Speculation Station and Consent Items Galore
Labor Negotiations, GHAD explained, HPD seeks new laser scanner, and the East Bay Greenway seeks approval for the new route.
Speculation Station: Labor Negotiations
Once again we drive on into Speculation Station where we look at the Closed Session items and speculate wildly about what could be going on. We can’t know, so why not have some fun?
Labor Negotiation
It’s contract negotiation season already, apparently? There’s a big roster of folks there, with multiple reps from the City Manager’s office, HR, and the City Attorney’s office. It’s impossible to know what’s going on, but suffice it to say, labor negotiations can be interesting and it’s somewhat surprising that it’s being dipped into already considering the usual negotiation period is more toward the spring time. That being said, negotiations take a long time, so maybe this is the first of many meetings to come.
Anticipated Litigation
Looks like the City is still strategizing around the “alleged” damage to 30800 Faircliff Drive. No idea what the damage could be, but if the owner thinks the City is responsible for it, my money is on tree damage or some kind of construction fallout of some kind. Time will tell!
Consent Items and Explainers
Consent items are things that the Council usually doesn’t bother to debate at length and approves in one big group. This means they don’t often get a lot of air-time, even though a lot of important stuff (read: Money) gets handled here. And since this week’s meeting is a Very Special Meeting, we thought we’d try to explain what makes it so darn special.
GHAD: An Explainer
That’s an excellent question! GHAD stands for the Geologic Hazard Abatement District and it’s a Special District (like a school district or waste district) that covers parts of the old La Vista Quarry. The Board is just the City Council under a different name and the purpose of the GHAD is, in essence, to collect some extra property taxes to help fix and deal with the earthquake risk that’s posed by the Hayward Fault.
The old La Vista Quarry parcels used to belong to the City, but much like the old Highway 238 properties, the City decided to sell them off to developers to make some money. The unfortunate thing is that the Hayward Fault runs right through the old quarry.
In order to mitigate some of the risks associated with the Fault being so close, certain parcels are going to be owned by the GHAD and they’ll maintain all the infrastructure that’s there with some extra money that the houses in La Vista will pay to the GHAD (similar to how you pay some property taxes for the Mosquito Abatement District(s) you’re in).
This parcel here is the one that’s being transferred to the GHAD in the meeting on Tuesday night.
The important thing to remember is that the GHAD is technically a wholly separate meeting body, even though its membership is the exact same as City Council, so there’s a whole separate agenda and minutes and everything that has to be done to deal with anything involving the GHAD.
Bureaucracy!
Animal Services To Get Translation Money
The Animal Services Bureau of the Hayward Police Department is getting $5,000 from the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program to translate all of their materials into multiple different languages, Spanish and Chinese, so that more people know what’s going on. This is a big deal since, as the Staff report states, 40% of the community is Latine and 30% is Asian or Pacific Islander.
That being said, there is a lot of linguistic diversity in the API umbrella, so we hope that they do some more research before focusing exclusively on Simplified Chinese. They may find that Tagalog or some other language will reach more people in the community if they look into it more. Not all Asians speak Chinese.
Also, it’s our hope at the Hayward Herald that we can one day run en español, tambien.
HPD Needs A New 3D Laser Scanner
The Hayward Police Department is looking to get a new fancy scanner for traffic accident investigation. Apparently we’ve had one for a while now, but it’s old and won’t work anymore. HPD has also reached out to the Sheriff’s department to borrow theirs, but they’ve denied the last two requests.
The money has already been allocated from the Capital Improvement budget and the scanner is mostly being argued for its help in preparing court testimony. The majority of the discussion is about traffic collisions, but I feel this little throw-away line is kind of important:
The scanner will also assist the City Attorney’s Office when defending litigation involving traffic collisions and other officer involved incidents. (Emphasis added)
So although the main billing for this is traffic accidents, it’ll also be used in courts to defend officers involved in… other incidents.
