For as much as proponents and opponents may try, their voter guide statements can’t fully inform on the critical issues underlying the City’s designation of downtown parking plazas as the priority location for building affordable housing.
MonitorMenlo.news · Opinion · August 17, 2026 · Reports/Opinion
This is an opinion piece. It argues a position. Every factual assertion is sourced to the primary documents listed at the end, so readers can check it against the record and reach their own conclusion.
The City’s $164,951 consultant’s study on the ballot measure impacts doesn’t do the job, either. The report’s preparation and contracting record is set out separately in An integrated extension of the staff.
Voters who truly want a critical review of the issues unfortunately need to wade through the City’s housing element, its RFQ and RFP documents, the developer responses, the Council’s staff reports on the measure, the City’s unfinished parking management study, and the city budget to assess the downsides and upsides of the City’s design to convert highly used parking into high density housing.
Strip away the campaign literature and Measure P poses one question: who decides the fate of the downtown plazas, and on what record.
Measure P’s answer is to publish the specifics and put them to a vote. That is slow and inconvenient. It is also legible. Voters would see a named developer, a real subsidy figure, a real space count and a real building height before anything is conveyed.
The answer on the other side is to leave it with the Council — the same Council that has spent three years and two grants without publishing a parking recommendation, that will not deliver a financial review of the bids until six weeks before the election, that ordered its impact study late and then complained of the deadline, and that moved from solicitation to three bids in seven months while the facts stayed in the drawer.
That is not a claim of bad faith. It is a claim about demonstrated priorities. An institution that moves this quickly on disposition and this slowly on disclosure has not earned unreviewable authority over land the City assembled by eminent domain in the 1940s.
The rest of this piece is the record for those assertions.
Measure P would add Title 17, Chapter 17.01 to the municipal code. It would bar the City from selling, leasing, donating or otherwise conveying any city-owned downtown parking lot without voter approval, require a further ballot measure after any determination that a plaza is surplus or exempt surplus land, and require a ballot measure before any physical alteration permanently diminishing parking availability, access or convenience.
Proponents filed the petition October 10, 2025 with 2,200 valid signatures against a 2,103 threshold. On December 2, 2025 the Council placed it on the November 3, 2026 ballot under Elections Code § 9215. The county designated it Measure P on August 13, 2026.
That is the operative text. Everything else in this campaign is argument about what it will produce.
Opponents warn that the ordinance kills affordable housing, wrecks Housing Element compliance and invites state intervention. Read against the text, most of that collapses.
It does not prohibit housing. It conditions the City’s conveyance of its own land on a vote. Development voters approve proceeds.
It does not require a vote for parking improvements. Structures, EV charging and ADA access are outside its reach.
It does not apply anywhere but the eight downtown plazas. It is not a citywide growth control.
It does not regulate height, density or state law. Base zoning allows 60 units per acre at 60 to 64 feet; public benefit bonuses reach 100 units per acre at 81 to 85 feet; AB 1763 adds up to three stories or 33 feet for 100% affordable projects within a half mile of Caltrain. Those numbers hold no matter how anyone votes. This cuts against the scale rhetoric on the proponents’ side too, and it should be said plainly.
Then the central claim. The argument against Measure P — signed by Mayor Betsy Nash under the title of the office — tells voters an independent analysis finds the initiative likely violates state law. The City’s § 9212 report, at page 44, says it is too soon in the planning period to say whether the measure jeopardizes state housing compliance. That hedge was compressed in the executive summary and did not survive into the slide deck the Council saw.
A report the City paid $164,951 for — and the strongest claim Measure P’s opponents make is one that report would not make. Our companion piece, Bluff, or blunder?, checks the argument’s seven claims one by one against that report.
The RFP specified that developers finance and replace all 556 spaces without using City money. Not one of the three bids does that.
Presidio Bay Ventures asks $15 million plus fee and tax waivers. Related California and Alta Housing propose no privately financed parking at all and would have the City bond a garage priced near $63 million. Alliant Communities asks for two separate City financing accommodations: a loan of the impact fees, repayable with interest, and a second loan covering the upfront fair market lease value, structured as a residual receipts note. Eden Housing, the one respondent in the RFQ round to say flatly that no-cost replacement parking was infeasible, did not bid.
The City runs a structural deficit. Its FY2026-27 budget balances only with one-time state help, and unassigned reserves are projected gone by 2028. The independent financial review of these three proposals is not due until September — six weeks before the election. The bid-by-bid detail is set out in our RFP Fast Facts.
The draft the Council reviewed set requirements. The RFP it issued set priorities. That shift is visible inside a single document.
Section 3.1 of the September 15, 2025 RFP says proposals should provide at least 556 parking spaces, one-to-one replacement, “able to be constructed by the Developer without financial contributions from the City.” But the Notice of Request for Proposals, on page 3, says all replacement parking must be developer-financed without City contributions. Section 1.4.2 says one-to-one replacement is “strongly preferred.” Section 3.2(F), listing Development Objectives, returns to should.
