Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Mayor John Mehaffey promises to bring to his new job the 'long-term view' he promised when he ran for office in 1998.
Mehaffey is new mayor of Saratoga
By Kara Chalmers
On Dec. 12, the Saratoga City Council elected Vice Mayor John Mehaffey to the position of mayor of Saratoga.
Mehaffey, whom the people elected to the council in 1998, ran then on a promise to "provide the long-term view" on the council. His agenda as mayor that he outlined on Dec. 12, shows how he further plans to deliver on this promise.
He also said he wanted Saratoga's government to stay open and accessible to citizens.
"The citizens of Saratoga are our eyes and ears in the community," Mehaffey summed up his speech on Dec. 12. "I want to encourage everyone out there to be involved and send in your complaints and observations, and I personally assure you they will be acted on. And I want to hear about it if this does not happen."
The council elected Councilman Nick Streit as vice mayor.
"I promise to completely support John and his agenda, I think his agenda is perfect," Streit said at the meeting.
Mehaffey, 44, who has lived in Saratoga since 1987, and who is married with a 9-year-old daughter, first became interested in Saratoga politics when the city was involved in a lawsuit over pollution in Saratoga Creek. At that time, his daughter was very young, and his wife used to walk her by the creek near their home.
By 1996, Mehaffey was campaigning for Stan Bogosian and Jim Shaw, who ran for the council on a pledge to end the lawsuit over the creek, among other issues. Mehaffey also campaigned for the first Measure G, a slow growth initiative that passed in 1996.
Mehaffey was an advocate of the new Measure G that was passed in this November's election. The measure places a moratorium on any proposed conversions of commercial areas to residential until 2002. A year ago, the city council reviewed the planning commission's approval of the Azule Crossing development, a proposal to convert a commercial center on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road to a mixed residential and commercial development. Mehaffey was an outspoken advocate of preserving as much commercial space as possible at Azule, since land zoned commercial is in such short supply in the city.
Mehaffey, a Libertarian, was born and raised in Minnesota, and moved to the Bay Area in 1979. He obtained his bachelor's degrees from the University of Minnesota in electrical engineering and computer science and his master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. He said he always knew he wanted to be an expert in computer science.
Mehaffey worked at Hewlett Packard for 15 years and then formed his own company in Saratoga Village called Gedanken, a small consulting company that supports obsolete computer systems by making disk drives and software, and consulting for companies that have old equipment. Mehaffey also works at a start-up software company in Sunnyvale called Monta Vista Software.
One of Mehaffey's political platforms, which relates to his career, is to upgrade technology at city hall. According to him, employees at the city are not taking full advantage of the Internet and email, but he said that more training for employees would remedy the problem. According to Mehaffey, the city would be more productive if every staff member was technologically savvy.
He also said the city's website is rudimentary, and needs to be upgraded with the minutes of all council and city commission meetings so they can be searched, as well as agendas for upcoming meetings. Mehaffey said that even if the city does not hire an employee to upgrade the website and maintain it, there might be people or students in the city who would be willing to do it for free.
"We just have to ask," he said.
Mehaffey also suggested that the city hire a planner for the community development department, who would focus solely on long-range planning and land-use issues. He hopes to place this on the council's agenda for discussion soon, he said. Mehaffey said it is important for him and other council members to "step back and take a look.
"You end up with your nose to the grindstone dealing with day to day things," Mehaffey said, noting his campaign pledge to take a long-term view. He said that the city's recent discussion of a new civic center complex epitomizes his way of thinking. The council is discussing whether it would be prudent to plan to rebuild the entire civic center, rather than just to renovate and expand the Community and Senior centers. Mehaffey favors the master plan approach.
Although it is unclear what kind of role the city could play in implementing a busing program for school children in Saratoga, Mehaffey encourages such a program. He said the city could play a role by bringing the schools and the Valley Transportation Authority, which would provide busing, to the table for talks.
"It's an idea whose time has come," Mehaffey said of busing, which he calls an easy answer to the city's traffic problems.
According to Mehaffey, the city does need to provide affordable housing, but the goals for the numbers of units that the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) has assigned to the city are unreasonable.
Mehaffey said the city should try to get ABAG to reconsider the numbers and see if the city could count the new units at the Oddfellows Home and Our Lady of Fatima Villa, as well as all the city's granny units that today aren't permitted, as affordable housing.
Mehaffey added he would be in favor of creating a city policy that any new developments would be required to have a certain number of below-market-rate units in order for the city to approve it.
Mehaffey said that as mayor he is eager to begin revitalizing the city's Gateway business district. Because the state recently turned over a portion of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road to the city, along with $2 million, the city has the money to make improvements to the area. Mehaffey, who says the area looks like an "industrial zone" today, said he wants to turn the Gateway into something that "says Saratoga.
"We're going to put something in there that looks nice," he said.
Mehaffey, a business owner in the Village, also advocates the "seeded" business program that the city began by recruiting its first store, Patrick James, into the Village in the hope of drawing more shoppers there.
In his free time, of which there is not much since Mehaffey has been working two jobs and serving on the council, he enjoys computer gaming, model-building, skiing, hiking in woods and going to the beach with his family.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
