All of which are SPECIAL CONCESSIONS
You’d think from the city council meeting last night that our Old Palo Alto community is beset with teenagers clogging our streets with parked cars, traffic jams grid locking the neighborhood, and an incessant noise streaming from loudspeakers and referee’s whistles. The Old Palo Alto streets have ample street parking. Traffic is unremarkable morning and evening. And, the only community noise we hear in Old Palo Alto is from the Caltrain, the occasional Stanford football game, and concerts at Shoreline. The aforementioned concerns presented last night are vastly out of touch with the reality of living in Old Palo Alto.
The truth of the matter is most residents of Palo Alto know Castilleja as an excellent school, but they have no idea where the school is located. Nearly everyone is shocked when they learn there is a school off Embarcado. The community conversations at our parks, the farmer’s es, the community pool, the Old Palo Alto block parties, and the drop-offs and pick-ups from school are about real issues (housing crisis, climate change, social justice, restoring the community with Covid, etc) and NEVER about the minutiae Castilleja’s remodel or expansion. After 6 years, the city council has lost perspective. Castilleja has time and again revised its plans to work in good faith with its neighbors and within the city’s ordinances. Castilleja agreed to an extreme TDM (for a non-existent problem) in the name of compromise. The council needs to work in good faith and stop moving the goalposts.
And how did the city find out?
I support Castilleja. I live half a block away, and I’m so grateful for all they bring to the community. I’ve never heard Casti events, and the students are thoughtful and polite. Castilleja has spent six years responding and adapting the plan to neighbor demands, and the goalposts keep moving. It’s time. A small, independent girls’ school needs and deserves to modernize after over fifty years. The rhetoric about violating their CUP needs to end. Yes. They did. The new head, Nanci Kaufman, immediately alerted them when she became the head and found out what had happened. Traffic has been reduced. Allow this school to modernize. Stop wasting taxpayer money on more proceedings.
As a Castilleja parent, I am grateful for the Mayor, Vice-Mayor and 3 CC members stopping, listening and voting for additional time to consider the “facts” of this situation.
Hopefully on 6/6 they will NOT allow Castilleja to expand as they wish by not granting a text amendment, encroachment and variance.
Last night I found it fascinating how many speaking hookup bars near me Saint John on behalf of Castilleja were actually rude to CC members and the public whose opposes their plans.
And how many were demanding more enrollment, no monitoring and continued special treatment even BEFORE their current expansion plan is settled!
Mr. Lait seemed shocked when the TRUTH came out about how easy it was to GAME Castilleja’s air tight, world class, rock solid transportation demand management program (TDM). Just park or get dropped off a block away from school! Easy done! Wink; wink.
If a car does not come into the campus where the monitors are stationed, no count of the car trip is made. Who designed this system which will be used to determine Castilleja’s future enrollment increases?
I think it explains why Castilleja repeatedly boasts of a 30% reduction in no new trips, while I see girls walking across Embacardero to school after parking on Melville.
It is ironic that the garage is touted as requested by neighbors to “end parking in the neighborhoods while the TDM is so flimsy that neighborhood parking will continue.