Dear City Council, We are a family of three (four, if you count our dog Chewy) living in Allied Arts and we are writing to you to voice our strong support for temporarily closing downtown Santa Cruz Avenue for an outdoor dining & shopping experience. In the 20 years we have lived in Menlo Park we have always been surprised by our city's inability to revitalize our downtown area. It is incomprehensible that we live in an area of such wealth, yet for some reason Santa Cruz avenue remains an eye sore. We have been closely following the discussion started by Curtis Mo on Nextdoor on May 4th and we think it would be a wonderful idea to move forward with his proposal for an al fresco experience. Especially during these unprecedented times, when restaurants are struggling to survive and might have to close unless they have more seating. They have done a wonderful job of reinventing themselves these past months by pivoting to takeout and pick up but this is not a sustainable solution for them. If they start to close, there will be even less reason to go downtown for food & shopping...resulting in a further decline of Santa Cruz Avenue and our community. What do we have to lose? Now is the right time to do this to help our businesses survive, to make our community come together, to start to recover from these traumatic times.... moving forward with this plan is more important than ever. Let us find the simplest way to do implement this proposal and then re-evaluate in a couple of months. We hope you will vote in favor and we look forward to coming together as a community while we eat and shop in our newly designed Menlo Park downtown area! Sincerely, Ariana Beil Karlis Felzenberg Lucas van Es (16) Chewy (4) 918 College Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025 650 776 4451 Received on Fri May 22 2020 - 16:11:08 PDT
