The city of Palo Alto announced this morning it has reached a tentative agreement with the Palo Alto Unified School District to expand the city’s holdings on the Cubberley campus in order to build a community center.
The agreement will go to the City Council for approval on Monday and the school board on Tuesday.
The plan calls for the city to ask the voters in 2026 for approval of a bond measure to pay for the project.
The city said that before the bond measure, it will develop a plan for a rebuilt and renovated community center and related uses on the site, and then Palo Alto Unified School District will develop its school improvement plans.
The city will pay the $65.5 million from the bond measure to the school district for the property. The city already owns eight acres at Cubberley and the new seven-acre parcel will be adjacent to it. See map above. The city’s two parcels front Middlefield Road.
The school board initiated the project in 2023 with a letter inviting the city to make an offer to purchase additional acres at Cubberley. Both the council and school board created Ad Hoc committees to work on the idea. The city’s committee was made up of council members Julie Lythcott-Haims (Chair), Pat Burt and Lydia Kou. Their counterparts from the school board were Trustees Jennifer DiBrienza (Chair) and Shounak Dharap.
Today’s announcement wasn’t unexpected. Council approved a resolution a year ago saying it wanted to buy seven more acres at Cubberley and explore a long-term lease on 20 additional acres.
Cubberley was built in the 1950s and served as Cubberley High School until 1979, when the school district closed it due to declining enrollment.
Starting in 1989, the city of Palo Alto ran a community center at the site. The city has leased portions of Cubberley from PAUSD since the late 1980s. Currently, there are 23 tenants and 24 artists who sublease space at Cubberley from the City, along with dozens of individual groups who rent or use the theater, pavilion, classrooms and athletic fields from the city.
Why are they building a community center there when there’s a perfectly good one at Mitchell Park, less than a mile away? After all this time, this is the best they could do?