatment plant to a systems-based approach. And I really like to see that systems-based approach at Lakewood, as you all know, to help get more playtime, make me happy, make the sports league happy, and hopefully make you guys happy as well. Again, thank you for bringing this to the council. I'm super excited to see construction on it again. And that's it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. That was the final remote public speaker for this agenda item.

Okay, I'll bring it back to I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to Council for any final questions or emotion. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I'm ready with emotion.

is that a question councilman roussel question yeah i go ahead i just wanted to um i like to comment about the virgin rubber if that's possible um and i have a question how does this um sync up with the study issue on the artificial turf will this um happen after or before how does that what's the timeline um so for the artificial turf study issue um we we've designed the

the sports field with a type of grass that we can maintain and can be used and programmed. So this will be installed and constructed before, you know, the timing just doesn't work out to take any recommendations from that study for use in this project right now. For the port in place safety surfacing, the specifications that we have right now do allow for the lower portion of the port in place safety surfacing to be installed with recycled tire rubber. based on the thickness varies based on how close it is to different types of play equipment. The top, the wearing course, the top surface that is the bright colors for the Port and Play Safety Service, that is required to be virgin rubber. And when it's all installed correctly, it is inert. I don't know, Pat, do you have any other things to add?

so i think that is okay so the part that gets close to the child's skin will be virgin rubber is that what you're trying to say that's correct is it two inches the top it's a half inch a half inch so the top the wearing course on top the half inch there is is virgin rubber okay thank you so much those are my own question thank you council member um vice mayor i do see council member lay has her hand up thank you council member lay

I would appreciate the opportunity to make this motion if that is allowable. Thank you so much. I move staff recommendation for this item. Thank you.

And I second. Thank you, Vice Mayor. To your motion.

Thanks so much. It's so good to see this moving forward. This is a park that my son has spent a lot of time at. He goes, he attended Lakewood School for a lot of years. We have a lot of good memories there. The school uses it, the neighborhood uses it. It's a really great park, and I'm just so excited to see this moving forward. I want to address a little bit about the Port-in-Place Rubber. This is a nuanced issue. It's the difference between sustainability and accessibility. That's a hard thing to do to... have to meet both these demands. It is important that children who have accessibility issues or anyone with accessibility issues be allowed to and able to use parks as they are intended to be. That is a difficult thing to do with all natural surfaces. I think we all agree on that. And I am glad that the city is moving forward to looking at other options. And in this case, I'd look at having virgin rubber on the top surface. I do want to maybe in the future talk more about the shade issue as someone with two very young children who crawl and who get their little knees down on the surface. This is increasingly a problem, more so than it was when I last had a tiny child, even 10 years ago. more so than my colleagues' childhood in Southern California. Days are getting hotter. The Fair Oaks playground, for example, used to be sandy and it used to not be as sunny there. But now I think this is something that we as a council, we as a city need to be more aware of. I don't want to drive to Washington Park to take my kid to the park when it's too hot. Sometimes I do anyway, because that's where the shade is. Nevertheless, I am very happy to see this move forward, and I look forward to taking my children there in the future. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member. Vice Mayor?

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I'll just speak very briefly on this. I'm very happy to see this project moving forward, especially with the batting cages, which I know has been a major ask in our community for some time, having increased infrastructure for cricket. um you know i think that this is going to be a fantastic park i very much remember that 2024 meeting when we had the discussion about the design and how in-depth that went and i think that this is uh we're moving towards something really great here and i respectfully urge my colleagues i vote thank you

Mayor Mrakas, Thank you, Vice Mayor and i'll be supporting this motion, thank you for staff for finally getting this in front of us, and you know I appreciate the efforts to make sure that the stays on track, and you know, opening up the playground in July, not that far that not that long away. In order to meet the grant requirements, you know, I think, um, having a brand new park there for the summer will be appreciated. I know we, you know, it's like, and and that turn around is fairly is fairly quick. You know, in looking at some of the other playground renovations that that were implemented over the last over the last year, um, getting this fully redone. and i'll say five months is or less than five months is uh a a gargantuan task and i'm hoping that the the um company is ready to move that forward as quickly as possible but but i appreciate you know appreciate this coming in front of us appreciate you know the batting cages as well as the renovation of the existing picnic tables which was one of the questions that council had had at the very beginning that we were concentrating on let's say the fields and the new portion of the park but not really focusing on let's say a refresh of of some of that existing area so i appreciate that effort and happy to support this motion with that city clerk can you please conduct the vote the motion carries 7-0 Thank you and let's go ahead and take a five minute recess and come back at 910. ahead and reconvene our next item is item 26-0326 consider approval the first substantial amendment to the fiscal year 2025-2026 human housing and urban development action plan to terminate the work for sunnyvale project is there a staff report good evening yes there is mayor vice mayor council members my name is matt hazel i'm the housing programs analyst for the city of sunnyvale

We're looking to consider approval of the draft first substantial amendment to the 2025-26 HUD annual action plan to significantly change the budget beneficiaries and scope of the work first Sunnyvale program, which has now ended. Sunnyvale receives two annual grants from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, known as CDBG, which stands for Community Development Block Grant and Home Investment Partnership Program, often referred to as HOME. These grants are intended to be used on community development programs and local housing strategies designed to increase opportunities for low-income residents. Each year, we must submit an action plan to HUD on how we intend to use our home and CDBG funding allocations. The action plan for program year 2025-26, which we are currently in, was approved by city council last spring on May 6th. The plan included funding for the Workforce Sunnyvale program, a workforce development program that provided people experiencing homelessness with job readiness training and employment support. The program operated by the nonprofit Downtown Streets Team ended on October 31st, 2025 after the organization closed their business. The city of Sunnyvale has a citizen participation plan. that requires that residents be given a meaningful opportunity to participate in the planning of HUD-funded activities. Because the program's closure represents a significant change in scope and budget, this creates the need for a substantial amendment to the action plan. A substantial amendment must follow the same public outreach and engagement process used when the original plan was adopted. That's why we're discussing this item tonight. The amendment was reviewed by the Housing and Human Services Commission on February 25th, 2026, and was approved as shown in attachment three of this report with a vote five to zero. The substantial amendment includes a few changes to the program details in the action plan. These sections of the action plan that would be amended are summarized in attachment two of this report. First, it updates the program's target end date from June 30th, 2026 to November 24th of 2025. Second, it changes the goal outcomes that the program was able to accomplish in the shortened timeframe. The program was able to assist seven unhoused residents obtain work instead of their goal of 15 for the whole year. It was able to assist 20 unhoused clients with job training instead of their goal of 60. Lastly, the amendment updates the budget to allow the city to uncommit the remaining unspent funds. The program was budgeted for approximately $513,000 and ended up spending approximately 171,000, leaving 341,000 unspent. These funds will remain uncommitted for the rest of fiscal year 2025-26 and will become available for funded programs in the action plan for fiscal year 2026-27. That action plan is scheduled to be reviewed by Council on May 5th, 2026. With that, staff recommends alternative one, approve the draft for substantial amendment to the fiscal year 2025-26 action plan as shown in attachment three of the staff report. Thank you. I'm happy to answer questions you have.

Thank you. Are there any questions of staff? I don't see any. I guess you're being very concise. With that, I'll go ahead and open the public hearing on this item. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial star nine on your telephone. Indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have no speaker cards in the room. City clerk, are there any remote participants wishing to speak on this item?

No, Mayor.

Okay, I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to council. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I move staff recommendation alternative one. Thank you. Council Member Sell.

I second it.

Thank you. To your motion. Please vote yes. Diddle. Thank you. I'll be supporting this motion. You know, it's hard to see the program close down early. That being said, you know, it's like I think we'll ultimately have additional funds for next year's action plan. So thank you for staff for, let's say, pushing this funding forward. And, you know, hopefully we can get good use out of it in the next fiscal year. With that, City Clerk, please conduct the vote.

The motion carries 7-0.

Thank you. With that, we'll move to our final item. Our final item is item 26-0378, Appeal and City Council Call for Review of a Decision of the Planning Commission Approving the Related Applications for 5-10. and 920 DeGwine Drive. Council Member Selle, you have a statement.

I am required to recuse myself because my employer leases a building on the project site. So I will be leaving the meeting now.

Thank you.

Is there a staff report?

Yes. Thank you, Mayor, council members. I'm Trudy Ryan, the city's community development director. Joining me. very, very closely. Our Shawn Mendren planning officer, Norin Kulivolepe, principal planner. In the audience, we have, are sitting in the audience area, Angela Obeso, the city's transportation and traffic manager, and Dennis Ng, assistant director of public works. We also have Pat Angel, who is our CEQA consultant from Ascent, who's available should there be any questions about the environmental review. Can I have this staff presentation, please? We're talking about a 20 plus acre site in the area of Sunnyvale that we call East Sunnyvale. It's an area that has been planned for conversion from industrial to residential development. You can see on the slide that the development on the left, which is to the west, has already been developed at a similar density to this project, and also to the right is a residential development of a similar density. This particular site is shown as medium density residential in the general plan. And it is part of the East Sunnyvale sense of place plan. It was not rezoned recently to residential because there were still some outstanding questions about the suitability of the soil condition. A little bit more about that in a moment. What we're looking at is a use permit to demolish the industrial buildings that are on the property and construction of 370 housing units. That includes 151 detached single-family homes, 41 accessory dwelling units associated with some of those single-family homes and 178 three-story townhomes. There's also a tentative map that would create the ownership opportunity for all of these residential units except for the accessory dwelling units. This map shows you a general layout separated by color of two different types of single family detached and two different types of townhomes associated with the project. I'm just have a couple of slides, just to sort of show you what the streetscape would be like along to going in store drives the applicant will show you a little bit more about the design details of the of the application. This application was considered by the planning Commission on February 23 it I my apologies for the typo I didn't get it. fixed in time, but it was appealed by the neighbors in 2026, not a year before. And it was also called up by two council members through a process we call call for review. The neighbor that appealed the decision had four basic reasons, the waivers, traffic and safety concerns on Degine, the CEQA review and parking and neighborhood impacts. The two council members did not state a reason and the code is very specific that no reason shall be stated. I want to talk a little bit about state density bonus law. These are some relatively new laws that significantly restrict the city's ability to deny projects and our ability to not enable the waivers and concessions that are afforded by the state density bonus law. Because the project will include 15% of the units as below market rate affordable units, it does entitle the applicant to one concession and no limit to the number of waivers that are needed. to develop the project that they've designed. So essentially we have one concession and 17 waivers. I'm not going to go over each of these. I did want to call out that we really have two types of waivers associated with the project. One is waivers from municipal code requirements and the other is from the objective design standards. one of the reasons for the waivers associated with the municipal code has to do with the product type that's included in this application so this zoning district more typically has town homes as you would see on the east and west of this project this particular application includes a lot of small lot single-family detached homes and the regulations talk about front yard setbacks which would or intended to apply for more multi-unit buildings. So we've highlighted those in red. And then of the objective design standards, we were not seeing those because the objective design standards have only been around for a couple of years. And we've learned a little bit more about how helpful, useful those design standards are. And we are due to come back with some modifications to the design standards, particularly for building form. But we will use that opportunity to also bring other things to the council's attention if we think adjustments are needed to still meet the community expectations on project design. The applicant raised a number of points about the density bonus waivers. And again, I'm not going to read all of these, but I want to make sure that council can understand that The city has very little discretion when the state density bonus law comes into play. The courts have interpreted a lot of the provisions very broadly that essentially applicants are afforded the opportunity to build the project that they've designed for the site. That being said, staff works really hard with applicants when they come in. In this particular case, the applicant had a preliminary review and we were able to work with them to get some changes to more closely align to the city's expectations. But again, because of the product type of so many single family, it does affect the number of waivers and concessions. As I said, the courts have interpreted physically precluding very broadly, so we don't have a lot of discretion on that. I'll talk a little bit more about the consequences at the end of my presentation. There is, again, case law that helps guide us. We do have the objective design standards. Just because of the way the various laws are, we essentially have to grant them unless we can persuade the applicant that maybe there's another way to do it and still meet their expectations. And we have had lots of conversations with the applicant, and they have modified a number of items over time. Regarding the concern about traffic and safety on Degain, I just added this slide just to point out that the peak hour trips associated with the current potential use of the buildings, they're not fully occupied at this point, is much higher than the peak hour trips and even the average daily trips that you would expect to see from residential versus the industrial office development. So there's not a lot of or, you know, sort of detailed numbers that would suggest that it's going to be more trips around with the use that could be there. Because they've been low usage, yes, there'll probably be some increase in the number of vehicles. At the Planning Commission meeting, there was some conversation and concern about whether or not traffic calming features could be added, and collector streets, which Degain is, would not be eligible for traffic calming. There are some other things that would be speed management tools, and those can be added, and we've added that as a clarification in condition EP40 that the applicant will install those as part of the project. So we wanted to make sure that you were aware of that clarification. We will also complete a stop sign warrant study after the development is completed. It doesn't make a lot of sense to do it beforehand. There's also a concern that was raised by the appellant on the CEQA reliance. We find that the regulations, again, pretty specific in that we do need to rely on previously prepared environmental studies, which we have done. We hired a consultant to assist us and make sure and do a consistency checklist that everything has been covered. As I said, there was the one remaining issue that was pointed out in the EIR on whether or not the site was suitable for residential and we do have a site management plan that was approved by the san francisco bay water regional quality control board that that gives direction on how the site can be developed to to make it safe There were also concerns about the number of parking spaces. I think the applicant does live in a development where they do struggle to find parking. This project, again, with the state density bonus law standard, It only has to provide 652 spaces versus the 767 spaces that they are providing. So they are exceeding the standard. We really have no discretion on requiring additional. Well, we have no discretion on requiring additional parking. We're delighted that the applicant is cognizant of the need for additional parking.

