The final slate of candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot is set after last week’s filing deadline. Following is a roundup of candidates vying for seats on local councils, school boards, healthcare and water districts, as well as candidates and measures at the state and regional levels.
Los Altos City Council
Six candidates are running for three open seats on the Los Altos City Council, including two incumbents. After serving two four-year terms, Councilwoman Megan Satterlee is termed-out.
Incumbents Jeannie Bruins and Jan Pepper are seeking re-election. Bruins, who currently serves as mayor, was elected to the council in 2012 and previously served on the Planning Commission. Pepper, also elected in 2012, is CEO of San Mateo County’s Peninsula Clean Energy.
Joining the incumbents in the race are Lynette Lee Eng, Neysa Fligor, Steve Smiley and Alex Glew.
Eng, a realtor who lives in south Los Altos, is active in the schools.
Fligor is an attorney involved in regional politics.
Smiley has a background in aerospace engineering and ran for council unsuccessfully in 1997.
Glew is also an engineer and runs a consultancy in Mountain View. He mounted an unsuccessful bid for a council seat in 2012.
Los Altos Hills City Council
Los Altos Hills extended the nomination period deadline for city council candidates, allowing nonincumbents until Aug. 17 to file the necessary paperwork. Joining incumbents Courtenay C. Corrigan and Roger Spreen and newcomer Garo Kiremidjian in the race are Peter Evans and Michelle Wu.
James Burnham, an engineer at Sunnyvale-based semiconductor company Rambus, pulled papers but chose not to file them.
Evans, a mechanical engineer and chartered financial analyst, is founder and president of New Power Technologies, a Los Altos Hills-based energy technology company. He is a member of the Purissima Hills Water District Board of Directors and the Los Altos Hills Environmental Initiatives Committee and an associate member of the town’s Emergency Communications Committee.
Wu is co-founder of Voicent Communications, a Mountain View-based business automation software company. She is a 20-year resident of Los Altos Hills, a longtime member of Friends of the Hills 2000 and former member of the Los Altos Hills Traffic Safety Committee, which is currently suspended. She said her top priorities as councilwoman would be protecting the town’s rural ambience and maintaining town safety.
Mountain View City Council
Eight candidates are running for four open seats on the Mountain View City Council.
Two incumbents – John McAlister and Chris Clark – are running for their second four-year terms.
Former Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga seeks a return to the council after serving for eight years, ending in 2014. In the interim, she ran – and lost – a race for a seat on the El Camino Healthcare District Board of Directors.
Candidates Thida Cornes, Lisa Matichak, Lucas Ramirez and Greg Coladonato have experience on city/schools committees and boards.
New to the race is Ken “Kacey” Carpenter, a parent, community volunteer, technology leader and Bernie Sanders volunteer and delegate.
“My recent experience at the Democratic National Convention inspired me to run in my local Mountain View community election for city council,” Carpenter wrote on his GoFundMe.com site.
Carpenter is requesting $27 from each supporter with a goal of raising $2,700 to cover campaign costs.
Coladonato, a member of the Mountain View Whisman School District Board of Trustees, upset incumbent Phillip Palmer to win his board seat in November 2014. Earlier that same year, he ran unsuccessfully for the District 24 seat in the State Assembly.
Cornes has served seven years on the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission. Her goals include pursuing better housing options and safer, more accessible streets.
Ramirez, who serves on the city’s Human Relations Commission, wants to address the city’s jobs-to-housing imbalance and lack of affordable housing.
Matichak, a member of the city’s Environmental Planning Commission, cites confronting housing challenges and traffic congestion as priorities.
Most of the candidates have careers in the high-tech industry. Incumbent McAlister, running on a “Residents First” platform, is a small-business owner.
School boards
Most candidates running for local school boards will face contested elections this year, with the exception of two races.
The Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District has two seats up for grabs, with incumbent Phil Faillace and Mountain View High School parent Sanjay Dave the only two candidates to seek the seats. Their terms will begin in December.
The Los Altos School District, which has two four-year seats and one two-year seat open, will see a contested election only for the two-year seat.
Incumbent Steve Taglio and Covington School parent Jessica Speiser were the only two candidates to file for the two four-year seats on the board of trustees.
In the race for the two-year seat, which has no incumbent, Santa Rita School parent Bryan Johnson faces off against Tanya Raschke. Raschke, a Mountain View resident, has children who attended Loyola, Santa Rita and Bullis Charter schools and are now at Los Altos High.
