I have known Dr. George Ting, candidate for the El Camino Hospital Healthcare District Board of Directors, for more than 25 years from two quite different perspectives.
First, Dr. Ting represented the hospital and medical staff in overseeing the medical information system jointly developed with Lockheed, and later Technicon – the first of its kind in the world – where I had led the Lockheed/Technicon team.
Five candidates are running for two open seats on the Los Altos City Council in the Nov. 6 election. Two essentially want to preserve the status quo – nothing wrong with that, because Los Altos is already a great community. But like it or not, change is coming, and we need council members with the vision to plan wisely.
We see three candidates who want to make a great community even better – they have identified ways we can improve our quality of life, in the near future and for generations to come.
Our Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District is one of the best in the state. It isn’t that way by accident – the district has historically benefited from strong leadership from its board of trustees, particularly in recent years.
Incumbents Debbie Torok and Fiona Walter are both highly deserving of another term on the board. Both are intelligent, committed and responsible.
There are two very good reasons to vote against Measure C. Simply summed up, it’s not needed, and it could do more harm than good.
The Los Altos initiative on the Nov. 6 ballot claims to protect parks and open space from being sold to developers. It requires voter approval for any change in city-owned property, be it sale, lease or rezoning. But we’re convinced the measure’s creators’ intent isn’t necessarily saving parks, but saving parking lots – the downtown parking plazas, specifically.
The Los Altos School District needs steady leadership, and continuity in that leadership, to oversee some complex issues facing the district – among them the 10th school site process and the sensitive handling of Bullis Charter School relations.
Incumbents Bryan Johnson and Vladimir Ivanovic have demonstrated good leadership, and they deserve another term. Newcomer Shali Sirkay also deserves election to the board based on her work with the Los Altos Mountain View PTA Council, the district’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee for Finance and the campaigns for the past two bond measures. Furthermore, her gracious, positive personality is needed to offset the animosity we see in the district community from time to time, particularly over Bullis Charter School.
I disagree with the Mountain View City Council’s stance that the 10th school site should house a neighborhood school, as stated in the Sept. 26 article in the Town Crier (“10th-site discussions miss north of El Camino Real perspective”).
The equity issue at stake is not so much the walking distance of the school; the glaring equity issue about to transpire is that such a neighborhood school would likely create a disparity in access to a top-performing school. As a former resident of the Mountain View Whisman School District, I observed that school performance in Mountain View was closely tied to the socioeconomic status of the students’ families. The schools in the more affluent parts of Mountain View clearly outperformed their less affluent counterparts. As a child of immigrant parents, I know that many immigrants would place a much higher value on access to a high-quality public education than a short walk to school.
What are the proper roles and responsibilities of city council members, council-appointed commissioners, task forces and working group members and city staff?
After the confusion of the Aug. 28 Los Altos City Council meeting, this seems like a question worth asking. For example, we observed council members stating that they would overrule Planning Commission parking recommendations – which came from the parking committee that had devoted months to the subject. Council members also believed that their opinions about traffic issues should supersede analyses by appropriate commissions and city staff. The final confusion was that council members were uncertain of the goals of the Downtown Vision study – which has been underway for nearly two years!
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