Los Altos marches to the left

Eight years ago, when Los Altos voters favored Al Gore over George Bush, the Town Crier predictably made sure to mention "the city's rich Republican history." (Just as predictably, the paper failed to mention its publisher's prominent role in local Republican politics). Four years later, a similar article by Miss Mischief characterized my hometown as "typically a Republican stronghold."

It's time to dispense with that idea. Los Altos is a place with many problems. But I am happy to report that Republicanism is not one of them.

Since the 2000 election, the margin by which Los Altos voters have favored the Democratic candidate for President has tripled, with Barack Obama pulling in more than twice as many votes as John McCain this year.

In Los Altos Hills, the margin is slightly smaller, but the trend is the same.



The local electorate's take on Prop. 8 is further evidence of the city's liberal tilt: despite the Town Crier's courageously bad endorsement of the measure, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills strongly rejected it (63-37 and 60-40, respectively).

Has Los Altos changed, or has the Republican Party?

Nationwide, voters with postgraduate degrees went Democratic by as much as 64-36 margin. (This is not surprising given their choice between a former law professor with Joe Biden as a running mate and Warren Buffett as an economic advisor and, on the other hand, the trio of a gas tax holiday advocate, Sarah Palin and Joe "the Plumber"). With 40% of its population over the age of 25 holding advanced degrees, Los Altos is likely lost to the Republicans for the foreseeable future. It may not be long before reporters are referring to its rich Democratic history.

NOE 2008 Election Special

Four years ago, the day after John Kerry conceded the 2004 election -- a day so depressing I spent it staring at birds in an effort to console myself, only to make myself more upset when I realized the birds were bound to suffer worst of all -- my paper ran a banner front-page headline declaring that Matt Pear, Nick Galiotto, Laura Macias and The Professor had won election to Mountain View's four open city council seats. The story's "Klemke Wins!" quality notwithstanding, this wasn't so bad in itself. But we found out the very next day that though 100% of precincts had reported, the county had yet to count the paper votes, about 1/4 of the total cast. This led to an embarrassing headline the following week when we had to backtrack from our original story. If there was a saving grace, it was that every other paper made the same mistake in interpreting the county's data, and that none of the results actually changed.

This is a long way of saying that I have at least a plausible excuse for waiting so long to post an election recap. With the possible exception of Measure B (more on that later), the local elections finally appear set. Based on results posted as of 11:00 a.m. Monday morning, it seems safe to say that all incumbents won. But why stop there? This is local politics, after all, and therefore calls for some snide analysis.

Los Altos Hills "Town" Council: Beating John Vidovich

Complete Precincts 9 of 9
		Percent	Votes
RICH LARSEN		21.38%	2,527
JEAN (JOHN) H. MORDO		19.91%	2,354
GINGER SUMMIT		19.87%	2,349
JIM ABRAHAM		13.47%	1,593
TONI C. CASEY		13.18%	1,558
JOHN VIDOVICH		12.19%	1,441

Three-time mayor Casey, whom some observers have compared Saruman, returned to the local political scene (over the polite objection of the Town Crier) to complete her downfall. The strict property rights, anti-Barn (but, she stressed, pro-Little League) agenda on which she and Abraham ran carried the endorsement of the Palo Alto Daily News but not, to its credit, the Town Crier. She called for an unenforceable moratorium on campaign signs, as they are out of keeping with the city's character. (That character, the Town Crier immediately reminded readers, is "pleasant"). She also claimed the endorsement of both a deceased resident and, less impressively, the organization of which she is president. And, as the Town Crier accurately predicted, her organization attacked Mayor Mordo with last-minute mailers that wrongly accused him of breaking the law and labeled him as arrogant after he publicly apologized for false statements he had made.

She finished behind every other candidate except for Vidovich, who didn't spend a dime on his campaign despite the million dollars in unwanted federal subsidies he had lying around. It's refreshing to see not even Los Altos Hills is conservative enough that affiliation with the Bush Administration is a winning platform. Perhaps the town is becoming an ideopolis.

Mountain View City Council: Read NOE, win a seat

Completed Precincts 43 of 43
		Percent	Votes
LAURA MACIAS		17.73%	13,315
TOM MEANS		15.31%	11,497
MIKE KASPERZAK		13.82%	10,383
JOHN INKS		13.62%	10,231
JOHN R. MCALISTER		10.21%	7,666
CHRIS CLARK		9.76%	7,332
ALICIA CRANK		8.31%	6,240
TRACY GORDON		5.87%	4,410
DIANA WANG		5.37%	4,030

Maybe it's an infinitesimally small sample size (I'm still waiting for new correspondent Happy to run the appropriate regression analysis), but if there's one trend that jumped out at me from the Mountain View returns, it's that the winners tend to read NOE, at least occasionally. The Professor, a regular commenter, and Macias, who once called this post "smarmy" (which I still choose to take as a compliment), cruised to reelection. Kasperzak finished third, returning to the council as a Democrat. I don't have any evidence that fourth-place finisher John Inks is a NOE reader, but I also don't have any evidence that he isn't.

