Palo Alto prepares to move forward with new El Camino Park fields

About time. I seem to remember it was supposed to be out of action for about 18 months.

I am still upset that we don't have a functioning library service at present.

Have lots of memories of Little League games here. I wonder how they have been managing without it.

YEAH - that is excellent news. I am seeing mini-ball parks going up everywhere now so this is good news.

What is wrong with Palo Alto? Just a few yards down the road, Arrillaga is going to build a 400,000+ square foot office complex. All that property tax revenue is going to go to Menlo Park! How can we even think of allowing such valuable land to remain in the public domain when it could be high-density office space? People around here are way too busy to go to parks anyway.Check with Arrillaga; I'll bet he'd be thrilled to help out there.

Stanford land is not exactly a property tax revenue generator.

I don't know what the "Utility Department's Water Fund" is or how its use might be restricted. However, this time of drought doesn't seem the time to use "water fund" dollars to fund sports fields.

Synthetic turf, new field lights, bike parking, a new bathroom, a scorekeeper booth, and create a bike path.

All very nice, but why is my water bill paying for this?

Maybe the Water Fund is helping to pay for the restoration of the park since it was the Utilities Dept that tore up the park in the first place. That makes sense to me. Maybe before people make statements like "Why is my water bill paying for this?" they should think a little bit.

Great use of space. To opportunity cost dude: no way. No more office space development in Palo Alto. If u like density, head to sf, downtown Oakland , or San Jose. It's not all about money. Quality of life over developer profits who sure as heck to live in Palo Alto!

Oh the memories. When our family moved to Menlo Park in 1949, El Camino Park was the center of entertainment and sports for the area. Television and the Giants had not come to the Bay Area yet. In the summer, the Palo Alto adult softball league was the "majors." When the best teams played each other (I think they were Smith's and Palo Alto Sport Shop), there was Standing Room Only at El Camino Park and if you did not get there early, you parked almost a half-mile away. Some times I miss those days of simple pleasures 65 years ago!

A city's amount of tax revenue is not a good measure of its quality of life. If we wanted to maximize tax revenue, we could squeeze the biggest possible building on every square inch of land and ruin the quality of life. Oh, I guess that is what we are doing.

If we are concerned about our quality of life, we should be tearing down office complexes and making more parks. Seriously.

# OpportunityCost

This is public land purchased and set aside by the citizens of Palo Alto for everyone's benefit. Transferring one of the last open parcels to Mr. Arillaga would provide the City with one time small cash infusion (that it does not need) and rob the citizens of exceedingly rare open space in perpetuity...to the sole and only benifit of Mr. Arillaga.

The last time I looked...Mr. Arillaga does not live in Palo Alto.

So...lets recap what we have learned. By taking your proposal, the citizens of Palo Alto would permanently lose a park and Mr. Arillaga, who does not live in Palo Alto, would gain a profit from developing a nice park into a office. The opportunity cost would be the value of a permanently lost park vs Mr. Arillaga's profit (and some property tax).

The proposition does not add up.

Let Menlo Park add the offices to the existing abandoned car lots and live with both the traffic and visual plague.

@Misunderstanding >> The last time I looked...Mr. Arillaga does not live in Palo Alto.

Look again. The Santa Clara County tax assessor claims his parcel is in Palo Alto.
The famous 7.7 adjacent acres recently added to Foothills Park is also in Palo Alto.
Or maybe I'm wrong. It's been known to happen.

It looks like Mr. Arillaga's estate is within the city limits of Palo Alto, but oddly (at least to me), he is in an area covered by a Los Altos zip code.

So, likely, he gets his mail at a Los Altos address, but the postman has to drive through Portola Valley/San Mateo County to deliver his mail to Palo Alto.

Another project that's more than 2 years late and costs a few more million dollars than originally planned.

Feh.

El Camino Park has not been worked on since early this year, which is unfortunate, because the Mayfield soccer fields are being redone in January & February.

El Camino Park should have been up and available now, instead it's now projected to be several years behind schedule.

Can't we have a city management which actually cares about this city?

Same lack of progress here as on the Magic Bridge Playground which was reported to be finished but which our eyes tell us is still mounds of dirt and debris accented by big construction equipment.