PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

Members of the council--

Due to other commitments, I don't think I will be able to come to the
council meeting this evening, but I did want to share some thoughts with
you. I think this is a very important crossroads at which you have
arrived, and I think it is very important you approach this and give
direction at the general principles level.

1. You need a plan for El Camino Real. That plan must come first and
foremost.

2. Borrowing some from correspondence from Patti Fry and Martin Engel
that I saw posted on the city council e mail site, I think the approach
for 1300 (or other projects that might come down the pike) is very
straight forward. I agree very much with the thoughts they expressed on
1300. You can responsibly conclude the city will continue to work and
support any project which conforms to existing zoning and the general
plan. That means the city is open for business, on terms prior
councils have previously voted upon and enacted and reflected in the GP
and ZO. But projects asking for a GP or zoning change do NOT follow
existing rules by definition, should be given NO special treatment, and
certainly should NOT be viewed as having reasonable grounds for
reliance. Doing this repeatedly either leaves our GP and ZO in tatters
or says they are deeply flawed. The city needs to get on with longer
term planning right away. You can't endlessly have the same planning
staff dealing with the latest exception request. If the GP or zoning
ordinance is flawed--which I don't believe as a general matter--then you
need to fix that first, not just keep piecemealing projects.

3. I have some sense the council is worried about not being perceived
as being business friendly, with things as remote as fears about the GM
project apparently being thought of as bogeymen. I would submit the
present situation of everything being an ad hoc "crap shoot" is
actually not at all business friendly. It may be developer-friendly if
they think they can play the GP and zoning lottery and get a winning
ticket, but it is leading to outright speculation in land which is
destabilizing our business rental market and underlying sales tax base.
Stable rules is a basic tenant of an environment business prefers. I
submit that means following the city's GP and zoning ordinance, and
setting expectations clearly those are the rules of the game. Remember,
business friendly here may well be quite different than appeasing
developers.

4. IF any exceptions are to be made AFTER a new plan is delineated,
establish that will be a very high bar in terms of clearly demonstrable
attributes of the project and very substantial public benefits ABOVE
mandated fees--many millions in projects at this scale in my estimate.
However, thinking about exception cases and standards for them should be
part of the plan for ECR, not be put in front of it.

5. If you are thinking about transit oriented housing, mandate that is
what it really is. In the current environment it seems to be just a
slogan developers have adopted to appease government policy makers. As
long as a unit has full private vehicle parking and as long as the
housing market is as fragmented relative to work locations as it is in
the Bay Area, frankly it's a pipe dream that use of transit will be
anything meaningfully above the statistical norm for the city at large.
From reading the publicly available Derry traffic materials in the city
archives previously, that's the conclusion I reached on their proposed
development yet closer to the train station. Our schools, our suburban
lifestyle and other things drive a desire to live in Menlo Park, and
thinking we are building live-work units that will actually function
that way in any meaningful way, or that droves of transit riders will
miraculously move in is really a pipe dream in my estimation. However,
what is a reality is the out of scale nature of projects like these, the
substantial traffic and impositions on our public infrastructure they
will cause, the resulting deterioration in quality of life for existing
residents.

6. Stop cold this thinking mixed use density can be the SUM of multiple
different zoning categories. This is just a developer license to print
profits for itself, but it comes at the direct cost of excessive height
and density to the community, traffic and the like. I view the
densities allowed in R4 as already BEYOND what is reasonable for and
accepted by a majority of residents in Menlo Park. But in any case, a
developer should not be able to build a project that approximates the
SUM of both allowable residential AND commercial maximum densities for a
given parcel. That is flawed double counting plain and simple. The easy
and fair way to assess this instead is make a logical allocation of the
overall lot square footage, and then allocate the allowable commercial
square footage against and retail or office components, and then apply
only the residual of the lot square footage to the residential portion.
If you do that on this or other projects, of course the density will
come down, just as it should ! These proposed densities are way, way
too high and you need to at least get back to the far upper bounds of
the zoning we now have, which itself is ABOVE what this parcel is zoned
for currently.

7. Get away from this "the numbers don't pencil out" rhetoric if it
arises. That is developer FUD speak for, I want my project full boat.
Plain and simple, remember responsible projects like Menlo Square,
Beltramo's and others can be built at 18.5 units/acre and assuming they
don't live in some parallel anti-economic universe, I expect their
numbers must "pencil out" for them. Your responsibility is NOT to
support speculative land purchases, nor to bail developers out of prior
bad deals they might have made. Here you have responsible, readily
available comparables as metrics.

Many of us will be watching your deliberations and positions very
carefully. This study session represents an opportunity to establish
some clear principles. I only hope you pick the right ones.

Best, Elias Blawie

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Received on Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:25:49 -0700