|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Menlo Park City Council is trying to find a middle ground between building a community plaza downtown or reopening eastbound vehicle traffic on the 600 block of Santa Cruz Avenue for the first time in six years.
Councilmembers revisited the plans for a public plaza in a study session at its Tuesday, Oct. 13, meeting, where they were asked to give feedback on the block’s future. Opinions varied between maintaining the existing community gathering space and reopening the road in light of the potential for more development downtown.
The 600 block of Santa Cruz Avenue has been closed to eastbound traffic since 2020, giving downtown restaurants and shops more outdoor space during the COVID-19 pandemic. The council voted in June 2025 to keep the block closed in part because of its frequent use as a gathering spot for residents.
After discussion, the majority of councilmembers voiced support for piloting a redesign that would open the eastbound traffic lane, eliminate the bike lane and maintain a smaller community gathering area in the parking spaces. Councilmember Drew Combs recommended piloting the configuration for six months to a year, to collect data on how the community responds to the hybrid configuration and compare that to the block’s current, larger plaza space and to the block’s pre-COVID arrangement with both traffic lanes open.
“What I’m proposing is something that punts this to a new council in a year, but at that point they will have additional data points about how (this option) looks in practice,” Combs said at the meeting.
Most members of the council previously supported building a permanent public plaza on the block, citing its frequent use by teenagers after school and its potential for staging large community events. A few public speakers highlighted these benefits, especially the success of Fourth Fridays, a free event that brings live music downtown, which launched in August and is organized by the nonprofit Downtown Menlo Fund.
Marnie Foody, the nonprofit’s chair, said at the meeting that they’ve heard the event was a success from downtown business owners who saw their sales jump during Fourth Fridays, but getting rid of the plaza would limit their ability to continue hosting the event.
“We are seeing literally hundreds of people coming not just from Menlo Park, but from the surrounding area, to our downtown,” Foody said. “We had hoped to build our series to a full schedule of events in 2027.”
Although there was broad support for the concept of a community gathering space, Mayor Betsy Nash said she had done a “complete 180” on the current plans over the past month. Nash said she’s frequently seen trash and blight pile up around the plaza, negating its purpose by making it less inviting.
She added that the plaza cutting off traffic on Santa Cruz Avenue might obstruct the necessary construction work on other developments near downtown. A Menlo Park developer plans to build a six-story residential building at 800 Oak Grove Ave., and the council is trying to get housing built on three downtown parking lots.
“I’d actually love to see a plaza expanded at some point and generally a larger pedestrian area downtown, I just think right now is not the time,” Nash said.
Councilmember Jeff Schmidt was the outlying dissenter, who said he supported moving forward with plans to make the plaza permanent. He said he wants a public plaza for residents to use and worried that the pilot would destabilize an already “concrete proposal.”
“We’ve done all this work, we’ve sunk some cost into this thing, and we’re a year away,” Schmidt said. “It’s almost like dropping the ball at the 10-yard line before you score a goal.”
City staff said they’ve already spent about $61,000 on furniture and $30,000 on hiring a consultant to design the permanent plaza, leaving about $250,000 for the project. Economic Development Director Collette Hanna said construction on the permanent plaza with the current plans was estimated to have been completed by the end of 2027.
It’s unclear how long it’ll take for the city to pivot to a smaller community space and an open eastbound vehicle lane, but City Manager Justin Murphy said the next step will be for the city council to vote on reopening the vehicle lane in a future meeting.
Mayor Nash said she’s frequently seen trash and blight pile up around the plaza, negating its purpose by making it less inviting.” So, the City fails to maintain the cleanliness of the plaza and its the plaza’s fault. That’s a weird response!
The project was to be completed in September 2026 and now a modified version will take until the end of 2027.
Glaciers move faster. Why can’t our city manager do a lot better than that? And why does our city government have so little pride in our downtown?
Sadly, that’s kind of logic we expect from this group of leaders.
Glad to see some common sense returning. This closure creates bottlenecks one street north and south of Santa Cruz at ECR. These streets (Oak Grove and Menlo) back up for blocks. Sometimes it’s impossible to make a left out of the Trader Joe’s parking lot due to the backup on Menlo Ave. It’s time to re-open our covid-closed street!
Good questions, Dana. And why did the city need to hire a consultant–M Group as usual–to tell them how to use that space? Among other things, M-group suggested putting in hopscotch squares for children in the middle of our upscale downtown. The city paid them $30,000 because no one on their staff could figure out how to creatively use the plaza for community benefit. Then they paid $61.000 for generic picnic tables only used by kids after school, and charmless white cube planter boxes that add no visual interest or beauty to the look of the downtown.
Interesting here with Nash, who did “a complete 180,” explained the plaza had to go because “people are just not taking care of the area” and it’s “completely littered with trash,” confessing, and I quote, “I do not know how to get people to clean up after themselves.” So the plan is: remove the gathering space because of litter, and hope the litterers take the hint. Or was it something else, perhaps, that is no longer allowed to be spoken of?
And then there’s Schmidt. His sunk-cost “fallacy” policymaking is what’s wrong with government: we already spent ~$100K, football metaphor included, so let’s just spend the rest. He reported that he went down to the farmers market, rode the bike lane, stood in the street holding up the design printout, and stated: “tried to picture in my mind the space.” He then voted his visualization. This is 2026. The city paid $30,000 for design concepts and $61,000 for furniture (where do you even find the stuff they bought), and the decision-making technology on display was a man squinting at a piece of paper. It’s one block (less than half of one). Can someone get a 3D walkthrough video made of a single city block concept? I am sure the software costs less than a single picnic table. But sure, let’s all close our eyes and visualize.
A district one candidate (Wonman Lee) built a whole Menlo Park city housing element visual planning “game”. Maybe he could create a planning tool for this block and model usage, placement of furniture, behavior, cleaning needed. (hint – I would like to see him add the impact of 80 Willow traffic to surrounding streets.)
MP city government and its employees simply don’t care about downtown menlo park. If they did, it would simply not look like this… I do hope the newly hired maintenance worker proves effective. The DT deserves better.
“What I’m proposing is something that punts this to a new council in a year…” That’s my councilman, anything to avoid making a decision. I’m so tired of this council delaying decisions, avoiding hard decisions, and kicking the can down the road. They’re voting to tear out all of the parking lots but they’re just deadlocked on a one block plaza. You can’t make this stuff up.