There aren’t a lot of large items on this agenda, but we’ve got a whole lot of items, unfortunately. We carried over most of the general items from our last meeting, and almost all of the consent calendar was pulled by one councilmember as well, meaning we’ve now got a consent calendar of 17 items on top of eight general business items. So we may be at this for a while.
We start the evening with a rather long study session involving two items. The first has us looking at a study that was conducted to review water cost of service. The second is one that I’m looking forward to – an examination of the city’s IT services.
The general meeting starts with not one but two special presentations. In the first one, the Chamber of Commerce will be presenting the results of a survey it commissioned to gauge resident views on transportation. In the second one, PG&E is presenting information about its pipeline safety program.
As mentioned, the consent calendar is huge. We’ve got three sets of council minutes and the bills. We’ve got a carry-over of the tenant based rental assistance agreement, an amendment to an outside counsel agreement, an ADA-related contract, a bid for restroom renovations in Orchard Gardens, and the second reading of our maps ordinance from a couple of meetings ago. For the new stuff, we’re looking at appointing Dr. Judy Miner to the NOVA Workforce Board. We’re kicking off this year’s community event grant process. There’s a modification to a NOVA contract for youth services. There’s a contract for mitigating stormwater runoff at the SMaRT Station. There’s a resolution necessary for receiving CalRecycle funds. There’s reauthorization of the Sunnyvale Downtown Association. There’s a final tract map for a small project on Helen. And finally, there’s our annual review of the city’s Code of Ethics.
Item 2 is a recommended continuance of an item to review transportation impact fee, housing impact fees, and park dedication in lieu fee details. This was deferred from our last meeting.
Item 3 has us considering a $6 million loan out of our Housing Mitigation funds to redevelop an existing property into an affordable housing property. This was also deferred from our last meeting.
Item 4 is an appeal of a planning decision denying an application from a homeowner on McKinley to add a 280 square foot first floor addition. The PC split 4-3 on the issue.
Item 5 is once again our annual report to the state on our Housing Element.
Item 6 is a weird one – we’re holding a hearing as part of a private effort to issue bonds to finance renovation of Life’s Garden Affordable Senior Apartments. All of the financing and liability is the responsibility of a separate, private LLC, but we have to hold the hearing before they can issue bonds.
Item 7 is another strange one – discussing the rotational schedule for our voting rights on the VTA Board of Directors. We are part of a 3-city VTA sub-region with Santa Clara and Milpitas, and our sub-region gets two voting members and a third alternate on the Board of Directors. In 2012, when the sub-region was formed, the three cities signed an agreement that specified the rotation of voting rights – over six years, each city gets two two-year terms as voting member and one two-year term as alternate, with assignments for the first eight years also explicitly spelled out in the signed agreement. According to the agreement, Sunnyvale was alternate first, in 2012 and 2013, then voting member in 2014 and 2015, and we are supposed to still be a voting member in 2016 and 2017. For some reason, VTA believes that Milpitas and Santa Clara are currently the voting members and we are the alternate, in violation of the signed agreement. So we will discuss what’s going on.
Item 8 has us once again discussing our friendship relationship with Dubna, Russia (another continued item).
And item 9 has us approving a contract extension and modified joint use agreement for the sale of the Raynor Activity Center to Stratford Schools and access to Raynor Park. When we approved the conditional use permit at our last meeting, we made changes to the joint use agreement. We required advance notification of exactly when Stratford intends to make priority use of Raynor Park, so that we can make it available to the public or other groups at other times. And we accepted Stratford’s offer to pay $22k/year to cover maintenance for the portion of Raynor Park that they use. The contract extension is necessary because of the terms of the original sales contract. The original contract specifies that we go into escrow after a conditional use permit is issued. But it also specifies that this has to happen within two years of the agreement to sell, unless both parties agree to an extension. The lawsuit over the RAC caused the process to take more than two years, so now we have to agree to an extension, per the original contract. The contract modification also does a better job of accounting for the possibility of additional lawsuits.
And that’s it.
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