Cupertino Matters
- New Mayor/Vice Mayor
- RECAP – City Council meeting, Tues., Dec. 17, 2024, 6:45 p.m.
- RECAP – Council, Thurs., Dec. 12, 2024
- RECAP – Planning Commission, Tues., Dec. 10, 2024
Holiday wishes to all our readers, celebrating not just Christmas but also a host of other holidays. City services will be closed from Tuesday, December 24, 2024 through Wednesday, January 1, 2025 in observance of the Winter Holiday. The first meeting of the city council in the new year will be Jan. 22, Wednesday, due to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on January 20. Cupertino Matters will be on hiatus until council resumes.
The major council news is that Liang Chao was selected as the new city mayor, succeeding Sheila Mohan, and Kitty Moore was selected as new vice-mayor, succeeding J.R. Fruen. These are each one year terms. A recap of the first meeting for the reorganized city council is included below.
The good news is the restart of key construction in Cupertino. As reported in the Mercury News, the iconic Flint Center undergoes demolition five years after closing; The Foothill-De Anza Community College District is planning to build a new Creative Arts Building. In addition, the latest newsletter from The Rise (formerly Vallco) includes this update:
“Over the past two months, we’ve put the finishing touches on preliminary site work and are mobilizing to kick off the new year with broad construction of infrastructure that will lay the foundation for future retail, residential, and recreational spaces at The Rise. This progress marks an important step in transforming The Rise into the dynamic downtown destination that we believe is a cornerstone for Cupertino’s future and long-term growth.”
There is more development in the pipeline posted on the redesigned city website. The state-approved Housing Element for Cupertino contains 58 sites to support the development of an additional 4,588 new homes in the next seven years. However, as property owners develop plans to build these units, actual proposals in higher opportunity neighborhoods (as required by the state per AB 686) have encountered opposition from neighbors of adjacent single-family homes. One site at 20865 McClellan Road is for 27 townhomes on an acre of land and is subject to the protections of the Housing Crisis Act (SB 330), which locks permissible land uses into place at the time of an application’s submission. Another such site sits at Evulich Court on Linda Vista Drive for 52 townhomes.
Neighbors attending city meetings complain that they did not receive notification. However, the city did extensive outreach during the process of developing the Housing Element process over the past three years as documented by Vice-Chair Seema Lindskog during the Planning Commission meeting referenced below. Councilmembers Ray Wang (at the time, a member of the Planning Commission), Kitty Moore and Liang Chao, as well as Planning Commissioners Steven Scharf and Muni Madhdhipatla specifically chose to designate these sites for higher density housing, i.e. townhomes and apartments/condos in largely single-family areas. Their actions and comments can be reviewed in this complete summary of the city meetings and approval votes.
A reminder that the application deadline for city commissions is 4:00 p.m. on Friday, January 3, 2025. These serve as advisory bodies to the City Council by considering public input and providing recommendations to the Council. Appointments to all commissions will occur late in January 2025. Commission appointment durations were realigned in 2024 in order to clean up off-year appointment cycles. Applications can be submitted online at cupertino.org/vacancies via the new commission-specific application links.
For research, past issues back to January 2020 of Cupertino Matters are posted on the website. Encourage your friends who would like to become better informed about our community to subscribe to our email newsletter at CupertinoMatters.org.
RECAP – CITY COUNCIL, Tues., Dec. 17, 2024, 6:45 p.m., Regular Meeting
YouTube: 2 hr. 35 min. Adjourned at 9:30 p.m.
Agenda and Presentations
Consent Calendar Item No. 4.: City Council meeting schedule through January 21, 2026 was pulled by Mayor Chao who questioned the meeting rescheduling to accommodate Monday holidays (three in 2025). After discussion and a friendly amendment to consider moving council meetings to Wednesday, the item was passed unanimously.
Item No. 5: Appointment of 2025 Council Committee assignments. Mayor Chao explained her reasoning in allocating assignments. There was minimal public and council discussion.
Item No. 6: City Work Program and Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) Program prioritization process. This last minute agenda item initiated wholly by Mayor Chao was unfocused, commingling CIP and CWP projects. The City Work Program runs on a two-year cycle, Capital Improvement Projects, though, operate on a five-year cycle. They are part of the budget process in April and May. There was minimal public comment, perhaps stemming from the lack of any clear guidance from the Mayor on what she wanted to achieve with the discussion. Council discussion meandered, with a final proposal for a study session for the January 22 council meeting, with general guidelines adhering to a staff-prepared roadmap dating from a November 14 Informational Memo. Council approved 5-0.
