The Planning Commission seats seven. The roll call from its May 18, 2026 meeting names them: Ross Silverstein, chair; Katie Behroozi, vice chair; Andrew Ehrich; Jennifer Schindler; Misha Silin; Katie Ferrick; and Nancy Larocca Hedley.
Every one of those seven names appears on the endorsements page of homesformenlopark.com, the website of the organization opposing Measure P, listed with their City titles.
One of them went further. Silverstein, the chair, signed the rebuttal to the argument in favor — the 250 words that will appear in the voter pamphlet under his name and his title.
What the Commission is for
The Planning Commission is not a campaign organization and was never meant to resemble one. It is an advisory body of residents appointed by the City Council to review projects, hold hearings, take public testimony, and recommend. Its authority is entirely borrowed. It has none of its own.
What it does have is a queue. Three development teams answered the City’s solicitation for Plazas 1, 2 and 3. Anything the Council chooses to advance has to move through design review, and design review runs through this commission. The seven people who will sit in judgment of those applications have already told the public, by name and by title, how they feel about the ballot measure that would give voters a say over the same ground.
They are entitled to that view. A commissioner does not surrender a vote or a voice on taking an appointment, and nothing in the Municipal Code says otherwise.
But an advisory body exists to hear a thing out. Seven for seven is not a body hearing a thing out. It is a body that has finished.
The cast, and what it says about the record
The endorsements page lists more than the Planning Commission. It carries the chair and vice chair of the Housing Commission, commissioners from Environmental Quality, Complete Streets, the Library Commission and the Bicycle Commission, and past members of most of them. It carries Mayor Betsy Nash and Vice Mayor Jennifer Wise. It carries Karen Grove, listed as former chair of the Housing Commission, who is also the Vote No campaign’s treasurer, the contact on the ballot argument, and the contact on the rebuttal.
Read down the page and the City’s advisory structure reassembles itself as a campaign roster.
Two errors on that page. It lists both Andrew Ehrich and Ross Silverstein as “Planning Commission Chair.” Ehrich chaired the commission previously; Silverstein chairs it now. It also lists Jennifer Schindler as “Planning Commission Former Chair.” Schindler is a sitting commissioner, reappointed April 28, 2026 to a term running through April 30, 2030. A campaign that has enlisted this much of a city’s civic apparatus might be expected to know who currently runs it.
Predictability
Something has to explain how a seven-member body arrives at unanimity on a contested ballot question in a town that split 62–38 the last two times it voted on land use.
The likeliest explanation is not conspiracy. It is selection. People are appointed to advisory bodies by a Council that has views, through interviews conducted by that Council, on the strength of applications that ask where they stand. Over several appointment cycles, a body drifts toward the people who agreed with the last set of appointments. Nobody has to coordinate anything. The filter does the work.
What that produces is predictability, and predictability is genuinely useful to a City government. Staff can plan. Projects can be scheduled. A council majority can move an initiative through hearings knowing roughly what the hearings will say.
The cost only shows up when the ground shifts.
An advisory body is supposed to be the instrument that tells a Council something it did not already believe. That is the whole function — residents in a room, hearing testimony the Council will not sit through, reporting back what the town sounds like. A commission selected for agreement cannot perform that function, because it has no mechanism for registering a change in the town’s mood. It returns the same signal whatever the input.
Fifteen percent of Menlo Park’s registered voters signed the petition that put Measure P on the ballot — half again the ten percent state law requires. That is a signal. It arrived through the one channel a commission cannot filter, which is why it arrived as a ballot measure instead of as public comment.
What it costs
If the plaza project goes forward in any form, the applications land in front of these seven.
If Measure P fails, they review three proposals for a project they have publicly committed to defending, and every finding they make will be read in that light. If it passes, they review those proposals knowing the voters overruled a position they had signed their names to.
Neither is a good place for an advisory body to stand, and both were avoidable. A commissioner who wanted to keep faith with the review had a straightforward option: hold the view privately, and stay off the roster. Seven declined it.
The predictable answer is the cheap one. It costs nothing to give and nothing to hear, which is exactly its problem. A Council that has arranged never to be surprised by its own commissions has not eliminated surprise. It has only guaranteed that when the surprise comes, it will arrive from the voters, on a ballot, where nobody appointed anybody.