April 8, 2025 Joint City Council and Shoreline Regional Park Community Meeting

Video

Agenda

• 1. CALL TO ORDER/PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE: The Mayor calls the meeting to order and leads the Pledge of Allegiance. (00:00:00)
• 2. ROLL CALL: The City Clerk takes attendance via roll call. The Mayor also announces technical difficulties with the virtual video feed. (00:00:35)
• 3. PRESENTATION: Item 3.1: Proclamation recognizing Steins Beer Garden Founder Ted Kim. The proclamation is read, and Ted Kim offers a few words. (00:02:36)
• 4. CONSENT CALENDAR: Council members provide comments on specific items (4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.7). Public comments are heard, followed by a unanimous vote to approve the calendar. (00:08:35)
• 5. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE PUBLIC ON NONAGENDIZED ITEMS: Public comment period for items not on the agenda. Several community members speak on various local issues. (00:19:24)
• 6.1 Residential Addition to Historic Structure at 415 Bush Street: Staff presentation regarding a historic preservation permit for an addition. The applicant speaks briefly, and the item passes unanimously. (00:25:51)
• 6.2 Residential Development Project at 294-296 Tyrella Avenue (Builder's Remedy): Staff report and applicant presentation on a Builder's Remedy project. Includes extensive public comment regarding neighborhood impact, traffic, and density before unanimous approval. (00:28:34)
• 7.1 Preliminary Review of Fiscal Year 2025-26 Recommended Budget: This segment begins with a long meeting recess. Once reconvened, staff present the preliminary operating budget. Council members ask questions and provide feedback. (00:42:34)
• 8. COUNCIL, STAFF/COMMITTEE REPORTS: Council members report on their recent activities and committee meetings. The Mayor then adjourns the meeting. (02:05:07)

Transcript

1. CALL TO ORDER/PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

[00:00:00] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: And it's 6:30 on the dot, so we are going to get started on our meeting. Welcome to our joint meeting of the Mountain View City Council and the Shoreline Regional Park Community of April 8, 2025. I'm going to invite you all to please join me in the pledge of allegiance. So please stand.

[00:00:18] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

[00:00:33] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great.

2. ROLL CALL

[00:00:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you, we'll move on to item 2, roll call. The city clerk will take attendance by roll call.

[00:00:39] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Councilmember Clark?

[00:00:40] Councilmember Chris Clark: Here.

[00:00:41] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Councilmember Hicks?

[00:00:42] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Here.

[00:00:43] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Councilmember McAlister?

[00:00:44] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Councilmember Ramirez?

[00:00:45] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Here.

[00:00:46] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Councilmember Showalter?

[00:00:47] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Here.

[00:00:48] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Vice Mayor Ramos?

[00:00:49] Councilmember Emily Ramos: Here.

[00:00:50] City Clerk Heather Glaser: Mayor Kamei?

[00:00:51] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Here.

[00:00:51] City Clerk Heather Glaser: You have a quorum.

[00:00:52] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great. Thank you so much. Alright everyone, um, we're just need to announce that you may know we're experienced a little bit of technical difficulties tonight with our hybrid meeting, and tonight we appreciate your patience as we're going to navigate it.

[00:01:10] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Staff has been working since early this morning to correct a challenge with our virtual video feed, but unfortunately, it was unable to be fixed before tonight's meeting.

[00:01:21] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: The video is viewable on YouTube, so you can just go to YouTube and look up the City of Mountain View, and we'll be taking public comments virtually by dialing 669-900-9128 and entering meeting ID 843-5126-7142.

[00:01:50] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: And there's going to be a 15-second delay between the YouTube and our live streaming of the meeting. So I'm going to again ask for everyone's patience as we move through our virtual public comment period, and it's going to be for every item that we're taking public comment on tonight.

[00:02:08] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Um, so thank you again for your understanding, but we just want to make sure that everyone is heard, and we didn't want to have to cancel our meeting.

[00:02:15] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: So we're going to move on to item three. Please note this is a presentation only. The City Council will not take any action. Public comment will occur after our presentation item.

[00:02:28] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: If you'd like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the City Clerk now, it's happening right here to my left, and we're going to...

3. PRESENTATION

[00:03:12] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: We move on to item 3.1, which is our Steins Beer Garden founder Ted Kim Proclamation. We're happy to be joined this evening by Ted Kim, founder of Steins Beer Garden, to accept this proclamation. So, and I think Ted brought his family, so if you'd like to bring your family, you're welcome to come on down to the lectern. Great. Before we get going, did you want to introduce your family? Okay.

[00:03:52] Ted Kim: This is my wife Kathy, our daughters Zara and Zia.

[00:03:58] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. I'm so glad you could all make it. So, um, we're just gonna present the proclamation. And it reads, whereas Ted Kim, the visionary founder and owner of Steins Beer Garden has become a cornerstone of our downtown Mountain View's dining and social scene for over a decade, opening its doors in 2013. Steins quickly became a beloved gathering place, blending a modern take on the traditional beer garden with a curated selection of craft beers and elevated comfort food. Beyond his success as a restaurateur, Ted played a key role in bringing the spirit of Oktoberfest to Mountain View, co-producing the annual Mountain View Oktoberfest in partnership with local businesses and organizations. His leadership helped grow the event into a major community tradition, attracting thousands of visitors each year to celebrate Bavarian culture with authentic food, music, and of course, world-class beer.

[00:04:55] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: And whereas as Steins Beer Garden enters a new chapter under new ownership, we recognize and honor Ted's lasting contributions to Mountain View, fostering connections, supporting local events, and enriching the city's culinary and cultural landscape. His dedication to quality, hospitality, and community building leaves an enduring legacy that will continue to shape the experiences at Steins for years to come. Now, therefore, I, Ellen Kamei, Mayor of the City of Mountain View, along with my colleagues on the City Council, do hereby thank Ted Kim and his family for his vision, leadership, and commitment and wish him great success in what lies ahead.

[00:05:31] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: And before I give this to you, I have this like app that does, you know, memories and it was almost four years ago that you with a bunch of other businesses did dining out for API during our COVID-19 pandemic, which was aimed at combatting discrimination during the pandemic and encouraging people to go to our Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian-owned restaurants in Mountain View with all of the proceeds going to nonprofit. So thank you for that as well. So would you like to say a few words?

[00:06:08] Ted Kim: Sure. Uh, this is, this is great. Actually, the last time I was here was 13 years ago when we were just starting under very different circumstances. So it's uh, it's very poetic that we're, we're finishing here. Um, it's been great. The city is amazing. Uh, this community is amazing. I think um, wanted to initially just open a restaurant and I love beer and I love food and I love um, just uh gatherings and it's turned into something uh so much more. And when we first announced that we were closing, the outpouring of support that we've had from the community has just blown my mind. So very thankful, uh very sad to be leaving, but also um, grateful and glad that we've uh been able to be a part of this community for so long. So thank you.

[00:07:30] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Would any member of the council like to say a few words? Okay. Uh, would any uh now we're gonna take public comment for the presentation item. Would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on the presentation item listed on the agenda? If so, please click your raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card. And I see Peter Katz. So each speaker will have three minutes.

[00:08:01] Peter Katz: Thank you very much. I noticed that Ted was uh making a beeline for the exit here, but I'm so glad you stayed. Um, I could easily use up three minutes uh just saying how much Steins has meant to the community, but I'll keep it shorter and just say that I thought the proclamation said it beautifully. Um, what I just would like to add is that you've not only been a uh lovely to all of our residents and visitors and all of that, but you've also been lovely to the business community as well.

[00:08:29] Peter Katz: You've been a stalwart in terms of bringing more uh life and vitality uh not just to Castro but to the surrounding area as well. Um, you've provided benefits to a lot of our businesses in terms of um, the community organizations and the um, just all that you've done for the community. And so on behalf of all of us, thank you so much for 12, 13 amazing years and uh we do hope you'll stay in touch. Thank you.

4. CONSENT CALENDAR

[00:08:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: The way it will move on to Item 4, which is our consent calendar. These items will be approved by one motion unless any member of the council wishes to pull an item for individual consideration. If an item is pulled from the consent calendar, it will be considered separately following approval of the balance of the consent calendar. If you would like to speak on these items or the next item, oral communications on non-agenda items in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk now. Would any member of the council like to pull an item? I see Councilmember McAlister.

3. PRESENTATION

[00:08:57] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. And I think now that concludes this item. Thank you very much. I'm not seeing any raised hands in Zoom. Wonderful. So...

4. CONSENT CALENDAR

[00:09:11] Councilmember John McAlister: I would just like to make a comment on 4.2 and 4.5.

[00:09:16] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay. I think if they're just comments you can do so now.

[00:09:21] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay. 4.2 is about the ambulance, uh, we're going to, City of Mountain View is going to start providing ambulance service of our own to our community, which will increase efficiency and, uh, make people feel a little safer. The reason I bring this up is back in 2012, 13, something, uh, Chief Wardell was looking at this with the other chiefs down at this California League of Cities conference down in Long Beach, and we were discussing it because the, the, these cities were able to collect reimbursement for their services they provide. And I said, wouldn't this be great for the City of Mountain View?

[00:10:03] Councilmember John McAlister: And, um, well, today, things do move a little slow in, uh, public government, but we are at that point, so we are going to be able to have this service that will definitely, uh, make life better for our health. Uh, response time better, consistency better, keeping fire engines in duty the whole time. And so, I'm glad that we are doing this and I think, uh, we're starting with one engine, but who knows what will happen as we move along and, uh, people do it. Palo Alto has their own ambulance, uh, other cities have that too, and they all, uh, say it's a great service. So again, thank you for the chief, and for the city, uh, manager and the staff to get this going together because I think it's a great benefit to the city and I look forward to do a ride along with one of these one of these days. Thank you.

[00:10:50] Councilmember John McAlister: And then 4.5? Okay, 4.5. I pulled this one for the council. Uh, I've been always concerned about the use of, uh, consultants. We seem to be using, uh, consultants in my, since I've been gone for a while. And, uh, when I was looking at the fees for 4.5, there was a consultant service, there was a city project manager fee, there was a city administration fee.

[00:11:20] Councilmember John McAlister: And then, the reason I was concerned is why are we using so many? And this goes back to when we start looking at our projects, our CIP projects, and I'm going to quote what the staff wrote. The use of consultants for design is standard practice. The model that the city uses for this capital improvement team is that they are project managers, and not technical design. Due to the large capital improvement program workload, including the 243 CIP projects managed by public works, the use of consultants to perform technical components is required for staff to deliver on-time projects. And I was hoping that, and somewhere down the line, as we hopefully reduce some of all these projects, that our staff will be able to pick up that, uh, expertise and technical experience and we can reduce the funding and, uh, get things done more efficiently. Thank you, Mayor.

[00:12:07] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Councilmember Showalter.

[00:12:11] Councilmember Pat Showalter: I too just have some comments, um, and I want to add on a little bit to what my, uh, colleague, uh, Councilmember McAlister said. Another thing I think about the ambulance service that I wanted to touch on is that from the point of view of those of us who might need it, um, how's it going to look in terms of billing? And basically it's not going to look any different. And I think that's really important. So, um, uh, uh, you know, you won't, you know, if you've ever had to have an ambulance come, you know they come, they take care of you, they don't ask you a lot of questions about insurance, any of that, they take care of you and they take you to the hospital. And, um, that will be what happens in the future. Um, and I think it's really good to know that, because, um, uh, you know, medical, at one time or another we all need, uh, we all need these services or someone we love does.

[00:13:04] Councilmember Pat Showalter: So, um, then I also wanted to mention a couple other things that are on the consent calendar tonight that are related to the fire, um, fire department. One is the mandatory fire inspection report. Of course we know that the fire department goes out and fights fires and we know that they do a lot of medical response, but another thing that they do is they inspect all of the multi-family homes and schools in our jurisdiction. And, um, it's a lot of them. So this report was to, um, to publicly state that they have completed that round for this year. And I think, um, just with the, uh, uh, you know, the idea that things that get measured and reported get done, this is very important. So thank you, uh, Chief Diaz, for, um, overseeing that and for it getting done and for letting us know.

[00:13:53] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And then another thing I wanted to talk about is, uh, 4.7, which is the reimbursement for mutual aid. Uh, the fire department, besides fighting fires here in Mountain View, gets called to assist other places, particularly in wildfires. And, um, the state has a system set up so that we get reimbursed for the time and, um, and materials that are associated with that mutual aid. And so, um, I think it's important to realize that this mutual system exists, it exists for the, um, you know, for the benefit of all of us and all Californians, and, um, and, and this item tonight is we're accepting a reimbursement from the State of California, uh, for services that our fire department offered during the Park Fire. And also I just want to, I know that the whole council, we're profoundly, uh, thankful and, um, proud of our firefighters for the service they give.

[00:14:51] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Then I want to move on to Public Works. Public Works is another thing that, um, sometimes it's the, uh, unsung hero around, and, um, but there's a tremendous amount of work that Public Works does in a city government. And, um, a couple of the items I wanted to bring to your attention tonight are the Shoreline, um, PVC landfill header replacement. Shoreline Park is underlain by a closed landfill. And, um, but landfills need long-term O&M. So, um, uh, because decaying garbage produces methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, and it's also very corrosive. So, so it's really important that the city takes care of this facility, and that's what this item is about, is okaying funding to do that.

[00:15:37] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And then another thing we all care about is pavement maintenance of our, um, of our, uh, streets. I know when I was on the campaign trail last year, the number one thing I heard about was the paving of El Camino Real and when was it going to happen. And, um, well, that's a state route, so we didn't have as much control over that as we would have liked, but, um, it did happen, which is great. But anyway, every year Mountain View, um, has a series of roads that we, we, um, we repave or provide slurry seals to or add safety fixtures to, and that's what this other item is about. So with that, I, you know, I'd just like to thank Public Works for all that work. Should I go ahead and read this stuff now? ... Okay. ... Um, do you have to do public comment?

[00:16:25] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Yeah, let me, let me do the public comment now. Thank you. Okay, would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on these items? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit a blue speaker card to the city clerk. We'll take in-person speakers first, if we have any, and each speaker will have three minutes.

[00:16:57] Mike Rogers: This is for the consent calendar, right?

[00:16:58] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: For the consent calendar.

[00:16:59] Mike Rogers: For the consent calendar, uh, you know, I was here for another item that I'm going to speak on later in public comment, but wasn't aware of Mountain View, uh, initiating their own ambulance service. It's very opportune. Um, my name is Mike Rogers, I'm also the vice chair of the County Health Advisory Commission and part of our role is to actually administer, one of our members administers the Emergency Medical Commission. Um, so I'm very aware of this, what's been, the county's really been struggling to meet compliance on ambulance times and deliveries of patients to the hospital. So it's very opportune for Mountain View to take this step forward.

[00:17:38] Mike Rogers: Mountain View is a leader in for example El Camino Hospital in stroke management by getting people to the hospital with strokes in under five minutes really changing the outcomes. So very opportune. I wasn't even aware of this until John McAlister brought it up. So, because the county is still struggling. We're still struggling because of staffing, training, contracts with the major providers, AMR etc that they're now negotiating a new long-term contract. So good luck to you. Thanks for doing that.

[00:17:56] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Any other public comment in person? All right, I am not seeing any virtually. So I will bring the item back, um, for a motion. And note that a motion to approve the consent calendar should also include the reading, the title of the resolutions attached to the consent calendar items 4.2 and 4.3. Councilmember Showalter.

[00:18:20] Councilmember Pat Showalter: All right. I would like to move passage of the entire consent calendar. Um, item 4.2, adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View to adopt ambulance billing and user fees to be used by the Mountain View Fire Department for advanced life support emergency ambulance transportation services, further reading waived. Item 4.3, adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View acknowledging receipt of a report made by the Mountain View Fire Chief regarding the annual inspection of certain occupancies pursuant to sections 13146.2 and 13146.3 of the California Health and Safety Code to be read in title only, further reading waived.

[00:19:07] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. So we have a motion by Councilmember Showalter, seconded by Councilmember Hicks. Let's vote.

[00:19:21] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, and that motion passes unanimously. So we will...

5. ORAL COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE PUBLIC ON NONAGENDIZED ITEMS

[00:19:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: We'll move on to item five, which is oral communications. This portion of the meeting is reserved for persons wishing to address the Council on any matter not on the agenda.

[00:19:33] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Speakers are allowed to speak on any topic within the City Council's subject matter jurisdiction for up to three minutes during this section. State law prohibits the Council from acting on non-agenda items.

[00:19:45] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: If you'd like to speak on this item or the next item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the City Clerk now. Would any member of the public joining us virtually or in person like to provide comment on this item?

[00:19:58] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or submit your blue speaker card to the City Clerk. We are going to start with in-person speakers first. Each speaker will have three minutes. And we have Mike Rogers.

[00:20:19] Mike Rogers: For pulling that up. Actually, could you skip to the next one? Here's a diagram I've submitted to the city several times on pickleball and tennis.

[00:20:28] Mike Rogers: Former president of the Mountain View Tennis Club, I've started the net game program, I started the Tennis Advisory Board about 20 years ago to help guide the city to continue the legacy community model that was really the foundation of Mountain View's recreation traditions.

[00:20:44] Mike Rogers: Many of the other programs in nearby cities were started as adjuncts that came to us for help decades ago. But I wanted to talk to the work plan specifically and an item that Pat had brought forward, Councilmember Showalter, and had been discussed last time.

[00:20:57] Mike Rogers: Scope is important and that's why I kind of used a lot of hyperbole in an email after the initial meeting on that and I realize this is not on the agenda tonight.

[00:21:06] Mike Rogers: But I've coordinated meetings between the head of the Pickleball Association and the Mountain View Tennis Club in recent weeks and we're in strong agreement we need to see this figure out how to move forward faster and provide adequate services and capabilities of facilities.

[00:21:20] Mike Rogers: I think this proposal would be less than $2 million, which is half of what the current plan is going on the capital side that went through the Parks and Recs Commission.

[00:21:28] Mike Rogers: Now there are other issues with that, but scope is important here. Mountain View is way behind Sunnyvale and City of Palo Alto who built things peripheral to their existing facilities, didn't cannibalize a major community center to do so, and have 15 and 16 courts respectively that are being well utilized.

[00:21:45] Mike Rogers: We have hundreds of people waiting for pickleball courts. I don't play pickleball, but I love the fact that it's just as social, just as much exercise, and we need to figure out how to support both these communities moving forward.

[00:21:56] Mike Rogers: Thanks for your time and attention. I appreciate the emails I did get back after the last council meeting. Thank you.

[00:22:02] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Next in person is Ida Rose Sylvester.

[00:22:22] Ida Rose Sylvester: Thank you Mayor Kamei and City Council. I'm Ida Rose Sylvester and tonight I'm representing Together We Will, an organization I founded in 2016.

[00:22:32] Ida Rose Sylvester: We uplift people in community action and our 3,400 members have become politically engaged and more engaged and connected to their community through our work. Next slide, please.

[00:22:43] Ida Rose Sylvester: On Saturday, we held an event that we called Hands Off Mountain View, tied to a global movement of 5.2 million people at 1,600 events with the purpose of protecting democratic values in our nation.

[00:22:57] Ida Rose Sylvester: We partnered with Lenny Siegel of Mountain View Voices for Peace and Justice and Sally Lieber. Between a march that went down San Antonio, from San Antonio to Grant Road along El Camino, and a rally that we held at Gateway Park, we estimated that we had a minimum of 3,000 people and much more likely above 4,000 people in attendance.

[00:23:20] Ida Rose Sylvester: We had people of all ages, from babies in arms to people in their 90s. People of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities stood together and stood up for each other.

[00:23:33] Ida Rose Sylvester: For most of the march, we were an impressive line of a mile to a mile and a half of people stretched as far as you could see, with people also unexpectedly lining El Camino to cheer us on, hand us drinks.

[00:23:46] Ida Rose Sylvester: And we also had a tremendous number of people drive by. We didn't have a single person flip us off. We had high fives, horn honks, people rolling down the window yelling, way to go! It was wonderful.

[00:23:55] Ida Rose Sylvester: The crowd was joyous, peaceful, and very, very safe. We built community, created friendships, and people stood up and said the people of Mountain View stand up for each other and for our rights. It was a wonderful moment for that.

[00:24:13] Ida Rose Sylvester: Mountain View is a very diverse community and we know that not everyone is aligned with what we did, but we want you to know we all love America too, just as much as you do. And we are here mostly to build community with each other and we hope you can join us too and learn what we do.

[00:24:30] Ida Rose Sylvester: I would be remiss if I didn't thank Mountain View Police Department. Thank you very much for your partnership from the start of our event and for keeping us incredibly safe.

[00:24:40] Ida Rose Sylvester: I'd also like to thank Mountain View Fire Department for incredibly rapid response when we had a couple minor medical emergencies due to the heat. So thank you so much, we couldn't have done it and couldn't have done it well without you.

[00:24:54] Ida Rose Sylvester: I'm grateful to all of our attendees, our volunteers, photographers, and press. It takes a literal village to pull off an event of thousands of people like this.

[00:25:04] Ida Rose Sylvester: Also, I want to point out that after the event, literally hundreds and hundreds of people streamed downtown to get food and to go shopping.

[00:25:12] Ida Rose Sylvester: I saw people downtown for more than two to three hours after the event was over having a great time enjoying our downtown.