“Preparing our students for a bright future in tomorrow’s dynamic workplace begins with an outstanding kinder through eighth-grade foundation today,” Raschke said in an email to the Town Crier. “I know how to work collaboratively with diverse organizations and communities toward a common goal, set the right priorities and implement on time and on budget.”
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District Board of Trustees has six candidates vying for three seats on the board, with only one incumbent running.
Incumbent Laura Casas seeks re-election. Newcomers to the race include former Cupertino City Councilmen Gilbert Wong and Orrin Mahoney, Los Altos resident and member of the Foothill-De Anza Foundation Peter Landsberger, Los Altos Hills resident and Foothill College employee Eric Rosenthal and Patrick Ahrens, former De Anza College student and former student trustee on the community college board.
For south Los Altos residents, both Cupertino Union Elementary and Fremont Union High School districts’ boards of trustees will see contested elections in November.
Cupertino Union has two seats available in November. Incumbents Josephine “Jo” Lucey and Phyllis Vogel will face off against district parents Gregory Anderson and Liang Chao.
Anderson and Chao, supporters of increased transparency for school district officials, kicked off their campaigns together last weekend.
Fremont Union has two seats available, with incumbent Jeff Moe, Roy Rocklin and Jenny Yuan in the running. Rocklin is a district science teacher and the father of Homestead High graduates. Yuan, the mother of a Lynwood High School student, wants to bring parent representation to the high school board, which does not have any current district parents.
Los Altos residents also will be casting their votes for a candidate for the Santa Clara County Board of Education for Area 1, which serves local school districts. Incumbent Grace Mah is running against Sheena Chin, a Palo Alto Unified School District parent and Palo Alto City Library Commissioner.
El Camino Healthcare District
The district race won’t appear on the November ballot. Three incumbents filed unchallenged for the three open seats on the El Camino Healthcare District Board of Directors – John Zoglin, Julia Miller and Dennis Chiu.
Zoglin is the longest-standing member of the board up for re-election. He has served on the board since 2007 and has spent his career in e-commerce.
Miller has been with the El Camino Healthcare District since 2012. She attended the Democratic National Convention in July in Philadelphia.
Chiu, who is also completing his first four-year term on the board, has served on the Santa Clara County Planning Commission.
Purissima Hills Water District
The terms of three Purissima Hills Water District directors – Brian Holtz, Steve Jordan and Ernest Solomon – expire this year. All three men filed paperwork to run again. There are no challengers.
State and regional proposals
Voters will face 17 measures in November, the most to crowd a ballot since the spring of 2000. While many election cycles see ballot measures in the double digits, they seldom concentrate so heavily in the November election.
Low voter turnout in 2014 helped contribute to the large number of initiatives as well. Turnout sets the signature requirement for a citizen initiative to qualify for the ballot. Low turnout two years ago meant that signature gatherers had an easier time meeting the threshold of 8 percent of votes cast in the previous election. Eighty percent of this year’s initiatives came from citizens.
An initiative to legalize recreational marijuana use in California has already been pulling the most press attention this summer. Proposition 64, endorsed by political figures including Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, would legalize the sale of marijuana products and enact sales and cultivation taxes for cannabis products.
Key measures already pulling in substantial campaign spending include a proposal to raise the cigarette tax by $2 per pack (Proposition 56) and the California Drug Price Relief Act (Proposition 61), which aims to lower drug prices by requiring state programs to pay no more for medicines than the rate negotiated for veterans – the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs routinely pays approximately 75 percent of the average manufacturer’s price.
The two countywide measures on the ballot will require a two-thirds vote of approval.
Measure A, a countywide bond of up to $950 million, would fund affordable housing for vulnerable segments of the population such as veterans, seniors and foster youth.
Measure B, a half-cent sales tax proposed by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, promises to repair potholes in all 15 member cities, finish a BART extension to San Jose and Santa Clara and make other transit improvements across the region. The current sales tax is a combined 8.75 percent in Santa Clara County – Measure B would raise that to 9.25 percent.
One of California’s U.S. Senate seats is up for grabs this year, the first time in decades, but only Democratic candidates fill out the slate – when Barbara Boxer steps down in January, either U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez or state Attorney General Kamala Harris will take her seat.
Anna Eshoo, the congresswoman representing Los Altos’ District 18, is running for re-election against Republican contender Richard Fox, a physician and attorney from Los Gatos.
Local state Assemblyman Rich Gordon will be replaced by one of two Democrats, either Palo Alto City Councilman Marc Berman or Palo Alto-based attorney Vicki Veenker.
The local state senator, Jerry Hill, is running for re-election against Republican challenger Rick Ciardella, a Menlo Park-based landscape architect.
