Publication Date: Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Foothills Park redux
Foothills Park redux
(November 02, 2005) by Don Kazak
Ron Andersen came up to me during a break at a 1991 Palo Alto City Council meeting to tell me what he was planning to do.
Andersen, then a mild-mannered councilman, said he was going to propose that Foothills Park be opened to non-residents.
I asked him if he understood how strongly people felt about keeping the park reserved for just residents and their guests. He did.
So I wrote a column about Andersen's plan, saying what a good idea it was.
I have never before or since had so many readers absolutely enraged at me.
Andersen's proposal was defeated after intense debate. He was re-elected to a second term, but battered by the experience.
No issue in Palo Alto stirs emotions as much as any talk about opening up the 1,400-acre park to non-residents. It's the clichéd "third rail" of Palo Alto politics.
The background is that Palo Alto voters approved a bond issue in 1959 to buy the park. It was kept closed to non-Palo Alto residents after neighboring cities declined to help fund its purchase.
The idea was that we paid for it so it's ours.
But the idea to keep it closed to non-residents has a bit of a murky background. Nothing in the 1959 public vote indicated officially that the park would be open only to residents, but the mayor at the time apparently made a verbal promise that it be a Palo Alto-only park.
When the park opened in 1965, the council established the residents'-only policy, subject to review in five years. But prior to that review the council passed an ordinance to make the residents'-only policy permanent.
The point is that the policy was not set in stone from 1959. So it would be hardly breaking an original promise to change that policy.
Many Palo Altans clearly disagree.
Councilwomen LaDoris Cordell, Judy Kleinberg and Dena Mossar proposed having a discussion about revisiting the residents'-only policy. That proposal was rejected on a 5-4 vote last week.
Some who spoke at the council meeting were livid that anyone would even suggest talking about opening up the park to non-residents.
It may take another 14 years before the idea resurfaces.
"It is 2005 and it is time" to have such a discussion, Cordell said. A majority of her colleagues disagreed.
Several people have pointed out that the timing of having that discussion in the middle of a council election campaign could not have been worse.
Trying to approach the subject unemotionally, there seems to be four reasons to keep the park closed to outsiders.
The first is the 1959 "promise," which was not really made into a permanent policy until almost a decade later.
The second is that Foothills Park is a fragile nature preserve and must be protected from overuse. Of course it should. One does that by having a cap on the number of people admitted on any given day.
A third reason is political: A majority of Palo Alto residents seem to disagree with changing the current policy.
The fourth reason is that a decision to change the policy by the council would either be put to a vote of the people by the council or be subject to referendum, and a special election would cost the city $200,000 to $300,000.
But some things just feel wrong, and keeping the park closed to outsiders feels that way.
Mossar said the city recently "did some fancy tap-dancing to get the money from the county and state" to fund the 13-acre gateway to Arastradero Preserve, because of the residents'-only policy for Foothills Park.
"I got loud and clear messages that giving us money was repugnant," Mossar said.
Former Mayor Gary Fazzino is "generally supportive" of the current policy, but for a little-talked-about reason: The park is open to non-residents on a de facto basis. The little guardhouse at the entrance of the park is not staffed on weekdays, except during the summer.
So, five days a week, nine months of the year, anyone can in fact visit the park.
Too bad they have to sneak in, so to speak.
Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.
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