Page Mill seeks to remove west side of East Palo Alto from city limits

Thursday, August 27, 2009
Jessica Bernstein-Wax
Palo Alto Daily News

Twenty-six years after East Palo Alto became a city, its biggest landlord has launched a move to unincorporate the city's western side.

An attorney for Woodland Park Management LLC, a subsidiary of Palo Alto-based Page Mill Properties, filed documents June 30 asking the San Mateo Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) to remove areas west and south of Highway 101 from the city's "sphere of influence."

If approved, the move could be a first step toward unincorporating part of a city that had struggled a long time to form.

"Given the substantial evidence illustrating a complete inability of the city to provide city services, including but not limited to crime prevention and law enforcement, street maintenance and street lighting, LAFCo should consider the option of reducing the city (sphere of influence) to remove the affected area, allowing the formation of the community services district and/or a police protection district," attorney William Ross said in the documents.

Woodland Park, residents of western East Palo Alto and other property owners would fund that district — presumably through taxes — potentially getting police assistance from Menlo Park and the San Mateo County Sheriff's office, according to the documents.

The LAFCo board will conduct East Palo Alto's sphere of influence review at its Sept. 16 meeting, and staff is not backing Woodland Park's request, said Martha Poyatos, the agency's executive officer. A sphere of influence designates who provides municipal services to a given area.

"I'm making a recommendation to not adopt it," Poyatos said, noting that formation of a community services district there would be financially infeasible and contrary to LAFCo's mission of simplifying and consolidating municipal services for greater efficiency.

"It's a pretty unusual request," she added. "I'm not aware of any scenario like that that's taken place in the state of California. To remove it from the sphere is almost more some sort of policy statement and is tied to what I think is a legal battle with the city."

Page Mill and East Palo Alto have a stormy relationship and are currently involved in about 10 lawsuits over rent hikes and other issues. Earlier this month, attorneys for Page Mill sued the city in an attempt to get a new rent control law off November ballots because of alleged meeting law violations and other issues.

Page Mill officials did not respond to requests for comment in time for this story.

East Palo Alto City Manager Alvin James said Tuesday his staff is preparing a response to Page Mill's LAFCo filing and would analyze the entire sphere of influence review ahead of the September meeting.

"Basically what they'd like to do is redirect the taxes from the city coffers into the coffers of whatever this new mechanism would be," James said. "Their objective seems to be that they would like to take a major responsibility for public safety away from the city as far as the area where their property is. By my look at the statistics, I think we're doing a good job."

That's a sentiment East Palo Alto police Chief Ron Davis echoed, saying the area where many of Page Mill's buildings are located enjoys one of the lowest crime rates in the city.

"Their reference to the police department's non-responsiveness is disingenuous at best," Davis said. "I take it as a direct insult to the police department and ... the men and women who put their lives on the line every day for the community."

Woodland Park's submitted paperwork also includes extensive e-mail correspondence between Davis' staff and former Palo Alto police Lt. Tim Morgan, who retired earlier this year after his consulting work for Page Mill was called into question.

Morgan's employment with the company and its potential effect on a Palo Alto Police Department extortion investigation into a prominent tenant organizer is the subject of an active internal affairs investigation.

In a Nov. 25, 2008, e-mail included in Ross' filing, Morgan identified himself as a consultant providing "assistance to the management company regarding security and security preparedness issues."

Palo Alto police's policy manual prohibits employees from accepting outside employment "as a private security guard, private investigator or other similar private security position" to avoid potential conflicts of interest. In addition, Chief Davis said Morgan repeatedly tried to use his title with the Palo Alto Police Department to get meetings with him.

"He would do that when he called up," Davis said. "As a police chief, I am not going to respond to those sleazy tactics."

Morgan previously asked the Daily News not to contact him for stories related to Page Mill. But interim Palo Alto police Chief Dennis Burns said Tuesday that the internal affairs investigation is still under way and would probably conclude in a month.

"We looked across the board as to were there any policy violations and, if there were, who would those people have been," Burns said, adding that the department will not release the findings because the investigation is a confidential personnel matter.

E-mail Jessica Bernstein-Wax at jbernstein@dailynewsgroup.com.

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