Eager for a breakthrough after a decade of scuttled plans and shattered dreams, the Palo Alto City Council endorsed on Monday a proposal to expand the city's control of Cubberley Community Center with the goal of rebuilding and enhancing the aged but popular hub in the south end of the city.

By a unanimous vote, council members directed staff to work with the council's specially appointed Cubberley Ad Hoc Committee to develop a proposal for a 55-year ground lease with the Palo Alto Unified School District for land at the 35-acre community center. The district currently owns 27 acres and leases most of this space to the city, which owns the remaining 8 acres. The ground lease could be for most of the site.

If approved by the two bodies, the agreement would give the city the certainty it needs to advance the long-awaited redevelopment of Cubberley, a dilapidated Middlefield Road campus that both parties see as vital to their long-term interests.

Palo Alto leaders and community members have long envisioned the future Cubberley as a bustling hub with state-of-the-art athletic, art and classroom facilities and nonprofit spaces, a concept that was memorialized in a 2019 planning process led by the firm Concordia. The school district, for its part, sees Cubberley as a potential location for a future school, should such a need arise.

With its vote, the council both reaffirmed its plan to acquire more Cubberley land and squashed a previously floated idea of swapping land at Terman Park, a city-owned property next to Fletcher Middle School, for a portion of the community center. The idea sparked an outcry from area residents and other park users who were anxious that the swap would limit their access to Terman Park.

City staff also warned that transferring or selling Terman Park land would require a vote of the people in order to "undedicate" the parkland, a requirement that would delay both the planning and the building at Cubberley.

"We'd need to have a lot of discussion on what other city property we'd be wanting to trade in exchange for Cubberley," Community Services Director Kristen O'Kane said.

For many of the stakeholders in the Cubberley debate, including those who participated in the Concordia process, the vote couldn't have come soon enough. City leaders have been considering ways to improve the dilapidated community center for years but their options were limited by the simple fact that they don't own the land.

The school board indicated after the Concordia exercise that it has no plans to redevelop Cubberley's gym and theater or to pursue a revenue measure to fund community center improvements, something it cannot legally do unless there is a direct connection to education. That effectively killed the plan.

But prospects brightened in March, when board members issued a letter indicating that they're willing to part with at least 7 acres of Cubberley land and inviting the city to make a proposal. The council's Oct. 16 vote was the city's first formal response to that letter.

Current users of Cubberley cheered the action. Nancy Cohen, who serves on the board of directors at Friends of Palo Alto Libraries, a nonprofit that uses Cubberley, was among the speakers at the meeting who urged the council to increase the city's share of the aged community center.

"A vibrant community of tenants and other users struggle with the disrepair of the current buildings that are long past their useful life," Cohen said. "Wires stick out of holes; walls are crumbling; toilet facilities are few and antiquated. Replacement is necessary."

Former Council member Alison Cormack, a longtime proponent of repairing Cubberley, also supported the new proposal by City Manager Ed Shikada and O'Kane to enter into a long-term ground-lease for Cubberley space and give the district the option of leasing back some of its land at a later date. Such an option, she said, "neatly solves the longstanding problem of the space we need now and the option the school district needs for the future."

"The good news is, literally anything you do would be better than the dilapidated, disaster-in-the-making buildings we are using now," Cormack said. "I implore you not to let the perfect be the enemy of the better."

The challenge of building on leased land

In addition to pursuing a lease of the entire campus, the council's committee will also explore the idea of buying 7 acres or more outright. Such an option would give the council even more certainty when it comes to constructing new buildings at Cubberley while still leaving the school district with 20 acres for a future school.

Two school board members addressed the council during the discussion and reaffirmed their willingness to work with the city on a new Cubberley deal. Board member Todd Collins expressed some reservations, however, about the prospect of the city signing a ground lease for a larger share of Cubberley and constructing something on Cubberley land, making it less viable for a future school.

Speaking for himself and not the board, Collins said it would be a "key consideration" for him to make sure that the school district has a "clear path for 20 acres" should the need for a new school arise in the future.

"It would be pretty hard to do that if you build something on a piece of land that we wanted back," Collins said. "We are trying to work together on this and that would put us at odds."

But Jennifer DiBrienza, president of the Board of Education, said that she and her colleagues are amenable to proposals from the city that go beyond 7 acres. She urged city leaders to pitch ideas that they believe would work for them.

"We continue to look forward to those proposals and are happy to entertain them when they come our way," DiBrienza said.

Under the existing arrangement, the city pays the school district $2.5 million annually to lease most of Cubberley space for a term stretching from 2020 to 2024. The key difference in going to the ground-lease approach is the length of the term, Shikada said.

"(We'd be) going from a short term of a few years lease that we have been operating under for the last several years to a long-term ground lease in which the city would assume primary responsibility not only for operation of the property but also the responsibility for the maintenance and repairs of systems," Shikada said.

The council broadly supported the ground-lease approach, a mechanism that has been deployed in local developments such as Stanford Shopping Center, Avenidas and Stanford Research Park. Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims called it "the quickest, cheapest way to get us to the future Cubberley that our residents are asking us to build," while Council member Vicki Veenker agreed with Cormack that pretty much any approach would be better than the status quo.

"Just about anything would be better than what we have now," Veenker said.

She and others also supported looking beyond the 55-year term that staff suggested. Veenker suggested pursuing a lease-to-own option, which her colleagues agreed to explore. Council member Pat Burt also supported a longer lease term, particularly given the city's plans to both construct new buildings and to allow the district to re-lease its land.

"Why would we build structures that have 75-year life on land that we might have to give back?" Burt said.

At the same time, he also didn't hold out much hope for a long-term lease for the entire Cubberley site. Burt noted that the school district has repeatedly shifted its position on its anticipated uses at Cubberley. Still, he lauded the current board for being a "collaborative negotiating partner" and supported focusing on the portion of Cubberley that the district said it's willing to sell, lease or trade away.

The current partnership between the city and the district is markedly different than the one that the two parties were considering in 2019, when they hoped to jointly develop Cubberley to include various amenities that could be shared by both parties.

Palo Alto resident Ken Horowitz, a longtime proponent of Cubberley redevelopment urged the council to focus on the city-owned portion of the center.

"Palo Alto residents have been waiting and waiting and waiting for a community center," Horowitz said. "You can get it done in the next five years.

"Demolish what you have, build a new community center on the 8 acres, lease some land that you need now for the tenants currently there and they'll be happy, and in 2030 hopefully we'll have a new community center and it will be owned and operated by the city of Palo Alto."