By City came to grips with horrific state, national events, while dealing with its own squabbles
Town Crier Staff Report
The year 2001 was memorable for all the wrong reasons, except that perhaps we have emerged from this horrific year a little wiser and more humble. The overwhelming news events of the year, the state power shortage, followed by Sept. 11, the anthrax scare, the dot-com bust and economic recession, rippled through our community, affecting virtually all of us. We started the year complaining of skyrocketing utility bills and rolling blackouts. We ended it in a surge of generosity, organizing fund-raisers for Sept. 11 victims and giving to our own struggling non-profits. The fact that the Town Crier’s Holiday Fund is up over last year’s totals is a testament to people’s increased empathy, despite a time of economic strain.
Locally, we exhibited community pride over the opening of the Los Altos History Museum while it seemed everyone in town debated the benefits of a hotel versus a theater at a prime downtown location. The state’s power-buying aftermath meant cuts in store for local cities and school districts. The Los Altos School District had to downsize plans for its facilities renovation project while the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District expanded theirs due to a budget surplus. The economic woes of the year hurt Hewlett-Packard, which in turn affected the Los Altos-based David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The foundation put on hold its downtown expansion plans, then impacted its company’s future by supporting opposition to a proposed HP merger with Compaq.
Our area also saw some new faces in key positions, with a new Los Altos police chief, Don Johnson, a new Los Altos Hills city manager, Maureen Cassingham, and a new Los Altos parks and recreation director, David Brees.
Here’s a month-by-month account of our year in review:
January
Hundreds of friends locally and around the world paid tribute to longtime Los Altos-area resident Alan Cranston, who died Dec. 31, 2000. The 86-year-old Cranston was remembered as an energetic, thoughtful man and an influential state senator. Cranston was a major player in nuclear disarmament campaigns.
Los Altos city officials hammered out the final details of a plan with Mountain View’s cable studio in early January that provided an interim home for the city’s cable station, Access Los Altos. The city’s cable station lost its studio space at Foothill College when its lease expired Dec. 31 and temporarily suspended broadcast.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announced plans to consolidate its operations into one downtown Los Altos building by 2004. Later in the year, the foundation pulled back on those plans, even eluding that leaving Los Altos altogether was among its options.
Los Altos swimmers took one final dip in the community pool at Covington School before the Los Altos School District permanently shut it down Jan. 31 as part of extensive school renovations planned for the campus. The Los Altos Masters club, which operated the pool, served about 1,000 swimmers annually.
Los Altos placed its first neighborhood ban on two-story homes in a four-block area that lies between city hall and Los Altos High School in the neighborhood bounded by Merritt Road, East Edith Avenue, Beverly Lane and North Gordon. A city law allows for a seven-year ban with neighborhood support.
February
De Anza College showed few telltale signs of the bomb scare that shut down the Cupertino campus two days earlier, except for a banner hanging above the cafeteria thanking the teenage photo clerk who tipped police off to the possible bombing.
City officials and executives of Rambus Inc. were in high spirits for a Feb. 13 grand opening of the high-tech company’s new Los Altos facility at the former Tree Farm site on El Camino Real.
The Los Altos Hills City Council voted to hire Maureen Cassingham as city manager following a 12-month search. Cassingham served as assistant city manager and city manager in other Northern California locations over the past 10 years.
March
A new chapter in the annals of Los Altos history began in March with the public grand opening of the new Los Altos History Museum. The project was the culmination of strong grassroots efforts, as Los Altos and Los Altos Hills history enthusiasts poured funding, know-how and labor into the three-level, 8,200-square-foot museum, located behind the Los Altos main library at 51 S. San Antonio Road.
April-May
Downtown Los Altos witnessed two special events in a one-week period in May. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader to Buddhists throughout the world, visited Main Street optometrist Jabina Ramde for an eye exam and new eyeglasses May 17. The Dalai Lama was in the area for an appearance at the Shoreline Amphitheatre.
Despite considerable opposition from a group of Rosita Avenue residents concerned about increased traffic flow, on May 8, the Los Altos City Council decided to move forward with a three-pool swimming complex at Rosita Park. The proposed Los Altos Community Aquatic Center is slated to replace the community pool demolished earlier as part of the school district’s renovation of Covington School.
June
On June 12, Los Altos council members voted to allow construction of a boutique hotel on the .78-acre, city-owned lot at First and Main streets. The council decided in a 3-2 vote that it preferred approving the site for the hotel instead of the alternatively proposed six-screen movie theater.
Also in June, the Los Altos Hills City Council made a decision that could potentially affect 70 percent of town residents. On June 7, council members voted 3-2 to adopt a revision a building ordinance revision that increased allowed floor area from 4,000 to 5,000 square feet and development area from 6,000 to 7,500 square feet on constricted lots - sloped lots of less than one acre. The vote followed more than five months of public debate.
