City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Let's call to order the special council meeting study session of August 11, 2026 at 534 p.m. Before we begin, 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 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. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. Following the study session, the regular council meeting will begin at 7 p.m. City Clerk, may we have the roll call please?

Mayor Klein.

Present.

Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Present.

Council Member Cisneros. Council Member Srinivasan. Present. Council Member Sal.

Present.

Council Member Chang. Present. Council Member Lay. Present. Thank you, six present with.

Council Member Cisneros has just arrived in the room.

Thank you, seven present.

Thank you. All right. Moving on to our next item, 26-057. Is there a staff report?

Yes, there is. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. I'm Ryan Dyson, housing specialist. And tonight I'm joined by Dena Belzer and Jake Cummings. Dena Belzer is here in person and Jake Cummings is available remotely on zoom. There are consultants from strategic strategic economics. And tonight we'll be presenting on the city's inclusionary housing feasibility study and presenting findings for council feedback. So I'll begin with a quick overview of the study. The background for this study is that the city's inclusionary housing policy, which is our requirement for new market rate development to include affordable units in those market rate developments, that inclusionary policy was originally adopted in 1980. To date, we have 344 active BMR rental units and just over 501 active BMR ownership units. We've recently updated the inclusionary policy in 2019 for the rental program, and that was brought back after it was paused in the mid-2000s. And then in 2021 for the ownership program where that was increased from 12.5% to 15%. We're here tonight because of a study issue, CDD 2301, which asked us to consider increasing inclusionary housing requirements to 20% and also review and update the in lieu fees. And there was also a housing element program, H5, that addresses this as well. Like I said, we are joined by our consultant team, Strategic Economics. As we began working on this project, we noticed that there were other jurisdictions in the county that had similar studies that they were also working on. We participated in the Santa Clara County Community Planning Collaborative and we started working with those jurisdictions and with the planning collaborative and decided to do a grand nexus and feasibility study. We issued an RFP and selected strategic economics as the consultant. And you can see on the slide here the other participating jurisdictions. The jurisdictions outlined in yellow are the ones that participated in the inclusionary housing study. There are other aspects of the study that the city did not include or did not participate in. So Sunnyvale, Gilroy, Los Altos Hills, and City of Santa Clara all also participated in this inclusionary housing feasibility study. As part of the study, we've completed community and stakeholder engagement, including reaching out to the real estate industry to developers, both market rate and affordable as well as affordable housing advocates and the general public. The final report for the inclusionary housing feasibility study was published earlier this year after several public draft meetings. And then we also presented to livable sign about last week with the initial findings of the final report. And I'll discuss our current inclusionary housing policy. We have 2 policies, 1 for rental housing and 1 for ownership housing. The rental policy applies for projects with 3 or more units. It's a 15% onsite requirement with 5% for very low income and 10% for low income. And then there is an in lieu fee that must be approved by council. So developers may attempt to use the in lieu fee option. For that, we have adjustable fees depending on the size of the project. Typically projects are going to be more than seven units, so they'll be paying $33 per square foot. But usually these are for fractional in lieu fees rather than for full units. The ownership projects is applicable for seven or more units, and this is an inclusionary requirement for 15% on-site units. All of those 15% are moderate income. And the inlet fee, which again must be approved by council, is 7% of the contract sales price. And for the technical aspects of this study, I will turn it over to Dina Belzer with strategic economics.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council members.

I can barely see over your screens.

Thank you for inviting inviting us here tonight. Let's see if I can make this go. Yeah, OK, great. And again, my colleague Jake Cummings is joining us from New Hampshire. Jake did a lot of the technical analysis, so he'll step in to answer some of the technical questions that you may have. But since I'm here, I thought I would speak to you directly. So I want to start out by reviewing with you what the goals of the study were. to analyze the financial feasibility of alternative scenarios for the inclusionary policy and the in lieu fee, and look at other key factors that might influence your decision. Recommend in lieu fees and inclusionary requirements that align with your chosen policy, but also respond to the current market moment. And we want to really underscore that point that the market is very dynamic, but because we are doing financial models, we have to use assumptions that are fixed at a point in time. So we, I'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute, but we did try to address this through sensitivity analysis, looking at a variety of policy scenarios, but this is one of the challenges. And then also there are these policy considerations. So there's what the community wants. There's the financial feasibility. So these are the nuts and bolts of the costs and the revenues. Then there are also state and regional laws and guidelines that control policy. There are what peer cities are doing. So if investors are comparing across cities about where they would go, it's important to understand what your surrounding cities are doing, and then finally, what your current policy is. So in terms of the policy considerations, the State Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD, has a policy that restricts inclusionary requirements to no greater than 15% unless you do a feasibility analysis and show that 20% or something higher than 15% is feasible. So the idea of doing a 20% inclusionary requirement would automatically or does automatically trigger this feasibility review. And the reason for this is because sometimes cities use a high inclusionary requirement as a way to actually block development. So the state is very concerned about that. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission also has a transit-oriented communities policy. And in order to be compliant with that policy, Cities need to adopt a certain level of inclusionary housing also in order to be eligible to particularly to obtain certain kinds of grant funding. And then finally, the number of inclusionary units that need to be included in a project in order to meet or qualify for the state density bonus also have their own inclusionary requirements. Now, the state density bonus inclusionary requirements only apply to the base project that's allowed under the zoning. So if I'm building 100 units and under the zoning, that's all I can build, and then I had 15% affordable or 15 units, right? If I get a density bonus and I add another 20 units, I cannot add an additional 15% on those 20 units. I can only still have the 15% that are allowed by the base zoning. So important to remember that. In terms of the financial feasibility, inclusionary requirements do decrease the revenue that come to projects. So let's see. I don't know if you can see it. Can you see the mouse? Can you all see the mouse? No, okay, never mind. Okay, so on the left here we have two bars that show you how pro formas work conceptually, and in the green bar we have revenues, and in the left bar we have costs and return, and then there's the arrow pointing to that dashed line. And that arrow signifies what a developer could afford to pay for land or property, their development site, to make their revenues and their costs equal. And their costs, of course, include their return, their profit, their return to their investors. now what happens with uh and the reason that we talk about residual land value or land value as the remainder of the revenues minus the cost is because revenues are set at the market at the market level so you know the revenues in sunnyvale can be similar to the revenues in some of your adjacent communities the same with costs the same with returns those are not set based on uh location per se although revenues are do reflect price premiums for certain kinds of locations but every land transaction is negotiated separately and privately so we don't know per se what developers are paying necessarily for property and they decide what they can afford to pay based essentially on this residual So all our analysis reflects a residual land value. We have an average or normative residual land value to which we will be comparing the residual or leftover land values. So on the inclusionary units, because people are paying only 30% of their income, there may be paying less than what the developer would otherwise expect to achieve. So the inclusionary units within a project impact the revenues and decrease potentially the residual land value that that project can afford to pay. Now, with the in-lieu fees, it's a cost to the project because it's a one-time fee that's paid up front, but it also impacts the residual land value. So that's why we look at both the in-lieu fee and the onsite inclusionary units using in-lieu fee as our metric. In terms of the building prototypes that we analyzed, we created a series of prototypes that are very typical to the kind of development that are happening again in this market area. And then some cities, it made more sense to include more or less of the prototypes. So for Sunnyvale, we have two ownership uh prototypes of five-story condominium and townhouses and then for rental prototypes we have small scale rental five-story rental and eight-story rental and all the details of the different prototypes are reflected in the slide it's important to note that we did tailor the revenues specifically to the sunnyvale market So in terms of the financial feasibility and in lieu fees and the impact they have, what we find, what's shown here on the left are the bars. The boxes show the amount of land value that we would expect to see associated with each of these development types. And the blue bars show where the residual land value ends up. So the rental prototypes do not support a 20% requirement. And again, we just tested the 20% in this analysis is what we're presenting. And the dark blue bar shows If you charged market rate rents, what would the residual land value be? And the light blue bar shows the residual land value with the 20% inclusionary. Now what you notice is that for the small scale rental and the five story rental apartments, the blue bar is going down it's uh it's a negative land value so those projects wouldn't pencil whether or not they had an inclusionary requirement and the eight-story rental apartments with some ground floor retail does have a small sort of a nominal residual land value but it is still on the very low end Yeah, so again, this is the kind of analysis that's required by the state to be able to justify a 20% inclusionary requirement. In terms of the ownership prototypes, again, we tested townhomes and the five-story condos. And what we found is that the townhomes are marginally feasible, again, Current market conditions, so you see they're sitting just under the residual land value bar. So it means that there's probably a tiny bit of room in there, but the condo project does not support the 20%. Again, that's, oh, excuse me, I'm confusing my bars here. The townhomes, the dark blue bar way above, the light blue bar, yeah, just below, but with the five-story condo, they're both negative. Okay, and again, it's important to remember that these are under current market conditions. So we did some sensitivity analysis to test what increases in sales prices might do for the townhouses just to see how much it would take to make these changes. and we also tested them at different inclusionary with different policy scenarios. And what you see is that the three bars all the way to the left reflect what would happen under any set of conditions if the prices were to drop 10%. You know, if we have another great recession and suddenly property values drop, even the market rate with no inclusionary would be maybe just marginally feasible. The current market, you see with the no inclusionary and with a 15% inclusionary requirement, the townhouse projects are feasible and the 20% scenario is just underneath. Now, if there's a 10% increase in these prices, then everything becomes feasible at the 20%. And of course, with the 20% increase in the values of the units, they become feasible. So this just gives you some sense of what some movement in the market would do to the policy. We also did a comparison of peer cities, which we think is best practice and also reflects some of the state and regional incentives as guidelines too, right? So for example, most of your peer cities have a rental requirement of about 15%. This chart shows both rental and regional incentives ownership all the way over to the right. Cupertino does require 20% on its ownership projects. Mountain View requires 15% plus an additional 10% for townhomes, but they're also pitching those to 135% AMI, so that makes a difference. That's the area median income. And so that helps. And then Los Gatos has a range of different, they have sort of a stacked or sliding scale for their projects. And these are the current fees. So some of these cities like Santa Clara are at least studying this. They haven't moved forward with the implementation of a policy yet. And Mountain View has just completed their study. So for the rental in lieu for the fees, and remember that the fees are created, or don't remember, I'm going to tell you right now, these fees are created based on the revenue foregone by virtue of including units that cannot be charged. They're not being sold or rented at, in this case, rented. at the full market value. So there's a gap there and the idea is that this in lieu fee covers just the gap between what it costs, the amount of rent that the tenant can pay and what rent the developer would charge in order to cover their costs and make their profit. So again, you can see for the small scale at 15% inclusionary, the in lieu fee, the onsite equivalent would be $72 for this is your, I believe this is your current fee, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Your current fee is at the right. Yeah. It's $33. I see. This is what the gap would be again for 15%. This is the in lieu fee that you could charge for these different building types. So $72, $91, $98. So the gap goes up as the construction type is more expensive. So now comparing the in lieu fees by jurisdiction, again, Sunnyvale, your current in lieu fee, as you saw on the prior slide, is quite a bit lower than some of the other peer communities, lower than Cupertino. Los Gatos has a different approach, et cetera. So most of these equivalents were higher than what you charge today for your rental. looking at the same in lieu fee analysis for the ownership products in order to cover for the townhouse, the current fee, which is 15% for moderate income households, it would be $93. And if you were to increase the inclusionary amount on townhomes, It's $124. Your current fee equivalent is $69. And the five-story condos, it's $89 as opposed to $70 for your current fee. So you could justify increasing those fees by quite a bit. In terms of the comparable units, again, Sunnyvale, now what you're doing for your in lieu fee is you are charging 7% of the contract sales price. So that is actually... uh your equivalent fee is um lower than what you could what the gap is which is something to keep in mind and then also it's higher uh the that fee than some of your peer cities so just looking at palo alto and santa clara mountain view just increased their fee so their fee is more in line with what your fee would be if you were charging it based on the filling the gap for the foregone revenue

so with that i'm going to turn it back over to ryan to take us home and then we'll take questions great thanks dina so just to summarize those findings uh the current market conditions do not support an increase for the rental and condo requirements above 15 so it cannot be justified to hcd but an increase of the townhome requirement to 20 could be supported based on the findings CoB, Gerrit Slattern, Also, the rental in new fee could be raised to match the cost of providing onsite units and primarily that's a way to ensure that the units are provided on site, since, in most cases we don't see projects paying a fee, but this would encourage units to be provided on site. CoB, Gerrit Slattern, And same with the ownership and the fee currently it's the percentage of sales price, but that could be converted to a square footage base fee that will align more with the cost of providing onsite units. and so our next steps tonight we're here with the study session to get your feedback but we will be going to the planning commission and housing and human services commission in october and then back to city council in november on november 10th with our final recommendations but for tonight we're opening this up to discussion and questions but we want to keep in mind the council feedback requested tonight is should the townhome requirement be increased To 20%, should the rental in the fee be increased to align with the cost of onsite units? According to the study, this would be up to $93 per square foot. It's currently $33 per square foot. Should the ownership in the fee be converted to a square footage base fee and should that align with the cost of providing the onsite units? For townhomes, this would be up to $93 per square foot at the 15% requirement. If that requirement were increased to 20%, then the fee would also be increased to $124 per square foot to line up with the onsite requirement. And then a potential condo in the fee would be up to $89 per square foot. And so with that, that concludes our presentation. And thank you. We'll take questions.

Thank you very much. I am going to ask my Council member colleagues to hold questions to four minutes. I will be giving two minutes to members of the public. I see eight attendees in the zoom room, so by my math that means that we should be done with Council and public comment by 640, which will give some time for Council discussion after public comment. Do I have any colleagues wishing to ask questions on this item? Councilmember Srini-Vaasan.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. You mentioned that YETCD requires a feasibility study for greater than 15%. Who does the feasibility study? The city or the...

The feasibility analysis? We did it. Right. We, yeah. I can tell you more about how that works if you're interested. Okay.

And then in your financials, I like the way you presented. But the returns doesn't include the land value returns, right?

That's correct. Well, the land value is So there are two ways that we think about land value. One is this residual land value. So it's the revenue minus the costs. And sometimes that value is negative because the costs are higher than the revenues. But then there's also what land is transacting for in the area. So when you see those dashed bars or the boxes in our slides, those represent an average land value based on recent transactions. So that's where using the market, the transaction information to set an outside land value benchmark?

Thanks for answering that, because that was my next question, because there was a red bar there. Thank you. And then You mentioned that 20% inclusionary can be done for townhomes. Right now, these are moderate income level. Are you recommending the same, continuing with the moderate income level?

Yes, the study was for 120% AMI, so moderate at 120%.

What was the discount these inclusionary units will go from a base unit, let's say, million versus inclusionary, how much would be the discount?

The sales price for a for sale unit, it does depend on the size of the unit and I can I can look up some numbers for you.

And then in slide number 17. Santa Clara has one unit. What does that mean there? The last row there less than 10 units.

that would be a requirement for uh one one unit since the percentage is so small at a 10 or a 10 unit project that the requirement is set at one unit okay yeah okay got it and then um

You also mentioned about the next few slides which calculates on-site equivalent for rental and then also for townhomes. This calculation, slide number 18 would be fine. So what you're suggesting here is if we go by in lieu fee, realistically, it would be $72 or 91 or 98, right?

It could be somewhere in between. Yeah, it could be an average. It could be a weighted average by number of units or something. But yeah, we recommend selecting one fee as opposed to.

Okay, thank you. And then last question. Any update on Mountain View study?

I'm sorry.

Data for the Mountain View study? You didn't participate in this particular?

No, but you said that the study was completed in Mountain View?

Right, yeah, no, they made their decision separately from the Grand Nexus study process. So we just said that they had approved, adopted their policy. i think uh just recently okay right but that's um all i know i don't know jake if you have more to say on the subject of mountain view if not i can look it up thank you very much yeah

Thank you very much, Council Member Srinivasan. Next up, Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you for working on this study and for bringing such valuable information. This is such a difficult topic because at one hand, you know, we have a vested interest both at gunpoint and not to go ahead and produce affordable housing on the other side of zero percent of zero is always going to be zero. So we're trying to avoid that calculation. uh primarily or at least in my perspective my first question is when you're calculating the impact of either a fee or um an inclusionary requirement on the residual land value Are you calculating an ongoing difference between the BMR and market rent for rental units? I'm just trying to get a handle on that because that's an overtime cost, whereas this fee is a one-time cost and how that one graph captures both things.

Right. So we do what we call a static pro forma. So we take a rent that's a point in time, but we use what's called a capitalization rate. which is sort of like a discount rate. So if you did a 10-year cash flow and then you discounted it back to get a net present value, I don't know if you know any of these terms.

You're taking it right back to my economics class. I appreciate it.

Right. So the cap rate is a way of calculating sort of what that terminal value would be factoring in some amount of time. So that cap rate, the static pro forma, is a very standard way that developers think about these kinds of projects. And they really only get into doing these dynamic pro formas when they're really getting into the nuts and bolts of a particular project. And since we're not looking at particular projects, we're just looking at averages and normative numbers, this is a very acceptable approach. So that's how we deal with it. No, I agree. Absolutely.

Capitalization would be the best way to do that because we're looking at two different graph types, really, with the cost and how to factor that in. How much is it to build an affordable unit? Like, and that is a, I mean, that's the question, right? But are we looking... Because of that capitalized cost over time, is that taken into account when we're calculating, say, an in lieu fee and wanting to understand, like, are you giving us in lieu what it would cost for us to go ahead and subsidize or otherwise aid the development of affordable housing in another way?

I can start off with maybe the cost of building an affordable housing unit in Sunnyvale. And that does range depending on the project. But we've been seeing in the last few projects from $700,000 into the $900,000s.

