Public Hearing to Consider Introduction of an Ordinance Amending Alameda Municipal Code Chapter XXX to Comprehensively Update Citywide Off-Street Parking and Loading Space Regulations and Make Conforming Changes to Other Zoning Code Sections, as Recommended by the Planning Board.  (Planning, Building and Transportation 20962700)
County Public to consider introduction of ordinance amending the Individual Code. Chapter 32 Comprehensively update city wide off street parking and loading space regulations and make conforming changes to other zoning code sections as recommended by the Planning Board. All right. And I see Allan Chai, Andrew Thomas, Brian McGuire, who's taken the lead on this. Welcome, everyone. Thank you. Council member. Mayor and council members. I'm going to turn this over to Allan Tai and Brian McGuire, who have done all the heavy lifting on this important code amendment. This is something that the city council has been asking for and looking for for quite a while. And so we're really pleased to have finally been able to bring it to you tonight. Thanks, Brian. We'll do the honors of giving you the presentation. Thank you. All right. Good evening, Mr. McGuire. Good evening, Mayor. As the Ashcraft and members of the City Council, Brian McGuire from the Planning Building and Transportation Department. Item seven C is the introduction of an ordinance to comprehensively update citywide off street parking and local space regulations and make conforming changes to other zoning code sections as recommended by the Planning Board. It's worth noting that in addition to hearing about these proposed changes, if we have time, you'll hear these changes are for private off street parking, but you'll also be hearing about parking management in the public realm. Item seven if you can hopefully get there, I'll try to be expeditious. Parking is not a new issue for alameda. Council is taking a number of previous actions leading up to today. The Alameda Point zoning code adopted in 2014 was one big change. Tonight's changes cover the entire city, except for Alameda Point, where we are not proposing any changes at this time. The 2018 Transportation Transportation Choices Plan Project number eight is a near-term high priority item is to update parking policies for new development to reduce future congestion. Associated with. Growth. Additionally, last but not least, the Climate Action and Resiliency Plan calls for the elimination of minimum parking requirements and establishment of parking maximums. The car also specifically calls for promoting electrification of our transportation sector. With the types of requirements in the ordinance before. You tonight. We started this year the public process at the Commission on Persons with Disabilities in June to discuss the needs for accessible parking and how to prevent impacts on people with disabilities while still pursuing our transportation and climate goals. Planning Board held a study session also in June, followed by the Transportation Commission in July, which discussed the amendments and unanimously recommended adoption of the proposed changes. Finally, on September 27th, Planning Board gave unanimous recommendation to adopt the proposed changes in the ordinance today. And that brings us here to City Council to introduce this ordinance. The graphic you see on the slide shows what one and a half parking spaces and the associated sort of dry bile space. Takes up in reference to, say, a typical two bedroom apartment. Just to give you a sense of the just from from a sheer space point of view, you know, how much space parking parking needs can can take up in any any project. Studies can show some of the benefits of eliminating minimum parking requirements, such as reducing auto trips and overall congestion, promoting shift to more sustainable transportation modes , and perhaps most importantly, reducing the cost of housing. We have several goals in crafting the ordinance. We aimed for a code update that reflects the current City City Council policy objectives. Has an equitable approach in how we provide parking for people with disabilities and adopts aggressive but reasonable requirements. For electric vehicle charging capabilities. This table also in your staff report just show some local data illustrating recently approved projects with the parking that the existing the current code would have required and the the reductions that the planning board finally approved. So you. See 1.5 spaces per dwelling unit is is common planning. Board has reduced requirements. On hotels to allow for a little less than one parking space per room and so on. Table A from the ordinance shows us the maximum allowable. Off street parking in the proposed changes. Exceeding these ratios in this table would require an administrative use permit that gives the city a chance to make sure that a project adding more parking than is typical is beneficial and mitigations can be required if necessary. Our goal with the ordinance was to eliminate the minimum parking requirements without reducing the overall supply, current or future of accessible parking, which serves as a mobility lifeline for certain folks in our community. So staff proposes maintaining a minimum standard and new parking facilities for disabled parking, which exceeds what the California building code requires. Here we're looking at a visual representation of the proposed electric vehicle parking requirements. This is. Also one thing called for. In the car. You can see townhomes and single family homes with private garages would require a level two EV ready parking space in each private garage. That essentially means like your typical 240 volt outlet, like a dryer plug. Ready to. Go for your EV. Multifamily would need to have at least 25% of those level two EV ready spaces and an additional 25% of level. One road ready spaces, which