First proclamation, I will go ahead and introduce it,
and then I will call our friends from the library up
to do their presentation for us.
So this is National Library Week, which is a fun week,
because libraries spark creativity, fuel imagination,
inspire lifelong learning, offer space
where individuals of all ages can explore new ideas
and be drawn to new possibilities.
They're vibrant community hubs,
connecting people with knowledge, technology, and resources
while fostering civic engagement, critical thinking,
and lifelong learning,
which are sometimes important civic skills.
They're free and equitable access
to books and digital tools and innovative programming.
My sister taught me about Libby this weekend,
so I'm getting on top of that,
ensuring that all individuals, regardless of background,
have the support they need to learn, connect, and thrive.
They partner with schools, businesses, organization,
connecting the dots to maximize resources,
and empower job seekers, entrepreneurs,
lifelong learners, providing access to resources, training,
and opportunities.
They nurture young minds through storytime,
STEAM programs, literacy initiatives,
fostering curiosity, and a love of learning
that lasts a lifetime.
They protect the right to read, think, and explore
without censorship, standing as champions
of intellectual freedom and free expression.
Another thing that is very important in this democracy,
dedicated librarians and library workers
provide welcoming spaces that inspire discovery, collaboration, and creativity for all.
And so all of the work in the libraries across the country are joining together this week
with us to celebrate National Library Week under the theme Drawn to the Library.
And so with that, I would like to ask our, and I've got to get the names, the Ignacio
Valley Library Community Manager, Alexander Birnbach, and the Downtown Library Community
manager Addie Spanbock to come up and give a presentation on our libraries and
I'll come over and present this and we'll do the picture after your
presentation. Thank you. Good evening City Council members and City Manager. I hope
everybody's doing well. My name is Allie Bernbeck and I'm the manager of the
Ignacio Valley Library. And I'm Addie Spanbock. I'm the manager of the Walnut
Creek Library just here across the street in downtown. So thanks so much for
having us we're here to share some statistics and information about
Contra Costa County Library as well as some specifics to the Walnut Creek
Library and the Ignacio Valley Library and as was said we're here to talk about
National Library Week which is next week April 6th to the 12th. National Library
Week is an annual celebration highlighting the valuable role
libraries and librarians and library workers play in transforming lives and
strengthening our communities. So first off with some statistics circulation of
library materials continues to increase and this past fiscal year was up about
four percent and circulation of ebooks continues to rise we are at eighteen
percent over fiscal year 22-23 if you are not familiar Libby is one of our
ebook providers it is completely free with your library card and you are able
to check out many many many materials all without actually entering our
building. Okay and exciting news on all fronts library visits are up six percent
from last year so patrons are returning to our buildings and we are still seeing
a lot of wonderful activity and virtual use is up 22% and again virtual is ebooks
e audiobooks anytime anybody visits our library website you can access museum
passes through the library, state parks passes, digital newspapers and magazines as well,
so there's a ton to kind of visit reading recommendations and see on our library website.
And for just a little bit of fun, here are the most popular books in 2024.
This is countywide, but very much applicable to Walnut Creek.
So for early readers, The Thank You Book by Mo Willems.
readers loved Dog Man Book 11 to be specific by Dave Pilkey. Teen readers
enjoyed divine rivals by Rebecca Ross and our adult audience was particularly
drawn to the women by Kristin Hanna. All right so for those that aren't familiar
the Rolling Reader is our early literacy outreach vehicle and it celebrated its
first year on the road in November of 2024. It travels all throughout the
county to various sites and has already driven more than 6,000 miles.
And then these are just a few of our new digital resources.
So O'Reilly is a collection of technology and business ebooks,
audiobooks, courses, and videos.
We're always expanding our digital offerings and
these are all free with your library card.
For Mango Languages, it's a compliment to our other online language resource,
Rosetta Stone and then many people are familiar with consumer reports you're
able to access ratings and reviews all online and free with your library card.
Okay and a brief recap of summer 2024. Lunch of the library is one of the
library's most successful programs. This past year we offered nine
different branches throughout the county offered free lunches at the library and
they served over 13,000 meals across the country. For summer reading we also have
We also had 7,881 participants from all across the county as well, and participation was
up 21% from the previous year, which is an exciting stat, and we're hoping that this
year's summer reading will gain even more attention and participation.
That's coming in June, so please keep your eyes out.
And just a few more things from 2024.
So Project Second Chance, which is the library's adult literacy program, celebrated 40 years
in 2024 and it's helped more than 6,500 adults improve their reading skills.
It's a wonderful program and we hope to see it continue for many, many more years.
Self-service Sundays launched in December at the Concord Library.
This is where patrons can browse the collection and check out books, return items, pickup
holds, connect to Wi-Fi and use the space for studying and reading.
And we're hoping more people take advantage of that service.
And finally, the North Richmond Lockers launched in April 2024.
They're housed inside the Kareen Sane Senior and Family Community Center in Richmond.
And they're open Monday through Friday from 9am to 1pm for patrons to pick up materials
remotely.
Right.
And some specifics for Walnut Creek Library just across the way here.
So outreach continues to be a main priority for us and we're going to be increasing our
outreach efforts to schools in 2025 to just ensure that all children have
access to our fabulous resources and services. Use Services staff regularly
partners with Lindsay Wildlife to offer an on-site story time and we also
participate in city events like trunk retreat. In 2024 additional lockers were
installed at Rossmore which gave us the ability to increase access to many more
residents. I believe the locker capacity doubled with this addition, and those lockers were funded
and supported by the Friends of the Walnut Creek Library, so we really appreciate their support.
We continue to have our regular and popular program offerings such as Storytime, ESL Conversation,
Moving and Strengthening programs with Tai Chi and Yoga, many, many more. In May of 2024, we started
up our Insiders Program again, which is a program that was developed pre-pandemic for
adults with developmental disabilities.
When this first started back in May, we would have about 10 to 15 attendees every month,
but now have about 30 to 40 attendees that come every month just for the program.
In September of 2024, our teen librarians started a monthly teen advisory board.
Right now we have about 12 devoted teenagers that come.
They are very interested in gaining volunteer hours and working for the library, advocating,
planning programs and marketing for us.
In March they had a diaper and wipe drive that they contributed all of the donations
to Bay Area Crisis Nursery.
And this summer they'll be starting a Red Cross blood drive.
So keep an eye out for that.
You guys can come across the street to donate blood.
And we have a number of wonderful programs on the horizon, including an increase in programs
for seniors, cultural celebrations, and recognized events for AAPI Month and Juneteenth.
And Ali's going to top this statistic, but in 2025 marks 15 years that the Walnut Creek
Library, as we know it, was built.
It was opened in July of 2010.
So please keep an eye out.
We're hoping to celebrate that accomplishment this summer.
And we really want to recognize that wonderful community space.
So please do come by when we have that celebration.
So these are just a handful of accomplishments from us across the way.
And we hope to see you guys soon.
Thank you, guys.
Oh, one more.
Just a few a few more tidbits from Ignacio Valley Library.
So some people may not know, but there are two libraries in Walnut Creek.
They're both part of the Contra Costa County Library system.
The Downtown Walnut Creek Library is one,
and then the Ignacio Valley Library,
which is located on Oak Grove Road, is the other.
So just a few tidbits from the Ignacio Valley Library.
The big news is we are turning 50 in September.
We opened September 1975,
so we will be having a celebration.
Everyone's invited.
Keep your eyes peeled for more details,
but we are really excited about that.
In the meantime, the Ignacio Valley Library
continues its popular weekly story times.
We draw about 75 to 90 attendees
that each of these Tuesday and Thursday story times.
We also have some special story times that we host,
such as Story Time with the Dentist
or Story Time with the Ruth Bancroft Gardens,
which are fun and educational as well.
And we're very excited to start.
We are bringing back and revamping
our bilingual Farsi story time,
which will be for right now, one Friday a month.
And we're hoping if we see enough interest
to build that up to maybe twice a month.
So that first one will start this Friday, April 4th.
A few accomplishments that we're proud of,
our partnership with LifeSteps Foundation
for the Grow With Me group,
which is a series of meetings facilitated
by two developmental specialists
who offer educational support and guidance
for families with children
experiencing developmental delays.
A bright step forward in sustainability
was the launch of our seed lending library, which
you can see up there in the old-fashioned card catalog.
So patrons can check out packets of seeds at no cost
to start their own gardens.
We rotate seeds seasonally.
We've got fruits, veggies, herbs, flowers.
And we've even had some members of the public
bring back their own seeds that they'd like to donate to us.
We've added additional opportunities
for kids to bolster their steam literacy skills
with our drop-in monthly LEGO club.
And on the horizon, we are increasing our outreach
efforts, just as Addie mentioned,
to local schools to get more library cards
into the hands of our community.
We've started Healthy Brains Club
for anyone who wants to get together
in a comfortable, friendly environment
and enjoy word problems, dokus, puzzles, and crafts
to sharpen cognitive skills while forging
connections and friendships.
We're offering additional fine arts and craft opportunities
for our tweens with our after school tween lounge.
We already mentioned we're thrilled about our new Farsi
Story Time, Bilingual Farsi Story Time.
And we partnered with Contra Costa Legal Services
to offer financial and health literacy seminars to adults.
So the workshops include advanced healthcare directives,
powers of attorney, preventing elder abuse,
and preventing fraud and identity theft and more.
So in short, both of our branches have been extremely busy,
but we are thrilled to be here.
And we hope that you'll come visit
and that we'll see you soon
because everyone is welcome at the library.
Okay, any questions?
Thank you.
Turn to my fellow council members.
Council member Dafeni, did you, no.
Thank you very much.
While I wasn't at the 50,
the original opening of the YV library,
I clearly remember the opening of the downtown library
15 years ago, and I'm so excited
that we were able to accomplish that project.
I once visited Williamsburg, Virginia,
and one of the things that stuck with me
in a presentation about the history of Williamsburg
was just the discussion that public libraries
are fundamental to democracy and how important they are
that we maintain free public libraries
as a corollary to free public education.
So thank you for the work that you do.
It's very important in all times.
Yes, thank you.
And now ask my fellow council members to join me out front
and we'll do the photograph
and you can have your proclamation.
Thank you.
Next up I'd like is our proclamation
honoring Cleaner Contra Costa Month.
Is there somebody here from Sustainable Contra Costa?
All right, I will read this
and then meet you at the podium.
Where's my cheat sheet?
The city of Walnut Creek has a long commitment
to environmental sustainability,
including when we adopted our Sustainability Action Plan
with ambitious goals for the community
and city's operations and a climate emergency resolution
emphasizing the need for urgent action
to address climate change.
Earth Day has been celebrated in April since 1970,
and I remember the first one.
And Sustainable Walnut Creek organizes
an annual Walnut Creek Earth Day celebration,
which will be April 15th from 11 to two in Civic Park.
City of Walnut Creek, Contra Costa County,
and Sustainable Contra Costa provide an online platform
called Cleaner Contra Costa,
where residents can find practical solutions
and local resources to save energy and water,
reduce waste and take meaningful climate action.
So 930 participating Walnut Creek households
have collectively saved 350,000 pounds
of greenhouse gas emissions, 430,000 gallons of water
and 78,500 in energy costs since it started in 2019.
We at the city support this collaborative effort,
bringing awareness and local actions
to pivotal issues facing our planet.
because when we reduce the impacts by conserving resources
and investing in local solutions, we all benefit.
So the community members of Walnut Creek and the county
are encouraged to form teams and take action together
at the cleaner Contra Costa Challenge.
And I will.
Thank you.
I have a couple of...
Okay, you're coming with me, wonderful.
I'm coming over here to help with it.
Hi.
Thank you for coming. Oh, yes.
Okay. There you go.
Go ahead. Terrific.
So good evening, everybody.
I'm Tina Newhazel with Sustainable Contra Costa
and we are here as a partner in sustainability
and to celebrate the great work Walnut Creek is doing.
We're grateful for your ongoing support
and collaborating on our shared vision
of a healthy community, economy and planet.
Sustainable Contra Costa was started here in Walnut Creek
along with Sustainable Walnut Creek 16 years ago.
We work in partnership with individuals and organizations
to build economically vibrant, socially just,
and environmentally sustainable communities for all.
The city of Walnut Creek was one of the founding members
of the Cleaner Contra Costa Challenge in 2019.
Together we've helped thousands of people
learn how to make changes to save water and energy,
reduce waste, and build a healthier,
more connected communities.
Scoco celebrates local sustainability heroes
at the annual awards gala, which I think all of you
have been to at some point, all of the city council members
here.
And we provide sustainable living workshops.
And our youth-led program, SLEA, or Sustainable Leaders
in Action, empowers over 40 students
each year with professional development, camaraderie,
and climate action.
If you have teens interested in sustainability,
SLEA is a great opportunity.
Skoko and Walnut Creek city staff
I've been working together on several projects,
including the successful Repair Cafe in January.
Thanks to the city, Sustainable Rossmoor,
Recycle Smart, and all the volunteer repair coaches,
126 items were repaired and kept out of the landfill.
We hope to do that again.
Skoko has also been working with Northgate
and Los Lomas teachers and students this year.
The Cleaner Contra Costa web platform, as you mentioned,
helps you make positive impact
on your pocketbook and the planet.
And thanks to partners like Walnut Creek,
it's available to everyone in Contra Costa County
for free in both English and Spanish.
The challenge offers over 90 actions
to save resources and reduce emissions,
ranging from simple things like taking shorter showers
to larger changes like upgrading to electric appliances
with information on all the rebates
and programs available to you where you live.
It also includes a resiliency category
for emergency preparedness and connects you
with the local CERT team.
So the website tracks your progress,
showing household and citywide savings
in energy, water, gas, CO2, and money.
It offers helpful resources for everyone,
whether they're renters or youth,
as well as those who already live sustainable lifestyles,
like many of you I know.
