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This year in Menlo Park was about a city reopening. Faced by pressure from residents to bring back community events following years of pandemic shutdown, the city has slowly brought back the citywide events that used to bring people together.
Along with reemerging from the pandemic, the city also faced significant challenges this year planning for state-mandated housing growth, which requires Menlo Park to take a hard look at where it can add housing over the next eight years. Adding a wrinkle in the local housing debate, an unsuccessful voter initiative sought to curb what future development would be allowed in large residential swaths of the city.
Major developments
Menlo Park saw several large developments move forward in major ways this year. Early in the year, the city approved Stanford’s Middle Plaza project on a 3-2 vote. The development faced controversy over the removal of parking spots in front of local businesses and the fact that city staff brought street modifications connected to the project to Caltrans for approval before bringing them to the council. Still, the 429,739-square-foot development was ultimately approved by the City Council in March.
The council also approved Facebook’s massive Willow Village development on a 59-acre site that will include offices, housing, retail and community amenities. The project is set to include a grocery store that is greatly anticipated by nearby residents, over 300 below-market-rate units and a 93-room hotel. The city and developers went back and forth for months on the make-up of a quarter-billion dollars in community amenities and the development schedule.
While Willow Village has been approved, other major developments will be getting underway in 2023. A detailed plan for the Parkline redevelopment of SRI’s campus is now in the hands the Menlo Park Planning Commission. The mixed-use office and housing development, with open space and bicycle and pedestrian lanes throughout the campus, promises a major change for the Linfield Oaks neighborhood site near Burgess Park. The United States Geological Survey’s 17-acre campus at 345 Middlefield Road, also in the Linfield Oaks neighborhood, was put up for sale but the property’s constraints appeared to scare off buyers. Despite a great deal of interest, no bidders emerged. The City Council has expressed a desire to see housing built there, and up to 10 acres have been scouted for a new public middle school.
State mandates for affordable housing development dominated much of the conversation in Menlo Park in 2022, with the housing element requiring the city to plan for adding 3,800 new housing units by 2031. The draft housing element sent to the state included 69 opportunity sites and 83 parcels for building, including 3,644 housing units in projects that are already in the pipeline either proposed, approved or under construction. The state rejected Menlo Park’s first housing element draft, giving the city a Jan. 31 deadline to resubmit an acceptable version to the state.
The focus on the housing element brought affordable housing advocates out in droves, culminating around the Nov. 8 election. Groups including the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County, Menlo Together and Menlo Park Neighbors for Affordable Homes didn’t just weigh in on the housing element, but on one site in particular as a kerfuffle developed over the site of the former James Flood Magnet School. Nearby neighbors feared that the possible 90-unit workforce housing development for the Ravenswood City School District would disrupt traffic and pedestrian safety while affordable housing advocates said that providing teacher housing was crucial.
Politics
The year started off with political controversy as Menlo Park’s city manager, Starla Jerome Robinson, resigned ahead of her planned retirement amid allegations that the City Council was attempting to oust her. Longtime city staffer Justin Murphy stepped in as interim city manager in January, and was officially named city manager in June.
Politically, affordable housing was at the crux of Menlo Park’s debate in 2022. Measure V, a citizen-sponsored initiative on the November ballot, aimed to restrict the Menlo Park City Council’s ability to rezone single-family lots for higher-density use. All rezoning of single-family lots would have to go to a vote in a general election. The measure was soundly defeated by voters, but it created a great amount of political controversy during campaign season, with everyone from residents to state officials weighing in on it. The campaign to defeat Measure V raised huge sums of money, over $300,000.
The City Council election in 2022 brought a sense of deja vu, with Betsy Nash once again defeating Peter Ohtaki, only this time she was the incumbent. Council members Cecilia Taylor and Drew Combs retained their seats after running unopposed, and Council member Ray Mueller set to resign after winning a seat on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.
Instead of appointing an applicant to fill the two years left on Mueller’s council term in December, the decision was postponed to Jan. 9. Mueller has objected, saying it’s unfair to his voters to make the appointment at a meeting that he cannot vote in.
Elections weren’t the only political situation brewing in Menlo Park this year. The City Council plan to remove parking on all of Middle Avenue faced controversy over complaints about lack of outreach to residents who would be affected. The removal of parking hasn’t been up for final discussion yet, but the City Council has decided to explore the option as a part of the pilot project, only leaving a few parallel parking spots in front of Nealon Park. Several different outreach methods have been discussed, including going door-to-door to meetings with the affected residents and talking to prominent members of the community, but residents have said that outreach has been lackluster.
