And my response:
Good story, Chad. Another point about 27 University is it is actually simultaneous with 456 University potentially back-online as a place for public events: City of Palo Alto staff actually took what they were hearing from residents about wanting leadership to work with the landlord (not Arrillaga) at The Varsity Theatre and suggested to Arrillaga that his massive office towers monument would go over better with Theatreworks as the poster-boy, or patsy or whatever you want to call it.

There are relatively fewer people these days passionate about the fate of 456 University and what government could or should do to enact the people’s will, but the historical context is that in the 1990s thousands of citizens signed a petition trying to urge City Council to not grant the zoning change that resulted, for 15 years or so, in a retail use for the historic Theatre.

The Grand Jury report of June 6, 2014 finds there is corruption involving one developer and two deals, but it remains to be seen how widespread is the rot or what anyone can do about it.

Not sure why you picture the editor of a local paper here, but the local press — the Weekly, the Post and to a lesser extent the Daily News — were cheerleaders of the project in their real-time coverage of it and certainly not aware and were not looking for any pattern of secret dealings or corruption. They under-play the report, in my opinion.

Who are taking credit for being the whistle-blowers? (I don’t blame them for being discrete).