|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Alison Cormack, who was elected to the Palo Alto City Council in 2018 and who has been a vocal advocate for building more housing and redeveloping Cubberley Community Center, announced Friday that she will not seek a second term.
Cormack, who was the top vote-getter in the 2018 election, is one of three council members concluding their terms at the end of this year and the only one who is eligible to run for another four-year term. Council members Tom DuBois and Eric Filseth, who were both elected in 2014, will both be terming out.
Over her four years on the council, Cormack has served as chair of the Finance Committee and as member of the Sustainability/Climate Action Plan Committee. She has also represented the city on the board of the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency.
On policy issues, she has often clashed with members of the more slow-growth “residentialist” faction of the council, which gained ascendancy in 2020. She has been a persistent advocate for renovating Cubberley Community Center and expanding the city’s shuttle program. She has also been the only member of the current council who has publicly supported instituting limits on campaign contributions for council races.
Her independence came at a cost as Cormack found herself on the losing end of several political tussles. In 2020, when the council deadlocked 3-3 over who would serve as vice mayor (with Greg Tanaka abstaining), she broke the stalemate by throwing her vote to Tom DuBois, a member of the residentialist group who would go on to serve as mayor the following year. And even though the council had initially designated Cormack to represent Palo Alto on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority board of directors, it reversed course after the 2020 election and gave the seat to now-Mayor Pat Burt, a move for which DuBois and Filseth had advocated.
In an interview Friday, Cormack said she is concerned about the factionalism on the council. She also acknowledged, however, that working as a faction succeeds.
“That’s the inherent paradox,” Cormack said. “I don’t want to do it but I see that that works.”
She reiterated that point in a post that she published on Medium on Friday, explaining her decision not to run. She encouraged others to run for council and advised them to run “as a team.”
“When you run as a team, you can govern as a team,” she wrote. “So share your treasurer and donor lists and mailer expenses with other candidates who think like you — and consider that an investment in getting colleagues memos supported, and seconds to your motion, and votes to go the way you want. Running with others will make your campaign easier and lay the groundwork for allies on council who will already trust you.”
Cormack said that she began to consider not running for a fresh term in August 2020, when the pandemic brought to the forefront the sharp socioeconomic differences between Palo Alto residents and residents in East Palo Alto and east San Jose. The pandemic, she wrote, “served as a catalyst for me to reflect on where the greatest needs are in our larger community.” She has been volunteering at the Second Harvest Food Bank over the pandemic and she said that hunger and child care are among the issues that she plans to focus on after her council term expires.
She listed in her Medium post some of the accomplishments she is proud of, including the hiring of a new city auditor, city clerk and executive director of the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority during her term; her votes to support the construction of Palo Alto’s new bike bridge, which opened last November, and the new public-safety building, which is in the midst of construction on Sherman Avenue.
She also cited several disappointments, including her failure to sway her colleagues to adopt policies prohibiting council members from using electronic devices during meetings and pursuing campaign finance reform. She also lists as one of her failures “gracefully letting a colleague with more tenure take a leadership role,” an apparent allusion to the vote for vice mayor in 2020.
“Let’s just say it wasn’t reciprocated,” Cormack wrote.
Cormack said in an interview that she hopes some of the projects that she has championed, including the redevelopment of Cubberley and the expansion of the shuttle program that was shut down during the pandemic, will come to fruition after she is no longer on the council. Palo Alto, she noted, has plenty of precedents for that: Vic Ojakian championed the new public safety building; Karen Holman supported the new history museum; and LaDoris Cordell fought to drop Foothills Park’s “residents-only” requirement.
Cormack said that her decision not to run is related to the “Great Resignation,” a nationwide trend of people leaving their jobs during the pandemic. She emphasized that she will remain fully committed to her duties until her term ends. The reason she is announcing her decision now, she said, is because she wants other people to have time to mount campaigns.
She said has worked hard since winning the 2018 election to “maintain my own and the council’s calm demeanor.”
“I’ll be sad if that changes when I’m no longer on the council,” Cormack said. “I will look for candidates who can be graceful and thoughtful under pressure.”
That’s too bad.
