Joint Study Session between Sunnyvale City Council and Planning Commission
May 20, 2014Note – This transcript was produced by someone not familiar with Sunnyvale. I take responsibility for corrections, names, etc. I have deleted comments and jokes that are not directly related to main topic. –Andy Frazer
Vice Mayor Davis: Okay, the clock is now 6:00pm
City Manager Robert Walker: I’d like to kick things off to Staff and don’t waste a lot of time, but for this particular issue, I do want to set the table. The Balanced Growth Profile1, I was here when it was first created, and I have seen it used a whole bunch of different ways. And yet the last couple of years, it’s been used more and more in one particular way, and it causes me a little concern. Part of tonight is to talk about that.
But just in general, I would suggest if you are going to use the Balanced Growth Profile as an evaluative tool to judge where we are in relationship to where we want to be in terms of growth, you have to put up a huge cautionary sign. That’s my suggestion, and let me tell you why.
But first let me say, I think the city has contributed to the notion that it should be used that way. We’ve done our fair share of suggesting through narrative that that might be appropriate, that there are reasons for doing that. We’ve I think contributed to that. But it’s dangerous, and I think it’s kind of like using a wrench to try and flip the pancake. And I apologize to Gary Luebbers for not using a sports analogy here, but it’s the best one I could come up with.
You can do it, but you’re not going to get the results you think, and you’re likely to get criticized by people watching you off to the side, because it’s just not intuitive. There’s something wrong with this picture. Here’s why: if you’re going to use this Growth Profile to judge where we are, it’s really predicated on two very bad assumptions.
The first bad assumption is this: that that 2005 baseline, where we look at all of these indicators – jobs, housing, population, all of these things – and we say “There’s a relative balance there, and that’s the balance we want to keep so that this goal in 2025 maintains the same balance” – so we can look at anywhere in between to see, are we maintaining that same balance or are we getting out of balance?
The reason that’s a bad assumption is it assumes that this goal of 2025 keeps the same balance as we had in the base year, and it does not. And in order to prove that, all you have to do is take out your own personal calculator and do the math. It’s pretty easy. The balance out here is not the same as the balance in the baseline. So that’s a problem with that theory.
The second major assumption that’s bad is that 2005 represents not only a desired state, but the assumption is it’s the desired state in 2025. That’s a bad assumption. Nowhere did any council or did any staff say, “Hey, 2005 and 2025 is the only desired state.” The way that we’ve determined that 2005 was a good balanced state was we did a survey. We did it in 2005; it was a community satisfaction survey. [It] turned out that everybody was pretty happy. And so we said, “You know what? Based on the fact that everybody’s pretty happy, this balance that we have right now must be pretty good, ergo, let’s try and have that out here in 2025.”
But that’s not the only balance that could determine we’re happy. We do that survey every other year, and every other year, our survey results have been pretty much the same. Everybody’s pretty darn happy. So if you’re going to use that theory, you might as well reset the baseline right now, or in 2011, and say “You know what? Everyone was pretty happy there, so we’ve got a new baseline. Start over.”
I’m laying that out there just as sort of “setting the table” [sic], and these guys will go into a lot more detail. But that’s the primary message I would get out there. It’s just really dangerous to say you’ve got to keep this profile, and any time you get out of whack, “Uh oh, danger signal.” I just caution against that. So with that…
Vice Mayor Davis: City Manager, thank you very much, sir.
City Manager Walker: We’re going to have Trudi start off, since she was around during the time when the Balanced Growth Profile was developed, to kind of give a historical context for what this was intended to do and what it currently represents, and then I’ll follow up with some future actions, depending on what the council might want to use a Balanced Growth Profile for.
City Planning Officer, Trudi Ryan: I’m trying to move around a bunch so I don’t block anyone’s view, but just raise your hand if I’m – I’ll just assume that I’m in your view if you raise your hand, not that you have a question. So really what I’m going to present to you is some historical information, but a lot of additional questions, in addition to what City Manager just presented.
To start out, here’s essentially the agenda, four questions. What is the Balanced Growth Profile? Why do we have it? What does it tell us? And how can we use it? And the “how can we use it?” part, Hanson will cover in his presentation.
The Balanced Growth Profile was a result of a study issue from 2006 called “Transitioning from a Growth to a Steady State City.” From that study issue, we launched an effort that resulted in the Community Vision2. The Community Vision became a part of the General Plan3. The Balanced Growth Profile is a small chapter within the Community Vision. The Community Vision has a series of value statements about what we would like as a community, where we’d like to go as a community. But the Balanced Growth Profile has a series of numbers to try to help us head in a particular direction.
I thought I would read a definition to you of ‘steady state’. There are lots of different definitions, and that’s just one of the first cautions, I think, along the line of what Robert was saying. What do we mean by a number of the terms that we’re using? I think we all use a lot of them differently.
A steady state is “a stable condition that does not change over time or in which change is one direction is continually balanced by change in another.” So depending upon which half of that definition you like, you’re going to respond to the Balanced Growth Profile in a different way.
