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California Newspaper Publishers Association
NOVEMBER 25, 2016 VOLUME 24, NO. 44
www.MountainViewOnline.com
650.964.6300
MOVIES | 19
Major changes to school boundaries on the way MV WHISMAN DISTRICT RELEASES FIVE PROPOSALS TO BALANCE STUDENT ENROLLMENT By Kevin Forestieri
I MICHELLE LE
Amanda Brotzel, a volunteer at Mountain View’s Community Services Agency, sorts donated food on Nov. 21. CSA is one of seven nonprofits that share contributions to this year’s Mountain View Voice Holiday Fund.
So much more than a soup kitchen HOUSING CRISIS PUTS PRESSURE ON CSA’S SAFETY NET SERVICES By Mark Noack
T
o see how the area served by the Community Services Agency has changed, Tom Myers needs only to peer out his office window. For the last year, he’s been viewing the scene across the street as construction crews fin-
Mountain View Voice
2016
ished a 184-apartment luxury complex expected to open in early 2017. Those apartments are
expected to rent for $3,500 to $8,000 a month, and those tenants probably won’t be needing CSA’s emergency food pantry or help paying the next month’s rent. But Myers says the surge in high-priced homes and the shrinking number of affordable See HOLIDAY FUND, page 8
t’s a touchy subject that’s bound to affect property values and leave some people disappointed, but the Mountain View Whisman School District is launching its second major effort to re-draw attendance boundaries throughout the city. Last week, the district released five proposed boundary maps that re-zone every school in the district, including Slater Elementary, which is expected to be opened at the start of the 2018-19 school year. All five proposals will be subject to public review in the coming months, before the committee winnows down the options. It will be up to the school board to ultimately approve the final boundary map. The new boundaries are designed to fix two problems. The Whisman area in the northeast area of Mountain View hasn’t had a neighborhood school since 2006, when the district closed Slater Elementary and sliced up the neighborhood into attendance boundaries for Huff, Theuerkauf and Landels elementary schools. With the
re-opening of Slater Elementary just a few years away, the district is scrambling to accommodate the new the Slater attendance boundary. The other major problem is that Bubb, Huff and Landels all have enrollment floating between 550 and 580 students this year, pushing the limits of the existing facilities. Enrollment waiting lists from earlier this year revealed a big group seeking to transfer into all three schools. That waiting list included students who lived within the boundaries and faced getting elbowed out of their own neighborhood school. District officials have since said that all kindergarten students who requested their own neighborhood school got in this year. The maps, which are available on the district’s website, mvwsd. org, all include a new boundary for Slater that’s roughly bounded by Highway 85, Central Expressway and the Sunnyvale border. Proposal “D” extends the western boundary to Moffett Boulevard and south of Middlefield See BOUNDARIES, page 6
Toxic cleanup gear malfunctions at Moffett Field NASA COMPLAINS THAT NAVY’S WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM WAS OFFLINE, TECHNICIAN DISAPPEARED By Mark Noack
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n a squabble between Moffett Field’s federal agencies, NASA officials are complaining that a U.S. Navy treatment system that’s supposed to be cleaning up toxic groundwater has been malfunctioning for an unknown length of time. Regulators from the Environmental Protection Agency and the State
INSIDE
Water Resources Control Board say they are investigating the incident to learn more. The U.S. Navy has been looking to exit Moffett since the base closed in 1994, but the military branch is still responsible for cleaning up a variety of chemicals, including trichloroethylene (TCE), that have leeched into the water table during its tenure. Navy officials have an agreement
with NASA for the research agency to eventually take over operations and maintenance for its array of treatment systems designed to pump and purge toxic chemicals from the water. Starting in October, NASA officials took over a Navy system known as Site 28, located just west of Hangar One. The nearly 20-year-old system includes nine pumps and a treatment plant
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designed to run continuously, cleaning about 70 gallons of contaminated water per minute. But the Site 28 system was failing, according to an update earlier this month made to the Moffett Restoration Advisory Board. At the meeting, NASA environmental management chief Don Chuck excoriated Navy officials for handing them a clean-up system plagued with
problems. “The system we received was not in very good shape and we’re missing a lot of records from prior to us taking it over,” Chuck said. “We’re working to find out what happened and if the system wasn’t operating before we took it over.” Among the problems, Chuck See MOFFETT, page 7