Must. Strongly preferred. Should.
Three registers, one requirement, one document
The downgrade happened in the open. At the August 26, 2025 meeting, Principal Planner Tom Smith recommended recasting the terms as priorities, explaining that the 345 units, the 556 spaces, and design compliance would remain City priorities “but would not automatically disqualify a developer if they cannot be provided.” The Council authorized release on that basis, 4–1, then-Mayor Drew Combs dissenting. We report that record at length in Requirements, priorities, and infeasibility.
Section 6.1 tells the selection committee to recommend proposals that “most closely meet the Project priorities.” A priority a bidder should meet is something the committee weighs. A requirement a bidder must meet is a floor no proposal can fall below. Those are not the same instruction, and only one of them a developer can be held to. The City has left itself room to argue either position depending on which page it cites.
One more gap belongs here. Section 3.1(A) sets the income band at 15% to 80% AMI. Program H4.G — quoted in § 1.3 of the same RFP — promised 345 units at 30 to 50 percent AMI. A unit at 80% AMI satisfies the RFP priority and does not satisfy what the Housing Element committed to.
This is the disconnect, and it is a pattern rather than an incident.
The City applied for a Metropolitan Transportation Commission parking management grant in March 2023 and was awarded it that July. The project kicked off twelve months later. Utilization surveys followed in September 2024 and May 2025. An open house came in September 2025, and a survey drawing more than 1,000 responses closed that October. In January 2026 the City began Phase 2 on a second grant. On April 28, 2026 the Council approved, on its consent calendar, an amendment to the City’s agreement with AECOM Technical Services for supplemental work on the study, plus a further appropriation from the Transportation Fund. [Corrected Aug. 19, 2026: this sentence originally dated the action May 19, 2026. The April 28 minutes appeared on the May 19 agenda for acceptance; the action itself was taken April 28.]
Three years, two grants, two rounds of utilization data, and a supplemental appropriation — and no published recommendations. Neither survey has been packaged in any form a voter can use to test the phrase “highly used” against evidence. The City has the data. It has not handed it over.
Now start the other clock. The Council authorized the RFQ in June 2025. The RFP issued September 15, 2025. Proposals arrived in December. Seven months from solicitation to bids on 556 public parking spaces.
The same asymmetry runs through the § 9212 report. State law would have let the Council order it while the petition circulated. The Council waited until certification, then absorbed a 30-day deadline of its own making. And § 9212 lets the Council specify what its report addresses — so the Council chose the questions, and the report answers the Council’s questions rather than a voter’s.
Consider what the City demands of others. The RFP directs each developer to submit a pro forma in PDF and unlocked Excel, with a full table of assumptions, sources and uses, income and expense projections, a loan sizing worksheet, thirty-year cash flow projections and a tax credit worksheet.
Thirty-year cash flows from developers. For voters, a report with a citation error — AB 32 misattributed as SB 32 — inconsistent date ranges, and a headline statistic that will not reconcile against the City’s own budget.
Elections Code § 9282 caps a direct ballot argument at 300 words; § 9285 caps a rebuttal at 250. Nobody explains a 55-year ground lease at $1.00 a year, a housing element site inventory and a garage financing structure in that space. Neither statement is a research document. Neither was written to be one.
That is the problem with resolving this on the voter guide alone, in either direction.
There is no substitute for reading them.
Ten documents, several hundred pages, to decide one local land use question. That is an unreasonable burden to place on a voter.
It is also, at the moment, the only honest way to decide it.
Sources: City of Menlo Park, Development on Downtown Parking Plazas 1, 2 and 3 — Request for Proposals, issued Sept. 15, 2025 (§§ 1.3, 1.4.2, 3.1, 3.2(F), 4.1, 4.2, 5.2, 6.1, and the Notice of Request for Proposals at p. 3); Staff Report #25-126-CC, Attachment A (Aug. 26, 2025 draft) and the Aug. 26, 2025 Council meeting recording; Staff Report #25-180-CC and #25-181-CC; the City’s § 9212 report, at p. 44; the three developer responses filed Dec. 15, 2025; City Council minutes, April 28, 2026, consent item G6 and Staff Report #26-063-CC (AECOM Technical Services amendment and Transportation Fund appropriation); the City’s Downtown Parking Management Study project page; San Mateo County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder & Elections (Measure P letter assignment, Aug. 13, 2026); Cal. Elec. Code §§ 9212, 9215, 9282, 9285. The $164,951 figure and the § 9212 report’s citation error, date-range inconsistencies and unreconciled headline statistic are carried forward from this publication’s own earlier reporting.
Disclosure: the operator of MonitorMenlo.news has made personal financial contributions to Save Downtown Menlo, the organization sponsoring Measure P. This site does not raise or expend funds on the measure and is not affiliated with any campaign.