We really have two sets of numbers. One is the Balanced Growth Profile, another is the Community Condition Indicators. The Balanced Growth Profile is the big picture, and the Community Condition Indicators are the finer grain. We present those every year in the annual budget. Staff uses some of the numbers in the Community Condition Indicators to assist in putting together a budget and recommending a budget to the council in terms of how services might need to be changed.
So for example, the Community Condition Indicators, as information is available, we may have more information of the character of the community, what are the relative ages of our residents, whereas in the Balanced Growth Profile, we just have a flat population number.
These are the 10 items that are in the Balanced Growth Profile. The last three are in italics, and the reason they’re in italics is that we think that the transportation capacity improvements, although we had a measure for that, is only measuring a certain set of transportation improvements in the community, and so it’s suggesting that other transportation improvements haven’t been made.
When you look at the little teeny bar over there – I’ll give you a bigger picture later – you can see one little project has been completed, but it doesn’t address the fact that there may have been other projects. And we still haven’t completed the bars for the utility and the park capacity improvements, so you’ve never gotten that information because we haven’t developed the metric for that.
This is the 2013 Balanced Growth Profile, which is in the Recommended Budget. I just wanted to call out that we’re at the 40% mark in terms of the number of years [of] the 20 year horizon that was selected for the profile. The population bar and the school capacity bar are past that 40%. Nothing else that’s tracked has reached that 40% bar yet.
Conversely, this one, which a couple years ago council members asked for, shows you projects that have been approved but not built. But it doesn’t give you approved population or approved jobs. It only gives you these three bars. So it could be misleading to let you think that certain things are going to happen in the community.
And really just to point out, again, you can see the population bar is a lot longer than the housing units bar. Why is that? Well, it’s because household size has increased, not because we’ve built that many more units. So there’s just lots of different pieces of information out there that – just advising you, perhaps, that you want to make sure that when you’re looking at the numbers, you avoid the trap of going down some pathway without questioning what other numbers might be involved.
Why do we have the Balanced Growth Profile? I really think if you ask five people, you might get seven opinions. And in fact, I’ve heard the same person at different times express how the Balanced Growth Profile may support a position, and it makes perfect sense in their head; to some other person, perhaps it doesn’t.
These are the maybe less flippant, if you will, responses to that. But it was developed to respond to this notion of steady state, which I believe really was that if you change one area, you might have to change something else to keep the community of the character and with the values that are expressed in the Community Vision.
It is a planning tool for anticipated change. Most of the numbers and the projections were grabbed, if you will, from the projections that ABAG4 was doing every 2 years. They don’t do them quite as often, and we don’t agree with them all the time on their projections, but we felt that it was a reasonable estimate of population and jobs for the year 2025 when we prepared the Balanced Growth Profile.
It could be used as a tool for prioritizing infrastructure improvement projects – although as I said, we haven’t filled in those two lines yet. And it can inform General Plan amendment decisions.
What is balance? Another definition for you; there’s lots of different definitions for balance. I think it was more trying to get at the notion of “a state in which various parts form a satisfying and harmonious whole, and nothing is out of proportion or unduly emphasized at the expense of the rest.” Again, that’s a pretty broad statement, and you may read different things into it. But you could have a balance where you’re looking at the growth items and the infrastructure items, and indeed, the Community Vision says that that’s one of the purposes for the Balanced Growth Profile.
You can have balance in jobs and housing. That could be the main purpose for you to look at it. Or you could have any combination of two items, or a combination of several items, or try to balance everything. I don’t think that’s very well defined in terms of how we would like to use that, and I think Hansen will talk about that with you a little bit more.
What does it tell us? It provides us growth projections, a snapshot of the change, relative balance in development and infrastructure – if we had all the infrastructure information for you – and it can be a decision-making tool. But it doesn’t provide you the General Plan build out. It isn’t a statement of growth management, and again, Hansen will illustrate why it’s not really a jobs/housing policy. It doesn’t comment on the service priorities in the community. It doesn’t give you information on the progress of projects other than the fact that we show you approved projects that are development projects. It doesn’t show you approved projects that are city projects, so you’re not getting all of that information.
Just as an example, I mentioned demographics; it doesn’t give you that. But that might be making the difference in terms of the services you might want to provide.
[This is] just a quick indication of these four indicators of growth. The darker orange is where we were in 2005. The pie shape in the middle that’s got two colors, one of them is to 2025 and the other is to General Plan build out. Just a way to emphasize that no, the Balanced Growth Profile was not intended to show all of the development that would occur in the community; just a projection of what could happen by 2025.
Why did we originally only give you build projects? I think it’s important to understand not every project is built. Some projects are never built; sometimes there’s a superseding improvement that comes that’s not two 200 unit projects, that’s one 200 unit project, if it’s built.
Some of them are phased [in] over long periods of time. There’s a project in Moffett Park that demolished a million square feet to build two million, and they still haven’t replaced the first million, and that was approved in 2002. That’s probably the most extraordinary example that I can give you, but I think it illustrates that just because it’s been approved, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen next year.
And then we’re also talking net new. We do try to present that, but if you just see this two million square foot project – which is Juniper Networks, by the way, in case you’re curious – it wasn’t at the time a net of two million. It was a net of a million, which hasn’t occurred yet.
