7 p.m. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Environmental Planning Commission meeting of January 21st, 2026.

We will call the meeting to order at 7 p.m. For those joining us in person, please note that due to our hybrid environment,

audio and video presentations can no longer be shared from the lectern.

Requests to show an audio or video presentation during a meeting should be directed to EPC at MountainView.gov by 4.30 p.m. on the meeting date.

Additionally, due to our hybrid environment, we will no longer have speakers line up to speak on an item.

Anyone wishing to address the EPC in person must complete your yellow speaker card.

Please indicate the name that you would like to be called by when it is your turn to speak and the item number on which you wish to speak.

Please complete one yellow speaker card for each item on which you wish to speak and then turn them into the EPC clerk as soon as possible, but no later than the call for public comment on the item you are speaking on.

Instructions for addressing the commission virtually may be found on the posted agenda.

Now I will ask the EPC clerk to proceed with roll call.

Commissioner Subramanian?

Here.

Commissioner Pham?

Here.

Commissioner Gutierrez?

Commissioner Dempsey?

Here.

Commissioner Cranston?

Here.

Vice Chair Donahue here and Chair Nunez here all Commissioners present with the exception of

Commissioner Gutierrez okay thank you very much Mr. Clerk all right minutes approval if any we

will move on to item three minutes approval 3.1 Environmental Planning Commission meeting minutes

of December 3rd 2025 if anyone in attendance would like to provide comments on the minutes

please fill out a yellow speaker card and provide it to the EPC clerk.

If anyone on zoom would like to provide a comment on the minutes,

please click the raise hand button in zoom or press star nine on your phone.

Phone users can mute and unmute themselves with star six. Mr. Clerk,

are there any, we do not have any, um,

speakers online or requests on in person. Okay. Uh,

any discussion from commission? No. Uh,

any motion okay looks like we've got a motion to approve the environmental uh planning commission

minutes of december 3rd 2025 from commissioner vice chair donahue seconded by uh commissioner

dempsey uh mr clerk uh can we take the vote

The motion carries. Four yes and two abstain.

All right, excellent.

Then we will proceed to item number four, oral communications.

This portion of the meeting is reserved for persons wishing to address the EPC on any matter, not on the agenda.

Speakers are allowed to speak on any topic for up to three minutes during this section.

State law prohibits the commission from acting on non-agenda items.

If anyone in attendance would like to provide comments on on-agenda items, please fill out a yellow speaker card and provide it to the EPC clerk.

If anyone on Zoom would like to provide a comment on on-agenda items, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or press star 9 on your phone.

Phone users can mute and unmute themselves with star 6.

Mr. Clerk, any speakers submit yellow cards or on the Zoom list?

None in person and none online.

All right. So looks like we have no takers. Then we will proceed to our public hearing for agenda item 5.1, the small business streamlining and other minor zoning code updates.

We'll first hand it to staff for a presentation. Then we'll have questions from the EPC and followed by public comment.

At the closure of public comment, the commission will then deliberate and then take action.

So I think we can proceed with the staff presentation from our assistant planner, Madeline Fall, and assistant community development director, Lindsay Hagan.

Thank you, and good evening, Chair Nunez and Commissioners.

I'm Madeline Fall, Assistant Planner, and I'm joined by Assistant Community Development Director, Lindsay Hagen, to present proposed code amendments to City Code Chapter 36, known as the Zoning Code, related to streamlining permit procedures for certain small businesses and other minor code revisions and cleanup.

the package of proposed zoning code amendments will implement various actions from the city's

economic vitality strategy with the purpose of eliminating certain barriers to zoning

sorry zoning barriers experienced by businesses to implement actions 1b7 and 4a6 and strategy

4.5.D. The proposed amendments remove two of the largest barriers to small businesses in Mountain

View by streamlining permit procedures and reducing parking requirements. Specifically,

the amendments remove change of use permits, which disproportionately impact small businesses

and include reductions in required parking standards for retail and personal service uses.

For certain small businesses, small footprint land uses, the amendments waive requirements for

conditional use permit and from new or additional parking. Identifying and

addressing these issues will support businesses that offer goods and services

that Mountain View residents value and encourage those businesses to locate in

Mountain View, activating commercial corridors and centers. In addition to the

economic vitality strategy, staff has initiated the proposed amendments to one,

One, implement the council work plan item of completing city code cleanups.

The proposed amendments update inconsistent language and modify or add land uses and definitions to reflect modern land use terms and advance a more user-friendly zoning code.

And two, staff routinely prepares minor zoning code amendments to align with state and federal laws, improve consistency and transparency, and update procedures.

A major element of the proposed amendments are new streamlining provisions for small footprint businesses.

These provisions were developed by staff through review of planning use permits approved by the city between 2020 and 2025.

These approvals were evaluated to find common patterns that could inform staff on the specific land uses to consider for streamlining,

the maximum tenant space size to consider, and appropriate operational standards.

Our review found that 37% of the use permits, or 35 out of the 95 permits evaluated, were comprised of the following active land uses.

Retail, restaurant, personal services, and indoor recreation and fitness centers.

Staff has also consistently heard interest in these types of uses during community outreach for recent precise plans and at the public counter.

Also, staff found that the majority of these permits, or 86% of the 35 permits for active commercial uses, were in tenant spaces at or under 4,000 square feet.

After conducting this review, and based on our conversations with small business owners, commercial brokers, and property owners at the public counter through the permit process and through outreach, staff felt that these four listed uses were a good baseline for the streamlining effort.

and staff is specifically referring to these land uses as small footprint land

uses because the term small businesses can have many connotations.

Staff is proposing to geographically focus the streamlining provisions for

small footprint land uses within the city's existing commercial zones as

shown on the map on your screen and an attachment to to the EPC report. It's

important to note that the package of amendments before the EPC tonight does

not include any changes to precise plan areas. The changes we are discussing would only impact

a precise plan area if the specific precise plan currently refers to the commercial zoning

land use table. The qualifying land uses include the active commercial uses discussed on the

previous slide and listed here. In the commercial districts where the four uses are currently

allowed land uses, either permitted or conditionally permitted, staff is proposing these uses be

permitted if they meet a list of operational standards which I will

describe in a moment. Provided a business complies with these criteria, the new

provisions would allow the use to be exempt from use permits and from

providing new or additional parking beyond what already exists on the site.

This streamlining would allow the applicant to submit directly for a

building permit which could save up to six months of time and $10,000 or more

in permit fees and operating costs on the unoccupied leased space.

This slide shows a list of the proposed operational standards for small footprint land uses.

These standards were developed for review of the conditions of approval placed on past

permits as well as applicable city code requirements.

The standards include the maximum tenant space size, compliance with other applicable codes

and laws and basic objective requirements for loading solid waste outdoor activities noise and

any changes in ownership here's an example of how the small footprint streamlining provisions

are captured in the amendments to the commercial land use table a new row is added with revised

permit requirements for restaurants that are 4 000 square feet or less and the existing land

and use would be updated to clarify that current standards continue to apply for businesses

that are over 4,000 square feet. Additionally, staff is proposing to add language to the

operational standards that if a business violates any of these provisions, the city will utilize

existing code enforcement procedures that are already established. To further implement the

economic vitality strategy, the proposed amendments also include the following changes. First, to stay

competitive in the retail market regionally, staff recommends updating the minimum parking

standards for retail and personal services to one parking space for 250 square feet.

This is based on a survey of 10 cities in our region, which was summarized in the staff report.

Through staff's research, Mountain View was identified to have the highest parking requirement

in the region. There's no need for the city to have such a high requirement compared to the

other cities surveyed. Second, staff recommends removing requirements entirely from the zoning

code for change of use permits, which is a use permit approved at the staff level. This permit

can be a burden for businesses and a confusing step for applicants that are proposing a change

of use from one permitted use to another permitted use. It can also take what should be a ministerial

permit review and make it discretionary where conditions can be placed on the

permit. If approved both changes would have impacts in all commercial and

industrial zoning districts and not just for small footprint land uses. The

changes to parking standards would impact precise plan areas only if the

precise plan specifically refers to the zoning code. In addition to implementing

the economic vitality strategy the package of proposed zoning code

amendments include a comprehensive set of minor cleanups which have been drafted to improve

consistency and usability and add new land uses or update existing land uses with modern business

types and definitions. The proposed cleanups can generally be categorized in the areas that are

shown on the slide, which I will touch on briefly in the following slides. The majority of the

amendments include broad updates to the residential, commercial, and industrial land use tables,

and the parking standards table to align land use category names throughout the code to use similar formatting, grammar, and capitalization,

and to incorporate appropriate references to sections where definitions and applicable requirements can be found.

To add greater clarity to the zoning code, and in some cases to consolidate land uses, staff has proposed one, adding new land uses.

So one example is public recreation, which will distinguish recreational facilities managed by a public agency from privately operated facilities.

Two, combining similar land uses under an existing or renamed land use category to be consistent.

And three, renaming an existing land use category to reflect a modern, more inclusive reference and to further improve the clarity of the land use.

In addition to changes throughout the code, staff is proposing specific changes to the industrial land use table.

These changes include, one, recategorizing existing uses to align with land use terms used throughout the code.

Two, adding land uses to the industrial land use table, which are allowable based on other sections of the code but are not currently listed.

Three, adding new land uses to reflect current business conditions, including adding outdoor retail as conditionally permitted in districts where retail can be located, and adding a shopping center warehouse retail use to reflect existing warehouse retail centers in the MM zone.

Four, updating permit requirements for the existing offices, research and development

land use to allow it as a permitted use in the MM zone where it currently requires a

conditional use permit.

Five, renaming the existing storage use to storage accessory to match the existing definition

and to further distinguish the use from personal storage and warehousing which are already

listed elsewhere in the zoning table.

Staff proposes the following changes to the required parking standards table.

One, updating land use names to align with the land use tables.

Two, consolidating parking standards under a given land use name.

A number of the land uses have multiple parking standards for different business subtypes.

Three, adding new parking standards for all listed land uses, including separating out some of the individual land uses, which are currently combined for easier identification.

And if no parking standard currently exists for use, then adding a parking requirement based on a parking requirement listed elsewhere in the code, applying a parking standard that has been used historically, or requiring a parking study.

Staff proposes to modify zoning code definitions to add any new, combined, or renamed land use categories, as previously discussed.

In addition, staff proposes to add definitions for existing land use terms that were not previously defined and to update language and listed examples for certain definitions to meet current business trends and to increase clarity.

Due to the combining of various existing land uses, there are certain land uses where the proposed updates have altered the zoning district in which a current land use is allowed or conditionally allowed.

These are summarized on your screen.

A summary table is also found in attachment four to the EPC report.

Most of these changes expand where the uses are allowed with a conditional use permit or as a permitted use.

There is one use that would go from permitted to requiring a conditional use permit, which is plant nursery.

The change would align the plant nursery with all other outdoor retail uses in the city,

and it does not impact any current businesses in the city.

overall staff feels these alterations in permit requirements are appropriate based on the current

businesses within the city and given the overarching effort to streamline and modernize

land uses in the zoning code in terms of community outreach city staff discussed the proposed

amendments with various members of the business community to verify they would result in meaningful

improvements including one-on-one meetings with brokers and meetings with developers and the

Chamber of Commerce. Staff received unanimous feedback that the proposed amendments are a

positive improvement to support the retail and service business community. In addition,

the business community expressed interest in expanding the streamlining provisions

to certain precise plan areas. Moving forward, staff will present the EPC's recommendation on

the proposed amendments to the City Council at a public hearing tentatively scheduled for February

24th, 2026, followed by a second reading in early March. If approved, it's anticipated that new

updates would be effective in early April. Additionally, these changes, if adopted,

may precipitate text changes to various precise plans to ensure consistency with the zoning code.

Staff will undertake this effort as resources and workload allow. Also, staff will be evaluating

expanding the Express Permits MV building permit program

to incorporate the four small footprint land uses.

For any commissioners not familiar,

this program allows for a more condensed review for building permit,

and it includes a scheduled Zoom meeting with city staff reviewers

and the applicant's project team over a three-week time window.

In conclusion, staff recommends that the Environmental Planning Commission

recommend that the city council adopt an ordinance amending city code chapter 36 and find that these

amendments are not subject to the california environmental quality act thank you for your time

staff is available to answer any questions also here tonight is amanda rotella economic vitality

manager to assist with any questions thanks thank you miss fall uh we will proceed to the questions

portion from the commission. Are there any questions that the commissioners would like to

field at this time? Commissioner Subramanian. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, staff,

for your presentation. I had a couple of questions to clarify some of the points that were noted.

In the staff report under parking and permit exemptions, number three, there was reference to the qualifying small footprint land use being exempt from meeting the minimum number of parking spaces.

But I think elsewhere, it speaks about exempting it from providing any new or additional spaces. So could you clarify what is intended there?

Thank you, Commissioner, for the question. So the intent is to essentially not require the business to provide any additional or new parking. So whatever parking standard is set in the parking standards table in the code would not apply. So whatever parking is available on the property would be sufficient.

The caveat that is noted in the report that I'll just highlight now is the building code requirements about certain electric vehicle parking and accessibility or ADA parking would still apply.

Thank you for the clarification.

So the idea is that the code would be updated to the newer standards and therefore the businesses don't have to provide anything in addition to the new standard.

Is that?

Um, so there's two different points, um, in terms of the new parking standards, it really

is the, um, like there's the retail, you know, component and the restaurant, I'm sorry, retail

component and the personal service component, um, that we are updating that parking standard

in this package of amendments, sort of across the board that would apply to any of those

uses in the city.

Um, in terms of the small business footprint, it's only those four listed uses.

if they comply with sort of the framework we've established,

then they won't be subject to adding any new or additional parking

for what's the stat standard set.

Thank you.

Commissioner Dempsey.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Help me understand the reasoning behind running this analysis

for all the commercial spaces,

but not for any of the kind of heavy retail precise plan areas?

That's a great question.

I think part of our effort here was to look at, you know,

where we're seeing a lot of these permits getting triggered

and what are those land uses.

And so really we started from what we know, what the history, you know, tells us.

And so for us, that was really a starting point.

And so a lot of that is focused in the commercial areas.

I will say the list of uses, I'm sorry, the permits history we did look at does include some of the provisional use permits that are in the precise plan areas.

This effort, if you can't tell by the size of these attachments, is quite large.

And so I think we wanted to focus on what we felt was achievable in this first pass.

But as we mentioned towards the end of the presentation, you know, there is an effort of carrying some of these cleanups and other effort into the precise plan areas.

I will highlight a number of the existing precise plans already allow for some of the streamlining.

