City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Good evening, everyone.

Good evening, commissioners, staff, consultants, and members of the public. Welcome to tonight's joint commission study session on the general plan 2050 update. I'm Molly Pfau Klopp. I am vice chair of the planning commission, and I have the honor of calling this meeting to order. Tonight's study session brings together planning commission, design review commission, transportation commission, parks, recs, and open space commission, and the arts commission. Will the secretary please call the roll?

Yes, and I want to apologize in advance for any names I butcher. I tried to catch a few of you, but just in case, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. And in no particular order, Commissioner Anderson?

Here.

Commissioner Moran?

Here.

Commissioner Kound? Here. Commissioner Strongman?

Here.

Commissioner Kwok? Here. Commissioner Klopp?

Here.

Commissioner Needing is absent, and let us know in advance. Commissioner Basting? Commissioner Riley? Here. Commissioner Case? Is absent and let us know in advance. Commissioner Prowse? Or Prose? Excuse me. Thank you. Commissioner Newsom?

Here.

Commissioner Kraling? Present. I said that wrong. I know I did. I even asked you. I'm so sorry. I got nervous. I capital D-L. Sorry about that. Commissioner Patch?

Here.

Commissioner Ashe?

Here.

Commissioner Guerrero?

Here.

Commissioner McMahon? Commissioner Baltazar? Here. Commissioner Dresser? Here. Commissioner Kurland? Here. Commissioner Tesfaye? Here. Commissioner Magnani?

Here.

I ruined that one, too. Commissioner Pinkstaff? Here. Commissioner Sasser? Here. Commissioner Brockhaus? Here. Commissioner Garland? Here. And Commissioner Oller?

Here.

Thank you.

Great. So the purpose of tonight's meeting is to provide an overview of the general plan update process and gather commissioner feedback on key issues and community priorities within each commission's area of expertise. Staff from the Community Development Department and Alta Planning and Design, the city's general plan consultant, will be leading the presentation and discussion. This is an informational study session only. No action will be taken and no formal recommendations will be made. Do you want to make a couple? Go ahead.

Thank you so much. And I just want to state briefly, the presentation is broken up into sections. There will be opportunity for us to gather input and answer your questions. We're going to try our best to collect it by table. And so as staff addresses your table, you'll have that opportunity. Because you guys are mixed and mingled amongst commissions, we do ask that you provide your name and the commission you're representing before you provide your comment. So thank you.

Thank you very much. So before we begin the study session, we'll open the meeting for public communications. But since this is a special meeting, comments are limited to items on the agenda. Speakers are asked to complete a speaker card provided to the staff before speaking, and each speaker has two minutes to provide comments. Do we have any cards? Don't all rush at me. Okay, so there are no comments. We will now move to the study session.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the study session. I'm Crystal DeCastro, principal planner in the community development department and also the project manager for the general plan update. So tonight marks the beginning of a major effort to update the Walnut Creek general plan update, a long range planning document that serves as our roadmap for the future. Walnut Creek's general plan was adopted back in 2006. Since then, the community has evolved STATE REQUIREMENTS HAVE CHANGED AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES HAVE EMERGED. SO THIS UPDATE GIVES US AN OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE A FRESH LOOK AT WHERE WE ARE TODAY, WHERE WE WANT TO BE BY 2050, AND THE STEPS NEEDED TO GET THERE. SO TONIGHT IS THE FIRST STEP IN THAT JOURNEY. AND WE'D LIKE TO BEGIN BY WALKING THROUGH WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM THIS PROCESS FROM THIS EVENING'S DISCUSSION. SO LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT THE AGENDA. HERE WE GO. So we'll start by introducing the project team, provide an overview of the general plan update, and discuss the approach to the community engagement plan. We'll then conclude with the discussion on key issues, desired outcomes, and engagement opportunities for the plan. Tonight is about building a shared understanding of the process and beginning a dialogue about the opportunities and challenges that will help shape our future. Your perspectives as commissioners are especially important throughout this process. Your expertise helps connect the planning effort to the real world opportunities and challenges facing Walnut Creek. And we're looking forward to hearing your insights and issues and priorities that will help inform this update. So let's meet the project team that will be leading this effort from start to finish. So the first is the city's general plan team. Joining me are Erica Vanderbren, community development director, Allison Rustick, associate planner, that's in the back over there, Kat Lee, assistant planner, Shireen Marks, executive assistant supporting project coordination. She's not here today, but she helped prepare everything there on your table, including the coasters and candy and everything else. Together our roles to guide the update, coordinate engagement efforts and help ensure the general plan is informed by both technical analysis and community input. So to support this work, the city is in partnership with Aalto Planning and Design. Aalto brings expertise in long range planning, community engagement, and technical analysis, and will be working alongside with us through this update. With that, I'll turn it over to Eric Jurkovic from Aalto Planning and Design, who will walk us through the general plan framework and their approach.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Eric Yurkovich, and I'm a principal and deputy director of community planning at Alta Planning and Design. We are a mission-driven planning and design firm really focused on creating healthy, sustainable communities where we work. We have a pretty long and deep background of working on general plans across the state of California, and we've been fortunate enough to be working with the state of California right now to update the guidelines for general plans and specific plans across the state. We've also had an opportunity to work with probably with some of you all on some of the work on the North Downtown Plan and urban design guidelines here within the city over the last decade or so. You're going to have an opportunity to meet Tiffany Yang, who's the deputy project manager on the project, in just a moment when she introduces herself. But you'll get an opportunity to work with a lot of our really terrific staff. So you'll see them at commission meetings, at public workshops. You'll meet Valet and Anna and Sasha throughout this process. You'll get a chance to meet them. In addition to the ALTA team, we have a really, really great set of collaborators who we work with pretty consistently on projects across the state. So first of all, Harris and Associates is a firm you might recognize. They've been working with you all on your safety element update and your housing element update. Those are two chapters of your general plan that were recently adopted. They're going to be working on things like open space and conservation, noise, and the environmental impact report. Farron Piers, as many of you all know, has worked extensively here on multimodal transportation with the city. They have an office here in Walnut Creek. They've been working with you all and across the East Bay and across the state and country for decades working on multimodal transportation. Plan to Place is our community engagement lead, and they're really a leader in really helping to facilitate community engagement processes that bring people to the program, meet people where they are, and really motivate participation. Bay Area BAE Urban Economics is a local firm really focused on financial feasibility, financing, and economic development strategies. And their job is really to help us visionary planners turn our ideas into something that's implementable and feasible. And then last but not least, we're teamed up with the Cultural Planning Group. And they've done hundreds of cultural plans, master plans, all across the country. And they're here to bring their expertise to the process. You're going to get a chance through your commissions to meet with representatives of all of these firms as we go through the process. Now, this is a really exciting time. This is actually, I think, the best time of a general plan. There's a lot of excitement. People are kicking it off. It's all vision. We get to think about what our values are for the future. And we get to think about how we root this plan in our shared values moving forward. This plan really, the general plan can really help shape the evolution of the city moving forward and into the future. Now how many of you all are just generally familiar with general plans? Any hands raised? We got a few. A few half-raised hands. California law requires that every city and county in the state have and regularly maintain a general plan to really chart a roadmap into the future. Many of the places, the services that we use every day, that community members use every day, from our neighborhoods, our parks and our open space, to our roads and our bikeways, to the public services we provide, are part of these kinds of long range planning efforts. Once adopted, the general plan can really lay the foundation for a lot of decision-making that council, commission, city staff do around things like land use, housing, mobility, parks and open space, and public services in the community. The plan itself really helps set that 20-year vision out into the future. What do we want to be? What do we want to achieve in the future? really building on what we love about the place and the things we don't like so much about the place. And at the same time, addressing the preponderance of state laws that get passed every year that we have to address. But I think it's really important for everyone to recognize that a general plan isn't just about five, 10, 20 years from now. It's really about addressing what's important to you all in the community. So we want everyone brought into the process. So if people are interested in housing, or climate change or arts and culture, and they're really concerned just about today. What we want to do is bring them into the process and make sure that we can connect up what they care about today to the vision and values that we established through the general plan process. Now, the state of California makes us do certain things. It makes us, in general plans, it makes us address certain topics. Those are listed on your left-hand side. So things like land use, transportation, open space conservation, safety, noise, housing. Those are required topics that general plans have that we have to address. NOW, AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, YOUR SAFETY ELEMENT AND YOUR HOUSING ELEMENT WERE RECENTLY ADOPTED. SO WE'RE NOT ACTUALLY GOING TO WE'RE NOT REOPENING THOSE. WE'LL KEEP THOSE AND MOVE THEM FORWARD AS THEY ARE. GENERAL PLAN LAW IS ACTUALLY PRETTY FLEXIBLE, THOUGH. IT ALLOWS US TO TALK ABOUT ANY ISSUES WE REALLY WANT THAT RELATE TO THE KIND OF THE SERVICES AND AUTHORITY OF THE COMMUNITY. SO IN THIS ONE WE'RE GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, ARTS AND CULTURE, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES. SO THINGS THAT ARE TOPICS OF INTEREST TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS. Now, when I think about general plans, what I like to talk about a little bit is the heart of every general plan is really the land use chapter. That was why general plans were created by the state and required by local jurisdictions around the state. It's really to orderly plan for growth over time. Now, land use is really how we organize and plan for different spaces in our community, what we set aside for housing, what we set aside for businesses, parks, open space, community amenities. All those decisions and choices that we make influence a lot of other things. It influences how we travel, the sustainability of our community, how livable it is for the people who live here, as well as the natural systems and resources that thrive inside Walnut Creek and around in the surrounding community. So the choices we make in a general plan about land use have all these effects. Now, those effects aren't just related to those big picture topics, but how we choose to make decisions about land use affect how we travel, how we go to work, how do we go to jobs? Do we walk? Do we take transit? Do we bike? Do we drive? What does that mean for our public health? What does that mean for our mental health? All of these in turn have repercussions for air pollution and climate change. So as we start to think about these things, a general plan gives us an opportunity to think about all these issues in tandem, right? So how we think about jobs and economic development, how we travel to those things have real impacts, whether it's to city services, to housing prices, to how we support and meet the needs of our community through our services. So we'll be talking about all the interconnections between these topics as we go. Now, we're not here to tear up all of the great work that's already been done in the community. And I'm sure as commissioners, you have been involved in a lot of different planning, policy initiatives, on the ground programs, services. Our job here is really to lift up and honor the work that's already been done by the community. We're here to really learn from you all. TO KNOW WHAT'S WORKING WELL, WHAT'S NOT WORKING WELL, WHAT LESSONS DO WE NEED TO LIFT UP AND CARRY FORWARD INTO THIS GENERAL PLAN PROCESS AND WHAT DO WE WANT TO BACK AWAY FROM THAT HAVEN'T REALLY BEEN WORKING. AND THIS IS JUST A SNAPSHOT OF JUST A FEW OF THOSE THINGS THAT WE'LL BE THINKING ABOUT AND INTEGRATING INTO THE WORK THAT WE DO THROUGHOUT THIS PROCESS AND ACROSS ALL THOSE DIFFERENT TOPICS OR CHAPTERS IN A GENERAL PLAN. Now, before formally kicking off the general plan process, city staff actually went through an engagement process starting last year where they talked to community members, to city staff, even to city council about some of the priorities, the values, and the vision and how to run this process. That kind of early engagement is really helping us to make sure we meet the evolving needs of community members here in Walnut Creek and making sure we understand the economic and social conditions here in the city and make sure that we're reflective of those long-term priorities. Now, during those discussions, there were a lot of kind of common themes, and we're going to hear a lot about that as we do more engagement. Those were things around infrastructure, public safety, economic development, community amenities, walkability. So those are some of the common themes that came up in those discussions. And then further, the city had more discussions with council about how to kind of shape the process. And one of the things they wanted to do is kind of do our engagement more of a topic-based approach. So that's why we're going to be meeting with you all throughout the process. We're going to be talking about individual topics and elements in the work that we're doing on those to get your feedback as commissioners and community members who are interested in those. And Tiffany's going to talk a little bit about that interaction with you all as we go through the process. And then finally, all of that feedback really helped us shape up what our process looks like. Because general plans take two, three, five, sometimes eight years, we try to really break them into distinct phases where we cluster our technical work with a lot of different types of community engagement at each of these key points. So we've broken our process into five points. And right now we're really in this kind of existing conditions envisioning phase. This is really a phase of discovery for us, right? We're really here to listen and learn from you all, from community members, to understand what some of the values are, what the vision for the future is, and how we can leverage different issues and opportunities to make important changes in an evolving community. We've done an engagement plan, a communications plan. Our website was launched last night, which many of you all might have seen today. We've been working on a series of existing conditions reports. So we're really starting to gather information about Walnut Creek that we'll publish out later. Then we're going to really start to create a vision and set of project outcomes that kind of guide the process. That will all happen in this phase. So some of the questions you're going to hear this evening that you can see on your table really kind of lend themselves to helping us determine what that vision, what those outcomes are that you want to see in the future. So then we'll move into a phase where we look at land use and mobility alternatives that really meet our vision and values. We'll talk about updates and refinements to the goals and policies of the actions of the general plan. And then we'll review those with all, with the community, with you all. And then ultimately we'll move those all through the adoption process. That's a high-level overview of the process. And now we're going to pause as our first of two pauses just for kind of clarifying questions on the team or the overall process. The next part of the presentation is going to be on community engagement. So if you have those questions, you might want to hold those until we turn back and we do that part of the presentation next. So with that, I think if there are any clarifying questions, Crystal and I are happy to take those.

