As a resident who puts a high priority on the environment, and former member of the Environmental Quality Commission, I wanted to share my thoughts about environmental issues and measure M.
A high priority concern, from the perspective of environment and quality of life, is car traffic which generates pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
The main function of Measure M is to reduce the size of office developments near Menlo Park's Caltrain station. However, robust research shows that locating offices near rail is the single biggest factor contributing to greater transit use and less driving.
If Measure M passes, the city will be encouraged to concentrate more jobs by the freeways, where more people will drive.
Measure M doesn’t change the overall amount of commercial development in the plan area, encouraging a shift from general offices -whose workers can take transit - to medical offices and high-traffic retail businesses likely to generate more car traffic and less use of transit.
Jobs/housing balance is a major issue in Menlo Park and the entire region, which has added 114,000 jobs last year but only 7,000 housing units. This trend encourages longer and longer commutes. However, Measure M does not increase the amount of housing, and may encourage larger, more expensive units because the same number of units can be built in more available square feet.
One of the big concerns about the Specific Plan is that it did not have strong enough requirements for developers to contribute to important infrastructure, including bicycle and pedestrian improvements. Measure M makes even more difficult to fund such projects by cutting developments to a size that won’t result in public benefit contributions.
The City Council has recently decided to discuss stronger options to require public benefit contributions. Instead of City Council making decisions to fix the plan where needed, Measure M's provisions can be changed only with new ballot measures, making it difficult for the city to adapt to change.
I am deeply appreciative of earlier generations of environmentalists who helped preserve our region’s natural environment by halting plans by developers to pave over San Francisco Bay and the hills. In that era, environmentalists measured success by the ability to stop and limit development.
Now, when climate change has become a major issue, there is a new understanding that sprawling land use patterns also create environmental harm, encouraging more farmland and open space to be built over, and requiring driving for most activities. A return to more traditional, compact development patterns reduces the pressure to build on farmland, and helps create places where people can walk or bike for more daily needs.
I’d rather see improvements to our city’s policies for the Downtown/El Camino area, including stronger policies to encourage more sustainable transportation (drawing on examples from nearby cities), stronger policies to require public benefit contributions from development, and stronger policies to address the jobs/housing imbalance. Measure M doesn’t solve these problems, and makes it more difficult for the city to adapt to change.
That’s why as an environmentalist, I’m voting No on M.
