City Council - Regular Meeting

good evening everyone i am calling this meeting to order at 5 0 3 p.m this special council meeting closed session of june 16 2026 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. If a 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 study session on the community equity assessment update will begin at 6 p.m. and the regular council meeting at 7 p.m. Mr. City Clerk, may we please have the roll call?

Mayor Klein. Present. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Present.

Council Member Cisneros.

Present.

Council Member Srinivasan. Council Member Sell.

Present.

Council Member Chang.

Present.

Council Member Lay.

Present.

Six present with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you very much. Members of the public will now have an opportunity to address council on the closed session item. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk. Raise your digital hand now or dial star nine on the 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. As I see no members of the public in the room, we will proceed to online comment. Mr. City Clerk, are there any members of the public wishing to give comment online?

No, Vice Mayor. And then just before we move on, I wanted to double check for the absence of Council Member Srinivasan. Is that an excused or not excused?

That is an excused absence. Thank you.

No remote speakers.

All right. I'm hereby closing public comment. Council will now adjourn to close session. See you back here at 6 p.m. All right, I will now call to order the special council meeting study session of June 16th, 2026 at 6 0 2 PM. Uh, Mr. Uh, before I begin, uh, the city does not tolerate disruptive behavior in our meetings. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by the council. If a 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 a disagreement with the content of their speech. Location and online meeting details are available on the council agenda. Scan the on-screen QR code or click the language access and translation link on the council agenda to read and listen along in more than 60 different languages. Please do not spill your coffee. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. Following the study session, the regular council meeting will begin at 7 p.m. in council chambers. Mr. City Clerk, may we please have the roll call?

Mayor Klein. Present. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Present.

Council Member Cisneros.

Present.

Council Member Sernivasan. Council member so that's a council member Chang has in Council overlay present 6 present with council members from the Boston absent.

And council members from the Boston's absence is excused moving on to study session item 2, 6, 0, 4, 1, 8 is there a staff report.

Good afternoon, yes there is a staff report. May have the presentation. Okay perfect thank you. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and members of the City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to present this evening and for your continued commitment to equity access, inclusion, and belonging in Sunnyvale. My name is Fernanda Perdomar-Ziniegas. I'm the Equity Access and Inclusion Manager. Joining me tonight are Dr. Sara Romano, Director of Policy Analysis at MIG, the consulting firm selected to conduct the Community Equity Assessment, and Dr. Sha'Carri Byerly, Managing Partner at Evitarus, who led the Statistically Representative Residence Survey. Tonight, we will provide an overview of the Community equity assessment, including the projects background methodology Community engagement efforts emerging findings preliminary recommendations and next steps. We also look forward to hearing your questions and receiving your feedback as we move forward toward finalizing the report. Before discussing the findings i'd like to briefly reflect on how we arrived here. In 2021, the City Council established Equity, Access, and Inclusion as a council priority and formed the SEED team, marking the beginning of a more intentional effort to ensure all residents have equitable access to city services, programs, and opportunities. In 2022, the City created the Equity, Access, and Inclusion Office to coordinate and advance this work across the organization. In 2023, the equity access and inclusion manager position was made permanent, reflecting the city's long-term commitment to this effort. Also, in 2023, the City Council established the Human Relations Commission. Through initiatives such as Allyship Circles, United Against Hate Week, community trainings, and multicultural engagement efforts, the commission helped strengthen community relationships and build trust with residents who have not always participated in city processes. Building on this foundation, in 2024, the City Council approved the Community Equity Assessment to better understand how residents experience city services, programs, and community life, identify barriers and disparities, and gather input to help guide future decisions and investments. The City selected MIG to conduct the assessment, and the project kicked off at the end of 2025. To allow for deeper community engagement and broader participation, the timeline was expanded from eight months to 12 months. Early in the process, we met individually with each council member to learn from your experiences and seek your guidance on which communities and perspectives should be included. We also build upon the relationships established through the Human Relations Commission, now committee, and our broader equity access and inclusion efforts. These connections help us reach Community leaders fake communities youth youth seniors people with disabilities immigrant communities and many other residents, whose voices were critical to this process. With that I will turn it over to Dr Sarah Romano from make who will walk us through the assessment methodology and key findings.

yeah actually.

We want to share an overview of our methodology in terms of the questions we set out to answer and what activities we implemented for the assessment. There were six key questions the city wanted to answer. One, how easy or difficult is it for residents to access city programs, services, and amenities? Two, how does resident access vary across groups? And when we talk about groups, we can look at things or define groups by where people live, primary language spoken, race, ethnicity, income, age, or ability status. I'm sorry I forgot that there aren't animations for the third question for residents with access challenges, what are the key barriers. For how connected and engaged you residents feel to a broader sunnyvale community, a fifth question is what Community needs would residents like to see the city prioritize and, lastly, how can the city best address equity gaps and improve its offerings for all residents. so this framework that you see on this slide was guiding not only themes and categories we prioritize for designing a survey instrument but was actually used across all of our data collection tools this drew on the content and structure of the 2025 national community survey and it also aligned with many of the strategic goals that the city council has outlined so i'll read these these were inclusivity and belonging arts, culture and education, access to public services and amenities, mobility and public safety, and economic security and well-being. So the Community Equity Assessment was a mixed methods data collection process. This means that we used both quantitative and qualitative methods to answer the key questions. This kind of approach supports getting to robust findings because we can look across a number of different activities and data sets and have a very high level of confidence with the findings that come out of the research. This approach we're also referring to as integrated because in doing our analysis, we looked across both the quantitative activities and the qualitative activities to assess findings, so we had the opportunity to look for where is there overlapping convergence and what we're seeing. Where might there be discrepancies and the findings that we're sharing tonight we're referencing as integrated findings across all of these. So, to share a little bit more about the activities, so the two quantitative methods that we used were one, a community profile, and this includes a series of GIS maps that reflect 12 key indicators that align with the framework. So it included things that show geographically resident proximity to transportation, grocery stores. The maps show things like housing burden in terms of cost, relative income levels across the city. It helps paint a picture of issues of access in a different way than some of our other activities did. We also had a representative resident survey that was implemented by phone and also email. Residents had the option of taking it in English, Spanish, or Chinese, and this was a random sample. Our qualitative activities included informational interviews. These were done with neighborhood association chairs, city staff, business community leaders, the mayor and vice mayor, and school system representatives. we also had four focus groups two with youth including the the teen advisory committee of the city also the advisory committee on accessibility members and human relations committee the community conversations were akin to focus groups but these were done with three different groupings of residents and we had two conversations with the same group for a total of six conversations. So the goal was really to go more in depth with a particular community to deepen our learning and build a space of trust. And these groups were Latine residents, Indian and South Asian residents, and Chinese and South Asian residents. And these were conducted, some were virtual, some were in person. One of the community conversations was conducted in both English and Mandarin. And moving to the community forums, these were three open to the public forums held here at City Hall, the library, and Columbia Community Center. And the goal was to host these in different parts of the city for geographic ease of access for different communities. These were all in person. One of them had Spanish and English consecutive interpretation. And one also used, I think, the same software that's being used tonight and across city council meetings for live interpretation. And we provided food and childcare at those forums. So in terms of how many residents engaged directly with these activities, we saw 531 residents total. This included 400 survey respondents, 18 interviewees across the informational interviews, 61 focus group participants, and 52 residents came to the public forums. From our analysis thus far, there are several key themes and findings emerging. First, residents love Sunnyvale and agree that the city has many strengths. So these were things that we heard over and over across our activities. The cultural diversity, there's a love of the public parks as an important amenity. There is a strong sense of public safety that we heard about. Residents recognized the city's growing investment in services and amenities like bike lanes, a new library, expanded homeless services, amongst others. We also heard people speak positively about an effective and responsive government and strong partnerships that the city was building. We also saw clear patterns of disparities and access and belonging for some groups. The map that you see here is one of the community profile maps that we created for the equity assessment. We selected this one. The remainders will be in the final report. This one shows what is called the diversity index, and it reflects the probability that two randomly selected individuals are of a different race and ethnicity. So if we focus on the green and bright green, what this shows is that Sunnyvale has very high ethnic and racial diversity. This matters not only for strategizing how best to serve a diverse place like Sunnyvale, it also matters for better understanding some of the disparities and access we found. where there may be overlapping ways issues of access are experienced. For example, on this slide we can see the groups we found most experiencing disparities in access and belonging were Latinos, residents in the two northernmost zip codes, residents with a disability, and residents without a bachelor's degree. So some of what we'll be sharing tonight point to how not only ethnic and racial background, but also things like where people live, ability status, socioeconomic status help to understand disparities. So two main emerging equity themes that we have organized the preliminary findings into are access and gaps and connection and belonging.

Thank you, Sarah. I'll be taking us through the first theme, which is access and gaps. Consistent with the positive findings that you just heard, a majority of residents do report ease of access with city services and amenities. However, that access does not appear equal across community. There are disparities in attitudes and experiences by income, by race and ethnicity, primary language spoken at home, neighborhood primarily measured by zip code, as well as ability or disability status. You can see here that we asked residents in general, how easy or difficult is it for you to access Sunnyvale City services and programs? You'll see the green shaded portion of the pie, a majority say that it is indeed easy. Notably, however, a third or 33% say they've never tried or they're unaware of the services that are offered by the city. 12% report difficulty and 3% preferred not to answer the question. As a follow-up for those that found it difficult, that's the 12% of residents, we ask, which of the following has had an impact on your difficulty accessing Sunnyvale City services and programs? A sizable share report difficulty using online or digital services, and it's notable that there was no real distinction by age. We thought initially that this might be due to less facility among an older population dealing with a digital divide, and we did not find that to be the case. The next tier of items included hours that were inconvenient, those who did not feel comfortable or welcome, and cost as well as transportation. Just 4% of residents overall reported language as a barrier, and an even smaller proportion reported vision, hearing, cognitive impairments, or some other disability or accessibility barrier. There were a range of miscellaneous items that were also mentioned, and that's the 26%, but no individual category when we took a look at the open-ended responses rose to the level of 1% in order for us to capture quantitatively what those items might be. You can see here when we look at the 12% that found it difficult to access city services and programs, we find that one in four Latino residents and residents with disabilities have difficulty. Other subgroups, and I'll note that the subgroup sample sizes were lower than 100 respondents, so these are suggestive of gaps, but they can't be said to generalize to the broader population because of the low sample size here. Those groups that disproportionately reported difficulty include 43% of those whose home language is Spanish, 26% of residents with a disability or special need, 26% of Latino residents, and 25% of residents with household incomes of $50,000 or less.

Thank you. So one of the benefits of pairing a quantitative tool like a survey with qualitative activities is that we have an opportunity to go deeper with certain groups where we're seeing or anticipate that there might be experience of disparities. So in qualitative activities, we did learn more in depth about access challenges facing certain groups of residents. And for residents who have limited English proficiency, we found language access is a more prominent barrier to information and services than the survey suggests. People mentioned issues of language discrimination, so a sense that they're treated differently because of their level of English proficiency. And people also mentioned a loss of opportunities because information services were not available in their language. This wasn't limited to those who speak Spanish as a primary language. We also heard about challenges accessing or understanding city information from residents who speak Chinese and Tamil amongst other languages. Another key finding related to accessing gaps emerged from our conversations in focus groups and community forums with residents who have a disability or otherwise identify as having accessibility needs. And what we heard is that disabled residents experience mobility barriers and infrastructure gaps. related to accessible parking, sidewalks and disrepair and need for both automated building doors and dedicated rideshare locations for safety and for ease of access, ease of getting around the city. In regard to programs, residents identified critical unmet needs that included things like after school care for children with disabilities or special needs. A last key finding for the presentation that we'll share related to access and gaps relates to young people. And what we heard from youth is that there are gaps in programming and recreational opportunities for teens. Teens want places to gather and spend time socializing, especially at night. There's an interest in activities tailored to youth's unique needs and interests, such as extended library hours, teen lounges, and multi-use streets and trails. And notably when sharing thoughts on living in Sunnyvale, several youth shared they feel a disconnection between quote unquote north and quote unquote south and would like to feel the city was more integrated overall.

Now to our second theme, which is connected to connection and belonging. Three in five Sunnyvale residents or 61% do indeed agree that they feel connected and engaged with their local communities. However, one third or 32% to be exact, don't feel connected or engaged, including nearly half of those who live in zip codes 94089 and zip code 94085. You can see on this page the full breakout in the pie to the left. Sixty-one percent agree that they feel connected and engaged with their local community living in Sunnyvale. Thirty-two percent disagree, and seven percent preferred not to answer the question or said that they do not know. I'll note again that as we broke out the results across various subgroups, we have smaller sample sizes for the majority of categories here, but nonetheless, this is suggestive of where gaps may exist. This includes 53% of residents whose home language is Hindi, who say that they disagree that they do not, they disagree that they feel connected and engaged with their community. I pointed out early nearly half of residents living in zip codes 94089 and 94085 report feelings of disconnection, along with 45% of Black and African American residents, 41% of residents who are millennials or age under 40, and those with a disability, 38%. These are the specific statements we asked residents or presented to them and asked if they agreed or disagreed. The first is, I feel connected and engaged with my community living in Sunnyvale. We've broken out the results by zip code. The lighter shaded box, zip codes 94086 and 94087, only 3% disagree with the statement. There's a stark contrast, however, when we compare that to the dark shaded box, 94089 and 94085 as zip codes, where 49% disagree. We see a similar pattern with the statement, I feel comfortable voicing my concerns about Sunnyvale to city council staff, to city council and staff. The lighter shaded box, 10% disagree, and the darker shaded box, 25% disagree.

What we heard in qualitative activities echoed much of what the survey suggests in terms of certain groups of residents feeling less connected and engaged overall. We found that residents across zip codes, for example, share a perception that the northern part of the city receives relatively less attention and access to services and amenities. And mentioned in particular were things like lack of walkable communities, insufficient access to public transportation, limited retail options, need for low-cost childcare, free school lunches, and after-school programs, and a concern about impending loss of grocery stores. When we listened to what residents with disabilities had to say, we heard about experiences that come to bear on how accepted and or included some residents feel. Disabled residents express not always feeling safe, comfortable, or accepted in public and community-based settings and want greater public responsiveness to their needs. Residents in this community expressed the significance of speaking up publicly and the frustration of not seeing a level of responsiveness desired. So we'd like to share some preliminary recommendations that we look forward to continuing to discuss with the city moving forward. For access and gap, this theme area, recommendations include expanding free low cost and sliding scale programs to improve affordability and access, offer activities and services at varied times to accommodate diverse schedules, Continue expansion of neighborhood level access through mobile services and pop up events continue to implement pedestrian bicycle and transit infrastructure to create more accessible transportation options develop language access policy with clear standards for city translation and interpretation services. So this list continues expanding recreation and social opportunities, including safe evening activities and teen centered programming, increase flexible use spaces for youth activities and community gathering, increase resident awareness of tenant legal aid and community support services, and continue investing in and supporting affordable housing development and infrastructural improvements. For connection and belonging recommendations, ensure social media posts are representative of the full diversity of the community, expand cultural celebrations, public art, bilingual programs, and community-based cultural activities, and continue to leverage the Teen Advisory Committee, the Advisory Committee on Accessibility, the Human Relations Committee, and others to support outreach, community engagement, and relationship-building efforts.

So we recognize this is a lot of information and tonight's presentation is intended to provide an overview of the draft findings and recommendations before the report is finalized. Our next steps are the final community equity assessment report will be presented and delivered on August 11 during council meeting and the equity access and inclusion and strategic plan is slotted for spring 2027. As we move forward, we appreciate your feedback on a few questions, which I posted here on the slide. And with that, we're happy to answer any questions and hear your feedback. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. I will now ask for questions from my colleagues. Council Member Sell. And let's see, it is 628. So I will ask my colleagues to try to please keep questions to three minutes so that we have time for public comment and any final wrap up.

Okay. Well, thank you for doing this. Really good feedback, really easy to understand. For your recommendations, they were sort of high level. I was just wondering, where does staff see this going? Like, there's those high level things, you know, work more on this in general. We, you know, do have our council priority projects. I was wondering if it, what do you think about mapping like those high level things too, like what we're already doing and seeing like where there's gaps just as a thought, what do you think? Or where do you think the next step would be?

Absolutely. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members, Connie Vercel, Assistant City Manager. You're absolutely right. And as Fernanda mentioned, our next steps is that we will come back to Council with a full report. And then also as part of that report, the idea is that we would create an equity access and inclusion strategy that will address those implementation. And the discussion is already being had at staff level in regards to how do we align it. to our current council priorities and understand you know the services the report will provide a recommendation for priorities but the strategic plan will actually have the implementation plan in regards to timing and if there's any additional resources that are needed that would be the time that we would work with the city manager in regards to coming up with a complete funding package if there's additional funding needed.

okay uh that's all my questions so really great job thank you to the consultants thank you to staff i know staff worked tirelessly to do the outreach and so thank you really good results thank you thank you very much council member cell council member cisneros

Yes, thank you. I've been looking forward to this day so much, and that was a really fantastic presentation with information that, you know, as soon as I thought, oh, I wonder what is underneath that number, then you told me, which was such a rich experience when we're diving into data that You know, it's difficult because I'll just take a minute. Sorry, Vice Mayor, but it's very difficult to have something that is so personal and individual and very human and then communicate it into data. It can be a very big challenge. And I have my first question is about that. You mentioned that the survey instrument that you developed aligns with the National Community Survey, you know, the gold standard for kind of understanding that the nation, you know, good or bad. Is by aligning what we're doing here in that national community survey, are we able to run an analysis where we're comparing ourselves to other similar communities in the country to see how we're measuring up?

