Los Altos has settled a long-running lawsuit over the closure of a gate at St. Joseph Avenue in the south end of the city.
City Attorney Robert Booth announced last week the suit, filed against the city six years ago by the Roman Catholic Bishop of San Jose, has been dropped, allowing St. Joseph to remain a closed street.
The bishop sought to force the city to open the road after a gate was installed in 1993. Church officials were negotiating to sell land to housing developers and wanted a through street to accommodate traffic.
In 1995, a trial court ordered the gate removed. But the city continued discussions with the bishop on the issue, Booth said. At the heart of the effort to retain the gate were St. Joseph area residents themselves, who lobbied hard to prevent a vehicular traffic invasion.
"It was a total effort on the part of the neighborhood," said resident Mark Karp.
Karp said that St. Joseph Avenue, which dead-ends south of Interstate 280, is only 16 feet wide, with no sidewalks. Opening it, he said, would have created traffic safety problems.
"This is preservation for the kids," Karp said.
Booth said the settlement "protects the neighborhood from through traffic from developed areas above it, and (Rancho San Antonio) park users."
Power outage hits downtown
A power outage in the middle of the scorching heat last week left 14 downtown Los Altos customers without electricity for approximately three and one-half hours, PG&E officials said.
The July 13 outage occurred when a transformer "gave up the load after three days of high demand," said PG&E spokesman Scott Blakey.
Crews replaced the transformer and a secondary line that looked like it might also go, Blakey said.
The power outage, affecting businesses on State Street, lasted from approximately 3:30 p.m. to 6:30-7 p.m., Blakey said.
New commissioner in Los Altos Hills
Charles Wong was voted in as a new planning commissioner at the Los Altos Hills City Council meeting last Thursday.
"I want to give my time to do volunteer civic work for my community," Wong said.
A Stanford University graduate, Wong is the president of an Internet company and has lived in Los Altos Hills for four years. "When I come home, our community environment soothes me with its rustic beauty and serenity," he wrote in his application. "I want to contribute my time and effort in wisely preserving what we have here."
Wong said he hopes to be a role model for Asian-Americans, proving to his generation and his children's generation they can have a community life as well as work and family lives.
Wong will replace outgoing commissioner Emily Cheng, who recommended Wong to fill her seat.
- Town Crier Staff Reports