The surprise, according to both the Voice's analysis and this theory, is that Miz Crank did not fare better. This is somewhat of a shame for the city. Perhaps her emphasis on public safety resonated less as economic shocks and other big news made the six homicides earlier this year fade from the collective conscience. As it happens, it's beginning to look like that spike in the murder rate was more statistical noise than some kind of violent crime wave. I can't say I'm sorry about that, but it might have been better for Miz Crank's campaign had that not been the case.

Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District Board: Forgiving Phil Fallaice

Completed Precincts 76 of 76
		Percent	Votes
SUSAN SWEELEY		43.64%	24,442
PHIL FAILLACE		32.21%	18,040
COLIN RUDOLPH		24.15%	13,526

Sweeley ran away with the board's first contested election in years, overcoming an unfortunate paraphrasing about the achievement gap in a Voice profile. I'd like to think that the difference in support between Sweeley and fellow incumbent Faillace is a result of people remembering the latter's effort to ruin the science curriculum at the high school back in 1997 (an effort which in turn forced me to give a speech to the student body in protest, taking off my shirt only when the closing lines didn't go over as well as I had hoped). I think a much more likely explanation is that the district has 6,000 voters who vote like my mom.

Santa Clara County Measure B: Not forgiving BART-to-San-Jose

Completed Precincts 1,142 of 1,142
		Percent	Votes
YES		66.48%	393,322
NO		33.52%	198,319

BART-to-San-Jose looks headed to defeat, again, no thanks to the local papers. The most mystifying twist this election was that so many of them finally caved in and endorsed this misguided project. It seemed almost like they were sick of having to argue against it. Or perhaps they were adhering to Koland's stance on high-speed rail: 'We waste billions of dollars on a lot of these, and we usually don't get anything cool in return.'

The only thing about this proposal that has changed since local papers and county voters rejected it in 2006 is that BART boosters had the decency not to hold hospitals and social services hostage this time. It's not as if tunneling under downtown San Jose to pick up a small fraction of riders at a huge portion of the cost suddenly became a good idea. Of course, defeat at the polls hasn't stopped the project before, and it probably won't stop the project this time. But that's no reason to endorse it.

They are simply being good neighbors

Months ago, the Town Crier referred to Los Altos Hills as an environmental leader. If that seemed phony at the time, consider it again in light of last week's rather unsurprising report that the Hillpeople don't really give a damn if everybody else has to conserve water.

Responding to California’s second year of below-average rainfall and the driest spring on record, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a proclamation in June, officially declaring that the state is facing drought conditions and calling on citizens to reduce their water consumption by 10 percent voluntarily.

While the 27 water district agencies that serve the Bay Area have reduced water usage by 13 percent, Purissima Hills Water District, which serves two-thirds of Los Altos Hills residents, has cut back its water usage only 2 percent, according to data from the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency.

If any city has reductions to make, it's Los Altos Hills, where the residents use twice as much per capita as the rest of the Bay Area. At least, I suppose, they're not slobs.

Mom, maybe it's time to talk about those five lawns again.

Dead guy endorses Toni Casey

This might have been an honest mistake, but it's still really funny.

On the other hand, Duffy Price, who leads the town activist group Hills 2000 and is helping Mordo’s campaign, noted that council candidate Toni Casey is listing endorsers on her materials who are, in fact, not endorsing her. One resident, Lou Antonioli, said Casey listed her husband, who has been dead 10 years.

She "took full responsibility for the error," but that hasn't mollified the town vandals.

Casey showed me campaign cards that had been defaced, with devil’s horns and a mustache drawn over her image, saying things like, “She has caused enough damage to LAH.”

It occurs to me that a certain of our correspondents is currently neither in Argentina nor in England.

What's scaring us: Art & Wine edition

I've been a little under the weather the last few days, so it feels like the right time for a linkdump, in the form of a list of things people are afraid of this week:

The Bush Administration: The Environmental Protection Agency protecting the environment.

Speaking of which: Jesus.

Congress: Big campaign donors being unable to use "I was just following orders" as a defense for helping the government spy on citizens.

Remember when people said that was not a defense?

Los Altos Hills residents: Toni Casey running for office

Personally I hope she does, because I am curious whether Los Altos Hills is conservative enough that her affiliation with George Bush might actually be to her advantage.

Los Altos residents: Mountain View residents

Don't worry Mom and Dad, the police think she was adopted.

