Publication Date: Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Letters
Letters
(January 07, 2004)
BID benefits downtown
Editor,
On Dec. 15, the Palo Alto City Council unanimously agreed to pass a Resolution of Intention to establish a Business Improvement District (BID) in downtown Palo Alto.
I want to thank the council members for their support and enthusiasm regarding this endeavor. The BID Advisory Committee has been working on this project for close to two years and we are genuinely excited to potentially have, for the first time, an effective tool to market our downtown area and to promote it as a destination shopping area.
We see this as the biggest formal step for the continuation of the downtown as a vital and vibrant economic business district.
I am also inspired by the incredible potential this business district offers for the entire downtown to work together. The input from the professional segment of the downtown community has been instructive and essential to creating a proposal that is not only equitable but also supported by the varied composition of downtown business.
I am convinced that the continued involvement of the professional community will make a huge difference in the future of downtown Palo Alto.
In an ongoing attempt to reach out to and educate downtown businesses about the potential benefits of establishing a Business Improvement District, the Advisory Board is hosting a final outreach meeting on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Garden Court Hotel, 520 Cowper St., Palo Alto.
The panel of speakers will include two BID executives, a commercial developer and a former Mountain View city planning official, all with extensive experience with such districts. It is open to anyone, and downtown businesses are especially invited.
Stephanie Wansek
General Manager, Cardinal Hotel
Hamilton Avenue
Palo Alto
Reaching out works
Editor,
Kudos to the teachers at Paly and Gunn who are reaching out to connect with their students.
It is fabulous that Paly and Gunn teachers are taking the time to listen and talk with students. One of the "Forty Developmental Assets" that helps indicate success for a teen is having one special adult person in their life they can count on -- one person who relates to them in a positive and meaningful way.
How fortunate when that person can be on a youngster's campus, where they spend the better portion of their waking day. Many of us who were lucky enough to have such a teacher in our lives can still remember that teacher's name and face, and how he/she helped us when we were growing up.
Counseling, when it works, is a different process. Rather than stopping by to talk, relate, catch up with the day's trials and successes, it is a regularly scheduled series of meetings to delve into a problem.
Adolescent Counseling Services (ACS) provides free counseling to all students on the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) secondary campuses and at Menlo-Atherton High School. Counseling takes place in a private room at the school without interruptions (hopefully).
Because of the continuity of the process, a student has the opportunity to bring up more serious problems that may require long-term interventions. Although a student may start out by talking about a family problem, by the third or fourth session deeper issues such as substance abuse, severe depression or suicidal thoughts may surface.
When appropriate, a parent can be called in to share in the solution. Last school year, ACS counseled approximately 1,000 students on the PAUSD secondary campuses, or about one in six students.
Counseling is not for every student nor is it the right answer to every problem. How fortunate we are in this community to have teachers who care and take the time to make students feel special as well as counselors to help work with students and their families to solve the more complex problems.
Our teens need and deserve the full attention and love of each and every member of our community.
Sue Barkhurst, Executive Director and
Holly Ward, board president
Adolescent Counseling Services
Middlefield Road
Palo Alto
A road to share
Editor,
I'm concerned about Michael Goldeen's advice that "Middlefield Road is for the cars," not bicycles (Dec. 26), and Wendy Kuehnl's endorsement of his suggestion that "bicyclists use the Palo Alto bike route as opposed to Middlefield Road" (Jan. 2).
Bicyclists who are uncomfortable in traffic might want to avoid the narrow lanes on Middlefield between Matadero Creek and Oregon Expressway, and in north Palo Alto near the Menlo Park border.
But Middlefield is an efficient, direct north-south route that bicyclists find attractive for the same reasons as motorists; it even has bike lanes from Montrose to Loma Verde. Parallel routes have numerous stop signs or may be out of the way.
Everyone can share the road. No one should imagine that bicyclists "belong" only on quiet streets or "don't belong" on Middlefield and other arterials.
Alan Wachtel
Janice Way
Palo Alto
No 'Unblock' sympathy
Editor,
After reading Joe Durand's letter in the Palo Alto Weekly (Dec. 24), I really can't feel too much sympathy for his Unblock group catching the majority of blame regarding the disappearing signs.
If I recall, shortly after the traffic-calming devices were put in place, our friends at Unblock plastered the neighborhood with both amusing and offensive material. Practically every telephone pole had some propaganda on it.
I do know that some neighbors were removing offensive signs that were mocking not only the City Council but those who have spent years working with the city for traffic calming.
During Christmas week, the traffic was minimal and there were very few commuters racing up and down the streets burning stop signs. I liked what I saw -- neighborhood streets that felt like neighborhood streets.
Is that really too much to ask for? Or are people here just too put off by an added 15 seconds to their morning latte trip?
So, Joe, don't expect too much sympathy from Downtown North for you being blamed for the disappearing signs. You gave the kids too much sugar at the start of all this and have lost control.
I think your crusade has become much more mature lately but people's memories are not as short as you may hope. Tell your kids to leave the signs alone and try handling any traffic-calming dilemmas like adults? For once?
