Congratulations to the selfless volunteers who make the downtown Los Altos Festival of Lights Parade happen every year. This year’s wonderful event benefited from great weather, with performers and spectators alike clearly enjoying themselves.

The parade is arguably the most popular community event of the year, so there’s competition for choice viewing spots. For years, people have reserved spaces many hours in advance, some even the day before the parade. They’ve done so by setting out blankets and chairs, and marking spaces on the sidewalk with tape or chalk.

El Camino Hospital and its El Camino Healthcare District remain unique among local medical institutions. Unlike Stanford, Kaiser or Palo Alto Medical Foundation, we, the public, get to vote on district leadership. Two seats on the five-seat district board of directors await your decision in the Nov. 6 general election.

You have your choice among four candidates. We believe Mike Kasperzak and incumbent board member Dr. Peter Fung are the most qualified.

So what were voters telling us in the wake of the Nov. 6 local election?

• While sometimes wary of it, residents by and large don’t want to micromanage government. That was one message we picked up from the defeat of Los Altos’ Measure C, an initiative that would have required voter approval for any change in city-owned property, be it sale, lease or rezoning. A similar-type measure also was defeated in Sunnyvale.

Los Altos Hills is – and will continue to be – one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. According to Zillow, the median home value is in the $5 million range, with that figure up a whopping 13.8 percent over the previous year.

But to quote a familiar refrain, you get what you pay for: a quiet, rural, idyllic community with scenic foothills, only a short commute from Facebook and Google; a place with 1-acre lot minimums, low crime, friendly neighbors and even the occasional horse.

Los Altos City Council (2 seats):

Nancy Bremeau

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.