Hi. I'm Stephen Kwok with the Planning Commission. So to get a better sense of the process, are we going to hear from the team more on a commission-wide basis, or are we going to have additional sessions like this one where we're coming together as a joint commissions group?

YOU ARE PREEMPTING THE NEXT SET OF SLIDES, BUT, YES, WE'RE GOING TO DO A MIX OF INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS WITH THE COMMISSIONS AND A COUPLE OF THESE JOINT MEETINGS WHERE WE BRING EVERYONE BACK SO YOU CAN HEAR FROM YOUR PEERS AND COLLEAGUES ACROSS ALL THE DIFFERENT COMMISSIONS. ALL RIGHT. WITH THAT, THEN, IF THERE'S NO MORE QUESTIONS, I'LL TURN IT OVER TO TIFFANY TO TALK ABOUT ENGAGEMENT.

Hi, good evening, everyone. Hi, good evening, everyone. My name is Tiffany Ng. I'm a senior associate with ALTA Plan and Design. And we're really happy to be here tonight to talk more about the community engagement strategy that will be accompanying the general plan update process. We have a really great team of consultants that we're working with, including Plan to Place that Eric mentioned that's leading on the engagement strategy. So if you take a look at the work that we have here, you can see that we're breaking it down into two main concepts, right? We have our outreach work, which includes activities such as the communication and engagement plan, the project branding, and the interactive website and communication strategy. So for these activities, this is really about making sure that we're reaching people across the community, making sure it's an inclusive process, and making sure that we produce materials that are accessible to different segments of the population. The plan itself is multifaceted. It includes a number of different ways to communicate with the public, as well as different strategies to engage people on different levels, whether it's workshops or surveys or community events. We also have project branding, as you see, which we're really happy to say that we kicked off the logo recently. So you see that on all of our products, as well as the website and also our style guide. The website itself, raise your hand if you actually have seen the website yet. I know it just came out today. OK, some folks? OK. You should really check it out because it's pretty fun. Our team with Plan to Place and the ALTA team put a lot of effort to making it attractive, vibrant, and easy to access. So the language is easy. We have a key terms issue. And we have many ways in which people can engage with that website. Sorry, that's a really good point. When I get to more talk about the website, we'll give you the URL. But really quickly, it's just walnutcreek2050.com or walnutcreek2050.org. In terms of the ways in which we engage the public, meaning the ways in which we actually talk to people, engage in discussion, do education, get feedback, we start off with a couple of really different ways to talk to the public. So one is that we have a number of informational forums. These are three different forums throughout the general plan process that discuss key topics. So this could be like land use, it could be sustainability, it could be mobility or other kinds of housing issues. Ways in which the public can learn about these topics from experts and also find ways to like develop common language around these issues, right? Some of these terms can feel inaccessible to the public and this is a way to break it down in a really fun and engaging way with experts in the field. One other thing that we're doing right now, which is currently underway, are these series of community partner meetings. And so these are ways in which we reach out to different segments of the community. This could be the business community, community-based organizations that work on things like sustainability, public health, climate, or education. We talk to these experts locally, and we find out what are these key issues that we should include in the plan, whether it's the existing conditions report or the general plan policies. We also do, in addition to this, a number of topic-specific focus groups. We're going to have about 10 of those throughout the course of the general plan, which focus on additional stakeholders and groups that can really focus on ways to make these topics in the general plan accessible and inclusive to more members of the community. And so these are really tailored to making sure that we have a welcoming process and include populations and different perspectives that might not be as represented in the plan. We also will be holding a series of community workshops. There will be four key workshops and open houses through the course of the plan. And the first one we'll be talking about will really focus on this initial stage of the plan, which is on the visioning and project outcomes, thinking about the ways in which we can get the public to give us feedback on things to include in the plan. To accompany the workshops, we'll also have a series of online questionnaires. These are web-based platforms or surveys, kind of, but not statistically significant, in which people can give their feedback on their own time on an online platform. We'll also be engaging in some informal community pop-up events where we go to different events in the city, whether it's a farmer's market, a cultural arts festival, or other places where people are located at to make sure they have information about the general plan and ways to get involved. So you can see there's many other ways for people to get involved in the general plan throughout the course of this project. And we layer some of these activities together to make sure they kind of give us the outcomes we need for the general plan to make sure it's robust. So as you can see in this project phases diagram, the top part shows the different stages of the general plan. So there's the existing conditions and visioning part, which is where we're at right now. That's going in the summer and fall of this year. We also have the land use and mobility alternatives phase, which is happening in the summer and fall of next year, 2027, where we'll have a chance to talk about the different ways in which experts and the public have thoughts around the ways in which we can see land use and transportation and mobility in the future. We'll also have a phase of policy review and development in the winter and spring of 2028 to think about looking at the existing conditions and issues at play. How can we develop good policies, solutions, and strategies to address some of those issues that we are discussing? TOWARDS THE END OF THE PROCESS, WE'RE GOING TO HAVE THE DRAFT GENERAL PLAN ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW PROCESS ABOUT WINTER OR SPRING OF 2029, WHICH WILL PRESENT THE DRAFT PLAN, INCLUDING ALL THE DATA, ALL THE POLICIES, ALL THE BACKGROUND INFORMATION, AND HAVE A CHANCE FOR THE PUBLIC TO WEIGH IN ON THIS PROCESS AND ALSO DO IT IN AN EXTENSIVE ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW PROCESS OF THE PLAN. Last but not least, at the very end, we'll have the final plan on adoption in summer of 2029. And as you can see, throughout this process, we'll have those different activities I mentioned before. We'll have the speaker series, we'll have the focus groups, we'll have the open houses, and all these built together to make sure that everyone is including the plan, that we have the right data. One thing we do want to mention is that we know, of course, Walnut Creek is a very diverse community. There's lots of people from different segments of the population, different levels of expertise, different issues and things that they care about. We want to make sure that we engage many people in this process, especially groups that maybe are not truly involved in general plan processes or land use planning. So people that you might see that are familiar are from the business community, the arts community, open space and resources. We have libraries, the arts and culture. We have notable institutions like from the health community. We are going to partner also with other districts and departments and agencies like local school districts to make sure that everyone, whether they're a nonprofit or a local volunteer group or an agency or part of the city or the county, can weigh in on this process. And of course, we are engaging with city councils and sorry, city commissions and city councils throughout the course of this plan. We started this off by doing this kickoff with all these commissions here, which is awesome. We look forward to hearing your feedback on key questions. And we're going to follow up this process with a city council meeting on July 21st. I have to remember my dates. to ask them similar questions about what they want to see in terms of the vision for the community and ways to make sure that this process achieves the intended outcomes and goals of the plan. Another thing that we think is going to be really interesting is that we're going to try out an innovative and self-directed way for people to engage the plan on their own time. We know that this also helps for accessibility reasons and make sure that if you can't attend an in-person workshop or a virtual workshop due to your schedule, there's still an online way for you to engage in the plan, to give your feedback, to ask questions. So in this virtual open house, which will accompany some of the activities in the near future, like the community workshops, people can go online on the website to look at these different displays, these posters, learn more about the plan and the process stage, and also give their feedback on key questions for the plan. And again, so if you want to look at the website and scroll through it, this process of having a website is important, not just because we need to have an online presence, but because it's a really good way for us to engage the public and get people's feedback and get people more involved. Websites allow for two-way communication between the community and the city. it can incorporate really interactive questionnaires and mapping exercises. So if you look on the website, there's like survey tools that you can fill out. There's an online feedback form that you can fill out at any time to ask questions about the plan or the process. And there are mapping exercises to like, when we talk about things like land use or mobility or alternatives, people can actually go to those interactive platforms to give their comments and also see other people's comments that are giving comments to that process. And of course, as websites do, they're really important for connecting people to upcoming events, ways to get involved, and other resources and videos. The ePlan will be the product of this general plan process. It'll be online so that we are able to track and monitor the way in which the plan gets implemented over time. It's a way for us to share success stories from the city. And it can incorporate dynamic maps and visualizations to make sure people really have a sense of what the plan really means, right? A lot of times, plans can be words on paper. We don't want this to be a paper exercise. We want this to be something where it's a living document that can be referred to, used, and is accessible to more people. So taking a look ahead, we have some things coming up on the horizon. We have a number of community engagement activities. As I mentioned, the city council meeting on July 21st. We are continuing to engage with community partners in conversations about how to inform existing conditions and data gathering. We'll start to have some pop-up events that we're going to be attending in July, August and September this year to get out the word about the General Plan and also let people know about the resources online that are available in the city. And we're going to also have our first workshop on visioning project outcomes and issues and opportunities, which will be around September this year, making sure the workshop is in a central location that can assure more accessibility. And again, a company that will have online questionnaires so people can get feedback. Another thing that our team is working on are the existing conditions reports. These foundational reports gather current data about the city based on different key topics that will inform the policy development and the chapters of the general plan. So you can see the topics will include economic, demographic, and fiscal analyses. Land use, parks, public facilities, inventories. community design and mobility and access issues, open space and conservation, community health indicators, and noise. So that's kind of a summary of our engagement for the general plan process. We look forward to seeing if anyone has any questions. So yeah, go ahead.

Thank you. Is this meant to be a project for council and commissioners, or is this for the public at large to engage with?