[00:25:19] Ida Rose Sylvester: So we didn't just do good for building community, we actually did great economic-

[00:25:25] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Thank you. Three minutes are up. Thank you. Appreciate it.

[00:25:36] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Alright. I am not seeing any hands for virtual public comment. And good news is that there's no longer a delay, so that's good.

[00:25:47] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: So we will close oral communication and move on to item

6.1 Residential Addition to Historic Structure at 415 Bush Street

[00:25:51] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: 6, which is our public hearings. First we have item 6.1, our residential addition to a historic structure at 415 Bush Street. Do any Council members have disclosures to make?

[00:26:14] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, I'm not seeing any Council members. So we're- staff is making their way down, Principal Planner Diana Pancholi to present the item. If you'd like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the City Clerk now. And you can also raise your hand in Zoom.

[00:27:01] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: Thank you and good evening Mayor and members of the Council. My name is Diana Pancholi, Principal Planner with the city's Planning Division, and I am joined here tonight by Assistant Planner and Project Manager Madeleine Fall. The item in front of you tonight is a residential addition to a historic structure at 415 Bush Street.

[00:27:22] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: The .17 acre project site is located at the northeast corner of the intersection between Bush Street and Velarde Street. The site is currently developed with an existing two-story historic single-family residence. The general plan designation is low-density residential and the site is located in the R1-1 zoning district. The surrounding uses are one-to-two story single-family and multi-family residential uses.

[00:27:51] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: To provide some background, the city retained a historic consultant, Page and Turnbull, as part of the ongoing work to update the city's historic preservation ordinance. This included city-wide survey of historic resources. For this site, Page and Turnbull prepared a historic resource assessment, or HRA, for the property, confirming the eligibility of the existing single-family home for the state and national registers under the criterion C-3 as an excellent local example of Tudor Revival architecture.

[00:28:24] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: The project is before the Council tonight, as the city code requires properties that are eligible to the state and national historic registers to be reviewed by the City Council.

6.2 Residential Development Project at 294-296 Tyrella Avenue (Builder's Remedy)

[00:28:34] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: council to determine substantial compliance with the US Secretary of Interior standards or SOIS for the treatment of historic properties. As mentioned above, the city is currently working on updating the historic preservation ordinance, which will take into consideration how minor modifications which have no impact on the historic significance of its structure may be reviewed and approved in the future. City council could consider removing the council review requirements for such small single family residential additions as a policy change as part of this ordinance update and as part of other efforts to the update to the city code.

[00:29:14] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: Staff is targeting bringing back the historic preservation ordinance um to the city council for further direction in Q4 of 2025 and for ordinance adoption in Q1 or Q2 of 2026. A little bit about the scope of the project. The project uh consists of a request for a historic preservation permit to allow 136 square ft addition to an existing single family residence. The proposed addition is located east of the existing structure along Velarde Street, where the 136 square foot ground floor addition will allow for an expansion of the existing kitchen.

[00:29:57] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: For projects involving historic buildings, one of the four sets of standards is selected from the Secretary of Interior standards. Given the scope of the project, the standards for rehabilitations were selected for this project. These standards allow changes to the building while ensuring its historic character is retained. Review of the applicant submitted SOIS compliance analysis memo concludes that the proposed project would not result in an adverse change to the historic resource and minimizes impacts to the physical characteristics of the historic resource that conveys its historic character. The design of the proposed addition is complementary to the existing structure.

[00:30:37] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: The addition features materials and detailing that matches the building's historic character, such as the proposed stucco finish, window frame details, and horizontal wood siding at the gable end. The addition also has a standing seam metal roof, which will differentiate the addition from the existing structure. The addition is differentiated from the historic residence using a standing seam metal roof. The addition is complementary to the structure in terms of scale and materials, and the project minimizes the removal of historic features to two windows and a set of non-original French doors.

[00:31:10] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: In their existing condition, these features are screened such that the change will be minimally visible from the public right away. All other features contributing to the Tudor revival style, such as the wood shake roofing, curved bargeboard, and exterior cladding with a half timber and lightly textured stucco finish will be retained. In conclusion, the project has been designed in compliance with the standard for rehabilitation, allowing the residence to continue to express its historic character and Tudor revival architectural style while accommodating the small addition.

[00:31:48] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: And for these reasons, staff recommends that the city council adopt a resolution approving a historic preservation permit pursuant to the conditions of approval attached to the council report and find that this project is categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to section 15331 the historic resource restoration and rehabilitation. This concludes staff presentation. Um city staff, including community development director Murdock is present here tonight for any questions. The project applicant is also here tonight and has a brief statement for the city council. Thank you.

[00:32:25] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Uh we'll now hear from the property owner Brad Bettman and the architect Robert Bryant.

[00:32:41] Brad Bettman: I can be very brief. Um my name is Brad Bettman. Uh my wife Kathy and I chose to move to Mountain View uh 45 years ago. We've lived in our current neighborhood, in fact on our current block for 42 years, and in the current house for uh 35. Um we're doing this remodel so that we can uh uh continue to spend uh our future in the house. Uh it's been 34 years since we last remodeled our kitchen, and uh it needed a refresh, but as we were uh starting to plan we realized we needed to eliminate the daily trips up and down uh our stairs to our basement to access the laundry and and uh freezer and pantry storage that's down there.

[00:33:26] Brad Bettman: But to bring all those items up, we needed more space. And so we decided to push out one wall of our kitchen to create that space. And we settled on a layout that uh gives us that space but does not uh, you know, severely impact uh our yard and create problems there. Um once complete, our uh addition will give us the added space, eliminate the trips carrying uh loads up and down the stairs, and also provide us some uh gathering and informal uh dining area.

[00:34:00] Brad Bettman: Um it will create a uh greater definition of our side yard facing Velarde, and it will give us increased privacy in our backyard. And we are making every effort to uh make sure all the design, the materials, and finishes will will blend perfectly with uh the existing house. That's all I have. Any questions?

[00:35:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Did you want your architect to speak or no?

[00:35:27] Brad Bettman: If if he'd like, uh...

[00:35:29] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: It's it's all right. Just he was listed so I just wasn't sure if you needed...

[00:35:33] Brad Bettman: If you have questions for him...

[00:35:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay.

[00:35:37] Robert Bryant: Hi, my name is Robert Bryant. I think the what you've seen so far is is uh relatively self-explanatory, but I'm here to answer any questions if you have any. Uh otherwise we'll hope that uh there's no issues.

[00:35:50] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, I think the council members have some questions. So, uh, do any members of council have questions? Okay, great. Councilmember Hicks.

[00:35:58] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Hi, I just wanted to know whether the process was relatively straightforward and easy to get through? It seems like it's a, you know, a I've worked in historic preservation in the past, it seems like you're doing uh good with the community, but I just wanted to know was it you know was it relatively good to get through?

[00:36:17] Robert Bryant: I think it can be, and I think it will be streamlined.

[00:36:20] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Okay, great. And did you I just wanted to know did you um make the kitchen all electric? That's another thing that we work on.

[00:36:28] Robert Bryant: Yes.

[00:36:29] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Okay, great. Given that, I have a com- I realize that we have a motion coming, but I do have a comment after when we move...

[00:36:38] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Sure. Well, uh it looks like we have a motion waiting for a second, um but we need to open it up for public comment. So... all right, do any other colleagues have... thank you very much. Do any other colleagues have questions? All right, so um would any member of the public on the line like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or press star 9 on your phone.

[00:37:03] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: I am not seeing any um people for vir- for virtual or in-person comment, so I'll bring it back to council um for deliberation action. And note that a motion to approve the recommendation should also include the reading the title of the resolution attached to the report. Councilmember Hicks.

[00:37:26] Councilmember Alison Hicks: So this is my comments are this is clearly a relatively small project. Um uh but I just wanted to comment that I think it's a great example of the way that historic preservation can blend with a number of other city goals. So if you look at the plan for the project, the uh the yard also has an ADU, correct me if I'm wrong but that's what it said. Um which I don't think was a part of this project, but I but I wanted want to show the community and council members and anyone else who's listening that historic preservation projects often keep um keep uh housing units smaller, leave room for an ADU, so an an additional unit, al- also often give you the opportunity to electrify uh thus helping to meet our decarbonization goals, and turning uh what would be one unit if you hadn't done historic preservation you might have done a monster home which would be one unit instead of in this way there they're more housing units created and it's a way of without displacement while meeting our our decarbonization goals and our housing goals all at the same time. So um this is a good example of that. I think in the future hopefully um the process can be streamlined, maybe it doesn't even have to come to council, but I'm glad that we have this model available for people to see.

[00:38:59] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Councilmember McAlister.

[00:39:03] Councilmember John McAlister: Brad, why? 200 and some thousand dollars to add 130 some 137 square feet. That is a hell of a commitment to the city of Mountain View. Or you use commitment in another way, but uh... yes I I was quite impressed because I'm doing a remodel and paying $1,700 a square foot is uh impressive enough. But to go through the time, the energy, the staff put all that thing, I sort of agree somewhat with Councilmember Hicks that that small you just go, hey, just do it, you know? But it's uh, I hope you enjoy it and it's probably going to take you another 35 years to recover your money on that one, so uh, but thank you.

[00:39:47] Brad Bettman: Yes, hopefully it will.

[00:39:54] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Uh Vice Mayor Ramos.

[00:39:57] Councilmember Emily Ramos: Um I'm kind of sad that like we it does have to go all the way to council to uh to to go through this process. I hope that eventually does become more uh streamlined and easier. I think about how my um my my mom is renovating her kitchen right now, or or trying she's been wanting to renovate her kitchen for like since 2016 and it's just been a fun fun time for her. But it's also um it's a way for you to make it your forever home, to continue making it your forever home as she's getting older and she can't reach certain things anymore, she can't lift certain things anymore, to make it her own.

[00:40:36] Councilmember Emily Ramos: So um I'm glad that you continue maintain the historic elements of of your home and and make it through um this process. Please let us know um what barriers you face in this process as we obviously we we are undertaking our historic preservation policies right now, um and I hope you enjoy your forever home.

[00:41:04] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: (unintelligible background voices) Sorry, so we're in the deliberation now, so it's the... Thank you. Okay, so for the for the public watching in who are not in the room, uh property owner said that they did not know that they lived in a historic home, but okay. Um any other other comments on the motion on the floor? All right, if not, Councilmember Showalter.

[00:41:37] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Yeah I would just also like to comment um we remodeled our kitchen, but actually it turned out to be um 80% of our house, about um 30 5 years ago, and just yesterday we got a new oven and microwave installed because and we're we're changing out all the appliances because they've just worn out. So I can really um I sort of feel your pain except fortunately we don't have to remodel the kitchen. We will have to repaint however, that's the new appliances really make that, you know, the the cabinets look very dingy. So we're going to have to work on that. But anyway, we all are admiring the work you're doing. Thank you so much for taking care of your property.

[00:42:20] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And we would like to adopt a resolution of the city council of the city of Mountain View approving a historic preservation permit to construct a one-story 136 squ ft addition to an existing two-story 13 40 sqt historic single family residence on a 0.17 acre site located at 415 Bush Street APN 158-30-020 and finding that the project is categorically exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act CEQA pursuant to CEQA guidelines section 15331 historic residence restoration rehabilitation to be read in title only, further reading waived.

7.1 Preliminary Review of Fiscal Year 2025-26 Recommended Budget

[00:42:34] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Item 6.2, which is our residential development project at 294-296 Tyrella Avenue, our Builder's Remedy. Do any Councilmembers have disclosures to make?

[00:42:50] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Yes, I visited the property and I met with the developer on the telephone this afternoon.

[00:43:00] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, great. Any other disclosures? All right. Vice Mayor Ramos.

6.2 Residential Development Project at 294-296 Tyrella Avenue (Builder's Remedy)

[00:43:05] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, so we have a motion by Councilmember Showalter, seconded by Councilmember Hicks. Let's vote. Okay, and that motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much.

7.1 Preliminary Review of Fiscal Year 2025-26 Recommended Budget

[00:43:07] Councilmember Emily Ramos: I met with the developer a little over a year ago, but nothing really since then.

[00:43:16] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay. Great, thank you. And I'll disclose I visited the location. All right. Principal Planner Diana Pancholi will present the item. If you'd like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the City Clerk now. And we'll turn it over to staff. Sorry about that.

[00:43:45] Selina Chen: Good evening, Mayor Kamei, Vice Mayor Ramos, Councilmembers. I'm Selina Chen with the City Attorney's Office. I'm going to provide a brief overview of the legal background and the parameters that apply to the proposed project at 294-296 Tyrella Avenue.

[00:44:05] Selina Chen: First of all, the proposed project is a housing development project under the Housing Accountability Act, which is found in Government Code section 65589.5. The stated intent of that law is to significantly increase the approval and construction of new housing for all economic segments of California's communities by meaningfully and effectively curbing the capability of local governments to deny, reduce the density for, or render infeasible housing development projects.

[00:44:38] Selina Chen: And I've included the stated policy of the law, which is that it be interpreted and implemented in a manner to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and provision of housing. Next slide, please.

[00:44:53] Selina Chen: The proposed project is also a Builder's Remedy project. So you may ask, what is Builder's Remedy? The Builder's Remedy is a provision of the Housing Accountability Act. And I'll start with two caveats. First, Builder's Remedy is an evolving area of the law. There is no definitive guidance from the courts on these provisions.

[00:45:17] Selina Chen: And the second caveat is that the Builder's Remedy provisions were recently amended by AB 1893, which allows applicants to choose whether to be subject to any or all of the new provisions of law that went into effect on January 1st or be subject to the laws that were in effect when the preliminary applications were submitted. This applicant has chosen to be subject to the law in effect in 2024 when his preliminary application was submitted.

[00:45:47] Selina Chen: Under that law, the project qualifies as a Builder's Remedy project because the preliminary application was submitted before the City adopted a substantially compliant Housing Element. There was about a four-month period during which we did not have one. And at least 20% of the total units will be sold or rented to lower income households. What does that mean? Under the law, the HAA limits the City's ability to deny or condition approval of this project in a manner that renders the project infeasible for affordable housing development.

[00:46:28] Selina Chen: And then the Builder's Remedy provisions of the HAA prohibit the City from denying or conditioning approval based on inconsistency with the zoning ordinance or the General Plan land use designation. Next slide, please.

[00:46:43] Selina Chen: You may ask what local control remains? The city can apply objective, quantifiable written development standards that do not result in a reduction of the proposed density and do not render the project infeasible. The city may impose fees and exactions that are otherwise authorized by law, and the city must comply with CEQA. Next slide, please.

[00:47:13] Selina Chen: So as previously stated, there is no definitive guidance from the courts on the Builder's Remedy provisions of the HAA. However, we do have recent legal guidance from the Court of Appeal that supports a premise that local control has not been abrogated by the Housing Accountability Act. This slide includes a quote from a recent Court of Appeal decision interpreting the HAA.

[00:47:37] Selina Chen: And the court in that decision stated, 'We recognize the HAA's stated policy that it should be interpreted and implemented in a manner to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of and the approval and provision of housing. But compliance with the HAA does not mean that every proposed project must be approved or that maximum allowable density must be allowed at every site. These arguments highlight the tensions inherent in the Legislature's efforts to solve a statewide problem that lies within a realm typically controlled by local authorities.'

[00:48:13] Selina Chen: So I'll conclude my presentation by just acknowledging that even the courts are realizing there is a lot of discord between the legislature trying to regulate this area and the City's inherent authority under the California Constitution and State Law to regulate land use within the city. Thank you.

[00:48:38] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: Good evening again. Mayor and members of the Council. Diana Pancholi, Principal Planner with the City's Planning Division. And now I'm joined by Krisha Penollar. She's a Senior Planner and the Project Manager for this project. This project does qualify as a Builder's Remedy project.

[00:48:59] Krisha Penollar: So the half-acre project site is located on the southwest corner of Tyrella Avenue and Middlefield Road. The site is currently developed with one single-family residence. The General Plan designation is Medium-High Density Residential, and the zoning is R3-1, which is Multiple-Family Zoning District. The surrounding uses include two-story condominium developments to the north and west of the site, a single-story multi-family site to the south, and single-story single-family residence to the east.

[00:49:38] Krisha Penollar: This project is requesting a Development Review Permit to construct a 7-story, 80-unit residential condominium development with three levels of parking, replacing one single-family residence on site. The proposal includes 20% affordable units for lower income households fulfilling the Builder's Remedy criteria. The project also includes a request for Heritage Tree Removal Permit to remove and replace six heritage trees, and a tentative map to create 80 condominium units on a single lot.

[00:50:12] Krisha Penollar: This is the proposed project site plan that includes street frontages along Middlefield Road and Tyrella Avenue. Vehicular access to the at-grade parking garage and primary access to the main lobby is located off of Tyrella Avenue. The proposed ground floor plan primarily includes parking and main entry lobby located on the northeast corner of the building, a single ground floor unit at the southwest corner, and a trash room fronting Tyrella Avenue.

[00:50:43] Krisha Penollar: The proposed multi-family residential use is consistent with the General Plan Medium-High Density Residential designation and R3-1 zoning district. The project as proposed meets some development standards in the zoning district but does not comply with all the standards. However, pursuant to the Builder's Remedy provisions of the Housing Accountability Act, the City may not disapprove the project based on the project's noncompliance with these standards.

[00:51:16] Krisha Penollar: In terms of design, the project architecture is a contemporary design with materials such as stucco, lap siding, glass railings, steel accents, and fabric awnings. The building design includes balconies to provide articulation and help break up the building mass.

[00:51:34] Krisha Penollar: The project includes approximately 20,000 square feet of open area and landscaping, including the ground level landscaping and pedestrian pathways, private decks, and around 11,000 square foot of roof deck above the seventh floor. The project meets the open area landscaping requirement of the R3 zoning district but does not meet the private open space requirement as not all the units have private open space. The applicant has indicated that it is not feasible for the project design to include private decks for each individual unit.

[00:52:07] Krisha Penollar: The landscape plan utilizes a number of low-water use and native plants through which the applicant intends to meet the City Council 75% native landscaping goal. However, some revisions are needed to the landscape design, as some species were erroneously listed as native plants but are non-native plants indeed.

[00:52:29] Krisha Penollar: In terms of the tree proposal, the project site currently contains 16 trees, including 8 heritage trees and 8 non-heritage trees. 6 of the heritage trees are slated for removal due to their location within the building's footprint, which makes preservation impossible without compromising the project design. To mitigate the loss of these trees, the applicant will be planting 17 new trees across the site at a 2.8:1 replacement ratio for heritage trees. The applicant worked with their arborist to study relocation of on-site trees, but because of the size and the age of the trees, they were determined unsuitable for transplanting.

[00:53:16] Krisha Penollar: The affordable housing component of the project includes 20% of the total units for lower income households. This exceeds the City's 15% BMR housing requirement and qualifies the project for Builder's Remedy. The proposed 20% equates to 16 units at 80% AMI. City's BMR ordinance requires affordable units to be reasonably dispersed through the project and have a proportionate distribution of units by number of bedrooms to the market rate units.

[00:53:46] Krisha Penollar: The BMR units for the project include 16 studio units. This does not align with the City's requirement. However, as a Builder's Remedy project, City staff recommends approval of the project as currently proposed, notwithstanding its noncompliance with the proportionality requirement for the BMR units.

[00:54:06] Krisha Penollar: In addition, under the Builder's Remedy provisions of the Housing Accountability Act, the applicant must provide sufficient legal commitments to ensure that all the affordable units remain affordable for a minimum of 30 years and that is being proposed here. There is one single-family dwelling unit on the property. The City's Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance applies to sites with more than two units, so the project is not subject to the Tenant Relocation Ordinance requirements.

[00:54:34] Krisha Penollar: Additionally, the existing tenant is not considered a low or a very low-income household and therefore not subject to the SB 330 requirements either.

[00:54:47] Krisha Penollar: In terms of parking and transportation, the project is required to provide 150 parking spaces for residential parking and 23 guest parking spaces per the City's parking code. The project is proposing 83 vehicular parking spaces on site and does not meet the City's minimum parking requirements. Pursuant to the Builder's Remedy provisions of the Housing Accountability Act, the City may not disapprove the project based on the project's noncompliance with these City standards.

[00:55:15] Krisha Penollar: Additionally, typical project review of this scale includes preparation of a Multi-Modal Transportation Analysis to determine the local level project impacts including bicycle, pedestrian, and vehicular movements. An MTA study was prepared and changes to the onsite circulation have been made such as removal of the driveway entrance off of Middlefield Road, removal of a secondary service driveway on Tyrella Avenue, and adding loading spaces on site.

[00:55:43] Krisha Penollar: However, the MTA indicated that the applicant pay their fair share cost of a pedestrian hybrid beacon and crosswalks across Middlefield Road due to the increased pedestrian activity. But this is not imposed due to the applicability of the Builder's Remedy provisions.

[00:56:00] Krisha Penollar: The project is proposing to replace damaged curb gutter and sidewalk along the project frontages, and projects typically dedicate frontage for public utility easement and require undergrounding of the overhead utility lines. Since the undergrounding would require undergrounding across Middlefield Road, the City is not pursuing this requirement due to the cost and the applicability of the Builder's Remedy.

