School among the oaks? Woodside faces decision on building Phillips Brooks School campus amidst 92-acres of woods and meadows School among the oaks? Woodside faces decision on building Phillips Brooks School campus amidst 92-acres of woods and meadows (October 03, 2001)

By Andrea Gemmet

Almanac Staff Writer

After traveling along the dirt road leading into the heart of the large Woodside property owned by Phillips Brooks School, visualizing the proposed campus that is marked by colored tape and wooden stakes takes some imagination. The phantom outlines of classroom buildings, the gymnasium, administrative offices and a library poke out of the dirt and peek through the groves of native oak trees that grow thickly along the dry creek banks.

It's a tour that Woodside town officials will be taking on Wednesday, October 3, as they size up the architects' drawings and engineers' analyses before beginning deliberations on Phillips Brooks' plans for a 290-student campus this month. Few motorists zooming by on Interstate 280 between Woodside Road and Sand Hill Road realize that the land just west of the freeway falls within Woodside's town boundaries. In fact, the multi-million-dollar project is easily the biggest proposed development to face the town in years.

Officials from the Menlo Park-based private school are gearing up for what is likely to be a contentious set of public hearings over the merits, and environmental consequences, of their proposal to convert roughly 14 acres of the site's 92.2 acres from undeveloped oak groves, hills and meadows into a permanent home for the school, which offers classes to students in nursery school through grade five.

Currently, Phillips Brooks leases the La Loma school site on Avy Avenue in Menlo Park from the Las Lomitas school district. Phillips Brooks purchased the Woodside land in 1997 for $6.9 million, after it had been sold by the Lawler family and passed through the hands of several developers, without ever being built upon. A five-parcel subdivision map was recorded for the property more than 100 years ago, according to Woodside Planning Director David Rizk, and there is a nine-home subdivision map that was approved in 1995 but never recorded.

"Our site is going to be developed one way or the other, either as nine estate homes or as Phillips Brooks School," said Sam Bronfman, chairman of the school's board of trustees. "If the townspeople fully understood their choice, they would see it's not open space vs. Phillips Brooks, it's Phillips Brooks vs. a nine-lot subdivision."

Mr. Bronfman argues that the school offers a greater benefit to the community than the subdivision would, with fewer of the environmental consequences discussed in the draft environmental impact report, which was released August 31.

Chief among the significant environmental consequences or "impacts" identified in the report, which was prepared by Wagstaff and Associates urban and environmental planning firm, are the increased traffic, potential damage to the site's delicate creekside and wetland habitats, and the visibility of the campus from I-280 and Sand Hill Road. The report also offers specific mitigation measures, or steps to be taken to reduce those impacts to a "less than significant" level. Traffic problems

The report's traffic analysis predicts that the school would generate 782 new vehicle trips on the average weekday, and although that should represent an insignificant increase in traffic to most nearby major intersections, there are two areas of concern __ the I-280/Woodside Road interchange, and the intersection of the campus' entry road, Lawler Ranch Road, with Sand Hill Road.

During the peak morning commute hour, the school is projected to increase the traffic volume on I-280's southbound on-ramps by 1.7 percent. Predicting conditions in 2005, after the Phillips Brooks project would have been completed, the report estimates that traffic delays would be unacceptably lengthy, with the average vehicle having to wait 80 seconds or more to get through the intersection.

Suggested remedies include a carpooling and/or busing program to reduce school traffic, or requiring Phillips Brooks to contribute to the construction of a second left-turn lane from westbound Woodside Road onto southbound I-280.

At the intersection of Lawler Ranch Road and Sand Hill Road, predicted problems include traffic delays caused by drivers trying to turn left into and out of the school, and potentially dangerous conflicts between drivers slowing down to turn right onto Lawler Ranch Road while fast-moving vehicles exiting southbound I-280 attempt to merge onto westbound Sand Hill Road in the same short lane.

Proposed solutions to those problems include installing a stoplight, lowering the speed limit on that section of Sand Hill Road, and building an extension of the I-280 off-ramp lane.

Mr. Bronfman says that the school is already formalizing a carpool program to address traffic problems at its Menlo Park site, and officials have begun investigating the complicated issue of organizing buses.

"We will do whatever it takes to mitigate the issues," he said. "If that means busing or carpooling, or if we have to put in staggered start times, we'll figure out a way to do that."

Jody Lawler, whose home is adjacent to the Phillips Brooks site, said she makes the turn onto Sand Hill Road from Lawler Ranch Road several times a day, and considers the intersection to be dangerous, particularly in the morning.

"Almost every other month there are narrow misses," Ms. Lawler said. "People are not careful on that road even with very low levels of traffic. If you put a lot more traffic there, you're going to have a backup in both directions."

Another proposed mitigation in the report recommends constructing a wider median strip on Sand Hill Road, so drivers turning left off of Lawler Ranch Road will have a protected area in the middle of Sand Hill Road from which to complete their turn and merge into the eastbound traffic lane. Ms. Lawler said she feared such an arrangement would encourage drivers to take foolish chances and make the intersection more dangerous. Criticism led to changes

The campus project being studied is a revised version of Phillips Brooks' original proposal to build the school on 74 acres of the property and carve out an 18-acre residential lot that could be sold to raise funds.

