PALO ALTO — When Castilleja School Head Nanci Kauffman went into her first public meeting on the elite, all-girls school’s expansion plans in 2016, she expected her neighbors in the quaint, quiet Professorville neighborhood would be upset they’d likely live through years of noisy construction.
She expected the usual neighbor or two would complain about trees, and easements and height limits and all — after all this was NIMBY Palo Alto, where the “Palo Alto Process” has become a running joke among developers whose projects languish in years of review. She also thought some would struggle with the revelation in 2013 that the school had lied about its ballooning enrollment for years, in violation of the city’s conditional permit.
But Kauffman never imagined that discussion on the project would explode into six long years of a protracted battle with city leaders while waging a costly campaign to sway the minds of ticked-off neighbors and Palo Alto residents who it appeared had lost all trust in Castilleja.
What she thought would be an easy meeting at the start of the permitting process turned out to be a harbinger for the years of open and loud opposition that would come.
“I went into that meeting assuming that the big issue for the community of neighbors was going to be that they would need to live in a construction zone,” Kauffman said. “I did not anticipate that they would be as disappointed and angry as they were.”
After six years of public debate, countless staff and consultant hours billed, dozens of public meetings and neighborhood town halls and multiple design revisions, construction can begin on what has been the city’s most hotly debated and complicated proposals for years.
The Palo Alto city council in June finally approved the school’s plans to demolish five academic buildings, rebuild them from the ground up and dig an underground garage to facilitate drop-off and pick-up. The construction will give way for an approved and capped enrollment increase of 28 students for a total 450 students, well shy of the school’s initial proposal of 540 students.
“I’m glad to get it behind us,” said Palo Alto Mayor Pat Burt. “It has been a long, protracted process and I think all parties are glad it’s over.”
But why did the project take so long? And what does it say about the “Palo Alto Process”?
In interviews with Kauffman and Palo Alto leaders, it’s clear the school had lost the city’s trust from the very beginning after admitting in 2013 that it was actively violating its enrollment cap, a skirting of city rules leaders and residents wouldn’t soon forget despite the school paying a hefty $265,000 fine.
“There was always a level of distrust that took a very long time to address with some members of the community,” Kauffman said. “Over time, I’ve had people of all different positions share how happy they are that this is resolved and that Castilleja can grow. In the end, I felt the support, but early on that was hard to come by.”
While she’s happy that the project is finally moving forward and is now keenly focused on finding a temporary school to relocate to during construction, Kauffman won’t forget the strife that the project brought to the neighborhood and the community over the past few years.
She lives just a block from the school and would see all the “Stop Castilleja Expansion” signs her neighbors had put up while on her way to school. It had become not only a part of her professional life but also her home life too. And she could sense at every public meeting that the questions and concerns came from a place of hostility, something she felt bitter about for years.
She said she couldn’t understand at times why the council took so much time to listen to residents, many of whom were not experts in the land use, engineering and other technical aspects of the project but nevertheless were always there to give their two cents.
“The way that California works is that the voice of each individual matters and I don’t necessarily disagree with that but it’s challenging when the voice doesn’t have the expertise to render a valuable opinion,” Kauffman said. “This whole project was at the intersection of people who were disappointed with the growth in Palo Alto and disappointed with the council and their leadership. It became a place where this could be exercised in some respects.
“But probably the biggest challenge for me was the distrust: distrust of individuals in the neighborhood, of experts, of Castilleja. I’m fine admitting naïveté, but it’s hard to have your integrity challenged.”
For Burt — who was on the council when the project first came to the city and oversaw its approval last month — the six years of debate made for a “frankly much better project as a result of our guidance and the boards and commissions’ work.”
As a consequence of lying about its enrollment numbers, Burt said “whatever was going to happen moving forward, it would not be making approvals based on trust.” The entire project would have to be “strongly verifiable” and focus on the “concrete tedium,” he said.
Burt put the blame for the delay squarely on the school’s shoulders.
“Frankly this whole thing would’ve gone forward much more expeditiously if they had requested something in the neighborhood of 450 students,” Burt said. “They created a difficult project by seeking to stretch the boundaries of what was expected. On top of that, they had really lost the trust of the city and the neighborhood for violating, pretty flagrantly, their conditional use permit. They were trying to fit a size 13 foot into a size 9 shoe. It was always going to be a tough fit.”
Burt also said he and other Palo Alto residents opposed to the project were offended by the school’s idea that they were against private education and all-girls education, a point frequently brought up by Kauffman in an effort to sway people to her side. Burt called the school’s campaign to paint opponents of the project as opponents of girls’ education “disingenuous” and contributed to the strife Kauffman described.
“I think that they dug a hole with their dishonesty with the original conditional use permit violation and they kept digging with that campaign,” Burt said. “I would hope that they would have recognized that here they attempt to develop the next generation of women leaders and yet they had these kinds of disingenuous and elitist responses to any concerns that were expressed about a big expansion development.
I don’t know that they learned that or acknowledged it but I certainly know it offended a great percentage of the neighbors.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com