[00:56:24] Krisha Penollar: In terms of environmental review, the project is determined to be categorically exempt per California Environmental Quality Act Section 15332 Infill Development. The project is determined to be consistent with the City's Vehicle Miles Travel policy and have a less than significant VMT impact.

[00:56:47] Krisha Penollar: Typically development projects of such scale and scope are encouraged to conduct a neighborhood meeting to gather community input during the project review phase. Although staff strongly encouraged applicants to host a neighborhood meeting to engage with the community, the applicant has declined to conduct a meeting for this project.

[00:57:07] Krisha Penollar: Similarly, the applicants declined to attend a Design Review Consultation meeting to discuss the project design. These meetings are not mandatory, but applicants typically participate as a way to get design feedback from the staff and also from the community.

[00:57:25] Krisha Penollar: The Zoning Administrator and the Subdivision Committee reviewed this project at a joint public meeting on March 12, 2025, where 13 members of the public commented on the project as detailed in the staff report. At this meeting, the Zoning Administrator recommended the City Council to conditionally approve the project per the conditions of approval attached to the staff report and in the draft project resolution.

[00:57:50] Krisha Penollar: Following the joint Zoning Administrator and Subdivision Committee meeting, staff continued project review and recommends certain deletions, revisions, and additions to the conditions of approval in a good faith effort to reduce financial constraints on housing development projects for lower-income households. The condition modifications are further discussed in the staff report and also included in the draft project resolution which was attached in the Council agenda.

[00:58:22] Krisha Penollar: Upon further requests from the applicant, staff is proposing two additional modifications to the published project conditions attached to the... that are being shown on the slide here and also presented to the Council members as a desk item. These relate to the modification to condition of approval number 64 and adding a new condition... sorry, modification to condition of approval number 64 for the building codes, and adding a new condition of approval for Mountain View local amendments to the project resolution.

[00:58:58] Krisha Penollar: In conclusion, the project is found to be consistent with some of the development standards, achieves General Plan and Housing Element goals by increasing market rate and affordable housing opportunities in the city, and helps meet City's Regional Housing Needs Allocation. Therefore, staff recommends that the City Council adopt a resolution conditionally approving the Development Review Permit, the Tentative Map, the Heritage Tree Removal Permit pursuant to the conditions of approval for the Builder's Remedy project attached to the staff report in the draft resolution along with the two modifications that are being shown that were shown on the slides previously and previously discussed.

[00:59:39] Krisha Penollar: And this concludes staff presentation. City staff along with the Community Development Director Christian Murdock is present here tonight for any questions from Council. And the applicant is also present here tonight and has a brief presentation for Council. Thank you.

[00:59:57] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, thank you, staff. We'll now have a presentation from the applicant. Please introduce yourself prior to the presentation. And you'll see the timer right here.

[01:00:14] Forrest Linebarger: Hi, I'm Forrest Linebarger for the applicant. Thank you, Mayor Kamei and City Council members. And thank you, staff. Many projects that come before you tear down as many units as they put up, displacing low-income housing for richer housing. This project is a rare one that is only removing one housing unit and it is not a low-income housing unit. We're providing 80 new units and 20% affordable with no displacement of any low-income units and only one tenant being displaced at all.

[01:01:05] Forrest Linebarger: Next slide. Contrary to staff's presentation, we met with approximately 28 neighbors on April 24th, 2023, and we shared plans with those neighbors. And I was going to briefly share the feedback we got from them. Primarily the feedback was decrease the density, increase the parking, and remove the low-income units.

[01:01:35] Forrest Linebarger: Next slide. We did end up reducing the project size by 6% to 80 units. And we also implemented a number of transportation management programs, a lot of them unique and fascinating although I won't have time to go into them tonight and staff did not cover them either. We did not feel it was appropriate to reduce the percentage of low-income units.

[01:02:04] Forrest Linebarger: But in short, these are showing some of the transportation management strategies we've used. These tend to reduce car ownership, which reduces the parking requirements, also reduces traffic, and reduces air pollution. And that's all I'll be able to say on it right now. Thank you.

[01:02:26] Forrest Linebarger: Next slide. We also had a second meeting with a small group of neighbors just in November. I don't want to really go over that because of time constraints. So next slide.

[01:02:38] Forrest Linebarger: So the project provides 20% low-income housing. It's reserved for households earning 80% or less of AMI. The City requirements are only four low-income housing units for a similar project and eight moderate-income units, which is a much easier standard to meet. The cost of the additional percentage and the deeper income levels required for this project qualify it as a low-income housing project and that also gives us additional benefits and protections against local code requirements, because of the cost burden of meeting these extended ones... and Builder's Remedy, staff I think did a pretty good job of going over that. But it also makes some of the City's additional requirements infeasible.

[01:03:38] Forrest Linebarger: Next slide. Of the City's over 200 conditions, we're only having an issue with four of those conditions. To make this project feasible, there's four conditions that make this project infeasible. I think you guys have letters from YIMBY Law and CalHCF, which are probably the two most muscular non-profit housing advocacy groups, also saying the same thing. I'm not quite sure why staff is holding on to these issues. I'm going to try to go into them as much as I can right now. You don't give me a lot of time to do that.

[01:04:18] Forrest Linebarger: But I first want to point out the areas that staff and I agree is... your staff report says... that the City must afford the fullest possible weight in the interest of approval and the provision of housing. The fullest possible weight.

[01:04:38] Forrest Linebarger: And also in the staff report, it mentions that the City cannot condition a low-income project in a manner that makes it infeasible. These four conditions make it infeasible, why would you try to... why would you try to impose those four conditions? I can't understand it. At a 200, it's just four. So I urge you to look at these more carefully. It's just four conditions. And I'm going to try to go over them right now. I've got two more minutes.

[01:05:08] Forrest Linebarger: The project conditions that we're having an issue with are from the project conditions... it's the permit expiration condition, and the condition 61, the BMR unit continued affordability condition, the condition number 64, the building code condition, which I see staff is recommending a change although I have not seen that change and I just saw it just briefly for the first time right now. And also condition 17 from the map conditions, which is another permit expiration conditions. We have suggested alternate language for those that makes the project feasible.

[01:05:47] Forrest Linebarger: And what you have to realize is a project like this... is a for-profit project with 20% affordable. The margins are razor thin. Financing in these uncertain times... we have razor thin margins. To get financing, to have the right economic conditions to build this, we need more time than two years. Two years is not enough time to do it. It's not even legal under the PSA, which is where staff and we disagree. And it's illegal obviously if it makes the project infeasible. So I urge you to look at those conditions. I did not see those in the staff's revisions.

[01:06:42] Forrest Linebarger: We've got razor thin margins on a project like this. We are in uncertain economic times, the cost of labor is very, very high right now, the interest rates are historically very, very high, and we have a lot of uncertainty right now in the financial markets. It takes more time. In addition, we see projects do not always come before City Council for extensions. I hear from staff that oh, every project that asks for an extension gets it. But we actually see that that is not the case. I have a developer that I know who...

[01:07:17] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. All right. Now we'll move on to Council questions. Does any member of the Council have any questions for staff or the applicant? Councilmember Ramirez.

[01:07:29] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you, Mayor. I have two questions for the applicant and then a few for staff. So I wanted to clarify first, thank you for the presentation. There was some new information. I wasn't aware that you were proposing a market and availability of hot food. Is that available to the public or is that accessible... how does that work?

[01:07:49] Forrest Linebarger: Very good question. In the proposal, it was it's available only to residents, but I hear that that was a concession to the City. We actually wanted to make it available to the public, but I heard there is increasing appetite, we would prefer to have it open to the public. But right now in the current proposal it is open to residents and their guests. Although, I think it would be smart to make it open to the public.

[01:08:15] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay. Thank you for the clarification. And then the other question I wanted to better understand what you mean by financial feasibility and how you... how you define that and how the conditions render the project financially infeasible.

[01:08:33] Forrest Linebarger: Sure. Well, I think I was just explaining when I got cut off there about the timing for projects. So we have to get financing for a project, we have razor thin margins, we have high building costs, everybody knows that, we have high interest rates, I think we're all familiar with how high the interest rates are now. It's going to take time to get this project through, we do not have financing available right now, and to limit it to a two-year time period not only violates the PSA but it makes the project infeasible. We can't get it done in that amount of time. And it's from today's date, not from the date that the PSA requires, which is when all of the project plans have been approved and all the other approvals have been done.

[01:09:21] Forrest Linebarger: But there also are other conditions that make it infeasible if you want me to... if I can continue?

[01:09:28] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Um.

[01:09:29] Forrest Linebarger: That's just the two...

[01:09:30] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Well, I think that was the primary one that you elevated, right? And I don't want to take too much time. Thank you. I have a few questions for staff. First, can you clarify for maybe CDD the permit extension process?

[01:09:45] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: Sure. So usually... thank you for the question, Councilmember. Diana Pancholi, Principal Planner. So usually we stay in close communication with the applicant team... and if they need further time in order to move forward with the construction and they have been putting in good effort, coordinating with staff coming in with the building permit review, and there are some fair reasons because of which they're not able to meet the construction or start the construction in the given time, then they come in and file for a permit extension permit with the Planning Division. And staff will review and go through all the proof that has been provided to see if we can make the findings in the code, which are pretty straightforward findings. And then we schedule that project for a public hearing, which is done at a Zoning Administrator level, to make the recommendation for or to hear and review the permit for the extension at the Zoning Administrator level.

[01:10:46] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay, so the Council would never hear a request for a permit extension.

[01:10:54] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: That is correct. Usually we have not seen it in the past many years that any of such permits have been challenged to City Council.

[01:11:06] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

[01:11:13] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: I see the City Attorney in the queue.

[01:11:15] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: Sorry, I just wanted to clarify that when you say that council would never see that, that's not totally true. I think that if it was denied at the lower level, it could be appealed. The denial of the extension could be appealed to city council. So it could end up in city council.

[01:11:30] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay, that's a helpful clarification. But only if there were a denial, and to the best of my knowledge there has not been a denial for a permit extension at least since I've been observing local government. Two last questions. The first is around vesting rights... can staff help explain how that works and what that means?

[01:12:25] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: Sure, good evening Mayor and Council. Christian Murdock, Community Development Director. The main vesting provision in SB 330 is related to what's called a preliminary application. And it's a simplified form of application that the legislature created through SB 330 to allow an applicant to submit a limited amount of information compared to the typical regular application process, describing a project with limited information that is submitted to the city. It's not reviewed for completeness in the same way a regular application is. And so, upon confirming that all the statutorily required information has been provided, at the date of that application being submitted, the applicant then vests in the local regulations in effect at that time. Which means if a developer for instance wanted to undertake a project in reliance on the zoning and general plan on that site, submits an SB 330 preliminary application which meets the statutory requirements, the applicant is then entitled through the course of processing of that project, provided certain other requirements are met including timely submittal of a regular application, to proceed through to a decision on the project not subject to new regulations imposed by the city or modified regulations imposed by the city, unless the applicant chooses to be subject to those modified regulations. So for example if the city wanted to relax a standard for example, the applicant could choose to be subject to that new standard, but otherwise efforts by a local agency to downzone or impose new standards that would be burdensome on a project, those cannot be applied to a project that's vested rights in other regulations under an SB 330 preliminary application.

[01:14:06] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you. And the intent by the state then is to protect applicants generally from retroactive regulations that may have the effect of reducing density or maybe leading to project denial. Is that a fair assessment of the law?

[01:14:21] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: I think the retroactive part not quite, but new regulations put into effect by a jurisdiction after the SB 330 preliminary application. So retrospective depending on your perspective, retrospective to the decision on the project perhaps, but subsequently enacted regulations after the preliminary application.

[01:14:39] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay, thank you. Final question. Also a point of interest from communications from the community, some members of the community suggested that findings be made showing that there are substantial or significant public health and safety impacts. Can staff help us understand what types of findings may be necessary for denial on the grounds that there are public health and safety impacts?

[01:15:13] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: I'll make the first effort to answer the question. There are specific terms provided in state law related to modifications or denials of projects related to unavoidable public health and safety impacts. I may not get all of them, but essentially they need to be quantifiable and unable to be mitigated in some other way in order for a denial to be sustained on that basis. It's an intentionally very very high bar that the legislature set to provide an outlet in the most extreme situations for projects that absolutely cannot be constructed in a safe manner, and there's no way to mitigate the specific identifiable quantifiable threat to public health and safety. So more general concerns about scale or intensity are insufficient as a basis to invoke that authority to deny a project. But perhaps some other issue such as unavailable water supply and you can quantify how much water the project would need relative to how much water a project can be served with. That's one hypothetical where perhaps that type of denial could be sustained if there was no other way to mitigate that issue by water conservation or drilling a well or some other alternative water source for example.

[01:16:36] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay. And then, so could traffic be a public health and safety impact?

[01:16:42] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: I think it's hard to answer that question in the abstract and in the hypothetical.

[01:16:48] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Do you think with this project we could make findings that are defensible showing that there is a severe public health and safety impact associated with the project?

[01:16:56] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: I'm not aware of any information that staff has developed to lead to that type of conclusion for this project.

[01:17:03] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Okay. Thank you for your responses. I appreciate the time. Thank you, Mayor.

[01:17:06] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. And I just want to clarify for the public and those joining us online, applicants in Mountain View are given seven minutes to present. So every applicant that comes before us gets the same seven minutes. Councilmember McAlister.

[01:17:21] Councilmember John McAlister: Well, thank you for seven minutes. Okay. So, I've been away from Council for a while. This new Housing Element came along, new environment. When I was on Council before, people were building and they just... they were in great shape. You used the phrase feasible or infeasible, or the staff report sees it not you, but you used it a few times. At what point do you start balancing the quality of the project versus the feasibility of the project? So a lot of times it sounds like well, we're gonna do this this way. Now, you've been around a while so you make projects that are very well received. But on this one I keep seeing this doesn't make it feasible. So are there tradeoffs? What are you doing that will still leave it at the quality that you're used to, but at reducing all these infeasible items that you're talking about?

[01:18:41] Forrest Linebarger: Not entirely sure I understand, but are you saying could we cheapen the construction costs in other ways and therefore make things that would otherwise be infeasible feasible? Is that what you're asking?

[01:18:52] Councilmember John McAlister: Well, alternatives, yeah, so that you could still keep the quality that you're used to building to, I mean, and not say it's not feasible.

[01:19:01] Forrest Linebarger: Well, I think when we do the design, we try to bake in both a level of quality that'll last, durability and aesthetics that will last, that will make the project last and increase its value. If you build a project too cheaply, you lose value, you lose rents, you lose sale price. So you've got to be managing that all the time. The City also has a... I think we went through seven reviews with the City where they were encouraging us to increase the quality of materials. So we've got a lot of material... we do have material costs. But I don't know of a way off hand where I could say maybe cheapen the construction if that's what you're asking.

[01:19:43] Councilmember John McAlister: No, I'm not saying cheapen, I'm just saying there's tradeoffs. So when you say things are infeasible, it's sort of... Example, the water meters. If you were building a condo project right from the get-go, every unit would have a water meter so that you could assess it. But in this way you're only just going with one. It's one way to make it feasible.

[01:20:04] Forrest Linebarger: Correct.

[01:20:05] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay. But is there... there has to be tradeoffs somewhere along the line on that. And that's why I'm saying when you look at your... when you did your pro forma and you said okay, here's what we have to work with, and then well this is going to affect the pro forma as we go down, how did you balance that with, you know, we want this thing to stand and if it does become a condo project in the ten years, you know, you don't want to have people coming and knocking on your door so far like so. What in your mind, were you able to maintain the quality but say okay, well we need to look at this?

[01:20:39] Forrest Linebarger: You brought up a great example. Single water meter. So we lose the ability to regulate individual water meters that way. So there is a certain cost to that. But the cost of individual water metering was greater and we found that was a way to reduce the cost and the what we lost out of that was not as high as what we gained by going to a single water meter. So I think you brought up a great example.

[01:21:07] Councilmember John McAlister: So you've asked for some more time. Are you... most developers I meet, they want certainty. But it sounds like there's a little bit of a gamble going on with funding and time. And I just... most developers haven't really been building right now because of the uncertainty of the cost, market value, and all that. Why do you feel comfortable sort of plowing ahead when a lot of other people... Do you have some gut feeling that this is going to work? So I was wondering how you feel comfortable going forward when all this uncertainty about labor costs and money.

[01:21:51] Forrest Linebarger: Well, I do want to... I want to maximize my time to do this because oftentimes you have to wait until the right pieces fall into place. And we of course, nobody has a crystal ball on where interest rates will be or where housing costs will be. I think construction costs are probably just always on their way up. But under SB 330 it seemed like a fair way to handle it where with the vesting rights where it's two and a half years from when all of our approvals are made, including like the plans for construction... that would give us that additional time that we would need to get all of our ducks in a row. And of course it always could be that something happens that makes a project not feasible at that time, but that would give us a little bit of runway so that we could put a project together and be able to make it work. Whereas a super short time frame like right now does not... is not a great economic time to race forward with a project. So we are looking for more certainty and we do need more time, that's what I was saying, yeah.

[01:23:00] Councilmember John McAlister: And this is a sort of an anecdote for you to give us. Do you lose sleep over the potential cost of lumber coming from Canada at 100%...

[01:23:09] Forrest Linebarger: Yes I do.

[01:23:12] Councilmember John McAlister: That's going to be one. Okay, so thank you for that. I have a question now for the City Attorney. We got some last-minute clarifications from the applicant's attorney and himself. Did you review those and was there anything pertinent that you could share with us?

[01:23:31] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: I did. I did read the email from the applicant. I read the letter from his attorney. And then I also read a recently submitted letter from the California Housing Defense Fund. I am happy to address that. Jennifer Logue, City Attorney for the City of Mountain View. I think that you're misunderstanding the use of the quote from the case. We were not using that case to say that it was factually identical to the current situation. We were simply taking a quote from a recent court opinion discussing the Housing Accountability Act, recognizing the tension between what the legislature is trying to accomplish in a field that has been typically regulated by local authority. And so in that case, the court just simply recognized that the Housing Accountability Act does not require that every project be approved as proposed. And with regard to it does talk about maximum allowable densities, that would not apply to the Builder's Remedy part, those that are Builder's Remedy projects, but we were just simply citing it to say that there are courts out there that are recognizing that there is this discourse between what the state legislature is trying to accomplish and local government regulation and that local governments still have some regulatory power. So that was the only reason why we were citing to that particular quote from that case. Not at all stating that the case was factually applicable to this project.

[01:25:23] Councilmember John McAlister: Has any municipality or county defeated a Builder's Remedy project in court?

[01:25:33] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: I don't know what you mean by defeated.

[01:25:35] Councilmember John McAlister: Has any project been killed in court? Has a project been denied and the denial upheld by a court?

[01:25:43] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: I am not aware of any lawsuits in which that issue was actually argued, that there was actually a challenge to the denial of a Builder's Remedy project. I have reviewed cases where there are issues that have been decided where a city has said a project did not qualify as a Builder's Remedy project and the court disagreed and said no, it does qualify as a Builder's Remedy project. But I have not actually seen a case in which there was a denial of a Builder's Remedy project and that denial was challenged, and that there was a court of appeals opinion on that.

[01:26:23] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

[01:27:34] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: I just wanted to note, um, make one comment with regard to the two-and-a-half-year period that he just referenced. Um, that provision of the Housing Accountability Act, he, he, there is a confusion between two time periods. There's a time period in which the applicant has time to do everything that needs to be done in order to be able to obtain building permits, to, so to submit an application for all building permits and to actually pull those permits. So there's this time period from approval, assuming tonight is, the project is approved, and when you get to building, uh, pulling building permits. And then that two-and-a-half-year period that he is referencing actually starts after building permits, um, can be pulled. And that two-and-a-half-year period actually, when you read the Housing Accountability Act, it actually provides an exception for local governments to avail themselves of if construction is not commenced within that two-and-a-half-year period, and what it does is after that two-and-a-half-year period expires, we then can impose new local regulations on the project. So when he's talking about the two-and-a-half-year period after, um, eligibility for pulling building permits, it's just a separate time period. And he will still, this project will still, um, have its protections, the vested rights, and not being subjected to new regulations until that two-and-a-half-year period expires. But that has nothing to do with the two-year period, um, that the city provides in order to do everything that is necessary in order to pull a building permit, and then also the potential two-year extension option that the city provides. And I also just wanted to state that some of the best evidence that we have that it's actually feasible, that this two-year initial period plus the two-year extension does not render a project infeasible for development, is the fact that, um, I worked with staff and just asked, in passing, how many projects have gotten to the building permit stage in the last five years, um, within that four-year time period, and they were able to quickly find seven housing development projects that were able to pull permits within that four-year time period. And so it was feasible, and, you know, they're prepared to discuss those seven projects, some of which are much larger than the proposed project, and others that maybe are a little bit smaller. But the fact that we've got seven projects that have been able to go forward and pull building permits within that time period demonstrates feasibility. And so it's, it's, you know, the statement that it's infeasible is hard to understand in that context. Okay, thank you.

[01:30:29] Councilmember John McAlister: I started to understand that. Uh, and then my last question, uh, applicant kept referring to his project as a low-income project, but I thought the builder's remedy made it that to get the ability to do a builder's remedy you have to have 20%. So is it an affordable unit complex or not?

