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Letter: Lesson for Atherton in library parking issue?

The Feb. 29 Almanac carried several instructional articles, including the editorial about the current library parking "crunch" in Menlo Park.

Unfortunatenly, the "crunch" is perhaps the result of a planning oversight in working out the details of the beautiful new Arrillaga gymnasium there.

We hope the Atherton Library Building Steering Committee takes note to further inform their shortsighted, in our opinion, insistence that a glorious state-of-the-art facility (a new library structure) would have a minimal negative effect on the existing Holbrook-Palmer Park.

The traffic circulation and parking dilemma would be less of an issue by far if an alternative site such as the present library location were selected. The steering committee's Needs Assessment (available at the Atherton library) states that "demographically Atherton is a very uniform community ... with predominantly similar socioeconomic lifestyles."

It goes on to say that an overwhelming majority of Atherton residents (99.5 percent) fall into Segment 01, titled "Top-Rung." This demographic profile is said to be uniformly mature, married, highly educated and wealthy.

One would expect that such a "highly educated" population would have the ability to utilize well-meaning criticism and to profit from the mistakes of others to ensure, as much as possible, a workable as well as pleasing project. A consensus might be that the town of Atherton already has enough troublesome baggage to sort out.

Stuart Awbrey, Rittenhouse Avenue, Atherton

Posted by Right You Are, a resident of the Atherton: West Atherton neighborhood, on Mar 11, 2012 at 6:39 pm

Right you are, Mr. Awbrey. Thanks for pointing this out.

As Kevin Costner said in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." And, I assure you they will indeed.

This is like watching a train wreck. We all know how it's going to end, but difficult not to watch it happen.