Well, we see it as in many ways, right? There's also ways for the public and stakeholders to engage, but we think of the council and the commissions as important stakeholders in giving feedback.

And is the website plan that you showed us, is that meant for the public? Is that public facing? Yes. Okay. Yes. Everyone can see that right now. Okay. And you want the public to engage with feedback and such?

Yeah. Yeah. As we get more content for the website, you'll see these interactive, very specific maps that people can comment on, have surveys, et cetera. Yeah. May I have one more question? Yeah, of course. Well, after you, maybe we can invite some other folks to share.

Okay. Are there plans to transition or use the website also as an app? I just know that many people use apps. They're engaged with apps these days more than websites per se. I just wanted to know about that.

Yeah. Well, one thing that's great about the website is that it's accessible by phones, right? So you can see it really well and clearly on your phone. But I don't believe it's going to be turned into an actual standalone app.

Yeah.

Okay. Can I just make a quick reminder for people to introduce themselves in the commission? Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Thank you. Sorry about that. Do you want me to do it now?

I'm Sherry Kurland, and I'm with the Arts Commission. Great. Nice to meet you. Was I supposed to push that?

Any other questions?

Go ahead.

Jill Dresler, Arts Commission. When you talk about the community at large, does that include those that live in Walnut Creek but that aren't in the city that are in the county?

That's a really good question. I think we are definitely making sure that the community in Walnut Creek is here, but we do include people from the Contra Costa County area, especially like agency departments and other organizations to weigh in on some of these issues.

speaking more than I live in Walnut Creek, but I do not technically even live in the city. I live in Contra Costa County with a Walnut Creek address, of which many of us do.

Yeah, I mean, to my understanding, yeah, we definitely want to make sure that people who engage in Walnut Creek and have a voice in Walnut Creek, there's things in the city that affect people in unincorporated areas, right? And then there's also the planning area, which is bigger than the city boundaries. Any other question? Go ahead. And then one, and then I see two over here. Okay.

Charles Crowley in Transportation. Will you be sharing these presentation materials with us all?

Yeah, definitely. This will be public material for everyone to see. Thank you. I saw a hand over here.

Oh, yeah, go ahead. Introduce. Fran Garland, PROS. Since the housing element is done and is a given, right, how is that going to be explained to the public that, no, you can't question that we need this much housing, and no, you can't, you know, end up trying to, you know, not have these potential new houses, you know, in this particular area or, you know, whatever. You know, I think that's going to be tricky a little bit unless people were also engaged in that, which I don't, I don't know, doubt very many people were engaged in that. So, I'm just curious how you'll handle that. Right. Good question. Eric, do you want to share?

We'll handle it carefully, I think, is the way to say it. You know, our job isn't to reopen and relitigate the seventh cycle, sixth cycle housing. We just started the seventh cycle across the state. It's insane. But what we often try and talk to community members about is that a housing element is really intended to focus on an eight-year cycle, right? It's your housing plan for eight years for the city. A general plan we're looking at 20, 25 years in the future. So you're really looking at three or more different housing element cycles. So when we think about what that means, that might be we need to find more places for housing in the community than we did during the housing element cycle, right? We might need to be thinking about other housing programs that might support the needs of community members overall, right? So what we want to try and do through this process, especially through the efforts around land use and mobility planning, is really set the city up to successfully do a seventh and eighth cycle housing element and be ready for those. Thank you.

I THINK ANOTHER GOOD POINT THAT ERIC RAISED IS THAT WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THROUGH THIS PROCESS WE'RE DOING CAPACITY BUILDING TOO. SO WE'RE ALL LEARNING ABOUT THE GENERAL PLAN PROCESS TOGETHER AND WHAT THE CITY CAN AND CAN'T DO. SO WE WANT TO DO EDUCATION, MAKE SURE WE KNOW WHAT THE GENERAL PLAN CAN COVER AND WHAT THINGS IT CAN INFLUENCE OR MAYBE HAVE LESS OF AN INFLUENCE ON.

I'm Ryan from transportation. Who makes the final decisions on these? Like if there's multiple ideas, does it go to city council? Do you go line by line? Or is it kind of like general approval? How does that work?

That's a great question, and it would vary by the topic or the element. There are certain things that certain commissions have statutory responsibility over. Things that the Planning Commission really, it's really the land, you focused on the land use. The Transportation Commission, your role and responsibility really focused on mobility. Ultimately, the City Council is the decision maker in all of this. They are the ones who ultimately approve or disprove the plan and the implementation of the plan going forward. Our hope is that we work with you all through the process, and we bring you and community members along, and that we work through the issues as we go. And I don't believe you always get to 100% consensus, but we want to agree generally on our values and the direction we're headed, and sometimes the implementation might follow those values in that direction.

So one hand, then two hand, if that's okay. Go ahead.

Yeah. I'm curious about the community. Go ahead. Oh, sorry, Brendan Moran, Planning Commission. I'm wondering if you can just maybe just explain how the community engagement, the pop-ups work, right? So you're standing there and there's a tent and you've got literature, but like people come up and say, Do they start complaining? Do you kind of try to, like, drive them into, you know, a helpful discussion or what? Just talk to me about that.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think in my experience, and Eric can share more about his experience, but we want to make sure that, you know, we're not going to make any decisions at the table. We want to make sure people know about the process, what the topics are at hand. And if they want to give feedback, we can direct them to places to give feedback, either online or in other places or, like, workshops. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Matt Brockhouse, PROS, I think you have a great variety of ways to engage the public. How are you going to notify the public of those engagement opportunities?

That's a really good question. So I think we want to make sure we one thing is that we're talking to community partners to make sure that they can also give us feedback on ways in which Walnut Creek residents and stakeholders best engage and can get information. So community partners can be people who could be like ambassadors or leaders to help get out the information through the people that they talk to. That's one method. So like kind of working with trusted community people to talk to them. Another is using, like, we have newsletters. We are going to do banners, have things in the community that are physical, make sure that people have flyers. There's ways in which people can go online, like websites and listservs. So we're going to collect emails so people can get on the listserv for the Neural Plant Update. So we're trying to be really, you know, multifaceted with engagement. But we appreciate feedback, too.

And then just to piggyback on that is that we do have our nutshell, the newsletter. We'll have information there, our email blasts, our social media, our Facebook, Twitter accounts, Insta. And then also we will be collecting people's information on the website. And so we'll have an email list for those that want to get the information. We will push out the information to those to let them know about the different events that we're having and how to engage.

And if everyone here wants to help, you can definitely direct people to the website. On certain pages, they can sign up with their emails. Any other questions?

Hi, Sarah Baltazar, Arts Commission. I think my question is about piggybacking, Eric, on your comment around the values. There was a slide earlier, and it had kind of the table of contents of what the general plan needs to include. And there's probably a state protocol assigned to that. And then, yes, you just passed it. And on the right side, go one more. This right side, economic development, arts and culture, healthy communities implementation. Those kind of feel so important to the body of people that are in this room. Are you trying with this group to help build the values that align to all of this work or how are the values set? Is it done community wide or how do we get under those things that should so deeply inform this report?

We're really... What I would say is that the city started doing engagement last year and started collecting some information about values, priorities, key things to be thinking about in the general plan process. So we'll take that information, information from meetings like these where we bring all of you together to talk about it, some of the questions. The next section is a discussion question section and you'll see some of those values laid in questions there. We'll be talking to council about those things next month as well. And then, as Tiffany mentioned, we have a series of community events coming out in the fall where we'll be talking about a vision, project outcomes, those key issues and strategies that we want to be thinking about as part of this process. So we're going to be capturing it from a broad array of people, right? Decision makers, stakeholders, community members, and really trying to weave together something that's comprehensive and shared.

Hi, Cherise Cound, Planning Commission.

I was just curious, with your experience with general plans with various cities across the state, if there are cities that we could look at to see what it looks like further down the line that might be similar to the direction that we're going, that we could look at as possible examples of successful plans that you've done. Yeah.

Eric, what are your favorites?

I'm also tired. I can tell you about the hard ones too. Sorry, I should turn the mic on too. Happy to share some examples with you offline. I think that might be easier. And we can share some examples that we've done, that other consultants have done. And I think sometimes, like, we've done interesting plans in places like Culver City where they have a very strong arts and culture focus, right? And so there's an arts and culture element that's not common in a lot of communities, right? So we can kind of share out some of those examples that may touch on these different topics that you might be interested in as well.

Great. Over here.

A lot of cities...

I'm sorry, what's your name again?

I'm sorry, Brent Anderson, Planning Commission. Great. A lot of cities, when they're doing a general plan, will have a citizens committee specifically to deal with the general plan. There's a lot of attempts in what you're describing to talk to commissioners, to talk to the public at large. Do you anticipate a citizens committee for this project or perhaps several successive ones?

So thank you for that question. We actually posed that specifically to council, and council felt that it was more representative of the community to not funnel it through specific, you know, a subset of folks, but to be able to have a broader outreach to the community writ large, and then also to engage a consultant that was skilled in that consensus building in a more modern way of trying to do public engagement and outreach.

Great. Any other questions? We also have questions for you, so if there's no other questions, we can move on to that part of the day.

Okay, this is my favorite part. where we get to stop talking and answer questions and now you have to start talking and answering questions. So for the rest of the time we have questions. They're actually printed out on your table if you want a hard copy of the questions. We have kind of two slides worth of questions. I'm going to go through all the questions and then we're going to come back to the slide and we're going to go through those questions. These questions really are intended to help us understand kind of what the vision and values are that you all share for the community, in the community. So what aspects of Walnut Creek should we carry forward? So the character, the identity, the quality of life, right? What are some of those pressing issues that the general plan needs to tackle, right? And then how should Walnut Creek maybe think about tackling those? And then what are some key outcomes you think are important that we use to establish early on that we're constantly working through and towards through the general plan process? So these questions or buckets of questions are really about kind of that visioning, values, outcomes, issues, and opportunities. So we're going to answer all those questions first. The second set of questions I want to share with you so you can see the set of questions, again, these are also on your tables, is we want to make sure that if you have any thoughts on community engagement that you share them with us. This is a really good time for us to think about how we integrate your feedback into the process. So who are the non-traditional groups that we should be engaging in the process? And how might we do that generally? We all have worked on planning projects. We all generally know the likely folks who will show up at a community workshop. How do we get a more different, inclusive, how are we more inclusive in those groups? And then really, we want to know how you think we should measure success, right? So part of what we'll do is track the effectiveness of our engagement and our outreach, how many people show up at meetings, who they are, what are their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, just so we know who is participating in the process overall. So we want to hear a little bit if you have ideas on that. That would be terrific. So with that... I'll put the Stay Connected up here. So if you haven't had an opportunity to get to the website yet, you can hit that QR code, which is giant. It's got the logo in it, too, which is awesome. But there's a project email. If you want to get in touch with the team, please feel free to email them, community members as well. And then, again, the website is up at www.walnutcreek2050.com. And, again, this QR code will take you there. I AM GOING TO TAKE US BACK TO THE QUESTIONS. AND WE HAVE ANOTHER QUESTION FROM CHARLES.

DO YOU WANT US TO REINTRODUCE OURSELVES EVERY TIME OR ARE YOU GOOD WITH YOU'VE ALREADY GOT IT?

I THINK IT WOULD BE HELPFUL IF YOU JUST SAID YOUR NAME AND YOUR COMMISSION. I THINK COMMUNITY MEMBERS YOU MAY BE LISTENING IN AS WELL, THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR THEM AS WELL.