RECAP – CITY COUNCIL, Thurs., Dec. 12 , 2024, 6:00, Televised Special Meeting (Election Results and Swearing-in Ceremony)
YouTube: 2 hr. 26 min.
Public comments were extensive with 44 speaker cards. Many public speakers recognized Hung Wei’s years of service on the FUHSD board and community organizations in addition to serving on council. Competing groups of speakers also supported either Vice Mayor Fruen for Mayor or Councilmember Chao.
Item #1 Statement of results of the General Municipal Election held on November 5, 2024 and declaration of candidates who received the most votes and were elected for the position of City of Cupertino Council Member. This was the formal recognition of the results of the General Municipal Election.
Item #2 Recognize outgoing Councilmember Hung Wei. She spoke movingly about the support received from the community, and that Cupertino is her home so she will be back. The city is sending her a gift, as is typical for outgoing councilmembers.
Item #3 Oath of Office of Recently Elected Councilmembers. Councilmember Kitty Moore was sworn in by the city clerk; Councilmember Ray Wang was sworn in by former mayor Darcy Paul.
Item #4 a. Councilmembers elect Mayor b. Councilmembers elect Vice Mayor c. Mayor and Vice Mayor Oath of Office. After Mayor Mohan’s motion to appoint Vice Mayor Fruen as Mayor, Councilmembers Moore, Chao, and Wang voted to overrule the Mayor’s call for a vote and elected Liang Chao as Mayor and Kitty Moore as Vice Mayor. Mayor Chao then spent nearly 20 minutes rehashing perceived accomplishments from 2019 to 2022 and complaining that the division in the community stemmed from earlier council decisions on Vallco, ignoring the reality that Vallco is now an SB35 project that bypasses the city council. The 2023-2024 council accomplishments were ignored – state approval of the Housing Element, a successful budget realignment to address the loss of $30 million in annual sales tax revenue from the city’s major sale taxpayer, settlement with the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration to preserve over $70 million in General Fund monies, and settlement of various lawsuits. Mayor Chao promised transparency, community engagement and accountability during her term, but offered no specifics, other than suggesting reverting to practices that dominated 2022 and led to the Civil Grand Jury investigation of the city’s governance practices.
RECAP – PLANNING COMMISSION, Tues., Dec. 10, 2024, 6:45 p.m., Regular Meeting
YouTube: 1 hr. 46 min.
The sole action item was Item No. 2: Zoning Map Amendment for Priority Housing Site No. 24 in the 6th Cycle Housing Element (Application No.(s): Z-2024-001, EA-2024-001; Applicant: City of Cupertino; APN: 359 13 019; Location: 20865 McClellan Road), which engendered extensive public comment. Neighbors voiced their opposition to the development of 27 townhomes in this neighborhood, otherwise characterized by single-family residence, though this is a Priority Housing Element site, vetted and approved through the entire Housing Element process. Anger was expressed that the neighbors were not notified of the rezoning that occurred during development of the site inventory. The action item was to correct a typo to reflect the correct zoning designation per the General Plan: that is to rezone the site from R-3 (the city’s standard lower-to-middle density for stacked apartment building zoning) to R-3/TH, which would also allow townhouses–both at a density of 20 dwelling units per acre. Many of the comments, however, were directed at a development application submitted for the site in October proposing 27 townhomes. This application utilizes provisions of state law to lock in the existing land use rules and activates special provisions of the state’s Density Bonus Law to achieve a higher density on the site and to allow it to bypass the city’s normal R-3 development standards. Because that application enjoys the legal protections of the Housing Crisis Act, the rezoning itself has no direct impact on the October development application. That is, the rezoning neither “allows” nor “disallows” the 27-home project. It merely corrects an error in the zoning code. After Vice-Chair Seema Lindskog pointed out the hypocrisy of Planning Commission members in the Housing Element process in 2022, the item was approved 3-2 with Scharf and Madhdhipatla voting nay, even though they had previously approved the higher density zoning for this site.
CUPERTINO COURIER: December 20, 2024
The front page story and article on page 3 is entitled By unanimous approval: Council elects Liang Chao as mayor, Kitty Moore as vice mayor. Community briefs are (1) Athena Zhang wins nonprofit’s art contest and (2) ‘Home Alone’ screening on Dec. 24. There are no legal notices.
CUPERTINO COURIER: December 13, 2024
The front-page story and article on page 3 is entitled ‘Commitment to equity’: De Anza College finds its 5th president in Dr. Omar Javier Torres. Community briefs are (1) Holiday bank concert and (2) Granting access to art. Page 5 is a previously published Mercury News article entitled Wang wins second open council seat. There are no legal notices.
Warm regards,
Jean Bedord
Cupertino Matters
Publisher and Editor