[01:30:51] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: You are correct, in order to qualify for builder's remedy, um, the project does have to propose 20%, um, of the total number of units to be affordable units. There is a different definition in the Housing Accountability Act that talks about affordable housing, but that is in a specific provision, and it requires a deed restriction of 55 years, and there's other requirements for it to qualify as a, quote, affordable housing project for the purposes of those provisions of the Housing Accountability Act. So, again, we're, we're talking about two different things. In order to qualify for builder's remedy, it does have to have 20% affordable units.

[01:31:34] Councilmember John McAlister: But it doesn't... it's not necessarily...

[01:31:37] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: It's not necessarily affordable housing project, as that term is defined in certain provisions of the Housing Accountability Act.

[01:31:50] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Yeah, I was glad that we got to talk a little bit this afternoon, um, Mr. Linebarger. And one of the things that I wanted to sort of share, um, and and maybe talk about a little bit more, is one of the things you're concerned about is meeting reach codes, uh, meeting our building codes. And, um, in the, uh, requests that we received from you and your attorney, you didn't distinguish about what aspects of the reach codes were problems. And, um, they are complex. You know, there's a number of things that are, um, included in them. And I got the impression, and I hope it was correct, that, you know, the reason you didn't want to meet these was purely economic. And is that the case?

[01:32:41] Forrest Linebarger: Um, maybe in one way you could resolve everything down to economics. But, uh, for instance, the parking regulation in your reach code, our current plan does not even meet it. The project that's actually up here for approval does not actually meet the parking requirement in the reach code. Uh, nor does it meet the natural gas requirement that the project is already baked into the project, already approved up to this time. But you've got a reach code that says it's got to be all electric. Now, I love all-electric construction, I do a lot of it, I've been doing it for two decades. But, uh, um, but this project, we needed to use gas to keep for the economics of the project. It's already baked into the project, but you're also saying now a reach code...

[01:33:22] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And when you talk about the use of gas... you are talking about the use of gas for, um, heating water. Is that correct?

[01:33:30] Forrest Linebarger: Uh, heating water and heating, uh, air.

[01:33:33] Councilmember Pat Showalter: So you were talking about water, um, heat, and air conditioning, for the use of gas.

[01:33:49] Forrest Linebarger: Right.

[01:33:52] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Okay. So, um, so I guess my question to you is, if we could find you, um, the technology to do this cheaper, would you be interested in that?

[01:33:53] Forrest Linebarger: Well, sure. We're always...

[01:33:55] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Okay. That's my question. Thank you very much.

[01:33:57] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Thank you. So most of my questions have been answered, but maybe I'll... maybe I'll ask a few quicker questions. So I hear from the applicant a fear that they can't get an extension. This question has been asked, but I just want to kind of put a point on it. In, in the, uh, number of years I believe that in the number of years I've been on council, there have been no extensions denied and none have come... this is basically I think what you said... and none have... none have been brought to council because of that. I just want to get a straight... Yes, is that true? They've been...

[01:35:58] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: That is correct.

[01:36:06] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Yes. Okay. Um, and then the second... this is something we've been talking about too regarding the permit, uh, expiration. It looks... when I put the developers' condition number one regarding permit expiration and the city's condition number one regarding permit expiration side by side, and look at them, they look kind of like comparing apples and oranges. Am I, I'd like a clarification on whether I'm reading this wrong, because the developers ask for two and a half years with no mention of an extension. And the city is giving two years plus another two years with extension, so four years. So it looks like we're giving a longer period than what the developer is asking for. And I guess I'm... that's question number one, are we actually giving him a longer period than what he's asking for? And number two, if we give him what he's asking for, two and a half years with no extension, is that... is that what he's asking for? Is that something we could give instead?

[01:37:32] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: So, I understand the confusion, this this is a bit confusing. It's when his two and a half year period starts.

[01:37:40] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Yes, that's different in the text. I'll sum it up.

[01:37:44] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: Yes. So the proposal from the applicant is to not have the two and a half year time period start until the project is completely eligible for building permits. Which means from tonight, assuming Council will approve it, up until the point that the project, the applicant is eligible to pull building permits, there would be no time limit. It could be years, it could be 10 years, it could be 20 years. There literally would be no time limit on the amount of time it would take for him to get the project up and running and ready to actually pull building permits. At the point that the project was eligible to pull building permits, that's when his proposed two and a half years would start. So what he is actually asking for is much, much longer than what our code would require. And our code is saying from tonight's action, up until the time you're eligible to pull building permits, you would have an initial two-year period plus a potential two-year extension for a total of four years, which is what I have shared that there have been multiple housing development projects that have been able to pull those permits, um, within that four-year period.

[01:38:00] Councilmember Alison Hicks: So it sounds like if he moves at the speed that those developers have moved, we're giving him a longer period. But if he does not, his, his is longer, is the way I'm...

[01:38:03] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: If you accept what the applicant is asking for, his is significantly longer. There's literally no limit on the amount of time to pull... yeah, to pull... to pull building permits.

[01:38:04] Councilmember Alison Hicks: But if he pulls them fast, ours is longer.

[01:38:06] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: Yes, true.

[01:38:08] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Um, and then, uh, about the, uh, the idea that there would be a community... call it what you will... coffee house and food vending on site is something that was also new to me. Um, and is that something that we could find some way to allow, that the community would be able to use that?

[01:38:26] Planning Manager Eric Anderson: I think the main concern that I would have, and I would defer to staff to add their input, is consistency with the residential zoning of the location not being situated to have public-serving establishments such as a cafe open to the public. Um, not to mention potential limitations with available parking and other factors of site design that would typically be considered in a review and approval of a public-serving establishment such as that.

[01:38:56] Principal Planner Diana Pancholi: Yeah, and I just want to clarify that the current design does show those amenity areas, but they are limited to residential, um, access only.

[01:39:04] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Okay. Thank you. Those are my questions.

[01:39:09] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Any other council members who have questions? Okay, I have a question for the applicant. So one of the things that you've talked about is how your project will include the 20% affordable units, um, while our ordinance only asks for 15%. However, I just wanted to clarify that you have only proposed studios as your below-market-rate units, versus what the city would require, which would be a unit mix of studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom, to meet the housing needs of our community. And when you state that it's infeasible, it's infeasible because of cost?

[01:39:51] Forrest Linebarger: Infeasible due to cost, and, uh, and, and your, uh, your the graphic that they showed was actually incorrect. It said the number of units required by the city, it said 16, which is so strange because, uh, so they did go to proportionality and it said required by the city, and you add it up it came to 16, but under the city's requirements it's only 12. So, uh, and that includes moderate, mostly moderate...

[01:40:16] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Right, but my question to you was about your units and what you're proposing and why you're only proposing studios. So you're only proposing studios because of the cost?

[01:40:26] Forrest Linebarger: Because of cost, correct.

[01:40:28] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay. Have you done further exploration, since you have, um, had these two informal meetings with the community, I'm sure they provided input on looking into the potential for other size below-market-rate units?

[01:40:39] Forrest Linebarger: Uh, we did look into doing, uh, looking at other size, uh, units. We did actually in a previous proposal have some larger units in there. Um, but, uh, in the end, uh, we were unable to provide any other size below-market-rent units. But the staff also wanted some larger three-bedroom units. We were able to provide those at the market rate. Uh, so we did do some unit shifts based on, on staff's requests. Those were coming from staff, not from, not from neighbors. Uh...

[01:41:11] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Well what are you going to charge for a three-bedroom market rate unit?

[01:41:13] Forrest Linebarger: Well that would not be something that we would be deciding right now. That would be about when it would go to, when it would go to market.

[01:41:21] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: I see. So you don't know yet.

[01:41:23] Forrest Linebarger: I don't have an idea. That would, I couldn't really give you an answer for that right now.

[01:41:30] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay. All right. Well, if you're going to say that you're doing it for staff, you know, letting us know how much you're thinking about is also helpful if you're saying it's going to be a benefit. So. Okay. All right. Thank you. Um, does anyone else have any other questions? All right, well, thank you very much to staff and to the applicant. We'll now move on to public comment. Would any member of the public on the line like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or press star nine on your phone. And, uh, we'll take in-person speakers first. We have quite a queue. Um, but I also recognize, um, that many have not had the opportunity to, uh, connect with us. So, uh, I'm going to display a timer for three minutes to allocate the full amount of time for our residents to be able to share their concerns with us. So first up we have Roger for Mary, Trevor, Mario, Alicia, Audrey, Chloe, Nikki, Noah. I think you'll get 10 minutes? Okay. Yeah, if there's more people to add, please let the clerk know. Thanks. And then I think the timer's here, is that right? And then over here. 10 minutes? Yes.

[01:42:49] Roger Noel: Good evening, council members. Thank you for your service to the city, appreciate it. My name is Roger Noel, I'm a 45-year resident of Mountain View. I live at 323 Tyrella Avenue. To streamline tonight's proceedings, I am speaking on behalf of myself as well as the residents' names that we just mentioned. Thank you for the opportunity to advise the council of our concerns regarding the planned 7-story, 80-unit apartment building at 294 Tyrella Avenue. We are firmly opposed to this project. We had a short-notice meeting with the residents of all three neighborhoods that will be affected by this project: Wagon Wheel, Slater, and North Whisman. Even with short notice and other major events happening in Mountain View, 18 residents showed up to express their concerns, and many more have emailed concerns. There were 30 public comments submitted in opposition to this development the last time I looked on the website. As you can see by this collage picture I created, you can see what a massive impact this building will have on the existing neighborhood. If you look to the left of that big tree, there are no big buildings at all down the entire street. So this just gives you an idea of the impact that this is going to have on the neighborhood. This neighborhood consists primarily of 1 and 2 story residences. The 7-story project is completely out of character for this neighborhood and will have a negative effect on parking, traffic, and quality of life. Parking. Every day our neighborhood is filled with parked cars from the German school on Easy Street. Parking on Tyrella and Easy Street, as well as other streets, is bumper-to-bumper on both sides, making it dangerous for drivers and kids walking to school. As the car parking for this project is on a paid basis, inconvenient, and inadequate, street parking will only get worse once this project is built. Traffic. The intersection of Tyrella and Middlefield is very dangerous. I have observed many serious accidents there, most recently on April 4th. This project will only make this intersection more dangerous. Quality of Life. This project has rooftop amenities consisting of a bar and pickleball courts. The noise from these amenities will be heard throughout the area, disturbing the neighborhood. Construction noise and dirt will cause a major disruption to quality of life. We are not opposed to development, but this project is just not right for the neighborhood. Impact to 255 Easy Street. 255 Easy Street is a 2-story condominium building at the corner of Easy Street and Middlefield. The west and south sides of this existing property will be completely surrounded by this new 7-story building. The people that live in those units will never see the sun again from their homes. Other surrounding homes, such as the triplex next to the project, will also have most of their sunlight blocked. Other neighborhood projects. There will also be more impact to the entire neighborhood from the other project proposed for 266 Tyrella, a 4-story, 47-unit building just four lots away. This project will also have a negative effect on parking, traffic, and quality of life. So, skip to the previous picture, please. This picture, no the plan one. That one. You can see that dashed gray and white line that goes down and goes to the left. That's going to be how it surrounds the 255 Easy Street property. Next one. And that's what the 2-story condo on Easy Street looks like. That'll be a 7-story building about 10 feet in front of it. Okay. Conclusion. We are not inherently opposed to development. We support the concerns of our neighbors. It is the project's non-compliance with the city's development standards for size, density, parking, setbacks, height, and other neighborhood projects planned in the area that are the source of many of the neighborhood residents' concerns. We are respectfully requesting that City Council delay a decision on this project at tonight's meeting. In the interim, we are also respectfully requesting that the City Council go to court to seek clarification on how the builder's remedy provision of the California Housing Accountability Act is applicable to this development proposal, and in particular, where the city and the developer are not currently in agreement regarding the city standards. Thank you very much for your time.

[01:48:41] Martin Rosenberg: Uh, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to address the council today. Um, I'm going to talk about what I believe is how you can deny this permit and be in compliance with the Housing Accountability Act. Um, according to the Housing Accountability Act, the Mountain View City Council is authorized to deny a development proposal if it, and I quote, would have a specific, adverse impact upon the public health or safety, and I'll demonstrate how it will about safety, and there is no feasible method to mitigate or avoid the impact without rendering the housing development project unaffordable or financially infeasible. The Housing Accountability Act further states that a specific, adverse impact means a significant, quantifiable, direct, and unavoidable impact, based on objective, identified written public health or safety standards, policies, or conditions as they existed on the date the application was deemed complete. I believe the additional traffic that will be created by the proposed development will adversely impact the safety of the residents of Tyrella Avenue, commuters who already use Middlefield Road, and elementary school children who attend Vargas Elementary School. Mitigation would require widening Tyrella or moving Vargas Elementary School, both of which I think everybody understands are not feasible. So here are the facts to support what I said. The Tyrella-Middlefield intersection is already dangerous, as somebody else pointed out. Just last week, last week, um, there was a major collision between two cars that required multiple police and fire units to attend. Tyrella Avenue between Middlefield and Gladys is only .15 miles long. To say it differently, one and a half tenths of a mile, or a whopping 800 feet. All right? Um, in other words, it's a very small space. The extremely small section of Tyrella currently consists of 53 housing units, 23 single homes plus 30 apartments located in two 2-story buildings on the east side of Tyrella. As you noticed, the proposal would replace one single home. Uh, if approved, it would be especially difficult to deny that other proposal, which is only about 400 feet away from this one, um, which is 47 units. Considering that two single homes would be demolished to make way for it, that's 125 additional units in 800 feet. Um, that's, and percentage-wise it's a whopping 330 percent, uh, the number of units would be 335%. Um, I'm about to run out of time. There's a lot to this, I sent it all to you in a letter, I hope you'll read it, um, and I hope you won't make a decision tonight. Thank you.

[01:51:43] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Joel Gruber, Ivan Linscott, Paulette Vashio, Hui Wang, Eugene Cordero. If you all could just queue up so we can continue. Thank you. Go ahead.

[01:52:06] Joel Gruber: Good evening council members. Um, my name is Joel Gruber, um, and I live just down the street from this project. Um, I live close enough to be directly impacted by the project, and I just want to note that I was never invited to any, uh, community meetings and have never been to anything with the builder. Um, I attended the March 12th zoning meeting, and since then I've spoken with many neighbors. Uh, we all share a similar concern. This project is being pushed forward under the builder's remedy, but it's not clear that it legally qualifies. As a multi-generational Mountain View resident, now raising my own family in this beautiful city, I humbly request that the City Council refer this project to the courts for a legal ruling. Approving this project without clarity invites confusion and future conflict, not just for our neighborhood, but for others across the city. The outcome of your decision tonight could set a legal precedent for many communities beyond our own. A court decision would provide a definitive answer on whether the builder's remedy applies here, and it would protect the city from further legal risk, whether from the developer or housing organizations. This is your opportunity to lead with transparency and ensure that Mountain View sets policy based on law, not pressure. Please choose clarity and refer this to the courts. Thank you.

[01:53:45] Ivan Linscott: Good evening Mayor, Vice Mayor, council members. I'm Ivan Linscott, my wife and I live on Leslie Court, which is one block from Tyrella Avenue. And, um, as you've heard, and I have witnessed, this laundry list of non-compliance uh, for this project. You can, I am egregiously opposed to it, and I'm here to join to delay your decision at least for further evaluation. I'm sure you know the magnitude of our opposition, we've articulated it, well, quite a bit. And I don't envy you the conundrum you find yourself in, uh, situated between this rock and the hard place. Uh, it is, it is a job for which, you know, we elected you, and I appreciate very much your being here to take advantage, to take charge of it. Um, you know, it's all I think because your hands appear to be tied by this builder's remedy act. It's a, it's a process that has had unintended consequences. I don't think our legislators intended to have this massive disruption within an established neighborhood dropped in our, in our, in our place. Uh, it's, uh, I wasn't privileged to those deliberations of the legislature, so I really don't know what they, what they intended. But, but, like Frankenstein, whose quest for immortality created a monster, I believe this builder's remedy act has created a monster in our midst. And I also believe we can make this monster go away. Because the viable mechanism for adjudication of bad legislation is necessarily the courts. And I know your reluctance to actually open that door, but what, what do we really have as a viable option? I think nothing. This is, I say, the rock and the hard place. Let's find a way to provide some lubrication between those two objectives, and, and, and confront this monster, resolve to do so, please. It's, it's I think not only for Mountain View and ourselves as residents, but as we just heard, setting a precedent is a dangerous, destructive act, and I'd hate to see this community, the community that you so ardently represent, and we elected you for, do that. Thank you.

[01:56:43] Paulette Vashio: I've never done any public speaking. Can you just speak into the microphone? Thank you. Thank you. Any tips are welcome. Um, I wanted to say thank you all for, uh, doing the things that you do here for Mountain View, and I know that you're all involved in, and want to maintain a quality of life for all Mountain View people. And, um, I would like to really, uh, strongly disagree with your approval of this, these building proposals. And also, also plead with you to get more information about how it might affect the public health of our community, because I think that this is, um, all along Middlefield Road we've had large developments of properties. Uh, we've had seen so much of this, and I don't, I don't feel that after the what happened in LA, that our infrastructures can really stand things that are maybe like less than building code standards, and what happens if there's an earthquake and then there's a fire and our fire department can't handle it, and our water supplies get, you know, compromised. And what if our medical system, if we keep up this continual density, what if, what if we find ourselves in the situation, and I know that that's the worst maybe the worst case scenario, but I know that some of you are thinking that there maybe needs to be more research about how this will be affecting our public health. And I would strongly encourage you to, to do that research and not be afraid of litigation, because it has to stop someplace. And where will it stop? And Palo Alto did a lot of resistance, and I think that Mountain View is capable of doing that as well. I'd like to also address some of the things that the builder said tonight, that it was affordable housing. I don't want to seem ungrateful for the fact that I have a place to live, and some people do not, but I think that it's not really affordable, the only people who really win in these housing developments are the builders. And the other things are left for us to deal with in terms of infrastructure and other things. And I hope that you'll support us in that. And also in conclusion I'd like to say that, that there should be no concessions that are not legally necessary to give. Um, uh, like not for open space requirements, certainly not for parking requirements. I agree that there's a terrible need for parking. Even now people are double parked on Tyrella, and yes, in fact, just last week there was an accident because of that. Um, so I, I think that maybe we should just think about using our energies in, in a way that clarifies the situation, and with that clarity we can proceed in a legal way to make things happen in a good way for everybody to maintain quality of life. Thank you.

[01:59:48] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Your time is up. Yeah, sorry, thank you. Okay, uh, Hui Wang, Eugene Cordero, Julie Muir, Isha Kumari. So if Eugene, Julie, Isha could queue, that would be much appreciated. Thank you, go ahead.

[02:00:06] Hui Wang: Good evening. Dear Mountain View City Council members and zoning administrators. Thank you for your time. I am here with my concerns towards the Tyrella Avenue housing development. We live two minutes walk from the site, started from 2022. And, uh, I have, agree with my neighbors that a 7-story structure with 3-story of parking will be overwhelming for the neighborhood, with a lot of concerns. On the other hand, I totally welcome developments with 3-story development or smaller FAR with controlled affordable housing ratio. Here are the reasons. First of all, almost all the buildings in the community are fewer than two stories, forming a cozy, walkable environment for the people living here. A 7-story building, mega building, will destroy the quiet neighborhood and we will be greeted with noise and smog from the stories, stories of garage above ground, facing the street, and many levels of stucco walls above. Let alone the sunshine we are going to lose. So far, the developer has not shown any renderings of eye-level, at street view, at the building entrance to prove if it fits the context. Another major concern is the community safety. The site sits right on the crossing on the way 5-minutes walk from Vargas International School and a few other elementary schools. A major school in the Mountain View city. And the increased traffic will be posing danger to kids and family going to the school. Traffic lights might be needed to be added, and we don't see the traffic study which is necessary to tackle this issue. Furthermore, I would like to question the need of a 7-story 80 units building on less than half an acre site itself. While transit-oriented development, TOD, with high floor area ratio is common these days in the Bay Area, typically in San Francisco, the site is not necessarily within the typical zone of a half-mile zone, half-mile distance. And I measured by myself instead, the site is actually more than one mile from the Caltrain Mountain View station. Needless to say that the demand for TOD dropped dramatically after COVID, with the work-style pattern change, and with a lot of developments already on hold throughout the Bay Area, making us question the necessity of this over-scaled development. Thank you so much for listening and I really appreciate your consideration. Thank you.

[02:02:20] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Eugene.