So the effort really is to look at, you know, where do we need to make further tweaks?

Does that include any of the big three, the San Antonio, El Camino and downtown?

So a number of them, the way those provisions are set up in those precise plans already allowed for some of the streamlining that our current commercial zones don't allow. So some of it's already being achieved. I think part of the effort and the additional work we need to do is to see where are there still differences that we may need to tweak.

this is probably not something that not data that you have right now, but I think this might

be a useful data point for when the council sees it. If you could give me a sense of how many of

the small footprint retail businesses in Mountain View are going to be covered by this change and

how many are left out of it, I would be very interested to know that. So if you could tell

me you're going to get 80% of the small footprint small businesses in Mountain View by doing what

we're doing here, I'd say right on. If it ended up being like 60, 50, I'd be concerned because

actually I so support, this isn't comment time. So let me just say, I think the work done here

appears to be really good work and I would love to see it applied more broadly if we can

do that with relative ease. So, but anyway, I think that data point would be useful for a

further iteration of this. Yeah. And what I would add to that, and I appreciate the comment, is

essentially based on the surveyed history we see the the four uses we're talking about is 37 percent

of the the use permits we see so it was the majority by far in terms of packaging uses

you know of a similar kind that are having an impact so

we'll see what data we can pull but I hear what you're saying in terms of it would be helpful

information and i do think just the fact that the uh the chamber raised it as an important next step

is another piece of data that suggests probably gonna be some value to it thank you mr chair

uh excellent and uh we are uh in the question phase appreciate the commentary uh just in the

vein of uh kind of keeping this rolling here um questions uh commissioner fam

One of my questions was already asked by Commissioner Dempsey, so thank you for that. Another question I had was just more general context around the motivation for this work. I know some of it came from council and council priorities, but was there any motivation or influence regionally or statewide for some of these amendments?

appreciate the question commissioner um i think you know a lot of uh and what we sort of tried

to identify in i think the beginning of the staff report um it is a common practice for us here in

the city of mountain view every couple years to come forward with kind of a package of minor code

amendments and cleanups so it's not unusual for us to be doing that i think um so that is kind of a

common effort that we put forward. A lot of the focus here was on implementing the economic

vitality strategy and sort of the small business focus. I'd say a lot of the cleanup effort,

quite honestly, sometimes when you introduce new staff, new regulations, new state law,

you start realizing there's things we can clean up and present better in our code. And I think

that's really all the effort. A lot of the effort here is a lot of that. And I think also just

hearing a lot of the feedback and implementing the code and hearing the feedback we hear from the

business or property owner community helps also kind of drive some of the list of amendments we

do and making it a lot of the effort in this package of amendments is really to make it easier

for someone to track their use across the different aspects of our code, which is really

challenging for someone to do today. So a lot of this is to try and build a better user interface

with our zoning code, both from a public perspective and business perspective, and also

from a staff implementation perspective. So I would say, you know, it's a lot of those things

wrapped up into this package of cleanups. And Chair, if you'll allow, good evening,

Christian Murdoch, Community Development Director. All of the reasons that the Assistant Director

mentioned are important and relevant. I'll say another driving force from my perspective in

giving direction and guidance on this work is vacancy elimination. Vacancies are problematic

when they occur in our community and eliminating barriers for small businesses to open,

particularly low-hanging fruit where we can resolve parking issues proactively that we know

even after going through the process don't surface as ongoing operational issues is important. The

time and the cost associated with obtaining these discretionary permits is significant for small

businesses and it leads to them failing because they consumed so many resources early in that

process or looking for some other community to locate in and not resolving a vacancy in mountain

view and so to the extent we can speed up the time that those vacancies are resolved and occupied by

businesses that want to locate and thrive in our community that's important work and that's a

driving force for this as well

Any further questions?

No?

All right.

Thank you, Commissioner Pham, Commissioner Cranston.

Did I wait long enough?

Okay.

For people who are wondering, I've been told that they can't hear me on the thing, so they

gave me a microphone.

So several questions.

um the 37 that were in these categories can you characterize what the other 63 was

um so a number of them i think examples were listed in the staff report but essentially um

there wasn't a lot of consistency across the board on what some of those other uses were but

they range from things like office research and development.

We've done school CUPs, childcare related CUPs.

I think that's what's coming to mind.

And then of the 86% that were under 4,000,

were all of those in this category or were,

were they spread out where some of these retail restaurants,

personal service indoor larger than the 4,000?

I apologize, Commissioner. You're asking of all the 95 permits?

So on slide four, you say that 86% of the 35 permits were for tenant spaces under 4,000.

Okay. So that's limited to these four categories?

Correct.

Okay.

Of those, how many of those were located? So there, and you look at the map, there are

areas that are, I tend to think of as retail-ish, you know, it's a shopping center of some kind,

a plaza of some kind, but there's also three, the three largest blocks are not, okay? The area

along Middlefield, the area along Moffitt, and the area that's kind of tucked between 237 and 85.

How many of those permits were into those, in those large areas rather than in the other areas

that were included?

I appreciate the question, Commissioner.

I don't have necessarily a specific breakdown,

but I can say that we do get a frequent amount of CUPs

in the CS zone along Old Middlefield Way.

And we do get a handful in the CN

or the commercial neighborhood zones,

which are primarily the shopping centers.

and then we would get a smaller portion of them in the CRA zone which is a long moffitt

and we get very few if any in this in the CO this is the commercial office

do you have any way of assessing who what we're not seeing when given the current what we have

here today what are we not getting because I'm I'm I'm it's one of the things I'm struggling

with this is that this is an i'm generally like the idea but i'm i'm a little worried that this is

narrower than it should be so how do you how do you have any way of getting a feel for what's

missing at all many of you as you talk to brokers that said they just won't bring something even

into mountain view simply because it's just not something that's feasible that's what i'm trying

to get a sense of? I'll be honest, Commissioner, it's a hard question to answer in the sense that

we had to start this exercise somewhere. And so I think for us, it was starting with what we

know historically, and what we've heard consistently. I think sort of what I'm

hearing you ask is almost like a larger study of what sort of retail marketplace, you know,

we could attract or services we could attract that we don't currently have,

which wasn't necessarily part of this scope or effort.

But I think for us, this is really an exercise of starting somewhere.

And I think starting where we hear and interact with customers the most,

which is really at this ground floor, sort of as the director highlighted,

sort of low-lying fruit that we know is our use is trying to locate here.

And so improving that existing process.

But in terms of a broader study, that would take a much different effort.

to undertake. The decision to extend the rules for these into the other areas

that aren't included in this, why was that decision made?

So I think in terms of why we didn't go beyond the commercial districts,

We have a number of precise plans.

I think, again, trying to take this effort and have a starting point, this was something we felt like we could achieve and bring forward and start and see its impact.

I think in terms of the effort of undertaking the review of the numerous precise plans we have would be a larger undertaking that we just didn't think we could do in combination with this at the same time.

That wasn't actually my question.

Let me ask it a different way.

Things like the parking standards are being extended to areas that are not part of what you're calling a small footprint land use streamlining.

Those parking standards affect businesses that don't fit into these categories.

Why were something like the parking standards extended to other things in the standards that don't meet the same kind of characteristics as these kind of businesses are?

In terms of the, and we'll use the example of the parking standards for retail and personal service.

When we did the survey, seeing that we had the highest standard for us was sort of a red flag of why we're not potentially one of the issues of why we're not attracting retail.

And so for us, it seemed like a very straightforward thing we could take an action on and propose for consideration in terms of trying to alleviate any of the zoning barriers we might have for that type of use, especially since we hear about it so much at community meetings and other outreach efforts as an interest, you know, use that is of interest.

And you're correct, it does go beyond the small footprint business framework we're talking about, but it is still centralized on the commercial industrial zones and a handful of the precise plans that reference the parking standards.

But I think for us, that was a one way to additionally address the economic vitality strategy action item related to parking barriers.

i think that's anything else i have would be more in the go into the discussions section so

thank you commissioner cranston uh vice chair donahue so i just have one remaining question i

and it relates to something i think that commissioner dempsey was talking about uh

so you said that the that this doesn't apply to the precise plan areas i i understand that uh

unless the precise plan specifically refers to the standards of a commercial zoning district,

do you have any sense of, I don't think that you answered this, but do you have any sense of

which precise plans or how much of the precise plan areas do that?

We actually have a slide as a backup because we thought this might come up.

There's five precise plans explicitly that reference the zoning, either the zoning land use table or specifically reference the parking standards in the zoning code or specifically reference what I'll call the exempt or certain uses or scenarios that are exempt from a planning permit, which is where we put language related to the small footprint business exemption.

So these five have some element of these amendments where it would relate back to them.

And so I'll just take, for example, the downtown parking or the downtown precise plan currently has references to the parking standards of other listed land uses in that precise plan.

If it doesn't have the standard in it today, it refers you back to the zoning table.

And so there are scenarios where, you know, adopting this package of amendments would effectively make change in some of these areas.

Okay. Yeah, great. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Okay. All right. I have a question then.

It regards to the recency of the parking analysis. So in the presentation, I think you guys mentioned that we're currently the, you know, that 180 number is the highest amongst our kind of like neighboring cities.

was any accounting done for the recency?

So for example, that 250 number

that would bring us on par with Sunnyvale, for example,

was that a standard that just got revised

to get to that 250?

Or is it like some number from the 1980s?

Or how do we know that, you know,

they're not looking at their own parking situation

and going, right?

I guess, are we modernizing?

How do we know we're not modernizing

to something that's going to be unmodern in, you know, five years or something like that?

It's a great question. In terms of the surveying done, it was based on all the existing

zoning parking standards that these cities have available. So I'll be honest, I don't know the

timing of all of them. But again, for us, it was a very evident sort of concern that we were the

highest when we surveyed these cities and these cities are ones that have popular downtowns and

popular commercial centers and corridors and so i do know at least some of the handful of cities

have more recently looked at their parking standards um i know a portion of city of san

mateo did i know a portion of um sunnyville as well and so there are certain cities where they've

definitely done some more recent updates, but I don't have specific dates or timeframes for that.

Thank you. Commissioner Subramanian.

Thank you, Jira. I have a quick follow-up question. Recognizing that the revised parking

standards will probably be applicable to any new businesses that are coming in,

how do you see the impact of this being applied to existing businesses given that

a lot of, you know, legacy retail has the larger parking? Is there a process

in which some of this can be applied at a different stage to them as well?

Great question. I think in terms of how these new parking standards, if they go, you know,

get adopted and go into effect, would impact existing sites, it's really going to get triggered

only if they have a turnover in tenancy, in which case if they're already parked at today's standard,

they'd have no problem meeting the new standard, which to some extent may be a benefit for those properties

because they might be able to have a different mix of uses on the site that were maybe more challenging to meet

under the current parking standards.

So there are benefits in that regard, but it really only gets triggered when there's some sort of permit request coming in.

Thank you.

Commissioner Gutierrez.

Thank you, Chair.

I have a couple quick basic questions.

So when you looked at the comparisons with other cities regarding the parking space allotment,

were you able to also figure out or determine if there was a positive impact with those

spaces that might have been not rented out or leased out to then have a business opportunity

to show up?

Because it would be nice to be able to see that correlation and say, well, in Sunnyvale

they did this or in the other surrounding cities when they did this they had a certain percentage

of vacancy and then afterwards the percentage of vacancy decreased and if you brought that up

early in the report forgive me i missed it because i came in late so i appreciate the question i think

um you know did we specifically talk to city staff in those cities and ask them that question

i'll be honest no but um it is definitely something we can follow up with some of the

you know, the cities that we know have more recent, you know, done more recent updates.

I will caveat to say parking is often not the only thing that will bring in a tenant or business,

but it is a major factor. So there's often a combination of things that cities, you know,

do to try and streamline. Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm thinking a couple members

of city council might be interested in that. That's why I also brought that up just because

it's always good to have some sort of example or like you had the, which was awesome. I like it

when you anticipate some of the questions that we may ask,

and all of a sudden you have a slide just in case, right?

That's awesome.

And then the other basic question is for the city attorney.

Good to see you again.

When I look at the findings that the amendments are exempt from review

under the California Environmental Quality Act,

I've always wanted to ask this,

and it triggered my curiosity even more when I saw the article earlier today

on the View Voice where Los Altos is having some sort of lawsuit

over a sequel, quote-unquote, violation.

How do you all check that to make sure that it's not covered by CEQA?

Does a team check with the city attorney office?

And do they in turn check with a state agency somehow, somewhere?

Or how does that process work where you can say exactly what you just said, which is finding that the amendments are exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act?

So staff typically takes a look at what the action is and applies whatever categorical or statutory exemption, if one applies, and we work together closely on all the CEQA exemptions.

In this case, we've identified two bases for CEQA compliance, each as a separate and independent basis, but we do work together.

Great. Thank you. And I'm sure I should have asked that before, but thanks for the response. I appreciate that. Those are all my questions.

Commissioner Cranston.

okay so a follow-up to commissioner at the end i can i'm sorry i can't pronounce your last name

very well um so baranian um so i'm i'm trying to put this in in my head i'm thinking of

one of the places my favorite place for breakfast it's on middle field it's it's a little restaurant

kind of faces middle field but it's in one of these a lot of the buildings along middle field

are these kind of low, almost like an office strip mall kind of a thing,

and it goes back, and there's like six units beyond it.

If they wanted to rent the space next to the restaurant,

would they have to meet the parking standards,

even though the building doesn't have anywhere near enough space

to allow these kind of standards in anything

except the one that's facing the street?

or is it because the building already exists they could do it anyway or is it simply they

could not even i think to apply in those areas

if i'm understanding the question i'll start here um in terms of how parking standards are

applied to multi-tenant sites uh it's really when each use comes in we verify the parking is met

on some sites and i'll use the example as a shopping center they have one parking standard

applied to the whole center. So the independent uses, it's not triggered as much because as long

as they meet the five or six uses listed in a shopping center definition, then we don't have

to keep looking at parking over and over. For the multi-tenant sites, I know a number of them on

Old Middlefield Way in particular, we do have to kind of look at it case by case. I will say

the benefit of what we're trying to present here with the small footprint businesses is if you are

one of those four uses, we're not saying you have to add any parking or do any additional parking.

We're basically saying you have to meet the basic accessible parking on the site, which a number of

these sites might already meet, even if you have a new use go in. And you would also need to meet

the electric vehicle charging requirements under the building code.

all right uh looks like that's all the questions we'll move on to public comment for this item

if anyone in attendance would like to provide comments on this item please fill out a yellow

speaker card and provide it to the apc clerk if anyone on zoom would like to provide comment on

this item please click the raise hand button in zoom or press star 9 on your phone phone users

can mute and unmute themselves with star six.

