OPINION
BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
The goal of a city council member should be to make their city better. A council member running for re-election should be able to point to a number of achievements that made life better for residents. Yet in the past four years, things have been getting worse in Palo Alto. Incumbents Pat Burt and Greer Stone have some explaining to do.
Here’s some questions they should address:
1. Why does it appear that University Avenue and California Avenue are rebounding much more slowly after the pandemic than the downtown areas in Redwood City, Mountain View, Los Altos, San Mateo, Burlingame and San Carlos? City Council owns this problem because they’ve been making the rules for University and Cal Ave. Why isn’t Palo Alto doing as well as similar cities? For longtime Mid-Peninsula residents, did you ever think that one day we’d be saying that downtown Redwood City is more vibrant than downtown Palo Alto?
2. Why did you allow the city to miss the deadline for having a state-approved Housing Element, a plan showing where more homes can be built in the city? Under state law, cities that miss the deadline must allow developers to build projects that exceed height restrictions. Now a developer is proposing to put a 17-story tower on the Mollie Stone’s site at 156 California Ave., and two other large projects are pending.
3. Why did the city not publicize a $40 million surplus before it asked voters to approve a new tax on businesses in 2023? Why should we trust a city government that keeps important information like that from the public?
4. Did you consider the 100 or so businesses along El Camino Real that will lose their street parking when new bike lanes are added to that thoroughfare? Some of the businesses have warned that they will have to move or close if they lose that parking. Are bike lanes more important than local businesses?
5. Why did you allow City Manager Ed Shikada to bar the public from the upper floors of Palo Alto City Hall at 250 Hamilton Ave.? When this issue surfaced, the official line was that members of the public might be stealing items from the desks of city employees. But nobody produced any police reports to that effect. I think the upper floors were declared off limits for some other reason that hasn’t been made public. Maybe it’s because a startling number of city employees don’t show up at work any more since they’re working remotely?
The incumbents who seek re-election will need to explain all this. The challengers should tell the voters how they’d solve these problems, many of which were caused by the current council.
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Biden’s impact here
If people begin to perceive that President Biden won’t be re-elected, turnout is going to drop in dark blue places like the Bay Area.
Democrats will say to themselves, “What’s the point of voting?” If that happens, new taxes and bond measures (which are also taxes) will fail since anti-tax Republicans are going to be voting.
That means the $20 billion bond measure for housing projects in the Bay Area is in jeopardy. The statewide bond measures for school construction and global-warming grants probably won’t pass either.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
