Our Town: 'Back-room' setback Our Town: 'Back-room' setback (June 11, 2003)

by Bill D'Agostino

Every time the Weekly is delivered to his home, Tom Ashton pores through it, cutting out notices of Planning and Transportation Commission meetings.

The meetings might sound boring, with yawn-inducing phrases such as "floor area ratio," "height limits" and "setbacks." But for neighborhood groups like Ashton's Midtown Residents Association, the notices are a way to keep some control over their part of Palo Alto.

Traffic is typically the main concern. "It's never about not wanting the people, it's about not wanting the cars that those people drive," Councilwoman Nancy Lytle said.

Without giving their two cents at commission and council meetings, neighbors worry developers could have their way, and vice versa. As today's cover story makes clear, neighbors don't trust developers who, in turn, fear the sway neighborhoods appear to have on certain members of the council (Lytle, for one).

Whether you think neighborhood groups are NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) forces freezing vital housing projects or saviors of Palo Alto's pristine way of life, it is vital they are at the table for discussions about projects.

Witness what happened at 800 High Street, scheduled to be voted on in November. The project seems laudable -- building 61 apartments a few blocks from the downtown train station. But it will be the focus of an expensive and divisive election, partly because neighbors, rightly or wrongly, didn't feel heard.

The amount of ex parte communication going on behind the scenes could be to blame.

Everyone, neighbor or developer, who asks Vice Mayor Bern Beecham and most other city officials for a private coffee gets that privilege. Beecham said such meetings are vital for him to understand projects. He worries that forcing all information to emerge during public meetings could hamper his understanding of projects and issues.

"It's not a bilateral conversation," he said of official meetings, adding that background discussions are "essential for representative government."

But City Attorney Ariel Calonne wants to change the rules. He worries it's not fair when one side gets to talk to decision makers without the other side present to rebut information.

Even worse, private contacts could encourage "improper considerations by the decision maker," such as friendships or support, Calonne said.

"Time after time after time we hear that the city has been biased, persuaded by back-room contacts with developers." Developers also may feel neighbors have an inside track, he noted.

To work, public meetings need to be adequately "noticed" by the city so they are noticed by the neighbors and others.

Thanks to Herb Borock, a long-time watchdog of city affairs, an illegal meeting was headed off last week after he spotted an announcement, which concerned a virtually unknown project -- the teardown of apartments on Tanland Drive, to be replaced by condos and townhomes.

Chief Planning Official Lisa Grote said the meeting was scheduled because a majority of planning commissioners wanted to meet with the developer, Truemark.

It was distressing to learn how little some commissioners and staff understood of the state's open-meeting law, the Brown Act. "It is not a special meeting of the planning commission," one commissioner said. It's only a meeting with four of the seven members, a planning staff member argued.

But Terry Francke of the California First Amendment Coalition said a majority of commissioners is, for all intent and purposes, a meeting of the full commission.

Only Borock's discovery and Calonne's timely intervention prevented a violation of state law -- neither the Weekly nor all members of the commission were notified.

An irony is that because the developer can legally meet with some commissioners in private, under current city rules, much of this project could get hashed out in Palo Alto coffee shops, away from the watchful eyes of the public and the press -- "The Palo Alto process," Councilman Judy Kleinberg observed.

Ashton and I might vainly look in the Weekly for a notice on the project for some time.

Bill D'Agostino is a staff writer. He can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com.