SURE. SO CHARLES CRELLING AGAIN, TRANSPORTATION. ON THE OTHER SLIDE. For the purpose of the exercise, it would be helpful if you told us your definition of a non-traditional population for engagement.

Oh, very good question. Well, when we work on community planning projects, we tend to get older, wealthier residents to participate. We have a harder time getting younger adults, youth. We have a harder time getting families to participate, right? And we have a harder time getting often lower income families to participate. big picture, like think about who those might be here in Walnut Creek and how to engage them. And many of you all have been involved in planning processes in one way or the other, and you probably have a sense of who comes to those meetings. So how can we be more inclusive in this process?

So I had one general question, and I would, Molly Klopp, Vice Chair, Planning Commission. I suspect a majority of commissioners in the room are overachievers and have other aspects of their life besides being on Planning Commission, or being on a commission. Do you wish for them to answer from their whole selves of their whole life, or to focus on their response as a commissioner to these questions?

Someone brought an air horn, I don't know, in the back. In general, if you all could focus on comments from the perspective of your commissions to begin with, right, because we're pretty well represented in the room. And if maybe we get to the end and something hasn't been said that you think is really important and it's maybe outside of your commission's purview and responsibilities, maybe that's a good time to bring it up. But I suspect we'll hear a lot of those things throughout the course of the evening. Okay, so how we're gonna do this, we thought about doing this by commission, but since everyone's, we mixed you all up, it's kind of fun actually. What we're gonna do is just go table by table. And what I'd like you all to do is answer these questions at your table. Just pass the mic around, go through these questions. You can answer all of them. You can pick which question on here you feel most that you want to answer. You don't have to answer all four questions that are up on the screen here. And we'll just go one commissioner at a time, go around the table, go to the next table, and so forth as we go throughout. And we can start maybe, does anyone want to volunteer to go first? Does anyone want to volunteer to go first? I just need one hand. Yes. Okay, so we're going to start in the back right, and then we're going to come, and then we're going to go, this is clockwise. Oh, yeah, sure. It sounds like we want to do a quick bio break for five minutes, and we can restart at 7 o'clock, when the clock hits 7. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you. 🎵 🎵 you Thank you.

Attention, everyone. We're going to return to the meeting. Please take your seat.

Okay, thanks, everyone, and thanks for coming back right on time and not dipping out to watch the U.S. soccer game, which just kicked. Don't do that. Okay, so here's, again, here's what we'll do. Again, my name is Eric Kirkovich, Alta Planning and Design. We're going to go table by table. Just share your ideas. We're going to start in the back corner. Thank you for volunteering. Again, feel free to answer all four questions or pick the one you're most interested in, the one you want to talk about. Everyone here is going to have a chance to talk, talk from your commission's perspective. And then once we go through that, we'll do a second round where we can do the community engagement questions at the end. So why don't we start with the gentleman who raised his hand. Again, tell us who you are, what commission you're on, and go for it.

My name is Jeffrey Prose. I'm on the Design Review Commission. And in the first one, unique and special, I've lived in the Bay Area most of my life. And one thing I've really come to preach about Walnut Creek is a very vibrant street scene in the evening, but it kind of evaporates at 8.30, 9 o'clock. And so what can we do to kind of add a little more spice to our nightlife?

I'll add on. I'm Phil Newsome, Design Review Commission. I've been on the Design Review Commission for about five years. And a lot of what we hear from folks nowadays with the housing element and all these changes, SB 330. Oh, it's on. Can you hear me? OK. I mean, one of the things that I hear on the Design Review Commission is people come and they defend the character and identity and quality of this town. And with the larger The larger buildings that are going to be plopped down in the middle of town, really, people talk a lot about, in my mind, scale is preserving the scale of downtown. We're blessed with kind of a small town grid. and trying to build around that grid, trying to reinforce that grid while allowing this density, if that makes sense. Another thing that comes to mind is one of the great resources we have is there's all these great fingers of open space that I think many people can walk to it in five or 10 minutes, and actually, reinforcing that, improving it. With that, the opposite side of that is with climate change is these open spaces, you know, we see all these fires that are happening, is basically maintaining a buffer in the open spaces that actually is safe. So those are my thoughts.

Hi, Karen Basting, chair of a design review this year. I grew up here, raised in Contra Costa County, and my dad worked at Capwell's on Broadway Plaza when there was a Capwell's. I worked there too. It's very important to me to keep the historic and charming qualities that Walnut Creek is still managing to hang onto in some locations. And the other two gentlemen on our commission already talked about that. I am also one of those lucky people that is within walking distance, a few minutes of an open space that I take a daily hike in, and keeping those connections is really important to me. I think the inclusiveness and the vitality of downtown is a key goal, and I agree there should be a little bit more ACTIVITY THERE AT OFF TIMES. ON THE OTHER HAND, AS WE ALL KNOW, WE HAVE A LOT OF TRAFFIC AND WE HAVE PARKING ISSUES. SO WE HAVE TO TRY AND BALANCE THOSE OUT TOO. I THINK THAT'S IT FOR THIS SLIDE SELECTION. THANK YOU.

My name is Cricket Riley, also on the Design Review Commission. We're all at this table. For me, my fellow commissioners said most of what I believe and want to see moving forward. I think we have really attractive downtown a very vital downtown it is I think an example of a successful downtown and a lot of places no longer have that so maintaining that maintaining their we do have standards for new construction but we often see on the Commission that they're kind of bland so again trying to reinforce the character of our city. It's also really important in my view that we continue to prioritize public plantings, so street plantings, trees, things like that. We all know that the trees in a space radically affect how it feels as well as property values. So as we move forward, as we look at climate change and growth, that we take into account and we continue to prioritize how we plant in our public spaces.

PRENDON MORAN, PLANNING COMMISSION. I THINK THE BIGGEST THING THAT I'LL TALK ABOUT IS THE MOST PRESSING ISSUES FACING THE CITY IS MOBILITY. TOO CLOSE NOW. OKAY. And that's only going to get more pressing as we build more homes, whether we want to or not, and where those go. And moving people around, especially from the downtown area to the Northgate area and further south. And having connections and thinking about that now, rather than 25 years from now, we're still solving these problems. You're up, Sarah.

Sarah Baltazar, Arts Commission. Let's see, I took a lot of notes. So I definitely really love aspects of the Lesher Center, the Bedford Art Gallery. I love that there's a youth arts lab over the summer that is starting to kind of build this cultural creative labor that can live and stay inside of Walnut Creek. instead of being too small of a town to stay in. My colleagues here, the access to nature and those open spaces, both the walkability and its protection seem extremely important. And to my friend's point on mobility, I think a generational transition as a person with young kids and then also keeping my 80-year-old mother here, Walnut Creek is starting to become a place that is hard to stay in. So what that means for us in terms of accessibility and mobility, and in general just the arts as a hub and as a workforce that I think we overlook with the density of housing and the focus on shopping, there needs to be a lot more gathering spaces that are not solely dependent upon consumption, but actually building community and belonging.

Could I just, before we move to the next table, ask you a follow-up question about that? Why, can you describe maybe more about why it's becoming hard to stand?

Rent is very high, and it goes up, and there's not a ton of rent control protections for renting families here. It's really hard to buy. Something that probably needs to be completely redone is still a million dollars. Housing, new developments for seniors that go in are also really high. Some of the really beautiful ones, like our friends at Via Monte, it's a large buy-in. So it's hard to get into Rossmoor in your 70s and 80s as somebody who's doing this with my family researching where we could go from small condo on like Oak Grove and the Keys to a senior living facility seems a little bit more out of reach than it was 20 years ago. Does that answer your question?

Absolutely. Thank you for the extra clarification. All right. So we're going to move up to the front table. We're going to go clockwise. Yeah.

So who would like to kick us off?

Thank you. Charisse Kound, Planning Commission. With the first question of character, identity, quality of life, I think I agree with so much of what has been said already about Walnut Creek. I think of it as being a very welcoming, safe, clean city. with a thriving downtown, beautiful outdoor accessible spaces, but also the quality community spaces, free places like you were saying, Sarah, that don't require you to pay to be there in that space, whether it's our libraries, our parks, our recreation spaces. And also I think about my family as my kids have grown up here, the access to our city preschools as well and low cost kind of schools, recreation and summer camps. When I think about the pressing issues facing Walnut Creek, I think about also some larger issues that are go beyond Walnut Creek, but do affect us and we have to figure out how to respond to those. So thinking about our economic changes as AI and and the way that people interact online changes the revenue source of our city. I think that's going to be a big shift for us and for so many other cities to figure out that's going to be important to this plan. as well as climate change and how that is going to affect our lives in so many ways. I think those were the main issues from my perspective. Thank you.

Sharon Pinkstaff, chair of the Prose Commission. I just want to echo some of the points that Cherise made. The access to the Walnut Creek open space is one of the key reasons I moved here a quarter century ago from San Francisco. And I saw families in our neighborhood move to Walnut Creek because of the outdoor amenity, as well as our parks and camps for children. youth and sports facility that the city owned and the city operates so that's aspects of Walnut Creek that's attractive to folks like me and other young family or families and then we I feel we need to preserve that piece of Walnut Creek identity in the general plan update. For the critical pressing issue for me, I live near Ignatial Valley Road. The traffic on Ignatial Valley Road, it's a road of regional significance, if you will, so it's not only Walnut Creek residents are using You know, the traffic is actually caused by more than just Walnut Creek residents because it's a corridor to get to the freeway. So I feel that we need to address that now and in the future. That's definitely a big, should be a big consideration in the update.

I'm Ryan, Transportation Commission. Um, I think in terms of what is unique and special, a lot of people kind of talked about this, but it's the destination. Like people from all different cities come to Walnut Creek and enjoy being here to shop, to hang out, to go to restaurants, stuff like that. Um, also just love the trees in Walnut Creek. I feel like we have some of the most trees out of any city I've ever been to and they're beautiful. And so I think we should just continue to plant trees, continue to, um, you know focus on that part of it and it and to tie it back to transportation the more trees it's better for walking better for biking even better when you're in the car because if you're sitting in a stoplight you got some shade it's way nicer than if there's you know sitting in the sun so um yeah those are some of the best parts about walnut creek um pressing issues is traffic and parking um i think one thing that we can do is with autonomous cars that are coming, I think planning for that, not having so much parking necessarily, because people won't have to park with autonomous cars potentially. So thinking about that down the road, 10, 15 years, it's going to change a lot. And then in terms of outcomes, I guess just measure how many people are coming to downtown, like how many people are coming to the city, is it going up, is it going down, how can we fit more people in the city, you know, through other types of transportation, through walking, biking, buses, public transportation, stuff like that. Because, you know, there's, cars take a lot of space, so you only have so much room to to park basically and to get downtown. So I think that's the way we can measure that.

Diego Kirsch, Student Commissioner, Transportation Commission. For what's unique and special about Walnut Creek, I agree with what's already been said. So the downtown area is really vibrant and special, and it brings people from other regions. In terms of critical issues, I think affordable housing is a big one. And then specifically regarding transportation, parking is another issue that was brought up at our commission meetings. Specifically, we talked about curbside parking management strategies and how do you get people to utilize our parking garages and not just curbside parking. And so, yeah, I think that as Walnut Creek evolves and grows, we need to have, like, strategies to address that and make sure that we don't drive people away by increasing, like, their parking rates. So, yeah.

