Correcting Massive Misinformation About The Actual Sequence of Events

Our resident-focused supporters have uncovered a recent misinformation and disinformation campaign about the Housing Element process and this article provides the facts. Watch out for the revisionist history.

We deserve better!

Planning Commission Put In Hard Work Before January 2023

The CA Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) assigned a Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) number of 4588 units to Cupertino. The planning commission worked with the planning department and spent hundreds of hours to identify potential sites. City Staff suggested to the planning commissioners to select sites where owners explicitly stated that they wanted their parcels included. Staff and consultants were repeatedly told that HCD did not want to see sites with no owner interest. The process to find sites that could support 4588 units was difficult. The planning commission finished the work in time for the city to submit a compliant housing element (HE) by January 31, 2023, even with a switch in consulting companies, especially given the incompetence of the first consulting team hired.

Had the 2023-2024 city council submitted this plan by January 31, 2023, there would be no builder’s remedy projects like Scofield.

Special Interest City Council Majority Deliberately Submits Late Housing Element On February 3rd, 2023

Unfortunately, the new city council majority of Hung Wei, JR Fruen, and Sheila Mohan, discarded the work of the Planning Commission and Planning Department and essentially started over. The city council majority added sites where there was no owner interest to build and took away sites where owners explicitly expressed interest. The exact opposite of staff’s original recommendations.

Moreover, this giddy majority also unnecessarily up zoned the whole city for higher densities, which worsens future cycles of submission. Pipeline projects such as Vallco, which had 1000s of units were not fully counted. This weak-willed majority sabotaged Cupertino’s efforts by telling HCD to remove or reduce units that were coming from existing projects that could have been counted.

But the worst thing this majority council of Hung Wei, JR Fruen, and Sheila Mohan, did… they submitted the housing element on February 3, 2023 and missed the January 31, 2023 deadline.

Late Submission By This 2023-2024 Majority Council Exposed The City To These Builder’s Remedy Projects And A YIMBY Lawsuit Settlement

To make matters worse, the city did not adequately defend its YIMBY lawsuit, and kowtowed away its environmental protection rights in a settlement. This developer-backed council majority gave up the city’s ability to require a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review.

Because of the timid actions of this spineless majority council, there will be no Environmental Impact Review (EIR) or CEQA review of projects.

Misinformation and Disinformation Campaign Attempting Revisionist History

Residents across Cupertino are furious and with good reason. In fact, some are lawyering up and many have organized petitions. Our opposition, composed mostly of developer backed and uncontrolled-growth candidates, are trying to blame the members of council who were trying to prevent this debacle in the first place (i.e. Liang Chao and Kitty Moore)

Given the resident backlash, developer groups seek to rewrite history and assign the blame to my running mate and me through a misinformation campaign.

We even have one council candidate running around the city falsely promising residents that he would be able to reduce densities of parcels in the Housing Element and mitigate Builder’s Remedy projects by cutting deals with the developers. That may have been how he used to cut backroom deals in the past, but that’s not how it works today. In fact, he thinks he can just direct staff. Unfortunately, that’s just illegal.

The Developer Driven City Majority Continues To Waste Tax Dollars With Giveaways

The collusion by HCD, YIMBY groups, and some of our own elected officials led us down this treacherous path. Hard earned tax dollars have been squandered with developer give aways and ballooning consultant costs.

Cupertino was the last city in Santa Clara County without an approved Housing Element. This is a result of collusion between HCD, YIMBY groups, and some City Council members.

The City Council also gave a developer $77 million in city money by waiving impact fees, yet $145,000 for July 4th fireworks was unavailable. We could have even had a drone show for about the same price tag. Sadly, the same developer also wants us to foot his sanitary district fees, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in backing by one of the largest sovereign wealth funds and foreign sources of investment.

A Resident Focused Majority On Council Will Help Right Past Wrongs

We have an opportunity for Cupertino to achieve its full potential. Let’s restore a resident focused majority back onto city council.

Vote for the only Resident Focused Candidates
Kitty Moore and Ray Wang because we deserve better!

Please vote

Number 1 (Kitty Moore) and

Number 5 (Ray Wang)

on your ballot.

© 2024 R “Ray Wang For Cupertino City Council 2024