The other thing, the other issue I want to say about the inclusionary units is that they sometimes are less expensive to build because they're not qualifying for other kinds of tax credits or grants that you might get from the state or the federal government, which come with other requirements, for example, on energy efficiency. that sometimes drive up the cost. So sometimes you see that affordable units are more expensive to build than market rate units. And the reason for that is because there are sometimes higher performance standards for the building itself. There are higher transaction costs. associated with trying to put together all the different layers of funding that you need for a capital stock so um that's a the question is uh it depends the answer to your question is that should take you back to economics as well it depends um

And so when we're calculating the fee, we're not calculating it based on the depth of affordability. So when we have for ourselves low and very low required for renter, whereas you see other cities saying, well, we have moderate or even above moderate sometimes. I'm wondering if it would be appropriate to then adjust the in lieu fee based on what we're asking them to build and what that cost would be.

Well, you don't want to get too complicated with the in lieu fee, and you're not going to recalculate it for every time. So I think that's, if you set an average, I think you're okay. And then, of course, the advantage to having the revenue, we saw this in one of the comments from one of the citizens who wrote in. in response to this question, they said, well, what are the trade-offs in terms of having the onsite and the in lieu? And the benefit of the in lieu is that you can use that money then to qualify for tax credits in these other grant programs that are really set up to provide housing for very low income. households who generally are not covered by the inclusionary programs. The inclusionary programs tend to target the 80% of median but not the 40% or sometimes anything below 50% is not really viable unless it's a very small fraction. if that makes sense, because you're giving up that rent revenue and you have to fill the gap somehow, so there's not enough cross-subsidy from the market rate units.

That makes sense. This is really helping me narrow down on what's important in this decision.

Right, yeah. Because there's so many things that could be.

And then my other question.

Councilmember Cisneros, we're actually at time. If you can hold your questions until after the round. Thank you.

Mayor Klein. Thank you very much. First, so before this comes back to us again, Definitely want to find out what Mountain View did if they decide to make any changes in any cities that you talked about. Other cities are going through the studies right now. If it makes it to their council, make sure that we get what their new numbers are if they've made a decision to make any changes as far as that's concerned. You said in your presentation that in lieu fees are paid up front that's not the case in Sunnyvale okay so in Sunnyvale we pay as the units are sold and we take that seven percent right um which I've always had an issue with because conceivably how long that project ends up being built means that that in lieu funds that the developer would conceivably pay the city can't be used for other affordable housing developments As you have looked at other cities, it looks like we're the only city doing this 7% as opposed to a cost per square foot. Are the other cities taking those fees up front regardless of whether the project gets built and conceivably sold to another developer? Are they taking it immediately to to. apply to other housing projects?

Well, if I'm understanding your question correctly, usually the fee is collected when the certificate of occupancy is, well, that's one way to do it, is to collect it at certificate of occupancy. So you're not charging it separately from the way you would charge other impact fees. So a building can get entitled, like it can get all its zoning approvals and everything like that, But until they come forward to get a building permit, they're not paying any impact fees, right? Correct. Right.

Yes.

So they might pay impact fees, get the building under construction, and then they run out of money. You know, stuff happens. Right. But that's generally how the fees are charged somewhere when the project is moving forward.

I understand. And so I'm trying to get a better idea. When this comes back, I would like to know. that what other cities are doing for in lieu fees? Are they taking them at groundbreaking? Are they taking them at full occupancy of all units? Because there's a very big difference from that standpoint, from a city standpoint, that because we take them as, you know, after groundbreaking, but not until occupancy of each unit and taking seven percent of that cost and we're just talking about um um affordable affordable housing right i mean talking about for sale housing only i want to make sure that that fair enough you know the use of those in the fees are are appropriate because in my mind we it's the cost of we're allowing the developer to to not build in our city Not build affordable housing, but but pay the city because of that.

Right.

For me, it's important that. We get that money, get the money as possible and whether or not that's that at that's at approval of the process groundbreaking.

me it seems very late to do it at occupancy so i'll just bring that okay and what other cities are doing i would love to hear that as far as that's concerned if i could just add there may be some complications because of state law that um mandates deferral of impact fees so we'll find out specifically if it applies in this situation um but many of the other impact fees cannot be collected until occupancy okay Even though yesterday, not today, yesterday for rental, we were collecting them at building permit. And for ownership, we were collecting them at sale because it was a percentage of the sales price.

Okay.

And so we'll get the other information for sure.

Okay. Because to me, figuring out what other cities are doing there, what we can do from a state standpoint, to me, is part of this process that we can apply that money. The sooner we can apply that money, the better, especially if the project doesn't go forward. And then I would love to see, so you based all this specifically on Sunnyvale and we've had tons of multifamily apartments, we've had tons of multifamily townhomes, we've had very little condos. And you're kind of saying, Well, we could get more from in lieu on condos and, and. I, you know, what that percentage is, is it is it 17? Is it 20? That, you know, for, for, for, um, for sale makes sense. That being said, um, I would like more details on. the condos that we have, because I only know of Toll Brothers within the last few years, and we've tried to encourage condos as much as possible, but we have not seen that happen in our city. And so my only question is, for one thing, what projects that we have that would have this new fee? And the other half of that is what, from a condo standpoint, Do some cities based townhomes because we were not seeing the townhomes we're we're not seeing townhomes use the units per acre. State bonus we're only seeing them meet the bare minimum of units per acre because they don't have the land right. And so from an in lieu fee, do other cities have a difference between town homes? Is it units per acre or is it just units? As far as you're showing here, it's mainly units, less than X number of units. Above 100 units is a different sort of thing. I would like to look at encouraging town homes wherever we can. So thank you. Okay.

Thank you very much, Mayor Klein.

Is that?

Yes, I do see that. Is there a comment from staff?

That was me. I'm sorry. I forgot to lower my hand.

Okay. Council Member Sell.

Thank you for your presentation. For cities that currently have 20%, has there been any analysis on how it's impacted the rate of development of new housing? Any thoughts on that?

No, I mean, the 20% is pretty unusual, actually. And I've been looking at some cities that have rolled back, like San Francisco just rolled back its inclusionary policy to 3%. San Jose rolled theirs back from 15 to 10%. So right now, given the current market context, cities are actually going in the other direction. They're moving to lower percentages, not higher.

And what were some reasons for them like lowering it?

The market feasibility challenges are across the region. It has to do with, you know, the cost of financing is very challenging. These are all things that are national or international situations. They're not particular to Sunnyvale or to the Bay Area. And San Francisco, the rents are now through the roof because of all the employment around AI, right? But they're still struggling. They're having the same problem. So this is why they're rolling their inclusionary policy back.

Okay. And then from looking at Sunnyvale, you don't see a reason for rolling it back.

That's sort of a policy question and obviously on the rental units, even without the inclusionary, they're just not feasible. So at the margin, if you roll back the number of units, um maybe you would make the projects a little more um feasible the um i think the one of the reasons developers that a lot of cities are settling it's still settling at the 15 and there are a lot of reasons why they're staying at that 15 one is that it lines up with the state density bonus more or less you know the inclusionary the the income thresholds might be there might be some variation but it kind of lines up with that um There may be individual development projects that can make it work. It also sets a policy in place that as the market re-accelerates, you're ready for the upside of the market. So nothing's feasible today. You could have zero inclusionary. You could have 15%. It's not really going to make the difference. It's really when the difference, when the tipping point comes into play and at the margin, When would it make a difference to have 10% or 15%? I think that's sort of a hard policy question to answer. San Francisco also updates their inclusionary requirement every three years. And they have a pretty elaborate process for doing that. And as far as I can tell from having just looked at this, they are the most aggressive on the updating of their policies of any city in the region. San Jose does it on an ad hoc basis. Other cities in the state do it on five years. So, you know, that's the other way of sort of dealing with this uncertainty is to add a provision in the policy that mandates an update.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Council Member Sell. Council Member Chang.

Thank you for the presentation and to Council Member Purcell's point I would be interested I know we're looking you're talking about San Francisco and San Jose rolling it back but I would be interested in seeing cities like East Palo Alto or Santa Cruz that have the 20 percent and how that's impacted development just as a comparison and then just some short requests if If we could get the presentation for September a little bit earlier, I know it's going to planning and housing and human services. So if it's possible to get the presentation and some background a little bit earlier, just because for Council Member Lay and myself, this study issue came from in 2023. So we don't have as much of the background as some of the other people might. So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Chang, Council Member Lay.

Thank you so much. And to also piggyback on Councilmember Sal's point, you mentioned in San Francisco they have a policy that this is updated every three years. As a process question, Ms. Ryan, what is our current policy on how often these are looked at? We don't have an adopted policy. We don't have one. Okay. It's based on when the... council sees a need to look at it. Okay, so this was a study issue that came in 2003 and it says that it was last updated prior to that in 2021 and there was no update and no study.

Over the years, we've updated it several times. We start out at 10% um with 20-year deed restriction and the the length of time has increased the percentages have increased um ryan alluded to we had this period of time where we couldn't require it of rental projects until some other aspects of state law changed and when we came back we had um We added in the low, the very low to the low. So there's just a lot of incremental changes to adjust it to make it more reflective of the need in the community.

Okay. And that's reflective of the needs of the community and the current market conditions

For example, we always do some level of feasibility analysis. Correct.

And then as Council Member Chang mentioned, this is my first time encountering this. For my reference, how many of these units are being built in the city? How many have we seen since the last IHO update or how many townhomes, how many condos, how many apartments are we talking about? How many are we looking at?

how many inclusionary units yes uh i don't have those numbers um i i have the total numbers of units but uh since our last update um i could i could get back to you with with those numbers okay thank you um that's the extent of my questions thank you very much council member lay um i have a few questions uh mr mayor would you time me as well thank you um

This is a question for Director Ryan. Would it be fair to say that we're seeing a lot more townhome starts over the past five years than other development types?

That is fair. We're seeing more townhome developments, but not compared to numbers of townhome developments in prior history.

So townhome development is more or less staying level.

Well, no. The total numbers of townhomes per year has gone down because the sites that are zoned for that kind of perfect density have slowly been redeveloped into townhouses. So there are fewer sites that are available for that. The sites that are available for the higher densities, we're seeing less of that because of market conditions. But I'll say recently there was the project with townhomes and single-family homes at the corner of Degine and Stewart that was approved. And that's forgetting the number, 300 and something units. There was a large eight-story development and rental project in Moffett Park recently approved. So those are very recent examples of projects. where developers are seeing their opportunities.

I had not heard about the Moffett Park approval. That's good news. But would it be fair to say, in general, that we're seeing a lot fewer rental starts over, say, the past five years since before the pandemic?

um yeah we did have the thousand units that was built out at the former AMD site the Irvine development 900 and something because 100 units were townhomes so that sort of took up a lot of the demand if you will for for apartment development It's just not an even average, you know, right?

It's all this is. We're dealing with small numbers, so it's all very spurty and pointy graphs and so forth. I will say that in my conversations with developers, the phrase that keeps coming up is it just doesn't pencil when talking about virtually anything other than townhome development. And so looking at this, my understanding is that Mountain View has differential IZ rates based on product type with townhomes specifically, I think targeted at 25%. And then other development types targeted at a lower percentage. Is there some evidence or best practices about using inclusionary zoning to sort of shape the development that you want to see go forward?

I'm sure that has entered the minds of some communities. As we mentioned, if your in lieu fee is higher and there's an option, it might incentivize providing the units versus the in lieu fee, but our situation is you have to get council approval for an in lieu fee. So there's really, that's, there's, You know the phrase, it depends. I think we used that once before. That's a lot of development. There's a lot of many, many things that go into determining if a project's going to be feasible.

And then depending on what we move forward out of this meeting, that's going to have an impact on staff capacity for the following several months, I'm presuming, depending how much we want to change out of this meeting.

Well, we were geared up to come back to you in the fall if there's some new direction that that could potentially affect the schedule.

OK, understood. Alright, I have no further questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I keep forgetting that this is my meeting has been a. All right, I see no further hands from my colleagues, so I'm going to go and open it up to public comments. Since we are currently running on schedule, members of the public will have two minutes to speak. Going first, we have our first in-person speaker, who will be Dan Kay.

Mayor Klein, Mr. Vice Mayor, members of the Council, I'm Dan Kostenbetter. I represent the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. We applaud the leadership you've taken and that of your staff for creating housing at all income levels. but raising the inclusionary zoning percentage higher than the current 15% is not recommended. We also caution against raising the affordable housing in lieu fees as well. We share the council's goals of producing more affordable housing. Employers, businesses of all sizes need housing at all price points to attract and retain a diverse workforce. that raising inclusionary rates can halt development and building entirely if they get too high. And multifamily housing development already faces three major constraints today. One is the cost of capital. Secondly, elevated construction and labor costs. And then also whether rents are going to continue to improve. So, requiring more than 15% of units to be below market rates requires market rate units to subsidize cross subsidize a larger gap. And high inclusionary zoning is effectively a tax on new home construction. If you think about that, the 10% requirement on a 200 unit project, get you 20 affordable housing units. A 20% requirement on a project that gets canceled produces zero affordable housing. So that's an important consideration. We would recommend that you table the study tonight and just stop work on this project. Let staff do other things and wait until financial markets and other market conditions improve. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Next up is Gabriel.

Hi, I agree with basically everything the previous speaker said. I'm Gabriel. I live in downtown Sunnyvale. I see that you folks are considering increasing rent control requirements for private developers. We desperately need to lower housing costs. I feel that very acutely when I see my rent bill each month. But raising so-called inclusionary requirements or in lieu fees is absolutely not the way to do it. The root cause of the affordability crisis is a supply shortage of homes. If we raise the cost of building new homes by imposing, as the previous speaker said, effectively a tax on new home construction, which is exactly what this proposal will do, then developers will simply not build anything since they won't be able to turn a profit. Indeed, as the Sunnyvale Zone Commission study pointed out, the building most cost-effective rental and condo units would no longer be feasible if these proposals were implemented. Even if you reduce, say for townhomes, the increase in fees and requirements to just under what the study said that the feasibility was at the time the study was conducted, you still raise the cost of housing overall, which is always passed on to residents like myself who are already overpaying. you know, are overpaying. Furthermore, we would still be locked into these higher costs when market conditions change for the worse in the future, at which point all types of new housing would become entirely infeasible to build. We've seen recently with pandemic inflation and the war in Iran just how quickly the economic environment can degrade. With these proposed changes, we would raise the cost of housing for residents and stymie efforts to build new homes, locking up the next generation of Sunnyvale residents. affordable housing is great but fees and requirements are useless if we make it impossible to build any units the result of this unfunded mandate would be no new housing subsidized or otherwise which benefits no one i urge that you reject any proposal to raise development or in lieu fees or requirements for subsidized units in fact we ought to lower or to eliminate the current requirements thank you thank you very much do we have any other speakers and any other members of the public in the room wishing to speak on this item before we hear from our own speakers

And after you're done, if you could fill out a speaker card for the city clerk.

Sounds good. Hi, good evening, Mayor Klein and members of the city council. My name is Vanessa Lazar. I'm going to be speaking on behalf of SVA Home tonight. So, actually strongly supports inclusion housing is an important tool for creating affordable and mixed use communities. That said, these requirements seem to be responsive to market conditions. So they do not make new housing more difficult to build given the significant visibility challenges we're facing in the current market. Not even just here locally, but at the federal level. We think it just doesn't make sense at the moment to increase the rates and it's difficult to say that from 15 to 20%. Yes, we won't be able to capture more in-move fees. Yes, we won't be able to build some more units, but that's considering or assuming that we'd actually be able to get buildings moving at all. So because of that reason, I feel home is actually going to support that. I know this is a study session, but maybe Revisit this at a later date when the economic conditions have changed, but in the current market, not to increase it from 15 to 20%. And the reasoning for this is actually because of the city's recent residential visibility analysis that you did with some of the other cities across the county, which kind of found that. And I'm assuming you're going to be discussing that small scale, you know, 5 storey, 8 storey rental prototypes already infeasible under the current market conditions. and you know the eight story prototypes also can currently uh support the existing 15 requirement let alone the 20 uh overall you know there's a lot of different kind of variables whether it be the high cost of construction uh and other things that are kind of getting in the way at the moment for this kind of thing to happen and so while it sucks and we really don't like to say this we would say that keeping the current level of 15 inclusionary just makes sense so with that we would implore that you know when this does come to council again uh as a sort of action item to maybe not that time but in the future uh see if it makes sense to increase it but for the time being just leaving it as is makes the most sense so thank you thank you very much next up we have jim d

Thank you for providing a little time to address this issue. Unfortunately, I come from a completely different viewpoint than the previous speakers. I think that it's important that we try to do what we can do to build more inclusionary homes for those people who are pricing out of the area. For instance, the City of Mountain View and the City of Saratoga have both gone to 20% in certain circumstances, and the City of CNSA is also interested in talking about this kind of a raise in the inclusionary market rate. We need to find homes for our school teachers, our public servants, and other people, especially the people who are completely unhoused and are unhoused because their rents have increased so much that they can no longer afford to stay inside an enclosed building. So I hope that my remarks will hit home. I have been talking about inclusionary housing for several years when I was on the Housing and Human Services Commission. It was my recommendation to this council that we increase that rate. Unfortunately, at the time, the council decided not to go forward with that. But I hope that you will sincerely think about it very strongly and move in that direction. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Does anyone else want to speak on this item before we hear remote speakers? Seeing none, City Clerk, do we have any remote participants wishing to speak on this item?

Yes, Vice Mayor. City Council Chambers, First up, we have a nail be followed by Dennis m. City Council Chambers, And now you've been unmuted and have two minutes to address City Council.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Anil Babar with the California Apartment Association. And I want to speak to the recommendation to keep the inclusionary where it's at. Studies have shown that there is a diminishing return on marker rate units as you raise the inclusionary and keeping it at 15% recognizes the market conditions where it's at. I also want to urge you to reject the increase in the aloo fees. We have a lot of projects that are barely feasible and the more cost you add to housing, the more expensive it is. The goal of everyone is to lower the cost of housing, get more affordable housing. This is not the way to do it. If you're not building any housing, you're not getting any affordable housing through your inclusionary zoning program. So I would encourage the council to continue to support the 15%. If not, a study at least lowering it if feasible. Other cities have done it. They recognize that a lower inclusionary Well, it will bring it definitely will bring affordable housing units on online. It will also add an additional amount of market rate units over and above what your 15% level is bringing. And I would encourage you to keep the in lieu fees where it's at. Don't raise the cost. Don't put more costs on housing. There is already enough cost put on housing that we can't control. Let's control the cost that we let's control the cost that we can't control. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Next up is Dennis M. Sorry, that was your line.