Yes, we can and the national community survey is the survey that the city does and we do do it with other cities. You may recall that staff came to council at the strategic session and presented the findings last year and that was we said it at the beginning that that was the start of some of this work. If you recall so we are building on that and so the idea was to you know start building on what we have. If I could take a step back, part of the reason why we're doing this work is that we have been hearing a lot of anecdotal information and information in regards to services and gaps. But we never really had any data. And then the National Community Survey data, it's broad. So what this allowed us to do, it really allowed us to do a very deep dive into some of the information. And so now we actually have um some you know information that could be you know really drilled down that we can take this data and do you know census blocks or census areas in in different areas so we're slowly starting to build our foundation and we want to build on that um so i don't know if shakari or sarah have anything else to add

Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything that Connie shared. I think the one thing that I would add is, you know, the extent to which other cities share the results of their national community surveys, that's going to be the best way to compare the data. You know, what was learned in Chicago? What was learned in Sunnyvale? This was really an opportunity to design a survey that would allow us to get a little more granular and also have the data so we could pull it apart by different groups. You know, how are people responding um based on income level or if we look at this you know just by different age groups what can we see race ethnicity what can we see where people live in sunnyvale so um it's not that you couldn't do some comparison but really looking at you know the results of one national community survey and another because those are the same tools that would be the the best way to do that kind of comparison even though we're looking at similar things more in depth

That's fantastic. I think it's going to be really helpful when we're looking, you know, down the line to measure the effectiveness of our efforts to respond to what we get in the survey. And so that's really where I'm thinking. You really want to be able to understand if you're doing things in an effective way. And some of the data that you shared was really quite striking. like really like when you pulled that apart with the groups, you can see like what the way we felt like, yes, this is confirmation. And then we got a little bit deeper. Um, Did you find that you had difficulty engaging any group that you wish you got more from when you were going through this survey? And how do you think that we could be supportive in helping get that engagement for future data collection?

I will say that we had very healthy response rates, which is always nice in the city. Staff did a great job of utilizing and leveraging social media and making sure that they were responsive to questions from residents about the legitimacy of the survey. We do have a sample size of 400, which is not large enough to break out the groups that have, that are a smaller proportion. So if you think about getting to a sample size of 100, which is what we look for for a margin of error that's around plus or minus about 8%, we would need to have a population that's at least 20 or a segment that's at least 20%. And some of our population segments like those who have disabilities or Latino residents or African American residents represent a smaller proportion. So while we did have response rates in line with the distribution of the population, as the city thinks about continuing the work, particularly with your probability-based sampling, increasing the sample size so that we might be able to take an even more statistically reliable look at some of those smaller segments of the population. So response rates were good, but we were working with a lower sample size that didn't allow us to have as robust a read on statistically reliable experiences.

That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to hear that the sample we did get seems more or less representative.

It's representative.

It's a representative sample, but it needs to be a bigger one.

Could you speak a little bit more to millennials?

You mentioned that they were one of the groups, I believe it was in the belonging and connectedness piece, where they had, I think it was like 41%. Can you speak a little bit more to that and what you learned about why that may be?

Absolutely. I think some of the qualitative research that Dr. Romero did in the community conversations shed a lot of light. What we did find is when we asked residents about their feelings of connectedness and engagement, those who are under 40 disagreed that they had that sense of connectedness and engagement in their local communities. And that's relatively striking, and it is a statistically significant finding. We had 102 of those respondents who were under 40, so that gives us a fairly strong level of reliability. The overall percentage was 32%, so you're about 10 points higher in terms of the disagreement that they feel connected and a sense of belonging. The qualitative research I think sheds some light on why those feelings may exist among that segment, that age group.

I was just confirming that the statistic was age 40 and under all the way down to youth. I think, you know, something that the qualitative, activities shed light on is you know this is a population subset that's really looking for connection and engagement and is trying to socialize and wants places to gather that are outside of their schools and in home so i think um looking for that and then we actively and then we heard some of the ways like oh we're not quite finding the spaces that we want or at night we don't really know where to go So I think that we did kind of gain some understanding of why the levels of connection and a sense of belonging to the city overall in the community might be lower amongst younger people.

So interesting. We have four of such of that group, I believe, up here. So we're going to be interested. Maybe we should tell them about that. I will leave it there. I have a thousand questions, but I know we're limited on time. Thank you all again.

Thank you very much, Council Member Cisneros, Council Member Lay.

um thank you so much for the presentation and thank you for the work that you did and um thank you for also highlighting that in the presentation it said millennials and i believe you said that that's actually anyone under 40 but i just want to say that's not what a millennial is because if we're grouping millennials along with teenagers that's me along with like very nearly my oldest son so that's not that's not the same age group it's not quite the same thing and so in the future i think i would like to see that um separated out a little bit better especially within the presentation where It said millennials. I also wanted to ask, we had an email about Chinese language, specifically about simplified versus traditional Chinese characters. And it seems like the surveys were done in simplified characters. if someone was more comfortable with traditional Chinese, or if someone did come to one of these sessions and they did need a different language of access, for example, Arabic, Vietnamese, Tagalog, would they have been able to participate?

I can speak about the survey. We did only offer it in simplified Chinese, so there was not that additional option. However, we did provide an email address to which residents could have submitted a concern or reached out to the city for additional support. We personally did not receive those requests, but city staff may have. And then I'll allow Sarah to respond with regard to the qualitative research.

I mean, similarly, we offered activities and translation services, primarily Spanish and Chinese, and the one in-person community conversation we had was in Mandarin. I think you know the recommendation around moving forward a language access policy you know inherent to that is you know based on title six for example what are the threshold languages given how diverse the city is that will help inform you know the given the percentage of residents who speak a certain language or the number what are the languages that really need to be a clear part of you know this is what we always for vital documents we do translation into these languages for inter interpretation services this is what we can guarantee um so i think you know just to bring in that that recommendation and the work that's already in motion that that's a part of it is thinking about language access services and how to to broaden and deepen those but um if you want to add anything

Yeah, and also we're following what the Santa Clara County Office of Immigrant Affairs is using as well, Simplified Chinese, and we've been using Simplified Chinese for a while here in Sunnyvale. And I was going to say something else related to, yes. And I wanted to add to that, as part of our council priorities, we're looking into Title VI and language access, our language access plan. So at the same time that we were doing the community equity assessment, we are also working language access plan so it's coming as a recommendation but we're already underway in this process and one of the issues um is definitely determining is chinese simplified or traditional chinese what the community um is you know needs but as i said the county office um translates documents official documents and vital documents to traditional chinese

Thank you. And I recognize the difficulty of providing documentation in so many different languages when we are such a diverse community. And something that I want to remain cognizant of is that as we are approaching different communities and we are approaching communities with these languages, it's easy, I think, to exclude communities that are have already been historically excluded. And I just want us to keep that top of mind. I am I am Vietnamese and it's it's it's frustrating sometimes to be caught in the Asian box because my experiences are very different than Council Member Chang's, for example. And it's it's different. It's a different box. And then I believe I don't think I have any other questions. Thank you.

Council Member Lay, I do have a point of correction for you. The millennial age range is actually age 30 to 44. So forgive me, Sarah, for misspeaking in that regard. That was the 30 to 44 age segment. Okay, fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Mayor Klein.

Thank you. I'll try to be quick. So great to see the response rate. What percentage, and I'll continue on the language, the concept, what percentages of the responses were in non-English? Because I think that's critical. Because you said 4% described language as a barrier. But how many basically responded in either Spanish or Chinese?

And I'm pulling up the number, so I'll have that, I'll have that for you.

Okay, I don't want to get right immediately, but I do think that that's important from an operational standpoint. You know, 14% of our population speaks Spanish at home, 14% speaks Chinese at home. and i want to hopefully get closer to those numbers as we continue to do outreach within the community um second how and this is kind of outreach and just in general you you concentrated on the tac the teen advisory committee committee and i'm happy to hear that you know it's like what here are very concrete requests that they have you know the concept of more programs a team you know center or what whatever it is at the end of the day So definitely getting more details on those requests is good. Did we fully activate the rest of our committees? So age-friendly, which I think is a mixture, but mainly seniors. Did we go through, and 94085 and 989 were seen as from a response standpoint, not really, let's say, feeling less engaged from a city standpoint? Did we focus on like the Columbia Neighborhood Center Advisory Committee, I think it's called? So did we try to focus on the utilization of those committees beyond the outreach meetings? And thank you for having multiple outreach meetings and online surveys and all that, but did we go beyond that from utilizing all of our committees?

Regarding the younger group, the teen group, we not only connected with the Teen Advisory Board, but also with students from Homestead and Freeman High School. And the perceptions were, their responses were different in the sense that folks that are part of the Teen Advisory Board have a little bit more affluent background or environment. Students that were interviewed in, you know, Homestead and Fremont, it was a little bit more diverse. So they had a lot more difficulties with transportation, for example, getting to school and things like that. As far as the demographic of our conversations in the Columbia neighborhood, that was one of the reasons that we wanted to engage that part of Sunnyvale to get more participation, and that's the cohort of folks that we actually got for one of our community forums, actually the first one. And the other question that you had related to the other committees, as we shared, Human Relations Commission, which is now a committee, was part of that. And the demographic of our community forums where and the older category as well. So we did not directly engage the age-friendly committee. However, a good portion of the folks that participated in community forums were part of that group. Actually, the Chinese, and when I say Chinese, it was East Asian, so it was not just Chinese. Same thing with the South Asian, they were not just Indian. around that group or belonging to that group. Okay.

And just trying to make sure that we're actively utilizing those committees and from an age-friendly, so understanding, Trying to activate all of our committees for whatever focus that we're utilizing is important. Did you have an answer?

I do, and we did have a lower response rate among our non-English speaking residents. And so 3% of survey respondents chose to take the survey in Chinese, and that was simplified Chinese, and 2% elected to take the survey in Spanish. I appreciate that.

Thank you. Looking forward to seeing more details as far as that's concerned. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mayor Klein.

Council Member Chang.

Thank you for the presentation, I have a couple of questions, do you have more information about the household demographics, I would be interested to know, for example, if if the people that felt more disconnected if they were living alone or. If there are some more of that information, as well as how long or length of time in the city if they've been living here just a year or two they might need more time to feel integrated into the city or something like that.

Excellent questions. We do have the results cross tabulated. And as we put together the final report, those details can be included. And if you give me a few minutes, I can look through the cross tabs and pull those up because we did ask number of people in the household and also length of residence. For length of residence, we had categories. So we may have had a year or less, but we'll double check and be able to present those numbers to you.

Okay, thank you. While you're pulling that up, I have a comment about maybe as we are doing outreach or rolling out the new CRM, it's a good opportunity for people to be able to understand the new system because there was highlighting the access challenges being difficult to using online digital service. And if you've ever submitted a service request, it can be very difficult. It can refresh and delete all your information. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to integrate some of that with the new CRM rollout.

If I just can add something to your previous question. I was going to say that a lot of the folks that participated in the community forum have lived in Sunnyvale over 20 or more years, but we also had a good number of folks that were kind of like just been here for maybe less than five. So we have a good spectrum of folks that participated that had lived here for many, many years and folks that just recently arrived.

Okay, thank you. And I can add in terms of the length of residence, the cross tabulation that we have is those who have been residents for five years or less. We do see some greater sense of disconnectedness among our more recent residents. but it's not as high as some of the equity gap groups that we presented in the data. So for example, when we asked residents if they agreed or disagreed that they feel connected and engaged with their community in Sunnyvale, 37% of residents who have lived in Sunnyvale for five years or less disagree with that statement. It's a similar number for those who have lived in the city for six to 20 years. And it's markedly lower levels of disagreements for longer-term residents. So that percentage is 20% or one in five for those who've been residents for 20 years or more. And then your other question was about household size. And so just moving along in the cross-tabulated results. We actually don't have that breakout tabulated, so I will take a note and ensure that we get the answer to that question to you.

Thank you, I just wanted to share as well shikari is something that we might want to include in the final report is breaking down. the data around length of time having lived in Sunnyvale in terms of people's ethnic and racial identity and language, because we did just one example, you know, amongst immigrants, something we heard was there was a big interest in civic learning and civic engagement, learning about the school system, learning ways to participate, all of the ways that being in a relatively new place was different. And there's a lot of learning curves. So I'm curious if we would see something in terms of people's background in relation to length of time living in Sunnyvale and then their sense of connection and belonging.

okay thank you very much council member chang uh it is my turn now i will attempt to be brief because we still need to get back to council comments uh and public comment um the one thing that well many things left out to me especially the severity of the geographic disparity between north and south um and the issues north sunnyville faces and is very clear to me reading and listening to these this report that the city needs to be doing much more to address that divide. Something that struck me, though, is in the initial slide breaking down why residents who felt that city services were difficult to access. Very few of them explicitly said language. But as we proceed through the report, it's actually very clear that ESL populations and ESL residents are having some of the greatest difficulties here. and having the some of the greatest difficulties accessing city services in terms of sense of belonging etc and i was wondering if you might be able to comment on what you see is that is the cause of that particular divide

I'm sure a few thoughts here. So in designing the assessment, we, in part, this was an opportunity to engage groups who have been historically underrepresented or disadvantaged. So I think for the qualitative activities where we're going deeper, we're intentionally speaking to Spanish-speaking residents or Chinese-speaking residents or low-income residents. We are, to an extent, we're intentionally targeting and over-representing so we can have a really in-depth learning of what the experiences are. So that's one thing that comes to mind. We are able to hear... more about language issues when we attempt to and are very targeted in our approach to hear from let's say those with limited English proficiency who are less likely to participate in the U.S. Census, who are less likely to take a phone call and engage in a survey over the phone. So to a certain extent, you know, this kind of approach, mixed methods, having a diversity of activities, it's because we know that in any context when we're doing research like this, there's some communities that are less likely to participate in some of those conventional activities. So I think it's because we were listening intentionally to different groups to hear those experiences that might not come through as strong on the survey.

And I would add in terms of the disparity between the barriers that people cited, I think you're referring to that specific question, you know, what posed the difficulty in accessing the services. I think it's probably an intersection of the issues that are listed. So the number one issue was the digital divide, not knowing how to access city services online, which could be connected to lower levels of comfort or facility with the English language, navigating how to actually shift from the English version of websites or digital materials in their language of preference. And so we often find that it's not a single factor. And so that was a multi-item select response. So we could kind of look at the populations that selected more than one barrier to provide the city with more guidance on how to integrate services and address kind of those cross-cutting challenges because it may not just be language. It may, when we do the qualitative research, we find that it's not language alone or having translated materials isn't the only channel for access. It also includes the civic literacy component. So even if I have something in my language, is the vocabulary of a level that makes it accessible? For example, do I know how to get online and go through to the language services or the translated form? So we can do some of that additional analysis, but that would be first blush, the disparity from my point of view.

Thank you. But just very quick answer. It is clear from it. I'm not wrong when I say it's clear from this data that there are specific issues with non-English speaking or ESL communities and access to civic engagement and services. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. At this point, I'd like to bring it to public comment. Mr. City Clerk, Uh, Mr. City clerk, are there any members of the public, uh, wishing, well, I will call on members of the public participating in person first followed by remote participants. Speakers will have two minutes to speak. Uh, does anyone want to speak on this item before we hear from remote speakers?

Mr. City clerk, is this card for this item or something in the future? Sir, is this for this agenda?

Okay.

um vice mayor there's nobody in the room indicating desire to speak on this agenda item but you do have at least one remote speaker all right thank you uh we will move on to remote speakers remote speakers are warned to limit their comments to the agenda item being considered speakers are who are ruled out of order will not be given another chance to speak on this item the title of this agenda item is community equity assessment update mr city clerk may we hear from the first remote participant

Yes, first up is an individual calling in with a phone number ending in 481. The individual calling in with a phone number ending in 481, you've been unmuted. The individual calling in to speak to counsel, you should be unmuted. You may need to dial star six on your phone.

Yes, can I speak now?

Yes, you may.

Yes, I'm calling about the water rates. Is that not an issue right now? Do I have to wait?

Yes, that will be later in the meeting, sir.

Okay, so do you have an idea when that might be?

Mr. City Clerk, which agenda item is that again?

That is going to be agenda item 4, so it'll be part of the 7 o'clock regular meeting. My guess is we won't get to that till at least 7.30, if not later.

Thank you.

Vice Mayor, there are no other individuals indicating a desire to speak on this study session item.

All right, I will close the public here. Public comment on this item. Staff, could we get the slide back with what you want from us, please? Thank you. I will now take comments from my colleagues. Councilmember Lay.

To be, for clarification, outreach has not been completed. Will continued outreach be done? Or is this the number crunching phase?

Are you asking if we could, if we finish all the outreach? Yes. Yes, we have.

Okay. I think that this, I think the survey, I think, showed us a lot of the things that we knew, had a gut feeling about, and it is good to have quantitative data, particularly the the very stark, the very, very stark differences between North and South Sunnyville. So thank you for providing that data. So that answers, I think the third point where I think the findings align with what we've been hearing and what we've been feeling and seeing within the community. I'm curious to see a further answer to the Vice Mayor's question about what makes some of these, disparities more felt within the English language learner communities, non-English speaking at home. And just, I am curious also about, I'm curious personally about how we're defining some of these language things, because if you asked me what my home language is, I'd say English, and I think a lot of people would say the same, even if English might not be their strongest language. I'm curious about that. It's not, I think, going to be necessarily I don't know if that's necessarily something that we need to drill into more deeply. And that's the extent of my comments. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Lay. Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you. I'll be brief. I just want to kind of answer these questions here. concerns that were not addressed based on council's experience. I think looking at parents, single parents, parents of different age groups, those with different age children, you kind of touched on it there with affordable childcare and other, you know, recreational access points, but I think that there could be some really rich data in, you know, more people, this is a great place to raise children. This is a great family friendly city. We wanna make sure it's family friendly for every single family, right? So I'd love to dig into not just single parents, but like different kinds of family structures and how the city is supporting them, because I know those could be unique experiences. Where do you see improvement in access to city services? Really, these recommendations are very helpful in thinking about those concrete improvements, meaning we need to go to people, go to where people are, and also care about what people want to do and how they want to do it. And I think that that's exactly where I'd like to go next. is think about what it would look like for us to do that on a couple issues. And then, of course, you know uh local government is not part of a civics education in this country which is a shame because it should be this is where people are in in in this room right now because they know that this is where it makes a difference and uh things that affect your lives in improving civic education uh what what's the city here for who are the people who were referring to what can we do what can't we do um how can you get involved and i think that there's a lot of information asymmetry pretty much across the board um yes the findings do um align with the community um any additional recommendations

no not at this time i think we have a lot i don't think i need to add thank you so much um to everyone who made this happen it's wonderful thank you very much i don't see any uh mayor klein sorry um issues raising my hand now um so very quickly you know i i i think the majority of the concerns are at least addressed and and For me, and I think all council would love a deeper dive into the data. So providing that report and giving us that data is important. Fully utilizing our committees and focusing on, especially as we look at adding issues of transportation um adding the branch library in you know the north part of the city making collecting this data you know critical as far as as far as kind of an ongoing effort you know it's like okay asking as we open the branch library you know here's how you can give feedback for an area that at least from initial initial findings we see as um feeling just basically not as well represented as the rest of the city and so immediately capturing that you know at that location i think it makes a lot of sense and then um assessments needs for improvement from a language standpoint uh you know we focus on well the the 28 that doesn't speak english at home but there's a lot of residents that i would say are part of those smaller percentages and how we figuring out ways to do outreach into that whether or not it's through churches or other organizations where certain churches are primarily non-english speaking for all of their for all of their um con congr basically all all their proceedings are basically not in english and they're a good portion of our community that conceivably aren't Spanish or Mandarin speaking and how we can do outreach directly to those I think has additional value. And in general, just looking forward to seeing the results of this report and then conceivably continuing to do outreach. So thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Okay, a number of things. Areas of concerns not addressed based on my experience. What I would say is I've been very impressed with the depth and breadth of what we've seen tonight. I don't recall, Mr. City Manager, if there was something put on our calendar for a deep dive with staff on the community equity assessment. I seem to... I would love for us as council members to have the opportunity for a deep dive with staff on this item because there is a lot here and a lot more than can feasibly be discussed this evening. And perhaps we could see about getting an opportunity for briefings prior to the final report approval.

