Dear Honorable Councilmembers—
I write to share my perspective on what the City should prioritize for 2018.
First, the City should focus on the downtown. The City should make whatever adjustments to the downtown specific plan that are required to make the vision of a more vibrant and beautiful downtown a reality. For example, basement space should not count against a building’s floor area ratio.
As part of the focus on downtown, the City should put serious energy into a downtown parking structure. My preference would be for the City to at least explore the option of building an underground parking structure with a park at the surface level, similar to ones found on Stanford’s campus. I understand that this is more expensive, but such an option should be at least considered and community input received thereon. Perhaps a local philanthropist or company would be willing to donate substantial funds to support creation of a downtown park/structure. Or perhaps the community would prefer to pay for parking over an above-ground structure. But some sort of downtown parking structure should be a high priority in order to unlock what people in this community so desperately want to see in our downtown. More parking and more park space would be the best of both worlds.
Next, the City should continue to focus on sidewalks, bike paths, and safe routes to school in order to allow children and all residents to more safely and joyfully travel through our community. In particular, children walking to La Entrada need safe sidewalks (both sides of the road) on Sharon Road. This should be the highest priority.
While we should all be grateful to Mr. Arrillaga for generously offering to support construction of a new library, I do not believe such a project should be a priority for our community at this time. While a new library would be lovely, our current one is quite good, and we have much more pressing needs that require the City staff’s focus and that would have a greater impact on the overall quality of life of our citizens.
Thank you for your consideration and for all that you do for our community.
Sincerely,
Nikki Stitt Sokol
