HomeMy WebLinkAbout2000-07-19 City Council Summary Minutes
Special Meeting
July 19, 2000
1. Interviews for Planning and Transportation Commission........333
ADJOURNMENT: The meeting adjourned at 6:50 p.m...................333
1. PUBLIC HEARING: Joint Meeting with the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission re the Draft Environmental Impact Report Prepared by Santa Clara County for the Proposed Stanford University Community Plan and General Use Permit............334
ADJOURNMENT: Meeting adjourned at 9:55 p.m.......................381
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The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Conference Room at 5:40 p.m. PRESENT: Beecham, Burch, Eakins, Kleinberg, Mossar, Ojakian ABSENT: Fazzino, Kniss, Lytle SPECIAL MEETING 1. Interviews for Planning and Transportation Commission No action required. ADJOURNMENT: The meeting adjourned at 6:50 p.m.
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Special Meeting July 19, 2000 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 7:10 p.m. Council PRESENT: Beecham, Burch, Eakins, Kleinberg, Kniss, Lytle, Ojakian ABSENT: Fazzino, Mossar Planning and Transportation Commission PRESENT: Bialson, Burt, Schink, Schmidt ABSENT: Byrd, Cassel, Packer SPECIAL MEETING 1. PUBLIC HEARING: Joint Meeting with the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission re the Draft Environmental Impact Report Prepared by Santa Clara County for the Proposed Stanford University Community Plan and General Use Permit (Public Testimony Closed) Please see attached City Council and Planning and Transportation Committee Meeting transcript dated July 19, 2000.
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JULY 19, 2000
Palo Alto City Council and
Planning and Transportation Commission JOINT SESSION – SPECIAL MEETING - 7:00 PM
City Council Chambers
Civic Center, 1st Floor
250 Hamilton Avenue
Palo Alto, California 94301 ROLL CALL:
City Council Members: Staff: Liz Kniss, Mayor Frank Benest, City Manager
Sandy Eakins, Vice-Mayor Emily Harrison, Asst. City Manager Jim Burch Ariel Calonne, City Attorney Nancy Lytle Ed Gawf, Planning Director Bern Beecham Lisa Grote, Chief Planning Official Judy Kleinberg John Lusardi, Asst. Planning Official
Victor Ojakian Donna Rogers, City Clerk Luke Connolly, Senior Planner Commissioners: Zariah Betten, Executive Secretary
Kathy Schmidt, Chair Annette Bialson, Vice-Chair Jon Schink Patrick Burt Mayor Kniss: The City Council has had a brief meeting earlier tonight to do interviews with the Planning and Transportation Commission. City Clerk, could I have you call the roll for the Planning Commission and then for the City Council if you would. [Roll Call] Mayor Kniss: It is good to see you all here tonight. I know you know why you’re here. Tonight is the night we are going to hear comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Stanford Community Plan and General Use Permit. For most of the evening we will refer to this as the GUP as you probably know. I want to say a word or two to you first and then we’re going to look to our Staff for some background on this. At that point we will go to the audience unless the Council or
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the Planning Commission have some brief questions. We are only going to be in question mode tonight. This is not the night that you will be hearing from us regarding our response. This is your night. As soon as I have said a few words I’m going to ask our Vice-Mayor to give us an indication of how many there are of you. We will try to give you the maximum amount of time we can. It may not be the full five minutes we normally can give. So let me give you a couple of words of background on this. I’m doing this for two reasons. I hope we’re being taped tonight. I’m going to presume we are. The yellow light went on indicating we are either on the air or being taped. The area we’re going to talk about tonight is approximately 4,000 acres of land that as you know is within the Stanford Community. The Plan or GUP was submitted to the Santa Clara County Planning Office and made available for public review in November of 1999 and environmental review was initiated with appropriation of the DIR. Tonight what we are going to be talking about are the series of hearing that we are going to have. Then the Council’s recommendations that were made in advance of Stanford’s formal plan and GUP applications. The purpose of what we are going to do tonight is to be talking about the EIR. Tonight, you are not responding to the plan although I know that it is not usually wise to tell you all what going to tell us, but it would be helpful for us tonight if you did respond to the Draft EIR. Having said that I am fairly sure that you will talk about whatever you would like to as far as it deals with this particular issue. As you know what we’re discussing tonight consists primarily of the academic campus and the largely undeveloped foothill property that is southwest of Junipero Serra. After that which we are discussing tonight, the GUP, is approved that becomes a broad-based land use entitlement that allows a specified amount and type of development to occur. As you recall the last GUP went through in 1989. I know many of you in this audience are already aware of this information but I know that many who are presumably watching at home, and I think we have a fairly good sized audience tonight, may not know all of this background. The 1989 GUP had about 2.0M square feet of building area including the residential construction and about 140,000 square feet of this is left, so-called, which is why Stanford has applied again. At this point the proposal as you know requests about 2.0M square feet of academic buildings and facilities and up to about 3,000 dwelling units. A fair amount of property. However, included in this, this time, is the Community Plan. As we’ve said before this is not an entitlement mechanism but is instead a long-range policy document that if it is adopted will amend the County General Plan concerning Stanford’s unincorporated Santa Clara County lands. This has not been done before. This has not been prepared. This is why this is a particularly important document that we’re going to be discussing and to which you’ll be responding tonight regarding the EIR. We’ve mentioned some of the key background, some of the purpose of the City’s review. I do want to remind you tonight that the City is only a review body. We do not make decisions on this. I think you’re well aware that the decisions are made at the Board of
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Supervisors and that our Supervisor Simitian will have a good deal to say about what the outcome is on this. There are a couple of EIR issues that I know that you are going to be concentrating on tonight. Among those are alternatives that maintain the level of development and you’ll notice also there is a reduced scale alternative that is mentioned. And also, you will see down at the bottom of CMR-00 on Page 3 of 8 that there is a discussion of long term or permanent dedication of open space. That, as it says, should be looked at in the DIR as a way to mitigate or lessen significant open space impacts. I know a number of you will speak to that tonight. It will help us if you use a fair amount of specificity when you do that. Tell us precisely how and why and so forth you would like to see whatever you would like to see in the open space areas. Primarily we will be discussing of course the area west of Junipero Serra. As you notice also in here there is a boundary line that we have indicated that is in the map. I think that probably, Ed, you’re going to show us an overhead of the urban growth boundary, sometimes called a UGB. This is a UGB that runs along JSB which as you’ll hear is Junipero Serra Boulevard. The last thing I would like to say before I go to Staff is that I think you should know what our schedule is for the project after this hearing. On the 7th public comment will close on the DEIR. On the 14th of August a Preliminary Community Plan will be released for review. On September 7 there will be a hearing of the Planning Commission to take testimony on the Preliminary Community Plan. Either in late September or early October there will be an additional City review and recommendation. That is something that I’m sure you will all want to weigh in on. A final EIR will be released October 9th and a special Planning Commission meeting will be held October 18th. There is hopefully going to be a decision made by this on October 30 or 31. So having said that, once again welcome. We certainly are looking forward to your comments tonight. I would like to turn this over to City Manager Benest. I think he is going to ask for a presentation from Mr. Gawf. Mr. Frank Benest, City Manager: Yes, let’s get right into it. Ed Gawf our Planning and Community Environment Director will initiate the Staff report. Mr. Ed Gawf, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you. Thank you Mayor Kniss, Members of City Council, Members of Planning Commission. Tonight we start the process, I underscore the word start, start the process for the review and comment on the Stanford Community Plan and General Use Permit Draft EIR. This is one that it was interesting hearing the recap of the history that we’ve had on it already but it is one that I think we are going to build some history over the next few months as well. What I want to do in my comments is really touch on three things. I want to talk about the context in which we are reviewing this document. Secondly to present to you some initial Staff comments and I again underscore the word initial. The timeframe for reviewing the EIR is actually dependant upon which perspective you
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might have. It’s either very long or if you’re trying to review it and make comments on it, it’s very short. It is a 45-day period from the day it was released to the day we have to have written comments to the County. As we’ve indicated August 7 is the date for the written comments to the County. Given our need for Planning Commission and Council environment and public hearing the time gets a little tight. So we went ahead and scheduled the public hearing almost two-thirds of the way through our process. We’re still reviewing the document. We’ll have more technical comments and some additional comments to make to the Planning Commission next week and the Council on the 31st. I want to go over the initial Staff comments tonight. The third thing I want to do is talk about the key dates and events that show the “where do we go from here” kind of thing. Just very briefly as an overview, the lead agency is Santa Clara County. By that I mean, Santa Clara County as the lead agency prepares the EIR. It is intended to be a record of their analysis of the impacts of the project. Again, the project in this case is the Stanford Plan and General Use Permit application that they made. This is not Stanford’s document we’re reviewing. It is the County’s document. Let me say as an overview, and I actually intended to say this a little bit later but, let me say that I think the EIR is a good solid EIR. What we’re doing is looking at from our perspective and there are some things that I think we need to look at and make sure that everything that needs to be in there the County is aware and can put them in there. The purpose of an EIR, as you can see, is to inform decision-makers and the public about the project’s significant environmental effects and ways to reduce them. Both are important. Identify the impacts and identifying the mitigation for those impacts. In effect, it is a full disclosure document. It is intended to disclose all the material and facts that are relevant from an environmental standpoint at least to a proposed project so that decision-makers have that information prior to making the decision. As we’ve indicated, the focus tonight should be on the EIR and its composition. We will have another time to talk about the project. I know it is a little different role for us. Usually we have the EIR and the project together when it comes to the Planning Commission and the Council because we are the certifying agency. It’s our EIR. In this case, we have a different role. We are the reviewing party. We are the reviewing agency and we’re making comments during the public review period to assist the County in their review. As the Mayor indicated it is very important to know tonight that public comments that are made to you as Commission and Council and to us as Staff are intended to help us shape our recommendation to the County. If individuals wish to make comments directly to the County and have the County respond to their individual comments they need to make those to the County in writing or at the Public Hearing here on August 3. So that is the EIR and the lead agency. Tonight, as we look at the EIR, I think it is important to clarify what we are trying to focus on. When I think of it I think of three basic areas. One is the adequacy of the analysis of possible impacts. Have they included all the impacts in this case? The accuracy
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of the evaluation that they have done on the impacts. Have they omitted something that should be considered in the review? Again, this is intended to be a full disclosure document. Secondly, I think it is important to identify ways, if we see them, to avoid or mitigate the impacts. Part of the process and part of the reason for the process is not to just recognize impacts but to mitigate them to a less than significant basis. And third, to be able to suggest additional or preferable alternatives of mitigation measures. So this is the basic focus for our review tonight. Let me go over, very quickly, the summary of significant issues. This is taken from the Draft EIR. The County in their review identified 13 environmental or significant issues that they analyzed. Of those 13 they found that five had significant impacts even after mitigation. I would direct your attention to Attachment C in the Staff memo. Attachment C is a summary taken from the Draft EIR of the impacts and it goes through a series of steps. It identifies the impact, it then identifies whether there is a significance in the impact. So you have an impact without any additional mitigation, is there any environmental significance. Then the third column is if there is an impact are there mitigation measures that should be proposed. Then finally the analysis of whether those mitigations as identified address the issue or reduce the impact to less than significant. So you can see on this chart that there are five environmental impacts that still have significance even after the proposed mitigation. Of course, I think our focus and our effort would be to reduce these even further from the five, to look at mitigation methods that might further reduce these impacts. Our review followed the project issues that we identified last Fall. We tried to use that format just for consistency purpose. We recognized that we were discussing the project at that time, not the EIR, but we used that outline. You can see the categories that I want to touch on just very briefly. Please go to the next one Luke, on the open space. Under open space there really are a couple of points I want to make. The first one, a key point, I think the wording in our Staff memo could be better worded. What we really are saying is that we should retain the alternatives that have included adjusted academic growth boundary. If we could go to that map, Luke. This is from the Draft EIR and it shows the project academic growth boundary. It is actually the green line on that. It includes what is known as the Lathrop property. So that is the project academic growth boundary. They have identified two alternatives to that. Alternative A is an academic growth boundary that parallels existing development primarily along JSB and includes the existing houses on JSB. It includes the existing development and Carnegie Institute on the other side of JSB, and it also goes around the area that is known as Area B from the Sand Hill Agreement which is most of the holes of the golf course that are on that side of JSB. The exception to it is, Luke if you can show the area that under the Sand Hill Agreement for Area B that was shown as potential for additional housing, the rest of Area B was identified as open space until the year 2010. There was a section that was shown as potential housing and it