Charles Crellin again. I'm actually chair of the Transportation Commission, but for your background, I should add that I also served four years on the Design Review Commission. And I'm also serving now as a county airport land use commission. So looking through various lenses. Unique and special. I'm going to attack this slightly differently. And I'm going to think about what brought me to Walnut Creek 25 years ago, which was quaint, charming town. And it brought me from the peninsula in San Francisco, which... was no longer being quaint and charming. But I'm also starting to worry about, and this is where I'm going to attack it, like from a different angle. I don't know. I feel like we have an identity crisis. What and who are we trying to be? Are we losing our identity? And a great example would be, you look at the new Broadway Plaza build out, the old one, folks have seen it was a very small, quaint, and charming. I always liken the new part of Broadway Plaza to trying to be Rodeo Drive-ish. But you contrast that right across the street with the old, charming, quaint, old downtown, which I absolutely adore. But that's now getting overtaken with exercise places, kickboxing, yoga, spin cycles. So we're losing the restaurants, we're losing THE CUTE SHOPS THAT WERE UNIQUE THAT WOULD BRING PEOPLE HERE. I'M REALLY WORRIED ARE WE, ALONG WITH SOME OF THE DESIGN REVIEW COMMISSIONERS MENTIONED THE LARGE SCALE OF THE BUILDINGS. Are we trying to be San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, a Chicagoland, a major metro Sacramento? Or are we still trying to be a unique, quaint, yet thriving town with a level of being urban? On the critical issues, I probably don't have anything too original here. Traffic, crowding, we have a reasonable amount of lower level crime. infrastructure, roads, how can we evolve over time to address those issues? I think we need to have intentionality in this general plan update. And so then project outcome. We were supposed to answer all three of these right now? Yep. So for project outcomes, I think we make sure we have an overarching vision that drives all the sub-elements of the general plan. and really make sure that we have a well-defined identity vision, who do we want to be, and then make sure the general plan supports that. Thank you.

Hi, Molly Klopp, Walnut Creek Planning Commissioner. So for me, what's unique and special about Walnut Creek is a lot of what people have mentioned in that it's got this wonderful mix of urban and rural and green space. It's pretty diverse, not extremely diverse, but pretty diverse in terms of the Residents and the types of businesses and it's very welcoming and inclusive and easy to get around mostly in terms of critical issues the things that I am most concerned about our affordability just in general and That translates also to housing affordability availability of housing I think we are approving developments as fast as they come but there are not enough coming and not enough creative out-of-the-box ideas to fill the need and developers and money available to create the project plans so it's it's a I think an overarching challenge and it also translates into transportation challenges as we build more houses and so I think over time I'd like to see us learning from communities that have creatively addressed that kind of log jam and you know opportunities different ways to meet it and different ways to repurpose existing space which is a lot less expensive than building new space I worry if we don't address the affordability and housing issues, we will be a much less diverse community because we'll drive out those young and creative folks and we'll have a bunch of seniors. They'll be starting to be driven out too. So in terms of outcomes, I think really being able to measure that process of the acquisition of housing, solving of problems, demographics of the community over time, how it changes, and just success of the various initiatives that we create together. Thank you.

My kin Strongman Planning Commission, sorry, she turned to me off We are under a lot of pressure to provide housing But our predecessors for the last 50 years to try to make sure that we are not just a bedroom community So we need to keep the balance of everything else of employment retail culture open space and anything like that. As for project outcomes, one thing that's always impressed me about Walnut Creek is we have a tendency to do it right the first time. Other cities around here don't. They'll do it and then five years later have to redo it. Another pet peeve of mine is we need to loosen up what qualifies for not retail but commercial space we have a tendency to be very selective on it we had a case or a project just in the last session of the planning commission that is just wanted a dental office wanted to expand but they were in a retail zone and they had to have a cpu just for that which i thought was crazy that they just there was no change in the building or anything they just wanted to expand um and we need to kind of loosen up so other things could happen without having

bureaucracy of coming to the Planning Commission or any other Commission so thank you Jill dresser Arts Commission I think one of the something that's very unique about Walnut Creek is our arts and culture the Bedford gallery is one of the few city owned and run art galleries that I know of anywhere maybe besides San Francisco It is an amazing gallery that brings students from all over the Bay Area. This spring we had classes from Hayward taking BART and buses and walking to the gallery for tours. Who does that? That's like crazy because they don't have those resources in their city. The arts and culture brings in so much economic business in the evenings and during the day to Walnut Creek with something going on at the Lesher Center and its three galleries and the Bedford, its three theaters and the Bedford Gallery every single day. Next thing is open space and parks. We didn't move here for that, but that's been a total bonus to have the open space and parks. Having a BART station that's walkable to downtown is so important to the economics of this city and to bringing people in. I gave a public art walking tour this weekend. I'm always shocked when I say to people, do you live in Walnut Creek? And half the people don't live in Walnut Creek. They are coming to Walnut Creek to take a public art walking tour. Our public art is robust. We now have five different walking tours. People want to take them. They're sold out. Then they're staying for lunch. Then they're doing something else in the city. Also, something that's really unique about Walnut Creek, I think, is the free shuttle buses we have, the downtown loop from BART, and also the free shuttle from Creekside Drive, I think, in early mornings and afternoons. So all the apartments on Creekside Drive, if they're trying to get to the BART station or even to downtown Walnut Creek, they don't have to get in the car. They can hop on the free bus. So I think that's super special that the city is providing that. Issues, we've got traffic, we've got parking, the climate crisis. We also have to build in fire resiliency to our neighborhoods and to our open space without cutting down all the trees in the open space. Eventually we'll learn that oak trees are incredibly helpful to build fire resistance, fire resiliency, and will keep our oak trees even close to our houses. But we also have an issue with, I think, just the housing open space perimeter where we have to deal with critters. And people are busy poisoning the ground squirrels, which then poisons everything else. So we have to deal with wildlife in our communities, and we have so many people in our communities, and the deer are all in our communities. So it's dealing with wildlife and how we deal with them with our houses. Outcomes I think the autonomous vehicles is coming and we need a plan for for how that's going to impact our city I'd like to see people talking about native plans. I'd like that to be called California native plants being put into our city into our parks and into our open space and I'd like to see public art start making its way out to the neighborhoods and the parks and

Hi, I'm Nitsunet Tesfaye, Vice Chair of Arts Commission. I've lived in Walnut Creek nearly 16, 17 years, and we moved here for the school systems. We love, I'm in an active PTA involved with different activities, so our school system is, I know for a fact that a lot of families, sorry, I get a little nervous, that move here for those reasons. And with the unique access to the open space, my kids go to a school where there's a three acre nature area in the back. and being actively involved with that with the students was just incredibly wonderful and just community based. So that's one of my favorite things about Walnut Creek as well as our open space. And I think a lot of it has been covered in why our city is so special. But I do think that one of the critical issues as I have over the years witnessed a lot of young families having to move. because of housing and the diversity issue as well because of housing. So I think that's something that definitely will impact the community and everyone else. And another thing I think as Vice Chair of Art Commission, I'm also an artist, a working artist in the community. I have a 13 year old who loves to hang out with her friends. I am noticing that there's not a lot of youth activities that are centered around the arts as much as it should be unless you're in a camp or most of the time it's something that you have to sign up for affordability becomes an issue for a lot of folks as well so if there's a way to get the youth engaged and in the culture and arts after-school programs summer where without necessarily having to sign up for different things I think that would be a wonderful resource would like to see going forward

Okay, Sherry, I'm going to call on you next.

Hi, I'm Sherry Curlin, Arts Commission. Boy, everyone's contributed so well. What I'd like to say about the unique and special things to Walnut Creek and what brought me here 30-something years ago was the schools and the open space. Now, as a retired person, it's community engagement with the arts program in Walnut Creek. It's really important to my personal well-being that I be engaged in community arts programs, as it is, I see, for many, many people that attend them. So those are, I would say, some very unique and special things about Walnut Creek, and the food and the walkability. I think some critical issues are access, and what I mean by access is even the community programs that we have, they're either impacted, and so people try to sign up and they can't attend because they get impacted, or because the architecture of the sign-up system can't keep up with demand in some way. I think there's an equitability issue in that a lot of people attend our arts programs from as far as Livermore and Clayton and Berkeley, Vallejo, wonderful. But as an example, I live a mile away from the Community Arts Center, and there were three terms that I was not able to book myself into. As a city resident, it becomes frustrating. So I would say, for me, a critical issue among those who want to take those kind of courses, and that might extend to the soccer classes and the swimming classes and summer camps. As it is now... In order to sign up, you've got to be on your computer at 1159 a.m. on the day of and be lucky enough to get your slot. And now I'm going to speak up about that because if I'm a parent and I want to get my kid into a program and I'm working, How in the world can I manage to get my kid that lives in Walnut Creek into a program like that? It's really very difficult. So I would say that's a critical issue. And a project outcome that I'd like to see is probably linking other parts of Walnut Creek to downtown, the Northgate community. I like what someone said back here about that. You know, I live near downtown so I can walk and it's wonderful. But if I lived in Northgate, my experience of Walnut Creek would be very different. So that might mean moving some aspects of Walnut Creek to different pockets of the city or making it easier for folks to come in.

Thanks. Is the parent who was unable to get my kid into the Oakland Zoo camp, in the 10 seconds it was open? I understand that problem. All right, let's go to the back corner. And then I think we have one more table.

Hello, Edward Guerrero from the Transportation Committee. So unique and special. Obviously, as everybody says, the arts, it's amazing. I think it'll continue to grow. The open space is also great, although I don't think that the access is that easy to the open space. Depending on what side of town you're on, it's not always easy to get there or park or... you know, access it as it should be. I think one of our greatest things is also the medical care. Having two hospitals, especially John Muir, the level of care there is probably one of the best in all the Bay Area. As far as critical issues, YV. YV is it. With so many people using it, I don't think it's like somebody said over here, it's not a Walnut Creek thing. I mean, everybody is coming through YV. My personal take is it should be treated like the CHP treats the freeway. It should not be closed down at all during the day for whatever reason. If it's gonna be work done on it, it should be done at night. Kind of like the highway. There's so many people that are affected by YV and especially because the hospital sits there and some other infrastructure sits there. I think it's very important to keep it open. I also worry about the hospital. The way John Muir is going, you know, it's not in the best financial shape. Oh, sorry. It's not in the best financial shape, and I would not want to ever see it change hands and be owned by something that wouldn't provide the level of care that it provides now. Housing, I'm not sure where we're at with ADUs. I don't know enough about it, but I think it should be something that's very important or very accessible to those who are trying to increase the housing, because housing is obviously an issue. And then as far as the project outcomes, I love the website and what ALT is proposing. I think that if there was a way to capture those that are going to be accessing the website or coming out to the meetings, is there data that we can derive from there to find those that are not accessing it and not coming to the meetings and find a way to reach them? I think that's the underrepresentation that we're looking for. Thank you.

