Council picks Showalter as mayor

Asked about the big issues facing Mountain View, the city’s new mayor, Pat Showalter, doesn’t need to ponder for long. It’s “housing, housing and more housing.”

The city needs to build more residences, plan it out better and find ways to keep families and households living here without mortgaging their future, she says. Trying to tackle those goals, she expects, will dominate the coming year as she occupies the city’s top seat.

Having just completed her first year on the council, Showalter on Tuesday night was picked by her colleagues to take the city’s helm at a tense time in local politics. Mountain View is experiencing a building boom like never before, with records amounts of office and residential development being proposed. But while some see a robust economy on the rise, others see the scourge of gentrification. A growing segment of the community is complaining the city could be changing for the worse, forcing low-wage earners to go elsewhere.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Showalter won the honorary position in a unanimous vote, making her the city’s point-person for 2016. At the same meeting, the council picked Ken Rosenberg to serve as vice mayor.

As she takes the gavel, Showalter says she is cognizant that these polarizing housing issues aren’t exactly new, nor can they be reasonably expected to be resolved in her limited term. Nevertheless, the city’s new mayor says she intends to be a steady hand on the tiller as the city implements and fine-tunes a slate of new housing policies.

Showalter speaks highly of the collaborative and courteous relationship between council members. But that doesn’t mean she always marches in lockstep and housing is one area where she sometimes parts ways with her colleagues.

Last year, as a groundswell of tenants urged the city to do something to curb rising rents, Showalter was one of the few council members who wanted to take immediate action to freeze rents while a formal rent-control program could be studied. She still believes such a “cooling-off period” would have provided the time and flexibility needed for thoughtful policies.

But her plan never gained traction, and the council instead produced a hodgepodge of new programs including beefed-up mediation and rental subsidies ideas that didn’t win much support among renters or landlords. As the old adage says, a good compromise leaves both sides dissatisfied — but of course, the same can be said of a bad compromise.

Ultimately, the deal was a letdown, Showalter says, but she asserted that now her role is to try to make that deal work as successfully as possible.

“I’m disappointed, but at the same time, you always have to do what’s politically available,” she explains. “We’ve heard all these hours of testimony from people (facing rising rents) and now following through on that should be a huge priority.”

In the coming weeks, as the council adds specifics to these housing programs, she says she intends to push for low thresholds and tight language to protect renters. At a minimum, she says she would want binding arbitration to be available for any tenant facing a rent hike of at least two times the regional consumer price index (about 5 percent). To a degree, she believes the city’s recent rash of rent hikes are a short-term crisis that will eventually settle down as the economy cools off.

The new mayor also puts some hopes in the city’s long-term housing remedies, particularly its plans to build new housing throughout North Bayshore. She describes the area as a grand opportunity for housing, but it is up to city officials to ensure that growth is implemented intelligently.

One of her goals during her term will be to strengthen outreach and collaboration with other Silicon Valley cities to address the mutual troubles, such as affordable housing, traffic and shared resources.

In some ways, these priorities are nothing new for Showalter, said former mayor Jac Siegel. The two served together for a period on the city’s Planning Commission, and even then Showalter showed a strong interest in residential issues and the so-called job-housing imbalance in Mountain View. Then and now, she favored higher-density homes as a way to do more with the limited available land, Siegel recalled.

“I’m sure she’ll make a great mayor … she’ll grab the situation and do well with it,” Siegel said. “Pat is very smart and she’s an engineer she’s able to understand the technical things from staff really easily.”

One problem that may arise is the workload. The demands of being on the council can easily match a full-time job, but when you’re mayor that time commitment “triples,” Siegel said, as the post comes with a litany of ribbon-cuttings, proclamations, special events and other ceremonies.

Showalter, who works as a civil engineer for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, intends to balance her day job with her mayoral duties. Her employer “generously” allowed her to switch to a part-time schedule, she says. But she did express some concerns about handling the demands. Coming from a technical background, she is accustomed to reviewing each line of information in front of her, but that level of detail often becomes impossible for processing a 500-page meeting packet.

“That’s scary for me,” she said. “I’m used to getting into detail and understanding things clearly, but things get thrown to us really quickly and I can’t delve into it at the same level.”

Operating as a high-level decision-maker often means relying on the best judgment of city staff and consultants. Showalter says she’s also been impressed by the level of research that civic-minded community members invest into city business, and they often provide valuable advice for elected leaders. She hopes to keep that dialogue open by continuing a mayoral tradition of having a regular coffee meetings with anyone who wants to talk.

Those meetings dubbed “Chats with Pat” are being scheduled at 11 a.m. on the second Tuesday of each month and at 3 p.m. on the last Saturday of each month at Le Boulanger cafe at 650 Castro St.

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