Diverse night. We start the evening with no less than three closed sessions. The first involves ongoing litigation over the resolution of Sunnyvale’s redevelopment agency. The second one involves our semiannual performance review of the City Manager. The final one involves labor negotiations with our few unrepresented managers (managers who cannot be a part of a union or association because of the nature of their jobs).
We then have no less than three special orders – recognizing Teen Self Esteem Awareness Month, recognizing Municipal Clerks Week, and recognizing Affordable Housing Week.
The consent calendar is relatively small. There’s a contract for water main replacement for the year. There’s a budget modification for NOVA – apparently we received more in grants than projected. There’s our quarterly investment report. And there’s another amendment to an existing outside counsel agreement.
Item 2 is probably our big item – potential modifications to Caribbean Drive.
Item 3 is a withdrawn item – a Sunnyvale church was asking to possible do a general plan amendment, but the application was withdrawn.
Item 4 is a request to study amending the Downtown Specific Plan regarding Block 20 (one of the eastern Mathilda blocks close to El Camino). The owner wants to change the usage and increase the density and height.
And item 5 is probably the most important – starting a pension trust fund. It’s a bit complicated, but I’ll give it a shot. CalPERS invests pension money and makes payouts based on a projected investment goal that it tries to achieve . It doesn’t always make that goal, which creates unfunded liabilities for our cities (money that we owe to make the pension payments whole). Conventional wisdom is that CalPERS is too optimistic about its investment goal, meaning cities need to pay more. But CalPERS isn’t willing to lower its projection too fast, because doing so would instantly create large bills for cities, probably more than many can afford. And Sunnyvale wants to get in front of this. If we were to pay CalPERS more money outright (as we’ve done in the past), that money can’t come back to us, even if it’s not eventually needed. A better approach is to maintain a pension trust fund that we control, which we can eventually use to make CalPERS whole if necessary, or return to the City if it’s not needed. That’s the proposal, at least.
Follow