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is the area that is shown there. The second alternative, Alternative B, has the academic growth boundary that basically parallels the City urban service area but parallels JSB from Page Mill to Sand Hill Road. So what we have is the project academic growth boundary, we have two alternatives, and I think those are good alternatives to consider. Part of the evaluation that we as Staff will make and I would ask that you as City Council and the Planning Commission make is should there be another alternative to that. As we discuss this, are these enough alternatives for us to consider or should we be looking at some other hybrid of that. I’m sure we will hear comments on that tonight as well. Going back to the open space, the second issue on open space is this issue of how long is the commitment of open space beyond JSB. Long term or permanent dedication of open space we indicate 25 years/[as long we’re discussing it]. I think the issue is long term or permanent dedication of open space and should be looked at as part of the Draft EIR to mitigate impacts. The open space impacts that were included in the present Draft EIR identified a significant open space impact. They identified that because of the proposal by the applicant to have the academic growth boundary go further into the open space area on the west side of JSB, basically the Lathrop property. That is why it’s identified as a significant open space impact. I think there is a significant open space impact because of the duration or the lack of duration, if you will, of the permanency of the commitment to open space beyond JSB. When you have 4,000 acres in Stanford and the unincorporated portion of the County and 1,700 are contained within the core campus area. Those 1,700 acres can have additional urban growth. In fact, we’re looking at whether it is 2.0M square feet, if it’s non-housing or 4.0 or 5.0 million if you add the square footage for the housing, we’re talking about a significant increase in the size of Stanford. I think there is a need to look at the issue of should there be dedication or reservation of open space beyond JSB for a longer term than is being proposed. I think there is a significant impact because of the intensity of development. That’s something I know we’ll discuss at the Planning Commission and City Council. So that’s open space and that’s clearly one of the key issues. The next issue is housing. The first point we made on housing is just a reminder that when the specific developments come in on campus, especially ones that are adjacent to our community and our existing neighborhoods, we need to make sure that the traffic and visual and all the other environmental impacts are reviewed at a project level. What we have tonight is proposed to be a program EIR which would give basic environmental clearance to the application. But when specific projects come in we want to make sure that additional review is done. That’s our first point. The second point is one where the Draft EIR should identify the additional housing needs generated by this proposed development. What they’ve done is identified the housing needs corresponding to the number of jobs being created on campus or on site, if you will. But as we know there are more jobs than those just being created on campus. There are what we call the multiplier effect. That one job on campus
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generates another job off campus in effect. We think the totality of the jobs should be looked at and there should be mitigation to that. That Stanford should address that issue either by identifying other sites either on campus or off campus or looking at other ways such as if they were in the City of Palo Alto they would pay a housing impact fee. So there are other means to address that impact that they have. So that’s the housing comments. Schools, there are a couple of points. One is under state law the Draft EIR is intended to correspond to that which proposes mitigation measures as the payment of school impact fees. I’m not sure what exactly it is today. It’s $2.00 per square foot. We know that may take care of the CEQA need and that may be what is legally required but we know that that doesn’t address the real needs that we have in our community. So our second point is one that Stanford has done and my expectation is that they will continue to do. It is really emphasizing the point that Stanford needs to continue to be very active in working with the City and the School District in addressing the school issues. The students generated by Stanford presently and the students that will be generated by the Stanford development and the students within the City of Palo Alto go to the same schools. Those schools are impacted from a capacity standpoint and this issue, we think, needs to be addressed. Again, from an EIR standpoint, it is not an EIR issue. I think the mitigation as proposed is consistent with CEQA. Circulation and parking, I have a few points here. I won’t cover all of these but let me touch on a couple. The first one I think is a new mitigation that we would suggest that the County include. This is that the Draft EIR identifies various transportation measures but these measures need to be placed into a more comprehensive context. We have street systems that unless you have a city map you’re not sure whether they are in the County or the City of Palo Alto. We need to have a street transportation system that integrates both the City transportation needs and Stanford’s transportation needs into a comprehensive system. That would include properties that are in the Stanford Research Park, the medical center that we just looked at last week, and the campus itself. This mitigation would require Stanford to prepare an integrated transportation plan with both long and short-term elements to be worked with and reviewed and approved by both the County and the City. Secondly, we think Stanford should be required to pay its fair share and we’ve identified fair share as all of the Stanford trips that are going through the different intersections. One can try to separate out whether the new trips versus the old trips and where they come from but they are basically Stanford trips and we think they should be viewed that way. Finally on transportation, the City Staff strongly supports and agrees with the no net new commute trips. I had to read that because I invariably get one of them wrong. No net new commute trips mitigation strategy. As we talked about last week with the Cancer Center the days of just widening the intersection, I think, are over or should be over. That is the case here as well. The County has included that in the Draft EIR as an option. That is the option I think that we
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should support and we should strongly support the County in that regard. We still have some issues with it, how it actually works and what happens if the goal requirement is not met, and we will have additional comments on that. The land use is more of to make sure that it is accurate and there is full disclosure on it. The development districts identified in the Draft EIR give the impression that the proposed development described in the GUP is not only anticipated, it is only anticipated to occur in these districts. That is not necessarily the case. I think it needs to be clear, I think that’s the intent, but it needs to be clear that that is the case. You may recall looking at the EIR that they have divided the campus into specific districts or zones. Parts are for transportation reason but I think also for analysis purpose. I think we need to look at if that is indeed the case and there will be restrictions to the effect then we need to have that stated in the Draft EIR. The next one is biological resources. Option 2, which I’m a little amazed at this because it seems like just a clear cut, why not? We had two options for how to deal with the Tiger Salamander and we believe Option 2 that should be incorporated into the project since it avoids the significant impact to the species and its habitat. Finally, there are some other areas that we are reviewing that we will bring more information to you over the next few days. That has to do with drainage basin and some of the concerns we have that the flood control issues and the drainage basin on the Stanford campus. The second area that we continue to do research on is the community facilities area. This is sort of a new area in this regard. We think it is important to look at childcare, parks, recreation, libraries and what the impact that this additional development will have on those facilities from a community-wide standpoint. We know that the residents of the 3,000 additional units will not just stay on Stanford’s campus. They will use other facilities and we need to make sure we understand what they use is and what the impact is as part of the EIR. So with that that’s an overview of our comments on it. The final thing I’d like to do is just hit on a couple of key dates. As was mentioned earlier, the Planning Commission will continue their meeting to July 26 where they will consider this issue. The public hearing will be closed tonight and so the Planning and Transportation Commission’s discussion on the 26th will look at the issues and deliberate on those issues and make a recommendation to the City Council. The City Council’s review is scheduled for July 31 and again the public hearing will be closed. So it is an opportunity for the City Council to review and deliberate and make their recommendation to the County. As has been indicated a couple of times, August 3 Santa Clara County will have a hearing actually right here in the City Council Chambers at 6:30 p.m. to receive comments from the public in the Palo Alto area on the Draft EIR. There are a couple of key dates after August 7 which is the final date for comments on the EIR. In mid-August or late August the County Planning Staff will release their recommendation on the project. That is a very key point. The next point after that is in late September, we’re looking at approximately
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September 26, the Planning Commission will review the project: the plan and the use permit. We’re looking at a tentative date of October 16 for the City Council to look at the issue to make a recommendation to the County Board of Supervisors who will then make the final decision. So with that, thank you. As I said, tonight is really devoted for the public hearing so we will be taking notes and be prepared to respond to those and any questions or comments that the Council or Commission has at the appropriate time. Mayor Kniss: Thank you Ed. I appreciate that. I know we all appreciate the time that you have spent on putting that together in a brief time period. We have approximately 50 cards. I would like to take five minutes at this point and ask any of the Council or the Planning Commission if they have something they need to ask or say before we start that will help the public in directing their comments toward us. If you don’t have anything to say that’s just fine and be free to ask those afterward. I don’t see any lights from any Council Members or Planning Commissioners. So we are going to begin the public hearing. Given the number of cards we ask you to limit your comments to three minutes. Vice-Mayor Eakins will be timing this tonight. If any of you happen to have heard exactly what you would have said you are more than free to associate your comments with someone else. Having said that, I will read about three at a time. The closer you can get to the mike so you’re ready to go, the better it will be. The first three that are going to speak are Peter Drekmeier, Denise Dade, and Rick Marshall. Welcome Peter. Mr. Peter Drekmeier, 570 Matadero, Palo Alto: Good evening. It’s nice to see you all again. I’m Peter Drekmeier with the Stanford Open Space Alliance. I want to start by reading something in the EIR. It says, because most of the Stanford land is zoned A-1 there are very few uses permitted as a matter of right. Like the rest of us, there are some restrictions on Stanford’s private property rights and rights for development. Right now, Stanford lands in unincorporated Santa Clara County are 40% denser in daytime population than that of Palo Alto. That’s even when you include the industrial park, the shopping center and the hospital in Palo Alto’s figures. So it can be argued that Stanford has already received adequate development rights. Yet, now they are asking for between four and five million additional square feet in the next ten years. That’s a 35% increase in the campus or the equivalent of three Stanford Shopping Centers. The EIR says, significant unavoidable impacts occur in five different areas: open space, traffic and circulation, historic resources, construction noise, and growth inducement. It points out that redesignated the Lathrop District as academic campus will be growth inducing. Stanford says we only want 20,000 square feet there but the truth is what they want is it redesignated so they can come back later and develop it as densely as the rest of the core campus. It points out that the Stanford Plan would not protect the California Tiger Salamander which is a candidate
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for the Endangered Species List. Points out that if we’re lucky the housing might off-set the housing needs but with the multiplier effect it is going to bring a lot of low-income jobs, people who can’t afford to live in this area. It points out that the traffic will impact 17 intersections in the area. I think it is time for us to treat Stanford like any other developer. True, Stanford is a wonderful university. We all love Stanford. Stanford is also a developer, Stanford Management Company. They have a very special situation where they come back every ten years and ask for more. Now if our neighborhoods and commercial districts could do that, every ten years want a 35% increase, image what our community would look like. We are already at saturation point. I would urge you to look at permanent protection of the foothills to off-set this huge amount of development by maintaining the academic growth boundary along Palo Alto’s urban service area, along Junipero Serra Boulevard, and excluding the golf course. I would encourage you to follow the County Staff recommendation that academic reserve and open space be changed to open space and field research. We need to maintain the no net new commute trips. And the most important thing is we need a maximum build-out plan from Stanford. We need to know what’s the future going to look like. That way we can avoid these problems where the community physicians don’t know what’s going to happen to them the next day. The golfers don’t know what’s going to happen, the environmentalists, the school district.Like every community it should be zoned and we should know what to expect. I’d like folks in the audience, if you support permanent protection of the foothills to put your hands up. If you would like to protect the golf course by maintaining the current growth boundary also raise your hand. Thank you very much. Mayor Kniss: Good job. Denise Dade. Ms. Denise Dade, Committee For Green Foothills: I’m speaking on behalf of the Committee For Green Foothills. After reviewing the Draft Environmental Impact Report we’d like to raise the following concerns to ensure that the final EIR will be adequate. The location of the academic growth boundary is critical and it must be located so that it is consistent with County General Plan Policies. The document fails to analyze the proposed academic growth boundary with fundamental County Policies. Stanford’s proposed expansion of its academic campus into the foothills in the area called Lathrop would redesignate this area as urban allowing urban development to occur outside of Palo Alto’s urban service area designated as its urban growth boundary. The County General Plan is exceptionally clear that urban levels of development and urban service expansions are not allowed outside of cities urban service areas. I want to quote the County General Plan Polices RDGQ for lands outside cities urban service areas under the County’s land use jurisdiction. “Only non-urban low-density uses shall be allowed.” And County General Plan Policy RGD-6, “Urban types and levels of services shall not be made available outside of cities urban service
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areas from either public or private service providers.” The Draft EIR does not mention the existence of Palo Alto’s urban growth boundary as defined in Palo Alto’s Comprehensive Plan Policy L-1 which designates it clearly as the existing urban service area and the limit line to Stanford’s development as it is now. The Draft EIR fails to acknowledge the expansion of the urban development line for Lathrop and is inconsistent with these County General Plan Policies. The Draft EIR must contain an alternative which shows a permanent academic growth boundary consistent with the existing County policies and consistent with Palo Alto’s urban growth boundary. This is an incredibly important policy that is in place in the County for over 20 years. That is to respect city’s urban growth boundaries and not allow urban development outside of those boundaries. It is a principle tenant of Planning that has shaped the whole way the County has been developed for over 20 years. The Community Plan also as submitted by Stanford is legally inadequate. This is very important for the final EIR. California State Planning and Zoning Law, Code Section 65302 requires General Plans to contain development densities and intensities for all land use designations. The current Community Plan estimate doesn’t have those and it will need to have those before the final EIR will be adequate. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. It will help to move us all along and give you all a fair opportunity to speak if you’d hold your applause until the end. Thank you. I’m going to read again two or three cards so that you can be ready. Rick Marshall and then Janet Cox and then Kai Drekmeier. Mr. Rick Marshall, 264 Fernando Avenue, Palo Alto: Good evening. I know this is going to come as a big shock to you I’m not going to so much focus on the EIR as the plan itself. The good news is I will be brief. It is ironic to me that a university that prides itself as a good neighbor, as someone who believes in the community, and someone who has a commitment to policies like no net new commutes would come out with a plan like this. This is clearly and attempt to negotiate, to come in as hard and with the steeper demands in the beginning stages so hopefully at the end they can get what they want. Maybe something scaled down, maybe something a little bit closer than they originally expected. So really what I want to focus on here is that this plan is laughable, that this plan is not tolerable, and we will fight this. There is no way we will stand for this and in the long run Stanford has to know that this plan will not fly. This community will not tolerate it and we will fight this every step of the way. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Janet Cox, Kai Drekmeier, and then Tom Jordan. Ms. Janet Cox, Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation Board, Palo Alto: Good evening. Do you have copies of these remark? I’m here representing the Board of the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation.