Mayor Darling just listed the progress
made by Walnut Creek residents recently.
Also impressive are the countywide results.
We have overnight 5,900 households participating
in Contra Costa.
And together, we have saved 3.6 million pounds
of greenhouse gas emissions, 4.4 million gallons of water,
67,000 gallons of gas, and over $840,000
since we started the program together in 2019.
Thank you all for helping us share these solutions
and resources with people and for doing your part
to create a strong, resilient community
and a healthy planet for our kids.
Be sure to take just one minute to create your free profile
on cleanercontracosta.org,
and you can start finding solutions and actions
and money-saving resources that are right for you.
I'm happy to answer any questions
and you can reach out to us at info at sustainablecoco.org.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Any questions for...
No, you guys are just doing such great work.
Thank you.
Can we take a picture?
we are going to do the picture. All right and last but not least is this is
National Public Safety Telecommunications Week and this is a super
important one as witnessed by the number of law enforcement here in the room with
us tonight and this proclamation recognizes that emergencies can occur at
any time that require police, fire, emergency medical services and when an
emergency occurs the prompt response of the police or the firefighters or the
paramedics is critical to the protection of life and preservation of
property and the safety of our police officers and firefighters is dependent on
the quality accuracy quality of accurate quality of accuracy and
information obtained from citizens who call in on that emergency number and
tonight we're recognizing the people that are on the other end of that line
having done it once or twice it's a little bit intimidating and it's very
nice to have that person say now let's take a breath and tell me what's really
going on and we just want to say you guys are such a vital link for our
police officers and firefighters helping keep them safe helping keep our
community safe and also helping suppress firearms get people off the street that
need to be off the street get patients into the care that and I know that you
you've had a tremendous growth with the 988
and you know, you've had a lot of learning and growing
and we appreciate it.
We recognize that your job is not the most stress-free job
and we appreciate everything that you guys do.
And so I'd like to invite dispatch supervisor,
Tori Maxfield and lead dispatcher,
Shamika Riley up to accept the proclamation.
Thank you so much for this recognition and appreciation.
Dispatch Appreciation Week is a special time
because it allows us to put a focus on those
that are behind the scenes and that we may not
really know who is answering that call at any given time.
It's not a police officer, it's not a secretary,
it's a highly trained and highly skilled individual
that has spent up to a year learning how to do the job
before they are put out on their own.
So we really appreciate this recognition.
I'm also proud that National Public Safety
Telecommunicators Week, which is a mouthful,
started right here in Contra Costa County,
for those of you who don't know,
at the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office in 1981,
and was later made a National Week of Recognition.
I'd like to thank everybody
who is representing from the police department tonight.
That's very nice, thank you so much.
And if you're thinking, oh darn,
I didn't realize that Dispatch Appreciation Week
was so soon, no worries.
It is actually April 13th.
So you have time if you want to bring snacks
or anything like that.
So thank you very much.
We appreciate this.
Thank you very much.
Do I get a photo?
Did anybody have any questions for the dispatch?
Other than just to give you our gratitude for all
that you guys do.
And now we'll do the photo.
OK.
You guys in the back of the room, do you want to come up?
Or are you guys going to come up?
Oh, no, this is all about it.
OK.
It's your group.
Okay, now that all the love in the room has been circulated and we appreciated everybody,
the next on the agenda is the consent calendar.
Does any council member wish to pull any item for discussion?
Yes, I'd like to pull item 2C which is the award of the contract for the annual slurry
seal project.
Okay.
And I'd like to pull 2E which is the authorization to execute an agreement with Pemberley Productions.
Okay.
Does any member of the staff wish to pull an item?
We're good there.
So does any member of the public wish to comment
on the items on the consent calendar
except for items two C and two E?
Seeing no one, I'll ask council
if anyone would like to make a motion
with regard to the consent calendar
except for two C and two E.
I'll make a motion to approve consent calendar items
two A, B, D, and F and G.
Second.
Call please. Mayor Pro Tem Wolk? Aye. Councilmember Silva? Aye. Councilmember Davenny? Aye. Mayor Darden? Aye.
All right now we'll turn to 2C. Thank you very much. So is there someone here who would like
to answer some questions? Well hello there. Thank you very much for being here this evening. This is
what we're doing tonight is approving just over $800,000 of expenditures for the annual
slurry seal program and I thought we'll start first with what is slurry seal and
what does it really mean? Slurry seal is a treatment we put on streets it's
part of the pavement management program where we put a sealant on top of the
asphalt to preserve the asphalt have it last longer. So it preserves the asphalt
does it cover cracks and nuances like that so that they don't get to be bigger
cracks and sinkholes. Yes exactly. I know we do other projects at the same time
when we're doing you know when we're dealing with the 38 to 40 roads that we
do every year. Can you describe what projects we'll be doing in the Larky and
Buena Vista areas this coming spring and summer? Yes so this in addition to the
slurry seal in that area where there's also going to be some safety
improvements. That includes some striping improvements with high-visibility crosswalks
at the trail crossings and also adjacent to Buena Vista Elementary. There's a couple crosswalk
there, so we'll put the high-visibility crosswalks. There's also going to be a new stop sign put
at the Alvarado and San Juan intersection. Right now there's no stop sign going through
Alvarado and there will be a new stop sign there so that gives a better crosswalk for
the kids in the back of the elementary school there.
Let's see, there's also going to be new edge line striping on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Avenue.
The edge line striping are kind of like these lane lines on the road, but it gives a little
additional room for pedestrians to walk on the side, something else.
The project also extends into Lancaster Avenue.
That was the project we were gonna do last year,
but we pulled it back to this year.
But with that project,
we're putting in some bike facilities out there,
and we've done the ADA improvements last year
in preparation for this project.
So if I could summarize what I think you just told us,
in addition to protecting the surface of the roads,
we're also doing pedestrian and bicycle improvements
to improve the safety of pedestrians,
bicyclists, and drivers?
Yes.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Mayor.
I have a couple questions too, thank you.
So when a slurry seal is done,
how long is the expected life term of that
until more work or repaving would need to be done?
Yeah, we usually look for like a return period
of like about 10 to 12 years for the slurry seals.
Okay and so this being on Ignacio.
No.
No, wait a minute, hold on a second.
Larky.
Larky, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I'm thinking of something else.
I think that's it.
10 to 12 years, great, thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your questions.
Thank you very much for taking the time.
Does any member of the public want to comment on item 2C?
Does anybody want to make a motion?
I will make the motion to award the contract
to 2414 the 2025 Slurry Seal Project.
And I'll second that.
Coding's company.
Nope.
Second that.
Roll call, please.
Councilmember Silva.
Aye.
Mayor Darlene.
Aye.
Councilmember Devaney.
Aye.
Mayor Pro Temo.
Aye.
Okay, measure press.
And now item two E.
Two E, so I have a few questions
and here's Carolyn Jackson to answer them.
So this is regarding executing an agreement
with Pemberley Productions for the presentation
of the woman in black for an amount
not to exceed $187,500.
So Carolyn, I wanted to ask,
how often during a season are there requests
for additional funds like this
for center up co-productions?
Thank you for the question.
So this is not typical that we have an item
coming to council due to the purchasing policy.
So it's the amount of the contract
with this particular vendor
that raises it to council tonight.
Typically, if it's a production
that we have many different vendors working on,
it wouldn't come before council.
But since it's a single vendor for the entire production,
including the acting company, it does rise to that level.
And funding for a production like this
is part of CenterRep's typical budget
and is part of what we're developing for the FY26 budget
as we're going through that process now.
And it really varies season to season,
whether we have a co-production of this style
where we have the entire pieces coming to us.
The most recent case was a Mystic Pizza
in the 23-24 season.
Okay, thank you.
And would this play be in the 800 seat Hoffman Theater
or the 300 seat Margaret Lesher Theater?
The 300 seat Margaret Lesher.
Okay.
And since we haven't seen the plans
for the 25-26 season yet,
will there be additional financial requests
for productions being anticipated during the season?
So we are looking across the Arts and Rec Department
at rising labor and material costs.
I'm sure that's not surprising to hear,
as well as citywide.
There are rising costs that are impacting
our budget development process.
So we are working on that with the city's finance team
and there'll be more detail shared with council
of what FY26 and 27 looks like in May.
But we do anticipate for CenterRep
and for the Arts and Rec Department as a whole,
a request for increased funding to address those rising labor
and material costs.
And we do anticipate as well a one-time request
for increased funding to support the new production
of a Christmas carol.
Okay, those are my questions.
Oops, I just had one question.
The money that's in this contract,
which fiscal year budget is it coming out of?
So a portion, the deposit towards the contract
in this fiscal year and that's about fifteen thousand dollars and the
remainder is in FY twenty-seven. And this isn't in addition to your current
budget it's just part of your budget and we're seeing it because of the a large
amount because every it's a one and done right? Yes that it's part of what would
be a typical budget for Center Rep but the purchasing policy raises it here and
the timing of needing to secure the contract in order to get to a season
announcement okay great and congressman or councilmember I think I did read
though that you're projecting a positive return on this production that though the
the ask is I think what bigger than usual the the return is is anticipated
to be like ten thousand over so yeah the ticket sales specifically for this
production are projected to be about ten thousand higher than the contract for
pemberley productions and really every production kind of has varying degrees
to which the ticket sales offset the expenses but in this case we're looking
at that being a positive. That's great. How are you able to make that projection?
So we look at both our predicted increase in season subscription so we're
actually up 12% in subscribers this season and expecting a continued growth
not quite that high but looking at more of a 5% growth in subscribers and then
Can we look at other productions in recent history that we feel are similar in terms
of either the theme or the audience type and make a projection on how many single tickets
we think we will sell for this particular production?
Okay, thank you.
Any more questions?
So for me, so my comments on this are something that I typically am surprised at myself about
as a former actor and six year arts commissioner.
I love the local theater,
I love Leisure Center programs,
and everything that has to do with art.
But without seeing the full season schedule,
I'm reticent to approve funds for this
when we're looking at cutting back in areas
throughout the city.
Due to the upcoming budget,
of course there's some concern about some of the programs
that are coming out in Center Rep
over the course of, well, this current season,
and we just heard Carolyn talk about
a new re-envisioning of a Christmas carol
with a smaller production, but it's going to have
additional new first-time costs.
So without knowing all of this and us being looked at
to make some potentially difficult cuts in budget
for the upcoming year,
I'm concerned about what we're doing now
without even seeing the full rollout
of the entire program for Senna Rep.
I also understand that this is a traveling production,
And therefore it's not even gonna be casting local actors,
which our center rep company typically,
we wanna be able to cast local actors,
have local people fulfill those roles.
Doesn't, that's not gonna be happening here.
I think just without an understanding
of what the rest of the season holds,
and with what's going to,
what we're going to be looking at having to do,
that I just don't feel comfortable
making this approval right now for this additional budget
request for this show.
I can't in good conscience do that.
I'm sure everyone remembers that the public.
But is this part of the strategic plan
for the Lesher Center?
This particular production is not,
but the concept of doing more co-productions and finding
areas in the season where it's a more manageable series
of expenses, predictable series of expenses,
to allow for some more artistic risk taking in other areas
is part of the strategic plan.
So the strategic plan, if I recall then,
does anticipate in order to elevate the role of center rep
to a more regional company is not about always local actors.
It's about bringing in superior performers
from across the nation, actually.
And I think we are never going to have
opportunity to say yes to productions if we don't say yes to productions and
there will always be a reason to be reluctant to get outside our comfort
zone but I think this is planned we're having to say we're being asked about
this because the total amount of the production is a single fee and so it
exceeds the budget amount but it's anticipated to be within what the realm
of a production like this would be in their season. And if we were to wait
until July or end of June to do this, we would be missing the season for this
production. It would be waiting a year. And so I'm in favor of being
able to do this, and I don't know if any member of the public wants. Why don't we
see if there's any public comment? All right, we'll go ahead and close public
comment and come bring it back here. Council Member Definney did you have
anything you wanted to say on this one? I want to make sure I understand that the
issue and the concerns because I'm not sure I'm appreciating them fully at this
point but is is one of the concerns that this was this is a city-run program and
that we'd like to like continue to promote like local talent is that part
of the well the concern I think I can understand that we're using city space
and city funding I mean I think that's part of the concern certainly that we're
one of the few Contra Costa theater companies that are remaining and we're
I believe we're doing a disservice to our local acting community and the
regional acting community by not casting shows with local actors this is not the
first time it's happened. We've had several productions that have happened this year that
have not cast local actors. And I just get concerned if we're looking at, I don't know
how many shows we're going to get, but let's say it's five, and therefore 20% of the shows
at least, we don't even know it's coming, are not going to be casting local talent.
I think we're doing a disservice to the concert cost in general.
Maybe one way to frame this, I mean, because typically we would never see this. It's just
because this one production didn't come
in two smaller chunks that we're seeing it.
So perhaps it would be better for us as a council
to step back into our role as overall policy setter
and say, you know, what did the strategic,
we have a strategic plan for the Lesher Center
that said, here are some things that our experts
that we brought in, our national experts,
here's some things that you guys need to be doing
to make sure you're viable going into the future.
it was important as we were coming out of COVID to take the time to do that.
I believe we are getting a report on the strategic plan at an upcoming meeting. My suggestion would
be Mayor Pro Tem Wilks' concerns are important and probably are best dealt with in the overall
strategic planning part of our work rather than a decision on one individual's show.
