Regular City Council and Special City Council Meetings March 7, 2017

0:00:15good evening everyone this is a meeting of the el cerrito city council thank you all for coming and um i'd like to announce that we just had a closed session and no decisions were reached and we didn't even i think get so far as directing staff the um so now we'll start with the regular part

0:00:40of the meeting and we'll start out with a pledge of allegiance or observation of a moment of silence led by council member greg lyman 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

0:01:10all oops okay uh are there any council or staff communications or announcements paul do you have anything um just a point that uh uh last saturday when our commission our council was interviewing for committees and commissions there was a poet laureate our el cerrito port laureate had an

0:01:37event at the el cerrito library part of the centennial project uh mosh shin win and i hear it was a great success over 100 people showed up so uh el cerrito is becoming a real arts mecca here so very proud of that okay thank you greg no okay this past friday i attended at the santa

0:02:01clara university in santa clara county san jose area i heard and and met with an associate professor by the name of pratipan gula sekaram and his specialty is immigration so elected officials around the bay area attended this panel on immigration and the situation that's going on

0:02:32on the federal level that will affect us locally so i found it to be very informative and i hope at our next council meeting we can discuss all of this thank you michelle i just add on to what paul said um i was going to mention this during my liaison report i am the arts and culture

0:02:57commission liaison and i was able to attend part of the poetry reading on saturday and it was really amazing if any of you get a chance they will be having more readings throughout the year and they really did a terrific job it exceeded my expectations i was holding back tears at one point and

0:03:22then at the next point laughing and it really felt great to be part of the community especially just it brought up a lot of emotions that we're all feeling right now and they were able to express it so well and um we had uh everything from you know a a child that had a small poem

0:03:44to um i believe a man that wrote a poem about his about meeting his his wife who had passed away but he was talking about the first time they met and it was just amazing to see the wide variety of things that they shared thank you and i'll just mention a couple

0:04:03of other things i attended the mayor's conference on march the 2nd and we had a very interesting speaker who was dr leroy murashida who's the current president of cal state hayward i'm sorry my son went to cal state hayward the it was he was the president he is

0:04:26the president of cal state east bay and he spoke to us on a number of different issues but in particular he talked about how the college was really wanting to be more a part of not just the hayward site but also the um the you know the larger east bay and they do have a

0:04:49campus out over the hill and um so he talked a lot about that um and but he was a very interesting uh speaker and i enjoyed uh speaking to him uh offline too and then on saturday what i did uh before we got together for our the council meeting where we interviewed

0:05:12candidates for boards and commissions and committees is that i went to the opening day for el cerrito youth baseball and which was an utterly amazing event and group of kids they started by marching down the street from el cerrito high school to cerrito vista park and

0:05:34then they paraded down the steps onto pomona avenue [Music] team by team and as i understand it there are now at least 340 students enrolled in that program so it's an absolutely uh tremendous opportunity for the youth of our uh city and also i believe our surrounding

0:06:02cities because i don't believe at all that it's i know that it's not limited to students who live in our city um so it's it's really an a great day to see that so with that we'll move on to the next item on the agenda which is oral communications from the public which is

0:06:21an opportunity for members to speak on items not on the agenda if you want to talk about a item on the agenda you can do so at that time and if you want to talk about any closed session item or [Music] any consent calendar item you can do so now are there any speaker slips yes mayor we

0:06:47have two requests to speak al miller followed by tom panis okay thank you good evening mayor abelson council members and staff this is one of the happiest nights of the el cerrito library foundation's years because i get to tell you about the results of last october's el cerrito

0:07:14rotary club's sip and savor event for people that might not know what that is it is a wonderful event held at the mira vista country club it has all kind of raffle prizes there's a putting prize or you can win a thousand or ten thousand dollars i forget what it is but

0:07:35it's uh if you want to ever meet anybody in el cerrito that's the day to do it uh it's the major fundraiser of the el cerrito rotary club this year there were two organizations designated as the primary beneficiaries the ostrito library foundation [Music] was one of them and elsewhere high

0:07:56school school activity fund was the other one at their luncheon meeting last thursday they presented ten thousand dollar checks to each of these organizations the library foundation uh speaking on behalf of that as president of the library foundation and the school

0:08:18activity fund so come october this year they will be i'm sure having another event and uh save the date when they come out with the cards and tell you when it's going to be because you don't want to miss it so the library foundation is very grateful to the rotary for their

0:08:39support for us and i think it's just another indication of the overall general support for a new library and rochelle imagine how much more you would have enjoyed the poet laureate event when you are witnessing it from the new performance center in the new library that the needs

0:09:03assessment has identified thank you thank you and congratulations okay are there there's another speaker yes tom pass [Music] good evening mayor abelson members of the council and city staff my name is tom panis and i live at [address removed] in el cerrito i'd like to remind you that of some of

0:09:31the commitments that have been made to the community regarding our historic resources at the strategic plan session on january 26 2013 then council person friedman suggested we should directly address historic resources in the strategic plan a brief just after a brief discussion

0:09:47then mayor lyman proposed that the strategies used to implement the goals the strategic plan should include one elsewhere to adopt a historic resources ordinance and two el cerrito will perform a survey of the town to identify the most likely historic structures

0:10:01although the council will approve this explicit language what appeared in the next draft of the strategic plan was examine current policies on historic preservation the revised language was marginally useful at best and did not reflect the council's stated desire

0:10:14as a strategy such language as a recipe for inaction beyond that it provides no guidance insight or direction regarding our community's valuable historic resources at the strategic plan update meeting on march 28 2015 i reminded the council and staff that we hadn't made any progress

0:10:30on this front standing here this evening that situation has not changed i think it's time to stop pushing this down the road and get the ball rolling our city and our community need and deserve a historic resources ordinance and a survey of the city as have been demonstrated by the chiang

0:10:47mai home historic district and the hana gardens project giving our historic resources the respect they deserve not only preserves our heritage our heritage but enriches our community in many ways i urge the council to not only revise the strategic plan explicitly to include

0:11:01the ordinance and survey as described above the next time it comes before you but to also set a time frame for accomplishing both of those tasks on a different subject last night i attended i attended the san pablo city council meeting there was an overflow crowd it wasn't

0:11:16just me and everybody went home very happy because the council passed the safe haven resolution thank you for your time this evening okay so that that uh concludes uh oral communications from the public correct yes okay thank you okay so with that we will move on to

0:11:39presentations we have three tonight and the first one is march is american red cross month proclamation and there is a speaker i believe right our speakers good evening my name is merle mcqueen and this is james lyon we are members of the red cross lead leadership council here in contra costa

0:12:10county it's an honor to accept the proclamation from the city of el cerrito declaring march as red cross month we thank you for this honor march is red cross month a time to recognize our nation's heroes who help those in need and their community every day the american red cross depends

0:12:32on local heroes our volunteers and our donors to deliver help and hope during an emergency volunteers comprise 90 of the red cross workforce here in contra costa we have 514 active red cross volunteers local heroes who provide many hours of service to our community

0:12:51the red cross is not a government agency it relies on donations of time money and blood to do its work an average of 91 cents of every dollar the red cross spends is invested in humanitarian services and programs during red cross month you too can become a community hero by taking a few

0:13:09simple steps create an emergency preparedness plan for your household test your smoke detectors and remind your neighbors to do the same if you don't have smoke detectors contact your local red cross chapter for assistance learn life-saving skills from red cross

0:13:25classes like lifeguarding or cpr become a red cross volunteer we highly encourage that give blood or make a financial donation and you can see redcross.org for more information on how you can help i'm a member of the leadership council for the contra costa chapter for the

0:13:44east bay leadership council with the red cross we're just getting underway and we want to come to all of the cities in contra costa county and make face to face we hope that there are no disasters that will require us to have to reach out to everyone but in the event that we do we

0:14:02don't want that to be the first time that you hear from us so we want to thank you for the proclamation and definitely thank you for your time here this evening thank you and we have a proclamation for you okay oh thank you [Applause] and that brings us to presentation number two which is the

0:15:16environmental quality committee's work plan and it's being presented by howdy gowdy and maria i'm just here on my good evening uh mary ebelson and uh members of the council i'm maria sanders and i'm uh the manager for operations and environmental services uh i'm also

0:15:37the liaison the staff liaison for the environmental quality committee so i would like to introduce the chair of the environmental quality committee which is howdy gowdy uh good evening mayor abelson council members i'm howdy gowdy charles eqc um so our mission is um to educate inspire and

0:16:12activate our community regarding environmental quality topics um we have 11 members um i believe both dave weinstein and mark miner have served the entire existence of the committee since 2008 or nearly that we have a lot of other long-standing members and we continually

0:16:30continue to gain and refresh our committee with with great new members as well to keep it active and dynamic i want to take a moment to recognize mildred dandridge who sadly passed away a few months ago she was a long time eqc member even though she wasn't on the committee the

0:16:54last couple of years she made a number of contributions to the eqc the environment the community in general and particularly in the areas of environmental education in um in the schools so i just want to remember her and thank her for everything she did for our community

0:17:16um so the role of the eqc is to provide environmental advice and policy development recommendations to staff and council we also have a strong commitment to environmental program activities including public outreach education volunteer service to the community in the form of hands-on environmental

0:17:41work parties we have many goals enumerated here but just you know quickly we focus on the whole community all ages residences and businesses the eqc strives to inform and champion environmental efforts in the city particularly the climate action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

0:18:04other areas include reducing hazardous chemical use protection of and creation of open green spaces we're very lucky to have the 100 acre hillside natural area in our city limits and finally sustainable water systems both enhance enhancing natural systems like creeks and improving efficiency and

0:18:23reuse and utility water systems serving buildings um so we've you've seen our past accomplishments and before i'll go through them fairly quickly since we want to focus on what we're work plan is for the future but you know we've contributed to the development of a

0:18:47number of significant policies in the city most notably climate action plan single-use bag ordinance community choice aggregation and the urban greening plan we have you know a number of program activities as well where again the green team volunteer events and um education and outreach with uh

0:19:18events like the hillside natural area or the hillside festival earth day 4th of july and so for policies that were this past year of 2016 i would say we were a little bit thinner than some of our previous years in policy work but we did talk about an updated environmentally

0:19:50preferred purchase policy we also made some recommendations to council on on other issues like the bay area air quality management district refinery emissions regulations and the plastic bag ban [Music] initiatives that were on the ballot last november so in the program area for last year um