Community
The community saw many post-COVID reopenings this year. The Arrillaga Family Gymnastics Center in Menlo Park was closed due to the pandemic, and the City Council voted to add the gymnastics program back to the budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year. The program is currently hiring employees to bring the highly regarded gymnastics classes back. Popular community events, the Halloween parade and holiday tree lighting, both came back despite concerns about a lack of city employees to staff them.
The debate over management of the pool at Burgess Park was a hot topic this summer, as the city and contractor Tim Sheeper wrangled over the renewal of a contract to operate it while the new pool in Belle Haven is being built. City Council members said that they hope to bring both pools under the same management, and after some heated debate over the terms of the agreement, Sheeper ultimately signed on to continue management of Burgess Pool for another year.
The city has also grappled with staffing vacancies throughout the year, making it tough to hold events and carry out its goals. Staff shortages almost delayed the reintroduction of the Halloween Hoopla event after pandemic cancellations. In April, the city had about a 10% vacancy rate, with 27 staff positions open, including 10 executive and management positions. The city is working to fill the vacancies, but as of October, they were still causing delays within the city government.
Local businesses
Menlo Park’s downtown fought to come back from the COVID-19 pandemic this year, with many of Menlo Park’s interior design stores on Santa Cruz Avenue banding together to form the Menlo Park Design District. The Design District has brought businesses together to support each other and the local community, offering free design classes in hopes the downtown can become an alternative to San Francisco’s Design District.
Menlo Park decided to continue downtown road closures, as the pedestrian-only areas introduced during the pandemic retained their popularity. The street closures can last as long as the California State of Emergency does, but after that the city will have to conduct an environmental review to make them permanent.
The city’s downtown was given a clean bill of health in a downtown improvement study which offered suggestions to make it better, such as building residential units, in line with the success of local retail hubs such as downtown Redwood City. Other long-term goals included offering vacant storefronts for pop-up shops to increase the economic health downtown.
Environment
Menlo Park kept moving toward its 2030 environmental goals this year. The goals worked their way into several discussions of electrification and bay restoration as the city moved closer to the goal of carbon neutrality.
Menlo Park joined forces with BlocPower, which aims to help Menlo Park reach carbon neutrality as a “one-stop shop” for everything that residents need to electrify their homes, from incentives and contractors to lower-cost equipment. BlocPower also provides workforce training to provide the labor needed to complete the project. The city received a $4.5 million state grant to pursue electrification as a result of this partnership and hopes to electrify 15 buildings in 2022, 100 in 2023 and 1,000 or more in 2024 and the years following.
Menlo Park and East Palo Alto also embarked on a bay restoration project to protect and restore 500 acres of shoreline habitat. The Strategy to Advance Flood Protection, Ecosystems and Recreation along San Francisco (SAFER) Bay Project received a $1 million grant from the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority.
Science and technology
Scientific developments in Menlo Park were massive this year, literally. A 3-kilometer accelerator at SLAC under Menlo Park was altered so that 1 kilometer of it was cooled to 2 Kelvin, or -456 F, which is colder than the coldest point in our solar system, Uranus at -371 F. The superconducting accelerator, known as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS-II), will help future experiments at SLAC, and could lead to innovations in batteries and memory cards. The cryoplants are two of only six in the world that can produce such low temperatures.
Scientists at SLAC didn’t just look forward this year, they also looked back. Some of the earliest printed pages were analyzed by an incredibly fine and high-powered X-ray beam at SLAC to see if both Western and Eastern cultures worked in conjunction to develop their printing presses. SLAC is analyzing first editions dating back to the 1400s, including pages of the Canterbury Tales, Korean Confucian texts and pages from the Gutenberg Bible.
If looking to the future and the past weren’t enough, SLAC is also looking farther than it ever has before with the world’s largest camera. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is going to a northern Chilean mountaintop to look out into space, hopefully creating a map of 17 billion stars, including small galaxies made up of only 500 stars. The camera is expected to see 12 billion light years away and detect 20 billion galaxies.
Add to the Local business category: Live music delivered by the Guild Theatre, which is also driving restaurant traffic on show nights!