Oct 14, 2007

Ready for the council

Yeh, Espinosa, Schmid and Burt know city well

Editorial

The people Palo Alto residents elect to the city council next month will confront far-reaching issues, from Stanford's hospital and shopping mall expansion plans to the need to upgrade the city's library system and replace its police station.

Fortunately, we have a talented pool to draw from. Our choices for the four seats include two candidates who attended Harvard, one who attended Yale and a fourth well-schooled in local issues. We recommend Yiaway Yeh, Sid Espinosa, Greg Schmid and Pat Burt.

Two of the candidates offer youthful energy but can articulate Palo Alto's past challenges as well as most of the other candidates. Yeh is 29 and Espinosa is 35.

We liked Yeh's emphasis on the need to take care of Palo Alto's retirees and young families. Yeh, a public-sector management consultant, stressed the need to focus on California Avenue, a critical commercial center that often gets overshadowed by Palo Alto's popular downtown. Furthermore, he seems to appreciate the financial limits facing the city officials and the difficulty of selling cost-conscious voters on bond financing for library upgrades and a new police station.

Espinosa, like Yeh, attended Harvard and now works as director of philanthropy at Hewlett-Packard. He has ambitious plans to build on Palo Alto's environmental reputation if elected. He offers ideas that won't necessarily burden the taxpayer, either - he wants to foster a green technology hub and promote green building practices. We also appreciate his ideas on making city government work more efficiently.

The two other candidates we endorse, Schmid and Burt, offer valuable experience from the business world and have demonstrated a commitment to local service.

Schmid, an economist who attended Yale, led a research group at the Federal Reserve and served on the Palo Alto Unified School District board. Schmid advocates the need to stem the loss of hotel and retail sales tax revenue, an issue that concerns many of us, and we like the way he offered specific proposals on the appropriate use of special task forces and strategic planning for growth.

Burt offers valuable business experience as the CEO and president of the high-tech manufacturing business Acteron, and has become an astute observer of development in Palo Alto through nine years on the planning and transportation commission. In a bid to reconcile residents' interests with those of the business community, he touts the development of new hotels as a way to raise the most revenue for the city with the least impact on its all-important quality of life.

Yeh, Espinosa, Schmid and Burt bring impressive credentials to the race, along with a keen understanding of Palo Alto's unique strengths and challenges, which is why we endorse them.