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Reporter Gennady Sheyner sat down with Joe Simitian following a celebration in his honor to discuss all things local politics and good governance. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Palo Alto Weekly: At a recent celebration of your political career, you told a story about how as a teenager you had to choose between living with your mother in Colorado or your father in Palo Alto. What made you choose Palo Alto?
Joe Simitian: Palo Alto historically has been a place where prior generations had built for the future, and with real purpose. And there’s a very deliberate nature to the place that people created. And so, when I arrived in Palo Alto, and when my buddy Gary Fazzino arrived, there were already great schools and wonderful libraries throughout the community. You tell people, you know that Palo Alto has literally five different libraries, a children’s theater, a community center, a public utility. I mean, the people in the generations who came before us in this community thought to the future and built and maintained and sustained a place for the coming generations, and all of that was already well in place by the time I arrived in Palo Alto in the summer of 1967. … I spent that summer here and I had a passion for theater at the time, so I was in a production at the Palo Alto Children’s Theater. I made friends from my Children’s Theater days that I’m still in touch with all these years later. It was a very formative time in my life, obviously. I was fortunate to have two loving parents, both of whom cared deeply about me and my future. But Palo Alto was a very special place. And as I said it, and as Gary and I used to say, it really was the place I was meant to be, to become the person I was meant to be. And will forever be appreciative of that.
PAW: At Paly, you were a student body president. Did you have any inkling that at some point you would ultimately get into politics and seek elective office?
JS: If you were at all inclined toward an interest in political affairs, showing up in Palo Alto the summer of ’67 was certainly going to foster that. You’ve got to keep in mind, my father was a social studies and government teacher at Palo Alto High School, so that came naturally. Between ’67 and ’70, we had the anti-war movement, the draft, civil rights, second wave feminism, the psychedelic sound. It was a tumultuous time. And if you were at all inclined towards politics and government, the late ’60s here in Palo Alto was a very vibrant time.
PAW: Why did you choose the school board as your first venture into elected office?
JS: Well, it’s funny that you ask, at the time I had people who said, “If you want to run for office, you should run for City Council. You’re a 30-year-old, unmarried with no kids. And I said, ‘I’m running for the school board because that’s where I want to serve.’ … That was certainly not the norm at the time and I spent a lot of time articulating the rationale for my candidacy, which was that I believed, and I still believe, that to the extent we hold ourselves out as a society of equal opportunity, our public schools are what make that real or not. That we can’t guarantee that every kid succeeds by any definition, but we can and should guarantee that every kid has the opportunity to succeed to the greatest extent their abilities allow. And that’s what public education historically has been, and I hope continues to be.
PAW: We heard from one of your school board colleagues about your hatred for acronyms, and a resolution you authored to speak in plain English. Why was that such a priority?
JS: I have always felt, in my public service, that to the extent that we’re going to engage the community in the work we do, which I think is essential, we need to be plain-spoken about the nature of the work we’re doing and its importance. And I was somewhat teasing, but had a, perhaps a serious purpose in introducing a resolution for jargon-elimination month, because I had spent a lot of time on the school board asking folks when they were presenting, ‘Please explain their their acronyms, or the educational jargon,’ so that people in the community could could understand and participate. I hadn’t thought about it in years but it’s probably indicative of a larger notion that I have held that we want to include people in the process, and when we use language that excludes, we’re working at cross purposes.
PAW: What were some of the issues you were dealing with at that time on the school board?
I have watched the debate around Ethnic Studies with some interesting concern as a member of the public. But I actually was enrolled in an elective course called Minority Cultures back in the late ’60s, and it was an elective course that was designed to provide students with an opportunity to understand communities and cultures that were not readily visible or present in Palo Alto. If you go back and look at a yearbook from 1970, when I graduated, you know, the community was very different. It was certainly more economically diverse, and that’s something I missed. On the other hand, it was not really all that racially or ethnically diverse, and so the class was an opportunity for high school students to broaden their understanding with an elective course, at least at the time. But the biggest issue at the time, which really ripped the community apart, was school closures. And, you know, the worst of that had happened by the time I arrived on the Palo Alto school board in 1983. … People used to ask me, how do you deal with all special interests in Sacramento? And I said, ‘Look, when you’ve had to make hard decisions that affect Palo Alto families, their kids and their schools, the rest of it’s easy after that.’ That’s perhaps an exaggeration, but not much. I’ve had this extraordinary opportunity to serve in five different venues over those 40 years, but I often went back to the lessons I learned as a school board member, and they stood me in good stead in every other role I would hold.
