Letter: Measure M is in the spirit of democracy

"two of our community members put their intelligence and knowledge forward"

Unfortunately, in spite of their good intentions, they failed the test of intelligence and knowledge.

Measure M is poorly worded and has dozens of unintended consequences. It is an attack on good governance in attempting to replace the six year long, community wide effort to produce the Specific Plan with the overnight creation of two people. Measure M has had no public vetting, no public hearings, no impact studies.

Measure M is a Mistake.

In the Menlo Park pipeline is 2 million square feet of office development.
850,000 SF Bohannon Approved by MP voters
260,000 SF Sobrato Approved by current council 2 weeks ago.
400 000 SF Stanford & Greenheart on ECR proposed and current council wants to approve them
027 000 SF Hunter/Beltramo on ECR Approved and built.
430 000 SF Facebook Approved and under construction
1,967,000 SF TOTAL
60 acres just purchased by Facebook for how many SF of office? We do not know.

State and Regional Housing mandates (ABAG) will force us to find 5,000 housing sites in Menlo Park or we lose all transportation money for our roads, shuttle busses, possible undercrossing at Middle Ave.

We do not need all this office. We need retail. Stanford only has to provide 10,000 SF of retail in its 400,000 SF development, thanks to the three incumbents running for another term. Greenheart talks of 23,000 retail but has told the City, it may not work so they will have bank or real estate offices on the ground floor of their development. The General Plan calls for retail on ECR.

Peter Carpenter has no dog in this fight. He lives in a gated community in Atherton, a town that allows no offices or retail. [portion removed.]

We do not want Menlo Park to turn into an Office Park, like Sunnyvale. VOTE YES ON MEASURE M

@wake up

This is the FOURTH blog entry you've posted the exact same thing in.

What's up with that?

At least TRY to have an original thought......

Roy

So, by Lynore's account, democracy is when Save Menlo gets 65% of its funding from a venture capitalist who doesn't even live in Menlo Park? Second place on the donations list was "Committee for Referendum," an anonymous entity based out of a Mountain View apartment. Then Save Menlo uses that money to pay signature gatherers and an out-of-town attorney. All facts, reported by the Almanac (Web Link

On the other hand, I say democracy is when extreme "no-change" candidates like Chuck Bernstein, Kelly Fergusson, Russ Peterson, and Vince Bressler continue to lose Council elections to "responsible growth" candidates like Ohtaki, Mueller, Carlton, Cline, and Keith.

Not the first time Save Menlo has played fast and loose with the truth, but I think "democracy" is pretty clear in this case.

spirit of democracy my a**. Representative democracy is what we have and is what was used over the course of SIX YEARS to come up with the DSP. Measure M is a temper tantrum by those that didn't get "their way" in a very public process. There is nothing "democratic" about what measure m folks are doing. It's totally self serving, self centered action by a few that don't like what the majority agreed to (democracy anyone?).