If any council members would like a briefing, we can arrange that. Just reach out to my office.

Okay. I will just say, put me on that list, please. Next, where does council see a need for improvement in access to city services? Very clearly, we need to be looking quite critically at how we address the way we are providing services to people who do not speak English as a first language or do not speak English at all. That is something that's very obvious to me. The digital divide that was raised is a major challenge. That's something else that we need to be looking at. As Councilmember Chang said, I hope that the rollout of the new CRM with mobile friendly will help on that because most people, their primary computing devices these days is their phone. um something that came up was hours and accessibility one thing that i would love to see is the idea of city service office hours at the new lakewood branch library at times outside of the traditional working day so that they are more accessible to residents in north sunnyvale more accessible to residents who are working a nine to five and have difficulty accessing city hall during business hours because they're at work too um that's an experience i've directly had serving on council actually um I think that something in terms of the assessment findings very much aligns. You know, I have been hearing. I mean, frankly, since long before I was on Council, it's one of the reasons I ran in the first place about the just general dis under investment and disconnectedness of North Sunnyvale and the need to improve connectivity there. The need to improve services there. The need to for the city to. be one city and to make the North feel like it is as much a part of this city as the downtown and South Sunnyvale are. And we still have not achieved that. You know, the issues around access to retail, around access to education, that is a major problem. And, you know, the issue of access to the high school, the city does not have control over that, but still. It aligns with my experience as a millennial, as an LGBT person, that there is a lack of third spaces for people my age and younger to connect, to meet, to be in community. And yes, we have a number of lovely third spaces in the downtown, but it does not That is very much geographically centered in the downtown. It does feel like there is a lack of places for people to go and be in community. um in terms of additional recommendations um one thing i would call out for increased focus is the height the educational access piece and the interactions with the school district many residents are not fully familiar with how the school district is functionally an independent branch of government from the city council but equity issues with the school district very much play in school districts I should say very much play into the results that we're seeing here and making sure well making sure that they get a copy of this report first of all but also making sure that we're looking into access to education as part of this report I think is going to be very important the lack of a high school in North Sunnyvale remains just a serious serious equity problem um with that we are over time i'm going to turn my microphone off i want to say thank you to staff for an excellent presentation and i will ask the mayor when we should come back for the main session let's take a nine minute recess and come back at 7 20. thank you thank you

Good evening. Let's call to order the Council meeting of June 16th, 2026 at 721 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 consent calendar or public hearing items. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited to matters within the council's authority generally referred to as council 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. scan the 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 and 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 must be submitted prior to the time i call the item 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 the public comment period for that agenda item and time limits will be strictly enforced guidelines are posted on the city's website and on the council meeting agenda next up next up is our salute to the flag please stand if you are able and 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.

City Clerk, may we please have roll call? Mayor Klein. Present. Vice Mayor Mellinger. Present. Council Member Cisneros.

Present.

Council Member Srinivasan. Council Member Sell.

Present.

Council Member Chang.

Present.

Council Member Lay.

Present.

Six present with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. And please note for the record that Council Member Srinivasan's absence is an excused absence. Next, Vice Mayor, may we please have the closed session report? Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor.

Nothing to report. Sorry, I'm missing my subject words here. Council met in closed session to discuss Madam City Attorney. Could you help me out here?

There we go.

There we go. Thank you. Closed session earlier this evening held pursuant to California Government Code Section 54957.6, Conference with Labor Negotiators, Agency Designated Representatives, Heather Ruiz, Director of Human Resource Employee, of Human Resources Employee Organization, Sunnyvale Employees Association, SEA slash IFPTE Local 21, and Service Employees International Union, SEIU. Nothing to report. Sorry about that.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next, we have two special orders of the day. Let me come to the lectern. Good evening. Before we begin tonight's meeting, we have two special recognitions. For the first recognition of the night, we have a special guest present to honor Disability Pride Month. Joining us is Neely Hellman Caspi, a member of Sunnyvale's Advisory Committee on Accessibility. Please come forward. Sunnyvale is committed to taking active steps to create an accessible community Our Advisory Committee on Accessibility is made up of community members and the committee provides input to staff on accessibility issues related to city services, programs, and facilities. Neely, would you like to say a few words?

Good evening, and thank you, Mayor Klein, council members, and a special thank you to the city staff for inviting me to speak on behalf of the Advisory Committee on Accessibility to the City of Sunnyvale. Bringing forward this proclamation recognizing Disability Pride Month, which is celebrated worldwide in July, carries an important message. My name is Nili Hellman Caspi, and I'm a volunteer member of the Advisory Committee on Accessibility, which provides input to city staff on accessibility issues related to city services, programs, and facilities. Disability Pride Month is an opportunity to celebrate the many ways our society can and should include individuals of all abilities. The observance began in the United States to mark the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act or ADA in July of 1990. That is why we celebrate it in July. The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. According to recent census data, 4.3% of Sunnyvale residents under the age of 65 live with a disability. When people talk about disability, we often picture a wheelchair, blindness, or being hard of hearing, to name just a few conditions. As a healthcare professional, my daily work has taken me to the bedsides of patients in hospitals, on hospice, and to residents in skilled nursing facilities where I have seen a wide range of conditions. Some of these conditions are not necessarily visible. a mental health condition, an older person who needs more time to read small print, or someone who is a neurodivergent and needs accommodations to access services. One of Helen Keller's most beloved quotes is, the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. I believe every person has the right to experience life to its fullest in whatever way their abilities allow. As a society, we must stay aware of the challenges some of us face and make sure we treat everyone with dignity, compassion, and equality. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to do a little bit of recruiting. i will soon be completing my second term on the accessibility committee and it means that a seat will be opening if you know anyone who might be interested in this volunteer position please visit the city website and look under the committees section i'm grateful that the city of sunnyvale sees the value in having such a committee thank you thank you neely david

Thank you, Neely. And ultimately, this year marks the 36th annual anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disability Act, enacted by the US Congress, as Neely said, on July 26, 1990. The results of decades of activism from the disabled community, the ADA is a landmark piece of legislation that ensures the civil rights of people with disabilities And to commemorate this anniversary, July is recognized as Disability Pride Month. Although we've come a long way since the passage of the ADA, the disabled community as a whole and people with disabilities still face a lack of understanding barriers to access and discrimination. Approximately one in four people in the US has a disability, whether it's temporary or permanent. And while their experiences are diverse and unique, they have a shared community in that how they experience the world is often shaped and influenced by that disability. To affirm our statement of values, the city honors and respects our individual experiences, and we will support and protect people of any ability. Today and every day we celebrate and honor the resilience of our disabled community, which ultimately includes Sunnyvale residents, business owners, workers, city staff, students, and we recognize and ultimately value their contributions past, present, and future. I further call upon all of us to uplift their voices and to learn more about other experiences. On behalf of the City Council, it is my great pleasure to proclaim July 2026 as Disability Pride Month in the City of Sunnyvale, and we extend gratitude to Neely and the entire Advisory Committee on Accessibility. Thank you to all of your members, and thank you for your hard work. Thank you. Sure, absolutely. And for our second recognition of the night, we honor one of our own Sunnyvale residents. Joining us is Charlie Olson. Come on forward, Charlie. CJ Olson has been a staple of our Sunnyvale community since 1899. And today, when we think of Sunnyvale, we often think of microchips and tech campuses, but before it was Silicon Valley, of course, it was the Valley of Heart's Delight. If you stood right here a century ago, you wouldn't see concrete. You would see a literal ocean of pink and white blossoms stretching all the way to the horizon. Sunnyvale was covered with world-class orchards and was home to the largest cannery in the world. The air was filled with the smell of ripening fruit. As a third generation family farmer and orchardist, Charlie has worked to maintain the city's heritage orchard for close to 50 years. His work stands as a testament to the roots of Sunnyvale as a close-knit agricultural community. the Sunnyvale and the apricot and cherry trees he has lovingly taken care of are a living record to our city's past. Through his work, residents and visitors both can see how the history is stretched through time, tasting it in bursts of sweetness from our blind apricots, and of course the tartness of our cherries. Amongst the technological expansion that Sunnyvale is best known for, the acres of apricots and cherries remain a quiet sanctuary and homage to the Valley of Heart's Delight. Using traditional farming methods, Charlie and his team continued the storied legacy that preserved flavor and accomplished a commitment to preserving our agricultural past. Charlie, would you like to say a few words?

This is a high class place. Just a second here, I have some help. I want to say some words of gratitude to my grandparents and parents who led the foundation for my farming and fruit stand business in Sunnyvale. To all my workers over the decades and still now who supported my contributing forever love of farming. My gratitude to the city of Sunnyvale who agreed to my bringing my business to Samoan Heritage in the last 50 years. To my daughter Deborah, a tenure that her And in her life, Pierre, let me start this over. To my Deborah and love of her life, John Pierre, for carrying on and growing and enhancing the fruit stand business. And to Sunnyvale's T.J. Olsen Cherries. To all the support from my county and who Home Corps provides. And finally, last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Muff, and your trusty helpmate, Larry, for creating such a central heritage orchard farm operation that you have already created. I wish you continued success, of course, and thank you to all of your customers over the years. I want to show Leonard and Larry the same loyalty that you showed me. And right here, you'll see me at the ranch from time to time. And once again, thanks to everyone Who deserves it and good evening to all. Thank you.

And our city manager, Mr. Kirby. Stay here right here, Charlie.

Mr. Kirby. Good evening, everybody. I'm Tim Kirby. I'm the city manager. I don't usually, I usually leave these things to the professional here, the Mayor, but I did want to take a few minutes to say a few words, Charlie, if that's okay. So, as we know, Charlie represents a living link literally to Sunnyvale's roots. Sunnyvale is known around the world for innovation, as the Mayor pointed out. But those of us who call this place a home also know another truth. The valley is defined by orchards, by families who worked hard, by seasons, by the quiet, steady work that turns blossoms into fruit. And for nearly half a century, you've been doing that. And you've been part of this identity here in Sunnyvale. Charlie's a third generation farmer right here in Sunnyville, that matters. It means farming isn't just what he did, it's part of who he is, part of the story of his family and part of the story of this city. Charlie means something personal to me as well. I started with the city in the late 90s in the solid waste division. And one of the first things I had to do was try to talk Charlie and to stop burning his pruning and instead put it into dumpsters. Because in the middle of a city, it was a little rough having a bunch of fires in the middle of the day. I don't think Charlie remembers me, that kid in Solid Waste who probably did that back then. But I remember Charlie, and there's a personal reason for that, because Charlie reminds me of my uncle Andy, who is a dairy farmer, a retired dairy farmer in Wisconsin, who farmed for years until retirement. Same big guy with glasses, always wearing coveralls. I love it. So very personal touch for me there. Yeah. You also did what responsible professionals do. You communicated clearly and thoughtfully as you planned your transition. You gave us the required 90-day notice. Thank you. As a bureaucrat, I appreciate that a lot. Thank you. And you really gave us the time to work through the transition to keep the orchard where it is. As a person, Charlie is a kind community member. Every city hopes for, grounded, dependable, and generous with your knowledge. He's the type of person who makes you feel welcome, whether you're a visitor seeing the orchard for the first time or a resident who's lived here your whole life. So you're not just somebody who tended trees, you're somebody who has helped tend the spirit of our city. So thank you for that. So with that, on behalf of the city of Sunnyvale, thank you. Thank you for your nearly 50 years of care. Um, I'm honored to have worked with you and, uh, I'm honored to work with Elizabeth going forward. And I know that the staff, I know we have some of our staff here who is also thankful to have worked with you over these years. So thank you so much. Please join me in giving Charlie a warm and well deserved round of applause.

And here you go. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Thank you for all that you've done. On behalf of the City Council, you know, it is my great honor to present this to you. And, you know, thank you for making a difference in our city for so many years. Thank you. My pleasure, sir. Very good. next up is oral communications this is now the public opportunity to address council on topics not listed on tonight's agenda or the special orders of the day This section is limited to 15 minutes and may be extended or continued after the business section of the meeting. Individuals may only speak once during oral communications. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means the council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited matters within counsel's authority, which is generally known as counsel's subject matter jurisdiction. If a speaker's comments are outside of counsel's subject matter jurisdiction, 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 please submit speaker cards to the city clerk raise your digital hand now or dial start 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 council member chang has several announcements

Celebrate Parks and Recreation Month. July is National Parks and Recreation Month and the City of Sunnyvale is celebrating the essential power of parks, play, and community. This month we invite you to get outside, explore a new trail, visit a neighborhood playground, and discover everything our city has to offer. Highlights of Parks and Recreation Month include park pop-up events, ice cream sandwich giveaways, the Fourth of July Festival and Family Fun Nights, and family fun nights. Friday, July 17th is Park and Recreation Professionals Day. Whether you're enjoying one of our beautiful parks or engaging in the mini camps, classes, senior or aquatic programs this summer, Take the time to thank one of our over 500 hardworking staff for a job well done. To help you celebrate we have created a downloadable park and recreation month activity calendar available on the city of sunnyville's website by searching special events. It features daily inspiration free events and reminders for our communities biggest summer milestones for more information email recreation at sunnyville.ca.gov or call 408-730-PLAY. Second announcement, 4th of July Festival, America's 250th anniversary. You're invited to join Sunnyvale in celebrating America's 250th anniversary. On Saturday, July 4th, come down to downtown Sunnyvale and historic Murphy Avenue to enjoy our festival. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and feature amusement rides including a 72-foot Ferris wheel, carnival games, a 100-foot slide, family-friendly entertainment, a bike parade, and free bike valet for stress-free bicycle parking. The event is just a short walk from local restaurants so you can savor delicious food while enjoying all the festivities. Admission is free. For more information, please email recreation at sunnyvale.ca.gov or visit sunnyvale.ca.gov and search special events. Bring your whole family and celebrate with us. We hope to see you there.

Thank you, Councilmember. I have several speaker cards in the room. First up is Alexandra followed by Diane, sorry, Alexandra K followed by Diana C. One moment. One second.

Hi, this is Aleksandra Karwasiecka. With your permission, I would like to speak again about our beloved Las Palmas Park. So we have heard many real people talking about it. So I thought we should also listen to artificial people talking about it. And I have run a little artificial intelligence study using Claude to help us with deciding what to do with Las Palmas Park. So I have composed a query to Claude asking to give me arguments, pros and cons, of building a gated sports complex versus open meadow in urban environment. As an output, I got a list of arguments. Majority of them were in support of open meadow, but there were two arguments. in support of gated sports complex. So let me talk about those arguments. One of the arguments was if the open space is not used by any sports, then creating a sports complex would definitely encourage people to play sports i think we can immediately dismiss these arguments because las palmas meadow is extensively used by many many sports not only individual sports but also team sports and they do it without any encouragement so i think this argument can be taken down in fact i am worried that if we build a fence around it it will create restriction and it will limit the number of people playing different sports there so the argument about encouraging we can dismiss The other argument was related to finances. Klotz said that if city is in the serious financial difficulty, creating a sports complex would help because the city can charge fees for organizing all sorts of sports activities and competitions there. Are we in financial difficulties here in Sunnyvale? I cannot hardly believe it. We're in the center of Silicon Valley, which is one of the economically most strong areas, if not in California, maybe even in the United States. So I don't think we are having any kind of financial difficulty here. The economy of Silicon Valley, it could be even one of the strongest in the world. So I don't think we have financial crisis at hand. In addition, we have very high property taxes that also provide revenue to the city. So the second argument of financial crisis in Sunnyvale can be also taken down. In summary, this little artificial intelligence study supports again the thesis that the park should remain open and free, no fences, no lights. Thank you, Claude, and thank you, city people, for listening.

Thank you, Diana C., followed by Monica F.

Hi, I've lived in Sunnyvale for 45 years across the street from Las Palmas Park. And during that time, I've seen it change a couple of times. When my kids first were here, there was a huge teepee structure on the island and that's been taken down and changed. And that was great because it made the park safer for the children. I would hope that the park continues to remain a large open space. I counted probably about 200 people there this past weekend, having picnics, playing with their kids on the lawn, and for that to all go away would be a shame. Currently, the park is used at least twice a week by volleyballers who make use of the big field and put up as many as 18 volleyball courts. I think it's wonderful. And they're not restricted in where they put the nets and the nets cover most of the park. the other thing i want to mention is living across the street from the park there is no parking ever in front of my home and to encourage an activity that would potentially bring in others from other parts of the city to park you need to make a parking structure or you need to open up more parking on the streets Currently, the park is surrounded by streets on one side with no parking signs. A lot of the time, the city vehicles park there, and on the weekends, other people park there as well, but they say no parking. How does that figure? And to invite more people to the park for an organized sport would be a disuse of the park, the open space. Which brings me to another idea. I think it's been mentioned before. We have a large area at Baylands that could be used for organized sports. The two times I've been over to that park, there's nobody there. It's a big open field with nobody there. And so to invade the space that's used by many people does not seem right. Please think about this when you're making your decision, which I realize isn't until probably February or so. But I would like to continue to live across the street from a beautiful park. Thank you.