is the lower sort of voltage typical. Electrical wall outlet. We have proposed 10% of commercial parking spaces. New commercial parking spaces have a level two charger installed and places where most people park all day. Like an office to have an additional 30% of spaces capable capable of being upgraded to a level two with minimal additional cost by having the electrical panel capacity and conduit already in place. These numbers represent a first attempt at striking the balance between accelerating the electrification of our transportation sector and managing cost burdens in concert with affordable housing and economic development goals. We would anticipate evaluating these numbers on an ongoing basis. To see if we are getting it right. This ordinance codifies what has been implemented on a project by project basis. The last ten or 15 years to try and mitigate congestion impacts from new development. We have proposed some simplification of the bike parking requirements and adding some clarifying requirements to make sure long term parking bike parking spaces we are providing are usable to residents and employees of the projects. Staff is recommending that you, the City Council, introduce the ordinance to comprehensively update citywide off street parking and loading space regulations and staff is here myself, Andrew Thomas, Allen, Ty and our consultant on all things electrification, Farhad Farman are here to answer any questions you might have. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. McGuire. Council Do we have any clarifying questions from staff? Councilmember Harry Spencer. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Maguire, for your presentation. I appreciate all your slides and whatnot. I want to go back to the staff report and background. It has refers to other cities and having excess parking from developments. I think San Diego, L.A., UCLA, there are different ones, but I didn't see anything for the city of Alameda. Has there been any analysis that the city of Alameda housing developments and where we are trying to right size the number of units. I'll. I guess I can start and then Andrew can jump in. And I'm not sure that we have, you know, like academic studies of our existing parking. But I think. You know, Andrew. Comprise speak to some some anecdotes locally. Well, yeah, we, um, I'm blanking on the name. It was the group, a Bay Area group did a survey of Bay Area communities. It was not just Alameda, it was also Berkeley and others where they were basically going into existing residential projects and just observing, like how much of the parking was actually being used. A couple Alameda projects were included in that study. It was about five or six years ago and the results were very similar from other cities, which is they found that in a lot of the newer residential projects that, you know, that not all the parking was being used, basically indicating that we were over parking some of our residential projects. I think the Brian's, you know, Brian had to move fast. The point that were that he was making with some of those slides is. The Planning Board has been working to try to figure out what the right amount of parking is and what that slide that he was showing of all our prior projects, both hotels, residential, commercial. We have not we have not been requiring the total amount of parking required in the ordinance. They've been doing parking waivers regularly to try to right size the parking amount for each project. What this ordinance does essentially is use that information as as our maximum. So we don't see that this ordinance from a parking perspective is going to have a huge change in the amount of parking it's built with each project. What we're saying now is, hey, if you want to do more than that, which which is what we've determined is about right for these uses over the course of the last five or six years of of planning board hearings about individual projects, well, then we're going to have to have a different conversation. Why do you need more than that? And how should we mitigate it? But if you want to do what that number is, or a little bit less than that. You're good to go. K Councilmember harry spencer. Could we go back to the chart? The director thomas is speaking to randy. Can you take us to that slide? You know, the one with the existing projects show Del Monte and some of the hotels. That's it. So 1825 Park Street. What's there. Now? That's a small building. That's a small property right down by Clement. And it's a coffee shop. Coffee culture. No, it's. Okay. No, it's not that. It's not that far down. It's just a few doors up the street from that existing, existing property. No, no, no. Excuse me. No parking. I mean, the parking there. No access to the street. So they want to redevelop their property. The part that the zoning code said they needed to have nine parking spaces, they couldn't fit any on the property. I mean, that's a that's an issue. And there's another one on Webster Street, 1929, that's down by the roadway in right there by the Cross Army trail. We have a number of properties in Alameda, especially on parking lot, the street. You can't find a single parking space. Those are two, I think, you know, outliers. Those are situations where the planning board didn't require any parking spaces because if you put in a curb cut in a parking lot, you wouldn't have been able to build the building. Well, my question was commercial. Residential. I think it's commercial. No. Yeah, I'm sorry. There was a both commercial. Both commercial? It's actually this scooter. I believe it's a scooter importer. No, it's across the street from them. It's if I may, it's next door to the USA. Kung Fu, I believe it is, yes. Remodeling a sort of existing site. And it's a mixed use, very small mixed use building and sort of one storefront wide with a little bit of residential above some commercial on the ground floor. Okay. So thank you. So it's commercial, right? Can we agree? It's commercial. It's got residential upstairs. There is a residential upstairs commercial downstairs. I think it's one unit, Brian. I think maybe that's correct. It's one unit. Of residential upstairs. Correct. Thank you, Mr. Tai. