Another long night ahead.
We start the evening with a study session involving city-owned properties. This was initiated by council, so we can look at what future opportunities we have for open space, for potential school properties, for low-income housing, for other city services, and so on.
We then have no less than four special orders. The first is for swearing in our two new commissioners. The second recognizes Parks and Recreation Month. The third commends the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club on its 80th anniversary. And the fourth recognizes the winners of this year’s Santa Clara Valley Science and Engineering Fair competition.
Another big consent calendar. There’s a grant that will fund half of some upgrades to our fixed and mobile operations centers. There’s a $2 million contract for repair work at the WPCP. There’s a $100k Safe Routes to School contract for bike routes. There’s a $5 million contract for this year’s road resurfacing work, and a $2 million contract for rehabilitating Hendy Avenue.
Item 2 has us looking at a possible ballot measure to adopt certain gun control ordinances.
Item 3 is approval of our annual budget and fee schedule. We had two public hearings on the budget, plus the annual budget workshop, and that tends to clear out a lot of the advance work. Sometimes this item goes quickly, sometimes it doesn’t, if there are last minute surprises.
Item 4 involves long-term leases and financial aspects of the Armory housing project.
Item 5 has us looking at updates to our signage ordinances. Staff has identified a number of shortcomings in our current requirements, and they are proposing a bunch of changes that should help both businesses and the customers who look for them. These are things like increasing the flexibility for temporary signs, and allowing more than one permanent sign on a business’ wall (say, one on the facing side and one on the corner side).
Item 6 introduces some clean-up language related to unrepresented classified confidential employees (the ones that don’t belong to a bargaining unit). A lot of it has to do with the now three retirement tiers that we have for both safety and misc. employees.
Item 7 is a combination of two changes. One is to add a bunch of new and changed titles to our list of jobs. The other is to give a proposed 2% increase to unrepresented classified managers. These employees haven’t had an adjustment since 2008.
Item 8 is a contract for developing the Peery Park Specific Plan. Peery Park is the general area bounded by 101, Mathilda, Mary, and Maude (and then some). We’ve been wanting to develop an updated plan for Peery Park for several years now, and it’s now coming forward. This is being partially funded by a developer that owns property in the Peery Park area.
There’s one interesting point in the information only items. We’ve been looking at the park dedication requirements for a new housing development on Stewart, which requires $3 million on land or the cash equivalent. The developer had proposed paying 1/3 of that in cash and giving us land for a pocket park for the rest. But the city took a look at the land and found sufficient contamination that we’re going to pass on the land.
And that’s about it.
Follow