Pretty short and serious evening.
We started the evening with a study session on the Lawrence Station Area Plan. In short, we’re looking at the zoning in a 1/2 mile radius around the Lawrence Station in order to design a more transit-oriented, higher-density neighborhood. It’s difficult to summarize the entire study session in a blog entry, but there are three different ways we can go with this area. First, we can make it all high-density housing. Second, we can make it high-density mixed-use, residential and some sort of commercial/industrial/office. Third, we can go for high-density office/research.
There are two complications with this. For starters, not all of the land in question is within Sunnyvale. The Sunnyvale/Santa Clara border zig-zags through the area, and Santa Clara has already rezoned their sections of the area for high-density residential. Additionally, there are already businesses and homes in the area, and at least one of the businesses has just started development of a long-term, multi-parcel facility in the area in question. The development of this area is a long-term plan anyway, multiple decades, so that may or may not be an issue.
Then we adjourned to our regular meeting.
We started the meeting with acknowledgement of Councilmember Swegles’ passing, and we all took a few minutes to make a few comments. I can’t do this topic justice, so I won’t even try.
We then had a presentation by the Alliance for Innovation, giving Sunnyvale its 2011 Outstanding Achievement in Innovation Award for our Sunnyvale Works! program. This program succeeded well beyond what anyone hoped for, and it was really nice to see our efforts recognized in this way.
We then went on with the general business. The consent calendar was passed 6-0.
Item 2 was acceptance of the proposed Consolidated General Plan. This was a huge amount of work that took very little time to deal with. Staff spent about 18 months reviewing the 22 elements of the General Plan, the methods through which the elements have been historically updated, and the ways in which the General Plan is used, all with an eye to reduce its size and create a structure and format that can be more easily used and updated. Staff also made use of a General Plan Consolidation Advisory Committee, consisting of a representative from every commission and two councilmembers. The end result can be found here. Anyway, we approved the new Consolidated General Plan on a 6-0 vote.
Item 3 involved placing unpaid administrative citations on the property tax rolls. In short, to deal with people who don’t pay their citations, we place them on the tax rolls for eventual payment. We only had two such. It’s pretty amazing that between the unpaid citations and the unpaid utility bills, we only have a handful of delinquent residents out of 140,000 people. Anyway, we passed this on a 6-0 vote.
And that was about it. After talking about Ron, we weren’t really in a mood for a long, chatty meeting, so we adjourned pretty quickly.
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