After decades of talk, the city of Los Altos is on track to rebuild its dilapidated Hillview Community Center. Well, maybe not.

It seems at least three members on the five-member Los Altos City Council are not satisfied with the current design and footprint, which they contend is too small and too costly. Mayor Lynette Lee Eng thinks the city can get a better “bang for our buck.”

In the wake of recent news to start the year – yes, we’re all thumbs.

Thumbs-up: To the 2019 Mountain View City Council, which saw three newly elected members sworn in last week, along with the appointment of a new mayor and vice mayor. As mayor, Lisa Matichak brings a level-headed approach to leadership, while newcomers Ellen Kamei, Lucas Ramirez and Alison Hicks all come highly qualified to carry on the business of this high-profile city.

For years, we and our friends in the newspaper world have operated under a double standard. In print, we’re all about accountability. Letters to the editor must have names. Information in news stories must be attributed. Online, however, we’re not as accountable. In our collective desperation for people to use our websites, we’ve allowed readers to offer their feedback anonymously. As all of us are well aware, anonymity emboldens some to be aggressive, even hurtful, in their comments. We’ve encouraged and enabled that cowardice.

We want to change that. Our first step has been encouraging people to use their real names online – no more pseudonyms like “Los Altan” or “Fed Up.” We may get fewer comments, but we feel it’s the right thing to do. We encourage our newspaper friends to follow suit.

Some might dismiss it as a Town Crier Police Blotter item, a sad but insignificant story – a young man found dead in his car Dec. 14 outside the McDonald’s restaurant on El Monte Avenue in Mountain View near the Los Altos border.

Local media covered the story and used it to highlight the systemic failure of the area’s jobs-to-housing imbalance. The high cost of living is not only making it difficult to live here, it’s also making it difficult to work here.

The Los Altos School District needs to come up with a proposal by Friday on how to accommodate Bullis Charter School and its 190-student increase from 915 to 1,105 students for the 2019-2020 school year.

The increase means the school district may no longer be able to fit all charter school students on the Blach Intermediate and Egan Junior High school campuses. It means the district will likely offer part of an additional elementary school site.

Alex Samek had barely latched onto his new role as chairman of the Los Altos Planning Commission when he was arrested for a DUI Nov. 30 after being spotted asleep on Highway 101 in his self-driving Tesla. The story played big on nightly newscasts and even made headlines nationwide.

Understandably, Samek has laid low following what must be an embarrassing incident for him. But hopefully sooner rather than later, he faces the music. He can start by apologizing to city council members, who appointed him, and his fellow commissioners for putting them in a difficult position. He clearly made a mistake, one that could have been deadly. We hope he has learned a painful lesson about drinking and driving, and he is very lucky the result wasn’t tragic.