The city of Los Altos has scheduled an open house next month to reveal the newest design for rebuilding Hillview Community Center.
The event is slated 5:30-6:30 p.m. July 10 at the Los Altos Youth Center, 1 N. San Antonio Road. City staff and members of the project team will be on hand to field questions and address any concerns about the design.
Representatives from the Berkeley-based Noll & Tam Architects will discuss the virtual walkthrough of the setup of the new building and the ways it could serve the community. Selected in July 2017 by the project task force, the architects stressed that they would not conform to one design style, but to any style that could provide the community with solutions.
According to the project page on the city’s website, the construction budget is capped at $25 million. The budget, which the Los Altos City Council approved in April 2017, will be pulled from the city’s reserves.
The community center is in the middle of the design development phase, said Public Works Director Susanna Chan. It is the second of three design phases. She added that one of the project team’s main focuses is to include high-performing and sustainable green elements; both were incorporated into the last phase, known as the Schematic Design, and have been refined since its acceptance March 13.
The open house will be followed by an update on the project from the Public Works staff and engineers assigned to it at the Los Altos City Council meeting, set to begin at 7 p.m.
A review of the project is scheduled 7 p.m. today at the Complete Streets Commission’s meeting, another part of the design process, in council chambers.
City staff and architects from Noll & Tam anticipate construction on the project will begin next summer.
The city has received mixed responses to the project, particularly after the city council and the Children’s Corner preschool board of directors failed to reach an agreement on a renewed lease in the updated building. The preschool has been a tenant in Hillview Community Center for 40 years and expressed interest in remaining there when the center was completed. The lease proposal has been bouncing back and forth since October 2017 and was unanimously continued into an exclusive negotiating agreement at the April 10 council meeting.
Los Altos Lutheran Church representative Robert Smith appeared in front of the city’s Planning Commission Thursday to ask for a use permit that would allow the Los Altos Chinese School’s afterschool program, which also operates out of Hillview Community Center, to use two of its rooms during regular business hours to teach up to 12 children.
The Los Altos Chinese Preschool currently operates at the church and is run by the same person as the Los Altos Chinese School; the after-school program is not an entity of the preschool, according to a letter the church sent the commission.
The letter does not give a timeline for whether the move out of Hillview would be temporary or permanent.
