01 06-26-08 - Laserfiche WebLink

City Attorney Roush said he would generally agree with that; when called upon to interpret Initiatives, because there is no legislative history that might accompany a Council adopted statute or ordinance, courts do look to ballot arguments in terms of what information was presented to voters, and when it came time for staff to apply a particular project to the Initiative, they would look to what was expressed as the intent. Councilmember Sullivan said it provides some guidance. He said he believes the Initiative, what the proponents and what the 5,000 people who signed it did, is consistent with current General Plan policy, the policy of this City Council, and the priority to do a southeast hills ordinance. The goal of the City Council priority is a Southeast Hills Protection Plan, to reduce development in the southeast hills and get as much open space as possible. To him, this Initiative is exactly a means to achieving that goal. As far as aCouncil-sponsored Initiative, it could have done this before starting the Oak Grove process. Instead of going first to developing some hillside protection ordinance, we decided to use another process and he was an advocate for that process which was engaging neighbors and the developer to see if a compromise could be reached; not create an ordinance first. Getting enough signatures for the ballot tells him that a sufficient number of people in town did not like that approach and that we should have done the hillside protection ordinance first. Had this Initiative not qualified for the ballot, this Council would not be advocating to quickly put some sort of hillside protections in place, so he therefore disagrees with much of what he has heard. He said the report outlined many possible scenarios with a lot of questions the Council asked, he thinks it is very important that the proponents articulated their intent because it clarifies the more ambiguous items we are pointing to. He thinks the language is simple, straight-forward and reflective of what the community wants, thinks it has been helpful that they want option 1 on page 19 of what the 10-unit exemption means, they have clarified their intent on the housing cap as applied to assisted living facilities, and he thinks the intent on the Initiative as applied to roads answers the question about the Happy Valley Bypass Road. He said other concerns raised include the fiscal issues which have been demonstrated to be negligible. Regarding the school district, he thinks it is very likely that the Initiative itself would have no impact on the school district as far as their plans to build out facilities. The impact will be when discussion is held on how we want to build out the town. None of the other General Plan policies go away; just because we have a 10-unit exemption doesn't mean we will turn the hills into West Virginia and flatten them out, which he believes is a false argument. Regarding the 25% slope, his conclusion is that it is just fine-tuning what that is. Some of the positive things the report points out is that this would likely result in more workforce housing. The more houses built in the hills, the less opportunity the City will have to do something else. Regarding options outlined by staff and the current motion, he thinks the Council should do nothing and let the Initiative stand on its own. He thinks we should allow a debate on the pros and cons and let this work itself out in the community and the vote in November. Through this exercise, the citizens of Pleasanton will make an informed decision. It is no different than the other initiatives, the citizens understand what is important to them and will be able to figure it out, and we are heading toward a competing measure. Councilmember Sullivan said he thinks the only reason to put a competing initiative on the ballot is that if we believe the Initiative, were it successful, would have some major damaging impact to the City, and there is no evidence of this. The only reason he thinks to put a re-affirming measure on the ballot is that we want to know if the public is satisfied with the current policy. He thinks the people can just vote on the current Initiative. If they are satisfied with the current policy, they will vote no. But a reason to do any of the above should not be because the Council Special Meeting Minutes 13 June 26, 2008