Posted by Dick, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood, on Mar 29, 2007 at 10:34 pm

It's time for "Residentialsts" to come forward and run for the council. The current council, for the majority, are business people or business connected people and have no interest in city-wide issues and are not "Residentialists" except in their own "important" neighborhood. Almost always new people are selected by the business connected council members and groomed for the job and get the support of the local newspapers as the newspapers depend on advertising from the business community primarly. Palo Alto is in many ways a third world type of city and in Palo Altos case run by the super rich and super connected. Look at Alma Plaza, Albertsons was not a local connected company and was essentially run out of town and a connected developer buys the property and to maximize profits wants to build high density housing and make it a non-viable shopping center. Probably 20 million $ was spent on the small park in the SOFA area where many council members, past and present,live and are "connected". No new parks have been proposed anywhere else in the city although thousands of new housing units are planned in South Palo Alto. Almost all of the undergrounding of power lines have occurred in North Palo Alto, usually where council members, old and new live. Maybe city managers live also. South and West Palo Alton's need to get involved and elect council members who will work for residental issues. The recent (two in particular) few council or mayors from South Palo Alto have openly shown no interest in major issues/needs in South Palo Alto. An exception could be a new Mitchell Park Library /community center. We will have to wait and see if this is designed in a way to assure it's failure at the polls.

Posted by Rodham, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Apr 6, 2007 at 12:49 am

Dick says -- "Almost always new people are selected by the business connected council members and groomed for the job and get the support of the local newspapers as the newspapers depend on advertising from the business community primarly."

If that's true, how did Correll get on council? The Daily News didn't recommend her and she's been feuding with that paper ever since.