Malibu Grand Prix site claimed by office park in Redwood City

After seven years of negotiations, a new 750,000-square-foot commercial office campus will claim the vacant site once home to Redwood City’s Malibu Grand Prix amusement park following a 5-2 vote in favor of the project by the City Council Monday.

“We’ve finally gotten to a place where we can move forward,” Councilmember Jeff Gee said during Monday’s City Council meeting. “Redwood City has earned the right to ask for community benefits in exchange for development and that’s what is before us tonight, a pretty damn good robust set of community benefits that we can look at that will help many parts of our Redwood City community.”

In its current iteration, the project at 320-350 Blomquist St. would include 765,150 square feet of total office space spread across four buildings, a parking structure and surface parking with 2,591 stalls and a 35,000-square-foot employee amenities building. And about 42% of the site will be used as public open space.

Jay Paul Company, the team behind the project, is also offering roughly $65 million in additional community benefits in exchange for a zoning map and General Plan amendments, which would allow the office space to be built on a property currently zoned for industrial use.

Community benefits would include 64 deed-restricted units at exactly low-income levels that would be donated to the St. Francis Center, $13 million for park and athletic field improvements, $6.5 million for the city’s Blomquist Bridge extension project, $4.7 million for pedestrian and bike improvements along Blomquist Street and Old Seaport Boulevard, another $2.5 million in affordable housing financial contributions and $1 million for the Highway 101 and Woodside Road interchange project.

But Councilmember Diane Howard and Vice Mayor Diana Reddy argued the proposal would do more harm than good. Both asserted the new project would bring in thousands of new employees who would add more strain on the city’s housing and traffic systems than they’re offering to support.

And the commercial project would not be a right fit for the industrial area that should complement uses at the Port of Redwood City, an area of business that has historically continued to see success despite periods of recession known to hurt office uses, they argued.

“It’s apparent, I’m in the minority here but it’s difficult to be enthusiastic about such a large project on the east side of 101 that will have so many negative impacts on our community and the biggest one for me is housing,” Reddy said.

The team had initially sought to build a commercial campus of more than a million square feet on the site but has greatly whittled down the project size since first submitting plans in 2015. Meanwhile, contributions to community benefits continued to increase over the years including another $9 million since July’s meeting when developers initially said their previous $54 million offer was their last.

Ultimately, a majority of councilmembers and public speakers agreed the proposal and its community benefits package would be a better asset to the city than if a light industrial project were to be proposed in the area. The $65 million community benefits package is being offered in addition to more than $20 million in required city fees and other improvements like hardening the area to sea-level rise and building all-electric structures, Mayor Giselle Hale noted.

If a project were to meet current city zoning, staff has argued the city would experience similar impacts on the environment and traffic with about the same number of employees coming to the area, but the additional community benefits wouldn’t be part of the conversation.

“We still have a lot of community benefits in this package so I’m thinking it’s something worth voting for because otherwise we’d have something with much less community benefits potentially,” Councilmember Lissette Espinoza-Garnica said. “Any other project would be probably just as impactful, if not just a little less, so that’s why I think it’s good enough for Redwood City.”