Brent Anderson, still on the Planning Commission. The unique aspect of Walnut Creek, we've heard a lot of things about the qualities in Walnut Creek, but some of those qualities are present in other places nearby. Maybe not to the same degree, but still. I think what really is unique about Walnut Creek is its regional identity. It's a regional center for shopping, for business, which means that... People not only come into Walnut Creek in the morning and leave in the evening or vice versa, but people come in and out of Walnut Creek all day long. So, and because of, I mean, it's a natural situation, Walnut Creek's in the middle of the county, so the big highway interchange, you know, it's got a nice big flat area to build on, and it'll continue to be a regional center. And so, you know, it needs to And that has impacts in that I think that the population, the citizens in Walnut Creek, have understood and internalized the fact that it is a regional center. It's different from other cities. And that's okay. That's part of the reason we like it here. It's part of the reason we get frustrated with things that are here. But that's the way it is. It's accepted, and we're going to work with that. I think that's different from any other city nearby. As far as issues, really two. There will be more housing, bigger housing, more dense housing. It will happen. Partly that's because Walnut Creek, unlike a lot of other cities nearby, is willing to build housing and has done so, but primarily because of the other cities around the state who have resisted housing. so much, the state has taken over and has said there will be more housing, like it or not. It'll probably be easier for Walnut Creek to do that than some of the other cities who are not used to it, but it's going to continue to happen and maybe even accelerate. And that has impacts on transportation. It has impacts on parking. It has impacts on schools. We haven't really talked much about schools. We don't have a schools commission in the city. But we can't forget about that, and housing is going to have an impact on that. Autonomous cars may help the parking issue, but if you can drive your car and then send it home, that's great for parking, but you double the traffic. So think about that, too. And the other thing I want to mention is because we have a unique downtown here, Downtowns have to be treated differently than residential areas. There were a couple of people talking about preserving the downtown. Preserving residential areas, you come back, you know, you move somewhere else, you come back a generation later, and the residential areas are similar, that's great. If the downtown is similar, it's probably dead. Downtowns, especially in a regional center like this, have to change. The change can be controlled. It can be directed to some degree. To some degree, it's other forces, financial forces, just planning forces, all kinds of things. But we have to recognize that downtowns will change. They have to change in order to stay vibrant, which people have mentioned. And so we have to plan for that, not just plan for what we have now.

Stephen Kwok, Planning Commission. For me, I've lived in the city four years. I'm fairly new as city residents come. And so I've quickly fallen in love with the city. What I like about Walnut Creek is a lot of others here have spoken to it. So the city identity, the connectivity, the willingness of the residents to contribute to the health of the city and the vitality. I work for the county, so I think a lot about how our city operates in context of the wider region. I like that we're a good regional player when it comes to larger projects such as transportation initiatives throughout the region, climate resiliency as the risk of fire becomes greater and greater and the risk of flood comes greater and greater. How is the city operating in the context of the region to help you know, not just Walnut Creek, but also Lafayette, Alamo, the county up and down. How does the city contribute resources to the wider region to enable the wider region to be resilient and sustainable? In terms of connectivity, I think one of the critical issues we have is the ability to, mobility has been mentioned. I think in terms of physical obstacles, 680 and 24 are major obstacles to moving around between neighborhoods and downtown. I live on the other side of 680 from the BART station, so that's a personal experience for me. And Walnut Creek is another major obstacle where there's a lot of great housing on the one side of Walnut Creek, but downtown is on the other side. So trying to cross Walnut Creek on foot or by bike The creek itself is another obstacle that I think we should be working to bridge to make connections from downtown to the areas around it better to allow for more opportunities to move around in different modes, biking, walking, bus, and so on. Another thing that I've learned, I'm working through the home buying process right now. And one of the things I found out, it's very difficult to get a homeowner's insurance policy for specific types of housing. And so hazard mitigation, I mentioned it briefly, fire, flood, other areas. As we continue to build different types of housing, how are we managing the risks that come along with it? How are we working with the state and different players in the corporate world to allow people to have continual access to affordable housing? and to have access to the financial side of it, the insurance side of it, so that they can continue to live in a city that becomes, as the risk environment changes for the city,

Laura Patch, Transportation Commission. So I kind of have a different perspective on the character and identity portion. Having grown up in La Miranda and deciding to move here as an adult, I have the, like, why did I come here instead of anywhere else in the Bay Area? And part of it was that I just remember Walnut Creek always having things to do. As a teenager, it was safe for our parents to let us come here and hang out and not be worried about us because there were places to shop safely. There were food that we could, restaurants that we could be at. There were art exhibits. There's just a lot of... interesting things that appeal to a variety of ages, I think, that bring people to Walnut Creek. And I know a lot of people mention our downtown. Part of what makes downtown unique is that you've got the big stores, but then Main Street has more little independent type stores. And so I personally would like to see one of the outcomes be maybe bringing something about that character to other commerce areas in Walnut Creek. Downtown is not the only place that there is commerce, but it is the only walkable commerce that we have in the city. And that is irritating to me because people should be able to go to like multiple stores and not just always have to be in downtown. PLANTING WOULD BE HELPFUL ON THAT BECAUSE THERE'S AREAS WHERE IT'S TOO HOT TO WALK BECAUSE THERE'S NOT TREES AND THINGS OF THAT NATURE. FROM A TRANSPORTATION PERSPECTIVE I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SEE SOMETHING IN THE GENERAL PLAN THAT ADDRESSES MOBILITY FROM A CAR LAST PERSPECTIVE. Having grown as a suburb, Walnut Creek is still very car-focused, but I think my generation and those younger are moving away from every single person in their family having a private vehicle and going around, right? That's part of why we see kids on the very terrifying electric bikes that they're on. You know, if they can have that and they don't need to have a car, that's great, but it needs to be safe. So part of that is having good public transit. We talked about YVR a lot. Maybe there needs to be a tram or some easier way that people don't have to get in a single vehicle and drive that distance. I think that also helps with the climate issues. It reduces fire risks because you don't have cars that are going to light on fire. even if we switch to EVs, right? Because EV fires are terrifying. And then I know this is a little outside of my commission, but I want to address housing as a young person. It is very hard to afford to live in Walnut Creek. The high density housing that has come in tend to be rentals. And as somebody already said, there's basically no rent control TO HELP KEEP THOSE AFFORDABLE. THEY WERE HIGH END APARTMENTS SO THEY WERE ALREADY AT A HIGH PRICE POINT. THERE'S A LACK OF ENTRY LEVEL HOUSING IN WALNUT CREEK SO PEOPLE JUST OUTSIDE OF COLLEGE CAN'T REALLY MOVE HERE EASILY. And same with mid-level. There's a lot of expensive single-family homes and nothing before that to help people. So that's what I have to say. Here you go.

Awesome. Awesome. Thanks. It's two to one turkey currently in the first. I'm totally listening to everybody. Jared Ash, transportation. I have an interactive question for the audience. How many people live on the other side of John Muir from here? How many people live in like the greater Larky area? Right? How many people live in the let's say, greater rug gear area. I know I'm leaving people out. The downtown walkable, multifamily, BART accessible stretch. As I'm going here, part of what makes Walnut Creek unique is that there are very separate sides of Walnut Creek where, yes, we are all one community, but how many people do you know if you live in the North Gate neighborhood that live in the Lurkey or Rudd Gear neighborhoods or live in the downtown in the walkable areas? Most don't. And that's good and bad and that's okay, but we have to just look at that. There's four school districts, Charisse? five that come in here, right? That's very unique for a town this size. So that also further separates us a little bit because we tend to know the people who would go through our system. So I think those are just part of what makes Walnut Creek unique and good, and that's all positive. But it also makes it different because we all see things differently. I'd say going to critical issues and project outcomes, I would tie them together in terms of future proofing. The world by the end of 2050 on this, I know people have briefly mentioned autonomous vehicles, but if you look ahead at CCTA, we're talking about planning Contra Costa Transit Association, We're talking about how to do aerial transportation and how to bring that to our communities. So people can go from here just to San Ramon in it or to San Francisco. Shopping is going to change with drone deliveries to the department stores so you can get that color in every size you want. They're going to need warehousing. I don't expect you to know all of those answers and be a futurist, but we have to create flexibility around how fast things are moving into the future with all of these technologies from transportation to shopping and everything else. Because at the last plan, none of us were getting groceries delivered. And when was it created? Maybe Amazon didn't even have Prime. But you're only like 19, so. You know, so just saying it's changing quickly and to just consider that. And we've sort of talked about, my colleague over here talked about Walnut Creek as this regional hub. Economic development has been touched on but never really talked about. That is a critical issue. We are a center of the East Bay from arts to activities, and we need to continue to focus on economic development. And I think part of this plan, when it comes to zoning and CPUs, APUs, things like that, needs to create flexibility for things we don't know. And I know that's so hard to do in your job and planning something that's 20 plus years in existence, but where you can create some flexibility and don't hammer things very specifically. If you can have retail on a second floor versus a first floor or medical office on a first floor and a second floor, just creating those little things can help make it economically more attractive in 10 years to somebody who's looking to invest in this area and to grow their business. Thanks.

Peter Magnani, Arts Commission. Unique and special, I'll stick with arts on this one. Well, yes to everything everybody said about everything else. One of the really important things that makes Walnut Creek a true regional hub, vibrant regional center, is the Lesher Center, and that's been touched on. It truly is city-owned, but it truly is a regional center in that it proactively brings people in from all over the region. Modesto has one, and they occupy that role in their community. Davis has a regional center. Places are lucky enough to have that economic anchor, if you will. It's an economic driver. It's a driver of diversity. The quality and the... diversity of programming at that place brings in all kinds of audiences and brings them not just to the center but then brings them into the town where they spend time and we see them unlike somebody mentioned that The town closes down too early. It closes down too early because the restaurants close too early. But on a Thursday, even a Wednesday night, you can walk around downtown and it's filled with people. They're mostly kids. And there isn't a lot for them to do. And it'd be great if there were more. They're just sort of wandering around and showing off. But... And, you know, how it should be carried forward and strengthened as the community evolves. We need more. We need more arts. We need more programming at the Lesher Center, but we need more venues of all kinds, performing arts venues, galleries, more public art in more parts of Walnut Creek to bring that all together.

Critical issues.

Same thing. I mean, there's a million of them. But I'll touch on the one that keeps me up at night. And I guess I'd say we're building more and more places that fewer and fewer of us can afford to go to. There's still a pretty good mix of big places and small businesses. But my nightmare is that you wake up one morning and it's what I think of as Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. It used to be a mecca of wonderful, unique shops, interesting restaurants, cultural diversity. And then almost overnight, it was Sephora and Crate and Barrel. And that's pretty much it. And when I see new stuff going up, I think, and the way Broadway Plaza has kind of developed, I worry about that. And I think we really need to encourage in every way we can the preservation of small local businesses of all kinds, because that's really a large part of what gives us our character. And white people come here. They don't come here to shop at the chains. They come here for what? for what they can't get in their own community. So that's my piece. And thank you for doing this, by the way.

Thanks. Art Oller, PROS Commission. So when I think about unique and special, and I look around the room and I listen to everybody, everybody has a different perspective. It's all in the in the eye of the beholder. But all of us found something or many things that brought us here. So it's everything here that's available. And one of the things that I think we're challenged with is looking forward to 2050 and still having people coming here for all of everything, because we do have everything here. And what we don't have, we can go experience elsewhere. But we'd like to live here. So that's why we're here. So that's the way I view it. And from a parks and rec perspective, you can't find a better community for open space in the United States in terms of acres per person of people that live here. We take care of our parks and we build fantastic things on them. Look at our $75 million project going on at Heather Farm. And that's going to be incredible when that's done next year. Right?

