The Two Downtown Los Altos Plazas Measure D Doesn't Touch

Ask three neighbors what's on the November ballot for downtown Los Altos and you'll likely hear some version of "the park thing" or "the parking thing." Both are half right, which is worse than being wrong. Measure D, headed to Los Altos voters on November 3, would require a citywide vote before the city can sell, lease, or redevelop any of its eight downtown parking plazas. What most people miss is that two of those plazas, the ones already tagged for affordable housing on Edith Avenue, are written out of the measure entirely. Their fate was settled months ago by state law, not by anything voters will decide this fall.

That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out what you're actually voting on, or just trying to understand why your favorite parking plaza might look different in two years.

How a parking lot fight became a ballot measure

The petition that became Measure D started with a Notice of Intent filed with the City Clerk on March 17 by residents Barbara Loebner and Lucinda Langley-Andrews. The proposed ordinance is straightforward on paper: no sale, lease, donation, or redevelopment of city-owned downtown parking plazas without majority voter approval.

Volunteers with the campaign committee For Downtown Los Altos spent thirty days in April gathering signatures by hand, since state law requires in-person, ink signatures for this kind of petition. They needed roughly 2,200 valid signatures from registered Los Altos voters. They turned in 3,097. The Santa Clara County Registrar's sample review projected 2,676 as valid, or about 117 percent of the threshold.

At that point the City Council had three options under state election law: adopt the ordinance outright, order an independent report on its fiscal and legal impact, or send it straight to voters. Council chose the report first, then voted on June 23 to place the measure on the November ballot rather than adopt it themselves. That choice alone tells you something. Adopting it would have ended the debate in June. Sending it to voters means five more months of campaign mailers and a mayor, Sally Meadows, who according to reporting in the Palo Alto Daily Post declined to comment on the effort at all.

The plazas that were never actually in play

Here's the part that gets lost in the "downtown is under attack" framing on both sides. Plazas 7 and 8, sitting near Edith Avenue, were declared surplus land back in 2024 and identified as sites for subsidized housing. That designation falls under California's Surplus Land Act, which governs how public agencies can dispose of land for housing regardless of local ballot outcomes. Measure D's own text carves these two plazas out, allowing affordable housing there "only as specified on two designated plazas in the City's housing plans."

In other words, whatever emotional weight the phrase "downtown redevelopment" carries in this campaign, the housing question isn't on your ballot. It was decided by a different process entirely, one that predates the petition drive by more than a year.

What Measure D actually governs is everything else: Plazas 1 and 2, where the city has been designing a new downtown park, and by extension Plazas 3 through 6, which aren't part of any current proposal but would fall under the same voter-approval requirement if the city ever tried to redevelop them.

What's actually happening on Plaza 1 and 2

The park itself has been moving through design since 2025, funded through park-in-lieu fees, the payments developers make instead of building park space themselves, rather than general tax dollars. The city hired Watry Design and planning firm MIG to run the community engagement and produce concept alternatives.

At a February 24 special session, more than twenty residents spoke, most of them against the park as proposed. The Council responded by directing the design team to drop underground parking from consideration and pursue only options that keep parking supply neutral or better. That single directive reshapes the whole project, since underground parking had been the leading way to replace the 226 surface spaces currently split across Plazas 1 and 2.

Layered on top of the park is a separate, related plan: a portion of Plaza 2 has been eyed for a performing arts center tied to the Los Altos Stage Company, which currently performs out of the Bus Barn Theater. Theater backers have said publicly that the uncertainty created by a pending ballot measure makes it harder to line up the kind of large donations a capital campaign needs. Whether or not Measure D passes, that fundraising math doesn't get easier until the plaza's future is settled one way or the other.

The numbers nobody puts side by side

Downtown Los Altos, per the city's own 2024 Downtown Parking Strategy, counts 2,504 public parking spaces total, including 395 on-street spaces and 1,305 public off-street spaces, spread across the study area bounded by Edith Avenue, San Antonio Road, and Foothill Expressway. The park project alone touches 226 of those spaces, about nine percent of the total, but it's the nine percent people walk past every day on Main Street and State Street.

The design work itself carries a price tag of up to $2,288,500, authorized for community engagement and concept development on Plazas 1 and 2 specifically. That's public money already committed regardless of how November goes, since the contract predates the ballot measure by about a year.

Two arguments, both worth hearing straight

Supporters of the measure frame it as a matter of process, not opposition to any particular use of the land. As Los Altos resident Cindy Andrews put it in a campaign statement, the ask is that "the public have a meaningful say before public land is permanently altered."

Opponents argue the measure creates a different kind of risk. A rebuttal argument filed for the ballot pamphlet calls Measure D a proposal that "opens the door to Builder's Remedy," the state provision that lets developers bypass local zoning if a city falls out of compliance with its housing obligations. The concern is that slowing down the city's ability to act on its own land, even land unrelated to housing, could complicate how Los Altos demonstrates progress on its broader housing commitments to the state.

Neither claim is something a voter can fact-check in thirty seconds, and both will show up in the official arguments mailed to every household ahead of November 3.

What changes, and what already didn't

If Measure D passes, any future sale, lease, or redevelopment of Plazas 1 through 6 requires a citywide vote before it can move forward, on top of whatever design and approval process the city already runs. If it fails, the Council can proceed with the park and theater discussions using its existing authority, the same authority it's used since the 2018 Downtown Vision process that first floated turning parking plazas into parks, theaters, and housing.

Either way, Plazas 7 and 8 keep moving under the Surplus Land Act track that's already underway. The most contested piece of this fight, in other words, isn't the piece most people think they're voting on.

Downtown's day-to-day keeps running regardless of the ballot outcome. The Wild West Whiskey and Bites Stroll still steps off September 18, the Corvette Spectacular still lines Main Street September 20, and the Holiday Stroll still winds through downtown in November. What Measure D decides is quieter than any of that: who gets the final say the next time the city wants to change what a parking lot becomes.

Understanding a town this closely, down to which plaza is actually up for a vote and which one only sounds like it is, is part of what it means to track Los Altos for a living. If you're weighing what a market like this looks like from the inside, whether you already live here or you're deciding if this is where you want to, Vicki Ferrando can walk you through it directly. Request your complimentary market valuation and get a read on the town that goes past the headlines.