We start the evening with no closed sessions, no study sessions, no presentations, no special orders. That’s fairly unusual. Anyway, we get right to business. The consent calendar is fairly large. There’s a resolution which is required before the City can accept Measure B transit improvement funds (which we can’t accept right now anyway, because Measure B is blocked due to ongoing litigation). There’s a $145k contract to inspect the coating of two water tanks at Mary and Carson (which, from memory, involves hiring divers to go into the tanks with SCUBA gear and check them out, but I could be wrong). There’s an extension/amendment of a contract to add $150k in additional temporary engineering services to our public works traffic efforts. There’s proposed rejection of a bid for sewer siphoning services – it was estimated at $100k and the low bid was $1.1m (due to a huge demand and no competition for services). There’s a contract amendment to add $87k to fire protective clothing (we’re hiring officers faster than anticipated). There’s approval of this year’s slate of League of California Cities Peninsula Division officers (Councilmember Smith is on the slate). And finally, there’s approval of Sunnyvale’s voting delegate for the September League of California Cities conference (Councilmember Smith is proposed).
Item 2 on our agenda is a proposed $12 million, 10-year agreement for new resource planning software for the city. This solution would replace multiple different software packages in use and would handle the bulk of Human Resources employee planning and management record keeping (more or less). This is quite obviously a huge step forward in the City’s IT capabilities.
Item 3 has us authorizing $30,000 as part of a $55,000 firearms buy-back program within the City of Sunnyvale, scheduled for September. The County is putting up the other $25,000.
Item 4 has us authorizing an amendment to our agreement with VTA regarding funding of the Monster Interchange upgrade. This one is complicated. When Measure B was passed, part of that plan included Sunnyvale getting $34m in funding for this project. However, since Measure B has been blocked by a lawsuit, those funds are not available, which threatens to stall the entire project. And fixing the Monster Interchange is Sunnyvale’s #1 transportation improvement.. So now we’re looking at using SB1 (gas tax) state grant money, which requires a significant local match. Unfortunately, this also cannot wait, because a November ballot measure could reverse SB1. But if we get the money approved and the project out for bid before then, we can obligate the State for that $17m. That puts some pressure on us to act quickly. Note that when people talk about killing the gas tax or killing Measure B, these are exactly the kinds of projects that get killed. This funding matters to us – a lot. Putting Measure B on hold has already cost the City of Sunnyvale $17 million in funds intended for this specific sort of use, and the gas tax repeal is an even bigger threat to statewide road improvements.
Item 5 is a bit of a weird one – a request to take two R-1-zoned single-family lots and redone them to be R-0, in the hopes of doing a future subdivision of the two lots into three lots. Both staff and the Planning Commission recommend denying the request.
Finally, item 6 has us potentially selling the Unilever “margarine factory” city property for $33m. According to the staff report, we had previously entered into negotiations with one party for a $33m price, but that party backed out. So we had a second-highest bidder, but two additional bidders came in later, one of which matched the original high bidder’s bid. This is property in the middle of an industrial portion of the city.
That’s it. Pretty diverse night.
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