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Menlo Park city officials have been adamant that the downtown plan the city is working on should reflect the vision of the community as a whole.
But how, exactly, in a city of over 30,000 residents, do you measure the will of the community, short of a vote? After past planning efforts went off the rails when people questioned whether consultants’ recommendations were in line with residents’ desires, City Council members want to make sure that the city comes up with a plan a sizable majority of residents can get behind.
The city has gathered feedback through surveys, interviews, and community workshops. But “the emphasis is really on getting people to the workshops,” said Thomas Rogers, the city planner overseeing the downtown planning process. “Ultimately, you need to have a cohesive center for the project.”
Much of the debate around the crucial planning issues will happen at those workshops: the height of buildings along Santa Cruz Avenue and El Camino Real; whether or not the city should build multi-level parking structures; the types of businesses and activities the city should encourage downtown.
Does that mean that a couple hundred residents — a tiny percentage of the city’s population — will largely determine what the city is billing as a 30-year downtown plan?
Council members grappled with the concept at a June 9 meeting. Councilman John Boyle stressed that the workshops are not a “voting opportunity,” saying that the consultant hired to conduct the process is charged with incorporating residents’ feedback into a comprehensive design.
“Even if we get 100 people or 200 people to come to the workshop, that’s still just 100 or 200 people,” Mr. Boyle said, adding that he was relying on the consultant, city staff, and the steering committee to “think more broadly than just the 100 or 200 people who show up.”
At the meeting, the consultants stressed that they’re more interested in why residents take the positions they do than in what those positions are.
“We don’t do anything by votes,” said Prakash Pinto, a consultant with the firm Perkins+Will, which has a branch in San Francisco. “That’s not good planning. It won’t lead to a good result. A good result will be taking input, getting as much feedback as you can, and understanding the ‘why.'”
Mr. Rogers said the mix of people at the workshops so far has seemed “pretty diverse,” with plenty of new faces he hasn’t seen around City Hall, or at city events.
But previous planning efforts have foundered when residents challenged the consultants’ conclusions, pointing to a lack of empirical evidence. At the June 9 meeting, Mayor Heyward Robinson asked Mr. Pinto how he and his colleagues would determine guidelines for building height and density, the touchiest of subjects when it comes to downtown planning. “That is a pretty objective thing,” Mr. Robinson said.
Not necessarily, Mr. Pinto said, adding that he is just as interested in residents’ feelings about set-backs and building “massing” as he is in their opinions about height.
The consultant who prepared the “Center City” guidelines in the mid-1990s made similar arguments, concluding that buildings should be allowed to reach four stories if properly designed and set back. But residents balked at the total allowable height, and the plan was never approved.
“The discussion will come up: does the data support this?” Councilman Rich Cline said in an interview. “If not, it makes it very difficult for us to stand confidently behind the plan.” But “we’ve been doing this for two years; we should have the data.” If questions arise, the city can always go back to that data, to make sure it’s on the right track, he said.
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