[02:02:32] Eugene Cordero: Hello, thank you for listening to me. So my name is Eugene Cordero, I'm a long-time resident in Mountain View, also a professor in the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State. I teach courses in climate change and climate solutions. I'm going to offer an alternative way to think about this. Um, when I talk to my students about what to do about climate change, housing comes up really quick here in the Bay Area. We know that there's a strong need for more housing, and that, uh, that it leads to many benefits. And that means reductions in air quality, especially when the housing is near transit. This place is about half a mile from Caltrain, half a mile from downtown Mountain View, half a mile from Whisman Station. So it is a transit-oriented development, and it can provide, if you have 80 units, those folks have the opportunity to walk and take, you know, the Stevens Creek Trail is right along there. Um, it's, it's a great place for putting density. And I know that for some folks here, and I'm sympathetic, that density makes it sound like, oh, it's going to be horrible. But if we look at what development has been in in good areas like in some parts of Europe, we see that density actually leads to more economic development, it leads to safety because there's people outside, it leads to people benefiting their personal health because they have access to biking. And this, um, proposal, it's actually done a lot to improve that. It's got unbundled parking, it has bike share, or um, electric bike stations, it has, uh, two spaces for, uh, car share, and it's really encouraging people to not to have to have multiple cars. And why is that a benefit? That's a benefit because it's really expensive to own a car. You know, it's of course there's the price of gas, but there's registration, there's insurance, there's depreciation. So if we can provide a place where people can live and they can own one car, that's a significant economic benefit, and there's environmental benefits with that as well. So, um, I want to encourage the council to approve this project because we need the housing. And council has said repeatedly over and over, you want housing. This developer has tried to develop this unit, this property since 19, in the early 1990s. That's over 30 years, been going to the city back and forth trying to get something developed. City staff are not really interested. They, they have blocked him many, many times. That's why there's builder's remedy. Why does that exist? Because cities are not building the housing.

8. COUNCIL, STAFF/COMMITTEE REPORTS

[02:05:14] Public Speaker: And that's why the state had to say we have to force it. But I think that the council here is really supportive of housing because they know what the benefits are going to be to downtown, to our community, to producing a safe and walkable and friendly area for our residents.

[02:05:30] Public Speaker: And so I want us to kind of build on that and think very broadly about this, and I would like you to strongly consider approving this. Thank you.

[02:05:40] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Apologies for my mispronunciation there. Um, Julie. Julie, Isha, Lou Abrams, Nishith Singh.

[02:05:53] Julie Muir: Good evening everyone. Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council, thank you again for all of the work that you guys do to make Mountain View a wonderful city to live in. My name is Julie Muir. I'm a resident here in Mountain View.

[02:06:07] Julie Muir: And I just want to offer, kind of following along with some of the other residents what they have said is that the waivers that this project is asking for, in this project but also built other builder remedy projects, do not allow for sound community and urban planning.

[02:06:27] Julie Muir: So I suggest that the city seek clarity on the waivers being requested and to do that by asking the City Attorney to go to court to clarify the legality of these waivers and to see if how it works out on this project, because that's the one that's in front of you, but then also how that will impact other projects.

[02:06:48] Julie Muir: And I just ask you to do that on behalf of Mountain View residents who are gonna have to live with the consequences. Right? This building project is forever. The consequences will be borne by those in that neighborhood who have to deal with the traffic, who have to deal with the, um, all of the negative parts of this project. So I just would ask that you would hold on this decision and seek clarity on the law. Thank you.

[02:07:11] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Isha?

[02:07:17] Isha Kumari: Hi, I'm Isha Kumari. I'm current resident of Mountain View and I'm here to request the city to deny this project unless, until it's compliant.

[02:07:27] Isha Kumari: I request that the council, I request council to protect the neighborhood's integrity and maintain its desirable living conditions. I have following concerns with the proposed project.

[02:07:41] Isha Kumari: Character and aesthetics. The proposed seven-story building significantly exceeds the current height of two to three stories in the neighborhood, disrupting the established low-rise character that resident values. This change would create an eyesore, diminishing the area's visual appeal and community's charm.

[02:08:04] Isha Kumari: Traffic congestion, like everyone mentioned, introduces 85 units on an half an acre site. This will substantially increase the traffic. With limited road capacity, this development could lead to severe congestion, longer commute times, and potential safety hazards. Traffic studies should be cited to illustrate the projected impact on the local infrastructure.

[02:08:30] Isha Kumari: The FAR, which is the floor area ratio and infrastructure load. The FAR of five is drastically higher than the typical half FARs, indicating excessive density. This overload could strain utilities such as water, electricity, potentially requiring cost...

Additional Content 1

[02:08:44] Paulette Vashio: costly upgrades that may not be feasible or desirable for current residents or if it is feasible, it would be from our tax dollars. The environment impact, the building's height will cast significant shadows affecting neighborhood properties and local greenery. I myself live across this property and I will be directly impacted by the sunlight and the environmental conditions that this will bring. The fire safety concerns, a taller building complicates evacuation processes and the fire department access, posing increased fire risk. The mechanical equipments that are going to be on the building top or anywhere it's situated is gonna generate more noise. It'll be disturbing the peace, which was the first reason why I ever moved to Mountain View. I used to be in a high-rise city when I was in the San Francisco. Parking challenges, like everyone mentioned, accommodating 85 units on limited land likely results in insufficient parking, leading to street congestion and reduced livability for residents. Population density and resource strain, the sharp increase in population density from 85 units will strain local amenities like schools, parks, reducing their availability...

[02:10:11] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you.

[02:10:15] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Okay, Lou... Oh, sorry. I just read what... might be the handwriting.

[02:10:26] Len Abrams: Hi, I'm Len Abrams. We've had the place since 1990, I guess, and it's a one-story condominium on Ada, which is I guess a block away. And I regularly go home from turning on Middlefield to Tyrella, and of course I had to take a different route because of that accident that was previously mentioned, but I have many times had to swerve around double-parked cars, Amazon trucks, etc. on Tyrella, which is a very narrow street. And I even in my complex have a problem with sightlines leaving my driveway on Ada, and this is going to make things much worse. Um... So I guess my points are the negative impact to the community. And I think in regards to the previous speaker's comments, I think it's... I've measured it and it's a little more than a mile to the Caltrain station. So it's not a half... within a half a mile. But anyway, it changes the community and the double-parked vehicles and more vehicles because this is less than half of the City Council's or the city's requirement for parking. Thank you very much for listening.

[02:12:31] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Nishit Singh, then Rachel Alavars.

[02:12:38] Nishit Singh: Hello, myself Nishit Singh. I would like to echo what my fellow residents have mentioned in terms of concerns against this project. As a neighborhood resident, I live right across the street on Middlefield and I would like to request the Mountain View City Council to protect the neighborhood's desirable living conditions overall. And overall, like, my concerns are in line with what everyone has already mentioned so far around the character and the aesthetics of this project. This is going to be completely out of the character of the area. We only have either a one-story or two-story buildings in the entire neighborhood. I don't see a single seven-story building in the entire 94043 zip code. And this is going to be just setting up a totally different kind of precedence in the area. This will also lead to significant traffic congestion, and it will not leave parking spots for individuals who... Like, even right now, there is a traffic or parking scenario in the neighborhood. And then, as others have already mentioned in the past, there are schools in the neighborhood, right? And then, for drop-off and everything, during school drop-off hours, the entire parking spaces are already occupied and there is a lot of traffic congestion during that time. And if we add a project that has more than, like, around 80 units without sufficient parking spaces, then it is going to just lead to street parking and eventually create public safety hazard over there for everyone. The floor area ratio thing, FAR, in my estimate, all the residential buildings over there in the neighborhood are like 0.5. This would be far more than 0.5. It would be in my approximation 5 or 6 FAR. That's like almost 10x of what is present in the neighborhood. And it will have significant environmental impact. It will raise fire safety concerns since the access is only going to be from the Tyrella side. Imagine being in a situation where you have 80 units and all the access and everything for the safety is going to be on the Tyrella side. That is going to raise a lot of concerns overall. To end my thought, I am also trained as an architect. And in my opinion, even imagining such a project which is just going to be so out of character in that area is just not in professional integrity overall. That's my overall thought on it. Thank you.

[02:14:26] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Rachel?

[02:14:34] Rachel Alavares: Thank you. My name is Rachel Alavares. My husband and I have lived a block away from the proposed development for almost 30 years. I'd like to provide a little history to add to the comments you've already heard and a little neighborhood information. Those of you who visited the site may have seen a block away that there is already public-serving establishments. There is the Clocktower Cafe, Roger's Deli, and a Chinese restaurant. Two blocks away there is a Everest restaurant serving wonderful Nepalese food. So we already do have public-serving restaurants, and I would warn of the health and safety effects of opening a residential restaurant or cafe to the public, especially if I understand correctly it's on the roof. There are access issues to consider. Also, you may be aware or not, but this applicant had previous projects in motion. Most recently, a 44-unit development that was going through review. Two days after the opening of the Builder's Remedy opportunity, he laid before the planners the 88-unit project, all fully prepared and laid out. I would like to know why he didn't simply add to that 44 units the additional 16... sorry, 20% requirement of affordable units that would have qualified it for Builder's Remedy, that would have then pushed that 44-unit project straight through. Also, two years ago, 44 units would have had cheaper finance and labor markets. So that was all I wanted to say. I do... I am curious why 44 units was not satisfactory and why instead an 88-unit tower or 80-unit tower was chosen. Thank you.

[02:16:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Any other in-person public comment that I missed? Alright. So, we're gonna move on to virtual. As I mentioned at the offset of our meeting, we have a little bit of a glitch and we're worried a little bit about feedback. So protect your ears as we try...

[02:16:50] Dylan O'Connell: Great, thank you. Hello Mayor and City Council. Good evening. First my sincere thanks to all members of the City Council. Whenever I come to listen to you guys in these meetings, I'm just so impressed with how thoughtful you are and how hard you work to make this community stronger. I'm Dylan O'Connell. I'm a nearby Mountain View resident for many years, and I'm here to speak in support of the Builder's Remedy project on Tyrella Avenue. I love living in Mountain View, but the housing shortage here has been devastating. This project delivers 80 new homes that we desperately need. In particular, I would really like to highlight the dire economic conditions we're all currently facing going forward. It's more important than ever to give people an affordable place to live near their family and their friends and their work. And that economic uncertainty hugely raises the costs of any delays and makes future projects much less likely. It's already so challenging to get anything built and I think it's only gonna get worse from here. For a more positive note, as someone with a set of poor eyesight, I know how hard it is to find housing in the area that isn't so reliant on 24/7 access to a car, and I know this area very well, and I'm thrilled that it's so close to the bike trails and the public transit and especially our wonderful downtown. So thank you all so much again for your great work.

[02:18:02] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Okay. That concludes in-person and virtual public comment. So I will bring the item back for Council deliberation and action. And note that a motion to approve the recommendation should include reading the title of the resolutions attached to the report, as well as I believe the attachment for item 6.2 that staff also included, looking at staff, is that correct?

[02:18:32] Community Development Director Christian Murdock: Yes, Mayor. The two conditions of approval related to building code and local amendments.

[02:18:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Right, so it's the two... the two items as well as the other two items that staff recommend building into the project resolution. Correct. Thank you. Well I think um... Oh okay. Go ahead.

[02:18:58] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Ramirez. Thank you. First, I want to express my appreciation to everyone in the community who participated in this meeting and for all of the emails that you've sent. We do our best to stay on top of the correspondence that we receive, but I think it's tough when there's an overwhelming number of speakers, so I certainly did my best and tried to ask questions in advance of or before the public input to better understand some of the ideas and concerns that were shared tonight. It's hard to know where to start, but I'll start with maybe responding directly to some of the suggestions that were shared. And I might need staff's and the City Attorney's help in articulating some of these points. There were suggestions to postpone the meeting or postpone a decision to determine if the Builder's Remedy was applicable in this case. And I'm not certain that the answer that we would receive from a court is going to be the answer that you're seeking. The challenge is that the applicability of the Builder's Remedy I think is fairly clear. The Builder's Remedy provision applies when an application is submitted and is deemed complete when a city does not have a certified housing element. And when the applicant's project was submitted, it was during a period of time, a brief period, but nevertheless a period of time when our housing element had not been certified by HCD. And I'll share that our staff did a good job. There were many jurisdictions that took substantially longer to get certified. I think most recently the county was I think good to... yeah, the last one to get certified, two years late. And there are something like 40-some-odd Builder's Remedy applications in unincorporated parts of the county that are causing a significant number of challenges. So it was an unusually challenging housing element cycle. The standards imposed by the state were much greater than what they had been historically. And I think every jurisdiction really struggled to meet that bar. And we were a few months late, but we eventually did meet the bar and our housing element was certified. But there were still five applications submitted in that period. And the Builder's Remedy provision is... is ambiguous, I think, as the City Attorney was sharing earlier, but some of the fundamental limitations are clear. We can't deny a project simply because it is inconsistent with the general plan or with the zoning. And that's a major constraint. That's where most of the development standards that we would impose are found. So it's not like a State Density Bonus Law project where there are waivers and concessions and incentives. It's a different set of limitations. And the state has attempted to clarify them. I think there were even in the emails we received, suggestions that we look at, I don't remember what the law is, it's a Buffy Wicks bill, AB 14 something or other, but even then, right, it's the challenge with using state laws, as the Community Development Director was sharing earlier, the rights of this project are vested under a different state law that is intended to provide some certainty to a developer that the rules aren't going to change in the middle of the game. So in this case we're heavily constrained. And it's a difficult position for a City Council to be in, to review a project in what is, you know, a public hearing where we take public input and we, I think, all desire to make the project as favorable and beneficial to the community as we can, but the state has severely restricted our ability to take any action other than approve the project as proposed. We can, I think the staff have worked with the applicant in good faith to try and address community concerns and explore voluntary applications of our development standards, and the applicant has shared some occasions where he has done so voluntarily, but at the end of the day, our ability to deny the project or to impose changes that reduce the density or render the project financially infeasible are really limited. And if we attempted to do so, it is very difficult for us to defend those impositions in court. I think that's what the intent of the Housing Accountability Act is, right? It's to make it very difficult for a city to deny housing or to reduce the density of housing. And the Builder's Remedy provision in particular is extremely challenging and constraining. So, there are a bunch of other stuff I could say, I'm curious to hear what my colleagues have to say, but since I have the great privilege of terming out in a year and a half, I'm gonna go ahead and make the motion to approve the staff recommendations, including adopting a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View conditionally approving a development review permit to construct a seven-story 80-unit residential condominium building replacing an existing single-family house, a heritage tree removal permit to remove six heritage trees on a 0.48-acre project site located at 294 to 296 Tyrella Avenue, APN 160-32-001 and 160-32-002, and finding the project to be categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to section 15332, infill development projects of the California Environmental Quality Act guidelines, to be read in title only, further reading waived. Adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View conditionally approving a tentative tract map to create a single lot for 80 condominium units and one common lot at 294 to 296 Tyrella Avenue, APN 160-32-001 and 160-32-002, and finding the project to be categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to section 15332 infill development projects of the California Environmental Quality Act guidelines, to be read in title only, further reading waived. And then also a modification to condition of approval number 64, building codes. Construction plans must... Do I have to read this into the record as well or just accept the amendments?

[02:26:36] City Attorney Krishan Chopra: You can accept the proposed amendments.

[02:26:38] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you. So with the amendments that staff has shared during this meeting. Thank you.

[02:26:53] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Sorry. I'm sorry the public comment period is closed unfortunately, and now we're on deliberation and action. I apologize. Um, so we have a motion by Councilmember Ramirez.

[02:27:11] Councilmember John McAlister: I'd sort of like to hear what the Vice Mayor has to say first, I'm sorry.

[02:27:15] Councilmember Emily Ramos: Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Councilmember McAlister, for letting me go before you. And thank you, Councilmember Ramirez, for falling on the sword. This is kind of where we have the issue of a larger picture and the immediate results, those who are affected by the immediate results, have a significant clash. The Builder's Remedy, what some wanted to call the zoning holiday, or there's a lot of different names for it. Some happy names, some not so. And it has been a very divisive topic among many of communities. The Builder's Remedy was supposed to be that hammer that the state put down on cities where they felt refused to build housing. I don't believe Mountain View is a community like that, but it provides an introspection of what are the barriers to housing that our community puts forth. And in a way, it's a very judgmental way that they put it, but I would like to have us reflect on in a non-judgmental way. The problem is it's not that community character isn't important, it's just hard to quantify. It's hard to defend. It's hard to put into court and fight that out. It's a little easier to take actual metrics. There are things... there were conditions of approval that the developer has requested, and my understanding is we are holding our ground on some of them, and we are holding our ground because we dug through the code and ensured... well, not ensured, with law, it's never... nothing is really assured, very different from engineering, where like it either works or it doesn't. But I believe our staff is trying to do the best that they can with the constraints that were put on us to ensure that, one, Mountain View still remains an affordable community while also being a community that values your input. I welcome some of you whose first time is here, and that makes my heart sing, but it makes me really sad that we won't be able to do what you ask. But I appreciate staff's ability to help us navigate through this project. I appreciate the community's patience and the community very much letting us know what is important to them as we consider future developments, because each one of these discussions helps us formulate what is important to our community. With Builder's Remedy, we are far more limited to what we can and cannot require, but that's only five projects. Other projects will come forth, we know what the community is seeking, we know what the community will have a lot of opinions about, and we know that as we go forward with future developments that will impact our community. So I have seconded the motion, because I can't let Councilmember Ramirez just die on the sword on his own. And those are my comments.

[02:31:26] Councilmember John McAlister: Yeah, I have a question first before I go into my... I'm going... So there was talking about a lot of traffic. Will this 80 units, this traffic require a traffic review of that intersection that may require a signal, I mean stop signs or yields or somewhere along that line?

[02:31:48] Senior Civil Engineer Renee Gunn: Good evening, Council members. I'm Renee Gunn. I'm a Senior Civil Engineer in the Land Development Division of Public Works. We did do a limited MTA, a multi-modal transportation analysis for this project, and we did look at the peak number of trips that would be in the hour, and it didn't have any adverse impact to that intersection.

[02:32:23] Councilmember John McAlister: So... I guess there's some concern over there. Was... did you take into consideration the 80 parking spaces and people coming and going into that VMT study?

[02:32:39] Senior Civil Engineer Renee Gunn: So the way that traffic studies are conducted, they use the MUTCD, the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control, and the way that we calculate how many new trips are going to be created by that project is by the number of units in that project. So the standard methodology that we use, that VTA uses, counts the number of units, not the number of parking spaces. But you can get discounts on those trip generations based off of things like TDM or reduced parking.

[02:33:23] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay, so I'm not familiar with a lot of that, but I figure that we're gonna have three-bedroom, two-bedrooms, so we're gonna have more than 80 units... more than 80 cars potentially in there. So can you take your standards and then add in external factors to give it a more of a... a local feel for it?

[02:33:48] Senior Civil Engineer Renee Gunn: So the concern that comes is that we need to treat all all projects equally. And so we need to have a standard for how we calculate those trip generations. And I would have to defer to the traffic engineer on whether or not there are things that we normally do to change those numbers ever so slightly, but I can tell you that the study that was done here is per our standard methodology.

[02:34:21] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay. Well, shouldn't... well this is sort of going sideways with traffic, but... thank you for that clarity on that one. Okay. Here's my thoughts. I'm new, again, I told everybody I came into this housing element thing totally unaware of what's going on, and staff, you did a fantastic job of helping me better understand it, because I didn't know if we were renting, were we selling, what was going on. So I appreciate your... it was very helpful. But as a person that looks at these things, and I know developers like certainty over flexibility, the wording of the Builder's Remedy, and this is not towards the applicant, it's just towards the legislation that really concerns me, that potentially gives us hope that we could look at, the word feasibility or infeasibility. There's no definition of it. What's feasible to me, it may not be feasible to the individual, and to allow these projects to go forward without defining, or just giving somebody whatever I feel like is unfeasible, not saying to a developer, I'm just saying in general, that they can define whatever is important to them without looking at the standards of the state or the city. And I will not support this motion. I may be a symbolic one against it, but I think we need to start looking at when there is words that we are not allowed to have the individual define what we're doing, because normally we say, here's what they're doing, doing, doing, doing, we don't ask for a pro forma, which would be nice to have because then it would sort of give us an idea of what's going on, but then that sort of gets into the mechanics of the project. But this project or the word unfeasible, feasible or infeasible, is too wide open. And so, to my fellow council members, it's not clear. There is... this is so ambiguous that it could be anything, and anything could be approved. And so I really appreciate the people that came in and said, let's take this to a potential court and get it clarified. People weren't pushing no, they wanted it, they were just saying let's see if we can get clarity on this going forward. And that's why my symbolic vote will be to say no, I do not want this to go forward until we get clarity on what's required because cities are required to be very clear what they're doing, but the state legislature isn't giving us that ability to to interpret it. We it's so broad that we have to interpret it way over here and not actually what's fair for the community. So that's one of my other concerns. On a local note, we the VMT, when we had this traffic study, what bothers me is that I've seen other projects that say vehicle miles travel, it's a low area. But I'm also seeing all of a sudden these big developments all popping up in this whole area. So all of a sudden, there's gonna be one development that triggers it from a low mileage to there, and all of a sudden we just sort of made the project worse. So I'd like to have staff, when they consider this, look at what's going around it. So eventually we're gonna have that problem where the vehicle mile travels is no longer there, and yet we've allowed this situation to develop. So with that being said, as I said, I will not support this motion. I really would like to see the council join cities like Palo Alto or Los Gatos or other potential other cities that are looking at how to get clarity on the Builder's Remedy, that once we so, I know it's a limited period, but this will be ramifications going down, it could be potential precedent going forward, and it would be helpful because who knows what legislators going to put on us again where we lost our ability to do what the neighborhoods want. I believe in housing, but I feel more important about developing communities. And if we're just building housing, I call it silos, we need to look at buildings that provide open space that keep cars off the street, that allow people to gather together and feel welcome to Mountain View. A lot of you guys have been here for years, I've been here for 71 years, so that gives you an indication of how long I've been around, and we had a good community back then. And I'm sorry to say it's it's slowly going away. Someone mentioned as Mountain View's affordable, that's another word that's got to be defined because what's really affordable because people are saying it's not affordable. My two kids, they can't afford to live in Mountain View. And so I know when we've got some new condos coming along, it's the ones that I heard on El Camino, 1.5 million, and they still haven't been built. So that's a chunk of change. So you got my thoughts, of where I'm going, and we hope for the best.