Let's see.

So this is the part I mentioned. It was not in my draft that we sent out to you, but I wanted to make the council aware that if there's a finding that we have violated the Housing Accountability Act, where the state density bonus regulations are part of, we could be subject to monthly penalties of 10 to 50 000 per month until we correct the the error that was found there could be per unit fines so per dwelling unit um in this case 370 If the court finds that we acted in bad faith, there could be additional fines. We might be obligated to pay attorney's fees. If it's referred to the attorney general, we could have our housing element decertified and it would result in a mandatory project approval. So it's pretty onerous. Sorry to have to paint that picture for the council. I think that... kind of gives you enough context. Staff is recommending that you deny the appeal and make the findings required to approve the CEQA determination that the project is consistent with the LUT EIR and no additional environmental review is required. and approve the use permit and tentative map based on the recommended findings in attachment three to the report and subject to the conditions of approval in attachment four, which do include that clarification EP40 on the street improvements to manage speed. And then just a note that the CEQA finding is pursuant to 15183 of the CEQA guidelines that finds that the project is consistent with the general plan. And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you. I'll bring it to council for questions. First up, Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, and thank you very much, Ms. Ryan, for a very clear and precise presentation on this project. I'd like us to get slide 15 back the legal consequences for violation of the Housing Accountability Act, please.

Um, so you said there were how many units in the project, 370, 370, um, 41 of which are the accessory dwelling units.

So even setting aside possible multiples, were we to deny this project, we would be facing a $3.7 million fine.

Yes, I think Rebecca might have a better way of phrasing it.

So it's not quite as bad as that. The $10,000 per housing unit is if we are ordered to approve the project and we refuse to approve the project at that point, we would be facing those fines. However, the fines of $10,000 to $50,000 per month would be what we would be facing immediately. Okay.

And Madam City Attorney? Is it your opinion as the city attorney that we are legally compelled to approve this project, that we would face these penalties if we deny this project, very likely?

Yes, that's my opinion.

OK, thank you. We received a petition from the appellants, which raised five points, and I'd like to ask the city attorney first on each of these, which we would, which of these could trigger a Housing Accountability Act. And so the first was to grant the appeal and conduct a de novo hearing on the project. Would that likely trigger exposure to the HAA? so um this is a de novo hearing so um yeah that wouldn't that wouldn't make sense we're already at the de novo here right excellent um do we have the power to require evidence-based justification for all 17 density bonus waivers and concessions

So we, I believe we have evidence that supports those waivers and that is based on the fact that the law, the way the law has been interpreted by the courts in HCD is that essentially the project can, the proponent of the project can design it how they want to design it and we cannot say, You could have fewer waivers if you had smaller units or if you eliminated some units or you eliminated some of the amenities in the project. So we can't force them to do that. So they've designed the project to fit the site and they need all those waivers to do that.

Okay. Implement pre-occupancy traffic and safety measures on Degena Drive. I believe that that is something that we are doing as part of the conditions of approval.

That's correct. I would let staff speak more on that, but I believe there are some conditions related to that.

the speed control measures would need to be completed before the project is completed for occupants. We don't have an exact timing of when that would be completed, but the idea is that it would be towards the end of the development of the site.

Okay. Re-evaluate project-level CEQA analysis to address change conditions or site-specific impacts.

We have already completed the CEQA analysis that we're legally required to do, and I'm satisfied that we have done the job we need to do on the CEQA, and there'd be no reason to redo it at this point.

Consider neighborhood-wide parking impacts and implement enforceable mitigation, including street parking and fire lane protections.

So parking is not considered an impact under CEQA. So we would not have a basis under CEQA to do additional review because of parking. And yeah, we've done the analysis that we need to do under CEQA.

Thank you.

And I'm satisfied.

okay um so in summary to deny the appeal would very likely lead to an adverse legal ruling for the city um to grant right to to grant the appeal would deny the project would result in i i'm i'm certain it would result in a lawsuit from the developer and we would really have no defense understood um i do want to ask some specific questions about the project uh first since this project was called up for appeal will the developers or will the residents who filed the appeal originally since this was called up for by council will they be required to pay the normal appeal fees

The appellants were advised that the council had called it up for review, in which case they could withdraw their appeal and we would have refunded the fee. However, as an appellant, they do get extra time to make their presentation to the council at the beginning and the end of the public hearing, and they chose to retain their appeal.

Understood. Thank you. So in terms of fire lanes and guest parking enforcement, so a big part of the crux of the appeal is around the issue of parking and the description of parking impacts in the Vale, including people parking in fire lanes due to lack of adequate parking, residents not using their garages to park and instead using surface parking. I live in a townhouse development, and it was made clear to me when I bought, actually when I moved in because I rented first, that it was against the, I believe I was explicitly told it was against the conditions of approval for residents to park in the guest spaces. And this development was built in the 1980s. Is that still a pretty standard part of our conditions of approval? Do we require that to go into the CC&Rs?

I'm not aware of conditions that say that residents can't park in the guest spaces. We do request a parking management plan that We'll oftentimes address that. There's often a condition about the garages needing to be available for vehicle parking. And we can look up and tell you which condition. When I say we, of course, Noren and Sean are really busy over here. So that's a more standard condition to make sure that those are available. It sometimes will depend on the nature of the parking spaces and how many unassigned spaces there are. Most of the homeowners associations though include a provision

some of those spaces have to be for guests and not for and you can't call somebody visiting you for a year a guest sort of thing yeah um something i would like staff to look into possibly before we get back for a motion would be can we require as a condition of approval uh things in the ccr and rs regarding residents shall not park in guest parking residents shall park in their garage

let me let us check on that and and sean has it yeah vice chairman um it actually conditioned bp14 that requires the parking management plan uh item d says tenants shall use their assigned parking spaces in the garage for vehicle parking prior to using unassigned parking spaces okay um i may have additional questions about that um but i'm not gonna focus on that for now um

let's see here i believe that that does and just to be clear um this site it's not zoned residential but it was changed in the general plan to itr as when was that done

So it actually shows as residential, medium density residential in the general plan with the notion that we would eventually rezone it to ITR. ITR is a tool that Sunnyvale has that allows the original use, if you will, or the prior use of industrial office to be a legal conforming use. um as opposed to if you just rezoned it residential only they wouldn't be allowed to expand so that's the majority of of properties in this neighborhood went through that itr process and we recently rezoned a number of those sites

Okay, but when was this project added to that medium density residential pool in the surrounding area?

Yeah, that was in 2017 when the land use and transportation element had its last comprehensive update. So this site was shown as future residential.

Okay, and when was the veil completed?

A little bit after that, or a little bit before, I'm not sure the exact date. Around then?

Yeah. All right, I don't believe I have any other questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next up is Councilmember Cisneros.

yes thank you and thank you staff and and uh also city attorney for your responses to my colleague because many of my questions were asked and answered um I have a question so when we oh when we were hammering out the details of our revamped traffic calming uh program there was a lot of discussion about collector streets and why that is excluded and I would love to just

um have a quick reminder of why collector streets can't be included within our existing traffic calming program how do i turn this on is this on yeah so apologies it's my first time up here um angelo beso transportation and traffic manager so when we updated our traffic calming policy in december of 2024 we added residential collectors to eligible streets uh as of right now degine is classified as an industrial collector and so it does not qualify as a traffic calming street uh however when we do recognize that there are quite a few streets in our city that have changed uses just as this area has from industrial commercial to uh residential so we we have have been having some discussions about needing to update our street classification map and going about that. So that's happening kind of in the background. As this development came up and we started hearing all of these concerns about the traffic and speeding on to Guyne, and then with this new residential development coming through, what we decided to do was to look at it not as a traffic calming program eligibility, but more as a speed management tool. So we're using the same tools as our traffic calming program, for collect for residential collectors what's eligible for that use and to go back to your question collectors the intention of collectors as defined in our in our land use and transportation element of our general plan is they are meant to connect local streets to major arterials for all modes of traffic and so we need to make sure that we don't uh prevent the the usage of these streets to get efficiently between the two uses however we do recognize that there are speeding issues on these types of streets so this this approach that we're taking with this development to have what we're calling speed management to differentiate from traffic calming you know looking at the same toolbox but how can we do it as part of the development off-site improvements which are the improvements that they have to do on their frontage and the developer has been very helpful and open to discussing options to help address the concerns that we're hearing

Thank you so much for helping make that connection between what we would do in any other situation to redress concerns such as this, whether it's because of a new development or just because there are neighborhood identified issues, and finding a creative way to apply the new tools we've learned through this program to the situation without needing to go through that process. pulling in the new developer there. So that's very helpful to connect those dots. Yes, and then I guess in terms of, I think we've talked about the parking and the HOAs and Curie, if there's already impacted parking, wondering because I know this condo development where the appellants are is relatively new. If it's being adequately enforced or if there's parking or there's conversion use or parking outside of the garage that's occurring there, that would be exacerbating this problem that has been identified. I don't know if there's anything the city can do to interface with that HOA or identify if that is part of the problem.

