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For decades, Gary Wesley took on a tireless, self-appointed role as a legal and policy watchdog in Mountain View, even when it didn’t make him a lot of friends and many of his lawsuits went nowhere. He was found dead in his home Jan. 2 at age 68.
Wesley was a common sight at City Council meetings and authored ballot arguments on countless measures, usually asking voters to reject a tax measure or proposed ordinance. He made politicians uneasy, would take up legal battles for free and always seemed convinced that public agencies were rife with corruption and grift.
Despite his frequent presence at City Hall, he didn’t have much of a social circle and news of his death last month took many in the city by surprise.
“He was doing what he thought was right, which maybe wasn’t always right,” said former Councilman Mike Kasperzak. “He did think he was serving a public purpose.”
Over the years, Wesley took up numerous causes that were all over the map, politically. He sued the city, and more recently Valley Water, to stop fluoridation plans, and hammered the city with lawsuits over a lack of transparency. He tried to remove the city’s proposed rent control measure, Measure W, from the ballot in 2016, and more recently challenged the Valley Transportation Authority’s Measure B sales tax.
Wesley was consistent, however, in his demands that public agencies follow the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law. He alleged that Mountain View violated the Brown Act in the 1990s, and last year represented a case that the Mountain View Whisman School District had overly vague descriptions of closed-session items. In most cases his lawsuits fell short.
Wesley even lashed out at the Mountain View Voice, accusing its publisher at the time of silencing dissenting views and making baseless claims that the newspaper was acting as a booster to get a day workers center built in Mountain View.
He remained a relentless critic and council gadfly, but never held public office, though he ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in in 1980 and 1996.
Kasperzak said he remembers running against Wesley at the time, and that his personality never changed all that much over the years. Wesley was amiable enough in public, but at council meetings would always use accusatory language and make Kasperzak and his colleagues uneasy — like they were doing something unsavory even when everything was above-board.
“Even when I knew he was wrong, whether he had his facts wrong or the law wrong, the way he spoke and the way he intimated things — he was good at causing people to feel unsettled,” Kasperzak said. “I don’t think he had any major victories that caused Mountain View to change anything for the better, but he was a constant reminder that we needed to dot our I’s and cross our T’s.”
Others felt he was an under-appreciated watchdog. Don Letcher, a property owner in Mountain View, said Wesley was a “huge benefit” to Mountain View and felt he was the only person who was willing to take the city to task on alleged Brown Act violations. Letcher said he became friends with Wesley after Letcher was arrested for trespassing at City Hall in 1998. Wesley was willing to represent him in a federal civil rights case against the city at no cost, he said.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Letcher said Wesley had grown cynical over the lack of civil penalties for violating the Brown Act, and instead focused his attention on landlord-tenant matters. He took it upon himself to deliver flyers during the 2020 presidential election with information on which Mountain View City Council candidates he believed would favor tenants.
“He would take the underdog’s side and he would fight any way he could,” Letcher said. “He was strongly focused on keeping the government honest.”
Though public officials have a mixed view on the mark Wesley left on the city, Kasperzak said he felt Mountain View did benefit from the citizen’s oversight. He may have cost the city a fortune in legal fees, but it made city officials acutely aware of the laws they had to follow. If the City Council ever slipped up, Wesley was likely to notice and raise hell.
“He took his watchdog role seriously. And while I think most people would agree he was probably overzealous, society needs people like Gary to hold people accountable,” Kasperzak said. “Sometimes they might only be right one in a dozen times, but the fact that they keep watching keeps people honest.”
Information regarding the cause of Wesley death was still pending as of Monday.
I will miss Gary. Although we never met in person, we communicated over email. His posts on MV Voice forums were always informative and to the point. Not having him around feels like not having someone who would watch your back in various city matters. Thank you, Gary. Rest in peace…
Gary’s ballot measure analysis was usually spot-on, especially related to bond measures which were misleading and pay lip service the oversight intent in the California Constitution (ref. MVWSD’s Measure T last year).
Sometimes, he’d write an opposition opinion just because no one else wrote one; he thought it was important in democracy that someone argue the other side.
I don’t know if I would have liked him in person, but based on his writings, I think he was an asset to our community and I will miss him.
Thank you for an insightful article on Mr. Westley. Like many, I knew his name from the various public forums that he participated in over the years, including letters to editor of the Voice and the town square, but knew little else about him. Sometimes, I thought he made good points, others seemed less so, but his engagement as a watchdog was admirable.