BPA Newsletter: Spring 2002: Additional Info

President's Column

Highlighting facts early

1. Traffic Issues, Barron Park Elementary School, ... : Detailed presentation (in 9/99) to group that became the Safe Routes to Schools task force.
2. Plans to rebuild Matadero Ave (in Barron Park) including Traffic/Speeding/Pedestrian issues (11/13/2001) outlining scope of issues and need for interaction between multiple section of City staff.

Examples of failures of local circumstances to become part of the decision process:

1. In the mid-1990's, the City developed design guidelines for Barron Park streets. This was in response to the inconsistent criteria used during the original process (mostly before Barron Park became part of Palo Alto). The City hired consultants to develop the guidelines, and they presented them at a public meeting.

   Apparently they based their recommendations on normal street widths without checking our streets because many of our streets (including mine) were significantly narrower than the consultants' narrowest option. Their narrowest scheme required a 40-foot wide right-of-way, but the distance between poles and trees near my house is roughly 30 feet.

2. The current Comprehensive Plan (CP) was developed during the mid-1990's led by the CPAC (Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee), which was composed of residents supported by City staff and consultants.

   One of the ideas advanced was to have bicycle trails from the Bay to the foothills and to route them along the creeks. In most places, there is an access/maintenance road along one-side of the creek, and this road can easily be converted to be a bike path.

   The CPAC subcommittee routed one of these paths along Matadero Creek, not bothering to check for exceptions. When they held public meetings on this proposal, I told them that, in the Barron Park segment, there was no access road, no public right-of-way, and that their route literal passed through people's homes. However, the subcommittee was too wedded to this concept that they refused to believe that Barron Park could be different.

   I raised this problem at three successive meetings over a period of a year, only to be dismissed each time. I belatedly realized that it was better to remain silent: there was no time to develop a good plan, and it was better to have a patently unworkable proposal than a bad one.

A tale of two meetings

Housing Element of Comprehensive Plan

• Housing Element of the Comprehensive Plan: City Manager's Report CMR 136-02 (PDF)
• Housing Element: BPA Board Position: 2/4/2002 (talking points of oral presentation to City Council during public comment period)
• Desperately seeking housing: Future demand sets high goal for city officials from the Palo Alto Weekly, Wednesday 30 January 2002
• The municipal divide: Longtime Palo Alto 'south vs. north' debate can't seem to go away from the Palo Alto Weekly, Wednesday 13 February 2002. Report on the Council meeting of 2/4.
  Commentary: on PAWeekly article on North/South divide in Palo Alto: a message to the BPA email list arguing that the focus on the north-south issue misrepresented the tenor of the presentations at the meeting.