I kind of took that as a rhetorical question is if there's anything the city can do. I'm sure the appellants will provide some information about the challenges they're seeing, and it might be more appropriate to hear what their concerns and comments are before we offer assistance where we might not be clued into exactly all of the concerns that are there. But because I do have the microphone, I will say that I looked up The 2018 is a couple of the units I saw, that's when those were completed. So that's about the time that the Vail development was completed, was 2018. Okay.

Oh, and then just one question for clarity, and I know this, but if we were to, if this were to get, we talked about getting referred up to, say, the Attorney General and then having our housing element decertified, My understanding, of course, that would trigger the builder's remedy. And I, you know, that itself is, I want, you know, recorded what that means.

Right. So if our housing element was decertified, then that would open the door to builders remedy projects, which are projects that can be built without having to comply with any of our zoning regulations. So it can allow the builders remedy can allow a much higher density project than wouldn't be allowed or it could be it can allow a residential project in a non residential area.

And that would be something that we wouldn't even It would just go through.

Right.

It wouldn't be up for approval.

Right.

Okay. That's all. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next up is Council Member Chang.

Thank you for the presentation. First, I have a procedural question. At what point do we make any declarations?

Declarations?

For meeting with the developer? Having met with the developer?

You know, you could make it now.

Okay. I met with the developer on March 16th. I asked clarifying questions about community engagement, parking availability and potential construction impacts. And in our conversation, they discussed that the HOA could enforce garages not being used for vehicle storage and for other uses. And then my next, my first question is in the news, there was an article on the impact on a restaurant. Could staff clarify the potential retail impacts of this project?

none of the buildings on the site have a retail use on them there is a site across the street that is another development that does have a combination of retail and industrial office where there is a restaurant and I think another but that's not this project that's across the street and that was it was a development that 24 units something townhomes um that was approved very recently okay thank you i'm sorry i'll just add because it was in the council question um that adding more people to the neighborhood will increase the demand for retail which would support retail that's existing or may choose to to locate in the vicinity

Okay, thank you. I had a different separate question. In the Planning Commission meeting, it was noted that the garages of single family homes are eligible for ADU conversion. So how would that be managed? Or how could the HOA be enforced? What would be the enforcement mechanism in that?

That's a fantastic question. I mean, that would not be any different than any place else in the city. It might get to the CC&Rs that are on the site and whether or not those can be enforced. And that's a little bit beyond my knowledge. The courts have been pretty deferential to the addition of housing units. So that might be a challenge here as well as across the street. Thank you. That's all my questions for now.

Thank you, Councilmember. Next up is Councilmember Srinivasan.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the presentation. I have a question on slide 12. That is a traffic and safety concern on design. Yeah, that's like thank you. Here it says 213 during morning and 281. There are 370 units unless it's split between the design and other streets toward and others. Is that the idea or is it specifically can't thinking of just one street or the entire traffic from this project?

so this the standard practice for uh projecting trips from any development is using what we call the the trip generation manual which is a international guidance uh it's also our city policy it's the ite chip trip generation model um so for each type of land use that the research goes into that to develop the anticipated trips that would be generated both am peak PM peak and then also daily traffic. So that's where these numbers came from. We compared the existing land use to the proposed land use. Those numbers, it's not a one-to-one per unit because it's anticipated that some people either work from home, some people don't work on the same hours, night shifts and such. And so all of that is taken into account with the research that this document provides. So I'm not sure if that answers your question though.

Yes and no. The reason why I'm confused now is 370 units and then even assuming two person per unit, that's 740 people. And then this trip is even not everybody will be working from home. And then of course, that practice is slowly waning away. So With that, I don't know why this number is low unless it seemed to say that the traffic can go to other streets.

If I could help, some people might be leaving at 7 and some people might be leaving at 10, but we're just looking at the biggest hour, the most number of trips. So the total daily trips, Do you have that on top of the total?

Yes.

So if we look at the total daily trips in and out of the sites under the current allowed use, the current construction, it's still considerably less for the residential than it is for the office industrial. But the peak hour is what we were pointing out here. because of the concerns of congestion, which is different than other concerns that neighbors have expressed.

Thanks for that explanation. That pee cover is the key there. Just one hour. Yeah, it's a pee cover. So it's not specific to one street, but then it's from that complex. Do we have the daily traffic? Yes.

So comparing the existing daily trips is 4,112. The proposed use, including all the different, the single family, multifamily, and ADUs all combined, the daily trips is 3,013. So there's actually over a thousand less trips anticipated daily for the new residential proposed use.

That kind of makes sense. Yeah, 370 units. And then, thank you. Thank you for the clarification. I also want to declare that I met with the developer today. at a presentation. Thank you. That's my those are my comments. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member. I have several comments. First, I want to disclose I met with the developer on March 18th and multiple questions for staff. So thank you for the presentation. This project barely meets the minimum 75% Requirement from density, so 18 units per acre that we would be requiring 24 units per acre and that's all through the 41 additional on on the single family homes. This is the 1st time that we've seen 80 used being used kind of in this way.

Yes, it is. And I just, it's a nuance, but I think it's important to understand that the city policy is that a project should be built at 75% of the zoning density. And this site's zoning has zero. The general plan, however, is projecting that it would be a medium density, which, as you said, is up to the 24 units per acre. As we were discussing early on in the project with the developer when there were fewer units, that they kind of introduced the concept and kind of highlighted the concept of including the accessory units, which would be allowable on a single family home, but we're for sure getting them. And because of that sort of nuance, if you will, between the city policy and the zoning, we found it was acceptable in this case to to to make sure we got the units and it gave us a bigger variety of unit sizes on the site. So it wasn't sort of it's a more broad set of of housing sizes.

And did we talk to them about additional conceivably additional because some of the single family homes don't have ADUs, and so did we talk to them about adding additional ones?

We did not. Once we were satisfied that it met the spirit of the 75%, we didn't follow that further. The issue, as one of the council members pointed out, is if you convert a garage to an ADU, you don't have to have any parking. So that could exacerbate some of the other issues if that were to happen in the future.

Right. But the ADUs that are being added right now are basically in single-family units with garages.

Yes. So those are units that have a two-car garage.

Yeah. And we, from a city standpoint, didn't allow adus to be sold separately correct the city does not allow that correct but but that was when when that was made to council it was mainly because of an ho the the requirement to add an hoa onto a single family home from this neighborhood we already they're going to be required to have hoas correct

This development has a lot of shared property that would require the homeowners association to manage.

So from from a city standpoint where, you know, this would be the perfect place to require or basically allow an ADU to be sold separately.

But you wouldn't have that opportunity to do that this evening because the regulations.

Understood. Yeah. But but when we were looking at the ordinance, we were only thinking about, let's say, the existing concept of a single family neighborhood and not single families be going within multifamily.

Yeah. And I couldn't speak to exactly how these are designed, if that would make sense or not in this particular development proposal.

Yeah. And then as far as the mix of, so the project will meet our 15% inclusionary requirement. That mix of units will reflect the general mix of units within the project as far as what's applied to that 15%.

Yes, it'll, yeah.

Okay. And then for waiver number five, you know, so this was the exterior common open space external accessibility. The developer basically said that there wasn't space for trees every 25 feet or benches every 50 feet. How many additional trees would be needed for the project?

I think we provided that response in the council questions. I'll ask Noren to help us out here.

We did. So to comply with that objective design standard, an additional 26 trees would need to be added.

Okay. And does staff believe there are locations that conceivably we could be adding them in?

It's possible. We would need to work closely with the developer to make sure that it doesn't conflict with infrastructure. One of the site constraints on their lot is that a lot of the landscaped areas are used for stormwater. So putting trees there could be a little trickier.

Okay. And as far as benches, the lack of benches is how many? 53. Okay.

And there may be opportunities to add benches, especially along the site periphery.

Okay. And so I'll ask the applicant about this later. And then for waiver seven, open space trees, the developer basically says there's one tree per every 2,000 square foot of open space as opposed to one for every 300 square foot, which is what our standard is, correct?

Correct.

Okay. And then How many trees for open space is a site lacking?

That would be deficient 425 trees. Okay. Significant amount.

Yeah. And similarly, but part of this from their standpoint was bioswales, bioretention areas. Is staff, is the arborist fine with with planting near that? You know, we have lots of bioswales that we're adding to these developments.

Yes, we did consult with our city arborist, and he's in agreement that there is a potential to add trees, but we would have to be careful about the species and how the entire bioswale is designed. So we'd have to work closely with the developer's team. Okay.

And then lastly, you know, I appreciate the new condition of approval for EP40 in the Planning Commission meeting, this was a industrial collector and nothing could be done. And looking that we're looking at the speed calming or is basically looking at calming measures from a speed management standpoint. What is the, let's say, what's the external process? And I guess I'll ask Angela to come back up. What's the external process that Public Works is looking at to evaluate what streets should be reclassified and, you know, how, what is that processing coming back to us?

I would have to ask others to discuss the process to update. It is a portion of our land use and transportation element of the general plan. So there would be some formal process to bring that back and get that approved by council. But going to your question about what factors that there have been quite a few areas that were originally or were previously industrial or commercial or retail and are now being redeveloped as mixed use or residential. And so while we haven't yet determined exactly what factors, we've already started looking at areas where we, for example, we've been getting traffic calming requests and we can't because of the street classification or where we know that developments are in the works or have been you know have already been developed and so we're developing a list of those streets that we city staff want to look at reclassifying uh basically it's it's the land use that we're looking at okay and um the loot update is scheduled for

27, 28, 28, 29?

Well, the entire general plan is indicated in the project. There's a finance project for updating it, and it says 27, 28. Okay. Thank you. That's when we would start it.

Okay.

And I think that was all of my questions for now. Thank you.

um vice mayor mellinger thank you very much i also would like to disclose that i met with the developer at some point last year the date escapes me to discuss this project in addition i had two brief conversations with the lobbying firm retained by the developer on this project focusing on tree coverage many of the issues the mayor just raised thank you thank you councilmember lay

Thank you. I want to thank my colleagues for asking such insightful questions. I think many of mine were already addressed. But I'm curious about, I guess, the jurisdiction about ADUs per Councilmember Chang's question about whether, I guess, whether HOA rules can preclude ADUs in single-family homes in a situation like this or if the city's ordinance or if state law or something else takes precedence.

We're sort of looking at Rebecca, but she can't see us. I think we would have to research that a little bit more fully because that hasn't bubbled up for our service, but Rebecca, if you knew.

So I believe they likely could, the owner likely could do an ADU under the state law. I have read in the news about litigation between HOAs and residents in some projects. There may be some ongoing litigation over that.

but we would not be, enforcing the HOA, that would be up to the HOA itself and the resident, correct?

Correct. Correct. What a fascinating new legal frontier. Thank you. And I additionally want to disclose I met with the developer last week on March 17th. We had a discussion about many of the things that were brought up just now and about parking within the community and the HOA rules and how they would be able to or not able to enforce that. Thank you.

Thank you. That was all of council questions. Councilmember Cisneros?

