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The Menlo Park City Council met Saturday for its annual goal-setting meeting, ironing out its top priorities for the year ahead and letting the community air its grievances and recommend which new priorities should be adopted.
Ultimately, the council generally opted to home in on several top priorities for the year ahead: helping the community recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout, including rebuilding departments that were scaled back significantly in budget cuts last year; updating the city’s housing element, a state-mandated process that involves planning for housing growth; and moving the city’s climate goals forward by supporting a project to protect the city’s Bay side from sea level rise.
They also responded to input from many community members who were primarily focused on two issues: Caltrain noise and leaf blowers.
Other community members urged the council to follow up on its summer discussions of police reform, which have faltered in the absence of a permanent police chief. And some asked that the council declare implementing its climate action plan a top priority.
City staff planned to iron out the nuances of the Saturday discussion and report back at the council’s Feb. 9 meeting.
The top goals
When it comes to responding and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, Councilman Ray Mueller said he wanted the city to be more proactive about helping where it can to improve outcomes at a hyperlocal level. He said he was interested in seeing how the city can help to support vaccinations for underserved populations, and existing county and state efforts to support small business recovery and programs supporting childcare providers. He said he favored assigning a staff member to working exclusively on COVID-19 response matters.
“There’s so much information that has to get out to the public – we are in the best position to do that with our stakeholders,” he said. “We are in the middle of something that has altered everybody’s life – and delivering on that right now is of critical importance.”
While other council members disagreed that it was the city’s role to get as involved with the COVID-19 response as Mueller suggested, there was a consensus that one significant piece of recovery for the city will be to restore its library and community services departments, where operations have been severely curtailed due to the pandemic. The city will need to figure out a plan for services like gymnastics and in-person classes to be restored, including details like who will teach them – contractors or employees – said City Manager Starla Jerome-Robinson.
Another big project coming up this year is planning for the 2022 RHNA, or Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which mandates that the city plan for thousands of new housing units – one recent proposal required Menlo Park to plan for 3,075 new housing units, including 1,218 designated as affordable to low- and very low-income households.
While the assessment is done every seven to eight years, this assessment cycle will look different from previous ones, said Cara Silver, interim city attorney. There will be a lot of housing units to accommodate and require discussions about fair housing and environmental justice, she said.
In addition, the city has partnered with PG&E, Facebook and the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority to submit a grant application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a project to protect areas near the Dumbarton Bridge from flooding and sea level rise. The city is expected to learn whether the funding proposal, for $50 million, will be approved in the summer. In the meantime, it is working with the other agencies to iron out how the project would proceed if approved.
Mayor Drew Combs pushed back on the recommended goals and said he wanted to better reflect what residents want the City Council to accomplish. “I have a concern that a lot of those goals are things that aren’t having direct impacts on residents enough,” he said.
A quiet zone?
When it comes to what the residents want, there was no shortage of nearby locals, including Atherton Town Council member Rick DeGolia, sharing impassioned pleas to look into making the Encinal, and possibly Glenwood and Oak Grove avenues, Caltrain crossings into a “quiet zone.”
Atherton was the first community along the Caltrain line to create a quiet zone at its Fair Oaks crossing and is working to install one at Watkins Avenue, DeGolia explained. To do so, the rail crossing must be fitted with what’s called a “quad gate,” blocking vehicle and pedestrian access in all directions when the train is approaching. Otherwise, train operators are mandated to blow the horn starting about a quarter mile from each crossing, he said.
And with four crossings in Menlo Park, residents noted, the noise can be incredibly disruptive for daily living. Residents talked about how their lives go on pause whenever a train passes by, since nobody can hear anything else, and how the train routinely wakes up sleeping babies. Radu Mihaescu, who said he has lived in several locations near the Caltrain tracks in Menlo Park, added that the noise can have public safety impacts too – once, he and his neighbors failed to hear a crime taking place near their homes because they all wore earplugs to bed because of the train.
“What was an irritant has grown into an unbearable problem,” said Martin Mazner, stating that the number of trains on the Caltrain line has tripled over the past 15 years.
The council asked staff to look into how much it would cost to install such gates at the Encinal and Glenwood rail crossings. Replacing all of the gates would be estimated to cross $1 million per crossing while adding new ones would be estimated at $500,000 per crossing, said Public Works Director Nikki Nagaya.
Leaf blower ban?
Another frequently-voiced problem that a number of residents pushed was that of gas-powered leaf blowers. Such blowers, residents said, pollute the environment with their relatively high carbon emissions and can cause respiratory issues by blowing dust and particles around. They are also very noisy. Residents urged the council to ban gas-powered blowers and only permit electric ones.
