As Stanford awaits the green light from the Menlo Park City Council on its plans to develop a luxury hotel and office complex at the Sand Hill Road corridor, a debate over the costs and benefits of the project has come to the forefront.

The proposed venture, a partnership with premier ultra-luxury hotel company Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, would include a 120-room hotel, a restaurant, a health spa and several office buildings.

Rosewood and the University have carved out a 21-acre slice of Stanford land between Interstate-280 and Sand Hill Road, an area that has been virtually synonymous with venture capitalism since the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. The facility will cater primarily to the corporate heavyweights who flock to do business with venture capital firms in the area.

The city of Menlo Park levies a 10 percent occupancy tax on hotel rooms. At that rate, a high-end hotel such as this one could generate millions of dollars in tax revenue each year.

According to Steve Elliott, director of development projects for the Stanford Management Company, fiscal analysis has determined that the economic benefits of the hotel will be significant.

“[When it is stabilized,] the hotel project will provide $1.9 million to the general fund of Menlo Park,” he said. “In addition, the property taxes from the project will provide $500,000 a year to the Menlo Park schools.”

Yet despite its potential to swell the city’s coffers, not everyone is convinced that the hotel’s presence will be a boon for the community.

Lennie Roberts, a legislative advocate for the Committee for Green Foothills in San Mateo County, expressed concern about the growing imbalance between jobs and housing in the region.

“The price of housing in our area is the result of too many jobs being approved by cities who want the tax revenue,” she wrote in an email to The Daily. “This project will likely exacerbate the problem, resulting in workers having to travel long distances, especially lower-paid hotel and service workers.”

Elliott estimated that the new facilities would employ about 600 people altogether.

The addition of the hotel and office complex could also increase traffic congestion in the area. Some Menlo Park officials have also expressed concern that traffic on Sand Hill Road and I-280 would spill over into residential neighborhoods.

City Councilmember Andrew Cohen said that he has no complaints about the hotel itself, but that the traffic changes would be negative.

“Stanford’s overall plan, including all the other offices and other development, puts quite a burden on the city’s traffic capabilities,” he said.

Cohen said that he considers development along Sand Hill Road an inevitability, but empathizes with local residents who are opposed to the traffic that a large hotel complex would create.

Elliott pointed out that the developers are taking traffic issues into consideration, however.

“We’re required to provide what mitigation we can where there are impacts,” he said. In this case, the hotel will be paying a traffic-impact fee to the city and making improvements to the nearby northbound off-ramp on I-280.

According to a Jan. 31 Enviornmental Impact Report, the project will require ecological mitigation as well. Since a portion of the site is classified as wetland habitat, the developers will need to create new wetlands to replace existing ones — typically two to three acres of wetlands for every one that is destroyed.

“There are wetlands areas of about 0.91 acres on the site and we will be required to mitigate that, most likely by relocating and recreating wetland at an additional site on Stanford land,” Elliott said. “The plan on that is actually to increase the amount of wetlands at a 1.5 ratio.”

Cohen said he does not believe environmental issues will have much impact on the city’s final decision regarding the project.

While he remarked “you probably won’t find the Sierra Club liking it,” Cohn expressed that financial considerations would likely be enough to override any environmental concerns.

The building’s developers also plan to minimize the impact on the area through the architectural design. According to Elliott, all of the complex’s buildings will be between one and two stories in order to minimize the effect that construction will have on the view of the foothills.

The buildings are designed in a “California ranch style with low pitched cabled roofs and open patios and courtyards to create kind of an open feeling and more relaxed feel,” he said. “It’s trying to complement the outdoor environment along Sand Hill Road.”

The projected Adobe style of the development is a sharp contrast from its 1980s predecessor. Designed as a large, mid-rise building, the earlier development failed to launch due to economic and various other reasons, Elliott said.

Within the past two years, the plan has been redeveloped, and Elliott said construction is slated to begin at the end of 2006, finishing sometime in 2008.

In order to reach such goals, the management team is working closely with several departments on campus to foresee all land-related matters and verify the totality of the construction’s impact.

Laura Jones of Stanford’s Planning Office has already reviewed the site for archaeological resources on three separate occasions.

While she did not find an “archeological site” on the complex, Jones said she did come across lumps of chert, a material that Native Americans typically used to make knives and other tools.

Jones did not come across these pieces of chert until her third visit there, and after spending around 10 hours at the site with other specialists, she is confident that the construction will be able to proceed safely.

“It’s not what you would call a highly-sensitive sight archaeologically,” she said. “We didn’t find any tools and it’s not a good place to put a village because there’s no water-source there, and it’s on a hill. We’ve looked at it pretty comprehensively.”

Nevertheless, an archaeologist will be required to monitor the development, as will a paleontologist, in case any fossils are found.

“If they really hit a bunch of fossils in the basement there would be some minor construction delays,” Jones said.

Stanford Conservation Biologist Alan Launer similarly sees no concerns in the conservation planning department.

He observed that the site was in an isolated location, and stated that he did not perform a lot of his conversation work there because of the area’s relative biological isolation.

Launer’s only concern with the construction is its interference with the water that flows under the site to a nearby creek.

While this water already flows under I-280 and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Launer emphasized the importance of monitoring the impact construction will have.

“We just have to make sure that that run-off is clean and not increased,” he said. “You don’t want the run-off’s timing and magnitude to change.”

The planning commission will hold a public hearing on the proposed Sand Hill Road hotel/office complex at 7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 27, in the council chambers at the Menlo Park Civic Center.

If the project is approved and the review process goes according to schedule, the hotel could be operating as early as 2008.