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In addition to taking stances on a number of proposed state initiatives, the Pleasanton City Council unanimously approved the city’s legislative framework for 2021 at its regular meeting on Tuesday.
Every year, after reviewing and discussing proposed state and federal legislation, the council’s Legislative Subcommittee develops policy recommendations for the council. Since 2016, those legislative advocacy efforts have been expanded to include a legislative framework with annual legislative “focus areas” for the city.
“I have watched the Tri-Valley framework that has been put out by prior councils and I believe that this is a continuation of that, and can allow our regional partners and us to have a unified voice on these important topics,” Councilmember Jack Balch said before voting.
Among the city’s focus areas for 2021 are COVID-19 response and recovery, housing, fostering economic prosperity, mental health, and the city’s infrastructure including streets, water, sewage and telecommunications.
Senate Bills 5 and 15, which involve housing and development, received council support, as did SCA 2 on public housing projects.
Another bill that had “conditional support” from staff and also caught the attention of Mayor Karla Brown was Senate Bill 38, concerning beverage containers — a topic of interest for many Pleasanton residents since the buy-back center at Pleasanton Garbage Service folded last year.
“We’ve been hearing a lot of concerns about there’s no place to recycle beverage containers,” Brown commented before asking assistant to the city manager Becky Hopkins to tell residents “how this may or may not help their situation, where they’ve got cans and bottles that they’ve paid a nickel in recycling fees and they want to get their nickel back. How do they do that?”
Hopkins explained that SB 38 proposes a program modeled after the mattress industry program where, “when you buy a mattress, you pay a fee, and the industry has to run this program to make sure those materials are recycled. When you buy a new one, the old one is properly recycled.”
In this instance, the beverage container industry would be required to create and fund a self-recycling machine program, which would be enforced by CalRecycle.
Current law requires an attendant to be present at California recycling stations but Hopkins said “in other parts of the country you have a vending machine, you go and you can deposit and then you get your money back.”
“Think about the Coinstar (machine), where you go and dump all of your change in and you get money back,” Hopkins said. “It’s kind of the self-vending idea and that’s really what this bill is contemplating.”
The bill has been minorly amended, but Hopkins said it has “conditional support” from staff because “it’s not clear if it’s going to fully replace what’s in existence now — does that mean that recycling centers that are currently operating go away, such as we had a buy-back center here, to just this vending machine model?”
Without any clarity about other options for residents, Hopkins said staff is “waiting to see what will happen there in regards to that bill.”
“The funding for the California redemption value funds other programs as well, and it’s not contemplated in the bill of how those recycling programs would be impacted, that aren’t the buyback centers but that benefit from that redemption value money,” Hopkins added.
Most of the other bills rejected by staff concerned housing development and planning and zoning, including Assembly Bill 115 and Senate Bills 6, 9 and 10. The issue of local control over density and housing carried over into the council’s next discussion right after voting on the legislative framework.
Continuing with a related item from their Feb. 16 meeting, the council unanimously adopted a resolution expressing the city’s position on housing and preserving local control, pushing back on state-level efforts to end single-family zoning across California.
Originally scheduled for discussion last month until time ran out, the resolution states the city “supports legislation that provides, promotes and protects affordability in the housing stock,” and is also “context-sensitive, that does not take a one-size-fits-all approach and allows the city to exercise its local control developing locally appropriate plans that meet state objectives.”
“The draconian usurping of local authority is becoming so intense, the agenda of eliminating single-family zoning across the state,” Vice Mayor Julie Testa said.
Testa added that Senate Bills 10 and 98 “are touted, they are celebrated as being bills that are designed to end single-family zoning across the state, which is the essence of an assault on local control.”
“I think that we all recognize that there is an appropriate need and place for different types of housing throughout our community, but it should be each community that makes the decision of how that’s going to be done and where that housing goes, and how it fits together,” Testa said.
The council also authorized Brown to send a letter of response concerning Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget measure to add a “Housing Accountability Unit” to the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