Mr. Clerk, how many speakers do we have

either in aggregate, I guess, in person and online?

We have one speaker in person and one online.

Okay.

Can we do two and a half minutes?

Sure.

Would you like in person or?

Okay.

So first speaker is Tim Vago.

So my name is Tim Vago, and I am president of the Nicholson Company,

and we are general partner of the RankSorff Center up at 101 and RankSorff Avenue.

So just wanted to come in and kind of vocalize my support for these amendments

that are being made to the zoning.

You know, streamlining the codes is very important for us.

I mean, of course, having vacant spaces is deadly to us.

We want to be able to get our spaces filled as soon as we can.

And kind of what drove this in 2025 is that we had a possible tenant

that she was a resident of Mountain View,

and she wanted to open up a Pilates studio in our center.

And it just wasn't zoned correctly for that.

And so, you know, she had to start going through the CUP process,

found it burdensome and decided to, you know, move on to space in Sunnyvale.

You know, apparently that was easier and quicker for her to open it.

So, you know, they've come to us for outreach and we give them our feedback.

And, you know, so we just really appreciate the efforts that have been made to improve this situation.

And that's all I wanted to say.

Thank you very much for your comment.

Mr. Clerk, we'll proceed with the Zoom comment.

The next speaker is Peter Katz.

Peter, you should be able to unmute yourself.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Great.

Thank you, Speaker and esteemed Commissioners.

I'm Peter Katz, President and CEO of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce.

I first want to say that the Chamber really applauds staff and their efforts and urges

the EPC to recommend approval of these important changes to Council.

As was said earlier, the Chamber has been consulted a number of times, and overall,

we see a lot of this code cleanup as being overdue, necessary, and very beneficial, especially

to our small businesses.

Tim just gave one example.

I can give you many, many more.

As noted, some of the longstanding issues in the zoning code that are addressed here and raised in the economic vitality study have unfortunately become barriers to our ability to attract the kinds of businesses that residents want and need in Mountain View.

The zoning code needs updating to reflect modern business trends and to support the vitality of our commercial areas and retail centers, many of which have struggled to fill vacancies over the years.

The proposed changes will proactively remove zoning barriers and encourage a number of popular businesses to locate in our shopping centers and commercial areas, such as personal services businesses, indoor recreation, in-studios, and fitness centers.

In particular, the streamlined process for small format uses less than 4,000 square feet will significantly reduce the timeline, cost, and risk for small businesses wanting to open up Mountain View.

We often hear from our members that Mountain View has a reputation for being a tough town to do business in,

and that many desirable businesses are choosing to locate elsewhere.

These zoning changes will make Mountain View more competitive,

help us attract the kinds of businesses Mountain View residents want and need,

and they will go a long way towards demonstrating that Mountain View is a business-friendly city.

Let's keep it going.

We hope that the city will extend these changes to many of our precise plan areas where we've seen similar changes.

Again, we thank staff for responding to input from the business community and property owners and for working collaboratively with us and for all your hard work on this.

We are very excited to see this move forward to the city council for approval. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Katz. Mr. Clerk, any other speakers?

No more.

Okay. Then in that case, we will proceed to deliberation from the commission and then take action.

Any commentary or input from the commissioners?

Commissioner Gutierrez?

Yep.

I like the changes.

I like that there was an initiative there to engage with the community,

especially the business community in general,

but just overall to also find out what's going on around us so that you can

make the best decision possible to present to the EPC and then move forward

with suggested changes to the zoning codes.

One way or another, when you have that type of initiative

and proactive perspective, things do get done.

So I thank you for being able to look into that

and to bring us something here that we can all agree on

will help move the needle

and that you're also thinking about the future perspective

of how to incorporate this

within the other precise plans accordingly, right?

Based on workload and opportunity.

We don't know what that may look like for you all

because you all know your schedule better than we do.

but anytime you have the chance to do something like that at that level that would also be

appreciated and just a friendly reminder to members of the community like with the chamber

of commerce or other business owners in general that are interested in future potential sites

if you see and encounter issues with the city of mountain view and any type of the process you have

when you interact with us to open up a potential business and you see an opportunity to give us

constructive criticism we're here you can talk to us you can email us us or the team or city

Council, it's not like it's a one-way conversation, right? It's not just always initiated by the city.

Sometimes there's big changes also happen when we get that type of feedback along the way. So

we appreciate your time and patience with all that. Thank you, team.

Thank you, Commissioner Gutierrez. Commissioner Pham.

I want to thank staff for all the work here. It was a lot of work based on our read,

and it's great to have a lot of community support for this, and you explained the

motivations very well. So it was, you know, easy to understand and easy to get around. One thing I

would ask that you consider potentially for the council audience is some sort of language to

explain your guys' plan to expand this to the precise plan. I know that you mentioned it may

be impacted by workload or other priorities, but just some general paragraphs or thought about how

it could work out and what it may look like and schedule would be helpful for that council audience.

That's all.

Thank you, Commissioner Pham, Vice Chair Donahue.

I also think this is great. I think that it's clear that this is not something you just did

last week that it's taken a lot of effort to get here.

So thank you for that.

I think it really, well, hopefully will help the small businesses.

You know, that's, we'll see, but that's the goal.

And I think that's a worthy goal.

I think that the parking standard, I mean, Mountain View is a special city,

but I don't think it's special in how much parking is necessary for certain uses.

So I think that aligning with some of our kind of peer cities makes a lot of sense.

And other miscellaneous changes I think are also important.

One thing that stood out to me was replacing churches with religious institutions.

I mean, we have the Buddhist temple here, right?

I think being more inclusive in that way is great, and many of the other language changes, I think, are great. So generally, I'm supportive and good work.

Thank you, Mr. Vice Chair, Commissioner Dempsey.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me be stunningly unoriginal and say I also like this. And I really want to commend staff for putting so much good work into, you know, into code hygiene, which doesn't get the respect that it deserves. It's like actually really important to do cleanup.

So I love what you're doing here. I think the only, I wouldn't even call it a criticism, the only request I would make is I want more of this. I think it's valuable when you do this, and I would love to see it expanded to the precise plans.

In fact, you know, I'd love to see some, just as Commissioner Pham said, some conversation about when this might, you might be able to do that.

Because here's what I worry.

My worry is there's so many other things that the city has to do that when will the window open to do this again?

A year from now?

I think that's potentially a pretty significant loss.

Especially for the precise plan areas where we talk a lot about vacancy and we worry about those vacancies.

If this is going to be useful, if this is going to be helpful, like, let's take a good idea.

and have more of it. So anyway, bravo for that. The only part that made me worry was the reduction

in parking requirements. I always worry about that. A lot of times it's nothing we can do about

it. I do want to commend staff. You did an excellent job of explaining precisely why

it needed to be reduced and why that was a reasonable choice. It was probably the best

explanation of why we're going to do what we're going to do. So I thought that was fantastic.

And I just want to praise you for that as well. So good work. More of it, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Commissioner Cranston?

So I'm going to say first, I like the direction here.

So I'm going to come across as a little bit negative, but I need to give some context.

So I am a small business owner with 3,000 square feet of space.

When I looked at this, I did not immediately, when I saw small footprint land use streamlining,

I thought, oh, this is me.

This is not me, okay?

It is not me at all.

This labeling this as small footprint

is for consumer-facing small footprint.

And so let me walk through my concerns here.

So I agree with Commissioner Dempsey,

this needs to be extended,

but there's some things in here

that I don't believe we should be doing

because they would actually hurt someplace like me.

My business is I'm a small printer.

OK, I think of myself as more of a commercial printer.

It's not a copy shop.

I'm not a FedEx office, but I do business with consumers.

People want to I got a call today.

Somebody wants to do their wedding invitations.

Somebody's son got killed.

They need a poster for the funeral.

They need business cards at churches.

But I also do stuff for events and I do stuff.

I do graphics for business windows.

OK, so these kind of places that you're talking about here want to put something on the window

that says, hey, we're open from 9 to 5,

so I'll make the graphics for them.

So it's not, I'm not consumer-facing.

I'm more the business services piece.

And I looked through this, I had actually,

I went back to the beginning, I'm like,

did I miss something?

And I realized, yeah, this isn't me.

This is very focused on the things

that are consumer-facing.

And some of the things in particular

would actually make it harder,

in particular the parking standards, okay?

The extension of the parking standards

you're saying it's too it's getting too low it's the it's way too high okay i have 3 000 square

feet of space about 40 of my space today is equipment and inventory i'm trying to add another

piece of equipment that'll take me to over 50 of my space being equipment that means out of the

3 000 square feet i need to have 12 parking spaces and i have four employees okay there's a similar

business in Sunnyvale that's double my size, 6,000 square feet, and he's got eight employees,

and he lives with 10 parking spaces, saying that we need 250 square feet for these other areas,

and I don't have the delivery van and the trailer that he has, but he would actually have to have

26 parking spaces for something where he needs 10. So the extension, what I'm concerned about,

but I like the changes for the customer-facing pieces.

I am really concerned that extending these into areas

that were not part of what you looked at

is going to actually make it harder for somebody to actually move into the city.

There used to be a business like mine in this area, okay?

And it went out of business during COVID.

It hasn't come back.

A lot of printers went away.

But I could never, with these requirements,

I could never afford to have 12 parking spaces in addition to my 3,000 square feet.

OK, the definitions in here today that were the changes are being made.

Printers today. I have large format printers. I do window graphics.

I don't just I don't do it. I do quick copy. I do posters.

I do banners, you know, grand opening for my new restaurant.

OK, that's what I print. OK, menus.

I print those business cards for the people. I print those.

I'm not I'm not the consumer, but I'm serving one of those business services.

and the definition that's been in here for sort of looking for things,

I would not meet the criteria for what a printing business does.

I drove past a place that does the stuff you put on windows, like in cars,

where they want to tint their windows.

There's nowhere in these definitions that would cover that kind of a business.

I drove past one that does vehicle reps.

Is that a consumer-facing?

it's most of the time vehicle reps are being done for businesses.

They wouldn't fall in any area either.

So I'm concerned that for the areas that this is focused on,

which is the consumer-facing pieces, I'm in.

I'm really worried that the areas that weren't part of focuses

have not had sufficient attention to actually be incorporated

into the changes we're recommending to council.

And I think we need to go back and look at those

before we make the changes that go that far.

I'd be happy to give you my thoughts on the commercial printing business and the things that kind of touch that.

But I don't know somebody who does, you know, engine modifications or, you know, a lot of other things, a lot of stuff.

The reason I asked about Middlefield and the area over by the 237, 85 there, those are not primarily consumer facing streets.

okay yeah people can go in there get their car repaired um but there's a lot of other businesses

in there that are doing other things there's a i can think of a camera repair place there's

you know there's there's i mean there are some high-end vehicle repair locations but there's a

fair number that wouldn't fit in this and that's part of my reason for asking about the these strip

things because if somebody wanted to add another you know a landlord wanted to add a business to

fill up one of those spaces and had to add you know 20 parking spaces for businesses that don't

exist you know they would never be able to rent that space so i don't know how i don't know how to

feed fold that into this discussion because for the focus of the what i when i went back to the

beginning read okay this is the consumer facing stuff i like it i am really not in favor i'm not

on board with the extension of these things into areas that aren't consumer facing and because

they would actually make it. I could not move into Mountain View to do this. The business that

went out of business during COVID could not move back into the city under these rules as the way

they are today as a business services. So that's my, like I said, I don't, I like the consumer

facing piece. I'm in. How do we amputate the business piece or call it phase two for a follow

on to address these other areas that's what i would be that's what i'm worried about and i will

let staff tell me how we would do something like that but i i don't know that i could support this

as is without finding some way to amputate that portion for small business small footprint land

use phase two okay good yes steph uh any commentary on kind of in what ways business

services were accounted for in the plan or any kind of amelioration or resolution to Commissioner

Cranston's concerns there? Yeah, I'll just start by saying we're not here telling you that we're

done. Our code needs a lot of work. Our precise plans need a lot of work as well. As the assistant

director mentioned, speed was important, right? And the ability of what we could put together

and bring timely to respond to identified business community needs was important to us.

And so we didn't want to stop and try to do the omnibus code modernization process and be done in three years and have a bunch of businesses fail or vacancies remain and persist.

And so this is what we could do efficiently, effectively, and quickly.

And that's why we've brought it.

Receiving this feedback about what priority next step items would be is very helpful to us.

And so we'll take that feedback and put that into our work planning to the extent that we can.

Thank you.

Commissioner, Mr. Murdoch.

Yeah, Commissioner Guterres.

All right, cool.

So I have a quick question.

Now that Commissioner Cranston brought this up, Christian and team in general,

the way that Commissioner Cranston described his business,

was that under our terms and understanding for the definitions you gave us

as consumer interfacing businesses, would his business fall under that auspice

or is it something else?

Well, I guess part of the question would be,

so we have two different categories

he could potentially fall under for that type of business.

It could either be printing and publishing,

which is a use in our code.

We also have a use called business support services today.

And so there is some photocopying type uses that are in that.

And that's typically more of a business to business type of sales.

And so, you know,

those would be the two different uses that we would consider for the

description he gave for his business.

Thank you.

Okay. Then I will make commentary. I do like it as well.

You know, I, in particular, I'm very

receptive to the idea of making sure we can do something now rather than

yeah not being as nimble as we could be in the moment.

One thing I'm trying to glom onto as well,

Director Murdoch,

you said that there was an opportunity to,

you know,

kind of move forward by also,

I think as you mentioned in that vein of not being done,

yet, right, and us having an opportunity to kind of give affirmative feedback on what's the next

kind of priority area we would like to have the council look at or consider. Is that kind of

business service orientation something that we could, for example, you know, move this forward

with an additional kind of, you know, guidance from the commission that, you know, business service

distinguish or differentiation is a priority item that we'd like the council to consider as well?

Is that something that we'd be able to do as part of this action?

So I don't think we'll be able to add that work in, you know, to catch up to the council

process as part of this. I think hearing from the individual commissioners as we have about

other areas they wish could have been a part of this is as much as we need, I think, at this point

in time to think about how we might prioritize the next stage of work. There's already the need

to prioritize the precise plans for this work. And so again, you can see how this work can easily

agglomerate into a significant effort. And so we take these types of feedback and prioritization

from commissioners and try to factor them into how we lay out and prioritize our work.

