Should be paid for via business tax, not by residents.

Excellent point. What -- if anything -- is the City Council doing to make businesses pay their fair share??

I'd vote for adding the level back at the top to make up the lost parking. Having 94 more spaces is well worth the slight increase in height. The arbitrary 50' limit is causing us to cripple our ability to create the best use of land. We need to just raise the maximum to 60' so an extra level can be created. At this location the visual, shadow, and density impacts will be so minimal that it just makes sense. So much less expensive to build above ground rather than digging deeper anyway! Honestly, we should do this for new housing projects too!

Scale it back more. Why are we spending tens of millions on housing for cars when we have a terrible shortage of housing for humans? What are local businesses contributing toward parking their cars and reducing their car trips?

Perhaps if they hadn't spent all that money on needless work on Ross Road the money could have been spent on the second underground level.

The Palo Alto dilly-dally is very expensive. If these structures had been built 5 years ago, they would have cost much less.

Thanks residentialists for for your ill-advised delaying tactics.

The article mentions that construction costs are rising, and cites the cross-101 bridge as an example at $16M. Yet in the very same paper is an article that EPA will build a cross-101 bridge for under $9M. What the ...!

Why blame the residentialists and not all the developers, commuters and big businesses?

Posted by Norman Beamer< a resident of Crescent Park

>> Should be paid for via business tax, not by residents.

Posted by Online Name, a resident of Embarcadero Oaks/Leland

>> Excellent point. What -- if anything -- is the City Council doing to make businesses pay their fair share??

(etc from several posters)

When you folks say "business", what type(s) of business(es) are you talking about? It appears to me that growth in office workers in the area has caused the parking shortfall. To me, that says that office space should be taxed, not necessarily the retail businesses that many are trying to encourage in the area.

>> Excellent point. What -- if anything -- is the City Council doing to make businesses pay their fair share??

If you impose additional burden on local retailers... say goodbye to more local retailers.

@Anon, agree with you that retail and professional services businesses should not be taxed because they are serving the community. It's a real shame that our office-development friendly city staff and council keep denying them the parking permits THEY need while making the doctors, dentists, nurses, opticians, accountants, insurance folks and their staffs BEG to be considered for parking permits when they -- as long-standing businesses -- should have had FIRST shot at those permits.

Where's the accountability from the city? We've got several highly paid parking "experts" and their parking consultants who ignore OUR concerns.

(I've lost too many long-time personal services people in the past few years because they're tired of getting ticketed and I resent their loss AND the time / expense of seeking out their replacements.

Residents have paid for and are expected to pay huge amounts for garages for the occupants of offices, fund expensive parking permit programs, and pay for the (unproven) "Transport Demand Management" program, to solve the parking problems of commercial property owners. The system is so rigged that developers can game the parking requirements by not even having to provide the allocated one parking space per 250 sq ft of each new office space.

Meanwhile developers continue to build and lease intensively used office space, with the encouragement of our current development friendly council majority and the majority of past council members. Facilitated by our city manager and his staff who (as I've heard stated by them) see their job as advising developers as to how to maximize each development, and go out of their way to do so.

Meanwhile, residents who pay about 2/3rds of the property tax revenue, are expected to bare the cost of parking for these office occupants. (And remember that unless these office tenants produce a product for which sales tax can be charged, they are pretty much only bringing lunch money to the city, if their employer doesn't offer them a free restaurant.)

Meanwhile, a few people are making huge amounts of money, or lining campaign coffers past and future. And, while the owners of these office properties are benefiting from the enormous leases they can now charge, many don't even live in Palo Alto. Talk about outsourcing.

I would still like to see many, many more 30 minutes only parking spots near downtown, Cal Ave and similar business districts. Trying to run a few errands in the lunch hour and perhaps needing to drive between both areas to drop off documents or pick up an item is just not easy.

Get all day parking off the streets and into garages and lots. Leave some 30 minute spots so that we can get our business done rather than spend precious minutes circling looking for a quick stop spot. I don't mind walking a block, I just want to be able to park for an errand at lunch time.