New Positions Being Added At The City
Did you ever want to know how much everyone who works for the City makes? Well you can take a quick peek at the Salary Schedule and see for yourself. The changes appear to be primarily for the Senior Fire Protection Engineer, Police Mental Health Professional (a new position for counseling for Police Officers), Mobile Mental Health Clinician (for the HEART program), and Senior Information Technology Systems Analyst (new position, possibly in response to the big hack this year).
Habitat for Humanity Project Moves Forward
Dedicated readers will remember that back at the end of September, the Planning Commission approved a development on A Street (by the Speedway Express on Walnut St). It took a long while because of some contamination hazards on the property, but after Council approves this, the project can begin in earnest.
All around, this is a positive thing, but watch out for construction delays in the next year or two.
Fire Station Cost Overruns Continue
Construction just keeps being expensive! The new Fire Station 6 and Fire Training Center on the southern side of the Hayward Executive Airport needs more money to get it across the finish line.
How much? About $2,250,000. This money is going to go to “construction management” and “support” as well as “temporary housing, fixture, furniture & equipment (FF&E) and staff construction administration costs”.
Let us hope that the project finishes sooner rather than later.
East Bay Greenway: Bike Lanes Connecting BART Stations
This, quite honestly, deserves its own post but we’ve got limited time and resources here at the Herald. But to sum up a very big project in as few words as I can, the East Bay Greenway is a big multi-city project being led by the Alameda County Transportation Commission (ACTC) that’s trying to connect all of the BART stations from Lake Merritt to South Hayward with some kind of “urban trail” infrastructure (likely a grade separated bike lane/walking path like the old Iron Horse Trail in the Tri-Valley).
The initial plan seems to have been to buy the old rails that parallel the BART tracks from Union Pacific, who currently owns them, and convert them to a trail. There are some criticisms of plans like this since we also need more rail infrastructure, but these rails aren’t being used at this point and BART parallels them already. However, that’s a really expensive plan, so ACTC is looking at a more manageable plan in the near-term to provide some kind of continuous bike path connecting the 7 BART stations.
For most of Hayward, that initially meant putting in a Class IV bike path (see below) all along Mission, much like what already exists south of Industrial.
However, City Staff had two issues with this plan:
It’s expensive and a lot of construction work.
We literally just finished Mission Blvd in 2014, please don’t make us go back!*
So instead of putting in Class IV bike lanes on Mission, the plan is to follow this route
It’s a parallel street to Mission and is much lower traffic (though people regularly speed and get into collisions with parked cars due to it being long and straight with wide lanes). Some of it already has separated bike lanes (Class II), but most of it is, at best, Class III (which is a Bike Route, and, in our opinion, inferior and more scary to use as a cyclist).
But even these are going to be tricky to deal with in practice:
Meek Avenue, Silva Avenue, and Sycamore Avenue, which are too narrow to accommodate both bicycle and on-street parking so parallel streets may be utilized to provide a contextually appropriate bicycle facility. Further, Grand Avenue and Whitman Street have stretches where residential driveways require balancing parking and bicycle facilities. On Grand Avenue removal of one travel lane will be evaluated and coordinated with the community for providing an appropriate bikeway facility. Whitman Street approaching Tennyson Road has schools directly along Whitman Street which need to consider how a bicycle facility will fit within the context of pick-up and drop-off situations. (emphasis added)
The highlighted section of Mission Blvd above is pedestrian improvements are being suggested because it’s a part of the “Pedestrian High Injury network.” Things being considered are bulb outs, mid-block crossing additions, and “pedestrian refuge islands” which really highlights just how hostile Mission Blvd is to pedestrians, despite the intensity of development being pushed on the corridor.
Of note, removing excess lanes, narrowing lanes, or modifying the design of the corridor in any way to improve compliance with the 25-30 mph speed limits are not being considered.
*Editor’s Note: If they had just included bike lanes in that section of Mission in the first place, as was in the original plans, we wouldn’t be in this situation.