Around Town Around Town (February 27, 2002)

PEARL'S WISDOM . . . Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's 1980-81 application to Stanford University reflected his approach to journalism. "I'd like to learn to explore untraditional areas, and overlapping fields; I'd like to avoid the tendency to fall into well-worn fields and methods," Pearl said of his academic goals at Stanford. "I'm good at relating one frame of reference to another -- at finding connections," he wrote. Of his strengths, he said, "I keep an open mind about all that I'm exposed to, so that I take a real interest in what I'm learning." A memorial service for Pearl was held Monday afternoon at Stanford, where he attended as a communications major from 1981 to 1985. "He was the kind of person you remember," Marion Lewenstein, retired professor of communications at Stanford, said of her work with Pearl as a student in the early 1980s. Pearl was in two of her writing classes and she supervised an independent-study project he did in 1985. The project, which followed the attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan, dealt with misinformation put out by the White House when a President became ill or injured. Although initial reports said that Reagan was not seriously injured, it emerged there were real concerns about his life. Lewenstein said Pearl found historical parallels, reviewing both original and secondary sources. "He just had an unexpected, or different, perspective in coming at the information, and he was a very good writer -- it was a delight to read. He did this in his senior year, and after he graduated he wanted to come back during the summer and polish it up even more. That was what made him stand out," she said.

HELLO, NEIGHBOR . . . In an effort to reach out across El Camino Real, Stanford launched a Web site this week devoted to town-gown relations. Illustrated with sunny campus photos, http://neighbors.stanford.edu contains information about tours of Memorial Church, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and Jasper Biological Preserve. The site has tips about good places for bird-watching and offers a miscellany of factoids, such as the number of trees on campus (50,000). It also has pages devoted to the General Use Permit, housing and open space. Alan Acosta, the university's communications director, said the idea for the site came about during negotiations over the GUP, which divided the university and Palo Alto. "It's a way of reaching out. We're mindful we need to do that more," Acosta said. Visitors to the site should be on the lookout for information about Community Day on April 7, an all-day open house for the public.

PUBLIC IMAGE . . . Employees in the records section at the Palo Alto Police Department have traded in their civilian duds for uniforms. Lisa Scheff, the records manager, hopes the change will clue the public in about what the front desk does. People tend to confuse it with the revenue collections counter on the other side of City Hall, she said. They also tend to accost the nearest uniformed officer for help with complicated records questions, ignoring the civilian-dressed records staff. The new ensemble, designed with guidance from an employee poll, consists of dark blue pants, a sky-blue shirt with official police patches on the sleeves and a silver seven-point star for a badge. "This is the first uniform I've worn since I got out of the Army," said John Stichter, an employee at the police desk since 1971. The last desk employee to wear a uniform was a police-matron clerk 30 years ago.

HANDS OFF THAT TILL . . . Palo Alto registered a protest in Sacramento against a bill designed to reduce sales-tax revenues going to six counties around the capital. Rather than sending all growth in sales tax to the local jurisdictions, AB 680 proposes to send only 33 percent directly to the local level, tie 33 percent of the allocation to population and 33 percent to meeting affordable-housing goals. In a letter to state Senator Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), the chair of the Senate Local Government Committee, Mayor Vic Ojakian called AB 680 a "dangerous precedent" to "destabilize the ability of cities to provide current services." Ojakian said the bill penalizes cities that have nurtured local businesses and planned their long-range finances. "Patchwork solutions such as AB 680 to a fundamentally flawed government finance system will not work and will only sow the seeds for dissention among government entities," he said.

CRUNCH TIME FOR HOUSING . . . Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, (D-Palo Alto), has urged President George W. Bush not to adopt a formula for Community Development Block Grants that would reduce the affordable-housing entitlement for Palo Alto by 50 percent. The President's formula affects communities with per-capita incomes of two or more times the national average. In a letter to the White House this week, Eshoo criticized the formula as "arbitrary" and out of sync with housing realities in the Bay Area. She noted that nearly 70 percent of Bay Area households spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. "The same salaried employee renting a home in Silicon Valley would spend 30 percent of their income a rental unit while the same unit in Austin, Texas would require only 15 percent of their income," Eshoo wrote. She also asked that the President review the formula in light of 2000 census data on per capita income, which will be released in June.