What the City’s own $164,951 report concedes about the parking-plazas measure.
MonitorMenlo.news · August 3, 2026 · Reports/Opinion
Menlo Park paid a firm already under contract to the City $164,951 to analyze the Downtown Parking Plazas Ordinance. The study argues against the ballot measure — and along the way states several things that complicate the City’s own case, including that building the housing at stake would likely cost the General Fund money and that it is “too soon” to say whether the measure would jeopardize state housing compliance.
Last November, when the Menlo Park City Council considered what to do with a citizen initiative that had just qualified for the ballot, it had three options under state law: adopt the ordinance outright, send it to voters, or first order a study of what the measure would do. The Council chose the study, despite the cost and delay it would bring. It appropriated $164,951 from the General Fund to pay for a study it asked its longtime housing consultant to complete, and gave the team 30 days to do the work.
The Council did not conduct a search for consultants. The single contracting action it authorized was an amendment to the City’s existing Master Services Agreement with Metropolitan Planning Group — M-Group — in a not-to-exceed amount of $164,951. M-Group in turn assembled what the staff report calls a consultant team, adding Bay Area Economics and Hexagon Transportation Consultants. No separate contracting authority for either appears in the record. The Community Development Department and the City Attorney’s Office are also named as preparers on the report’s cover page. M-Group is no stranger to the City, or to cashing its checks. (See our profile of the firm.)
The resulting document — a Ballot Measure Impact Analysis prepared under Elections Code section 9212 — is long enough that few residents will read it end to end. M-Group’s Geoff Bradley condensed it into a PowerPoint presentation to the Council on Dec. 2. As many expected, the report’s findings ran heavily against the measure. The large majority of the findings in the presentation Bradley gave that night described potential harms; only a couple pointed to potential benefits.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Buried in the body of the report are statements the City and others have seldom, if ever, repeated. They are the inconvenient truths about the downtown housing that many council members want, that the ballot measure would slow, and that — if the measure passes — would leave voters as the final arbiters of the scorecard the consultants built. Several of those truths merit another look.
The ballot measure would restrict further alternate uses of eight city-owned parking lots in downtown Menlo Park and nowhere else in the city. Downtown preservationists describe those eight parcels as a small, specific set of heavily used municipal land long dedicated to a community-wide function. Opponents describe them as the linchpin of the City’s affordable-housing plan and the way to ward off Housing Element non-compliance and the dreaded builder’s remedy. Each framing depends on a number, and the report supplies it.
The eight parking plazas total about nine acres — roughly 0.2 percent of the city’s usable land.
Table 6 of the report inventories Menlo Park’s land by designation. The City’s usable land area, excluding the Baylands and the Bay, is listed at 3,517 acres. The city-owned downtown parking lots appear as a single line: 9 acres — 0.2 percent of land in the city, and 0.3 percent of land where housing is allowed. The report does not hide this figure or relegate it to a footnote. It publishes it in a table and then argues, on the merits, that acreage is the wrong measure — that these particular parcels are unusually valuable because the City already owns them, because land cost is among the largest barriers to affordable housing in San Mateo County, and because they sit within half a mile of Caltrain and SamTrans service on El Camino Real. That is a legitimate argument, and voters can weigh it. But the underlying number is now on the record in the City’s own document.
Source: 9212 Report, the “Land Use Designations” table midway through the report; figures adapted by the consultants from the General Plan Land Use Element.
In essence, the ballot measure would affect decisions over downtown land that in size represents about nine football fields, five of them on the north side of Santa Cruz Avenue — the ground the City wants to hand to private developers in the first round of its move to convert parking plazas to apartment buildings.
The most common characterization of the measure — from the Council dais, in public comment, and in regional coverage — is that it blocks housing on the parking lots. The report declines to say that, because it is demonstrably untrue.
Voter approval “would not necessarily make development … impossible to achieve.”
In the Housing Impacts chapter, discussing Program H4.G directly, the report states that the requirement to secure voter approval “would not necessarily make development on Downtown parking lots impossible to achieve” — while adding, in the same sentence, that it would create a “significant barrier or constraint” to development. The report returns to this repeatedly. Development and improvements could still occur if the measure passes; the measure adds a step, and the report’s case is that the added step reduces the likelihood and lengthens the timeline, not that it forecloses the outcome.
Source: 9212 Report, the discussion of Housing Element Program H4.G, later in the report; see also its Fiscal Impacts chapter.
This is the report being careful, not the City conceding under pressure — and it deserves to be read that way. But it is a materially different claim than the one circulating in the campaign, and it came from the City’s own consultants.
The first topic Elections Code section 9212 authorizes a city to study is a measure’s “fiscal impact.” The report devotes roughly five pages to it. It arrives at no dollar figure — not for the measure, not for the development the measure would slow, and not for the cost of the additional elections the measure would require. What it does produce is a set of findings that run in both directions, and at least one that cuts squarely against the City’s current plan. It bears repeating.
The affordable housing the City is pursuing would likely cost the General Fund more than it returns.