I get that. We're still being asked to approve a budget for this item, and it goes beyond what we
normally do. I understand it's part of the overall strategic plan, but this is not being asked in the
context of here's the entire season and we need additional for this show. We're going to be asked
to make some challenging cuts in our budget area over the next couple of months, and so this is
really the reason of where I'm concerned here that we're going to be making this
approval while we know there are cuts to come. Are you talking specifically about
cuts to the arts programs or are you talking about citywide? I think what
Mayor Pro Tem is talking about is that we are going to have a tight budget
this year but just as we don't get into the engineering and say well do we
really need to slurry seal Larky shouldn't we be slurring the ceiling
somewhere else I think it's appropriate for us to say we have concerns we want
to make sure that we're doing a good job strategically on the Lusher and deal
with it that way and not dive into one particular show that staff is putting
forward so my my inclination tonight is to go ahead and approve this and then
bring the questions raised tonight back when we look at the strategic plan for
the Lesher Theater at an upcoming date. I'll be voting no. I will move to
authorize the city manager to execute an agreement with Pemberley Productions
for the presentation of the woman in black in an amount not to exceed
$187,500. I will second that. Please call the roll. Councilmember Silva? Aye. Mayor
Darling. Aye. Council member Davini. Yeah I appreciate those concerns and I think
they're valid and I bet I agree with the concept of in this upcoming meeting
addressing the priorities more holistically instead of you know in
this in this particular case so I'm gonna say aye and I look forward to that
discussion. Mayor Pro Tem Wilk. No. Motion carries 3 to 1. All right thank you and
Thank you. It is a difficult time and this is not our last difficult discussion this year.
That brings us to public communications. This portion of the meeting is reserved for comments
on items not on the agenda. Under the Brown Act, the council cannot act on items raised
during public communication but may respond briefly to statements made or questions posed.
We could request clarification or refer the item to staff. Consistent with section 9.5
the city council handbook.
We get 30 minutes at this time for public communication.
And so that will lead us to 719.
If anybody does wish to address the council,
please step forward to the podium
and present your speaker card.
This is the time for public comment, anybody?
All right, with that, we are closing public comment.
That's a record, made me have to turn my page.
Next on the agenda is council member
and staff announcements and reports on activities.
City attorney, is there any closed session action?
Madam Mayor, the only reportable action
from closed session this evening was that the city council
by a 4-0 vote directed the city attorney's office
and staff to resume the litigation
that is ongoing with Windsor Capital Group, thank you.
Thank you.
City Manager, report tonight.
I do not have an update this evening.
We're just whipping through here.
City Council Member reports,
Congressman, or Council Member Definney,
I gotta stop the conversation.
Thank you, no, no, you can do that.
I think I made Jeff Captain one, or police Captain one.
Yeah, no, to continue the trend,
I don't have a report for tonight either.
I had the pleasure of going to Ireland with my son
for a good portion of the last two weeks
on his spring break for a rugby tournament,
which was very enjoyable.
So I don't have anything to report back to the city.
Aye.
Council Member Silva.
Thank you very much.
A few reportable items.
Council Member Francois and I are the members
of the Council's Standing Housing
and Community Development Committee.
And in our recent meeting, we set the stage
for the upcoming April 21st hearing on from,
to decide on which grants to recommend to the council
for our community development block grant funding.
Keeping our fingers crossed that federal government
comes through with that,
as well as our community services funds
and our homeless services funds.
So that'll be coming to us on April 21st
and then coming to council in May.
I'm a member of the executive board
of the Association of Barrier Governments.
And at our recent meeting,
we reminded everyone that the annual meeting
of the General Assembly, so every city has a delegate
and every county has a delegate to the General Assembly,
is Friday, June 20th,
so stay tuned for more information on that.
We also had a conversation about Assembly Bill 670,
Quirk Silva's bill.
It is really about being able,
This bill, if approved by the legislature and the governor,
would allow all cities and the counties to count,
get credit for their arena numbers
for preservation of naturally occurring
affordable housing with long-term deed restrictions.
So this is a complicated process of how we might do that,
but there is an opportunity there to get credits
toward our arena allocation.
Last week was the March meeting
of the Golden Rain Foundation board.
I talked about a number of things that we're doing here
and they asked me a few questions about whether members
of the Rossmore community should attend last week's
planning commission meeting on to discuss
the minor adjustment required for the pickleball facility
that is proposed for Rossmore.
And my response was very neutral,
but I would never not encourage people
who come to a meeting and express their points of view, and so I understand there were people
from both sides at the meeting.
They also are in the process of, they, Rosmore has a nine-member Golden Rain Foundation board,
which is like a city council, and so three of the seats are up for election, and so they
will be seating new members of their board in a few weeks.
last week I'm well I am a member of the League of California City's Housing
Community Development Committee and we had a meeting last week I know council
member thank you Mayor Pro Tem Wolk I knew I had something wrong so I just
really you're on the Environmental Quality Committee so I'm sure you'll
mentioned about that. We had an interesting panel of a couple of
development consultants who were presenting on what they needed to spur
commercial residential development all manner of and what would be required
from the economic development perspective. A couple things they
mentioned that's the ministerial, clear rules, help us get to yes, customer
service orientation. And then one of the items was that we should understand that
the loans and financing of some of the projects that we are enamored with, like
mixed-use residential and commercial, is not really easy to fund because of the
if we over have the amount of commercial in a mixed-use project, it messes with
the financing. And it becomes very complicated. So these are some of the things, and those
things change. So what the rules that are now applicable today may not be applicable
in five years, but I think it's a heads up that we should be talking to the development
community very honestly about what the financing issues are. And there were a few bills that
We discussed, one was AB 87.
And this is a bill if passed that would clarify
that density bonus law is intended to promote
and support affordable housing,
not to be an afterthought on a commercial project
with a few affordable housing units
in order to get the density bonus benefits.
And that, so we had a robust discussion on that.
We had a discussion on AB 650,
which is the housing element reform in the arena more time
and that HCD would, should be required to give us,
their first response should be the response
and not keep moving the goalposts.
And I did mention to our lobbyists
that perhaps we have a good example
of how the goalposts moved.
When we went from just listing in the first round,
the 120 sites and the capacity to having to prove
that we could actually get the capacity by round three
and that's moving the goal posts.
So, and I think I will leave it there.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Mayor Pro Tem?
Thank you.
Well, I have some good news and some not so good news.
The good news is met with our youth commission.
That's always a great evening getting a chance to talk
with some of the issues that they've got.
And it's always a fun and engaging evening
whenever that happens.
So I met with them a couple of weeks ago
as also a member of the Environmental Quality Policy
Committee and the Cal Cities
Policy Committee's meetings last week.
We talked about a lot about fire and the fire mitigation,
plan safety shutoffs, so it was Con Edison
that actually provided the presentation,
but because we're all throughout California,
and of course we have PG&E here,
and there's a variety of different power companies,
they didn't take questions, they just left.
We had a lot of questions.
So that was kind of a little frustrating.
But we also talked about the importance
for California standing up and ensuring
that we have our own environmental quality standards
that we're going to retain,
regardless of whatever the federal government
is pushing on us, and so we took some stances
that as well. Along those lines, had a meeting with State Senator Tim Grayson
a couple weeks ago, and Council Member Silva joined me on that. We talked a lot
about housing, about fire, about insurance. These are all issues that people
throughout the Center's district, but certainly what we're hearing in Walnut
Creek, are very important to people that are around here. We are considered a
high fire risk no matter where you live in Walnut Creek.
So people wanna make sure that not only are they protected,
but they're gonna have insurance.
So that was important.
Okay, for the challenging aspects.
I sit on the board, in fact on the chair of the board
for County Connection.
We just found out last week that as part of our continued
progress into moving into 100% zero-emission bus fleets,
which is also a state mandate, our assumed federal grant
that had been earmarked for the approved
community project fund for hydrogen fuel cell generators was denied by the
current Congress along with all community project fund requests across
the country. Hydrogen fuel cell transportation projects are now being
delayed until at least 2028. Bus and truck manufacturers have now put building
chassis on hold nationwide due to the foreseeable future and maybe until at
least 2028. These are typically years-long ramp ups and we've been moving in that
direction and the complete denial by Congress means that until there is a
positive response by Congress there won't be manufacturing movement in this
direction. Electric grants are being canceled across the country and the
manufacturers are out converting their expected electric buses back to diesel.
In addition, there have been 10 bus manufacturers in the country. There are
now two and so these two, looking at their own profitability, have moved away
from zero emission buses until there is more certainty of how we can move forward in our
Congress and in our country.
In addition, electric bus battery plants and other sub-manufactures of zero emission buses
are closing as well because of the uncertainty in purchasers.
This really caught us all by surprise.
Maybe it shouldn't have, but we had just heard from the congressman's office just prior to
our last meeting that it was expected we'd be earmarked and it's cut and it's
cut across the country. In other great news, the inductive charging system in
Walnut Creek we're now again having problems with our wave electric
chargers for communications to the buses. The one in the bus courtyard works.
However we need the one in the Walnut Creek BART station to work to be able to
recharge the buses and have it run on our routes. We can't get a hold of the
people that wave who are dealing with these cash flow issues and have now gone
radio silent for weeks. We're continuing to try but unfortunately it means that
our electric bus fleet is now in the county connection courtyard until we can
get the Walnut Creek conductive system working again. So we're continuing to
work on that. That's the update for our non-zero mission buses now. Can I ask you
question. Yeah. Mayor Pro Tem Wilk. So does County Connection have an adequate
sized fleet to be able to serve the route four and route five? Yeah,
absolutely. All right. Yeah. There is no problem with the current routes being
handled now. We've got plenty of buses for that. Unfortunately they won't be,
they will continue to be diesel buses for the time being and we do have
concerns of how we're going to be working with the state with the state
mandate into requiring us to move toward a zero emission bus fleet. How can we do
that when the manufacturers aren't providing it and the grant funding is
not coming? Well I think the state legislature could see this coming.
Probably. And on that cheery note, a couple things. I sit on the MCE board
which is the electricity provider for most of us here in Walnut Creek. We did
approve the budget this year. As part of that budget approval we left the
electric utility rates for residential and most commercial customers the same.
We have not raised it since 2023. We did change, there is a standby charge that's
charged on medium-sized grocery stores, on agricultural efforts, so that they
have the capacity when they needed the afternoon. It's called a demand charge. We
had not raised that for a while. We had found we were significantly below PG&E
and we were not recuperating our costs
to provide that service to them.
So we did raise that our rates for the demand charge
are still less than the PG&E rates for demand charge.
And we looked across the customers
that pay that demand charge and we're confident
that we will continue to retain them.
We are cheaper than PG&E, our pricing is more stable,
and we sent out notices and heard back
from exactly zero of them.
So we did have to raise that one rate.
The other thing that we did in this budget
is the power grid in California has gotten very congested
and that has prevented MCE from accessing
some of the solar energy that's being generated
by our people that we have contracted with
in the San Joaquin Valley.
So we had our staff negotiated an agreement with PG&E
for a software update on parts of the grid
in the San Joaquin Valley.
It will cost approximately $10 million
for PG&E to install that software
to better manage the grid in those areas.
And it just gets down to managing the electricity
in the nanoseconds.
It is projected that that $10 million investment
will allow us to access $20 million in power
on an annual basis that we had been unable to get
to the Bay Area because of the congestion on the grid.
So that was kind of a big leap on faith.
You know, you have to deal with PG&E
and they said they could do it.
So we'll see, fingers crossed that that works.
On the good news front, there was a federal grant
that we had been told was no longer available.
And then we backfilled with something else.
And then they said, nevermind.
And they gave us the federal money.
I don't know, nobody really knows what's going on back there.
So that was all well and good.
And the MCE has decided that they are not going to go after
any community benefits funding this year.
They just don't see that being worth their lobbying effort
to go back to DC right now,
considering the kinds of things we're asking for.
Couple other things, the Walnut Creek Chamber,
we had a great meeting a week or so ago,
looking at turning the strategic plan into actions,
and I know the city manager and assistant city manager
were both there along with myself
and working with all the different partners there
to help them move forward.
We had a couple ribbon cuttings, night and gale retreat,
and easy breezy yogurt, two businesses that are new
or celebrating their first anniversary,
and I got to serve Meals on Wheels
at their Walnut Creek Cafe, which was a lot of fun.
You can go for three bucks, get your food.
Of course, federal funding stress is with us all
and they are worried about whether or not
they will be able to continue to provide that
given what's going on in Washington.
But CBDG money, hopefully.
I also went to the East Bay Innovation Awards
and Caitlin Sly, who is our incoming chair
of the Walnut Creek Chamber and her organization
got an award.
We also had three nominees here in Walnut Creek
and was really proud to support
Earn and Learn Junior Achievement
and Local Addition Creative.
They were all nominated but did not get awards.
But it was just a great chance to see
all the different things going on
in Contra Costa and Alameda County.
And then upcoming Earth Day,
we've mentioned this earlier on April 19th,
you can meet at 8.30 with the cleanup crew
on the roof of the Macy's parking garage
and eat donuts courtesy of the mayor,
and then go help clean up downtown.
working towards Civic Park and when you get to Civic Park,
the sustainability fair will be starting at 11
and go till two o'clock and that's a great chance
for people to get information, celebrate
and just have a good time and there will be food trucks.
And then the state of the chamber is coming up
on April 16th, which is when Caitlin Sly will be installed
as the new chair and we'll get to hear all good things
from the chamber and that is my report.
Anybody need a break or we're gonna keep going?
We're all good.
Okay.
Thank you all for listening through that.
We'll now, our next on the agenda is a public hearing
titled Adoption Resolutions Leveying Annual Assessments
for the Downtown Walnut Creek Business Improvement District
and Downtown Walnut Creek South Business Improvement District
for FY26.
So I wanna take, before we dive into this,
a moment to explain the process for the public hearing.
item on number 5a. In order for the city to levy assessments for the downtown
Walnut Creek business improvement district in the downtown Walnut Creek
south business improvement district the City Council must first conduct a public
hearing at to which it must hear and consider all protests against the levy
of assessments. If written protests are received from the owners of businesses
in the proposed area which will pay 50% or more of the assessment proposed to be
levied no further proceedings to levy the assessments shall be taken for a
a period of one year from the date of the finding
of a majority protest.