0:20:26you know again climate action plan implementation was a strong focus and one of the areas that we accomplished a lot with climate action plan implementation is the community choice aggregation [Music] opportunity that's available to our residents through the city partnering with mce to provide

0:20:49100 renewable power and towards that goal we started planning a special centennial outreach um that we're calling 100 for 100 renewable power for you know 100 years in el cerrito and and you'll hear more of that as the main body of that work will be this this year

0:21:17um we held a uh eco film we have an eco film series that is sort of an ongoing uh means of community outreach and education and also last year we had uh we took part in this the city was a member of what was called the cool california challenge there were 22 cities in

0:21:44el cerrito placed 11th in this sort of competition between cities to have residents make commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a result of our efforts we did earn 2700 for the city which the eqc helped to program and that funding was used to do some stewardship behind the recycling

0:22:13center removing invasive plants and reseeding so it's nice that that had some returns we held two lectures and workshops this past year one on water efficiency in greywater and the other a solar installation and financing workshop and of course we had the the third hillside

0:22:38festival and as always you know co-sponsored with trail trekkers and that event has also been earning some returns in that it has been a fundraiser has helped to pay for some of the maintenance and costs in the hillside natural area and as as always there are several

0:23:05ongoing green team events held each year typically about six a year mostly litter cleanups but also we've been doing some invasive plant removal we did some weeding in the the fairmount rain garden this past year also um and the city uh the eqc hosted some meetings

0:23:30with uh the city building official to discuss you know opportunities for environmental uh related aspects of construction projects and um we also hosted a former uh el serious staff member garth schultz who was informing us about the trends in the solid waste management

0:23:52area so for our work plan this year green team volunteer events continue to be one of our main focuses coming up we have a earth day stewardship on the pg e right of way next to mosher we did this last year and it went well we're going to do it again with them on on our earth day

0:24:27we have other public education and outreach events planned potentially the film after the flood which is a film about climate change by leonardo dicaprio and workshops uh we haven't nailed any down at this point but there are a number of topics that have been on our agenda for a while including you

0:24:56know energy efficiency of homes and financing of improvement energy efficiency improvements for homes such as pace and pollinator safe and healthy garden workshops so electric vehicles are also on our agenda the national plug-in days in september and hope to participate in that again

0:25:23that is something we've had some effort in coordinating with richmond in this past year so for the climate action plan implementation we are obviously continuing with our 100 renewable power outreach and education specifically with the deep green outreach campaign

0:25:52which we're calling 100 for 100 this year 100 renewable energy for the 100 years of el cerrito and we intend to attend many of the centennial affiliated city events and we have resources to inform residents of their renewable power choices and we have you know developed materials to help our members

0:26:19be good you know knowledgeable deep green ambassadors and we're happy to share them with anyone who wants to help provide information to the community about energy choices including yourselves um and actually i'll give you some of our 100 for 100 stickers as a start of your

0:26:40participation so we look to work with staff and mce to encourage and provide analysis resources to follow through on transitioning municipal accounts to 100 renewable power to support the climate action plan goals as analysis resources are available we intend to review

0:27:04climate action plan goals and accomplishments and potentially look at revised goals if appropriate we continue our discussion of revisions to the environmentally preferred purchase policy is recommended in the climate action plan and because residential natural gas is the largest

0:27:28fraction of our greenhouse gas inventory and we're exploring ways that we can help to reduce that footprint and educate the community about it so in implementing the urban greening plan a very new idea that's like to explore is the idea of creating a cooperative working group

0:28:02between um the you know the bodies of el cerrito and um and community groups to try to have you know some cooperation on uh on building initiatives to to you know keep momentum and things happening under the urban greening plan um and hopefully eqc could be part of

0:28:32that we've we've proposed you know continuing our work with an emphasis on things like pollinator habitat connectivity and other stewardship you know acquisition preservation of open space and um it's also come up in our committee that we're sort of increasingly

0:28:53focused on the idea of how you know we can help you the city decision makers in your you know budget process regarding environmental choices that need to be made so so we're you know going to reach out to staff and and to yourselves to try to figure out the best way for that to

0:29:15happen that we can contribute some input on areas of environmental importance in the city that need attention and might have you know budgetary ramifications um you know one example of which is you know having the resources like in the hillside natural area to do the stewardship we

0:29:35need to do you know just because it's named natural doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything for it to to be in good condition so and obviously the hillside natural area will be celebrated again with the fourth annual hillside festival on may 21st again providing some fundraising for

0:29:56maintenance and restoration trust migration strategies continue to be an area that we're working on and you know recently we've had a lot of conversations with um staff about the inventory and the deployment of trash cans in public spaces so for our upcoming events

0:30:25we have a couple of green team events the madera green team broom pole will be march 18th the saturday at 10 a.m there will be a cerrito creek uh green team cleanup april 8th at 10 a.m and i already mentioned the earth day stewardship on the pg e right of way at

0:30:45moser that's april 22nd and the third annual hillside festival is may 21st [Music] and that's a further snapshot of our calendar calendar of events um so in closing you know the eqc wishes to thank and recognize maria sanders our staff liaison who is very involved in

0:31:13all the activities we undertake on top of the many full-time employees worth of work she's responsible for and we appreciate all her work and efforts and we look forward to the potential of having additional staff support in the environmental analyst area to relieve her of some of this burden

0:31:32and also enable the eqc to further work on monitoring evaluation and future policy development of the climate action plan so thank you very much i just like to note that i believe that our council is already um 100 on board with 100 and and that is to say we've already

0:31:55signed up i think yeah that's great i've i think i've heard it said at one point in time that it was unique in mce service territory to have a council where all the individual members had their personal accounts as deep green so that is a great leadership statement and i appreciate

0:32:15that if if that's still true and hopefully the city and its municipal accounts can do the same thing some some cities have so we have a little catching up to do there so yeah um to that end mayor uh last time i checked we were the only uh city council that is 100 deep green and

0:32:36if i could get uh some a bunch of those 100 for 100 stickers next week when i'm there i will remind everybody that we are the still probably the only council that is 100 deep green yeah um i will steal some of my thunder from my liaison report uh to let to give

0:32:52you this information um how do you see that you can help people become deep green we are will be setting rates next week at mce and the normal um greater than 50 percent uh participant will be uh one percent cheaper than pg e's corresponding rates so uh mce will be

0:33:18less expensive than pg e for power for the average user home user and some average business users going forward for this count for this fiscal year and that's going to be great news and it's going to help us achieve some things like attract people to deep green

0:33:37great yeah that's excellent yeah because the increment is not that big to do you know it's a penny per kilowatt hour which is usually for most customers only like five dollars a month or something like that so it's a pretty modest increment to go from 50 to 100

0:33:56i'd like to add that i was deep green and then i went the next step and got solar so now i'm providing making my own energy that's great yeah can i ask on the on the deep green for the centennial effort what's the goal how many numbers of households or what what do we have now

0:34:15and what are we trying to get to at the end of this yeah so i should have mentioned i i think i had it in my notes that um we have somewhere over 460 of the el cerrito accounts already opted up to deep green and i think the total number is somewhere in the range of 9

0:34:35000 something so it it ends up being about 5 which is one of the highest rates in mc's territory so we've done very well by comparison to other communities um but you know five percent still sounds like a a modest number so i i would like to increase that i don't know that we've

0:34:57set an exact goal for ourselves at this point but we will be tracking it and see you know how how it changes as events go by and we do this outreach throughout the whole year because you know we're focusing on this for a while so can i ask one more question just to say

0:35:16uh um howdy on the pg e partnership along moser can you tell me that's been for two years now is that right yeah this will be the second year um you know for for many years uh pg e has managed that land and pre you know primarily what they're being asked to do is is fire prevention

0:35:39mitigation of you know they don't want the dry grass to get too high especially since a fire under the power lines is a special kind of hazard so um you know the the fire department is very specific about what they'd like to see you know to mitigate that hazard

0:35:59and in the past pg e has done fairly uh destructive practices of disking which um is no longer the case and they're now taking a much more um you know holistic approach to trying to be good stewards of that space i think you know we've had a number of meetings with them and they kind of

0:36:22understand that even though it's a pg e of right-of-way it's contiguous to the hillside natural area and people do use it informally as a recreational resource and so they're they're very much receptive to the idea of you know improving the management and and bringing back some of the

0:36:44uh resources that are kind of already there we we discovered there are some large patches of lupine and other native plants that were in areas that didn't get disrupted by prior management and so those are pretty nice resources and can be encouraged and that's kind of what our work has been

0:37:03attempting to do and i guess my question was going to be did did they offer up and volunteer efforts do we ask to work with them and do they contribute volunteers and revenue for earth day or they've yeah they did make a a good commitment to providing resources and volunteers at

0:37:23the joint work party i would say in terms of the interaction you know they they were working with the city on meeting the fire mitigation criteria and you know they were proactive about involving the public on their plans and they frankly adjusted their plans based on feedback

0:37:48so i think they've been very receptive in working with the city and the community to come to a good management solution good thank you i'm staying with the hillside natural area i noticed that you had in a slide more budget more funding for hillside maintenance and i'm just curious what

0:38:09you have in mind with that regard and you know is it more of the invasive plant removal like you did behind the recycling center um yeah so i mean i think it's a conversation that needs to develop i'm i'm sort of relaying this message that's coming you know through the eqc but also

0:38:28through other community groups that have an interest in this and i think the feeling is that a lot of work has been done with volunteer efforts and that's great and we will continue to do that but that there is a um you know a level of need that exceeds volunteer

0:38:49capacity both in scope and and in some of the technical difficulty aspects i mean you know there are good places for volunteers to pull broom and there are bad places for them to pull broom because it's too steep or too inaccessible or so um i think that's that's the feeling is that you

0:39:10know to do a complete or thorough job it's going to require a combination of resources from volunteer efforts and um you know more professional efforts great thank you okay do you have any questions like i i see rebecca milliken back there and and i just want to thank her i know

0:39:31she's been uh working uh with howdy and and the uh team and and as the formerly is on to um the eqc i appreciate all the work that you've done last past year and and i hope we can our city i believe is in a second place with the most uh uh deep green um households is that true

0:39:57no to to to be clear richmond has more houses than we have i think they're at 500 and change but their percentage is lower and a smaller community has a higher percentage but fewer houses than we have yeah there's there's a lot of ways to slice the data but we we do

