An "unfortunate" decision

Updated list of things the Mountain View City Council thinks are and are not worth saving:

• Worth saving: contaminated hangars; abandoned office buildings
  
• Not worth saving: farms

Matt Pear led the parade of horribles with a ridiculous assertion that the inheritors of a $27 million piece of property were losing money. (Pear apparently thinks everybody who was born on third base has hit a triple). Everybody else brought up generally good but rebuttable points.

Jac Siegel said it would be unfair for the council to spend more money on parkland south of El Camino, even though (lawyer Lex Watson's bloviating notwithstanding) the council would not have had to buy the land.

Margaret Abe-Koga said she didn't want to spend $500,000 of the city's money pursuing split-zoning, forgetting (as did the Voice) that changing the zoning to detached single-family houses won't be free.

Nick Galiotto pointed out that the farm was not really a link to the city's past, though I'm not sure how important that is.

Laura Macias correctly pointed out that this decision simply perpetuates a system that unfairly burdens residents north of El Camino, though I suspect her solution involves not building much new housing anywhere.

Tom Means told a joke, which often presages a disappointingly conservative vote.

Kudos to Ronit Bryant, for being the lone vote for my romanticized notion of childhood in Los Altos.

Kudos to the owners, for making a boatload of money.

And, most of all, kudos to the neighbors, who heroically overcame abuses of their civil rights to win a round for NIMBYism.

Another mystery solved

Case closed.

The sad thing about this is that farm foe Thomas Holmes's quote is no longer quite as awesome:

"I'm going to be asking for 24-hour police protection until we defeat these bastards."

Listen up, kids

Say you're driving around Mountain View early in the morning after the prom. Your date wants nothing to do with you. You're angry. Maybe you've headed out to the farm to sneak a few drinks. You want to break something. If you happen to come across a political sign, do everyone a favor and don't pussyfoot around with hiding it in someone's yard.

Really go after it.

And you thought Mountain View couldn't learn anything from Los Altos.

According to an unverified but entirely believable report in the Voice, the police department is looking for the thieves who took several signs that advocate replacing open space with single-family detached homes. I'm surprised they could spare an officer from their investigation into the murder of Alex Fernandez, what with all the attention the media has paid to that over the last several years.

Weekend rundown

While lobbyists from the ag and auto industries spent the week fighting California's efforts to address smog and global warming, hell's demons used enhance interrogation techniques on Jerry Falwell's eternal soul. Meanwhile, I was back in Los Altos, catching up on the news:

The members of the Los Altos School District board is in trouble for using "reply-all" in their responses to Amanda Aaronson's concerns that the plan to redraw school assignment boundaries will screw over Mountain View residents. This is what you people get for not voting for my dad.

The Mountain View City Council appears to be at least considering a plan to preserve a portion of the Grant Road farm. Council member Matt Pear is not happy about this, telling the Voice's Daniel Debolt, "It's an eminent domain action cloaked in a rezoning verbiage. That sums it up I think." Thanks for clearing that up.

With Memorial Day approaching, Michael Shapiro comes out swinging in the San Jose Metro, blasting the Army's disinformation campaign regarding the death of Pat Tillman. The article also relates the similar experiences Karen Meredith and Nadia McCaffrey faced after their sons were killed.

Finally, Los Altos High has replaced its marquee with an electronic billboard. Sorry Craig.

Where the sidewalk ends

Housing debates in Mountain View often feature complaints that city council members have forgotten what city they represent. This is usually a rhetorical device.

In Los Altos, however, the city council appears to have quite literally forgotten its jurisdiction. At its last meeting two weeks ago, the council debated and voted on the future of the Grant Road farm, which, for those of you keeping track at home, is in Mountain View.

Council member Lou Becker, casting a dissenting vote, put the objection much more politely than I might have:

"My concerns are (that) I don't want to give them an impression that we're trying to tell Mountain View what to do. The decision is really totally theirs."

Of course, Los Altos has been telling Mountain View what to do for years, just not so blatantly. One of the few things I took from the Voice when I left was a copy of a college paper written by Nick Perry called "Exclusion across El Camino." It documents how land use policies (particularly minimum lot sizes) have enabled Los Altos to remain a wealthy bedroom community while Mountain View, among others, have struggled to survive as full-service cities in the face of rising housing costs (wrought in large part by Proposition 13, but that's for another rant).

This is particularly relevant now with a "slow-growth" majority on the Mountain View council. "Not-In-My-Backyard" mindsets may have a lot to do with that change in Mountain View. But I think that Los Altos' consistent refusal to do anything other than pat itself on the back for adding a condo here or there is largely ro blame. Viewed from that perspective, Mountain View's political climate becomes easier to explain (and defend) as "Not-Just-In-My-Backyard."

My favorite line in Perry's paper, by the way, comes from the introduction: "Where the sidewalk ends, Los Altos begins." It doesn't quite work as an insult, given the tenor of Shel Silverstein's poem. But it might at least explain why the Los Altos City Council got confused about the farm.

Goodbye to the Grant Road Farm (for now)

Add the Grant Road Farm to the list of places that once made growing up in Los Altos but now no longer exist. According to Daniel Debolt's story in this week's Mountain View Voice:

In a surprise move, the owners of the city's beloved Grant Road farm told the Schmitz family that it is time to leave the property — in all likelihood to pave the way for a housing tract proposed by SummerHill Homes last year.

I don't quite get the part about this being a surprise. Potential buyers had been making offers on the property for years before the owners finally closed the deal with Summerhill. David Schmitz himself told Debolt last summer that he realized the farm could be sold at any time. And when I wrote about the sale a year ago, the headline began with the word "finally." Schmitz seems at least somewhat hopeful about the future, but its not clear whether he's talking about the efforts of the Mountain View Farmlands group.

Meanwhile, the friends of the Rengstorff House (now out at Shoreline Park), are planning to save the farm's windmill. I can't decide if this is touchingly appropriate or just pathetic, like NASA's plan to mark the historical significance of Hangar One by drawing a chalk outline around its base.

But what does Barry Bonds think about it?

Let's all thank the Merc for sparing some people from the Barry Bonds beat today to pay attention to Mountain View. Sure, the story on the pumpkin patch is a month and a half old, and it's not exactly news when a headline has the word "finally" in it, but it's not a bad story and it's good to see the Merc paying attention.

(Pretty amusing that both the Voice and the Merc ran the same basic photo, not to mention the same angle on the story. Great minds think alike, I suppose, but then again so do simple ones.)

Tough times over on the south side of El Camino, losing both the Pumpkin Patch and Matt Neely at the same time. Maybe they can go meditate in Cuesta Park Annex before we stuff it wall-to-wall with soccer fields.