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Palo Alto Weekly And now it all comes down to a road. When the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 last week to approve the plan for Carnegie Foundation to build a think
tank in the Stanford hills, it was an anticlimactic end to two years of Stanford and its supporters jostling in public with environmentalists and others. Of course, it's not really over - Carnegie has to come back in 90
days to get approval for an access road up to the site. Stanford officials seem to think that figuring how to get a road up to the site isn't a big deal, and in fact had started looking at alternatives well before the
supervisors' meeting. The county, in giving preliminary approval to Carnegie, ruled out using and improving an existing road, Vista Lane, because it is outside the academic growth boundary the county established for
Stanford last December. So assuming the road is a solvable problem, this long drama figures to be over, for now at least. There were some 40 public meetings over the year and a half leading up to Stanford winning a
new general use permit (GUP) from the county Dec.12. It was an extraordinary display of public participation: packed public meetings and hundreds of letters and emails, not to mention the scores of letters to the editor and some
guest opinions that were generated. With Carnegie now on board, Stanford won most of what it went into the GUP process asking for. No one really questioned the 2 million square feet of new academic buildings Stanford won
the right to build, although that's a lot of space. And the 3,000 new housing units are accepted because of the area's housing crisis. One thing that didn't happen is Stanford didn't get an ultimate build-out limit or cap,
although it was talked about. Instead, there will be a "sustainability study" done during the current GUP, which presumably will look at how much more Stanford can realistically squeeze onto its campus. The GUP
and the Carnegie process were both emotionally draining for many people, including Stanford and the green groups allied against it. I'm not sure why that has to be the case - that the green groups are allied against Stanford - but
there is definitely an "us versus them" quality to what went on. There is a lingering distrust of Stanford for many in the community. Palo Alto City Councilwoman Nancy Lytle, speaking to the Board of Supervisors
in San Jose on Carnegie last week, characterized Stanford lightly by referring to a long-ago song, "Whatever Lola wants...." Stanford President John Hennessy, in his first state-of-the-university address back on
March 8, acknowledged the need to build bridges back to the community. Hennessy said he would form outreach groups to deal with policies regarding the Dish area and with Stanford's own homeowners, who were disaffected
during the GUP process by Stanford's plans to build infill townhouse amid existing faculty housing. The Dish area is private property and the rest us can walk or jog up there only with Stanford's sufferance, and that
generosity should be noted. But the way the new restrictions came in last September - a sudden ban on dogs, newly paved paths, new chain-link fencing, security guards at the gates - left a bad taste in many people's mouths.
If Stanford is serious about reaching out to the public and, in Hennessy's words, "bolster our relationships with our neighbors," the Dish area is one place where Stanford could score some points by how it deals
with the people who use it. When it won its new GUP, Stanford also won the right to build up to 20,000 square feet of new buildings in the hills, but smaller buildings, no larger than 5,000 square feet. However,
after Carnegie, maybe Stanford should rethink those development rights. One suspects that with 2 million square feet of new buildings ahead, Stanford could live without the 20,000 square feet in the hills. Besides, even trying to
build an artist's studio up there would probably lead to another fight. And if nothing else, the green groups are well-organized, efficient and, now, veterans of the Stanford battles. Supervisor Don Gage, in voting
for Carnegie last week, made the surprising comment that he "will be extremely, extremely hard-pressed if anyone comes before me and wants to do any (more) development there . . . in those foothills." Deciding not
to build anything else in the hills would go far in winning points with the community, farther than anything else Stanford could ever do. Page last updated November 4, 2001. |
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