Politics & Government

Transportation Commission Deems Stanford Hospital Expansion Project "Inequitable" for Menlo Park

Palo Alto gets millions of dollars; Menlo Park gets the traffic.

The Menlo Park Transportation Commission declared that the amount of funding offered by The Stanford University Medical Center to mitigate traffic from their imminent expansion project is not sufficient to compensate the city for the modifications that would have to be made to accommodate the increased amount of traffic coursing through town.

The City of Palo Alto would receive at least $10 million to pay for the transit demand management initiatives required to ease congestion on the roads, according to a memo from Michael J. Peterson, Vice President of Special Projects at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, to Palo Alto City Manager James Keene.

That same memo further posits that Menlo Park would receive $836,340 to fund its “fairshare” of the cost of mitigating traffic on the main thoroughfares in Menlo Park. The cost of modifying the roads to accommodate the increase in traffic would exceed $23 million, according to a traffic study done in 2009 by TJKM.

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The Menlo Park Transportation Commission published earlier this week that summarized their position on the impact that the project would have on Menlo Park.

“After reviewing the details of the traffic mitigations offered by the SUMC to Menlo Park, this commission is concerned regarding the inequity of mitigation proposals offered to Menlo Park, as compared to what has been offered to Palo Alto,” the report states.

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“Menlo Park will never enjoy any revenue in it’s general fund from local taxes associated with the SUMC development…The inequity is intolerable,” the report states.  

The SUMC project would add 2,053 parking spaces for the individuals who would be traveling to the campus after it expands by 1.3 million square feet, according to the Transportation Commission's report.

The SUMC’s Draft Environmental Impact Report projects an increase of more than 200,000 annual patient visits to the Stanford Medical Center and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital by the year 2025.

Peterson’s memo to Keene states that 51 percent of the traffic from the SUMC project will land on the roads in Menlo Park.

At the March 9 Transportation Commission meeting, Peterson said that Stanford was willing to contribute $3 million to traffic mitigation initiatives in Menlo Park.  That amount has not been put into writing, nor discussed at any of the subsequent meetings. Peterson could not be reached by the time of publication.

Those traffic mitigation initiatives include installation of adaptive traffic technologies at major thoroughfares, the purchase of Go Passes for hospital employees, operating costs of a shuttle services, and the promotion of bike usage.

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