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I can read really fast and try to get through it or I can excerpt or I can read until you stop me. Would you like to pick? Mayor Kniss: Why don’t you excerpt. That would be helpful. Ms. Cox: The Board of Directors of the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation submits the following comments to Stanford University’s Community Plan. You don’t to hear that. Our primary concern is permanent protection of exiting open space in the foothills, with no new development in the Lathrop District or modifications to the golf course northeast of Junipero Serra Boulevard. To accomplish this we support: 1) A modification of “Academic Growth Boundary Alternative B,” which would bring the boundary into conformance with the City of Palo Alto’s Urban Service Boundary. Adoption of this boundary would also afford the best protection for the California Tiger Salamander. 2) We also support County Staff’s recommendation that Stanford lands outside the Academic Growth Boundary be designated “Open Space and Field Research,” instead of “Academic Reserve and Open Space.” Stanford’s daytime population density in unincorporated Santa Clara County already exceeds Palo Alto’s daytime population by 40%. Since the University has already developed the land so extensively, expansion of the magnitude being proposed (adding four million square feet over the next ten years) should only be permitted if it is offset by a commitment to permanent protection of the foothills. Our secondary concerns, also central to quality of life for all of us who live in the area, are housing and traffic. We recognize the need for additional housing and academic facilities at Stanford. The housing proposed in the Draft Environmental Impact Report should accommodate the proposed increase in faculty/staff employment and postgraduate population; however it will not address the existing shortfall of housing for these groups. More significantly, the new development will exacerbate our area’s low-to-moderate income housing crisis. Speaking to the California tiger Salamander habitat, the Draft plan/EIR relies on proposed artificial breeding ponds to mitigate effects of development in the Lathrop Development District on the salamander’s native habitat. However, construction of new breeding ponds is an unproven technique. In fact, experimental ponds that have already been constructed have failed to produce salamanders in both of the past two years. Please not that the plan sets no standards for measuring success of this unproven mitigation strategy, and successful mitigation is not proposed as a condition for development to proceed. Under the current proposal, monitoring could continue for decades without showing any success. I’m going to skip down to Growth in the Foothills. I’m going to quote from the plan. I’m sorry. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. We do have your letter and appreciate that. Thank you.
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Council Member Ojakian: Just a quick question for her. I just want to make sure, you’re letter is three pages long? Ms. Cox: Yes. Council Member Ojakian: Thank you. Mr. Kai Drekmeier, 257 Everett Avenue, Palo Alto: I’m just a citizen and I’m concerned with protecting the existing open space that we still have. I was born at Stanford Hospital a little over 32 years ago and I grew up in Palo Alto. I love it here. I’ve visited other countries and I’ve lived in Boston, New York and Southern California and though I’m excited about those places I’d take Palo Alto and the Bay Area any day. Still Palo Alto and the Bay Area have changed. Today without any further development the Bay Area is already over-developed and it has lost some of its incredible natural beauty. My children will not be able to see what I saw as a child. To preserve what we have today it is crucial that we, the people of Palo Alto, insist on a permanent academic growth boundary and Junipero Serra Boulevard. We have to make sure that happens. There is a bigger more far reaching reason we have to rethink the Stanford growth plan overall and that has to do with the message it sends. I’ve always been incredibly proud to be from Palo Alto. I’m proud of Palo Alto and Stanford. I see them as places that are both affluent and also intellectual and more importantly socially enlightened. Because of the resources and broad expertise in this community it is clear to me that we have a responsibility to exhibit leadership and foresight in everything we do. Many of us have aspirations and concerns at the state level, national level and globally. We are no longer creeping towards and ecological crisis. We are now starting to jog. More than anything the world needs a model for smart development. This is a development plan that takes into account all of the issues that are brought on by growth and a development plan that reduces rather than increase reliance on driving and the use of fossil fuels. Stanford and Palo Alto have a responsibility to do this right. The growth plan should not move forward until we have something intelligent that the whole community is proud of. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Tom just a minute. The next speakers are Andy Coe, Cedric de La Beaujardiere and then Kathy Durham. Welcome. Mr. Tom Jordan, 474 Churchill Avenue, Palo Alto: I’m Tom Jordan a citizen of Palo Alto. I’ve lived here for 36 years. I’d like to address the Community Plan which I think is particularly important because this is the public document. It’s really not an application from Stanford. It is a public document which is entirely 100% under the control of the County. Your voice is probably the strongest single voice as input into that. There are ten things that if you could have implemented in the Community Plan I think we would be possibly about
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two-thirds of the way toward protecting open space in the foothills. This is just the Community Plan not the GUP. First of all have an academic growth boundary roughly where the academic reserve and open space line now is which is also about the same as your urban service boundary. That is not an alternative study and therefore you should ask that that one be studied. It actually preserves a little more space and most important point is that’s where the current General Plan line is. Stanford has laid no basis for changing it. It should not be changed. That’s where it is now and that’s where it should stay. Secondly, the academic growth boundary should be defined. One part of a definition that I would recommend is that there be no applications accepted for filing beyond the academic growth boundary. That puts teeth into it. That’s what it should mean. You simply cannot file. If you want to do something beyond the academic growth boundary you file to amend the growth boundary first then you file your application. The third point is that the land designation south and west, in other words the hill lands, be Open Space and Field Research. That also be defined. Those words have clear meaning but right now the designation up there is Academic Reserve and Open Space and we have an application for a non-Stanford non-academic use in the Carnegie. So if you don’t define it right in the General Plan County Planning is accepting and processing applications which seem to be consistent with the plain meaning of the General Plan. The fourth point is define then what can be done in an Open Space and Field Research. That would be a longer definition but clearly no structures, Stanford use only, golf course has to be dealt with. It has just come out recently that Stanford’s long term plan is to put a golf course there. I would simply suggest whatever the County policy is with regard to golf courses be Stanford’s. The sphere of influence of Palo Alto right now is completely ignored in the County General Plan. I recommend that that be amended so that at least the County must consider your sphere of influence impact and if they are going to reject it they must give a written reason decision why they are not going to follow your sphere of influence. To have it ignored is really not proper. Increase the density of housing and impact of the golf course came entirely from the EIR. I don’t know who else suggested it. I would simply say what should be studied would be increased density in the other housing areas and not impact on the golf course. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Tom, if you have something in writing, if any of you do, and you want to leave it with the City Clerk to be copied for us please do that. Or if you want to put it in writing later and send it to us we’d really be pleased to have it. Mr. Jordan: That’s what I’ll do. Mayor Kniss: Andy Coe and then Cedric, Kathy Durham and then Ole Olson. Mr. Andy Coe, Stanford University: Madam Mayor, Member of the City
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Council and Planning Commission, my name is Andy Coe, Director of Community Relations for Stanford. We have a few comments to make to you tonight. First all let me say that we appreciate the hard work of County Staff and its consultant team in their review of our General Use Permit and Community Plan Application. We look forward to working with Santa Clara County, Palo Alto and the Community in the months ahead to finalize the plan. Like you, we are conducting our own review of the Draft Environmental Impact Report. We will be submitting formal written comments on the DEIR to Santa Clara County. We are and will be listening closely to public comment and look forward to your formal deliberations in the next two weeks. We continue to believe that the plan that we have proposed is extremely responsible and addresses issues of importance to all of us who live and work in the mid peninsula area. It reflects many of the suggestions and recommendations that were made by members of the public in a series of forums held last summer prior to Stanford’s submittal of its plan. The plan emphasizes in-fill development in the core campus area which is consistent with current planning practices which will result in vast amounts of University lands remaining as open space. The substantial amount of on-campus housing we are proposing, up to 3,000 units, will add much needed housing to the short supply that exists today in the region. Let me comment on two areas. The first is open space. Currently two-thirds of all of Stanford lands are essentially open space and that same proportion of land will remain open under the University’s proposed plan. Virtually all, 99.53%, academic and housing development in our plan will be concentrated in the core campus area north of Junipero Serra Boulevard. We are proposing to build up 20,000 gross square feet of academic related facilities in the 154 acre Lathrop District on the south side of JSB. This area is already developed and occupied by think-tanks, artist studios, a student observatory and the golf course and club house. Our modest proposal for development in this district is very consistent with what is already there. Finally, Stanford is not proposing any development in the 2,090 acre foothills district south of JSB, an area encompassing over 50% of our land under County jurisdiction. The second area of comment is housing. We continue to believe that the housing component of our plan is well thought out and if implement will be of great benefit to Stanford and the community. As is fairly typical anywhere however, there is opposition to housing in some specific locations that we have proposed. Many of those who are concerned about specific sites believe that Stanford has plenty of land to simply relocate that housing that they are most concerned about to another location. Stanford does have a lot of land but few available sites in the core campus northwest of JSB where the County and Palo Alto want housing located. In proposing the original 3,000 units we thoroughly explored all possible housing sites in the core campus area. If we are to fulfill our original pledge appropriate housing sites must continue to be made available. Thank you for this opportunity to address you tonight and we look forward to your continued deliberations. Thank you.
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Mayor Kniss: The next person is Cedric de La Beaujardiere. Mr. Cedric de La Beaujardiere, 3153 Stelling Drive, Palo Alto: I’m here to speak in support of limiting the development to the existing campus space. I think that one of the big reasons for the problems that we have currently in the Bay Area with high traffic congestion and a deficient mass transit and skyrocketing housing costs are our patterns of sprawling development and single use development. I think a solution to this is to increase high-density mixed-use developments and I think Stanford should follow this practice. One possibility would be to have Stanford hold a contest among its many professors and students for development plans that would develop within their existing space and yet meet their academic and housing needs. That’s just one possibility. So I just urge you to hold Stanford to develop only in their existing academic space and please preserve for us and our future generations the open space which we currently cherish. Thank you very much. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Kathy Durham and then Ole Olson and then Jeff Segall. Ms. Kathleen Durham, 2039 Dartmouth, Palo Alto: Good evening. I live at 2039 Dartmouth just off of Stanford Avenue and across from Escondido School. I thank you for the opportunity to speak. I’m not one of the usual suspects who enjoys bashing Stanford University every chance I get. I’m a Stanford grad so is my husband so is my mom. My husband works there. One or two of you might remember that the first time got involved in local traffic and safety issues was during the hearings the Council held for the last General Use Permit. That is was in 1988-89. I was a parent of a first grader and a pre-school child. Now the older boy is on his way to college and my baby is going to start high school in the Fall. How time flies. I’m gong to focus on the main message that I gave in 1989. I was actually amazed to find this quote when I dug out the copy of my comments on behalf of College Terrace neighborhood on June 19, 1989. We are concerned that the TDM program, the monitoring of traffic on roads like Page Mill and Junipero Serra won’t help us at all. In fact, we predict that smart Stanford commuters who see increasing congestion on Page Mill will cut through our neighborhood in increasing numbers. Prophetic words. I went on to ask that City Council monitor traffic volume and speed on Stanford Avenue as part of the conditions of the 1989 Use Permit. I also urged City Staff to be proactive working with County Planning Staff to mitigate the impact of Stanford’s development on our neighborhood which is surrounded on three sides by Stanford land. At that time, ADT on Stanford Avenue near Yale, was reported as 7,900 vehicles per day. The traffic engineers hired by Stanford predicted that ADT counts on Stanford Avenue in the year 2000 would be 8,200 without the GUP growth and 8,500 with the University’s proposed new growth. I’ve got the page right here for you.