Pardon, yes. I also quickly want to disclose that I met with the developer on March 17th. We discussed project design, waivers and concessions, planned contributions to community infrastructure and mobility, parking management, and other potential opportunities for the developer. to have a positive impact on the community in the future. That is all.

Thank you. I'll open up the public hearing on this item. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial star nine on your telephone to indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. This is slightly unique. The appellants will be provided 10 minutes at the beginning of the public hearing divided amongst the appellants who formally appealed the Planning Commission decision. Following the appellants, the applicant is also provided 10 minutes to address counsel. Then I'll go through the public speaking cards that I have. At the end of the public hearing, the applicant will receive an additional five minutes, and the appellants who formally appealed the Planning Commission decision will also receive an additional five minutes following the applicant. First up, is there an appellant presentation? And whoever wants to speak, you'll have 10 minutes total that you can speak.

however you want to share it.

We shared the slides.

Yep, so you'll see them up on screen. They use that. Okay.

so basically we are uh appealing for a couple of points you know one is the we actually heard density bonus waiver so we won't speak too much to that um traffic and safety we have a lot of concerns around it um I'm not sure about the numbers that were presented by the city but We have seen, we have had accidents because people were rushing to get to work and they lost control. These are some pictures of those accidents which we captured. Then SICA analysis, again, we'll skip. the other is parking impact we don't have pictures but we are going to speak to what has happened in parking so that is one thing which we're going to cover and then we're going to talk about relief so without further ado let me just speak about my name is Rishi and I'm going to speak about the parking impact So while we understand state density bonus law requires city to grant concessions, but also the California government code section 65915, it actually empowers the local government to retain the absolute authority to deny anything which is resulting in specific adverse impact upon public health, safety, or physical environment. So when we think about parking, Our community, we have 450 units and 320 stalls. So it's not just young couples who live there. It's multi-generational families who live. Then we also have people who are renters who live there. it ends up being more than one or two vehicles per family and if you come on a friday saturday sunday night all the parking spots are full as well as the publicly available spots on the road are also full and then people end up parking in disabled parking spots and the red zone spots creating a lot of risk so we call cops but call cops also have so much bandwidth and then when we look at this particular community which is being built is only four it's got 412 units but only 113 common parking stalls and then we heard that a lot of these single-family homes can be converted the garages will eventually be converted into jadus and nobody can prevent those because that's a law so where will all those vehicles go you know they will also have multi-generational families which will live there And we will all require cars to commute, take their kids to work. So the parking is going to be a big problem. So we request, you know, so not only that is a problem, but also it is a risk for even, for example, if there is a fire and the street, the side of the street is occupied by illegally parked cars and the fire engine cannot turn around and get into the place where the fire is. So it's a safety hazard. So with that, I'll rest my side and allow my other homeowners to speak.

Thank you. Hello, good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Fanny Guo. I'm one of the owners on the Diguin Drive. I'm here to talk about traffic safety. Before I get into the details, I want to share a personal story. I have a daughter and I have actually two daughters, but when my older one was between the ages of two and five, we often walk across Diguin. And there are many instances where cars either didn't stop or they were stopped way too late. So then the oncoming traffic was frightening my daughter. There were moments when she got really frightened or she even stumbled while trying to cross the streets. As apparent, those of you could probably relate, these are not situations that you'll forget. So importantly, this is under current traffic condition, not with hundreds of additional units and cars added. This is why traffic safety here is not theoretical. It's already an issue with the current situation where we're currently living. This development proposes 329 units, approximately 370 ADUs are included. That translates into significant increase in daily vehicle trips, all funnel onto the Green Drive, a street that already has known safety challenges. Today, we're seeing frequent speeding, limited traffic calming measures and constrained visibility in certain areas. Adding hundreds of vehicles, especially around driveways will intensify the risk. One of the key concerns is that current traffic analysis relies heavily on VMT metrics. While these may satisfy the CEQA requirements, they don't reflect railroad safety conditions that residents experience daily. For example, current traffic volumes may appear lower on paper because the nearby industrial buildings are not fully occupied. so it creates a misleading baseline. Equally concerning is the timing of mitigation. The proposal defers key traffic controls, such as intersection improvements or traffic calming, until after occupancy. This approach puts residents like us in a very reactive position, whereby safety measures are addressed only after problems occur. We believe this is not appropriate when the risks are already foreseeable. Traffic safety should be proactive, not reactive. We're asking for reasonable practical measures, pre-occupancy traffic calming, intersection evaluation and control before residents move in, clear traffic signage and road markings, and enforceable triggers, not optional or defer actions. Thank you.

Good evening, Council members. My name is Chen and I'm living near the Linguini Drive. I have concerns regarding the waivers. Let's look at some examples. The front yard setback is reduced from 15 to 10 feet to 3 feet. At that point, the standard doesn't really being adjusted, it's being erased. Second example is a minimum loss size reduced from It's all in square footage as to ask my assess one hundred as I runs on and six hundred, and this is not a way versus like rezoning the indiscreet. Uh, certain is the the rare setback is reduced from the benefit to to fit. This is the elimination of physical livability, and this pendant repeats across all the seventeen waivers. The justification is always a bit. It's always the same without those favors and the fewer units. could be built. Maximum unit count is not a legal basis to override every development standard. So the question is no longer about individual waivers. The question is about, has the CDS been asked to approve the project where the rules no longer function? Because when every core standard, like law side, step back, open space is waived, this is no longer a compliance project. This is like project ask. This is a project asking to operate based on the rules. I mean, that's it. Thank you.

Good evening, council members. My name is Gong Yu, and I'm also a resident of the neighborhood. My neighbors have already addressed concerns on parking, traffic, and safety. I just want to close by asking the council to look at this proposal not as an isolated project, but also as a test case for our city's future. We know that Sunnyvale is growing, which is great. We see the massive redevelopments at Lakewood, Fair Oaks Plaza, and 845 Stewart Drive. But for that growth to be successful, it has to be held to a high standard. So I'm not asking us to stop our growth, but we're just asking you to partner with us to ensure the builders follow the rules that protect our quality of life. And I hope that we can set up the right example here for the sake of the entire growing neighborhood. Thank you.

Thank you. With that, we will move on to the applicant's presentation. And you will have 10 minutes.

good evening council members my name is kyle winkler development director at tidewater and i've had the privilege of advancing this project in your wonderful city over the last year and a half and i'm here to speak on behalf of the applicant team for sunnyvale park place Real quick, the site is located in North or East Sunnyvale. It's bounded by Stewart and Degine Drive, and it's surrounded by similar density townhomes, apartment buildings, and R&D office buildings. The site has six R&D office buildings that are currently really underutilized and not really populated. You know, as as mentioned before, we've really been following the medium density residential designation here and guiding us to where we've gotten here today, which is really calling for that that that whole residential scheme and we kind of look at the site in the top right image is kind of the whole of the donut of filling that last vision of kind of creating industrial residential housing here and then also want to point out that I don't believe this site was a housing element site or the units here were counted in the arena allocation targets in the last housing element cycle. Real quick on existing conditions kind of illustrates here the empty parking lots and empty buildings and then also the opportunity to create kind of similar and emulate density of the surrounding townhomes that have already been developed. On timeline, we've worked really efficiently here to get here tonight. We're happy that we had a successful planning commission hearing a month ago. We put the project on hold as we worked through this process. We're hopeful that we can be successful here tonight and then we would get right back to design and then eventually groundbreaking in approximately 18 months of construction. Speaking of the design features, we do have 370 total units, 329 primary units, and 41 accessory dwelling units. We have a mix of everywhere from ADU to two bedroom, all the way up to five bedroom homes here. We do have 49 BMR units. And as mentioned, we do have four distinct product types. We have two detached product types in the orange and yellow. And then we also have two attached town homes in purple and blue. We will be an all electric development. And then also we are implementing a multi-use pathway for the neighborhood connecting Stewart Drive up to Swaggles Park. Just pointing out the site circulation and trying to create that porosity from the frontages to create a lot of opportunities for pedestrian access into the site. I do want to speak a little bit to the demands on the site plan, because it's been talked about a little bit. But there's a lot of competing interests for this land, whether it be the homes, the parking. And in particular, the stormwater treatment requirements are substantial here for the site. And that's really what creates a lot of the open space here. And then also what's not really visible is all of the underground public and private utility undergrounding lines. And both of those in conjunction have a real impact on the ability for trees to be planted on the site also other competing interests are making sure we have the appropriate fire truck access and solid waste turning radiuses and those have been really ever evolving requirements that have kind of happened over the last over the last years so again that's just a little insight in how we arrived at the land plan today real quickly i want to skip through some of this but this is a couple of our detached product types we can come back to this if needed the attached town homes And then also here's some renderings. I'll go back. The image on the right shows the multi-use path that's going to be installed along the east property line. The image on the left is Swaggles Park and the large bioretention planter that's required. And then these are the entrances off to the site off of Degine Drive. I also want to highlight the sustainability measures. We are going to be Greenpoint rated. This will be all electric development, which we're excited about the potential for a net zero capable development should the residents choose to use clean energy programs. The homes will have solar power. They will be EV ready garages. Substantial open space, we are meeting the amount of score footage of open space for the development. And again, just focusing on these other opportunities of multimodal transportation, so the multi-use path and promoting bicycles. And then also our TDM management plan, which is increasing the bicycle infrastructure on site and putting multiple bike racks in every garage, bicycle fix-it stations throughout the development. And then also creating creative opportunities for carpool coordination within the TDM management plan to try and minimize the amount of car usage. We are relocating public art. There are two pieces that we've been working with the city's art director, as well as the artists themselves, where we're relocating the pieces thoughtfully. Speaking of site mitigation, we are proud to have done a really extensive on-site investigation of current conditions, knowing that historically in the area there is impacted groundwater. We're proud to report that we've engaged with the Water Board, submitted a site management plan, and we have received their approval for our site management plan in conjunction with the residential development here. I did want to touch on what we have heard from the appellant. CERTAINLY APPRECIATE AND RESPECT THE CONCERNS THAT THEY HAVE RAISED. AS REALLY SAID, TRAFFIC, THERE'S REALLY THE TWO POINTS OF TRAFFIC, EXISTING TRAFFIC, CONGESTION, AND THEN EXISTING SPEEDING. AGAIN, WE BELIEVE THAT WITH THE EXISTING CONGESTION THAT WHILE IT'S NOT INTUITIVE GIVEN THE COVID IMPACT ON THE RND OFFICE CAMPUS BUILDINGS OF 50% OCCUPIED THAT if we weren't to advance this residential development and they were to repopulate as 100% occupied office buildings, we do think there could be increased traffic and greater traffic demands on the neighborhood. And then also on speeding, I think it's been spoken about, but we are committed. We have had really thoughtful engagement with leadership from traffic, to come up with these speed management options that we're committed to implementing. Those are the bull bout on Santa Real, signage at the existing crosswalk, the restriping of Degine Drive, as well as the installation of traffic ballage as well. And we're committed to doing that, and we're committed to doing that as a part of our coordination and installation of the offsite improvement plans that we'll be working through the process on. On parking, this is a difficult one. We are providing parking that is in excess of what is required. Again, there are a lot of demands on that land, as I mentioned earlier. We have heard frustrations that some of the neighboring projects The garages don't get used for parking. They may not be as functional. Our garages we feel are a little bit more functional. They're a little bit larger. So we are expecting that they will be used for parking more often. We are committed to working closely with staff on the parking management plan at their discretion. And we really want to focus on the education to prospective buyers, the education to prospective tenants. We put a little snippet of kind of what our home building partner has used in previous developments. So we really want to work on upfront education of residents to make sure that they understand the rules of what their garages are meant for. which is for parking cars and also having HOA enforcement measures of inspections of the garage and other enforcement measures. So really that we're maximizing the benefit of those unassigned parking spaces that are not part of the garage. Speaking of the state density bonus, as mentioned, we are afforded a concession and many waivers through that legislation. I'd say the concession that we're using is fairly benign. I think there's some much more extravagant concessions that are being used throughout the state. We're looking to not recess windows, just given our concerns over water intrusion. And then on the waivers, I think you can bucket those into two categories. I think it's really setback related. Some of that's product related, which is related to the detached product, which I think I just want to reinforce also was really well received by the Planning Commission. I think those would exist too, even in a fully attached product scheme. And then also the objective design standards. I think this is a little bit of a new phenomenon, but these are really seem to be modeled after a podium apartment project, particularly one example is the ground floor height of needing to have 14 foot tall ceilings on the ground floor, which seems to really be modeled after having a ground floor retail component. And I also know that you know it seems like we are in line with other town on projects that have been approved after the objective design standards are neighboring project right across the street from us that was just approved in January had a very similar amount of waivers and also pointing out that you know this has been evolving throughout the many years and I think if you were to go apply the current conditions to other neighboring projects they might you might see that they might have the same amount of waivers as well. It was talked briefly about, but one of our main focus throughout this process has been focused on the loss of retail because it's been the overwhelming feedback we've received from the community and we're sharing the concerns throughout the potential loss of retail. I do want to reiterate that we are not a village center and this was not a product in the appeal, but I do want to just point out that we have been working with community and we want to be a partner with community to see if there is an opportunity for us to help play a role here, and that could be a direct investment, that could be market research and education, or that could be supportive of policy making. And then closing it out real quick, I just want to point out the opportunity here. We think it's transformative opportunity of converting underutilized office buildings to help address our housing crisis in the state, producing 370 homes, 49 deed-restricted affordable homes, and all electric development. So that, thank you. Thank you. And you have several questions.

