Battle for Byxbee Park: What About The Plan?

On a crisp, luminous Monday morning at Byxbee Park in the Palo Alto Baylands, Emily Renzel stands atop a low grassy vista, gazing at the sprawling, dark-brown landfill before her and imagining those massive piles of garbage covered in grass.

That vision is, after all, part of the Palo Alto Bayland Master Plan, which Renzel had fought to create for years prior to being elected to City Council in 1979.

One of Palo Alto’s fiercest environmentalists, Renzel today finds herself locked in a turf war with people who would likely be her close allies, under most other circumstances.

At the core of the debate: What do with the city’s organic waste once the landfill and an old biosolid incinerator shut down next year. Palo Alto Patch began reporting on this green vs. green battle last fall, which burgeoned last month when an initiative that would allow 10 acres of the 126-acre Byxbee Park to be used for a proposed anaerobic digester plant made it onto the fall ballot.

After waiting 33 years for the park to finally be completed, Renzel is getting anxious.

“We’ve been waiting a long time for this park,” she said. “This is supposed to be a pastoral open space park.”

Indeed, according to the Master Plan, which was adopted in 1978, the landfill, once completed, would “create the hill-and-valley effect of the pastoral park” and provide a “passive upland meadow recreation area” with “hills that will blend with the textures and colors of the surrounding marshland.”

The latter clause, for Renzel, has become a particular source of contention, because the proposed anaerobic digestion plant would require cutting into the side of the park’s would-be tallest hill and possibly building a massive retaining wall.

The hill, at 60 feet, was designed to be the “main high-ground landmark in the flatness of the Baylands,” according to the Master Plan. If voters approve the Green Energy and Compost Initiative this fall, that landmark will be flush against 10 acres of industrial wastewater facilities (see examples in sidebar).

But the city needs to deal with its waste, say proponents of the measure, and, therefore, it should be done in the most affordable, environmentally friendly way possible. Building and operating a municipal anaerobic digestion facility is the best way to do that, and the only place to do it, according to Cedric de La Beaujardiere, who co-chairs the city’s Blue Ribbon Compost Task Force, which first studied the proposal.

“This is really the only site in Palo Alto that’s big enough,” he said, “and there’s no other site available that’s next to the water treatment plant.”

Not so, says Renzel. If the city wanted to, it could buy commercial real estate on the other side of the treatment plant on Embarcadero Way at a cost appraised in 2009 to be $22-$48 million—or $2-$4 million a year over a 10-year loan cycle—for 8.8 acres.

However, that option was presented to the Blue Ribbon Compost Task Force, which Renzel herself also sat on, and was rejected, leaving only the dedicated parkland as an option.

With a feasibility study for the project inching closer to a June release, the City Council has been skeptical of the methodology used to weigh benefits and costs.

Last month the council meticulously scrutinized a preliminary analysis of the feasibility study and agreed that significantly more information was needed in order to accurately model the pros and cons of the various options.

In the meantime, a pitched messaging battle has landed in Renzel’s lap, and so far, she says, the initiative’s backers have dominated media coverage and done so with literature that she says is misleading.

“The proponents of this initiative in their literature that they handed out, used a picture—which you have also used on Patch—that makes it look like there’s just a continuation of the green from the park, with this long slather of green.”

Indeed, Palo Alto Patch has published computer renderings depicting a living roof on the proposed facility provided by proponents, who conceded Monday that a green roof has since been removed from the design because of its high cost.

Renzel said a living roof would have added $4-$6 million to the budget, which is $5-$8 per ton of refuse.

De la Beaujardiere provided Patch with updated renderings Monday depicting that change (see sidebar), and said that the original design for a green roof was done in good faith in order to accommodate the desires of conservationists such as Renzel.

“The whole reason that we decided to put a green roof on it to begin with was to appease the park people,” he said, “so it’s kind of ironic that she points to that as being too expensive and undesirable.”

Regardless of what happens with the roof, Emily Renzel must successfully persuade Palo Alto voters to vote against the initiative this fall if she is to ultimately prevail in seeing her larger vision come to fruition.

For her, this story is not even about the landfill, per se, but rather about staying true to a vision first planted decades ago.

“I object very strongly to the proponents referring to this as repurposing of the dump,” she said. “This is dedicated parkland.”

“Byxbee Park is only five minutes from any place in Palo Alto. Senior citizens, especially—but also young families with children—anybody can come here and in an instant be out in a wilderness. It’s a wonderful experience and it is nearby, and it should not be intruded upon by a major industrial facility.”

Part Two of this series will look into the costs and benefits of building a proposed dry anaerobic digestion facility at Byxbee Park.