0:40:18stand out when you see the data and either way we do stand out we we have done a good job or i mean i think it reflects the community values that you know people want to um to make this commitment and choice so um we just want to further encourage and and educate about that and thank you for

0:40:39recognizing rebecca she's done a lot of great work i actually had on my notes to recognize a number of our members uh renee solari um trina mackey and rebecca were all involved in the workshops that we um hosted and yes so thanks thank you oh thank you okay okay

0:41:03i don't have any questions okay well thank you very much it's um i appreciate your report and uh sounds like everything's going really well yeah thank you thank you thank you okay our next presentation is on the specific plan i put it up there good evening council members mayor and council

0:42:23members my name is melanie mintz and i am the city's community development director i am here tonight as you know to provide a presentation on the san pablo avenue specific plan i think my goal tonight is or i think all of in a staff's goal tonight is just to really make sure we're all on the

0:42:46same page um i'm not going into too much detail and decided not to pre-guess which threads you would like to follow and we'll just try to give as brief an overview of a very long document as i can and then let your questions really get into any detail that you'd like

0:43:04i'm joined tonight a plan like this takes the efforts of many in implementation so i'm joined by a few who might have better answers to some of your questions or correct me when i'm wrong um so margaret cavanaugh lynch who's our development services manager annie vette

0:43:19ortiz our public works director will both be providing part of this presentation and then kat alquist who's our community development analyst working on affordable housing and economic development and sean moss our senior planner who has a lot of the major projects on san pablo avenue under his

0:43:34review right now is also here as well as others again so tonight i thought just to get us all on the same page um i would review a bit kind of the origins of the specific plan its purpose the processes we use in implementing it um how does it work what are some of the

0:43:54results we're seeing um and going forward um what's next um the specific plan um i think you all have one but i have mine here um of course there's a is a large document um that really tries to achieve several things one of them is to articulate a vision that builds uh upon lots of public

0:44:21outreach and as you'll see overlapping plans and goals that have been adopted but importantly it's also an implementing document as well as a vision it actually contains the regulations when it comes to the development code that makes uh that helps make that bring

0:44:35this vision into fruition so it's not just aspirational its main components of course are form-based code which i'll go more into but that's really the piece of it that is the regulatory document and that governs how the built environment will be built in the plan area

0:44:52a complete streets plan which is both aspirational sets metrics sets standards and goals but also sets out some specific improvements and a really important piece of the specific plan was the programmatic eir that was developed evaluating the environmental impacts of the entire

0:45:08program which is both the form-based code and the complete streets plan the origins of the specific plan are many and go beyond these but these are the kind of most recent ones of course the city's last comprehensive general plan development was in 1999 which laid some of the visions that

0:45:29emerged in this specific plan really looking at nodes along san pablo avenue and in my next slide um i'll i'll share a little bit more about that and these other plans which i'll talk about in a moment so the general plan definitely identified as one of its major issues in

0:45:45its um introductory framework um that development along the san pablo avenue corridor is unattractive and not pedestrian friendly and that retails sales are low per square footage that there was a lot of retail but that it wasn't really it's what we see out there

0:46:01a lot of single story commercial big parking lots not what you really see in an urban environment where things are more compact it identified different things that the city could do to try to address this challenge of course at the time and still cal san pablo avenue corridor is also a state

0:46:16highway so anything we do on it has to really reflect that purpose as a state highway as well as well as the different um constraints um that that imposes um so that was the general plan the climate action plan was kind of the next um big document that really laid some of the goals out about what

0:46:38the specific plan would be and specifically in its land use transportation and community development area it talked about encouraging more compact higher density um at our bart stations and along san pablo avenue increasing the economic base by creating more jobs and more pedestrian friendly

0:46:55type of economic activity again not the single story commercial with a lot of parking but more dense type of urban pattern and investing in infrastructure that would also encourage people to bike walk and take transit more you can see in the graphic on the bottom right

0:47:11all of these goals were developed to support the city's ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals and i believe maria is probably in the audience too and she could talk more to this but land use was really one of the main ways that we were going to be able to reduce our

0:47:29greenhouse gas over time emissions and one of the things i didn't talk about in terms of the origins were statewide ab32 the state's climate action laws and plan bay area emerged around the same time as the specific plan that we're talking about tonight and of course the strategic plan was

0:47:46actually adopted in the same year as the climate action plan and it also has several goals that are very specific to what the specific plan um carried forward i'm including attracting and maximizing opportunities for both new and expanding businesses um reimagining underdeveloped and

0:48:04underutilized properties again encouraging use of alternative modes of transportation all of these were intended to really help develop a sense of place and community identity which is really what led to choosing the form-based code as the tool and of course a complete streets plan

0:48:19which also contributes to those goals and then again as i just spoke the implementing the climate action plan by reducing vehicle miles traveled through a more urban well-connected multimodal form and there's going to be some you know jargon transit oriented urban form uh

0:48:34multi-modal form hopefully at the end of this um i'm not using too many acronyms actually but if there's any concepts that you want more depth on uh please feel free to ask i'm sure you've all read it we made we wrote it so that it was very interesting bedtime reading so i'm hoping

0:48:48that this is all redundant um our economic development action plan in 2006 actually so jumping back before the climate action plan clearly articulated that in order for us to meet our economic development action goals we had to really shift our strategies and really

0:49:03focus on an urban lifestyle and attract high quality development in key commercial areas i encourage you to look at that it says other things about fairmont avenue and creating pedestrian streets and but it really articulated that when you if you bring people i think the city had

0:49:19often wanted retail and other commercial development but each time we um engaged uh specialists in these fields they often say bring the people bring the density and the businesses will will will follow the alone greenway master plan and urban greening plan really look at the green

0:49:36side of what makes urban density livable obviously it also these goals also provide amenities to both existing as well as the future residents and we've been fortunate to get urban greening grants from the state which also recognize that for cities that are dense and going to

0:49:54get denser which is a good climate action goal that we still need to focus on livability and kind of the quality of urban spaces and green spaces and recreation as well as green infrastructure um so i um in terms of the process that the specific plan went um into before it was

0:50:11adopted there's really two major um times i think one of the things you learn in planning school is that planning is iterative right that you keep working at it until you get to what your goal is and then sometimes that feeds back again so the first specific plan which which didn't end up being

0:50:26adopted but really set the foundation for the next specific plan was started in 2011 and it was started with the city of richmond as you know two-thirds of the west side of san pablo avenue are in the city of richmond at the back of sidewalk so during that process there were

0:50:42numerous public meetings an advisory group and after several revisions and study sessions at both council and the planning commission it came back to city council in 2011 and city council after discussion asked staff to return again and do another revision that was looking to

0:51:01the staff report and at the time talked about more contemporary land use standards and that was really again higher density higher heights and lower parking requirements at the same time our redevelopment agency at the time got grants from mtc to look into these issues to look at

0:51:18what was the economic feasibility of tod you know how high did it have to be what would attract the investment um what kind of parking requirements were economically feasible both of those studies which are also available on our website talk about increasing height and

0:51:32decreasing parking if we want to attract investment that would create that urban lifestyle that our economic development action plan called for and again also to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and importantly i think in terms of context at the same time that this version one

0:51:48of the specific plan was being adopted the city was also and redevelopment agency were doing physical improvements on san pablo avenue and i think um a couple things that that achieved one it was working with caltrans we learned through the development of the theater

0:52:04of course and um adding bike racks and the led lights and crosswalks and flashing crosswalks and just a lot of more pedestrian amenities and planting over 350 trees on san pablo avenue that we really wanted to create the place that could attract the investment um

0:52:22[Music] concurrently that was also the time 2008 of course was when the recession started so it was also a good time to be investing in public improvements when we weren't likely both with the code not being aligned with the market but also with the market in a

0:52:35slump um so sam the specific plan that the city council eventually adopted in september of 2014 built off this first specific plan um but it utilized some of what was learned and created some new strategies so as i've mentioned it contains the form-based code which is not just the

0:52:52vision but it's the regulations it added a complete streets plan fortunately public works had gotten a grant to do a complete streets plan which really helped round out the built environment and the transportation environment kind of go hand in hand if we're going to create

0:53:06change on san pablo avenue and importantly as i mentioned we also included a programmatic eir and that piece is something that almost constantly at planning conferences and developers are constantly saying that's a missing piece often because if you don't do that then each project is being

0:53:24evaluated individually and you're not looking at how it all works together as a system um also the second the second version of the specific plan was um initiated after redevelopment dissolution which really meant that we had to be even more market-based than the first one the first one could rely

0:53:41partly on what the redevelopment agency's efforts would be in terms of um consolidating properties having funds to invest to kind of close market gaps but we really needed to the built environment requires the private sector to invest so we held the developer architect charette to make sure that our

0:53:59proposed regulations were meeting our vision and were economically feasible as the mtc funded studies advised we also held several public meetings and we did them concurrent with the active transportation plan and urban greening plan development to really talk about how all these

0:54:16things work together and we also convened a complete streets technical advisory group and a vet we'll talk more about who who that consisted she would get more into the outcome but we made sure to have caltrans bart ac transit richmond albany bicycle bikey spay and everybody really

0:54:37who needs that avenue to function and who would either be supportive of the goals or would need to um you know help provide the technical info to make our plan feasible and supportable so in developing the regulations we needed to kind of have a test point to make sure that they were going to be

0:54:53achieving our goals so we developed this key this set of principles and strategies to test each uh proposed regulation one was that we strengthened sense of place and you can see that in strategic plan we wanted to make sure that what we were proposing through the

0:55:08form-based code and complete sheets plan did that returning ensuring return on investment kind of goes several ways we wanted to make sure that both public investment in things like the streetscape were honored we weren't scrapping the old we were building upon

0:55:20what's what exists but we also wanted to make sure that each private investment could kind of be somewhat certain as to what the future was again i've already talked about really trying to use the market enhancing and humanizing the public realm was an important goal one of the

0:55:37things that the san pablo avenue corridor is often talked about is it was it was a highway and it was an auto oriented highway and the single story large parking lots don't really promote interaction um or um walking and so looking at how our built environment and our street could could

0:55:55really come down to the human realm was important and catalyzing mode shift of course to support our climate action goals and the eir again something i really like to emphasize is we did never meant at all to say that we wouldn't still be predominantly driving vehicles and that

0:56:10we don't have people all over el cerrito and elsewhere that are going to come in vehicles so we really wanted to preserve street parking we just wanted to add the pedestrian and the bicyclist in this environment and the transit user so form-based code the definition of it