Here are a few concerns as we are putting together this presentation that we’ve identified, is that it’s not finished. It is missing some of the capacity improvements. It doesn’t provide you the complete information on projects that have occurred. It doesn’t present projects and processes I indicated. And it is subject to many interpretations.
So now, Hanson’s going to talk about how we can use it.
Hanson Hom: One of the advantages or disadvantages of not being involved at the earliest stages of the Balanced Growth Profile is that I kind of took an objective look at trying to investigate –
Trudi Ryan: My subjective look, yeah.
Hanson Hom: Yeah, what was this thing, what was it all about. And then I hear how people are using it, and as our City Manager mentioned, I’m going, I don’t think the information that’s being developed really is that developed as a tool to be used for the purpose that people are using it for. It’s not that thought out of a profile that’s being applied in ways as though it insinuates certain policy direction that was deliberate by the City Council. As much as I can read into the history and what Trudi has told me.
Basically, what I’ve come to conclusion on is really what this is, as Trudi mentioned, these are the big community indicators for the city. It doesn’t say relatively what’s good or bad as far as the relative growth. It’s really based on historic growth patterns. What I understand is that there was this satisfaction that in 2005, we were satisfied with the city. That’s a steady state.
So what does that actually mean as far as balanced growth? What actually happened was staff interpreted that the level of growth that we were experiencing on the historic, maybe past 10, 15 years, if we continue that same pattern of growth, that would be balanced growth, and then looking at what infrastructure or other kind of improvements were needed to support that. If we just drew a straight line projection and say “That is balanced or steady growth,” what do we have to plan for?
Well, I don’t really conclude necessarily some interpretation that that represents balanced growth. As Robert said, things change. The other thing is that right now, as Trudi mentioned, we’re only measuring really six indicators out of the ten: population, jobs, housing units, office industrial space, and factoring in and public school capacity.
So what does it really tell us? First it tells us population: we’re growing at a much faster rate than historically, because you see the 40% line of where population is, so that’s what it tells us. Historic pattern: a lot of that is not because of new housing units, because you see housing units way before 40%. It’s really a change in household size. So the usefulness about growth profiles is telling you, historically speaking, [is] what’s changing in the community relative to historic patterns.
For instance, office industrial space. Yes, we’ve approved a lot of office industrial development way beyond what the 40% line is, but what that tells me is historically, Sunnyvale is changing from a bedroom community to more of a higher density employment center in Silicon Valley. That’s what it tells me.
One of the big arguments that people have is school capacity. If you really rely on the Balanced Growth Profile, it says we’re way beyond what’s needed for school capacity, but we constantly hear the community, the dissatisfaction with the level of school capacity. So something’s wrong with that measure, because it currently shows us way beyond capacity. To me, that metric needs to be recalibrated. We really want to use it as a way of measuring balanced growth.
What does the Balanced Growth Profile not do? Trudi kind of touched on this before. The definition of a balanced growth is really based on tenuous assumptions of what the definition of balance is, of what steady state is. Bottom line, it just compares, in my opinion, historical development pattern with what has currently happened in the last 8 years or so.
It is not correlated with the General Plan. When you look at the 2025 General Plan, what the growth capacity is, the numbers that are the end numbers for 2025 do not reflect the General Plan. All the growth that has happened is actually within, even though we see the 40% line, is within what’s allowed in the General Plan, but the final numbers aren’t correlated with the General Plan. First thought, of course it should be correlated – but it’s not.
It also doesn’t prescribe – sometimes I thought, “Okay, this Balanced Growth Profile, when we look at jobs, housing, is meant to say there’s a balance of jobs and housing we’re trying to achieve.” When you look at the numbers, they have mixed policy directions, and I’ll talk a little bit about that more.
More recently, we hear people using it on project by project basis, as though the Balanced Growth Profile is meant to establish development quotas, like “We can’t approve more office development till we capture residential” or vice versa. Given the tool and the background how this developed, to informally use it as a quota system I think is an erroneous direction to use it for – unless we do further work, and I’ll talk about if we want to go that direction, what we would need to do.
It’s not a growth management tool, mainly because we have not.. A growth management tool generally means you’re trying to make sure your infrastructure stays up to speed with the population job growth. As Trudi mentioned, we haven’t calibrated and measured some of the key indicators, like parks, traffic capacity, infrastructure capacity, utility capacity. So if we’re going to really use it as a growth management tool, we need to do more homework to finish up that, too.
As I mentioned, we’re not currently measuring infrastructure improvements on the key indicators. It’s one of the misnomers; people see the bars go – I just saw just recently, “Oh, we only achieved 1% of our infrastructure capacity.” We’ve done quite a bit of infrastructure capacity; it’s just not reflected in Balanced Growth Profiles. There are a lot of misconceptions about what the Balanced Growth Profile represents.
So if we wanted to use it as actually a balanced growth tool – a lot of it’s been for discussion purposes, looking forward. If we wanted to use it as a balanced growth tool, as many are using it or would like to use it, there are certain things that we really need to do first as far as further homework.
I think the city needs to examine what are the underlying assumptions and policies of what constitutes balanced growth: jobs, housing, capacity, [and] infrastructure. I think we would need some more policy discussion for that.
