Walk down State Street on a Thursday evening this month and you'll pass the farmers market tables between Second and Third, the same layout that's run there since spring. You'll also pass Plaza 1 and Plaza 2, the surface parking lots on either side of that stretch, without giving them much thought. Come November, Los Altos voters will decide whether the city can ever touch those lots again without asking permission first.
The measure is called Measure D, and the story most people have heard about it goes something like this: residents got fed up with City Hall quietly signing away downtown parking, so they gathered signatures to force a vote before four different projects, a park, a theater, affordable housing, and a parking garage, could take away the plazas for good. That version isn't wrong exactly. It's just missing the part that actually determines what happens on the ground, which is that the people who wrote Measure D already decided two of those four projects don't need to be stopped.
What the ballot question actually does
The initiative amends the Los Altos Municipal Code to add a new chapter covering the eight publicly accessible parking plazas in the area bounded by Foothill Expressway, San Antonio Road, and Edith Avenue. If it passes, the city can't sell, lease, or materially change any of those plazas without a separate vote of the people, not just a City Council resolution.
Getting it to the ballot took real organizing. Petitioners Barbara Loebner and Lucinda Langley-Andrews filed the notice of intent in March 2026, and by May the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters had verified enough signatures to clear 117 percent of the threshold required to qualify. Faced with the choice of adopting the ordinance outright or sending it to voters, the City Council chose the ballot on June 23, 2026, setting up a November 3 decision.
Plaza 2 is doing double duty
Here's where the story gets specific. The city's current design work, a contract with Watry Design worth up to $2,288,500, targets Plaza 1 and Plaza 2 for a concept the city calls "Downtown Park with Parking." At a February 24, 2026 meeting, the City Council told the design team not to pursue underground parking, which narrowed the options to a mix of surface parking and green space on that footprint.
Plaza 2 is also the site the city named back in its 2018 Downtown Vision plan for a different project entirely: a new performing arts theater that would give the Los Altos Stage Company a permanent home. The company has run productions out of the Bus Barn Theater for 48 years, a 99-seat space that its president, Vicki Reeder, has described plainly. "There's no lobby," she told the Los Altos Community Coalition in 2024. The company's board now co-chairs a formal capital campaign, the Los Altos Performing Arts Center effort, with community leaders Robin Abrams and Joe Beninato leading fundraising and a consulting firm, Indigo Skies Consulting, brought on to run the strategy.
Two projects, one acre. That's the actual fight underneath the ballot language, and it explains why theater leaders have said publicly that a successful initiative would make fundraising harder, since donors are reluctant to give toward a building that a future election could still block.
At the June 23 council meeting, resident Jon Baer, president of the group Friends of Los Altos, laid out the stakes from the initiative's side of the argument:
"You folks are committing three of our acres to a performing arts center, a park... and a parking garage."
Vice Mayor Larry Lang pushed back on the framing, asking when the council had actually committed to those outcomes rather than studying them. The exchange captured the real disagreement. It isn't over whether downtown should change. It's over who gets to decide the order operations happen in, and whether a park and a theater can actually coexist on the same lot at the same time.
The housing piece was never really in dispute
The part of this story that rarely gets mentioned is that Plaza 7 and Plaza 8, the two lots the city declared surplus land in 2024 under California's Surplus Land Act, aren't where the real fight is happening. The initiative's own text carves out an exception, allowing affordable housing to proceed on the plazas already designated for it in the city's housing plans.
That carve-out exists because state law leaves the city very little room to maneuver once land is declared surplus. The Surplus Land Act requires specific notice, review, and good faith negotiation steps that run through the state Department of Housing and Community Development, independent of anything a local ballot measure can override. The people who wrote Measure D understood that, so instead of trying to freeze the housing plan too, they wrote it out of scope from the start.
That's the piece worth sitting with if you only take one thing from this. The headline version of Measure D sounds like an all-or-nothing vote on downtown's future. The actual text is narrower. Two of the four projects everyone's arguing about were already going to happen regardless of how the vote goes. What's genuinely on the ballot is whether the city can keep moving on the park and the theater, both aimed at Plaza 2, without asking voters first.
Here's how the plazas break down:
| Plaza | What's actually planned there | Who decides |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Park and parking concept design (Watry Design contract) | City Council, subject to Measure D |
| 2 | Same park concept, and the 2018-designated site for a new theater | City Council, subject to Measure D |
| 7 | Declared surplus land in 2024, slated for affordable housing | State Surplus Land Act, exempted from Measure D |
| 8 | Same surplus land and housing designation as Plaza 7 | State Surplus Land Act, exempted from Measure D |
The remaining four plazas in the downtown boundary aren't currently attached to a named project, but they'd fall under the same voter-approval requirement if Measure D passes.
Who's actually arguing about this
Mayor Sally Meadows has declined to weigh in publicly on the ballot campaign itself. Vice Mayor Larry Lang has been more direct in council meetings, telling residents in June that the council isn't trying to block the measure from reaching voters, only that "the implications of this are very complicated." On the initiative side, the group ForLosAltos has framed its campaign around heritage tree preservation as much as parking, warning that current park designs could remove a third of the Chinese pistache trees that line the plazas.
Local business reaction has split along familiar lines. Some merchants worry that losing surface parking during any redesign hurts foot traffic before a new structure is finished. Others, including backers of the theater project, worry that prolonged uncertainty makes it harder to raise the philanthropic dollars a project like LAPAC depends on, since ticket sales alone cover only about half of the current Bus Barn Theater's operating costs.
What doesn't change no matter what happens in November
The farmers market isn't going anywhere. It runs through mid-October this year, Thursdays from 4 to 8 p.m. on State Street, the same footprint it's used for years, sponsored by State Street Market and the Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation. The city even set up an outreach booth right at the market on Aug. 13 to gather feedback on park design options, which tells you something about where this conversation is actually happening. It's not in a hearing room most residents never visit. It's at the table where you're buying peaches.
Whatever voters decide on Nov. 3, the plazas themselves won't change shape overnight. Design work, environmental review, and the theater's own capital campaign all move on timelines measured in years, not months. What Measure D determines is who gets to make the next call, and whether that call can happen without another trip back to the ballot.
If you're trying to make sense of how a decision like this could eventually shape property values, buyer interest, or the character of specific blocks downtown, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who's been tracking these plazas as closely as the people arguing about them. Bay Area Home Sales keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local decision because it shapes the Peninsula long after the signs come down. If you'd like to talk through what any of this might mean for your own plans in Los Altos, reach out and we'll walk through it together.