That's okay, Vice Mayor. Dennis, you've been unmuted and have two minutes to address City Council.

Thank you, Council Member Mellinger, Mayor Klein, and members of the City Council. I'm Dennis Martin speaking on behalf of the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area. And the BIA Bay Area represents market rate developers and associated industries across the Bay. I want to call your attention to the letter we submitted earlier today. and the attached peer review study that was conducted by the Development and Financial Advisory Group out of Sacramento. And that peer review study raises several concerns and about the assumptions and methodologies that were used to devise the nexus study and feasibility study. And many of those reinforce the consultant's own feasibility analysis, which already demonstrates that today's market cannot support additional inclusionary burdens without further discouraging new housing production. Sunnyvale has long been a regional leader in housing production, and that success has required careful balancing of affordable housing objectives with economic feasibility. Increasing inclusionary requirements when the city's own study concludes that most product types cannot support such an increase, risk reducing overall housing production, resulting in fewer market rate and affordable homes alike. For these reasons, BIA respectfully requests that the council, one, decline to produce any increase in the city's inclusionary housing requirements above the current 15% standard. Two, exercise caution before increasing in lieu fees that would further impact project feasibility. And three, direct staff to continue monitoring the market conditions and revisit the issue only if future Data indicates sustained and meaningful improvement.

Thank you very much.

Seeing no further remote... Vice Mayor, that was the final remote public speaker for this agenda item.

Thank you very much. I will close public comment and bring it back to my colleagues for discussion. Council Member Srinivasan.

I had a... Actually, I had a question on slide number 20... One, this is, sorry, slide number 17. Last Gatos has 20% moderate for 100 units plus. How do they pencil out? The difference could be the below market rate or moderate. Is that the difference? Why it's penciling out for them?

We don't know if it is penciling out for them. That's their policy, but we don't know how it's working. I think that's what somebody had asked for earlier is information about how for the communities that do have a 20% policy, how's that working?

I don't have specific comments except from members of the public. I am also agreeing with the comments we heard. Current market condition may not be conducive for any change. But having said that, I agree with Mayor Klein about how we collect in low fee. That is, I see on the slide at 25, that Los Gatos, I think they collect during the building permit valuation. Sorry, two slides before that. And then we correct at the sale price, which may not be the right way because as Mayor said, now we are waiting for the sale of the unit as opposed to some other event as such. I think from what I understand, building permit valuation may set the, building permit level rather than at the stage of building, issuing the building permit. So I am inclined to agree with that. That is collect the in lieu fee earlier rather than wait for the CLSH because some of the constructions are delayed and then we will be just waiting for that. I know one of the projects in my district is already late by almost 10 years now. Anyway, thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Srinivasan, Council Member Sell.

from what we've heard from your report and from some of the input we've gotten. I also don't support making changes at this time. But I'd like to come out of this study, if possible, with some guidance on what signs we would be looking for to reopen this study, how often, what is a good recommendation for a process to be you mentioned San Francisco is pretty aggressive about looking at this. So I think that's a good thing. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Council member. So council member Cisneros.

Yes. Thank you. I think you staff and the members of the public who took this opportunity to speak and tell us about your perspective there and what the thing that we kept coming back to as I was listening is 0% of zero was zero. You're not gonna have any inclusionary units at all if you make them impossible to build and that's just the way it goes. And these are just one, when I think about this, Inclusionary zoning and inlay fees are just a couple of levers that we have at our disposal economically to affect the kind of changes we want to see in our housing market. But they're limited, they're hard to change, and they're fixed based on market. So I would love to continue a discussion generally about how to produce more of the product types we want to see more affordable housing maybe this is in that discussion and that's what i'm really getting at um because it's about supply and demand believe me i always tell the story i tried to negotiate with my landlord downtown because we're great tenants and the rent increase was a little high you know we don't want to move could you cut us some slack and their response was to say find a less expensive three-bedroom apartment downtown and you can move there And I said, well, we don't have any. So there I go. I pay. But that was a direct example of how supply and demand will affect your ongoing price of rent over time. And so increasing the supply will have a positive effect, even if many of those units are market rate, which mine is. Not everyone qualifies. Those are a small amount of units overall. If we were to continue to have a conversation, I am interested in digging more into the data about the in lieu fees and how we collect it for the ownership townhomes and condos and things there. And also considering, say, lot size when we're thinking about having a larger when we have a larger lot, how could that be? How can we focus on rental? there as being a big opportunity to have a higher number of inclusionary units potentially, as opposed to fewer ownership models there. So I would want to look at it there. That's some fine tuning. But as one of the speakers said, we're in a weird economic situation right now. And I would almost rather have that conversation when things have leveled off a little bit and we're not guessing in the dark and maybe making a bad decision at the exact wrong time. But that's all I got. Thank you all.

Thank you, Council Member Cisneros, Mayor Klein.

Thank you. First, thanks for the presentation. You had my questions from earlier. I appreciate the speakers who talked about that the economic conditions are difficult. That's all I ever hear from developers. It's always difficult. No matter what in lieu fees we set, no matter what inclusionary requirements we put on, it's always difficult. But I think looking at the data, we can definitely say that rental inclusionary increase is not called for. I will question staff to evaluate whether or not now or sometime in the near future we should look at conceivably inclusionary increase for townhomes versus condos. We have seen a plethora of townhomes over the last few years and very little condos, and it's a portion of our market that developers continue to say that they can't build, but they're building in other cities and just trickling into our city. i'm not ready to include increase that now now part of that conceivably from staff looking at it would be should we decrease the inclusionary requirement for condos to a lower percentage in order to have more of them built in our city because developers are let's say bending over backwards to get the units per acre by adding townhomes with ADUs in areas that we were hoping to get condos, stacked condos. So from an inclusionary standpoint, I'm fine keeping things the way they are. From an in lieu standpoint, I disagree wholeheartedly with the residents and speakers. The in lieu requirement is something that is normally partial, you know so it's a partial unit of trying to hit 15 of some number of units and the other the other portion of that is if a developer thinks that that the city might be interested in doing in lieu for for sale units or something of that nature to get the money into the hands of the city faster and especially when you're talking about condos or townhomes conceivably the the 15 number of townhomes, that money as opposed to housing one or two families for a smaller townhome development, you can conceivably apply to an affordable housing development and get five or six families per every two. So there is value in those in lieu fees. I think that, you know, I've always questioned our 7%. I would love to see, you know, staff look at that. We are behind as much as the public is saying don't change our in lieu fees. We don't approve in lieu fees that often. And understanding that mainly it's for sale and not rental. um and so from that standpoint i think you know re-evaluating these in lieu fees makes total sense um because as we continue to see from from a for sale standpoint the value of each of these homes is going up dramatically and that percentage means some you know understands that that we're seeing townhomes i think partially because of that percentage here in sunnyvale and i want to build more housing i would love to see condos be given some sort of let's say recompense but but for me you know evaluate in lieu um leave inclusionary alone or or evaluate conceivably lowering it for specific things and and maybe that when our moderate housing moderate income housing study comes back in the fall that will that conceivably is part of that discussion and not part of the specific study thank you thank you very much mary klein council member lay

Thank you. I agree with the Mayor in that I feel like the in lieu housing has room to shift given the Mayor's justifications there and as many of as my colleagues and the members of the public have said it seems unwise at this time to pursue increasing our percentage. I am interested, as Council Member Sall said, in looking at this on a schedule. I don't know if the three years that San Francisco has is reasonable for us, but I would like to see this looked at as soon as market conditions permit. I'm Everything's a little bit crazy right now with the market, with international relations. But if we can be as nimble as we can in adjusting to these. I'm also interested in looking at condos, as the mayor said, and I believe what was recently approved in Moffett Park. Ms. Ryan, are those rental units? the project that was approved in moffett park is a market rate development it's market rate great are those condos no they're apartments they're apartments okay great um i know that we have a lot of development planned in moffett park in my district it looks i would like to see that move forward um and i've i recall correctly most of moffett park is intended to be workforce housing um it's going to be relatively small units and between 50 and 80 percent AMI living up there. this is more to do with what's coming later but i would also like to see those types of units and those types of affordability spread through the rest of the city that area is hard to access and increasingly cut off from or not increasingly but somewhat cut off from necessary services so as we fill in our city i would like to see those those types of housing looked at elsewhere as well thank you

Thank you, Council Member Lay. I will speak next. I'm going to say that I very broadly agree with the mayor's comments. It is important that when we are looking at housing types, we look not just at the amount of affordable housing we're getting, but at the relatively affordability of different types of market rate housing. If you are working class, you are not going to be buying a townhouse. You are not going to be buying a condo. If you can't get into an affordable unit, you are going to be looking to rent an apartment, possibly with roommates, possibly a smaller apartment than you would like, possibly an older apartment than you would like, but you're going to be looking to rent an apartment. And when we look at the construction market, what we are seeing is not only very few condos, which are a less expensive ownership option that the mayor has championed for many years, and I agree with him on that, we see very relatively few apartment buildings moving forward right now. Moffett Park was approved three years ago, and we're only just starting to see applications get approved. And that is not due to the city, that is largely due to market forces. So, If anything, I believe that we should be looking at reducing the inclusionary zoning rate for apartments and condos. Now, that said, I also agree that we should probably be looking at changing the in lieu fee schedule when we collect it and also increasing the in lieu as recommended by staff for townhouses. And I want to say this. Townhouses are the least dense form of development that we are getting typically. As the mayor pointed out, many townhouse developments are struggling to meet our legally required minimum density. And the problem with townhouse developments is they do not ever redevelop for all intents and purposes. I believe the CC&Rs on my complex require an 80% vote by owners to close the HOA and redevelop. That is almost infeasible. so when we convert our medium density land or mixed use land as we are seeing with village centers to townhouses that's essentially land developable developable land that we lose forever and so looking at what i would like to see i would like to see us encouraging the construction of apartments and condos as more naturally affordable forms of housing and if we're going to be looking at inclusionary zoning I agree that it's probably not feasible to raise the IZ rate on townhouses, but I think that it's worth looking at raising the in lieu fee on townhouse development and changing that collection schedule as the mayor suggested. The other thing I want to point out is that the way we are assessing these fees is not equitable. that we are punishing the most affordable type of development. Apartments require 10% low income, 5% very low income. Townhouses require 15% moderate income. There is a much greater tax that we are levying, a much greater fee, I should say, because it's not technically a tax, but a much greater fee relative per unit on apartments, the most affordable housing type, the type that we want more of, than we are on townhouses, the least affordable housing type. That strikes me as a bit out of whack. So I will agree with my colleagues. Let's not move the inclusionary zoning rates now. I would support bringing the fee, the in lieu fee for townhouses up and looking at that payment timing schedule. But other than that, I think that You know where we're at right now. If anything, I would be looking at lowering other inclusionary zoning rates, not raising them. Thank you. And since this is my meeting, Council Member Chang, did you have any input on this?

No, I feel pretty similarly, so I don't feel like I need to hash it out again.

Thank you.

Alright, thank you. And with that, unless I have any further questions or comments from my colleagues, Mr. Mayor, when would you like to open the Council meeting?

Let's go ahead and take, let's do a nine-minute recess and come back at 7.05.

Thank you very much. This meeting is now adjourned at 6.56 p.m.

Good evening. Let's call to order the council meeting of August 11th, 2026 at 7 0 6 PM. The city does not tolerate disruptive behavior in our meetings. Sunnyvale prides itself on the rich diversity of our residents. We are committed to creating a culture of belonging where members of our diverse community feel included, safe, and respected. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means the council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by council for a consent calendar or public hearing items. Speaker comments during oral communications must be limited matters within council's authority, generally referred to as council's subject matter jurisdiction. If a speaker's comments are not related to an agenda item, their presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of a disagreement with the content of their speech. Location and online meeting details are available on the council agenda. Scan the QR code on the screen or click the language access and translation link on the council agenda to read and listen along in more than 60 different languages. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. Comments and 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 specific item and time limits will be strictly enforced. Guidelines are posted on the city's website and on the council meeting agenda. First, please stand if you're able and join me in a salute to the plaque. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Next is roll call. City Clerk, may we please have roll call?

Mayor Klein.

Present.

Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Present.

Council Member Cisneros.

Present.

Council Member Srinivasan.

Present.

Council Member Sell.

Present.

Council Member Chang.

Present.

Council Member Lay.

Present.

Seven present.

Thank you. Next up is oral communications. This is now the public's opportunity to address council on topics not listed on tonight's agenda. This section is limited to 15 minutes and may be extended or continued after our general 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 to matters within council's authority generally referred to as council subject matter jurisdiction if If a speaker's comments are outside of council's subject matter jurisdiction, the presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. This allows council to conduct its business in a reasonably efficient manner and protects the rights of other speakers. A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of a disagreement with the content of their speech. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk raise your digital hand now or dial 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 Sell has an announcement.

After their summer break fun, Sunnyvale students are heading back to school. In the upcoming weeks, students all over the city and South Bay will be walking and biking to school. Some students are driving to school for the first time this year. To ensure a safe return and commute for everyone, here are a few pointers. Obey the 15 miles per hour speed limit around schools. Our public safety officers will be there out there as a reminder. Drive carefully and observe all traffic laws. Be alert for pedestrians, bicyclists, and student drivers. Please obey all crosswalk guards. Do not use disabled parking stalls as drop-off. Be patient while driving, especially in school zones. We wish everyone a safe and happy return to the school year.

Thank you, council member. I now will be reading the speaker card names of people in the room. I will read off two names. The first name, please come to the lectern. The next person be hopefully waiting in the wings so we can reduce the amount of transition. First up is Russ M followed by Mike C. Thank you. One second.

okay good evening mayor and council russ melton ceo of the sunnyvale chamber of commerce thank you for the opportunity to speak and while the city clerk is bringing up my foils i just wanted to mention that the chamber of commerce was incorporated nearly 80 years ago in 1947 in fact our predecessor organizations date all the way back to 1906 making us the granddaddy of sunnyvale non-profits our members employ over 60 000 individuals in sunnyvale Lots of exciting things going on at the Chamber of Commerce and last Wednesday we had our breakfast with Congressman Ro Khanna. It was a huge success with over 60 community leaders attending, including some folks in this room behind me. I appreciate everybody's attendance and Mayor Klein, thank you for spending some time with us and providing an introduction to the Congressman. That's you on the right hand side of the screen there, Mayor. Next up, I wanted to mention golf tournament and banquet is coming up on September 17th. Here are the two most frequent questions I get as CEO of the Chamber of Commerce with regards to the golf tournament. Question number one is, do I have to be a pro golfer to participate in this tournament? And the answer is no. We welcome all levels, all skills, all skills. of golfers and in fact the very experienced golfers who attend an event like this know that there are going to be a wide variety of skill levels and everybody is cool with it so i just want to assure anybody who's on the fence for that reason and the number two most common question is that the old greenwood barbecue at the gold rush saloon which is where we're going to have our banquet is on the same site and same location as the sunken gardens golf course so there's no driving around in between the two events it's all right there at sunken gardens some other exciting things coming up tomorrow night we have a grand opening we love grand openings at the sunnyvale chamber of commerce welcoming new businesses tomorrow is safe haven elder care facility mayor klein and council member sell thank you in advance for being there and we'd love to see all the council members in attendance if your schedule permits thank you And on October 14th, we have another breakfast with event. This one is with one of our state constitutional officers, State Treasurer Fiona Ma. And we're really looking forward to that event. And I have a mark your calendar. Can you believe it? This is going to be the 60th annual Murphy Award events, recognizing great leaders in the city of Sunnyvale and folks who make a difference. This is going to be held on February 11th, 2027. in the evening, mark your calendars. We're still constructing the website, but if you're interested, tickets are available for sale as well, or sponsorships. And for everything that I've mentioned here tonight, you can find your way at svcoc.org. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you.

Next up is Mike C followed by Karen G.

Hi, my name is Mike Cascone. I am a 45 year resident of Sunnyvale and I am speaking on behalf, but not an official representative of the Sunnyvale, Las Palmas, Green and Serene group. Two weeks ago on the 28th, I brought up the issue of conflict of interest and Larry very helpfully directed me to send an email to the city manager, which I did. I got the following answer. The state's conflict of interest laws prohibit city officials from participating in government decisions that would materially impact their financial interests. My understanding is that Commissioner Geary is a volunteer without salary or other financial interests in cricket organizations that would require him to recuse himself from cricket related matters. In addition, the Parks and Rec Commission is a volunteer advisory body where the commissioners do not have decision-making authority. They only make recommendations to the City Council. I responded to that saying that I have found Section 8 of the Sunnyvale Code, which City Manager sent me a copy of. Conflict of interest. In order to assure their independence and impartiality on behalf of the common good, members shall not use their official positions to influence government decisions in which they have immaterial financial interest or where they have an organizational responsibility or personal relationship, which may give the appearance of a conflict of interest SO COMMISSIONER GEARY IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE NCCA CRICKET ORGANIZATION AND SO HE DOES HAVE AN ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY Well, he may not have his financial interest. We really don't know. It certainly does not look good from the outside. So I would like to have a response to this email, which I sent on July 29th. Thank you very much, City Manager, for responding as quickly as you did. Thank you.

Thank you. Karen G., followed by

Hello. I am speaking for myself tonight, but I am speaking about Las Palmas Park. Before I begin, I want to thank you very much, Mayor Klein. I can tell that you're always listening to the speakers. Thank you so much. Some of you, I can't tell because you're looking down. I don't know what you're looking at, but it is really nice to make eye contact, so I appreciate that. Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that on June 28th, I did file a complaint with the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury over the City of Sunnyvale's planning process for renovations at Las Palmas Park. My complaint had 54 pages of evidence. So I just wanted to let you all know that. Thank you for listening.

