** NB: THIS PAGE AND MUCH OF THIS WEBSITE IS IN THE PROCESS OF BEING UPDATED FROM 2020 TO 2022. ALTHOUGH MY VALUES HAVE NOT CHANGED, I HAVE GOALS RELATED SPECIFICALLY TO THE WATER DISTRICT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AS I TREAT THESE ISSUES WITH MINDFULNESS AND CONSIDERATION.**
Economic Justice
- Align Palo Alto with the policies of our neighbor cities and enact a business tax on our largest businesses and landlords. Palo Alto is the only city of our type to give businesses a free ride.
- Conform tax burdens with usage of public services: Palo Alto jobs outnumber residents at a rate of 3 to 1, yet residents shoulder all the tax burden for our public services, including utilities, fire, and public safety.
- Exempt small and medium sized businesses from tax liability to ensure a business environment of innovation and entrepreneurship.
- Support the Schools and Communities First initiative in order to end future reliance on parcel taxes to support schools.
- Take control of contract negotiation: Negotiate on behalf of resident interests rather than caving to demands made by the police union, telecom companies, commercial developers, landlords, and the highest paid city executives.
- Create a city enforcement division with teeth to enforce code violations and collect code-mandated statutory penalties. Code violations of $5,000 per day mean just that - if a developer does not build what is required of them on a site, we should not have to go to court to collect the penalties. Those penalties should be demanded immediately.
- Diversify city leadership. People of color and women must be represented in leadership in all meaningful positions throughout city staff, commissions, and committees.
- De-fund and redesign the police department to make it a much smaller part of a large network of community support that is focused on de-escalating conflict. Rely on community members to preserve peace; use the money to fund health initiatives, public education and other forms of community development.
- Revise all police union agreements. Ensure transparency in the rules and regulations the police department must follow.
- Commit to joint programs with our closest neighbor, the City of East Palo Alto.
- Open areas like Foothill Park to our neighbors - we should not be limiting access to natural spaces based on where people live.
- Invest in programs that assist public schools.
Environmental Sustainability
- Prioritize immediate construction of protected bike lanes to ensure that no more children are killed when biking down residential roads.
- Invest in other infrastructure improvements to enable convenient and safe alternatives to cars, including pedestrian bike bridges and walk streets.
- Invest in publicly-provided electric shuttles rather than parking garages to remove cars from the streets rather than encourage car use.
- Close University and California Avenues to car traffic.
- Enforce existing parking restrictions, collecting city revenue from parking tickets.
- Preserve open and green space for public use.
- Clearly mark and disclose the location of all Superfund sites in Palo Alto, so that residents and potential employees are notified about the existence of potential toxic pollution in their water and air.
Transparency & Fairness
- Require that all elected officials eliminate all potential conflicts of interest before taking office, to ensure that the city government is working for residents and not for wealthy donors or employers.
- Put an immediate halt to financial benefits currently enjoyed by Palo Alto elected officials, such as our mayor, who works full time for a Palo Alto based subsidiary of Ford Motor Company, and who acted in the direct interest of Ford by removing the business tax from the ballot, and approving additional office space near his employer’s office.
- Require disclosure of any potential conflict of interest on the City Council website, not hidden in a campaign filing.
- Transform Council roles to paid full time positions with reasonable, government-rate salaries ($150,000 to $175,000) in order to ensure that Council Members act on behalf of the city that elected them rather than the corporate interests that pay them.
- Revive office of inspections and enforcement to ensure land is being used legally and appropriately. Enforce zoning codes against residential properties not being used for residential purposes including Ghost Houses (vacancy penalties) and multiple homes by the same owner (only one home should receive primary residence subsidies).
- Enact business tax to fund housing and to make state and federal tax incentives effective.
- Raise fees for developers who do office construction, lower fees for residential construction.
- Expedite approval processes for housing.
- Convert commercial areas to residential; never the reverse.
- Build affordable housing for teachers and essential workers at Fry’s, Cubberly, and other large lots. Reclaim land for parks and housing!
- Halt all office construction unless and until businesses and landlords pay their fair share (versus relying on residents to pay their way, like now).