Right. Because I also heard from Commissioner Pham and Dempsey some desire around some kind of

just directional input to council on, hey, we also want to understand a little bit more around

how this is going to expand on precise plans. And so, you know, I want to make sure that,

you know, if there's that majority sentiment on that, not necessarily imparting it as like,

hey, this is what the priority ought to be, but more like guidance from the commission on

what we think, you know, council should explore as that kind of next prioritization item,

more along those lines because I am hearing, you know, majority support here for this as is,

but I also want to make sure that I capture if there's majority sentiment as Commissioner Pham

and Dempsey are kind of indicating, which, you know, I wouldn't think is a bad idea as well.

And obviously understanding you have your own work cadence and, you know, structure that you

need to be mindful of, just trying to thread that needle there. Is that something that's possible in

terms of, because I know for sure I would agree, you know, I'd like to see some differentiation,

you know, in the vein of not being done here, right, in terms of facilitating business services,

facilitating, you know, a future with regard to how we're looking at the precise plans around this

without slowing this down. How does that land for you in terms of just like,

just possibility there. Right. So from my perspective, it's about hearing what's

important from the commissioners and then taking that back and figuring out how we can try to work

that into other processes, other work that we have to do. What I'm not able to do is commit to you

that what you provide feedback on tonight will become the priority. There's too many other

things I need to balance in that regard. Of course. Perfect. Good thing that's not the ask.

then in that case I am seeing majority support for this you know in terms of like I also share

that concern from Commissioner Cranston I'm also very amenable to Commissioner Fram and Commissioner

Dempsey's view on kind of expanding this to the precise plan just having some kind of understanding

on that Commissioner Cranston I will go to you in a second I just want to make sure Commissioner

Subramanian did you have any commentary on this before we thank you chair I'm generally in support

of what is being proposed here.

Okay, thank you.

Commissioner Cranston?

So I'm going to make a motion.

Is it possible for staff to pull up the exhibit

on the ordinance itself and go to page 39?

do we have a second

39 okay uh it looks like uh commissioner gutierrez is seconding so we have a motion

from commissioner kranston second by commissioner gutierrez yeah just letting staff know

okay so what i'm going to do is the is move that the addition and edit to the processing

production section be removed from the proposal in its entirety and reviewed at a future date

the biggest concern i have is in these kind of things all the business or business services

fall under these kind of things and these are the ones that to me um the change in the parking

requirements makes them infeasible in the city in its entirety so i believe these were my i believe

these were added um in with without it wasn't bad intention okay but i think the addition of these

is actually making makes it more difficult for businesses to come into the city and stay

than than they could have those and there wasn't sufficient diligence done on these things

to adequately to see whether or not this is a positive or negative so my motion is the section

starts processing production and ends on the next page at public safety facilities,

that that section be removed from the proposed draft going to council.

Yeah, so I wasn't aware that he was going to make that modification,

so I withdraw my request for the second.

Could I ask a clarification?

of the question Commissioner Cranston posed.

So without the addition of these parking requirements,

what does the current code require?

I appreciate the question, the clarifying question.

Currently, most of these uses would have

no independently listed parking standard

for the use listed.

But what generally and historically has been applied

is the, if you look on page 37, it's the manufacturing and industrial general parking

standard, which is the same parking standard as what has been delineated in that section.

So the intent of these amendments was to simply match, in this case, what historically has

applied to what the listed land use was. And so in our zoning code, just for further clarification,

In our zoning code, if there isn't a listed sort of parking standard at all, it does defer to the zoning administrator to essentially make an interpretation on the parking.

And often, if it's not a listed parking that's a similar sort of use that may apply, it would be a parking study that would be required.

So said another way, this was not intended to change the parking standard.

It was intended to add clarity and connect the dots between uses and parking standards.

Our code had a lot of gaps and inconsistencies.

And so this makes it clear that if you're one of those types of uses, you're very clearly associated with a particular parking standard.

There's less guesswork.

There's less chance for mistake, misapplication of some other standard or triggering a parking study that is a complex and costly endeavor.

Thank you for the clarification.

Commissioner Dempsey.

Yeah.

And this is to staff.

Maybe you did just answer the question I'm about to ask, and I'm being repetitive.

I just want to understand the practical implication of the change to the motion that Commissioner

Cranston had proposed.

If you could just put it into plain English for me, what it would mean to do what he said.

Sure.

I think it would result in those uses from the zoning land use side reverting to what's

in the code currently, which is a more generalized description of those kinds of uses without

very explicitly saying it's those uses from the use side. So when you go from the use to the

parking side, it's best to have a direct line from use to parking use and thus parking standard.

Currently, we do not have that for those uses. And so the line is squiggly, right, or fuzzy,

and it's not clear where you draw that to in terms of a parking standard. We try through training and

and common practice to be consistent, but there's a potential for misapplication because it's not

explicit that use A goes to parking standard for use A. Okay. So there'd be some net increase in,

in applicant confusion about what exactly the rule would be.

I think that's, that's our sense that it, this increases clarity and reduces the chance for

confusion or ambiguity. Okay.

Commissioner Cranston, I'm not seeing a second for the motion.

So if it's, I guess, how does it make it worse than what it is today?

It just, what I'm suggesting is don't change it for now.

It wouldn't be worse than what it is today.

But what it is today is not helpful or clear from the staff's perspective.

And this, as is proposed by staff, would at least improve clarity while we, you know,

endeavor to find a time in the future to do the work that you've described about

finding what's the appropriate parking standard that doesn't disincentivize these businesses and

enables them to function optimally all right i'm gonna um presume that um that motion will not have

a second um anyone else would like to make a motion or further the discussion

thank you commissioner gutierrez thank you chair um i move that we accept a recommendation by staff

for the small business streamlining and other minor minor zoning code amendments that's presented

thank you do we have a second

uh i'll second okay all right thank you uh vice chair donahue

all right i think we can put that on the screen commissioner uh guterres if you would like to

read a motion at the right appropriate time i think staff is ready

sure um i move that the environmental planning commission recommend the city council adopt an

ordinance of the city of mountain view amending chapter 36 zoning of the mountain view city code

to implement the economic vitality strategy by streamlining permanent processes for certain

active small footprint land uses, remove change or use permanent requirements, and reduce minimum

parking standards for retail and personal service uses, to make other modifications,

clarifications, and technical corrections throughout the chapter to align land uses

in the residential, commercial, and industrial zones with parking standards and definitions to

improve consistency and clarity, and to modernize definitions and land uses to align with current

business trends and finding that the amendments are exempt from a review under the california

environmental quality act as recommended by the environmental planning commission to be read in

title only further reading waived and parents attachment one to the staff report and parents

The motion carries.

6 yay and 1 no.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

Having completed the item, we will now move on to item 5.2,

mixed-use residential project at 490 East Middlefield Road.

First, we'll have a staff presentation, then questions by the EPC,

followed by public comment.

At the closure of public comment,

the commission will then deliberate and take action.

We'll begin with a staff presentation

from Senior Planner Jeffrey Sumura

and Principal Planner Diana Pincholi.

Real quick, we're just going to make a quick announcement.

This is just to let you know we have a desk item for EPC related to this project.

It is modifying the conditions of approval, which is attachment one exhibit A for the

proposed project.

the changes have been shown in Redline.

All right.

Good evening, commissioners.

My name is Jeffrey Cimura, senior planner.

I'm joined by principal planner Diana Pincholi.

Item in front of you tonight is a mixed-use residential project at 490 East Middlefield

Road.

Okay.

Okay, the project is on an approximately 2.86-acre site, is located on the northwest corner of East Middlefield Road and Ellis Street.

The site is currently developed with a two-story commercial office building.

The general plan designation is East Wiseman Mixed Use, and zoning is within the P41 East Wiseman Precise Plan.

The surrounding uses include office buildings of varying height, ranging from one- to four-story buildings.

The project is requesting a planned community permit and development review permit to construct an eight-story mixed-use building with 460 apartment units and ground floor commercial.

The project is approximately 391,775 square feet in size and includes a one-level at-grade parking garage with 442 stalls.

Additionally, the project is utilizing state density bonus law for a 27.5% density bonus above base units.

The project requests a heritage tree removal permit for the removal of 29 heritage trees with a proposed replacement of 173 trees.

The project also includes a request for a development agreement between the applicant and the city to utilize both the East Wiseman Precise Plan Residential Bonus FAR program and state density bonus law to develop the additional floor area.

As required under Section 36.54.15 of the City Code, the zoning administrator will separately consider and make a recommendation to City Council on the proposed development agreement.

So to clarify, the development agreement itself is not before the EPC tonight.

It's going to be subject to a recommendation by the ZA and will be considered separately by City Council.

As the project is providing approximately 15% affordable units, the project is eligible for a 27.5% state density bonus, so up to 100 bonus units from the 361 base units.

The applicant is proposing 99 bonus units for a total of 460 units.

The project is also eligible for up to one concession and unlimited waivers of development standards.

The applicant is requesting one concession that the applicant has indicated would result in identifiable and actual cost reductions to provide for affordable housing costs pursuant to state density bonus law to provide the BMR units as the smaller unit type offering otherwise required to be of comparable size to the market rate units per city code.

The applicant is requesting six waivers or reductions in development standards that would otherwise physically preclude the construction of the project at the density permitted.

This includes relief from the East Wiseman Precise Plan minimum six-foot Paseo requirements, minimum private open area dimensions, minimum bicycle parking, minimum common open space, minimum ground floor height, and full PUE dedication along the project frontage.

Staff has determined that the project cannot be constructed without these concessions and development standard waivers,

as full coal compliance would generally require a reduction in density bonus area.

The project includes fully affordable units at or below 80% of the area medium income, or AMI, and split between two income levels.

This exceeds the City's 15% BMR requirement and provides for a wider variety of lower-income units.

Pursuant to City's BMR ordinance, the affordable units shall remain affordable in perpetuity.

Aside from the unit size proportionality requested under the concession, the project complies

with other requirements otherwise applicable under the BMR ordinance, including distribution

of affordable units throughout the development and bedroom count proportionate to the market

rate units.

The site is comprised primarily of the proposed mixed-use building with ground floor commercial

uses along East Middlefield Road and Ellis Street. Surface parking and vehicle access is located

along East Middlefield Road at the southwest corner and Ellis Street at the northeast corner,

and a secure ground-level parking garage entry is also located near Ellis Street.

The primary residential lobby is along East Middlefield Road, which provides a mail and

package room, leasing offices, access to the parking garage, a secure bike room, and residential

upper level floors, which include shared outdoor amenities and interior common spaces.

The project features a contemporary design. It's organized around a second floor courtyard

with upper level roof decks that help break up the building mass. The building frames East

Middlefield Road and Ellis Street and emphasizes the key corner with active ground floor uses,

public artwork, and vertical articulation to support a pedestrian oriented streetscape.

Massing is stepped and articulated with balconies and decks to reduce perceived scale, and a lighter plaster palette with dark metal accents further softens the building's height and bulk.

The site contains a total of 112 existing trees, 25 heritage trees, 77 non-heritage trees, 5 heritage street trees, and 5 non-heritage street trees.

The existing tree inventory is largely composed of mature parking lot and perimeter trees,

many of which are in poor to fair condition due to constrained planting areas, proximity

to the building, and long-term conflicts with overhead utility lines.

The project will require the removal of a total of 107 trees, including 29 heritage trees,

four of which are heritage trees, heritage street trees, excuse me, and 78 non-heritage

trees, two of which are street trees.

Due to the poor health and growing conditions of the trees, as well as the comprehensive redevelopment proposed on the site to accommodate the building, and as well as site and frontage improvements, the tree removals are necessary for project feasibility.

There are very limited locations where existing trees do not directly conflict with the construction or the long-term building operations.

However, four tulip trees and one coast redwood are proposed to be preserved in place along the Ellis Street side where project conflicts are not anticipated.

The applicant proposes a total of 173 new replacement trees with a minimum box size of 24 inches

and proposed at a nearly 6-to-1 replacement ratio, which exceeds the City's standard practice for a 2-to-1 replacement ratio for heritage trees.

The new replacement trees are anticipated to create an on-site canopy coverage of 44.5% at full maturity

based on the project's site open space area compared to 35.6% of existing canopy coverage.

The project provides approximately 34,400 square feet of common and private open space,

including a second floor podium courtyard, roof decks on the fourth and seventh floors,

and landscape areas throughout the site.

Streetscape improvements include new detached sidewalks, landscape strips, and street trees

along East Middlefield Road and Ella Street, with additional planting within the parking areas.

While a waiver from the East Wismer Precise Plan open space requirements is requested,

the landscape design meets the intent of the Precise Plan by enhancing usability, greenery, and pedestrian comfort.

The project is within one half of a mile of a major transit stop and is therefore not

required to provide any parking per Section 36.32.50 of the City Code as well as the East

Wiseman Precise Plan.

The project is voluntarily proposing a ground floor parking garage with 442 assigned residential

spaces utilizing a stacker system with additional standard and accessible stalls and a dedicated

moving truck loading space.

surface parking accessible from Ellastree and East Middlefield Road is located along the north

and west sides of the proposed building with 20 spaces dedicated to residential use and 34

commercial parking spaces as well as three loading spaces. The project will meet all required electric

vehicle and accessible parking stalls per the city code. Per the precise plan, projects with at least

100 units are required to provide a transportation demand management plan or TDM plan with measures

such as maximum parking and car share requirements,

bicycle parking and membership

in the Mountain View Transportation Management Association.

The applicant has provided a TDM plan

and meets all the East Wiseman Precise Plan requirements

for residential TDM measures,

except for the minimum bike parking requirements,

which the applicant has requested a waiver for.

The proposed TDM measures would result

in a 14% peak hour reduction from all trips for the site

and aligns with the Precise Plan goals

of reducing vehicle trips

and promoting alternative modes of transport.

In addition, the project complies with the East Wiseman Precise Plant Streetscape Design Standards,

as the project is proposing an 8-foot-wide detached sidewalk,

as well as a 6-foot planter strip along East Middlefield Road and Ellis Street.

Additionally, new curb ramps and repainted crosswalks will be provided.

The project is determined to be statutorily exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act

pursuant to Public Resources Code Section 21080.66.

Standard conditions of approval have also been incorporated in the project resolution for additional site testing and a preliminary endanglement assessment to mitigate any potential hazardous materials to acceptable levels for future occupants.

Per the VMT policy, the project is statutorily exempt and VMT is considered not to be an impact pursuant to CEQA PRC Section 210.66.

During the review process, the project was reviewed at a design review consultation meeting on September 3, 2025.

Those recommendations focused on enhancing the streetscape, ground floor activation, landscaping, and improvements to the building's articulation to alleviate building mass, accent colors, and materials.

