Three influential Palo Alto commissions are in for major changes after a series of resignations and an unusually convoluted appointment process.
The City Council on Monday made a series of appointments to the Planning and Transportation Commission, the Architectural Review Board and the Parks and Recreation Commission. For the planning commission, which is generally viewed as the city's most critical advisory board, the council reappointed incumbent Commissioner Bryna Chang for a fresh term. It also appointed Keith Reckdahl, who currently serves on the parks commission, to fill a seat on the planning commission.
Reckdahl, who also has been serving on the North Ventura Coordinated Area Plan Working Group and on the Expanded Community Advisory Panel, will fill a seat that is now occupied by Commissioner Michael Alcheck, a real estate attorney who has stood out as the commission's most persistent advocate for faster growth. Alcheck termed out with the conclusion of his current term on Dec. 15.
The Parks and Recreation Commission will also greet new members. The council reappointed incumbent commissioners Anne Cribbs and Jeff Greenfield to fresh terms. Later in the meeting, after numerous rounds of voting, council members appointed Nellis Freeman Jr., a project manager who works at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Shani Kleinhaus, an environmental advocate with the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, to open seats on the commission.
Even with these appointments, the commission will have a vacancy, thanks to Reckdahl's appointment to the planning commission. The city will recruit for his open seat on the parks commission position next year.
The five-member Architectural Review Board will also be short-handed for a while. While the council reappointed incumbent members Peter Baltay and David Hirsch to fresh terms on Monday, it opted not to fill the third open seat, which is being vacated by board veteran Alexander Lew. Instead, in an unusual move, the council unanimously agreed that the candidates who applied for board seats lack the necessary qualifications.
Further complicating the situation is the pending resignation of board member Grace Lee, an architect who last week informed the city about her plans to step down. By expanding the recruiting period for Architectural Review Board candidates, the council hopes to find architects who can fill both Lew's and Lee's seats on the influential board.
Randy Popp, a former chair of the Architectural Review Board, urged the council not to make appointments until it finds qualified candidates. The city, he suggested in a letter, does not currently have enough "properly qualified candidate to fill all the open seats."
"I recognize that we do not want to discourage people from applying for these positions but as with any job, you must possess the necessary education, skill, and experience to be successful both individually and as part of a team," Popp wrote. "The decision to place a candidate on the ARB has decades of impact on our City as those individuals guide applicants toward our goal of quality buildings."
He reiterated his concerns at Monday's meeting and noted that Lee's resignation leaves the critical five-member board with four open seats (two of those were filled minutes later, when Baltay and Hirsch were appointed to fresh terms). The pool of applicants for ARB positions also included Valerie Driscoll, Yujin Jeon, Kathryn Jordan, Manix Patel, Brigham Wilson, Jim Xiao and Bin Zhou.
"Having candidates who are elevated to the ARB who are qualified, and have the type of experience with the type of projects that they are asked to review and the skill set needed to do this highly technical review that is required is paramount," Popp told the council on Monday.
Mayor Tom DuBois agreed and proposed extending the recruiting period so as to give additional applicants a chance to step up.
"I do think we need to have the necessary skills and experiences in most of those positions, if not all of them," DuBois said.
Comments
Registered user
Old Palo Alto
on Dec 15, 2021 at 2:43 pm
Registered user
on Dec 15, 2021 at 2:43 pm
This was not a shake-up, although Palo Alto sure could use one!
As to Michael Alcheck leaving the PTC, his departure will make little difference - other than shortening meetings, abent his overlength soliloquy. Mr. Alcheck is a commercial developer by profession, and his personal and business interests will remain represented by the two corporate attorneys on the PTC who represent commercial developers for a living. Those two lawyers have proven their loyalty to their client base over the past years, by means of delivering a series of unprecedented and undeserved windfalls to billionaire real estate investors and commercial developers.
There are no other types of lawyers on the PTC, so for years the other members of the Commission - and the public - have heard only landlords' and commercial developers' interpretations of the law -- interpretations that diverge profoundly from lawyers who represent communities and small businesses for a living. Although representing community interests is something that is taken on by Ombudspersons (or City Attorneys) in better-run cities, here in Palo Alto, our leadership takes biased statements made by paid representatives of commercial developers as gospel -- whether or not they recognize that this is, in fact, what they are doing.
As to City Council's failure to appoint members to the ARB, there must be another reason, as lack of requisite skills and experiences has never prevented City Council from making appointments in the past.
If past appointments are any indication, the skills and experiences most important to City Council members are those of rubber-stamping City Council member political agendas. Given how increasingly out-of-touch City Council decisions are with the majority of community sentiment, chances are that City Council will have an increasingly difficult time finding "qualified" candidates in the future -- at least without directly recruiting allies and supporters - no doubt what they are doing now.