Tomorrow in addition to being beginning of October and the first and only vice presidential debate is an Alameda City Council meeting.

The Morning Bun team will be reading and listening in case any council candidates email in or give live public comments. We'll aim to publish those comments later in the week.

The meeting begins with a few agenda items that will not be open to comment:

• Performing arts center at Alameda Point: a closed session negotiation between City of Alameda staff and Radium (Little Opera House Inc) regarding a "ground lease with purchase option" for 2151 Ferry Point, where the non-profit is seeking to build a performing arts center. Per the staff report "This action does not constitute a 'project' as defined in California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines Section 15378 and therefore no further CEQA analysis is required." But one wonder if that will stop the two Food Bank litigants from attempting to attack this project, too.

Items on the main agenda open to public comment include:

• 6-A "Various Parking Efficiency and Management Actions" was pulled from the consent calendar by Councilmember Trish Herrera Spencer at the previous City Council meeting. A few years ago, my wife got a traffic sign custom-printed for me that reads:
  "FREE
  PARKING
  policy
  lectures"
  That sign is on the wall here, next to my little desk at home, to remind me of how verbose I can get about a certain topic. But instead of writing yet another blog post about this topic, let me point out that this agenda item was merely on the consent calendar to begin with. It's a contract to purchase some parking pay stations, and it's a written update on longer term parking pricing strategies. These topics have been actively discussed with full agenda items at both City Council meetings and Transportation Commission meetings over multiple years, and will most certainly return again in the future. The councilmembers — and candidates for Council — would be wise to simply say that they support the staff recommendation and look forward to future updates.

• 7-A "Execute a Lease for a Retail Suite Portion of the Historic Alameda Theater Building, with Shear Terror, LLC dba It’ll Do" Solid name for a barber shop, and an even more solid name for its legal entity. A simple retail lease like this shouldn't be a big deal... it shouldn't require a full agenda item and a slide presentation... but all leases or sales of city-owned property require a 4-out-of-5 supermajority vote. That means that Vice Mayor Daysog and/or Councilmember Herrera Spencer will need to be talked into supporting this lease.

• 7-B "Study Session on the Future Development of the Enterprise District Area in Alameda Point" The Mayor's Economic Development Advisory Panel has been meeting and advising city staff and the city's real-estate consultants about the potential future for this wedge of Alameda Point roughly between Encinal High School and the USS Hornet. The infrastructure both above ground and below ground is in awful shape, and the Navy hasn't even finished transferring all of the parcels to the City of Alameda. There's lots of work to be planned and financed. But Councilmember Herrera Spencer is in no rush: on June 4 she subdivided the Mayor's motion to appoint members to this advisory body, and voted against the male appointee, saying that Alameda's boards need more diversity than yet another man serving on a city advisory board. (Later in that the same meeting, she spoke approvingly of the Mayor's new male appointee to the Transportation Commission; apparently her opposition to males is only opposition to those with expertise in real-estate development.) The two litigants also commented at the May 21 and June 4 meetings to speak disparagingly about some of the Mayor's appointees. Unfortunately, passing through a gauntlet of insults is apparently now a part of trying to perform any kind of work on behalf of the city, businesses, and non-profits at Alameda Point. Even more critical is that a supermajority of 4-out-of-5 councilmembers will be required to approve the lease or sale of city-owned spaces in the Enterprise District. We know how the 3 current responsible members of council vote on this topic. We know that Vice Mayor Daysog is always a wild card (depending upon whether he's actually read the agenda packet and who last spoke with him). How would the newcomer council candidates vote on leasing or selling properties at Alameda Point in order to finance the rebuilding of the surrounding infrastructure?

• 7-C "Update on Construction Impacts from the Oakland Alameda Access Project" will be familiar to dedicated watchers of the Transportation Commission... but not that many people have heard about this yet... otherwise we'd all be hearing a gigantic gnashing of teeth across the entire island! Current construction plans for the Oakland Alameda Access Project will involve shutting down one lane of the Posey Tube for 2 years and shutting down one lane of the Webster Tube for 8 months. The two separate closures will overlap by 5 months — so commuters will get the delays both ways, AC Transit buses will so delayed that they can't make their transfers, and thousands of drivers and passengers will be wondering who did this to them. This project is being overseen by the Alameda County Transportation Commission (not the City of Alameda; not Caltrans). The city has recently hired expert consultants to review how the construction could be performed with only temporary night-time closures, rather than any daytime/permanent closures. The city has been lobbying ACTC to revise its construction plans so they'll be less of a gigantic pain in the... tubes.