First up is Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much. Could we get slide 20 back with the garage management and parking stuff? That develop. Yes, this is the one. Okay. Um, I would just like to take a quick moment to read the very fine print at the bottom. Okay. So I wanted to thank you for including these. I'm assuming these will be encoded into the CC&Rs, the covenants for the property.

Yeah, this is an example of one of many that we would expect to to include. And this is more for illustrative purposes of kind of how we're thinking about something substantially similar.

Yes. I will say one thing that I would like to say is that if residents demonstrate that they do not have cars, they should be able to use their garage for other uses, but they should have to demonstrate that we want to encourage residents to adopt a car light lifestyle. And I think that would be in the interest of traffic mitigation as well. So a couple other questions about this. You've mentioned installing bicycle parking in the garages. Are you looking at installing any other sort of amenities? Ceiling racks, for instance, can be a good way to allow residents to use their garages for storage while maintaining parking availability.

We have not looked at providing that for the residents. I think that would be allowed as long as it wasn't precluding the car parking function, if that makes sense, which we don't believe the bike parking racks that we're intending to install or will install would preclude those vehicular parking. okay um next question so there is a hundred and some odd unassigned parking spaces in the complex correct yes um are what fraction of these if any are designated for guest parking only uh i don't know if we've gotten to that level of detail uh with our home building partner on how they would allocate the unassigned between guests or not um we haven't gotten to that level and i think we could talk through that with staff during our parking management plan process with which they also have to approve

as part of the parking management plan you know would it be possible to write into a ccr that you know i'm going to defer to staff on how many of those spaces should be designated for guests only but i would like to say i think it should be a substantial number um on the order of half at least that is an opinion not

anything else um but can it be written into the ccnrs that guests under no circumstances will guest parking be used by residents uh unfortunately our home building partner has been bitten by the spring break bug um but i think we could be open to having those discussions with staff i don't know if i can make those like direct commitments of what what policies can be implemented here as far as the unassigned parking spaces

OK, I did want to talk as well about the trees. So obviously there are substantially fewer open space trees in this project than would be called for by normal city standards. One per 2000 square feet as opposed to one per 300 square feet. That's almost that's barely 10% of the trees we would normally hope for in such a project. you know, are you open to working with the city arborist to include additional trees where feasible, you know, given species and other things? Obviously, there's some complexity of working them in near or with the bioswales.

um yeah i think you know we we have consistently been guided by our consultants around the uh really difficult coordination to do that and we've kind of taken an approach of being conservative of showing the trees that we think we can plant i think we are committed to working with staff through the landscape plan permit to try and find opportunities for additional trees within the site I'd also point out too that we do have 215 total trees for the site. I know we are deficient with that ODS measure for the open space though.

Okay. In terms of the construction management, obviously the city has its own construction management regulations, and I will not recapitulate them here. To the extent that you're going to have large trucks coming in and out, can you attempt to prioritize them coming in from areas that are not currently developed for residential? So if you come up Degene from Wolf, you're not going to be taking the trucks by anyone's house. Can you prioritize that?

I think we can prioritize that and I think we could work through that through the construction management plan process, which would kind of implement the various mitigation measures outlined in the conditions of approval, right?

Because you know, obviously the construction will increase traffic in this area, so I think it would be best if you know the bulk of traffic can be directed to come in from Wolf rather than from Dwayne or other directions. I think you could also come up from Arquez and dodge most of the housing as well, if I'm remembering the location correctly. Okay. And the last thing is, you know, will you commit to working with the residents in the nearby community, the Vail, the Irvine development, regarding construction-related issues and ensuring that the construction does not impinge on their quality of life?

Yeah, we are committed to being open and transparent partner there. I believe we need to be very clear with them and designate a person who can be the liaison that they can call at any moment with any perceived violations of the construction management plan that we will be implementing as opposed to all in conjunction with all the mitigation measures that are part of our conditions of approval.

And Ms. Ryan, can you remind us what the permissible hours are for construction in the city of Sunnyvale?

I always love a challenge. There's no construction on federal holidays that the city observes. And Monday through Friday at 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. I will double check these times. And then shortened hours on Saturdays, although a lot of the residential developers don't always do the whole day on Saturday. Sunday, there is no construction allowed unless a specific request has come in and gets approved. Typically, we don't approve that when it's adjacent to residential.

All right. I would, of course, expect strict adherence to the construction hours as part of the development of this project. Thank you very much. I have no further questions for the developer.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. I had a few questions. So the Vice Mayor started on the concept of the lack of trees. And you're over 400 trees short from either waiver five or waiver seven. And you would be fine with the condition of approval of working with staff to add additional trees at open space and periphery wherever possible? um yeah i think we would i don't know if there's a drafted language but i think we could review and probably get comfortable with that okay and then as far as benches um you know and this is the concept of an aging community and the need for benches is critical you know because especially um many of our seniors, their distance away from their home is completely dependent upon how far they can walk until they reach a bench. And if that bench is too far, they don't walk, they're basically more homebound. And so are you fine with a similar condition of approval of working with staff to meet the, as possible, the lack of 53 benches that are there?

Yeah, I think similar answer. I think subject to the language, I think we get comfortable to try and increase and get closer or increase the amount of existing benches.

Absolutely. And from a staff standpoint, I'm hoping that you'll be looking at benches within the project. but along the multi-use area next to Sweegles Park and conceivably in the park strip that has been done in the city. It's not common, but it is permitted and is able to be permitted. And so to me, it's making the community more walkable in general and benches are part of that solution. But thank you for agreeing to some version of those two conditions of approval. And that was all my questions. Next up is Councilmember Cisneros.

yes hello thank you um for coming to present uh it's a nice concise presentation i just have a couple questions my my colleagues asked some very good ones that took some off of my list um i want to first say that i agree that if someone can demonstrate that they don't have a car for whatever reason and may want to use that space that that's actually should be rewarded for that in some way and perhaps this is a compelling reward and and also allows them to you know take advantage of that for some other um purpose as long as it's lawful not stop letting something legally etc that would actually be pretty cool um my understanding is all of the garages are outfitted for electric charging ready to go uh yeah they're capable for a charger to be installed yes Okay. And would there be other electric vehicle chargers on the property that isn't in garages?

I believe so. I believe that's part of the municipal code to create a capable and maybe staff might be able to help a little bit. I can't remember off the top of my head, but certainly capable areas for future chargers.

All right. Well, I'm glad to hear that because that helps alleviate some of that parking burden as well, especially with the, you know, it's becoming more popular to have an electric car when you go to the gas station. People are thinking about making some switches. And then we were talking a bit about the unassigned parking and maybe limiting it to only guests or things. I think something else that's very important is to put a time limit. regardless of which way it goes. Because I think the concern here is that people may use that the spaces for car storage of, say, an inoperable vehicle, maintaining access to their garage spaces. It happens. You don't get around to selling it. And that really just starts eating up all of all of the spaces. So to make that consideration as well. But that those are the only kind of comments and questions were asked answered. Thank you again.

Thank you, council member. That was the last council questions. Thank you very much. I have several speak cards in the room. First up is William G. Followed by May X.

Hello, Mayor and Council Members. I'm William Garrett. I live in the Fusion townhouses across the street from this development. And just to preface my statement, I think we should be approving housing and I think i would love it if we could even build more densely in this parcel because it's a very large parcel but i i also recognize that you know i don't think the city really has discretion to be adding or requiring many big changes here uh so this comment really is more directed at the city uh more generally uh i worry that This project is emblematic of a change in the neighborhood where we are replacing a monoculture of underutilized industrial and office space with just housing. And the applicant did mention the issue of maybe a loss of retail. And this specific parcel doesn't have retail on it, so that's not a problem with this project. but there are other neighboring proposed projects and approved projects which we are going to potentially lose neighborhood retail. That means that we now have these nice urban walkable neighborhoods being created with nowhere to walk to other than just other houses. So if we lose Fair Oaks Plaza, we lose whatever, a half a dozen restaurants. We lose a grocery store. And now we're actually asking people to get into a car to go do something. And then you bring up all the parking concerns and everything else. So this is really, I think the project's great. Let's build more housing. But the city also should be really careful about the projects that we are approving to make sure that we maintain a good mix of urban utility in all of our new projects. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is May X, followed by it looks like Kiki W. Sun.

They went home. They were here since 7. It's too late for them.

Thank you.