0:56:30it's kind of an emerging zoning framework is that it's a land development regulation that fosters predictable built results and a high quality public realm by using physical form as the principle one of the ways that i heard forum based codes described once is that uses change

0:56:45over time right you'll see something that might start off as a bike shop then become a daycare center then might become a grocery at some point and buildings last if they're built well a very long time and obviously we see this in europe right a lot of buildings

0:56:58sometimes they might even be churches and then their daycare so one other thing that a forum based code looks at is if you built a high quality if you build a high quality built environment that interacts well with the public realm it can accommodate those changes over time

0:57:11and we really wanted to emphasize context really wanted it to be a very el cerrito specific plan one that recognized residential is you know a block off of san pablo avenue in almost nearly all locations and how do we really look at that so the form-based code which again is

0:57:27the main regulatory component in the plan contains an administration section telling you how it's utilized it contains land use regulations um which i'll get into noticing requirements we added that sites are posted within the specific plan area the development standards and

0:57:44application and approval procedures a really key component and i haven't seen this in other specific plans although i hear that ours is being borrowed and copied from a lot is that it relates to street types san pablo avenue is obviously different than fairmont or stockton or mosier so

0:57:59how do you get that when you're looking at form the street type standards talk about how wide for example a sidewalk should be in that section so in a major san pablo avenue commercial street it's 14 feet whereas on a gateway street where you're really accommodating more

0:58:15vehicles it might be the more minimum five to seven feet um on that sidewalk what are you trying to accommodate is it people sitting outside you know what are the different amenities pedestrian and activity zones that we were trying to accommodate um an important thing that i might not

0:58:30have mentioned before but this gets into this is in those economic studies um it also pointed out that we should move from requiring ground floor commercial and so prior to the specific plans adoption we used to require ground floor commercial along the entire avenue

0:58:45which is really six miles three miles on two sides um and that kind of results in a it's it's a lot of miles and a lot of square feet to fill with retail especially as a lot of retail moves to out of brick and mortar establishments um so this general plan back in 1999 recognized you'd

0:59:02really need to concentrate on nodes so where we have commercial streets now you can see on your plant on your maps it includes the dark blue so down in the theater area up by stockton at moser and again up by del norte in those areas we require ground floor commercial

0:59:20and also a little bit on stockton fairmont hill and maybe petrero so where there's strong existing retail and it's in our nodes we require ground floor commercial but allow residential upper stories where those where we don't require ground floor commercial we actually

0:59:38allow ground floor residential um which is again really trying to humanize it trying to bring in the people that will actually support the businesses we allow commercial anywhere so if anybody wants to be commercial they can be anywhere but we only require it in those nodes

0:59:52the form-based code is built on two transact zones so the transit oriented high or intensity mixed use is at both bart stations so within a half a mile walk of the bart stations within the plan area um and then the mid intensity is the area in between which includes here

1:00:11um the higher intensity within a half a mile of bart lets you go higher so you can go up to 65 feet which is the equivalent of about six stories the ground floor is high 14 foot first floor so that it can be really accommodate quality commercial environment it can go higher than that and we're

1:00:29seeing several of those which i can talk about if it's an affordable housing project as defined by state law which means that it meets density bonus laws that again includes downtown the theater block which has a little bit different requirements for the ground floor and

1:00:44uptown the mid intensity allows five stories and up to six stories again if it's consistent under the state density bonus law it allows residential ground floor and it does require commercial ground floor as i said in nodes at stockton and mosur parking is always a very very hot topic

1:01:08we were definitely in all of the studies we've done said that we need to lower parking people are lowering parking in all um kind of transit oriented areas parking is very very expensive to provide structured parking is very expensive it often is a limitation for small

1:01:24businesses being able to build and locate because they have to dedicate so much of that also by reducing parking you create the walkability because you start to get a more intense land use um there were several brokers who actually really encouraged us um and supported

1:01:37this so that they could move properties easier if we if we moved in this direction um however it does bring up issues of how do you manage the remaining on-street parking like i said we emphasize maintaining on street parking in our complete streets plan which we'll

1:01:50talk about and we have some studies going right now that talk about how we can do better job managing our on street parking as development occurs and parking becomes more of an issue transportation demand management is an interesting thing we really talked a lot

1:02:05about this there's transportation demand management can mean giving free bus passes car share bike share can mean a lot of different things the key when we wanted to leverage with this plan was location we felt that if we really if we build so close to our transit that is the best

1:02:21thing we can do to help reduce the demand for the single occupancy vehicle on a regular basis um when people go above or below our parking standards if they need more they're a nordstrom rack and they want more than we said for example we can work with them maybe to do things like

1:02:36employ like we can negotiate to ask for more tdm measures like you need more parking but can you give your employees bus passes for example um same if they go under we require a parking study so if they go down to zero in tohimu which is a transit oriented high intensity or down to a half into

1:02:55memo then we might ask for something additional to help address potential impacts in neighborhoods um a key part of our plan was also to ask for good open space so that the quality of the living environment was high um so we asked for 80 square feet per unit and that can be divided any way

1:03:12the developer wants in terms of private or common so private being again just for that unit common being shared barbecue type areas but also for buildings greater than 25 000 square feet we ask for public open space and we can the plan says that we can take open

1:03:30space and loo payments i've talked to our city attorney we don't have a policy yet so we would negotiate this on an ad hoc basis right now but i hope to bring a policy forward soon and this is there's some places we really want the public open space and it's identified in the urban

1:03:44greening plan there's other times that it might be better to contribute to the city so that we can fully develop our open spaces like fairmont park or central park or so that's something that's kind of on a case-by-case basis there's other regulations and processes specific to

1:04:00the specific plan that are not in our uh zoning ordinance um if you have any questions about um another real highlight and something that's a departure from the rest of our zoning ordinance this you'll hear us talk a lot about tier 1 2 3 and 4 projects this was designed again to streamline

1:04:20the process and to encourage investment so tier 1 and tier 3 are both for existing buildings tier one is a simple process if you're painting or doing signs or just something that's the value is less than fifty percent of your building and it's just really a simple

1:04:36up uh facelift upgrade um that used to have to go to the design review board we decided we could handle those administratively so that now just goes to the zoning administrator which is margaret or her designee um if you are so i'll keep going down um tier two is new construction and the

1:04:55majority of projects we're seeing are coming through wanting to be tier two the body of decision on that is the design review board who looks at the site plan and the aesthetics of the project previously a project like this would go to the planning commission and then the

1:05:08design review board we decided in this plan to try to leverage all of the work that went into the specific plan the council had already decided that the height and the parking was fine we didn't need to keep going to the planning commission to discuss those items and so if it met our prescriptive

1:05:22standards in the specific plan it could go to design review and the the public dialogue would really be about how it looked and felt more than what it was um tier three is also existing structures but it's a more major there's going to be financing involved likely and it's a more major upgrade in

1:05:38that case rather than just going to our zoning administrator we do send it to the design review board to make sure we're leveraging and one thing we think about here is we wanted to get as close to the specific plan goals but we wouldn't for example ask them to move

1:05:50their building right so it's not going to meet those kind of standards and we're not going to ask them to do structural improvements if they're not so it's really transparency and other items like that tier 4 is uh new construction also but it might not meet the prescriptive

1:06:06standards of tier two um so it's higher it has more shadow on something it's something just different than what we ever thought of so it couldn't fit the exact standards in that case we go and have the conversation at the planning commission and the design review board

1:06:22in those cases we still encourage people to meet as many of the standards as they can and we only take it to the planning commission for the thing that varies so and when we bring it to the planning commission we have a requirement in here that there's some findings that we make

1:06:36those are that it contributes to the overall goals of the specific plan in the city it doesn't detract from the overall goals of the transect zone and it gives us something so this is when we start to negotiate for some sort of a community benefit um so maybe a higher

1:06:48level of lead certification maybe affordable housing really kind of on a case-by-case basis um all of these actions are appealable to the next body of decision so if it starts at the zoning administrator it's publicly noticed just like any of the other decisions there's a 300 foot

1:07:05notice it's posted on site and the meeting agendas are everything supposed per the municipal code and appeals would go to the next body so tier one if it was appealed would go to either the design review but probably to the design review board if that's appealed to the planning commission and

1:07:22ultimately to city council uh just quickly the land use chart so a form-based code as i mentioned doesn't look at use a lot it believes that the uses might change it's the form that we're looking at however as we move away from more standard euclidean zoning there's a

1:07:41um we still thought that it was worthwhile looking at the use however we streamlined some so restaurants needed uh full-service restaurants used to need a use permit in the specific plan we said we want those we don't need to keep talking about it let's those are

1:07:55permitted as of right um same with live work units offices multi-family and residential an administrative use permit which would be the zoning administrator again might be something like a restaurant again but now it might have alcohol sales so we want to know a little bit more about how

1:08:09it's going to operate or outdoor seating we might want to know more about the adjacent neighbors and how that's going to work and what their hours are going to be for example so you can see going up the line conditional use permit might go to the planning commission

1:08:23things are only allowed in certain locations and some things are not permitted at all drive-throughs for example if a drive-through closes a new one can open up in that location for up to a year and if not then the specific plan does say no that we're moving away from that

1:08:39pattern so results i just passed you out a new map partly because it's bigger but also we just got a new application so you can see number one we just received an application for the taco bell site for 146 units um including 10 affordable using the state density bonus laws

1:08:58so you can see um we are now up to well let me go through this so in the last decade really village of town center was our was our largest project and i think that opened in about 2006.

1:09:11since that time we really had it was pretty quiet we didn't have any multi-family or new commercial development we had a couple reuses chipotle moved into payless there was a few small things um then um specific plan was adopted in 2014 since that time those tier one projects you

1:09:29know barney mcbears noodles fresh the new brazil bistro banana leaf tie all of those are tier one so they just went to our zoning administrator for simple review of signs paint colors etc i think a lawn dance studio so those are uh since 2000 the end of 2014.

