Letter attached and appended below, unformatted:

Charles D. Bernstein
444 Oak Court
Menlo Park, CA 94025

December 10, 2007

City Council
City of Menlo Park
701 Laurel Street
Menlo Park, CA 94025-2483

Ref.:	Agenda Item # F-1, 
	Consideration of Consultant Review Committee

Planning for El Camino is one of the most important tasks facing the City Council. However, the planning process will not be successful unless it has credibility among the majority of residents with a broad spectrum of political beliefs.

The recommended process has some serious deficiencies. It is not hard to find echoes of the failed and phony “Smart Growth” process 10 years ago in which the results were assumed a priori and the process served only to justify the foregone conclusions. That may be a coincidence, but it is hard to repress the suspicion that the planning process is being driven by the same people who tried to pursue their agenda of densification in the past.

The deficiencies can be remedied to a large extent by making the following changes:

1. The entire process must be open and public. The secret meetings described in Task B-2 (p. A7) must be eliminated. Democracy cannot tolerate “anonymity.” This drawback was the principal issue that ended the Smart Growth process. There can be no compromise here: any opinion so proprietary or so explosive that it cannot be associated with its source has no currency in public decision making. In short, a stakeholder who is not willing to speak up publicly should not be able to make a mouthpiece of a publicly-paid consultant.
2. The process should end after Task C and the presentation of “a range of possible alternatives” (p. A4). The alternatives should then be discussed and debated in the normal political forums such as the Planning Commission and the City Council. Otherwise, the process will dissolve into a brainwashing and public relations effort. The “Working Group,” the Planning Department staff, and the consultant are not decision makers and will not be accepted as the formulators of a single “take it or leave it” vision. By stopping at Task C, the precise composition of the Working Group becomes less important and there will be no need to do “vote counting” to ensure that the recommendation that emerges will reflect the majority of city residents.
3. The Planning Department staff should participate in the study, providing technical support as needed, but should not oversee the process. Individuals in the planning field are simply too wedded to the academic conceits of “the new urbanism” with its higher densities and greater traffic congestion. Moreover, the Planning Department is an interested party insofar as its budget is dependent on the size and volume of projects it considers. The consultant should report directly to the City Council, not to the staff.
4. The intent of the visioning project must be restated: “increasing economic vitality” (p. 1) should be ONE goal, but there are obviously others, such as improving the quality of life for residents, reducing congestion, improving pedestrian and bicycle safety, increasing cultural and entertainment opportunities, and so forth.
5. Reference is made to economic studies being reviewed by “Economic Research Associates” and a discussion of “economic possibilities” (pp. A1, A3, A9), but there is no detailed information regarding this firm or its expertise. The City Council should insist that any information presented as an “economic study” be prepared by an economist (a Ph.D. in economics from a recognized institution of higher education) and not a real-estate broker using some misleading title as an “urban economist” or other euphemism for a representative of the real estate industry. If the firm is a real estate consulting firm, the firm’s product should be described as a “real estate study,” or something similar so as not be misleading.
6. Any effort to “educate” the community should be applauded. However, the first speaker in the “speaker series” will speak on “mixed-use development,” which sounds suspiciously like a brainwashing session on the new urbanism rather than an educational effort. While I am not familiar with Ms. Conley’s background, this session sounds very much like the typical real-estate advertisement for increased density rather than an educational session. I suspect that she has no advanced degree in economics and presenting her talk as a discussion of “economics” is misleading. The selection of this speaker as the first of a series is likely an example of why the Planning Staff should not be in the position of driving the planning process (see point #2, above). There is nothing wrong with a biased speaker as long as the speaker’s background is not misrepresented and a range of views are expressed in subsequent lectures, but to date there is no evidence of a broad range of perspectives being offered in the lecture series.

Please do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Support an open process with unbiased information from the outset. This is the only approach that has any hope of success.

Yours truly,

Charles D. Bernstein