October 22, 2004

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Publication Date: Friday, October 22, 2004

Laura Macias

Laura Macias had only lived in Mountain View for one year before she signed up for Leadership Mountain View in 1990, the orientation-style program that serves as an incubator for community leaders and future council members.

"It started to feel like a community right away," said Macias, who had bought a condominium at the Old Mill the year before. "Mountain View welcomed people that wanted to get involved." Fourteen years later, Macias is in the middle of her first term with the environmental planning commission. She has also served seven years on the parks and recreation commission. With a background in business management and service on a number of nonprofit boards, Macias is confident that she can help bring more focused analysis to the city council.

When asked to name the three most important issues facing the city, she said that two override all others in importance, namely economic development and affordable housing. "If we're going to be a good city, we need to have revenue," said Macias.

Macias started working at age 13 to help pay for tuition at a Phoenix preparatory school. From a family of migrant laborers and factory workers, Macias' generation was the first in her family to attend college. But when the dot-bomb exploded, Macias was among those left scrambling for work. Now she has specific ideas for how to bring business back to the area. Macias said the city should develop a specific marketing plan aimed at recruiting businesses and set measurable goals so it can gauge its success. She added that the city needs a task force to find solutions to reduce unemployment. "I think we need to spend time to see if there are some people that aren't working that want to be," she said.

To alleviate the housing crunch, she thinks the city should support more pre-fab units in the interests of affordability. Macias is also concerned about ineffective relationships between the council and city commissions, a problem she has heard about from colleagues as well. "Being on the commissions for the last nine years I've noticed a lot of stops and starts," she said. When the council ignored the planning commission's recommendations and raised limits on building heights on Castro Street, Macias said that it made the downtown area vulnerable to overbuilding and crowding, something she wants to prevent.

While on the parks and recreation commission, Macias helped ensure that hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees paid by developers who did not include enough parkland in their projects went towards the acquisition of city parks. On the issue of historic preservation, Macias criticized the council's decision to reject the planning commission's recommendations and pass a voluntary ordinance. "We cobbled together something that was not the best, but a decent try," she said. "They took the easy way out."

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