LAUGHTER

But notice I ask the staff that question because one of the critical issues for me is that two things. One is that we can continue to attract and retain the incredible people that do everything here because they work here. They work for the city of Walnut Creek. And they build incredible things, and they maintain things, and they Make every place that you go to here an attractive place to be that the city controls. Think about that. Every place you go to, always, especially our parks, takes a lot of work, open space. Very few people work there, but the people that do work incredibly hard. And the recreation that we have, haven't heard much talk about that, but there are so many things you can do here that people from all over the place are coming to do those things and make it very difficult to sign up at midnight. So maybe it's not a critical issue today, but retaining that incredible staff we have could be a future issue because of costs. Costs are going up everywhere and it's hard to keep salaries aligned with what we need to do. So that's a huge difficulty. The other side of the coin is us. And I don't mean to say that in a selfish way. But one of the things that Walnut Creek has a strength and needs to have that strength in the future is we have an incredibly engaged community in terms of serving Walnut Creek as commissioners, as other committees that exist. We need to continue to have that, and I know that there are great efforts to recruit new people when the time is, when terms finish and people come aboard. We need to continue that. We are a city of planners and if we don't get 2050 right, shame on us because who better to do it than us? And with the help of the community and I think some great ideas being shared by the consultants here and how they're gonna get the community engaged, I think we can do that. So I think the outcome will be just another great plan that we execute in the city of Walnut Creek.

Fran Garland, Prose Commission. So, like many of the people I've said here, I came here because I liked the neighborhood I live in has direct access to open space, three or four trails, you know, very good schools, et cetera. So, that's, you know, that's what I like. And we took full advantage when my son was young of the recreation opportunities and I love the arts programs and I volunteer at Lesher. It is a really great place to live and raise a family. As you say, going forward, from our commission's perspective, You might not think about this very much, but we get a lot of conflict on our commission. And I think many people have said here we're a regional hub. And that's part of the reason is that people come from outside because we have things. And so we... everybody wants to play pickleball in Walnut Creek and everybody wants to ride their bike in the open space and so do the equestrians and so do the, you know, hikers and the people who want to just preserve the environment and so we get, you know, and I just think we need, as we're going through this process, we really need to consider going forward how we're going to solve these kind of problems and can we accommodate everyone and how do we kind of work to make these areas of potential conflict. As we grow and as we remain and even maybe improve as a regional hub, I think the conflicts will potentially get worse. And then another one I think is, someone mentioned it earlier and I don't really know what the statistics are, but I certainly see our demographics changing. And I think from our perspective as the parks and rec and open space, that matters a lot. Where do you put your parks? Where are the people going to be? Where are the children going to be? Do you need the five-year-old playground? Do you need the senior center? You know what I mean? I think we really have to be considering what will we look like. And I know that's part of the planning process is to try to identify that and do it. But I think it is important that we really, because I think the city is changing a lot, particularly with the new building downtown, the new housing, the higher density. I see an awful lot of younger people walking, not so much kids, but a lot of younger people walking dogs and stuff like that coming out of those apartments. So, yeah, those are things that I think are going to be important.

Matt Brockhouse, Provost Commission. One of the things I love about Walnut Creek is you don't have to leave Walnut Creek. So many people have talked about how it draws people in, but really, as a resident of Walnut Creek, I don't have to go out of Walnut Creek to do pretty much anything. I mean, I do, but it's so nice that I can shop here, I can eat here, I can recreate, my kids can recreate without really having to leave. And that was different. I came from Moraga, and that was different because from Moraga, you've got to leave to do anything. Yeah, exactly, right? But with that being said, a couple people have mentioned it, right? Broadway Plaza is a regional draw, and we've got those large multinational companies that have stores there, and that's great. But I think what makes a community unique is also a ton of unique and small commercial opportunities that I see kind of starting to disappear. So if Walnut Creek had a lot of character because it had this quaint downtown, If we don't put in some policies or some incentives to keep small businesses there, to keep retail rent down so that they can get in to make it easier for an upstart business to get a storefront and hang their shingle, then that quaint kind of character is going to disappear. And we might still be a regional hub for commerce, but it's not going to have that unique feel. It's going to look like any other mall in any other city. And so I think it's really important that we do what we can to encourage the development of arts and small business, but also to give them a place to survive. I think another critical issue, we've talked a lot about transportation. For me, it's a little bit different. I have really young kids. And my kids can't go to their friend's house or to their park on their own because it's just too dangerous for them to get there. My daughter's seven. She knows exactly where her friend lives. It's a block and a half away. And I would trust my daughter fully to get there on her own. But I would not trust anybody on the road alongside her to keep her safe. And I think that's a really big problem. Sure, public transit could help with that because there would be fewer cars. But also just that sense of, like, We're a community, and we're a town, and we should have some vested interest in our fellow residents so that kids can just be kids. And that's disappearing. Sure, my daughter can go to the park if I take her there. But there's going to be a point where she could go there on her own, but it's not safe for her to do it. I have to take her there because I don't trust all the cars on the road. So I think that's a really critical issue. that just moving around town is safer for everybody, no matter how you're doing it, driving, walking, on a bike. I think an outcome that would be really helpful to focus in on is kind of what Fran was saying is the demographics. You know, if we think about housing, sure, it's important to think about units and what those units cost. But if we look at the demographics, I think we can address a bunch of different things, right? If the age of the community is moving downward, then that probably means that housing is also supporting that downward growth, that there's schools for those people, that there's activities for all different ages. And I think that if we think about targeting a younger demographic in all things, it will help with affordability, it'll help with transportation, it'll help with housing and any other factor that we might look at.

Glorianne Sasser, pros commission. I'll keep it mostly pros focused. So I agree with recreation is very important. We need to continue to have recreation for all ages. Also, I believe that youth sports is important, and we need to keep that quality of life going through our community into 2050, particularly aquatics. And also, no one has mentioned the golf course, Boundary Oak. I'm not a golfer, but I recognize having a municipal course of the quality that we have in this community is very important, and we need to make sure that that remains healthy into 2050. And then lastly, just two comments, is that Broadway Plaza, if you love it or hate it, it's vital to the community for the economics, and so we need to keep that healthy. And also, all that shopping is changing. We don't know what it will be like in 2050, so that needs to be important. That's very important. And I also think that continuing to have the medical here is very important also, so we want to be friendly to that community as well. And that's all I had. Thank you.

I think we got everybody. We didn't miss any commissioners, is that correct? Yes, just scanning. Okay. We have a couple more questions on engagement, which we're going to do quickly. I'm going to make you all do them popcorn style. But before we do that, I'm just going to give everyone a five-minute break, and we can come back at 8.10. If you're not going to take a bio break, maybe just get up and move around and get the wiggles out. All right, thanks.

ON THE OVERHEAD. HELLO?

CAN YOU HEAR ME THROUGH THE MIC? HELLO? RIGHT? HELLO? I DON'T THINK IT'S WORKING.

HI, EVERYBODY.

WE'RE GOING TO RESUME. WE'RE GOING TO GO BACK TO IT.

YEAH, IT'S JUST LOUD IN HERE. THAT'S ALL.

Ah, thank you so much, Molly. Thank you all for coming back to your tables. We got these last round of questions, and I will pass it back to Eric.

Okay, we're going to do the same table, same order. Here's what I would suggest. It's 8.15. You guys gave us a ton of feedback on the other topics. We want you to give us feedback on engagement. It's important. But I would suggest going quickly, popcorn style. If you've heard it already, you can plus one something. You can say, I heard that. I agree with it. And then move on. So you don't have to articulate all the ideas again, just to kind of speed up the process. But want to hear from every table again. We're going to start same table, same order. You volunteered to go first. You get to go first on this one, too.

Jeff Prose, the Design Review Commission, non-traditional population, what comes to mind for me is senior citizens that, in a bigger urban context, can look inwards and be a bit more frightened about their community. And I think that we need to kind of bring them out and make them a bit more engaged and let them know that the world is a happy, sunny place and they're a big part of it. and measure that success I think they'll just come from the how we measure their participation and I think a process which allows us to I think someone really spoke about flexibility perhaps in planning but a process is flexible and how we bring people in and change programs and be able to kind of pivot as a need to to remain flexible and open and inclusive

in the education realm?

And this is a really great question. I think just answering it directly, because you gave some examples. So how do you get with young families? We don't have any representative of the school districts here. That's one way to get them to the table is engage in that. We have these great sports programs. We have Giants Soccer League, those type of things. Try to get into those channels. And when you're dealing with younger families, you've got to do things like give them QR codes, go to their meetings, give them a QR code, and give them the opportunity, because they don't have time to go do things like surveys and those type of things, because they just don't have time to sit in things like this. Measuring success. It's always about what you're doing, which is get those visions and get those goals. You measure versus the goals. That's what you have to do is make sure the goals are clear.

That's what I got.

I'M JUST GOING TO SAY YOUNG PEOPLE BECAUSE IT'S 2006 LAST TIME AND I THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE AROUND THIS ROOM SAID I'VE BEEN HERE FOR A QUARTER CENTURY. SO THIS IS OUR TIME TO MAKE THE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE, THAT'S GOING TO BE THEIR CITY IN 2050. SO WE NEED TO THINK ABOUT THEM AND INCLUDE THEM IN THE DISCUSSION. THAT'S ALL I'LL SAY. THANKS.

Karen Basting, Design Review Commission. I have a background in doing outreach, and for BART, actually, that's how I started there. And one of the things, there's some things that I have suggestions for you about. One would be HOAs. We have a lot of multifamily communities, and that's kind of a captive audience. And, for instance, our newsletter is coming out where I live shortly, so I'm going to put this in it. And so looking at other types of groups like that where you're reaching across demographics, where you have families, there are lots of families and lots of folks from other populations in my neighborhood. And other effective things are, for instance, tabling at BART, which you can do. So you'll catch the people coming off the trains or going on the trains. And I think other than that, what was already said about seniors and youth and reaching out through the school districts and the libraries to those groups.

SHARICE COUND, PLANNING COMMISSIONER. NONTRADITIONAL POPULATIONS, DEFINITELY YOUNG PEOPLE. AS A FORMER SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER FOR MOUNT DEAVIL UNIFIED, I APPRECIATE EVERYONE WHO'S MENTIONING THE SCHOOLS. THANK YOU. ALSO, THERE ARE A NUMBER OF SCHOOLS THAT HAVE REQUIRED CIVIC PARTICIPATION AND STUDENTS ARE LOOKING FOR PROJECTS TO DO. NOT ONLY SENIORS IN HIGH SCHOOL, BUT EVEN YOUNGER AGES, SOPHOMORES, AND EVEN IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. And I love that our city has a youth commission and that those youth came up with the idea that there should be a youth commissioner in each of our commissions that we have here. So thank you, Diego, for being here today as well and participating. I think that's really incredible. I think about our diverse communities, people who may speak other languages, and if there's a way to have kind of ambassadors from those communities that are at these tables as well who can share the information and help us consider how to really reach those communities. Thinking about people with disabilities and what kind of accessibility issues they may be facing. and people who are in multi-family complexes, so I like your idea about the HOAs. Thank you, Karen. And then ways to measure the success of our outreach and engagement efforts. I was thinking about participation demographics, like if we can see who is participating in terms of age, race, gender, but also it would be super cool, I think, if we could look at a map of the city and there were like little points on that map. that you know where we could see kind of big picture are we reaching every corner are there neighborhoods that we're missing that we're just not hearing from um and then um it was exciting to see that our city is starting to use ai for things like being able to access city services in a number of different languages and so that's great but also can we think about how we can do that human to human as well so like again i kind of think about the ambassador idea along those lines

I'm thinking about the young family for the non-traditional population. Oh, Sharon Pinkstaff, PROS Commission. One effective way perhaps would be the Sunday's farmer's market in downtown Walnut Creek. You see a lot of young families with children, and it's a very good venue to kind of engage them in conversation. And I know you folks already talked about that in your earlier presentation. And that's Sunday here and Saturday at the Shalyn's farmer's market.