Subsequently, the applicant implemented changes in paint color and stucco textures,

incorporated additional landscaping to the retail courtyards,

and additional shading elements throughout the residential floors

to enhance the residential character of the building.

Typically, staff recommends that applicants host a neighborhood meeting for projects of this scale

to gather community input during the project review phase.

The meeting is not mandatory, but the project planner typically would attend the meeting if it is held.

the applicant had declined to conduct a neighborhood meeting for this project.

The project is tentatively scheduled for an administrative zoning hearing on February 11,

2026 for review and recommendation of the development agreement and City Council for

consideration of the EPC and ZA recommendation on March 10, 2026. I also want to note that

after the agenda for this hearing was published, staff identified some necessary modifications

to attachment one and exhibit A. Those are the project conditions to modify some of those

conditions based on applicant discussion. This includes modifications to conditions 5, 25, 33,

34, 45, 50, 67, 81, 84, 85, 127, 136, 138, 150, and 155. A list of the recommended revised

conditions have been provided to the EPC as a desk item for consideration tonight and posted

online for reference. In conclusion, the project is found to be consistent with the applicable

development standards, achieves general plan and housing element goals by increasing affordable

housing opportunities in the city, and helps meet the city's regional housing needs allocation.

Therefore, staff recommends that the Environmental Planning Commission recommend that the City

Council adopt a resolution conditionally approving the planned community permit, development review

permit and Harris's tree removal permit pursuant to the conditions of approval for the project

attached to the council report, along with the modifications to the conditions of approval

as described earlier.

The staff received one public comment on the item, which has been provided to the EPC prior

to this meeting via email, and it's also available on Legistar.

And this concludes staff's presentation, staff community, as well as community development

Director Christian Murdoch and Assistant Community Development Director Amber Buzinski is here

tonight available to answer any questions you have. The applicant is also here and they will

be making a presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Quick question around the precedence of that

is RAPC questions. I guess is there a desired time frame for the presentation from the project?

uh developer so our typical practice is to provide them seven minutes okay um sure

is that are you ready yeah

andrew take one um chair nunez uh vice chair donahoe and i hope i got that right i was trying

I'm Donahue or Donahoe. I wasn't sure of the two.

Members of the Environmental Planning Commission, my name is Brian Griggs, and I'm with my colleague Andrew Jacobson.

Andrew's going to take the lead really on presenting our project and some of the motivation behind it and why we're really excited to bring this before you tonight.

I'm going to take a quick moment to thank your staff, which has been really collaborative to work with.

We've been able to process this fairly quickly.

And I think you've really got some talent between Jeff and Diana.

And then the Public Works folks, Susanna and Quinn, have been just phenomenal, along with Christian and Amber.

So I commend you on the folks you've got.

And you should be really appreciated, appreciate what you have, because we work in a lot of different communities together.

But Andrew's going to talk about the project.

We're both going to be able to answer questions, whether it's about affordability or other aspects.

We kind of worked on it collaboratively.

But why don't you take over?

All right.

Thank you very much, Chair, Vice Chair, Commissioners. Really excited to present this project. I think the first image here kind of gives you the context of where the opportunity lied for us. We knew we wanted to provide housing. We knew we wanted to provide high-density housing. There's an amazing East Whistman precise plan, and there's realities on the ground today, which you can see is mostly commercial.

So what we took upon ourselves was we need to create a vibrant project here. And we actually kind of started at the ground floor and really started with how do we create a area and a project that will invite people into the retail.

And as you know, retail is very important for residential, the future of the precise plan, the future of the neighborhood, an amenity to the commercial now, and most importantly, amenity to the residential.

So if you go to the next slide.

So you can see is at the ground floor, we provided as much ground floor retail as possible.

And it will be our goal to bring in great retailers.

They're going to bring people from all over and hopefully bring other developers to develop residential around here.

I know it is typical to do as little retail as possible because it's hard to make work.

In our view, it's worth the fight.

One of our strategies for this project was also to pull people out of their units.

So as you'll see, the units are on the smaller side.

What that creates is a naturally affordable unit type.

And it creates a new typology for what's probably more typical in Mountain View, which is bigger units.

People stay in their units.

We look around, everybody is staring at their phones and their computers all day.

This is a building that's meant for community.

We want people out of their units.

We want people collaborating, hanging out at the pool, hanging out at the amenities, hanging out at the retail.

So next slide.

This is an image of the retail and how it actually coordinates with the gym and co-working space above.

So you can see what we try to do is bring all those amenities to Middlefield as much as possible.

So when you drive by, you feel a sense of vibrancy as opposed to privacy where a lot of buildings are very insulated.

The amenities are in the middle. You don't really know who's inside.

We really wanted to draw people out. So when you drive by Middlefield, you want to stop and go here.

Next slide. Here's a shot at night.

You know, the corner is where we're going to be working on some public art.

We have some work to do there, but we think that corner is going to be very important, not only for the project, but for the neighborhood.

And you can see we did try to break up the massing in terms of the retail, the residential, and how we finish it at the top.

Next.

So here's a floor plan of how the, this would be the top of the podium.

So how the pool, dog park, gym, co-working space actually flows throughout the project and how the units will have direct access to them.

You'll see we have quite a bit of storage.

So we had to think a lot of what are the repercussions of going with smaller units?

Well, one of them is storage.

So see, there's a healthy amount of storage, a very healthy amount of amenity.

our hope. And if we're actually successful in this, those amenities are where people will be.

They'll go to their units to sleep at night, but we want to drive them out as much as possible.

This is level three. There are some double height spaces. So trying to break up those floor plates

as well. So you feel more grand in some of the areas and it's not, doesn't feel like a big box.

and then level four we'll have a lot of outdoor space on top of the the podium and gym deck

and more in places to invite people to get out of their units and then on the seventh floor you'll

see a lot of different areas that a little bit more private you can book you know if you want

to have a party with friends or people hopefully in the community you can bring them in you can

book spaces and they're all outdoors. And again, the same theme of trying to bring it all off

middle field. So as people are driving down, they get a sense of vibrancy. That's it. A minute and

a half to spare. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Then in that case,

we'll proceed to questions from the commissioners. Commissioner Gutierrez.

Yeah, I have a question for the team. When I look at the EPC desk item, I need your help for

clarification to conditions being modified. The first one, which is five, we'll look at

community benefits package down in C. Five units, three studios at 90% AMI and two,

one-bender units at 100% AMI, in addition to the 15% 55 affordable units that are being

provided at a weighted average of 65% AMI to meet the city's below market rate affordable

housing requirement. These five units will be restricted to an affordability term of 10

or 15 years pursuant to terms in the development agreement. I need your help to understand that

last sentence. In plain English, what does that mean?

Good evening, Chair, Vice Chair, Commissioners, Christian Murdoch, Community Development Director.

What this is describing is an additional element of affordable housing proposed by the applicant.

Specific to the last sentence that you asked about, Commissioner Gutierrez, there are two potential terms for those units.

The base term that would come along with the project is the 10-year term.

There are other affordability provisions contained in the development agreement that's being contemplated.

that if the option for those is triggered by the city,

then the affordability term would extend from 10 years to 15 years

to align more effectively with those additional affordability provisions

that are contemplated in the development agreement.

Great. Thank you. I appreciate that.

And then I have two questions for the developer.

Can you please take the podium?

Great. How are you tonight?

Good. How are you doing?

Good, good, good. So I have a quick question. So why did you decline to conduct outreach

within the neighborhood and community?

So we did a lot of iterations on the design, a lot of work towards this. We went to designer view,

we made a lot of changes from that. And given the vicinity is mostly office, we just felt we've got,

We've done a lot of work. We've iterated a lot. And we felt we landed in a really good spot from a lot of feedback from staff. So it wasn't, we don't want to hear anymore. It was, we've spent a lot of work on this and we really want to move this forward.

Okay, great.

And thank you for clarifying that.

And then my other question is,

I understand you're wanting to have a certain type of community

and you have a vision.

You share that in a very professional way,

and I appreciate that so we can further understand

the vision behind the community.

My concern is you're focusing a lot with studio and one bedrooms.

Ideally, I would like to see what we don't have already,

which is more low-income, two-bedroom units,

and very low-income two-bedroom units.

Why the decision to go with zero for a low-income and 80%?

Sorry, so why to go to?

Yeah, why don't you offer two or three units,

two bedrooms for low-income and 80%?

Right here you have zero.

Am I understanding this incorrectly?

Page three to the staff presentation.

With zero at two.

please help me can you give this to him

oh it's the majority because thank you diana appreciate it

in the chart where you had the breakdown of percentages for what types of affordable units

you'll note that there's a zero there for two bedrooms for a low income and 80 percent or for

low income because we put them into very low income yeah so why so why not offer it in both

columns so go one and one like one two and two go two and two yep um i mean these these are we spent

quite a bit of work moving this around right so i would expect an answer then if you've done a lot

of work moving things around so you're saying two and two meaning four total yep well we only have

6% of the whole building is two bedroom.

So proportionately, it would be 6% of the units,

and we've done it as four.

So you're looking at it more from an economic perspective

and not a community benefit.

Yeah.

I mean-

That's all I need to know.

That's all I need to know.

Mr. Gers, can you speak into the microphone?

Can you repeat what you just said, please?

I don't even remember.

We have 6% of them are two bedroom units in the project.

We're proposing 4% for this and having the other ones be studios.

Okay.

So that's why then lies the issue for me.

When you propose community as a whole, I don't just look at it as an economic perspective.

I understand your perspective.

And I hope that developers will understand more of our city perspective.

For me, I would think at minimum, especially when you're going to have profitability one

way or another within this community because of the retail and the types of people that

you're trying to lure in there.

Two at minimum for low income at 8% I think is a reasonable number along with two at very

low income 50%. And why do I bring that up? Because I'm concerned. I am not in your position,

nor do I claim to know what your position is all about. But knowing that Meta laid off 15,000

workers, and the last two years, this area has had a strong number of unemployment numbers come in

that affect the very same people you're trying to target, studio and one bedroom folks, people

coming out of universities, either with a master's or PhD, or just joining the workforce. Man, I wish

you look. Whereas I know if you were to have a little bit more two bedrooms in general, I think

you would attract families, which is what we want and what we need, because we've had this type of

perspective in general years past. So that's why I asked the question. Thank you very much.

I respect that.

Okay.

Is that it?

That's it.

Okay. Yeah, I'm super presumptive that the applicants will be here for commentary as well.

So to the extent that we are able to keep this to questions for now,

commissioners are going to hit me at the end of this year.

I apologize in advance to everyone.

Commissioner Subramanian.

Thank you, Chair.

While we have the developers at the podium,

could I ask a couple of questions off you,

and then I'll turn to my questions to staff.

Thank you for your presentation.

Could you please share a little bit of the retail market study you conducted

as well as the residential market studies you conducted

and a little bit about the retail

or the type of retailers you expect to attract

to the spaces you're planning

as well as the residential market study

that determined your unit mix.

Yeah, great question.

Reality is on the market study of the retail,

if we had gone off the market study of the retail,

we would have said, don't do retail.

I mean, that's just the reality today.

What we need to do in this project is create a project within a project. And we need to create a project that can house retail and can lure retail in that will actually thrive. And how you have to do that is lots of unit, lots of density, and lots of vibrancy and people that tend to frequent retail shops.

What we imagine in this are cafes, food and beverage, first and foremost.

You know, we'd love to have small type market if possible.

It's a very tough business right now.

Hopefully that will change.

But first and foremost, we'll be focused on food and beverage and cafes and, you know, light bites and things like that.

And you'll see in the retail, we did actually flow that to the outdoors.

And so we do want to bring people outside, not just indoor retail. Our hope is I grab a coffee, grab food, and then come and actually hang out outside the project. In terms of why we went with this unit mix, we did cater this for single people and couples.

I completely agree on this is not geared towards families. This is not geared towards people who want to be insular and stay inside their home. We're really looking for a specific tenant who actually wants to thrive in community, which we feel in Silicon Valley is lacking. And that's where we see the opportunity to be completely honest.

thank you um next question could you talk a little bit about your uh decision around the

building aesthetics um and the choices you made with regards to materials and color composition

yeah i mean i think if you look at the design when we first started to where we landed

um it was a little bit more plain a little bit simplified when we went to design review we got

a lot of great feedback. Where we went with that was a little bit more warmer colors. I think one

of the biggest moves we made was actually adding quite a bit of balconies. Same idea of bringing

people towards the outside of the building. So when you drive by, it looks like a community that

people live in. And then adding that double height space at the top, we thought really broke up the

passing. Thank you. Did you conduct a study of the surrounding neighborhoods and the newer

buildings that have come up in Mountain View and consider their palates? We considered the

areas directly around it. You know, our view on this, to be honest, was come with something

completely different and something new that isn't typically seen in Mountain View. This is

probably a bit more of an urban typology than I think exists in Mountain View, which is more

everything kind of gets brought to the ground. There's walk-up townhomes and units on the ground

floor, less retail. So I'd say to some extent we did. A lot of our thinking was how do we bring

something new to the city? Thank you. I have a few more questions for staff. So in your presentation,

Jeff, I think you noted that the current mix as proposed provides 15.23% of affordable units.

But when I run a quick number of 60 over 460, I get 13%. So could you clarify that?

Staff will confirm.

I think that's based off of the base density, not the density for the project.

Yeah.

Thanks for your question.

And thanks for clarifying.

That is based off of the base units on the project, which is 361 units.

Okay.

Okay, so the base was considered on the 360 without the density bonus being added to it.

And so the 28% was all of the 55 without the five additional units.

So the 27.5% bonus is what brought the project up to 460 units total.

So that's the additional 99 units.

Got it.

I did not see specific mentions to what alternate was being proposed.

There was some mention of no public utility easement being provided.

So could you speak a little bit to the overhead line and what's being recommended for the utilities?

Yeah, I think a representative from Public Works is able to assist with that question.

Good evening, commissioners. My name is Renee Gunn. I'm a senior civil engineer in the land

development section of Public Works. So typically for this project, we would ask for a 10-foot wide

public utility easement along the frontage of the project. And that's to put in PG&E,

transformers, other things of that sort. In this case, they provided us with a, excuse me,

a detailed plan that shows exactly how much space they need, and then are carving out the easement

to follow the space that they actually need. This is a common exception that we allow.

thank you for the clarification um those were all the questions i had thank you chair

thank you um commercial crownson

okay a few questions um the commercial parking is in the back of the building

with the retail spaces on the front so there's no none of the none of the spaces for people going

to the retail or inside the building or right in close proximity?

There's just like there's stackers directly behind all of the retail spaces.

Correct.

So there, if you look at the ground floor in the garage itself, there wouldn't be access

for somebody going into the retail to go through the building.

