3/1/2007

Post date: Mar 23, 2013 8:56:46 PM

River Oaks Neighborhood Association Board Meeting

Present: Jean, Mike, Marcelle, Abhay, Jurgen, Laura, Jim Foran

(Laura volunteered to act as secretary)

Meeting called to order @6:15pm

    1. Report on Meeting with City Council Members

        1. This effort is to try to garner support for RO-NA among the other council members both (1) while District 4 is not represented on the council and (2) for future votes.

        2. Jean is actively working to get meetings set up with Campos, Cortese, and Liccardo; she's pushing to have these complete by the next Board meeting.

        3. Eric talked to Scott Green, a staffer for Councilman Chirco, on Feb 20th, see his presentation and follow-up letter. He reports:

          1. Last week Scott Green of Chirco's office found a window in which to meet with me. I didn't have time to invite anyone else along because it was such short notice. Anyhow, attached is the presentation I threw together, along with the follow up letter I sent yesterday. Feel free to use anything that might be useful in meeting with out council offices. Scott stressed the importance of bringing as many council members on board as possible. Stopping the projects didn't sound possible, but lowering densities, keeping traffic off River Oaks, and possibly moving the park to parcel 5 sounded possible (not promised, but worth exploring).

        4. Need someone to work on Constant, Nguyen, and Pyle.

    2. Drafting Bylaws

        1. Jean presented a first draft

        2. Changes to the first draft were discussed and agreed upon in the meeting.

        3. Laura is taking the action to incorporate the changes and mail out a second draft to the board.

        4. A quick highlight of the work-in-progress bylaws:

            1. Membership: Two classes of membership: voting and non-voting. Voting membership has a small annual fee, but allows you to participate in voting for Officers of the Board.

            2. Officers: COfficers on the Board must be Voting members. onsist of at least a president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer. Officers-at-large may also be elected to volunteer time or for specific roles. Elections are held annually, term of office is one year.

            3. Meetings: Board meetings will be held monthly (although in practice probably more like biweekly). General meetings will be held biannually -- one meeting for elections and one intended as a social event. The public is welcome at all meetings.

    3. Helping Out with Jim Foran's Campaign

        1. Jim will be calling people who haven't voted yet to remind them of the special election for District 4 Councilmember. Jean will be helping out with the calls.

        2. Mike will send out a reminder to the yahoo group.

    4. Walking the Sony Site to Visualize the Proposed Park

        1. Only one person showed up for Jean's planned walk on 2/24. After walking around the site, her impression was the semi-circular park proposed by Irvine is rather long but not deep (in that it doesn't extend far back from the road).

        2. She asked the Board if there was another day the Board could get together to walk the site, but no date seemed to work for everyone.

    5. North Park Parking Situation

        1. Marcelle has observed (and taken pictures!) all street-side and park-side parking slots were being used at the North Park complex. Jean has also observed this. This refutes Irvine's assertion from the Sony meeting that there is "no problem" with the parking situation at North Park. North Park has 1.8 spaces per unit according to Irvine at the Sony meeting.

        2. Considering that North Park is inside the transit corridor boundary, resident and the pending Irvine/Sony site is not, residents in the Irvine/Sony site will probably have more cars. That means even more parking slots per unit will be needed in the Irvine/Sony plan.

        3. Marcelle is going to present this evidence of a problem to Irvine to try to get them to amend their Sony plans to a full 2 parking spaces per unit.

    6. Learning How Other SJ Communities Interact with the City

        1. There is an upcoming community meeting in Berryessa for the proposed rezoning of the San Jose Flea Market into mixed commercial/residential. This is an opportunity for us to observe how a well established neighborhood association interacts with the city.

        2. Jean, Marcelle and Jim will attend.

    7. Immediate Plan of Action

        1. Continue to address the problems with the Irvine/Sony plans by appealing directly to Irvine. Need to push for a follow up meeting to see the changes made to the plans. Marcelle to drive this action.

        2. Focus on the Planning Commission meeting which will rezone Sony:

            1. As a point of procedure, all concerns/issues must be brought up at the Planning Commission meeting or they will not be permissible for discussion at later discussions about that particular site.

            2. Commissioner Jim Zito is an environmentalist and is most likely to be sympathetic.

            3. The "big" parameters of the project are nailed down at this meeting (eg: density, park size, location of streets, etc), so...

            4. Need a big turnout to show community support.

        3. Need to form a plan-of-action for Essex/Cadence, especially since we have less knowledge of their design and potentially great impact on Crescendo.

        4. Mike will act as liason to the Parks department, will keep an eye out for the parks-planning workshops

        5. Need to develop a relationship with the consultant that is working on the master plan and guidelines for development in NSJ. Supposedly there will be an informal agreement between the consultant and Irvine and Essex before development goes forward.

    8. Website @ www.ro-na.org

        1. Website redesign complete, see http://www.ro-na.org

        2. Need to formulate a distribution list based on the sign-in list from various meetings. Marcelle and Jean will work on this and get it to Laura.

        3. Limit the use of this distribution list for important annoucements (eg upcoming community meetings), and also to ask people to voice their opinions to the city on various topics. (Laura notes this should be set up like the EFF's "Action Alerts".)

        4. The first email blast should go out next week to explain (1) that this distribution list will be limited to important announcements and (2) check out the new website.

        5. Laura to figure out the best way to send this so we don't get tripped up by ISP spamblockers.

    9. Next Board meeting: 3/15, 6:30pm Premier Pizza

Meeting adjourned @7:26pm