By the way, the sign-stealing videos posted by another resident on www.dtnforum.com were both impressive and very sad.
Anthony Tam
Hawthorne Street
Palo Alto
Barrier misinformation?
Editor,
I am growing increasingly frustrated by the slanted information being presented as facts and the misrepresentation of opponents' positions on barriers in Downtown North.
Wednesday's batch of letters (Dec. 24) in the Palo Alto Weekly is representative of these efforts to distort the facts.
One letter claims, "Everyone affected has had ample opportunity to have their say. " Another says, " All neighbors were welcome to participate." This is simply not true.
My home on Middlefield Road was not allowed to participate in the original survey, and at recent public hearings I have heard multiple people say they wish to limit future surveys to the "inner neighborhood."
Closing streets pushes traffic onto nearby streets, shifting the burden to other residents. Everyone impacted should be considered "part of the neighborhood."
Another letter tars those opposed to the barriers with the brush of caring only about being "inconvenienced." The author has not been listening.
I oppose the barriers because:
1) They take traffic from low-volume, low-accident streets and push it onto neighboring streets that already endure some of the highest accident rates in the city.
2) The barriers will have a negative impact on emergency services for many, i.e. ambulances and fire engines will be delayed. I do not view these as reasonable trade-offs.
In an earlier letter from the president of the Downtown North Neighborhood Association I read that, "Children are safer with the barriers installed." Whose children?
If he only considers the children on his street, he may be correct. But Palo Alto also has children residing on the streets where traffic has increased due to the barriers and I doubt their parents feel they are safer.
I did agree with the sentiment of one recent letter. It called for creating "a shared vision in which residents respect one another."
To achieve this, we need to make every effort to listen to each other, make our discussions inclusive and stop making the safety of our neighborhoods a political campaign.
John Guislin
Middlefield Road
Palo Alto
Unfair Tolkien analogy
Editor,
While attempting to be humorous, the Dec. 24 Palo Alto Weekly (Around Town, "Bagginses in Palo Alto?") incorrectly characterizes the Lothlorien School in Palo Alto as an academically bereft refuge for marijuana smokers, defending this "view" with a bare assertion that "well, that was the reputation at the time," and by attempting to make tenuous links to "Tolkien-related" bumper stickers and Palo Alto "head shops."
While I wasn't fortunate enough to attend the Lothlorien school, I had several friends who did and can observe that the use of "illicit leaf" by students at Lothlorien seemed much less prevalent than among students attending Palo Alto High School at the same time.
More to the point, Lothlorien students designed their own program of study together with an academic adviser, published papers of significant length, and appeared in many cases to develop a "love of learning" that stood in marked contrast to the boredom that more than a few of us experienced at Palo Alto High School.
As concerns J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, perhaps one distinction between Palo Alto teenagers of that day and this day is that regardless of what we were or were not smoking, we read Professor Tolkien's "opus," appreciated the beautiful prose and rich descriptions, and considered the concepts of "friendship," "fellowship," "temptations of power," and more that are so vividly presented in Tolkien's writings.
Today, although the same thing could be done, it may be more likely that everyone will just watch the movies instead.
Geoffrey M. Kronick
Portland, Oregon
Palo Alto High School, 1973
Red meat realities
Editor,
Current USDA effort to protect the $175 billion U.S. beef industry from the Mad Cow crisis deceives American consumers.
Mad Cow disease had not been detected earlier because, until recently, USDA had been testing only 5,000 of the 35 million cows slaughtered annually (1 in 7,000). Europe and Japan test thousands every day.
The 1997 ban on feeding cow slaughterhouse remains to other cows, a common transmission path, is not preventing spread of the disease. A government survey found 25 percent of feed plants out of compliance, and the cow diagnosed Dec. 22 was born after the ban.
Americans do consume meat products containing spinal column and brain tissue, traditional carriers of the disease. During slaughter, muscle tissues are routinely sprayed with bits of these tissues. T-bone steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs, and beef fillings and toppings contain bits of the spinal column.
We cannot determine the number of cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the deadly human form of the disease contracted by consuming infected beef, until we start examining the brain tissues of thousands who die of dementia each year.
Other animals raised for food are also capable of carrying, contracting and, presumably, transmitting the disease, but they don't get to live long enough to manifest symptoms.
Folks in the meat industry should seek a more secure career. The rest of us should make a New Year's resolution to replace meat in our diet with vegetables, fruits and whole grains.
Andrew Kagan
San Antonio Road
Palo Alto
Bush's Constitution
Editor,
I am very concerned about President Bush's wish to change the U.S. Constitution to prevent gay marriages. He is inferring that Americans can be free as long as they do what he believes is proper, and that he has the right to seek a change in this country's Constitution to match how he believes it should read.
Not everyone in this country holds fundamentalist Christian views like his, and not all religions condemn same-sex marriage, as his religion does.
It's ironic that he is actually trying to change the Constitution to make his beliefs take precedence over others', and become law in the United States -- especially considering the war he is fighting against terrorists, who demand that others believe and do what the terrorists believe is proper.
Renee Durante
East Maude Avenue
Sunnyvale
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