Thank you, Monica F followed by Wesley Y.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor. council members, city manager, city staff. I wanted to take this opportunity to communicate and introduce myself. My name is Monica Faria and I'm your local government affairs representative for PG&E. Moving forward, I will be your primary point of contact for all PG&E related matters. Previously, my colleague Sergio Jimenez served in this role. If you have questions or concerns in regards to PG&E, I'm here to help. I want to submit myself as a pillar in the community and be able to, if you have issues from the community that we can elevate to our leadership and find ways that we can, find paths forward. I value strong partnerships with our local government leaders and I'm committed to being a responsive and collaborative resource. I look forward to connecting with each and every one of you and I'll be reaching out individually so that I can better understand your priorities and how I can be of service. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. And my last speaker card in the room is Wesley Y.

good evening council members my name is wesley you and i'm a sunnyvale resident working on an sp9 urban lot split project on north pastorey avenue i wanted to bring your attention briefly to a concern regarding a 51 000 parks in lieu of fee being imposed on my project as a condition of approval First, under the city's own parks fee formula, the fee is calculated based on the difference between proposed dwelling units and existing dwelling units. And in my case, there are two existing dwelling units and two dwelling units after the lot split. Therefore, the formula appears in that a fee of zero. Secondly, the project does not involve any new construction, additions or expansion of housing. It's simply a lot split. Because no new dwelling units are being created, the question whether nexus exists between the project and any increased demand on Sunnyvale Parks. Third, the California Department of Housing and Community Development has publicly taken the position that Quinn Park's fees will not be imposed as a condition of approval for SB 9 urban lot splits. The city's current position appears to be inconsistent with that guidance. I respectfully ask the council to review this issue and ensure that the implementation of SB 9 is consistent with both the city's code and state housing law. Thank you. Thank you. One moment.

Vice chair, staff and director Ryan. I am recalling our extensive conversations about park fee reform as part of our housing element approval, and in particular, the baseball bat that HCD threatened to take to our knees if we failed to do so. That was specifically triggered, if I recall correctly, by excessive park fees or perceived excessive park fees on an SB 9 lot split. My understanding was that we were at least in the process of resolving this issue. Can you comment further?

That's a lot of questions. And we have made some progress toward addressing the issue. The facts associated with Mr. Yu's comments, I would need to understand a little bit more about what he's talking about to be able to comment. about his situation but in general yes we have lowered the park fees there is one specific for sb9 lot splits there are some requirements for sb9 in terms to qualify for that and i don't know what that situation is in terms of it has to be owner occupied one of the units has to be owner occupied so i would have to look into all of that i would appreciate getting an update absolutely thank you

you very much that was my last speaker card in the room oh one second sorry councilmember lay sorry miss the hands thank you um i was hoping the city manager would um address the previous um public commenters about the state of the las palmas park renovation i'm on the website about it now and it says that outreach will occur during the summer do we have a more exact timeline for that

as Ramana Chinnakotla, Interim Director of Public Works, to come up and comment on what our timeline looks like right now.

Thank you, Tim. I'm Ramana Chinnakotla, Interim Public Works Director. So we just got an external facilitator on board. We will be actually having our first meeting with them in the coming week. So we will be starting our enhanced outreach beginning in July.

Mayor Mrakas, Thank you, thank you.

Mayor Mrakas, That was my last speaker card in the room city clerk do we have any remote speakers wishing to speak on the side.

Mayor Mrakas, Yes, Mayor first up is mailing s followed by Eric K mailing you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council, and I will pull up your slide these submitted.

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Mei-Ling Stephan. First, I'd like to thank Council Member Srinivasan for meeting with neighbours about our concerns. Cal Water is proposing to drill a new well 800 to 1,000 feet deep at only 17 feet from the closest neighbour's property. The claim that drilling and construction activities will cause insignificant ground vibrations is based only on plugging in numbers into Caltrans' semi-empirical formula without any real inputs from on-site measurements and analysis. I am especially concerned about CalWater's use of Caltrans formula for peak particle velocity for a distance of only 17 feet from the source. The formula is intended for use far away from the source. The general distinction between far field and near field is illustrated in the image of a stone thrown into water. The spherical ripples in the far field are different from the complex motion close to the source. In Caltrans formula on the right, the reference peak particle velocity is typically measured at a distance of 25 feet and tabulated by Caltrans for various vibration sources. I'm sorry that I omitted the exponent n in the equation. Okay, for well drilling, CalWater is using a PPV reference value measured at 100 feet by a consultant and Caltrans formula to project backwards to only a distance of 17 feet. The consultant doesn't pay any attention to whether 17 feet is in the near field or the far field. So the validity of this is their calculation for 17 feet is highly questionable. An independent expert review is in order. In this well project, there is only one chance to do things right. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up is Eric K followed by Steven M. Eric, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the city council.

Yes. So this is Eric Kroc, a longtime Sunnyvale resident. I just want to echo the request made by many other speakers at this and prior meetings that we not transform the open green space at Las Palmas Park. by installing large fences, bright lights, and potentially astroturf. Right now, that green space is informally used by a diversity of people for a diversity of purposes. And you can easily see that if you go there any weekday or especially on the weekends. And if we were to transform the open green space at Las Palmas Park by reserving most of it for a marked off sports field with tall fences breaking up the open space, it would mean that most of that open space could now only be used by whatever game was in progress. on the sports field. And that would likely reduce overall utilization of the open space because you can easily see 100 or 200 people at a time using the open green areas on weekends. And if we carve that up by means of fences, then essentially only the people playing a game, plus those who chose to be spectators, would be able to participate. So it's likely to reduce park utilization as opposed to increasing it. I don't see any evidence that there is a problem that Las Palmas Park is... underutilized in its current design. Bright lights are bad for wildlife. They're bad for insects, bats, birds. They throw off the diurnal rhythms of animals, and they would inevitably shine into the front windows of people all around the park. Finally, we don't need more AstroTurf in Sunnyvale Parks. I would love to see us basically not pass some kind of a policy that we will not install new AstroTurf in Sunnyvale Parks going forward. Because of all of the problems that are created by AstroTurf. It's bad for the environment. It creates microplastic runoff. It heats the area. People can be injured by being on the AstroTurf or falling on it. So in sum, I would very much strongly urge the council and the Parks and Recreation Commission to adopt a renovation plan for Las Palmas Park that preserves the open green lawn space for informal use. Thank you.

Thank you. And Mr. Kirby, you have a comment?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to mention that, and we'll add this to the FAQ for the Los Palmas project site, but artificial turf is not being considered for Los Palmas or any other park. We currently have a study underway to evaluate artificial turf that has actually been going to commissions over the past week. Yeah, I see Dora Grichinacote was up here as well.

I was just going to add that it is already on the FAQ. There is a question and answer portion of the site that very clearly says that we are not considering any artificial turf for Las Palmas. Just want to clarify that.

Thank you.

Council Member Sal.

Just a quick question. How do people get involved in the outreach meetings that will start in July?

If there's anyone in Sunnyvale who doesn't really know about Las Palmas by now, We will be actually putting in a QR code with a sign at the park. We'll be actually putting in many signs around the park. So if someone is interested, they can use the QR code to find out when we will be having meetings, when we will be having focus group, get togethers, all those things. So all the details about the outreach will be, can be gotten from the QR code. We also have a website that will list all those meetings.

so yeah so to get to the web page you would just um go to the sunny bell website and type las palmas at this point yeah you could just search for las palmas park and sign up for the mailing list yes okay yeah you can do that also thank you thank you next up is stephen m stephen you've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the city council

Hello, good evening, council. I really enjoyed the public recognition tonight. Disability pride is quite important. I was with my blind friend today who rode Caltrain down. She's so brave and gets off the train. But yes, there is an issue with the encampment by Caltrain. And you guys should already know about this and being taken care of it. But I submitted and accessed Sunnyvale. So hopefully that'll get some attention. I also appreciate the recognition of Charlie Olson. He is an amazing man. I've seen him moving agricultural pipe in just the last year or so. Just an amazing man. And when you look at what to do with the Heritage Orchard, I hope you get in contact with Charlie's crew. He has an amazing crew. They know what to do. They're trained. They have all the equipment. The best thing for the Heritage Orchard is just to keep doing what you're doing and have Charlie hand over the reins to his crew, which are awesome. But my key point tonight is regarding the Baykeeper lawsuit. I wrote you a letter. I don't hear back. You're not allowed to reply. This is all shrouded in darkness. As New York Times says, democracy dies in darkness, but you've kept Baykeeper in the dark for seven years, and you can continue to keep it in the dark. So I go and find your brief you just filed on Friday, and I wrote you a letter in advance. You have an audience of one, Judge Davia. And to tell you the truth, what you've written to him in the brief is just absolutely ludicrous. You keep repeating the same points over and over again that he's already ruled on. That's just inflammatory. That's just contradictory to how you might influence a judge. What you have here is absolutely legal incompetence. Your lawyers are saying there's no harm from fecal bacteria. You have human poop in the creeks. And you're not taking responsibility. You say there's no harm, but you have Don Edwards Wildlife Preserve right where your outflow goes. You say that there's no swimming, but by and large, there's sea lions coming out. At Moffitt Park, your DPS posts pictures of rescuing sea lions, and here you are dumping raw sewage into the creeks, and you think it's okay? It's not okay to have poop coming out of the storm drains. And what you're asking to judge for is more and more delays. You're not stepping up. This is not like Sunnyvale. I'm at my wit's end. I keep writing to you and I hear nothing back. This is absolute insanity. You keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different answer.

Thank you. mayor that was the final remote public speaker for oral communications okay i'll go ahead and close oral communications and next up is our consent calendar 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 9 in 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 one speaker card in the room to speak on one f so we'll pull one f um city clerk That was my only speaker card. City Clerk, do you have any remote participants wishing to speak on a consent calendar item?

No, Mayor.

OK. I'll close public comment and ask for a motion. Councilmember Chang.

It's not a motion, but I just wanted to speak to item 1G because I'll be abstaining from it.

Sure.

I just wanted to provide a little bit of background. The subcommittee met on May It was Council Member Srinivasan, Council Member Lay, and myself. And I wanted to say thank you to Valerie Suarez. She's the chair of the Snail Neighborhood Association, who's been working with staff over the years. And thank you to staff for the responsiveness in making the funding available for neighborhood associations more flexible with the tier funding structure based on neighborhood association size. I'm stating on this item because one of the community event applicants, I consider personal friends. Thank you.

Thank you. And I just want to thank the subcommittee for for giving the recommendations as far as that's concerned. And normally we have a bigger discussion on these items, but decided to make it consent, just because we normally just take the subcommittee's recommendation. So thank you for that. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

We were to pull 1F, correct? Correct. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I move the consent calendar minus 1F.

Thank you. And I'll second that. City Clerk, can we please conduct the vote?

Council Member Sell, can you please register a vote? Thank you. The motion for consent calendar items 1A through 1E and 1G through 1K carries 6-0 with Council Member Srinivasan absent and Council Member Chang registering an abstention on item 1G, as in George.

Thank you very much. At this time, let's go ahead and take item 1F. Do we have any comments or questions from Council on 1F? And 1F was the Verde design contract for Sarah Park. I see no comments or questions from Council. I'll go ahead and open up the public hearing on this item. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk, raise your digital hand, use your raise hand feature now, or dial star nine on your telephone to get 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 one speaker card in the room, Zach Kay.

within the quote draft consultant services agreement between city of sunnyville and verde design inc for design and construction support services for sarah park renovation enhancement close quote pdf there's quote exhibit a detailed scope of work sarah park renovation enhancement pr-25-01 close quote On physical page number 12, under section 11, project information letter A description, a bullet point reads, quote, assess the grass athletic field for replacement. City will not consider synthetic turf as option for improvement, parenthesis, agronomic study not included, close quote. I think many, but not all, will be happy to hear that. Further along on physical page number 54, under the quote, tennis court layout, close quote heading, quote, general note, all surfaces on tennis courts to be artificial turf as manufactured by Tweedy Inc or approved equal, close quote. At present, all the tennis court surfaces are a painted hardscape of some kind and to my eye from outside the fencing appear in excellent condition Will it be clear in the public outreach all the Sarah Park tennis courts as presently envisioned will be converted over to plastic grass? Is that a surface the tennis players want to switch to?

Thank you. that was my last um vice mayor mellinger oh that's fine that was my last speaker card in the room um city clerk do we have any remote speakers wishing to speak on item 1f no mayor i'll go ahead and close public comment and bring it back to council vice mayor mellinger

Thank you very much. I'm not finding the second page reference that the speaker referred to, but city staff, I'm not aware of tennis courts anywhere that use artificial turf. Could you comment on this?

I can take a stab at it, but I don't think that's basically part of our scope, converting any of the tennis courts to artificial turf. I think the scope would include assessing the condition of the current tennis courts and figuring out if we need to make any improvements. And again, this is just the general scope. Nothing has actually been decided. It's what actually will be done at Sarah Park like any other park is going to be something that will come out as part of the public input and a lot of other discussions that will happen throughout the design process.

all right so i'm not finding that reference in the document real right now but um what we're saying is that we're not committing to any particular materials except for the fact that we will not be using synthetic turf to replace the athletic fields and that any further change anything else is subject to further discussion and change absolutely okay thank you i appreciate it thank you councilmember cell

so i live less than my house is less than 500 feet from sarah park so i need to recuse myself from this boat so i need to leave the room and then have uh thank you thank you councilmember cell

Vice Mayor Mellinger. Thank you very much. I move approval of staff recommendation on 1F.

Thank you. I'll second. Thank you. City Clerk.

Mayor Mrakas, me any comments i'm briefly i'm satisfied that this contract is not signing us up for artificial turf by stealth, but I appreciate the Member of the public calling this to our attention and I will be. Mayor Mrakas, Following up with staff and making sure that that is not happening, thank you.

Thank you and city clerk, can you please conduct the vote.

The motion carries 5-0 with Council Member Sell recused and Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. And Council Member Sell is returning to the chambers. And with that, Good evening. Let's call to order the joint meeting of City Council and the Sunnyvale Financing Authority of June 16, 2026 at 8.15 p.m. This joint meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means the Council and the Financing Authority can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by the Council and Financing Authority for consent, calendar, or public hearing items. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited matters within the joint meetings authority, generally referred to as the council and financing authority's subject matter jurisdiction. If the 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. City Clerk, may we please have roll call?

authority chair mayor klein president authority vice chair vice mayor mellinger president authority member council member cisneros president authority member council member srenivasan authority member council member cell president authority member council member chang president authority member council member lay president six present with authority member council member srinivasan absent

Thank you. And for the record, note that authority member, council member Srinivasan's absence is an excused absence. Next up is oral communications. This is now the public's opportunity to address the joint meeting on topics not listed on tonight's agenda. This section is limited to 15 minutes and may be extended or continued after the general business section of the meeting. Individuals may only speak once during oral communications. This joint meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means the council and the financing authority can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited to matters within the joint meeting's authority, generally referred to as our subject matter jurisdiction. If a speaker's comments are outside of the council's and financing authority's subject matter jurisdiction, the presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. This allows the joint meeting to relax 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 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. Speakers will have two minutes to speak. I have no speaker cards in the room. City Clerk, do we have any remote participants wishing to speak under oral communications?

No authority, Chair Mayer.

Thank you. I will close oral communications. and next up is our consent calendar i'll i'll go ahead and open up public comment on our consent calendar item please submit a speaker card to the city clerk raise your digital hand now or dial star 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 two minutes to speak i have no speaker cards to speak on consent city clerk do we have any remote participants wishing to speak on our consent calendar item no mayor i will close the public comment and bring it back to council authority member mellinger um move the consent calendar 30 price here sorry about that and authority member sell second thank you uh city clerk can you please conduct the vote

The motion carries 6-0 with authority member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. Let's move to our general business. Our one item is item 26-0158, City Council Adoption for the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Budget, Fee Schedule and Appropriations Limit and the Sunnyvale Financing Authority's Adoption of the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Budget. Is there a staff report?

There is Mr. Mayor and authority chair and City Council and Sunnyvale financing authority. This Matt Paul and your finance director. The items before you tonight include the City Council adoption of the fiscal year 2026-27 budget fee schedule and appropriation limit and the Sunnyvale financing authority adoption of the fiscal year 2026-2027 budget. Three actions are required by the City Council and one by the Sunnyvale financing authority. first the council must consider and take action on the proposed fee changes the proposed fee schedule is presented as exhibit a to the fee resolution which is attachment one utility service fees are addressed in the next item on your agenda Second, the Council must adopt the fiscal year 2026-2027 budget by June 30th of this year. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by resolution. The budget resolution, which is attachment to including exhibits, presents the appropriations by fund, fund transfers, and reserve changes that are necessary to implement the budget as recommended in this report. 3rd Council must adopt by resolution the fiscal 2026 2027 appropriations limit the calculations in detail supporting information are contained in attachment 3. Lastly the Sunnyvale financing authority must adopt by resolution the fiscal year 2026 27 budget for debt service related to the civic center bond issuance which totals approximately 7.5 million. The budget resolution and attachment for includes the appropriation for the debt service payment. Staff provided a detailed presentation of the recommended budget during the budget workshop on May the 19th. And on June 2nd, the city council and financing authority held a public hearing on the budget to receive public comment and ask additional questions. The city's boards and commissions have had the opportunity to review the recommended budget and their comments and meeting minutes are included in attachment five. Also included is a revised general fund financial plan reflecting position approvals made after the recommended budget was submitted, which is an attachment six. In addition, two of the council priority projects recommended for funding in the recommended budget have been updated to provide further clarification in attachment eight. Follow up on the two projects that were not recommended for funding is referenced in the staff report and were referenced in the June 2nd staff report. Follow-up from the May 19th budget workshop and answers to council's questions regarding this agenda packet are both posted to Legistar. The associated resolutions to approve the budget, fee schedule, and appropriations limit are also included. Staff recommends alternative one for consideration by the council and financing authority. This concludes our staff report and everyone is here to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you very much.

We'll come to council questions. First up is Authority Vice Chair, Vice Mayor Malinger.

Thank you very much for the mouthful of a title. so the question i have is regarding to the i have a number of questions but uh the one that is salient right at this moment is regarding the food co-op priority project i think um you know i was the one who asked the question in the monday morning about you know the possibility of the city engaging a speaker um to come and do a presentation on what it takes up to stand up a food co-op uh rather than you know committing to a full-on multi-million dollar project to potentially support a city sponsored grocery store um the response from staff indicated that uh having the office of economic development bring in such a speaker would delay the economic the retail master plan study one question i had and this is perhaps for the city manager is whether it would be feasible to have another department be responsible for engaging a speaker on this topic. For instance, I could see it being added on to the existing sustainability speaker series, essentially tell the sustainability commission, hey, you're doing one more talk this next year and it will be on food co-ops or alternatively having library and recreation services bring a speaker in since LRS has speakers on a variety of topics throughout the year anyway.

