Bruce Karney: setting priorities to meet core goals Bruce Karney: setting priorities to meet core goals (October 18, 2002)

By Candice Shih

Bruce Karney divides the city council's tasks into two categories: things it must do and things it should do.

For Karney, addressing the city's budget woes falls in the first category, and creating more affordable housing falls in the second. He says he has the experience and expertise to handle both.

As a knowledge management consultant at Hewlett Packard, Karney, 49, has made job cuts. He knows that laying off workers or cutting hours may be necessary for the council to do in order to balance the city's budget. But compared to other items, protecting the city's core workforce is a priority.

"Activities that are not essential to the mission," like capital spending on parks or the community center might have to be delayed as a consequence, said Karney.

Affordable housing and Mountain View's jobs/housing imbalance are issues Karney wants to address on the council.

"There's not enough capacity to meet demand," he said. The lack of housing is directly linked to issues of traffic and transportation, too.

The city should encourage car sharing, he said, and continue to build jobs and housing along transit corridors. And it could try matching prospective renters with residents who have extra bedrooms to increase housing density.

Karney said the NASA Ames redevelopment plan is on his radar screen because, by creating more jobs than housing, it would further tip the scales in the wrong direction. He said that fostering popular support to get more housing would be a way to counteract that.

Karney has had experience with downtown issues as a member of the Downtown Revitalization Committee from 1993 until 1996. He said the city can help to improve downtown through code enforcement and zoning, but wants to see communication between the city and downtown merchants improve.

But because downtown is not publicly owned and he doesn't want it to look like a mall, "it's up to the business owners to sort it out," he says.

Karney, the chair of the Old Mountain View Neighborhood Association, said he has not been directly involved with the city's emergency ordinance on historic preservation.

But he says that historic preservation is important, and should be undertaken in a way that does not hurt property owners.

In 22 years in Mountain View, Karney has lived in four different neighborhoods and helped guide the city through a number of local issues. He was active in the campaign against Measure N which would have brought Home Depot to the old Emporium site and he campaigned for recent school and library bond measures.

Through his neighborhood association, Karney led an effort to build Mercy-Bush Park. And he has nurtured his interest in politics through his now 10-year membership with the League of Women Voters, of which he served as treasurer.

Originally from Olympia, Wash., Karney graduated with a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford and an M.S. in management science from UC Berkeley. He is married to Twana Karney, the executive director of Leadership Mountain View.
Favorite book(s): Biographies of the founding fathers including David McCullough's "John Adams."
E-mail Candice Shih at cshih@mv-voice.com