Secondly, if we’re going to do a Balanced Growth Profile, ideally it should be correlated with what the General Plan capacity is and what the zoning capacity in the city is. Eventually, once the land use and transportation element is adopted, the ideal thing to calibrate the plan capacity in that document, what about growth profile? Then you can perhaps translate it with the balanced growth too.
Then it’s really talking about, well, what do you actually want to use it for? Is it meant to mainly provide a measure of these broad community indicators, which is the current, quite honestly, “usefulness” of the measure. There’s some definitely usefulness as far as historic context to the measure. Do you want to use it as a General Planning tool for high level policymaking? Or do you want it as a really detailed growth management tool, which some cities have, where you set goals and limits on the amount of housing units, office development you approve annually for over a certain period of time? So there has to be a discussion, what do you want to use this for?
Jobs/housing [ratio] is kind of an example of where some further discussion be needed on what do we mean by jobs/housing balance? In 2005, the job/housing balance was 1.3 to 1, which in Sunnyvale is really good, because most cities – ABAG has strived to be 1.4 to 1.8, so we’re doing really well. When you look at what the planned growth, net growth of jobs versus housing in the Balanced Growth Profile is, it suggests a very aggressive jobs growth versus housing growth. But even if we did achieve that very aggressive net growth, our job/housing balance in 2025 is still very good, 1.5 to 1.
My question is if steady state means changing to a different jobs/housing balance, or was the intent to stay where we were in 2005 as the balanced state? It kind of raises a question of what we mean by these numbers when it comes to the jobs/housing balance. I think if we want to use it in that way, we probably need some further deliberation and policy discussion.
So it’s a growth management tool. If we want to use it as a growth management tool – which a lot of cities have growth management plans in place, and there’s some valid reasons why you might want to have a growth management tool – basically the key purpose of a growth management plan is really tracking your infrastructure improvements with private development, like growth in population, growth in housing units, office space, etc.
So if we really want to use it as a growth management tool, we need further homework in tracking a number of measures or metrics. We need to calibrate what is transportation capacity, utility capacity, parks. We amended our ordinance to five per thousand5. Is that the right metric to track as a growth management tool? School capacity, it sounds like we need to reexamine what’s the appropriate metric for school capacity. Do we feel that school capacity is not sufficient as reflected in the current Balanced Growth Profile?
And there may be other city services and facilities that some cities track, like library capacity, public safety capacity, services for recreational programs, etc. So I think if we really want to use that growth management tool, there’s considerable more discussion in that area.
One thing I would mention is that some folks, in looking at the Balanced Growth Profile, they said, “Well, you haven’t been doing any infrastructure transportation improvement.” You just look at the past 5 years – for instance, Sunnyvale Works, where prior city management was very aggressive at funding a whole assortment of infrastructure improvements. The city implemented a lot of transportation improvement, bike plans, plans on the way to redo our basic water treatment plan. There’s water system, recycled water plans out there, huge goals for solid waste reduction, on and on. So when someone looks at the Balanced Growth Profile and says, “You haven’t done any infrastructure planning,” it’s really erroneous, because it’s an incomplete profile.
The key takeaway is really, just for discussion purposes. First of all, what’s good about the Balanced Growth Profile? It does provide you from a context of where the city is headed versus the historical development pattern, and that is really good. And it provides reflective indicators, these broad indicators of where we’re headed.
What is confusing about the Balanced Growth Profile? I think we’ve talked about that. It just needs more homework if we’re going to use it for more than intended purpose. You need to define what that purpose would be.
And if we’re going to tie it to the General Plan, we want to use it as a Balanced Growth Profile tool or jobs/housing balance tool or growth management tool. It really needs to be tied to the General Plan.
Those are my thoughts, and I really throw that out there for discussion purposes.
Vice Mayor Davis: Thank you very much, Mr. Hom. We have approximately 33 minutes to complete the study session. We’re going to go around the table, and the members of the Council and the Planning Commission will each have an opportunity to speak. I ask that everybody keep your remarks to a minimum so that everybody will have a chance. And also please be advised that there are people here in the audience who also might want to express their opinions, so we’d like to finish just a little bit early.
With that, we’ll start with Mr. Whittum.
Councilman Whittum: Thanks. I’m glad we’re having this meeting. I know it’s nominally about the Balanced Growth Profile, but I think more generally, it’s about community concerns about growth and effects of growth. I think one of the questions I have is when we have this discussion, are we capturing the primary concerns and are we arriving at some means of dealing with them?
I think basically, the problem is really not growth, but the ill effects of growth or the impacts of growth. Most people aren’t unhappy that there are more jobs, but then if there’s congestion, crowded parks, lack of space in schools, then that’s a source of unhappiness. But it’s not necessarily the growth, but some of the effects. So I really think the growth is limited by infrastructure, and it’s not really limited by an arbitrarily arrived at profile from 10 years ago.
So I think that really the problem is that the Balanced Growth Profile is not really accompanied by mechanics for implementing the infrastructure needed by growth. We’re missing some of the mechanics. We have some of them. For example, we’re raising park fees, but that was some years after the Balanced Growth Profile. At least we’re doing that.
