There are nine candidates vying for four spots in this year’s Mountain View City Council election: Chris Clark, Devon Conley, José Gutiérrez, Nicholas Hargis, John McAlister, Eric Poicon, Emily Ann Ramos, Pat Showalter and IdaRose Sylvester.
Key issues span from affordable housing and development to sustainable infrastructure and environmental goals.
The Post spoke to the candidates to hear about their experience and policy stances.
CHRIS CLARK
Former mayor Chris Clark has served two terms on the council and is the chief operating officer of the nonprofit OpenResearch. He currently serves on the Environmental Planning Commission, which he was appointed to in 2021. Clark’s key goals include building affordable housing, improving the city’s economic vitality strategy and developing infrastructure.
“Having some continuity on the council is one of the primary reasons why I decided to run again,” Clark said.
Mountain View’s supply of affordable housing units has doubled over the last decade, according to Clark’s campaign website. With aims of continuing to redevelop lots and sites into housing, Clark said he hopes to build more dense, affordable housing around transit hubs and utilizing the empty lot behind city hall.
“The key thing that we need to do during this sort of lull in development is … ensuring that when development activity does pick up that we aren’t behind the ball.”
To address vacancies downtown and follow the economic vitality strategy — a guiding document that outlines an innovation-driven local economy — Clark would like to work with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to liberalize zoning restrictions.
Clark is also committed to moving backlogged infrastructure projects forward, he said. Specifically, he would like to prioritize the traffic underpass for the Rengstorff and Castro railroad crossings.
“One of the things over the next four years that I think voters are hoping for is that a lot of our infrastructure and things like transit, parks and open space and environmental sustainability can catch up,” he said to the Mountain View Voice.
DEVON CONLEY
Devon Conley is the president of the Mountain View Whisman School District board, was appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission in 2017 and has spent 22 years working with families in education and city policy, including as a former teacher, she said.
Her priorities include creating family-friendly housing, enhancing parks and open spaces and expanding access to child care and transportation safety.
“I’m running for city council because I believe that family-friendly city planning benefits not just families, but all of Mountain View,” Conley said.
Conley said she would like to create a more family-centric city, where children are safer navigating on their own. Conley is also devoted to green initiatives that take climate change into heavier consideration, according to the Los Altos Town Crier.
Regarding affordable housing, Conley would like to open affordable housing units that are two or three bedrooms and well-suited for small families. She is also aiming toward building more stacked flats, typically duplexes sharing the same floor, which are more family and senior-friendly.
JOSÉ GUTIÉRREZ
José Gutiérrez currently serves as the vice chair of the Environmental Planning Commission and works as a litigation legal specialist at a high-tech company. He previously served as a trustee on the Mountain View Whisman School District board. His top priorities include ensuring the creation affordable housing, building green spaces and improving road safety. He is also endorsed by the Mountain View Police Officer Association and has been an active member of the community for 24 years, according to his website.
“New voices from underrepresented neighborhoods, like mine, can make a difference at city council,” Gutiérrez said.
To expand affordable housing, Gutiérrez is focused on preventing development oversights that could reduce available units. He was also the only planning commissioner to vote against Google’s North Bayshore project, which included the removal of 350 affordable units, according to his website.
In an interview with the Mountain View Voice, he also pushed for the city to increase its affordable housing requirement for developers from 15% to 20%, emphasizing the need for stronger affordability measures.
Another priority for Gutiérrez is enhancing road safety for vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists. He plans to achieve this by advocating for increased traffic signs and improved infrastructure, especially in areas near schools, he said.
NICHOLAS HARGIS
Nicholas Hargis is a congressional aide for Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and campaigned for Kamala Harris’s first presidential campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa after graduating from Harvard University. He’s focused on creating affordable housing for vulnerable residents — such senior citizens and people with disabilities — and would like to propose lowering the eligibility threshold for what the city considers affordable.
To make rent control more accessible, Hargis said he would like to simplify the petition process for applying for rent reduction and ensure that community members are fully informed about their options. He hopes to improve conditions for tenants who are displaced by their building being redeveloped to “give the most vulnerable residents more time to make a plan.”
Hargis would also like to increase investment in green infrastructure through initiatives such as protected bike lanes, expanding the tree canopy and installing heat-reflective sidewalks. He also supports upgrades on city buildings, creating cooling shelters for heat waves and implementing a ban on new gas stations by 2045.
To address vacancies downtown, he’d like to reevaluate zoning ordinances and work with the Chamber of Commerce to advertise small businesses.
“I’ve worked closely with community partners to create a platform that is highly progressive, is achievable and [that will] responsibly bring Mountain View into the future,” Hargis said.
Another key aspect of Hargis’s campaign is his commitment to helping local families, which he hopes to achieve through easing permitting processes for daycares. He also said he would work to implement a low-income laundry assistance program and aims to ensure that everyone is enrolled in Medi-Cal and Covered California, now that they have no immigration status or age requirements.