PAW: What were some of those lessons?
JS: You learn to listen. You know that nobody’s problem is small to them. You learn that even the smartest guy in the room is going to be wrong from time to time. You learn how to hear the wisdom in one voice, even if it could too easily be drowned out by 100 others. You learn to do the right thing as you see it and then manage the consequences. Don’t overthink the politics, just figure out which the right thing to do is, and then explain your point of view. I’ve often joked with people as long as I’ve served in the different offices that pretty much everybody in Palo Alto has been mad at me at least half a dozen times on various issues, but it has always been a place where you could look your constituents the eye, tell them why you voted the way you did, give them what you thought were your good reasons for reaching the conclusion you did, and as long as they thought you were well intended and had good reasons, people were prepared to accept the occasional difference of opinion.
PAW: How did these insights serve you in your next venture on the City Council? What was it like for you to serve on the council in the early ’90s?
JS: In my case, after spending eight years on educational issues, you get to the Palo Alto City Council and you’re dealing with everything under the sun. One minute you’re talking about utilities, the next minute you’re talking about land use, the next minute you’re talking about the senior center and childcare issues. The range is wide and it’s tough to have the depth that you would like when you’re dealing with that. And it was even more the case when I went to the county and then at the state legislative level. … In the state Legislature, in a two-year session, there are 5,000 bills that are introduced and you’re expected to not only have an opinion on each and every one of them, but you’re supposed to have an opinion that is well formed and thoughtful and that enables you to cast a thoughtful vote. So I would say that the difference between the school board and City Council was the sheer range of issues, and that also meant that the community dynamic was different, notwithstanding the fact that I ran for the school board as a non-parent.
PAW: Did you find it more liberating or exhausting to be out of the school lane and dealing with so many other issues?
JS: I enjoyed them both a lot and there is something about being the mayor of the town that you grew up in and where you graduated from high school that is just a particularly sweet and satisfying opportunity. But I think school board members don’t get their due. It is serious and vital work and I think sometimes people don’t realize that governing a school district is, in fact, a governance responsibility in the same way that they understand governance to be the role and responsibility of a city or a county or a state. There are budgets to be balanced, there are personnel decisions that are critical to the success of the enterprise. There are kids whose lives will be shaped by the decisions you make day after day. So it’s a tough job and, frankly, I think it’s an underappreciated one, and you learn a lot about governance.
PAW: Looking at the current situation in Palo Alto, it does seem like being in the school board is in some ways more thankless than being in the City Council given the pretty ferocious debates happening in education these days. But do you recall any of the issues that the City Council was dealing with that really continue to stand out in your mind from your time on the council?
JS: Affordable housing and the jobs housing balance was a big issue in the ’90s, and to some extent, that’s one of the frustrations I feel, and that I think is shared by others. Here we are, you know, years later, and those issues are still plaguing us. I was an advocate for three or four different projects in Palo Alto that make me smile every time I drive by them. Projects like Page Mill Place, which serves adults with developmental disabilities. That was a project where a group of parents came to see me and said, “Hi, do you remember us?” And I said, ‘Sure, we worked together when your kids were in the Palo Alto School District, and I was a school board member, and these were, you know, had been kids with developmental disabilities.’ And they said, “Well, our kids are grown now, and we are worried that they need to have a place to live and call home, and we won’t be here forever.” So this was parent leadership that ultimately was successful in getting patients placed in place. … When I had been on the council, the Fry’s site (a property on Portage Avenue that was formerly occupied by Fry’s Electronics) had been zoned residential, but in order to let the property owners have a continuing commercial use, there was a 20-year amortization period. So that period ran out when I was on the council and the owners came and said, ‘We don’t want it to go residential. We want it to stay commercial, and the people understandably concerned about maintaining sales tax revenue that was generated by Fry’s. This is part of what’s been known as the fiscalization of land use. And there was an 8-1 vote in favor of extending the amortization, or not or canceling out the residential zoning. And I was the sole dissenting vote, and I made the case that we needed the housing and that we had a jobs-housing imbalance, and that we had an obligation to address it. The Weekly wrote an editorial literally within the last six years, when the Fry’s site came up again for consideration, and I couldn’t help but smile to think, ‘Oh my gosh. You know, here we are again, you know, decades later, revisiting the same set of issues.’ … Almost everyone wants Palo Alto to remain a place of opportunity that continues to welcome newcomers, and certainly new families. On the other hand, no one I know wants to despoil the charm or character of the community. So the question is: Is it possible to thread that needle? You know what I said to people at the time and I still say it from time to time is, ‘Look, it’s easy. You vote for good projects and you vote against bad projects.’ … I was a housing advocate even then. But I thought, I thought we could do it without compromising the human scale of the community. I always thought that was a false choice, and I still think so.
