After securing approval from City Hall last year, a proposal to demolish three homes on North California Avenue and to construct three larger homes on the site may plunge back into uncertainty on Monday night, when the City Council considers an appeal from neighbors who say they haven't been adequately notified about the project.

The appeal was filed by Beatrix Cashmore and Nicholas Kaposhilin, whose homes are also located on the 900 block of North California Avenue, near Louis Road. The appellants are seeking to overturn the approval that the applicant, Greg Xiong, received from the city last fall for the three-home project.

Under the proposal, which the Architectural Review Board approved in September, the three existing homes would be demolished and replaced with three two-story homes. Each of the new homes would have basements and the largest one would also have an accessory dwelling unit.

Normally, a project involving single-story homes gets approved by the Planning and Community Environment Department without public hearings. But when three or more homes are involved, the project requires a review by the city's Architectural Review Board before it can gets the city's stamp of approval. The only time a project of the sort gets to the council is when a resident files an appeal, which is what happened in this case.

The council had a chance on Jan. 9 to deny the appeal and reaffirm the planning director's approval. Instead, after several council members raised questions about some of the details of the applications, members agreed to continue the item to Jan. 23. The appeal remains on the council's "consent calendar," where various items get approved by a single vote without discussion.

The appeal from Cashmore and Kaposhilin claims that neither they or any of their neighbors had received notices from the city about the Sept. 15 public hearing on the project (none of them spoke at the Architectural Review Board meeting). A project of this scope, they wrote in the appeal, "is unusual and input from local residents about management of potentially disruptive or unsafe effects on the neighborhood should be addressed in collaboration with project planners."

Planning staff maintain that the project "met and exceeded" the standard noticing requirements, which include a published notice in a newspaper (in this case, the Weekly) and mailers to properties within 600 feet of the property.

"Staff is unable to attest as to whether the appellant actually received the notice, which is subject to other variables beyond the city's control, including proper postal delivery and what an individual or family member does with the notice and the amount of attention paid to the notice when received," a new report from the Department of Planning and Community Environment states.

The appeal also raises specific concerns about management of commuter and bicycle traffic during the construction season and about the lack of parking being made available to construction workers. Cashmore and Kaposhilin are also requesting that the council delve deeper into plans to monitor the effects of basement construction -- specifically, the "dewatering," also known as the pumping out of groundwater that would have to occur for basement construction.

But Palo Alto officials maintain that existing conditions already address the dewatering issue. The city is requiring Xiong to commission a geotechnical report listing the "highest anticipated groundwater level." The city's Public Works Department may also require that all groundwater be tested for contaminants before the initial discharge and at intervals during dewatering.

"It is anticipated that this review combined with standard practices and the department's evolving policies on this topic will ensure that dewatering impacts will be minimized," the staff report states.