After the project met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception at Woodside public hearings in late 1999, the school's planners adapted the design in order to reduce the number of potentially significant impacts on the environment.

The current plan has a smaller footprint __ 34,000 square feet as opposed to 43,000 square feet __ than its predecessor, which reduces the amount of cut-and-fill grading needed to build on the hilly site from 308,500 cubic yards to 87,410 cubic yards. The total loss of open space with the revised project would be 14.2 acres, compared with 20.1 acres with the original proposal. The estimated number of trees that would have to be cut down dropped from 1,348 to 948 as a result of the reduced amount of grading.

Still fewer cubic yards of grading would be required if the school gets permission to hook into the West Bay Sanitary District's sewer lines, eliminating the need to create a septic system and leach fields. Mr. Bronfman said he feels confident the school can get permission from the sanitary district.

"We think it is very, very feasible, and it would eliminate one or two acres of grading," he said.

Connecting to the West Bay sewer system however, could create another problem, according to the draft environmental impact report. An extension of the sewer line could stimulate new development in the area, it says.

"Unless the proposed project sewer connection ... incorporates clear provisions prohibiting use of the easements and sewer line by other properties, the sewer connection could have a growth-inducing effect by facilitating development of nearby lands with septic tank limitations."

Mr. Bronfman said school officials have no problem with restricting further access to the sewer line. Environmental concerns

The sewage treatment proposal is just one of several areas of concern for Debbie Mendelson. Ms. Mendelson is the chair of Woodside's Conservation and Environmental Health Committee, but said at this point she can only make personal comments on the project because committee members will not come to an official recommendation on the project until after the site visit and study session on October 3. The committee strongly opposed the previous version of the project, she said.

In spite of the revisions, she said she still sees many problems with the project. Besides the increased traffic and the amount of grading, Ms. Mendelson said she is very concerned about the fire hazards and the risk of people becoming trapped on the site in the event of the natural disaster. The proposed school would be accessed by Lawler Ranch Road, but plans include two emergency vehicle access routes, one through the CTETA horse park and one that connects to Quail Meadow Drive.

Ms. Lawler said she is not only worried about the safety of the school's students and staff in case of a fire, she's worried about how the school's traffic will affect her own access to emergency services, since the property she and her husband live on is accessible only by a road leading off of Lawler Ranch Road.

"Certainly the emergency access (to the site) is not proper, because it is in the middle of the woods, and it's the woods that are going to be on fire," Ms. Lawler said.

The proposed campus would have a "moderately high fire risk," according to Woodside Fire Marshall Bob Nahmens, because it introduces daily human activity into a flammable open space area.

However, there have been no major fires in the project's vicinity in recent history, he said in a letter to Woodside officials. The Woodside Fire Protection District has tentatively approved the school's fire management plan for reducing fire risk, pending some clarification on the emergency access road specifications.

Fire officials estimate that the average response time from the Woodside Road fire station to the proposed campus would be three to four minutes, and said that they have enough staff or equipment to provide fire protection and emergency medical services for the school.

One complication is that some of the usually prescribed fire-suppression measures, such as mowing dry grass and clearing brush around buildings, will have to be done very carefully in order not to disturb the habitat of the native species in the area.

The difficulty in protecting the site's delicate ecology is evident in the long list of mitigation measures outlined in the environmental report, Ms. Mendelson said. Special steps are recommended to prevent pollution of the riparian areas, maintain the health of the extensive stands of native oaks __ an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the trees are blue oaks, which are rarely found in the mid-Peninsula __ and protect the threatened red-legged frogs that inhabit the property's two ponds.

Even with the revisions, Ms. Mendelson said the property still does not seem to be a feasible site for the school's campus.

Mr. Bronfman argues that the school will be a much better steward of the land than nine individual property owners, and points to the fact that more than 80 percent of the property will be protected from any future development through easements that Phillips Brooks will give to the town. The school buildings have been redesigned to hug the slope of the land and to have rooflines below the top of the tree canopy, screening the campus from I-280, he said.

"We're not saying that we're not going to impact the land, because we are, but we're going to do it in a much better, much less significant way," said Joyce Massaro, spokeswoman for Phillips Brooks School.

One of the most visible features of the campus would be the full-sized baseball field with an overlapping full-sized soccer field along the property's eastern border with I-280. The playing field, however, is a community benefit that subdivision homeowners can't offer, said Mr. Bronfman. The school's pledge to share its field with local youth sports organizations has won Phillips Brooks the support of a group of Woodside parents and coaches eager to address the town's scarcity of playing fields. The field committee organized a petition supporting Phillips Brooks' project at this year's Woodside May Day Parade.

School officials will be rallying members of the field committee, as well as its parents, to attend the public hearings in Woodside and show their support for the project, said Mr. Bronfman.

The entire school community is anxious to make a permanent home for Phillips Brooks in Woodside, he said, and hopes to see the project completed in 2003.

The students in particular can't wait to start going to school among the trees, said Ms. Massaro

"We want to put down roots for future generations of students," said Mr. Bronfman.