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I’ll provide it in my written comments. Well, the monitoring didn’t happen. They are just beginning efforts to slow cars on the upper end, the County end, of Stanford Avenue thanks to Joe Simitian. And guess what Stanford Avenue traffic counts near Yale were when the City finally got around to counting them in the Fall of 1999? 9,600. 1,700 more cars a day. Almost three times the increase predicted by the EIR. I believe that no other collector street in Palo Alto experienced this level of growth and volume during the boom in the 1990’s. So you can understand why it certainly doesn’t sound like the last GUP resulted in no net new commute trips to me or my neighbors. My point here is to insist that you get it right this time. Please advise your County colleagues to impose independent monitoring of traffic volume and speed in a real integrated transportation plan. Mayor Kniss: Please do give us your written comments Kathy. Thank you. Ole Olson, Jeff Segall to be followed by Diana Sworakowski. Mr. Ole Olson, 570 Matadero, Palo Alto: Good evening. I’m a 1978 graduate of Stanford and also an active member of the Stanford Open Space Alliance. I have three words for you: quid pro quo. Stanford taught me to be a construction manager, to develop the very types of projects that will be embraced by their General Use Plan. They also taught me quid pro quo, the need to negotiate this for that, to give this to get that in dealing with the jurisdictional body such as yourself and the County Board of Supervisors. Just a couple of years later I was asked to build a building at 900 Hansen Way, a two-story building. The City said surely you’re not going to destroy that 40 year old historic building there. And surely we didn’t. We put a 40 x 40 pad over at the Children’s Health Council. Early one morning moved that 40 year old building over, patched it up where it served as a daycare center for staff of the Children’s Health Council. Quid pro quo. That was a Stanford that I was proud to be associated with. Then another year later I was asked to build a building at 3803 East Bayshore right there on the banks of the Barron Creek. Again, wanting to enhance a site we asked for a variance to improve the project and the City came back and said you know, we need another half mile of bike path to finish off the bike-way Palo Alto to Mountain View bike path. My owners were really glad to put the $30,000 to build that bike path on a $300,000 project that was greatly improved by the variance. Quid pro quo. Now Stanford asks for 4.0M square feet of development. Four million. And they ask for permanent protection of the area around the dish, the area west of Junipero Serra. Quid pro quo. In your recommendations to go forward to the County if you would use that, let that the backbone of your negotiations. Quid pro quo. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Jeff followed by Diana and then Mary Davey. Mr. Jeff Segall, 240 Fernando Avenue, Palo Alto: Good evening Members of Council and Planning Commission. I number of comments that I would
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have made have already been made so I’d just like to second a number of comments that have been made already by Tom Jordan, Denise Dade and Peter Drekmeier. Also I had a brief chance to look through the Staff report and it looked like Staff had made some very good comments. Just in addition to those it is my understanding that the EIR does not make comparisons between the population density which Peter mentioned and the surrounding population daytime density of Palo Alto. I think that would be a very useful thing to have discussed in trying to get some kind of handle on what we’re really talking about, what the situation is now and what the situation will be at build-out of the proposed GUP. One other thing I’d also like to mention is a consistency with another proposal which is currently before the County. In the EIR for the Carnegie Institute it says that the Carnegie is, “not suited for core campus.” Yet this proposal would redesignate the area around it, the so-called Lathrop District, to be consistent with core campus. This strikes me as something of a contradiction. Thank you very much. Mayor Kniss: Thank you for your comments. Diana Sworakowski. Ms. Diana Sworakowski, 3357 St. Michael Court, Palo Alto: I’ve been a resident of Palo Alto for about 26 years and I’m also a member of the Stanford Golf Club. I’d like to talk a little bit about this proposal that they are going to maybe building housing on first of all Hole Number One and possibly on the first seven holes. Stanford is one of the few natural golf courses in the area. Many golf courses have housing developments around them and artificial features such as man-made lakes, waterfalls and hills. Around the golf course at Stanford the land is natural with grasses, wildflowers, and many old trees all of which support abundant wildlife. The San Francisquito Creek which criss-crosses the golf course several times has also been left in its natural state with large areas of vegetation on either side which we call [baranka]. The creek area supports abundant varieties of fish, animals and birds. I’ve just returned from England where I played on several golf courses. The majority of the courses over there are constructed to fit in the natural surroundings. I was very much aware of the similarities that these courses have with Stanford. It would be such a shame to interfere with this unique golf course. Thank you very much for letting me speak. Mayor Kniss: Thank you for your comments. Mary Davey followed by Christopher Stromberg and then Paul Hartke. Ms. Mary Davey, Los Altos Hills: I’m speaking as an individual and as a Board Member of Mid-Peninsula Citizens for Fair Housing and also as a Director of the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District and a Board Member of the Peninsula Conservation Center. First of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak to you this evening. And thanks to your Staff and to the County Staff for all the hard work they have done in preparation for this evening’s hearing. I want to support the
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comments that have been made by the Committee For Green Foothills, the Stanford Open Space Alliance, your Staff in recommending some additional search for housing and the open space impacts, and also Tom Jordan. I want to add a few major points. The proposed General Use Permit proposed by Stanford for the next ten years has significant impacts upon the loss of open space and traffic congestion in the mid-peninsula. Unless these impacts can be mitigated the County should say no to Stanford developing any more administrative or academic facilities. But be allowed to build the necessary housing units in the core campus to meet an existing shortfall and future development. “Stanford University is a private institution and as such is subject to normal zoning controls and project approval procedures.” This is page one of the Environmental Impact Statement. This is from Parsons and is on the first page of the EIR. This means the County can deny use permits to Stanford unless the County Board of Supervisors finds there are sufficient mitigation measures to ameliorate the significant impacts of development. All Stanford lands west of Junipero Serra should remain permanent open space. This excludes the 154 acres called Lathrop as a site that is proposed for the Carnegie 20,000 square feet buildings. Necessary affordable housing for students, graduate students, post-docs, faculty and staff should be constructed before any facilities are allowed. This will meet an existing housing/jobs imbalance created by Stanford in the last ten years when the University chose to build campus facilities and not housing. At present Stanford is implementing no new net commute. The DIR states, the County cannot require this of Stanford. If it exists now, why can’t it be continued? Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Mary, would you if you can leave your remarks with the City Clerk? Ms. Davey: Yes, I did. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Mary would you come back for a clarification? Council Member Lytle: I’m sorry Mary, can I ask you a question? When you spoke of the Junipero Serra line, did you say excluding the Carnegie site or including? Ms. Davey: Excluding the Carnegie site. It would be contiguous with your urban services boundary. That’s what we believe it should be. I think your Staff has already spoken to that. We would even exclude the golf course and keep that if that were something to negotiate. But it seems to me the case can be lead for the County respecting your urban service boundary. Council Member Lytle: Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Christopher Stromberg, Paul Hartke and then Phil Sorensen.
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Mr. Christopher Stromberg, 704 Campus Drive, Stanford: I’m a grad student at Stanford University. I’m also a member of the Graduate Student Council at Stanford. I am here, as usual, to speak on the subject of housing. Everyone here knows that the housing situation for graduate students at Stanford is bad. To give you an idea, in our most recent housing lottery in May 985 students lost the housing lottery. This is a little bit down from last year but keep in mind in this next round of housing units there were an additional 480 units plus and off-campus subsidized program that was expanded. So really the demand has increased. To put a human face on this, roughly half of the graduate students here at this meeting today who applied for on-campus housing in the lottery lost. I’d ask those people to wave. Given this desperate housing situation, all of the housing proposed in this application is extremely important. The housing needs to be built and it needs to be built quickly. One of the concerns that the Palo Alto City Council has commented on in the past is the potential grad housing site along El Camino Real next to Escondido Village. I would strongly urge the Planning Commission and City Council to accept this as a valid housing site subject to the mitigations proposed in the Draft EIR. This site represents housing for 250 grad students. There are also no real practical alternatives for this site. Someone suggested simply adding these housing units to the core of Escondido Village as suggest, that would be a good alternative site. In the GUP application however, Stanford is already proposing to add 725 more units into Escondido Village. We’re concerned that adding too many more spaces would simply make Escondido Village too dense. In your own Staff recommendations you also had a comment that additional housing sites should be found. You have a site here that is a site that would allow 250 housing spaces to be built. Since the visual impacts of building 250 housing spaces on the El Camino Real frontage can be mitigated to a less than significant level according to the Draft EIR I would encourage the City Council and Planning Commission to accept this housing site as appropriate. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thanks for your comments. Paul Hartke. Mr. Paul Hartke, 350 Sharon Park Drive, #I-1, Menlo Park: Thank you so much for allowing me to speak. I thought Chris and I submitted our applications to speak separately so we wouldn’t be back to back. I wonder if you put us together. Anyhow, I am a graduate student at Stanford University here to speak on behalf of the housing. I’ve spoken at many of these things and I have vowed not to shave until we have this all wrapped up and hopefully Supervisor Simitian will get this rolling. We will be finished by Christmas. I just would like to say that I’m very pleased that the EIR does address the issue of housing. I think it is integral to the entire package. I just think it is important when people through out numbers like 4.0M square feet, etc., that large chunks of housing will be built. They are going to help
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affect the jobs imbalance not contribute to it. The only other point I would bring up which the Staff mentioned a little bit earlier, some of the other community services including childcare and other services in the residential areas I know Stanford is considering and has proposed in the plan to build some of those things to help address the transportation issues. So I hope we can look at those as well. Thank you very much. Mayor Kniss: We hope you get to shave fairly soon. Linda Cork and then Phil Sorensen. Ms. Linda Cork, 680 Torwood Lane, Los Altos: Thank you. I’m Chairman of the Department of Comparative Medicine at Stanford. I too have spoken at a number of these hearings and I want to lend my support to the GUP as it is written. I have a concern about low income families and housing for them. I also have a big concern about housing for faculty. I have faculty who commute from Fremont, Sunnyvale and further because they cannot afford housing in the Bay Area. My faculty are paid reasonably well. They are not high income people. They are not physicians in high income specialties but they make a decent income. Most of them cannot afford to buy a house in the immediate vicinity. This is a problem. The housing that is being placed on campus is desperately needed. By linking it to academic growth, however, there is a two-edged sword. If you have the academic housing and you have the academic growth they need to go together. If you limit the areas where housing can be placed there can be no academic growth. When I say academic growth you need to understand that when we talk about growth a lot of times that’s simply replacing buildings at the medical school. All academic medical centers are struggling because of a variety of issues that have nothing to do with the transportation problems of the peninsula. There have been three research buildings built in the last six years. Three, to replace many of the ones that were damaged in Loma Preata. This is a huge problem. The medical school is poised to take an enormous advantage of the things that are being built here in the Bay Area and not all of the growth here is Stanford. In fact, most of it is not. But a lot of it is fueled by the intellectual and stimulation that comes from Stanford. The problem is that if we want to be ready to take advantage of the human genome project, the tremendous opportunities that await us in imaging technology for non-invasive diagnosis we have to be able to have the laboratory space, we have to have the faculty and we have to be able to do that right away. We can’t wait. We can’t have a very slow growth and we’re not talking about adding a lot of people. It isn’t a lot of people we’re adding. A lot of the traffic we see is not generated by Stanford. I travel Junipero Serra every day to work. Most of the traffic doesn’t go into Stanford. I don’t know where they are going. Maybe they’re going to Downtown Menlo Park. But a lot of them don’t go to Stanford. Some of them do. That’s absolutely true. But to force Stanford to put its activities off its campus is only going to increase
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traffic problems. So I beg you to consider the growth. Everybody wants to preserve the foothills but there has to be some negotiation and compromise. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Phil Sorensen, Stan Christensen and Nonette Hanko. Mr. Phil Sorensen, 968 Elsinore Court, Palo Alto: I’ve been a Palo Alto resident for nearly 50 years by choice. Also a member of the Stanford Golf Club by choice. It was the golf course that first attracted my intense interest in this development plan. I have been reminded often in the last few weeks of one of my father’s favorite sayings, “it’s easier to smell a rotten egg than to lay a good one.” I think in some ways we are smelling some rotten eggs in the plan. I think that Stanford has not been as well served by their planners as they might be, that there are alternatives that have not been fully explored. I also can’t think of a more complicated planning problem than the one than we’re facing here with six or seven jurisdictions and I don’t know how many passionate advocates for particular positions on which they want to draw a firm line. The point made by the gentleman who talked about quid pro quo, the point just made about negotiation, seems to me to be very important. Not everyone can have everything that they want out of this process. I think the only way the process is going to be resolved is if there is compromise all the way along the line. For example, I’m not convinced that it wouldn’t be appropriate to remove the untouchable sign from some of the boundaries. For example, to open a few hundred yards along the southwest boundary of Junipero Serra as a space for faculty housing across the boulevard from places where faculty housing already exists, an area where some housing has existed for a very long time. And also the area which Stanford has designated in their plan as a possible site for a school. I cite that as only one example of a kind of open mindedness that I hope that all of us can come to accept. I am with one semi-flippant suggestion for ways to take care of a lot of things at once. I agree that we ought move upward in the size of some of the structures as a way of saving the small footprint but also making the space. It occurred to me today that a beautiful opportunity for dual purpose would cover the stable area. We could have stables, a tack room and hay mound on the lower floor and housing above. Mayor Kniss: Now that is an idea. Stan Christensen, Nonette Hanko and then Hunter Tart. Mr. Stan Christensen, 640 Forest, Palo Alto: Good evening. I’ve spent much of the last ten years serving as a mediator in land use disputes around the country. This one is of particular interest to me as I’m a Palo Alto resident. I want to agree with the gentleman who just spoke. There is need for compromise in all land use proposals or disputes. The problem is Stanford’s plan asks for so much that it is even hard to get
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out of the starting block in terms of compromise. All these things have to be looked on the basis of is there a net tangible benefit to the community. In this one, even in the reduced scale option proposed n the EIR, or the County’s environmentally superior alternative the plan is desperately in the red and in need of further investigation. Let me be specific. In the Lathrop District Stanford is asking for a new land use designation. That would be a disaster to agree to that, too many other counties have gone down that path and changed a rural to an urban designation which really just facilitates further development in the area. Mayor Kniss: We have a problem with the microphone. Mr. Christensen: Let’s see if that works. I was talking about the Lathrop District. It would be a real mistake to change the land use designation in that area principally because it would facilitate further development of the foothills. The irony of this proposal is many of the people speaking against the development of the foothills, a lot of people are speaking against that, everything Stanford wants to achieve in their plan can be achieved not developing the foothills. There is a real link here. Stanford has not helped us understand why the Carnegie Foundation has to be located there and couldn’t be located elsewhere. I suggest that you look at that in more detail. The urban growth boundary expansion. Help us understand why we’d expand the urban growth boundary. There has been no justification. The EIR needs to study permanent growth boundaries it also needs to study permanent open space. Neither one is adequately addressed in the EIR. The EIR also does not study the reduced scale option without Lathrop. The reduce scale option as you know, they say they are 50% smaller, but the impacts would be the same. Well, that is ridiculous. Of course the impacts environmentally would be smaller if it’s 50% as big. That needs to be studied further if that’s the conclusion. It needs to be studied without looking at the Lathrop District as part of the development necessarily. A couple of other quick points. The EIR needs a much stronger tie to housing. Of course Stanford needs more housing but similar to the Sand Hill development a year ago they have thrown in all kinds of other pork and said we need this as part of a package. We need to look at these things issue by issue rather than assuming that Stanford could come in and this kind of Trojan Horse drives you and get a lot of development that is going to be bad for the community. Parking for recreation is not addressed adequately in the EIR. Obviously if we’re going to have a net tangible benefit on this project Stanford has to continue to let the community use the trails as they generously have. The parking situation is a disaster. That is not addressed. They could build some parking lots. There are simple solutions to this if you look around the country where this has been done before. A road going through the foothills. The EIR says this would have dramatic impacts. If people locally knew that there was going to be a road proposed to built through the foothills to deal with the traffic I
