The council was a smaller-than-usual group, with Mayor Ken Rosenberg stuck on the East Coast due to winter weather, and Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga recusing herself because her work at Synopsys presented a potential conflict of interest.

On Tuesday, a slim majority of City Council members threw their support behind a new combined alternative, one that maximizes office and housing growth in the area. This option would pack residential growth along Middlefield and Whisman roads, while office growth would be concentrated near highways 101 and 237, as well as the light-rail station.

For years, Mountain View officials have eyed East Whisman as ripe for redevelopment, but efforts to draft a new precise plan were sidelined while the city dealt with similar transformation efforts for the San Antonio and North Bayshore areas.

The two-hour study session on Feb. 14 took a magnifying glass to Mountain View's original tech district, where semiconductor firms competed by day and employees relaxed together by night at the bygone Walker's Wagon Wheel tavern. While most manufacturing has long since left the area, the East Whisman neighborhood still remains a major hub for Google, Symantec and a hodgepodge of smaller start-ups.

The Mountain View City Council gave the go-ahead Tuesday to initial plans to develop the East Whisman area into a dense, mixed-use neighborhood with 9,700 new apartments. For tech developers, the council also pushed ahead on plans to max out the area with at least 1.7 million new square feet of office space.

The Mountain View City Council backed a combined alternative that would maximize new housing while allowing at least 1.7 million new square feet of office space. More information about the city's proposal can be found at https://tinyurl.com/zt8mcr3

"We all are talking about the jobs-housing imbalance -- the inability of our workers to live and work in close proximity have all these negative factors," said Pilar Lorenzana-Campo, policy director for [email protected] "We're so thrilled how the last few years have gone and the progress the city has made for East Whisman."

But most other council members favored a heavy push for housing. Councilman Lenny Siegel tried to encourage his colleagues to allow buildings as high as 12 stories for the neighborhood -- although the rest of his colleagues opted to scale down to eight stories at most.

"I have real concerns about this -- I don't want gridlock in this area," she said. "To count on light rail as the hub for transportation, that really concerns me."

Splitting from their colleagues, council members John McAlister and Lisa Matichak expressed wariness that the maxed-out East Whisman plans could worsen traffic and "quality of life" for the neighborhood. Matichak expressed doubt that light-rail line would provide adequate transit for future residents, and she asked staff to investigate the ridership data for nearby stations.

In a letter sent to the city, Google's real estate director, John Igoe, did not specifically refer to his company's proposal, but he urged city leaders to grant flexibility for any mixed-use development in that same Logue Avenue area.

Conspicuously absent from the meeting and much of the discussion was Google, which has a huge foothold in East Whisman and clearly intends to expand further. Last year, the company pitched a project for a 3.9-acre site at the end of Logue Avenue with about 330 apartments and 200,000 square feet of offices. At the time, the council decided against considering the project ahead of its update of the East Whisman precise plan.

To that end, the council asked staff to prepare an additional impact study looking at much higher office density along this area. In an interview following the meeting, Tsuda said increasing the floor-area ratio for this area (a measure of building density) could result in an additional 1.2 million square feet of office space.

At the tail end of the discussion, the council left the door open for much more office space to be added later. This possibility emerged for the region of East Whisman south of Highway 237, a section where numerous property owners were requesting higher office density to ensure that redevelopment projects would pencil out financially.

Much like the North Bayshore area, accommodating the traffic demand may be the biggest challenge for plans to build out East Whisman. The council urged staff to make bike and pedestrian routes a top priority. Community Development Director Randy Tsuda said his department would draft a "full suite" of transportation options for the neighborhood, to be presented at another study session sometime around April.

Another twist in the city's decision-making was the potential for a new school site. In a letter to the city, Los Altos School District board member Vladimir Ivanovic urged council members to allow the district to transfer development rights, allowing the district more flexibility to find a suitable site in the competitive real-estate market. The council gave direction to city staff to draft a policy for transferring development rights.

East Whisman could become dense mix of housing, offices

Council backs plan to transform area into mixed-use neighborhood