Dear Council,

As you discuss the next steps regarding the El Camino Real/Downtown planning process, I encourage you to consider the following recommendations:

1. Involve the newly hired Community Engagement Manager in discussions about process, including as a member of a Consultant Review Committee.
2. Utilize the Community Engagement Manager to facilitate discussions and to build community consensus for more detailed plans and for any modifications to current rules and practices.
3. Prior to embarking on amendments to Zoning Ordinance or General Plan and related EIR, take an initial step at the beginning of Phase II that creates several alternative scenarios with more details about uses and combinations of uses, evaluates impacts, and allows the community to weigh these.

I believe gaining community support for a more detailed plan is essential prior to spending time and money on modifying formal documents. I also believe that taking this step will make the remainder of Phase II much more efficient, more rapid, and more successful. Indeed, skipping it in the past may explain while prior efforts failed. It's possible that this step was already contemplated as part of Phase II, and I apologize if I missed its mention, but I do want to stress its importance.

So far community collaboration has been quite limited to single small groups
(tables) about individual topics but not across groups or topics, and
certainly not regarding alternatives and information that would help weigh tradeoffs. This will be critical for the remainder of the planning process.

I believe that the visioning process so far is an excellent start but the Vision document itself is too general to guide all of the Phase II steps proposed in the consultant report. To date, the Visioning process has defined only the outer bounds of what might be tolerable in terms of form. Because details are not yet provided about substance and the potential impacts (positive and negative) have not been identified, it is unlikely that community members share a common sense of what this Vision really means.

The phrase "the devil is in the details" comes to mind. It's also the details that will ultimately determine the level of community support. It's better to plow through those details next rather than in the middle of reviews of Zoning Ordinance and General Plan amendments and the like.

Not to do this is akin to asking someone who is dieting whether they would like a chocolate sundae but without determining whether they have dietary concerns and without letting them know the calories or ingredients involved
(some of which might trigger an allergic reaction) or offering an
alternative that might be nearly as tasty without the offending ingredients or calories.

In order to gain community support for the details of a plan to implement the Vision (and possibly modify it), this next step should include the following tasks:

– *Define explicit criteria* for selecting allowed uses and combinations of uses. Using the dessert example, this identifies what parameters must be considered (total calories, sodium, cholesterol, allergies).
For example: specifies targets for minimum of revenue of x generated, maximum number of vehicle trips, reduces vehicle trips from current x level to y level, reduces current housing/jobs imbalance by x, provides x goods and services to community, protects locally owned businesses, provides safe path between Burgess and Downtown for schoolkids on bikes.

– *Integrate Vision elements into several alternative scenarios* with different combinations of uses and densities to help the community establish priorities when tradeoffs or balancing of competing priorities must be made. Using the dessert example, this might lead one to consider altering the proposed chocolate sundae or to identifying some alternatives (fruit, cooky).
So far, most of the discussions about El Camino and Downtown have been conducted separately not in combination with one another. And so far, most of the discussions about various goals and objectives have also been conducted separately and not in combination. This task helps accomplish this.
A few examples of such potential tradeoffs: between providing housing and generating sales tax revenue, between providing parking in front of business and improving bicycle and pedestrian safety or accelerating traffic flow, between protecting existing businesses and increasing liveliness of an area, between providing parking and promoting use of alternatives to motor vehicles, between adding housing and stressing city and school district resources, between parks and revenue-generating uses.

– *Investigate feasibility of certain elements that could affect other decisions* such as evaluate one-way streets downtown relative to parking designs and pedestrian/bicyclist circulation, evaluate plaza or public park east of El Camino in the context of tolerable noise levels, protected railroad crossing and desired pedestrian/bicyclist circulation.

– *Evaluate the impacts (positive and negative) of each scenario *against
the defined criteria. Again, using the dessert example, this might lead to selecting a chocolate sundae without the whipped cream or nuts but also might lead to selecting a different type of dessert altogether.

The most expeditious way to take this step might be to assign these tasks to a diverse but representative group of community members in public meetings, possibly several long sessions during which issues are hashed out. The alternatives could then be reviewed both with key stakeholders such as Stanford and with the broader community with the express objective of getting feedback and building consensus about favored approaches.

It may be necessary for the Council to decide which alternative or modified alternative proceeds to the final steps (ordinance, general plan amendment if required, EIR if needed, etc.) but that decision then would be based on community feedback about some concrete and detailed alternative scenarios and how to weigh impacts.

Thank you for embarking on this exciting and important effort that will affect our community for decades into the future.

Respectfully,

Patti Fry

Menlo Park resident

Former Planning Commissioner and CZOU Committee member Received on Mon Jul 14 11:25:18 2008