Thank you vice mayor for that that question. I think the first option is to have the Economic Development Department do it. I think we could. Probably do that without a delay, but I didn't want to commit that to happen. The sustainability speaker series. The speakers are determined by a subcommittee of the Sustainability Commission, so I think Council could suggest either advocate in your individual capacity or. should suggest as a body to the sustainability commission to to add a speaker in that way or the third way is there is a a national group called the Food Co-op Initiative that does webinars. They have recorded webinars on how to start a food co-op and they are specifically in place as a 501 to support food co-op establishment. So I think council could also share that with any interested members of the public who would like to read through that as well.

If I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is if it did impose a delay in the office of economic development, you think it would probably be fairly small.

That's correct. Yes.

Okay. Um, that satisfies my curiosity on that regard. I would be happy enough to just say that I'd leave it to the city managers, um, uh, judgment as to how that should be implemented and whether it's economic development or lrs or someone else rather than attempting to over prescribe as a council i think that does it for my questions for now thank you

If I could, Mayor, I would still prefer that if that was something that was desired by the full council for us to hold something, that that be part of a motion.

It will very likely be part of a motion that I make or an amendment that I make, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it. OK, I guess I do have one other question which is pertaining to the other declined, presumably declined policy proposal on partnering with other agencies for workforce housing. Staff said that you know you are engaging in conversations on that. I believe in the staff report. Could we get say a report back at the end of the year as to whether those conversations went anywhere? Or is it just? Sufficient to say that, you know, you'll tell us if you hear anything?

Yeah, I was planning to let Council know informally if anything happens as a result of those conversations. If there's anything to happen or to follow up on as part of those conversations, yes.

Okay. I would just say that, how shall I phrase it? I have a lot of appetite for this. I understand that we need partners, but I prefer an optimistic evaluation, let's say, if you're considering whether to bring that, bring information back. Thank you.

Thank you, Authority Vice Chair, Vice Mayor Mellinger. Next up is Authority Member, Council Member Chang.

Thank you. I wanted to follow up on my question from the last meeting regarding non-resident versus resident fees regarding golf and different Different rounds that were played it was shared that there were a little bit more from non residents compared to residents and sunken garden and. Not maybe not for today, but in the future, I would like to better understand how the resident and non resident is structured and if we could look at in the future if it makes sense that we raise non resident a little bit more compared to the resident fees, thank you.

no response needed currently no okay just checking um i had several questions um first of which uh following up on on the vice chair vice mayor's uh comments um as far as doing let's say another webinar or social or basically a discussion from a from a food co-op standpoint does additional funding need to be earmarked or is that in the um City Manager do you need additional direction from where that funding might come from or where is that left in the details that up to you

Initially, my take was that we should apply some additional funding to it, but I think we can look and see if somebody's interested in doing it for free. If we need to, we can come back for a budget modification separately.

Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you for that clarification. Next, I want to talk about the potential bike and ped counting program. And so staff gave us several options and basically said that a hardware solution isn't viable. And I would like to hear more on that from a staff recommendation standpoint and then further discussion. Thank you.

Sure. So we are recommending actually a hardware solution. Several of our traffic signals actually have.

Sorry, can you get a little closer or speak up? Thank you. Is that better? Yes, much better.

Thank you. So we are recommending a hardware option. We have several traffic signals that have video detection. So those cameras can actually count bike and ped uh pedestrians and bikes so what we are saying what we're recommending as a pilot is to use that technology to actually do that i think there was the first hardware solution was to buy another system and actually install it at a specific location and that would require power it would require design And of course, it would require a lot of money. So what we are recommending is something that we already have that we can use to get the same result. And I'm going to have Angela Obiso, who is our transportation manager, and she can also chime in and add a little bit more color to the question. Angela?

Yes, yes, thank you, Romana. So as he said, we've got video detection existing at many of our signals. Some of them need some upgrades in order to do these counts, but about a quarter of our city's traffic signals we can currently collect by Comped. So what we're thinking is we'll run a pilot program, see how much staff effort it takes to gather those counts and monitor. And then at the same time, we'll look at what will it cost to upgrade our other traffic signals and kind of come up with a long-term plan to get our whole system upgraded. But for now, just kind of seeing how much staff time will it take to actually collect that data. But that's our recommendation.

So I thank you for that. And just to clarify, so it's an automated count. that would be collected at our traffic center here in City Hall? Or is this additional effort that city staff would have to do on a daily basis to be collecting the counts? So ultimately, you know, trying to scope what city staff efforts are going to be to get this data.

Yeah, the real answer is kind of halfway in between. As part of the detection, our camera system is currently counting at each cycle to see there are, you know, four bikes there, there are five bikes there, whatever. So that data is continually being counted. The amount of staff effort that we don't know yet that this pilot program will help us understand is How much staff time will it take for us to query the system, obtain those counts, and then start to track them in some database outside of the system? That's not something that we've done to date except for specific projects. So we want to start having that data on an ongoing basis. That's the question, how much staff time that will take.

Okay.

Did that answer your question?

That answers my question. So for me, and this is something that I wish this had come up earlier, because this is something that if we had the capability, we should have been doing for a long time now. I'm trying to get the data that before we install bike lanes or bike lane changes, trying to collect that data in a reasonable fashion as opposed to just the intersections where conceivably bikes are backed up or passing through those intersections, understanding that we have video technology now. How long before we see our first data? And from a council standpoint, we have certain intersections that we're monitoring. And thank you for the response to the question, but trying to get a better idea of the value of this. Because it's like looking at what new ATP projects are going in. We want to see, and we made changes to, for example, Maud and Matilda. I wish we had had the before and after data for Maud and Matilda and what conceivable change in ridership we might have seen. Up to this point, staff has always told me that the only counts that we do are visual counts of someone sitting there counting bikes going through an intersection or bikes going along a corridor. If this capability is there, how long do we think it'll be before staff can enable it?

I'm going to let Angela answer that.

Okay. So to answer, it sounds like a few different questions in there. The technology of the video detection hasn't always been as good as it is today, and we haven't always had the upgrades that we now are implementing. We're implementing as projects come to be, and we get funding, and we say, oh, there are old cameras at this intersection, but we need to do the whole intersection upgrade, so we then include the latest and greatest video detection system. We also recently upgraded the software that gathers all of the video data. And so that technology is a little bit new. So we haven't always had this capability. It's a relatively new thing. The purpose of the system is to detect bikes and peds and vehicles in order to run the traffic signals. So that's been the main focus to date. There hasn't really been any direction or querying about using the system in this way. And it was once it came up at the budget workshop, where we went back and took a look and said, oh, our system can do this. How many locations can we do this at? And what would it cost if we wanted to expand it everywhere? So it's a conversation that we haven't really had until recently. So hopefully that addresses your concerns there.

So I'm just going to just add to what Angela is saying. I think you're also looking at some kind of an idea of what it would take in terms of staff effort to actually collect, to program, let's say a specific location to be able to collect this data. So I'm thinking, I'm just going to guess, I think about 20 to 40 hours is what it would take to program a specific location to be able to start counting and collecting this data that we are looking for. And Angela, is that a good estimate?

Yeah, sounds good.

And is that within the current budget?

Yeah, so what I said was, as a pilot, if there's a specific location that we're interested in, we could basically do that as a pilot to assess what it would take to actually be able to start collecting this data.

Okay, so I appreciate that. It's not as flexible as I would like to see and, you know, conceivably I'll have further discussion with the city manager on whether or not this needs to be a later agendized item. So the sooner we get past July 1st and get a better idea of the timing of that, I would really appreciate that. So thank you for that. So thank you. Next, and this kind of goes to some of my questions from the budget workshop, as well as the Monday morning questions, and it talks a little bit about DPS overtime. So, Chief, one of the things that we've seen, you know, kind of for the last few years is pretty much a flat level of overtime from a DPS standpoint on a yearly basis, kind of irregardless of staffing and, you know, as we've increased the number of sworn officers as well as kind of reach full staffing, those numbers have been pretty much, or the amount spent on overtime has remained pretty flat that it's like, always about $10 million, although we budget around six, five and a half, six as memory serves. And just want to get a better feel for how you think conceivably we're looking at adding an additional five staff to DPS this year and how that hopefully will affect our overtime budget because For me, we added several officers a few years ago and understanding that there's constant fluctuation within the department, but do we think that we'll get a handle around overtime?

Thank you, Mayor. So Dan Pistor, Chief of Public Safety. The overtime budget is a concern and it's something that we are certainly focusing on this year. The short answer to your question is the community group that we're going to be standing up does have a component in there that will we anticipate will help us on our overtime and specifically we developed that team to work on the weekends in straight time so that'll help us in the significant cost that the department handles during special events we are also forming that team to have no set hourly time frame it'll depend on the need And our current model is whenever we have community issues that are needing to be addressed from a public safety standpoint, we address those concerns through overtime. So this team conceivably will be working a lot of their time on straight time. So yes, the short answer is yes, we anticipate that the team will help us drive down our overtime numbers. We are also taking many steps through the management team to focus on our overtime budget. But overtime, as you alluded to, is a difficult thing for public safety to keep track of because it's difficult to plan for, right? obviously we have to maintain our service levels no matter what no matter what the kind of world throws at public safety we have to be able to respond and still do our community events and all the things that are important to council and in the community so that drives up over time but over time is also an issue and something that we are paying attention to also from an officer wellness standpoint right i mean we don't want to burn out our staff by continuously working overtime So I got a little long-winded there, but I hope I answered your question.

No, and that to me is part of the question. It's a mixture of things. It's burdening staff as well as figuring out whether or not we're making a difference. It's like throwing additional officers at the problem if that's not lowering lowering the amount of overtime we need to reevaluate at the end of the day is part of my question. You know, I had some questions about mutual aid. I did want to kind of follow up on, let's say, activation. So especially like this year, we have Super Bowl, we have FIFA, and there's a lot of like additional traffic monitoring assistance do we get funded i know mutual aid is kind of a separate thing but from but from let's say lawrence expressway tasman our efforts from a city standpoint to assist in especially those areas What funding do we get from a city and how is that called up?

Yes, I would also add to the list that you just gave us, but we had the Palisade fires, we had some major hurricanes that affected the US that we sent our members to. It's a complicated question, but the answer is yes, when we participate and we help out our neighbors in Santa Clara, we do get reimbursed, but we don't get reimbursed for a backfill over time. So from a management point of view, what we try to do is utilize officers that are off duty so we don't create vacancies that need to be filled through mandatory overtime. But we do get reimbursed from Santa Clara when we do send our officers there. So in Super Bowl, we did send a significant number of officers to help stand up Santa Clara's ability because obviously no one department could handle something like Super Bowl and they needed help. And it's It benefits the city of Sunnyville to keep this region safe, right? So we are the second largest city in the county. We need to be good neighbors and ultimately having a safe county benefits Sunnyville. So that is how we determine when and how many officers get sent to mutual aid requests. We try to do our best, but our primary focus is Sunnyville and our budget. So it's a balancing act and it depends on what is happening in our city and what is happening in our current staffing and how our equipment looks. but yes we do get reimbursed in those instances but it's the backfill over time that really gets you and there's also several grants so you talked about traffic initiatives a lot of those are done through grant programs that we receive from the state no and I appreciate that thank you you know and it's mutual aid it's assistance across the county across the state and beyond

wherever we can help and understanding that, and I commend the officers for going above and beyond to that degree. It's keeping our community safe, number one, but when there's countywide events, and or statewide emergency it's assisting where we can and realizing that now we're we're not sending the whole department there but but you know key individuals to help out in certain cases so so thank you and pass that thanks on to the officers and i think that's all the questions related to overtime so thank you thank you and let's see where was i mr kirby i thought you had a comment but still no thank you okay um i think that is all of my questions for now see no other questions or comments from the joint authority Let me go ahead and 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. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have two speaker cards in the room, Agnes V followed by Zach K.

good evening council staff and members of the public i'm agnes veith and i sit on the sunnyvale community services board on june 2nd i spoke before council regarding the county's proposed funding reductions to the emergency assistance network homeless prevention program and the effect these cuts will have on sunnyvale community services During this meeting, Council Members Sell and Cisneros asked me questions regarding these cuts, and I provided my written response to Council and staff on Tuesday, June 9th. Since the 9th, I have met with our City Manager, and he will be convening a meeting with SCS to discuss these funding reductions. I would like to thank Mr. Kirby for his interest in SCS and the work we do. Thank you.

Thank you in one moment. Mr. Kerr, do you have a comment?

I do. Thank you. No, thank you, Agnes. I appreciate that. I just want to provide a little bit more color. I think there's a lot of moving parts happening right now in this space and one thing's clear that funding is under pressure with Somerville Community Services. I think back when maybe in the the springtime or a little bit, maybe even earlier, we discussed with council, maybe even last year, we talked with council about if we saw funding shortfalls with SCS or with some of our federal funding, especially that comes to support human services, that we would evaluate that and come back to council with a plan. And I want to thank Agnes, and I know Marie's not here, but also Marie, for working with us to try to nail down what that actually confusing and very complicated picture looks like over the next few months. But we are committed to working together to try to find a solution to continue to support our community. So thank you, Mayor, for the opportunity. And thank you, Agnes, for your comments.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up is Zach Kay.

My impression is enterprise funds are supposed to engage in cost recovery for the services they provide. Is that going on? If CalPERS comes up short, are the fees within enterprise funds adjusted to cover the incurred pension liability? Or to put it differently, are they covering the true cost of their employees? Our unfunded pension liability is rather large.

Thank you. Oh, uh, authority vice chair.

Vice mayor manager for staff, um, that is actually an interesting question as to how, um, funding for pension shortfall works as opposed with regard to enterprise fund. We have the irrevocable pension trust. which is not enterprise dollars going into that, correct? That's basically, we've typically been contributing excess ERAF and other things that would typically go into the general fund, right?

Yes, at least during my experience here, that's been the general fund going into the pension trust.

But that pension trust will be applied to employees who work whose salary comes out of enterprise funds as well, correct?

Yeah, those costs are spread proportionally according to the number of employees in each. So our pension costs are spread proportionally amongst all the different funds, yes.

If for whatever reason CalPERS has shortfalls in excess of what we predict and what we've modeled in our 20 year budget, which right now we've modeled that we can cover those shortfalls. um then that could lead to rate increases down the line correct sure if it depends on the the level and severity of the of the shortfalls but those pension costs increase that could be a contributing factor to to uh consideration increase rates okay um are the are rate increases being used to help address pension liability currently

That's a tough question to answer, but it's a mix of a lot of different factors when it comes to each of the enterprises, but that's one of the costs for sure that they have to bear.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. That was the last of questions in the room. City Clerk, do we have anyone remote wishing to speak?

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

Hello again, this is Steve talking. I think DPS does a great job, but I'm concerned about the limited resources in traffic enforcement. I think there's like five officers working on traffic and Sunnyvale has the most atrocious drivers. I mean, it's just, you see it. I mean, you see the driving around here. It's just absolutely like mind-boggling how bad the drivers are and what they do. Right. Please do look at more funding for traffic enforcement. I mean, these are lives at stake and we need to do something about the really atrocious driving that happens. Second thing, not for this budget, for the future, revenue is always good and contributions by folks are good. And I was really sad to hear all the criticism of you guys about the parking. and the status of unhoused situations yeah i'm saddened by that but i'm what i'm more certain by is the billionaires that come here and criticize you that aren't doing their share i mean literally folks what we have going here is you guys are doing your absolute damnedest to get stuff done and these guys come in and criticize you unfairly for stuff that's going on and they won't come up with some parking to help our unhoused people be where they need to be. I'm so sorry about the greed, the billionaires, and all I ask you to do is think about increasing the business tax, particularly on those people that are protected by Proposition 13. We have a lot of rich landowners that somehow came to Silicon Valley early on, and now they have great corporate advantage in tax rates on your corporate real estate in the city. Meanwhile, you've done a great job creating a framework for unhoused facilities. You've invited people to do something, and they don't. These rich billionaires come here and criticize you unfairly, and I'm sick of it. I think the new owner of the buildings on Matilda, they should step up. Our number one employer in this city is who? Apple Computer. Why aren't the billionaires still stepping up and why aren't you criticizing them? Because there's a huge problem with wealth disparity. Wealth disparity brings unhappiness to everyone in the community, whether you're a billionaire, a millionaire, or whether you're just scraping by trying to do housekeeping or landscaping or whatever and getting chased by ice. Billionaires

not city council you guys you're doing your best billionaires you need to step up thank you thank you mayor that was the final remote public speaker for this agenda item okay i'll go ahead and close the public hearing on this item um and bring it back to the council and financing authority are there any final questions before we get to motion um authority vice chair vice mayor mellinger got it

Chief Pistor, you mentioned the Community Crime Reduction Task Force. Is that the correct? We need to come up with a cuter acronym for that. One of the things that I have been wondering about as well, and that the previous commenter brought up, is the issue with traffic enforcement. Will this task force be able to take on, at least in certain spot instances, traffic enforcement duties? I'm thinking about, for instance, back to school first couple of weeks, things like that.

it's the community crime response team no community crime response team so we'll work on the acronym it's ccrt and yes the short answer is yes that is exactly how this team is going to be utilized so whenever there is an issue within the community that needs to be addressed traffic is our number one complaint this team will be flexible and will be able to move throughout the city to address concerns and focus on an issue

OK, just speaking, not providing direction as one or putting this in a motion or anything. I absolutely think that traffic enforcement should be a major priority for this team. It is one of the biggest complaints that I get from my constituents as well. I appreciate that. Thank you. Other questions. Mr. Pollan, so this would be the item where we would tackle the senior golf rate for Sunken Gardens, correct? So that should be in a motion.

That's the senior fee. The change in the senior fees is included in the fee schedule in front of you.

It is already included. Thank you. Okay. A couple of weeks ago when we banned van lording, we talked about bringing back the maximum fine permissible. Is that in that fee schedule as well currently?

Yes, it is.

Okay, great. Let's see here. The last thing I wanted to bring up was that leadership Sunnyvale a couple of weeks ago came and asked for an increase in their funding. I would be of a mind to increase that from $6,000 to $8,000 per year and add a $200 per year simple cost escalator on that so that it keeps up roughly with inflation. Is that a, this would be the time and place to do that, correct? Yes. Okay. So I will signal to my colleagues that whatever motion I make may include that.

