Report 03-224 Attachment 7

May 13, 2003

Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
City Hall
456 West Olive Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3707

Dear Mayor Miller and Members of the City Council:

On March 26, 2002, the Downtown Stakeholders Advisory Committee transmitted to you the Downtown Design Plan, which was prepared by the Committee over an eight month period with the support of City staff and consultants (ELS of Berkeley and Keyser Marston of San Francisco). On April 23, 2002, the City Council adopted the Plan in concept, referred the Plan to staff and Planning Commission for environmental review, and initiated an extensive public outreach program.

The Stakeholders Committee has listened carefully to questions, comments and concerns raised by the community over the past year. Committee members attended the various public outreach meetings, including the most recent meeting of April 10, 2003, on the Draft EIR. On May 1, 2003, the Committee reconvened to consider all of the public input on the Plan, and to make its final recommendation to the City Council.

The Committee perceives public support for the following aspects of the Plan:

• Its vision: An enhanced, traditional downtown serving the community with a variety of destinations in a pedestrian-friendly environment.
• Building upon the success of historic Murphy Avenue.
• "De-malling" the Sunnyvale Town Center Mall, by extending streets and pedestrian ways into the mall to reestablish the historic downtown street grid as much as possible.
• Creating comfortable, safe, attractive and interesting public sidewalks and public places throughout downtown.
• Increasing the number and quality of retail shops and personal services.
• Providing opportunity for more people to live downtown in proximity to transit, shops and services.
• Making downtown a unique and attractive public place which gives a positive identity to the entire City of Sunnyvale.
• Protecting residential areas adjacent to downtown from unnecessary intrusion of traffic, parking, noise and glare.

The Committee also perceives widespread community concern over the Plan’s proposed height and intensity of new buildings which might give downtown an overly urban character in juxtaposition to the more suburban character of many of the city’s neighborhoods. In this regard, the greatest expressed concern was over the proposed Mathilda "boulevard", lined on its eastern side with 100-foot tall office buildings from Evelyn Avenue to El Camino Real. Related concerns were also expressed over the traffic impacts of such intense development.

At its meeting of May 1, the Committee responded directly to the major concerns expressed by the public, particularly with regard to height and density. The Committee was cognizant of the fact that unless a reasonable amount of increased density was permitted above existing development, developers would not proceed to create those aspects of the Plan which received widespread community support.

The Committee now recommends that no new development be permitted in Downtown Sunnyvale over four stories in height, with the exception of the Town and Country area, where a height of five to six stories would be permitted in residential structures with ground-floor retail.

The specific changes to the Plan recommended by the Committee are as follows:

• Town and Country (Block 1a): Lower permitted height from 100 feet (8 stories) to 75 feet (5-6 stories)
• Town Center Mall (Block 18): Lower permitted height from 75 feet to 60 feet, except for a movie theater structure in the center of the block which could rise to 80 feet.
• Mathilda, east side, between Washington and Iowa (Block 18a): Lower permitted height from 100 feet (6 stories) to 75 feet (4 stories). The Committee noted that approximately 1/3 of this Mathilda Avenue frontage will be storefronts (the McKinley Avenue extension of the Mall to Mathilda) which will likely be no taller than two stories.
• Mathilda, east side, between Iowa and El Camino Real (Blocks 13 and 20): Drop all recommendations for rezoning these blocks, leaving heights and densities as currently permitted (effectively lowers proposed height from 100 feet to present maximum of 50 feet).
• Mathilda, west side, between Evelyn and Washington (Block 17): Reduce permitted height from four stories to two stories, and permitted density from 55 units/acre to 14/units/acre.

The Committee also reindorsed the 12 implementation recommendations contained in our letter of transmittal of March 26, 2002 (first six pages of the Plan document), with one minor change to the eighth recommendation on transportation improvements. The Committee continues to give high priority to the proposed loop from Mathilda Avenue southbound to Evelyn Avenue or to "a functionally equivalent solution".

The Downtown Stakeholders Advisory Committee again thanks the Mayor and City Council for giving us the opportunity to serve our City through preparation of the Downtown Design Plan. It has been a long, arduous but exciting process. With the revisions made at our last meeting, we believe that we have achieved the major objective of the planning effort: to articulate a long-range vision for Downtown Sunnyvale which is widely supported throughout the community. We encourage the City Council to endorse the Plan, as revised, as the basis for revision of the Downtown Specific Plan and Design Guidelines.

Sincerely,

_____________________
Joseph Antuzzi, Chairman, Downtown Stakeholders Advisory Committee
127 W Washington Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086

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