Reports and opinions.
On September 30 the Menlo Park Library hosts the ballot explainer, given by the League of Women Voters of South San Mateo County. The League opposes Measure P, and its president is signer three on the argument against, under her League title, dated July 27. Asked how those sit together, she answered five questions in detail: Voter Services writes the material, “The Advocacy team is not involved in the write-up and review,” the League appears on its own opponents roster, and presenters will not argue its side. Asked a second round, she said the League is entirely volunteer — nobody paid, nobody evaluated by the president, and the Director of Voter Services a peer on a board that decides by consensus, not a subordinate. That answer corrects this site’s earlier description of her as the officer above both teams. The billing that calls the event nonpartisan remains accurate about parties and silent about this measure. The record is set out on both sides of the wall; the conclusion is left to the reader.
The downtown parking plazas were bought with people’s homes and merchants’ money, under a 1955 assessment the Court of Appeal records as putting no part of the cost on the public generally. The owners were paid in a promise: that the ground would stay parking. An editorial on the thirty steps from car door to shop door, the 556 spaces on the table, and why a council that wants the power to break a 71-year promise should have to ask the people who inherited it.
The mark opposing Measure P carries six words of affirmative argument, set to vanish at browser-tab size: downtown needs people, people need homes. Read at full height, the last word is the one to check. All three developer filings use it — two use the campaign’s exact phrase — while every proposal is a ground lease under which no resident owns anything and the buildings revert to the City.
A shaving cream company worked out how to make people read a sign from a moving car: six boards, a hundred feet apart, and a joke worth waiting for. The mark opposing Measure P does the opposite — the palette reserved for caution tape and quarantine, an instruction rather than an argument, and no mention of the word parking on a parking measure. Read at speed it says NOONP.
Every sitting member of the Menlo Park Planning Commission — all seven — has endorsed the campaign against Measure P, and its chair signed the rebuttal. The body that would review any project proposed for the plazas has committed itself in writing before it has seen the applications. Predictability is useful to a City government. The cost shows up when the ground shifts.
The rebuttal to the argument in favor says a Yes vote will not save downtown, improve parking, or create affordable housing. All three are true — and equally true of a No vote. It states as fact a risk to local control that the City’s own $164,951 study says it is too soon to judge, gives an incomplete if not misleading account of who controls the measure’s legal defense, and says three people put on the ballot what the Council placed there unanimously.
Menlo Park assembled the eight downtown parking plazas in the mid-twentieth century through a special assessment district and, where persuasion failed, condemnation — and dedicated them to public use. Seven decades on, three council votes could convey them to private developers as “exempt surplus property.” Measure P asks whether the owners of record get a say first.
Last year the Menlo Park City Council voted 4–1 to spend up to $164,951 on a consultant’s analysis of the ramifications of the parking plaza ballot measure. Mayor Betsy Nash was among those who voted yes. Nine months later she authored the voter’s guide opposition statement against the measure, doing so under the title of her office. Yet two of the opposition statement’s seven bullet points are contradicted by the consultant’s report or by the measure’s own operative text, and four more assert as settled what the consultants expressly declined to conclude.
Neither campaign’s 300-word statement informs on what the City is proposing, and the $164,951 consultant’s study answers the questions the Council chose rather than the ones a voter has. Measure P poses one question — who decides, and on what record. The record shows a City that took three years and two grants without publishing a parking recommendation, while moving from solicitation to three bids in seven months.
One bullet in the argument against Measure P — all eight words of it — appeared in the 2022 argument against Measure V, an entirely different measure, unchanged but for a capital letter.
A blank check is missing its payee, its amount, and its date. The RFP specified that developers finance and replace all 556 spaces without using City money — and not one of the three bids does that. What the downtown measure asks you to withhold, and from whom.
Alliant’s own bid promises outreach that will “shape project messaging, educate voters and neutralize opposition.” A deeper dive into the Menlo Park advocacy team behind the bid — and how its outreach firm, its City Hall reference, and its entitlements consultant are wired to the pro-housing coalition now organizing against the downtown merchants’ measure.
The same donors who spent about $331,000 to defeat Menlo Park’s 2022 Measure V — the Sobrato family, Karen Grove, and Bob McGrew — and the same San Mateo County housing nonprofit are again the biggest money behind the Vote No campaign on the downtown measure.
A Habitat for Humanity fee-waiver request sits on Tuesday’s Council agenda. Deny it, as staff urges, and the affordability standard that “no” vote sets would — applied evenhandedly — knock two of the three downtown-plaza bidders out on their own filings.
Before the downtown measure reaches your mailbox, three short texts get written under strict state rules — the City Attorney’s “impartial” analysis, and the arguments for and against. Who controls what, what they can’t touch, and the deadlines, most of them this month.