JOHN MCALISTER
Former mayor and councilmember John McAlister is running to “continue a legacy of service, bring new ideas and a steadfast dedication to enhancing the quality of life for all residents,” according to his website.
His priorities include ensuring affordable housing, effective transportation, environmental sustainability and public safety. He is endorsed by current Mountain View Vice Mayor Lisa Matichak and Councilmember Margaret Abe-Koga.
Currently, McAlister serves on the board of the Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Performing Arts Center Committee. He also been a part of the Mountain View community for over five decades.
On the topic of affordable housing, McAlister said he specifically wants to provide a variety of housing options for residents. He also supports the city purchasing and renovating older properties for affordable housing purposes, he said.
To plan sustainably for the city’s growth, McAlister said he aims to implement initiatives such as treating recycled water for potable use.
ERIK POICON
The president of the Silicon Valley Young Democrats, a human relations commissioner and specialist with the Santa Clara County Library District, Erik Poicon is focused on “community building,” he said. His other top priorities include representing renters and creating a social “safety net.”
With over 56% of Mountain View residents renting their homes, Poicon hopes to better advocate and speak up for renters if elected to serve on the council.
A big part of this, he said to the Los Altos Town Crier, is budget, saying that councilmembers sometimes “don’t having the money” to make change — an area he’d like to work to improve.
Having had a difficult childhood, in part due to displacement, Poicon said he wants less families to “fall through the cracks,” according to the LATC. He plans to do this by promoting safety initiatives like Vision Zero Vision, which works toward having zero pedestrian and biker accidents in the city, and in investing in local small businesses, he said.
EMILY ANN RAMOS
Councilmember and Rental Housing Committee member Emily Ann Ramos is an affordable housing advocate and preservation and protection associate at SV@Home, an affordable housing organization. Unsurprisingly, her top priorities as a councilmember are ensuring housing affordability and availability. Ramos also hopes to lessen the impact of climate change on residents’ daily lives, something she deems to be of growing importance.
Pushing for available subsidized housing is vital for Ramos, as she believes it “permeates through” many issues the city faces relating to poverty and employment. This, along with the effects of climate change — which Ramos said results in summers getting hotter and winters getting significantly colder — prove to be extremely dangerous for the unhoused.
“The homelessness crisis is really an offshoot of the housing crisis,” Ramos said. “And then you have the climate crisis going on. Together, especially in cold weather, that’s life threatening…”
Ramos also said there is a considerable amount of flood protection work the city needs to do in North Bayshore — an area that “stewards natural habitat,” according to the city’s website.
For the council to achieve all its goals, Ramos said the most important thing is to promote civic engagement, allowing people to feel heard and represented.
“When people feel like they aren’t heard, it creates barriers, it creates stress, and then the solutions are farther than they should be.”
PAT SHOWALTER
Longtime Mountain View resident Pat Showalter is the current mayor and served on the Mountain View Environmental Planning Commission for nearly a decade. She is also a retired civil servant, having worked for a variety of government agencies throughout her career. Her top concerns include lowering housing costs, rethinking pedestrian safety and prioritizing sustainability.
During her tenure on the council, Showalter said that the city has successfully constructed more than 4,000 new housing units, including over 600 dedicated affordable units. To sustain this momentum, she emphasized that securing funding for the upcoming housing projects is the council’s top priority, something they have yet to “figure out,” she said.
Another area “hugely important to the community” is traffic and biker and pedestrian safety, Showalter said. The council recently announced their Vision Zero plan — something Showalter said she’ll remain dedicated to in the future.
“We’ve looked at … the places where accidents have occures and where people think are dangerous,” Showalter said. “We’re trying to respond to all of them, or as many of them as we possibly can.”
In line with her work on the MVEPC, Showalter is also focused on building “climate resilience,” she said. Because Mountain View is on the shoreline, it is especially subject to the dangers of rising sea levels, something Showalter said must be better addressed and recognized.
“It’s important that we build protections so that this community stays dry,” Showalter said.
IDAROSE SYLVESTER
A Mountain View resident of over two decades, IdaRose Sylvester serves as vice chair on the Mountain View Human Relations Commission — which addresses the community’s social, economic and educational issues — and is the founder of a progressive action group and a volunteer program.
Sylvester’s top priorities center around creating a sustainable future, providing affordable housing and improving the city’s infrastructure. These goals go “hand-in-hand” for Sylvester, who said they all build off of and impact one another.
Regarding housing, Sylvester said she is interested in building affording units for middle-income residents especially — noting that Mountain View has luxury housing and lower-income units but “nothing in-between.”
“We need housing for our first-time homebuyers, people who want to build a life here, people who grew up here,” Sylvester said.
Another goal Sylvester’s dedicated to achieving is ensuring the city is carbon-neutral by 2045 “at the very latest,” she said. Like Showalter, Sylvester is also concerned about rising sea levels and other environment-related issues, such as droughts.
To fix these problems, Sylvester said the solving needs to happen at the municipal level, as the “onus is really on [the council] to create policies that will impact change.
