My Priorities for Woodside:
Public safety & security
Rural & equestrian heritage
Community & recreation
Responsive local government
Managing state housing mandates
Strategy & vision for the future
I love Woodside - working on my tractors, hiking with my dogs, dancing at the Pioneer, meeting friends at Bucks, the Village Hub and the Little Store
A nearly lifetime local, I have lived in Los Altos Hills, Palo Alto and Woodside since 1972. I earned an engineering degree from Stanford and an MBA from UCLA, and I am married with an amazing wife, five children and two dogs. After a great career as an operating executive for Silicon Valley startup technology companies, I retired in 2019 and in recent years I have been focused on public service in Woodside.
Public safety, security and wildfire readiness are top of mind issues for Woodside district 3 residents
In my service on the Town’s Circulation and Town Center Area Plan committees, I’ve helped to achieve major progress on public safety and transformation projects all over Woodside - from Four Corners to Woodside Elementary to Woodside Heights and Woodside High School.
Woodside’s small town, rural character is what makes us different from other Bay Area Communities. I plan to work with Woodside’s equestrian community on a strategy to increase the number of horses that live and ride all across our town.
I love Woodside’s rural and equestrian heritage
Recreation and community building are my passion
Improving the trails, pathways and outdoor recreational opportunities across beautiful Woodside is very important to me. In my service on the Town Center Area Plan committee, my focus has been on a long-term plan to evolve Woodside Town Center to be even more vibrant with public gathering spaces, improved retail offerings, and much more outdoor dining.
Financial responsibility and responsive local government really matter
Woodside is financially well managed. But our costs to provide public safety services are rising much faster than our revenues and we must get ahead of this. Our town is friendly and well run but we can always be easier to work with and more responsive to our residents and our local businesses.
My top priority is long-term financial planning to make sure we can continue to provide excellent public safety services to Woodside residents over the coming decades.
We must responsibly manage our compliance with state housing mandates
As of July 1, Woodside had issued permits for 125 new housing units toward our goal of 328 new units under RHNA Cycle 6 (due by 2031) – so we are at 38% of the state’s target, which is far ahead of the Bay Area average of 14%. This great progress means that we hopefully will remain protected from oversized builder’s remedy projects which would be so out of character in Woodside.
We should continue to try to make it faster, easier and less expensive for our property owners to build barns and ADUs and we need to remain best in class in the Bay Area in meeting our state-mandated housing targets.
In terms of building more dense and lower income housing, I think we have a great opportunity to work with our major local employers – the Town of Woodside, Woodside Elementary, Woodside Fire, Menlo Country Club and the Family Farm for starters – to make it as easy and cost-effective as we can for each of these organizations to build attractive, appropriately scaled housing for our maintenance workers, teachers, firefighters, restaurant employees and other town staff so that these vital members of our community who work here can also afford to live in and enjoy Woodside if they wish to do so.
We also need to starting thinking today about getting ahead of what will be coming in the next RHNA housing element cycle - cycle 7 - which starts in January 2031. About 70% of Woodside relies on septic systems for sewage management, and septic is currently incompatible with supporting state mandates for more dense housing. Our lack of sewer infrastructure is a serious bottleneck we are going to have to work with the county and the state to deal with. Woodside residents who live in districts 3 and 4 have also been vocal that they would like to see denser housing spread broadly around Woodside, and not exclusively concentrated in Woodside East of 280.
A strategy and vision for the future
There is so much more that I would love to do for Woodside…
If elected, there are so many more safety and quality of life projects that I would like to see implemented in district 3 and across Woodside:
I want to construct a pathway / bikeway / safe route to school along Woodside Road all the way from Alameda de las Pulgas past Woodside High School and Woodside Elementary School to Portola Road. This will require funding and cooperation from Caltrans, but I know we can do it!
We have to improve safety for cyclists and pedestrians in the Four Corners area, extending for several miles north and south on Skyline and on the approaches to Skyline. Every year there are multiple pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities in this area - it has to stop.
I would like to complete our roadside trails network - we are just a few small inexpensive projects short of amazing walking loops for people and dogs (and in many places also horses) throughout beautiful Woodside district 3.
This one is really hard - but I would like to figure out how to get bicycle Pelotons to more consistently obey traffic laws when they ride through Woodside. Enforcement is probably the only option, so this means finding budget.
I want to partner with Portola Valley, Menlo Park and Atherton to push Caltrans to execute a major noise reduction project on 280. The pavement on 280 from the Stanford Linear Accelerator to Woodside Road is old, loud, broken concrete - and it is horribly loud 24×7. We need Caltrans to repave this section of 280 with noise-reducing asphalt and also look at making attractive landscaping changes to further reduce noise throughout Woodside.
I want to see a comprehensive wildfire readiness and evacuation plan created and practiced across Woodside, plus I would like to see the Town work with our local neighborhoods to create cell phone, email and/or Whatsapp groups for local emergency communications as we have on Moore Road and in Woodside Hills and Woodside Heights.
I would like to see Woodside pull together a long-term, prioritized capital funding plan to maintain, upgrade and replace our aging infrastructure, such as our bridges, drainage systems and crumbling mountain roads. I’d also like to explore the strategic expansion of our sewer infrastructure, which will likely become our most critical barrier to meeting future State housing element mandates.
I love the public-private partnership model we created to fund the $2.5 million transformation of Woodside Road East of 280 into a parkway. I would like to explore a formal program to do more of this and build a list of candidate projects suitable for future public private partnerships - our residents are generous and there are many opportunities for projects that will improve safety and quality of life across beautiful Woodside. I would also like to be much more active in seeking county, state and federal grants to fund capital projects across Woodside.
I am so excited about the long-term vision for transforming Woodside town center that we are working on in the Town Center Area Plan committee. I’d like Woodside town center to evolve to become even more vibrant, with an improved mix of consumer-focused retail, more outdoor dining, public gathering spaces and safe ways to get around town for people, dogs, bikes and horses.
Big ideas, Real impact.
In my volunteer roles, I’ve worked really hard to make Woodside an even more amazing place to live. I’ve learned so much about our beautiful town and what we can prioritize to make it even better.
I’m so proud to have served alongside our dedicated, tenacious Woodside Town Council members, Town Volunteers, Town Employees, and our state and local agency partners to make impactful, tangible progress for our wonderful town.