An integrated extension of the staff.

For more than a decade, one outside firm has functioned as Menlo Park’s planning department for hire. Metropolitan Planning Group — M-Group — has provided on-call planning services to the City since 2013, and in its 2025 firm profile it describes that role plainly: it works as “an integrated extension of their staff.”^[1] The firm is headquartered in Campbell, in the South Bay, and lists additional offices in Santa Rosa and Berkeley — none in Menlo Park.^[8] The same firm has been paid to help produce two of the documents at the center of the downtown parking-plaza fight: the City’s Housing Element, which designated the plazas for housing, and the City’s official report on the citizen initiative that would require a public vote before that can happen.^[1][4]

M-Group was the consultant on Menlo Park’s 2023–2031 Housing Element Update. The public record shows the Council amending M-Group’s professional services agreement on March 22, 2022, by $490,052 — bringing the stated contract total to $1,472,052 — and appropriating $1,423,785 from the general fund for the work; the motion passed unanimously.^[2] A fourth amendment on October 24, 2023, added another $152,746.^[3] Two earlier figures — the base agreement amount and a March 2023 third amendment — are referenced in the record but not stated in dollars in the documents reviewed, so this is not a fully reconciled total.

Then, on November 4, 2025, the Council turned to the same firm for something different: an impact report on the citizens’ “Downtown Parking Plazas Ordinance” initiative — the measure that would bar converting the plazas to housing without voter approval. Elections Code section 9212 lets a legislative body commission such a report on a qualified initiative before it decides whether to adopt the measure or send it to the voters, but it does not require one; ordering it was the Council’s own choice. The council voted 4–1 to commission the report and amend M-Group’s master services agreement for the work at a not-to-exceed price of $164,951 — a figure that includes subconsultants Hexagon (a traffic and vehicle-miles-traveled analysis) and BAE (a fiscal-impact analysis).^[4] Then-Mayor Drew Combs cast the sole no vote, calling the study “kicking the can down the road,” as the Almanac reported.^[5]

The sequence is what draws attention. A firm that markets itself as an extension of city staff, and that helped prepare the Housing Element pointing the plazas toward housing, was also engaged to write the City’s analysis of the initiative that would slow that plan down. A Section 9212 report is an informational impact study — it examines a measure’s fiscal, land-use, and housing effects — and the Council, not its consultant, makes the decisions. Retaining long-serving on-call planners for both policy drafting and initiative analysis is a common municipal practice. Whether that arrangement raises questions about independence, or simply reflects institutional knowledge doing its job efficiently, is a judgment readers can weigh with the numbers in front of them.

The plazas have generated study costs outside M-Group’s agreements as well. The city’s adopted FY2025–26 capital budget carries a $60,000 line for a “Downtown Parking Lot Study.”^[6] The August 2024 “Affordable Housing on City-Owned Downtown Parking Lots” feasibility study — the Program H4.G analysis that first attached unit counts to the plazas — was presented by city staff, with no outside-vendor cost stated in the record; and in May 2023, University of California, Berkeley students presented downtown-housing concepts to the Council at no charge.^[6]

What the public record does not neatly total is the full, invoice-level sum the City has spent on consultants and experts across the Housing Element, the plazas, and the ballot measure. Authorized and appropriated amounts are not the same as dollars disbursed, and several base-contract figures are not stated in the documents reviewed. A complete accounting would require the City’s vendor and check registers alongside the underlying staff reports.

Two M-Group planners lead the Menlo Park work. Geoff I. Bradley, AICP, the firm’s president and a principal, was principal-in-charge of the §9212 report; according to the firm’s website, he holds degrees in architecture and in city and regional planning from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The Housing Element was led by principal planner Asher Kohn, AICP, who, according to the firm’s website, holds a master’s in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a law degree emphasizing land-use law from Washington University in St. Louis.^[7]

Bottom line: by the public record, Menlo Park’s Housing Element contract with its outside planning consultant reached a stated total of $1,472,052 in 2022, with a later amendment adding $152,746 — more than $1.6 million in all — and the Council paid that same firm up to $164,951 to study the initiative challenging the plan. It is money spent through a firm that, in its own words, works as an integrated extension of the City’s staff.