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So the company that. That is residential and it's. Yes. The 1929 Webster. Commercial. Okay. Internal terminals. Residential. Right. And that's why it's getting those spaces. So I wanted to point out that when you look at this, most of these are, in fact, not residential. And the ones that are actually do have other than apparently one unit, 1825. Well, the commercial Lexus commercial home, too. I mean, those are all commercial all the way down to the bottom. 1435 is residential mixed use. Okay. So right. So this shows that actually we are normally we have been assigning parking spaces for residential units. Then if we could go to the next slide. Okay. So this is now. If I understand correctly and if you can clarify the accessory dwelling unit, we're going to if they want more than one off street parking per unit. Then they go and they get some kind of special permit or something. They have that? Yeah. Essentially they have to ask for special permission. All right. The idea of going to maximums is to establish a maximum amount, say, on telling everybody you can build as many as you want up to this limit. If you want to go above that limit, then we need to have a conversation and discuss why it's necessary for you to go above the max, the maximum. And this this is an idea and it can have like up to 1200 square feet, three benefits. That's something. So you can have three bedrooms and most you get one parking space unless you get some special permission from staff. That's right. And the mayor and under. State law, a state eight EU law cities cannot require any parking if the adu is within a half mile of transit. And when we look at the Alameda map. Other than Crete in circle and harbor in Harbor Bay, every every property in Alameda would meet that state criteria for no parking for 80 use. Thank you. That completes my questions. All right. Thank you. The you know, counsel, maybe before we go on, it's 1046 and we have to take that vote. About what? COUNCILMEMBER That's right. Go ahead and take the, the, the words out of my mouth. We have got these remaining items seven D, seven G, seven H, and then there are seven referrals. There's something about the numbers to. Move the we go we re we go into a midnight and we get through as much as humanly possible. Is there a second for that? Councilmember Desai. That's the second. Okay. Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call? And this one takes four votes, correct? Councilmember de Herrera. Spencer? No. Next light. I Vela. No mayor, as you know. And that motion fails to two. Three. Okay. Want to craft another motion? We could. Well, we need to finish this one up, and I think we might be able to do that. Madam, quickly, we have many public speakers on this item. Just one. Okay, so. Now to. Guess, it's usually the trigger. Well, we are almost at 11:00, so we could just finish this one. Or for those who voted no, do you want to propose something else or do you just want to? And at 11:00 or when this item finishes. Cats over here. Spencer, go ahead. It's my clarification because I haven't announced it. So under Council Communications, will we be able to do that if we complete this item, which is a hard stop at 11:00? Oh. It depends. Yeah, yeah, it depends on how you fashion your vote to continue. But it's no new regular item. You have to vote to hear any additional items. But you can continue through those other sections and you can establish a hard stop time if. You so desire. But if the clock runs out before we finish voting, although I started a little early to give us time, we just ended 11, is that correct? You know, you would finish this item and then you would continue to those other, you know, non agenda item sections. Right. Okay. Vice Mayor Vella, anything from you? I would be open to hearing item seven tonight after this one. So I'll make a motion to just extend the meeting no later than midnight, but just to hear item seven. And what about when. You conclude this and conclude this item? Because I said, what about the like council communications and whatnot? I'm fine with that, including council communications. Okay. All right. So two, I just would. Like to be able to tell our staff or seven age that we're not going to hear. Tonight because. To cut them loose if necessary. Okay. So so that motion is to hear, to finish hearing seven C and seven G. Council Communications 77. Sorry. Are we? We're sorry. 70. Yeah, we. We're on air. We're going to also write. Right. Mm hmm. Okay. All right. In heart, stop at midnight or when it's finished, whichever comes first. Okay. Is there a second? I just want to make sure we're talking about seven G, which was the police. Yes, I'm okay. I'm happy the second. Okay. We've got a motion maybe got a second. Maybe we have a real cover. Please remember Jason. Yes. Spencer. I knocked right. By the. Fella by. Mayor as. I. That carries by five eyes. Okay. Thank you. Okay, everybody, back to our clarifying questions. Councilor for her. Spencer, had you completed your. Yes, thank. You. You had. Okay. Anyone else with clarifying questions? I. Okay, counselor. Everyday day I. Then I've got my clarifying question. So in table A under dwelling unit, the maximum number of bases. If this is adopted for a dwelling unit and that's a second row is 1.5 units. That's that's correct. Right. So that's correct. But currently. And 30. Dash 7.6. The minimum amount of dwelling units. And it depends on the square footage of of