Sunnyvale’s 2013 City Council election hinged on the rapid growth of commercial and residential construction. The conflict was clearly between residents who want to protect the quality of life in Sunnyvale, and the developers who want to build multimillion dollar projects.
Sunnyvale’s master plan, the General Plan, defines a planning tool called the Balanced Growth Profile (BGP). The city describes the BGP as “a planning tool which can be used to monitor growth and to determine the relative balance…between population growth and job growth, and between development and the infrastructure which supports it.”
The Balanced Growth Profile relates land-use decisions to the impact on schools, parks, utilities and transportation infrastructure.
By 2014, Sunnyvale’s rapid growth in Moffett Park (north of Highway 237), and along Mathilda Avenue developed 95 percent of the 7.6 million square feet of the office space envisioned by 2025 in the Balanced Growth Profile. Short-term, this rapid growth is a recipe for more traffic congestion. Long-term, it will create increased demand for more housing, and further overcrowding of our schools.
Concern over this Balanced Growth Profile metric resulted in a joint study session last May between city staff, the planning commission, and the city council (“Sunnyvale officials debate merits of Balanced Growth Profile,” Sunnyvale Sun, June 4, 2014). In this meeting, city staff presented some of the problems with the BGP, and identified steps that could resolve these problems.
City staff indicated a need to recalibrate some of the BGP metrics such as parks, traffic and infrastructure. Staff also revealed the city has been under-reporting new improvements to traffic capacity. Many attendees agreed the various school districts may not be reporting their school capacity metrics consistently.
But instead of developing an action plan to resolve these problems, many council members chose to continue ignoring the warnings of the BGP. Some council members took the opportunity to dismiss the relevance of this tool, which was created with input of many residents.
In the next few years, Sunnyvale will see a huge increase in commercial construction in Moffett Park and along N. Mathilda Avenue. Next year, the city council is expected to approve the new Peery Park Specific Plan, which will allow millions of square feet of new office space between Maude Avenue and Highway 101.
The Lawrence Station Area will bring thousands of high-density housing units to the neighborhood around Lawrence Expressway and Kifer Road, and residents near El Camino Real and Wolfe Road are already preparing for a huge housing project at Butcher’s Corner.
It’s easy for the city council to approve applications for huge office and residential projects. It is very difficult to allocate millions of dollars necessary to fund necessary increases for city services, schools and transportation infrastructure. The Balanced Growth Profile was designed specifically to prevent these imbalances.
The city council should represent the concerns of the residents when making major land-use decisions. The council has an obligation to all of our residents to acknowledge the importance of the Balanced Growth Profile as a development tool, and to work with city staff to correct any bad or missing data in the profile.
Anyone who is interested in the growth of Sunnyvale should carefully read the transcript of the joint study session available at didyouknowsunnyvale.com/docs/BGP_JSS_transcript.pdf
Andy Frazer is a former sustainability commissioner and former candidate for city council. He is also co-founder of Sunnyvale Pension Reform.
