Los Altos Hills residents may hold the solution to Palo Alto’s funding problems for Fire Station 8 in Foothills Park.
At its July 12 meeting the Los Altos Hills City Council authorized negotiations for a one-year trial deal with Palo Alto, offering almost exactly the amount needed to operate the fire station in exchange for access to the park for town residents. The park, located between Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills on Page Mill Road, is open only to Palo Alto residents and their guests, with the exception of through-hikers traveling between open space preserves.
The Palo Alto council has been seeking ways to increase staffing at the fire station in response this summer’s extreme fire conditions.
The Palo Alto council has yet to indicate an interest in a deal with Los Altos Hills, and Palo Alto Mayor Yoriko Kishimoto anticipated steep resistance to the offer from some of her residents.
The city purchased the park from private landowners in the late 1950s for about $1.3 million, and spends about $1 million annually to operate the park.
Los Altos Hills Mayor Craig Jones said that if the town contributed to the park proportionally to its population, it would offer about $135,000 to Palo Alto for a year’s access. The town, with approximately 8,000 residents, is roughly 11 percent of Palo Alto’s size. Palo Alto staff have estimated that it would cost $140,000 to extend staffing of Fire Station 8 throughout the fire season.
“It worked out to be almost exactly what the fire station charge was, there was some symbolic benefit to that,” Jones said. “We did not tie anything to them reopening (the station), that’s up to them. … We’re not asking to just benefit from the park that (Palo Alto) runs, we are willing to be part of the solution,” he said.
The Palo Alto council will have to weigh whether to allow Los Altos Hills to buy access to the park and whether to extend that option to other neighboring cities as well.
Kishimoto said that given Palo Alto’s long history of passionate debate over use of the park, any changes to the city’s policy would not happen quickly.
“I’ve consistently voted against opening the park except to the hikers,” she said, citing the park’s ecological fragility and its quiet relative to other local parks, such as Arastradero Open Space Preserve and the Stanford Dish.
The Palo Alto council planned to discuss fire protection in Foothills Park Monday after press deadline and Kishimoto said she expected to vote to fund Station 8 through the end of the fire season regardless of negotiations with Los Altos Hills, but that longer-term solutions would be needed to fund it in future years.
The council cut back the station’s operating hours in 2005 to save money, and staffing at the station has been a source of disagreement between the firefighter’s union and the city.
The Los Altos Hills County Fire District, which provides fire protection for the town, contributed funding to Station 8 until Palo Alto’s cutbacks in 2005. The district stopped funding Station 8 and created a mobile brush fire patrol to respond to wildfires.