Yeah, Ryan, Transportation Commission. I would just say this kind of goes along with the multifamily, but just renters in general. And you can go to, you know, post signs in lobbies. You know, it's easy to put mailers in in a lot of apartment complexes. So, yeah, I would just, like, try to focus on those groups as much as possible because it seems like we have a lot of homeowners that are represented, but renters not so much.

Diego Transportation Commission. So I agree with reaching out to school districts and having them give out surveys in schools. And then I think we should also have incentives for people to fill out surveys. So maybe having gift cards or prizes. And then for measuring success, we could compare with our previous survey, like from 2006, and seeing if we have more people from other demographics participating.

Charles Conley in transportation. As the recruiting world would say, you have to cast a wide net. Probably one of the most universal ways to cast a wide net. And I know this sounds really old-fashioned, but male. The majority of people, I would venture to say, in the city of Walnut Creek that live here and or work here, but primarily who live here, who we want to engage regardless of whatever diversity KPIs you want to look at. They probably get male. So I know it sounds old fashioned. It works for single family homes. It works for multifamily homes, et cetera. So it would, I think, get you a high percentage. Measuring's tough. Some things you can sort of obviously measure because you can look at maybe physical characteristics. You can take guesses. There's other things, because you mentioned earlier when I asked about nontraditional populations. tends to be the affluent people who come out for things like this. How are you going to gauge the non-affluent participation? Because we probably don't want to survey people when they come in the door. What's your income bracket or anything like that? So it's a hard one.

We actually do often survey people's income brackets. We do age, race, ethnicity, income, own rent. And often you can learn a lot just by the own rent question.

So Molly Klopp, Planning Commission, I agree with what everybody said, so check, check. But the thing I would add is homeless individuals or those living in permanent supportive housing, we have a number of those facilities, lovely places here in Walnut Creek, and I think that's a group of people who have unique needs. And in terms of measurement, I like everything you said on your survey questions, and we should measure all those things.

Ken Strongman, Planning Commission. We have thousands of people coming into this city to work, and they create traffic, and they also patronize the shopping and the culture, and we need to know what they need or how to properly satisfy their needs. Thank you.

Jill Dresser, arts. Ditto everything everybody else said. Can we have the questionnaire in the high school classes? Will the high schools decide, yes, we'll do this for all of our civics classes for 11th grade or 12th grade? Then you get all the 11th and 12th graders to answer. Are you allowed to ask what street people live on for measuring success? You can tell if you've got in particular neighborhoods. Maybe if they just give you a street name, you can then figure out what neighborhoods they live in it, see if you've covered the neighborhood well enough.

Hi, Net Test Fight Arts Commission. I'm going to agree with most everyone here. I would say the young families would be a population that I would definitely reach out to. And as well as I'm going to go back to the school systems because I do believe what makes a great school usually is the PTA. and I am an active member of my school's PTA and I can tell you that there's several committees on that and most everyone that's on the PTA boards or volunteers is because they genuinely care about the community and the kids and their children's experience, not just at the school but in the community setting. So I think that it would be a really wonderful opportunity for them to participate to become a community engaged in just, I think reaching out to the schools, maybe principals. I think they have more access to information that would be useful and they will know how to engage the community based on that. But I do think the school systems are really important to be engaged with. And I think one way you can measure that is the success for that is how they reach out to us as parents who are actually a part of the community. So I think seeing different types of engagement via, I don't know, we get newsletters. The school is very active. Teachers are sending assignments and things via Facebook. just electronics all the time. So I think that's a wonderful way to measure that.

Sherry Curlin-Arts. Click, click, click, click with what everyone else said. However, I would also add that in terms of reaching out to community, find a way to use Insta and TikTok to gather input. Kevin Wilkes, TikTok messages are amazing. I've been to many new restaurants because of him. If there's some way to tie in the way, you know, different folks around, anyway, you get the idea. So I would use that platform if you can. And I've thought about like a bookmobile with a kiosk, question kiosk, that can arrive and go to different events around the city as they're planned and scheduled. That could be fun. Plan events around that. Measure success. There must be some marketing ratio, like if you do a flyer and you get X percentage of engagement, you know if you're successful. So there must be another way to do that, right? So I would do that.

It's hard to get young families involved in this sort of thing because they've got two parents who are both working. They've got kids running around. It's hard to get the parents. You can get the kids, though. When my daughter was in third grade, I got a note from her teacher saying that I'd be a mayor for a day and run a city council meeting. Four kids were on the city council with me. And there were four kids who were in favor of putting a water park in the Lafayette Reservoir. There were four kids who were against it. There were four kids who represented environmental groups. And four kids who represented the developer. Each one had their three minutes. I think it was two minutes on Walnut Creek, but Lafayette, it was three minutes. They had the three minutes. Some of them read their speeches. Some of them worked from notes. Some of them worked without notes. And they were more cohesive arguments than you'd ever get at a standard city council meeting. And you not only found out what those kids thought, You also find out what their parents thought, because, of course, they were involved in the process, too. So if you can get into the schools, come up with some ideas for projects. And the schools, I think, would be willing to say, well, let's have a two-week local government segment that we're going to do. And at the end, we'll have a city council meeting, or we'll have a community town meeting, or whatever you want to do.

You get a lot of information that way.

Stephen Kwok, Planning Commission. I would say an important group to reach out to is renters. I'm a renter myself, and I've been fortunate enough to live long enough in the city. But a lot of renters will be here for a much shorter time. maybe one year, two years. And so the people that are moving in as renters and leaving the city, there's a lot of perspectives out there that are very valuable. They may come from elsewhere. They may come from out of state. They may come from other parts of the Bay Area. And so finding out what draws them to Walnut Creek or what's pushing them to leave is a great way to assess the good things about Walnut Creek and the things that Walnut Creek could improve on to keep people in the city In terms other areas that we can engage I would say people that live in the unincorporated areas at the edges of the city limits because a lot of how we do the land use planning here will impact the Cohesiveness between the city of Walnut Creek and the unincorporated areas so areas such as Contra Costa Center Where the Pleasant Hill Park station is I think about that one a lot people Alamo perhaps the unincorporated areas that are within the city but not So, like Walnut Heights, for example, the area down by Shell Ridge, people that live in that area, they may be unincorporated, but what we do here does impact their quality of life over there. Talking to people that work in the city but live elsewhere, I have a lot of colleagues that would love to live in Walnut Creek, and they know people that work in Walnut Creek, but they can't afford to live there. The businesses, maybe even the bus drivers, the BART people that run the transit, they have a firsthand perspective on who uses transit, how easy is it to get around, areas like that. Measurement and success, I agree with the people who've said that measuring by demographic, also by neighborhood, I think would be a very helpful way to see. But also measuring by organization, especially if you're going to do businesses, outside of the Maybe smaller businesses outside of the major Community organizations that we typically think of when we talk about traditional populations Second all of that about renters that was really important Non-traditional I would also say immigrants.

I know somebody said people who don't speak and English is the first language, so that would be part of that, but also there's others that I think are immigrants that would participate that we need to make sure that they are engaged and they're not often present at city councils and those kind of meetings. And second, what somebody said about multifamily as well as renters. I would recommend finding some of the events that the city puts on or Walnut Creek downtown puts on, those kind of festival moments where people are already at an event and you can talk to them, particularly if there's any family-friendly ones, because then you can get parents because they're already at that event. And then I second whoever said be at BART because I have found that young professionals are hard to reach because they work and then they work long hours and don't have time to come to community meetings a lot of the time. And then I second Charisse's idea about like a map where we're making sure that we get representation from all of the neighborhoods, as was pointed out the last round. Each neighborhood really has its own distinct feel to it.

Yeah, I'm going to say ditto to the room. I mean, a lot of just good suggestions, and I think you guys just took my last ones. But at the end, I actually do want to see a map that I know you're not maybe getting everybody's address, but I do want to see that you have talked to a set of people in every different neighborhood and multiple people. Because if you weigh 80% on this side of Heather Farms or on that side, it's not going to even out. So I would love to just see that as a measure of their success. I have to run, sorry.

Peter Magnani, Arts Commission. I would hope that you're reaching out to organizations that serve ethnic communities, African American, Asian, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, et cetera, because the people who participate actively on the organizational side there tend to be the idea people. The other thing is... The place in Walnut Creek where everybody from all walks of life, ages, come together is the library. And if I had your job, I would call Eddie Spanbach tomorrow morning, she's the librarian, and just say, how can we partner with you to get groups together to talk about these things?

our dollar price commission every single point of contact between uh... people that are involved in our programs are parks are cultural events, arts events, you name it. Every chance that we get to engage with the public, make sure you have an opportunity for them to be engaged, whether it's a handout, a QR code, something that they can take with them. Every single, go through the list of everything we do as a city and find a way to communicate with the people and see if they will take a survey make a call, whatever.

Fran Garland, Prose Commission. I have more of an observation. I don't really have anything to add on the partners. People have really covered most of what I would say. This is a three-year process, approximately, and there's going to be a lot of outreach over all of those years. So I think you have to make people feel like they're being heard. I think that's really, really critical. And, you know, that doesn't mean they get what everything they wanted, every idea they had gets implemented, but they need to understand how their input's actually used and that it is being used and it was worth their time and effort to do the survey or come to the meeting or whatever. And that's always been really important and, well, I've done similar kinds of things on the environmental side and that's always been important, so.

I would really second what she said about making sure that when people do engage, they can appreciate how their engagement contributes to the end product. And I think you've gotten a bunch of really good ideas about how to get information to people, a QR code or whatever. I think another thing, though, is showing up to the workshops or the open houses can also be really, really helpful for public buy-in. But so often, at least in my experience, those are like on a weekday evening, which is impossible for a young family to do. And so having different days, different times, different venues, right? Not just downtown, but maybe over in Shadelands as well so that they're accessible to a variety of people at a variety of times and locations so that you get a more representative sample in person as opposed to just doing the online or the mail-in stuff.

Laurie Ann Sasser, PROS Commission. I'm surprised. We get a lot of people attend the PROS meetings, and it's not always the same ones. There's variety depending on the topics. So I think it would be helpful if we could have an announcement on the agendas just to encourage people, you know, go to the website and give your input.

That would be terrific, actually, if you all could announce this. I mean, I think that would be very helpful and you share the information about how to stay engaged in the process. This is the information again, so you all have it in front of you. Just wanna thank everyone for all of the feedback tonight. It seems like we're gonna have our work cut out for us over the next few years, but really just wanna say thank you for giving us your evening and sharing it with us. We're going to have a lot of opportunities to engage with you throughout the process, and we're excited to continue doing that. So looking forward to seeing you all again at your individual commissions or back here in kind of a joint session or at community meetings that will be coming up over the summer. So just really appreciate that. So thanks, everyone.

Thank you so much for your presentation. We really appreciate it. And thank you all commissioners, staff, the consulting team, and members of the public for your participation this evening. The input received tonight will help inform the general plan update process. This meeting represents the beginning of a broader planning process, and there will be additional opportunities for discussion, community engagement, and input as the project progresses. But with no further business before us, this meeting is now adjourned.

Amen.