1:09:48um tier two um those that are under construction were actually entitled before the specific plan so creekside uh which is now going to be called metro 510 down at the plaza um and eden were both entitled prior to the specific plan is that news metro 51 now the we have just a small project approved

1:10:10which is the one two doors down on a vacant lot from high tech audio and then we have as of the slide we had 431 new market rate um i have to kind of check my numbers but you can you can see uh there's a lot so in here we have 706 market rate units um either under

1:10:28construction um proposed or approved 220 affordable units and if you look at the orange those are the ones that are just proposed and have not been yet approved so one of things when i talk about results at this point we're seeing pre-development activity these people still have to get their

1:10:47entitlements they still have to get all their construction financing um these our city manager likes to joke not until he's invited to the ground breaking do we really believe we believe they're coming but we'd still like to go to the groundbreaking um and it's a you know it's a tenure it's a

1:11:04it's a it's a complex process um and financial markets are changing all the time the affordable housing market just changed dramatically um under the new administration um we also currently have proposed almost 15 000 square foot new commercial um and in addition to everything that's

1:11:19on this chart we we and we have about three or four projects that seem to be milling about um asking lots of questions so we um as a tool to keep the public informed uh cat developed this map you can see it was updated today and it's also online and we have a major

1:11:37projects page so that once we receive a proposal before then there's a lot of talk a lot of change of who's going to be the developer who's going to buy it but once we receive a proposal we do put that up on our web page we will also start to try updating it with other exciting tier

1:11:511 projects like small ace as people know is a big project that's going to be coming that is likely going to be a tier one a significant change but not one that actually rises up in terms of review um with that i will pass it on unless you want to take any clarifying questions before we

1:12:12kind of shift gears and i pass it on to yvette ortiz to talk about complete streets and then margaret will talk about the eir i had one question um under other regulations and processes um it says environmental there's it just says solar and ev charging what exactly does that mean so what it meant

1:12:34i'm glad you asked you could see this one didn't have it but the reason is when we adopted the specific plan uh the new building code wasn't in place and so we were requiring the projects um wire for ev charging and wire to bring solar in we didn't require solar or the level 2 ev charging

1:12:51but we wanted it to be there in case the building code ended up doing that for us now and so the building code requires the same thing um but at the time we were looking at what could we do again in our tier 4 process we encourage people to go further and we can start to

1:13:05negotiate community benefits but we thought just getting people to build here is the big environmental contribution um so that's what that was thank you you're welcome thank you i i just wanted to these are great documents i mean i'll speak for all of them i think it's a great plan

1:13:23that staff has done i really enjoy this kind of stuff and um with the transit hubs and the corridor i think these are assets for an exciting time for el cerrito so congratulations on that i'm glad on your list of development items it's going on to the website so more people can know and hear

1:13:40about it i know over the last year people are saying what's being done what's happening with these empty storefronts and there's a lot being done and some may not get to fruition but there's a lot in the planning side of things and again like the last city council meeting on the massage

1:13:56parlor regulations i think continuing to talk to richmond is really critical on san pablo and i'd love to get updates on how that's going and then the public process again because i agree with you parking is going to be a really big issue going forward as long as we have

1:14:11the public process in there and the public knows about it it'll be a great process going forward so thank you very much okay yeah uh so continuing on that theme of public process uh the 300 foot ordinance or 300 foot requirement is i know that's the what is bound we're

1:14:28required to do have we thought about increasing that for any reason i mean there is is a 500 foot because there i know we've gotten people who have complained about the 300 foot not incorporating them when they can see the mayfair site for example we talked about that i think during

1:14:46adoption process and decided a couple of things it's it's a bit costly to do a mailing over time and both time and money we also realize that it's not only even people 500 feet right it's people a half mile away when it comes to the san pablo avenue so one of the strategies we

1:15:03employed was posting on site and the other one we started was com dev enews so people can sign up and we can keep people informed um also developing this major project's web page so i think just being pushing it out a lot more as we're and posting on site oh the other thing

1:15:18we did is we extended i think from uh 14 days to 21 days so we also extended the time period from 10 to 21 days that we advance notice a decision so that's what we decided to do rather than just choosing 200 extra feet we decided that there would be other ways that we could make

1:15:35sure that a larger again with the idea that people who pass by going to bart stations or stores are not going to necessarily live right there that this is really our community hub and that the word needed to come go out in different ways and then luckily i think you know east bay times obviously

1:15:50has been picking up a lot on projects as well um and uh in your opinion or the professions experience does form-based code encourage integration versus segregation of affordable units within the market rate units is there going to be more of a seamless this form based code

1:16:11create more of a seamless integration of you know economical units within market rate units uh several kind of thoughts on that so the form-based code by itself does not um again it doesn't sp form-based code tries to look at form versus kind of micro um dictating kind of specifics like that

1:16:34however what it does do is it gets it some affordability by design because it allows a lot of different size units um so it gets at some of that um the other thing it does is it starts to look at what a lot of good urban design does which is as you bring people

1:16:49of different means together living more closely together there's going to be a lot more amenities and um sharing going on in terms of the specific um well but the specific plan however there's the state density bonus so you can see in here two projects number one and

1:17:05number ten have opted to go higher and do inclusionary and they are currently telling us so that's using the state density bonus law and so they are providing we still have to analyze whether their numbers are right but they're doing very low income units mixed in with their market rate

1:17:20um then there's of course the affordable units which again like eden or the um or bridge are going to be nearby so i think we're one of the things you know back when we required ground floor commercial there was this idea that everything had to be mixed use and then

1:17:35the the field is kind of moved to be like if we're all in the same neighborhood does it really have to be the same building so a little bit more horizontal mixed use like we're all sharing the green way we're all sharing the restaurants but do we have to be vertical

1:17:48and then when it comes to affordable housing 100 affordable housing projects the tax credits don't favor mixing so in order to compete well for tax credits 100 affordable projects compete more strongly like ohlone gardens or so if you're looking for the market to provide

1:18:05it those will can be inclusionary um and but if you're looking for the large contributions that you can get from a bridge or rcd or loney gardens those are often 100 percent affordable is that yep does and like any good plan this is a a plan that covers as you said six miles of of curb

1:18:26along san pablo avenue and in that area there's certainly much more opportunity to do some of the projects that we expected and certainly one of the concerns i've heard is that oh we're going to be a canyon effect and and that that won't necessarily happen because not every

1:18:43property is going to turn over within a quick time frame although we're doing very well towards our overall numbers um at some point there will be uh pressures to potentially reconsider the plan what what is the process by which we might reconsider this plan 10 years or 15 years from now

1:19:04as we either achieve our goals or maybe exceed them so kind of two parts also to that so in terms of the canyon the form-based code does address that a bit parcels are different and have different existing adjacent uses so the shadow requirements for example daylight plane type of

1:19:22requirements um also just kind of looking at what's actual not what we thought was going to happen but what's actually happening we actually have uh three four story right so we have three four story projects so what we call the triplets i'm at guitar center across the

1:19:37street at eureka and rob's automotive are coming in at four-story um we have lots of six story we have uh midtown looking at five story and then now we have two that are looking at eight so i and if you look at i was just actually overlooking this map there's some things

1:19:52that aren't going to change so quick right so we do think for example 24 hour fitness does look like they're about to submit for the moser center that whole motor center doesn't look like it's going to change real soon we aren't moving right eden is being built

1:20:07now and village of town center is built they're not changing so if you look at a 20-year horizon which are the additional things that are going to change is a constant art and guessing and science you know there's a lot to it so one i don't think it's not all going to change and even when it is

1:20:23all changing so that's one part um the other part is how do we shape it and as you can see this is a lot of projects that are coming through um we joked when we were developing it that if we got five projects in the next five years we'd be we would have felt successful

1:20:39but we have you know 10 11 right now and probably 15 in the first two years although they will take 18 months to be constructed so i think it's an interesting time because we when we go to talk about what's next we might hit the numbers that were evaluated in the eir before these are

1:20:58all constructed so how will we know if it's achieving our goals does it is it increasing the walkability our goal is to make these very high quality and ideally really when we talk to residents i think it's hopefully going to bring a lot of the amenities that existing

1:21:10residents have wanted new restaurants places to walk to right so i hope that the upsides um outweigh um the the the fears um that might be out there um then i think it's up to council i think um we have to come back and do something or just let it retire so when the

1:21:27programmatic eir ret evaluated the first 1 706 units and 244 000 net new commercial when we get there get close to there at this rate let's say in two years we need to have a conversation we could either development could just be slowed by not doing anything because

1:21:47then each project has to start doing its own sequa rather than relying on the analysis of the programmatic eir or we start to have this dialogue what's next um there's i hear lots of speculation some people think higher some think status you know what what is that what

1:22:03does that feel like after that that change occurs what kind of mode shift you know we anticipate seven percent mode shift when this is when the specific plan was built out it'll be fun to test that what did we really get and how does that modify so again it's iterative i think that's going to be a

1:22:17conversation for council um [Music] does that help yep thank you very much any other questions i'll have a few steps about talking about what's next after we do the complete streets in the eir sorry oops good evening council members um let me get back to the right part here

1:22:52right slide so um i hope to give you a relatively quick overview of the complete streets plan tonight melanie covered a lot of the points on this slide thanks melanie i guess one of the two key items i wanted to point out is that overall the complete streets plan wants to

1:23:17create a streetscape environment that builds on the recent investments balances needs of all street users all street users being bicyclists pedestrians transit users and motorists as well as people of all ages and and as melanie just mentioned the goal of the specific plan complete streets

1:23:37plan and the active transportation plan and urban green plan combined was to encourage a moat shift of about seven percent from autos to these alternative modes the complete streets plan in order to make it feasible and overall successful was coordinated with various groups as melanie mentioned we

1:24:04formed a technical advisory group of various key internal and external stakeholders internal being police fire public works and of course community development external being caltrans because as you know most of the san pablo avenue is just like a state highway

1:24:24other key stakeholders are bart and ac transit as well as contra costa public health the other key thing in terms of coordination is that as we were developing the san pablo avenue specific plan and complete streets plan the west county was updating its action plan the

1:24:41west contra costa advisor transportation advisory committee was updating its action plans for routes of regional significance and san pablo avenue is a route of regional significance given it carries both bus and auto traffic across multiple jurisdictions in west county and

1:24:58provides access to del norte and we made sure that the multimodal policies that we're proposing as part of that we developed and adopted as part of the plan were consistent with that action plan we also made sure that we were um meeting the guidelines of the uh the

1:25:16california 2008 complete streaks act and a caltrans guidance on context-sensitive solutions again given that caltrans is a state highway the complete street plan provides improvements for transit pedestrians and bicyclists while at the same time providing improvements for reducing

1:25:39vehicle congestion at our hot spot which is around the del norte bart station in order to design for and track success of these improvements we establish new performance measures for all the modes because the existing right-of-way along some pablo avenue as well as as

