Fellow Council Members,

I have been trying to contact Morris Brown personally to discuss this with him, but apparently he is out of town for a couple of weeks.

I have no intent of debating this issue via email, and certainly not through this email distribution list, but in his email posting to CCIN, Mr. Brown accused me personally of intentionally making untrue statements and otherwise "fudging" the facts. Such an accusation against an elected official is, in my opinion, a serious issue, so I feel I need to reply.

I stand by my original statements. I don't believe anything I wrote was untrue. In fact, I also don't believe anything I said was even misleading.

I very clearly distinguished between the technical term "public benefit" versus "fees and subsidies tied to residential units." We may all disagree about the pros and cons of any trade-offs or compromises that are being proposed, and I certainly expect that we'll debate those further in the future. Mr. Brown and others may not like or agree with my assessment, but I'm disappointed that he chose to attack my character rather than to simply focus on selling his proposal.

Since he signed his letter as the "Contact Person for Menlo Park Tomorrow," I'm not sure if he was speaking for that whole political action committee or just for himself. When he returns, I will again attempt to privately speak with him (and his committee if appropriate) to ensure that I understand his claims. I will try to move the discussion back to the facts and the pros and cons of the issue at hand, rather than this type of personal attack which represents exactly the kind of political divisiveness that so many people in our City want to see end.

As usual, due to Brown Act concerns, I encourage you to not respond to me on this matter unless done in a public session.

/John

-----Original Message-----
From: Morris Brown [mailto:mbrown5@pacbell.net] Sent: Mon 12/10/2007 3:23 PM
To: _CCIN
Subject: Re: Derry Project Public Benefit -- The True Picture  

In his most recent widely distributed email, titled YOUR CITY / YOUR TURN NEWSLETTER (issue 2007/11), Council Member John Boyle writes of the Derry project:  

The new project also creates fewer housing units to address our housing shortage, and since many of our city fees are tied to the development of housing units, our city actually loses more than $2M worth of fees and subsidies that the old project would have generated (rec-in-lieu fees, school impact fees, below market rate housing subsidies, etc).

This is not true.  

We want to set the record straight on this section from his newsletter

The new project contains a $2,000,000 cash payment to the City in addition to all mandated fees --which are reduced---but in all scenarios, the $2,000,000 public benefit payment exceeds the loss of impact fees by at least $500,000 and as much as $1,000,000.  

Public impact fees are directly associated with anticipated negative impacts; with fewer negative impacts anticipated from a project reduced in size, the fees are correspondingly lower. These fees were never free spending money as he implies, but are to be spent to relieve impacts from the project.  

Recreation in-lieu fees are supposed to pay for the incremental additional burden on recreation facilities. Likewise traffic impact fees. With a smaller project, they naturally are somewhat decreased.

Mr. Boyle's analysis incorrectly bundles below Market Rate ("BMR") housing units with public benefits; he co-mingles public impact fees with personal estimates for BMR subsidies and oddly, he confuses public and private wealth.  

For the record, the value of BMR units is never computed or included by the City in impact fee calculations. Per planning principles, BMR units are "mitigations", not "public benefits". Mitigations are designed to offset identified negatives like additional stress on public parks and additional traffic and other infrastructure impacts. The public benefit associated with government imposed BMR housing units is diversity, an abstraction without financial valuation. The units are private not public, and any subsidies made are given implicitly, not as cash, by the private developer to the private purchaser, not to the City, through the City, or by the City. Neither the units nor the subsidies can be counted or lost as public wealth.

Each distinction is material, and Councilman Boyle, who has a Stanford MBA Degree, fudges them all.  

If Councilman Boyle values private BMR housing units more than public impact fees he should say so plainly. Many do. But to confuse the public by the false comparison of the impact fees with the true public benefit value which the revised project compromise yields, demands this response.  

Just to be clear, for a substantially less intrusive project, we negotiated a public benefit payment of $2,000,000 as real cash, undesignated as to application except that it will benefit the public/community. This is in contrast to the $100,000 cash benefit that the previous project would produce, and which already had been specified to be used for an additional study, with no other debate or discussion of its potential use.  

Morris Brown
Contact person
Menlo Park Tomorrow   Received on Thu Dec 13 11:26:51 2007