Dear Corinna Sandmeier and Menlo Park City Council,
As a resident of Linfield Oaks, I am writing to share some observations regarding the draft Environmental Impact Report for the Parkline / SRI project.
Firstly, while I am generally supportive of the housing component of this project, I have several concerns about the project as a whole:
* Increased Employment and Commuting Issues: The project is projected to add up to 3,800 new employees above those currently working on the SRI campus. The EIR housing analysis indicates that only 5 percent of these employees will be able to live in Menlo Park. The remainder will commute, many from areas without access to mass transit. Also, as a long-time Caltrain commuter between Menlo Park and Sunnyvale for the past 20 years, I can assure you that Caltrain lacks the capacity to accommodate this additional influx of workers, even with the upcoming electrification.
* Scale of Planned Office Space: The amount of planned office space is out of scale with the reality of Menlo Park and the surrounding neighborhoods (Linfield Oaks, Willows, Central Menlo). This will further exacerbate our jobs-housing imbalance, especially when so much office space in the immediate area has remained vacant for years.
* BSL-3 Facility Concerns: The presence of a BSL-3 facility in this project demands attention. The risk associated with the current facility is already borderline tolerable. With increased housing density, the need for broad-scale intervention in case of an incident is vastly increased. Simultaneously, the increased traffic caused by the new office space will dramatically impact prompt and large-scale emergency response. A BSL-3 facility is simply incompatible with this project and must be relocated outside residential areas. In fact, I encourage the City Council to consider banning such facilities in all residential zones.
* Traffic Impact: The traffic analysis predicts that daily trips to and from the project area will increase from 500 to 10,000. This will disproportionately affect residents like me who need to cross Ravenswood / Laurel to take our children to school. The SRI project will effectively remove one outlet for an entire community, leaving us only with Willow / Middlefield, which is already heavily congested. Traffic is already slow during school days, and with the impending USGS and Sunset developments, it is disappointing that the City of Menlo Park is not taking any initiative to alleviate traffic but instead plans for more development in this neighborhood only. Ironically, when the housing ordinance was passed in January 2024, the City resisted including other areas (e.g., Sharon Heights) in the scope of increased density due to a lack of resources for an expedited EIR review, and now all new development is concentrated at the perimeter of Linfield Oaks.
I appreciate your attention to these concerns,
Sincerely,
Nicola Diolaiti
Linfield Oaks Resident
