This is going to be a long one.
We start the evening with a four-way study session regarding the draft Land Use and Transportation Element (LUTE) and draft Climate Action Plan (CAP). The study session will include Council, the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, the Sustainability Commission, and the Planning Commission. Since this involves a large amount of city policy and a large number of people, I expect there to be a lot of discussion. This will take place over at the Library, in program rooms A and B (joined). After this, we go back to Council Chambers for the regular meeting.
The meeting starts with the swearing in of the two commissioners we appointed at our last meeting. We have a decent-sized consent calendar including some interesting items (a contract to demolish the buildings on the Morse Avenue Park site, for instance). Then it’s on to general business.
Item 2 is a notice of intent to amend our CalPERS contract for public safety officers. This is another contractual obligation that stems from our PSOA contract renegotiation several months ago. PSOA agreed to go to a two-tier arrangement, where new hires have their retirement age raised from 50 to 55, and this requires an amendment to our CalPERS contract. This item was pushed off from our last meeting at staff’s request, due to a problem with wording that staff discovered at the last minute.
Item 3 proposes modifications to our neighborhood preservation codes, in order to add more “nuisance” cases and make it easier for staff to enforce codes on problematic properties. The specifics are interesting and worth checking out.
Item 4 is the end result of a study issue I proposed – requiring wiring for electric vehicle chargers in new developments. My experience is a bit unique, in that I’m the only sitting councilmember who lives in a condo. One of the big down-sides of living in a condo is that you’re extremely limited in the kind of modifications you can make to your own home. This means that if a condo’s garage isn’t already pre-wired with nearby 240-volt wiring, its resident is pretty much out of luck. That’s a pretty significant disincentive for electric vehicles, particularly since it appears that the vast majority of future housing development in Sunnyvale will be multi-family dwellings. So the study proposes requiring new units to be pre-wired with 240v wiring to support car chargers, should an owner decide to purchase such a vehicle. This has a lot of details, so it will be interesting to see what discussion follows this one.
And that’s about it. I’m guessing it will be a good-sized meeting.
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