Five people signed the opposition’s rebuttal: Betsy Nash, Mayor of Menlo Park; Ross Silverstein, chair of the Menlo Park Planning Commission; Margarita Méndez, a public school teacher; Erin Paruszewski, a Menlo Park small business owner; and Jeffery Liang, a Menlo Park small business owner. The contact person named on the form is Karen Grove.
Three of the people who signed either the rebuttal or the argument against Measure P are identified by their standing as business owners. Yet only one identifies the business. Matt Burr signed the argument against as owner of Café Zoë and Neighborhood Pizza, which is in the Willows, not downtown, and which sits on a street Measure P does not reach.
The rebuttal then lists two signers as Menlo Park small business owners without naming their businesses or addresses. This leaves out a critical fact: whether either trades downtown, depends on the eight plazas, or would lose a single parking space during construction or after it.
Public reporting fills in part of what the forms leave out. The Los Altos Town Crier reported in February 2023 that Erin Paruszewski owned Alkalign Studios, a fitness business then based in downtown Los Altos, and that she had closed her Menlo Park studio in 2022. InMenlo reported in April 2025 that a Jeffrey Liang owns Spiffy Pottery Studio at 1919 Menalto Avenue, in the Willows. The rebuttal form spells the signer’s given name Jeffery.
On that reporting, none of the three appears to run a business downtown.
The proponents filed their own rebuttal, answering the argument against Measure P, on Aug. 18, 2026. It is not examined here. Readers who want to judge it for themselves can read it as filed; the County’s Nov. 3, 2026 election page carries every Measure P document.
Among the many flaws and falsehoods in what they signed, five points deserve review, two of which are especially egregious.
First, the opposition’s rebuttal alleges a Yes vote will not achieve certain things but fails to admit a No vote will not attain them either.
Then it tries to say that if anyone sues over the measure, three people alone will decide whether it gets defended. The ordinance does not say that.
One — a test that fits both answers
The rebuttal — the opponents’ answer to the argument in favor — says a vote for Measure P will not save downtown, will not improve parking, and will not create affordable housing. If those propositions are fact, they equally apply to a vote against Measure P.
Nothing voters do in November pours concrete, signs a lease, or opens a unit to a tenant. Measure P is about process. It bars the City from selling, leasing, conveying or repurposing the eight downtown plazas in ways that diminish parking, unless voters approve. It does not build a garage. It does not build an apartment. It sets who decides.
A claim that returns the same result either way you vote tells voters nothing about the choice in front of them. It simply constitutes words without meaning.
Two — what the legal-defense clause leaves out
The rebuttal tells voters that if anyone sues over Measure P, only the three people who put it on the ballot — not voters, not the City Council — decide whether to defend it. That is incomplete if not misleading.
Section 10 of the ordinance opens by declaring that the people want the ordinance defended by the City. Proponents may step in only if the City fails to defend it, or fails to appeal an adverse judgment. The first decision belongs to the Council and the City Attorney. The clause the rebuttal calls a poison pill operates only if they walk away from it.
The rebuttal is right that the City indemnifies proponents, and voters should know that. It omits the sentence immediately after, which caps that indemnity at no more than what it would cost the City to run the defense itself.
The filed rebuttal carries handwritten tallies down both margins, counted line by line, showing its text has a word count of 244, against a limit of 250. It’s a shame that the care taken in that word count did not carry over to make sure that the words used were precise, complete, and accurate.
Three — a risk the City’s own study would not state
The rebuttal tells voters that Measure P “risks losing local control city-wide,” and grounds that on what it calls the city’s annual report showing the downtown sites are essential to the plan for affordable housing.
Menlo Park paid $164,951 for a study of exactly this question. The Elections Code section 9212 impact report the Council commissioned before placing the measure on the ballot says it is too soon to say whether Measure P would jeopardize the City’s state housing compliance.
The rebuttal converts the City’s own “too soon to say” into a consequence stated as fact. It also moves the authority: the report that examined the measure is the impact study, not an annual report, and the rebuttal does not identify the document it means.
A voter has 250 words in front of them and no footnotes. Nothing in the pamphlet tells them the City’s own consultants declined to reach the conclusion the rebuttal hands them.
Four — three people did not put this on the ballot
The rebuttal intimates if not states that ballot measure P is the work of but three people. It confuses filers with proponents.
When the three petitioners filed with the City Clerk on Oct. 10, 2025, their signatures well exceeded the 10 percent threshold required by state law. The County verified 2,200 valid signatures against a 2,103 threshold.
Plus, the measure wasn’t put on the ballot by three petitioners acting alone. On Dec. 2, 2025 the City Council placed Measure P on the November ballot by unanimous vote, after commissioning a $164,951 report on its impacts.
Every member of that Council voted to send it to the voters, including Mayor Nash, who now is the lead signatory of the rebuttal under review here.
There is a further problem with counting to three. State law sets that number. Elections Code section 9202 provides that the notice of intention to circulate a petition “shall be signed by at least one, but not more than three, proponents.” Three is the ceiling, not a clique. Faulting the measure for having three proponents faults them for obeying the statute that governs how a citizen initiative begins.
Five — two names that will not be voting
The rebuttal closes by asking Menlo Park to join the five persons signing that filing, Congressman Sam Liccardo, and Habitat for Humanity in voting no.
That name-dropping misleads and misinforms.
It is true that Liccardo represents California’s 16th Congressional District, which runs from the San Mateo coast through western Santa Clara County, and that Menlo Park is split between congressional districts, with portions of it in the 15th, represented by Kevin Mullin. But Liccardo does not vote in Menlo Park city elections because he does not live there. He was mayor of San Jose from 2015 to 2023 and still lives there. San Jose is in Santa Clara County. He will not be casting a ballot on Measure P. Habitat will not either, because organizations are not residents or voters. Habitat gets no vote.
Beyond that, the pamphlet leaves out a material fact relating to any support Habitat might have for the rebuttal arguments. Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, the affiliate serving San Mateo County, is in an active financial relationship with the City of Menlo Park.
The City has committed $3.6 million from its below-market-rate housing fund to Habitat’s Laurel Landing townhomes in Belle Haven. On Aug. 11, 2026 the Council approved that subdivision, while denying Habitat’s requested fee waiver, 5–0, adopting the staff resolution without dissent. That vote came after the Vice Mayor and the Mayor said the City could not afford such subsidies for affordable housing given its current budget situation.
The authorization for this rebuttal was signed the following day.
That establishes no arrangement, and this piece suggests none. But when the community is told to join Habitat in voting no, it at least should know that Habitat has a live financial relationship with the council whose mayor signed the argument. The word limit is not why that disclosure is missing. The rebuttal found room for the name but not the rest of the story.