A cross-reference of every itemized donor to Menlo Park’s two ballot-measure committees and its three funded council candidates: only 17 gave to two, none to three or more, and the overlap clusters on one side — many also public Vote No endorsers.
The State has ordered Menlo Park to approve 80 Willow Road — a builder’s-remedy tower complex on the old Sunset Magazine site, the tallest tower near 450 feet — by Oct. 27.
In another meeting room the same night, the Housing Commission took up a bayfront research campus that would pay a $3.84 million affordable-housing fee instead of building homes it cannot legally site there — the deferral pattern the housing debate runs on.
Menlo Park has permitted 59.4% of its market-rate housing goal this cycle but just 18.5% of its very-low-income target — and when Meta paused Willow Village at the bayfront, the affordable-housing burden shifted toward the downtown parking plazas.
The plaza deal from the taxpayers’ side: a garage the developers price near $63 million and would ask the City to bond, set against a budget the Council balanced for FY2026-27 only with one-time state help — and a structural deficit the City concedes will keep widening.
What the City’s own $164,951 ballot-measure report concedes — that the downtown housing would likely cost the General Fund more than it returns, that the measure would “not necessarily” make development impossible, and that it is “too soon” to say whether it threatens state housing compliance.
Velagapudi’s recent Form 460, cross-checked against the “Vote No” campaign’s endorsers: sitting Menlo Park commissioners — and a sitting councilmember — who have both endorsed the effort to defeat the downtown parking-plaza measure and written checks to Combs’s challenger.
Who has raised what in the Nov. 3 election. The two campaigns fighting over the downtown parking-plazas measure — Vote No at $126,125 and Vote Yes (Save Downtown Menlo) at $74,449 — dwarf the council races, where Reed leads at $14,339.
The City’s on-call planning consultant since 2013 wrote the Housing Element that put the plazas in play — and was paid up to $164,951 to write the City’s report on the initiative to slow it down.
A reader-controlled model of how trading downtown’s parking for housing would play out for Santa Cruz Avenue’s merchants — set the assumptions yourself. Illustrative, not a forecast.
A verified, dated roster of California cities changing course on their certified state housing plans — and how the amendment process works under state law.
Menlo Park softened its downtown-housing RFP from “requirements” to “priorities” — and the feasibility question that follows.
An Almanac blogger launched a series promising to fact-check both campaigns in the downtown parking-plaza fight, starting in August — a second set of eyes on claims MonitorMenlo has been checking line by line.
Key deadlines between now and when Menlo Park empanels its next City Council — from the candidate filing deadline to the day a voter-approved parking ordinance would take effect.
A first pass at the six candidates for the three November 3 council seats — and where each stands on building housing on the downtown parking plazas. With a sidebar, “Shades of Blue.”
The City’s downtown-plaza timeline runs a financial review of the three proposals from July to September and aims to select a developer before the November 3 vote — a schedule that looks built to beat the ballot.
A plain-language digest of the City’s downtown-plaza RFP and the three Dec. 15, 2025 proposals — units, affordability, replacement parking, and what each developer asks of the City.
The downtown parking-plaza fight runs back nearly a decade — to a library the City almost got for free. See the whole saga at a glance.
The subsidy, the parking-cost risk, the city's budget, alternate sites, and whether there's real urgency to act before voters decide — answered with real statements from both campaigns' own websites, checked against the record.
The two campaigns answered the same five questions for The Almanac, side by side. Here's what each one said.
Five plain questions to the City Council and the three developers — about scale models, code and labor compliance, past defaults, and private lobbying. Four went unanswered, and the silence is its own answer.
Menlo Park wants to call three busy downtown plazas “exempt surplus land” and lease them for a dollar a year. On the statute, only one of the three bids clearly qualifies it for the bargain.
Which civic organizations have publicly lined up for and against the ballot measure — sourced directly from each group's own statement.
A sympathetic personal story is circulating in support of the housing plan — but it describes an income band two of the three proposals aren't built for.
MPCSD once warned publicly about what new housing costs local schools, then took the page down. The math it raised hasn't gone anywhere.
A large share of the city's housing numbers rode on a single company's voluntary, cancel-anytime agreement. That risk has now materialized.
A California city listed as endorsing the Vote No campaign says it never did — fixed only after a public records request.
The Vote No campaign's lawyers also do financing work for a company bidding to build on the very downtown sites the campaign is trying to keep in play.
A July 9 house-party invitation for the Vote No campaign, checked claim by claim against primary sources.
An outside outlet's sympathetic coverage of the campaign to block the initiative traded substance for name-calling — and its central alarm doesn't survive a look at the ordinance's own text.
City staff proposed picking a developer and declaring the plazas surplus land months before the election that will decide whether the City can do that without a vote.
Eight years ago Menlo Park let a philanthropist's library gift slip away for want of speed. Now it is racing to hand public land and taxpayer subsidies to developers. The money — and the tempo — have reversed.
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