We have traffic impact fees, but those aren’t actually adequate to cover the cost of the needed improvements. We saw the Lawrence grade separation, like $300 million dollars, and the traffic impact fees are a little bit short of that. So the impact fees aren’t quite adequate in covering infrastructure.
We’ve been a little bit slower the last 10 years to implement development agreements, so when somebody wants rezoning, we’re in position to ask for lots of stuff that has a nexus to what they’re doing and their effect and so on. We haven’t really been asking for that much over the years. However, I think that’s changing, and maybe we’re feeling a little more creative in that area.
I think we should feel comfortable to apply conditions of approval when they’re appropriate that have a nexus to what they’re doing, their effects. I think we’ll hopefully discuss some of this in the Climate Action Plan, but for a long time I’ve noticed that we’re really shy to ask for offsite improvements. We put in something, we say that it has a nexus to transit, but you can’t actually get to the transit from the site if you’re in a wheelchair, because we’re missing some infrastructure along the way. But we don’t require the offsite infrastructure. Sometimes I think we should look at that more carefully.
Lastly, the big one is schools. I’m really glad – I’m almost done. I’m really glad that the council has adopted a policy to advocate for increased school impact fees. That’s controlled by the state; they’re collected by the school, and they’re under $4 now, which is ridiculous considering that we charge $69 for parks. Parks are important, but they’re not 20 times more important than schools. They’re kind of as important.
So hopefully the state [legislature] will help us out on that. And after some helpful discussions with the city attorney, my understanding is that’s pretty much the only way you’re going to be able to do that, is to get the state to raise that impact fee that the schools are allowed to charge for school. I think that’s very important. Thank you.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Larsson.
Councilman Larsson: Yeah, a couple things. One, when I look at the Balanced Growth Profile, I often leap to this assumption that development equals growth or growth equals development. But I think one of the things that I heard Trudi saying is, for example, with population growth, there are things in addition to new housing that are causing the population to change.
The main knobs that we have are approving development for housing and for office or nonresidential, but there are additional factors beyond those knobs that are driving population change in the city, and that’s driving service needs in the city. It could be jobs outside of Sunnyvale or it could be changing household size, could be good schools; could be a lot of different factors that aren’t captured here currently.
So I’m interested in trying to capture those other factors as well, to have a more complete picture of what is causing our community to change, how are we evolving?
The other thing that occurs to me is that currently it’s a bit of a blunt instrument. It tells you how many new housing units there are, but it doesn’t tell you what size they are. Are they three-bedroom, or one-bedroom? Where are they in the city? Are they the right type, the right location? I think if we’re going to take this farther, we would need to have some more fine grain information to be able – if we’re going to make decisions based on it, we’re going to have to have more refined grain data. That’s all.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Olevson.
Commissioner Olevson: Thank you. [I have] a couple of questions. I would like to see this better developed as a planning tool. You mentioned that this is the big picture in the Balanced Growth Profile, and when I looked at the Community Vision Statement, out of the lengthy document, it was only the last few pages that actually talked about where we want to go. The rest was just historical perspective. I think if we’re using this Balanced Growth Profile – which the name itself implies it’s some sort of a useful tool – then we ought to spend the time to put the measures in place.
I’m a little concerned that we have school capacity as one of the elements to consider when we don’t have any control over it, and that’s a frequent comment we hear from the citizenry. “You’re adding all these homes; why aren’t you doing something about the school when our profile says we’re going to do be doing something about the school?” Thank you.
Vice Mayor Davis: Ms. Martin-Milius.
Councilmember Martin-Milius: For me, it was always interesting data, but not something that you could make decisions on because you’ve got – I mean, taxes, jobs, those are lag indices. They’re not leading indices. You can’t make decisions or compare jobs to some amount of office building and say, “They should match.”
So I’d like to see the whole title trashed. It’s not a balanced growth thing. That I think is what throws people off, because there is an expectation of some sort of ratios of balance that would be an ideal state, you could say. Not past or present, but ideal state. So this gives a great snapshot of a lot of things that are going on, but not anything that I think that we can make decisions on.
Of course, the schools – the schools are telling us they’ve got the capacity. The schools are telling us, they’ve presented how they’re getting that capacity and how it’s growing and so forth, and it’s like anything else; we have to believe what those agencies tell us. Again, that’s an interesting piece of information. It’s interesting data, but it’s not something I think that we can make decisions on.
So I would not like to have to have this continue and have it be called some sort of balanced thing, because it’s not. We either make it so that we can make decisions on it, or we say, yeah, this is a snapshot of where we are right now. This is a snapshot of everything that these areas have said.
And oh, by the way, we’ve got a $500 million project that we have to do water in. Big infrastructure issues that are coming up. So we might have some kind of forecast that goes along with the budget so that we do have some direct connections to budget, some direct connections to the General Plan and where we’re going with those things.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Meyering.
Councilmember Meyering: One of the slides showed that in ’05, the ratio was 1.3 jobs to 1 residential unit, and then the comment was made that the residents’ discontent is a reflection of a transition of Sunnyvale from a bedroom community to a commercial community. The data actually undercuts that. Sunnyvale was not a bedroom community; it was a balanced, medium-sized city, and the residents’ discontent is about the transition to a high density, high congested city.
