Some snippets of thoughts from the last year about Palo Alto, CA:
March 2009
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Palo Alto’s Foothills Park will remain exclusively for city residents after the council had voted down a proposal to open its gates to local business owners. Wow, a park owned by a city who won’t share it.
My first impression about Foothills Park: How presumptuous of them to restrict a chunk of nature that everyone has a right to and restrict access via the residencies… or income status.
Yet I don’t disagree with why this started and how they got into the mind set they have now. Some years back when Palo Alto took over this park, they asked for neighboring cities to pitch in and no one did. Yet it sets a poor example to folk about the premise of sharing. Yo – let it go.
If they run this park off taxes from Palo Alto commerce, then anyone who lives or does commerce in the city should then have the right to use the park, not just its very own citizens.
I find myself in Palo Alto often, yet the money I spend there is funneled into programs designed to keep me out? I can always spend my money at home or other places if that’s the case.
As Harry S. Truman put it: It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. Apparently Palo Alto council members care about the credit.
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May 2009
I seem to like picking on Palo Alto, CA.
Previously I’ve mentioned how they have this wonderful park up in the mountains – it’s big, it’s scenic, it’s connected to the wildlife in the region… but oh, you can’t go in unless you are a resident of Palo Alto.
That’s because back when other cities had a chance to pitch in and provide funds for the land, they didn’t. So the Palo Alto infrastructure struck back at everyone by saying since they paid for it, no one else can use it.
Palo Alto also started looking at some plan to charge non-residents fees to park in their city. That would also include the non-residents who own businesses in Palo Alto, but don’t live there.
Now the latest fun I’m having with Palo Alto… which some around here use the term affectionately, Shallow Alto, is that over the last few months they were looking to build a new police station for their cops. It was projected to cost $80 million. Fine, I get that. But wait! After all this time, something was being overlooked.
My new favorite newspaper, called the Daily Post ran an article in May of 2009 titled “Mystery Floor May Help Cops” points out that there’s been this 3rd floor of the present police headquarters that is empty… and has been empty since the building was built back in 1968… crickets… 10,000 square feet of empty space, just waiting to be occupied.
Palo Alto doesn’t seem to want people to come to their little neck of the woods and doesn’t seem to think there’s a limit on their spending. Or their vision of advancement is obscured. How do you miss an entire floor of a building? Eh, I’m not involved in the process. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.
For now, the Daily Post is my fav paper. They’re been calling out local municipalities on various issues. Red Light Traffic Cams that cost the city $6k a month for each intersection to run. Or that the Yellow Light time frames at these intersections seemed shorter than the national recommendation. Or how they’ve been outing the income of city officials in different locations. I liked the list from Palo Alto. Street Sweepers making $72k… librarians – $100k… the paper is a fun read.
I hope more people pick it up and read it. The only short coming is that the paper doesn’t think it needs a website… so we can’t visit it vicariously through the web… sorry. I’d like to see them be able to monetize an online existence. I’d be there everyday. But they’ve recently pointed out that despite many papers with online existences struggling, they’re doing well because they haven’t diluted their content with online access. (This effectively exposes their advertisers to the readers of the paper.)
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Whenever
Last night in the city council meeting, it was deemed that public input is the least important issue at council meetings.
In the soon to be classic words of John Barton, members of the public should only be allowed to speak for a total of 30 minutes at City Council meetings because “it’s probably the least important item on the agenda.”
So much for it’s top priority of “civic engagement.” As it stands, if there was something of great public importance, they’d hear about it in some other way.
Nice…
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It smells like an elitist community but all of these issues that catch my attention, I’m sure have many layers of complexity of which I don’t make enough to understand.
