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The Carnegie defeat...

by Don Kazak

Sitting in the Board of Supervisors' chambers in San Jose last week, I had no idea what was going to happen with the Carnegie Foundation proposal to build a new think tank in the Stanford hills.

But she didn't really know what would happen, either.

After about 30 people spoke on the issue, Kniss seemed cautious when she made a motion for continuance.

That was understandable. As a former Palo Alto school board member, mayor and City Council member, Kniss has only been on the county board since January.

As it all shook out, though, a couple of her more veteran colleagues seemed ready to reject the Carnegie plan outright, although the continuance was supported unanimously.

The Carnegie plan now seems akin to a dead man walking.

It was the wrong plan at the wrong time in the wrong place.

The community went through some angry and agonizing times in the 18 months culminating Dec. 12 when the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors approved a new 10-year general use permit (GUP) for the Stanford campus.

There were some 40 meetings during that time. It was one of the most amazing displays of public participation in a local issue I've ever seen.

Many of those meetings were packed to the rafters with hundreds of people. The public testimony was almost endless and always earnest.

And that didn't count the hundreds of e-mails the supervisors received shortly before the key vote on the GUP.

Watching the process, it's clear there are people who will defend Stanford no matter what it proposes, just as members of local green groups tend to be almost automatically skeptical about anything Stanford wants to do.

Some of that anger fairly simmers.

After the Carnegie defeat, one letter writer actually used the phrase "tree-huggers" to describe Kniss and her colleagues. But as the a memo from the county counsel explained, part of the Carnegie development would be in a special conservation area, which is not allowed under the GUP. As in illegal. As in, go to court and lose. Tree hugging didn't have much to do with it.

There is a love/hate thing going on between Stanford and the community, and it touches people deeply.

I don't know if many people picked up the significance of what John Hennessy did March 8 in his first state-of-the-university speech as Stanford's new president.

He broke with tradition by having five faculty members share the stage with him, all of whom spoke frankly about problems facing the university.

Hennessy said he wanted to improve town-gown relations and is putting several things in place to do that.

There are wounds that need to be healed. While environmental groups came away reasonably satisfied with the end result regarding protection for the Stanford hills, it was a bruising process for everyone involved.

That's why Carnegie was the wrong plan at the wrong time, and especially in the wrong place.

The Carnegie folks seemed a little stunned last week when they failed to win the support of the Board of Supervisors.

There may not be a more important job in society than teaching young people, and yet teachers tend to be overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

But the Stanford hills location, many think, just isn't right, even if there are two existing think tanks there now. Neither would likely win approval today, either.

I remember something then-Supervisor Joe Simitian said last year, in the heat of the GUP battle. He said all four of his supervisorial colleagues are well-versed in the sensitivity of hillside-building issues.

That didn't do Simitian much good when he didn't get support for his 99-year open space proposal for Stanford's foothill lands, but it did a world of good for Liz Kniss last week.

Don Kazak is the Weekly's senior staff writer. He can be contacted at dkazak@paweekly.com