Thank you. Next is Shangi P. Followed by

Hi, good evening, Mayor and city members. My name is Shaney Pan. I'm a Sunnyvale resident and father of two sons. I also have my career as a software engineer. I also serve in the committee as a volunteer soccer referee in a local youth soccer organization. so i'm here to ask the city council to review the sunnyville's noise ordinance and adopt a clear definition of noise disturbance let me explain why i'm asking making this request my family was repeatedly disturbed by people in a neighboring backyard who regularly talked and laughed loudly late at night. Because their backyard faces are bedrooms, the noise often woke us up and prevent us from sleeping. When I contacted the public safety, I was told that ordinary talking and laughing in private property generally did not violate Sunnyvale's municipal code, even if it is at the midnight. I was advised to close my window, use heavy curtains or white noises, Eventually I talked to my neighbors and fortunately they were reasonable and considerate since then the situation has improved a lot and I sincerely appreciate their response. I want to make it clear that I'm not here to criticize the city staff nor am I asking the city to punish my neighbors, public safety employees and Officers must follow the existing municipal code. I believe the problem is that the code does not provide them with sufficient clear and practical standard for addressing recurring neighboring noises. So my concern is broader than my individual experience. Other residents might face similar recurring late night disturbances, but their neighbors might not be as understanding as mine. Closing windows or white noises might not be effective solutions or not even available to them, especially when noise is regularly happening. So without a meaningful way to seek help, I'm afraid some residents might feel that their only option is to continue suffering or even consider moving. So before raising this concern, I reviewed the noises ordinance of neighboring cities like Mountain View, Cupertino, Los Altos provide useful models. Their code defines a noise disturbance to include sound that annoys and disturbs a reasonable person of normal sensitivity. So this reasonable person standard considers the actual effect of the noise, not simply whether it comes from a private property. Anyway, so I respectfully ask the Council to review the Sunnyvale noise ordinance and comparing with the neighbor cities. Thank you. Thank you.

Vice Mayor Mallinger. Thank you very much. Question for staff. Madam City Attorney, the concerns raised by the member of the public in the previous comment, First of all, was the feedback that he received from DPS accurate that regardless of hour that the talking or regular comment that that would not be enforceable?

In general, we don't enforce just general talking. If it was music or some kind of amplified noise or something of that nature, they might be cited, but it's generally Just people talking would not be above the noise limit.

Even loud conversation?

Yeah, even loud conversation probably would not be. Okay.

And the difference that he cited with the Cupertino, I believe, Mountain View codes, you know, under, you know, the reasonable person definition that was cited, would that materially change the outcome of his call?

They could have a standard that's more qualitative in that nature in their ordinance. I don't know. I haven't reviewed their ordinances, but ours is based on decibel levels. Okay, thank you.

And Mr. Ping, I believe you should look up the process for council priority projects, which is how we in general change policy in the city of Sunnyvale. And we just got a hold the date. uh on that for next march but i'm assuming the proposals are going to need to be in what mr city manager into january i'm going to ask uh assistant city manager sarah johnson rose to yes that's correct in january okay thank you thank you vice mayor um and my last speaker card in the room is manny g

My name is Manny Guerrero representing Las Palmas, Green and Serene. Our city's code of ethics states that city officials, both elected and appointed, should not use their positions to influence decisions where an organizational responsibility could create the appearance of a conflict of interest. During our meetings regarding park renovations for Las Palmas, we learned that some council members had recused themselves from decisions that could have affected friends, neighbors, even their houses of worship. This is commendable and reflects the standards expected of our leaders. So why is Prakash Giri, Parks and Rec's commissioner and president of the Northern California Cricket Association still participating in discussions regarding cricket facilities at Las Palmas Park? As president of the NCCA, he has an organizational responsibility that directly conflicts with the city's code. Claiming there is no violation because there is no personal financial gain is not just a myopic view of our ethics code, but of Mr. Geary's relationship with professional cricket. Mr. Geary is friends with Bijou Nair, a former NCCA president and owner of the for-profit Blazers Cricket Academy, a feeder academy to minor and major league cricket teams in the Bay Area and beyond California. So who stands to gain from a fenced-in cricket pitch at Las Palmas? The citizens of Sunnyvale or private interest groups looking to use public grounds for profit? Like it or not, Major League Cricket is loaded and has been pumping money into the Bay Area, not just for a field, but for influence. We have yet to hear specifically from the city attorney regarding this issue.

Thank you. That was my last card in the room. City manager, did you have a comment?

Yeah, I just wanted to take a moment to update council on the timeline for Las Palmas. for the outreach around that project. So we are looking at restarting outreach in September, and that'll be primarily through focus groups. From there, we will be preparing updated concept plans and then holding some potential additional outreach. and then preparing for Parks and Rec Commission and City Council to happen in the first quarter of the next calendar year. So to give you an idea of how this will progress, right now tentatively we're looking at probably March for a City Council meeting to discuss the concept plans. And then I just want to clarify something for the public. I have not seen any evidence that there is a financial conflict of interest on the Parks and Rec Commission. I have no evidence that there's any financial conflict of interest for any staff members or anybody else who's involved in this project. So I just want to clarify that because it was insinuated that there was money flowing in to influence this decision. And that is not, in fact, anything that I have seen.

Thank you. Council Member Sell.

This question is for staff. How would people be involved, engaged in the process on the Las Palmas? Just normal, general people that are interested but want to be involved and give input.

The city has a project page and we communicate through that. If you sign up for the email list, you will get notifications of outreach opportunities. The other way you can participate is by attending either the Parks and Rec and Commission meetings when they come up and providing public comment there or also the city council meeting when we bring this concept plans and providing public comment there.

Okay, thank you very much. So the best way to get involved is to go to the website. You do Google Las Palmas Park Renovation, and it takes you to the webpage. And on that webpage, there's a signup list to be on the mailing list. Thank you. Council Member Lay.

Thank you. To clarify, Mr. City Manager, the focus groups will be starting in September?

That's correct.

Okay. Thank you. And are we doing that in-house or through a consultant?

I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?

Sorry. Are we doing this in-house or through a consultant? Could you please remind me?

We're going to be using a facilitation consultant to help us with that.

Okay. And so that will be coming in September, and it will be coming before Parks and Rec and Council first quarter of next year. First quarter of next year.

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

Yes, Mayor. First up is someone calling in with the name iPhone. You have been unmuted and you have three minutes to address the City Council.

Is that me? that that is you yes you do okay yes sure sure i apologize my name is mohi and i live in sunnyvale especially in fair oaks plaza area and my request is for uh they are going to construct condominiums homes without having enough retail space We are concerned about a very small quantity of retail space. Plus, we are also concerned about the traffic load that would be increased in our area. Already on due end, we have one street on each side. I had mentioned this several times in my previous attendance with the city council I requested. And also the parking, when they are building these so many town homes and condominiums the parking would not be enough and this parking would be basically people will be parking on the streets so that will create another crisis for our neighborhood that will change our neighborhood for the worst so my request is to consider and do few studies environmental studies trip studies for traffic and parking and less retail space before approving my request from council members and also requests from the city staff to consider for any opportunity to to have it

done properly we are not against the new construction we want to have new construction but a reasonable construction sensible construction in our neighborhood thank you mayor that was the final remote public speaker for oral communications okay thank you i'll go ahead and close oral communications uh next up is our consent calendar i'll open up our uh public comment on consent calendar items uh please submit a speaker card to the city clerk raise your digital hand now Board, I'll start on your telephone, indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. I have no speaker partners for consent. City Clerk, do we have any remote participants wishing to speak on a consent calendar item?

No, Mayor.

I will close public comment and bring it back to Council.

Vice Mayor Malinger. Before I make a motion, Mr. City Manager, I wanted to ask a quick question about the bridge repair project. I noticed that the bridge from San Miguel to Lakewood was not included in that repair. I just wanted to check and see when was the last time there was a safety evaluation on that bridge or evaluation of whether it would need repairs or upgrading?

Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm going to ask Dennis Eng, the Assistant Director of Public Works, to come up and address that. And we might have to take that as a follow-up. I'll let him cover that.

Good evening, Mayor, Councilmember Mellinger. That I don't have offhand. We do receive reports from Caltrans every two years for the review of structural susceptibility of the bridges. we we attached last the last review uh with the Monday morning questions for Council so um we'll have to go back it probably wasn't until like the last the set before or the one before that all right thank you and with that I move the consent calendar uh and would appreciate that as a follow-up thank you um Councilmember Sreenivasan move to approve consent calendar

was already made a second you can send second thank you i didn't hear the move thank you thank you um any other comments seeing none city clerk can you please conduct the vote the motion for the consent calendar carries seven zero Mayor Mrakas, Thank you let's go ahead and move to our general business, our first item is item 26 dash 0498 approve the city's response to the. Mayor Mrakas, Santa Clara county civil grand jury reports titled for pothole damage and bts management oversight of Bart silicon valley phase two is your staff report.

Yes, Mayor and Council Members, David Carnahan, the City Clerk. As mentioned in the title, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released several reports recently, two of which they requested a response from the City of Sunnyvale. One is from June, titled Pothole Damage, Improving Claims Processes Within Santa Clara County. And then a few days later, they released a second report that Sunnyvale has requested to respond to, titled VTA's Management and Oversight of the Bart Silicon Valley Phase 2. So when the civil grand jury issues a report and identifies several findings and recommendations and identifies agencies that need to respond to specific findings and recommendations. So for these two reports, for the one related to claims for potholes, the city is obligated to respond to two findings and two recommendations. And then for the second civil grand jury report related to VTA, the city is obligated to respond to two findings or two recommendations. And then just as far as timeline, the city has 90 days to respond to each of the grand jury reports. So you'll find in the staff report attachment one is a draft response pertaining to the pothole damage claims civil grand jury report and attachment three is the draft response for the VTA management and oversight civil grand jury report. For each of these reports staff reviewed the findings and recommendations that are applicable to the City of Sunnyvale. for the pothole claims that generally the findings, the city, sorry, my apologies, I'm looking at the wrong notes. So the city is, you know, the city, sorry, my apologies for not being as organized for this presentation. So for the finding one, there was no response requested for the city. I'm sorry, my apologies. So that one, the recommendation is to partially disagree. That finding was that 92% of pothole claims were rejected for missed deadlines and correct jurisdiction, things like that. When the city partially disagrees, While the Sunnyvale's rejection response percentage is similar, there is a good reason for the city to reject claims where the city is not liable. So the city shouldn't be paying out claims if the city doesn't have liability or it's followed in the correct jurisdiction for finding to that. you know this happens because it jurisdictional lines are unclear the city again partially disagrees while the city does reject claims that are filed with sunnyvale where we're not the correct jurisdiction it's you know not necessarily clear unclear for claimants where they should be filing and whenever sunnyvale does receive a claim that is not sunnyville's jurisdiction where are known we communicate to them where they should be filing their claim And then there were two recommendations. One of them was to post a list of Sunnyvale's roadways on the city's website. And the recommendation is not to implement that because it's not warranted. And also jurisdictional boundaries can vary block to block or even within a sub block. So maintaining the list would be complicated and it would likely be inaccurate. Or if we were publishing something like a GIS map, There's accessibility challenges as the city strives to make sure we're meeting everyone's needs. And then the second recommendation Sunnyvale is planning to adopt, and that is to publish a list of expressways and highways that are within Sunnyvale's jurisdiction that are within, sorry, within the city's boundary where the city it's not their jurisdiction so this is like cal trains roadways and the county's roadways that run through the city that's a much smaller list and that doesn't change very often right any of the state highways or the county expressways those are not going to change hands anytime soon and then there were a number of other findings and recommendations that sunnyville is not obligated to respond to for that report And then for the second report related to VTA's management and oversight of the BART Phase 2 project, the city is obligated to respond to the finding related to how Sunnyvale and other jurisdictions make their appointments to the VTA board for finding six. The recommendation is to wholly disagree that the grand jury report sort of takes an excerpt of the VTA administrative codes and supposes that Sunnyvale needs to make appointments for folks that have know a transportation background and really if you look at the full context of that administrative code section it says where possible and for the sunnyvale community you know council members and candidates background in transportation may be a piece of information they use when voting but that's not solely how council members are elected by the voters and the government code right requires that sunnyvale's representatives to vta be elected council members So the recommendation is to disagree with that and then for that finding and then another recommendation from the grand jury was to have Sunnyvale be required to align with VTA's administrative code and the city is suggesting that we do not do that so that council can continue to make their appointments under their own Council policy as approved by council who is elected by the Sunnyvale electorate and not be beholden to an outside agency's administrative code. And then recommendation seven is that Sunnyvale and other agencies that we have a finding is that agencies have different appointment processes and that is likely true. However, Sunnyvale follows the same appointment process for the VTA board as it does for other outside governmental appointments. And then our recommendation is that the cities come up with a uniform process for making an appointment. And the draft recommendation is to not agree with that because, again, Sunnyvale City Council is elected by the Sunnyvale electorate and should be accountable to them and not to an outside agency or to something that other voters in other communities also would have a say in. uh there that's general summary of the recommendations in the staff report um and just before we uh move on to questions i don't know if uh human resources director uh heather or assistant city manager sarah johnson rios either you want to add anything no okay that includes the staff report we're open for questions from council thank you um we'll take it to questions from council first up is council member cell

Hi, thank you for responding to these grand jury reports. I read over the letters back and forth and very well written, so thank you. So one of the questions I had which related to questions about the VTA. There's the VTA response to the VTA grand jury. We had a pendium to our council questions. And so that took that paragraph and staff suggested an alternate paragraph. So I was just wondering if staff could elaborate on why those changes were made or I could elaborate on why I requested changes. Any thoughts?

So council member, thank you for that suggestion. Staff aren't necessarily proposing that we would make that change. That was just an alternate piece of language that council could consider. As it stands, staff's recommended draft response as published is staff's recommendation. However, any direction from council to make changes would be, of course, welcome and accepted.

City Council Chambers and Councilmember, I'll just add staff does not have any concerns with the language that's in the addendum to the Council questions. So if that's Council's direction, there are no concerns from staff.

So let me understand this. So there was the current paragraph that was in the letter. And then in our council response to questions, staff came up with an alternate paragraph. So staff is fine with either paragraph. And it's up to council to say which one they prefer. Okay, thank you. That's all my questions.

Thank you. Councilmember Sreenivasan.

Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. You said 92% of the claims are rejected. Does that mean that we are responsible for 8% of the claims? And then what are the results of those things? Thank you.

Yes, that's correct.

When was these claims filed, which I know it's from 2020.

The time period that the civil grand jury died was from 2020 through 2025.

Are we liable for these claims, or are we paid, or how does that work?

So the claims that were rejected were rejected for wrong jurisdiction or wrong entity. The other claims then go through our claims approval process. So it doesn't mean they were necessarily paid, but it means they were appropriately filed with us and then we go through the process.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

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

Thank you for the presentation and for drafting the letters. I had a thought that in the end summary, if we wanted to, if we could include something about a closing that makes mention of our city's good efforts. In page 10 of the Civil Grand Jury report, it says of the 16 jurisdictions, the Civil Grand Jury found that only Gilroy, Los Gatos, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale provide adequate claims process information on their web pages or on the claim for itself. a separate item is that we're one of the three cities that took helpful step of providing additional language options. I just think that might be kind of an added summary sentence. And then on the VTA's management and oversight of BART Silicon Valley for the appointment process, I don't think it needs to be included in the letter, but I just also wanted to mention, as the person that does work for a transportation agency, I explicitly asked to not be considered because of potential conflicts of interest. So I just wanted to, if there was some sort of line to be added to that too. Thank you.

Thank you. As we go forward, as we go towards a motion, consider whether or not that's part of the friendly amendment or not, but thank you. Let me go to a few questions, and some of them might be to our VTA rep. So thank you for staff's response concerning the VTA response to the same grand jury reports. uh specifically for vta bart phase two and and staff's response for monday morning questions was the vta has given had published but not given let's say the final updates to that i'll ask the our our vta board member the changes that conceivably were made when this came in front of the VTA board on the first I can't remember earlier earlier this month um as far as the response to the grand jury

So this month, the first Thursday of every month, we have a board meeting. And a large time was on the agenda to discuss the response. VTA staff provided a response to each question. There was new information that came out. the board with the auditor had some red lines that they wanted to put in the letters and staff agreed to those red lines but I think that we wanted to make sure the board as a whole seemed like they wanted to make sure that the language was tight and had been reviewed so as board we asked that the letter be sent back to the subcommittee of the um bart silicon valley subcommittee so it's being sent there this month and the letter response is not due until mid-september so we will have another board meeting the first thursday of september to review the final letter and make sure that everyone had time for their staffs each board member's staff to review it that the subcommittee had time to review it that everyone had a few more weeks to review it and then i assume we would support it being approved and published

i assume okay so yeah so so if you can forward when that's finalized if you before have staff forward that to council that would be approved be um preferred you know at some point so that we see what their response is and you know going through their draft version that went in front of the board um and you know the the the grand jury report was pretty specific on kind of cost overruns and estimates and scheduling since the project's begun. There's a recommendation that, so the response to one of the recommendations is the VTA board was going to prepare an alternative funding strategy, estimated capital costs, and VTA's responsibility for operating and maintenance costs by December 31st of this year. Is that on track for actually being completed for approval by the board as well as the Oversight Committee by the end of this year?

I have to look at the specific question, but I could go back to the VTA staff and get back to you on that. They did say in it that For some of the answers, they did say we already have the information, but the information is not in a format that is currently publishable. But by a certain deadline, we will have a pathway to publish that information. So those were some of the answers that the information exists. But by that date, they would have a plan to publish that information. That was a response to some of the questions, but you're welcome to email me and I will get back with VTA staff and get a response. Okay.

And you know, because the report brought up lots of issues on whether or not they would request to go above their percentage of sales tax revenue. And you look at the cumulative sales tax the VTA is getting above, ultimately, More than every city more than our city is getting on a, on a sales tax, you know, we're getting 1 cent of sales tax and they're getting 1.1 and slightly more than that. If you look at the breakdown. So, it it's. I would love to hear, you know, making sure that that percentage is. for what needs to go to all the other items of Measure B specifically, making sure that that percentage is held true and distributed across the county, which to me is important. But that's for you as our advocate to talk about as we go forward.