Previously, the Environmental Quality Commission did not recommend a ban because the batteries of electric-powered blowers weren’t considered to be as powerful or reliable, but the technology has improved since then, said Councilman Mueller. Enforcement is also a challenge – for instance, should gardeners or the homeowners who hire them be penalized when rules are not obeyed? Currently, the city has some electric leaf blowers but staffers don’t use them all the time because the batteries tend to run out before a full work day is over, Nagaya said.
Ultimately, the council decided to refer the matter to the Environmental Quality Commission again and ask its members to develop a recommendation as part of its work plan this year.
Change of plans: Research campus to leave Menlo Park, make way for more housingJune 12, 2026 6:46 pm
Disappointing to not see downtown revitalization as a priority for the City. Our downtown is run down and does not serve the needs of the community. Downtown should be a top priority, including planning for a long-term redesign of the hardscaping and landscaping. It was already dated and tired when we moved here 15 years ago. If residents were polled, I’m confident downtown revitalization would be a top priority.
Quiet Zones would be major improvement to Menlo Park.
I live next to the tracks. The train horns interrupt the sleep we need to stay well. And every time the horn blares, we are denied the ability to concentrate or communicate. (The sound of the train itself is tolerable – the horn is not.)
At the meeting there was a chorus of residents pleading for train quiet zones, making up well over half the public comments. I hope that the City gives this matter the priority it deserves.
I suggest that the role of local Gov’t is to “Do Good”, vs, “Feel Good”. Of these topics, I’d focus on:
1) Getting the small, locally owned businesses in the area back to as normal as possible.
– Help them to ensure that their customers are safe & cut out the red tape
– They pay the taxes that keep the MP Gov’t afloat
2) Caltrain “Quiet Area”:
– Follow Atherton’s lead ASAP
– If you think it is bad now – wait for the construction & High Speed Rail
– Use your political influence to finally stop the HSR & use the $ for local transit issues
I’m also disappointed that revitalizing our very tired Menlo Park (ie retail and restaurant, etc) is ONCE AGAIN, not on their agenda. The problem is only getting worse and there are more frequent discussions out there, on Nextdoor and beyond, suggesting that our Menlo Park City Council is not doing right by our community by ignoring this very important initiative. I am not sure what we need to do to get our City Council to focus on this. @Drew, Betsy, Jen, Ray, Cecilia?????
Really disappointed to see the list of “goals” for City Council. Not one member really focusing on the downtown area. It’s depressing. Why isn’t revealing downtown a top priority. The Council needs to ensure that the owners of empty buildings place businesses in their properties at reasonable rents. As for housing, that was the priority and now we have nothing but housing along El Camino Real and other streets. As D. Combs said — perhaps Council isn’t addressing the issues that the people of MP want addressed. Would like to see C. Taylor put the energy into downtown that she has in her own neighborhood — then it would improve. When do we vote on the Council?
1) Just because something doesn’t make the goals list doesn’t mean it isn’t happening–e.g. there’s apparently an economic development consultant working on downtown issues.
2) A ton of what our staff (and council) do is not discretionary, but mandated and/or essential. We can’t just phone in the housing element. It would be malpractice to avoid dealing with implications of sea level rise. Streets need to be resurfaced, potholes filled, development permits reviewed, etc.
3) Council isn’t all-powerful. They have certain levers at their disposal (e.g. zoning, parking minimum requirements, hardscape investments, etc.) but they can’t just dictate to private property owners what they should charge in rent or which tenants to accept.
4) A lot of the most pressing needs of our community don’t get expressed in public forums like goal setting. Folks who are just trying to get by, feed and educate their kids, pay the rent, etc. are under-represented. But they’re out there. And for them, a revitalized downtown probably doesn’t make it onto the top 10 list. Council represents them too.
5) Goal setting every year reminds me of trips to see Santa at the mall. It’s totally normal for kids to ask Santa for a pony, and of course Santa feels some degree of pressure to make that wish come true. But for most families, a pony is not a realistic addition. Maybe they don’t have space. Maybe they don’t have the money. Maybe they know that their kid *thinks* a pony would be the best present but what they actually would benefit from is a bike. If kids had perfect insight into their parents’ constraints and concerns, they might make more informed/reasonable asks. Lacking that understanding, they are likely to ask for the moon and be disappointed.
I recommend that citizens who are disappointed in this year’s goals commit to spending the next year attending council meetings, reading budget and planning documents, etc. It will be grounding and eye-opening.
I agree with all the others in strongly supporting these two priorities:
1. Making the downtown a more pleasant place to shop and dine.
2. Adding train Quiet Zones through Menlo Park.