3 council candidates want city employees disciplined 

BY DAVE PRICE 

Daily Post Editor 

Three candidates for Palo Alto City Council are calling for a reprimand of the city employees responsible for the sudden removal of 63 mature shade trees on California Avenue. 

While all of the candidates interviewed by the Post expressed various levels of outrage over the incident, John Hackmann, Corey Levens and Chris Gaither said they want the city employees held responsible for what City Manager Jim Keene has admitted was a violation of city policy. 

"I think the average person in Palo Alto says, 'Look at how things are done here .... The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. The city manager doesn't know.' The chief arborist says, 'It's not my responsibility, '" said Hackmann, an attorney. 

"Somebody did something wrong, but they can't be named? I think people in Palo Alto are tired of people not taking responsibility for their actions," Hackmann said. 

Corey Levens, a corporate attorney, said the council is to blame because it doesn't do a good job investigating issues and takes a hands-off approach. 

''I'm afraid it's a pattern of how things are governed," Levens said. "When something like this happens, if there are " no ramifications, it happens again." . 

Chris Gaither, a volunteer, said he finds it impossible to believe that Keene 'and the council didn't know about the tree removal in advance, as they have claimed. 

"If this were in the private sector, the person would be gone, regardless of how long they have been there," Gaither said. 

"Gaither noted that council member Sid Espinosa asked about a reprimand at last Monday's council meeting and none of the other council members touched the subject. 

Greg Scharff, another attorney in the race, said the area now looks "horrible," but the problem is that the city didn't tell the public about its plans in advance so people could get the city to stop the tree removal. 

"I don't want to go on a witch hunt and fire someone," Scharff told the Post. "We need to solve the problem." 

'We screwed up' 

Two candidates - incumbent Larry Klein and Planning and Transportation Commission Chair (woman) Karen Holman - said they felt Keene, who has been city manager for about a year, would be instrumental in stopping things like this from happening again. 

"One of Jim's real strengths is that he is candid and when 

something goes wrong, he acknowledges it and doesn't try to finesse it or tap dance around it," said Klein. "He came out and said we screwed up, and there was a screwup here in a number of ways." 

Public Works Director Glenn Roberts has also apologized since it was his department that cut down the trees without following the city's rules, which in this case called for hearings by the Architectural Review Board and Transportation and Planning Commission before beginning the project. Now, both boards and the City Council will review the project in the next two months. 

Klein said that while a low-level employee might have authorized the tree removal, the decision to bypass the three boards would have come from somebody "higher on the food chain." 

Attitude change 

Klein pointed out that when the city removed trees along San Antonio Avenue earlier this year, it did a much better job informing the public in advance and there was little controversy over it. "We should have pulled' out the same playbook and used it on California Avenue," he said. 

Holman said that when.the city proposed clear cutting eucalyptus trees along Sterling Canal in the Midtown neighborhood last year, advance 'notice resulted in an outcry from neighbors, who convinced the Architectural Review Board to revise the project. 

But given what's happened on California Avenue, Holman said city employees need to have a different attitude about following the rules. 

"There needs to be a different consciousness about this ... it's the public's realm. The public needs to be considered. After all, the government works for the people," Holman said. 

While Klein said he opposes the massive tree removal, the idea of reducing Cal Ave. to two lanes of traffic will make the street "a more pedestrian friendly place." 

More notification 

All of the candidates interviewed said they felt the city should do much more to notify people before such drastic changes are made in a neighborhood: 

• "The reason why people are so upset, besides the physical blight that it has created, is that people feel that their input and opinions are worthless," said Brian Steen, former executive director of the Sempervirens Fund and Big Sur Land Trust. . 

• Nancy Shepherd said one of her goals if elected is to get the city to provide the public with more timely and complete information, and that this incident was an example of why that was necessary . 

• "The unfortunate aspect of it, when you do something that drastic, you always want to make sure people know why it is being done, when it is being done, what it is going to look like," said real estate agent and former Palo Alto PTA council president 

Dan Dykwel. 

• “The core issue is the lack of community outreach, and that's the same issue I saw with the police chief  hiring,” said business owner Tim Gray. "The issue wasn't Dennis Burns or not Dennis Burns. It was a lack of community outreach so that when a decision is made, you have as many people united and moving in the same direction." 

Merchants' role 

Leon Leong, a real estate agent and former computer engineer, said he wanted more information about how the city made its decision and he also questioned how the California Avenue Area Development Association, the merchants' group, decided to support the tree removal. "Did they poll their members?" he asked. He said the city shouldn't have cut the trees based solely on CAADA's wishes. 

Gail Price, former school board member and executive director of the American Institute of Architects Santa Clara Valley, said she too would be questioning Keene and his staff if she were on council, asking them how the tree removal jibes with the Comprehensive Plan and city tree preservation ordinance. "This decision was contrary to the image we have of Palo Alto, a community that supports environmental issues and tree preservation," Price said. 

Mark Weiss praised the response of Keene's staff. "They're doing the right thing. They're saying we're only human." Weiss also said, "I don't see a smoking gun." 

Victor Frost, a panhandler who is running for council for the sixth time, said that a few days after the trees were removed, he was on California Avenue and people were coming there just to see the devastation. 

"It almost became a lynching mob," Frost said. "But they didn't have any oak trees to lynch them from."