And I did want to make one clarification, which they did put together in their press release. that the grand jury report seemed to tie this measure that will be on the ballot in November to BART Silicon Valley. BART Silicon Valley will not use the funding related to the November ballot. So that's what they...

Definitely made clear. They were they were more looking backwards at all the other and that's what I was looking at as far as far as all the multitude of ballot measures that the county's already approved to fund either BART itself or VTA. And so that to me was the bigger question here is making sure, especially from Measure B 2016, that the there was a maximum percentage going to BART. That percentage, of course, kind of varies. Well, it has a ceiling on what could go to Bart Silicon Valley. But, of course, it's based upon an ever-increasing revenue stream and things that conceivably VTA could look at on doing bonds and other things. John Kane- Understanding from financing standpoint, how they maintain Bart Silicon Valley in the operations and the outer control costs for Bart itself Bart operations becomes the bigger picture picture but.

John Kane- that's fine.

John Kane- And then from a. Timeline so so we weren't going to list the roads that from pothole standpoint where we weren't going to list the roads that were. That are not sunnyville roads, but we were going to list expressways and freeways and who to contact on our web page the timeline for that from a city standpoint. uh we are in we are in the planning phases for that and we'll meet the deadline of december 15th provided by the civil grand jury okay thank you um and then that was all of my questions uh councilmember lay

Thank you. Just a quick question for staff. Of the rejected pothole claims that are in a different jurisdiction, are the complainants then directed to the correct place to make the... Okay, thank you.

Yes, in our response letter, we let them know the correct jurisdiction to direct the claim to.

Thank you.

That was all council questions. Let me go ahead and open up the public hearing on this item. um please submit a speaker 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 news i have one speaker card in the room uh zach k

This is a bit petty, but I'm going to bring it up anyway.

If you go in the legislature and look at the attachments, there's attachment one, draft city response letter. Number two is civil grand jury report. Number three is draft city response letter. Number four is civil grand jury report. Could we actually in the future have titles that actually mean something so they don't overlap? You shouldn't have redundant titles on the attachments, at least as far as best practices. Thank you.

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

No, Mayor.

I will go ahead and close the public hearing and bring it back to Council. Council Member Selle.

I had a comment of the paragraphs that we could do for the VTA letter. There was one paragraph version that's in the original. You want to make a motion and include that change? Yeah. Should I make the motion? Go right ahead. Okay. So I'd like to make a motion to accept... The staff recommendations, which is accept alternative one and three, approve the city's response to the 2026 Santa Clara County grand jury report, potholes, damage, improving claims processes with Santa Clara County as presented in attachment one to the report and authorize the mayor to sign the response. Alternative three, 3 approved the City's response to the 2026 Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury Report details management and oversight of BART Silicon Valley Phase 2 as presented in Attachment 3 to the report and authorized the Mayor to sign the response. And then I also wanted an amendment Would I talk about the amendment right now? Yes. Okay. So in the pendium that staff sent today, they have a paragraph which was the original paragraph that's in the current letter, and they have below it some changes, which I think the changes are more accurate. The first paragraph talks about alternate.

So that's OK. We can talk about that. But basically replacing an item three and item four approved with approve the response with with appropriate replacement as the second response from staff today.

Yes.

OK. Councilmember Chang.

I wanted to make a friendly amendment to the first.

Do you want to second the motion? Second. Thank you.

With a friendly amendment to the first response to include in the summary the mention of our city making good effort on the adequate claims process and the providing additional language options.

I accept that.

Thank you.

And any other change? I think that's good.

Okay. To your motion. Mr. Mayor, I'd like to say a point of parliamentary procedure. I believe for the benefit of the public, it would be appropriate to share the paragraph differences for a moment, and so that that can be in the public record. Mr. City Clerk, would that be possible? That can be in the public record and on the video.

Yes, give me a moment for the page.

Yes, the second response to council.

Yeah, that's... That is there. It will take a little bit of time for me to craft what is proposed for the first response.

This is what I'm . But yes.

OK. Thank you, city clerk. Councilmember Sell, to your motion.

So I think these were good responses and thoughtful responses that staff came up okay and um and the only from like looking at the letters very carefully the only item that i found would i talk about now was that there was one part where um on the letter related to the vta they talk about um Sunnyvale appointing alternates to the VTA board. So we don't appoint alternates to the VTA board because we share two of the seats on the board with three cities and so the three cities rotate being on the board And then there's one of the city representatives that is not on the board. So the representative that's not on the board acts as an alternate for the two members that are on the board. So in the second version of the paragraph that staff provided, they don't mention the VTA board alternate. they mention the VTA policy advisory committee member that sometimes could be appointed to the VTA board position or the council could decide not to. So I think the second paragraph is more accurate because it does not talk about there being a alternate to the VTA board because we have not, since I've been on the council for about four years, appointed an alternate to the VTA board.

Thank you. Mr. Kirby, you had a comment or a question?

I do. Can I ask Sarah to make a comment, please?

Just a point of clarification. My understanding of the motion as it was introduced was Alternatives 1 and 3, but as I understand the amendment and the description, it sounds like you're motioning Alternatives 2 and 4. I just wanted to clarify that for the record and the minutes.

Yes, it was initially 1 and I'll say 1 and 4, but with the additional, with the friendly amendment, it's really 2 and 4, Alternatives 2 and 4. It's 1 and 3, both with modification.

Correct. Thank you.

Thank you for clarifying that. Thank you. Council Member Chang.

Thank you. I think staff's responses were good to the civil grand jury reports. And I think it's pretty clear that Sunnyvale is making a pretty good effort already based on their own report. So I wanted to include that part. For the second report and finding, I do think Appropriate experience is broad and it could lead to potential conflicts of interest. So I think it is best to leave it up to the individual jurisdictions on appointment process. And so I urge my colleagues, I vote.

Thank you. Next up is Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Thank you to Council Member Sell and Council Member Chang for their proposed amendments. I think they're very positive. I will be supporting the motion. I want to say I am grateful to the Civil Grand Jury, especially for the report on BART Silicon Valley. I will say that I largely agree that that project has not been well managed by VTA. I think that that goes back much longer than any of us have been on council. And I do appreciate the civil grand jury looking at it. However, at the end of the day, we are required to appoint a member of this body to the VTA board. And it's actually very unusual that we have a public transportation professional on the body. That is not something that happens very often. But again, due to conflict of interest, she asked not to be appointed. And so, you know, attempting to say, oh, well, you need to have such and such level of experience with public transportation to be appointed to this board, it simply may not be feasible given any particular, given a particular council makeup. Ultimately, at the end of the day, when we decide on intergovernmental relations assignments, We do so based on council member interest and the skills they bring to the table. But almost always it has to be 1 of us 7 and this is 1 of those cases. So, with that, I'd like to respectfully urge my colleagues. I vote. Thank you. Thank you vice mayor, and I'll be supporting this motion.

Thank you to. Staff for. Um, thank you to staff for, uh, creating this response. Um, and I just wanna thank, uh, I'll echo what the vice mayor said, you know, thank you for council to council member sell for, for being on the VTA board and, and, you know, ultimately I appreciate what the grand jury did here. You know, it's like, and kind of going through, um, the report, it's very clear, you know, that there have been ongoing questions. VTA initially funded BART back in 2000, the year 2000 with Measure A. So here we are more than 25 years later and finally getting to boring and the questions of cost overruns and other things. I look forward to hearing from the board on not just what the response is, but more importantly, at least what their plans are by the end of the year going forward from both a implementation and operation and their maintenance standpoint. I continue to raise questions about the cost of a station in Santa Clara. I continue to look at the viability of and general operation of BART overall when we've seen staffing increases and lack of let's say um lack of insight to or or lack of availability of an auditor and and their response to one so so you know making sure the VTA is being responsive to the residents of our county is important um that being said you know from a grand jury report standpoint we only had two areas where we were actually responding um for most for for both of these responses um most of this you know only a certain portion of it required sunnyvale to do a response and um i think you know as we said about the potholes and i appreciate what council member chang added you know it's like we are trying to do what's best from from a claim standpoint. I think updating our website slightly will improve that, but we were conceivably called out from that grand jury report. And then from a governance standpoint, the kind of the rotating between the three cities has worked well, especially because the board and the alternate on the board get a lot of, let's say, insight and and direct access from the VTA standpoint, and then all kind of the other subcommittees. You know, I appreciate all of our council members that spend their time on the VTA IGRs. They are, let's say, a lot of information, a lot of meetings, and so it isn't something to be taken lightly. And thank you, Councilmember Sell, especially for being on that board. So looking forward to hearing future response from the VTA. But I appreciate staff and what we've crafted here as far as a response to the grand jury. So I'm happy to support this motion. And with that, city clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion carries 7-0.

Thank you. And let's move on to our next item. James Meeker & and 26 dash 0630 except the Community equity assessment and findings on the Community access belonging and equity gaps is there a staff report. James Meeker & And we can pause for we can pause for a moment actually let's take a five minute recess and come back at 811. James Meeker & Thank you very much. Let's go ahead and reconvene and move on to our next item, item 26-0630, Accept the Community Equity Assessment and Findings on the Community Access, Belonging, and Equity Gaps. If you'd like to start.

Mayor Klein, I'm actually going to intro this one for us tonight. So tonight we're bringing forward, staff is bringing forward the findings from the Community Equity Assessment, which gives us a better understanding of how residents experience the city, our services, our programs, the community, I'll just want to acknowledge that this is a very hard topic to get our arms around, our minds around. There are things that we heard that are difficult to hear. Nobody on staff or council, I'm sure, wants to hear that members of the community don't feel connected to the city organization or feel like there's barriers there. So we're taking these findings very seriously. The assessment also tells us that a lot is working well and that we're doing pretty well. And that's my experience being in the community a lot, that residents value Sunnyvale. Generally, they feel that it's safe and welcoming. They value our libraries, our parks, our community centers and other services. And so really what we're not doing is starting over, but we're really building from a pretty good foundation. So just to be clear, what we're asking for tonight is about accepting the assessment and its findings. We're not asking Council to approve an implementation plan. That's something that staff is going to take on. We're not asking to implement new programs or funding. And we're not asking departments to take immediate changes based on the findings. These are things that we're going to work on Um, going forward, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more in the staff presentation, but council will see movement on this. And I know there's going to be some desire for council to say, what are the milestones, et cetera. And those, those are very valid questions. And I think you're going to see movement. on this work through amendments to council policies, changes in the way we do outreach, changes in the way we deliver services, and other enhancements that we're gonna make, really rebuilding our culture as an organization and how we interact with our community. So thank you for the opportunity to give a little bit of an introduction, and I will turn it over to Steph at this point.

Thank you, Tim. Good evening, members of the City Council. My name is Fernanda Perdomo-Simonez, Equity, Access, and Inclusion Manager. Joining me tonight is Dr. Sara Romano, Director of Policy Analysts at MIG, the consulting firm that conducted the Community Equity Assessment. tonight we are asking council to accept the cea and its findings on community access belonging and equity gaps the cea is focused especially on understanding how residents experience city services programs amenities and community life through an equity lens it gives us a baseline for understanding where we are doing well and where there are opportunities to improve Tonight we will briefly review the purpose of the CEA, what we learned through the assessment, mixed recommendations, and what staff is proposing as the next steps. The purpose of the CEA was fairly simple. We wanted to understand how residents experience city services programs and community life. And we also wanted to be intentional about whose voices we heard. Traditional public engagement does not always reach everyone in the same way. Language, disability, work schedules, transportation, child care, familiarity with government, and even whether someone feels comfortable engaging with the city can all affect a resident's ability to participate. That is where the difference between equality and equity becomes important. Equality means providing everyone with the same opportunity or resources. Equity recognizes that people might face different barriers, so sometimes we need to give some groups more than others to make sure everyone has a meaningful opportunity to participate, access services, and have their voices heard. This is really the underlying principle behind the CEA, the city's equity access and inclusion work. As we share with council during our June study session, this work has evolved over several years. Council approved the CEA in 2024 to better understand how residents experience city services, programs, and community life. We applied the same principle to how we conducted the CEA. Rather than expecting everyone to come to us or participate in the same way, we tried to meet residents where they were. We used different engagement methods, locations, and times, provided interpretation, childcare, and food, and intentionally reached out to communities that might be underrepresented in traditional public participation. Through those efforts, 539 residents and community stakeholders participated in the survey interviews, focus groups, community conversations, and public forums. So this image really captures both why we have an EAI office and why we conducted the CEA. We want everyone to have a meaningful opportunity to participate and benefit while recognizing that achieving that goal might require different approaches depending on the barriers people experience. With that, I'll turn it over to Sarah to walk us through the key findings and strengths, equity themes, and universal challenges.

Thanks, Fernanda. In the CEA, the findings are organized by strengths, equity themes, and universal challenges. For each of these, we'd like to highlight some of the key findings explained in more detail in the report and share some examples of how residents articulated their experiences. Across assessment activities, residents shared their appreciation of Sunnyvale's cultural diversity, public parks, and sense of public safety. The survey found that 61% of residents feel connected to their community and four in five agree that their neighborhood receives its fair share of city services and amenities like parks, infrastructure, and community programs. residents especially value the city's libraries parks community centers walkability public transit and cleanliness on the whole residents experience local government as effective responsive and welcoming and youth and adults alike view sunnyvale as a safe and welcoming place to grow up raise children and build a future these are a few examples of what residents shared with us the library is great I love the classes and services provided for various groups the next quotation the things that I like most about Sunnyvale is the environment and the security because you can go to the parks to parks in the evening and you'll be safe and lastly a lot of immigrants come here with small children and then the children move on and we stay on and become embedded in the community Equity themes refer to areas where the CEA showed differences in experiences based on specific factors and are organized in two themes, access and service gaps, and connection and belonging. Both the survey and the qualitative activities of the assessment demonstrated that residents across the city experience varying levels of ease in accessing and benefiting from city programs, services, resources, and opportunities. 51% of residents reported it's easy or somewhat easy to access city services and programs. 33% of residents, in contrast, reported that they never tried or were not aware of what services and programs the city offers. And 12% reported that it was somewhat difficult or very difficult to access services and programs. The survey highlighted that residents struggle the most with accessing affordable housing options and good paying jobs compared to, for example, access to pedestrian walkways, information about residential or commercial permitting, and care and support services for vulnerable residents. perceptions of ease of access also differ across socioeconomic demographic and geographic factors for example several subgroups were more likely to report on the survey that it is difficult for them to access city services programs and amenities and this included 43 43 of those whose home language is spanish 26% of residents with a disability, 26% of Latino residents, and 25% of residents with household incomes of $50,000 or less. Something that stood out from our conversations with youth was a strong interest in expanding youth-centered programs, social activities, and recreational opportunities. And similarly, residents with disabilities and their family members expressed the importance of improvements to infrastructure like sidewalks, streets, and parking, as well as available programming to enhance the quality of life for residents with a disability. The first quotation here is an example of what we heard from residents across different linguistic backgrounds, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and others regarding how the ability to engage with the city and their preferred language wasn't always accessible. In the second quotation, a young person communicated about various interests and needs, including what's reflected here about job opportunities. And the third quotation again references language services in relation to how improvements here and in regard to outreach and meeting documentation could facilitate greater civic participation. Across activities, many residents described Sunnyvale as welcoming. However, the sense of connection and belonging does vary across the city. For example, almost half of survey respondents living in the two northernmost zip codes reported not feeling connected and engaged with their community in Sunnyvale. And this contrasts with 23% in the two southernmost zip codes who reported feeling this way. The survey also found differences in reported sense of connection and engagement based upon how long someone has lived in the city. Across all survey participants, 61% agreed they felt connected and engaged, with 32% disagreeing. Looking only at residents living in Sunnyvale for 20 or more years, this number is higher. The average was 69% or 69%, excuse me, agreed that they felt connected and engaged. The percentage of those agreeing was lower for those living in the city six to 20 years and for those living in the city five or fewer years at 57 and 58% respectively. differences in connection and belonging also showed up along racial ethnic and disability status lines with more than two and five residents with a disability and those identifying as Latino respectively feeling that the opinions of residents are not included in the city's decisions. These are a few illustrative quotations. The first one is a resident sharing the perception of the adaptability of people with disabilities and how speaking up is significant, but people don't always feel heard. The second quotation reflects a resident's perception that belonging where it exists is tied most closely to one's ethnic and racial identity and community. And the third quotation is perception of a resident living in the northern part of Sunnyvale that her community has not heard or listened to. Universal challenges reflect the areas that most Sunnyvale residents agree are challenges for the entire community. 83% of residents characterized affordable housing availability as a problem for Sunnyvale residents, and this was followed by homelessness, 62%, and public infrastructure, 43%. Youth and residents in northern zip codes in particular share challenges with accessible public transportation, and notably residents across the city, regardless of where they lived, expressed concern about the accessibility of services and amenities, including public transportation in northern parts of the city. In terms of what they want the city to prioritize, improving public safety rose to the top of what residents want. This was followed by building more affordable housing and addressing homelessness. The emphasis on improving public safety in light of residents so clearly articulating a strong sense of public safety in Sunnyvale gives us insight into what people appreciate about living here, their values and what may contribute to them staying here. These quotations reflect contributions and interviews and focus groups from residents and highlight concerns about both the availability of affordable housing and homelessness and their impacts. As the consultant, MIG wants to recognize and commend Sunnyvale's commitment to centering equity in not only its public outreach and delivery of public services, but also in its efforts to continuously improve and adapt in support of serving all residents and ensuring everyone in Sunnyvale has a high quality of life. Actions related to many of the issues identified through the community equity assessment are already underway and the city has made important strides in achieving its goal for everyone to feel safe, seen and included. Our recommendations aren't intended to be prescriptive, but instead provide a high level starting point informed by promising approaches and an ever evolving field of practice. The consulting team recommends that the next step in advancing Sunnyvale's equity access and inclusion goals is to create an equity framework that can help inform more responsive policies, programs, and services. We suggest that framework elements include a guiding principle, strategic focus areas, and a phasing plan with defined outcomes in support of developing metrics to allow tracking progress and celebrating accomplishments. The guiding principle we recommend the city use in its equity planning is as follows. All residents should have the opportunity to achieve the same outcomes. Because communities experience different barriers, the city will tailor its strategies and investments to address those differences while maintaining a common vision and shared goals for the whole community. This principle of tailored strategies in support of everyone achieving desired outcomes is one that has guided more equitable policies, planning, and outcomes within and across local governments, school districts, nonprofits, and community-based organizations nationally. Based on the findings of the CEA, we recommend four strategic focus areas. These include community partnerships. For example, this includes things like building and sustaining meaningful partnerships with CBOs, cultural groups, neighborhood leaders, and residents to better understand community priorities, reduce barriers to participation, and co-create solutions. Secondly, communications. This focus area means, for example, working with residents, community partners, and other trusted messengers to tailor communications to the diverse needs of the community. Interagency partnerships refers to things like strengthening partnerships with schools, transportation providers, housing organizations, nonprofit service providers, and other government agencies to address complex challenges facing communities. In practice, this can look like coordinated planning, sharing information when appropriate, aligning investments, and pursuing collaborative solutions that improve outcomes across the city. And lastly, use of data. This references strengthening the city's ability to collect, analyze and use data to identify inequities, prioritize investments and evaluate outcomes. We believe the city's next steps towards planning and implementation should be grounded in the lived experiences of residents in the city's own operational realities. This will support ensuring that priorities and actions are meaningful, feasible and more likely to achieve lasting results.

