Racing the ballot.

Most government officials try not to take consequential actions close to an election, precisely so they don't tilt — or preempt — its outcome. It is why the U.S. Justice Department honors an unwritten “60-day rule,” reflected in the Attorney General's regularly reissued Election Year Sensitivities memo, which instructs prosecutors that they may never time an investigative step or a charge “for the purpose of affecting any election.” In Menlo Park, the city's own staff appears to be doing something close to the opposite: advancing a downtown-housing timeline built to reach its most consequential step — declaring heavily used public parking plazas “surplus” — on or before the very day voters get their say.

The norm

The restraint is familiar across government. The Justice Department's 60-day practice is the best-known version — not a law, but a tradition meant to keep officials from putting a thumb on an election's scale. Courts observe a cousin of it in the Purcell principle, hesitating to change election rules as a vote nears. The shared idea is simple: when the people are about to decide something, those in power should avoid decisive moves that could moot or shape that decision.

The schedule

Menlo Park's staff laid its plan out in a report for the July 14, 2026 City Council meeting (Staff Report #26-122-CC). This site first flagged the maneuver in Nash’s dash; the staff’s own Table 6 now supplies the calendar behind it. Its Table 6 — an “updated downtown development tentative schedule” — sequences the steps to hand Parking Plazas 1, 2, and 3 to a developer:

• September 2026: the Council reviews the financial analysis and gives direction on which proposal to select.
• 30–60 days later: the Council adopts a Surplus Land Act resolution — the formal declaration that the plazas are “surplus.”
• Then, in turn: notify the state, observe a 30-day waiting period, approve an exclusive negotiating agreement, obtain a Planning Commission conformity finding, and finally approve a disposition and development agreement.

Where the calendar lands

Start the clock at a September council meeting and add the schedule's own “30–60 days,” and the surplus declaration falls in October or early November 2026. The election is November 3. Nothing in the timeline defers that declaration until after the vote — the single most irreversible signal that the plazas are headed out of public hands is penciled in for the window around, and possibly before, the election.

That matters because of what is on the ballot. The measure voters decide on November 3 would require voter approval before the City takes actions that diminish the availability, access, or convenience of downtown public parking. A surplus declaration adopted in October would let the City argue it acted before the measure took effect — reaching the very decision voters were about to be asked to make, days ahead of their answer.

The deadline that isn’t

Staff defend the timeline as a matter of necessity. The report says the steps “further the City’s goals of meeting the timelines” set in Housing Element program H4.G, and warns that if the City fails to implement its certified housing element, the state’s housing department “can revoke its finding” of compliance.

Measured against the record, that urgency does not hold up — and this site’s point-by-point analysis lays out why. Menlo Park’s 2023–2031 Housing Element was already certified by the state — on March 21, 2024 — and runs through 2031. RHNA is a duty to plan for and permit housing across an eight-year cycle, not to break ground on any one parcel by a date certain; the plan carries a roughly 30 percent capacity buffer and dozens of other opportunity sites. And the state never required the downtown plazas at all. As Save Downtown Menlo documents from the Housing Element’s own text, the City “included the parking lots because they wanted to, not because they had to” — it called them an “opportunity.” If the plazas come off the table, the City can meet its numbers by amending the element and swapping in other sites, as neighboring San Mateo has done. And a sitting member of the Council has said as much. Reviewing how the City arrived here, Councilmember Drew Combs — who was on the Council when the plazas were chosen and, in his own words, “owning it” — acknowledged from the dais that choices were made: repurposing the downtown lots, he said, was “the vision that Menlo Park wanted” — not the option of last resort, but “what we wanted.” (See also Nash’s dash.)

So the compliance clock staff invoke to justify reaching the surplus declaration before November 3 is not the binding constraint it is made to sound like. On the record it looks more like a red herring than a genuine deadline — a real-sounding urgency the City’s own certified plan does not require. And whatever the intent behind it, a schedule with this much slack that still reaches its most consequential step in the days around the vote risks leaving residents with the impression that their say is a formality.

The schedule is labeled “tentative,” and staff say they will keep evaluating the “potential impacts of the ballot measure, if approved by voters.” But the calendar is still the calendar. Whether by design or simply by momentum, Menlo Park’s staff has drawn a timeline that reaches its decisive, hard-to-reverse step right as — or just before — the electorate is finally heard. That is the mirror image of the restraint most officials show near an election, and residents are entitled to ask why the rush cannot wait a few more weeks for the voters to speak.