PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

I write to you concerning agenda topic F2 for the council meeting this
evening. Preliminarily, I applaud your continued efforts to make El
Camino and downtown planning a top priority. With respect to tonight's
discussion, I urge you to focus critically on what questions we are
trying to answer first, and how to best get there.

Unfortunately I think the agenda item in front of you is a possible
answer to the wrong question. That proposal and its content would have
you answering narrow, later stage questions: is this the kind of
consultant work we want undertaken?; do we want to pick from some
optional services?; is the price right?; and, is this the right
consultant? However, I think you need to answer a much bigger question
as a threshold matter, and to do so you need to involve the community on
the front end as the key stakeholders, rather than on the back end as
the proposal suggests. Our primary stakeholders at this stage are the
broad community--the residents--who should define what are objectives
and preferences are. Recognize on El Camino for example that
theoretically choices can be all along a spectrum from a pastoral
setting with relatively little tax revenues or services like an Atherton
all the way to the other extreme of very dense and likely pretty tall
buildings, that variously might provide retail, office, residential,
transit centers or otherwise. Presumably the answer lies somewhere in
between, but we need to explore alternatives and choices. Very
importantly, we need to weigh and assess quality of life, economic
ramifications, impacts on or existing and desired infrastructure,
attractiveness of various types of business to our community, traffic
and other material factors. Various of those involve tradeoffs rather
than being complementary.

Thus, I suggest retention of a consultant is quite premature and should
be tabled at this time. I urge you to consider a task force to help
sort out how best to proceed and to develop information and
recommendations (and alternatives where relevant) for you to consider.
I urge this process be open and embrace strongly the community,
including particularly everyday residents. I am confident you will find
strong interest in this and many good ideas. If you are considering
spending the money proposed for the consultant, I suggest instead you
give the task force a budget guideline and have them then assess how
best it could be put to use. I also suggest you establish an initial
checkpoint after the task force is established, say in 60 days, where
they would report on things like any conclusions reached, status,
suggested action plan and any decision points to be addressed.

While again I think the consultant question is premature, I would also
observe several things relative to the proposal. First, in the
"community input" phase, I think the choice of stakeholders is putting
the cart before the horse. At the early stage the folks to be consulted
first are the ordinary residents--what do we want for our city, what is
our vision for the next 20 to 50 years, what are the tradeoffs, and
other important questions. Consulting with business owners, developers
and other constituencies has a definite place, but it shouldn't be the
first driver of input. Also, in many parts of town there are no
neighborhood associations, or those that exist are really politically
oriented groups. For example in West Menlo, I am not aware of any such
legitimate group that represents that area broadly defined. Yet the
proposal has that as the only resident input vehicle at the first steps.
I also think the comparison cities being considered don't represent the
right cross section. Mountain View perhaps, but really probably none of
the others. I think San Carlos might be a better choice as one
example--a small downtown, an El Camino corridor, years of struggling
with the Cal Train corridor and the like. Then I suggest instead other
cities not even apparently on the radar screen that are viewed as having
attractive retail and downtown areas and still a small town feel,
whether or not on El Camino--Los Altos, Los Gatos and Saratoga all come
to mind as possibilities. To my mind these are areas again I think a
task force can help sort out, and along the way you can harness the
interest and enthusiasm of the community, develop buy in, take advantage
of our own native talent, and have much of the work done on a high
-quality volunteer basis

Again for this evening, I urge you to focus on the right big picture
questions first. Let's agree first we want to involve the community
broadly and up front. Let's then figure out how best to do that.
Consider tonight a possible budget scope and a citizens' task force.
Defer until later thinking about choosing consultants, and for what
tasks.

Regards, Elias Blawie
Menlo Park resident

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Received on Tue Mar 20 13:53:58 2007