Okay. My name is May Su. I serve on the board of directors for the Vail HOA. Our community of 450 units is largely made up of working families with young children. Most of them even have tenants. These are the residents who go to work in the morning and come back late evening, working hard to build their futures. They don't have the luxury of time to attend every hearing, but they are deeply concerned about the safety on the street they commute on every day. I want to share a quick story. The $1 mandate. When we decided to file this appeal, we asked our residents to contribute just one single dollar per household towards the 270 filing fee. In less than 40 hours, we collected over $300 from our neighbors. Now we all know that this wasn't about the money. It's a vote of no confidence in this project. When busy neighbors take the time to hand over a dollar, they are sending a clear message to the city hall. We are watching, and we are very worried. Next, I want to discuss the burden of parking enforcement in Vail. To keep our HOA due affordable, we don't hire a private security firm. Instead, our own residents volunteer their personal time to enforce our common area parking rules. Many nights, our neighbors, people who already work 10-hour days, patrol our streets to ensure fire lanes are clear and the parking is fair. It's stressful, thankless work. Yet the proposed project offer only one third of the common area store that we provide. This massive deficit will inevitably lead to their residents and the guests overflowing into our private lots to double the stress of our volunteers and to destroy the harmony of our neighborhood. Because of the parking saturation, we already see cars parked on the red lines and near hydrants overnights. I personally observed from my balcony A neighbor who, while leaving for work one morning, was struck by an oncoming vehicle immediately upon turning onto Degrain Drive from San Marcos. The proposed site plan placed their primary exit directly opposite to our main entrance in San Marcos. This head-to-head alignment will likely create constant traffic conflicts. Without proper planning, we are literally inviting head-on collisions at our front door. Last, planning over profit. If a builder is allowed to bypass nearly all local standards with 17 waivers just to maximize their profit.

Thank you. And my last speaker card is Whit T.

good evening council thank you mayor and vice mayor um we're turning on behalf of the housing action coalition we're a member supported organization that advocates for building more homes at all income levels across the state to alleviate the housing crisis um we're super excited about this project we were excited about it when it was at the planning commission it's a truly great residential infill um underutilized office parked at 370 70 homes pardon me um this is kind of the exact type of missing middle housing that sunnyvale families really need it's undergone rigorous review it's fully aligned with the general plan and itr and the transition we believe will bring about a more balanced flow of traffic and the construction impacts will be mitigated through the city's strict requirements furthermore the developer is already committed to evaluating traffic calming measures and incorporating the multi-use path on Swagels for alternative forms of transportation. It meets every objective standard and aligns with the climate goals as a 100% all electric site, which we're super excited about. And reminding you that under the Housing Accountability Act, there is no legal or technical basis to uphold this appeal. So we ask that you move this project forward so we can start building for Sunnyvale's future. Thank you.

Thank you. That was my last speaker card in the room. City Clerk, do we have any remote speakers wishing to speak on the side?

Yes, Mayor. First up is Luis M. Luis, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council.

Thank you, City Council. My name is Louis Morante. I'm speaking tonight on behalf of the Bay Area Council in support of this project. The Bay Area Council represents hundreds of employers across the region, and we hear the same thing from nearly all of them. The housing shortage is the single greatest threat to our economic competitiveness. When workers, when anyone can't afford to live near their jobs, the places they go, their families, everyone struggles to hire, retain talent, commutes lengthen, and our roads and transit systems bear the cost. This project represents exactly the kind of development our region needs. 370 new homes, including 49 affordable units on an underutilized site that's already designated for this type of development. It converts a large amount of aging office space into a mix of single family homes, townhomes, as you've heard, in such a way that's really going to revitalize the vibrancy of this area. It's not just good housing policy, it's good land use policy. We also want to acknowledge what staff has made clear in their analysis. The project is consistent with state law. The density bonus waivers are entitled under the state density bonus law and your staff have done a really good job with this analysis and have found that none of the narrow legally permissible grounds for denial in the Housing Accountability Act apply tonight. The SQL reviewer confirms the consistency with the certified EIR. And I think as the applicant mentioned, it's quite notable that peak hour traffic will actually decrease compared to the existing industrial use. We understand neighbors have concerns and those concerns deserve to be heard, but the legal framework here is clear and the need for housing is urgent. Sunnyvale has bold housing goals and approving well-designed law-compliant projects like this one is how you meet them. We urge the council to follow staff's recommendation and deny the appeal to approve this project. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mayor, that was the final remote public speaker for this agenda item.

Okay. I'll invite the applicant back up for five minutes to address public comments or other information they might want to say.

I certainly don't want to take up that full five minutes, but just wanted to close that we're really proud of the development that we've come up with here. We're really excited about the potential opportunity to create housing. I think we tried to be very thoughtful in striking a balance of a lot of different competing interests and viewpoints, and particularly the lower density versus higher density. And yeah, we're just really proud of the merits of the project. and really hopeful that we can move forward, hopefully on the merits of the project and not just some of the draconian things we've heard from the city attorney here, except we have really worked hard to try and find that right balance and creating just a really, what we think is a special diversity of housing offerings here for your wonderful city. So with that, I'll leave you. Thank you very much.

Now the appellant group. Also has five minutes to address public comments or additional things to wrap up.

Good evening. My name's Mia Griffey, and thank you for your time tonight. I want to be very clear in closing. The concerns raised tonight are not hypothetical. They're predictable, evidence-based, and preventable. First, traffic safety. Degine Drive is a collector street already carrying increasing volumes of traffic, and this project will add even more. Yet the city is being asked to approve it without defined enforceable plan for speed control or traffic safety. The Public Works Report explicitly states the measures will be determined later. That is not planning. That is deferring responsibility. This project will be built and occupied in phases, meaning residents will begin moving in well before it's fully completed. The idea that safety issues can be evaluated after completion does not reflect reality. These impacts will begin immediately, while mitigation remains uncertain. Secondly, intersection safety at DeGuyen and Santa Real. The city continues to rely on a 2019 stop sign study, but... That predates massive changes in this area. Since 2019, we've seen hundreds of homes added at the Vale, expansion of existing apartments, new condominiums, and the opening of excuse me if I pronounce this wrong, Muwekma Park. This has resulted in thousands of additional residents and significant increase in pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle traffic. Yet the plan is to wait until yet after another development is built and occupied to reconsider safety at this intersection. That is not responsible. It delays action until after problems occur. Third, parking and roadway conflicts. The reality on the ground is this. No new parking was added with recent developments. Street parking along Santa Real Avenue has actually been reduced and the corridor directly feeds into the Degine project or right next to the proposed Degine project. The city should also consider adding additional street parking along the right side of Duane Avenue in front of the Vail community. Currently, there is no formal plan to ensure that these measures will fully address the traffic and parking impacts on the street. Both Degine and Wayne Avenue are expected to experience increased traffic congestion and spillover parking as a direct result of this development. At the same time, the City recognizes parking over bike lanes creates confusion and safety risks elsewhere. Yet here, we are being asked to accept a constrained corridor with a bike lane, buffer, parking lane, and delineators, creating a space where users compete for room, visibility is reduced, and conflicts are more likely. Let me be direct. If this project is approved without fully addressing these issues, the risks are known today. They are on record in this meeting. If accidents happen, if someone is seriously injured, it will not be because the city didn't know. It will be because the city chose to move forward anyway. The question before you tonight is simple. Is the risk acceptable? Is the potential of liability worth it? While the city has indicated that state density bonus laws limits its discretion, those laws do not eliminate the city's fundamental responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its residents. Even where additional density must be accommodated, the city retains both the authority and the obligation to ensure that real world impacts are properly addressed. Issues such as parking availability, traffic circulation, pedestrian safety, and neighborhood compatibility are not abstract concerns. They are daily realities for the community. Speaking as an HOA board member, The developer's reliance on HOA CCNRs as a mechanism to mitigate these impacts presents an unrealistic picture of enforcement and long-term compliance. As such, private restrictions are often difficult to monitor and are inconsistently enforced over time. If the city and developer believe the project provides significant onsite parking, the city should implement preferential parking permits for the existing Vail residents to protect neighborhood access and livability. Compliance and state law should not come at an expense of local safety and livability, and the city must exercise every available tool to ensure that the growth is managed responsibly and in a way that truly serves the existing community. We are not asking you to stop the development. We are asking you to do it responsibly. That means addressing traffic and safety before approval, not after, using current data rather than outdated studies, ensuring mitigation measures are defined, enforceable, and in place from day one, and fully considering both DeGuyne Drive and Duane Avenue, including realistic parking and traffic impacts. We ask that you pause or condition the project until standards are met. Once built, consequences are permanent, not theoretical.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I'll go ahead and close the public hearing and bring it to council for questions. I have a question first. So I appreciate the additional speed calming measures. I did have a question about that, though. I was a little surprised. Let me find it. One second. For EP40. One second. Almost there. EP40. Install quick build bulb out at the northeast corner of DeGwine and Santa Real. um using an impact recovery curbing system with delineators is there a reason why it's quick build and not a permanent build you know i'm assuming i i understand when we did a lot of quick build projects in your schools it was well let's evaluate it let's figure out is that what this the goal for this quick build project is or

Short answer, yes. We were thinking we haven't had the opportunity to really look at street storm drainage on the street, some of the other factors that go into building a new curb build-out, a permanent build-out, excuse me, bulb-out. But yes, the idea is that we would want to see it permanently built. And the opportunity is there. And actually, since we drafted this condition, we've been discussing internally about finding some way that we, the city, can help make it happen to be a permanent pullout. So that is on the table to be considered. I don't know if city manager wants to add anything to that. No?

I agree.

Thank you.

And that was an issue I raised also. And we will look at options to make it permanent.

Okay. And then the other question was install impact recovery delineators. Are these the standards?

It's the technical term for, you know, the quick build installations we've already put in. That's just the technical term for those devices. So if we do go the quick build, it would be the same or a similar style to what we have in other places in the city.

Okay. And... Ms. Ryan, you had a comment?

I wanted to clarify a couple of things. The first of which was just to restate about the hours of construction, now that I have it in front of me. Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. So those are the standard allowable construction hours. I also wanted to clarify, based on some questions that I heard from the council, that the speed management items that we discussed would be installed before the project is fully occupied, but not necessarily before the first unit is occupied. you would still have construction vehicles, and so we would want to be mindful of what that might do if you were to be adding those features along there. And also, as Angela just explained, if we are going into the permanent features, we need time to get that designed and scheduled. The other thing I wanted to point out is that there are some conditions of approval that speak to some of the questions that the council had. And let's see, one is BP 8F, which requires truck route approved by DPW and prohibits truck traffic in residential areas where feasible. So that is already contemplated. BP 14B encourages 25% to 75% of undesigned parking spaces to be reserved for guests. So that is an encouragement, but there is some guidance already provided in those conditions.

that's all yeah oh yes thank you um and i just want to signal to my colleagues that i'll be ready for a motion uh next up is vice mayor mellinger thank you very much ms ryan could you restate the uh guest parking uh item that you just said

Yes, that it says we encourage that 25 to 75% of the spaces be reserved for guests only.

Okay. Is that something that we could enforce through a condition of approval?

Well, that is a condition of approval. That is a condition of approval. Yeah. So it doesn't specify exactly there, but it is guidance as they prepare their parking management program.

Okay. Can staff work with the developer to try to get that number above 50%? And I believe one of my colleagues mentioned some sort of time-based parking on the unassigned spaces to prevent habitual use.

Yes, we do require that there is a definition of what a guest is so that that's clear.

Sorry, you meant for the unassigned non-guest parking space.

Oh, I see. We would be very happy to talk to the applicant about that.

Okay.

Developer.

Okay. Some legal questions for Ms. Moon based on some of the comments we did receive from the public. Does parking access or lack thereof constitute an impact on public health, safety, or the environment?

No, not under CEQA.

