Palo Alto may open park to everyone
Foothills has only been available to residents since ’60s
Palo Alto took its first tentative and contentious steps this week toward opening the town’s exclusive Foothills Park to nonresidents, though a formal plan likely won’t reach the City Council for debate until early next year.
The Palo Alto Parks and Recreation Commission hosted a twohour discussion on Tuesday focused on developing proposals that would increase access to the 1,400acre park, which has been open only to Palo Alto residents since the 1960s.
The first proposal, and the only one that seemed to be palatable to everyone at the meeting, would formalize the ad hoc system that’s already in place, which lets nonresidents sneak into the park on weekdays when a guard isn’t around to check IDs.
But other plans that would provide varying levels of increased access — from allowing entry to schoolchildren from nearby communities to instituting a complex reservation policy that would prioritize passes for Palo Alto residents — were met with mixed support from both commission members and people in the audience.
“Foothills Park is a very special place,” said Ryan McCauley, a parks and recreation commissioner who proposed to his wife at the park. But the current policy is a “rough tool” for the purpose of protecting a natural resource, he added.
“We might have other tools available to us today to do the same thing, to ensure we have the right balance between the
number of people using the park and preservation of the park,” he said.
Foothills Park was formed in 1959 when Palo Alto bought the land and chose to preserve it as an open space. Palo Alto invited neighboring cities to help with the purchase, but they declined. So Palo Alto, a few years later, decided that its neighbors didn’t have the right to enter the park.
Roughly 150,000 people visit Foothills every year, according to the Parks and Recreation Commission. Over the past five years, about 2,800 people were turned away each year.
The residentonly policy has come under fire before, most recently in 2005. Each time, the Palo Alto City Council has rejected plans to open the park. Changing the policy now may involve complex solutions that require months of discussions before commissioners are ready to submit anything to the council, elected officials said Tuesday.
Several Palo Alto residents at the meeting called the current policy “embarrassing” and not representative of their city’s openminded, freeranging politics. They said that while they respect that the fragile park environment needs to be protected and there should be limits on how many people can tromp through the front gate on any given day, there are ways to do that without coming across as snobs.
But many other residents argued that Foothills should remain a private treasure for Palo Alto residents only.
“It’s not that I feel superior to the people who live in Los Altos or Los Altos Hills or Menlo Park,” said Robert Roth, a longtime Foothills volunteer. “It seems to me, if the park is overused, the magical experience of coming upon a flock of quail or 30 or 40 young turkeys or seeing a coyote or any of the experiences of the birds and the beasts and the flowers in the park could be lost. There’s a need for a bit of quiet.”
One resident opposed to opening the park spoke to accusations that the current policy is racist — Palo Alto is nearly twothirds white, compared with 52 percent for the Bay Area as a whole. The resident said there’s nothing racist about limiting access to the park, and that expanding access might be a “feelgood” action, but it could ultimately ruin the quiet and tranquility of the space.
A few residents said during public comments that they feared that making the park open to everyone could create safety problems. Other residents, and Commissioner McCauley, pushed back on that argument.
“There are a lot of good reasons for why the current policy might be in place, but saying people from outside will pollute more or trash more or somehow create a safety risk, that should be an argument that’s off limits,” McCauley said.