The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper

City sets its priorities in legislative review

By Steve Enders

Sunnyvale's City Council has taken the first step in deciding what it will and what it won't be dealing with during the coming year.

In all-day meetings last Thursday, the council prioritized proposals drafted by various city departments involving what individual departments would like the City Council to study in 1998. The council will eventually take the information and form its calendar for the year accordingly.

The list of 99 items up for review was significantly narrowed down and will be cut again after the list goes back to the council next month.

The prioritized lists have already been sent back to each department, where during the next few weeks they will again be reviewed to determine how many issues the council can reasonably pursue in 1998.

The items presented to the council were issues that were deferred from last year's workshop or were raised by councilmembers, city staff, public hearings and various boards and commissions.

The process

The council takes the initial proposals and decides how important and urgent they are. This is done by numerically ranking the items by priority. Then each item is given a "raw score," which is the sum of each councilmember's own rankings.

For example, the council decided that the Department of Community Development's desire for the regulation of leaf-blowers and other power equipment was important enough to leave on the things-to-do list but gave it a low rating of four. The issue received a raw score of 39, meaning that each of the seven councilmembers ranked it fairly low.

Also, the council can decide, by majority vote, which items to drop completely from the list and which should be deferred until next year. Some items return every year, while others are new to the list. Some items are combined to help streamline the process.

The decisions

The office of the city attorney filed only one request, which was to look at campaign-finance reform for council candidates. The issue goes back to 1996 and the outcome of Prop. 208. Former mayor Stan Kawczynski had requested a review of laws to determine if the city could limit contributions from registered Sunnyvale voters. This year's council voted not to look at the item.

The office of the city manager put 31 items on the list but only had seven ranked and five others combined with other issues. The remainder were dropped from the list.

One issue that was dropped from the council's list was the Moffett Field ballot measure that would have left the issue of air cargo up to voters on a future ballot.

Another item dropped from the list was a proposal to check the city's social service employees' immigration status as a way to separate legal from illegal residents.

Top of the list

One item at the top of the city's high-priority list was a revision of Public Safety's massage-establishment ordinance. The proposal addresses a need to correct vague wording of the policy that defines what services can be provided at these establishments. The need for action comes from increasing complaints over the sale of sexual services from massage parlors and tanning salons.

Sunnyvale's legislative review process is one of only a few in the state, according to David Vossbrink, the city's community relations officer. He also said the review has been a part of Sunnyvale's governmental process for more than 20 years.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, December 17, 1997.
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