1:25:58well as the traffic volumes vary we the plan calls for varying improvements along the route for example in some of the most constrained right-of-ways along san pablo avenue which is the downtown area south of lincoln we had very constrained right away so we had to do trade-offs between what types

1:26:19of facilities we could provide on that section of san pablo avenue and i'll go into that in a little bit overall because of the quarter's importance as a transit route and as the city's main commercial area we prioritize transit and pedestrian travel and so we provided

1:26:40those facilities along the corridor but the bike facilities did vary going into some of the key design features the design concept has some overarching features as melanie mentioned we are maintaining on-street parking as much as possible for various reasons one it

1:27:07serves our commercial businesses but it also provides a buffer between pedestrians on the sidewalk and faster moving vehicles on the street and um we also will be maintaining two travel lanes in each direction which is the existing capacity another of the key overarching features

1:27:28is to widen sidewalks to provide a clear pedestrian path of travel we're also adding marked crosswalks where they're missing at certain intersections and also at mid-block locations where hopefully future development will also provide new pedestrian muse the last speech overarching features to

1:27:49provide for far side bus stops to improve transit travel times in uptown this is where we're doing a lot of more of the vehicle circulation improvements so the plan calls for an integrated package of improvements for both autos pedestrians by bicyclists this includes converting cutting to

1:28:12two-way for autos right now it's two-way for buses we have a bus contra bowling that leads from i-80 into the bart station but we all the plan calls for covering it for autos as well this will allow for us to be able to remove the second left turn lane on san pablo avenue at hill and cutting and we

1:28:32can repurpose some of that area for both bike lanes and additional landscaping we will also be modifying the intersection of hill and east shore to allow for at the at the driveway that serves the area of the former osh and staples center will be modifying that to

1:28:57right turns out only this provides for improved uh traffic operations at that intersection we'll be adding the fourth crosswalk at the intersections of cutting hill and not which currently only have three marked crosswalks so that reduces pedestrian crossing times

1:29:14along san pablo avenue and we hope to add bike lanes from portero to not and also consider either shared bicycle markings or bike lanes north of not but i know that that's an area where on-street parking removal might be of a concern so we'll have to reach out to

1:29:34businesses before we move forward with any type of bicycle facility north of not in terms of midtown midtown provides additional opportunities because it has the right the widest right-of-way and the lowest traffic volumes and a nice surprise that came out of this plan was that we

1:29:54were able to add a buffered bike lane so not a standard bike lane which is a five foot lane on the outside of the parking but a park a parking lane that's next to the curb and is buffered by both on-street parking and a striped buffer this provides for a higher class bicycle

1:30:13facility that is meant to encourage bicycling um this area of bedtime also has the white currently has the existing widest sidewalks and um alongside pablo avenue in downtown another busy area we have the most constrained right-of-way so the plan calls for just adding

1:30:37shared lane markings for bicyclists those shared lane markings are to signify that bikes have a place in san pablo avenue and it would connect gaps between higher level facilities in the midtown area and as proposed by the city of albany so as i mentioned earlier the complete

1:31:01streets plans developed multimodal levels of service metrics the prior level of service metric for the city only considered automobile delay and therefore neglect neglected to account for multimodal impacts of land use development and infrastructure projects so this is what

1:31:19an example of what a street design looks like when you only consider auto delay and this is what it would look like when you consider multimodal performance measures this is what we're aiming for although as as development occurs there will be increases in traffic auto traffic and

1:31:43delays the overall plan will provide for acceptable levels of service as and as well at the same time providing improved service for pedestrians bicyclists and transit users so this is just a quick summary of some of the multimodal level of service performance measures

1:32:05we'll be able to achieve a high level of service for transit and pedestrians and a high level of service for by bicyclists in the midtown and we're anticipated to maintain acceptable levels of service for autos and finally in terms of complete streets we're working on implementation right

1:32:26now public works staff is working with various development projects to provide guidance on some of the pedestrian design concepts we also envision that this plan would be implemented incrementally as opportunities arise and we will look for funding for a variety of sources including developer

1:32:45contributions grants and other city resources in december we submitted a grant application for about 7 million in federal and county transportation funds to implement the improvements around del norte and recently we heard that we're at least the preliminary scoring is that

1:33:02we're ranked high and so we're optimistic that we'll be able to get some of that funding and we'll know later this spring or early summer so hopefully we can come back with some good news and that concludes my portion i'm available for questions or i can turn it

1:33:18over back to margaret good evening madam mayor members of the city council if we get the lights one more time so you heard um a pretty detailed account of the form based code or the chapter two and the complete streets which is the basically the response of the public realm to the

1:33:54forum based code there's also an infrastructure chapter to our specific plan but the foundation of all of this and the kind of the frame of it all is a sequel document so as melanie mentioned earlier they were looking at doing an initial study mitigated negative declaration

1:34:14when the specific plan conversation first began in the city of el cerrito what we realized was looking at the climate action plan looking at all the other plans and documents and things going on at the state level regarding climate action a programmatic eir or program eir would

1:34:31be the best document available to support the type of plan document that was being prepared so eir sorry is an environmental impact report so you can always tell me not to use acronyms so the the environmental impact report prepared by the city was um created concurrently to the specific plan

1:34:53and was approved the same night as a specific plan by the city council what it allows us to do is it basically take a view of the plan area at about 10 000 feet so um and we'll get to the numbers in a second but we looked at what um a number of impacts actually

1:35:1416 impacts that environmental documents look at in the state of california listed there for you to see we didn't go site by site we went plan area wide so we figured out the different impacts that would be created by that the larger numbers the um and how to then evaluate ways to

1:35:39mitigate them if possible so this is a standard thematic checklist of what every sql document reviews for the city in this case we did it for the entire plan area and as i was saying we identified the significant impacts of the entire dwelling units commercial area

1:36:01complete streets developments would have wherever possible we identified mitigations to reduce those impacts to less than significant levels which is a practical standpoint it's also a legal phrase and in a few areas in the programmatic eir we identified so item some items that could not be

1:36:25completely mitigated to a less than significant basis and in that case the city council approved and adopted statements over writing considerations to those particular areas and as i was sitting there tonight listening to the other presentations i had to hearken back to what those were

1:36:42so it was aesthetics and visual resources construction noise which is a part one of noise impacts cultural and historic resources and there was one transportation traffic impact to the north end of the city that was uh something that we couldn't even with the multimodal level of service

1:37:00we couldn't completely mitigate it to less than significant impact so by the numbers the programmatic eir supports the specific plan's horizon so it's got two different ones one's by sure number of units and one's by the horizon year so as melanie noted we're looking at

1:37:191706 new dwelling units in 243 112 and that new square feet of commercial area and um the horizon year is 2040.

1:37:32we were hoping for five projects when we did this in 2014 that's true and now i think um we will be running through those numbers um probably in the next three or four years i totally concur with that and a lot of that's within our reach because of the specific one and a lot of

1:37:52that's beyond our reach because the economies of the region have everything to do with what actually gets built in the city of el cerrito so within the things we can control we try to identify the impacts we tried to mitigate them and even in the ones that we are

1:38:06have overriding considerations adopted for um the eir spells up very carefully everything we we must do everything in our power to mitigate those impacts it's not by any means a free ride to go ahead and ignore those impacts we want to do everything possible to bring things

1:38:23to a mitigated level just understanding that sometimes when you're going from more of a suburban development to an urban development some things you can't always get down to the baseline so with that i can take questions or hand it right back over to melanie we have a couple more just well i think

1:38:42yeah yeah just one question on the um environmental impact uh review that you guys do um especially around our transit hubs are you factoring in vehicle miles traveled at all as a as a because i know with the level of service the governor has moved toward moving away from congestion as a test

1:39:05isn't that right yes there's a lot of really exciting i just came back from a um advanced sequel case law class and um it's a little uh bedazzling to see the number of new exemptions that are coming forward what we do on a project-by-project basis is identify all of the information that we need to

1:39:27know about the project that we didn't know when we did the programmatic level of review so we go from the ten thousand feet down to the ground so soils reports um if there's a tr any uh vegetation we look for trees we look at the traffic produced by the project and

1:39:46the traffic produced will spin off into noise and air quality reports these are all either produced by the applicant and then peer-reviewed by staff and consultants or produced by us as lead agency through our consultants the number of 1706 was addressed in the multimodal plan so

1:40:08we don't look back at vmts per se beyond what is reviewed in the programmatic eir once we get past that level of development we probably will be revisiting how we look at um vmts and how that's identified through the environmental process i just thought it might be more important if we're

1:40:27moving toward that mode chair trying to get it to the seven percent yes yes travel will help in that direction right absolutely okay thanks okay so um the last few and then yes so just three more i promise or two or three um so going forward one of the things we promised is that this would be

1:40:52a dynamic document um that when we noticed you know sometimes you all might receive a complaint from somebody that it's not streamlined enough or something or we might note through our own observations or yours or the public's that you know how are we doing and

1:41:06meeting our goals is there something that's uh a barrier that we included mistakenly or or not mistakenly but we're learning and so we promised we'd come back and that we would try to make it a dynamic document so margaret and our team will be back in a couple of

1:41:19months actually with some some of those small fixes um then there's implementing policy some that i've mentioned an open space in lieu payment program um a vet mentioned that we'd be looking to charge developers sometimes so we're looking at developing a transportation a

1:41:34development impact fee of some sort for transportation um then there could be as greg has noted you know as we get further along maybe we want to or when we get to the end we might want to look at a larger from a meta level again currently some of the issues that we're

1:41:51working with we have grants from mtc and ccta which are called priority development area implementation grants that we applied for and we wanted to look at both barriers and one of those is our sanitary sewer capacity we're working with siege but they are um there are some issues um

1:42:08that have not necessarily contributed to economic development in the past and are a bit of a limitation right now in terms of capacity so we have a study going on right now where we have flow monitoring this is all funded by mtc where we have flow monitoring going on we can be in with

1:42:23siege and our and engineers and we've met with their board several times and will again soon to be looking towards switching right now projects each project has to do its own capacity study so it's very one-off it's expensive and it's not looking at the whole system

1:42:37it's looking at each individual project similarly right now any restaurant over a thousand square feet has to do a capacity study and capacity is about in a new where there wasn't a previous restaurant capacity studies are about ten thousand dollars so that's a pretty big hurdle