One question. Does that need, does that, is that part of both the financing authority and the council's motion or just the council's?

understand my question that's that's a good parliamentary question from from a budget perspective it's just it's just the councils okay just double check thank you madam city attorney i'm sure will tell us if we need to make it included in both motions um i think i think i am ready with a motion if my colleagues have no further comments or feedback

I see none. So let's do the council motion first.

Okay. Let me pull this up in the and of course, I close my packet. Give me one second. I apologize.

And I'll ask city staff, would it be alternative one with modifications or alternative two? depending upon um I think the the costs that are middle to say minimal um so if there's no real change from a cost standpoint would it still be one with modifications or would it be two with no specified cost changes so I'm assuming you're referring to the proposal that the vice mayor just correct

throughout so right so our our proposed recommendation is alternative one yeah right and you're saying maybe with the if we're talking about the changes so any changes i that's what i'm but but they were asking for additional changes but i think

we'll leave it to you. So go ahead, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I move alternative two with the following provisions. One, that staff host, that the city host a public seminar meeting speaker on the possibility of establishing a food co-op and what that takes in the next fiscal year and come back to council if that requires additional funding. Two, that we increase the allocation for leadership Sunnyvale in the budget from $6,000 per year to $8,000 per year, increasing by $200 per year annually going forward.

Thank you. Council Member Sell.

Second.

to your motion.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. This budget is the product of a lot of hard work by staff. Council has put in our own share of elbow grease into this document as well. I want to thank my colleagues for everything that has been proposed and worked through on this. There are a number of great things in this document. I'm going to toot my own horn for a moment and talk about, you know, the increased resources and the Strategy for retail in the office of economic development that we are going to now be taking moving forward on tackling our sidewalk maintenance backlog that we now have a 13 year plan to clear our sidewalk maintenance backlog. Right now, when someone submits a sidewalk maintenance request, it can take years for it to be dealt with. We are going to fix that. It is going to take a while, but we are going to do it. We have a number of other proposal, excellent proposals that have made it in. Streamlining the city permitting process, which was proposed by no fewer than three of my colleagues, Mayor Klein, Council Member Cisneros, Council Member Chang. Expanding the Safe Routes to School program. I think that's going to be critical. The new nonprofit grant program that Council Member Srini Vasan proposed. That is an excellent idea. I'm very happy to see that moving forward. There are two more that are escaping my memory at the moment, but that's okay. we are going to be establishing a senior rate for golf for golfers at sunken gardens. That's a fantastic thing. Um, you know, nine hole courses are sort of a natural for our senior community. So I think it's great that we're going to be providing additional support to them and many thanks to the ladies golf club at sunken sunken gardens, uh, for helping push this forward. Um, and I will emphasize again, just how valuable, the increased staffing levels across departments is going to be in the department of community development in the department of public safety the ccrt is going to be a tremendous tool for this city to keep our residents safe and deal with the various quality of life issues that fill our inboxes every week i think this is a fantastic document and i respectfully urge my colleagues i vote thank you

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Council Member Sell. Yeah, I'm really impressed with the way that the staff and the council in these very dire economic times has been able to use its funds very carefully so that in this budget we're able to expand services such as with public safety, with that task force, with a strategic staff, full-time staff in certain areas to improve service and efficiency and also really impressed many years ago, several years ago that There's that set aside service level set aside of 3.5 million a couple of years ago and then this year to use that over the years and this year to strategically invest that into helping with our unhoused comprehensive unhoused solution program and then also with the micro transit so that more in our community will be able to get to places in Sunnyvale. So while other communities are contracting services, Sunnyvale, because of the excellent work of our staff and the excellent work of the council and the community have joined together and we're able to fund these many things with the resources that we have so just really impressed with this budget and our community our staff and our council thank you council member next up is council member lay

Thank you so much. I will be voting in support of this motion. Thank you to the Vice Mayor for making it. I can't, for the life of me, find the proper attribution to this quote, so I'm going to read the one that Google AI gave me from President Biden, which is, don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value. And I think that's a great way to see what Sunnyvale values. We're putting more money into communication to better interact with members of our community. We're putting more money into DPS services. We're putting money into safe routes to school to And to the point that was made earlier today of sidewalks being an accessibility issue, we're putting more money into sidewalks. These are things that I heard about during my campaign that I'm sure my colleagues have too, and ways that your city government is committed to making our RESIDENTS' LIVES BETTER. I'M VERY EXCITED TO SUPPORT THIS BUDGET. I'M VERY EXCITED TO SEE THE WORK THAT WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO IN COLLABORATION WITH CITY STAFF. AND I THANK MY COLLEAGUES AND THE CITY STAFF FOR EVERYONE'S HARD WORK ON THIS. THANK YOU.

THANK YOU, COUNCILMEMBER. COUNCILMEMBER CHEN. OH, SORRY, COUNCILMEMBER CISNEROS.

YES, THANK YOU. AND THANK YOU TO MY COLLEAGUES FOR TYING THIS TOGETHER WITH SOME QUESTIONS. I WANT TO THANK STAFF. a number of conversations about this document, generating ideas, and also having the opportunity to give our feedback. And it really was wrapped up in here. And every time I went to go up, I have a question about it, it's already there. It's already in the budget. So that was really great to see. Really good work, everyone. In Sunnyvale, we are very proud the financial situation that we often find ourselves in and rightfully so. It feels really good to be able to talk to people about our city budget and how healthy it is in the approach that we take. And I'm always mindful of the fact that we are where we are because of many decades of very careful budgeting and building a culture of discipline. in this city that we are stewards of taxpayer money and we take that very seriously and we are going to make the most prudent and cost-effective decisions we can while also maintaining excellent services to our community. What has changed over the many decades is what those services mean and I appreciate my colleague for mentioning that. the fact that a budget is a statement of values, both of the people that are making that decision, but also of the community that we are responding to. And in addition to discipline and providing, doing the basics really, really well, our values also include ambition, our ambition to be better than we were last year. things like refining the study issue process or the permitting process or working on our plans to improve retail. I think what this budget really spoke to me is that we're willing to look at the way we do things and challenge ourselves and hold ourselves accountable to be as excellent as possible, even when that includes expanding our scope and, you know, discussing our values in a very transparent and open way. And I want to thank everyone who has engaged in that discussion with us, because not only has that informed our policy decisions, but that really helps inform what we're able to do in the long term with this budget. And I'm very happy to see that we're still in that good financial position, that you can be very fiscally responsible, but also very ambitious and progressive your policies at the same time those are not in contradiction i think we prove that every single year right here in sunnyvale i'm proud to be a part of it so thank you very much for the opportunity thank you councilmember councilmember chang

Thank you. I think the budget really does focus on improving core services delivery to our residents, and I do believe and commend staff for that. I do have a friendly amendment to Vice General Mellinger. And for Leadership Sunnyvale, the $200 annual increase, if you could amend that to the roughly 3% annual adjustment that the rest of the fees have.

So, hold on a second.

Doing math on the dais is always dangerous. So, Vice Mayor, I could offer that you proposed a 33% one-year increase followed by 2.5%, and that 2.5% decreases with $200 a year.

Yes, I think it's just that $200 annually is something not normal to me in budgeting. So I guess it's just more in line with the other fee schedules. the increase so your friendly amendment is specifically just for the increase after this initial increase for the annual percentage increase to be three percent in line with the other fee scale i'll accept that to the second yes thank you so i think

So it would be 3% after the first initial increase to 8,000?

Yes.

Okay.

So that's about $240 for the first year? Sure.

Okay. City manager has.

I'm sorry, I'm catching up here. We're talking about the leadership signing bill contribution?

Yeah, the cost escalator instead of a $200 per year flat cost escalator, a 3% cost escalator.

Yeah, if I can suggest just having an individual cost escalator for a single line item in the budget is administratively burdensome, I'd recommend we just... say inflate the cost as we inflate other expenses in in the budget sure I'll take that secondary secondary also okay yes that's what I was trying to go for thank you okay great that's that's fine that's fine thank you thank you Councilmember Chang any other comments thank you okay and and I'll be very short thank you thank you again for

bringing this budget to us, listening to our concerns and having a robust budget workshop just last month. Ultimately, you know, it's like this to me, the budget is meeting our, to the certain degree and to the most important thing, is meeting our goal of the 20-year plan, the 10-year balanced budget. from an operational standpoint where a lot of cities are looking at reducing staffing and cutting resources. We are actually adding 14 new employees this year. That to me really is critical. And then looking at the new priority projects, thank you for finding the appropriate budgetary locations to make sure that these get funded and looking at adding additional operations from a city standpoint. So I'm happy to support this motion. With that, City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion for City Council carries 6-0 with Councilmember Cerny-Vaz in absent.

Thank you, and now we'll move on to the financing authority motion. Mr. Kirby, did you have another comment? Mr. Kirby? Did, oh, just checking. Okay, Authority Vice Chair Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Authority Chair Mayer-Klein. I move alternative one for the Sunnyvale Financing Authority adopt the fiscal year 26-27 budget resolution SFA, including Exhibit A, presented as attachment for to the report, including the amendments that we just made.

Thank you. Authority Member Sell? Second. Thank you. To your motion? Please vote yes. Thank you. And with that, City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

Let me ask first, just let me clarify for meeting minutes. I don't believe that any of the amendments that were made to the council motion apply to the financing authority minutes. Is that correct? Okay. Thank you. So just to separate that. So the minutes reflect what staff's going to do.

Thank you.

The motion for the financing authority passes 6-0 with authority member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. This joint City Council and Sunnyvale Financing Authority meeting is adjourned at 9.11 p.m. Let's go ahead and take a five-minute recess and come back at 9.16. Thank you. let's go ahead and reconvene to the city council meeting and move to general business our next item is item 26-0149 adopt proposed utility rate increase for fiscal year 2026-2027, rates for water, wastewater, and solid waste utilities, and find CEQA exemption pursuant to public resource code section 21080B8 and CEQA guidelines section 15273. Is there a staff report?

Yes, there is. Good evening, Mayor Klein and members of the City Council. I'm Stephen Napier. I'm the Business and Enterprise Services Manager in the Finance Department. The item before you this evening is the annual review of the City's utility rates for water, wastewater, and solid waste and recycling services. The city provides water, wastewater, and solid waste services for Sunnyvale residents and businesses, as well as wastewater service for the Rancho Rinconada area of Cupertino. The utilities are self-supporting and funded solely through utility rates. Each year, as part of the budget process, staff reviews the financial condition of the utility funds and recommends adjustments to utility rates for both customers inside and outside the city. The rates for each utility are based on the cost of providing the service. To ensure the rates are properly aligned with the cost of service, studies are completed approximately every five years. We recently completed a solid waste cost of service study in fiscal year 24-25 and we will be beginning shortly a study for both water and wastewater rates early in fiscal year 26-27. The proposed rate increases for fiscal year 2627 are seven and a half percent for water 7% for wastewater and 3% for solid waste and recycling. If you compare that to our projections from last year's plan, so the proposed rate increases are unchanged for both water and wastewater rates from our original projections and we were able to lower it by 1% from what we projected last year on the solid waste rate increase. Water rates are being driven primarily by the cost for purchased water. Purchased water is approximately 62% of the operating cost for the utility. San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has announced that it will increase the rate for purchased water by 7.4% and valley water by 9.1%. Other drivers of the rate increase are improvements to aging infrastructure, such as water main replacements and the upcoming implementation of automated meter infrastructure. The recommended rate increase again is 7.5%. Wastewater rates are being driven primarily by infrastructure needs, mostly related to the reconstruction of the water pollution control plant, known as the Sunnyvale clean water program the recommended wastewater rate increases 7%. Solid waste rates are largely driven by inflationary increases in costs for contracted collection, garbage transfer, and disposal services. Rates also include the cost for monitoring and maintaining the closed semivale landfill as required by state and federal environmental protection regulations in compliance with state mandates to increase diversion of organics and other material from landfill disposal. there is also a project to complete facility improvements and equipment upgrades at the smart station that is expected to be complete by the end of 2026. the overall rate increase recommended is three percent for solid waste Sunnyvale fiscal policy requires that rates recover the cost of service, that they are reviewed annually, and that the rates support the total cost of the utility. Proposition 218 requires that property related fees may not exceed the proportional cost of the service attributable to the parcel. There is also a public notification process required to increase property related fees. This hearing was noticed in compliance with the requirements of Proposition 218. Notices were mailed to all utility customers on May 1st, 2026. Should the City receive written protests from a majority of the customers, the proposed rates would not become effective and the current rates would remain in place. As of right now, staff has received 102 protests, an update of two protests. excuse me, an update of six protests from before. And those primarily fall into two categories. So 53 of those or roughly half were citing financial hardship as a concern. And then another 22 of them were suggesting that we just find another way to raise the revenue or potentially reduce costs in other areas. And then there were a number of other reasons as well. Municipal utilities in California operate under strict rate setting laws and those prohibit providing subsidies to one group of customers using revenue generated by another group of customers. Since the city's utilities are funded only by the rates for each service, we are unable to offer a utility funded low income or other discount program. For customers who need assistance paying their utility bill, we have partnered with Sunnyvale Community Services to offer an assistance program that's funded largely by donations. The program will help pay one utility bill per year for eligible customers. Customers apply directly to Sunnyvale Community Services, and if they are approved, the city will be notified and a credit applied to the customer's account. So for this fiscal year, over $27,000 of support was provided to customers in the city. Aside from the Sunnyvale Community Services program, the city also offers payment arrangements with no interest for customers upon request. They would just contact us at the utility billing office. okay so staff recommends uh alternatives one and two find that the project is exempt from the california environmental quality act and alternative to adopt a resolution increasing the water rates by 7.5 percent wastewater rates by seven percent and solid waste rates by three percent for fiscal year 26 27. uh this concludes my staff report this evening i am available to answer any questions that you may have thank you for your time Thank you.

I'll bring it to Council for questions. You talked a little bit about the hardship requests. How many of those do we normally get approximately on a yearly basis?

Yeah, so for the community services program, I believe that 27,000 was split among 35 customers this year. I believe there have been additional requests that have come in as well. Some may currently be in progress. There may be others who may not have qualified. Thank you.

And I have heard from multiple seniors, let's say, who have an issue with the size of our garbage cans, even though they have the smallest can. And, you know, they're basically saying just the size of it is problematic. There's a program for seniors to conceivably request that our specialty waste ultimately helps them with those cans. Is that correct?

Mansoor, would you like to weigh in on that?

good evening uh mayor uh and uh council keith quinlan esd solid waste yes there is a program uh that uh we can assist with pulling out those containers for our our seniors okay and understand it's it's not a common thing but i have heard you know and

the community often helps out the neighbor to a certain degree that being said uh there is that possibility if they do have let's say a a um and this being disability pride month have a physical issue with taking out those containers um you know specialty waste is available to help out yes okay i appreciate that thank you thank you um council member chang

Thank you, how does the city work with multi unit family or apartment complexes are those with shared meters that might not get this information directly.

yeah so I mean the notices do go out to all of the utility account holders, we also do send them out. We have an advertised on the Internet through the city's websites, there are ways that people could we also are able to talk to people about it through the utility billing office.

Okay, thank you, is there a split of from the protests were received if there's a breakdown of if there's a specific area or. People certain areas more concerned.

We actually didn't tally it up that way, but that's a good idea and something we can consider for next year, thank you.

Thank you next up is Council member so.

Yeah, I'm looking at the charts that says monthly utility bill comparisons, single family residential, and it's pretty impressive how Sunnyvale ranks. For water, I believe Sunnyvale is lowest compared to seven other nearby cities. And for solid waste, I believe Sunnyvale is the lowest. cost compared to seven other cities and then for the total um I believe like only one other city out of the seven um is lower than Sunnyvale I was just wondering in general why do you think that is that Sunnyvale does so well in those categories

I attribute a lot of it to our financial planning. So we have a 20 year financial plan that we use to be able to project out much further than many other municipalities or utilities might. And so we're able to help anticipate things as they're coming and try to plan for those. In addition to that, we do keep additional reserves or rate stabilization reserve available within the funds that can help us absorb some short term stocks. So if we end up with a really large wholesale increase in one year, others may not have those reserves and they have to

basically do an equivalent increase to be able to recover their costs but for us we're able to better absorb that because of that reserve okay thank you quite impressive thank you thank you thank you council member next is council members yes thank you very much for the presentation and it's always great to see us reduce the amount that we are increasing something from year to year like with the um with the solid waste and you have the examples we put forward these programs, they took investment themselves to do these zero waste investments. I want to talk, but I want to talk about, you know, what, if we can, I'm trying to, I'm sorry, it's a little late, so I'm trying to say, so for water, for the other utilities, we have the major infrastructure investments over time, do you think that we're going to see a reduction in how much we're increasing the rate of year over year with those as well?

If you're talking for future years, I think there's a lot of factors that could change between now and then. So the projections that we've put forward this year are really our best effort at projecting what's going to happen in the future years. But there are a lot of factors, particularly given that we have some pretty large projects in place right now, especially on the wastewater side with the clean water program. So all those would be factors in that.

Okay. And of course we, It's not just Sunnyvale. We also have the Rancho Rinconada neighborhood and Cupertino and had for, I guess, a pretty long time. Is there still no plans for them to, that's going to continue into the indefinite future?

yeah i'm not aware of any plans for uh that to go away there actually was an additional section that was part of san jose and uh san jose uh basically purchased the the rights from that from us a couple of years ago and uh but i don't know of any plans to um have the cupertino go anywhere else okay and uh everyone gets the same fee across the cities we don't just because it's sunnyvale it's every it's completely flat That's right. The only difference is there is an administrative fee because we do not directly bill the customers that are in the Rancho Rinconada area. We place them on the tax roll. So we pass along the 1% administrative fee that were assessed by the county.

Oh, that's actually very helpful to realize too, because I was also thinking with, um, you know, say that there is somebody in the Rancho Rinconada neighborhood who is experiencing hardship and we would normally send them to Sunnyvale community services. It's not Sunnyvale.

That's true.

So have we experienced that? Um, And what would we do in that situation?

Yeah, so, you know, I have not heard of that. But we absolutely do have resources that we can refer people to, even if they can't directly help them with their utility bills. You know, Sunnyvale Community Services offers a variety of services to people beyond utility bills. So, you know, if we can't help them with utility bills, maybe we can refer them to someone who may be able to help them with food or rent or other needs that could then free up a little bit more money to be able to afford the utility bill.

I really appreciate that perspective. Thank you. I don't have any other questions.