This brings us to council action and next steps and what we're asking council to do tonight. Our next step is to develop an interdepartmental equity implementation plan. And I want to emphasize the word interdepartmental. The plan will identify priorities, strategies, measures, policy updates, and any resources that might be needed. And more importantly, we are not starting from zero. Our first step will be to inventory the work that departments are already doing and build on those successes. We already see increased multilingual materials, more departments conducting outreach in more places and at different times. from there we can identify what is working where there are gaps and where better coordination can strengthen the work already underway any future recommendations requiring additional funding or council policy direction will come back to council through the appropriate budget or policy processes Ultimately, success means that equity, access, and belonging become part of our organizational culture and part of how we serve the entirety of the Sunnyvale community. With that, we're happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Are there questions for staff? First up is Councilmember Sell.

Hi, I wanted to thank you for doing this study. It was... I, during the study, saw you go to many places, so it was all good, and it came to this conclusion. So I had a question. When I looked at many of the charts about income, inequality, and other things, it would always go back to like some areas of inequity on a lot of the maps were relating to North Sunnyvale. So when you're deciding how to prioritize, how to look at things and stuff like that, how will those things kind of come across? Like when I look at the graphs, many of the graphs talk about different demographics, different language barriers and all those things. And some of them are any thoughts of, you know, there's many, there's only limited resources we have. And so how do you decide like where to start with all this information on all this data that you have? And with knowing that, you know, we have these other study issues related to trying to, you know, Like one of our top strategies is more retail, maybe in certain parts of Sunnyvale, such as North Sunnyvale. So how do you, how do you, how does staff, this is like, as the city manager kind of alluded, this is large and it will take a lot of time. And how do you decide whether, where to start? or is that like later on in an implementation plan? You'll look at that and you'll strategize and what's the next step?

Yeah, if I could jump in, Council Member Brassell, Connie Brassell is Assistant City Manager. That's a very good question. And we did think about that and we do know that there's a council priority. You mentioned about looking at retail in the north part of Sunnyvale. And again, this is just, you know, a moment in time we wanted to understand what our baseline was, where there were some gaps in services, but it is that implementation plan that's going to come further to really understand how we can use a lot of these data points. We're looking at this as a data set that we can use and refer to, you know, depending again on the service that may be provided or the project in the area or, you know, whatever that might be. But that's part of the implementation plan that we'll really do the deep dive on.

Okay, and I think it's great. I think it's like a big reservoir of knowledge. And when you're looking at other things, studies, then you can refer to this and it can give you more information on how to approach those other programs. So thank you for your work on this.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much staff for this very thoroughly researched report. I will say that this was difficult to read and it's difficult to see many of the findings here, but it is important that the city face these findings without flinching and look them in the eye. something that i the the points that i found most concerning and that i think are going to need a great amount of effort to address um in general the lack of the sense of a lack of belonging in north sunnyvale a difference between three percent for 94086 and 94087 and 49 percent for 94085 and 94089 responding that they don't feel like they believe belong in the community a similar sense of lack of belonging reported for millennial and younger residents the response that we saw from latino residents and residents with disabilities expressing that they do not feel heard by the city these are all very concerning and the city needs to work to address these problems and these concerns and address them forthrightly um one question i have you know a lot of the response for this has called out in the report and the city manager's introduction is going to be operational it's going to be internal to city processes which inherently by nature of the charter are out of council's purview right that said It's also our responsibility as council to evaluate the city's response to these findings. And the recommendations of this report are to essentially adopt long-term principles. And I believe one of the public comments we received emphasized that it is important that this report simply does not simply gather dust on a shelf. right so the question i have is you know how are we going to make sure how are we going to report on this how are we going to collect metrics how are we going to make sure that the city is moving in the right direction not just next year not just two three four years from now but five ten years from now when everyone on this dais has probably moved on to other things um and i think that's probably primarily a question for the city manager but uh anyone else who wants to chime in

Hi, Michelle Pereira, Director of Library and Recreation Services. I think that's also something that we've really talked about a lot as well, is how do you institutionalize something so it's here after we're not, right? And I mean, a few things. Obviously, we have been spending a lot of time in the last 18 months or so working on policies. I mean, equity is not new to us today. We've been spending quite a lot of time updating, well, Assistant City Manager Sarah Johnson-Rios has spent a lot of time as well updating these council policies and really we have been looking at a lot of them through that equity lens. I think a good example of one of them is the special events policy that we updated and we really did take a look at that with an eye on equity and many others and I'm sorry I can't name the others off the top of my head. I also think as we look to the future we look at some of the practices we have now. Obviously, you know, I'm the library person and equity is baked into library work. This isn't something that started when it became a council priority. It started long before I was even in the profession. And it's just something that, you know, as you look at new ways to bring down barriers, which we've done for years, looking at the digital divide, looking at how you eliminate fines. That's something the council approved a few years ago. It's just something that becomes inherent and you move that needle along. And the more you look at what you do and how you can continue to improve what you do, which is what that implementation plan is for, the more institutionalized it becomes. That's why we want to make sure that it's not just Connie and I trying to say, hey, equity, equity. It's really every single department head being a member of this process and ensuring that it feeds down into the departments as well. We do a lot in this space already. And I'm sure we couldn't even name everything that we do. So that's really where we're going to start is to take a hard look at everything we're doing and how we make sure People are aware of that because that's part of the issue is some might say, oh, you don't do X. We might do X. We just haven't done a good enough job of promoting X. So, you know, there's no easy way to institutionalize something. However, you know, I think the steps with the plan, looking at what we're already doing and the buy-in that we have from the executive team and the city council is going to move that needle.

you used a verb there several times that I think is absolutely critical, and that is institutionalize. That, if nothing else, is something I want everyone to take away tonight is the importance of institutionalizing this, of having this baked into the fabric of the city going forward. To that end, one thing that I will say I would like to see is performance indicators in next year's budget for every single department. on how they are working to address equity. I don't know if that's necessarily feasible or necessarily needs to be included in a motion, but like that would be something I would like to see is, you know, we have our performance and workload indicators in the budget is one of the key things that we use to identify when and where changes are necessary. And I think that's, a very powerful tool to leverage. And I'll ask the city manager, I don't know that that would need formal direction.

No, I don't think so because Sunnyville has a performance-based budget. So our, you know, as we're standing up services like this and changing services and we're always looking for how we can measure those. I don't know what that performance indicator is or what those look like yet. Yeah. But we'll need to spend some time deliberating on that with Steph. But yeah, you don't need a motion on that.

Okay. Yeah, and I could imagine that for some departments, it might be easier to come up with those than others. IT might be a little more challenging than, say, library, or maybe not. I don't know.

Samir, if I could just chime in also. One of the things, if we go down the conversation of metrics, Michelle alluded to this, is that equity is not just one department. So I think if we start thinking and saying that each department would be held accountable for a certain metric, that may not be the best use this is why we're saying you know let's do the implementation and think about it um you know we were really thinking about examples and um wordly is one of the things that really has been benefited and you know fernanda was able to bring this on with a city clerk and that's something that we've been using significantly that's not just the office of the city manager or you know council or the library it's every department that does a hybrid meeting uses that right so how would you know where do you attribute that metric so i think that's you know something that we want to think through and don't want to commit um this is why we were very intentional of saying you know accept these findings and and we kind of have to sit with them too with a little bit right to understand exactly what it means and how we want to work that into the fabric You know, we use that word institutionalized because we really do want this to be long-term. And, you know, one of the terms that I've been thinking about is that, you know, we used to think practice makes perfect. And I'd like to think of it as practice makes permanent, right? And Wordly now has become something that has become part of what we do, right? Like people don't even second guess. You know, we came to council to recommend a new position in communications. And one of those goals for that, the way we wrote it up, is that that's going to set up you know templates and ways we do outreach so again we're really starting to practice to make things permanent and make it part of so we don't have to think about that that is just the way we do business

Okay. And that's a point very well taken that much of this is interdepartmental and cross-departmental and we don't want to overly silo and overly break down. And what you said about practice makes permanent, you know, to echo that there is a saying from Stafford Beer who was a cyberneticist, the purpose of a system is what it does. And I feel like that is something that should be taken into account here as well. The purpose of a system is not what the authors say it's supposed to do. It's what it actually does. And that's what we need to be looking for here. Not good intentions, but actual impact. The other thing that I wanted to raise on this, there's two other items I wanted to raise. The first, we heard a lot about collaboration with nonprofits, community groups, affordable housing providers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One area where I think that there needs to be additional emphasis for cooperation is with the business community and the labor community. We heard specifically about lack of access to jobs as a concern. We have heard a great deal about lack of access to retail as a concern. Both of these are areas where it's not so much nonprofits we need to be engaging with, but the private sector. and i again i don't feel that that needs to necessarily be captured in a motion but i would just like to see that you know raise that as we're talking about these issues you know there is a substantial role in the private sector of the private sector here and the city does need to be coordinating and working with them the second thing i wanted to ask is can you speak a little about how we intend to leverage the lakewood branch library and the columbia neighborhood center to further these efforts i think the library is sort of the more obvious one so i'm a little more interested in the neighborhood center

Sure. I think it's pretty similar, actually, between the two. I think the Columbia Neighborhood Center is probably the jewel in the crown here in Sunnyvale, but I think many forget just all the things it offers. And when it comes to being able to leverage that, if you just look at the types of programs that are there, just almost everything is steeped in equity. You know, we are serving that community where the number of grants we get to be able to do free programming for that neighborhood community, the dental truck that shows up twice a month in order to do free dental care for the community, and they can make an appointment. Obviously, the clinic that we have there, you know, that really is... all steeped in equity. And I think when it comes to how to leverage that, it really comes down to we can take a look at the surveys that we do there after the programs and the grants that we do. We do ask the community how they heard about this. What did you like about it? What would you change about it? We put out our messages in multiple languages. So, you know, a lot is already happening at Columbia. It just needs to be amplified even more so more people know how great Columbia Neighborhood Center is and what we can do. When it comes to Lakewood, you know, it's no pun intended, but it's kind of an open book right now, right? I know. I'm sorry. I had to throw that in. As we look at Lakewood, we have, you know, we're going to have this amazing community. We've got a new playground. We're going to have an amazing new library, amazing new park. It's going to be another jewel in Sunnyvale's crown. And the Lakewood Library, if it is as busy as the main library, we're going to have a lot of people in there. And I think it's a really great opportunity to ask, to survey as people come in, to survey after programs, to survey just who's in the library and to keep asking the same question. So, you know, on a scale of one to five, you know, what do you feel that you belong here in this library? if if it's i'm making this up a two the first time you fill it out and then we serve it that same person gets caught again you know a year later and it's a three we can see that that needle has moved so i think lakewood does give us good opportunity in terms of connecting with the community having a very tangible accessible And very easy way for the community to connect with city government. And I think Lakewood is going to be, that's one of the ways that Lakewood's going to be a way we move the needle on equity.

And if I may add, Councilmember, when we were devising the community forums and all the outreach we were doing to the community, the Columbia Neighborhood Center was one of the places that we wanted to hold our community meetings just because is a space where just the day that we were there, a lot of families, specifically Latina families, enjoy the amenities, the park, they come there to gather and it is one of the, like Michelle was saying, is one of the jewels of Sunnyvale because we have so many services that are being used by the community there. residents really appreciated the fact that we have our first meeting in there, in the Columbia Neighborhood Center, and we also provided childcare, we had food, as well as we had bilingual interpretation. So I think that this is all towards the fact that we are increasing and definitely looking into those communities that perhaps we have not reached in the past. But at the same time with the work that we're doing with Title V and the language access plan that we are building on through things like, for example, but also translating a lot of our documentation in different languages are part of that outreach that we are doing as well in that part of Sunnyvale.

thank you um quick final thing um some things that i would love to see for both columbia neighborhood center and the lakewood branch library would be making city services accessible there during specific hours so perhaps having office hours of some sort at those locations for residents to access city services that they might normally need to come to city hall for I think a mobile farmer's market, having a farmer's market at Columbia Neighborhood Center and or the branch library would be something that would be a very positive thing to look at. Um, and then finally, I'll note that we, you know, Columbia's neighborhood center plays this role to an extent, but we don't have a formal youth or teen center in the city and we don't have much access to LGBTQ spaces at all in the city, like on a permanent basis. Um, so those are all things that I'd like to ask, you know, be considered on the list as we move on. And with that, I'm going to turn my microphone off. Thank you.

Thank you. Vice mayor. Uh, next up is council members to snares.

Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, staff, for preparing this with such thoughtfulness and care to the community. It was really apparent, and as I was reading it, how much everybody who contributed to it genuinely cares about the people and see them as more than data points. And I think that standing out to me, I'm like, we're off to a really good start then, right? And I will note, there is a lot of positive things in here too about what people love about Sunnyvale and I get it I grew up here and I live here now I'm raising my kids here now um just more people want to be able to do that with greater ease and I've been really appreciating the conversation so far um I won't comment too much on specific programs I'd like to see because I'm sure you all will bring a lot of really great ideas to us and you're not you know, needing, help me think of things to do. I'm sure you guys have got it. Something that did cross my mind is that these are not new problems. I think anyone who read this report understood that this was a problem before reading it, but maybe not affecting who and with such disparity, which is a really important piece to actually solving it. So rather than this being a new set of problems that the city's addressing, it's just a different way to solve them at all and think about problems. And I appreciated that focus on the report and that focus on the path moving forward and looking interdepartmentally and saying like, okay, it may not seem like an EAI effort, but it totally is. And I'll leave that up to the experts. And I think another component of starting this work off is introducing ourselves to the community. and proper, like the issue that I have seen is like not knowing where to go or they don't know because they haven't had that experience before or don't feel comfortable coming or don't know how to access certain things. And when I was teaching political science and I do the local government section, I was teaching it like nobody had ever heard anything before. And these are all people who had been through high school government. So I know that most people don't know who we are. So I'd love an opportunity to introduce ourselves to people who may not know. just to re-level set you're welcome and here's how we serve you and then also continue those opportunities to show interest in their lives so if there's a way to come up with a way to get ongoing feedback that's specific to people's access when they're accessing our service that would be really helpful i think so that we can kind of check things as we go and then as you check back in with council to really think about what are the things that we're doing that that it is moving the needle because it's going to be hard to see that needle move. But when it does, we want to notice and then seize on that opportunity and try to take that farther and replicate it. So that's just going to be really what I'm looking there. And I also made a note here, community connection and connectivity is public safety. First and foremost, you're safer in a community where you know your neighbors and are aware of all of your resources and helping that can help people and also get people out of their existing neighborhoods, opportunities for people to go places in the city that they hadn't before to create a new kind of understanding of place and a shared sense of community with people who live on different sides of the city. I think could really help broaden that perspective. I don't want to be too repetitive here, but I did have a note here that I, the business community as well, they have reached wonderful success in many cases and we are in their backyard and they're our neighbors too. And we'd love to hear from them and support them in helping with more connectivity. And many of them are very eager to do that, um, either for legal, legally required reasons or not. Um, Okay, I think that's all the notes that I had, but I look forward to hearing from the public what they think about this, and I'm looking forward to seeing it go forward. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Councilmember. Next up is Councilmember Srini Basin.

Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for a wonderful report. And then on the positive note, what I really liked is the people who like Sunnyvale, the percentage or the trend is very similar to the national community survey. So which validates this survey in a both were done with two independent organizations. And then that's what I really like. Thanks for doing that. And then I totally agree. There are a lot of gaps. I liked what assistant city manager said. Equity is a foundation on which the city should be built. But having said that, I would like to see... People are always complaining about programs and services. And then... A lot of times they may not know what are the programs, what is the dividing line between the agencies, right? What city provides versus school provides, or rather VTA provides, or public transportation and other things. i i think coming up with a a list might be one way to do that but more importantly as director pereira said i noted three or four words you said promoting amplifying and all those things and then i think that is the critical thing when i look at slide 17 i want to focus on slide 17. Communication is very, very important. That is, are we a single window where we provide all the response to all their questions? I hope not. We will not be able to, for example, It could be related to school activities or school lunch program. We saw that on the survey, right? That versus what city provides. And then I also would like to see some kind of prioritization of our programs and services. based on what our services are accessed more and then where they're having the critical hurdle to access the service. It could be from food desert to any public transportation or health care, those kinds of things. We talked about Columbia Center. I really like the RotoCare coming there, but then how many people know that, right? So that is the critical thing. And then I also agree that we need to have some kind of milestone, though these are so subjective, we may not be able to have a milestone exact number, but at least knowing the trend. For example, Wordly, you mentioned that, which is my favorite, and then in the sense that Now it's translated to 60 languages. Are we seeing people using Wordly in different languages? How many are using that? Is that effective? That's a simple number we could get. That would indicate maybe it's not as we are seeing, or it's more than what we want it to be. So those kinds of simple metrics, even a trend would be very, very useful there. And then in this, we talked about community partners. I totally agree, neighborhood associations and then community partners. We have so many, Sunnyvale Community Services, Helping Hands, and all those organizations. But I want to talk about interagency partnership. For example, I was talking to the superintendent of Sunnyvale School District yesterday. He mentioned that they are coming up with Community Engagement Day on the 15th of September. Okay, this is a very, very important activity to participate because this is where most of the school parents will be coming into, and then that's in captive audience. And then there we should be able to say, these are the services we provide, and then this is how you can access that. And then you also mentioned about use of data. I talked about that. But overall, I think this report captures what we kind of knew, but then it gives us a framework to work on. I'm really glad that we did this. But at the same time, we need to prioritize some of the efforts because we don't have infinite money or infinite resources. Those are my comments. Thank you very much. Thanks for your work.