a unit less than 3000 square feet is two. Is that correct? And the dwelling units for greater than 3000 square feet is three. So that's the minimum amount of off street parking. Correct? That's correct. And just just to clarify, if there is a single family home that develops, any fraction can get rounded up without having to go through any process. So this one home, the effective number. Would be two in this. Case. Okay. But. So what I'm looking at, though, is it the maximum number even? I mean, assuming we can round it up is less than what's already in place. Although what's in place is the minimum okay, at least for dwelling units, especially for dwelling units. More than 3000 square feet in size. Also on table, on slide table A, it has hotels, motels. So the maximum number of spaces is one off street parking per guest room. That's what's proposed and what's in the current. Is one and a quarter per room. And but for our hotels within community the commercial districts. It's it ranges from 1 to 1 and a quarter, although I don't think there's going to be any hotels in community commercial district. So. So for the hotel motel, what's in the ordinance right now is one and a quarter. And what's being proposed would be lessening that to one. That's correct. As a maximum. One. Maximum. Okay. And all the hotels that have been approved in Alameda in the last ten years have been approved with .83 about parking spaces per room. I mean, if you think about it, typical hotel room. How many people bring two cars to a. To share one room? Not very often. So what? What all the studies have shown and what all the recent approvals in Alameda for all the hotels in the last ten years. They've all hovered around .83, like what is actually been proposed by the hotels and what have we actually approved? About 23 spaces per room. And when they're approved or or when requests come in for something lower than what's in the ordinance or in that schedule, they go to the ordinance. Right. And that would be 30 Dash 713, which is currently reductions in parking requirements, which kind of lays out. Kind of approach that you would take for justifying any reductions. Currently the minimum, which is what the current set in the new system. If you want to do less, it's okay. We you don't need special permission to do less. You need special permission to do more. Yeah, but if I think. Well, we're always concerned about is people not doing enough parking. So if you set the maximum. Right now, if you set the maximum lower than what was what was there before, you're basically setting in place a process that makes it easier to come in with lower. I think the what we've just what we've learned over the last ten years is that actually people. In particular on the commercial. We've often been trying to push them lower and lower and they're like, Look, I need at least this amount of parking. So what we've ended up for is what we've ended up approving is something very close to what the. The lenders who are who are financing the project are demanding. I mean, banks will not allow I mean, sometimes I've been in meetings where people are like, why do you need so much parking? And the answer is because my banker is requiring it. That's what I mean. So we very often don't have a situation where staff is saying, hey, we need you know, you're not giving us enough parking. It's very often that the developers of these projects seem to be financially feasible. This is the right amount of parking. And what the conversation has been over the last ten years is your minimums in your parking code are way too high. The right amount is about this for hotels. .83 for the residential, about 1.5. If when we've tried to push them lower, they've pushed back on us and said, no. We've had this conversation a lot at the planning board where the plan was like, Hey, we'd like to do less parking. And the developer is saying, No, no, no, no, I can't do less. To make it financially viable, I need to do about this amount. So I guess the point that I'm getting out though is simply that it seems to me what the table prior to table eight shows is that we have a system in place that already is flexible to accommodate when someone wants a lower standard. Okay. But that's that's. Yeah, yeah. No, that's that's true. That's true. The problem is we're forcing every project through this process of conversation to get a waiver. And that's what we're trying to avoid. We're trying to streamline the process, make it cheaper and more effective and, you know, just less costly for particularly for housing. I mean, that's one of our major goals. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Desai. So I have just one question for staff. I really like the attention paid to requiring charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. We hear a lot from residents, especially residents of apartment buildings, that there just aren't enough places if they have an EV where they can charge. So I noticed that this proposal has been through a number of different boards and commissions. Public Utility Board wasn't among them. So what are the implications for AMP, our municipally owned and very clean green electric utility of these expanded EV charging facilities and infrastructure? I'll take the first crack at this and find out about it. Mr. Maguire. Yes. If Farhad has anything to add after this, I'll defer to him. We did consult with AMP's staff on these plans, and one element of the ordinance does allow something that's called and the term is its load management system. Right. Which allows you to sort of not if you're building a parking structure, not have to overbuild the panel to handle everybody at full power 24 hours a day. And so we did work with AMP staff on this. But you're right, we did not go to the pub and there are some there are some cost implications in terms of cost to