With the City Council days away from its initial action on Castilleja School's proposal to rebuild its campus and gradually expand enrollment, Nanci Kauffman, head of Castilleja, and Andie Reed, member of the neighborhood group Preserve Neighborhood Quality of Life Now, outlined their hopes and concerns about the project at a virtual town hall meeting on Thursday night.

The virtual event, which was sponsored by Palo Alto Online and the Palo Alto Weekly, focused on some of the contentious issues in the approval process, including traffic impacts, the school's proposed parking garage and its plans to gradually increase enrollment to 540.

While Reed and many other critics of the school's proposal have argued that Castilleja's proposed enrollment number is too high (the school currently has 426 students), Kauffman called it "an ideal number for us because it allows us to increase the high school really with minimal increase in staffing."

"We get to improve our programs, our athletic programs, the arts programs, the language programs improve because we have a few more students to work with and we don't really have to add many staff members," Kauffman said.

Reed said she and her neighbors prefer a more gradual approach, with the school rebuilding its campus and raising its enrollment to about 450 students. While the city's proposed conditions would require the school to minimize its traffic impacts before it can get any further enrollment increases, Reed noted that verifying traffic counts and scaling back enrollment is a complex process that does not go far enough to reassure neighbors who have experienced traffic problems because of the school.

The Planning and Transportation Commission, which supported the school's plan to go up to 540 students, tried to offer some reassurance to neighbors by creating a "no net new trips" requirement for Castilleja, going well beyond the recommendations of the Environmental Impact Report, which identified a list of mitigations that would bring impacts to "less than significant" levels.

Neither Castilleja nor the neighbors have embraced that idea. Castilleja's transportation consultant argued in a letter that the requirement exceeds what was needed. Castilleja officials did not backtrack from that position Thursday, though they highlighted their success to date in curbing traffic. Almost all students who arrive from afar do so by train, Kauffman said, and school staff are prohibited from getting to school through solo car commuting more than twice per week.

But Reed countered Thursday that the process of verifying trip counts and going through the process of freezing or reducing Castilleja's enrollment is too long and complex to offer real reassurance to the neighborhood next to the school. The school, she said, should go beyond "no net new trips" and work to actually reduce its traffic levels.

Reed suggested that to increase enrollment, the school should embrace a "kiss-and-ride" program where out-of-town students get shuttled in from off-site lots, minimizing the number of cars arriving to and departing from the campus. She also said it's not fair for the city to put all the risks of the school's expansion on the immediate neighborhood.

"What we need to do is not use a baseline of where we were when we were having lot of traffic issues but say, 'Work your way down, and once you have — we'll be talking enrollment.'" Reed said.

To advance the project, the council would have to certify the environmental analysis for Castilleja's modernization project; approve its request for a variance that allows the new buildings to exceed density regulations in the single-family neighborhood; and approve a new conditional use permit that governs, among other aspects, the school's enrollment numbers and the number of special events the school is allowed to have. While Castilleja had proposed 90 events per year, the planning commission recommended reducing it to 74, as well as having no events on Sundays and limiting the number of events on Saturday evenings to five per year.

They would also have to approve staff's finding that Castilleja's proposed underground garage is compliant with zoning, despite a general prohibition on underground garages in single-family neighborhoods (the prohibition, per code, is limited to residential uses).

Kauffman said that the school had proposed the garage after requests from neighbors early in the process. In 2013, neighbors were "adamant" that they wanted a garage, she said, and the school's modernization plan appeared to be a "non-starter" without a new facility.

Reed noted that while the garage was part of the earlier discussions, shuttles and off-site parking lots were a more popular alternative for the neighbors.

"The idea of digging this hole and filling it with polluting cement and building a bunker for storage of cars is not something that jives with Palo Alto's sustainability goals," Reed said.

The issue of trust came up repeatedly during the town hall discussion. Reed said it's been a "battle all the way" for the city to get Castilleja to comply with its existing conditional use permit, which limits enrollment to 415 students. After Castilleja exceeded that number, the city issued a $265,000 fine to the school and required it to gradually reduce its enrollment every year.

Kauffman said that the school has worked extremely hard to regain the trust of the community, which is why some of the neighbors who did not support the school's proposal before do so now.

"We think we've fought hard to earn the right to continue on the path that we're on," Kauffman said.