In Google's hometown, progressives sweep City Council election
Source: Mountain View Voice
The city may eventually see some big changes to its landscape as a result of Tuesday's City Council election, which creates a council majority in favor of building a large new residential neighborhood near Google headquarters.
... Candidates Pat Showalter, Ken Rosenberg, and Lenny Siegel (in that order) held the lead as the first portion of ballots were counted and election night parties were held across the city. The trend continued until all precincts reported their results in the early morning but some provisional and mail ballots have yet to be counted. ... The city's growing jobs-housing imbalance was a key issue in the election, and Showalter, Rosenberg and Siegel were among those that promised the most aggressive measures to close that gap in an effort preserve the city's affordability and diverse character.
Siegel lead the charge as founder of the Campaign for a Balanced Mountain View earlier this year, and benefited from the name recognition his activism has created since he moved here in the the 1970s, including his job running the nonprofit that oversees toxic cleanup efforts in Mountain View, efforts to save Hangar One at Moffett Field and to stop cargo flights at Moffett in the 1990s. He also spearheaded two failed efforts to bring rent control to the city decades ago and was an anti-war activist with the local group Voices for Peace, among other things.
"Some of the candidates had slogans about preserving neighborhoods but to me that was just verbiage," remarked Siegel about his opponents, as he spoke to the group of supporters and neighbors that packed his home in old Mountain View Tuesday night. If elected, he said he would call on the jobs-rich cities in the region to form a regional body to address the area's jobs-housing imbalance. He criticized candidates who seemed to be saying that Mountain View employees needed to go live in San Jose. "How can anybody trust us if we don't put our own house in order?" he said.
Read more: http://mv-voice.com/news/2014/11/04/showalter-rosenberg-and-siegel-lead-in-early-council-election-results