June 22, 2019 Dear Planning Commissioners and Council Members, Re: 1704 ECR I recently sent you a letter signed by over 50 Park Forest Community members. In that letter, written before the staff report was released, we expressed reserved support for the architectural design of the proposed Hampton Inn (not for the Public Benefit Bonus), *provided that the concerns we delineated in an email dated May 15 had been adequately addressed. They were not. Hence this follow up. * Scott Barnum and I met personally with Corinna Sandmeier on May 7. Subsequently she emailed us to request that we put our concerns in a memo that she would share with staff and Mr. Patel. We sent that to her on May 15 and had assurance that she had also shared that email with the commissioners. I’ve attached it to this letter. In that letter we itemized 7 areas of concern to us that we requested be considered prior to the hearing. Those were: 1. Rooftop Terrace 2. Fencing 3. Drainage 4. Building Color 5. Lighting 6. Transformer 7. Potential Alley disturbance Of those, the only one commented on in the staff report is # 2 fencing. Our request for an 8 ft high fence was considered and is recommended for approval. The other items are not addressed by staff. Instead we see a few comments from the developer and his architect attached to the end of his project description dated June 12 and embedded on pg. 26, page G3, of the staff report. *The staff did not apparently review our concerns, nor did they share Mr. Patel’s response with us.* *We expect our concerns to be heard and considered by the city, not left to the developer to adjudicate.* We request again that: 1) The bumped-out room on the rear 2nd floor terrace be removed and that the open design that was originally agreed to in Mar 2018 be upheld. 3) We get explicit assurance that the drainage from this project will not impact trees or landscaping on adjacent properties. 4) The building color is given due consideration by the commission. Neighbors at Buckthorn Park are concerned about the reflected light from a white façade. 5) We’d like to know exactly where there is any light that is above waist height. Apparently, there are safety lights required. We cannot tell where those are and cannot wait for “mature” landscaping to obscure this. 6) We’d like to have staff and the commission review the positioning of the transformer and make a judgment about the best location for this. 7) Disturbance in the alley is of obvious concern to all the homeowners within visual or hearing distance of the alley. That would be a minimum of probably 6 Buckthorn Park households and 8 or more Park Forest households. There are many bedrooms that open to the common area that borders the alleyway. Reading “hotel operations require noise-generating activities to happen during non-sleeping hours, *as much as practicable*.” Is hardly sufficient for us to let this go. We want assurance that quiet will be respected after 5 pm and before 8 am and on weekends. I hope you can, for a minute, step into our shoes. We’ve negotiated many other matters related to 1704 ECR and put a ton of time and work into this project. There is no benefit here for us – in spite of our efforts, there will still be increased congestion and noise, impaired views and years of construction noise. The items we bring up here need attention. Please give these requests your full consideration. They were submitted for review over a month ago. We ask for you to consider the concerns of the taxpayers, Menlo Park residents, who will be very impacted by this commercial enterprise. Best regards, Susan Neville On behalf of Park Forest Plus application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document attachment: 2019.05.15.CSandmeier.Email.docx