By Linda Taaffe

The seclusion and safety of a dead-end street attracted Sue Bewley to Ray Avenue 30 years ago. These days, the Los Altos resident must keep her windows and curtains shut to buffer the noise and bright lights from the 156-room hotel that abuts her side yard.

Bewley says the neighborhood has been far from quiet since the city approved the construction of the 9,600-square-foot Rambus building and Marriott Residence Inn behind her neighborhood along El Camino Real, over the past two years.

The city rezoned the commercial area in the mid-1990s to allow mixed-use projects, including affordable housing. As a result, the City was obligated under state law to allow Rambus a reduced setback of 25 feet rather than 100 feet as part of a “development incentive” in exchange for placing eight below-market-rate housing units at the site.

The council later decided that housing units wouldn’t be acceptable at that site and allowed the developer to relocate those units elsewhere. The result - a more developed site area.

“I feel like we’ve been played for suckers,” Bewley said. “I have to keep my curtains closed on one side of the house, it’s so bright at night.

Swimmers taking a midnight dip at the hotel have awakened Bewley on a few occasions, and balls from the sport court have ended up in her yard.

She said the noise bounces off the massive, three-story building because there is no vegetation to buffer it. The addition of trees to block noise and light was part of the development plan.

“We trusted the city to make sure that the developer complied with all requirements, and the city didn’t follow through,” she said.

The city allegedly signed off on the project before the required landscaping buffer that would have lessened these impacts was put in place. And that’s not all - there’s the possibility that a new 50-unit apartment complex will be added at the former El Torito restaurant site on the south side of the neighborhood.

The Town Crier first featured Bewley’s neighborhood plight two years ago when 90 neighbors from Rilma Court and Ray, Mercedes and Loucks avenues petitioned the Los Altos City Council to adopt stricter building codes to better buffer residential areas from commercial buildings after they discovered an air-conditioning unit on one of the new buildings exceeded the city’s noise limit.

Associate Planner David Kornfield said the city required the property owner to bring the equipment within city code after neighbors brought the issue to the city’s attention.

“Despite it technically meeting the code, I think the neighborhood still perceives the noise as a problem,” Kornfield said.

Neighbors said they aren’t asking for much. They simply want the developer to fulfill the project conditions that the city established - landscaping to buffer lights and noise and to separate the neighborhood from the El Camino corridor. They also want a 10-foot-high pedestrian gate between their neighborhood and the hotel, which the city approved for an earlier project that fell through, to be removed.

“We’re concerned about our safety,” Ray Street resident Patsy Mullen said about the locked emergency-vehicle gate, which has a large gap under it that neighborhood children could use to go on the other side, where there is a swimming pool. Mullen is also worried that a future council could allow the hotel to use the gate for guests to access the property from Ray.

City officials said the gate is required for emergency vehicle access, and largely results in

the neighborhood’s most unobstructed views of the site.

“It cannot, and would not, ever be opened for public access,” Community Development Director James Walgren said.

Kornfield said several trees were either removed or missing from the plan, mostly in the rear yard, because the utilities were shifted there during construction. He said the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct bisects the property, limiting where trees can go. He is working with the developer to find other areas to fill in trees.

The council has not adopted stricter codes; however, it did take a proactive role in preventing future noise problems at the former Red Lobster site up the street, requiring developers to place the building’s air-conditioning units below ground and test their noise level for compliance with the city’s noise ordinance.