There's no majority protest when then the council
may adopt the resolutions confirming
the assessment report submitted.
Written protests must be received by the city clerk
at or before the time fixed for the public hearing.
So at this time, we'll now open the public hearing
for item number 5A for the Downtown Business Improvement
District and the SBID.
And anybody with an undelivered protest
to present it to the city clerk immediately,
no further written protests will be accepted.
City Clerk, how are we doing on protests?
No written protests have been received.
Well, good.
If we don't have a majority protest,
then I will ask staff to make their presentation.
Thank you, Mayor, and good evening.
I am Mike Nieman, your Economic Development Manager.
And as you mentioned, this presentation is to adopt
the new assessments for the Walnut Creek Business Improvement
District and South Business Improvement District
for the next fiscal year.
We held a meeting subject to the two-step process
on March 18th, where WCD presented their annual report
and financials as part of this process.
And tonight is the second meeting
which concludes the public hearing.
There were no protests received to date,
So the staff recommendation is to move forward
and adopt the resolutions
that would set the annual assessment rates going forward,
which is a 3% increase.
And with that we have a representative from WCD.
If you have any questions, send me as well, of course.
All right, thank you.
Since we heard this one at the last meeting,
just wanna check and see if there's any additional questions
on the part of the council for Kathy Hemingway
or for McNeeman.
no questions so um now is there anybody here who wishes to address the council on this item
seeing none i will um close this and open for a motion so question for the attorney
do we need to do two motions all right so then i will move to adopt the resolution that leveraged
the annual assessment for the downtown walnut creek business improvement district
fiscal year 2026. Second. Roll call please. Councilmember Silva? Aye. Councilmember
Davenny? Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Well? Aye. Mayor Darling? Aye. Motion carried. I will move to adopt
the resolution loving the annual assessment for the south downtown, no the
downtown Walnut Creek south business improvement district for fiscal year 2026.
Second. We'll call please. Council member Silva? Aye. Council member Devaney? Aye. Mary Darling? Aye.
Motion carries. Alright. Thank you. That was easy. So now we will take a short five
minute break. Alright. Assuming that Matt got back there and pushed the buttons,
next on the agenda is a consideration item titled Consideration and Direction
Regarding Parking Ordinance Update Options Based on Additional Data
related to the right size parking study. I invite staff forward to provide a
staff presentation. I will note that we have received an addendum since the
distribution of the agenda report. So I will turn to staff. Thank you, Madam
Mayor. Good evening council members. Tonight I'm going to be giving you an
update on the right size parking study and some draft policy options for
multifamily residential parking minimum requirements. The addenda did add two
additional draft policy options. However, the initial two from the initial
agenda report remain in the will remain under discussion tonight. And please
note the page numbers in the bottom left for future questions at the end.
Tonight we'll be discussing the relationship between parking minimums
and housing in Walnut Creek, the right-size parking study, and the
expansion to that study after the July 23rd, 2024 Council hearing, an analysis of that
data, and going over these draft policy options. So first, just a little explainer, what are
parking minimums? If a developer wants to build a building with a hundred one-bedroom apartments,
there is a minimum parking space per one-bedroom unit requirement from the city. That is currently
only 1.5 spaces. That means that this developer would have to build 150 parking spaces minimum.
If they estimate that they have higher parking demand, they can build more than that minimum,
but if they estimate less, or are trying to target their development for a lower parking
demand occupant, they still must build to that floor of 150 spaces. And this parking
supply does have an upward trend on housing costs. Obviously, you have the initial construction
costs of building the parking space in the first place, that's money you're spending
on parking instead of directly on housing.
It can also have a chilling effect because of breakpoints, whereas, for example, with
a garage, if you hit a parking requirement where the spaces are just a few over and you
have to build another floor of the garage, that could have a chilling effect, not just
in terms of entire developments that don't pencil out, but also in terms of reducing
units per development to avoid hitting certain parking thresholds.
So what we did is parking studies can be used to look at what the actual real demand is
out in the world instead of just looking at what the requirements are.
And this kind of gives us a sanity check for, like, how is this parking being used?
How much and where?
This then can be used to inform new parking minimum requirements to meet, you know, different
policy goals, but we can use that data in different ways.
It's important to note though that the new requirements
are not necessarily equal to the exact demand
that we observe because these are minimums
rather than targets.
Now you could target that the minimum
exactly meets the existing demand,
but that is a policy choice.
It's not an inherent decision that must be come to.
There are other reasons to under supply parking
compared to the existing demand
that I'll be getting into more as we proceed.
But one of the policy options included does match that.
So getting more specific, the right size parking study was begun several years ago.
There were some COVID delays, but we presented an initial set of recommendations to City
Council last year in July.
Council had some concerns.
They wanted additional data collected at new study sites covering a broader span of the
city to be more comprehensive.
And additionally, there was a request to collect further research on other California jurisdictions
how they did their parking policy. So between the two of these, we have
expanded the right size parking study. The right size expansion will use this
new data and further analysis to provide four different policy options for
amending parking minimum requirements. So to begin with, the research into other
jurisdictions. Starting with similar jurisdictions to Walnut Creek, these were
all regional destinations that have a dense, you know, downtown retail urban
core and a more suburban periphery, relatively dense. We can see that most of
these cities have relatively comparable city-wide parking minimums to Walnut
Creek. Sometimes they are still low overall, as in the case of Palo Alto,
Petaluma, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara, but it's fairly comparable.
However, none of these cities have updated their parking requirements
recently. Like Walnut Creek, this is more of a historical number that has not been revised in
recent years. So what about the cities that have amended their parking requirements more recently?
The big notable news is that Alameda, Culver City, and Emeryville have completely eliminated their
parking minimums for all land uses, not just residential. Carmel and Santa Cruz have lowered
their minimums significantly compared to Walnut Creek's requirements, and San Diego and Santa
Santa Monica have split up their city into districts,
many of which have much lower parking minimums
than citywide.
The full results of this additional research
is available in attachment one,
the existing conditions memo,
but obviously every city has unique needs,
so these results are only one factor
in the new policy proposals.
Next we'll be getting into the results
of the data collection.
So first a note on methodology,
this was kept consistent as possible
between the two iterations of the study.
Initially in 2023, we looked at nine large multifamily
complexes with onsite parking facilities.
In response to council feedback,
we added an additional eight
where data was collected in 2024.
These counts were taken on a typical weeknight
late into the night.
So the idea is that these are all residential properties.
The residents will be at home.
They're not going to be at work or out and about.
So we're trying to get the maximum level of parking demand
that we can measure from these study sites.
And for that same reason,
these were all fully residential in use.
There was no commercial component that was shared
that could potentially muddle the data.
And we were also able to talk to property managers
at all of these study sites
to get some useful, crucial information
about the bedroom and unit totals
for each of these complexes,
as well as how many of those units were occupied
at the time of data collection
and their strategies for parking management.
So we can see here the dots in pink
represent the initial 2023 data collection,
and the dots in green show the right size expansion.
The yellow shows the apartment buildings in the city,
so you can see that now we have pretty good coverage
of all of the potential study sites
through the ones that we did collect,
especially in the down South Creekside-Ruggier area
and out east along Ignacio Valley Road.
So, bottom line, across 17 sites, 1132 housing units,
and 1,595 parking spaces, we had 407 that were empty.
That translates to an average utilization
of the existing supply at 74%.
This means that roughly one in four parking spaces
that we surveyed was empty, late at night on a week night.
100% of the study sites we looked at
had empty parking spaces.
So now we're gonna get further into the data analysis.
To begin, I just wanna note AB 2097.
This is a state law that under most circumstances
prevents local jurisdictions from enforcing parking minimums
within one half mile of, in our case,
Walnut Creek Bart and Pleasant Hill Bart.
And that is for all land uses.
We are already compliant with this law,
but I'm noting it here
because all of the potential policy changes
we're discussing tonight will not affect the circled area
so as to remain compliant with state law.
And for the purpose of data collection,
we wanna look at sites that will actually be affected
by the policy proposals.
So we have excluded, for most of the following calculations,
all of the sites that are within this half-mile transit
radius, leaving these 10 sites in blue.
We are able, using the occupancy information,
to adjust for unit vacancies.
You can imagine that if an apartment building is half full,
its parking lot is also not going to have as many cars in it.
And we want it to be able to deal with that
and ensure that none of the data was muddled.
So what we can do is calculate the parking requirements
as if only the occupied units existed.
So if you have 100 unit building,
but only 50 of them were occupied
at the time of data collection,
we can pretend essentially
that it was only a 50 unit building
and then we can measure demand evenly
in terms of housing occupation.
So key takeaways, parking utilization overall
is much lower than our existing supply
and much lower than our existing requirements.
People are not using all of the parking
that they're provided at these residential complexes.
As things stand now,
our current standards would mandate building even more.
This unused parking wasteland and increased costs.
Getting more geographically,
unsurprisingly, close to Walnut Creek Bart in downtown,
we had the relatively lower parking utilization.
I mean, you can see that outside of that strict state-defined
transit proximate bubble,
the utilization is also relatively lower
around that periphery of downtown.
but once you get further south to Creekside,
the utilization is relatively higher
as it is out east along Ignacio Valley Road.
And interestingly, at the two study sites
close to Pleasant Hill Bart,
despite being in that Trans Approximate bubble,
we did observe relatively higher demand,
unlike the sites close to Walnut Creek Bart.
But it is important to note that this is relative.
Parking utilization is lower than existing supply
at every site citywide.
The highest we observed was 84%,
So those dark blue dots are 76 to 84%,
whereas the lighter colored ones are 53 to 76%.
And this is utilization, so this is based
on what was occupied versus supply.
We're gonna be comparing that to requirements as we proceed.
So also worth noting, the housing element has several goals
that amending parking minimums will support.
The limited supply and high cost of land are identified
as a major constraint on new housing development.
One of our programs has to review
and modify any development standards
that propose a constraint to development.
And the right size parking study
is also specifically called out by the housing element
to use the findings to reduce minimum parking requirements
for multifamily and mixed use projects.
And it's worth noting that while we're discussing
multifamily projects, this will also apply
to mixed use projects because they will use
the multifamily parking requirements per the square footage
that's dedicated to multifamily housing.
And then the commercial component
will use the commercial requirements.
In addition to the housing element,
we also consider the city council feedback
to expand the study and research
to inform better policy options,
using data collected on real parking demand
to inform how and where these parking requirements
are lowered, and to ensure that the proposed requirements
are data driven across a comprehensive sample
of Walnut Creek housing complexes.
So being specific, what are these policy changes
going to affect.
The new minimums have a limited scope.
They only affect new development or major redevelopment.
So existing facilities that are not substantially
changing their configuration will not be affected.
It also only affects multifamily housing.
So residential, otherwise like single family,
commercial, industrial, no other land use classifications
will be affected at all.
And of course, it lowers the, it adjusts the floor
for parking supply, but not the ceiling.
In most of the city,
we do not have any kind of parking maximums.
In the North Town specific plan, we do,
and that will remain completely unaffected
by all of the proposed policy changes.
So keeping in mind also that demand is lower
than existing requirements.
The 77% utilization that is outside
the transit approximate area, it's a little higher,
but it's still notably low.
Based on a 2020 estimate for parking construction costs,
so this is pretty conservative
because costs have only gone up for construction since then
of 23,000 per parking space.
The empty stalls just that we measured at these study sites
would account for over $9 million wasted on unused parking.
And I spoke with our housing staff
to get a rough estimate of how many units
that would translate into.
And just for example, 699 YVR is on the higher end
and that has about a million per unit.
So that would be nine housing units directly wasted.
But the average is lower.
It's more like 750,000.
And policies that are meant to supply
the highest demand outliers for parking
necessarily mean wasted parking at other sites.
So that's an important consideration.
This unused parking raises costs without providing benefits.
Used parking has a benefit, of course,
but unused parking is not helping anyone.
So looking at some of this,
what happens when the minimum is lower
than the number of housing units.
Their parking management strategies
are likely going to have to change.
If you have fewer parking spaces than you have housing units,
then that means that not every tenant is guaranteed a spot.
The usual solution to this is called unbundling.
It means that parking is charged separately from rent.
So the parking spaces that are there
are usually charged with an additional fee,
and then residents that are not getting parking
are not paying for it,
as opposed to the current system,
where all residents pay for parking
and they don't know how much of their rent
is accounted for by it.
They just see one flat number at the end.
This can mean for tenants who are not using any parking
that do not have a vehicle most likely,
that they are relying on transit and active transportation
and other ways to get around that do not rely on cars,
which therefore could lower congestion on the streets
and use of street parking, especially downtown.
And again, no existing tenants or developers are forced
to lower their parking supply.
This is only for development projects.
So with that in mind, we have an estimate
for parking demand.
This is different from the utilization.
The utilization looks at demand relative to supply,
how much of the parking spaces they got built
are being used.
This is simply how many parking spaces are being used, period.
We don't care how many they built.
And this has some limitations.
We can see that there is a linear relationship,
at least at our study sites, between supply and demand.
It's also pretty intuitively obvious
that higher parking supply can influence people
to use more parking, especially if you imagine households
with multiple adults.
If there's only enough supply for them to have one space,
they might have one car.
Whereas if there's unlimited parking,
they might have as many cars as they have adults and drivers.
So there is a relationship between supply and demand
that this demand estimation cannot really capture.
So that is an important consideration
as we go into the data.
However, it does give us an idea
of how much parking is being used at each of these sites.
It can give us a rough idea of per bedroom
and per complex and per housing unit,
how much parking is really getting used,
how much is really needed.
And again, we are taking vacancies into consideration
by only counting the occupied housing units.
It's also worth noting that at the sites we talked to,
Their usual parking management strategy
is one space per unit, regardless of bedroom count,
which is not how our requirements are written.
They increase as the bedroom size increases.