Okay. Under the Housing Accountability Act, is delaying approval of the, would delaying approval of this project be permissible?

No.

All right. I believe that does it. Oh, third question. We have been told by the appellant that we are essentially on notice that this project would create that, you know, in the event of a crash, the city could be liable. That is at least what I'm inferring from the appellant's comments. Could you speak to that and the way liability as far as traffic crashes work for the city?

So to try to summarize quickly, there is a concept in the law called design immunity and it protects public entities from liability for accidents or crashes that occur allegedly as the result of the design of the roadway as long as it was a reasonable design and it was approved by appropriate traffic engineering expertise and so on. Every case is subject to specific facts. And so I can't say that the city would never be sued for a dangerous condition, but we would have a strong legal defense.

Okay. So this is possibly a question for Public Works. We heard a lot of concerns about the idea that we're going to be doing these studies after construction is complete on stop sign warrants. I don't recall the exact set of studies that we're going to be doing. Can you speak a little bit as to... to what extent could we do preemptive intersection improvements and to what extent are we legally required to wait by the stop sign warrant process?

So with the conditions of approval as currently drafted, adding in that EP40 condition, and as Trudy mentioned, those will be implemented before full occupancy. So there is no studies necessarily. There's some discussions and analysis that we and the applicant, the development team, will need to work through. But that is being proposed as a condition of approval. So it will be implemented. it will be incorporated in the off-site improvements. The only study that we are delaying is the stop sign warrant. There's other, some of the conditions do have improvements at that intersection. The stop sign warrant, as was mentioned, the last time that we did that was in 2019. At the time, that business complex was, I couldn't tell you if it was fully occupied, but based on Google aerial photos, that parking lot's pretty full. So in my professional opinion, if it was not warranted at that time, it is unlikely to be warranted now where there's much less traffic coming in and out of this project site. So what we propose to do, and we already have it in our schedules to do, is keep an eye on the occupancy of this development. And when we feel that it's getting closer to something we think will be warranted, basically meeting the states and federal guidelines for when we legally can install a stop sign, then we will go out and we will do that study. And if warranted, we'll put stop signs in. But we have to have that study in place for legal reasons.

OK, and that was going to be my next question. Can you explain for the benefit of the public what a stop sign warrant study is and why it is necessary and why it has to and why it is affected by traffic volumes?

Sure. So there's a number of factors, multiple different things that we look at. We look at site distance and vehicle volumes and pedestrian volumes, collision reports to find if it is quote-unquote warranted. There is some legality, and I don't know if a city attorney has some insights to this, but there is some legality. If we put in a stop sign, there is the potential for collisions to occur because of the stop sign. And so we want to make sure that we're signing appropriately if there's, you know, it's warranted so that it's useful as opposed to potentially being a liability.

I don't know if... Madam City Attorney, can you speak to the importance of stop sign warrants?

It's a legal requirement to make sure that it won't impede the flow of traffic and it will not create additional problems for traffic. If there's too many stop signs, that could be an issue. So that's why there's regulations.

Okay. And my understanding is that unwarranted stop signs cannot be enforced.

That may be true as well.

Okay. Questions on the public safety front. Can we improve parking enforcement in this area? We are hearing quite a few complaints around parking in fire lanes. Now we're hearing complaints about people trespassing parking in a complex that they don't live in without guest permission. Can the city work with the residents here in the Vale and other surrounding complexes on this issue of parking enforcement?

So are you asking about traffic enforcement or parking enforcement on the public street?

I mean, if someone's parking in a fire lane, is that not city enforceable or does the property owner have to enforce that?

Oh, we lost our public safety officer. So I think that... So property owners do have an obligation to keep the fire lane clear and can have people towed for that. I'm not actually sure about whether the police could come and ticket. I would have to research that.

All right. Now, out of curiosity, and this might be for the city manager, what does the fire department do? What does public safety do if they were responding to a call and there is a vehicle blocking the fire in the fire lane?

They move, they will move the vehicle. By whatever means necessary? If yes, they will, they will attempt to work around it. But if they if they have to get through it, they will they will use the fire apparatus to move the vehicle. Honestly, I'd love to see that someday. I do not know of any instance of that happening, but I do know that that has happened somewhere.

OK. Last question. We have heard quite a lot of concerns about traffic on Degene in general. Actually, there's two questions. Sorry. We did hear concerns about the parking protected bike lane and the idea that having the parked cars and the buffer and the bike lane would actually increase conflicts or create congestion. Can our traffic staff speak to the concept of parking protected bike lanes and segregated uses and whether that increases or decreases conflicts?

so the the idea of a parking protected bike lane just to define make sure we're talking about the same thing today the parked cars are at the curb and then there's a bike lane and a painted buffer and then the travel lane what we're considering here is to basically flip-flop those so that the bikes are riding along the curb then there's a buffer and then the parked cars are closer to the travel lane So there is some potential to change conflicts there, but the rationale for proposing this for this use is that the presence of parked cars closer to the vehicle travel lane gives the impression, the perception of a narrower roadway. And with the perception of a narrow roadway, just like if you have a tree-lined roadway or narrower painted roadway, lanes that cars, drivers behavior will, they will slow. And so that's the thinking of doing it here. Additionally, it further protects the cyclists in the bike lane from the travel lane, from the cars that are moving. And we would install bollards within that buffer so that then there's room and a little bit of extra protection between the cars parked or parking and the bike lane. So that's the thinking here.

All right. Thank you. Lastly, so is there a plan to convert this from an industrial collector to a residential collector as the use along much of the street converts? Is there any plan to change that designation?

We will be looking at it. This is one of the streets on our list to evaluate as part of a street classification update for the general plan.

And then finally, if the residents have traffic concerns above and beyond this project, because it seems like the residents do have many serious concerns about traffic safety in this area. And I will reiterate, they are not accidents. They are crashes. That is a matter of city policy. I speak from personal experience as to how painful and debilitating surviving a car crash can be. What can the residents do to work with the city and what can the city do to work with the residents to help ensure, you know, improve traffic safety on this street, not just from the projects, the improvements that are proposed as part of this project, but going forward.

Can you clarify your question, please? What can they do if they have issues?

How can the city work with the residents to improve traffic safety on this stretch above and beyond what is currently proposed with this project?

Well, I think that the, the methods that, that are really great for us to be able to track and, and to, to follow how many concerns and where they are using our access Sunnyvale system, put it in there. You're also welcome to call us directly. We try to track all of those requests. We look at everything, you know, as of today, this street does not qualify for the traffic calming policy, but if we are able to change the street classification to a residential collector, then it will. then at that time they can come in and ask for that and we will work with them through that process. But just keep us informed and we'll keep tracking it.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next up is Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you. And thank you for answering those questions. Again, took some off my list. I do have one question. So health and safety, as I've been digesting and taking in questions, comment health and safety seems to be the primary justification cited by the appellants that we should take action here but health and safety is a legal standard especially in this case so city attorney what would be required to meet health to make a health and safety finding in a legal sense in a case like this

So under the Density Bonus Law and the Housing Accountability Act, there's a very narrow definition of public health and safety. So it can't just be a general concern about health and safety, such as a concern that, you know, it's unsafe to have congested parking. You know, that is, and I don't want to be dismissive of anyone's concerns. That is a genuine concern that people have. but it's not the type of public health and safety standard that we can enforce under the housing laws. So the housing laws say that the public health and safety issue has to be a standard. It has to be objective. It has to be adopted by the city. It has to be written, it has to be quantifiable, and also it has to be something that can't be mitigated. So having congested parking or having people parking in fire lanes can be mitigated by doing traffic enforcement. And actually I just looked up the vehicle code and I believe the police can cite on private property for parking in a fire lane. So that would be the way to mitigate that safety concern is to do traffic enforcement. And so that wouldn't be something we could... we could deny a housing project or impose conditions that they don't have to comply with otherwise because of a safety concern about parking congestion.

Okay, thank you. That's very helpful and very helpful about the citation on private property and I'm sure that's something we can talk to. traffic or parking enforcement about and make sure that they're aware that this is an issue and to expect some calls. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Ley.

This is for Angela. I'm curious about the timeline for the possible revision of this to a residential collector. It seems that this area has been transitioning for a while now. So I'm curious what the process is for that and if it's been in the queue for a while and how much farther it has to go.

that actually is a general plan update process question so i'm going to ask if trudy might have some insights as of right now we don't have it currently being worked on we in traffic are developing the list of streets so that's been ongoing but um trudy do you have any insights oh well i the the way i heard the question is um you know how how far does it have to transition from a primarily industrial commercial to residential before we can call it a residential street and

technically right now more than half of this street is industrial so it hasn't transitioned yet but that's why it can go on the list and we can say at some point in the future when this development occurs it We'll have to look at it. It could be that it's actually an important roadway for connection of two neighborhoods. I don't think that's the case here, but we would have to look at those things. So it's not just what's on that street, but also what type of vehicle users, where are their destinations? So we would be looking at that. At a minimum, we would include it in the comprehensive update to the general plan. If it looks like we have several sites and there's staff capacity for projects that haven't already been assigned to us, then we can bring it earlier.

Okay, and so I think what you said was that it is currently over 50% industrial, so it wouldn't have made the threshold. So does that imply that the threshold?

Yeah, there's no exact number, but 50% would for sure disqualify, more than 50% not residential would disqualify it as being a residential collector.

Okay. So there's not an exact number?

No, there's not an exact number.

I'm curious about this.

Yeah, there's not an exact number. You really have to look at how the street is functioning and who's using it.

Thank you. City Manager?

Yes, I'm sorry. I wanted to follow up on the last discussion about enforcing Fire lanes on private property. I want to take that as a follow up if that's okay with council. We are not staffed to enforce. Private property and fire lanes on private property and there are. Thousands of instances of that across the city so I think I don't want to commit to say. We're going to be able to do that when I don't know that I can do it equitably across all properties. But I'll take that as a follow-up to get back to Council.

Thank you. Councilmember Chang.

Yes, thank you. As to the follow-up, if you could also provide information about AB 130 updates to HOA and parking violations as part of that to get a better understanding.

Agreed. Thank you.

Yes. Sorry.

Yes.

Thank you. I see no other questions or comments. So I'll go ahead and move alternative two, deny the appeal and make the required findings to approve CEQA determination that the project is consistent with the LUT EIR and no additional environmental review is required pursuant to CEQA guidelines section 15183 and approve the use permit investing tentative map based on the recommended findings in attachment three to the report and subject to the modified conditions of approval, adding the condition. And I'll let staff figure out where this falls in a numbering standpoint, work with city staff and city arborist to evaluate species considerations and the addition of an additional trees within the site and on the periphery is condition one and the second condition work with city staff to add additional benches within the project or along the periphery uh vice mayor mellinger thank you very much i'd be prepared to second that with a friendly amendment yes which would be to add a condition to work with city staff

on the parking management for the unassigned parking spaces, you know, as we discussed earlier in the meeting?

To say increase it to 50%?

Yes, 50% guessed.

