Planning Commission April 14, 2026 - Special Meeting - Amended - Apr 14, 2026

meeting

Cupertino Planning Commission 1h 29m 4 speakers 7 agenda items transcribed 2 months ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Who attended and what is the purpose of the April 14, 2026 Planning Commission special meeting?

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:00

Commissioner Fung.

David Fung 0:03

Present.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:04

Commissioner Linskog. Here. Commissioner Rao.

Steven Scharf 0:10

Here.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:11

Vice Chair Scharf.

Steven Scharf 0:12

Present.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:13

Chair Kasolchron. Present.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 0:19

Excellent, thank you. So we will move forward to the approval of the minutes. If we may have a motion to approve the motion.

Steven Scharf 0:27

I'll make a motion to approve the minutes. I'll second that.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:31

Excellent, thank you. Commissioner Fung?

David Fung 0:38

Oh, yes.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:41

Commissioner Linscock? Yes. Commissioner Rao?

Steven Scharf 0:48

Yes.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:49

Vice Chair Scharf?

Steven Scharf 0:50

Aye.

City Clerk (Unknown Name) 0:52

Chair Kasulchran? Yes. The motion carries unanimously.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 0:55

Thank you very much. I assume we have no postponements for the day. City Clerk, do we have any oral communications? We have no speakers, Chair. Great, so we will move on to staff and commission reports. And this item is to report from the community noticing subcommittee on community noticing practices from other local cities. So I will now share my screen.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 1:42

Okay, can everyone see my screen? Yes, okay, excellent, thank you. Great, so before I begin, I first wanted to thank staff for partnering with us to put out this subcommittee report. I know that this is the first time, at least in recent history, that we have had a subcommittee that would present a report, potentially driving a recommendation back to city council, so I appreciate your partnership on figuring out a process to do this properly. So with that, just moving into the background on the community noticing subcommittee, this was actually approved about half a year ago on October 14th, 2025 during that planning commission meeting. And the objective was really just to report on best practices on community noticing from other Bay Area cities.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 2:32

SO THIS IS A TEMPORARY AD HOC COMMITTEE WITH LIMITED JURISDICTION AND SCOPE, AND IT REALLY IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE A REPORT BACK TO THE FULL COMMISSION FOR DISCUSSION AND POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION TO THE CITY COUNCIL, DEPENDING ON WHAT THE COMMISSION CHOOSES. SO THE SUBCOMMITTEE CONSISTED OF MYSELF AND VICE CHAIR SHARF. WE HAVE MET FOUR TIMES TO ALIGN ON THE WORK, DISCUSS FINDINGS AND FINALIZE A REPORT BACK TO THE PLANNING COMMISSION. And the goal of this really was based on community feedback to address resident and business feedback that we consistently hear people just don't know about development projects near them until it's too late. And many residents also report that they were unaware of major zoning changes.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 3:15

And this is especially the case for the parcel list for the sixth cycle housing element. So, you know, our goal here really is just to identify any opportunities where possible to improve Cupertino community noticing methods and policies for businesses and residents. So we started with a quick audit of where we are today with the City of Cupertino. So this is the website where all of the development proposals are listed, and the public hearings can be found within each development project. We also are adhering to physical notices of public hearing at the site of the development, as well as emails for anyone that is subscribed. And I did not have a photo, but of course we are also sending physical mail to residents within the noticing radius.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 4:03

So Cupertino is quite similar by and large to most neighboring cities who are all kind of just following California government code, which is to send a mail notification within a 300-foot radius of major development, have signage at least 10 days prior to the public hearing, publish a notice within a newspaper, and also provide the option to sign up for email notifications. Some cities we have seen are also exploring and expanding the noticing radius for very large projects to 1,000 feet or more. And so this chart, again, for the most part, cities are very similar in the way that they are noticing. And the one difference that we saw was really in the notice radius for mail. So you can see that many cities, from a municipal code standpoint, have codified the standard 300 feet as their noticing radius.

Chair Kasulchran (Chair Kasulcharan) 5:00

And then there are some other cities you can see to the right of the graph, Los Altos and Saratoga have codified a larger noticing radius at 500 feet, Palo Alto is at 600 feet and Mountain View has codified a 750 foot noticing radius.