build. But I think AMP expressed, you know, this is comparable if not a little bit. Of a reach from what recent projects are doing. So I think they are. You know, anticipating they seem comfortable with these levels. And may be eager. For the customers. And so AMP is comfortable that with the transmission lines we have and our sources of clean green power, they will be able to adequately accommodate these this expanded charging infrastructure. I can put those words in their mouth, but they did have an opportunity and sort of had input and didn't express any concern when we did discuss this with them. Okay. And I mean, I guess we could also probably assume that this doesn't all happen at once overnight. I you know, it would be lovely to have had that reference in the staff report, but thank you so much for bringing bringing that up. Mr. Titus, you want to add something to that? Yeah. May I add that? So. So the parking spaces and infrastructure would not just happen automatically. I mean, the ordinance would apply to with new development or new construction of parking spaces, and that would typically be reviewed by AMP. Right? No, I understand that it was more than just the capacity. I mean, I don't think. Well. For capacity issues as well. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. Any other clarifying questions? Counsel Then let's move on to public comment. Madame Clerk. We have five speakers, so they each get 3 minutes unless we get a couple more. The first is Jack Bowling. All right. Good evening, Speaker Bowling. Hi there. Yeah. I think this looks great. I want to thank staff, and I want to thank them for taking some of the comments that I made and adopting those into this with one of the committees. This came before in the past. I think this is a great step in the right direction. I think moving away from mandatory minimums and moving towards mandatory maximums without forcing discretionary review on every single project that could be built with less, because we know that adding a parking space to a project increases the cost of that project by 80 grand per parking spot . And when you're thinking about housing, that's terrible, especially about affordable housing, and especially in the summer, we like to complain about traffic as much as I don't think we have that much encouraging more cars more than we need without going for that. That review makes more sense to me than requiring more parking. That's just going to encourage more cars and be worse on the environment, and especially where we have places where we can build near transit. We can discourage car use as much as possible, but when we do, we have clauses in there for at least easy requirements for 25% in commercial areas. So I think it's a great plan. I really support this. I think staff did a great job on this and I fully, fully support this. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker. Good evening, Speaker Reid. Good evening again, Madam Mayor, and city council members. I'm weighing in to oppose the proposal for maximum standards for parking. This seems like a workaround that does not adequately address the fact that parking is an issue in many areas of Alameda, and a lot of residents do rely on vehicles as a mode of transportation. It seems as if new developments especially should accommodate for sufficient parking needs, as the city is also proposing an increased density in their general plan, in some cases up to 60 units per acre. It seems reasonable to increase parking instead of limiting it. I also heard Mr. Thomas State at the transportation meeting just a couple of days ago that parking is going to be an issue as we increase our population. So here it seems like we have some type of conflict here regarding equity by by unbundling parking on new developments. It's likely that people with less means may opt out of purchasing a parking spot further, creating an inadequate and inequitable gap. As a result, they may have to park in the street and walk further from their homes. And for many individuals and families, especially as they're bringing their children home, or maybe they also have disabled family members or people with limited mobility issues, this may be a burden. So I believe that it's more responsible to close that gap and and provide the parking that that's necessary for our residents. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Denise Trapani. Good evening. Speaker tiffany. Thank you. Mayor ashcraft and council members. I just want to provide bipoc almeida's very enthusiastic support for the introduction of this ordinance tonight, and I hope you all hope you'll move forward with it. One of the hard conversations we're going to need to have is, as the last speaker just alluded to, is as we increase our density , we're simply not going to be able to provide parking spaces for, you know, every single adult in Alameda to store their cars around the island. And as we've made amazing progress in developing additional transit options for folks with the introduction of the new line 78 to the to the new ferry terminal and across Alameda Trail, we're just providing more and more options, other options for people who want to get out of cars to choose other ways of getting around. We're in a climate emergency where we're adopting Vision Zero. You know, these are the kind of changes we need to make in order to to meet our reduction in vehicle miles traveled, go also to strongly support the introduction of this ordinance and want to thank staff for their work on this and hopefully you'll move forward with it. