In 2002, when Matt Neely won the most votes of nine candidates for city council, I wrote in the alumni newsletter to my high school water polo teammates that he was “perhaps my highest-ranking personal enemy.”
Imagine my excitement then, when after dreaming of taking my revenge on Neely for six years, the Voice hired me to cover Mountain View city politics.
Neely and I met when I was a senior at Los Altos High School. That year, some of my friends had cut the locks on Mountain View High’s marquee and made a rather vulgar but clever anagram with the letters.
Neely, an assistant principal at Mountain View High, for some reason decided that if he interrogated me for long enough, I would roll over on my friends. As one of the editors of the high school paper, I stayed true to my sources and kept my mouth shut. Neely told me I lacked integrity and later convinced the principal and Superintendent Rich Fischer to violate the state education code and censor the newspaper’s illicitly obtained photo of the marquee, ultimately embarrassing themselves when 12 different news outlets picked up the story.
Oh yes, I was definitely going to get Matt Neely.
I was disappointed to learn, however, that he was actually a pretty good guy.
In two and half years at the Voice, my most surprising discovery has been that the public officials we cover are, generally speaking, decent human beings driven by a desire to serve.
Neely has, of course, given those of us in the Fourth Estate plenty of opportunities to attack him — he once gave me a commemorative city watch in front of two other reporters, and made a reference to “Chinese fire drills” at a council meeting earlier this year — even though we’ve never taken them. But like his colleagues, he has always appeared to be in it for the common good, and his respect for the role of the press has been refreshing.
At a time when the mayor of San Jose is facing criminal charges for a back-room promise to give away millions of dollars of public funds, and the White House is excoriating reporters for telling the truth about its covert snooping operations, Mountain View is lucky to have people of Matt Neely’s caliber in charge.
Legacies of an indicted mayor
The city’s employee unions and its legal adversaries do not always like this, of course, and it occasionally embarrasses other agencies. But it is a clear indication of the respect that civic leaders have for both the press and the public at large, even on those occasions when neither appears to deserve any. None of this is to say that city leaders are perfect. Over the last two and a half years, I have seen council members skip meetings to attend Jimmy Buffett concerts, strike out with KMVT interns (in front of the camera), and drive to Bike to Work Day energizer stations. And on more important issues, the council often seems to pay lip service to resident concerns about open space or economic diversity without doing much to promote those causes. Members often hide behind a mantra of property rights as they bend over backwards for residential developers. But even when we have slung arrows — over development in Rengstorff Park, cops with Tasers, or free tickets to Shoreline Amphitheatre — the city has always dealt with us, and by extension the readers, openly.
Perhaps more than anyone else, those two are responsible for getting me interested in journalism, a field that I respected much more after being pressured to reveal sources and having my high school work censored. And despite the positive things I can say about both of them, I still believe the press is at its best when it serves as a watchdog for the community and exposes the truth for all to see.
Eight years later, the powers that be (this time, my editors) have once again thwarted my efforts to run the photo. And though taking my revenge ultimately proved unnecessary, I am giving both Neely and Fischer framed copies to remind them of the importance of a free press, even when it’s being petty.
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