Too bad for the developers and those looking for huge capital spending projects, maybe, regardless of what the neighbors want like the landlord’s desire to convert Town & Country Shopping Center from a resident-serving shoppijg center to undefined “medical/retail” just as the recovery was starting.
Excellent decision.
“Team” – a new euphemism for “Slate”.
I’m not sure Ms Cormack would work well with many. She always seems to take snarky shots at her colleagues when they are agreeing, with her being the one “to disrupt the calm”. I think it’s called micro aggression. Let’s hope we can some candidates that represent residents well.
Alison Cormack was well known around the community for her work on the Mitchell Park library and in the PTA. I believe many of her friends and contacts voted for her just because they knew her or knew her name. I think at least some of them were disappointed in her views which they did not know when they made their decision. I am not sure they would vote for her again.
It comes down to understanding who the candidates are before deciding to vote for them. Just because you know the person from somewhere, doesn’t mean you should automatically vote for them. I wish people in Palo Alto would pay more to council elections because so many take little time choosing compared to the more noisy bigger races.
“I’m not sure Ms Cormack would work well with many. She always seems to take snarky shots at her colleagues when they are agreeing, with her being the one “to disrupt the calm”. I think it’s called micro aggression. Let’s hope we can some candidates that represent residents well.”
In addition to her snarky shots at colleagues, you could always count on her to disrupt substantive discussions by saying, “Let’s hear staff’s take on this” since she and staff rarely represent residents well.
She really outdid herself representing the Town & Country landlord, giving us good giggles with her absurd insistence that patients at the proposed “medical/retail” establishments would surely go on shopping sprees while hurting, sweating and/or still drugged from recent procedures.
Re her support for campaign finance “reform,” where was she while her mentor Ms. Kniss was violating campaign finance laws and why aren’t they pushing to limit contributions from businesses and lobbyists as well as from residents?
Cormack’s close association with Liz Kniss says everything you need to know. Kniss was featured prominently in her pre-election fotos.
Pro developers all the way.
Hope she can be replaced with a citizen-centered candidae.
Ms. Cormack made a wise decision. She aligned herself with Liz Kniss and Adrian Fine, and the last election demonstrated how voters felt about how this group rammed business/developer-first policies through the Council. Proposing a tax on residents and opposing a tax on businesses was astounding.
Someone called “friends of Cubberley” posted the following on the other newspaper site:
I had hopes in Allison as a leader, but the defining moment for me was at the end of an extensive community outreach for Cubberley, she secretly instructed the consultant to add housing to the plan, thereby converting public facility to private usage. It was clearly not popular, and showed tone-deafness to the community, and the needs of a growing population. While Cubberley needs serious, action-oriented attention, I am leery of Allison’s continued involvement. Hopefully she will change her stance, and use her energy to make a long-lasting gem of a facility for an increasingly urbanized town.
Reaally?? Shameful. If true, why weren’t her “secret” instructions to the consultant widely reported??
Also, I’m confused by the timing of her announcement. Why now?
Her timing clears the path for one more seat on the council. No candidates have yet made public announcements that they are running. People considering running for council will not have to face the headwinds of any incumbents in the election.
Good riddance! For me the final straw destroying any respect for her was her support for lame duck committee appointments at the last meeting for term-ending members Kniss and Fine (along with Tanaka), with some comments justifying this hard-ball stunt as being OK not because of any ethical logic but “because they could”.
Given her performance I doubt she would have been re-elected. It takes a different temperament to create coalitions on an elected body. She has not demonstrated the ability to form those coalitions. Instead she has insisted she knows the correct path and worked at odds with the rest of council.
Cormack is the only remaining good member on a council that’s been trying very hard to banish our children to other states by starving them for housing.
But every election is an opportunity, and at least some prominent members of the self-deportation caucus are getting termed out.
@Scott, come on. How does adding 2,000,000 more people and literally tens of millions sq feet of new offices which STILL outpaces housing growth bring down prices?? That claim never ever made any sense, nor does the refusal to admit reality like there’s a DROUGHT and FIRE risk.