And it also doesn't account for any potential new changes
to parking management strategies, such as unbundling.
So these are the 10 sites that are outside
of the transit proximate area.
These are the ones used for all future calculations.
You can see that we've got the downtown periphery,
YVR and Red Gear Creekside covered.
I want to talk about the required parking to demand ratio.
So this is a way of looking at how the parking requirements, either existing or of potential
new policy proposals, compare to that demand that we observed.
So for starters, looking at the existing policy, we'd be required to provide 1,150 parking
spaces total for all of the study sites compared to the 765 that were actually being used.
So divide 1,150 by 765, and you get 150 percent.
This gives you an idea of whether the potential policy option would make a complex over-parked
or under-parked.
Above 100 percent is excess parking spaces that are not being used, whereas under 100
is potentially parking demand that is not being served,
at least at the minimum.
So here's our existing requirements
showing standard deviation.
That dotted line going up in the green
would be an exact one-to-one ratio at 100%.
Our existing requirements are all, to the right of that,
they are all over parked with an average of 150%,
which means that you've got a huge amount
of unused parking with our existing policies.
but some of the options will shift over
and the tables are also color-coded accordingly.
So that purple, blue is a lower parking supply
relative to demand, orange and red is higher in excess.
So with that in mind,
we're gonna look at four draft policy options.
This is two more than the initial Regener Report.
The first is the same though,
the North Downtown Specific Plan.
This was the initial recommendation
from the first iteration of the Right Size Parking Study.
It was supported by Planning Commission
when they passed a resolution to recommend
that the council adopt it on June 13th of 2024.
This allows significantly more flexible development
and a lower floor on costs.
The council did review this proposal
and had concerns at the time
because we did not yet have additional data
on key other areas of the city,
nor the additional research
on other comparable jurisdictions.
And we can see here that Altera and Royal Apartments
would be over parked and Pine Oak
would have exactly the right amount,
but the rest of the study sites would have a higher demand
than their minimum parking supply.
So if all of these sites had demand completely unchanged
from what it is now,
and lowered their parking supply
to exactly what the minimum is,
then there could be considered a dearth of parking
at the rest of those sites.
Option B.
Can you go back?
Oh, I'm sorry, yeah.
Sorry, you're going so fast.
You're covering 10 different sites,
and it's not a gross number
as if it's parking Levi Stadium.
some of these projects are much smaller than others.
And so it takes some concentration.
Understood.
So may I ask a question here,
or would you rather just plow on through
and then come back?
I would rather take questions at the end if that's all right.
Sure.
Okay, thank you.
But since you brought it up,
the overall average is weighted by the bedrooms and the units.
So it is accounting for the different sizes
of the different sites.
The curve is not weighted so that is worth considering
what the overall average is.
So that's 72% for the North Downtown specific plan.
On average, that's saying that across all of these sites
in total, so all the individual units,
it's not counting Little Pine Oak,
the same as Big Park Lake,
they are proportionately accounted for.
That 72% would be under 100%,
It's 28 short of matching one to one.
So let me make sure I understand what you're saying.
Park Lake has how many households or how many bedrooms?
I don't see that correlation here,
but 229 people are parked at Park Lake.
Correct.
Or cars are parked, I don't know how many people that is,
but how many cars.
And the North Downtown specific plan standard
would require 151.
So it would be under parked by about 70 cars, is that?
That's correct.
So 70 cars have to go find parking someplace else?
Yeah, if the demand didn't change at all.
If you assume that the same 229 cars need to park,
no matter what, that's not gonna change,
then yes, those 70 cars would have
to figure out something else.
And that's 66% that shows how much it falls short.
So that's 184 units or households.
So 129 cars parked?
So 189 is actually the total amount of units.
So Park Lake only had 174 that were occupied.
So for these calculations we used 174
because we didn't want to count empty units.
What is the proof?
So 174 occupied units have 229 cars parked.
Correct.
Still short.
We still have.
So this is under the North Downtown specific plan.
I know, but I'm just trying to make sure
that I understand how the table was working
so that we actually have to concentrate on.
We didn't get this information four days ago.
We got this information today at 2.30 at best.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thanks.
The next option, option B is balance.
This sets minimums to one half parking space
per studio apartment, one per one bedroom,
one per two bedroom, and 1.25 for units
with three or more bedrooms.
This is simple to understand.
It ensures that each unit has at least one parking space,
and it disincentivizes ownership
of multiple vehicles per household.
It also matches the parking management strategies
that we observed at the study site,
where one space is assigned to each unit, regardless of size.
So here we can see that Altera, Newell Vista, Pine Oak
and Royal Apartments would have an excess of parking supply
while the remainder of the sites would have a shortfall.
The overall average would be 83%.
So that's within 17% of matching one-to-one exactly.
Option C, this was a new one that sets parking minimums
close to but still slightly less than the exact demand
we observed at the study sites.
This is one half space per studio unit,
one per one bedroom,
and 1.25 for two or more bedrooms.
This allows greater flexibility
than setting the minimums to exactly match observed demand,
and it allows for the impact that supply can have
in terms of lowering that demand.
It slightly exceeds the observed parking management strategy
of one space per one unit.
And we can see in the effect that Altara, Newell Vista,
Pine Oak and Royal Apartments would be over parked,
they would have more parking than they need,
while San Marco would be dead on exactly,
and the remainder of the sites would be less.
Although, the floor of that is 77%,
and most of them are in the 80s, so it's not wildly less.
The overall average is 94%,
so that's only six less than exactly one-to-one.
And finally, we have an option
that does match demand exactly as best we can.
This sets a one half parking space per studio unit,
one per one bedroom, 1.5 per two bedroom,
and three or more bedroom.
So this exceeds the parking management strategies
that we've observed.
It offers the least flexibility and highest cost floor
of all of the policy options,
but it is lower than our existing requirements
and it matches our demand data as directly as possible.
So we can see here that Altara, San Marco,
Newell Vista, Pine Oak, and Royal Apartments
would all have excess parking under this policy,
and pretty substantially, the average of those is 140%.
So you've got a lot of wasted parking at those sites.
West Cliff Trail would have exactly one-to-one,
and the other study sites would have slightly less,
but aside from Camelback, it's all within five or 6%.
Camelback is down to 81%.
And here's a table of all of the parking demand
under each policy at each study site.
So you can see the highest is existing
where all of the sites are over parked,
followed by a meet demand that we just discussed,
where you have about half that are over parked
and about half that are very slightly under parked.
Flexible opens things up a bit more
and it also decreases how over parked
the over parked sites are.
This happens further into balance
where a lot of sites are over parked by a small amount
and under parked by a slightly more substantial amount.
And finally, North Downtown specific plan,
which is much more oriented around
maximal flexibility and lower costs.
So it does not meet that demand directly.
And here's a graphic, this is not to scale,
but showing more parking required for new development,
increased costs for new housing,
as we go from zero minimums,
as in Alameda, Emeryville, and Culver City,
or in our transit proximate area per state law.
And then the next most is the option A
for North Downtown specific plan,
followed by option B for balance,
option C for flexible demand and option D for meet demand.
We can see that all these proposals are still less
than our existing Walnut Creek requirements.
So with that, I will open it up to you
for questions and comments.
Thank you for a very colorful presentation.
Thank you.
Lots of good color in there.
So I will turn to my fellow council members
to see who has, I know people have questions.
I hear questions floating over here.
Who has questions?
Who wants to go first?
I'll probably have more than one round,
so I'll just ask a few to start off with.
Okay.
On the option AB, by the way,
thank you for the presentation.
That was very thorough and helpful, thank you.
So option A, B, C, and D,
I sort of wrote down their percentages of coverage,
so 72%, 83%, 94, and 104.
Then there's the tag there
for existing Walnut Creek requirements.
What would that number be?
Did we have an aggregate?
I saw the slide that had all of the numbers,
but what was the aggregate?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's 150%.
It's 150, okay.
Yeah, it was back here, but gone.
All right, and that's 150 based on existing,
not based on what it would be
if we had built according to our current.
No, it is based on what our current requirements are.
So the actual supply at most of these sites,
they were built when our parking requirements were lower.
Yeah.
So overall, and in most of the individual cases as well,
these sites would have to build more parking now
than they did when they actually were built.
So our current requirements would have
even more excess parking than we actually observed.
So the 150 is the hypothetical if all of our currents
were built according to our current.
Correct.
Parking management strategy, okay.
Alameda, Emeryville, Culver City, are they all in high,
are they all in transit bubbles?
half mile from Bart, I mean my understanding of Emoryville is like the
whole city is in that. So these cities, the half mile Bart bubble was driven by
state law, so local jurisdictions don't really have any choice in that matter.
Those three cities chose willingly to eliminate their parking minimums
entirely, they wanted to allow you know the maximum possible flexibility, the
lowest possible floor and housing costs. But I think some of these cities or good
portions of them it's sort of a new point like I think Emeryville is pretty
much entirely covered by a transit area is what I'm asking or do you do you know
if that's the case I have not looked into that directly so okay just cares
so the the number that we're we're shooting for I know you know we discussed
that like street parking, commercial garages,
other types of public garages,
we shoot for about an 85% occupancy.
Is that a number that you think
should be applied to multi-family?
So I think there are some different considerations.
For street parking and for commercial garages,
we want a certain level of vacancy
so that people can see empty parking spaces
and find it without having to cruise around,
congesting downtown, looking for a parking space.
So that's where that 85th percentile comes from.
So residential concerns are a little bit different.
You're not necessarily gonna have people
coming around looking, it's mostly residents.
There's some guest parking,
which is already accounted for.
The street parking is a little different
because we manage street parking
primarily through street parking management
rather than by development regulations.
So if you have a street that is over parked
where you have issues with too many cars
staying too long, clogging things up,
it's much better to approach it directly
using things like no overnight parking prohibitions,
enforcement signage, potentially depending on the area,
even meters or adjustment of meter rates.
Because with street parking,
if you're having a street parking problem,
it's usually best to go to a street parking solution.
because all of the effects of these,
including our existing policy, it's very long-term.
So if you're trying to manage street parking,
if you mandate that new development be built
with more parking supply,
it's not likely to free up substantial street parking,
certainly not anytime soon,
but potentially even not at all,
because we've seen in a lot of these areas
with street parking issues,
the housing complexes do have spare parking spaces,
and it's not helping them with the street parking.
But it could have the converse effect.
I mean, it could have the effect of congesting streets
if we don't have the parking on the multifamily sites.
Hello, I'm our Boardman City Engineer.
So I just, I wanted to address that question.
I just wanted to clarify too,
obviously parking is related when we're talking about
on street versus on a development site.
But we do have different management strategies
that we're able to employ.
The streets themselves, they're city streets,
they're public streets.
and there is something to be said about.
There is a, sometimes there's a good,
it's a good thing to have busy parking on streets.
We have this 85% policy currently for on street standards
for metered parking because the idea is
if you're driving down a block,
maybe there's one space that's available
that you can pull into.
When we're talking about congested streets
in terms of parking maybe closer
to these development projects,
Maybe it's in some of more of our single family,
like adjacent to our single family neighborhoods.
We have other mechanisms
like our preferential residential permit parking program
available to us to restrict parking on street.
But there's also something healthy about
the design of our streets allows
for parking to occur on the street.
And so there is a specific amount of parking
that's available on any street just based on how it's built.
that's not going to change.
Like a great example of this, and this is really,
this is a really obvious example of it,
but if you look at Lincoln and Carmel,
those two streets have a massive quantity of units on them.
And yet, the on-street parking that's available there
is highly limited, right?
That on-street parking is not serving those folks.
And if you're super, super lucky
and you're able to find street parking, amazing.
That's not gonna be a recurring situation.
But we provide that because it creates this friction
so that people don't speed along Lincoln,
because that can be that knock-on effect
if we don't allow people to continue to park
where we designed for on-street parking to occur,
that we see higher speeds,
which doesn't correlate well
with these residential neighborhoods.
But to that point, if those streets are already congested,
if we start building complexes
that don't have enough parking for their guests,
or it's something where they're having more guests over
and there won't be places for them to park.
Yeah, so guest parking, as Henry had mentioned,
guest parking is accounted for as a percentage
of the required onsite parking.
So those would be open spaces
that would maybe say marked as guest only.
And so those are intended to be for folks who are visiting.
That on-street parking could be that additional.
But there's no, with these types of complexes,
the way that our code is written right now.
There's no way for anybody
who lives in these apartment complexes
to get any kind of special permits for on-street parking.
It's really actually pretty much reserved
for a single family or duplexes within the city.
You'll see that in Almond Shoey.
So in the end, really what it comes back to
is that on-street parking has a very limited supply.
and so it is possible for there to be spillover,
but there's only going to be so much available
in terms of spillover that occurs if,
depending on where you land on this policy option.
Yeah, and then there was the comment about unbundling.
I understand that that would help in a situation
where you had enough parking for your tenants,
but maybe there was an abnormal distribution
of cars to house ratio,
but if you don't have enough parking
for the number of cars that are there,
I don't see how unbundling it
necessarily changes that dynamic.
You still don't have enough parking
for the spots that are available.
I mean, for the folks that want spots.
So if you have a building
where every single tenant does want a spot,
then that would be true.
What you see in practice with these unbundled facilities
is that if you don't have enough parking
to guarantee every 10 at a spot,
unbundling is actually a necessity.
You can't bundle it in with rent
when some of your units will not have a parking spot.
Yeah, I'm specifically talking about the scenario
where you don't have enough.
Because you were saying that one of the solutions
for units that might be built where there's more cars
wanting to park than there are parking spaces
would be to do unbundling.
and that's still, you can shuffle them around,
but there's still not enough parking spots there.
So that's where tenant demand comes into play.
If there's an apartment building that has 10 units,
but it only has two parking spots,
then it can accommodate two tenants
who insist on a parking spot,
and the other eight will not have that available.