1:42:51so we're looking we're working on that parking and transportation demand management um as council member fideli said parking is you know always in any city it's an issue so we're trying to understand what are the facts and what are some of our more sophisticated management strategies that

1:43:08we can use so we also have two grants one to look at south of petraro and one to focus on the del norte area because again as a vet described it's a little bit different the right-of-way constraints and issues so we'll be having public meetings on that and then as you know you just awarded a

1:43:25contract to strategic economics to look at an affordable housing strategy i'm just not not only within the priority development area but elsewhere so priority development area which coincides with the plan areas where most of our supply issues will be met it's where our new housing will be built

1:43:41the majority of it so things like you know do we start to look for an inclusionary ordinance what do we want to do so we're looking to do an affordable housing strategy that will also look at displacement naturally occurring affordable housing which is sometimes your less expensive older

1:43:54apartments how do we prevent that and how do we not lose some of our affordable units which might be expiring their uh below market agreements um challenges we've talked about you know this is really going to be achieved we can get grants sometimes for some of the public improvements but

1:44:11all of this private um the built environment really is for through private um sector involvement so continuing to work with them and attract their investment and economic development assuring um that the projects that we see are high quality and that they really contribute to the quality of life

1:44:28for both existing and future residents and then something we're also really um continuously continually mindful of is that we really want to be building trust with residents so our process trying to make things as transparent as possible helping people see that the former base

1:44:42code does have opportunities for participation and uh both trust with our residents our businesses and our development community is a real goal that we're constantly monitoring um so again completing the various pda grant sanitary study parking studies is next processing these applications that are

1:45:03coming before us we have never done this much development so working with police fire um inter public works ourselves to really continue to refine our processes looking at how do we inspect you know multiple multi-family developments if they're going on at once

1:45:22getting the funding to build the complete streets component and then as we've discussed member lyman is brought up what specific plan three look like um do we do a new eir how do we go going forward so that is it thank you for your patience and listening it's a lot to go

1:45:40through okay uh greg yeah a couple slides back you had a pull um development fee uh impact fee uh policies in here and and i was hoping that you might um think give us a little more thought on this or what your future ideas are for policies as you know increased development

1:46:03potentially you have the in lieu for open space you on a following slide you talked about sewers there's obviously storm drains and water quality which in some cases we have low impact development standards to to address water quality there's obviously the art fund that that

1:46:22developers have to pay but there are other services that need to increase as population increases and i was just curious how those uh services are addressed and maybe they aren't addressed through impact fees or or developer fees they're addressed through property taxes but for example

1:46:43increased fire coverage or increased police staffing and schools uh you know the increased need for schools especially since fairmont's already heavily oversubscribed so so what are what are some of the the other things that we're having developers look at besides the

1:47:07sewer capacity or low impact development to reduce the amount of pollutants that go to the bay what are some of the other things that they're having to look at as they come in i might have somebody look up this number but i'll start with the school district each new

1:47:21development there's a commercial fee and a um per unit fee and maybe if somebody uh wants to look it up or no i might i'll get it but it's a pretty i think that san pablo um west country cluster unified school district and maybe our school board members still here might uh

1:47:36no the um the mitigation there's a there's a large fee um and i can uh get that and we can try to um put that out and provide that information to you but there is a fee provided um that every new development will pay um and that of course then is up to the board to really grapple with how does it

1:47:55meet its capacity what are its demographic projections right and us working with the board but it the funding is through that um the other thing like you said property taxes are pretty significant on these changes that we're talking about so a project is about a 50 most of these

1:48:09projects coming through or about 50 million dollar projects and scott correct me if i'm wrong but i think the tax basis is about 1 so we could anticipate a 50 million project is about a 500 000 annual contribution to our general fund so there's going to be some funding

1:48:24um i think when it's um when the properties are sold they're reassessed so just for their new uh assessed value and then um when the buildings are built they're assessed again now at that and scott you have something to add to that we actually get 22 cents on 22 of the

1:48:41one percent um so we could we could turn this into a fiscal contribution so there's going to be funding along with that i think at this point we've never had impact fees um i'm just going to quote scott but to say that even if we had a 20 impact fee at this point we've had zero development

1:48:59so 20 of zero is zero and one of the problems we've had in the past is that people said development doesn't pencil so adding more in the past was not what we were looking towards but what do we do now um i think we know that we need to do complete streets and that might include part of active

1:49:14transportation so i have again through these grants of consultant on board looking to do the transportation nexus study remember these things all have to have a nexus to the developments we have to do a nexus study in order to establish the fees and look at that the new development doesn't pay for

1:49:29existing deficits but just for what it contributes so at this point i do have somebody right now doing a compare development impact fee comparison study um looking at where do we fall compared to other cities um so that we can see as we add sanitary as we add um transportation where are we

1:49:46falling and then i think let's have that conversation and see if there's need for additional as we also see the additional revenues flow does that yeah thank you okay any other show no anything i think we have the number if somebody wants on the school district number

1:50:08it's a per square foot impact fee that the school district charges uh 4.97 per square foot on new residential construction and 56 uh cents per square foot on commercial and industrial construction seeing projects that are like 25 000 square feet one other um point related to that question i think

1:50:33i'd like to bring out is when we have a new submittal to the city one of the first things we do is to make sure that the project is complete enough to have a conversation about and then we set up an interdepartment review meeting so the representatives of the police

1:50:46department the fire department the building division public works solid waste we all get in one room together with a full set sizes of the plans and we talk so obviously it's one thing to say it has to meet build a minimum building and fire code but we actually troubleshoot ways to

1:51:04come up with ways that the fire department can be efficient in their firefighting of these buildings um ways that uh right down to where the solid waste container is going and how far does the person have to push it to the road in order for it to be picked up so

1:51:22we all look at it independently and then we all come together and talk about it and bring those comments forward to the applicant so obviously we have to respond to emergencies from police and fire and others but we're trying to bring that design from the beginning of the

1:51:35entitlement through to the end of the building permit and um in el cerrito you cannot get a building permit unless the school district has stamped the plans and said that the fee has been paid in full so that's just one more check and balance to make sure the district gets what they

1:51:49need i believe we have some public comment yes we have two requests to speak tom panas followed by howdy gowdy good evening mayor abelson members of the council and city staff my name is tom palace and i live at [address removed] in el cerrito uh one more point regarding the developer fees that's a

1:52:14district-wide fee just because it's paid in el cerrito doesn't mean it's used in el cerrito um and it needs to be tied to growth uh in the district but i'll just say that in the the new mandarin school we just approved that i believe we were going to use 200 000

1:52:28developer fees to help fund that in the first year i'd like to thank the staff for a tremendous presentation on the specific plan it's really interesting to review this document that we struggled over for years and years and years now that's been in place for a while

1:52:49so much what the staff was trying to do in creating this and trying to enable when they did this it's actually happened that's really exciting to see uh and with that in mind i'll just point it was present that miss suggested this was a dynamic document because you know

1:53:05we're now seeing wic tac running around appropriately so it's service area proposing bus rapid transit among those places on san pablo avenue we have no guarantee that's going to happen but i just wonder how that's going to affect for example our complete streets plan

1:53:22where it says that we're going to have two traffic lanes so it will be dynamic and i know our staff is up to it so i'd just like to thank the staff again for a great presentation thank you good evening mayor council my name is harry gowdy um so i just wanted to make the observation

1:53:46i i think it's great that we're thinking about these infrastructure impacts and we all know that the infrastructure needs reinvestment irregardless of more um expanded you know capacity needs but it did occur to me that you know because we're proposing these um

1:54:11developments for a significant you know investment in that infrastructure that you know there's an alternative path that it would be i think helpful if it were considered which is that that investment could go into reducing the capacity needs of the building itself by efficiency of water

1:54:32use and and on-site recycling of and treatment of water and um while those things might seem expensive they're probably affordable by comparison to some of the impacts that they might otherwise have to to pay so i'm hoping that there is a a path for um you know using

1:54:52the you know impact uh investment that would need to be um to take place to actually incentivize you know more efficient low-impact technologies being used in the building so thanks do you have any last words oh lots not just art is one just to say that these this will

1:55:21be represent a lot of art um we have several developers that are going to be um well creekside for example is providing it to the art fund so some are going which is metro 510. um many are and then we do have several coming in now some of the larger projects that are looking to do on-site

1:55:40art so i think we'll be seeing it delivered in a lot of different ways and it's fun to imagine just how that ends up feeling thank you okay yeah i do have a i want to follow on to my previous question about the um revenue that this might generate to the city and

1:55:57and this is not to diminish our our my excitement for adding uh housing but you know with the the sheet you updated to talk about dynamic document we got an update just delivered today but the document that was delivered today is 926 units that are going to be added and

1:56:17our current housing element shows that we have 10 700 units so we're we're adding almost 10 percent of our our current housing stock um and quick math 50 million dollars a project uh at you know less than 22 percent of one percent or a very small number it would be generating revenue for us at

1:56:41about a hundred and ten thousand dollars per project per 50 million dollar project so i'm just trying to figure out how 10 projects 110 000 each get a million dollars of revenue that's not even 10 of our general fund yet we're picking up 10 percent almost 10 of what our current housing

1:57:01stock is so just trying to understand how the population numbers are i mean are you anticipating that it's going to be the 2.48 persons per unit in this area because that that's that's the number city-wide that we are using so so the infrastructure analysis in the specific

1:57:18plan as well as the eir got into some of this and what you could anticipate and what the mitigations were right to assure sustainability of the infrastructure and resources i also had prepared early in the earlier in the year and i um a fiscal and financial analysis about what the specific plan

1:57:36would be contributing greenfield development and infill development are different and we could obviously have longer conversations about this and we might tonight for example the there's some inadequacy in the existing sanitary for example right now when new development helps contribute to

1:57:55that being updated it's updating old infrastructure it's not extending it into some new place that is now being shared the cost of extension by everyone similarly our street is going to be improved but we're not building new streets so i i think that the overall data on

1:58:11what infill construction provides is different than when you think about greenfield and what it's going to be asking for of course there's going to be more calls for service by the police more than you know i think our general plan policy calls on council to maintain a certain

1:58:25number of police per i believe that if we did the math the contribution in the new taxes is probably getting close to what that so i think we'd have to do a more in-depth conversation about this but i think that the data in general when you think of infill versus

1:58:39greenfield development is that it again the same analysis that i had done also looked at all those new shoppers right so those people the sales tax is also another thing that starts to to benefit so you know we'd have to do a more deep conversation about it but i think at