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think it is a grave environmental impact. Is my time up? Mayor Kniss: Yes it is. We’d be delighted to have your written comments if you would. Thank you. Nonette Hanko, Hunter Tart and then Jeb Eddy. Ms. Nonette Hanko, 3127 Emerson Street, Palo Alto: I’m speaking as an individual tonight. I’m the Palo Alto Stanford Director for the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District but our district will be sending in the district’s position at a later time. So this will be personal thoughts of my own. I want to address the EIR. This map, figure 4.1-2, shows Coyote Hill here and I believe that the map should be changed. On the third page of what I’ve given you to read is a map that shows the Comprehensive Plan map. It actually shows the boundary of the categories as they should exist. In the document, the map that is produced in the EIR shows Coyote Hill including land that is already in research park use. Whereas the Comprehensive Plan map shows where the research park has cross Foothill Expressway and continued up Arastradero Road. So the map should be changed to show that the Coyote Hill undeveloped lands are the lands that are shown along the Comprehensive Plan actually separated from the research park by the Palo Alto Urban Growth Boundary. Those are undeveloped lands. There is land for agricultural conservation use, a zone district that was applied to that area in 1973, and which I think would be a good starting point for the County and the City to discuss zoning for all the undeveloped lands in the Palo Alto sphere. It should include the existing [mike problem] and the full study that the County has mentioned. In relation to that on pages 4.1-5 and 6 the EIR text categorizes Stanford lands in the City of Palo Alto listing medical center, shopping center, and research park but not Coyote Hill. It is inappropriate for the text to match the map and also appropriate since these lands are under Palo Alto’s jurisdiction for the Palo Alto Planning Department to suggest wording for the text of the Coyote Hill category. And to recommend that the City’s adopted urban growth boundary as it pertains to Stanford be shown as extending from Deer Creek and Foothill Expressway to Arastradero Road. I have other comments but since I’ve [mike problem] I hope you read it carefully. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Also, Ed, perhaps you could get back to her on the map and that question regarding the line. Thank you. Hunter Tart and then Jeb Eddy. Mr. Hunter Tart, 704 Campus Drive, Stanford: I’m another graduate student. I’m a Ph.D. student in mathematics at Stanford and I thank you for this opportunity to speak once again. Again, many of you have seen me at other meetings in the past I’m sure. So you know that I’m an advocate for more graduate student housing on campus at Stanford. I’d like to talk about a point that’s related to that issue but a
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little more about the traffic issue today. In particular I’d like to sort of advise you as you think about the mitigations that are required to off-set the traffic impacts of Stanford’s development. So there is no doubt that more on campus housing will increase the number of cars on campus. That is going to happen. But it will actually decrease the total number of cars owned by Stanford students. Let me explain why that happens. Many Stanford student’s I know, especially international students but also domestic students, come to campus without owning cars. The first year they are allowed to live on Stanford campus. Unfortunately due to the high demand for housing and the lack of supply many of those students are then kicked off campus so they have to find their own housing in the area. Virtually the only way to get back and forth between their homes and campus is to buy a car at that point. So I personally know many, many students who prefer not to own cars who have actually bought cars because they are forced to move off campus. In recent years as the on campus demand has grown so much Stanford has introduced a new program which is quite helpful to house more students off campus. Stanford has actually subsidizing rents in some off campus apartments. Many of those apartments are located in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. So again, that’s provided more evidence of this fact that people who move from on campus housing into those units have to buy cars. So I wanted to point that out. It’s something you may not be aware of in terms of the positive effect of moving people onto campus in terms of car ownership. So the punch line is if you move more people onto campus, particularly students around the Escondido Village area, you will have more local trips for instance to JJ&F Market. I think there will be more students who visit JJ&F Market. But we will have fewer peak-hour commute trips into campus. I think that’s extremely important. In fact, the no net new commute trips policy from the beginning was essentially to make sure that peak hour commute trips don’t explode. I think even bring more housing onto campus we can meet that goal. And finally one more point I’d like you to remember that student and post-doc housing is low income housing. In fact it is very low income housing. So I’d just like for you to keep this in mind in considering the potential effects or even the benefits of the development that Stanford has proposed. It is something that is not often thought about but just providing more housing on campus will actually have a very positive impact on the balance of low income housing in this very expensive region of the Bay Area. Among the sites that we are considering on campus I’d like to support what Chris said earlier that the El Camino Real frontage is a very nice site for campus housing. It is probably the best current site. So I’d like for you to support that. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Jeb Eddy, Allen Cypher and Elsie Begle. Mr. Jeb Eddy, 2579 Cowper Street, Palo Alto: My presentation requires the use of this projection machine. Four hours ago I was here testing it and it worked. Could I ask you to call a couple more people while I
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try to get up and flying again please. Let me tell you what I’m about. A week ago Monday I told you that I was doing some poking around on the web and Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton. I have a bunch of web pages and data from these universities that I think you will be very interested in. Mayor Kniss: In that case, Jeb, give us a high sign when you’re ready. In the meantime Allen Cypher and then Elsie Begle. Then if we still need some more time Dennis Reinhardt. Mr. Allen Cypher, 860 University Avenue, Palo Alto: I’ve been a Palo Alto resident for 15 years. During that time I’ve had jobs in Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City. In every case one of the most important things in the quality of my life here has been the ability to get to an open space area that is accessible to me and not too far away. So one of the most valuable things to me is that after work I can get to an open space area before I go home. So my real concern here is getting permanent open space protection for the dish area. I’m also concerned about redesignating the Lathrop area. It is so important to the quality of life here. I think I speak for so many people on this issue. Also I would be very happy to take public transportation there. I take a train where ever I can and usually do to go to work. I have to drive to get to the dish area now. If they had public transportation from the trains or if the Marguerite went there that would help also. But please make sure that this stays open space. Now is the time to make it permanent. Please make this area an accessible open space area which is so important to us. Thanks. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Elsie Begle. Ms. Elsie Begle, 501 Forest, Palo Alto: Actually I am glad there is going to be a presentation about other universities because I have lived all my life, fortunately, in college towns. I can tell you that if the University of Michigan, Yale and Princeton, those universities would die to have a tenth of the open space that Stanford has. The eastern universities are terribly restricted in what they can do in the way of new facilities or new programs because they are encroaching on city streets all time. So when I hear about open space I wonder if the proponents feel that open space can open minds. I don’t think so. I think that without the facilities for education, for research, that this is the way minds are opened. Not by looking at vistas of the foothills. So I think that the prime purpose of Mrs. Stanford’s legacy was to create a university that would serve the children of California. And to that end Stanford has performed nobly and it’s also created a whole new areas of research and scientific development. In years to come it may be that we need to do even more condensing of facilities. When I look at all the for instance in Escondido Village, the single story residences, I have a thing about there should be at least two stories for every new building that is built. We should economize on
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the use of space but make it more available. I think that if Stanford is going to continue it’s role as one of the preeminent universities it needs to have the opportunities for research, for education, and for scientific development. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Are you ready? Following right after Jeb will be Dennis Reinhardt. Mr. Eddy: These are some of the institutions that I’ve spoken with or who’s web sites I visited. I’ve also talked with the City Planning Department of Cambridge which is a two for one, and New Haven which is very proud of the relationship that it has with Stanford University. I probably spent between 10 and 20 hours and made on the order of a couple dozen phone calls. By the way, I have a list of URLs which I will e-mail to all of you in case you want to go to some of these places so you’ll know I’m not making this up. Princeton voluntarily pays local taxes to school jurisdictions in the local area. It has that 450 acres of permanent open space. Their growth plan for the coming year as a result of a three year planning process including Dean Hargedon who was here for such a long wants to 125 freshman over a full four year period to increase the university by a total of 500 undergraduates only. They just completed a $1.1 billion fund raising campaign. Their web site has a very impressive “town & gown” page talking about good relations between the two. One of the things they are expecting to grow, to develop, is web courses for alumni. Stanford I’d love to pay for a non-engineering web based course. This is a very interesting one here. I want to make sure we all see it. Yale has just finished a 25 year planning framework as they call it. It is not intended to be a zoning specific structural construction thing. But if and when they want to develop here is where they will do it. 25 years, and they specifically say that this is intended to cover an entire generation. Obviously we’ll be around but not in public office or doing things. I thought that was terrific. And in this process they basically said the construction will be mostly in-fill. They do not anticipate significant growth in student body or faculty. For Harvard I have a URL which will show you approximately 2.0M square feet in the last ten years with no growth in the student body. They just completed the world’s largest fund raising campaign. They have such a big complex web sit I do not have complete information on them. Mayor Kniss: I’m sorry to stop you. Highly unusual, but go ahead tonight, Jeb. Mr. Eddy: I don’t have what’s up there on my screen and it looks like I do not have the ability to scroll down further on this page. My conclusion is that other universities with the possible exception of Harvard are not engaging in such extraordinary growth as we are seeing around here. I want to commend the City for I think excellent, excellent work in reviewing the Draft EIR. I ask you as Planning
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Commissioners and Council Members to send a very, very strong message to the Planning Commissioners and Supervisors of this County that the growth as proposed in the plan is excessive and something like the reduced plan is much more appropriate. Thank you very much. Mayor Kniss: Thank you, Jeb. Dennis Reinhardt. Mr. Dennis Reinhardt, 1850 Sand Hill Road, Palo Alto: Having spent 24 of the last 28 years in Harvard Square it is impolite if not offensive for me to say that I have never been lonelier than I have been on the Stanford campus walking around the core of the campus. I would submit that what you are needing here is a new approach to density. We can’t look at density as a universal and uniform number across the entire landscape. What you need to do, I think, is to look at some of the sacrosanct areas. What I call the “Aussie Weed Patch” for example, along Palm Drive. I will likely be ridden out of town on this one but I submit that if you brought creative architects in and land planners, and there are many of them around here, you could create housing for students and probably the students who are kicked out would live as a trade-off in high density situations. The woman who was here just a few minutes ago talked about intellectual processes not going out to the wild lands. I used to study wilderness so I’m familiar with open space. I submit that the ultimate choice that you have here is to either grow forever without knowing where you’re going. What is the truth about Stanford? Where does it want to go? How does it want to be seen in the future, in its future about what it did in its past? Are we going to be engaged in creeping incrementally here? Or are we going to be engaged in a sustainable sufficiency? Consider those two phrases, creeping incrementalism, that’s Sand Hill Road. Waiting for the people across the creek to acquiesce and allow the bridge to be widened. Sustainable sufficiency, that’s you have enough, not any more than enough. Live that way. There are corporations, and in fact the Harvard Business School is setting up out here on Sand Hill Road. How many of you knew that? They are looking into the process of sustainable sufficiency. Mayor Kniss: There is a question about what course you teach. Mr. Reinhardt: What course I teach? What would you like me to teach? Mayor Kniss: Edward Holland, Laura Stuchinsky and then Bill Conlon. Mr. Edward Holland, 1111 Parkinson Avenue, Palo Alto: I’m a 42 year resident of Palo Alto and I’ve certainly seen an awful lot of bad planning going on around here but it’s not open space. Shortly after I came here Palo Alto had the foresight to buy Foothill Park. It is a lovely place to go. I might mention to people who are concerned about the dish area, it is less than four miles up Page Mill Road and takes a good deal less than ten minutes to drive up there. It was designed and
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managed as a park. Now it is fine that Stanford can maintain the dish area and allow us to go in there and use it even though we’ve refused to let any Stanford person come into Foothill Park. I think that the real problem of this area was talked about in the newspaper this morning. It is uncontrolled growth of jobs relative to housing. In the City of Sunnyvale they are down to something like three vacancies and the cost of rentals there are increasing presently at the rate 50% per year. Read that article. That’s where we need to put the effort in planning and that’s what Stanford is doing. They are building the housing that we have not provided for in the City of Palo Alto. We go wildly ahead and build more restaurants, we build Downtown parking garages which bring in more cars. Stanford is solving the housing and transportation problem. This is a good plan. Let’s put the effort where it should be. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Laura, Bill Conlon and then Steve Aronson. Ms. Laura Stuchinsky, Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group: Thank you. Good evening. I’m here representing the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group. I’m the Director of Land Use and Transportation. I’m also here representing another organization called The Housing Action Coalition of Santa Clara County which is a 100 member organization made up of individuals and organizations that are concerned about the production of affordable housing in Santa Clara County. Both organizations strongly support the housing element of this proposal. The proposal proposes increasing housing in areas that are already developed which would preserve open space on the campus or more accurately on Stanford land. Two-thirds of the land would remain open space as mentioned earlier. As others have mentioned there is a dire need for housing in this area particularly for graduate students who are earning $17,000 per year as a stipend. Or for faculty and staff who are earning between $50-60,000 per year who can’t possibly afford the average rents in this area particularly in the northern peninsula area. There is a need to build more housing in the entire area to meet the needs of the population. But we won’t be able to possibly meet the demands of the students who are there now or the future students unless Stanford is allowed to build more housing on campus. The housing that is proposed is of moderate density. Stanford is an excellent transportation provider. It provides incentives to people to not use their cars. The students that would be living on campus would be reducing the number of car trips made to the campus during peak hours. It is important to allow Stanford to grow in a prudent manner. It has been an enormous contributor to the vitality of this area. We need to preserve open space and provide housing for students and for faculty but for the University to remain competitive both in recruiting and keeping faculty and staff and students it needs to be able to grow in a prudent manner. We urge you to encourage the County to allow the housing development that is proposed in this plan to go forward as planned. Thank you.