Sorry, she DID take a position on the drought: she tried to sell OUR water rights so a San Mateo County city so they could build an office park! Fortunately smarter heads prevailed, suggesting her short-term greed was counter-productive with the drought likely to get worse no matter what short-term gains from the IRREVOCABLE sale would have been.
She also opposes any business tax for her corporate backers while shifting the tax burdens to us because it would be wrong for THEM to pay any share, forget about their FAIR share.
Online Name, if you aren’t in favor of new housing and new jobs, then you aren’t in favor of keeping Palo Alto families together. Our kids need both. If we don’t give them both housing and employment opportunity, then we’re forcing too many of them to choose between local poverty and self-deportation.
If you’ve been in the Bay Area for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve lived through the economic displacement of loved ones. It never had to be that way. It was a path we’ve chosen at the ballot box for the last four decades, at least.
But the promise of democracy is we can always make a different choice, and build a better future.
Scott, tell me where in the US children / recent college grads can reasonably expect to buy into their parents’ neighborhoods that are among the most expensive in the US. Even at half the price. I’ll wait.
(The average purchase price in the country is around $380,000, rising an average of 16% every year everywhere due to rapid population growth. $380,000 — or even $1,500,000 are a bit less than the $3,000.000 average price here.)
You’re also assuming they’ll never change jobs and/or more elsewhere for a better/different opportunity. How many jobs have you had and in how many different cities, states and countries? More than a few I’d bet, like most Americans.
Sure, I’ve had many friends and colleagues leave when they’ve lost their jobs and/or cashed out and/or aged out and/or retired. People start worrying about age discrimination at 35 which is no surprise since they stop tracking workers here at age 44. Many have found happiness and sometimes second careers elsewhere. I do miss them.
How long realistically do you expect your kids to stay here until they too consider leaving? Until you consider leaving? Where else to go has always been a hot topic.
What says EVERYONE has to work in the same tight spaces like rats, living in pods and rv’s? I can think of a few states that could benefit from some educated workers/ voters these days, can’t you?
But back to Ms. Cormack, what’s she done to pressure her backers/companies to pay living wages at a time when startups like DoorDash, Lyft, Uber etc. spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying in the last election to deny their workers any benefits and even minimum wage?
What’s she done to limit new office growth the raises housing prices and other costs?
What’s she done to ensure that “affordable housing” — which is primarily for well-paid techies (85%) — ALSO covers “low income” workers, now capped at 15% divided between low incone (10%) and very low income (5%)?
Where was she when the President Hotel evicted 85 long-time middle income residents and we’re now getting stuck with the bill to produce NEW downtown middle income housing?
That’s certainly the pro- self-deportation take. I’m happy for you that you seem comfortable with the personal losses you have endured due to housing scarcity. Not everyone is.
In the 1970s we were building a lot more housing, and, consequently, it was a lot easier to buy housing! When I grew up in an affluent Bay Area suburb, a friends’ parents were restaurant workers. They were a dual-income family, bought in the 80s. Modest house, frugal living. Good school district. Our region was still coasting on the housing investments of the Greatest Generation: the downzonings of the 1970s took time to choke out enough opportunity to kill the American Dream for the working class.
To your question: median home price in Detroit is about 1.4x median household income. They have a lot of supply because a lot of people moved out. They self-deported in the face of poverty created by evaporating employment opportunity. Our council wants us to be like Detroit. It could work! Anything that can be done by accident can obviously be done on purpose. Lot of rust belt towns are affordable. (But you’re misapprehending how bad it is here. Young people can’t just not afford to buy. They can’t even afford to move out of their parents house. We’re going to have to close schools because households can’t form.)
Rust belt shows trick is getting to abundant housing on the market. They accidentally killed prosperity/demand. Bay Area cities deliberately throttled supply 40-50 years ago, leading to shortages despite prosperity. We could just… reverse the shortages decision and keep the prosperity.
There’s precedent. During WW2 the Bay Area also had a housing crisis. War workers flooded the area. It was treated as an emergency. Berkeley suspended zoning entirely. It worked. Fast. But we’ve gone decades, mumbling “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas.”
The whole country is seeing huge price appreciation in housing pricing which is likely to continue due to speculation (25% and rising). So there’s no reason to expect Palo Alto prices to come down.