[02:40:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Alright. Councilmember Clark.

[02:40:28] Councilmember Chris Clark: Thank you. Well, while I share many of the same concerns as Councilmember McAlister, I tend to take a little different approach. The one thing I would slightly disagree with is I've been in Mountain View 17 years. I strongly prefer the Mountain View of today than what I guess I was in here in the 60s and 70s, but you know, I didn't move to Mountain View, I didn't deliberately move to suburbia. I wanted to be in a vibrant community that I knew would change and grow over time, and I view it as I think we've made progress over the years, and while there are certainly downsides to growth and development and vitality, including the cost of living and the cost of housing, there are also a lot of great benefits that come with it, and I moved here to be in the center of Silicon Valley and a vibrant community because I really appreciated the tactics that Mountain View has taken over time to grow and adapt and do all the things that it's done. So, while I share some of the concerns that were raised, I don't do protest votes. I don't vote certain ways to send messages. That's just my personal tact. I have nothing against that. I do want to dispel this myth that, you know, if Mountain View would just, and I totally understand the folks who are here saying please stand up and fight for us, you choose your battles. There's this... I think people are... people are talking about Los Altos and Palo Alto standing up, but they're... they're not really what they're talking about is state legislation that will have no impact on this project or any of the Builder's Remedy projects, the 10 that Palo Alto has. What they're talking about is how do we handle Builder's Remedy projects in the future, in future housing element cycles. So we were one of the few cities to get our housing element, we did submit it before the deadline, the reason that we were subject to Builder's Remedy is that it took the state however long the state takes to review it, and they sent back comments and they said that we needed to make some changes, and that was the... that was the reason why we were subject to Builder's Remedy for a few months. And I wish that hadn't happened. But it did. But just for those who feel like we we dropped the ball, we didn't drop the ball, we submitted what we thought would be a fully compliant housing element by the deadline, and we had to make some changes. So, that's a long way of saying I personally don't like this project. But I've also been around and doing this long enough that I know I know what the requirements are of us. And I know that sometimes we have to make decisions that are hopefully in the best interest of the entire community, based on the facts and circumstances and everything, all the other information that we have. I will just make one comment, as someone who lives in a 50-something unit condo building, so not quite the size of this. I would say that opening a food sales or anything in a building like that would be an absolute security nightmare because you constantly have people coming in and out of the building, and there are just packages sitting around, and it's just, it sounds nice, but I think logistically it would require a redesign and from a security standpoint. So I will reluctantly be supporting this motion. I don't think and while I do agree that the Builder's Remedy and everything should all be looked at again, and that whole process, I actually support some of the efforts of state legislators to resolve some of this. I don't... those efforts aren't going to change the rules for something that has already been submitted, and unfortunately there isn't a... as far as I know there aren't judges and courts sitting around waiting for, twiddling their thumbs waiting for cities to come ask them questions about Builder's Remedy. The only way to get those answers, the legislature left it deliberately, unfortunately, deliberately left it feasible and infeasible to the whims of the jurisdictions and the courts, and so the only way to get certainty around that is either to change the legislation, which won't end up applying retroactively, that I know of, or through litigation, which I don't think personally is the route that I would like to take at this time. So...

[02:45:19] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Councilmember Showalter.

[02:45:22] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Yeah, I don't really have any very much to add. I think all of us really wish this proposal was less dense. And we are in this position where essentially this Builder's Remedy is a penalty for not getting your housing element done in a timely fashion. But the rules of what was included in the housing element were drastically changed this time. So although this Builder's Remedy has been on the books for several decades, I've never heard of it being used until this round. Because really the rules for what has to be included in a housing element have changed so dramatically. So that said, we are caught with this penalty. And but that doesn't mean, as you've all suggested, that we should stop advocating far from it. We do need to talk and are talking with our legislators about what's wrong with this. And what can be changed for... but that's for future cycles, that's not for this one. So we are doing that, and we will continue to do that because it's very important. But the other thing I wanted to mention is that there are sort of two things that I always bring up that the city really needs to do. We really need to make sure that things are designed well, and we really need to make sure that they're built well. And normally, the design process, we all hear about it, it goes on a long time, but and it has a lot of rules, we can't apply all those rules this time, just the written down, you know, just the very objective ones. But we will be making sure that this is built safely. These Builder's Remedies are required to go along with all of the state building code, just like any other thing that is constructed in the state of California, and we will be doing our due diligence to make sure that this building is inspected properly and that it is constructed properly. So those are... that's just what I wanted to share with you, that it will be constructed safely. The reach codes that they are objecting to relate to decarbonization. They relate to doing things that change reduce our carbon footprint, and some of them are expensive. Many of us think they're well worth it, but in this case, the developer doesn't agree, and they are not required by state law to to follow that. So anyway, thank you for listening to my comments.

[02:48:14] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Councilmember Hicks.

[02:48:16] Councilmember Alison Hicks: So I'll start out by saying I'm not happy with this project, I don't think that it fits into our community well for any number of reasons, or fits Mountain View values in terms of for one thing if you have a building this tall you need wider sidewalks because many people will be coming in and out of it, and walking around it, and that's just to start with. At the same time, the purpose of the Builder's Remedy is to force cities who don't take the housing element seriously and are willing to drag their feet forever to take it seriously and make plans to produce housing. I don't think that that applies to Mountain View. I think we do take it seriously and we're taking it seriously. I actually think we should not have been caught up in this, but we were, or we are. And I also think that... I also think that so I do think I do support reforming the Builder's Remedy, and supporting... joining with cities that are doing that. But it will not affect this project. Is my understanding of things. And I also think that there's little chance that if we denied this project that we would have success in changing it. So for that reason, I will be reluctantly supporting the motion.

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[02:53:44] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: can or council, and I did watch the zoning administrator hearing and I know many residents not only went to that but are here tonight and I want to express my appreciation. And all of that culminates I think in the council struggles that we're having up here on the dais and quite frankly the lack of enthusiasm for this project as presented. And I feel that we have a few more builder's remedy projects that the council is going to need to see. And I would just ask that those that have them would take into account and heed our request to involve the community, to involve council. The applicant also did not reach out to to me as a member of council for my input prior to tonight. So, we hope and we have been very fortunate to have people act in good faith in our city and tonight unfortunately we do not see that before us. But given the different constraints that were outlined by our City Attorney and staff, I have to join my colleagues. I think we would all join John in his protest. However, we are constrained tonight. But I will say there's state legislation that seeks clarity on the builder's remedy with our State Senator Josh Becker, the Senate Bill is 457. And I know my colleagues and I will be keeping a close eye on that.

[02:55:42] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: And I would say too, just we are a community for housing and that prioritizes it, and I just want to re-emphasize that the community could have been a great supporter rather than what we're hearing tonight due to the lack of outreach. So there's a motion and a second, and so let's call the question.

[02:56:03] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Alright, and that passes 6-1. Thank you. We will move on to item 7.1, the preliminary review of Fiscal Year 2025-26 our recommended budget and we'll just allow staff to make their way to the dais and just take a quick 5-minute break for colleagues. Thank you.

[03:01:49] Dawn Arango: How's it going? Okay. Yeah. Everything's good. Test test. Okay, that worked.

[03:02:49] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Alright everyone, we're gonna reconvene. Thank you very much for your patience. We're gonna move on to item 7.1, our preliminary review of Fiscal Year 2025-26 our recommended budget. Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone and Assistant Finance and Administrative Services Director Grace Tseng will present the item. If you'd like to speak on this item in person, please submit a blue speaker card to the City Clerk now. We'll begin with our staff presentation.

[03:03:22] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Alright, thank you very much. Good evening Mayor Kamei, Vice Mayor Ramos and Council members. As stated earlier, Derek Rampone, your Finance and Administrative Services Director. Joining me this evening is Grace Tseng, the Assistant Finance and Administrative Services Director. Tonight we are presenting a preliminary review of the Fiscal Year 25-26 recommended budget. Just as a heads up, I'd like to remind everyone that this presentation focuses mainly on the general fund of the city as the main operating fund. As you know, the budget process really starts, really kicks off in November, 8 months prior to when it actually comes into effect. In November we send out a memo, a kickoff memo, for departments to work on their requests and they submit them to the finance department around the holidays. We then give a mid-year budget update every February, which includes an economic update, which was done less than 2 months ago. We are now in April, providing the preliminary review of the budget. And as I said earlier, this is mainly focusing on the general fund.

[03:05:22] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: We will then issue the recommended budget at the end of May, and we will come back to the City Council on June 10th with the recommended budget that includes a full analysis and economic outlook. And then on June 24th, after any final updates, we will come back to the City Council for the approval of the adopted budget. As we have discussed previously, the city has a long history of strong and sound fiscal practices. The city maintains fiscally prudent budgeting practices of balancing ongoing expenditures with ongoing revenues and only uses one-time revenues for one-time expenditures. The city makes it a priority to annually adopt structurally balanced operating budgets every year. In recent years, the city has experienced a strong revenue growth resulting in larger than normal operating balances at year-end, and these operating balances have been used to address a portion of the city's unfunded liabilities, such as making additional payments to CalPERS to pay down the city's pension liability, and also to fully fund the city's other post-employment benefits due to retirees for health insurance.

[03:07:18] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Another one of the city's financial practices is to build reserves in anticipation of potential budget constraints and to maintain sufficient funds to withstand significant temporary declines in revenues. In accordance with Council Policy A11, the city's reserve policy designates various reserve levels that are set for a number of uses. Among them is the general fund reserve, which is required to be funded at a level of at least 20 percent. And I'm happy to report that we are currently at around 20 percent at that reserve. And finally, staff have really solid financial experience, not only in the finance department but other departments as well. As a result of the sound fiscal practices and current and former staff having strong financial acumen, you can see the city has received several types of financial recognition and continues to receive this recognition. In 2001, the city was awarded as a AAA issuer credit rating by Standard & Poor's. They then upgraded this to the highest rating possible because of a solid and diversified local tax base, the city's low debt burden, high property values and personal income levels, and the expectation of continued strong financial operations by the city. At the time, Mountain View was actually only one of three cities to receive this distinguished honor. Now there's more cities that have this, but we were one of three at the beginning.

[03:08:58] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: The city has also received excellence for budget presentation and financial reporting for the budget and the annual audit report from the Government Finance Officers Association. In addition, the purchasing section of Finance has been awarded the achievement of excellence in procurement by the National Purchasing Institute. All of these awards are great examples of the excellent products the city prepares in the fields of budget reporting and procurement. Okay, as we turn to Building the Mountain View of Tomorrow, I'd like to provide an update on a new revenue the city is currently authorized to receive. Measure G, an increase in the property transfer tax of any property transfers of over 6 million dollars, became effective on December 20th of last year. This measure, as you know, was approved by over 72 percent of voters in November. Staff is estimating that the annual revenue could be 9.5 million dollars. City staff has recently held a meeting facilitated by the county with title companies last month to provide information on the new tax tier. So far, there have been two transactions over 6 million dollars, with one being under review for exemption actually. But at this time it's hard to, it remains to be seen when or how much the revenue will be in the future. Depending on property transactions, it could take a while to see significant revenue coming in for the city.

[03:11:17] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: I'd like to provide a quick economic update since the mid-year budget was given on February 25th. As you know, there's been quite a lot of economic activity since February. A federal government shutdown has been averted. Tariffs have been implemented, rescinded, and delayed and have been changing in amount and by country on a regular basis. And as a result, inflation still remains a real concern of most economists. As of last week, the stock market has seen dramatic decreases since our mid-year budget update less than 2 months ago. And it should be noted that the health of the stock market really impacts the return at CalPERS. If they don't meet their 6.8 percent assumed return on investment, the city has to make up the loss by contributing more every year. Also, the UCLA Anderson Forecast, a leading forecasting organization that's been around for over 70 years, has recently issued their first ever recession watch indicating that a downturn in the economy could result in the coming year or two. In their press release, they discuss the potential for a recession to be stagflationary, which is the combination of high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and elevated unemployment.

[03:12:56] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: And as you will see on the next slide, stagflation has been a recent hot topic among many economists. All of this really points to slow or stagnant economic growth in the near future. Here are some recent headlines that we've seen. There's a lot of talk obviously about a potential recession or stagflation, as I mentioned, and including the stock market drop that's recently occurred. On the flip side, there has been a little bit of good news with the addition of 220,000 jobs in March. Overall, as I said earlier, it just seems to be a lot of economic uncertainty, but as the time goes on, staff will be continuing to watch the data and hear from our economists and revenue specialists as we finalize the recommended budget in the next few months. As we turn to look at the potential impacts directly to the city as a result of recent federal actions, there are a few areas I'd like to highlight. The first is the amount of funding the city has received in the form of grants from the federal government. The city received over 6 million dollars in federal funds last year. To put that in perspective, it's a little bit more than 1 percent of the total city revenue.

[03:14:35] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: As you can see on the list here, a majority are for housing-related programs for the community, with a small portion for transportation-related projects such as traffic lights and also a small COVID reimbursement from FEMA. A very recent potential impact that has just occurred now in the city is an item that is in Congress currently. They're considering, which includes passing a tax bill that would include repealing the ability to issue tax-exempt municipal bonds. As you know, in the past, the city has issued several tax-exempt debts for improvements in the Shoreline community to finance the construction of Graham Reservoir, for wastewater projects, and also to refund some older Shoreline debt to take advantage of some cost savings. So repealing the availability of this tax-exempt financing for state and local governments would increase the borrowing cost to the city. This would potentially limit the ability to invest in vital public projects and would also increase the financial burden on local taxpayers as project costs increase as a result of these higher financing costs.

[03:15:48] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: In addition, as the city prepares to potentially issue tax-exempt bonds later this year to help finance the replacement of the police and fire building, repealing the ability for the city to use this tax-exempt financing could cause the cost of the new building to increase, which could reduce or delay the project until additional financing could be generated. It is also important to note that recent federal actions in regards to tariffs, which can cause the cost of goods to increase and result in inflation, can impact city operations. The city experiences these impacts by seeing a rise in construction costs, primarily for materials. Staff will also continue to monitor the possible federal impacts on the city as actions are taken at the federal level. Now we're going to turn to the preliminary numbers for next fiscal year 25-26, the recommended budget. As a reminder, this slide is presenting the general operating fund. And as you can see, the budget is balanced and stable, showing a slight operating balance of 96,000 dollars at the end of the year.

[03:16:47] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Overall, as we'll discuss later, there's a limited number of new positions being proposed, and next year's budget really focuses on addressing inflationary costs that we're experiencing, such as cost increases in the city's janitorial contract and other services. This is a snapshot of the revenues and expenditures as compared to the current year adopted budget, the current year estimated actuals, and the recommended budget for next fiscal year. As you can see, the current fiscal year, actual revenues are coming in higher than the adopted budget, and expenditures are coming in slightly lower than the adopted budget. And as for next year, as we talked about in the previous slide, we're expecting revenues to slightly outpace expenditures by 96,000. Those are the yellow columns. As you can see in the column second from the left, referring to the 24-25 current fiscal year that we're in, we're projecting an estimated 8.7 million dollar operating balance. As previously stated, next year's budget has a slight balance of 96,000 in the third column from the left, but as you can see starting after that in 26-27, deficits are projected from 2 million dollars to 3.7 million dollars. The staff recommendation will be to save any operating balance from this current fiscal year to potentially cover any future deficits.

[03:18:09] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Here is a snapshot of the city's estimated available balance and how staff is proposing to use it as part of the 25-26 recommended budget. You can see that we are estimating that we have a little over 26 million to be available at the end of this current fiscal year. There's also non-discretionary and discretionary recommendations for funding. After limited-period expenses and reserves are funded, we are estimating that we will be carrying forward a balance of nearly 4.4 million into the next fiscal year 26-27. I would like to point out that this is about half of what we anticipate or of what was available one year ago at this time. This 4.4 million dollars that we're anticipating for 26-27 will be used for limited period funding expenses and reserves in future years. As noted in the staff report, there are four positions that are being recommended in the general operating fund to be added. Two are new ongoing positions and the other two are actually conversions from limited period to regular ongoing positions. As detailed starting on page 8 in the staff report, this is a summary of ongoing budget recommendations for the general operating fund for next year.

[03:18:44] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: The non-discretionary at the top are being recommended to fund existing and new required operation costs and are related mostly to technology and the contract for janitorial services as mentioned earlier. And then the discretionary funding of 1.6 million is related to the four new ongoing positions discussed on the previous slide and other high-priority programs and services. We also have limited period funding that's being recommended in the amount of 5.6 million. To put this into context, for the current fiscal year we're in, 24-25, we had 10.8 million of limited period funding approved in the adopted budget. So we're only recommending 5.6 for this next fiscal year. And as stated earlier, the city only uses one-time revenues to fund these type of one-time expenses. For additional details you can see page 10 of the staff report. And then to wrap it all up I've listed the next steps in the budget process on this slide. As you can see, there's something in every month from now until the end of June. In May, the public hearing is slated for the CDBG and HOME programs and another study session. And then June 10th will be the public hearing for the recommended budget. And finally on June 24th, the operating budget and CIP budget will be adopted. And with that, thank you for your time and look forward to answering any questions.

[03:18:50] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you so much, and before we open it to council questions, I'll turn it over to City Manager McCarthy.

[03:22:08] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Thank you Mayor. So um, one of the things that I wanted to just do a touch base with Council on is about why we're here now in April. Um, so you may recall that the past several years we've typically just had the mid-year budget check-in and the budget brought in June. And during the pandemic years we actually had quarterly updates to Council just because things were in flux so much. So we were coming in November, um February, this spring, and then in June. So the Council requested last year that we have a preliminary check-in with uh with Council before the budget uh was to come in June. So that's really what this is intended to be, a review of what the recommendations are and then making sure that they are aligned or not with what Council is wanting for your service levels and for the programs and priorities that we have identified. Uh, I want to uh emphasize the uncertainty that you heard our Finance Director talking about. Uh, we know that we don't have that much federal funding coming to us, but the intangible effects we'll certainly feel. And as mentioned, it's everything from our construction costs, so our own projects, our own facilities, our own roadwork, our own buildings, even the price of buying vehicles that is going to increase considerably, especially as we move to purchasing more electric vehicles, which will also cost more money.

[03:22:14] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: So there's there's a lot of things that we are watching for increased costs that we can't quite predict right now, but we know it's very important for us to be mindful of. And then I also want to emphasize the piece that you heard our Finance Director talking about, which is the the volatility of this market and the impact on our pension system. And this is statewide. So for many years the public employees retirement system, so PERS, um has not necessarily met its assumed uh rate of return. And when that rate of return is not met, essentially it means that all of the agencies that participate in PERS have increased costs annually. So as there are negative effects from this stock market and all the volatility now, if they don't meet that assumed rate of return, it just means that our pension costs are going to go up. So the number that we have in the budget now is very likely to be much higher than what we're assuming it to be. So although our budget is balanced now, we just need to be very careful and cautious with how uncertain things are. And I think it's a it's a positive thing that we've been able to come talk to you essentially every other month this spring because of everything that's happening.

[03:22:36] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: So we will have more of an update for you in June, and I think we all know that throughout the month of April and May we're going to see what impacts the federal administration, uh what what the impacts of decisions from the federal administration might be, and we'll be able to talk more with you all about that in June. And then lastly I just wanted to highlight a couple things that we've placed a lot of great importance on um in making sure that we have a lot of transparency to our community. Um we do look at the budget requests from departments with a budget equity lens. This is something that we implemented several years ago. Uh we also for the first time have produced a budget video for our community and we also produce what's called a budget in brief, which is a really short document that summarizes our several hundred page budget book into an infographic that's essentially like five or six pages. So we started to do that so that the community would have um simpler and easier um information to digest. So that will also be a part of what comes after our June meetings. So I just wanted to kind of set the stage and reiterate that before you go into your questions. Thank you Mayor.

[03:22:42] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. I will now open it up to Council questions and I see Councilmember Ramirez.

[03:22:56] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you Mayor, I just have one quick question. Um, related to something that the City Manager brought up, how often does CalPERS uh look at and modify the discount rate? Is that something that's triggered by uh changes in in the market or is that just reviewed annually?

[03:23:08] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Yeah, good question. Thank you for the question. Uh, it's actually every four years that they meet to discuss it.

[03:23:11] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Do you know when the next time that might be? In other words, is that something that we might want to think about as we develop the budget or I'm guessing you probably have but if that's next year that might change the way...

[03:23:13] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Yeah, I want to say they just met recently but and they there's talk about them changing it, but I have not heard of the actual change in the last session that they had. So, but we will watch it and we will hear as soon as something happens.

[03:23:34] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you, appreciate it.

[03:24:03] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Councilmember Hicks.

[03:24:05] Councilmember Alison Hicks: So I asked most of my questions in written form and they were answered. Thank you very much. Um my my only question is what kind of feedback you're wanting. Is are we running this more like a study session? Do you want big picture feedback, getting in the weeds, all of the above? I'm thinking big picture, but...

