I’m not surprised that such a storage facility would be expensive to construct and maintain. Especially since this storage and treatment center is going to be underground, there are a lot of other considerations about what they need to do about the by products of the purification system. They can't afford to be dumping or contaminating the water table!

It will be interesting to compare the actual costs to the Town of Atherton of utlilizing HP Park rather than the school site.

The school site would have been provided free of charge and would not have required the disruption of the HP Park site.

The Town will still have to pay the same on going expense costs and perhaps without any cost sharing by other entities.

This seems like a poorly considered decision.

Las Lomitas was asking for a $750K payment to be able to use their property. HP park will be no charge to Atherton. That's one of the key reasons that Atherton decided to go with the park.

The $750k was for a traffic signal not for the use of the property for this drainage facility.

I predict that the Town will end up having to pay most of the cost of the traffic signal anyway.

@Peter

If Atherton is on the hook for a traffic signal one way or another, then it doesn't matter the town lowered its contribution to $500K. Atherton would presumably have to pay any cost overruns. And if it's a no brainer to add the signal, then it shouldn't matter whether there's automatic approval.

Yet, the deal fell apart over these two issues. It was Las Lomitas that turned Atherton down over these two issues.

There is also another major benefit to moving the basin to HPP. Atherton won't know the yearly operating costs until halfway through the design process. With HPP, Atherton could back out of the project at that point if the costs were too high. Not so, with Las Lomitas.