Gee I wish I could get a 3 year extension to paying my household bills due to COVID 19 — on things like car insurance or my car registration, my utilities or my income taxes or my kids orthodontic bills.

Avoiding for decades building the needed housing on their campus for their students and workforce to ease pocket books and climate burdens . Now asking for the city to approve an extension on paying for their super commuters who can’t find reasonable local shelter to wages near their Stanford jobs. This is so hypocritical.

Just say NO. Fines should not be waived. The city will need this money to mitigate additional commuter car trips through our community and keep our community streets safe and efficiently operational in the face of Stanford car trip increases. The city is also struggling under pandemic-related financial losses. (That was the whole point of the fines for failure to achieve your goals. It was the fail-safe measure to protect the city.)

Please note that Stanford is now proposing massive additional growth while offering little in the way of transportation impact mitigation funding contributions for their next round of expansion. Chutzpah! Why should we trust them on the next round?

These transportation mode shift goals were part of the mitigation for the LAST round of growth traffic impacts. Sorry, Stanford. You can afford this. Follow through on your commitment. The University doesn't pay taxes to help the city clean up the traffic messes it makes. This was the deal you made. Live with it. Palo Alto cannot afford to let you walk away from this commitment.

Why should Stanford Med get special treatment and fee waivers when they so obviously care more so little about their agreements and so much more about their non-stop expansion at the expense of the community, medical pros and all their patients! Let's remember the nurses' strike where one of their main complaints was the greedy cutting of all the nurses aides, hurting the nurses and patient care!

For them to use the pandemic as an excuse is outrageous given their conduct during the pandemic. Remember that without warning they evicted all the medical practitioners -- doctors, dentists, lab workers -- at 700 Welsh Road immediately after getting a huge grant to expand children's services in the middle of the pandemic.

This forced the professionals, including my dentist, to camp out in others' offices so they could treat ONLY EMERGENCY patients while they scrambled to find and construct new offices during the pandemic and while they and their patients continue to play catchup.

For well-endowed Stanford Med, the fines are minimal for violations -- $4,000, 000 -- the cost of maybe 2 Palo Alto houses they continue to remove thousands of homes and apartments from the city's housing stock.

Any city worker / planner who supports giving Stanford a break has clearly forgotten who pays his salary!

When I worked at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, Stanford workers were found to be parking in the PAMF garage, then taking the Marguerite to their Stanford jobs.

One said "I was wondering when you were going to catch me."

You know what reduce congestion on Palo Alto roads caused by Stanford Hospital employees driving to work? More homes in Palo Alto, so they can walk or bike or bus to their jobs.

My father-in-law was a professor at a highly competitive university in another city. He bought a house and paid property taxes like all the other citizens, contributing his fair share to public coffers for services he received--public schools for his kids, using public streets, libraries, etc. It's fine to give tax protection for land that is specifically used for education--classrooms, labs and the like. It is not fine to give tax protection to land that residential homes of paid professionals sit on and ask the community to provide public school, transportation, and other services at public cost to these SU employees. THAT is a problem. Stanford is private, wealthy institution. It is not my job, as a taxpayer, to subsidize their staff's lifestyle.

It is not ok for Stanford to increasingly use the resources (public schools, streets, etc) of neighboring communities without supporting those resources with tax dollars. No one has a problem with SU professors living in Palo Alto. The problem is Stanford pretending that employees' residential homes on SU-purchased land are educational uses deserving of tax relief. They are not.

"You know what reduce congestion on Palo Alto roads caused by Stanford Hospital employees driving to work? More homes in Palo Alto, so they can walk or bike or bus to their jobs."

@Adam, "You know what reduce congestion on Palo Alto roads caused by Stanford Hospital employees driving to work? More homes ON STANFORD;s OWN PROPERTIES LIKE RESEARCH PARK so they can walk or bike or bus to their jobs" -- something Stanford has consistently refused to do while they buy up houses all over Palo Alto.

Did you miss the coverage of the hearings about Stanford's development plans just this week?

"County adopts plan to steer housing toward Stanford campus

Original post made on Oct 17, 2023
After decades of building and buying housing in surrounding cities, Stanford University will now have to look to own campus for future residential growth under a plan that Santa Clara County supervisors approved Tuesday afternoon."

Web Link

Agree with online name. Stanford has plenty of empty land and [one of] the largest endowment of any university in the country. [Portion removed.] Time for the city to grow a spine and just say no to any of Stanford's plans that take advantage of Palo Altans.

They can easily afford and have the space to build a small town of Stanford employees with housing that is affordable.

It's long past time to start making demands of Stanford and following through on them.

Not long ago, Stanford hospital increase their only parking garage fees from $8/day to $14/day. It has 3 floors up and 2 floors down but the parking spaces are not enough for daily needs. All other parking structures are own by Stanford University and has short term and long term parking rates. The most expensive one are $133/month long term rate and next is #40/month which is a bit further. The nearest ones get's filled by 8am or so but for hospital employees that work later than the early 0645 or 7am shift, parking at this lots means you have about 15min walk at least to the hospital. Stanford can easily pay the lump sum penalty for not meeting the agreed conditions. Just do the math on parking fees. But they don't want that. Instead, they increase parking rates. Commuting would make sense for office workers but not for nurses who are required to work odd hours, let alone required to have "on-call" hours which means commuting is out of the question. Who doesn't want to commute? I have tried that but given the commitments required for work, it doesn't make sense. Employees live so far as Tracy or Modesto or Santa Rosa or Monterey because they can't afford housing around here. How do you get this people to commute? They even sleep in their cars.

Imagine you are a nursing staff member, or a surgeon who has just done a 10 hour shift/surgery and want to go home at 11.30 pm. Do you really want to walk, bike or wait for a bus? Or would you prefer to drive home and get to bed?

When Stanford has broached building housing on campus, the institution has never spoken of designating the housing for the majority of hospital workers. Respiratory therapists, housekeepers, nurses, transporters, kitchen employees, nursing assistants, physical therapists, social workers, lab employees, blood bankers, security, landscapers, maintenance workers, and many more job descriptions, were never intended as eligible for campus housing.
Doctors, professors and students will be considered for the housing, but the vast majority of hospital workers will not be. The Hospital has over six thousand employees who will always continue to commute.

I am a retired nurse now living in Fairfield. I checked out my commuter options and it would take me over 3 hours just to make it to Palo Alto and none of the times listed would work for a 12 hour shift starting at 0645. That simply is not feasible or safe. Living in Palo Alto is not affordable for the large number of nurses, therapists, pharmacists as well as physicians who are providing excellent care to local residents. Creative solutions need to be found but simply punishing the hospital isn’t helpful.

Why not raise taxes on every business in Palo Alto?

Yes fine Stanford hospitals, but also make every other business pay $10,000 each - Palo Alto has more jobs than housing. This would create empty land as a bunch of businesses would go bankrupt - this space could then be used to build houses with the money.

The word HUBRIS comes to mind.

It is not Palo Alto's job to solve Stanford's problems for them. Stanford should spend its $36 billion endowment on fixing the problems it created, not asking for handouts and concessions from Palo Alto.