So if they depend on a vehicle,
they're probably going to choose
a different housing point. A different location.
So it'll attract those eight tenants who use transit,
walking, biking, they rely on other means
and they probably don't have a car at all.
I mean, that brings up the whole,
that if, when we see that ratio of parking,
like tenants per unit, like number of cars in a complex
based on the number of parking spots that are available.
And the idea is that when you look at multifamily units
that have less parking spots available,
that there are less cars there,
and that when you look at multifamily
where there are more parking spots available,
there are more cars there.
So making the conclusion that building places
with less parking spots makes people abandon their cars,
I would say it probably goes the other way around,
which is that people with cars find places
where they can park them, and people who don't have a car
or don't need a car find places that pay less
so that they can live in a place
that doesn't have a parking spot.
I just don't know that that would necessarily,
one of the things that I'm seeing sort of as a theme here
is that by providing less parking,
we will therefore force people to have less cars.
And I don't know that I buy that as a premise,
because I think that people who need a car
are gonna need a car,
and they're not gonna give up their car lifestyle,
especially in these places that are farther away
from our parking, our transit hubs,
simply because we're not providing parking spaces for them.
Take, for example, San Francisco.
I mean, there's a place with lots of transportation options
and clearly not enough parking.
And I mean, people still have cars there
and they drive around for hours looking for parking spots
because they want their car.
So I don't want to create something like that here.
So I just, that was one of my thoughts on that narrative.
I'll stop for now.
All right.
Mayor Pro Tem?
Thank you.
Actually, a lot of my concerns were in fact,
were addressed by council member Davini.
I do have a concern that the state
has put on these overall mandates
and they're expecting people to change their habits
like they would in San Francisco.
My daughter had a car here.
She moved to San Francisco, she took half, what?
She left her car here, boyfriend left her car here,
they were in front of my house for months,
and because they were spending half an hour
looking around to find parking in San Francisco.
That's just not the way it is in Walnut Creek.
So without duplicating some of my same concerns
that Council Member Davini mentioned,
the question, and I'm sorry if I missed this, Henry,
What time of day was the data taken?
Because obviously, if it's during the day
or during work hours, there weren't gonna be cars there.
Yes, so these were all taken very late at night.
The second was all done in one night,
the other was across two, but essentially,
this is starting at like 1 a.m.
So you're catching everyone at home.
Fair enough, okay, great.
I love the example, Smidara,
that you gave regarding Lincoln.
I think that is a great example to look at that.
But right, if those people need cars, not because,
just as an example, they have to drive to San Jose,
they can't take public transit.
We don't have BART going down 680.
It's just a simple fact.
We also know, from a lot of us that are dealing
with statewide issues when it comes to transit,
there isn't the amount of public transportation that we need.
We know that.
I live down Ignacio.
Bus comes down once an hour.
It's just not practical for me to take the bus
to get down to BART.
and we understand that there's other issues
that are coming with the fiscal cliff
that I know we're not talking about right now.
However, we could end up seeing less available
public transit in the future
unless certain tax measures are voted on.
So there's all sorts of complexities here.
What happens though in the instance
if we approve something with less parking
and it's on Ignacio or it's on Treat,
even Oak Grove, where there just aren't,
you can't park there on the street.
And it's, and there's not an easy,
go around the corner and just park right there.
What happens there if we're,
if we have limited the amount of parking
and people need their cars down Ignacio,
they just, there's nowhere to park
if it's on Ignacio Oak Grove.
How would, how would we address that?
Well, most likely those projects wouldn't pencil out at all,
but if you had a particularly foolish developer
that wanted to build the absolute minimum in a place
that cannot realistically accommodate it,
they're gonna have serious trouble attracting tenants
who depend on their cars who need parking
when there simply isn't enough available for them.
And that's gonna ensure that those projects are not,
they're gonna have serious financial issues.
But it's not necessarily gonna translate
to a flooding of the available street parking,
because it is so limited and we have these programs,
permit parking overnight,
there's just nowhere for them to go.
It's not crowding anything out
because there's not enough to crowd out.
So they just have trouble
finding people to live there at all.
I mean, one of the reasons why
these limited parking is available in San Francisco,
Berkeley, even Henryville,
is because of the amount of public transit it's there.
So I would, I guess, ask are we looking,
I guess it's up to us.
We could have different levels of minimums
in different areas of the city
based upon what we expect the public transit to be able to be.
Is that accurate?
And it's not just public transit,
but also if you think about bikeways
and pedestrian connections, bus routes,
transit is interconnected and there is transit access
more than just what is strictly very close to BART.
But yes, so that's a consideration.
I also wanna mention that a lot of the time
we're not talking about like,
does this tenant have a car or not?
It's about how many cars does this household have?
Our current requirements for larger bedroom units
are two or more.
So you're incentivizing basically places
to build parking spots for two or more people per unit.
And then those people come in and they,
if it's a couple or a family or roommate situation,
They're incentivized to have more cars
versus the lower requirements.
All but one of these still supply
one parking space per unit.
So they could still have a car per household,
but there'd be an incentive to have fewer.
And that's a situation where,
okay, there's nowhere to park my second car.
I can't do it.
So that's where you maybe cut it down
because your partner has one or your roommate has one
or you can figure out a sharing arrangement.
Okay, thank you.
a couple things. I just want to make sure I've got this and then I'll switch
over to you. So I'm just thinking about this. So a couple things struck me. One
is we're talking about minimums not maximums. So you could have somebody come
in like when Brio came in they said here is the clientele that we're looking at
and although our parking minimums are this we know our clientele and we and
And basically, it's parked in excess of its parking
requirements.
So that's still allowed under whatever we do here, right?
Absolutely.
And I had a nice talk with a planner from Culver City
to discuss how zero parking minimums had gone for them.
And she said that they hadn't had a single application that
was actually for zero parking spots.
It's pretty rare, especially in these sites
that don't have good access.
You would need to be exceptionally foolish.
And I understand the need to plan around that,
because sometimes people are.
but the idea is just to set the floor.
And then we also had a couple of affordable developments
going in on Pringle that actually were zero parking.
Do we know how that, when we approved it,
there was a lot of concern.
That was back when I was on Planning Commission.
There was a lot of concern from businesses
in the neighborhoods and the developers said
that they had figured it out.
They knew there was gonna be a car share.
and do we know how those Pringle developments work?
Do we have, sorry, I should have told you this.
I was gonna bring this up in a minute.
So in my experience in traffic engineering
where we're getting direct requests from residents
who have concerns about roadways, about traffic safety,
and about parking a lot of the time,
I have not heard and I don't know of my coworkers
having heard of any complaints about that Pringle area.
Okay.
Yeah, and I'll go ahead and add that.
First of all, that's Riviera, right?
Yeah.
So that's exceptionally approximate.
So at this point now, that zero parking minimum
would be-
Would apply there, yeah.
Sorry, zero parking requirement would apply,
but there's actually meters on street.
And so this comes back to, and they're purple poles,
so you could park your car there for 10 hours
if you wanted to, but it comes back to
what is that on-street impact and how does,
how would staff address on-street parking restrictions
other management strategies to help alleviate the potential overflow. But
from what I can tell, the parking is used, but it's also mixed with BART. So, okay.
And then, so looking at the overall, I think there was, and I didn't write the
number down, there's one where you had everybody together, like all the
different options. And you look at that and it's pretty clear on page 40 that
that the existing policy just over parks
the heck out of everybody.
So absolutely, if I'm thinking about this,
that that's the Papa Bear and we don't want that.
And the north downtown only over parks too,
but under parks everybody else.
Yes, so that would be more of a bold decision.
It sets a floor, but it is kind of philosophically
more akin to cities that are, unlike zeros,
you do have that floor, you guarantee some parking.
But it would basically be making a decision
that lowering these development costs,
having more housing provided,
especially because this is only for residential,
is kind of being valued over on-site parking.
So that is a policy consideration for all of you.
And then the ones in between meet demand,
flexible demand and balance kind of fall across the spectrum.
And what, I understand what you guys are looking for today
is if we're gonna pick something,
where do we generally wanna fall along this continuum?
Yes, so meet demand.
You can see that some sites are over and under parked,
but we really got it as close to exactly as we could
with the data we had.
So that's basically the option that says,
let's lower them from these over parked existing requirements
down to what the data says people are doing right now.
And then the other policy options going right from that
are basically increasingly flexible.
They set the floor increasingly low.
So tonight we are hoping to hear your feedback
on these policy options.
If one of them appeals, then we can be ready in two weeks
with a draft ordinance for adoption.
Yeah, so we're hoping to hear from you.
Okay, don't hold your breath.
No, we can do great things.
And so, if we were to pick one of the options
that ends up with some squeezing,
then it's things like unbundling
and that end up making those work.
That's what you're saying, the unbundling,
the parking management, you know,
those kinds of things can step in
and make those minimums work
if that's what somebody decides to do with their development.
Yeah, and that's really,
that's most necessary for the North Downtown specific plan
because every option,
balance flexible demand and meet demand,
all guarantee one spot per unit.
So you're not necessarily as reliant
on those different strategies
to ensure that every tenant gets a parking space.
And meet demand is essentially saying,
looking at all the cars that were parked there.
There's room for them all.
Yeah, what's the requirement you need to park all of them?
Okay, so existing demand and meet demand,
no parking management really needed.
It's just either way over parking
or just parking about what we have right now.
And then as you move to the right,
you would need to become more innovative
in what you're doing to manage it,
or you would be relying on the developer
to make a cost benefit call
on how much parking he wants to provide.
Yes, okay.
All right, thanks.
Turn over to Kiliman.
May I comment just on that one thing while we're on the...
We're questioning not commenting right now
because we haven't heard public comment yet.
So we'll get back to the commenting.
I'm gonna stay with this chart.
Help me understand the colors
because red usually means bad,
orange means less than bad,
but I'm not sure, so clarify what the colors mean.
And then I'm gonna ask you to walk us through,
I'll give you the one example,
and walk us through the formula
that basically got to this percentage,
because the percentages don't make,
the percentage doesn't tell me much.
So first, define the colors, please.
Okay, so first of all, green is 100%,
that's saying that under this given policy,
the minimums that we set would be at exactly
the demand we observed.
you'd build exactly as many parking spaces
as we saw cars out there using them.
Orange and red are higher than that, they're above 100%.
So that's where we expect an excess parking supply.
Parking space is getting built at these minimums
which do not have demand for them.
And then the blue and purple is where we see demand
higher than the minimum supply.
So now, and that also applies to these graphs.
go back okay please go back because if let's take Park Lake at 66 percent are
they over parked or they're under parked so that would be under parked under 100
percent is under parked it's they don't have enough parking spaces to meet the
demand we observed okay so show my colleagues I would consider that in the
red not the okay so purple and red or dark blue purple blue are in the
extremes so walk me through how you got 132 percent on Park Lake what was the
numerator what was the denominator I just want to know because I'm trying to
translate this as to what the consequences so at Park Lake we had and
I don't have the exact number on me,
but we had a number of parking spaces that were,
oh, I do, actually.
Okay, so at Park Lake,
we had 229 parking spaces that were occupied.
That's when we went out there.
How many cars were parked in a spot?
It was 229.
And then the, sorry, which one did you ask about?
The 66%?
Park Lake.
Yeah, no, no, I mean the policy.
Was it the-
I want you to run from left.
Just run through all of them?
Okay, great.
I just need to understand how you derived these percentages
so I understand what it's really saying.
Okay, so going across from Park Lake,
and this is in the appendix, by the way,
it's the green chart on.
No, but it still doesn't tell, it's the same chart,
it doesn't tell me exactly.
No, I know, I'm gonna run through,
I'm just telling you that if you wanna follow along.
Yes, so we have the 229 parking spaces,
that gets divided by each of these in order.
So, sorry, it's the denominator for each of these in order.
So the existing policy is 303 over 229,
and that gives us 132%.
And then when we get into the other policy options,
216 over 229 gives us that 94%.
And so on with 195 over 229 giving us 85%,
and then 174 over 229 giving that 76%.
why don't you do that again?
Because something's supposed to be changing
to get those percentages to be different.
Yes, so what is changing is the amount of parking spaces
that each of these policies would require
for Park Lake specifically.
So under each of these given policy options,
we can calculate the requirements
because we know how many bedrooms,
what the unit distribution is.
So for Park Lake, we can say that you have,
So Park Lake has 91 one bedroom units
and 83 two bedroom units.
So then we can use the rates that says,
how many parking spaces are required per one bedroom unit?
How many are required per two bedroom unit?
We can apply it to those numbers
and then we can see how many parking spaces
would be required for Park Lake
under all these various different policy proposals.
All right, so the policy proposal
where everybody gets one,
Is that meet demand or is that flexible demand
or is that balanced?
That is balance.
All right, so Park Lake has 174 units,
so everybody gets one, that's 174 parking spaces.
Yes, it would just be adding the 91 to the 83,
it gives you that 174.
And so, and currently, those 174 units are putting,
I go over to the front page, putting 229 cars in there.
So it's going to be off by a third.
Yes, and that's where we get that 76%.
So the 229 cars, you have the 174,
174 into 229 gives you the 76%,
shows you how much it's falling short.
It's that difference between it and 100%.
So if we do Pine Oak that has 10 units,
we're gonna get the same percentages,
but with a very lower, smaller number of units
that are being considered.
Complex is smaller, 10 units.
Yeah, so you can see there Pine Oak along the bottom row,
you do have some policy,
meet demand and flexible demand are the same for that site
because it is a small amount.
But even at that small amount,
the different policy options do change it
and fairly substantially for the other policy options.
All right, let me go back to just some basic questions.
This policy that we would adopt would be
for condominiums and apartments, not for townhomes,
which is single family attached and single family.
Not for single family homes, not for duplexes,
and not for townhomes.