So you can think of that garage as a secure access for the residential.

The at grade around the building is for the retail.

So if you were to go into the garage and you don't have a key to actually

fob into the building, you'd actually have to go out of the garage around.

And so it's actually be further to be in the garage than outside the building.

So all the retail has access from outside the building.

And right now there is no space that's allowed for delivery vehicles?

Yeah, there's delivery vehicle.

There's space.

There's a space for moving and moving out.

But the lobby and the mailroom are in the front,

and there's no parking anywhere near that for Amazon or UPS.

Yeah, we've not.

We have.

Yeah.

Where would that be?

There's handicap parking and bike parking

directly behind the mailroom and the package room,

as shown on the plans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah in the top left it wouldn't be designated solely for the retail i mean

there would be some coordination on that but it's you know most retail deliveries are done

in the early mornings or are you talking about like for like doordash or uber is that what you

mean or are you talking about delivery to the retail deliveries to the retail deliveries to

the mail room. It looks to me like all deliveries would have to be from LS or from Middlefield.

Yeah. So we could designate one inside for the mail. But in terms of delivery for the retail,

yeah, there's a loading zone in the back there, back left, right?

So it's located, if you're looking at the site plan right here, there is a cross-hashed parking

space coming, you know, where it says garage access from the, from the rear, there is a

loading space right there.

Yeah.

So in retail space, A, they're going to have to have the delivery truck park way down to

that end of the building and walk all the way around, deliver their stuff.

Yeah.

Okay.

What's the height of the, of the parking in that first floor?

14 feet.

14 feet.

How tall are UPS trucks?

Steph, do you know what that is?

Could they come into that space?

Question for Steph.

the...

I thought that

all new projects had to be

electrical, all electric today. Is that not

the case?

Commissioner,

I can't make out your comments.

If you could repeat that, please.

So I thought

the city required all new developments

to be 100% electric today.

So that's

not a requirement that the city is able to

enforce any longer pursuant

to a federal court decision.

from a few years ago. What we have contemplated in the development agreement context, which again

is not within the purview of the discussion tonight, but for context, is to seek to design

the building with as much all-electric, as many all-electric systems as possible, save for some

of the common area like fire pits, pool, spa heaters, and so forth that really don't function

like that, as well as the retail space cooking appliances that might be needed for a restaurant

with gas fuel. So a strong intent from the applicant to maximize all electric design for

the building. So a question before I go on to the next question. So aren't we supposed to consider

this and it's entirely including the community benefits component? So it's a great question.

And the terminology here matters.

So the community benefits are a component of the East Wisdom Precise Plan that are a requirement for the bonus floor area ratio.

The public benefits are additional benefits for the community, but they're not community benefits per se, based on the definitions and terminology.

So the public benefits are in the development agreement context and within the purview of the zoning administrator to recommend to city council.

community benefits for East Wisdom Precise Plan bonus FAR are prescribed, and we've summarized

how the applicants propose to satisfy those requirements. Okay, so the East Wisdom Precise

Plan includes something that says that individual unit metering can be part of the community

benefits of the East Wisdom Precise Plan? So those are requirements for the bonus FAR. It's one of

the components related to sustainability and what have you.

I guess it's been a while since I've looked at that.

So the, so is the ZA going to look at,

review the stuff that's in this proposed list and then decide whether or not it

meets the criteria? And so if we went to talk about that,

we have to go to the ZA meeting. Is that correct?

So what's shown here, for example, in the desk item condition number five is not per se part of the development agreement public benefits.

There is some overlap like in 5C is an example where this meets certain requirements of the Eastwood's been precise plan community benefits, but are not required minimally.

And so they exceed the community benefits requirement and therefore are also considered a public benefit in the development agreement context.

There's nothing that the commission will discuss tonight that will necessarily need to be a part of the zoning administrator's review of the development agreement.

It's an independent consideration of that item.

The letter from the applicant outlining the community benefits is not something for us to discuss.

So maybe I can chime in.

I think, Commissioner Creston, you're asking about attachment seven to the staff report, which is the community benefit contribution letter.

that does respond to what the applicant is proposing

in exchange for getting additional FAR

under the East Wisman Precise Plan,

and you can comment on that.

A question for the applicant.

How did you come up with this $1.2 million tenant improvement fee?

Sorry?

How did you come up with this $1.2 million tenant improvement?

um it's calculation on what it will probably cost to get it to a space where we can actually lure

great tenants in you know if you build this as is open it up as a cold shell you're probably not

going to get a lot of interest so our intention is actually build it out a lot further than

what most retail would normally build it out so that we can lure tenants in they can make it

financially feasible. They'll either have a lot of runway so they can say, okay, I'll come in.

And as this building fills up, I'll be able to ramp up or they can put more money into the space

to thrive. So that was the intent for it. And so a question for staff, can the ZAs say that

there's a time limit on these things or how does that work? Just as 1.2, the building that I'm in

has retail space. I just moved into a space that was vacant for eight years. And so I'm just

wondering how could this money sit there for eight years? Sure. I'll start by maybe talking

a little more about what this item is as well in the East Wisdom and Precise Plan context. So

there is discussion of alternatives to fee payment, which can include support for small

businesses. So as part of the negotiations for the development agreement, the applicant

in the city worked through this contribution to support business operation. And the applicant is

also proposing to pay the per square foot fee that the council's adopted for the community benefits.

So the small business contribution is additive to the per square foot bonus floor area ratio

fee payment as well that the applicant will be providing. Related to your specific question,

yes, the zoning administrator can consider particular terms and time limits associated

with this contribution as part of the recommendation to city council.

And then this optional master lease, where the heck did that come from?

What is that?

So the question was related to the optional master lease.

Anything, this option to lease 60 additional units was like, what?

What's that?

So that's a purely development agreement term.

So not subject to the commission's recommendation tonight, but for context, that is a negotiated component of the development agreement as a public benefit related to affordable housing.

There are terms that will be provided in the development agreement that contemplate a standalone agreement being prepared if that option is triggered that would allow for more of those units, the block that's being negotiated to be provided at affordable income levels and potentially for the city to provide a rent guarantee so that if for whatever reason the rents are below what's negotiated, the city will make the developer whole at that affordable housing income level.

But in the event that the city chooses to lease them in different configurations that could deepen the affordability, the city may be able to actually subsidize those units by renting some of those block units at market rate, for example.

So it provides a lot of flexibility for the city to really target affordable units at income levels where they're needed.

How would the value of that be determined in order to assess how it fits into meeting the East Vision Plus plan goal?

Yeah, it's a challenging discussion to try to figure out the valuation of that block lease. That's why we have not ironed out all of the terms of what that agreement would look like at this point in time. There's just not enough time in the project entitlements phase of this to iron all of that out.

We have, you know, in our working on the contours of that to get key provisions identified, but knowing all the details would need to be worked out in that subsequent agreement if the city triggers the option.

And then a question for staff.

In the front of the building, you can pull that plan back up.

The size of the grass area between the street and the sidewalk on the metal field, what is that distance?

Like kind of where that pedestrian access arrow is, what's the distance of that between the curb and the sidewalk?

plan i'm seeing the landscape area looks to be six feet wide

you're talking about the green strip or yeah yes six six feet on the plans that i'm seeing

sheet a 4.6 so if the commission wanted to put a delivery space in that that would be a

specific deviation from the east westman precise plan in other words to cut out the grass and put

a place for delivery vehicles like ups trucks and amazon trucks yeah perhaps our public works

staff can talk about um how that might work in relation to right-of-way management

good evening again commissioners again my name is renee gunn

with the Public Works Department.

So we did actually look at that as part of this design process.

There are also plans for Middlefield Road to put in some new bike lanes,

which are needed along the way there.

And so when you start putting in duckouts there,

you start introducing conflicts between bicycles and pedestrians and the vehicles.

vehicles and the bicyclist. And that's why we pushed for any of that delivery activity

to happen on site on their at-grade parking and those delivery areas, because through a CIP

we're working on, that will all be turned into a buffered bike lane.

so but epc could say we get it but we want it anyway i'm my my question is specifically at the

last meeting um mr anderson raised the issue that the city is seeing on evelyn in front of the

fruller mark project the issue that i see every week in front of the dean okay which is it doesn't

matter whether it's not supposed to be parking there it says no parking but the delivery vehicles

or parking in the bike lane on Evelyn and on San Antonio.

So if we said we want to do it anyway, would you say, I mean, is that, are we allowed to

say that?

Right.

I think I need to remind the commission that as frustrating as it may be, and as much as

we've heard it on recent projects, we don't have an objective standard for this type of

loading zone or delivery zone.

And so this would need to be something the applicant would propose as part of the project.

and it's not currently part of the project.

And so I'd caution the commission

against imposing some requirement on this project

that's not an objective standard

and that's not something proposed by the applicant.

So the width of the grass zone

is something for the applicant?

It's not part of the East Whistlin Precise Plan?

Well, I think I'm hearing you describe

some sort of carve out there for deliveries.

I'm saying if we said we're okay deviating from the East Whistlin precise plan and cutting the grass out in the section in front of the mailroom and where the boxes are to allow for place.

So to me, that sounds like it would be us saying we are okay with a deviation from the East Whistlin precise plan to not have a grass strip in that section of the street so that there's a space for there.

it's not an applicant thing it's us saying the precise plan we're okay with the deviation there

is that not clear well i think the commission can express whatever flexibility it may want to allow

i think i understood the dialogue to suggest that um there may be desire to require that as part of

the project and i'm cautioning the commission that there's not an objective standard to allow

the city to require the installation of such a delivery parking space. And if I may just add to

what Director Murdoch just said, the six foot landscaping requirement is the direct requirement

in the precise plan streetscape plan for Middlefield Road. So that will be a deviation

from the adopted streetscape plan that we have in the precise plan. That's what I thought. Thank you.

My first question is, how does stacked parking work?

I haven't come across this before, so I'm just kind of curious.

Yeah, I can start and then maybe if the applicant can support further.

Thank you for the question, Diana Pancoli, Principal Planner.

We have stackers in a couple of projects in Mountain View.

There are different configurations of how stackers can work,

different type of puzzles that can work in moving the cars,

which are just stacked, and one of the space will be empty.

So while people are moving the cars around, it can go down, it can go up.

they have proposed a particular type of stacker at this point of time,

but I think the final details of what kind of stacker actually goes in,

is decided later on during the construction detailing

in order to understand the feasibility, the costs associated with it.

But there are different types of stacker systems that exist that can be used.

okay yeah i'm just kind of curious about how yeah just how it works problem um we've got them in

two projects now and generally it's it's much as what diana said we're actually doing a puzzle

system that goes down so there'll be a pit where if you come in your main uh garage level you'll

you'll you'll pull into a stall and that stall will either go up mechanically and then the bottom

on a lift and there could be a car in that or it could go down um you end up having about they

range in size between 24 and 32 in a pod and you always have one vacant so you can always program

your car in and if you're install you know four down here you put a certain code in and the

mechanically will come down what it enables you to do is not raise the height of the building by

having to do a second level of garage parking and it also because we have 14 feet it actually fits

you go down about seven or eight feet and you go up to 14 feet.

And so I think it's not cutting edge by any means.

It's being used pretty commonly now, especially in infill close to transit.

It does allow us to get the number of parking stalls, which we are able to provide.

Okay.

And so it can accommodate like a seven-foot vehicle or something?

Yeah, there's different size.

Yeah.

Suburbans usually are tough.

We're not doing 100% stackers by any means, but it'll probably get about 80,

85% of the car. But yeah, it's not just sedans. It'll fit like kind of average size SUV.

Yeah. Mini SUVs are SUVs. Yeah. Not full size SUVs. Okay.

Cool. Okay. And that all meets our parking standards and it's legit.

so this project is not required to provide any parking they are providing voluntary parking so

they will be subject to build it to our parking standards that is a condition of approval and the

applicant will have to abide by that okay um great well it's yeah innovative ways of doing things

that's great um okay the other question i had was that came up while i was reading and then we

actually got the public comment on the same thing. The people who live in apartments don't

have backyards, so their backyard is the public parks. And so that's why the Quimby Act allows us

to have a parkland dedication ordinance, and we do. But it doesn't appear as though they're

subject to that? Or talk to me about the park in lieu fees or dedication.

I can take that one. Selena Chen on behalf of the city attorney's office. So the city's current

parkland dedication fee is authorized under the Quimby Act. It's codified in chapter 41 of the

city code and it was the city's authority to require the dedication of parkland or the in lieu

fees is legally limited to residential subdivision projects so if there's a tentative map or a parcel

map approval that's required at this point we can impose a parkland dedication requirement this

project does not have a residential subdivision so there is no parkland dedication requirement

that applies to this project. Oh, wow. That's very interesting. Okay.

And I'll just add, that's something the city's working very hard to correct or to update and

supplement. And so just today, actually, the council finance committee considered a nexus

study that would impose a mitigation fee act fee that would allow the city to impose park fee

requirements on rental housing projects and potentially non-residential land use types as

well. So that work is ongoing. And at some point in the near future, I would expect the city would

have a fee in place to address residential development projects as well. Okay. Rental

residential projects, I should specify. Right. So like condominiums would,

would, if this, these were condos, the exact same project condos, they'd have to pay.

Correct. Oh, okay. Interesting. Well, I guess that's the way it is. Thanks.

Thank you, Vice Chair Donahue, Commissioner Dempsey.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I just have one question, and it's really for staff. I was hoping that you could help me understand the concession. And by that, I mean precisely what it is we are conceding.

I read it. I read the definition here four or five times and I still didn't have a proper mental

model in my head of what this meant. So I was hoping y'all could explain it.

Yeah, no, thank you for your question. So a consension or an incentive is essentially to

request an exception for a monetary restraint against the project, a financial burden on the

project. And then waivers are physical constraints to make the development otherwise infeasible

at the proposed number of units that are being proposed.

Right. So I think what I'm asking is this describes a smaller average floor area,

product type than would otherwise be required. I'm trying to wrap my head around precisely what

that is. And maybe it's better directed to the applicant. I want to understand what this is.

It's driven, and I break this up just because of the numbers. We have 50% of the units

of studios um of those 240 208 of them are smaller square footage they're 409 feet just

because of where they're placed in the building yeah so about 80 percent or almost 90 percent of

them are this what we call type a and then we have a studio type b that's 460 feet versus 409 feet

and we only have 22 of those so if you look at the average of the studios they're 414 feet because

they're weighted to the smaller footage. So we're asking for a concession to put them all in Studio

A because we have such an abundance of those versus the Studio B. There's about a five square

foot difference. So the average is 414. Studio A is 409. So the footage isn't dramatically different.