[03:24:08] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Yes, thank you Councilmember Hicks. So I think it's more do these preliminary recommendations um are they acceptable to Council? Are there any things that you might want to have us look at or tweak um or change? For example, reserves. Um and we're happy to ask or answer questions about that. So big picture, but if you do have anything specific, that's what we would bring back to you all with the budget in June.

[03:25:10] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Okay, thank you.

[03:25:18] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Councilmember Showalter.

[03:26:40] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Oh I was hoping she would take longer so I have more time to think. Um anyway uh yeah first of all I I just like to I know we're not supposed to make comments right now but this was really much easier to read I remember than previous ones. I don't know if I had just had enough coffee and I hadn't before but really I I appreciated that. I particularly liked the reserve um memo. That was very helpful in identifying what each of the reserves were. Um ah I um I'm interested in the the the the amounts for the Measure G. Ah we we had um basically uh forecast we'd have about ten million dollars a year and we're you know just a few months into the year per but but the amount is you know it's very small. And I wonder does that include the sale of the Microsoft um ah property and is that expected to be included because I thought that would be...

[03:26:50] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Thank you Councilmember Showalter. Unfortunately the sale of that property was prior to um this going into effect.

[03:27:35] Councilmember Pat Showalter: That is unfortunate. Okay. Alright. Um okay. And I I just as a general thing I I really liked seeing the conversions of limited time um employees to full-time employees. I think that that is very good. We that means that those individuals have um they've worked here, we know that they have a good work ethic, that they fit into the community... and um and uh so I think that that's really a and it's good for morale. So I'm I'm really pleased to see that. So that's a philosophical thing I I wanted to mention. And then um uh I did as as Councilmember Hicks um uh mentioned I I did uh ask a lot of questions this time and I'm not going to go over those again. But one that I didn't ask is about the cost of electric vehicles. And I do understand that some electric vehicles are are expen- more expensive, but not always. And I'm wondering when we expect the sort of the trend in the development of electric vehicles that are used by our fleet to um to have matured enough so that they won't be more expensive. Do we have a feeling for when that's going to happen?

[03:29:07] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Thank you Councilmember Showalter. Our Public Works Director Dawn Cameron will attempt to look into her crystal ball.

[03:29:53] Public Works Director Dawn Cameron: So, thanks for the question. It's a tough one to answer. Um I I think what I can say is that the technology is continuously improving, right, and so as the technology is, I'll call it going up, it's kind of catching pace um with other things that are going on. It's hard to pinpoint a year in which these things will equalize, uh but we've been kind of watching the trend of EVs over the past 10 years or so. Um gosh, I don't I don't know that I want to say this on camera, but memorialized forever on the internet, but I I would guess somewhere like seven to 10 years maybe we might be about uh about what you're asking for.

[03:29:56] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. And then and then the other question I have is that you know um having looked at these budgets for the last few years, um we've been seeing expectations for um the economic situation to decline for several years. You know, you've been forecasting that that several years out we will have a deficit. And we're all very delighted that that doesn't seem to be the case now, so that's great. But um it seems like in a sense you made the budget expectations um and the budget analysis really previously to the um uncertainty that has been um produced by actions of the federal administration in the last 6 weeks. I mean a lot of the budget was developed before the last 6 weeks. That's what I you know I sort of ask. So from my point of view, is it do you feel like this chart is um I feel like the circumstances behind this chart really aren't the same as the circumstances that we have today. And I'm not sure that anybody can know exactly what they are. So I don't mean that as a, you know, as a um uh a criticism. It's just it it's not as reflective as I would have thought normally because things are are so chaotic. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

[03:29:57] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Yeah, thanks for the question Councilmember Showalter. Um, I would say that we were making changes to this report right up until the last day uh that it was due into the agenda system. Um, so we are and we are keeping tabs on everything that's happening. Those headlines that you saw posted were just a few days ago, some of them. So, um I'm comfortable with where we're at, but things are things are changing every day. So that's why I think as we get to June, we'll see what happens between now and then. We'll be as up to date as possible June 10th and basically provide what whatever information we we know at that time. But it is changing daily and we are going off really recent as as recent as we can be. So, as of now, I think that's right where we are. So.

[03:30:31] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Thank you.

[03:31:12] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Councilmember McAlister.

[03:31:19] Councilmember John McAlister: Yes. It's going to take me a a couple of months to get back to thinking in these budgets, but uh these are more clarity questions for me. So there is a this one item there Capital Improvement Reserve and you're going to put 500,000 dollars towards for improving the city pavement condition. So is that 500,000 to be used right away or is that accumulated so that when a big project comes along you have the money?

[03:31:47] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Councilmember McAlister, so I'll attempt that question and aided by Director Cameron. So essentially what the thought process was for this reserve amount was to accelerate uh funding that might be needed to do it as quickly as they can. Um now you can decide whether you want those same amount to be equal, if you want to do something different with it. But the thought process was that Public Works would be able to identify specific projects that this would go to that would help accelerate um their completion.

[03:32:51] Councilmember John McAlister: So it is putting money into accumulate to get to a bigger project? It's not to be immediately used since it's...

[03:32:59] Public Works Director Dawn Cameron: If I could just add to that, so the intent um the staff intent at least would be to take the additional funds. Thank you very much. Um and apply them towards existing projects, either projects that have a shortfall in funding uh or maybe don't have the next phase planned, such as um, you know, maybe we're we're finishing feasibility but we don't have funds identified for design, something like that. So we would we would augment existing projects.

[03:33:19] Councilmember John McAlister: So it would, okay. So then it isn't really put into reserve. You you if it's available, you're going to spend it on something now. Okay. Well, that's why I was confused when you're putting something in reserve versus and it would be nice to go for a million dollars. Okay. Um that was one of the questions I had. The other thank you. The other question I had on budgeting. So and I don't know how it relates to CIP, so maybe you guys can help me understand is that we've seen our CIP projects get extremely... they're priced one thing, but when they come to reality because of shortfalling that inflation has just eaten up a bunch of it. Is there any correlation between your budgeting and then how inflation is really taking the CIP budget, which is theoretically the best it can be at the time picture, but as time goes along the inflation is eating it up. So do you understand the question? Say yes.

[03:34:01] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Yes, but I think the since CIP is out of Public Works, they might be better directed to answer this question specifically on how they build in inflationary...

[03:34:57] Councilmember John McAlister: But no, but do you build it into your reserves? So you're looking at... they might have one thing but you're funding the CIP projects. So do you also look as a conservative approach to the funding that goes over to it?

[03:35:27] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: So we don't really budget for inflation in the reserves. We're we're essentially socking money away for whatever the purpose of the reserve might be. Um and then at the time that that funding is needed from the reserve, then it would be spent on whatever the purpose of the item is. So we don't necessarily build it into what's recommended to be put into the reserve. But as far as the CIP goes, the Public Works team does build in inflationary cost assumptions into all their projects. And I believe they've increased that assumption with this CIP that you all are considering right now.

[03:35:31] Councilmember John McAlister: No, I I understand that they are doing that. But that's what I'm also wondering. The funds that they get into it. So I mean when you say 96,000 dollars that could be just a rounding error in a sense that it could go like that quickly to funding. So but that goes... um so on your reserves, and this goes to a big picture I guess, is the in taking into consideration inflation, has there been talk about reducing our reserves because we'll make it up in the back end because we're taking away that inflation erosion? So if we we have it in reserves, but yet we sit on it for a while before we actually put it into implementation. The inflation is eroding it away, but if we can use it upfront, we'll probably actually have less costs and a more sound budget.

[03:35:38] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Thanks for the question. Depending on the reserve, we will... sometimes the money goes in and comes out within a year. So a lot of them are not sitting on unless their intent is to be used in the future, saved in the future for a rainy day fund like our budget reserve. So a lot of our reserves like the CIP, a lot of it comes in and goes out almost the same year. So a lot of it is not sitting in there for any length of time other than the long-term reserves that I just spoke about.

[03:35:39] Councilmember John McAlister: And when was the last time the long-term reserves were reviewed?

[03:35:40] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: Uh, we just looked at it six months ago. Yeah, Council Policy A11 was just looked at.

[03:35:44] Councilmember John McAlister: And you felt it was adequate?

[03:36:15] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: At the time, yes.

[03:36:19] Councilmember John McAlister: At the time, okay. Thank you.

[03:36:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Any other questions from colleagues? Not seeing any, we can open it up to public comment. Would any member of the public on the line like to provide comment on this item? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or press star 9 on your phone. And we'll display a timer. Um, I am only seeing one public commenter. Albert, you get 3 minutes.

[03:36:44] Public Speaker Albert Jeans: Thank you very much. It's sometimes a challenge. Um, yeah, since we're talking about budget again, I thought I would continue my little presentation comparing Mountain View and San Mateo. Last time in February, I kind of gave a big overview on how there's a fairly large difference. And I'm from, you know, looking on the outside, just don't understand. I wish there was some way I could ask questions directly and get answers, but that's something you can do and maybe then you can forward the answers back to me. Next slide please. So this is all based on the adopted budgets for the two cities from last year, last fiscal year. Next slide please. And remember San Mateo is very similar to Mountain View. It just has a population that's 30 percent bigger, but in a lot of other ways it's extremely similar except they, there's some big differences in their government spending. Next slide please.

[03:37:44] Public Speaker Albert Jeans: And this is just a, I just picked Finance and Administrative Services. It's one of the biggest departments and it also has one of the biggest discrepancies with Mountain View, I mean, with San Mateo. You can see they have over twice as many people as San Mateo does. Now I don't know why, you know, it's just a mystery to me. Um, we'll get to document processing later, but down at the bottom for example, under risk management, there's two people and they had 7 million dollars expended on them. And you know, maybe that's just a one-time thing, I don't know what that means, I don't know what it's used for. If you take that out of the equation, then the spending is, you know, relatively proportional to the number of people. Um, and then we'll get to document processing. Next slide please.

[03:38:44] Public Speaker Albert Jeans: Okay, one of the items in the report was that one of these people is going to be, I guess, changed to a principal financial analyst. Well what about the other 3.5 full-time employees? And why are they still doing document processing? As it's explained to me, this is an sort of an outdated position, created way back when when word processing was a special skill. Only a few people knew how to do it, and so everybody had to have their documents put through word processing so it would come out in a standard format. Now, everybody pretty much knows how to use Word, you have templates, you know, everybody can produce, you know, publishable documents without any other people. Why are these people still doing this? Um, I don't know, you know, that's something you can ask Mr. Rampone maybe. And there's lots of other things, you know, I'm looking forward to the next budget coming out, and I'm gonna look at it with a fine-tooth comb, you can believe that. I'll look at San Mateo's too, and try to find out more about why they seem to get by with so much less than we do. Thank you.

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[03:38:44] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you very much. Great, thank you. All right. Any other in-person public comment? All right, and I am not seeing any virtually. So, I will bring the item back for Council deliberation and action, and per the City Manager, I believe it's... if there's any big-picture comments or... or any comments related to reserves or anything like that. Now is the opportunity. And then I... Does it also require a motion? Okay. Great, thank you. Councilmember Ramirez.

[03:39:28] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you, Mayor. First, I want to express my appreciation to staff for preparing this report. So, I'm... I'm glad that we're doing the preview, and I think it's even more timely given the uncertainty. Right? So it... it... I'm grateful that you have teed this up for us and it also happens to be serendipitous that we're... we're able to... to at least provide some preliminary input, especially during these... these challenging times. I have... so I... I support the... the... staff recommendations. I think this is very thoughtful and... and prudent and I think we do a very good job growing at a pace that is sustainable. As a colleague brought up earlier, we tend to budget conservatively, which is great because that means often at the end we're surprised with good news. You don't want it to be the other way around. But I think it's also especially important now just given what's happening at the federal level and it's... it's unclear, I think, how it will ultimately shape out. But as you all know, I don't have a lot of optimism for the future. So I do think it is a... it's a good thing to be... to be prudent and thoughtful.

[03:41:14] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: So, in addition to supporting the staff recommendations, and there are a number of really important things that I hope some of my colleagues highlight, I did want to elevate some ideas that I had the opportunity to share with the City Manager. So I don't want to speak for her, but I would be grateful for my colleagues' support. The first is requesting that staff explore what resources would be required to extend library hours over the weekend. I've been thinking a lot about how important it will be to provide safe and welcoming spaces, especially for vulnerable members of our community, over the next several years. There are additional benefits. The library is a great place to go during a heat wave when you don't have air conditioning at home, as I do not, and maybe some others on the council don't either. So I think there are a lot of benefits to providing, making available a third space, a public space, over the weekend when I think the utilization is likely to be quite high. So I'd be interested in the staff's analysis of what it would take to... to achieve that goal. Second is introducing or exploring the costs of implementing an AI translation tool or software. The City of San Jose has this, those of you who have been to council chambers have seen it in action. It's really powerful. You know, I don't want to necessarily call anyone out, but I think it's... it's been unfortunate that sometimes members of the council have been put in a challenging position of... of translating on the fly. You know, we have resources, which is great, but they're not always available. So this tool I think would relieve anyone, you know, who happens to speak multiple languages of the obligation or burden of taking on that responsibility, especially if they're also chairing the meeting, when, you know, we have a tool that we can use in any council meeting that can make sure that members of the community are able to participate regardless of the language that they... that they speak. So I'd love to understand... I can't imagine it's an extraordinary cost, but I think it's... it would be helpful for staff to... to analyze that.

[03:42:59] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: And Councilmember McAlister, you were asking the very questions I was thinking when I was reading the staff report. I'm... there certainly is a time value to money, right? And we have to be... there's certainly a place for... for thoughtful and prudent planning, but sometimes we could be so overly cautious that inflation picks up and the cost of capital improvements especially starts to run away from us. And the third item I'd like to request my... my colleagues to explore is transferring $5 million from... or some amount of money from the Equipment Replacement Fund to the reserve that we're using for the public safety administration building. And the reason is, as important as our fleet is to replace over time and... and to transition to EVs, we have a very pressing capital need right now that we're ready to deliver, but there's still a gap. And I'm looking at it aren't... I think it was $25 million, something along those lines. So I think staff is being very thoughtful in elevating that and requesting that we approve a $5 million transfer. But if we have an additional $5 million transfer from the ERF, then we get very close to closing that gap, and it also has the added advantage of protecting the general fund in the event that we need to use that to pay for the debt service. So I would rather use that money to deliver an essential capital improvement today than have it sit in the ERF for an unknown amount of time for something that is important, which is, you know, upgrading the fleet, but it's speculative, right? And I would rather benefit from the value of the money today. And then also, as a colleague brought up, that attachment with the information about the reserves was really helpful, and it was... on the one hand it's a good thing that the ERF is $6.7 million above what the policy requires, but also it doesn't need to be $6.7 million above what the policy requires. So even if we allocate $5 million, we're still above policy, that still gives us an enormous buffer to replace equipment as we need to. So those are the three. I'm ready to make a motion, but I want to hear what my colleagues have to say.

[03:45:09] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Separately, you know, this is where I might disagree a little bit with Councilmember McAlister, that $500,000 for pavement maintenance I would love to go into to supplement the active transportation capital improvements, in part because as staff had shared with us during the CIP study session, a lot of active transportation improvements are also pavement maintenance opportunities. So... and it has the advantage not only of helping deliver active transportation projects, but those roadways tend to be very heavily trafficked, right? So you think about Middlefield and Moffett, those are the roadways I think the community would like us to focus on and not so much cul-de-sacs, and as wonderful as it is for those neighbors, I don't think they're the ones who we necessarily need to prioritize when we have limited funding when we have very heavily trafficked roads that... that are worthy of maintenance in the near term. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much for your indulgence.

[03:46:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great. Thank you. And I think... I'm just taking notes of different items that colleagues may share, and so it might be helpful if it's like included all in one motion, or we might need to do straw motions just for clarity for staff. So I am taking all of those down. Not your comments, but just the other items. Go ahead... Councilmember Hicks.

[03:47:00] Councilmember Alison Hicks: So before I go into general comments, I thought I would maybe try to address Mr. Jean's question. In terms of document processing, if somebody can... we are moving along with that. Are we not? And maybe I think I could attempt to say how, but I think staff... the City Manager could explain better.

[03:47:22] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Thank you, Councilmember Hicks. So, there is a lot of differences between San Mateo and Mountain View. Their finance department doesn't have risk staff. They certainly don't have document processing, which we are evaluating. They also do not have centralized purchasing, and they are facing upwards of a $10 million budget deficit right now. So it's just a different... the agency has functioned quite differently over the years in Mountain View and they desperately are wanting to add staff and are not able to add staff because of their budget deficits. So just clarifying the difference between what's in the finance departments in both cities. But to your question about document processing, yes, that is under consideration.

[03:48:23] Councilmember Alison Hicks: Okay. Thank you. Um, so in general, for me, the big picture is that unlike in the past few decades when we mostly had steadily reliable and increasing revenue, the future here is, I mean it's in your report too, it's less clear to me now. Not just because of what's happening at the federal level, although that's certainly important, but also, the... over the past several decades we've had steadily growing tech and now due to remote and changing work locations of a lot of the tech companies, and also possible shake-ups among our reliable tech businesses due to AI changes. I don't think we're facing a disaster, but I think we'd just... and I think Mountain View remains a great city to live, work and play in, but I think we just need to be smarter. I mean, we've always... our budgets have always been smart, but we need to, you know, be even smarter. In particular, look at new revenue sources, and we've been talking about that. Measure G is... the property transfer tax is the first one, and we've looked at others like a TOT tax update, and I'm sure... or I hope we'll continue to do that.

[03:50:14] Councilmember Alison Hicks: The other thing I'd like to double down on is looking at our... well, what's increasingly being referred to as entertainment districts, like our downtown and San Antonio Center as possibly better revenue generators. And I mean, studies show that our downtown already punches above its weight when we did the economic vitality study in terms of restaurant and related revenue generation. But I think with careful planning we can do better. So... and our neighbors like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale are focusing on this, and I think we need to also. So what... and then we also need to pay closer attention to business attraction and retention in general, I think, than we have in the past. So a lot of this means closer attention to our economic vitality strategy. And I know we're hiring a new director. I just think we need to look at enhanced staffing in that area, and I'm not gonna... I'm not gonna name a particular line item. Um... but, uh... could be something like something more related to an urban design person, not just... I know we have somebody devoted to the downtown, but a little more attention to that in particular in hiring, I think would be one thing that I would want to recommend looking at. And then in terms of money to pavement, I agree that I would like it to go to active transportation or complete green streets, but not just solely to paving. Um... and I think another thing is the park... I was really happy to see the parks maintenance worker because I... I'm hoping for enhancement in that area as we work on... as we enhance our parks, biodiversity, green streets and urban forestry. I think those are the kinds of posi- some of the kinds of positions that we'll need. That's it.

[03:52:27] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Councilmember McAlister.

[03:52:31] Councilmember John McAlister: So I was looking at this Equipment Replacement Reserve, Councilmember Ramirez, and if we... time is money. I don't know if you've seen how vehicles are... you know, inflation going crazy, and if there's tariffs on these vehicles it's going to cost us a boatload of more money. So I think the time value to money that would probably be wiser spent on the vehicles, because the building of the public safety building is going to be a little more over time. And I know the importance of having equipment, especially when we do our fire trucks, new ambulances, anything that as this equipment starts running down, the cost of repair and labor sometimes outweighs the thought of sending other money. So I sort of like keeping our money where it is in there. Overall, I'm trying to avoid changing anything at this point because Council has a tendency to... and I'm guilty of it a lot of times... is muddling up a project and doing this, doing that, whereas the focus is high level: let's just get this through. We are in a times of changing economic times, and we better let the... be conservative on what we're doing. And of course the one project to me on maintenance of the streets... folks, you know, streets are the basic... the paving is the foundation for any of your complete streets, any of your active transportation. But we are still a city of cars, and I keep feeling guilty that every time something comes up, "Well, let's get rid of... you know, don't look out for the cars. They'll take care of themselves." And we need to start concentrating on getting our streets back up to where they've been, because if you get your streets up to that PCI where you want it, then you'll have that extra funds to do your safe streets, then to do your active transportation. And it is true that some of the active transportation will be taken care of with the paving. But those people, they're on the streets. So no matter how... if you green... put green lines in or whatever, they're still going to be going bumpity on the street, so you need to get your foundation squared away. So those are my thoughts.

[03:54:47] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Any other? Councilmember Showalter.

[03:54:52] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Well, well since were talking about kind of high-level things, one of the things I... I've been very concerned about is... is what can we do to really sort of punch up our efforts to create a community for all. I really like the idea of increasing the hours in the library. I think that's excellent. Something that isn't really a lot of money but I think maybe would be good to add a little money to is the neighborhood grants program. But just as we think about... there's a lot of fear in our community, which is justi... which is justified. I mean it's very reasonable that people should be fearful. And... and that means that the kind of programming we do... that we've done may... may need to morph. And so that's just something that I think that we need to consider as we move forward. And then the other thing I would like to say is that if we do go into a recession... you know, I... we've gone into a couple of recessions over the course of my life, and... and I think one thing that does happen when you go into a recession is those programs that the city puts on get... get more and more precious. The library... you know, having the pool available... the parks that people can go to... the things that you can go to that are, you know, essentially free. Our... our movie nights, our... our music on the green. Having an entertainment district, I mean that... that could also be part of that, but I think that the Performing Arts Center... yeah, I think that the things that bring the community together and are what we sort of think of more as programming become very, very important.