Yeah, single family and duplexes and those kinds of homes
have a different land use classification
in the zoning code.
And this is strictly for what is zone multifamily.
And so townhomes, which are single family attached units
would be.
So townhomes are not a formal classification
in our zoning code.
We were initially gonna carve out a separate definition
for them as part of this, but the,
and that can be re-examined in the future.
If that is desired by the council,
I would have to go to planning commission again,
but we can do that.
Right now we don't have any definition for townhome for that attached. So where
would they fall in this? It's case-by-case it depends on where they're
trying to build them what the land is zoned. Okay and mixed use projects that
make I know what it is but we're we're counting them as apartments and condos.
Yeah so mixed use it's based on the square footage dedicated to each use so
like if you imagine it's 50-50 residential commercial then 50% yeah I
Just for ease of, you know, calculus.
No, I'm just laughing about the conversation
I listened to last week.
Then 50% of those parking require,
of the required parking spaces would be derived
from the commercial and 50% would be derived
from the residential requirements.
The cost per parking space, $23,000,
sounds closer to a surface parking space
than actually structured or underground parking,
is that correct?
Yes.
So, underground parking is much more expensive.
Dig a hole, and a lot of concrete, and then above grade.
So, the Brio complex has, so I think it'd be very helpful
for us to have, as we're considering this,
to have the costs for structured parking,
because there's not a lot of land available
for flat surface parking.
Okay, thank you.
You mentioned $6.99 YVR except I see it
is when a half mile of BART, so.
Oh, I'm sorry, that was confusing to bring up.
That's not one of our study sites.
That is where I got the one million per housing unit
cost estimate.
Right, and that's because it's affordable.
That's construction costs,
so it's actually on the higher end.
The average that I was told by our housing division
was about 750,000 per unit.
did we have any input from developers
on when they look at these options
in terms of what their point of view is?
So we had some public comments from developers
who saw only those initial two options on the right
that were much lower than the other two that we've added
and they were very supportive.
We also had a public outreach with the first parking study
that had only the North Downtown
specific plan recommendations,
and they were also very supportive.
Developers, this is a huge benefit to them.
It opens up their options.
If they wanna continue to build a lot of parking,
they can, nothing's stopping them.
It just means that if they want to build less,
then they have that option.
I think those are my questions, not my comments.
Okay, yeah, I think we're at the point
where we'll go ahead and open it for public comment.
Is there anybody here for public comment?
Seeing nobody, I will close public comment
and bring it back up here.
And I want to get a reading of the room,
we're looking at trying to give direction to staff
on where we want to fall on this continuum.
And we don't have any option within a half mile of BART,
that's already done.
And so now do we, and I think we could probably safely say
that existing parking requirements would be a silly idea.
So amongst those four others,
we need to give staff some direction on which of these
we see as viable with meet demand,
basically codifying where we are right now.
North Downtown's specific plan being pretty much
the requirements on developers will be well below
what we would anticipate the demand be
in the current situation.
And we would be relying on the developers
to figure out what they wanna do.
And then flexible demand and balance
are kind of the mama bear options.
So let's go through and think about it in that way.
Where do you want to fall on how much flexibility we're giving to developers, given that this
is more than a half a mile for Bart?
Volunteers.
There was an old commercial for MAPO where let's let Mikey try it.
That ages me a lot.
So first of all, I appreciate all the work that went into this, and I appreciate the
willingness to have the additional sites. They're very helpful. Many of these
sites are different from each other so the percentages don't don't surprise me.
So these fact the environment what I'll call environmental geographic factors.
Park Lake is a lot of units has no on street parking anywhere near it. And so
it to me is this classic example of constrained on-street parking and a long
distance from the BART station. And the reason I know that there's no on-street
parking is because if you try to park in there and go visit a friend you are
parking. They have to have designated spaces for guests. The North
Downtown specific plan has its own uniqueness which is I don't think
you're suggesting we use the full policy from the North Downtown specific plan
because that also includes a maximum, not just a minimum. So I think the incentives we talk about,
like bundling and like unbundling parking, etc., are not necessarily working in reality the way
the theoreticians think they will, because it depends on whether there's on-street parking
available or not. And so you see different things happening and I think we have to be careful. And
Oh by the way, I lived in Chicago for five years.
There was no parking, I mean, you had to fight
for parking spaces and you'd get your parking space
in the winter and you'd hold onto it for months.
You would do anything but move your car
because you wouldn't, well first of all,
you probably couldn't get it out from the snow.
So I, and I loved living in Chicago, but there are,
and I think we also have to be cautious
of an assumption in an era of low housing supply
that just saying they can move to,
they can take another option of a place to live
that has more parking is not necessarily true in this era.
And people do change jobs.
That's a very metropolitan view of the world
and not necessarily a reality of today
working only eight blocks away and the better job is 24 blocks away. I mean it
it just it changes. The Dariel had you know it changes. So it's not for me the
North Downtown specific plan and it's not the meat demand it's certainly not
the existing one because we said we're going to right-size and no change is not
right sizing because it's basically accepting wrong sizing. So it's either
flexible or balanced. I do recognize and it may be a hybrid slightly where we
have some policy definitions also of where we think some other things might
be impacted. I do recognize that the lower you the lower the floor the
greater likelihood that you're going to get the investment, the developer's
investment in the number of units, not the number of parking spaces. But I also
think that no matter what we do here, we should not just look at one option or
the other, but we should also look at some of the policies that we haven't had
on the books. For example, the BRIO didn't have permission to hedge their
bets with more spaces but it didn't but build it so that you could rent it to
car dealerships for car storage that they didn't design it that way and we
didn't encourage that. So I think we have to think about what we would do to
encourage if you want to build more than what we require build it in a way that
you can do something with it for shared parking so that we can reduce the amount
of surface parking and I'll leave it there. Okay thanks that's that's good.
Thanks. Councilmember Definney you want to where are you what color? Yeah it's
interesting. It's interesting how the just by presenting certain options you
know we see it through a certain lens you know to me meat demand like should
be in the middle and then existing policies should be on like one side and
and then, you know, moving the other direction on the other side.
But we have meet demand where we've pretty much, you know, tried to accommodate the number
of cars that we currently see parking there, which seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
And we have existing that perhaps is providing too much parking.
I mean, what about an option in between those two?
That would seem like a reasonable thing to do.
I mean, because we talked about the,
and I understand there's different reasons
for how we think about parking on the street
or how we think about parking in public parking garages.
But I think from leaving this completely to market forces
is concerning to me.
You know, we have, I think, a role as government
to regulate how developers do things to a certain extent.
And that's why we make them plant a certain number of trees
or put art.
I think there'd be a number of developers that might,
perhaps out of maybe they're not being financially prudent
and getting the most out of their units
by putting the right amount of parking in there.
But if they build not enough parking, the place is built.
We have it.
It's in Walnut Creek now.
And it doesn't provide the parking
that is needed for those units.
And then what that does is it forces people
to park on the streets,
which they may or may not be able to do.
In the case of some developments that have been proposed
around the Almond Shoey neighborhood,
it would push them into the neighborhoods there.
I just don't know that allowing the developer
the decision of how much parking to put in
is really in the best interest of the city.
I do understand that we are
in a, you know, a housing crisis.
And I appreciate Council Member Silva's caution
about we are in this crisis,
but I don't want us to overcorrect on parking
and then create a different problem.
You know, the unintended consequences
of trying to solve housing may be the, you know,
the next problem we're trying to solve is,
which we're already trying to solve is parking.
And I do want to clarify that we're not talking
about downtown parking, right?
I mean, just for people that may be like listening
or watching and may just, parking might be a buzzword
for them and they, oh, they're gonna decrease parking.
It's only in these multifamily units.
So I know we're clear about that.
So, you know, I see an option, I see there,
I'd like to see an option in between the 150%
and the 100%, that's more in line with the way we do parking
other areas where we have a few extra spots if someone comes over to visit
that we don't anticipate that we're trying to maximize a hundred percent each
time that we're trying to make make the parking units a hundred percent full all
the time. Could you please explain I'm trying to
follow you where what's the hundred and fifteen what's a hundred percent. Okay so
if we can go to the slide that has the two arrows on it that move right to left
So in the body of the paperwork here, option A would provide 72% of the parking
for the number of parking spots that are currently needed at that location, for
our locations, the 10 locations outside of the two bubbles. They would have
72% of the needed parking in those areas. The next option B would have 83%
of the amount of parking that is needed in those locations.
Option C would have 94%
and option D would have 104%.
And then if we went to existing Walnut Creek requirements,
and if I understood correctly,
that is if we used our current parking requirements
and went back and built everything with those,
instead of the way they've been built, that would be 150%.
So somewhere between, so to me, D should be C
and there should be another option D
that's somewhere between our existing
and just being, to me, what is the middle,
which is providing just enough parking for the cars
that are required at this point.
Or an option E.
Or an option E after D in between existing.
So I, you know, I have concerns in those regards.
you know, when we push people out into the streets
where they're parking,
it's one of the things people complain about the most.
I know we're looking at this somewhat through the lens
of folks that want to live here,
but I still do want to represent some of the interests
of the people living here or who will be living here
that, you know, they're gonna wanna have the ability
to park where they live.
And when we push people out onto the streets
and they have to walk long distances,
I think that brings up a safety concern for people at night.
All right, they're coming home late at night.
There's no parking in their complex anymore.
They're parking three blocks away
because they can't find a spot.
Now they have to walk to their unit at night in the dark.
So those are some of my concerns.
Let's go back to the other slide.
The multi-color chart, there we go.
I do think that developers tend to do
what's best for them in their bottom line
and not what's necessarily best for the end customer
or the residents in this case.
I think we've seen that from commercial developers.
I think we'd see it from residential developers too.
I do think that some latitude is good,
but we still have to give some overall structure there.
In looking at this, it's obviously we are over parked
with the existing policy.
I completely understand that.
I look at the north downtown and the balance option.
There's just too much blue or over parked in those instances.
And I even see that in the flexible demand as well.
I can see having another option that's
closer to the existing policy that
provides a little bit more than what the meat demand has.
But understanding that in five or 10 years
when people would actually be living in these places,
there may be a difference in how people are driving.
and people will have to get used to that.
Completely understood.
So I guess if I'm looking at this,
I would say I'm closer to meat demand,
even though I think there would be a little bit leeway
that I would like to see a little extra options.
When I have gone to visit people
and they are completely parked for residence
and there's guest spots, there's like two guest spots.
And if those are taken, sometimes I've got to park
a quarter of a mile away because the way
that the structures are, it's these private little roads
and you can't park on those and then you gotta go out
to the main street and sometimes there's cars there.
So it definitely is a bit of a walk.
I didn't even think of the safety concern late at night
but obviously that would be part of it too.
So I would actually like to see a little bit more of that
and I'd like to think that I could trust developers
to add enough guest spots, but I don't know if they would.
So if you're looking for just these,
I would say meet demand.
So I think what you two are saying is we're fine
with what, just right size our parking requirements
by making them as many cars as there are right now.
I mean, that's what meet demand is.
That's meet demand.
Oh, okay.
That's what I think.
Yeah. Which given time, there may be fewer people that do have two cars and households or whatever,
and it would make it so there's a little bit of extra spaces, parking spaces, for cars in the
future. But I would say, yeah, meet demand would be, let's require there to be the amount of spaces
that would meet the requirement of cars. I mean, obviously for the years I was on planning commission,
And this is something that we've wrestled with again and again.
And I do see people younger than us
who are not as car centric as perhaps our generation is
and are willing to be more flexible about whether or not
a couple has one car or two cars.
people responding to the financial cues of unbundling parking where they they
have to weigh in balance okay we have two people right now we have two cars
it's going to be an extra $300 a month if we keep both cars why don't we save
some money get down to one car and go with that and I am reluctant to go for
meet demand because I think it locks us in place where we are. It requires
developers to develop to the current standard and I think that standard is
going to change. The behavior of residents is changing in response to
the economies of car ownership and the interest in being more green. So I would
be more interested in flexible demand or balance.
I think pretty clearly existing policy is buying
into making development really expensive,
and that's gonna make us hard to get us out
of the housing crisis.
I don't wanna get down to the North downtown
specific plan standards because I think there,
many of these developments are far enough out
that you need at least one car.
So maybe if we looked at the actual requirements
for meet demand, flexible demand and balance,
like how many units or how many parking spots per unit.
We could just run through those real quick,
go back to the, and I didn't write the charts down.
And I don't have a problem with unbundling actually,
because there will be some that say,
oh no, I can get by with one car.
I can get by with no cars.
And some that'll say, we go in two opposite directions,
we need two cars.
So I don't have a problem with unbundling.
Okay, so meet demand, okay, what's the next one down?
The flexible, and then what's the balance?
So the differences really are on all of these studio.
It's a half a spot per, what is the, not the existing,
but the meet demand is 0.5.
So that one's across the board.
One unit, one parking spot is across the board.
So...
Can you show those three again?
So these are all, they're all 0.5 for the studio
and they're all one for the one bedroom.
And the two bedroom is one and a half.
Yeah, it's the two, the three pluses
are either 1.25 or 1.5.
The two bedrooms are either one, 1.25 or 1.5.
So it really comes down to, what do we want?
Can you show us the next, sorry.
Go ahead.
And the next one.
So, studios and one bedrooms are the same on all three.
How do people feeling about just saying
that part of the requirement,
we go with the half and the one
for the studios and the one bedroom.
Well, because that's what it is on all of them.
On all of them, it's the same thing.
So we're fine.
So yeah, I think it's the two bedroom
that's the biggest difference.
Yeah, the two bedrooms, it goes from one to 1.5,
depending on the three bedrooms.
There's very few of those, but it's 1.25 or 1.5.
And I think since the trend you're
talking about of unbundling is probably going
to become increasingly popular, where you're not actually
obtaining the parking spot.
You're just obtaining the unit, and then you
decide whether you're going to get parking spots.
