Dear Mayor and Members of the City Council,
My family and I have lived in the Seminary Oaks neighborhood since 2012. I
am writing to urge you to reject the Willow Park application at 80 Willow
Road as proposed, and to hold firm on your requirement that the project
undergo full discretionary review, including a complete Environmental
Impact Report.
I understand the position the Council is in. The Attorney Generals July 29
notice and the applicants assertion of a late-October deadline have
created enormous pressure to act quickly. But a litigation threat is not a
substitute for the analysis that state and local law require, and a
decision made under a developers clock is exactly the kind of decision
this community will be living with for the next fifty years.
The basic facts of the proposal justify that review. This is a 6.7-acre
site proposed for buildings reaching roughly 458 feet — taller than
anything in California outside Los Angeles County, San Francisco and
downtown San Diego. It sits along San Francisquito Creek, on a site that
would require demolishing the former Sunset Magazine headquarters, a
building listed in the California Register of Historical Resources. The
plan pairs approximately 665 homes with roughly 332,000 square feet of
office, a 130-room hotel and retail — a mix that adds substantially more
jobs than housing and makes our regional imbalance worse rather than better.
The impacts closest to home have never been independently studied. Willow
and Middlefield are how my family gets to school, and they are designated
evacuation routes and primary emergency-access corridors for our
neighborhood schools. Adding thousands of daily car trips with parking well
below what City code requires will push that overflow onto residential
streets. No one has evaluated what that means for emergency response times.
An EIR is the only process that would answer these questions before
approval rather than after.
I am not asking the Council to be reckless about the Citys legal exposure.
I am asking you not to approve a project of this magnitude without the
record that would let you defend the conditions this community needs.
Thank you for your service and for considering these concerns.
Sincerely,
Ted Zagat
385 Santa Monica Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025