Thank you, Councilmember. Next up is Councilmember Chang.

Councilmember Lee was first.

I'll let her go first. Not according to Zoom right now, but okay. Whoever wants to go first.

Thank you for the presentation and thank you for the hard work. I really appreciate the depth and the breadth of the organizations that you reached out to this to get a statistically significant survey set. And to me, as Council Member Srinivasan said, it's interesting seeing how this lines up with the overall for the city and then the gaps that we are seeing. I think that everyone knows, knew to some extent the gaps that we're discussing today. It is nevertheless good to see them quantified with percentages. I think we all knew that North Sunnyvale feels and is in many ways historically marginalized and underserved and it's good to have the percentages on that. In addition to what Council Member Srinivasan was saying about interagency networking and support, I want to mention in addition to working with school districts, just geographically schools and the community college district and other agencies have satellites in places where the city doesn't. So if we are interested in saying, for example, Bishop has an auditorium, we can be doing I think more strong partnerships there. For example, Foothill De Anza has a satellite campus on the north side of town. Once Moffett Park is more thoroughly developed, maybe we can do things there in partnership with them. I also want to Oh, shoot. What did I want to? I was on a roll. I agree with the Vice Mayor's suggestion of partnering more closely with businesses and labor organizations. I think that's a good thing to look into. And also, for example, when we do outreach, believe at the last meeting we were talking about outreach for the artificial turf and there were very few respondents from the northern zip codes if we were to do outreach not just at the farmers market but also within those zip codes and especially perhaps to the ethnic grocery stores we have um new wing yon Taj Mahal, Chavez, a lot of these places where people naturally gather in community and with their communities. I think we can get a lot of feedback there potentially when the city is looking for, you know, these equitable, when we're looking for these equitable outreach opportunities. But overall, I am very excited to see the results of the survey. And thank you so much for the work that you did.

Thank you, Councilmember. Now, Councilmember Chang.

Great, thank you. Thank you for your work on this. It was really interesting. I thought that there was an intersection of poverty and seniors living alone in the middle of Sunnyvale that I hadn't anticipated when I looked at the report. So that was really interesting to me. And as we look at grocery stores and as the disparity of grocery stores in the northern Sunnyvale area, it's also that the grocery stores are just concentrated along El Camino Real specifically. And so as we're looking at more diversity development of grocery stores if not just centered along El Camino Real and other parts of the city as well for future decision making. One thing I wanted to bring up because this kind of happened to me recently was I was helping a monolingual Mandarin speaker with something police related and the materials were only in English and Spanish and they do they did mention you know that they have an interpreter line on the phone but I think if we want to look at written language, I know we're working on surveys now, having them in simplified Chinese, but my family is from Taiwan, so we read traditional Chinese and not simplified Chinese. And I just wanted to make that distinction. There's a lot of mention to Chinese, but it's not broken down in the way Hispanic and Latino population is broken down. So I was just kind of be interested in future to keep that in mind as well. But otherwise, I think that the report's really interesting as we look into the future of how we're moving on Sunnyvale. Thank you. Thank you.

And I have a few comments and maybe a question or two. So so first, you know, thank you for the report. I think it as as the rest of Council said, it's it's interesting data and you know, definitely we've seen that ongoing disparity, especially from the northern and I'll agree there's some surprises in the data that that you know, like what Council Member Chang just mentioned that that is interesting when you start looking at. how residents around the city are are you know feel that they're not being served and that's there's lots of disparities in their historical and and how we try to correct those so you look at you know you're looking at the question of services transportation public safety um definitely from a A liquid branch library, I think, from a services standpoint, this is a great opportunity from a city standpoint that as we. Add a brand new service, let's say core, um, to that north part of Sunnyvale. It's how we activate as the vice mayor said, you know, city services, but just educate residents of. Different backgrounds, different languages at that location and what services we provide there becomes very important. And, you know, kudos to staff and, you know, the city manager on how we've looked at, you know, increasing awareness in that community as far as reporting sidewalk issues reporting, you know, um. Reporting tree, you know, trees that need to be trimmed, you know, kind of the common service. The most common services that residents are looking for are usually of that that it's it's how they how they're being affected on a daily basis. And so to me that that is critical. You know, it's it's creating as big of an umbrella as possible, you know, meeting with our, you know, outreach with residents from around the city, but but also. also with our business community and how we bring all that together and trying to get what we want from a long-term solution. You mentioned residents that have been here more than 20 years have a better connection to the city and and i think that's kind of an ongoing issue that we have that it's not just age although of course millennials haven't lived as long but but often are moving into our moving into our community for specific jobs and so so from that standpoint you know it's a it's a relatively trans transient um portion of our residents that it's harder to reach out to. So as we've talked about previously this year, how we activate the rental community and making sure that it's not just a north-south, north-central and south issue. it's an issue of of especially from a rental community which is you know all across the city they don't feel connected and that's a historic thing and often because they're only here for a certain number of years it's harder for them to make that connection to the community but not just the services we're providing at different locations around the city but how we do outreach into that segment, which I think, you know, is across languages, across, you know, ages. And, you know, we work really hard from a city standpoint to provide, you know, family friendly things, you know, things for seniors, things for youth, you know, trying to hit all segments of our community, but it's getting them involved. It's communicating that to them, which is a critical thing. And I appreciate, you know, so we talked about services. To me, it's like Lakewood Branch Library is a critical thing. from a south standpoint you know i hear that come concern from especially i'll say district four and the concerns about no sidewalks and nothing kind of disconnects a community to a certain degree more than than if you can't walk down your side if you're not walking down a sidewalk and meeting a neighbor If you're walking into the street, there's less, let's say, general walking through that. And historically, because of that neighborhood, and you look at transportation kind of in the far south western standpoint too, some neighborhoods that don't have sidewalks that don't feel either they're connected to transportation or services or there's a community there so i do think that that also feeds into this general general issue you know and of course uh public safety you know language and you know general safety within the community and also going back and then so services transportation i'm hoping with what we kick off over the next month that you know that city shuttle um starts to fill some of that gap that that you know we're trying to provide services for every resident in our city to get around better in our city and so how we communicate that rollout as well as just kind of that service during the Lakewood Branch Library opening, during the different events at these core centers of Columbia Neighborhood Center, the community center, where our senior center, where our residents are. I think that's important. from a public safety standpoint, just making sure that we break down those barriers as much as possible. That's how we activate, that's the National Night Out. That's activating each of these neighborhoods as much as possible and educating. We've spent a lot of money and council has really pushed forth the need for neighborhood grants to activate communities all over our city so that they get to know their neighbors they get to know our their council as well as more importantly you know library cert and public safety you know breaking down those barriers as much as possible so um i think the report you know is was a good step um i had some questions on monday morning about about timing and i think you know it's it's how this rolls out um as we go into budget next year, as we go into to, let's say, priorities from a city standpoint, educating council on how this becomes part of staff's, you know, normal operation across across the different departments, I do think is important, but really appreciated the the the document as well as the presentation was was a good summary especially the kind of the details of comments from residents i think that that's always kind of hits true because we get lots of emails um but not often on kind of this general how you feel about the city it's always issue based as opposed to generally what you feel so um i'll get off my soapbox thank you for for for the presentation and and thank you for the report it's it was um very very enlightening as far as that's concerned I see no other comments from council. Let's 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 in 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 Deanna Gee, followed by Himanshu.

Good evening, Council and Mr. Mayor. My name is Deanna Gonzalez. I'm a longtime resident of Sunnyvale. I live in the home that I grew up in. Parents bought it 72 years ago, and I am North Sunnyvale born and raised. I want to say I appreciate the opportunity to review the equity assessment report and its findings. It is my hope that this report is not only a formal acknowledgement of the systematic challenges of North Sunnyvale residents, in which we've all experienced for decades, but it's also a way that we can mechanize the tool that the report has designed or has come up with because we need some solid action with this The findings of the EA provide an undeniable mandate to prioritize North Sunnyvale within the city's strategic framework. I know there's a whole city out there that has expressed how they feel. However, it's undeniable the percentage of people who responded in how they feel about North Sunnyvale. I know from my own experience and living in that area, and owning a home there that things need to progress in that area with more people living on that side of town i appreciate that the city has committed to a retail development retention strategy But that's just the first step. We definitely need the council, the city staff to begin assessing what they can do with the EA and to put this in place and implement some processes to see how equity can be spread across not only just North Sunnyvale but throughout the city. uh our north sunnyville has been coming to these meetings talking about uh the equity of loss of grocery stores services and the lack of retail services on that side of town again i'm saying this because i've lived there for most of my life uh transportation mentioned the transportation coming up with nine shuttles to serve the area i don't believe that that's going to be an accessible and adequate enough option i appreciate the consideration but i really need the city to prioritize this report prioritize the retention strategy and make sure that you include Members like me here several times this last year addressing the Council to provide support and input. Thank you.

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

Good evening, Mayor, Council members, city manager and staff. I appreciate the staff putting together the equity assessment report. The equity assessment does confirm what the North Sunnyville residents have been saying. But I think after hearing the staff's presentation, I'm a little concerned. that some of the reports are potentially getting lost so we've heard about investments in libraries and parks today thank you and those are important and we do not but but they don't address all the inequities that we've kind of identified that you've identified in your own report right the assessment identifies a broader pattern in north sunnyvale So loss of grocery stores, neighborhood serving retail, poor walkability, pedestrian infrastructure, transportation gaps, differences in neighborhood amenities, school and youth services needs, and weaker connection to city government, right? And the data is pretty striking. I was pretty amazed by that, right? So 34% of, I'm just repeating it back, whatever you have, 34% of respondents in North Sunnyvale zip codes 94085, 94089 said their neighborhoods lack the variety of businesses, shopping and amenities that make them good places to live. In 94086 and 9487, it was just 3% of those people that actually said that. So that's a stark difference. And this is why equity matters, right? So I think we understand that. So equity means identifying where disparities exist and directing them, directing the resources and solutions to address those specific needs. So library is great, but it does not replace a grocery store. Park does not replace neighborhood serving retail. Transportation somewhere else does not replace access within your own community. And pop-ups or farmer's markets are not substitutes for permanent, reliable grocery and retail access. Council has already made supporting neighborhood serving retail a 2026 strategic priority. So including development of retail and retention strategy, that's kind of what I'm talking about. So I'm asking both the council and the staff, please use this assessment to inform work now. Make North Sunnyvale a specific focus where your own data shows the need is greatest. and involve us, the neighbors and the community in shaping the response. So you have communities ready to step up and help, we're here. And so community engagement should also mean partnering with residents to develop that plan and implement those solutions. So otherwise we're documenting inequity instead of reducing it, right? So you have the data, you have the strategic priority and you have the community that's ready to partner with you. So now is the time to connect with them. Now's the time to act. And thank you again for your report and thanks for listening.

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

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

Thank you very much. I would like to echo the concerns of the previous speaker about the loss of retail in Northern Sunnydale. I'm particularly concerned about the Fair Oaks Plaza where the Taj Mahal is located. My understanding is that's going to be destroyed to be replaced by housing. Now, if that area were to be replaced by mixed usage, say retail on the ground for apartments above, I'd be all for it. But instead, the quote unquote mixed usage is just not destroying a tiny handful of the retail and eliminating the rest. This not only affects the convenience of those living in Northern Sunnyvale, but it's also going to affect people outside of this area because every person who has to drive further in order to, say, shop in a grocery store is one more car that's going to be on 101 or Lawrence Expressway or any other thoroughfare, and it's going to affect the drivability of everybody else.

Also, I'd like to thank you very much for the

but on the subject of walkability, it would be very nice if I could access that library from south of 101 without feeling like I'm risking my life by walking up Lawrence across 101 where there are really no lights and I have to dodge cars going on and off the highway. Thank you very much, and I yield the rest of my time.

Thank you.

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

Okay, I'll go ahead and close the public hearing and bring it back to council for any final comments or a motion.

Vice Mayor Mallinger. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I want to thank the members of the public who commented and spoke tonight and for the concerns that you've raised. And I am ready with the motion if my colleagues are.

Go ahead.

Thank you very much. I am going to move staff recommendation with a couple of modifications. The first is that we add a fifth point to the four mentioned, which is actually let me forward this email I had drafted, but I did not send it. Sorry, I have just sent that to David, but I'm going to read it aloud, which is. A fifth point to improve access to critical non-city services. Where'd it go? Apologies.

What page in the original document or?

No, no, it's something I'm adding. So it's not in the original document. My email disappeared from the screen. Try this again. A fifth point to improve access to critical non- What are the first four points that you're trying to add to is what I'm- The first four points are in the staff recommendation.

uh i'm sorry if i may jump in staff is not recommending those four items council um vice mayor mellinger just for clarification we're just recommending alternative one is just to accept the community assessment um what the the four items that you're referring to is the the count of the priorities And this is would be coming back. This is what we would use as a framework for developing the plan, but we're not recommending that council adopt those because we still need to go back and figure, you know, ensure that based on all the information we have, those are the appropriate ones. I would say if council wants to give guidance of something else to consider that we hadn't, that might be an additional 2, but we don't want you to we're not recommending that you adopt those 4 goals.

okay if we're not formally recommending that i still have a fifth goal that i would like included for consideration um and mr city clerk you should have gotten that by now and i will accept staff's direction on how best to incorporate this in the motion but i would like this memorialized in some way um

I do have it. Give me a moment to pull up that slide. My computer just froze up on me and I need to get it from here to over there.

The Jeopardy music is copyrighted, isn't it?

That's not part of the recording.

david um the four goals are not under report i mean not on the slides they're on the report so i don't know yes so you're not going to be finding it in the presentation just just give me a second to get it from city clerk computer where i would have like a

Just give me a moment.

I'll let you. All right.

There we go. Yes. So in the staff recommendation and improve access to critical noncity services for underserved communities identified by this report, including but not limited to retail and third spaces, public transportation options, schools and other educational resources, healthcare and affordable housing. And I really see this as pairing with goal one cited in that report on improving equitable access to city services.

Does staff have a comment?

Again, since we're not recommending, this wasn't part of the recommendation, what I would say is I would suggest that you accept staff's recommendation, alternative one, to accept the findings and to staff consider expanding the proposed operational goal number one to, say, improve equitable access to city

and non-city services um i will respectfully say that i would prefer to have this call down separately so that the items are listed but i'm happy to have say to accept the language of consider including among the goals

That would be fine except if you say, except the staff, and then again, be clear that is staff to consider as they're finalizing the operational goals to consider these items.

And the 2nd thing I would like to add. Is to explicitly identify North Sunnyvale as a region in need of additional services and special care as far as equity goes.

On that 1, I would say it gets because how do we define North Sunnyvale?

94085 and 94089. if if you say specific uh zip codes that's better than than a region because we don't uh it's hard to define otherwise just north versus south that's fair then to specifically identify 94085 and 94089 as areas in need of specific care and attention regarding equity council member so

I would second that motion. Is this the motion?

Yes. Yes. I would second that motion. In addition, I don't know where this fits in, but what I heard, okay, amendment. A friendly amendment.

A friendly amendment.

So it was mentioned by some community members that they would like like a community advisory group. I remember when we had the mobile home community and we had 13 mobile homes represented by one representative from each other mobile home. And then they were able to work with the staff and the developers to come up with an agreement. So I do see over my many years of advocacy that when you do engage like a pretty knowledgeable driven group that they're able to bring insights in and then their insights are just the iceberg of what many other people are thinking so then if you're able to hear from them it's kind of like your focus group idea but it's more like a so I don't know where that fits in like a more consistent focal group or Any thoughts, staff? Is that already embedded in what you're going to do to have sort of like maybe advisory groups and certain focus areas such as the two zip codes that Vice Mayor Millinger is mentioning?

Yeah, I don't think it needs a motion because that is embedded in some of the work that we want to do. We already have advisory groups, you know, the items in regards to providing third spaces for younger individuals, teens. We have the Teen Advisory Committee. We also have the Human Relations Committee that people could apply to be part of. We also want to work with a lot of the neighborhood associations, which we directly tie into the neighborhoods. So that's already part of the work that we want to do.

Okay. And then because of the motion of this North Sunnyvale being a focus area, then North Sunnyvale.

Can I just say, not North Sunnyvale, stick to the zip codes just for clarification, please.

The two zip codes mentioned, like there would be more information about all those resources of how someone can engage that go to community members in those two zip codes so that they can engage in already Some of the programs we have, like the Teen Advisory Committee, the Community Committees, the Senior Committees, and all of those. That would be great. So no amendment needed. Okay. So second, as said. So second.

Okay. Thank you very much, Councilmember Sell, for your second. And while there's no amendment there, I do believe that that feedback is worthwhile. and especially seeking to directly engage with North Sunnyvale neighborhood associations, leverage the teen advisory committee, senior disability, and human relation committees. These are all valuable bodies that should be directly engaged with as part of this work. So I will speak very briefly to my motion. I want to thank staff. and our consultants for a really excellent, thorough, detailed, and I would say unflinching report, a report that goes deep into the problem segments of our community are facing. Groups like our Latino community, our disabled community, people who speak English as a second language, residents of North Sunnyvale. This report has really laid bare a lot of things that we have sort of known implicitly or suspected or guessed at and made it really, really clear. clear and as director perera said now the goal is to institutionalize this and to institutionalize these findings and the response to these findings and i will say that as council member i am going to be harping on this probably continuously you're probably going to get very tired of hearing me talk about this but this is something that i think is absolutely critical you know to Make sure that we do practice so that we do make it permanent. It's very clear that change is needed. This report has made that clear. Now it is up to all of us to implement it and deliver it. I believe that the changes I've proposed to this report, while modest, do serve to address the very clear community concerns that we have heard. And so with that, I'd like to respectfully urge my colleagues, I vote. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Sell.

