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Can Menlo Park make way for a major development in the eastern part of the city without besmirching its conscience?
City officials hope to get more insight into that fundamental question in the coming months as the city enters negotiations over a 950,000-square-foot office/hotel complex near Marsh Road and Bayfront Expressway, proposed by the Bohannon Development Co.
The willingness of City Council members to approve the project as proposed may well hinge on the ability of the city and the developer to reduce car trips to and from the site, without scaling back the size of the buildings.
For a council that has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to mitigating the city’s carbon emissions, getting people to carpool or take public transportation to the project site is a crucial, if lofty, goal. Reducing car trips could also assuage other concerns about gridlock on U.S. 101 and on Marsh Road, and about the “dominance” of the project’s parking structures, which occupy nearly as much space as the buildings themselves.
“In a way, this (discussion) actually revolves around what we conveniently call transportation demand management, the use of the automobile,” said Henry Riggs, chair of the Planning Commission, in an interview. “It affects land use. It affects carbon emissions. It affects traffic. And its alternatives could positively affect the availability of shuttles” from downtown Menlo Park to the eastern region of the city.
The commission has recommended that the city aim to cut vehicle trips to the site in half through its negotiations with the Bohannon Co.
Mr. Riggs maintains that it’s a realistic goal, saying that the right mix of incentives and penalties — subsidizing public transportation and carpools, while charging employees a fee to park on-site — could have a dramatic effect on transportation habits.
Mayor Heyward Robinson expressed skepticism about the feasibility of that goal at the council’s Nov. 17 meeting, saying that in his experience, planners are happy if they’re able to cut vehicle trips by 5 to 7 percent solely through transportation demand management programs.
To some, the idea that the city can have its cake and eat it too — getting all the revenue from the project, without exacerbating gridlock, burdening other jurisdictions with housing demand, or damaging the environment — just isn’t realistic.
Resident Morris Brown said he was “terribly disappointed” at council members’ unanimous agreement that they would be willing to approve the project at its current size, provided that the city is able to secure sufficient mitigations and public benefits.
“You can say, ‘well, we’re gonna use shuttles, we’ll get people to bike,’ but I think you have to face reality here,” Mr. Brown said. “People are going to drive to this site. I think that basically, to reduce these impacts, you’ve got to reduce the size.”
Councilwoman Kelly Fergusson saw it as an either/or proposition. “You either reduce the (number of) trips, or you reduce the size of the project,” she said.
But “if you you reduce the size of the project, other things get reduced, too,” said Councilman John Boyle, referring to monetary and other benefits to the city.
How many vehicle trips would the Bohannon Co. have to vanquish for the council to approve the project? How many tons of carbon emissions would it have to reduce or offset?
Council members didn’t say, declining to take a hard-line negotiating stance. Ms. Fergusson said she thinks the city “needs to be able to call this a climate-neutral project.” Her colleagues noted that measuring carbon emissions or offsets is far from an exact science, and that the council hasn’t spent much time discussing the topic.
“Are we willing to reduce the size of the project to meet this goal (of carbon neutrality)?” Ms. Fergusson asked at one point, turning to her colleagues. She didn’t get an answer at the meeting, but Ms. Fergusson and Menlo Park residents can expect more clarity on that point after the first round of negotiations with the Bohannon Co. wraps up in early 2010.
Fewer cars and carbon neutral are not enough to warrant an approval. The city should make a plan for the whole area and not give away flexibility for that plan and for other property owners. If this project provided jobs and substantial revenue within the next year or so, if a large percentage of the project provided city revenue (not just the hotel) and if the city shares the benefit of the windfall profits from upzoning, then maybe an approval could be considered (assuming a lot fewer cars, too). In that case, a smaller project with fewer impacts should be seriously considered.