Following six months of negotiation that even involved federal mediation, El Camino Hospital management and Service Employees International Union, Local 715, settled its first contract for the hospital’s 875 non-nursing service employees. The two-year contract, ratified by the hospital’s union members on June 21, included an across-the-board wage increase of 4 percent a year.
July
Residents filled Shoup Park for an old-fashioned Fourth of July barbecue. Helping with the “Glorious Fourth” celebration were members of the Packard Foundation.
The Los Altos City Council last week approved a scaled-down version of the city’s first exclusively affordable housing complex near Loyola Corners. The controversial mixed-use complex includes eight very-low-income rental units and a two-story, 6,000-square-foot office complex on the 23,000-square-foot lot adjacent to Bank of America, bordered by Lorraine, Maple and Fremont avenues. The approved plan was more than double the size allowed in the city’s Specific Plan for Loyola Corners. The project was roundly criticized by neighbors.
City Manager Phil Rose appointed Don Johnson, a captain in the Sunnyvale Public Safety Department, as the new Los Altos police chief. He succeeded Lucy Carlton, who was retiring after 10 years at the helm.
August
A small group of homeowners in San Antonio Hills breathed a sigh of relief after leaping the last legal hurdle in a nearly two-year bureaucratic battle - approval for prezoning by the Los Altos Hills City Council. The action allows residents along Mora Drive to legally construct a sewer extension at their own expense. The extension will replace the aging septic tanks in their nearly 70-year-old neighborhood.
Los Altos Hills Mayor Toni Casey suggested residents fund $3 million for a new Town Hall, noting that council members had already committed $250,000 of their own money for the project. The 44-year-old structure was stricken by termites and was closed for a half-day while exterminators dealt with the problem.
The Los Altos School District discovered it would hold a Nov. 6 election because three incumbents, Jay Thomas, Victor Reed and Duane Roberts, were facing a challenger, Bill Cooper. The incumbents won re-election, as did Los Altos city councilmen King Lear and John Moss. They ran unopposed.
City and school officials finalized a deal for the construction, operation and maintenance of the two joint-use gymnasiums planned for Blach and Egan junior high schools. Under the agreement, the city of Los Altos would lease land at each junior high campus from the Los Altos School District for 100 years. The city would own the gymnasiums, and the school district would own the land.
The Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District celebrated both its future and its past at the dedication of the new $2.6 million library at Mountain View High, coupled with the district’s centennial celebration.
September
A Los Altos city law intended to quiet neighborhood construction squabbles seemed to hit its first snag. Two residents on Solana Drive accused their neighbors of allegedly using the city’s single-story overlay zone as a tool to snuff their plans for second-story additions just days before a scheduled review with city staff.
Other residents said those supporting the overlay zone purposely excluded specific properties from the boundaries outlined in the application in order to get the 70 percent majority vote needed to pass the new zoning restriction.
The city later eased requirements on the overlay zone, dropping the 70 percent to two-thirds majority.
Los Altos Hills City Council members discussed a complicated proposal for undergrounding utilities, developed after 2 1/2 years of research by the Utility and Information Systems Committee. Council Member Mike O’Malley called the proposal “unique. We will be pioneers.”
Los Altos filmmaker Elizabeth Thompson won an Emmy award Sept. 5. Her film, “Blink,” won for Best Coverage of a Continuing News Story at the news and documentary presentations.
From church sanctuaries to school assemblies and impromptu noontime gatherings, residents of all ages, religions and ethnic backgrounds gathered together to show love and unity in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
After the Sept. 11 airplane hijacking disasters that leveled New York’s World Trade Center and ripped open a hole in the Pentagon, residents shared stories of relatives and friends who worked at both ill-fated institutions. For Yvonne Olson of Los Altos and her son Ted, the U.S. solicitor general, it was a time of sorrow when they received word Ted’s wife Barbara, a former federal prosecutor and CNN commentator, was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Other residents, as well, lost loved ones in the attacks.
October
The St. Joseph the Worker Center was forced to close its doors when its lease expired, Oct. 31. Overcrowding, higher rent and program costs were attributed to its closure. The non-profit, located on El Camino in Los Altos provided work, trained and counseled more than 250 day workers per day over the past five years.
The Mountain View-Whisman School District released Patricia (Trish) Bubenik from her position as superintendent. Bubenik had been superintendent of the Mountain View School District since 1992, and oversaw the merger of the Mountain View and Whisman elementary and middle school districts this summer. The school board said new leadership was in the best interests of the district.
Bubenik is now executive director of the Palo Alto Chapter American Red Cross.
November-December
Site tests confirmed that three area U.S. Postal Service centers that process Los Altos mail recently tested negative for Anthrax contamination. The threat stemmed from cases of Anthrax being sent through the mail, resulting in several deaths, following the Sept. 11 attacks. The San Francisco and Embarcadero U.S. mail facilities and the international mail center in Daly City were tested for Anthrax contamination.