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Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Bill Conlon, Steve Aronson and then Judith Schwartz. Mr. Bill Conlon, 2330 Bryant Street, Palo Alto: Hi, I’m a resident of Palo Alto on Bryant Street. I’ve been here about 18 years. One of the things that’s troubling is that we have kind of a Jeckle and Hyde situation between Stanford University and Stanford Land Management Company. The management company of course is just in the business of building and if they stop building they’d all lose their jobs. So I think what our focus should be on what is good for our community. I think some of what’s good for our community will be good for Stanford. The fact is that Stanford and its incessant building program has been kind of dealing us a death by a thousand cuts, where they just keep coming back. So the comments about doing a long term coherent plan that includes real boundaries and real limits and give Stanford some constraints and let them work within that. I think that’s something that we really have to focus on. The other thing related to that of course is that the density means that Stanford really is a city. And the question of how we deal with this and what is really agricultural land and what is city land needs to be addressed. Perhaps we should look into addressing Stanford under the same rules that development in Palo Alto would be. My office happens to be in Mayfield, one of the areas that this City annexed at some time in the past. Perhaps annexation should be considered if there is no other means through the County to obtain the kind of growth control that we need. Finally, there is an issue about the habitat for the salamander. I think we need to be very careful in the EIR assessment about some of the finessing that’s being done about what’s academic, what’s field research, what’s open space. There is an article in Science Magazine a few years back I recall reading where one of the butterflies that is threatened was allowed and studied its extinction up at Jasper Ridge was actually studied by Stanford faculty. So I think we have to be careful not to assume just because they are doing research that there will be any protection for an endangered species. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Steve Aronson, Judith Schwartz and Lyman Van Slyke. Mr. Steve Aronson, 1914 Channing Avenue, Palo Alto: I’ve lived in Palo Alto for 50 years and seen many, many changes. I’m also a member of the Stanford Golf Course. I’m here primarily for that. I read in the proposal what the EIR calls a modest proposal to eliminate the first hole on Stanford’s 70 year old golf course. This would really cripple the golf course. Relative to that there is no doubt that there is housing for the University needed but I think that on the campus there are groves of Eucalyptus that should be considered. I think that high rise density, there are already high rise units on the campus. In the City Manager’s Planner’s Report there is a comment about will the project adversely affect recreational opportunities for existing or new
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campus residents and facility users. Yes, it will if the golf course is damaged. Roughly 33% of the rounds of golf are played by Stanford students. It is one of the recreational opportunities that they have on the campus. If they ruin the golf course obviously that is going to go. So I hope that you’ll take that into consideration and recommend that that not be included in the EIR. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Judith Schwartz. Ms. Judith Schwartz, 2330 Bryant Street, Palo Alto: I just want to express support both for open space and for more housing for students. I don’t think you either have to be a City Planner or a rocket scientist to know that if you put the housing near El Camino and down in campus that you won’t need cars as much as if it’s out the other direction. So I certainly encourage you to be logical and in the spirit of compromise to do more for the housing and suggest some higher density housing. I hope to be back talking to you about more creative solutions to help the housing problem because I think it’s one of the big things facing our community because we need all kinds of people here or it’s going to be a pretty boring, horrible place to live. So I’d like to give support to both sides and urge you to protect the open space and to ask Stanford to provide a permanent solution. You don’t need all that growth forever. It is kind of big and successful and it’s doing a good job and I think that the example of Harvard and Yale are maybe good models to take with us. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Lyman Van Slyke, followed by Tim Mulcahy and Richard Harris. Mr. Lyman Van Slyke, 591 Salvatierra Street, Stanford: I taught at Stanford for 35 years before retiring and lived on campus nearly that long. I associate myself with the remarks of those who insist on the essential nature of solving the housing problem if Stanford is to remain a first-rate university. I would argue that the prosperity and quality of life of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Santa Clara County depends to some very substantial degree on a vigorous university here at Stanford. However, I’m speaking tonight in defense of the Stanford Golf Course. I agree with those who say that taking the first hole will emasculate the golf course and to take the first seven holes will essentially destroy golf at Stanford. The Stanford Golf Course is not only an environmental asset but also a very great cultural asset. A great golf course, and the Stanford Golf Course is that, as we know from this being the eve of the British Open playing at St. Andrew’s in which Tiger Woods was much associated with Stanford golf will be playing, Notah Begay, Tom Watson, Mickey Right and others. A golf course is not simply attractive land. It is a cultural phenomenon equally important I think to bricks and mortar buildings. This is a golf course with a great tradition by a great architect. Also it has important environmental functions as a kind of buffer between the core
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campus and the undeveloped lands further out. I’m kind of an amateur bird watcher and I’ve seen the rival of many species of bird’s habitat to the golf course. The return of the Great Blue Heron which hunts on the Stanford Golf Course now, ducks and other small birds. So in addition to the Tiger Salamander there are other important environmental functions which the golf course plays. I believe that it is possible for Palo Alto, Santa Clara County and the University to work together to find non-golf course areas of Area B and the areas which are adjacent to it which are outside of Area B but which are also not part of the golf course that would provide an equal or greater amount of land than the first fairway proposal which Stanford has put forth. The housing in that area would be very near to where Stanford now proposes to put it on the first fairway and any mitigation that would be necessary would be essentially equivalent, one site or the other. But if part of Stanford’s reluctance to use that land results from agreements entered into with Palo Alto, I hope Palo Alto would be open to renegotiating those understandings with the University. Mayor Kniss: Thank you for your comments. Tim Mulcahy, Richard Harris and then Steve Krasner. Could I make an announcement before you begin? We have just taken our last card and we’re going to plow on through this. I looked up and down and people said they are comfortable continuing to go on. So rather than interrupt the flow we’ll continue to encourage you to be brief if you wish. Tim. Mr. Tim Mulcahy, 517 Van Buren Street, Los Altos: I spoke to this Committee last Monday night in reference to the Welch Road uproar. I still am kind of wondering how Stanford can build these housing units inside and where ever they are proposed and yet eliminate 60% of dentists and maybe 200 physicians on the outward boundary of Welch Road. I think it’s just not a very good plan. I come today because I think that when you take these facilities out, everybody talks about housing and where we can go and where you can’t go to find housing, well consider these 200 or 300 practices and where they will go. There is no affordable housing or place of residence that these physicians or dentists can practice. Mind you, there are about 10,000 patients from the Palo Alto region that will be used by these facilities that will have to find other facilities. I think there is a need for healthcare in this area. I think that not everything can be handled by Stanford’s healthcare system. Yes, I would love to have a very good cancer research center, a new cancer research center but that’s going to bring in another 350 housing units needed for this overall plan. Where are they going to get their dental work or their medical work if it’s not at the hospital itself? I think that this is very shortsighted planning and I would encourage you all to list this encompassed within the EIR for the entire plan in addition to the Welch Road Project. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Richard Harris then Steve Krasner and then
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Moira Fordyce. Mr. Richard Harris, San Francisco: I’m a resident of San Francisco. I’m a Palo Altoan-in-law. My in-laws that I spend a lot of time with live across the street from St. Anne’s Church on Melville. I’m here to speak about the Stanford Golf Course. This is a national treasure that we have in the Stanford Golf Course. It is a community resource as well which is a point that was missed in the EIR and needs to be emphasized. Of the 70,000 or so rounds played there in a year, approximately 20,000 are public rounds, about a quarter of your play at [Pal-Uni] is played in public rounds by guests or fund raising tournaments, or the junior clinics or any of these other public recreational uses that are made. In addition to the members, many of whom are Palo Alto residents, the students and the faculty play 25,000 of the 70,000 rounds. This is a local recreational resource that would be severely crippled if the golf course is damaged and invaded as the plan proposes to do. The notion that the first hole could be simply lifted out of the golf course without refitting the puzzle. The refitting of that puzzle which was created by one of the great all-time golf designers, a man named George Thomas, would create tremendous disruption in this area that was left as natural area in that golf course. That’s one of the great beauties of the golf course and why everyone treasures it. It is so open, it brings the nature in to the community and it is not a separate little distinct box of trees and fairway grass. It is nature that we are allowed to walk in. Go out there if you haven’t. That was a major point that was missed in the EIR. Another major point that was missed in the EIR is it is an historic site. It was built in 1929, it’s 70 years old. It has held seven national championships. It is beloved around the world. This is a world treasure that we have here. Palo Alto as well as Stanford are guardians of that treasure and we need to see it that way. I have a letter that I will introduce from former Council Members. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Give it to the Clerk. Steve Krasner, Moira Fordyce and Elaine Haight. Mr. Steve Krasner, 12 Peter, Stanford: I’m a faculty member at Stanford and I’m also a golfer. I want to speak for a few minutes about the golf course. Let me begin by saying that the housing crisis is a real crisis for faculty. We’re in an extremely competitive environment. We’re dealing with a world in which housing prices are 30% less in the areas where our competitors are located. The second point is I think it is true that Stanford has a very limited number of places where it can build additional housing on campus. The third point, and the reason I’m addressing you, is there is a solution to this problem I think. It would involve the City Council renegotiating its agreement about Area B. If the City Council were willing to allow the University to locate housing on any part of Area B as opposed to just the first hole, it would be possible to preserve the golf course
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in its present form and to build the additional housing which Stanford needs. That’s something that’s under your purview. It’s straightforward. It could be implemented and it is a solution which I think would work for all parties. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. I might remind those who are listening that Area B is a negotiated open space in exchange for Sand Hill Road. That’s what the previous gentleman was speaking about. Moira Fordyce. Did she leave? Elaine Haight. Ms. Elaine Haight, 166 Cowper Street, Palo Alto: It is an honor to be addressing the Planning Committee today because I think that you guys are really in 21st century and the year 2000. The work that you’ve done in Palo Alto has shown what good planning and land use can do. The reason that housing is expensive is that this is a beautiful place to live and you guys especially have been thinking and planning ahead about all of these different issues. Now, unfortunately Stanford isn’t in the 21st century. They are back in the olden days. I’m sure that the people that study this at the University wouldn’t agree with the Stanford development company. The development company itself is in this sprawl idea. If you look at the map, where they want to do the building is away from Palo Alto. They keep drawing everything, the golf course, the doctor’s offices, the open space, that’s where they want to build. That’s the wrong place to build. You know that. It’s been mentioned up here there are so many spots in-fill on El Camino, there is no reason that they should have to sprawl out there. The City of Palo Alto has made that urban boundary and it should hold to it. There is no reason to change the urban boundary at all. So we really are trusting you to go to County and to go to Stanford and say, this is the right way to do it and this what our boundaries are, and this is the way we want our community to be, and our community has been successful. Our property values show that success, that there is some intrinsic value to the type of land use planning that Palo Alto has done. I came to Palo Alto 15 years ago as a graduate student and stayed because Palo Alto is a wonderful place to live. After graduation I stayed here because of Palo Alto, not because of Stanford. So a lot of times people think everybody goes to Palo Alto because of Stanford but actually a lot of people go to Stanford because of Palo Alto. So you guys have some clout here and you can tell the County that and tell Stanford that. You know a thing or two about land use and you can teach them a little bit and draw them back to Palo Alto, bring them together with us. Now, another thing that you can do to help them and that goodwill of saying, Stanford grow with us down here by the El Camino, is to say we can let you share Foothill Park just as Stanford residents, as a gesture of goodwill and bring us all together. We share transportation, we share schools and we can also share that open space. But definitely they need to grant some permanent open space like all the other large land developers have had to do and you need to keep that urban boundary right where it is right now. Thank you.
