Recommendation to Direct Staff to Transmit the City of Alameda 2015 Housing Element Annual Report to the State of California Department of Housing and Community Development. Approval of an annual report is not subject to the review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), nor is an annual report defined as a “project” under CEQA.  No future review is required.  (Community Development 481005)  [Not heard on October 4, 2016]
So in a nutshell, what it what it says is that we issued 119 building permits in 2015. So this is for the calendar year, 2015. Calendar year, 2015. All right. And does this mean that we are agreeing to building any housing in the future? Does it speak to anything in the future? No, it's just telling the state what we built, what we actually not what we approved, but we actually issued building permits in 2015. So I wanted to clarify that because I think there's been some misunderstanding in regards to what we're being asked to. Prove this is. And I wanted to give staff that opportunity. Under state law, what essentially we have to prepare this report just documents how many building permits we issued. We and under state law we have to make sure that you have seen the report. You are the main you know you're the. And they just found a body. You are the council. So under state laws, staff gets put in this together. You have to send it to the state. And you need to show it to your to your legislative body. We like to show it to you first before we send it. Thank you. The other council members, did you have any questions or comments? All right. So just one member, Ashcroft. I believe that somewhere in this report, it talks about the fact that a universal design ordinance will be coming back to the council. Do you want to just tell us briefly? Actually, universal design ordinances and more importantly, when we can expect to see that. Yes, it's an effort that we've been working on off and on since 2012. It goes back to the 2012 housing element, but we are fully engaged at this point with our disability commission. We have a subcommittee with the planning board, so we have subcommittees from the two boards working together to help us structure an ordinance which will set standards for all new housing in Alameda to ensure that a percentage of that housing is designed in a way that it's either, you know, can be visited by somebody with a disability or can live independently. And those are two different standards. The idea here is that we should be building housing and that our housing stock should accommodate not only people with disabilities, but also people aging in place we all age. And rather than creating a housing stock that forces seniors to move out of their homes when they start to develop mobility issues, it's we hope to have it in. We've been having regular meetings with the planning board. They've looked at it pretty much every two weeks, and I anticipate that we'll be finished with the disability commission and the Planning Board before the end of this calendar year. Probably to the Council agenda has to come to the city council because you're the legislative body in hopefully January early 2017. Great. Well, thank you. And if there are no more comments, I would recommend. Yes, I would move that the council direct staff to transmit. The City of Alameda 2015 Housing Element Annual Report to the State of California Department of Housing and Community Development. Thank you. Second. All of us in favor. My motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Five F and it's my understanding there's speakers on this item also. And I pulled this item. There is a presentation that staff has prepared and I would like. The presentation to be presented. We've received many emails on this issue and I think it's very important that we have this as part of our public discussion. Good evening, Mayor. Councilman, ever since I was going to ask if you wanted the presentation, I'm happy to provide it. Thank you. So I'll go ahead and just get started. I think the here it is. So the main item is about approving a grant list for the upcoming grant application to the Allegheny County Transportation Commission, which has money related to the Measure B Regional transportation sales tax measure, tax measure. And they're looking for projects, discretionary projects to come to them for grants. So we put this list together, we took it to the Transportation Commission. And as part of that process, there were a lot of discussions with a primary transportation stakeholder in the city bike walk Alameda. They're here tonight and I think they're the ones who put speaker slips for this agenda item. We've had numerous conversations, so the discussion came up about the estuary crossing as part of this larger discussion about the grant applications and a bike and pedestrian bridge in the West End. And so. Although the actual items about the grant list, I think the real issue and that's been brought to your attention is about the bike pedestrian bridge. So I'm going to go through this quickly. The actual item is on this grants list and prioritized order. They are the projects. Some of these this this is we're still working through some of the projects. All of these may not get submitted depending on different issues. But these this right now, this is what we are looking at this. This list was approved by the Transportation Commission and recommended. There's also a named project and that an AC Transit lead project that we've participated as a partnership with AC Transit on. So these are the main projects. The question came up as to whether or not we should also be submitting a planning grant application related to a bike