I think this report is great. You know, over the years, my four years here, I've heard of little this and a lot of that and, you know, concerns about inequity in North Sunnyvale, but we weren't able to really substantiate that. And then, so this report does a really thorough job of going through all these different parameters and substantiating some of the things that we've been hearing. And so that makes it easier for staff and the council and the community to focus on those areas. So I think that's great. I remember when I first came on the council, we were doing Moffitt Park specific plans and parents from North Sunnyvale came to the council and says, our kids are having a difficult time getting to the high schools. And then that led us to look into helping what we could in terms of uh transportation different transportation solutions and we worked on getting vta to have more buses for the schools we worked on doing the beam and getting grants for the beam and this weekend i was volunteering at the sunnyvale community services for their school drive and i was giving parents a tour of the donated items that their kids could have with backpacks and everything about that. And I was just asking, well, I'm a city council member. What concerns do you have? And a lot of the parents had concerns about their kids getting to different, getting to the schools. And then I said, oh, do you know about the beam? And they go, what about the beam? What is the beam? And I was thinking, okay, you know, there is this, uh program that we want to roll out but the people that would love the program don't know about the program so that's why when you're this whole foundation of being able to understand the gaps and getting to everyone and you know utilizing partners and all of that you will get the message out and i think it's really good that this um this plan is so comprehensive. And if you start looking at that, then the investments we make to improve the city, those investments will get services to people that need it the most. And that'll just improve the quality of life of more people in Sunnyvale, especially in areas where people don't feel, you know, a part of being included in Sunnyvale. And so hopefully it will make them feel welcome and it will make them feel more included in Sunnyvale which is a priority for Sunnyvale so I think what you have done is really good thank you for researching the consultants working with consultants you know trying to figure out how all departments can work on this how council can be informed on what things are going on how to engage the community in already existing infrastructure so that their input could get into the programs to make all these programs better. So I just think once again, staff is doing an excellent job. So continue doing what you always do well. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Council Member. Mr. Kirby.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to... Make a few comments in line with, just to give context because it's a bit of a change of practice. While I don't have a vote, the charter does give me the opportunity to participate in deliberations over motions, et cetera. So I think inherently, I have some concerns with the motion and from an operational standpoint. First of all, inherently the study results will focus us on the zip codes that were identified, but I think there's a lot more nuance to how we deliver services. There are neighborhoods south in the other zip codes that are equally in need of that kind of attention. There's neighborhoods up off of Homestead and, you know, Queen Charlotte and Kirkland area. There are neighborhoods off of old San Francisco that are technically south that are also, you know, I think if we did the same kind of direct survey outreach type of work there, we would hear similar concerns of disconnectedness. So I want to just be, get into the record that I think While we need to focus on where the study identified that there was gaps in equity and feeling of belonging, that it isn't just those zip codes that we need to focus on. We need to continue to have a whole city approach and be more nuanced in that approach. And I also want to just... comment that a lot of what we're talking about with the non-city services i'm very supportive of that i want to be supportive of getting neighborhood serving retail into anywhere that it's needed those are oftentimes land use decisions that these days especially we don't have as much control over so i just want to set that expectation that it while we can strive to do that it's not always within our purview to make those things happen so I just wanted to share those thoughts. And lastly, just say that I appreciate the council's appreciation of this work. Like I said at the beginning, these are difficult things to deal with. These are tough problems to address. And I just want to make sure that we're reaching everybody in the community and not just focusing or looking at geographical areas as much as we are looking at where we're actually seeing gaps and getting more nuanced. I could even argue that there are areas of downtown where we need to focus on this type of work as well. So I just want to share those thoughts and I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Kirby. Council Member Sreenivasan.

uh thanks city manager for that comment and then in fact i wanted to say the exact thing instead of focusing on geography we this report first of all thank you la thanks a lot for this report uh for uh Backing the finding with data is very, very important. Of course, this is survey data, but having said that, we now know what are the problems we have. As city manager pointed out, If you look at Southern Sunnyvale, whatever the zip code 94087, for example, we don't have public transportation at all. There is nearest bus stop to my home is more than two miles. So, those kinds of things are still, yeah, it's not isolated to one region. Of course, we have other amenities. I'm not disagreeing with that. But at the same time, there is also ethnic and then age-wise deficiency. Indian seniors who visit their families have a huge problem from public safety chain snatching to home burglaries and all those things. So I don't want to nitpick on individual groups as such, but overall I like what I want to say. This report highlights all those kinds of things. We need to be focusing on all the services for everybody in Sunnyvale. Yeah, granted, there are some regions which were neglected in the past, but at the same time, other services, other areas also need services, other age groups need services. And then the report clearly identified an immigrant community As an immigrant, I know this for a fact. I have lived here many years to know where to approach, but a lot of them, especially less than two years or so, they don't know what city provides versus school provides or county provides. Then these kinds of things, communication, education, all these kinds of things are very, very important in my opinion. I like the report, but I am okay with the amendment, but I would like it to be extended to throughout Sunnyvale. And then with the focus on wherever the deficiency is, whatever the deficiency might be, whether it's a regional based or geography based or age based or immigrant status based, or we have talked about seniors, youth, All these kinds of categories are there. How do you split the community into various parts? Each of these groups will have their own issues with the services we provide. Most of the time it may be lack of knowledge, where to go or how to avail the services. But having said that, since there is a motion on the table, i am willing to support the motion half-heartedly but i i don't want to give a friendly amendment just to prolong the process but i i i'm hoping the staff will go with the spirit of the entire city as a whole entire age group as a whole community immigrant community or all these things as city manager pointed out And then just to highlight the South San Francisco Road, that community is a senior home. They walk across to a church, which is so dangerous, three people have been critically injured. So that's a huge safety issue. So I'll stop at that, but I will be supporting this motion with the spirit that staff will do the right thing for entire Sunnyvale.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Srinivasan. Council Member Mellinger, I will allow you a quick rebuttal.

I will very briefly say that I consider the city manager's feedback to be well taken. Regarding the non-city services, I absolutely, you know, state law does severely limit us. That said, we do have a number of items coming forward in the next year. The economic development study, the general plan review, where I believe having this guidance made explicit will be valuable. and regarding north sunnyvale i want to be clear my intention is to identify it as a specific or should i say those two zip codes as a specific area of concern but not to exclude any other areas of concern that is i want to be very clear you know the description of equity that staff provided talks about the need to acknowledge this neat well how we have to acknowledge and address the needs of specific groups and communities and two zip codes a third of the city's population um called out in this in this report that's a very large chunk that's a very substantial piece and i do think it is worth identifying that that is something that requires special attention because i will say i have heard repeatedly from my constituents and neighborhood associations that they feel forgotten that the city that their issues they feel like their issues the issues in north sunnyvale don't get the same degree of attention and i do think calling out explicitly that yes we hear That there is a we hear that you are saying there is a problem. We hear that there is a problem here that I think is worth doing, but it does not mean this is the only place in the city where problems are, and it does not mean it's the only place we're going to be focusing on. Thank you, thank you.

Council member lay.

For clarity, could. The vice mayor please remind me the content of the motion.

Perhaps the city clerk could do that.

I think David is frozen. There you go.

Sorry, it's the same screen for voting. And since there was a motion, I was ready for all of you to vote. But now this is here. So don't vote immediately after this is up here.

Thank you. And this was also the second point was the focus on the northern zip codes with the corollary that you just added. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to be clear about that and I will be voting in support of this motion again. I would like to thank staff for their hard work in this and in quantifying the gaps as the vice mayor has previously expressed in the rest of my colleagues have in the geography where I feel there is a special concentration of need. None of this is because of the current council or because of staff, but because of historic underrepresentation, historic patterns of real estate development, historic patterns of economics. I live in one of the first industrial to residential areas in the city, and I think it's safe to say that it originally wasn't meant for human habitation we're kind of retrofitting it now my son is going to start biking to school to cross 101 to get to school next week that's terrifying um but that's something that is going to be start being a reality for me and that i need to figure out because he doesn't want me to drive him um so thank you staff thank you for putting this uh this presentation together thank you for putting this study together happy to vote and support this motion

Thank you. Council Member Roussel, you have a quick comment?

Yeah, I had a quick comment. One of the public commenters mentioned that when we focus on certain areas and we solve problems, that her hope is that it'll solve problems for everyone. And just one comment, when we started working on this shuttle, we were just going to make it a shuttle for students to get from school to home. And then we made it a citywide shuttle because that's what Mayor Klein thought was pushing for in another way. and staff was able to help us find a solution that helps everyone in the city although when we started we were just going to help the students and so hopefully this will be in the same vein as that when we help some groups it'll ultimately help the whole city thank you councilmember chang

Thank you. Could you display what it is specifically? Is it just city and non-city services, or has it been changed?

so it's it's if i remember if i remember the suggested wording is changing item one sorry changing the first one go ahead okay i'm sorry um so again staff's recommendation was not for council to accept the um potential for operational goals this was just an example of what we wanted to consider in the plan with the vice mayor and thank you for mayor for allowing me to clarify the motion with the vice mayor's motion as i understood it is for staff to consider a fifth goal when in developing the operational plan that would improve access to non to critical non-city services for residents for residents living in 94085 plus 94089 era code that were identified by the report including but not limited to retail and third spaces public transportation school and other educational resources health care and affordable housing just to interject briefly and make a small correction

The 94085 and 94089 bit was actually separate. It was just to identify those two zip codes as areas of special concern. Thank you.

On 94089 for special concern, how would that take the Moffett Park specific plan development into consideration for future development?

So I think that would be a question to staff, how they would see that as opposed to the maker of the motions.

I think what we're doing here is experiencing the complexity and challenges that we're facing and why we're being somewhat nebulous about this because we're going to take time to develop it. So we will consider the Moffitt Park specific plan as we focus on these areas. The Moffitt Park specific plan, if it develops as planned, will help with a lot of the issues that have been identified.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, and I'll be supporting this motion. I have definite concerns about calling out the two zip codes a little bit because I think one of the things that the, depending upon what issue you're looking at, there are issues all over the city and a lot of this has to do where we've heard outreach or where we've heard response from outreach, whether or not you talk about issues of English as a second language. It's in the north, it's in the center, it's in the south. you look at transportation, you look at seniors living alone, you know, depending upon what issue you want to focus on, it's a different portion of the city. That being said, there is historical, let's say, lack of services or lack of connection to the north part of the city to help them raise some of the concerns for sidewalks, for, for, for trees for having, you know, no library services. And I think staff, council has already been working on those. Definitely there are ways to go forward. And, you know, we're definitely not there. But there's issues, you know, around the city. And I don't, and I appreciate staff's response of, and especially the city manager's response. it's an all city effort. You know, we aren't one district, you know, we aren't, you know, it's issues and it's often where neighborhood associations are and where they've been formed create the biggest kind of movement as far as getting services into the neighborhoods. And so you look at, you know, Lakewood is a fairly large neighborhood association covering a large area, but there's everything basically east of Fair Oaks and all of the mobile home communities that really don't aren't active in the city, don't come to neighborhood association meetings, things of that nature, and how we activate those portions of the city and neighborhoods around the city that don't have neighborhood associations. So that, to me, is part of it, is educating residents to complain, to figure out what how to ask for more services, how to report issues. That's part of what this equity assessment is trying to look at. It's the sidewalks in the south or it's cracked sidewalks in the north. It's a lack of sidewalks in some neighborhoods. not reporting or historical not reporting in certain neighborhoods on the west side on the north side you know you can pick your problem and depending upon what part of the city it either has been solved or There's a concern and, you know, being on council for almost 10 years now, um, I've heard complaints from all over the city on on all these different issues, transportation, some of these issues we can fix and, you know, yes, the city wide shuttle will. start solving some of those problems. It's not going to get the entire city out of their cars. It's not going to provide transportation for everyone. But it's moving things in the right direction. And so I'm fine with the motion. the spirit of the motion especially as far as focusing on certain zip codes but it is it is a requirement to meet the services and the needs of everyone in our city and and so how we can do that you know this assessment gives information to staff to to look forward in future years future efforts, future projects on how to improve their services, how to prove how we're serving our residents. So I appreciate that information. It's a direction. It's not a destination. It's highlighting those issues that we know that to a certain degree we know that we've had and exactly what we've, you know, what we're trying to do with you know, a branch library, you know, looking at other things that conceivably I've heard complaints in the south that, you know, there should be a branch library there. There should be, you know, as the vice mayor was saying, youth centers that those third spaces, whether or not they're downtown or whether or not they're north or south or east or west, you know, that's for staff to hopefully find potential locations for potential partners to work with. and hopefully this overall report gives them future direction to do that. So I'm happy to support this motion, especially the spirit of what we're trying to do from a city standpoint here, and hope my colleagues also support that. So with that, city clerk, can you please conduct the vote?

The motion carries 7-0. Thank you.

And with that, we will move to council reports from activities from Intergovernmental Committee Assignments. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much. Last month I attended the meeting of the Bay Area Water Supply Conservation Agency. We discussed, among other things, the status of SFPUC's capital improvement program and the potential cost that that is going to impose on water customers, as well as the emergency resilience framework. As part of that discussion, I did raise the that we needed to be looking at the threat from small drones. This is an increasing concern when we look at the global international security situation. Yeah, I believe that about does it. Thank you.

thank you i see no other reports move on to non-agenda items and comments uh this gen this portion of the agenda is for oral oral reports and announcements from council and the city manager to share information first for purposes of transparency i would like to disclose that an inadvertent brown act violation occurred on july 8th 2026. this violation occurred when a member of city staff forwarded an email thread between staff and one council member to the whole council subject to the email thread with Sunnyvale service request pertaining to recreational vehicle parked in city streets. None of the other council members replied to the email thread to avoid this from happening again. Staff has received coaching to exercise caution when forwarding email threads from council answer point to make sure that the thread does not include a council member. Do council members have any other comments? Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I want to offer my compliments to the Department of Public Safety on two items. First, the recent enforcement action taken against smoke shops selling illegal materials such as flavored nicotine vapes. This is a matter that this council and members of the public have been pushing hard for additional enforcement on. I am very grateful. I was very gratified to see that report. And the second is knocking down the battery fire this past weekend from our right here, right behind City Hall, and doing that in a timely, efficient manner that preserved the safety of the neighborhood, of city staff, and of this building. So I want to thank our Department of Public Safety for that excellent work.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Lay.

I would like to thank our Department of Public Safety for two completely different things. First of all, National Night Out. It was a very fun event to go to. My toddler enjoyed the fire truck party. He talked about it for several days afterwards. He was very excited about that. And also for getting the Safe Routes to School website up in time for back to school. uh and looking forward to seeing the maps up but appreciate what's done so far and am very impressed by the quickness which which we were able to organize the working groups for with the various school districts thank you thank you councilmember cell

i also want to mention that national night out was wonderful with public safety and i see the neighborhood association more and more neighborhood associations forming more and more neighborhood associations wanting to apply for the grants i think when michelle her mentioned that we would increase the grants And at the time you said it would be, I forgot what you said, but you would see it's a game changer or something like that. It has been a game changer. It's getting people excited to form neighborhood associations, to apply for grants, to come up with events that they wanna do. So it's bringing people together. And I just think you had a lot of insight when you advised us to do that. So I just think staff has a lot of insights and all those insights are creating great experiences and great events for our community.

Thank you. Councilmember Chang.

Thank you. I wanted to add the Department of Public Safety has been really busy this month. Laurelwood Elementary also opened its first day yesterday and had its ribbon cutting last Friday. So thank you to the Department of Public Safety for coordinating with Santa Clara Unified on safety improvements and in general, more coordination.

Thank you.

thank you and i'll just echo what my other council members have said you know so first it was great being at the laurelwood elementary ribbon cutting on friday and good to see you know um From that neighborhood standpoint, having a brand new school and investing in our future students is fantastic. And then, of course, that opened yesterday. But National Night Out was a lot of fun. I was able to make it to nine of the 17 locations around the city. But it was fantastic. um good to see so many people out and i had a lot of comments thanking council exactly what council member said cell said on the grant program that that definitely it has made a difference in helping to fund them that those neighborhoods to to better bring people together to make that event that much more special. So thank you to staff. Thank you to Council for moving that forward. And of course, thank you to public safety for for being there with the canine officers, the motorcycles, the fire, the fire rigs always good. Vice Mayor Mellinger.

I realized I had one more, which is a compliments to the Department of IT, although it's not just the Department of IT on the successful rollout of my Sunnyvale in June. I have already filed probably dozens of tickets. My apologies, but sorry, not sorry. And I have to say just how much of an improvement it is as a user. And I know, like I said, I know IT led that rollout, but it's a cross-departmental effort that everyone has been involved in. And I want to thank staff for that very successful launch.

Thank you. City Manager, do you have any non-agenda items?

Yes, briefly, I just wanted to second what Vice Mayor Mellinger said and thank you. Every ticket you file is not an email to me, so thank you very much. I also wanted to also thank the Department of Public Works for their response to the fire that occurred on Saturday at the Battery Fire. They came in. They shut down the AC so we wouldn't intake smoke into this building and then cleared it and worked with public safety closely throughout the recovery here. And then lastly, I wanted to note for council that there's an info only report on the agenda, closing out the interior levees council priority project, which was to evaluate closing the interior levees, which we subsequently found were already closed. So we got some signage up there. And that was thank you to Library and Recreation Services, the Community Development Department, and also Public Works for that one. Thank you.

Thank you very much. With that, this meeting is adjourned at 10.04 PM. Thank everyone for participating tonight. Have a great evening.