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Mayor Kniss: Thank you. It is actually nice to hear some kind words occasionally. We appreciate that. Rick Voreck, Fred Temple and Herb Borock. Is Rick Voreck here? Has Rick left? Fred Temple. Mr. Fred Temple, 291 La Cuesta Drive, Portola Valley: I’m a resident of La Dera and a member of the Stanford Golf Course. I’d like to speak about my concern for the bio-diversity impact on the Stanford Golf Course and the surrounding open spaces as well. When I first came to the golf course I was absolutely amazed at the bio-diversity that exists there especially with the birds. In particular I believe the golf course holds one of the largest concentrations of Western Blue Birds in the entire peninsula. Now, these birds are cavity nesters which means they require specific nesting grounds in the cavities of trees that have been excavated by woodpeckers. They used to take holes in wooden fence posts but those wooden fence posts have been taken down throughout most of the open spaces. The golf course has some of the finest nesting territory for blue birds on the peninsula. The fact is that the blue birds on the golf course are also the same blue birds seasonally migrate out into the open spaces. So it is very difficult to say whether taking the golf course birds would also decimate the population of the open space as well. That’s the blue birds. In terms of hawks, the mature trees along the fairways of the golf course provide great rooting spots and great hunting grounds for hawks. Just to name a few of the species that exist there, Red Tailed Hawk, Red Shouldered Hawk, Harriers, Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp Shinned Hawk, and Black Shouldered Kipe are all present on the golf course. Once again, they associate between the open space and the golf course. Now finally, the riparian corridor along San Francisquito Creek provides habitat for ducks that have a specific requirement for wooded waterways. In particular the Hooded Merganser and the Wood Duck which only will go to waterways that have the riparian corridor such as what exists San Francisquito Creek. So my concern is that to destroy the first set of holes of the golf course where incidentally most of the blue birds are concentrated is going to have an environmental impact not just on the golf course but potentially also on the open space. That’s all I have. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Herb Borock and then H.D. Thoreau and Dorothy Bender. Mr. Herb Borock, P.O. Box 632, Palo Alto: I’m going to see if this overhead projector works. I’ll start talking if someone can work this. Mayor Kniss: Why don’t you let H.D. Thoreau go and then I’ll call on you, Herb. H.D. Thoreau. Mr. H.D. Thoreau, 426 Sand Hill Circle, Menlo Park: I’m here this evening to plead with you, ask you, to give careful consideration to the plans that Stanford has spent a lot of time and money and effort
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putting together and working with your people on. Particularly the urgent need for housing on the campus. I am sure that that housing can be accommodated without totally ruining the fine Stanford Golf Course that will still exist. One more comment, I would like to assure you that I shave before coming down here this evening. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you for doing that. Is this warmed up yet or should we go to Dorothy Bender. Dorothy. Ms. Dorothy Bender, 591 Military Way, Palo Alto: I’m honored to be speaking here before you tonight. Ed reminds us that we should look at the Draft Environmental Impact Report and see whether or not they omitted something that should be considered. Council Member Burch: Dorothy pull the microphone closer to you. Ms. Bender: Okay. I looked at the DEIR today and I was looking specifically at projects in Palo Alto that are impacted by Stanford’s proposals. It mentions in Chapter 6 four Palo Alto projects, South of Forest Avenue Projects, Hyatt Ricky’s, and two projects on Hillview. I’m particularly interested in the Hillview projects because that’s the Stanford Research Park and I have been talking to several of you about opportunities in the research park to consider limiting development and perhaps even looking at the research park as housing opportunities. If you have looked at the zoning of the research park it is zoned LM-1. One of the permitted uses of LM-1 is housing. I have also looked at the Stanford Research Park Study of 1991 and want to segue into some findings that they made in 1991 and hope that you will consider these now as you are looking at your future zoning and planning for the City of Palo Alto. They say in 1991, the next ten years especially because of lease timing and competition factors are critical to the formulation and implementation of a redevelopment master plan for the park. Approximately one-third of the parkland and building areas is within 30 years of lease expiration. Redevelopment of the park will either be by design or by default. Default will result if sites continue to be viewed in isolation without attention to potential parcel combining or provision of needed special facilities. Conversely, a designed master plan would provide context for needed redevelopment and enhancement. It goes on to say opportunities abound for the City in cooperation with Stanford to take a proactive role in setting the stage for and participating in research park master planning. Then finally there is one other item that I want to list in light of your approval of Jim Baer’s project last night. The City should encourage upgrading of commercial properties on El Camino Real near the research park with the primary objective of improving the physical appearance of El Camino Real and also encouraging commercial activities that compliment the park. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. I’d almost forgotten that study. Where did
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you find it? Ms. Bender: I had it in my archives. Do you want a copy of it? Mayor Kniss: Yes, please. I’d really forgotten that. Winthrop Reis. Oh, Herb. I’d almost forgotten you. Mr. Borock: Thank you Mayor Kniss. Attachment B to your Staff report is a copy of the October 28, 1999, letter from the Council which I thought was an excellent letter, but that was last year’s Council. There are four new members and I believe the current City Council should endorse that letter and Attachment B. What I’d like to show you first on this overhead projector is from the 1971 Stanford Land Use Policy Plan for those who are concerned where the golf course is going to be moved to. It looked at several opportunities. One, to move the seven holes north of Junipero Serra Boulevard to just the other side of the other holes. In 1987 a study showed that was the most expensive option. Another option or alternative is on the south slope next to Highway 280 and Webb Ranch along San Francisquito Creek and in the area called by Stanford, interdale, between Highway 280 and Alpine Road. Golf course users can ask you to move housing someplace else but it is clear that it is Stanford’s intention to move that golf course regardless of what they are saying right now. At that time, in 1971, for the private users the public outside of Stanford there is also talk of a golf course along Deer Creek. In 1987 the Stanford Foothills Region Plan discussed the transportation network in the foothills consisting of long cul-de-sacs, connecting clusters, development of outposts. It was set up so those long cul-de-sacs can become loop roads. One suggestion was that Campus Drive East should be realigned perpendicular to Junipero Serra Boulevard at the time Stanford wanted to develop sites along these long cul-de-sacs. You will note in the current submittal that that realignment of Campus Drive East is in there although it is not needed for the Lathrop District. Just as Stanford widened Sand Hill Road because the medical center expansion needed it, they are putting in road extension now for future use. I’ve asked you before to consider open space development in the City and in Stanford together. Nonette Hanko talked about Coyote Hill which is next to Stanford north and south and you should consider those together just as you should rezone the DC power of that parcel. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. Anything you’d like to leave behind Herb we’d welcome. Winthrop Reis. And the last three that I have Edie Keating, Bob Moss and Dan Logan. Mr. Winthrop Reis, 27637 37th Avenue, San Mateo: Madam Mayor and Council I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak. I’m a Stanford graduate, a former resident of Palo Alto, and since I graduated I’ve been on the wait list for membership at the Stanford Golf Course. I want to speak to you about two issues. One with
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respect to the golf course and second with respect to the administration’s past treatment of the habitat of the Tiger Salamander. First with the golf course, as some previous speakers have said, I too believe in compromise but I also believe there are certain things that should not be compromised. One of the things that should not be compromised is the founding grant of Stanford University. Contained within the founding grant of Stanford University is land set aside for a golf course. This plan explicitly states that there are no explicit plans to replace the holes that are going to be occupied by development. Therefore, I believe very strongly that this plan does violate the founding grant of the University. I would hope that the Council and the committee would take that into consideration in their decisions. I believe that one of the reasons for that is that building golf courses has a major environmental impact. As a resident of San Mateo I just experienced an 18 month renovation of the San Mateo Golf Course which just renovating it on existing property not occupying new lands with golf course construction. Golf course construction from my own experience as a teenager growing up in Chicago is not a pretty sight and it is a major impact. But by not providing explicit plans for a new golf course construction the plan has enabled the Environmental Impact Report to overlook the impact of new construction. Secondly, I want to talk a little bit about what I believe is hypocritical treatment by the Stanford Administration of the habitat of the Tiger Salamander. This project is going to permanently disrupt a very large area. Much larger than the bed of Lake [Loganita]. Several years ago the Stanford Administration cancelled a one-night a year celebration called the Big Game Bon Fire which is held in the bed of Lake [Loganita], sighting the damage to the habitat of the Tiger Salamander that this one-night event would cause. Yet they propose to now permanently erase and area much larger than that through this plan. So I encourage you to take that habitat land and preserve it and preserve the golf course until explicit plans can be delivered to replace what is being taken away. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: How long is the list to actually get into the golf course now? Mr. Reis: I’ve been on it 12 years. I will probably be waiting another 12, I don’t know. Mayor Kniss: I had heard at least 17. Thank you. Edie Keating, Bob Moss and Dan Logan. Ms. Edie Keating, 3511 Waverley Street, Palo Alto: I wasn’t involved in prior General Use Permits for Stanford but my sense of them from ten years ago and then so long before that is that they consisted of Stanford saying to the County we would like to develop more and the County looked at it and put on some requirements but basically said, yes here you go. This current General Use Permit process and the
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Community Plan that is going along with it certainly looks like something very different than that. However, when I consider the amount of development that is requested and going on in the core campus and if we’re considering that that’s a possible outcome that all of that is granted, and when we look at what is going on with the foothills if we don’t have permanent of the foothills then my sense is that we haven’t done anything very different. That we are still saying that without too much of a requirement or trade-off or price, yes, here you go. Do all of the development that want to do. It is really crucial that we consider and that this EIR process considers permanent protection of the foothills. 25 year protection is really not that different from what’s happened in prior General Use Permits. It just delays it but it’s not a guarantee of reducing the growth inducing impacts or that any of that land is ever not going to be built on. The EIR needs to identify mechanisms for protecting open space permanently. I suggest that conservation easements which can be permanent are what should be studied. That will be the really huge difference that’s possible in this Community Plan process if we find a way to protect the foothills permanently. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Thank you Edie. Bob Moss and then Dan Logan. Mr. Bob Moss, 4010 Orme, Palo Alto: Thank you Mayor Kniss, Council Members and Planning Commissioners. I wasn’t going to speak originally but I think I have to give you a little bit different perspective on some of the things that have been said and not said tonight. I’ll begin by saying that I though that Staff report was excellent and I thought they did a good job of summarizing the major points and issues. I commend it to you for your close consideration. Now let’s talk about a couple of things that Stanford doesn’t want to do and does want to do. First a don’t. They don’t want to dedicate any open space because they say that anything more than five or ten years would have all sorts of terrible consequences. The sun would move backwards. The San Francisquito Creek would run uphill. The Stanford’s would rise up out of the mausoleum and haunt Hoover Tower. All these terrible things would happen. But in the research park they lease the properties for 56 years. Stanford leases faculty housing for 50 years. So if they can give 56 years to HP why can’t they give the salamanders 50 years? Is it because the salamanders don’t play golf and have never bought lunch for any trustees? That must be the answer. So I don’t see any problem with taking part at least of the open space and dedicating it for at least 50 years with a 50 year option. Now let’s talk about one of the things they do want to do. They want to build between four and five million square feet of development. I recall about seven or eight years ago there was a study made of the City’s potential build-out. At that time the zoning allowed about 3.25 million square feet of development. A committee was set up and they looked at the potential. Everybody, without exception including major developers, gagged. The result was that the Comprehensive Plan was modified to allow no more
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than about 900,000 square feet of build-out because of the immense impact that two to three million square feet extra would have on City facilities, traffic, housing, schools, utilities, and everything. Now Stanford’s talking about building twice as much as that which caused the most active developers in this area to gag. What’s that going to do to our resources? Our capacity to do things elsewhere in this community that we really think we need? Stanford is going to eat up everything that we thought was excessive and then some if you allow that much development. Give it very careful thought. If we couldn’t handle 3.25 million square feet in all of Palo Alto how can we handle five million square feet just in Stanford? Chairman Schmidt: Bob, you didn’t use all your time. Mr. Dan Logan, 126 E. Charleston, Palo Alto: I’ve lived in Palo Alto for a comparatively brief nine years although I also lived and studied at Stanford in the 1960’s for four years. How many of you know in what city, 40 years ago, the birth control pill was developed? Well if you answer Palo Alto you get an A. I didn’t know that until last week. So we have trouble here in River City, it starts with T and rhymes with P, and you have pill. Well, what’s that got to do with Stanford? Well, maybe not very much because it appears that we are having babies at about the rate that did back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I guess my point tonight is that Stanford and the surrounding communities really are one community. When we look at the issues on Stanford’s side and on Palo Alto’s side we really have to consider all of those impacts. For the last 20 years I’ve been watching my daughter and her age covert and burst the seams of everything from kindergarten to youth basketball to two years ago the largest number of applicants to Stanford in history where they had more than ten applicants for every student who was admitted. As the director of a large non-profit I’ve seen the impact of the birth rate, of the immigration, of the economic expansion which is so closely tied to the engine that Stanford has brought us. It is very clear for example, that the growth that’s proposed with Stanford is going to have an impact on non-profits just in today’s Weekly we have a story about the very significant space impact. So they are there. They are going to happen and I think we have to anticipate that. Can we just say no, we don’t want that growth? I don’t think that’s possible. I think we are all part of a community in which Stanford is a world-class university in our midst and we bear both the benefits and the burdens of that presence. The YMCA for example, we have dozens and dozens of Stanford students that work for us. We have Stanford folks on our boards as volunteers and donors. We have hundreds of Stanford folks who are members of the YMCA and clearly we operate at near full capacity. So that’s going to have an effect. My word is simply that I think we have to work together, work cooperatively, I don’t think an adversarial process benefits any of us. Stanford’s got more land than God and Lord knows we need to work so that we have space for all the things that we value. Thank you.
