Portola Valley residents question Town Center redesign Portola Valley residents question Town Center redesign (November 17, 2004)

** Flurry of letters follows mailing by plan opponents.

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

A number of Portola Valley residents has begun to question in earnest a $15 million plan to raze the town's 50-year-old municipal building complex and rebuild on ground considered geologically more stable.

In recent weeks, the Town Council has received some 34 letters that question the validity of recent geologic findings underpinning the project, suggest that the community vote on the plan, and complain about the project's cost.

"You may be spending $15 million for an option that is not demonstratively safer than the location of the existing buildings," said residents Warren and Barbara Poole in an October 25 letter.

"In our opinion, a plan of this magnitude should be voted on by the tax-paying citizens who will be responsible for it," said Les and Sheri Elmore on October 28.

"We are totally against the new project for the Town Center," said residents Sharon and Phil Humphreys on October 20. "It is a waste of money. ... The project should be put to a vote by the citizens -- now."
Why now?

The flurry of letters comes in the wake of a mass mailing to town households by the project's long-standing opponents, a group of four residents led by former mayor Bob Brown. The mailing included a letter by a retired civil engineering professor who argued that the buildings could be made safer by upgrading them to current codes.

Unease on the council over a sudden influx of letters would not be surprising. In 2003, residents voted in an unprecedented referendum to overturn -- by a margin of 4 percentage points -- a unanimous council decision that would have allowed the construction of several small homes near the intersection of Portola and Alpine roads. None of the major figures in that dispute appear to be involved in this one.

On November 10, the council unanimously accepted the conceptual master plan for the Town Center rebuilding project that had been months in the making, using ideas gathered during a series of community workshops in June.
The issue

The current building complex -- a former elementary school -- includes a town hall, a library, a multi-use room and several classrooms.

"There's a lot of risk in having people in these buildings," Mayor George Comstock told the Almanac. "This is a world-class fault. ... For me, it's not a sound policy to house people in buildings exposed to that kind of hazard."

A 2002 excavation by geotechnical engineers found that most of the complex is in a fault rupture zone in which the ground is subject to warping and folding, based on evidence derived from trenches and bore holes. The proposed site for rebuilding was found to be free of faults.

The town has $3.5 million set aside for the project, along with a $1 million donation from residents Bill and Jean Lane. Discussions on financing options had been delayed until the master plan's completion. The council recently acknowledged the chicken-and-egg nature of the situation.

In a town of some 1,800 households, the project's opponents have been the most active in speaking out, said Mayor Comstock. When asked about putting the plan to a community vote, he suggested that the letter writers meet with the council. "They would come around to our view," he said.

Asked about the viability of rebuilding elsewhere, such as at Ford Field, Mr. Comstock said that rebuilding at Town Center makes the most sense from an operational standpoint and that the buildings would rock and roll wherever they were built.

"In the final analysis, I think it will work out that the route that we're on will be the most appropriate for the town," he said.
The letter

In his letter mailed to town residents, the retired engineering professor -- James A. Cheney -- said that "living on top of the San Andreas fault is always risky" and that the town could safely use the "beautiful, well built" complex -- and save the cost of rebuilding -- after upgrading the buildings to current codes.

Mr. Cheney borrows heavily -- and selectively -- from a 1972 geological engineering report that predicts the buildings would not collapse under the intense shaking of a 1906-like quake.

The report notes that the buildings would likely collapse and cause a substantial number of casualties if the ground under a building separated, but Mr. Cheney emphasizes the report's reluctance to declare the buildings uninhabitable.

Mr. Cheney also discounts the likelihood of a ground rupture, citing "compacted soil," the ground-reinforcing effect of the root systems of nearby trees, and the uncertainty of predicting where faults will break.

The 1972 report concludes by recommending against retrofitting the buildings, but that recommendation is left out of his letter. Nor does he mention the 2002 findings showing evidence of the past ground ruptures.

The 2002 report also looks back some 1,200 years along the east-west border of the proposed rebuilding area, where no evidence of faulting was found, thus correcting a 1980s-era map that showed a fault there. Mr. Cheney says the fault is there and that they should have dug deeper.

Mr. Cheney met recently with the geologists who wrote the 2002 report at a meeting of the town's Geological Safety Committee. There was talk of the geologists "taking apart" Mr. Cheney's arguments, but attendees were left to draw their own conclusions after each side presented its case.

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