So what we have as these numbers exactly I don't think
as important as their sort of aggregate which is you know do we want to have
something that meets the demands of of what we see now I wonder though I mean I
know we're anticipating these changes and I think they may be coming but how
much do you think parking has changed in the last 20 years up down same up but is
it to be mindful that this is one this data is one moment in time right it
It might have been a Wednesday night, or a Tuesday night.
Well, they did two moments in time, but yeah, yeah.
Well, no, I think it's one moment in time.
Is it one moment in time, or was it surveyed twice?
Each one was one time.
Each of these were surveyed one time.
This was across three different nights.
Okay, no.
But each individual site was only surveyed once.
So it's one moment in time, so I think,
be cautioned that it could be higher or lower on any
them depending on a number of variables that are unknown. So I agree you know
it's it's not as it's not there are some things that seem a little easy this is
fluid. I would also there is no benefit to a developer to under park a project
there is no benefit because they can't sell the project because they have a
a parking problem, they can't rent the project,
it basically just drives rents down or the sales price
because it reduces the demand for the project.
So, and I've had numerous conversations with developers
over 18 years on the council,
and many of them 10 years ago didn't trust the data
that we were talking about because we were talking about,
We have BART proximate standard that was done 15 years ago
and they didn't trust that.
The Brio developers didn't trust it
and they have a bucket load of empty spaces
that they can't do anything with
because of the way the parking is configured.
It's not flat surface parking.
It's structured and their security system is such
that they can't even rent it to somebody working
in the neighborhood or working downtown
because they have to give access to structured parking,
which is not the way it was designed.
So requiring that, I think developers are getting,
I don't think developers intentionally try to,
I already said it.
I think it's trying to find the right option in these,
but just saying we'll meet demand that's happening now,
it's not getting higher, it's going to get lower.
And by setting it too high, we'll have to come back
in future years or we're going to get requests
for general plan amendments and zoning amendments
to lower the numbers because they will have a study
that shows they'll go out, they'll do a study
and they'll show that they don't need the parking
that we've anticipated because of one moment in time
one set of head counts that we did in a parking lot. But we could review that on
a case-by-case basis. But that is cost, that makes us unfriendly to development.
It really does, it says we're trying to keep development constrained. By dropping
it at 50% from its current? Yep. Well and to your point of the one snapshot in
It could be these are all falsely low numbers of parking spots that people are out of town and so maybe we're setting a
You know by going with a lower option. We're going even lower than we think we're going it's not I
Also your example of the Brio and I completely understand what you're saying being on the Transportation Commission for eight years
I certainly dealt with a lot of the things that we were looking at in terms of parking and everything else
But the Breo is within walking distance of Bart and they didn't take advantage of it because they didn't trust that people would
Right, but there's a lot of places further down Ignacio further down these numbers are not these numbers are not
North downtown specific plan
but the owner and I are
basically saying it's somewhere in between flexible and
balanced
What was that last part you said he?
Council Member Wilk, you said
that
Brio is close to Bart and they didn't take advantage and you mentioned that there's places that are further away
Further away. And what was I missed your response to that? Oh, I said we're
What we're not trying to do is a Bart proximate standard, which is zero
Now it's and the north downtown specific plan is a Bart proximate standard
What the mayor and I have landed on is somewhere between demand flexible and balanced
because we're really debating two-bedroom units and then the minimum number of three-bedroom units that are actually being built so
You can probably how many three bedrooms were sitting in the 1100 and whatever
Mayor, can I offer up a few just comments and thoughts here?
I just want to back up for a moment on this.
So this is obviously a difficult issue.
This is the second time we've brought this forward.
We brought forward more information,
a slightly different configuration of the council
back in July, wrestled with this.
We gathered more data, we brought it back.
Obviously you're wrestling with it a bit
to try to find the right balance,
and for good reason,
because you're weighing various trade-offs.
And so I would just offer up for some consideration,
some of the existing policies that your council has adopted
and some of the state laws that are dictating
a lot of policies for your consideration
as you weigh this going forward.
In our housing element,
we committed to reviewing parking standards,
which was effectively required by state HCD
as a means to further support housing
and housing construction due to the cost
associated with parking.
And that's really the driver for why we are here.
Obviously the state already mandated reduced parking
standards for areas that are closer to BART.
So I offer that up as consideration.
There's state policy that's forcing this
more uncomfortable type of situation.
And in discussion, our housing element
also suggests we should revisit this.
And then I would also add that your council
has adopted economic development
is one of its top five priorities for several cycles now,
which is to further enhance economic development.
One of the big drivers that is thwarting economic development
in California is the lack of housing.
And most economists will state the biggest threat
to the economy in California is housing.
So I offer those up as policy considerations.
I'm not suggesting you should pick one of these standards
or the other, but those are some
of the underlying fundamentals that have brought us
to where we are today.
So you just may want to keep those in consideration
as we're contemplating what type of direction
to give staff here with respect to next steps.
There's a couple of ways we can go on this.
I think the differences between the standards
really are what you're doing for two bedroom units.
I think, I understand the desire to stay with meat demand.
It's the path of least resistance,
but it doesn't move us down the road very far
in what we're trying to do to make housing available
in this city.
Can I have a question?
Sure.
Are we required to have,
other than the half mile within BART,
have this plan, whatever it is we decide upon,
be for the entire city, or can we break it up
and say that it could be flexible, for example,
within one and a half or two miles
and then it's meet demand from two to three miles.
I don't really wanna just meet demand in the city.
I think we're seeing,
I would rather not do meet demand in Walnut Creek.
My example is more of can we split it up
and do two different ones based upon proximity to BART.
If we're talking about flexible versus balanced,
the difference in those is a quarter of a parking spot
per two bedroom unit.
I'm not in favor of sticking with meat demand.
That's a deal that's not long-term policy prudent.
And just to clarify though, right?
We're not, when we say meat demand,
it's not that we're sticking
with our existing parking requirements.
we're slashing those by 50% if we.
Right, but that's the floor.
Yeah.
So basically they have no room to be creative.
Well, to adjust to the environmental opportunities.
And you know, it's really interesting
because I can't figure out what West Cliff Trail got counted.
But West Cliff Trail was a 20 unit apartment building
or complex that added eight units where its parking was.
And they brought it to the Design Review Commission
and the Planning Commission.
It never came to council.
So it's built in two, it was a 1960s complex.
Were you on the Planning Commission at the time?
No, it was before me.
No, it's not.
It's after me.
I don't know, I can't remember.
My brain shuts down a thing.
I'm a little bit through a design review,
but it's centered in it.
And I went back and looked at it today.
But there was an opportunity that they took advantage of.
And by using parking, and they came up with eight more units.
It was, you know, a 40% increase in the housing
that they had on site.
And I think those are opportunities
are what we need to look for,
but you can't look for them when we're just want
the parking the way it is on the ground today
as opposed to allowing the stamp, setting the floor lower
and letting them rise if they need to
because of in geographic constraints.
We have a project over on Cole Avenue
and it's 12 units and they're flats.
They're very expensive.
It's built on a hill.
And they couldn't figure out if they could build.
They were designed for people coming out of Lafayette
and Arinda that had four cars.
And he wasn't sure that they would even get rid of two cars.
So he saved the money.
He got permission from the Design Review Commission
and the Planning Commission, I think,
to build his underground parking was
done with an elevated system.
So there's no driveway going down into it.
And it turns out that half of the units only have one car.
Because those really wealthy people saw an opportunity
to not have to have a car because they
can walk around downtown.
But I think if we don't give them the room to make changes,
we will basically get people priced out of it.
The developer can't make the numbers crunch.
And so I think, I would be interested in knowing
what our colleague, Council Member Francois has.
Francois things, but I think we're stuck at a point where,
maybe it's a question of what do we have for the two bedroom
and the three bedroom units?
And we just look at that.
Cause as you said, we seem to be agreed on the half a unit
and the one unit or half a space and the one space.
looking for eye contact with the city manager.
Would it be okay if we continued this
and brought it back with a focus on
what do we do on the two and three bedroom units
so we can include council member Francois on the discussion?
It's certainly an option.
It'll be a little while based upon the council calendar
at the moment in terms of what's scheduled.
I believe we're currently in compliance
with all regulatory matters,
given that we already adopted the updated standards
relative to being proximate to BART.
So we're not under a tight timeframe
in order to revisit this.
So if your counsel would like us to bring it back
with some additional considerations
based upon the discussion we had this evening,
we can certainly do that,
but it'll likely be a little while,
a few months I would suspect.
Let's get a temperature reading here.
Okay.
So if you had to choose one, what would you choose?
I've got to look down and see what
I'd choose flexible demand
I'd go balance
And I'd ask developers to show how they're gonna make that work
you meet I
Would
Tend toward meat, but if I could if I could
Compromise on the flexible would that bring us all together for flexible?
Well, yeah, I mean you're over you yeah councilmember civil already said yes, so I guess it comes down to you and to
But I'm also more inclined to think flexible is is too high
so
but I just looked down and
The reality is there's only four of us sitting here and we could get with all no votes because we if we have a tie a
a tie is a no, and we have no decision with four.
That's why I'm really interested in hearing
what our colleague says as well.
That would be helpful for sure,
but I just wanted to see if we're able to get to,
if we're able to get to a negotiated flexible
would that have at least three votes?
So the difference to me in my mind
between flexible and balanced, which is where I am,
is whether or not you have the extra quarter
of a parking spot for a two-bedroom.
And if it's unbundled, then people can get it or not?
Well, see, I'm not confident that unbundled
is necessarily doing what it's supposed to do.
But the other alternative would be to go lower,
but have a stipulation the way some of the cities did
that there's, for each unit, there's a certain fraction
of guest parking space required.
So, I would go to Flexible if that brought us to consensus.
Interesting.
I mean, it's that from where I am.
I'm willing to go to Flexible.
I don't think it's as far as we need to push.
I'm willing to go to Flexible,
but I'd also like to see what happens if we had,
if our code would blow up if there was a-
Balance with a guest parking.
balanced with guest parking I just want to see and I would like to hear from
developers here in the council chambers telling us I mean it's easier to it's
easier to trust people when they have to come up and talk to you under and what
their experiences in other communities and other markets well I think the
developers would pick least you don't know well what why would they want to be
constrained I mean you they can always build more if they wanted to but why
would they want to be constrained well that's that's actually the idea yeah we
let them decide what makes sense right given their customer but we're but I
think we should decide what's best for the city and then you know let the put
the put the guide rails on the developers right I think the developers
would go with the least point of friction why not because I think it
always build more if they felt it was needed.
I think that us coming up.
No, developers, once they've built it,
they're not adding parking.
No, no, no, what I'm saying is that when the plan is,
I mean, they would look around the game,
here's the floor, they can always go up.
Of course, they would want to agree upon
Oh, as far as what we do, but not when they're actually
building, I'm like, no.
No, no, correct, right, understood.
So with that, I would say it sounds like we can come
to agreement on flexible.
I'm not sure by delaying this process
we're gonna come to any different conclusion.
But if we can get to all of us understanding
that we are reducing this by a significant amount
of what the current policy is,
and that this is going to be impacted
for places that are outside the immediate radius
of half a mile to Bart,
I think that gives at least comfort to me
that this is something that
they're going to have to have a certain minimum
in a city that doesn't have the public transit
to get them downtown, consistent public transit.
Right.
All right, I'm gonna try it.
Move, or this is consideration.
So recommend that we ask staff to bring it back
with flexible 0.51, 1.25, 1.25,
to clarify that as the option C that's up on the screen flexible demand yeah well
yeah I'll second is that okay I don't know if that was a motion but I'll
second I'm gonna make a substitute motion okay go ahead so it's an amendment
to the motion I will amend the motion to include that we see an option that does
show a a balanced with guest parking approach to as just an option as to a
way to see what you know that's in the end it will be additional parking it may
be the same as the flex but it may be the way that we want to write the policy
so it may help for the council's consideration if smidar could speak to
what was adopted as part of the objective design standards on guest
parking. It's just part of that optionality might
already exist. All right. Okay. And so, Smitra, can you speak to that?
Wisdom. Come forth. I hope you were signing to the city attorney that you
needed to talk. So I just I wanted to let you know that
in the objective design standards that your council did adopt, there is a
component of any required parking. So let's say a
100 parking spaces are required. There's a percentage of that that's already
assigned to guest parking. I believe it's 15% but do not quote me on that. Oh, it's
10% thank you. So 10% of it is already, that is guest parking and that's how the
objective design standards are written and that's for residential development.
So does this mean that, get definition here, does this mean that every, let's say
you're building a hundred units and they're all one-bedroom. Are they
building 100 parking spots total or are they building 100 plus an additional 10%
for guests? You're building a hundred. And 10% are for guests. Yes. Okay. All
right stick with your motion. Okay. So you withdrew that amended motion. Yeah.
I didn't get a second, it died for lack of a second.
So just so I understand before we go through the voting
on this then, we're saying flexible spending
so it's one-to-one, the whole, the rates that we had
and automatically it's going to be 10% guest parking
that has to be built.
Yes.
Okay, I'll stick with my second.
Mayor Darling.
Yes.
Mayor Pro Tem Wilk.
Aye.
Council Member Devaney.
Aye.
Council Member Silva.
Aye.
Motion carries.
Okay.
it comes back as a full proposal but we can get our colleague who is not here
tonight looped in so that certainly if council member Francois hears he can
weigh in but at this point based on the direction we would plan to notice the
hearing bring back an ordinance for your council's consideration and then we can
have the debate with councilmember Francois here between two bedrooms are
there is a 1.25 or one that's the difference you would have options to
modify the ordinance. Yeah that that's what you're yeah that's what I was
saying yeah. It's not coming back on consent. No I know our city manager and
prudence if she were here would dictate he'd not do that. So with that the
meeting is adjourned.