St. Matthew’s campus is currently overbuilt by 25% and under their parking capacity by 213 parking spaces, and the area around it endures significant traffic and parking problems seven days each week.

St. Matthew’s has tried to convince the neighborhood to accept another multi-use building on their campus, but without a brick-and-mortar solution that would truly solve the parking problems that exist today and accommodate the additional capacity that a new building would require.

Instead, St. Matthew’s is trying to convince its neighbors to accept certain promises to limit the use and hours of the buildings in exchange for a 25-year master plan and overlay zone that would allow a deficit of hundreds of parking spaces as required by code and a larger amount of building area (43%) than allowed by code, and seriously exacerbate the problems that exist today.

We completely reject this idea and proposal.

Rather, we respectfully petition the San Mateo Planning Commission and City Council to protect the sanctity of the neighborhoods around St. Matthew’s by requiring that they solve the problems their traffic causes in the neighborhood, rather than amplify them.  We ask that if they continue to propose such excessive overbuilding on their over-capacity campus, rather than granting them special treatment and asking the tax-paying neighbors to rely on 25 years of promises, they be held accountable to the same standards as other institutions like Borel Bank, Serra High School, and Draeger’s, as well as the laws of common sense and the wishes of their neighbors, and be required to adopt the neighborhood’s proposal, which includes maintaining 492 onsite, permanent parking spaces for all their buildings and fixing the related traffic issues around the campus, to truly solve their problems once and for all, instead of passing the cost onto all the taxpaying residents of San Mateo.