What we’re doing here is we’re saying that the residents who have this discontent use the Balanced Growth Profile as one reference point to try and persuade the public servants that the residents are discontent, and there’s a logical reason for the city to change course.
Our response to that is “We don’t really agree with one of your reference points.” I think the city would be well advised to go to the core issue, which is the discontent of the residents with what’s happening in the city instead of arguing whether or not one of the metrics is really 100% valid or only 80% valid. Thanks.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Hendricks.
Councilmember Hendricks: I have about an hour and a half of comments I could make, but I’m going to be really short. First of all, to this historical thing where we talk about 2005, if we were going to go back and try and look at the historical trend, I’d love to see what it was in the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, and the ’90s. Because that’s when I grew up, and I’d like to see how it was back then.
But rather than the specifics, I want to talk about what I think is policy level question that’s really on the table here, which is whatever we do with this information, does it become information input to the decision-making process? Because whether or not you have a chart like that, we’re all going to know what we’ve seen developed or approved or we’re hearing from the public. Or do we want to make this into something where it defines specific levels and essentially tripwires on what decisions can or can’t be made?
To me, that’s – we can talk a lot about the details of what’s in this or how we define schools, but to me, the high level real policy question is, is this just information and whatever the chart looks like that we gather and use in our decision-making process like we do with the public input and everything else that we get? Or do we want to go ahead and change this to become a specific tripwire thing that you can’t do this step unless this and this and this have already occurred?
To me, that’s the real question of what we’re trying to get to do. If you want, I’ll tell you what my opinion is on that, but I think that’s the real question we should try and get to. Because once you decide that, then we can get into how do we actually measure it and look at it and change school metrics or things like that. If you want to hear my opinion on that one, I’ll tell you, but that I think is the core question.
Vice Mayor Davis: One minute and 17 seconds. That was very good, sir.
Councilman Hendricks: I told you I wasn’t going to go an hour.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Griffith.
Mayor Griffith: I agree with [Councilmember]Tara [Martin-Milius] that the name does a real disservice by communicating that it represents something that it does not. I think changing that would be a good thing. I don’t have any suggestions off the top of my head, but almost anything would be better. Just naming it “Skippy” would honestly be better than that.
I agree with much of what Glenn said, but I have some concerns about turning anything into a tripwire when one of the tripwires is clearly going to be schools, which as has been mentioned, are beyond our control. I’d toss out transportation as one that is at least half not under our control either, seeing as how we have very little control over public transit in particular. That seems to be left to other agencies, and they don’t tend to listen to us as much as we’d like.
But I think some comments early on were pretty accurate in terms of people using this as a way to vent their discontent when it doesn’t represent what they actually think it does. I think it’s important to fix that, so that we are communicating accurate stuff to our residents, so that their discontent and our decisions are fact-based and not based on hype. That’s all I have.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Durham.
Commissioner Durham: Thank you. I’m more interested in where and how we deal with the new growth. We all know we’re going to have growth; the question is just what are we going to do? We can’t bury our heads in the sand. Things are going to happen in this area. We see without adding housing, we’ve added a lot more people compared with previous ratios.
Other questions for me would be, is this growth going to be in logical locations, and also not over-impact some areas of the city more than others? A lot of that goes with our infrastructure and other issues like that with the schools and roads and what transit we have or don’t have available. Thank you.
Vice Mayor Davis: Ms. Harrison.
Commissioner Harrison: I agree that statistics are a very good way to measure your performance as opposed to isolated complaints, let’s say, or concerns raised. But if you have accurate statistics, then it is a valid way to judge how you’re doing.
However, I agree that if we aren’t responsible for the statistic, if we aren’t responsible to respond to the statistic, as in number of children and how many schools are built, although we might track it as information to be informative to our citizens, I don’t think we should kick ourselves or pat ourselves on the back either way that we’re managing this along with transportation, public transportation being notably – you’ve got public transportation, then you’ve also got Highway 101 and 237, which are not under our control.
So although it’s useful – and the things that we can control, we should keep statistics on. How is the level of service with regard to the streets that we control? I think that’s a good measure. I know that’s part of the Community Conditions Indicator, but it doesn’t seem to be tracked here.
If we’re going to measure these things more specifically, perhaps number of households as compared to population is a better statistic to judge compared to housing units. Similarly, if we’re going to judge school capacity, wouldn’t we say, okay, we have such and so many children of this age, elementary school; compare that to our elementary school capacity. Break it down a little finer so that we know where we’re going and what things we would have to change if we were in control of them. That’s it.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Klein.
Commissioner Klein: Yes. Trudi wasn’t the only one who went through this almost 3 years ago. I went –
Vice Mayor Davis: Robert was here, too.
Commissioner Klein: That’s true. Actually, that’s right. On the Planning Commission, that was one of the discussions that we had as far as when the vision came out, it was really to a large degree just a suggestion. There were no teeth behind it as far as whether or not you’re trying to really limit growth, you’re trying to maintain a balance, or are you just trying to reflect the vision and the understanding of the community if they want to keep a general jobs/home balance and keep the quality of service within the city as it currently stands.