But because we have such an abundance of them, we want to put those as the below market rate.

Okay. And we just have a bigger, there'll be 22 for market rate that are a slightly different

floor plan. And the same is true on bedrooms A. There's a three square foot difference between

the average. We have 44% of them are one bedrooms. So we have 614 feet and model A 690. The average

of that's 617. So there's a three square foot difference. But again, from a marketing standpoint,

we'd like to have that bigger other product type. And then the question that Commissioner Gutierrez

said was really of the two bedrooms, you know, there's the average is 300, or excuse me, 837

feet. And we're asking to put the units in the 818 feet. So it's just a slight, it seems more

than it really is mathematically, I think, but it's more from a marketing standpoint to make sure we

have a bigger variety. Okay. Just out of curiosity, is there a, is there a floor on how small you

could make a BMR studio apartment? Studio, yeah. The ordinance-

Could you make it?

The ordinance requires, without an incentive, that they have a commensurate amount of bedrooms,

which we do, and a commensurate square footage. So in theory, you could do a 200-foot studio

if you used an incentive for that. We could have produced all of our studios as 200 feet.

But, you know, for a variety of reasons, one of which is equality.

You know, we want to make sure that people were hoping and you'll see they're distributed on the plan set if you got it throughout the floors, throughout the distribution of the floors, which we, again, feel is important for the affordable unit to not necessarily have someone who's paying market rate next to you.

We don't want that differentiation.

Okay.

Thank you for indulging my theoretical question.

I'm not in any way suggesting you've gamed it.

or anything like that.

It appears to be they're pretty close.

No, and we're proud of the way we've done it

because with an incentive, you can game it.

That's what I worry about.

You could put them all in the second floor.

You could make them all small.

And unfortunately, you could get away with it.

But that's just, my partners and I,

that's not what we want to do.

No, understood.

And thank you for, again,

indulging my theoretical wandering.

It's a complicated issue.

We spend a tremendous amount of time

with Wayne Chan and the housing department getting to this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Commissioner Dempsey.

Commissioner Pham.

I just had a few questions.

A lot of my questions were already asked by other commissioners.

First question for staff, more of a general question.

With all the conditions of approval and the items

and the development agreement, how do staff track them?

It seems like some of these come into play at different parts

or different points in the project or even after?

Thank you for the question, Principal Planner Diana Pancholi.

So community benefits, if you look at the conditions of approval

for every kind of community benefit, there is a set timing

of when that community benefit will be delivered to the city.

Similarly, when we have the terms figured out in the development agreement,

they also have the delivery timing for each of the public benefit.

So community benefits, usually, you know, we have like, you know, within this much time frame of the project approval, the applicant shall provide this or within this much time of the building permit.

So the project planner will be tracking that for the community benefit part.

For the public benefit and a DA, we do have an annual reporting of the DA.

You know, when you have a multiple year DA, you need to send us a letter and say, you know, what you have done, what has not been done, where you are.

So we keep a track of that. Of course, the project planner is going to be tracking that as well. But so we have record in the conditions of approval in the development agreement terms itself. And then we have the annual reporting as well.

All right. Thank you. Another question I had was related to the tree removal. I think it was page four of the slides. The figure looks, I think, worse than it is, especially since there's a lot of tree replacements, which is a good thing.

My question, maybe for the record, is of the trees removed, what percentage is either like poor or critical versus like good in terms of the condition of the tree?

Thank you for your question. I don't think we have an exact percentage handy, but you know,

per the Arbor's report, the majority of the trees were in poor, fair to poor condition. And again,

that's just based on the site constraints, a lot of narrow planters, a lot of trees that were grown

or planted too close to each other, and then issues with proximity to the building.

Okay. How were the 173 trees slated for replacement? What determined the mix of trees that were going to be used?

well it's a so it's a selection based on um uh you know it's applicant proposed um

we always have the the preference that they be california native which a majority of them are

and to meet the qualifications of a heritage tree replacement we ask that they be minimum 24 inch

box which they are so they have those 173 trees have met the requirements of heritage tree

replacement. In addition to that, we also have street tree list for street trees that needs to

be, you know, planted when you are coming in with a new project. So that's what we,

what we confirmed that, you know, what is being proposed is going to match the street tree list

as well. Okay. Last question. This was based on one of the last bullets in the community benefit

contribution letter, I think it was attachment seven, spoke about wayfinding between the project

and Pyramid Park, which I think is great. Is there any thoughts about wayfinding to some of the VTA

stations nearby? Well, that particular component was contemplated in relation to applicant

contributions related to parkland specifically. And so there's a nexus there for purposes of the

negotiation to guiding people to Pyramid Park to utilize that park space. The negotiations

have not contemplated similar wayfinding over contributions to install wayfinding to transit.

Okay. Thanks.

all right um ask some questions um i guess mostly for staff i i can't remember this might have

happened while i was on the commission or it might i don't like it just it seems like i can't remember

um the last time a desk item situation came up um maybe i'm like just like

unmeritoriously weirded out about it but it just seems a little like

i don't know like i guess i guess i'll ask a broad question like what are desk items like

what's the governance around them like like how and why um and what can be done with them

um vis-a-vis the brown act and what can't be done sure thank you chair um i think to start

I'll just remind the commission and the community about the challenging timelines under which the city is obligated to process housing development projects, specifically under Assembly Bill 130.

A very stringent timeline to take final action within 30 days of certain processing triggers is now in effect.

Fortunately, we've been able to work with the applicant to extend some of those timelines.

But nevertheless, it's an aggressive schedule combined with the additional work of negotiating a development agreement.

And so what this desk item reflects is an ongoing effort to collaborate with the applicant to find conditions of approval that meet mutual needs of the city and the applicant and the project.

What happened here is subsequent to sharing conditions, the applicant had comments.

We weren't able to address those prior to publication.

There are a whole host of conditions we were able to address, which you'll never know about because we got them into the draft resolution and conditions that you see.

But this reflects the ongoing work and collaboration to try to get the project as close to a place that there's no disagreement, ideally, between the city and the applicant.

In terms of governance, you know, we published these on the website.

We've made copies of the bill for the public concurrent with the distribution to the commission.

And so they're in the record.

They're fair game to be discussed.

And so, you know, we feel confident in the approach that we have in front of you.

It's not ideal, but it's just a reflection of the challenging circumstances.

So like, I think I appreciate that. I guess like I'm trying to understand in just like plain terms, like what's what's what's kosher, what's not right. And if if we are not subject to this law around, you know, the 30 day time frame, it stands to reason that we might be seeing more desk items situations in the future.

And so if that's the case, I think it's just good to get a brief kind of sense of like, for example, is it okay to say that theoretically, right?

I know this is not actually, I know we have requirements for us, but just, you know, in a vacuum here, like, oh, the project is going to offer, you know, I don't know, 30% below market rate units.

and then here's a desk item, the project will offer zero.

I'm not saying that's what's happening here,

but I'm just trying to understand what's allowable,

what's not, what's best practice, what's not best practice.

Can you just help me understand that?

Sure.

So maybe to tackle the hypothetical worst case scenario,

this is not an intention to bait and switch

and put something really favorable in the published version

and then reel it back at the last minute

in a way that's maybe less visible to some members of the community. What this reflects is ongoing

collaboration, desires to clarify things that maybe are unclear, to maybe correct errors that

sometimes occur given the volume of the work and the time that staff has to do it. People make

mistakes and so we correct mistakes. Sometimes applicants bring to light legal opinions that we

need to contemplate as well to manage risk for the city. So all of those are examples of things

that need to be addressed in a desk item of this sort. It's not ideally intended to make major

changes to key project components. And so we do our best to avoid that. But any range of issues

could come up in this type of context. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate it's an intent to

collaborate i guess i'm looking for clear-cut examples like i and again not necessarily focusing

on this specifically is my question i'm trying to understand in clear terms like where's the line

that we should be looking at for as commissioners or you know and if people are here gone to whatever

like what's the line in terms of like where a desk item goes into like just something that's

like a non-noticed thing if that makes sense like because for example right here if if i want to use

this example like if i was someone who cared way more about birds which i like whatever birds are

fine but like no i'm not trying to like like you know it says here like hey a qualified biologist

will come and conduct a survey of the project site and then in the original version it said

and surrounding 500 feet for active nests and now we're striking that out and in the prior

prior version it said if active nests were observed either on the project site or the

surrounding area like you know i'm not a bird expert but like what if that's a critical radius

and and that seems to me like a substantive strikeout to be making again i'm not the bird

champion but like how how can i why should i be okay with like that um yeah like and i'm looking

for comfort here right like why should i be okay with that maybe i can give you a little bit of

background of what happens when the this kind of a desk item is prepared when we publish the

conditions of approval a lot of the conditions of approval have been based on historical um you

know, knowledge and experience working on different projects.

But, you know, as of last few years, we have been challenged consistently to figure out,

you know, under the Housing Accountability Act, we are really subject to only objective

development standards in our code.

If we have a standard condition which doesn't have the objective standards, we don't have

a legal ground to require that.

and the example that you're using for the, say, the pre-construction nesting bird survey,

we don't have an objective standard for 500 feet. At some point of time, we worked on a project

which, you know, the applicant agreed there were some environmental conditions and we had the

purview under CEQA to require that. Unfortunately, in this particular project, this is an example

where we don't. Because our code doesn't say that an applicant will be required to do this,

We don't have the authority to do that. So the cleanup items that are here, you will see in a lot of places, staff has just referenced the actual code section to say applicant will be subject to this. So there is no ambiguity in what is discretionarily put into the condition from staff or the city's enforcing it.

Thank you. So it sounds like it's an objective, standard driven, significant. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. I don't have any other questions.

I forgot it was chair.

So therefore, we will move on to the public comment section.

Cool.

If anyone in participation would like to provide comments

on this item, please fill out a yellow speaker card

and provide it to the EPC clerk.

If anyone on Zoom would like to provide comment

on this item, please click the raise hand button in Zoom

or press star nine on your phone.

Phone users can mute and unmute themselves with star six.

Mr. Clerk, do we have any speakers either in public

having submitted yellow cards or on the Zoom line.

There are no requests to speak in person or online.

All right, perfect.

Then in that case, we will proceed

to EPC deliberation action.

We have the staff recommendation

and I'm now looking for commenters.

All right, Commissioner Gutierrez.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Chair Nunez.

This is Commissioner Jose Gutierrez speaking.

So I like the design.

I like that the community perspective on what this could look like will hopefully influence the type of community you want to build.

And when I've looked at design projects in general that have come in in the last couple of years,

they seem to be the same old, same old, right?

It's a modified version of what I see in housing in certain other parts of the world,

where it's just a square and some amenities to the square on top of the square.

And so this doesn't have that feel at all, which is great, because then I think that's going to help your cause for trying to get those units filled, right, with the community that you're pursuing.

So from the design perspective, I appreciate that.

I know there's debate around, well, is there loading spaces available for UPS or Amazon?

Some places have them, some don't.

In my neck of the woods between California and Reinsdorf, we've got a test pilot project where you've got bike lanes on both sides.

They have eliminated driving lanes to just have one going this way and one going that way.

In the middle is a turn lane.

and there are spots designated for loading and unloading,

which are not being used by Amazon or UPS or FedEx or DoorDash

or whomever you have stopping by to drop stuff off for you.

And I'd like to see enforcement on that, but I'm not city council.

But for you not to have as much of that, that's on you.

That it was brought up, hopefully you'll factor that in

because for this larger type of a community,

you're going to have that as an issue one way or another.

So if it's still in the early development phase where you can factor some of that in

and work with the city to try and find a possible solution,

I'd jump all over that so that you don't have the issues that we're having

with the tightness of space,

especially when there's been a reduction of parking spaces within that stretch.

You would think that they would use those spaces, but they don't.

So in this case, since you have a limited amount of space,

I might look into that right and I want to thank staff for the EPC desk item and this is more like

a red line project which is great because you get to see the difference between the before and the

after and then you look at what's highlighted in red to see what was modified and when these things

come up I always feel comforted by that because I'm used to that with what I've done in my past

as a paralegal and looking at briefs and all this and proposals and arbitrations and you see the

the terms and conditions to a mutual understanding of what the contract or settlement in the end

will be, which is great, which tells me that you're working with the developer, developers

working with you, basic norms of governance are applicable. And then you also have staff

working with the city attorney, I would think, to try and figure these things out as to what

is kosher and what's not. So when this comes into play, I know we're doing everything we can to make

this process transparent, right? And I'm just, of course, I would be remiss not to bring up

the two-bedroom issue just in general, just because you have to, right? It's part of what

I deem as a concern and as a benefit for the community. The majority of the folks here,

for the most part, we all get along well, which is great. But these two people here, Alex and me,

our numbers are going smaller and smaller in the city because of affordability, right?

Whether you have a degree or not doesn't matter anymore. It's always an issue of cost. And when

you're in that type of situation, when you have this chance to bring those issues up, you will,

right? You're not the first, you're not the last that I bring those questions to. So don't take

it personal. I'm just trying to figure this out. And that's why I ask those questions to also then

give you the chance to then explain the why, the vision, the perspective. So then that way,

If anyone's looking, and I hope someone's watching, they'll know that we're doing our best to try and bring these issues to light, just like Commissioner Cranston did with the issue of is there a space for deliveries, then I will also pursue those types of questions for affordability.

So outside of that, yeah, those are my comments, and I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Gutierrez.

Commissioner Suda Manian.

Thank you, Chair.

I want to congratulate the applicants on coming forth with a very dense residential project

and really trying to crack the code on bringing so much housing to Mountain View.

We appreciate it.

Please make sure that you go through with this project and bring all the units that you promised to this community.

We really need it.

I also want to congratulate you on your focus to really introduce street level retail.

I know that area is very lacking in a lot of amenities, retail being one amongst them.

And you're taking advantage of the opportunities of fronting onto two pretty major streets and trying to introduce street level retail.

It'll probably be a challenge, so good luck with that.

but I commend you on that sort of forward-facing, community-facing approach with the retail and also the planning of some of your spaces.

So there's a lot of activation that's felt on the street in addition to some of the massing moves you've made.

But with that, I'm going to make a comment that I do think that the loading and servicing for the retail does seem totally inadequate.

I think to Commissioner Cranston's point and some of my other fellow commissioners stating this, I think providing loading and drop-off zones far removed from the retail spaces is only going to encourage bad behavior with trucks stopping in the middle of the street right in front of the store and doing offloading right there.

That's going to be very disruptive to the traffic flow on middle field and to the proposed bike lanes that are being planned.