Mountain View residents: Brown people, and also gays

Last week, I lamented that people were more upset about the Voice's use of the non-word "preggers" in a headline than they were about a double-murder that orphaned an 8-year-old boy. Readers of the Voice site responded (with some prodding from yours truly) in a flurry of posts insanely blaming the tragedy on low-income housing and federal immigration policy. (Not a single poster said anything along of the lines of 'I hope the police catch the people responsible for this.')

They don't know how to haggle

Last week's settlement in the Westwind Barn lawsuit closed an embarrassing chapter in the history of Los Altos Hills. It takes a lot to embarrass Los Altos Hills, but allegations that the ranch hands at such an iconic location endured racial slurs, lived in unventilated rooms and worked overtime without pay should be enough to do it.

Interestingly, the plaintiffs alleged $500,000 in damages only to wind up getting $675,000 from the settlement. This is probably because the lawyer could have filed an additional claim for attorney's fees, but I prefer to attribute it to an inability to haggle on the part of Friends of Westwind Barn. I imagine the negotiations went something like this:

Friends of Westwind Barn lawyer: How much will it take to make this case go away?

Plaintiffs' lawyer: Since the City of the Town of Los Altos Hills already settled with my clients for $75,000, they are willing to deduct that from their overall claim, bringing the total request to $425,000.

Friends of Westwind Barn lawyer: How about $600,000?

Hi guys

I don't know if you remember me, but I used to write for this blog.

With finals approaching, I've been spending a lot of time studying recently (and, it turns out, inspiring the creation of other blogs). A few things I've learned:

Everybody in Los Altos Hills is rich, which, as a matter of federal law, means its okay to keep poor people out. Ybarra vs. Los Altos Hills, 503 F.2d 250. (9th Cir. 1974).

I live next to the stupidest bike lane in America. The only one that might be dumber is one I lived near last summer.

Minimum sentencing laws still suck. We can blame them both for the large-scale disasters like the unconstitutionally shameful condition of the health care system in our state prisons as well as for the more personal tragedies like the harsh prison term facing troubled Iraq veteran Sarge Binkley. Binkley may yet catch a break from the District Attorney, but other defendants from different backgrounds are unlikely to get the same treatment.

I've got to get back to studying administrative law, so I can explain why the County Board of Education inexplicably prevailed against the Los Altos School District's case alleging that Bullis Charter School's charter was too racist for the County Board to approve. I know that part of the answer has to do with the chemicals used by downtown Los Altos dry cleaners. Stay tuned.

African no longer welcome in Los Altos Hills

Although he has not been implicated in growing marijuana on the periphery of the "town" as other immigrants have, Los Altos Hills residents still want the African immigrant out of their upscale community.

"I'm getting tired of him," said Thomas Puorro, 82.

At first, the African immigrant intrigued neighbors, even though residents suspected that he was an escapee from a holding area in South San Francisco. A native to Uganda, the immigrant caught the attention of a Ugandan ambassador who sent a friendly note to "The Heights" Hills on the immigrant's behalf.

Despite international goodwill for the African, tensions are high.

Puorro added, "I'm getting closer and closer to getting myself a slingshot."


*John Rocker was unavailable for comment at press time.

Beaumont West

Dancing, pool, pinball.

Los Altos Hills finally lifted its ban on the latter after 51 years. Mayor Craig Jones, who admits to having never heard of the law until resident Steve Kalem stumbled across it, puts an amazing spin job on the story.

"Los Altos Hills, like Palo Alto, is one of those towns where people pay attention," Jones said. "We have the eyes and ears to point it out."

Somehow, despite the town's general ignorance of a criminal law that had been on the books for more than five decades, this story is about the alertness of the citizenry. This is even funnier considering the fact that, according to the Los Altos Neighborhood Network, us flatlanders once had a similar law. Presumably, at some point in time, Los Altos repealed its law, but Los Altos Hills decided that it wasn't quite ready to do so.

It's almost two weeks since I read about this

and I still can't decide what's funnier: Los Altos Hills being bitter about its exclusion from Foothills Park, or Palo Altans being arrogant enough they would rather risk the park burning down than letting in outsiders.

The Town Crier eliminates the amendments

Points to the first Town Crier staffer who can correctly identify what is wrong with the following paragraph, the lede in this week's article on the Los Altos Hills general plan:

"Unlike the nation's Constitution, which remains untouched through the centuries as the country's guiding document, towns regularly revisit and revise their municipal constitutions, known as General Plans. Los Altos Hills' plan has gone mostly untouched since it was extensively revised in 1975, and with some prodding from the state, the town has taken on the challenge of updating it.

Here are hints 11-27.

They would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling adults

The mystery of the headless Los Altos Hills cows reads like a Scooby Doo episode in reverse. The vagrants terrorizing the local populace for no apparent reason are teenagers, while the motley crue of detectives who implausibly solve the case are adults.

Hard to say this story isn't still amusing, but aren't we forgetting who the real criminals are?