We had discussions, and that was one of the questions for council, that it’s a nice idea, it’s a very good thing to track, but there’s nothing behind it from are we trying to rein ourselves in, or is it just something the council will track every year?
Looking back now, definitely there should’ve been a little bit more, at least, understanding of – well, for one thing, the tracking of the missing items. But when it really comes down to it, there are things that definitely we can’t monitor, we can’t control, but monitoring transportation through the city – if you talk to the citizens, I think their biggest issue is congestion.
And every time we approve an M/S FAR 1006 building and the effects on the surrounding areas, it has a ripple effect throughout the community. I think looking at that and looking at what we can do and tying this – not closely tying it to the General Plan, but re-looking at zoning and the General Plan and our long-term vision of, from a feature standpoint, where we want that density.
I think Council needs to take another look and staff needs to take another look, because when we start moving density, and as density moves off out of Moffett Park and into, say, Sunnyvale as a whole, those effects become more greatly seen, and what we could do from a transportation standpoint – other infrastructure, water, electricity, all of that, very important, but I think the daily effects that people see are the congestion and the ongoing effects of that on air quality and everything else.
So I hope that first we finish monitoring those items that we hadn’t been monitoring, and then looking at least what we can do to – what our long-term vision is. This is information, and that’s the way I saw this to begin with, but how we tie that to the General Plan needs to be soon.
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Melton.
Commissioner Melton: Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. I thought I would just give one perspective from the Planning Commission on the Balanced Growth Profile, since we raised our hands in January and asked for some more information on this topic. The Planning Commission, our job is to apply the policies that are set by City Council, and we have this Balanced Growth Profile that’s in the General Plan, and since we’re very meticulous in the Planning Commission, we want to deal with it.
There are two things with the Balanced Growth Profile. One, to echo what Hansen said, is that the Balanced Growth Profile was not created with sufficient robustness to withstand the scrutiny that is being applied to it currently. Those are my words, not Hansen’s, but I’m just echoing something that I heard.
And then the second thing is that optically, the Balanced Growth Profile shows an extreme out-of-balance situation when you look at industrial office space approved but not built. Optically, it’s something that reasonable people I think want to deal with from a policy perspective.
So in asking for the additional information, I don’t have a dog in the fight in terms of the policy that City Council sets; I just want to know how City Council wants that policy implemented, and that’s why we’re looking for policy guidance.
It seems that City Council could decide to change the name on the Balanced Growth Profile to something that’s maybe more reflective of the intent, or City Council could decide that it’s a real, meticulous, by the numbers gating thing that has tripwires. What I would say is better information would make it a better document. Tie it to the LUTE7 and the General Plan and the zoning code.
And then rather than using it for projects where the Planning Commission or City Council are looking to entitle something, that we just use it for policy issues – for example, General Plan amendments, zoning changes, and policy reviews. So better information going in, and understand specifically when we’re supposed to use it and when we’re not. Those are my thoughts. Thank you.
Mayor Griffith: Mr. Vice Mayor, if I could, real quick – the General Plan is policy. The Balanced Growth Profile is not.
Vice Mayor Davis: Okay. Of that we have a full understanding. My only comment is I think the mayor had a good idea. I think we should call it ‘Skippy’. We have approximately 12 minutes left, and we’ll try to get around the room to answer any questions that the public has. We’ll start over here.
Member of the Public, Dwight Davis: My comment is I was affected by the LinkedIn8 building. I live at 230 feet [away from LinkedIn], and I just ask the City Council to be cautious in how we do development in the future. Is it a city we’re going to want to live in, in 5 or 10 years, with just the congestion and all that, more people. My kids go to Bishop, and right now there’s 10 portable [classroom buildings] out there. Every year, it’s like where are we going to put the kids?
Vice Mayor Davis: Good comment. Mr. Frazer.
Member of the Public, Andy Frazer: Yeah, I’m just glad that Hanson mentioned proposing better defining the metrics and tying it into the General Plan, but I am very concerned that some people may take this opportunity of revisiting the Balanced Growth Profile. They may use that opportunity to not only – I won’t say open the floodgates, since it isn’t a policy - but to actually justify much more of the more profitable, high density office development.
Vice Mayor Davis: Ms. Lofgren?
Member of the Public, Holly Lofgren: I just wanted to reiterate I think Councilmember Whittum’s thoughts that it might not be that people are unhappy that the paper doesn’t show us being in balance; it’s they’re unhappy with what’s perhaps happening. And they look at that and they see that, and optically it looks like we’ve got an awful lot of office going in, which seems to be driving a set of things we’re talked about many times.
I just wondered if any of you caught the article in Mountain View9 about this topic. We’re not the only ones dealing with this, and they seem to have been talking about the same thing recently, and one of the – they talked about their RHNA10 being 2926; they talked about office workers were “bidding up housing prices and forcing people out of town.” The article called for a need for more tracking. They suggested raising fees on office development to go towards subsidized housing.
One [Mountain View] councilmembersaid this; they said “They suggested raising housing fees. It might discourage office growth, which she acknowledged is the source of the problem. She suggested that Mountain View share some of our economic development with San Jose, a city where many Mountain View workers have had to go to find affordable housing. I don’t know what it would take to spread it out more. We have to have all these businesses in Mountain View. If that alleviates at all some of the pressure to build housing, let’s spread all of it out some more.’”