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker. Drew Dara Abrams. Good evening, speaker dara Abrams. Hello again, mayor and council members. True Dara Abrams on the East End. And I want to offer one example. I mentioned I work at a park in Blanding. It's actually in the building at 1926. Park Park is esquina features, coffee cultures, nice, vibrant, new busy coffee shop and a building with zero on site parking spots. The site works because there are no office off street parking spots and it's a bit of a wedge right there. And the the the owner and his team did a great job figuring out how to make that site work. I'm not here to suggest that, you know, every commercial property should now have zero parking spots. But I think that's a great example of what can be built when the market has some more flexibility. I am hardly a libertarian, but parking policy is one of the few aspects where I think our city will actually benefit from more direct influences by market forces here. I think the city does have other programmatic means to make parking available easier to use, easier to pay for. I know you all have another agenda item on that, and I would encourage the city to adopt this policy and think ahead to other ways to improving the experience for everyone to access parking that does exist so less about ensuring some grand unlimited supply and more about maximizing the availability of what is built and making it really it is also can get a bigger goals like equity goals. You have a you have meters you can use and other means to make the parking that is available there accessible to all of the folks who need it. So thank you to staff for working on this policy that can really help the city join on the same good company in other cities that have adopted similar policies. Thank you. Thank you. And our next speaker. This is our last speaker, Jim Strelow. Good evening. Speaker Stellar. Good evening. I have a problem with how the presentation was presented. It has to do with slide number ten, that of charging requirements because it says residential, private, dedicated garage level two ev ready. Yeah. For what kind of project for the casual citizen looking at that presentation. They would fear that gee if I do some sewer work or change my fence or cut down a tree and need a permit, all of a sudden I'm going to have to put in any level two charger because of the way the presentation was worded. Now I agree. Buried in the agenda description is some note that it has to be, you know, ten or more, some number or whatever. But it's not being described very clearly to the average citizen what the residential requirement is, because there's nothing in the slides that help clarify, you know, so that maybe citizen residences will consider not doing projects because they're fearing that they'd have to install a level two charger. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. And madam, you said that was our last speaker. A recap. That was. Last. Okay. And with that, we will close public comment. But I wonder if I could ask someone and staff to just clarify. Mr. Strelow raised a question that I think others might be interested in. Could someone just. Mr. THOMAS Yeah, just real quick. This is off street parking, so if you're building a parking lot. These these these these requirements get triggered if you're putting an electric circuit in your existing home. It does not. So new buildings, new dwelling units, expansions of existing buildings. You know, this is about what your requirements are. If you are essentially building these types of things and you are proposing parking, then if you are going to be building new parking, we want you to go to we believe it's appropriate to require that you put in EV charging. Just one other just big picture comment just to sort of relieve some of the anxiety about parking. The average household in Alameda has 1.3 cars. Observation shows that a lot of people use their parking garages that we require them. They use it for things other than parking their cars. They use it for storing their stuff. But that's just observation. The data is 1.3 cars per household. What we're saying is if you want to do more than 1.5 parking spaces. That's that raises some questions. So we feel like the 1.5 not only is it very consistent with everything that the planning board has been recommending and approving of it, and the council has been approving over the last five or six years, it also is fits. It really reflects the actual data of car ownership. Among Alameda households in Alameda. So this is not a radical ordinance by any means. Okay. You'll let us know when you bring radical ordinance working. We'll want you flying clear in the presentation, please. All right. Okay. So. Okay, so back to I is getting a little later. Okay. So council discussion. Councilmember Harry Spencer. Thank you, Mayor. So I'd like to go back to the building address that's listed on the slide that we were talking about. Is 1825 part. However, from the conversation from the speakers, I'm thinking we're actually talking about 1926, which is where coffee culture is. There's there's two projects, both on Park Street, both on the same side of Park Street. Within a block of each other. There's coffee, coffee cultures at the corner of Park and Clement, which the last public speaker was talking about. He has an office there. They have no parking at all? No. 1926, then. One block up from that next door to the karate place on the corner. Is another project that was approved which is much smaller. Ground floor commercial one one unit upstairs, also zero parking. So if I may. Mr. Maguire wanted to add something. We'll be right back. Mr. Maguire. I just want to add it's possible that there's a typo in it and that I should have said 1820. Park Street across the street. Okay. Even numbers are on one side and on the other guy. I defer to you, Councilmember PEREIRA. You probably have that right. I apologize. Hey, thank you, Mr. Maguire, because I want to make sure we're talking about the right place, that. We have reached agreement that odd numbers are on one side of the street and even around the other. That's why we've