Publication Date: Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Editorial: Refocus 'Top Five' Palo Alto priorities
Editorial: Refocus 'Top Five' Palo Alto priorities
(January 26, 2005) What started as a useful priority-setting effort has suffered from too many add-ons -- City Council retreat Saturday should do some courageous pruning
It seemed like a good idea at the time. City Manager Frank Benest had just arrived in Palo Alto in early 2000 and pushed to get the City Council to establish a clear set of "Top Five Priorities."
Many staff members -- especially in planning -- were overwhelmed with council assignments and must-do jobs that were confusing and demoralizing, Benest noted at the time.
The initial Top Five list included "residential traffic calming"; updating the city's zoning ordinance; developing a 10-year financial plan for funding projects; "infrastructure management" for maintaining city facilities; and city-school relations -- joint planning to joint-use projects.
Four years later, the City Council next Saturday morning will tackle its annual Top Five assessment in a three-hour session at Lucie Stern Center, 1305 Middlefield Road -- public welcome.
The council has annually tweaked and added to the list, including in 2002 boosting "affordable housing" and fast-tracking an ill-fated library-expansion effort. The city is making progress on the zoning ordinance. It tried "traffic calming" efforts, most (not all) of which riled residents. The city was slapped down in its efforts to do joint planning and projects with the school district.
There were diversions. The council was embroiled in an internal four-year struggle that mixed personalities and philosophies, diminishing this year.
But the biggest diversion was an economy that fell off a cliff in late 2001 and has barely begun to climb back up. We're in a different world, priority-wise, than the bright days of 2000.
Today's Top Five list on the city's Web site rightfully puts city finances at the top, even though there is no priority order to the five. Other current priorities include infrastructure (the CityWorks program); affordable housing; land-use planning (including the zoning ordinance); and "alternative transportation/traffic calming." There are 15 specific work projects -- some complex and time-consuming.
Taken together, the priority and project lists begin to resemble the old "wish list" that in mid-2000 exceeded $300 million in approved projects with no realistic plan to make them happen.
We hope on Saturday the council and staff can focus more intently on today's big priority: assuring that the city's future revenues are secure and adequate.
Without that, other priorities become just cloud castles.
Are local businesses being 'chained out'?
Are local businesses being 'chained out'?
(January 26, 2005)The news that Sophia's Cafe, a locally owned coffee shop/restaurant in the venerable Charleston Center in south Palo Alto, has to vacate in favor of a similar establishment, Peet's Coffee & Tea, should raise a community alarm.
Other store or shop owners in the center told the Weekly last week that they, too, are feeling pressures from the center's owner, Village Properties, based in San Francisco, which declined to discuss the future of the center until next month.
Cafe owner Sophia Omar believes that shopping-center owners can more easily secure financing if their centers are populated with chain outlets rather than local, independent operations. This makes sense, but if true presents a bleakly homogenous future for whatever's left of community individuality in America.
Caught between "big box" stores, aggressive chain-store corporations, the Internet and a struggling economy, even the best locally owned businesses are beset on all sides. Their strength is loyal customers who value the personal connection. After Omar was harassed due to her Middle Eastern background following 9/11, she received an outpouring of community support.
Do we really want to live in a community of just chain stores? Do shoppers who opt for slightly cheaper prices -- not always guaranteed -- think those prices will stay low when all local outlets have been wiped out?
The timely intervention of new Mayor Jim Burch may have given Sophia's Cafe a new lease on life -- possibly in Midtown, where she will have to compete with the local Palo Alto Cafe and Creme de Cafe shops and the Starbuck's chain.
But whether hers and other quality local businesses survive in the not-so-long run will depend on individual decisions by thousands of local residents.
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