My point in mentioning this is that we’re all in this same boat, and I think it’s probably not whether or not we have a Balanced Growth Profile; it’s whether or not people feel that we’re building our city in a way that they think is balanced to them.
Vice Mayor Davis: We’ll go down to the end. Ma’am?
Member of the Public, Maria Pan: Yes, I just wanted to know what type of growth management tool are you utilizing right now in the General Plan? You just said the General Plan, that’s a policy document; then in this policy document, what is the policy to manage growth?
Mayor Griffith: Are you asking me directly?
Member of the Public, Maria Pan: Yes, but you just expressed –
Mayor Griffith: The General Plan is a collection of a few thousand different policies. There’s no way for me to point to one and say “This is what it is.”
Vice Mayor Davis: Mr. Cordes.
Member of the Public, John Cordes: I think this is a wonderful discussion. I apologize for being late, but I have sat through this before, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what was going on. I think also people have to have a perspective for what we want the future to be, and that’s really – people are seeing growth right now, and it’s causing a lot of angst, but we have to do a better job of communicating and visioning what we want to look like. I think that will help people feel more comfortable that we know where we’re going and what we want the city to look like.
Member of the Public (unidentied): I would just note the Letter to the Editor in the San Jose Mercury recently by a teenager saying the city’s changing, and she’s not loving the change.
Member of the Public (unidentied): I’ll just point out, I did hear a couple times tonight that you have no control over school growth. If something is something outside of your control, you still need to track it, you still need to balance against it, and you need to control the things you can to bring that back to balance.
Vice Mayor Davis: Ms. Hansen?
Member of the Public, Eleanor Hansen: I’m going to follow up a couple of leads already. I see the City Council as being the equivalent of a board of directors of a corporation. I cannot believe that the board of directors at say Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, would be using data from 10 years ago to be making their current decisions. We should develop a vision of what Sunnyvale is going to look like, but it should not be limited by what people thought they liked 10 years ago. In terms of business practice, that is ludicrous.
Okay, I’m just echoing some other things. At a certain level, you don’t manage growth; it just happens. You cope with it. The most you can do is just say – we’ve managed the jobs versus housing thing. You probably really don’t do that.
Vice Mayor Davis: Okay, we’ve gone all the way around the room a couple times now. I thank you all for coming tonight. I hope the information was pertinent, and it certainly will give – you want me to kick you around again? Okay.
City Manager Walker: Sorry, you can kick me later. Just one comment, I’m really sensitive to all of the comments from the public in particular, and some council members, about maybe we shouldn’t be focusing on this, but focusing on the community’s concerns.
I just want to say, because I’m also sensitive to these guys and the work they put into these things, I know they’re going to leave feeling like “Did we do the right thing?”, and I just want to remind council, this is what you asked for, is to focus on this tool. It’s a good start. But we are sensitive to the bigger issue. I know council is sensitive to the bigger issue, and I know your next City Manager will be working hard to convene the right meetings for that. So, just with that…
Vice Mayor Davis: That’s exactly what I was going to say. Thank you very much. Okay, we have 6 minutes before the council meeting starts. Thank you for being here. We hope that everything was informative to you, and we look forward to your continued participation.
Notes:
2 The Community Vision Element is part of Sunnyvale’s General Plan. The General Plan defines the Community Vision Element as “the Community Vision, describes the past, present, and desired future of Sunnyvale in broad, citywide terms. It provides both the background statement and the forward-looking vision upon which the functional elements of the Plan are based. As such, it is the overarching component of the General Plan, the source from which each of the functional elements springs.”
3 The General Plan is a city policy that describes the physical development of the city. It addresses land use, housing, transportation, schools, jobs, safety and sustainability. For a brief video explaining the General Plan, please see take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1puhYanRyE
4 The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) is a regional planning agency incorporating various local governments in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. It deals with land use, housing, environmental quality, and economic development. ABAG assigns each city a number of new housing units that each city must accommodate in its housing plan (known as the Housing Element).
5 Sunnyvale has adopted a policy that, effective July 2014, residential builders must provide new parkland at the rate of 5.0 acres per 1,000 new residents (or pay an in-lieu fee of $69/sq-ft of new residential floor space)
6 “M/S FAR 100” is a zoning designation that refers to very high density office space. “M/S” means the land will be used for “Industrial and Service” use. “FAR 100” means the building will be allowed a “floor-to-area” ratio of 100%, which is typically the maximum granted in Sunnyvale.
7 LUTE refers to the “Land Use and Transportation Element”, one part of the General Plan.
8 "Unhappy Sunnyvale Neighbors Form Preservation Group In Response To LinkedIn", Sunnyvale Sun.
9 “Council tackles jobs-housing balance“, Mountain View Voice, May 20, 2014.
10 ABAG is expected to require Sunnyvale to plan an average of 531 housing units per year (twice the city’s historical average) for the period 2014-2012. Sunnyvale City Council Approves Housing Elements Annual Progress, Sunnyvale Sun