1:58:54this point and and correct me if something's different but the analysis in the specific plan was that all of these plans together um make it work balance balance it out again if we you know we can do further look at that maybe when we look at number three you know when we look at

1:59:07what's next again how much can we burden on to these i think there's a real concept if you add inclusionary another do you do you see the vision i mean the city's economic development goals have long been bring it and it hasn't come so that hasn't helped so um so bringing it how do we now optimize it

1:59:26how do we see how you know what those impacts are and how do we make sure that we you know your annual budget is going to have to reflect somewhere where so that's not i just built on mr gowdy's comment uh indeed you know any type of uh impact fee it you know i certainly

1:59:43would be interested in seeing if we can encourage uh you know impacts you know the low flow toilets that then generate less wastewater that then we have less capacity needs those are certainly things that um would be great at which there's the zero that energy so remember water zero energy there's

2:00:08all sorts of programs out there that other cities are adopting so that their development uh doesn't increase the overall uh demand and they can stay within their communities current water uses so so remember new development um and this type of development uses a fraction of

2:00:26the resources as our existing development pattern so it's meeting new uh title 24 new california building code which is going to be more energy efficient than any of our homes practically whatever we've done the water and i think al could speak to this the um some of the issues that sanitary has is

2:00:46influenza and i the the new projects is wet weather flow is some of the issues these new projects aren't going to be contributing that at all and they're going to all be required per abmud standards to be very low flow fixtures so agreed and that is where our tier 4

2:01:02might want to try to leverage even greener but these projects in the bay area in california we have to do lid we have to do title 24 are pretty much equivalent to lead silver in other places um it's wired for ev as we talked about solar we do have several projects coming

2:01:18in with solar um so we'll keep looking for more we're working with public works on green infrastructure looking at that so i think there's maybe ways but these are again in terms of their impact whether it's vmt water usage extra sanitary are a fraction of the per

2:01:35capita usage of traditional development patterns so if i would like to comment at this time since we're moving from questions to comments i want to thank staff very much you guys have demonstrated deep knowledge not only in this plan but in development in our region so i want to thank you all

2:01:52for your timely investment and and deep uh understanding of the state laws and our economy and our local requirements it really shows in the quality of the plans and the quality of your answers to our to our questions tonight so thank you very much okay paul do you have any comments okay i

2:02:13think we are finished except i think we all want to say thank you very much it's been a what next year i think it's a great team that i see before me and i want to thank you all for um the fantastic work that you've done and we look forward to a number of these

2:02:33projects uh coming to fruition uh thank you all very much for your time thank you thank you okay with that we will move on on our agenda to the adoption of the consent calendar there a motion i move to adopt okay i'll second okay uh motion rochelle motioned and uh gabe uh seconded all in favor

2:03:12please say aye any abstentions uh any uh objections motion carries unanimously with that we move on to policy matters there's uh one item number seven a which is support for senate bill 300 the health warning label on sugar sweetened beverage act is there a staff report on this

2:03:40no okay um is there a motion is there a comment i'd like to move to support uh resolution number this resolution of the city council of the city of el cerrito in support of sb 300 senator monning's bill the health warning label on sugar sweetened beverages act there's a second a second

2:04:08discussion discussion yeah um did you look at some of the labeling or can you tell uh highlight some of the labeling changes that this would bring forward like for example it wasn't clear to me how the signage would be posted at the like refill stations at some of the

2:04:26restaurants so just curious if you have the um you know i we have obviously the full text but i it wasn't clear to me uh what the posting requirement was at those refill stations and then the penalties looked to be fairly minor actually the reduction of penalties

2:04:46um it looks like they reduced it from a thousand dollars per per fine to 500 so i was just curious if you were willing to elaborate on some of the um elaborate on some of the the details of this you've used the word you a bunch of times it was brought this was brought

2:05:04forward according to the agenda was brought forward by uh mr quinto so i was hoping that he would be able to speak to the matter so with the posting of uh what they'd like to do is put that on sodas and and sweetened drinks that are on the shelf at stores um [Music]

2:05:27in california the whole state of california not just elsarita right but it so beverage dispensing machine means any device that mixes concentrate with any one of the more uh or other ingredients and dispenses the resulting mixture into an unsealed container as a ready to drink beverage

2:05:47that's a that's like a you know at the refill station at the at a local uh fast food store fountain drinks yep mountain drinks and and it wasn't clear to me what the you know where the warning would go so i was just curious if you were if you would um you know if which which one of these

2:06:07warnings that i needed to look at and i definitely the vending machine is very clearly you know indicated that the warning would be on the vending machine and that you know that would be easier to enforce uh it was just wasn't clear to me how the the fountain machines would be

2:06:29labeled yeah i'm not sure about the fountain but i'm pretty sure with um the sealed drinks that are ready to open it will definitely be on the label yep good and then if i read it correctly and the the current penalty is a thousand dollars for food food violations and that this would

2:06:50reduce it down to 500 are you are you is that does that sound right to the people that are that you've been talking to i believe so and and this is uh uh going on in sacramento right now so uh this is something that uh um cities are looking at and uh so there they will be discussing that there's no

2:07:17exact wording on it yet um but uh looking at uh the bill um you know i do agree with what they'd like to do and putting uh the labels on there yeah the existing law authorizes the state department of public health to assess civil penalties in an amount not to exceed a thousand dollars per day this

2:07:39would reduce it civil penalties to not less than 50 but no greater than 500 i'm just curious why they're reducing the the penalty are you reading that this is this would be on uh the second page of attachment two uh which starts attachment two starts out with senate bill and if you go to

2:08:01the the paragraph uh arabic to where it says under existing state law under existing law the state department of public health upon request of a health officer as defined may authorize the local health department of a city county city and county or local health

2:08:16district to enforce the provisions of the sherman food drug and cosmetic law existing law authorizes up to a thousand dollars a day the next paragraph says this bill commencing july 1 2018 would provide that of any violation provisions described in uh one above would uh or regulations

2:08:34adopted would be just 50 to 500. so i'm just curious why they would um reduce the in the in the penalties just curious yeah i have no idea i'm sorry yeah i mean i mean i like the fact that they're building a range but it you know from 50 to something but it's just curious why they were reducing

2:08:58it okay it does sound kind of backwards um maybe that's maybe that's the sweetener they had to put in to get it passed well it sounds completely backwards actually there's different ways to um indicate support for things and one of them is called in concept which allows one to

2:09:27assume that things will get worked out along the way towards passage of a bill [Music] so we could do that if if the maker of the motion and the second or were so inclined sure absolutely okay well we have a specific motion before us but would you be asking the asking the

2:09:51maker of the motion and the person who's seconded if they're interested in doing that to get over the confusion about this which looks like they're um actually uh making it a less severe penalty rather than make implementing a penalty okay okay yeah so what would be the what

2:10:12would be the new text of the motion where's the amendment the resolution yep what would be the new will be the new text of the resolution we would go down beyond the whereases to now therefore be it resolved that we uh wholeheartedly endorse it um in concept and blah blah blah

2:10:38you said the words in concept after sb 300.

2:10:45and does in concept mean not sending a letter of support to the author and the committee that means you could go ahead and do that it means that you don't know for sure what the bill is going to look like late when it's finalized it's what it means that's what we do

2:11:00at the league of california cities policy committees all the time but because bills bills start out and and then they get formalized they start out they don't even have words hardly and and then they the words get added and then the words get changed and um so in concept is used for when things

2:11:24are in that process frequently um okay so i made that motion okay and you've changed it to in concept and your secondary has agreed to that i second the end concept okay thank you thank you thank you guys it's over that confusion because it certainly is a confusion i think okay so

2:11:45are we ready to vote on this okay all in favor please say aye aye objections in the abstentions motion carries unanimously and the maker of the motion was gabe seconded by rochelle thank you thank you okay now um with that we'll move on to item eight which is city council local and regional

2:12:12liaison assignments does you have any paul i was with you at the contra costa mayor's conference and went to the economic development committee okay thank you and uh i will report i did report it earlier but i'll make sure it's clear now as your liaison to marine clean energy

2:12:31or or mce as they're liking to call themselves now i did participate in rate review uh and they're in the fiscal budget for the next fiscal year their fiscal year is april 1 to march 31st we will be uh citing the budget next week um and part of the budget setting and rate

2:12:52setting includes a um a change in the rates so that we are below pg e in all categories great yep okay you were here yes i attended my first design review board meeting as the council liaison they did not have any meetings in january or february at the meeting that

2:13:18i attended there was a public hearing or a property at 802 elm for medium density residential turning it into a duplex and the design review board did not come to a conclusion at that meeting and they will be addressing it at a future meeting thank you okay um and i addressed the

2:13:46issues that i wanted to uh earlier in the meeting so with that we are adjourned until uh tuesday march 21st at 7 pm right here in city hall okay did i need to mention about the um mr guthrie's passing oh i'm sorry thank you i was actually wondering about first though the um

2:14:13the appointments um that'll be in the minutes yes i'll be publishing all the appointments and it'll appear on your next segment on the minutes in your packet on march 21st and we'll also be posted a summary of the meeting which includes the appointments we'll post to the city's website

2:14:31tomorrow okay thank you uh with that i have a um sad sad thing to do and it has to do with a member of the committee on aging who was really very was a great person to have on the committee and i think we'll all miss him a lot he passed away on february the 21st it was mark

2:14:59guthrie and he actually graduated from uc davis with a degree in wildlife and fisheries biology and he and his wife christine hills were married in el cerrito bought a home and started a family more than 30 years ago and their daughter sarah with an h graduated from el cerrito high mark

2:15:23supported tech futures at el cerrito high school and served for seven years on the committee on aging for el cerrito mark was appointed to the committee on aging on november 2009 and when he served on the committee he advocated for seniors and people with disabilities by serving on

2:15:45the senior transportation and legislation committees and he was always immensely helpful at planning and establishing our the resource fair which has been a real success for the committee on aging he will be missed greatly for everything that he has done for the el cerrito community and

2:16:08particularly for the committee on aging so i hope that you'll join me right now in a moment of silence thank you thank you um and he was just a lot of he was just a great committee member and uh so i've had the pleasure of uh volunteering with him at the senior

2:16:35committee and uh and uh he and i spent a lot of time together discussing uh a lot of services that we provide here in el cerrito so he will be missed okay thank you thank you the next meeting you