Thank you, council member. That's all of council questions. Let me go ahead and 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. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have one speaker card. uh steve s

Good evening, everyone. I wasn't going to speak on this topic until you brought up the can sizes and helping seniors, which I guess I qualify for that. I'd like to bring to your attention that people So objecting to this is a futile effort and that really shows the fallacy of our government thumbing their nose at the citizens to say you have to have 50% of written sign turned in. So I didn't bother to turn one in the last two years because it's a futile effort. So I understand government's disrespectful to us in that respect. I guess it's Sacramento. On the can issue, let's use my own example here is that I don't need anything more than the small can, but I have to take the medium can because of the false bottom that was put in to the small can. I couldn't get anything in there. If I had to cut up a hose or something else, I couldn't get those things in there. So I have a can that's larger, I'm paying more than I need. But now there's actually a new thing that's not tied to seniors. So maybe you could adjust that false bottom thing so I go back and save $7 a month or whatever it is. The city uses chip seal for the streets, which is a great thing for a cost savings. My street was done about 10 days ago. I've had quite a few calls with the city public works people since and discovered that my street has had chips sealed three times since sometime in the 90s. And we discussed things such as, Well, the irons, they call them the irons, the manhole covers, the valve covers, the gas shutoffs, they're deeper and deeper and deeper. I've measured them. They're about one and a half or two inches below the surface. But this latest chip seal has now created a trip and fall liability for the city. The first time that I had my refuse day and I took down my can, my medium one, it's a little heavier. I also have a sloped driveway. When I got to the curb, as I went down the apron of the driveway, I ran into a one inch high obstruction that made that can virtually almost fall over for me catching it. So am I going to fall into a face plant in the middle of that? And when I talked to the public's work person, he said, yeah, the problem is you've had three levels. That's too much. But the city and the city manager and the city council keep thinking, oh, savings to cost is great. So now the city is talking about doing raising the irons up there. I guess at the very least, you might want to look at the driveway aprons and grind those edges down. Because I have literally a one-inch bump right there that you can't get the refuse can over. So please have that looked at. Thank you.

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

Yes, Mayor. First up is someone calling in with a phone number ending in 495. The individual calling in with a phone number ending in 495. You've been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council. You may need to dial star six to unmute. The individual calling in with a phone number ending in 495. Yep, now you're unmuted. Thank you.

Hi. As a Sunnyvale resident and utility customer, I strongly object to these proposed increases. Residents are already facing significant financial pressures due to the rising cost of living. Housing costs, groceries, insurance premiums, childcare expenses, and especially gas prices. continuing to increase, especially due to the war, making it more difficult for families to afford basic necessities. At a time when many households are struggling to keep up with everyday expenses, additional utility rate increases are unreasonable and place an unfair burden on residents. The city is proposing increases of 7.5% for water, 7% for wastewater, and 3% for solid waste and recycling services. While the city cites infrastructures and operational costs as justification, residents should not be expected to continually absorb higher cost year after year. The projected increase of approximately 149 per year for a typical household may not seem significant on paper, but for many families, every additional expense matters. I respectfully request that the city council reject the proposed utility rate increases in their entirety. The city should pursue alternative solutions, including reducing unnecessary improving operational, sorry, efficiencies, seeking available grants and outside funding sources, and identifying cost-saving measures before imposing additional financial burdens on residents. Sunnyvale residents deserve reliable utility services, but they also deserve protection from continual rate increases that outpace household budgets. Given the ongoing economic challenges and rising gas prices that affect nearly every aspect of daily life, now is not the time to increase utility rates. Please accept this and hopefully we're able to not have this. Thank you.

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

Okay, I'll go ahead and close the public hearing on this item and bring it back to Council for a motion or any final questions.

Does council have a motion? Council member, sell. I'd like to make a motion if nobody else has questions. Go ahead. So I'd like to make a motion. Find that this action, alternative one, find that this action is exempt from CEQA pursuant. Do I read the whole thing? You can just say alternative. That's fine. Okay. Alternative one and alternative two. Thank you.

Vice Mayor Mellinger. Second. To your motion.

As it was mentioned, when you look at the comparison between Sunnyvale and seven other cities locally nearby, similar size, some larger, Sunnyvale for many of the categories ranks in the lowest cost. um so it is just really impressive when i ask staff like how much thought goes into trying to keep that utility cost low for the sunnyvale residents and although we never like to see prices raised but uh Sunnyvale appears the staff is trying its best to do different techniques to keep the costs low. So I really appreciate that for the residents of Sunnyvale. So thank you for staff working so hard to do that.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I will be supporting the motion. Utility rates in California are essentially cost recovery. And yes, prices for everyday families are going up, but also prices that the city is paying to provide these services are going up. this is not something these shortfalls these cost increases cannot be made up by external grants there is yes we can look at long-term efficiencies we are doing that continuously but to make those efficiencies typically requires an initial capital outlay there is no way for us to maintain a balanced budget and continue providing reliable utilities service without annual rate increases we try to keep those rate increases as low as we can those rate increases are strictly governed by the state of california but at the end of the day this is necessary for the long-term fiscal health and stability of the city so i respectfully urge my colleagues i vote thank you thank you vice mayor

And I'll be supporting this motion. Definitely, this is for the utilities that we are looking at here, you know, basically water, solid waste, and wastewater. All these are cost recovery on the expenditures from these funds. You know, it's like we are not making a profit that goes to other operations within the city. I will take um... i will raise questions with what the vice mayor said we're only looking at those three you know when you're looking at at the cost of energy within the community uh... from electricity and gas uh... that is PG&E for a gas standpoint and and for an electric bill standpoint it's uh... for the majority of the city silicon valley clean energy providing eighteen percent of your bill and uh... of your electric bill and The other 82% is all maintenance and distribution from a PG&E standpoint, which the city isn't in control of. But thank you for the residents who have raised issues. We try to keep these rates as minimal as possible. and ultimately understand that that uh from a city standpoint it's like it is And as as councilmember sell pointed to you know, we have some of the lowest rates within the county for residential Customers and if you look at what the average resident increase for all three of these increases for wet water wastewater and Solid waste it ends up being approximately $12 increase for per property for single-family homes within within the community and So with that being said, I'm in favor of this motion. I commend staff for trying to keep the rates as low as possible with the appropriate reserves to make sure that we are looking at potential water main breaks and other things that that affect our city before i get to the vote i did want to do one thing that i did skip over finance director again how many protests have we received 102 okay and no additional ones since well that's including the additional ones yeah thank you thank you um and with that City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion carries 6-0 with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. And now we will move on to our next item. Item 26-0060, adoption of three resolutions calling a general municipal election to be held in the city of Sunnyvale on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026, for the purpose of submitting a city voter, to city voters three amendments to the city charter. And because we have a very long evening tonight i will be asking the vice mayor to make a motion to to postpone this to a date certain of next tuesday night which is the 23rd but i did want to raise initial questions if council had immediate questions i think because of the lateness already in the evening, trying to wordsmith. Proposition wording doesn't really make sense. And for me also, having all of our council members on the dais would be nice. So missing council member Srini Bhasin wouldn't be good. But with that, let's go ahead and do a quick staff report if there's any questions or comments of staff before next week. Does staff have any comments?

No, we're just here to ask for direction from council. So just let us know what you guys need.

Okay. Thank you. I'll go ahead and open up the public hearing on this specific 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. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have two speaker cards in the room. First up is Zachary Kay, followed by Steve S. I can hear it now.

The Sunnyvale City Council that gave voters a choice of six council members and a directly elected mayor, even if it was the better choice, or a lawsuit that would cost millions and could not be won, now wants to extend council appointments to as long as two plus years. Maybe you should complicate things. At the same time, make the charter amendment protect against bestowing incumbency advantage on an appointee for a forthcoming election. You could add a new condition to the charter invoking its term limits. The council or mayoral appointee would be considered termed out. If they field steps on their rights, they needn't have sought appointment. They wouldn't face the appointee's incumbency advantage in the forthcoming election, No handicapped encountered. Members of the California state legislature that hit their term limits are turned out for life. In comparison, this is rather minor and stops abuse. You could advocate for the appointee ballot measure as restoring the spirit of the 1974 anti-coronism reform to the charter. Extending council appointments to get to the cheaper election the more people bother to vote in will bring opposition. It can be blunted if there's more to the measure. People will need to be considering your measure not on how the present city council behaves, but one 15 or 20 years out that doesn't seem as warm and fuzzy. Do people want to grant that council much longer appointments? It becomes an easier sell if the measure adds protection. But go ahead, take your chances, enjoy the conflict. There's sufficient reason for opposition. With the way it is now, I'm voting no. Thank you.

Next up is Steve S. Could I have my presentation, please?

Thanks.

A recent realization has occurred that was not brought up earlier, and to my knowledge was not brought up in the Charter Review Committee, that Measure B from 2020, of which many of you are familiar with, I am, has an undisclosed and a misunderstood effect Districts one, three, and five are not aligned with the mayor elections. Possibly we should have voted for a two-year direct mayor instead of a four, but we didn't. Districts one, three, and five, if they run for mayor and are elected, it automatically creates a vacancy. We have a built-in vacancy creator, and it would be likely near 24 months. The effects are different on the different districts. District 246, if they run for mayor, they're over. They can't run for council at the same time. proposed ballot questions it's very very important that ballot questions be truthful forthright and are not being sneaky okay we see in the state level we have this all the time we have lots of legal challenges against the ballot questions in particular in these ones the council vacancy ballots question does not disclose that voting for this would create 26 plus month appointments could do that doesn't disclose that mayor elections automatically create a vacancy the public works ballot question great job i think that's uh very clear on the city manager one it talks about the the the platitudes of all lining up with another authority but it doesn't disclose that there's already an intention to raise it to 250K, okay? That needs to be disclosed, right? So I've made recommendations before. I'd like you to consider this and having the week's delay is actually very good. I suggest that we do limit 50% of the city manager's contracting authority. It would be written as 50% of the contracting and the contracting authority is by ordinance, but you put this inside of the charter itself, a better chance to save yourself $150,000 on a defeat. Okay, and finally, To avoid the identified barriers to passage, which added a new one, mayor elections can create vacancies every four years when you run for a mayor. I have a suggestion that I've had here before. The same strikeouts that you have in 606D, but in 606G, change this to one and only one council member or the mayor could currently serve on an appointee or an interim appointee. If you line that up, you might pass.

Thank you.

i have no other speaker cards in the room city clerk are there any remote speakers wishing to speak on this item no mayor thank you i'll bring it back to council vice mayor mellinger thank you very much mr mayor i move that we continue this item to next tuesday june 23rd's regularly scheduled council meeting thank you and i'll second that motion any comments

So I'll just say thank you for moving this to next week. I'm in support of this motion. I think that, you know, having all seven council members here and let's say less on our agenda so that we can actually discuss these ballot measures a little bit clearer would be beneficial for us all. So I'm happy to postpone this item for one week. And with that, city clerk, can you please conduct the vote? the motion carries six to zero with council members trinivas absent thank you we'll move on to our next item item 26-0329 adopt a resolution to approve the fine the final engineers report confirm the assessment and levy and collect an annual assessment for the downtown parking maintenance district for fiscal year 2026 2027 is there a staff report

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. I'm Shireen Nafi, the City Property Administrator. Before you is the Annual Engineers Report, which allows the City of Sunnyvale to assess, levy, and collect taxes to cover the cost of maintaining and operating the Sunnyvale Downtown Parking Maintenance District. The property owners within the district are allowed to develop their properties to the maximum possible by not providing parking on site. Their parking demands are met by the publicly owned parking lots within the district in lieu of them paying their proportionate share of operation and maintaining these parking lots. Every year, the maximum assessment is determined by increasing the rate per stall by the change in CPI. For this year, CPI is about 2.48%. The proposed assessment for this fiscal year is the maximum assessment yielding about $257,000. This will cover the operating budget with $28,000 deposited in the reserve fund. The reserve fund is used to pay for long-term capital projects and any deficiencies in the operating budget. This concludes my oral presentation, but I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions of staff? I see none. I'll go ahead and 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. 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?

No, Mayor.

I'll go ahead and close the public hearing. And bring it back to council for a motion. Vice Mayor Mellinger. Move alternative one. Thank you. Council Member Cisneros.

Second.

Thank you. To your motion. Please vote yes. Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, please vote yes. And I'll just say parking in downtown does come at a premium. It's really well used. And if you've been there recently, it's a place that everyone wants to go. So having this is important, not just for the businesses there, but also the community to have access to something that we're really proud of and excited to share with everyone.

Thank you. And I just want to thank staff for the report and the assessment that that we do on a yearly basis helps basically run these programs so um assuming that that you know from from a parking standpoint you know our our parking maintenance district is is critical to let's say what's happening in downtown all the time so thank you to staff and and um looking forward to this going forward city clerk can you please uh conduct the vote

The motion carries 6-0 with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. Moving on to our next item. Our next item is item 26-0315, adopt a resolution approving the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and adopt a resolution approving the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan to be included in the UUMP and find that these actions are exempt from CEQA. Is there a staff report?

Yes, Mayor. So good evening, mayor, vice mayor and council members. I'm also an officer interim director environmental services. The urban water management plan and the water shortage contingency plan that you will be considering tonight are required to be prepared by the city every five years and filed with the Department of Water Resources by July 1. We follow the requirements of the California Water Code when we are preparing the plans. The plans serve as a series roadmap to ensure reliable water supply and prepare for future droughts. I'd like to introduce Winola Chung, Deputy Director, who will be providing overview of the plans and the staff recommendations.

Thank you, Director. Good evening, Mayor and Council. We are presenting to you tonight the City of Sunnyvale's 2025 draft Urban Water Management Plan and Water Shortage Contingency Plan. Trying to fence the... Thank you, David. I'll cover the regulatory background, our supply and demand trends, drought readiness, and then close with takeaways and recommendations. But to help frame the discussion, I will start with the key takeaways up front. So first, Centerville has a very reliable and diversified water supply portfolio, and that allows us to meet demand under both normal and single dry year conditions throughout the entire planning horizon. And under a five year drought scenario, we do project a small shortfall towards the end of the planning horizon. However, with the multistage response framework we have in our water shortage contingency plan, we're well positioned to manage that. And finally, we have a community that supports and they understand the importance of water conservation. So with their good work, we do see a steady decline in our per capita water use. So next slide. uh both the urban water management plan and the water shortage contingency plan are required under the state law to evaluate long-term supply reliability and drought readiness so sending this very first urban water management plan was done in 1985 and our first water shortage contingency plan was done in 2020 and we're now completing the 2025 update cycle for both the plants So with that context, this slide shows where our water came from and how it was used in 2025. So last year, about 60% of our supply came from San Francisco PUC and about 38% came from Valley Water. on the demand side residential use was about 60 percent with commercial and landscape making of the rest so this highlights both our supply diversification and reliance on regional systems as well as effective water use in our community So to further illustrate that shown on this chart is how demand has declined since 2000, despite our population growth. And looking ahead, we'll see demand is expected to increase in alignment with population growth. And our per capita water use has dropped significantly as well from about 170 to around 105 gallons per person per day today. This shows our conservation programs are effective and it continues to deliver results. And looking ahead, we are projected to meet demand through 2045, which is the end of our planning horizon in this update cycle under the normal and single dry year conditions. This chart shows how our supply exceeds demand across the entire planning horizon, and that gives us a healthy reliability buffer. Now, under a severe five-year drought scenario, we do see a relatively small shortfall of about 4% late in the planning horizon. And that's where demand management becomes critical, and we will rely on our conservation effort to bridge the gap. in our water shortage contingency plan we have a six stage response framework that scales from outreach to mandatory restrictions based on the condition so activation is based on supply conditions and also includes coordination with our regional partners to make sure we have a consistent approach across the region And equally important is the work we do year round to manage demand, which is reflected in our water conservation efforts. Our conservation approach includes regional partnerships, rebates, outreach, ordinance, and also data management. Most programs are delivered in partnership with Valley Water. and city focuses on coordination and outreach. And we're also moving towards advanced metering to improve customer awareness and water use efficiencies. And to reiterate our key takeaways earlier, so first Sunnyvale has a reliable and diversified water supply portfolio, and that allows us to meet demand under both normal and single dry year conditions throughout the planning horizon. We do project a 4% shortfall towards the end of the planning horizon under a five-year drought scenario. However, with the response framework we have in the water shortage contingency plan, we believe we are well positioned to manage that. and finally our community does a good job in water conservation and sunnyvale has a relatively low water use per capita number and we hope to continue that momentum and with their continued support With that, staff recommend adoption of both the urban water management plan and the water shortage contingency plan tonight. And this concludes our presentation and we're happy to answer questions.

Thank you. We'll come to council questions. First up is council member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for this presentation. I'm really grateful that we have all of this work done and we have such great report to turn in. Right. And I'm really always impressed with the kind of planning that we're able to do. I have a question about the improved metering to help people understand their water usage better. That's really important, especially for things like catching leaks or being able to identify use. Now, will this metering also help those who live in multifamily better understand their water use? Because we don't currently have the ability, I don't think, to have individual units see their individual water use.

Right, so regarding the advanced metering infrastructure project, which we'll be implementing soon, we'll be hiring a consultant to help us plan out the implementation phase and also the customer portal, how we can communicate the water use data with our customer. And at that phase, we'll be discussing the possibility of, or the feasibility of sharing the data with multi-family units.

If I may add, Councilmember, the unit has to have its own meter. So if it's a multifamily unit like condominiums, sometimes they have their own meter. So if they do have their own meter, then we can communicate water conservation messages to them through text or email. But if they're on a master meter, then we would communicate with the owner or the facilities manager. It's very hard when you have multi-units on one meter to detect leaks because you could have small usage all the time with 100 units or so.

That's right, absolutely. And but then even just to see habits, you know, like if somebody is looking at tracking their water usage and they live somewhere, it'd be great to be able to have to be able to have individual metering. But I understand the challenges there, and that would be outside of the scope of the project. So I 100% understand. But increasing that usability in condominiums, etc. And so when we we talk about that next, I would love to see you had that wonderful graph that showed the supply and demand of water and just seeing how multifamily accounts for less than half of the residential use, just how many, or with the advanced meter, how many of those residential units themselves, either single family or multifamily have access to that.

Yeah. At least the new laws, I believe, and Trudi can correct me, is multifamily have to have their own individual meters with the new state laws.

Oh, for new build?

Yeah. So each unit would have to have its own unit. They cannot use one master meter.