got three. Members of. Planning building. Okay. Jeff knows parking, but we don't know how to address the numbers. No worries. We've got to get back to you, Councilmember. So I would ask that that address be corrected in that staff report. So when people are looking at the sort of course, they can figure it out. But in regards to the speaker that spoke about coffee cultures, I go there. I recommend people try it and whatnot, but I park across the way. The Dragon Rouge and other people do too, because Dragon Rouge doesn't open until 1130 and that's more of a opens a little later and goes into like nine or 10:00. And I think the other businesses don't open until like 10 a.m. probably at the earliest there that shopping center. Now that I'm suggesting other people do other people do do it. I see it. I see it because. Right, I go to there. And so if you're building a business but they're able to take advantage of other parking nearby. Right. That still you can't count on that. And so I think it's important that we keep that in mind because rest assured, people that go to coffee culture, many of them are in fact driving and they're parking somewhere and they're not parking at this structure because staff didn't require them to have it. But they are parking a car and they're lucky that Kitty Corner, you have Dragon Rouge in pretty good sized parking lot because I think coffee culture actually opens pretty early in the morning and so people can cross the street and but you can't count on that . And so I do have concerns about staff's recommendations, especially when your examples don't take into account the whole area. And the problem is, in fact, in some of these residential areas, we we absolutely do not have sufficient parking right now. We have people that have to circle around their neighborhood and try to find parking. It does it could it may very well not be on their street. And we have, for instance, on San Jose, we have these older homes that have been subdivided within. So you have, you know, there's multiple rentals and they do not have sufficient parking, but we do not under current law, you can add the ADU and in fact you can sell, you can subdivide your lot and up to 40 and up with four units instead of one. And, you know, where are these people going to park? And even if it's one point, whatever the number was, this is sensitive times is still a car. And I am concerned that this actually does not take into account the total impact. And I do have a question because. I looked at where we are and ridership on AC transit and BART right now post COVID and we had the prior item where it was very clear that we still support being outside. We are concerned about COVID, and I'm concerned that this item really doesn't speak to where we still are on ridership. I see transit currently the most recent report I could find July 20, 21. It is about 37% of what it was pre-COVID at and similar numbers for BART. The ridership is fluctuates. They they're very good. They show daily ridership and it's anywhere between 25 to 43% of what it was pre-COVID. So people at least here in the Bay Area here in Alameda, we are not back to using public transportation like we were. In fact, we also know this. There is a quote recently from MGC spokesperson October 5th, and they said topping 90% of pre-pandemic levels is the car ridership through the Bay Bridge. So we know that people that are commuting are actually driving a car, whereas before they were taking public transportation. And I think as long as we are still experiencing that COVID and people are not riding public transportation, in fact they are dramatically not. I do take BART, the parking garage at Fruitvale. You can show up any time of the day. You can park on the ground level outside. There are next to no vehicles there because people really are not back to ridership, public transportation, which means and we do know this, we know it's very hard to get a used car right now. It's very hard because guess what? People have actually bought cars that instead of using public transportation and they need to park those cars in our city because they have to park them somewhere. So I think that when I look at this, I don't think there's been any adjustment for the impact of what we're seeing in COVID. And I think that we have to assume people are not going to just get on. It's not happening. People are not back to using public transportation. I do support adding the Chargers and stuff. I think that's very important. We see that happening. I think that's great because it's actually very hard and very expensive to add after the fact. So I think that's a good idea. But I think these other numbers don't take into consideration where we are right now in a pandemic and the impacts in our neighborhoods. It is is not not what I think this reflects or will serve us. So I cannot support that those these are, I think, dramatic changes. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Next, what I think I saw your hand up for. Yeah, I'd like to make a motion to approve the staff recommendation as written. I think the work was done really fantastic. I have no changes or tweaks. I'm just going to thank the staff for presenting the data that shows that these are not draconian. They actually support the existing conditions. I don't think we should be making long term, decades long policy based on a pandemic we're still in the middle of, and it supports the decision making that this council and previous councils have been supporting for the last 8 to 10 years. So with that, I'd like to move approval. Thank you. Great appreciation. Thank you. Driver second. Well, Vice Mayor Vela or Councilmember Desai. Anyone prepared to second or shall I? Okay. I was frozen. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Does she know that? Madam Clerk. Didn't I took notice? That took two snow. Thank you. Okay, Richard, thank you. In the interest of moving things along, I will happily second your motion and also second the appreciation to staff. I'm really excited about this. I think it's forward thinking where we should be. And I want to just comment really quickly. I counsel rehearsed Spencer you're absolutely correct that public transit has not come back yet from our pre-COVID ridership levels. It is starting to slowly and I will say I have rarely ever parked in the Fruitvale BART parking station because it's so easy to hop on AC Transit in Alameda. I'm kind of lazy if someone else could do the driving for me, I go for it and I just want the public to know that on a rainy day last week, maybe I had to go to San Francisco, hopped on AC Transit, went to Fruitvale, BART got on, BART went to the city. People were really good about wearing masks. One of my things, but honestly, transit at the BART station, on the platform, in the BART car, and there's not a lot of people because it was a little bit off commute peak hours, but it felt very safe and healthy and just, you know, couldn't have been easier. And then it at the end, when I was done with my appointment, I came back and it dropped me off in front of city hall, which is, you know, pretty, pretty sweet door to door service. And then the the coffee culture is I it's not that we're trying to do advertising, but it is. Mr. Thomas I was there the other day and I was remembering, do you remember the groundbreaking doing the groundbreaking? And then all of a sudden I was with a friend having coffee out in the courtyard the other day. We rode bikes, by the way, and they've got bike parking at the far end of the the outside courtyard there. But Marcel single, the owner, came along just to say hi and you know, he and his family live upstairs that is residential over retail and there's also office. I mean that's a really cool, cool development. And and as far as the parking, it is a bit challenging that spot. But I want everyone to know that that assisted living facility at the foot of Park Street that is actually getting a new roof, you might have noticed. And so right now, all the construction vehicles and equipment, they're staging them and storing them on the side of the building where the staff would normally park. So staff are parking on the street. So some of that will be eased. I mean, I, you know, Park Street Corridor, it's it's a bit of a challenge to park, but it's a little unusual right now. The point being Alameda is love their coffee and they find a way to get to these places and it's just really nice to have places to socialize and get caffeinated. So I saw this vice mayor and she's got her hand up. So. So you froze. So Councilwoman Knox White made the motion. I would have seconded, but we love your comments before we take a vote. Well, I was going to second and then I got kicked off of the zoom. So I could withdraw my second. If you. Really want to do it. It's okay. It's okay. No, I think, you know, in many cases, and especially on Park Street and some other quarters, there is ample parking lots and other parking alternatives, as well as a number of different ways to get to get to and from those locations. So, you know, I appreciate all of the staff work on this and all of the feedback that we've gotten. I'm ready to support this tonight. All right, Councilmember de thug. Thank you. You know, I think that in our ordinance, especially in 37.13, we do have a system in place right now that forces developers to come to city hall hat in hand to ask for lower parking standards. What's before us would make it easier for these developers to reduce parking. But. I think that the system we have in place right now is not that burdensome on developers especially. So there's no reason to change the system. And just one more comment on affordable housing. Again, the system we have in place right now even allows for a lessening of parking requirements in an effort to make housing more affordable . It's all right there in 30 dash 7.13. And the table that you saw demonstrates that. A lot of these developers, especially developers of big projects. Have been accommodated. So I'm not I don't see the compelling reason to to change what we have. We shouldn't make things easier for developers. Um, thank you. All right. So we've had a motion, we've had a cycle, we've had our comments made. We have a roll call vote, Madam Clerk. So we're British. I know. Where Spencer Knox. Is. Yes, yes. Yes. Mayor Ashcroft. Yes. That carries 3 to 2. All right. Very good. Thank you again, staff for all your hard work in bringing this forward. And we look forward to seeing it. Thank you, Brian. Yes. May I just please make sure to quick remark on the work. That staff did with the parking ordinance is. Fully supported by the State. Of California SB two planning grants. So with your approval tonight, the city would seek that reimbursement. So the cost has been paid for. Thank you. Please do. Thank you so much. All right. Yes. Okay. Okay. We need to move quickly. Council and staff, because we have a hard stop at midnight and we want to hear this other very important item. All of our items are important, but we have item seven G. So Madam quick, why don't you introduce that while we do a little moving of moving of screens here, if you would, please. Of course. Recommendation to authorize the Chief of Police to update Section 310 of existing Alameda Police Department Policy Manual to conform to existing best practices and statutory requirements mandating notification of California, Department of Justice and certain officer involved shootings. And we have the police chief and captain here tonight and we are promoting them. Excellent. It will be here for. You are welcome, Chief Geraci. Welcome, Captain Emmett. We're happy to see you. I know we're keeping you out a little late, but.