We see every day what happens in reality.

And I think unless you plan for it, the opposite will happen.

So I think I urge the applicants and staff to really go back and look at the plans and make sure that there are designated loading areas that are closer to the retail storefronts.

In addition to that, I think for a building of this size, what's going to become a big issue for our community is just like Uber pickup and drop off, way more drop offs.

And you're talking about almost 500 units and maybe 700 residents.

That's going to be a constant ebb and flow.

And with the lobby parked right in the center of the block, with no sort of drop-off point, that's going to become another constant nuisance for that street frontage.

So I do encourage you to go back and think about providing adequate points to really resolve that issue.

I also have comments for staff about a couple of other points that I noted in the plans, as well as some of the other attachments.

There was mention about the PASEO easement and that being one of the waivers, right?

I'm not quite sure how that's going to operate, particularly if this is the first site that's going to provide like one half of the Paseo.

What does that even mean?

And if that Paseo easement is going to abut a vehicular lane, will that provide the safety that is needed for a pedestrian walkway that is intended through a Paseo that's designed into that part of the plan?

It's not clear to me, so I think it bears further study and some clarification or some additional buffer, if that's possible, within the vehicular way that's adjacent to the proposed PASEO.

I saw mention about the project being responsible for installation of the bike improvements.

If it's built before the Middlefield Bikeway Improvement Project commences, that doesn't really make sense to me,

because then you'd have a strip of bikeway lanes being put in with no continuity to additional bike lanes on middle field.

So is there a better way to require the applicant to come back and put in the bike lanes if the middle field project bike lane has already been completed,

so they're not ripping up and not connecting it to nowhere.

Like the sort of sequence of that in the requirement of the applicant didn't quite make sense to me.

Could be a question if staff has any response to that, or we could leave it as a comment there.

I can start, and maybe if Director Murdoch has any comments on that.

That seems very complicated.

in today's market condition what we hear from the developers day in day out is that

for them to get the financing for a residential project to occur the the lenders need surety

we don't know when their section of the bike lane will come online after how many years will they

have to come back to put that portion of the bike lane in what would be the cost associated with

that, these are some of the factors that I see which comes into the play when we start talking

to the developer and asking them if they were agreed to that or not. Alternately, could it be

that they pay into it and it's done at the date when the entire bike lane project along Middlefield

is installed so it's done continuously? We have tried that in the past when the state housing laws

were not so stringent.

We tried that.

And in recent projects,

when we have explored it,

again, the cost comes into the picture.

Not knowing what the cost would be,

what their fair share of cost would be

to build that,

creates that unknown

for the developer to sign in

in an agreement

to comply with that.

Even with established developers

who have done a lot of work

in Mountain View,

it's a very hard sell because of that factor. So as it stands, the way it's being proposed,

this project will put in its sort of frontage of the bikeway improvement, but then because there's

nothing currently on middle field, will it not connect to anything? So what happens is that in

how we have envisioned this happening is through collection of the East Wiseman Precise Plan

impact fees, which then are utilized. So every developer is supposed to pay that fee when they

come in for the entitlement. That fee which is collected then will be used by the city when we

actually put in that kind of infrastructure project in. Yeah, so that makes sense. It's just

that you had this as a condition that they complete the bikeway improvements at their frontages

instead of it being into the impact fee that goes into the bikeway project?

So it is pretty similar to how we upgrade our sidewalks as well.

When a single family homeowner comes in to update their home

or do substantial changes to your home,

we ask them to update that portion of the sidewalk

because we cannot do it for the whole stretch at a time, you know,

or, you know, when we are looking at the sidewalk dedications as well.

So similarly, when a parcel comes in for development at that point of time, we can we have the that's the right place and time when we can actually work with the applicant or negotiate that kind of condition and figure out what is, you know, what is their fair share contribution to upgrade that they will pay at that time.

Retroactively going back and asking somebody to pay.

I'm not sure if we have the legal grounds to do that.

Yeah, I don't mean retroactively, but if they pay upfront into it rather than put in the actual bike lane is the clarification I'm seeking.

And I think the other part to know, and thanks to our public works staff, they're chiming in, you know, there is an existing bike lane at the frontage, which they are just improving it.

It is not placing a brand new facility in.

Okay, thank you.

So there is a connection already.

Okay. I have a few more questions pertaining to the TDM program. Some of the measures that were included in the TDM seem way more applicable to a commercial building than a residential building, particularly with regards to having, you know, reduction in peak hour employee trips. Like, we're talking about employees to the residential building, right?

so maybe i will take some um this opportunity to explain how the tdm requirements work for

the east westman precise fan so thank you for the question i think we've been discussing this

a lot with the applicant as well um city at this point of time does not have a tdm ordinance which

is applicable to citywide projects we are in the process of preparing one we are hoping to get to

finish line more towards the summer this year. In the absence of that, we have specific TDM

requirements in some of our most recent Precise Plan projects. Within the East Wiseman Precise

Plan project, we do not have a specific trip production TDM requirement for residential or

commercial project, or I should say residential or non-residential project. What the Precise Plan

says specifically, it references it back to whatever is the requirement in our greenhouse

reduction program, greenhouse gases reduction program, which says, you know, for a commercial

component of the project, there will be a 9% reduction. That is the only objective standard

that we can ask them to comply with. There is no percentage reduction requirement under the

East Wiseman precise land TDM requirements. There are certain measures which have been specified

within the precise land that a new development project coming up with the residential

development shall provide these TDM measures into their program, but no particular percentage

reduction to say, you know, need to address this much so they will have to do more than what is

prescribed. So that's why at this point of time, the applicant is actually proposing a 14% reduction

in the trips, but a lot of the measures that you see in there is only driven towards the

non-residential portion of the project. Yeah, noted. Thank you for the clarification.

Again, my point was like it just seemed a little moot to apply some of those TDA measures,

including requiring a commute coordinator. I know the transportation consultant provided the letter

which shows that they're compliant and achieved the 14% reduction. So this is probably moot,

but I wanted to make the point that applying TDM to residential projects is a little incongruous.

So I'll leave it at that.

I also wanted to just thank staff because I know this is a tremendous push to go through a lot of documentation

and test against the city's objective standards within the newer deadline requirements as stipulated by state law.

So kudos to you for going through it and for bringing more housing projects in front of our commission and the council.

Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Sudwamanian, Commissioner Donahue, Vice Chair Donahue, excuse me.

Well, I'm a commissioner.

Yeah, generally, I think that the project looks good.

I think there's kind of pros and cons, right?

I mean, I like that it brings a lot of housing units. The size of the units seems kind of small to me, but as you said, that's kind of maybe one of the goals. And I think, you know, really we need a variety of types of housing units.

So I think that having some developments that have smaller units is good because they would presumably be less expensive.

And so that helps fill a market need.

I like that the one thing I don't like is that the concession where the BMR units are not kind of distributed.

The types of units are not exactly proportional to the overall types of units, so that's less than ideal.

But I do like that you didn't create a special, this is a BMR size unit, and that's what we're providing.

It's a unit that there will be market rate units that are that size.

And so it is a fully reasonable unit for people to live in.

I like the pool and amenities, the different decks at different levels, things like that.

That's pretty good on the kind of open space and recreational kind of aspect.

than the parkland thing. I'm not super thrilled about, but I think that's not your fault. There's

kind of nothing to be done about that, unfortunately. I wish there were, but I guess

that that's in the works so that hopefully going forward, we will be able to provide adequate

parkland for new residents that we're having. Cutting down a lot of heritage trees is not great,

but they're not really in great shape.

And the six to one replacement ratio, I think is, is great.

And increased canopy, you know, in the long run,

I think is great as well.

As far as the, the delivery thing,

I do share concerns that I think we've,

we've talked about that on other projects as well.

it sounds like there's not a lot that we can directly do about that. But it's something I

think that you should keep in mind because you want to have a reasonable community that isn't

all jammed up with people double parking and kind of disrupting things. And

you want it to be a success. So I think that's in your best interest to just think about that.

So overall, yeah, I think it seems, you know, there's pros and cons, but in balance,

I think that it's a good thing. Thank you, Commissioner Cranston.

so overall the there's nothing in here that i that we can go after objectively i mean i understand

what's here i get what you've asked for um but objectively i do think you're going to have pissed

off people if you don't find a way to do drop-offs near the the mail room and the box and particularly

for the two center retail spaces that the retail spaces on the middle field end are close to the

commercial space there so you can usually have delivery truck there the retail space on ellis

could conceivably have vehicles park on the on the driveway um but the two in the middle are

going to have problems and i'm on the exact same kind of a situation up in san francisco where

there was no place to drop off um and people get really mad at it people at that and the reason i

have the vehicle i have is because i had to dodge around a amazon vehicle that parked in the middle

of the street um and i didn't see the car that was hidden behind it okay um so we've seen issues

in other developments in the area i really we're still working through as a city but i would really

i would for myself i would not object to a proposal that violates the east westman precise

plan streetscape requirements and put in a curb cut essentially in right there by the lobby because

that's also where uber drivers this real to your elevators in the front of the building are right

there by that and by those two retail spaces by the parking um so during the day you're going to

have the delivery vehicles coming out there in the evening you'll have the uber drivers coming out

there and then they can hop in and go up the elevator so i would not object to the applicant

approaching staff and staff saying okay let's cut out a six foot you know six foot deep of grass

and make it long enough for two uber slash ups slash fedex slash whatever vehicles that for debt

you know go in and drop off and you know for short-term things i would not object to that

being put in place going forward because i think there's more benefit to the community

the bike riders don't have to then swing out in front of

the traffic. The overdrivers aren't getting

flipped off because they're blocking things.

The delivery vehicles have a place to go.

But everything else in here, I get what you've done. I appreciate the fact you've worked with

the design review committee. I don't like the

generic boxes, so I like better what you've got here. I understand the

request for the changes and so that would be my only request is that staff and the applicant

seriously consider proposing something that would allow for a drop-off at least near the lobby

closer to and closer to the two middle spaces and near your where you have your mail room

thank you um commissioner Dempsey thank you mr. chair so

So I think very simple. So what's most important? What's most important is that this

is dense housing in an area of the city where we need dense housing. It's a lovely building,

I might add. This is a good thing. These are good things. So I'm absolutely going to be

supporting this today just on the strength of that alone. I do wish you had done a community

meeting and, you know, had one person show up for no other reason than because I can't imagine you

were going to have a big, you know, you're going to have a, you're going to have a big group. But a

lot of times that's a very important signal to us that you, that you did it. Nobody really cared.

And we're like, great. Nobody cared. That is actually valuable information to us if you throw

the party and no one comes. So I generally think it's always a good idea to do it. You know, most

of the other things that I might critique or wish were different about the proposal, they're all

things that fall under the category of issues that we can do nothing about that are outside of our

jurisdiction or outside of our power because of state law or what have you. And so I won't belabor

any of those points here because it would be a waste of my time. But I think the general takeaway

for me is it's a lovely building of a type that we need, and it's in a neighborhood where we

really need it. And so that is a good thing and worth supporting by itself.

Thank you, Commissioner Dempsey. I very much, I'm going to make my commentary,

I very much agree with that. I support it fully based on the strength of the actual housing

delivery. When the applicant said, hey, this is where opportunity is, you know, even the modern

yuppie needs a place to live. So, you know, like, yeah, right, like, I'm done with that.

I also agree that all the things that I would complain about aren't things that we are going

to have jurisdiction or sound steady ground to try and impart or require or obviate or do anything.

Like, I don't think that's what we're here for. I think Mr. Donahue put it beautifully.

You want this to be a success. I can tell you of my own accord that I do have those concerns around

the double parking. It's a real thing. It's come up over and over. This isn't the first project

where that's something that's come up. But obviously, that's a signal that this matters

to the community. If we're representing the community and you're going to have a project

in the community and you want that to succeed, then to the extent that I can recommend along

the lines of Vice Chair Donahue's guidance, like, just think about it. You want this to succeed,

the community wants it to succeed, and no one wants to have bad feelings in the future. So I

will be supporting it. I think I was hearing consensus around support. I know I'm not of

the mind of introducing requirements around the cutouts and all that, but I do want to just make

sure I'm double checking that there was not a majority sentiment for that, that we would have

to, because I know Commissioner Cranston was kind of teasing that out. I think Commissioner

Sumanian, I kind of heard you kind of teasing that out, but I just want to make sure I'm

double checking here. Commissioner Cranston.

Question that we can't require it. It is something that I think we, like I said, that it's something

that we asked the applicant to consider and staff to consider and that at least from one commissioner

there would not be an objection to removing the grass in that section um but that's not a wouldn't

be a requirement it's a request for the applicant and the staff to go think about it so it wouldn't

change the motion it's just advice to everybody let's see uh can we get then maybe uh anyone who

would like to be brave enough to maybe make a motion and chair just for the maker of the motions

consideration we have some language related to the desk item and the amendments associated there with

it's wonderful is there a script or like a paper that we yep okay who would like to make the motion

all right we've got commissioner donahue making the motion and then do we have a seconder

Commissioner Subramanian. Okay.

Vice-Chadani, who would you like to? Okay.

I make a motion that the Environmental Planning Commission recommends the City Council adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Mountain View,

approving a planned community permit and development review permit to construct an eight-story mixed-use building with 460 apartment units,

utilizing state density bonus law and approximately 9,371 square feet of ground floor commercial

replacing an existing office building a heritage tree removal permit to remove 29 heritage trees

on a 2.86 acre site located at 490 East Middlefield Road, APN 16053004, and finding the project to be

statutorily exempt from California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, pursuant to Public Resources

Code Section 21080.66 to be read in title only, further reading waived, Attachment 1 to the EPC

Staff Report. With the staff proposed modification to Attachment 1, Exhibit A, conditions of approval

numbers 525 33 34 45 50 67 81 84 85 127 136 138 150 and 155 as presented to the epc

great smile yeah thank you all right thank you mr cook i think we're ready for the book

um

uh commissioner putteris is marked as absent i don't know if we would he just kind of came in late

can you just tell me what the vote is and then i can indicate it no no no okay

it the motion carries uh six yes and one no all right thank you all right at that uh we will now

proceed to item six uh new business none all right now uh item number seven commission staff

announcements, updates, requests, and committee reports. No action will be taken on any questions

raised by the commission at this time. Staff, commissioners, any suggested next meeting dates,

maybe? Yeah, so Diana Pincholi, principal planner, just wanted to remind we will have our next EPC

meeting on February 4th, followed by February 18th. Thank you. Chugging along. All right,

so then we will move on to

item number 8 adjournment

this meeting is adjourned at

10.03

and 23 seconds PM

thank you everyone