I’m not happy about having friends and colleagues leave, just realistic. And glad they’ve chosen interesting places to relocate where I can go visit them.
None of these truisms have much if anything to do with Ms. Cormack’s ability to change reality, esp. not after her mentor Ms Kniss pushed so aggressively for Palo Alto to add more offices than housing for years which creates more — not less — pressure on housing prices and demand.
It’s mostly wrong to look at the country as a whole, because prosperous areas have generally made the same errors. Houston is an exception. Want to pay 250k for a home? Go to the largest city in the county without zoning. (Disclaimer: do not actually go to this dystopian post-democratic hellscape that does literally only this one thing better than us.)
But generally, in the US, I look at how things have changed over time. Zoning is a very new idea, and people only really got bonkers with it starting the 70s or so. So you can ask questions like: how have things changed since the 1970s downzoning? (Not great!) How did we fix historical housing crises? (Suspending zoning.) Did that work? (Yes.) What about before that? (No housing crises. Zoning wasn’t deemed constitutional until 1926.)
But the US isn’t the only place! Does legalizing housing production work in other countries? (Yes: Japan notably fixed a housing crisis with basically only that.) What about Europe? (Lots of social housing. The difference between the successes like France/Germany and failures like Stockholm boils down to whether or not they deliver on housing production or focus exclusively on price regulation.)
The ongoing destruction of our social bonds is a choice we make every election cycle. It’s a problem we decided to create. But it’s also been fixed in lots of places and times over the last century, and we’re a democracy, so we can just start making different choices whenever we want.
@Scott and OnlineName – your exchange is fascinating. Please add ghost houses to the equation. Investors buying houses and not living in them hurt cities in a couple of ways: much needed housing is taken out of inventory and the element of community is greatly diminished.
And to Scott – two things: First, I am surprised by how prevalent the expectation is that one can live where their parents, have their kids live near them, live where they grew up or live near where they work. To meet those expectations in many communities, a paradox would need to exist: many things would pretty much have to be static AND there’d have to be an endless supply of land on which to build housing so that generation after generation after generation could populate their hometown if they so chose. Second, when commercial development goes forward without mitigation for housing the old supply/demand equation leads, inevitably, to a seemingly endless increase in housing costs. That’s bad development policy but those who raised concerns were derided as being against change. Moneyed interests prevailed. And some City Council members helped that along.
@Annette: land availability is a non-issue. Almost all of our land is legally capped at 2 stories or less. That’s a policy choice. Last year Tom Dubois floated development in open space, so that’s clearly a (bad) option, too. Those are pretty much the options (up or out), but they’d both work, so we do have to take moral responsibility for the humanitarian cost of failure.
Bay Area’s vacancy rate is around half the national average. So whatever you think of “ghost houses”, they aren’t driving the overall picture. If you want fewer of them, look at planning approvals and permit times. (Aside: Tight vacancy rates are more correlated with homelessness than mental illness rates and even poverty. You talk about mitigations. Housing mitigates homelessness, and homelessness is expensive.)
There’s no paradox. Cities shouldn’t be static. If you have a lot of economic growth, that’s good, but you need to expand housing enough to accommodate natives and newcomers. We don’t, which means making our children compete for scarce housing with people we’re drawing from literally all over the world into an absurdly hot labor market. Of course they wind up in pods, cars, tents, and worse: Texas. Of course they can’t start households, much less families, and we have to plan school closures.
Growth benefits everyone, by the way. Our transit situation is Extremely Bad for people who’ve aged out of being able to drive. In Palo Alto, normal longevity leads inexorably to being imprisoned in your home. More local density both fosters better transit, and creating housing opportunities in transit-accessible locations.
@Scott – thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree that cities should not be static and that our transit situation is extremely bad. I’ve not aged out of driving, but I make every effort to drive as little as possible. The Embarcadero Shuttle was a great resource, but it is gone. We have a lot of work to do.
Scott, You use the words “self-deport” and “self-deportation.” Do you mean “move”? 😉
So many trees have been cut down at Cubberley thanks to her ridiculous influences. Good riddance.
Scott – there are too many people on Earth. Quit advocating for destroying the environment we need to live