Oh, that's fantastic. I really look forward to getting into the data about... you know, gallons used and everything and efficiency and building for that. But we'll leave that conversation for another day. But I have no further questions. This looks really good. Thank you.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. A couple of questions. For the benefit of the public, I'm the city's representative to the Bay Area Water Supply Conservation Agency, which is the purchasers union, speaking violently compressing the purchasers union for the cities and agencies that buy from SFPUC, where we get about 61% of our water. Could we pull up, I think it's page five, please? Yeah, slide five. So what I'm noticing here is that there's just an assumption that water use will continue to grow linearly with population. Historically, this has not been the case. Population has grown quite dramatically since 2000 while water use has declined. That said, there is, what is the minimum acceptable per capita water use? I seem to recall that there is a floor that essentially for a human being to make health, safety, bathing, basic uses, there's a floor that you really can't get below.

So for residential, I think we're shooting towards 42 gallons per day per capita.

That sounds about right as sort of the absolute floor. You're not going to be able to get much lower.

That's correct. So now I think, I believe we were at 55, but looking forward with the new California laws, they're looking at 42 being the floor.

Okay.

so does this projection take into account you know targeting that floor of 42 gallons per capita per day i don't believe so we just looked at a population projection commercial uh land use and we applied the formula just to note that the even by 2045 will we will be less than

than what we were back in the 1980s where we used over 32 000 acre feet and that is according to current project that's correct we'll still be below what essentially i'm getting from this projection is that we're not assuming demand reduct per capita demand reductions as population grows is that

We're taking into account making conservation a way of life. We did not use the number 42 to answer your question. But we took conservation into account when we did our projections.

That is fair. What I will say is I suspect that this, and this is not a bad thing because being pessimistic in projections is actually generally good policy, but I suspect this projection is pessimistic based on what we have seen with the dynamics of demand hardening in the past and just based on looking at the history of the past 25 years. I don't think we have too many, well, One thing I wanted to emphasize is, yes, there is that concern about the sort of tail end if there's a five-year drought towards 2045. And there may be some members of the public watching and asking, well, why can't we improve increased capacity or something to try to cover for that? There is a risk in overbuilding water capacity, which is that you can end up with that water supply capacity has fixed capital costs. And if the demand isn't there to support it, then that leads to increasing rates, which then actually leads to further decreases in demand. And you can end up in a very bad fiscal situation as an agency. So I want to signal that while obviously that is a risk, it's not one I find terribly concerning. I did want to riff on council member Cisneros question about individual water metering in multifamily. I would have to go back and look at the minutes from my own HOA, but I seem to recall that one of the things they were considering on their capital improvement program was individual per unit metering. And essentially they shelved it because it would have been unreasonably expensive. This is, you know, speaking as a resident who doesn't want one more bill to pay, it's delightful that it's just rolled into my HOA dues and I don't have to think about it. But from a policymaker's perspective, individual unit metering is, would it be fair to say that would be strongly preferred?

Yes. And a lot of mobile home parks are putting individual meters, even though they have their own master meter, they are putting individual meters for units. Okay. Okay.

And I guess one of the things I would ask is, has the city looked into any sort of measures to support multifamily complexes, either townhouse or condominium or apartment to convert and to add in per unit metering?

Not at this point.

okay thank you um i have no further questions thank you vice mayor next up is council member chang for the presentation i'm wondering if you could speak a little more about contingency planning not so much in the in a natural disaster but say a city well becomes contaminated or valley waters water source becomes contaminated how would we plan for that in that instance so your question is if we have a drought or an emergency Not so much a drought, but if, say, a city well becomes contaminated or valley waters becomes more limited in what they're able to provide, how do we plan for that?

We just happened to have a shutdown from Valley Water, actually, from November 1st to April 30th. And we were able to supply the whole city with SFPUC water. So we have contingency. We also have seven wells that can produce about 7 million gallons a day. So in case of a we lose one of our suppliers, we can supplement the supply from another supplier. But if we lose both, that's where we, you know, be an issue, the council would have to declare an emergency, then we'll take some drastic measures for people to reduce their water use.

Okay, thank you. And then I suppose because it's top of mind, because Cal Water is in the news, because of potential cybersecurity issues with hackers abroad that they're investigating. Do we have cybersecurity plans in place for if something like that were to occur?

Yes, so we have a SCADA system that communicates with our pump stations. We don't treat well. We don't treat water like Valley Water or SFPUC. So we work with IT. IT kind of manages our security, our system security. So they have a firewall. So IT really manages our security for our communication.

Okay, thank you. I mean, it looks like they're investigating it and it might not be true, but just want to keep that kind of top of mind as we think about water resources. That's the extent of my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. And I have several questions. First, thank you for the presentation. Thank you for adding the presentation as part of an attachment. So that's useful as I'm kind of going through the data. The original presentation was shown to the Sustainability Commission. Did they have any comments? I didn't see minutes from sustainability here.

So the original or the earlier presentation that was given to the Sustainability Commission was part of a study session. So there was no recommendations or motions from that study session. The I believe the meeting minutes were approved recently.

So if we can go back and I just wondered if there were any questions or kind of from a bigger standpoint, were there any issues or, or concerns raised? I understand they're not didn't make a recommendation. It was just for them to review this as kind of an info only item, but just wondering their feedback, if any.

uh if i remember correctly uh yeah if i may add to what we know they're saying there were no concerns they didn't express any concerns about our projections our demands and our supply okay i appreciate that um so the city's implementing the automated uh or advanced meter reading infrastructure uh with the new fiscal year uh

So I'm just trying to get a better idea. It's not just for our meter readers to kind of go through the community and read the meters. It's a 24-hour-a-day monitoring of those systems. So it's a fixed-point network within our community. Is that correct?

I can try to answer that. So it will be a meter that's installed with a device to send water flow data to a receiver at a frequency of choice. It could be minutes, hours, depending on the need. and the data will be collected and we can then display it on a customer portal so the residents can then see how their water usage pattern change over the hours of the day.

And part of that will be from a portal standpoint, the resident can put in requests to be informed if if the rate, you know, if there's a water leak, you know, it's like how that kind of system will be set up.

Yeah, so we're still evaluating the functions we need for the portal, but based on experience from other agencies there are portals that allow you to set a high alert low alert so the residents can then receive a email or a text or some kind of notification through some channels of their choice if their pattern shows a spike or a dip

if i may add mayor uh these meters these they detect minute amount of water leaking so i actually got a notice this week from san jose water company that i might have a leak i have a smart meter and they said you need to check leak that you have some water running all the time and uh sure enough i do have a leak so any anyway so they can detect a dry if it's dripping less than one hundredths of a gallon, it will detect the leak.

No, I appreciate that. I think I think our residents are not as worried about, let's say, the drip leak, but the main break or something of that nature while they're away and getting informed immediately if there's, let's say, a large change from a water metering standpoint. So I think that's at least the concern that I've heard from residents in the past. And not to discount any leak, water is a precious resource, but trying to make sure that they're informed as quickly as possible because of the ongoing damage water can do to a home and things of that nature.

Yeah, so for such a leak, for example, it would have to go so many hours because somebody could be running the sprinkler system. It's not a leak for an extended period of time. So if it's like going over so many hours, then it will send a notification that they could have a leak. Absolutely. Thank you.

So you talk about the 4% shortfall in the far horizon as far as that's concerned, and mainly based that upon the per capita population. How does our continual evaluation or expansion of commercial office space affect that water use in the grand scheme of things?

So just to clarify the 4%, that 4% shortfall is after five years of drought if we don't take any measures to manage demands. So in reality, if we have a second year of drought or third year of a drought, the council will pass a resolution to and implement rationing and 20%, 25%. So we will not realize a 4% shortfall. So this is the worst case scenario, five year of drought, and we don't take any action. Got it. Okay.

But as far as our estimates, so the estimates that you said of kind of where we'll be in 2040, I forget. 2045. 2045. Thank you. is that based only on population is that based upon you know a 20-year plan for for additional office space like at moffett park and all that as well and that's correct it's based on the general plan and also moffett park accounts for 7 400

acre feet which is about 6.6 million gallons a day so we are counted moffett park in that calculation okay but the but the increase you know it's like we're seeing new hotels we're seeing and it's and it's that bigger picture that you know our our long-term development is part of that plan so that's correct whatever the council has approved so far i mean in the general plan

Good. And then a certain portion of our residents are under Cal Water. And so we're setting up basically for those residents that are non-Cal Water, here's what our contingency plans are and conceivably ordinances that we put in place for, you know, depending upon the number of drought years and such to restrict the water usage. How would that affect the Cal Water residents at the end of the day?

so there are two things here if the city implements an allocation program for its customers uh water budgeting we can only do it for the city of sunnyvale customers if you have ordinance and the municipal code that prohibits water waste that applies citywide to all residents of sunnyvale so but uh Cal Water will provide allocations to their own customers during a drought. Okay.

And so, but there's no correlation between our plan and conceivably their plan as far as

That's correct because Cal Water gets water, have their own wells. They have a contact with Valley Water. They have about a thousand customers and the customers in Sunnyvale are connected to the customers in Los Altos and Mountain View. So they have their own system.

Okay, thank you. That was all of my questions. Let me go ahead. I see no other questions from Council. Let me go ahead and open up the public hearing. Please submit a speaker card to the City Clerk. Raise your additional 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. 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?

No, Mayor.

I will go ahead and close the public hearing and bring it back to Council. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And I am ready with a motion. I'm assuming I can go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. Thank you. I move staff recommendation alternative one. Thank you. Councilmember Cisneros.

Second.

To your motion.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. This is an important document. It sets out very important policies regarding how we manage our water supply, how we handle drought. Respectfully urge my colleagues I vote. Thank you.

Thank you. And I'll be supporting this motion, you know, we need to have the appropriate contingencies in place, you know, going through the drought previous years and putting in these ordinances that ultimately, you know, usually have a sunset because we have kind of a fluctuation from a water standpoint we're not sure whether or not what what la nina might bring in the in this winter time but from a from a fluctuation standpoint it's it's maintaining this precious resource and and sunnyvale's in a better place than a lot of cities as far as having multiple sources of water that gives us some a certain amount of flexibility that other cities don't have but it's important to plan what our water usage is in the long term, and making sure that if we have multiple drought years, we are ready to respond accordingly. So I just want to thank staff for putting the plan together and kind of setting up where we'll be in case of emergency. And so I'm happy to support this motion. With that, City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion carries 6-0 with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. And our last item of the evening is item 26-0566, adopt an ordinance extending the urgency interim ordinance pursuant to government code section 65858. imposing a temporary moratorium on the establishment and operation of smoke shops for an additional 10 months and 15 days. Is there a staff report?

Yes, there is. Thank you, Mayor. I will be very brief. This item is an extension of the moratorium that the council adopted on May 19th under state law, under the urgency zoning moratorium section. We can adopt an initial moratorium for 45 days. and then we can extend it for another 10 months and 15 days which makes it a full year so this would have the moratorium in effect until next year on may 18 2027 and this would give this will give us time to study appropriate regulations for smoke shops i'm happy to answer any questions thank you are there any questions of count from council first council member chang

Thank you for the regulations regarding the smoke shops during the extension will we also be exploring current compliance with the compliance with the current smoke shops with what's sold there.

I think that is, you know, part of the discussions we'll have while we're going through this process, I know, and maybe the chief can speak a little more. Neighborhood preservation does do inspections of smoke shops. And they will be continuing that over the next year. I don't think there's any plans at this time to do anything additional.

Sorry, it's a bit dramatic moving up here just to say I agree. Yes.

Do you have any comments, Chief?

No, that's correct. Our operations aren't going to be changing at this time.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. And from Council Member Cisneros, continue.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the presentation and for the attention to this issue. I'm grateful for the Planning Commission for taking this up and for that conversation. Would this moratorium apply to current smoke shops if they were to apply for a permit to either expand or relocate within the city?

they would be considered legal non-conforming which means they would not be able to expand their operation and they they would not be able to move their location but they could if they were lawfully established before the moratorium went into effect they can continue to operate okay and they

I'm trying to think of how to put the situation. So actually, no, I answered my question in my head. Thank you. It's a little late, but that was my question. Thanks.

Thank you. I see no other questions from Council. Actually, so when do we think that this will come back to us? I know we've added now an additional 10 months approximately to this, but when do we think this will come back to Council with the recommendation on what we actually implement from a city standpoint?

I would think early next year.

Okay. Appreciate that. Thank you. with that i'll go ahead and open up the public hearing on this item please submit a submit a speaker card to the city clerk raise your digital hand now or dial star 9 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 city no speaker cards in the room city clerk are there any remote speakers wishing to speak on this item no mayor thank you i'll close the public hearing and bring it back to council for a motion Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And I move staff recommendation alternative one, extend the urgency interim ordinance for an additional 10 months, 15 days.

Thank you. Council Member Cisneros.

second thank you to your motion um i think we all spoke pretty extensively about how important this was the last time this came before council when we initially adopted the proposal i want to thank the members of the community who've advocated for this matt savage with county department of health You know the way that the smoke shops have sprung up. You know the way that you know the things that are being sold there, including products that seem to be explicitly targeting youth, the proximity to schools and neighborhoods. It's very concerning and I am fully in favor of us taking this taking this action to ensure that we maintain as our city policy state is safe and healthy community for all. Please vote yes.

Thank you, Vice Mayor, and I'll be in support of this motion. Thank you to staff for continuing, bringing this back to continue the moratorium for now. I think that looking at what some of the other cities are doing in this case, I think definitely there are measures that we can put in place permanently to deal with some of this nuisance issues and you know I'm have full faith in our public safety officers and and doing invest initial continual let's say investigation into let's say some of the bad practices for a few of our smoke shops so I'm happy to support this motion city clerk please read the ordinance title and conduct a vote

An urgency interim ordinance pursuant to government code section 65858, extending a temporary moratorium on the establishment and operation of smoke shops within the city of Sunnyvale until May 18th, 2027. Council members, you can now vote. The motion carries six to zero with council members for Navas in absent.

Thank you. Next up are council member reports on activities from intergovernmental committee assignments. Are there any? And it's been a while since we've got to this portion of our meeting. If any council members can remember. I know. Lots of things have been happening. I just want to say about a week and a half ago I was in Long Beach representing Sunnyvale at the US Conference of Mayors. It was actually a very good conference to talk about a lot of issues from data centers to federal response in a lot of different ways. Housing, which is conceivably one of the few issues that might actually be moving forward at a federal level uscm has been very active with our our the senate and congress in general on trying to move forward the need for housing and kind of housing reform at a federal level it looks like there's actually some movement as far as that's concerned but it was a great meeting from you know, hearing from mayors from around the U.S. and a lot of common concerns across the nation on how our cities are operating. So, good meeting and happy to have been and kind of continue to represent, you know, Sunnyvale and the Bay Area, what happened at that. Actually, the mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, became president of USCM this year. And what I love about USCM is the president, vice president, first vice president, second vice president, always are a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent. kind of representing a partisan non-partisan view of of the world so really happy that to see a california mayor as well as a mayor that i'm well connected with from a california standpoint take over that that organization so happy to be able to represent as far as that's concerned i see no other updates from council Oh, Council Member Sell?

Oh, thank you. So I'm on the VTA board representing Sunnyvale. And so there will be a measure on the ballot related to raising funds for our transit agencies. I think it was asked, so it will be, the voters will be asked to see if they support the 14 year term sales tax, half cent sales tax. And I think it was asked like the 14 years it will be capital investments. The goal is not to, is for it to be 14 years in that 14 years to make capital investments. I think there was a question which maybe the mayor asked me is some people were asking that it go into service. and service increases and that didn't seem like a capital investment. So I asked that question and the investments would be to make it capital investments so that the cost per ride would be lower so that they could have more service and more ridership. So the goal is to invest in things that will make it more efficient and capital investments so that you can have more service. So that was the answer that we got.

Thank you. Next up is Council Member Le.

Thank you. I am on the VTA PAC. We had a discussion about the county expressway master plan that I believe was already forwarded to the VTA board. I also wanted to note on the topic of VTA that with the World Cup happening now, VTA broke records. More than 37,000 people traveled to Levi's Stadium for the first match, and that's very exciting. Great to see our public transit system working in the ways that we want it to. VTA is breaking records and clearing platforms in less than 90 minutes, which they are very proud of. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And is that mainly light rail usage or or bus and light rail, just kind of what the breakdown is, if you have it?

I don't know.

Okay, just wondering, because I think that's always been an ongoing question as far as light rail cost and the number of people per train, and being at 49ers games, that's often the best way to kind of get away from Levi's Stadium at the end of the evening, but wondering if that was also the case with FIFA. Yeah.

um thank you uh next up is vice mayor mellinger oh sorry yeah council member chang there was no legislative action committee meeting this month there was a city's association summer event instead that several of us attended and i just wanted to say thank you to sunnyvale city staff for supporting that event as well

thank you and thank you for that reminder definitely um it was a good event talking about basically emergency preparedness around the county and good to hear from um different city managers the chiefs the the the the county fire chief and others on how to be better prepared so thank you thank you for that reminder um vice mayor mellinger

Thank you very much. Last month, the Bay Area Water Supply Conservation Agency met to approve the annual budget and work plan and levied, get this, a 0% increase on our rate payers, which would be our member agencies. Thank you. Fantastic.

Thank you. Moving on, we'll go on to non-agenda items and comments. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I move to place a closed session on the June 23rd, 2026 agenda to consider whether the City of Sunnyvale should join an amicus brief in support of Santa Clara County's lawsuit against the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency concerning the proposed immigration facility near Gilroy.

Thank you and I'll be happy to second that motion.

Given the nature of this, I will not be making comments either further discussion on this. Thank you.

With that, City Clerk, can you please conduct the vote if you're ready?

Yes, ready. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you.

The motion carries 6-0 with Council Member Srinivasan absent.

Thank you. And next up is Council Member Chang.

Thank you. At the beginning of the meeting, I read an announcement inviting everyone to the 4th of July Festival. And I also wanted to remind everyone that fireworks of any kind are prohibited in Sunnyvale.

thank you and um just as it just as a reminder to council um and our residents but especially to council if if residents in your districts are raising concerns about certain locations where fireworks are well known please pass them to the city manager and the chief and um definitely we're hopefully to be on top of that this year um seeing no other quest comments from council uh city manager do you have any non-agenda items or comments no comment tonight thanks okay with that we will adjourn the meeting at 10 44 p.m thank you all thanks to everyone who attended have a good evening