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Mayor Kniss: Thanks Dan. That brings us back to the Council. We’re going to close the public hearing. That will terminate the input from the public on this since we have both met together as the Planning Commission and as the City Council. I’m reminded that the Planning Commission, however, will continue their deliberations next Wednesday, the 26th and I’m going to presume that you start at 7:00 p.m., the usual time. This is our opportunity to ask any of the questions that you’d like to have Staff considering before we come back and before the Planning Commission comes back. Since you’re all willing to put the break aside tonight I’m willing to plow on. If we get much beyond 10:00 p.m. we’ll take a couple of minutes at that point. If you’re comfortable doing this I thought I might start down and Jim’s end see if you’ve got some questions. If not, I’ll just go on. Okay. Council Member Lytle: I heard Staff mention in the report that we received this evening that they would be examining the impact of the growth in this use permit on our community facilities and services. My question is, will you be examining that cumulatively? I’m not seeing in the Environmental Impact Report an analysis of the population increases that will come both in jobs and employment from this proposed development, this 3,000 housing units and 2.0M square feet of development. In addition to the 2.5M commercial development that our Comp Plan EIR analyzed as well as the 1,200 housing units in our five-year housing plan and whatever the additional housing units would be beyond that to a ten-year plan. I would like to ask if Staff is going to be looking at the cumulative effects and impacts on community services from that cumulative growth as well as just individually for this project. If I could just raise one other question. I’d like to be able to see some population both jobs and house, residential and employment, population totals. The math should be added up I think for us. One of the things that’s been a criticism in the past has been this incremental consideration of things. We have this wonderful opportunity to have a plan that Stanford’s planners have provided us for their ten-year growth and to be able to compare it with our plan for ten-years that was adopted a couple of years ago and look at the whole thing together. I think we’ve missed that opportunity in the analysis that I’ve seen to date and would be hoping that we get a chance to see that in our next session of the Council or hopefully before the Commission considers this. My second question is that I heard the Staff say that they felt school impacts had been handled and were not a significant impact according to their analysis because of the impact fees. Yet when we did our Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report we came to a different conclusion based on our impacts of our community alone. When you consider that things haven’t gotten better since then I’m wondering how Staff can come to the conclusion this time around that there is no significant impact. Although we are adding 900 additional students as a result of this proposal according to the EIR. So I’m very curious why we’ve come to the conclusion that
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there is no impacts now although the situation, according to testimony we’ve received in the joint meeting with the School Board, is quite a bit worse. In fact, triggering the need for new physical sites which is the threshold at which CEQA should be evaluating impacts, when new sites are triggered. I don’t think those answers are available tonight but I’m hoping that they will come back to us. Mayor Kniss: I think our plan for tonight is to ask you those questions, if you don’t get them jotted down we can put them in writing, and the presumption will be you can answer those at the beginning of our meeting and then we’ll deliberate that night. Mr. Gawf: That is great. Also some of these may be incorporated into the comments that we pass on to the County and we would like that as part of the EIR. We may not do all the research ourselves but it may be part of our request to the County. Mayor Kniss: Jon. Commissioner Schink: I have a series of questions but since we get an opportunity a week from now I think I’ll try to submit those to Staff prior to that meeting so we can deal with it at the Planning Commission meeting. Mayor Kniss: Good. Thanks. I appreciate that. Bern. Council Member Beecham: I have no questions for tonight. Vice-Mayor Eakins: For DEIR consideration I would like an evaluation of the density analysis that we heard from our first group of speakers this evening. I don’t know how to test the accuracy of that 40% conclusion. Also, I want to reinforce Nonette Hanko’s concerns about the map and see if there are map corrections that need to be made. On the transportation section is it possible to evaluate the positive impact of having Marguerite go to the dish. The concept of smaller footprints being evaluated in the DEIR as alternatives. That’s my list. Mayor Kniss: Why don’t I just take my turn as we go along. One of the concerns that I have is about Area B. I think I’ve mentioned that to Staff already. I was troubled to find out that that was not as protected as I thought it was. That’s the 139 acres that we did, as the man mentioned earlier, quid pro quo when we did Sand Hill Road. I recall at that time there were far more assurances that what we have certainly been given in the reports. The second would be that I think there is probably nothing that is of as much interest to the public as that which is listed on Table S-1 which is under the open space issues. I think probably of most interest is how could we protect that open space permanently. What would be the nexus between this development
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and that? How can we look at that more significantly? How long term protection could we get versus permanent protection? The one last thing would be, once again I think several people have certainly come at that earlier tonight, Peter Drekmeier mentioned it and Bob Moss just mentioned it as well, four to five million square feet is almost beyond our comprehension. So thinking to Lanie Wheeler I would say where is the sugar cube display? Where is the CAD? Where is our indication of what that would actually look like when it is done? It is a rather dramatic impact. Kathy. Planning Commission Chairman Schmidt: I don’t have any questions this evening. Mayor Kniss: Planning Commissioners are so succinct. Judy. Council Member Kleinberg: There is little left but I do have two questions or two points that I would like to see that we particularly cover when we draw up our comments. One is the new roadways that Stanford has proposed. One is the Campus Drive East relocation and the other is the proposed cut-through the foothills from Alpine Road. I think that there have been a number of comments as well as some assumptions about what those relocations and roadways would do and would lead to. I don’t want to repeat them but I’m very concerned about those. The other is that there were a lot of eloquent statements about the golf course. While we really do need housing I’m just as concerned about the golf course being preserved as open space and as natural habitat. I’d like to hear Staff’s opinions and ideas about how we can maintain that open space and the natural habitats as well as the historical significance of that golf course. Mayor Kniss: Pat. Commissioner Burt: I would like to request from Staff that prior to our Planning Commission meeting on the 26th that we receive copies of the three party agreement from 1985 as well as the 1990 update that I understand exists to the three party agreement and preferably also if Staff could provide some analysis as to how that agreement has bearing on what either has been proposed or what should have been communicated and how it should have been done as Stanford has proposed making these changes in the context of that existing agreement. In addition, if possible I’d like to get either a copy or a summary of the 1991 Stanford Research Park Study. Thank you. Council Member Ojahian: I asked the City Clerk if she could get Ms. Bender’s copy or if she could loan it to us so all of us will have a copy of that. I’ll make a few remarks and maybe be a little bit longer than everybody else since I won’t be here on the 31st. I’ll be out of the country. I’ll be in a lovely open space area in Ireland. Hopefully I’ll come back to one in Palo Alto.
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First of all I’m going to associate with some of the comments or questions that Council Member Lytle made. Several of us talked about the impact on our community services which are already failing without any additional development. So looking at a cumulative impacts and spillovers from the campus are particularly important to us. On the housing area, a couple of things. I’m wondering how much more density can be placed in the Quarry Road area versus what’s being suggested there. And if you can show if there is any additional densities that can be placed over in the Escondido Village area where I realize significant amount of housing is going to go in where some of the housing exists. Then also looking at that area and anything that’s proposed along El Camino Real, how we can still maintain a comfortable buffer that provides that nice visual effect that we have that really allows Stanford to be separate from us in a sense, but also part of us. Then in relationship to that, this is an unusual one but hopefully you can respond back to the Council, the whole storm drainage system. We’re looking at, in Palo Alto, making sure that Stanford’s which ties into ours works very well. In particular along Stanford Avenue where we’ve told in the past that some of the flooding issues that we’ve had especially related to [Weary] Park have been caused by the Stanford storm drainage system and how that plays. So making sure that we resolve that issue is extremely important. I think, this again sort of an usual thing, has Staff both ours and Santa Clara’s looked at and run any numbers on the Emeritus professor housing on the campus which eats up a significant portion of the housing. It is unclear when all that is going to free up down the road, how that plays out over time. Meaning some of the housing isn’t for current professors, it is for retired professors as long as they are alive. It is a significant portion. I’m wondering if you’ve done projections on how that will work out. I can hear my colleagues laughing but I think it’s important because it is almost a third of the housing. Then we’ve had a lot of people talk about the Carnegie Foundation. I think it should be made clear to the public that’s a separate process in a sense under a different EIR than this current one, but how that inter-relationship does work, Staff talked about project splitting, how that really sort of comes into play. How you define that and how you can look at both of them together, I think is important in the overall decision-making. Then I’d make one last comment to my colleagues without going through these other ones because I think that’s enough. Since I am leaving town I asked Stanford to take me on a tour of all these various housing sites so I could really get a look and a feel for them and get an understanding of where they maybe could add more or maybe where they are adding as much as they can. They were very gracious to do that. They took me out yesterday. At the end of that conversation, I know Mr. Coe said that this would probably be a good idea for other Council Members/Planning Commissioners and I think it would be. He is willing to arrange that and I would suggest that you do that because it was really helpful for me. I’ll end my comments there.
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Mayor Kniss: I think we could probably arrange that as a special meeting. Frank? We could probably do that as a special meeting or two to have those tours if Stanford is willing to do that. Annette. Commissioner Bialson: Thank you. There are two items that I’d like Staff to look at. Both having to do with the golf course. The biological resources, we heard one speaker speak about the wildlife out there and I’d like some review of that. In addition the disruption and environmental impact caused by replacement of either the number one hole or the first seven holes. I’d really like to see that addressed. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: Jim. Council Member Burch: I did want to ask one question. I think it was something Dorothy Bender raised about the Hillview property and it made me think about trying to look at using portions of the business park for residential. That’s a place where we could put some housing and look at it. I know that the property up there on Hillview is conceivably polluted and might need some clean up but there is a company planning to go in there and I don’t whether it is beyond looking at as a potential housing site or not. But I would appreciate your perspective on that Ed. Mayor Kniss: There is one last area that I didn’t include in my questions which is the conservation easements. If you could come back with more information about that, that would help us as well. Annette. Commissioner Bialson: Can I ask Staff to also look at placing housing in what is called the Arboretum area? It has been sort of treated as untouchable but it is very tempting and I’d like to have Staff look at it. Mayor Kniss: Okay, I don’t see any other lights from Council Members. Ed, do you want to ask anything of us before we break? Any clarifications? Mr. Gawf: The next meeting is July 26 and July 31. I think it was very clear comments and questions from the Council. We understand them well. So we’ll get copies from the City Clerk and we will work on all these over the next few days. Thank you. Mr. Benest: Let me re-emphasize the point that Ed made. In some cases we can provide the information. In a lot of cases we are going to be directing or requesting the County to further explore these areas. So I don’t want disappointed Council people or Planning Commissioners that we have not done all the comprehensive research.
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Mayor Kniss: We would hate to be disappointed. Council Member Lytle: It would help the County in responding to our questions if we provide as much information as we have about these things. Mr. Benest: Absolutely. Thank you. Mayor Kniss: That’s also a good reminder that we’re not going to be making these decisions, that we are making recommendations those goes to the County and they’ll be reviewed by their Planning Commission as well. I really appreciate the group asking the questions tonight. They were asked well and they were asked very succinctly and I appreciate that. I haven’t even seen the blue banners for awhile. I’m sure there must be some left out there. I don’t have anything else to add at this point other than I appreciate what Staff has done on this. Most of you I know have seen the EIR. It looks like that, it weighs a fair amount. There are copies and I’m going to presume there are copies here at City Hall. Ed do you want to add a comment? I’m sure there is a copy in every library. Mr. Gawf: There is a copy in every library and I’ll make sure there is a copy in the Development Center as well tomorrow. There is also a copy in the Planning Offices on the fifth floor. Mayor Kniss: Thank you. It is also on the web but downloading it is going to take you a fair amount of time especially with all the graphics. That’s a fair amount of memory. So having said that, if there are any other comment from Staff? Looking at Staff I don’t see anything. In that case that means that this part of the meeting is closed. However, we do have Oral Communications. I don’t have any cards on that. If anyone wishes to speak to us please come forth now or we’re about to adjourn the meeting. Any Oral Communications? Is it related to what we are discussing tonight because the public hearing is closed? You can wait and ask us that question. If it is about another issue you can ask us now. Unknown Speaker: I was going to ask if the early maps showing the industrial pollution and dangerous pollution in the foothill area is available? Mayor Kniss: I have to have Staff answer that for you. Unknown Speaker: I just wanted to get that in the record. Mayor Kniss: Okay, thank you. Unknown Speaker: We should have a map of where these polluted areas are located.
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Mayor Kniss: Good. I’ll make sure that gets included. No further lights. Thank you all for coming. This meeting is adjourned. ADJOURNMENT: Meeting adjourned at 9:55 p.m. ATTEST: APPROVED:
City Clerk Mayor NOTE: Sense minutes (synopsis) are prepared in accordance with Palo Alto Municipal Code Sections 2.04.180(a) and (b). The City Council and Standing Committee meeting tapes are made solely for the purpose of facilitating the preparation of the minutes of the meetings. City Council and Standing Committee meeting tapes are recycled 90 days from the date of the meeting. The tapes are available for members of the public to listen to during regular office hours.
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