January 23, 2025
To: City of Menlo Park’s City Council Members
From: Dr. Rubye Cervelli, Property Owner and Menlo Park Resident (over 30 years)
RE: Menlo Park RFQ Reviews
Dear City Council Members:
Even though there was a petition with almost 3,000 residents’ signatures against using the City of Menlo Park parking lots for housing versus 300 supporting it, you are moving forward with RFQs from developers.
Menlo Park residents and business owners will want to review ALL of these RFQs with plenty of time before ANY approvals move forward.
Personally, I would like to be open minded and hope that consideration for the majority of your constituents and business owners plays a major influence in the decision-making process. That would include rejection of any or all RFQs that would overburden our town and would not address the following concerns:

1) Increased traffic and lack of parking during and after any construction

2) Disruption or lack of consideration for our businesses

3) Increased danger to our children who ride their bicycles to and from school as well as for pleasure outside of school hours

4) Increased danger to seniors and other adults who ride our bicycles as part of our lifestyle for shopping, eating out, getting to work, etc.

5) Increased police protection for any increase in crime

6) Increased need for maintaining and cleaning our streets and sidewalks
Some suggestions which might help would be to:

1) Severely decrease the number of units to a much more workable number and maybe splitting up the number of units to another site such as at the USGS and SRI campus on Ravenswood location or use some land at the Civic Center (so rarely is all the land used).

2) Make sure any RFQ takes ALL of the above concerns into consideration and includes traffic control, plenty of parking for businesses as well as any new residents, dedicated bicycling paths that are separate from sidewalks and streets, green space shared by both the new residents and all of Menlo Park residents.

3) Cost of increased need in law enforcement personnel, fire prevention, cleaning of sidewalks and streets, and any other increased costs to the community.

4) Increased costs to schools and other community services.

5) Consideration during construction activity for parking, traffic, pedestrians, and bicycling.
It seems you should put the whole topic of using the parking lots for housing on the ballot and letting the public vote. Also, you should be transparent about other locations for building affordable housing. Why target our very needed downtown parking hurting Menlo Park businesses.
Piecemealing the decision is reckless and does not allow the residents a complete picture of the plan. RFQs should include the full picture and not just using or targeting the downtown parking lots.
Kindly inform me and other residents of the date RFQs come in and when we residents may review the various options.