Pretty significant night.
We start the evening with another closed session on the Downtown, before we go into general session.
We have no less than three special orders of the day this evening. We start with the Tobacco Free Coalition of Santa Clara County and Community Advocate Teens of Today (CATT) Award. I know nothing more about it than you do. Then we recognize Parks and Recreation Month. I’ll toss in a bit of park information here. Everyone has been expecting that Sunnyvale’s next new park will be the Seven Seas Park in the Morse Park neighborhood, to be finished in early 2014, right? Guess what – Sunnyvale will be getting a new park sooner than that. Pulte O’Brien is building a housing development on the eastern side of Sunnyvale, which includes the donation of land for a public park. They’ve apparently offered to not only donate the land but also build the park for us (even though they are under no obligation to do so), and they’ll be doing it pretty quickly. I learned about this in this week’s Parks and Recreation Commission meeting.
Anyway, the third special order is a presentation to the MDA by the Public Safety Officers Association. Every year, to coincide with the Saturday of the Sunnyvale Art & Wine Festival, PSOA holds a “Fill The Boot” event, where they run around Mathilda and El Camino Real and solicit donations for MDA. They will be presenting the results of their efforts to MDA this night. I don’t remember the exact amount they raised this year, but it was an impressive number.
The consent calendar is an impressive one, with a grant, three contract issues, a budget modification for NOVA, two development map approvals, and an authorization request from the City Manager to execute a traffic signal agreement with Cupertino. I guess simply invading and annexing Cupertino was deemed a bad solution to the problem. Too bad – I’m pretty sure we could take them. Anyway, we then go on to general business.
First up is the 2012/2013 budget. This is difficult to predict. If the public hearing was any indication, there was little discussion and little expressed interest in tampering with what the City Manager has proposed. But this is nevertheless a significant issue, so there’s no telling what may happen.
Item 3 is a proposal to adopt a bicyclist anti-harassment ordinance, similar to one recently adopted by the City of Los Angeles. The proposed ordinance would do nothing on the criminal side, but it would give some teeth to the civil side, in the event of a successful lawsuit involving deliberate harassment, such as attempts to run cyclists off the road.
Item 4 is the continuation of an issue involving a proposed contract related to the Lawrence Station Area Plan. With one member absent last week, we were split on what action to take, and this will hopefully resolve this issue.
Item 5 is an interesting one – a proposal for a new office space development on the NW corner of Mathilda and Maude (the current site of Keypoint Credit Union). Basically, this is proposed as part of the long-term development plan for Peery Park, which involves upgrading this industrial area from class C office space to class A. I’ve got a lot of reading this weekend…
Item 6 involves amendments to the Civil Service Rules and Regulations. I’ve gone through this already, and I still can’t figure out what’s proposed to change or what concerns there may be with this issue.
And item 7 proposes changes to Council Policy to address Council use of staff time and control and distribution of confidential materials and information. Basically, staff and council have followed specific processes over the past several years, but those processes were never incorporated into Council Policy. This is an attempt to do so, and to clarify some ambiguity in the law and in existing practices.
That’s it for the main meeting, but we then have a meeting of the RDA Successor Agency. The developer of the northern-most half of the old Town and Country needs an easement along the north side to provide space for outdoor dining and emergency access. This also involves relocation of the bus stop right there.
Looks to be a very long, and very interesting night.
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