Haikus for the Hills

Dear secessionists,
Neener neener neener. Love,
Bullis alumni.

County board rejects
racist redistricting plan.
Too many white kids.

Lowland and Hill folk,
can't we all just get along?
We are all still rich.

Strange rumblings in Los Altos Hills

At the end of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the defeat of the dark lord Sauron also spells an end to the grand aspirations of his deputy the corrupt wizard Saruman. Undeterred by his lack of a patron, a weakened Saruman travels to the Shire, where he reasserts his will until the rural hobbit folk finally awake to their own power of self-determination and, in a battle unusually intense for that part of the world, overthrow the fallen wizard and his lieutenant.

That's not exactly how it went down with George W. Bush and Toni Casey, but the similarities are hard to ignore. NOE's Los Altos Hills correspondent Drew Grewal, reports that the disgraced former LAH Mayor is back at the helm of the Los Altos Hills Civic Association.

In the group's August junk mailing, Casey once again rails against the dual threats to our freedom of energy efficiency and deer.

"Casey and her cronies like Steve Finn paved the way for monster home development in this town in the late 90s, before Casey went to work for the Bush administration," writes Grewal.

He adds, "I suggest these topics instead of incriminating your friends on a public site -- friends who are upstanding citizens, teachers, and entrepreneurs. Your previous posts could amout to libel."

Was it a racism test?

Quick, name something for which the cities of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills both deserve A+ grades. Spraying raw sewage into people's living rooms? How about their creeks? Racist and illegal ordinances that cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars? Embarrassing public debates about "the gay agenda" or the overly diverse nature of local high schools (both of which also wound up costing taxpayers thousands of dollars)?

If you guessed helping address housing affordability, you would be right, according to the Bay Area Council. In a laughable report issued two weeks ago, LA and LAH received A+ grades for their commitment to helping the Bay Area achieve a sustainable balance between housing and jobs. Mountain View, with far greater residential density in its existing neighborhoods and 3,000 new units planned for vacant industrial areas near transit lines, received an F.

Those darn kids, with their skateboards

It's a good time to be a rapscallion in Los Altos. Maybe too good. Monday night, the city council followed Mountain View's lead in entertaining the local 'hoods by finally approving the concept of making tentative plans for a permanent skate park. Not to be outdone, Mountain View is finally going ahead with the plans, on hold for the last three years due to bizzarre concerns about gender equity concerns, to build a BMX park out at Shoreline.

Of course, give those kids an inch and they'll take a mile. For the perspective of the square community, we turn to the award-winning (seriously) editorial pages of the Los Altos Town Crier, which implores readers to "Grow up and leave the cows alone."

Regardless of how we feel on the subject of public education in Los Altos Hills, we can all agree that stealing and defacing plywood cows erected on town land is beyond the juvenile.

The cows, conveying the "Got Milked?" message of discontent following the 2003 closure of Bullis-Purissima School, are continually vandalized, according to their creators, and the incidents go up or down depending on the surge of publicity regarding town public education issues.

Some cases are the work of pranksters, but others surely result because perpetrators don't like a message that conflicts with theirs. Such protest and debate belongs in open public forums, not played out in petty, stealthy acts of vandalism. We strongly urge the guilty parties to recover their maturity and leave the cows alone. If town residents choose this option to express themselves, so be it.

I have to say that it speaks poorly of the investigative abilities of the reporters at the Town Crier, Daily and Mercury that not only can they find nothing better to write about, but that they also can't seem to sleuth out the fact that the people behind this dastardly political espionage are just a bunch of bored high school kids.

By the way, this might be a good time for me to apologize to Patricia Williams and other city council candidates whose campaign signs we removed in 1994 and hid in another candidate's bushes.

What took you guys so long?

A video camera captured footage of three thieves making off with a wooden cow in Los Altos Hills last week, predictably tickling the Mercury and even showing up on the United Press International wire.

You know what this means? I can now claim to have broken international news.

Los Altos Hills taking ball, going home

A closed-door meeting yesterday between officials from all over ended boringly, according to this morning's Daily News, with Los Altos Hills mayor Breene Kerr telling a crowd of people who had nothing better to do than wait outside that there was a "reasonable chance for agreement" over the town's threat to form its own school district.

I suppose there might be a "reasonable chance" that The Heights Hills town council is serious about all of this, and is not just trying to annoy Los Altos Elementary into permanently reopening Bullis (which is just as decrepit and overly paved as it was when it was closed three years ago). But given the previous stunts apologists for my alma mater have tried, this looks like just another ploy.

Unfortunately, my father didn't fare quite well enough in last year's election to win a seat on the school board (you should have stuck to the talking points Dad). So, for the best analysis I have yet seen of this issue, we'll have to rely on the board's original message rejecting the application to form Bullis Charter School:

"Education is the child's right, not the parent's."