I wish you had asked that question of the applicant. I won't accept that. You've made that statement to city staff. The applicant's heard that. I don't want to make a condition of approval that the applicant hasn't at least been able to speak on. Then I will second cleanly. Thank you. In understanding my position. Okay. First, I was able to make the findings and I just want to thank the residents and the, the appellants for raising concerns. I had some of the similar concerns that you had in in looking at this project. I don't always listen to the planning commission. meetings live, I happen to for this meeting and definitely some of the concerns that you raised were were some of my own. And I want to thank the applicant for working with staff, you know, in between the planning commission meeting and this meeting and staff working on some of the traffic issues. 40 is a big change, and I was concerned especially from a traffic calming and I'll say, sorry, the speed, a speed calming environment and what it would take when we were talking about traffic calming and changing that for residential collectors. I thank the applicant for moving this project forward and looking at building additional housing within the city. Thanks to staff for continuing to work with the developer, you know, and trying to make this project better. And hopefully the additional conditions of approval of of trees and, you know, benches help make this a more walkable site, a a better site overall for that community as a virus. As the vice mayor said and the city attorney said, our hands are really very tied from this project. by the state density bonus law, but there's a lot of things to like about the project, adding additional housing, you know, in a, let's say an underused industrial site. And this was, you know, this as well as many of the residents who live now in housing, were this was an industrial area that was envisioned for housing um 30 years ago and so ultimately you know 30 plus years ago ultimately it's finally seeing this conversion definitely we need to look at the issues of traffic and um i do appreciate you know the conditions of approval that were added here of adding quick build projects bollards um not not bollards impact recovery delineators um and um and some of the quick build projects for ball belts to make it safer for pedestrian crossing um i do think that that i appreciate that that has now been worked out and the developer paying for for those improvements um i'll disagree with the resident who said that this is missing middle housing this is not missing middle housing these are very large units and and I'm not completely happy with ADUs being used to get to that 75% requirement, conceivably building smaller, or if you're building ADUs in this case, going above that 75% would have definitely been my preference and I think staff's preference just to have more units in this general location. If ADUs fill a generational gap, either for college students returning home or Aging seniors having more of those in the in the community is a positive thing and and having them designed in initially means that that conceivably there's a garage and that garage won't get converted. I do. Kick myself a little bit now and I'll be having talking to the city manager about the concept of selling ad use because. the the main the main reason we said that that couldn't happen is because that would recreate an hoa and that wouldn't make any sense and here from a multi-family standpoint we have an hoa already and so it's it would have been an easy sort of ad and if you want to talk about missing middle then a sellable ADU is a missing middle. And that I agree with, not the project, not the 3000 square foot units that are here, It will meet a very large market rate requirement, but I do think that that is kind of a secondary sort of thing. You know, it's all electric. It's, you know, hopefully we get the trees and get some of the benches that we're missing. And, you know, For me, this is continuing to build out that area. This is the last real project site that hasn't been converted from the vision many years ago by councils long ago and part of our loot. But I think moving this forward, getting additional units there, looking at walking the site and saving the art, connecting up to Sweegles Park, there's a lot of positive things about this project. and I'll be happy to see it finally come to completion. So I strongly request your aye vote on this item. Next up is Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much. And I want to ask the appellants to please not leave yet because I would like to give you my card so that I can speak with you after this meeting and discuss the traffic issues that you've raised on Degena. This is very important. I know it's very late, but we should be done very shortly. I will be voting to support the project. And I have a bunch of feelings about that. But the first thing to say is that ultimately my feelings on the project don't matter. We are legally compelled to approve this project. The consequences for the city should we fail to approve this project would be apocalyptic. The builder's remedy destroys our local land use authority. And that is simply I will not subject the city to that. That said, there are things to like about this project. I am very appreciative of the traffic safety improvements that will be going in as part of this project. I am appreciative of the developer's commitment to including bicycle infrastructure at the project. This is very important for keeping those vehicle miles traveled low. I do bike Deginia fairly frequently. I do drive it fairly frequently. and making sure that that area is bikeable, trying to work as the city tries to work to build out our active transportation plan, that's going to be an important traffic mitigation feature. The other thing I will point out is that this will bring less trips than would be present if the existing office industrial use were fully utilized. and by converting jobs to housing the city has a jobs housing imbalance in favor of jobs uh removing jobs and adding housing will reduce traffic in the city overall it will reduce the number of people commuting in which is a major driver of traffic what i am not thrilled about with this project is more or less what the mayor described um and i am concerned with the general trend that we have been seeing of our medium density zoning being used for very large homes um and very few of them You know, what I would like to see with medium density is I would like to see, you know, smaller footprint homes with more open space and some more density. And I think that that can better support services in the area. You know, you have the opportunity to do mixed use when you do that. But that said, this project is conformant with our general plan. It's conformant with the law. We are required to approve it. I will be voting to approve it. And I respectfully request my colleagues. I vote. Thank you.

Thank you. I see no other comments from Council. City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion carries 6-0 with Council Member Sell recused.

Mr. Mayor, may I request a one-minute recess?

Go right ahead. We will do a one minute recess. Let's go ahead and reconvene.

Vice Mayor? Pursuant to Council Policy 7.3.19, I move that we extend the meeting to hear non-agenda items and comments.

And just comments, yes.

So just... Or the rest of the meeting is... Yeah, so Council Policy 7.3.19 does state that if you're going to hear items after public hearing, the motion is to hear the remainder of the agenda.

Yes.

That...

And I will second that motion. City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

Momentarily. I'll just jump on you. Sorry, I also need to update that we have all of council here. Give me one second. Okay, council members, please vote. The motion carries 7-0.

Thank you. Next, our council member reports on activities from intergovernmental committee assignments. Council member Srinivasan.

I have two updates. Very quickly, I attended the NLC conference in DC. We met California senators and our Congressman Ro Khanna. In addition, I also attended the IT and Communication Committee, which talked about the ADA compliance for our website and then captions. uh that's the quick update and then also today we I presented as the chair of Valley Water Commission to the Valley Water Board of Directors of the 2026 work plan so that's the quick update thank you thank you um next is Councilmember Chang

Thank you. This past month, the Legislative Action Committee was canceled, but I attended the Planning Commission Academy with Chair Iglesias, Vice Chair Shukla, and Commissioner Cerrone and Davis, and I just really appreciate all the work that they do.

And council member, thank you for attending that. I think it's worthwhile for all of our council members if you get a chance to attend the Cal Cities Planning Commission Academy. It gives you at least a quick overview, you know, two days, three days. of of kind of issues that are you know the issues that all of our cities are facing and i think you know it's it's good to also connect up to some of the planning commissioners at that point and getting their opinions on their process because we don't interface with them that much um next up is council member cell oh

Yeah, as Councilmember Srinivasan said, he and I went to the National League of Cities and it was pretty exciting to see our consultant in action with our legislature. So we visited several, we visited Congressman Khanna and several legislative aids. And we talked about bills they're working on. So one exciting bill they're working on is the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which will be a significant piece of housing legislation. And it will provide If it's a bipartisan bill, so if it's able to get passage through Congress and signed by the president, which we hope it would, but anyway, it will assist regional, state, local entities with strategies for supporting affordable housing. It will modify, maybe upgrade the CDBG and home programs. Currently, we use that to help us with tenant-based rental assistance, which helps on the order of 40 families that are close to being unhoused or unhoused, that program modification. would maybe possibly expand the program and maybe allow the funding to be used to build affordable housing. I also attended the VTA meeting representing Sunnyvale and some of what they talked about is their vision of improving things as light rail by making it more reliable more frequent and with that they hope to improve like ridership and i also attended the committee meetings for the air district and what they one of the committees i've on they focused on having communities all over the nine counties have councils and representatives in the community report on and comment on complaints of some air problems and and then having a process in which the air district would try to resolve those so that was all very interesting to see and informative and useful thank you council member next up is vice mayor mellinger

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Last week, I attended a meeting of the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, where, among other things, we discussed the upcoming implementation of the Strategy 2050, as well as general work levels for staff at the agency and how the agency can help support ratepayer assistance programs for its member agencies, not through direct funding primarily, but through making programs and playbooks available. In addition, I had the opportunity to speak in your stead at the rededication of Hangar 1 on Moffett Field. I believe Council Members Cisneros, Chang, and Sell were also present for that, as was Deputy City Manager Vercellis and City Attorney Moon. I will just say that... being inside of that building was a tremendous experience it is uh remarkable and i do hope that it is open for public tours at some point and thank you thank you vice mayor next up is councilmember cisneros

Yes, thank you. In the last meeting, I forgot to raise my hand and talk about how as alternate for the legislative action committee. I filled in for Charles for council member chain on 212 and I just wanted to go. Over what we talked about a little bit there, we talked about SB 627, the No Secret Police Act, and discussed the general public safety concerns cities are collectively grappling with, especially with major public events occurring right in our backyard. And our own assembly member, Patrick Ahrens, spoke to us via Zoom, made a little bit of time. He talked primarily about backfills backfilling federal funding cuts as they come along in different bills Patrick has that really are focused around alleviating poverty and I wanted to call out one concept that publicly funded or operated grocery stores which I know our mayor has spoken about and being interested in and so it's nice to see ideas that are coming out of Sunnyvale kind of showing up in the legislative calendar there And at that time, cities were really still waiting for their legislative priority process to go through before really getting into priority setting within the LAC group. In addition, as my colleague mentioned, joined folks for the Hangar One event after it was refurbished. It really was quite a trip and actually very meaningful to me. My grandfather moved my mom's family to this area because he worked for the US military in Lockheed Martin, specifically doing work QA for the missile project. And so I know that he spent a lot of time in hangar one in his career when he was alive. So I never thought I'd get to go in. And actually when it was being torn down, at first I thought, oh my God, I'm never going to get to go in. So it was a meaningful moment and really something to celebrate in a moment where things can feel very heavy. So that was very appreciated. And I'll leave it at that.

Thank you. And about a week and a half ago, I was at South by Southwest civic IO that is run through us conference of mayors talking about technology, innovation, data centers, AI, a little bit of everything, but it was, um, worthwhile. First time I had actually been to, um, civic IO. And after many years, it was the 10th anniversary and they've been pushing me to go for years. And now that I'm on USCM, Vice Chair for Tech and Innovation, it was finally kind of required that I'd be there and it was actually very worthwhile and having some great discussions with some tech companies as well as, of course, other mayors. Next up are non-agenda items and comments. Council, any? Council Member Cisneros?

Yes, thank you. I kind of have some exciting news. in 2024 i needed to go on maternity leave and at the time council members are not guaranteed that and that needed to go to a vote and we worked um with you know my colleagues absolutely granted that but it really struck me that we expect women to participate in politics but if you need family leave time or like anybody you expect people to do that but you're not guaranteed that and that especially affects women and there's a story in the mercury news about that and My daughter is now almost two years old, believe it or not. And I received an email informing me that assembly member Don Adese introduced AB 2134 to guarantee parental leave rights to all council members in the state of California. with my particular experience as her inspiration and invited me to give testimony on the bill when that comes up in the local government committee TBD. It was also selected as a legislative women's caucus priority bill for 2026. So I just feel very grateful that someone would take my experience and make something so meaningful. to public servants in the state of California and I think it's kind of ridiculous that it's not already there and apparently so do other people. So thank you colleagues for giving me my time and being sensible and for supporting me in that, thanks.

Thank you. I see no other non-agenda items or comments.

City Manager, anything this evening? Nothing tonight. Thank you, Mayor.

Okay. This meeting is adjourned at 1142 p.m. Thanks to everyone who participated tonight. Good night.