The report’s reasoning is straightforward. One-hundred-percent affordable housing developments are generally exempt from property tax. The City’s September 2025 request for proposals prioritizes 345 affordable units. So the sites would generate little or no new property tax while adding residents who require police, public works, library, and recreation services. The report states that because the RFP is expected to include a large share of property-tax-exempt affordable housing, service costs for the development the City is currently pursuing would likely exceed revenues by a greater margin than for taxable projects — and that those costs fall on the annual operating budget and are not covered by one-time development impact fees. The report treats this as an argument for mixed-use and non-residential development rather than an argument against the program. But the finding stands on its own: by the City’s own analysis, the downtown housing plan is a net cost to the General Fund.
Source: 9212 Report, the Fiscal Impacts chapter, early in the report (“Service Cost Impacts” and “Summary of Fiscal Impacts Associated with New Development”).
Passage “would not directly change the City’s current revenues or service costs.”
The Fiscal Impacts chapter opens its own summary with that sentence — adding that the measure would instead make development and modifications to the sites more difficult and uncertain. The fiscal case against the measure is therefore entirely indirect: it depends on a chain of assumptions about developer behavior, financing, grant competitiveness and future council decisions, none of which the report quantifies or assigns a probability. The chapter also notes several ways the fiscal picture could improve. Property-tax revenue would increase over current conditions if any non-exempt development were built on the sites. If the City used a long-term ground lease rather than a sale, possessory-interest tax would generally be roughly equivalent to the property tax a comparable private development would pay. And non-residential development on the sites would likely be fiscally positive.
Source: 9212 Report, the Fiscal Impacts chapter (“Property Tax Revenues” and “Summary of Fiscal Impacts”).
A central claim of many, and one propped up by the consultant’s report, is that if voters enact the ballot measure it will endanger the City’s compliance with state housing law. That, in turn, feeds the “sky is falling” predictions that losing or delaying 345 affordable units downtown could put the certified Housing Element at risk, with consequences ranging from lost state funding to the builder’s remedy. Deeper in the report, it says something quieter.
The City is “making good progress,” and the effect on state housing goals cannot yet be determined.
Reviewing the City’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation progress through Nov. 4, 2025, the report finds Menlo Park nearly three years into an eight-year cycle and making good progress on required production. It then states that it is “too soon in the planning period to say” whether the loss of the 345 planned downtown homes would affect the City’s ability to meet its state-mandated housing goals.
Source: 9212 Report, the housing-compliance discussion (Table 8 and accompanying text) later in the report.
The report then carries that “too soon” finding forward into a far more certain claim about how the measure would affect housing and equity. Read across three layers of the same document, the evidence never changes — but the certainty does.
The City is nearly three years into an eight-year cycle, making good progress on required production, and it is “too soon in the planning period to say” whether losing the 345 downtown homes would affect compliance with state housing goals.
The hedge is gone. The summary states flatly that passage “would negatively affect racial and economic equity,” and that barriers to building here would limit progress on housing cost burdens and exacerbate longstanding patterns of unequal access. Not “could.” Would.
Three bullets under “Equity Findings,” including that the measure could “limit progress in reducing housing cost burdens” for Black, Latino, and lower-income households and risk “widening racial and economic inequities.” The eight-year timeline, the good-progress finding and the too-soon-to-say caveat appear nowhere in the deck.
No sentence in any of the three layers is false. Yet the qualification that most limits the report’s central claim exists only in the layer with the fewest readers, buried deep in the report body. That limitation was not heard aloud on Dec. 2. What the Council received, and what has circulated since, is the version in which the uncertainty has been resolved. The Executive Summary is also where the report’s causal language is strongest and its evidentiary support thinnest: its equity conclusion is stated as a definite prediction about racial and economic outcomes, in a document that elsewhere concedes the measure would not necessarily make downtown development impossible.
Everything above describes a document dated Nov. 25, 2025. It was written to inform a Council decision that December. It is now being used for a different purpose — informing a citywide vote eleven months later — and the record has moved substantially since it was written.
The RFP asked developers to replace all 556 existing public parking spaces on Plazas 1, 2, and 3 at no cost to the City. According to The Almanac, two of the three respondents said they could build replacement parking only with a financial contribution from the City. The specific amounts sought are set out in the proposals themselves, which the City has posted publicly, and were discussed at the Council’s June 2, 2026 study session.
This is the single most consequential gap between the report and the present record. The report’s fiscal chapter analyzed a scenario in which the City conveys land and a developer builds housing and parking. It did not analyze — and at the time could not have analyzed — a scenario in which the City is asked to contribute capital toward the replacement parking. Voters weighing the measure’s fiscal effect in November are working with an analysis that does not contain this variable.
The 9212 analysis remains the most thorough government document on the ballot measure, and its core findings on planning and housing consistency have not been superseded. But its housing data stops at Nov. 4, 2025, and its fiscal analysis predates the proposals and the replacement-parking subsidy question entirely. It should be read as a December 2025 briefing, not as a current statement of facts. Yet its truths remain.
On Dec. 2, after receiving the report, the Council voted unanimously to place the Downtown Parking Plazas Ordinance on the Nov. 3, 2026 ballot rather than adopt it outright. Then-Mayor Drew Combs, now a councilmember, had been the sole vote against commissioning the study a month earlier, predicting that people would use the parts they agreed with to validate their positions and discredit the rest. That prediction is being borne out — including by this article.
This piece is opinion and commentary. Quotations from the 9212 report and the council record were checked against the documents in our reference library; page citations are to the report as filed. It was AI-assisted in drafting and verification and reviewed by the site operator before publication; see our AI use disclosure.