[03:56:44] Councilmember Pat Showalter: But when you translate it, how does that... how does that translate into the built environment? Well, it does with good paving that you can build complete streets on. Lots of trees that make people want to, you know, to walk. You know, that... that sort of... those things do create more of a healthy built environment. And um, so those are the kinds of things I think we should be concentrating on, and um... I... I really want to also say that finance is not my strength, and if... everybody you know has observed that over the years. It's not my strength, um, but I do understand how vital it is, too, because you can't do anything without the proper funding to carry it out. So um, I... I really want to express my appreciation for the staff, for um, writing up this very careful staff report for us. Particularly the reserve document, that was very helpful. And um, and I think this sort of rolling it out, um, a little more gently than we've done in the past is going to really pay off this year. And um, so I want to... you know, I want to thank you for that.

[03:58:14] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And in particular the... when we had the budget-in-brief a couple of years ago, that was a very, very useful document to share with people. So I'm really glad we're gonna do that again. Um, it... I... I don't know how many people there are in the community that read the 600-page budget. I'm pretty sure that, you know, the sum total of people who read it is like under 20, and here's, you know, 10 of 'em right... right here. Um, and... but that budget-in-brief is read by hundreds of people, if not thousands. So it's really, really valuable in communicating what, uh... how we're spending our money. So I... I just want to really put in a big plug for those communication things that... and they're important now because they communicate, but they're also important because we're... you know, we are the government that's... we're functioning well and we really need to communicate how are we doing that. And there's no better way to communicate how you're doing well by having your act together with respect to funding. And that's what we are, we do have our act together with respect to funding. And I think we need to make sure that as many residents of Mountain View who are paying attention and want to know about that, get this information. So that's the other thing I want to say, is really important. I think the communication of how we're doing this is more vital than ever because of the political situation we find ourselves in.

[04:00:03] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Vice Mayor Ramos.

[04:00:08] Councilmember Emily Ramos: Thank you, Mayor. Ah. Um, uh, so thank you to staff. I actually found this to be a very easy read comparatively to our large budget that I usually just have playing in the background. Um, uh, I didn't really realize that we could just ask for things if we wanted to and just like just consider it. So I'm actually generally in support of all of what my colleagues have... have suggested because I think they are all really good ideas, and I would love to see us take... to see if it's... it's possible if we could do these things to essentially improve the lives of our residents. Like the entertainment district sounds great. AI translation tool, exploring the library hours. Do you know on Sundays it's 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. um, on Sundays at the library, and it's not necessarily the library itself that I really struggle with the hours, it's the... their Wi-Fi is the only one that allows you to go to old newspapers... Uh, so like those limited hours just cut into that time when I just really want to look into like our Mountain View history. Um, because I am a nerd like that.

[04:01:34] Councilmember Emily Ramos: I appreciate Councilmember Showalter's highlight of the Neighborhood Grants Program. I would also... uh... we brought back... um... when we looked at the budget... uh... the city is bringing back Community For All grants, and I think that's a great thing. I think that's something we would love to continue. So that's a plus one, wherever we can add to that. I appreciate Mr. Jean's analysis of our budget. I shared it with some friends in San Mateo City Council, and they all love him very much. Um, I... one thing I would also like in as we think about the budget-in-brief, I really do appreciate that. Ah... highlight the type of expenditures and revenues that directly affect our residents. Those are like things like the Neighborhood Grants, like we know yes, our residents are pretty much touched by everything that goes through our city, but they are more directly involved with some of these budgeting items that are involved, like our CNCs or our Community For All grants. The things that like they can feel and touch. Um, and so those are the kinds of things I want to see in our budget-in-brief to see that these are the opportunities they have directly as a resident. Um, but yes, thank you for staff for... for bringing this forward.

[04:03:01] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Councilmember Clark.

[04:03:04] Councilmember Chris Clark: Thank you. Um, I think I largely agree with you know Councilmember McAlister here. I think... you know, I... I don't want to mess with this too much. I'm open to, you know, if the ask is just to you know explore and bring back sort of what the... uh, what the cost would be to expand hours in certain ways at the library, I'm open to that. Um, I'm not sure... I understand the merits of it, I just, without quantifying, I have no idea whether that's something that's feasible for us to do. But I'm open to looking at that. Um, for the, for the pavement, um... you know I'm open to... you know, if there are ways to prioritize active transportation projects within that bucket, I'm open to it, but I don't think I'd want to do is just reprogram the 500,000 from pavement to active transportation. I think that is a... that's a much bigger deal for me. Um, but... but I as we heard at the CIP session, I think there's a lot of overlap between some of those projects. And so obviously I think we should prioritize active transportation projects. I just don't think I would fully... think I would understand if there are any unintended consequences of actually reprogramming that... that entire amount.

[04:04:44] Councilmember Chris Clark: Um... AI translation, obviously I think that's great. I'm not sure if that can just be something that's done through city manager authority or city clerk or if it's something we actually need to budget for. But I think those are the types of tools that I think can... can really assist with not just translation but things like document processing and other things that... I think these tools will become more and more powerful and less expensive over time pretty rapidly. Um... and then... uh... I don't think the... I don't think now is the right time to reprogram money from the equipment replacement fund. Um, if we get to a point where the $25 million gap... we're talking about a $5 or $10 million gap and we decide at that point that we want to rob one fund to to fill that out, I think that's a discussion I'd be open to. I just don't think it makes sense to do right now. Um, 'cause I do think the equipment replacements are important to... to occur on a... on a specific timeline, and those costs can be very unpredictable as we're about to see because as of 9:00 p.m. Pacific, the tariffs are in place. Um... which uh brings me to thank you, staff. Um, I know that you'll be following the environment very, very closely. It isn't the exact same situation but it feels eerily reminiscent of this exact time in 2020 when we knew something was happening. We knew we were going to have to watch the budget very carefully between when we first saw it and when we adopted it. And I think this is one of those cases where you know a lot of things may or may not happen between now and June. So I appreciate you keeping an eye on everything and... and being willing to adjust these parameters and other things between now and June. So... those are my thoughts. Thank you.

[04:06:19] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Councilmember Ramirez, did you have more or did you want to respond to folks or... Okay. Well, I think that... all of these are explore. Correct, colleagues? Some of the suggestions. So I think the... the straw polls and the two pages or three pages of items you've given me are... are just all explore. So no final action here. Correct? Is that what you wanted to talk about? One or respond to...

[04:06:47] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Go ahead. Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. So I'm going to do a one-two punch on this one. So first, not necessarily on you, Councilmember Clark. I like you, Councilmember Clark. But I will say, I think many have been following my great antipathy towards this particular reserve for many years. I looked up in the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report the balance and the level of activity for this reserve over the past 15 years, and it with one exception, it rarely has been above like 2 and a half million. The activity is minimal compared to how much money we've socked away, and it's routinely ballooned up into like the 30 million dollar range. If the activity were more like 15 million, I could justify that balance. But because historically the activity is very low, with the one exception being very recently, I think this past... or no, this fiscal year that we're currently in, we're looking at like 11 or 12 million dollars, much of which is fleet, right? So I think we have been overly cautious in this reserve. And to Councilmember McAlister's point, the fact that we've stocked away that amount of money for so long has meant that we've deprived ourselves of the opportunities of investing that money wisely in actual capital improvements. So I feel like this is not an uninformed opinion. It's based on looking at the reserve activity over since basically 2009 and seeing that the activity is very low, the reserve balance is very high, and very difficult in my opinion to justify. But more importantly, I'm going to ask... I think it's going to be my friend, Assistant City Manager Andrews who... who is I regard as an oracle in the Measure G fight from yesteryear. I know you've been working on the public safety administration building and financing. If memory serves, in the next council meeting we're going to vote on a PSA for... is it a construction manager? And that means we're really close to starting to... to, you know, to go to bid. Is that right? Can you give us an update on the public safety administration building and the financing that we're looking at?

[04:09:16] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: So the good news is that direct question should actually be answered by Director Eng. But on the financing piece, correct. So on June 10th, we're coming with the final financing plan in conjunction with all the bond documents that are going to be required to issue bonds over the summer. We'll actually be meeting with S&P credit rating early May in conjunction with the city manager and the rest of the financing team. So we're moving forward fairly quickly on the financing side. In terms of the bid packages, I don't know the exact dates, but they are coming soon. And perhaps Director Eng knows the dates.

[04:09:56] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Mayor, may I? Before our director gets up here, I would just like to add that the funding that we have identified for the public safety building, if council is open to it, since the direction is to explore, perhaps what we can do with the team is see what might be needed still for the timing of EV purchases. And then what we would need based on our bond financing to put some... maybe some extra money aside. And maybe it's splitting the difference if that's something that council's open to, with exploring it. While keeping, you know, the fund still intact and having a balance, and then also identifying what extra funding might be needed. I also want to say real quickly that keep in mind that this bill is moving through Congress about the financing for bonds for municipalities. So if our bonds can no longer be tax-exempt, it means that our cost for the public safety building will go up. So we're really going to have to be strategic about how we're identifying funding for that, which is another reason why our assistant city manager is working so hard and fast to try and issue these bonds this summer. So just to add context.

[04:11:32] Finance and Administrative Services Director Derek Rampone: And I would just like to emphasize what the city manager said. The difference in spreads between tax-exempt and non-tax-exempt municipal debt is anywhere between 100 basis points and 150 basis points. It's a full percentage. Which would mean that would be that much less in bond proceeds we would get if we have to pay the higher interest rate.

[04:11:57] Public Works Director Dawn Cameron: With respect to timing of the public safety building. So we've actually broken the building and the parking garage into two separate bid packages, right? And we're proceeding forward with the public safety building... it's really the administration building for public safety as is. I don't remember off the top of my head exactly where we are with design, I want to say somewhere in about nine months or so we should be seeing that go out for bid. We're currently in the process of the early stages of the garage portion of the building, looking at how much that would cost, what that would mean with respect to overall, you know, financial impact for... for the project, and... and really what a garage could look like as a... as an architectural partner, I'll say, to the civic Americana theme that was already approved for the public safety building. So that one is going to lag a little bit behind.

[04:12:52] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: Thank you very much for the update. I appreciate both of you responding to the questions. I'll just share I... I agree with the Mayor. The intent is to explore. I'm not necessarily wedded to 5 million, I'd be comfortable with much more. But I'll leave that to the City Manager and I just think that the overall intent is we're really close, we can deliver this very important capital improvement that we've been planning for 20 years, and I would rather do so rather than focus on a speculative investment in something that is important, our fleet, but we don't actually have like a plan for that right now. Thank you.

[04:13:31] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: All right. Thank you. Okay, Councilmember McAlister. And then maybe we can do some straw polls. What do we think?

[04:13:39] Councilmember John McAlister: But I first want to recognize the entire staff out there, how well they're engaged in this tonight, and I appreciate them being here 'cause we can't do it without 'em. But question to the city manager, and it's sort of a little off path, but from my perspective of trying to reduce projects and make things go a little quicker. I keep hearing, "We'll explore this, we'll explore that." So even though it sounds like it's not much, how much time is really involved when we... people say, "Well, could you explore it?" Not... don't take it personal, it's just I've heard it many times, that, "Well, we'll just look at this, we'll look at that." And if we keep doing that, we just keep getting a little more project, a little more project delayed. So I just wonder... is it possible? Is it time-consuming? What's the answer on this?

[04:14:27] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Great question, and fortunately, Councilmember Ramirez and I spoke about this a while ago. So I've actually had a chance to look into this further before this evening. So the library piece of it... that will not take that much time because we've already looked into it. And I just need to talk with my team and better understand some of the potential implications and costs. The thing that I would just remind council of though is that you have a $96,000 balance for ongoing costs. So the things that you're suggesting are... are great, this is exactly the sort of input that we were seeking. However, we will need to look at how those could be funded with our one-time limited-period funds, which that balance is a little over 4 million dollars, but that amount is also used for next year's limited-period funding and reserves. So that's... when you say "explore," that's what we will be looking at. We will be looking at what the potential costs of these items are. Some of the things you've identified do fit already with some of the other limited-period items that we've recommended. So I think we would just bring back more about the story of how they fit in. Other items I think could be funded by the limited-period amount that we do have left, but it is going to be very difficult to identify ongoing funding. And this also gets at what Councilmember Showalter was talking about with the snapshot of our forecast. So a forecast is only good as the day you make it. And particularly now with everything going on. So, I think... to your question, Councilmember McAlister, I don't see anything that's been mentioned tonight being particularly time-consuming or difficult. Our budget team meets every week. Various folks have various jobs that they're doing based on, like, tasks I mean. So, this is doable. This is doable.

[04:16:39] Councilmember John McAlister: Well, thank you for answering the question, but the question was more broad than just what's going on tonight budget... but overall every... there's always a "Could we explore, not... the items tonight... but in general, when we do a straw poll or somebody says, 'Let's explore, let's explore.' How much time is it that we really are adding onto anything or is it really that they can do it if there is the gap in there, they have the bandwidth to answer these questions? Or do you say, 'Okay, well let's try to get more other things done?'"

[04:17:15] City Manager Kimbra McCarthy: Well, I think to the foundation of your question, it's also why we have worked with council to implement a work plan that is more manageable, because we haven't had time to do all the things that were on the "explore" list and we haven't been able to execute on all of council's work plan projects. So... and that's something else that you all will be talking about in your next meeting, which is your work plan. So going from 70 projects to 40 projects to hopefully less than 14 or 15 projects this time around. So it really depends... it's hard for me to give a specific answer, but yes, adding on anything to explore or anything to go do does add to staff's bandwidth and ability to do just the fundamental things they're working on. But I would also say that having a more manageable workload will help, and we haven't talked about it very much, but there is a one-hour rule. I was trying to remember how long it's been since we've talked about this, and it's been years, I think, since I've mentioned it. So if there is something that ever comes up that council wants staff to explore or look into, there is a one-hour rule that... that basically says that if it's going to take staff longer than one hour to do this task, that we would have to come back to council to report out on how long it would take to do such a thing, whatever that project is. So, we haven't really talked about it that much, but that's kind of the confines that we look at these things, is, "Is this a task that could be accomplished in a few hours, one hour, or is it a bigger project or issue?" Which is why we're trying to shrink the workload, 'cause we just don't have the capacity to do everything.

[04:19:13] Councilmember John McAlister: Okay, I just want that clarity because we seem to be piling on small projects. They're all great, but we're just keeping piling on. So, thank you.

[04:19:22] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: You can vote no on everything. Okay. All right. I know we're already passed... wait, the item started before... right? Okay. It's been that long. Okay. So, um... I think we've had a robust discussion. So I think that we can start doing some straw polls, if that's all right with everyone. Sound good? All right. Um, just my comments are... um... I'm excited. Uh, thank you so much for bringing this preview to us. I think, um, as colleagues were saying it's very timely and necessary, and, um, we've had such a robust discussion about it, so thanks for bringing it. Um, one thing that wasn't mentioned was the fee study. And after a decade of reviewing our fee study, it's like we're so close. Um, I'm really excited about this, um, particularly given all the different implications that we talked about. Um, you know, one of the things that I, uh, want to preview... not to take a straw poll on it, but just we... when we passed Measure P, and then Measure G... I think as a council we thought, although I wasn't part of the prior one for P, I think we thought that there was going to just be a lot more revenue generation. And as we are talking about tonight, we're just not seeing that. And, um, I think it's a challenge for us to think about how else we can be creative. So obviously the fee study is going to be one. I think talking about what we may need to have to go out for in 2026, right? Is the reality. Um, and so that is also framing my mind as we're... as we're talking about this, and, um, that's an unfortunate reality, um, but thank you to staff for all your efforts as we're navigating this.

[04:21:14] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: So I heard, um, general support of the direction that we're going in with a couple of suggestions on things that people would like to have explored. So if we don't mind, just a show of hands. Exploring expanding library hours on weekends. Okay, that looks unanimous. Yay. Okay. AI... looking at exploring live AI translation service software tool for our council meetings. Okay, that looks like six. All right. Um, looking at 5 million... or, how about this? Exploring a staff recommendation on moving Equipment Replacement Fund funds to the public safety reserve. Okay, that looks like six. All right. Moving on. Can you help me with... were those some straw motions? Councilmember Hicks or... comments? Okay. Exploring, evaluating the economic vitality staff and seeing if there's any way to enhance the revenue-generating component of that. All right. All those in favor of that? All right, that looks like six. All right. And that was everything for you. And then I did not hear any from Councilmember McAlister. Councilmember Showalter, exploring increasing our Community For All grants, which we are doing. Okay. Um, you also mentioned exploring support for entertainment districts. Did I write that right? Okay, great. All right. And... um... Vice Mayor Ramos talked about exploring including in our budget-in-brief ways to highlight the funds that directly affect our residents. Does that sound right? Okay, and I'm fine with that. I think it's more just an including... including it. But anyway...

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[04:23:44] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: exploring including more information in the budget in brief about like for example the community for all grants or our CNC grants and having that more highlighted in the budget in brief for our residents to read. That was my understanding, is that correct?

[04:24:00] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: All right. Everyone okay with that? Okay, that looks like five. No, oh six. Okay.

[04:24:07] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: All right. I just want to make sure I got all, everything. All right. So with that, we have done all our straw motions. May I have a mover and a seconder?

[04:24:17] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: How about a little bumpity bump, John?

[04:24:20] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, uh we have a motion by uh Councilmember Ramirez, seconded by Councilmember Hicks, so let's uh

[04:24:26] Councilmember Pat Showalter: What's, what's, what is the motion? Not the straw vote, but what are we voting on?

[04:24:33] Councilmember Lucas Ramirez: The staff recommendation which is to I think prepare a balanced budget with the the direction that was included in the report.

[04:24:45] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Essentially to accept the City Manager's preliminary budget recommendations with the changes that you have cited.

[04:24:56] Councilmember Pat Showalter: The exploring?

[04:24:57] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Yeah.

[04:25:01] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Yes.

[04:25:03] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. All right. Let's vote.

[04:25:15] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: All right, and that passes unanimously. Thank you very much to staff who are who are with us at this late hour.

[04:25:23] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Um, City Attorney Logue, do I need to take a vote to continue past 10:00 or not because we're almost there?

[04:25:32] City Attorney Jennifer Logue: I don't think so, we're not...

[04:25:33] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Okay, perfect. Just checking, sure. Perfect, perfect.

[04:25:35] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: All right, so um I'd like us to move on to uh item eight. Uh this this item is reserved for Council Members to make brief remarks on city business conducted in their official capacity or to report on meetings attended at the expense of the city.

[04:25:59] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Vice Mayor Ramos.

[04:26:01] Councilmember Emily Ramos: Thank you, Mayor. Last Friday, I went down to Burbank for the Cal Cities uh Governance, Transparency and Labor Relations Committee. I was appointed this year. Um, yeah. We talked a lot about AI and uh Brown Act.

[04:26:19] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great, thank you. Any other reports?

[04:26:24] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Uh, Councilmember Clark.

[04:26:25] Councilmember Chris Clark: Just very briefly wanted to make folks aware, um, I attended um, it was like an overview of the Assessor's office. Um, which was actually quite interesting. I don't know, I don't think they've posted the the session to to view yet, but um one of the interesting tidbits that I learned is that they are um, there's in state law, uh they're about to start assessing the uh parklets and things um like on Castro Street uh where a restaurant might set up a parklet. Those are about to be assessed and and they were they were just warning they wanted folks to know that it's state law they're not doing it to penalize folks, but they also understand that a lot of people are going to be very surprised when they see that assessment. So, they're they're trying to spread the word. So um, if if staff or others are interested, just FYI, I don't really know who to raise that to, but if we get inquiries, which we probably will, um that's what's going on.

[04:27:29] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Thank you. Yeah, thank you for letting us know.

[04:27:31] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Councilmember Showalter.

[04:27:33] Councilmember Pat Showalter: Um, just a uh a brief uh report about BCDC. Um, we I I wanted to let you know that the Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan received um the was awarded by the American Planning Association State and Regional Award for Excellence in Sustainability at the um APA conference in Denver last week. So that's that's um that's pretty exciting. This is our regional effort to plan for sea level rise protection. And I also wanted to um let you know that uh in Santa Clara County um we are working on um putting together this plan jointly and some money has been applied for um uh for grant funds to help pay for the planning. Then the other thing that we talked about um at BCDC is the Bay Water Trail. I mean most of us are familiar with the Bay Trail. I think many of us are on it very often. But there's also a Water Trail and this water trail is designed to be um landing places and launching places for small boats like kayaks and canoes so that people can go out and enjoy the um enjoy the uh uh the bay. And there's the the dream someday is that you'll be able to sort of circumnavigate the whole bay in your canoe and there'll be camping places for you to stop and visit from um time to time.

[04:29:07] Councilmember Pat Showalter: And uh I also attended the morning with the Mayor. Thank you very very much. And um along with everybody else the uh Rengstorff Aquatic Center Grand Opening, which I think we are all going to enjoy greatly.

[04:29:27] Councilmember Ellen Kamei: Great. Thank you. And I just want to report I attended our Council Transportation Committee meeting last Tuesday. All right, any other? Okay, we will move on to item nine, our adjournment. The next City Council meeting will be held on April 22nd, 2025. This meeting is adjourned at 11:00 p.m. Thank you. Have a great night.

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