PAW: I’ve often heard people talk about how Palo Alto, being at the very north of Santa Clara County, doesn’t get as much of a voice on a county board that is dominated by San Jose with its population of a million people. Did you feel that when you were a Santa Clara County supervisor?
JS: It’s real, and to some extent, it’s understandable and perhaps even appropriate. Look, San Jose has half the population, and San Jose has more than half the need if you think about the county as focusing on its role as a safety net organization. So I have sometimes felt obliged to explain to my constituents why resources are headed to other parts of the county, including San Jose. On the other hand, I’ve been a vocal advocate for the folks in my district who need the county’s help. And this isn’t about being parochial. This is about trying to ensure that folks who need and deserve help from the county get it wherever they live. I have argued strongly that in some ways it is tougher to be a person of modest means in a high-cost area like Palo Alto and the north county, west valley district that I have represented. The cost of living is high, the services that support people of modest means are few and far between, and you are too often invisible. … I was just thinking about this again as I was driving. We’ve got a fast track system that says one group of Californians gets to move along the highway at a pretty brisk clip, and another group of Californians is stuck in the slow lane. And that’s both a literal and metaphorical example. This notion of two Californias or two Palo Altos troubles me. And one of the first things I remember from when I was on the board in the ’90s was that the lease was coming up on the Social Service Agency, what you and I would call it the welfare office, in Mountain View, and it was literally the only welfare office in the county, and they were planning on moving it to San Jose or maybe to Sunnyvale. And I said, ‘You know, over my dead body.’ And they said, ‘Well, you know, we think the need is greater.’ And I said, ‘You do? You do a scattergram through a map that shows where the folks are who actually access services there?’ Sure enough, it showed that the concentration of need was, in fact, around that Mountain View office and, and it got a little testy. Finally, I just said to somebody, ‘If it is the policy of this county to gentrify my district, you need to say so in an open public meeting.’ (The office was saved). … I was always acutely aware of the fact that the small cities I represented, including Palo Alto but also Mountain View, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno – they only have one supervisor. If I didn’t go to bat for my folks, there was nobody there to go to bat for them. I was acutely aware of that and it sometimes made the conversations difficult. But more often than not, I was able to bring my colleagues along and make the case.
PAW: What was your transition to Sacramento like?
JS: Let’s just say the political culture in Sacramento was not the one I was raised with here in Palo Alto. … Here, you are one member on a nine-member City Council, which it was then, or, one member on a five-member school board or Board of Supervisors. But you get to Sacramento, and it’s exponentially more difficult. There are 80 assembly members and there are 40 state senators in the second house who are not even your colleagues in a day-to-day sense. Plus, you got to get a signature from the governor. You had literally 1,000 lobbyists when I was there. It’s a different dynamic. It’s a challenge. And meanwhile, you’re trying to stay connected with folks whom you represent, which is how I started the, “There ought to be a law.” contest. The life was, you get up on a Monday morning to hop in the car, you drive up to Sacramento, there’s an afternoon session, you’re there, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, you’re in committee, you’re taking meetings in your office. Then on Thursday morning, there’s another session. And then you drive home to your district, and you try and connect with the folks you represent, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. … At the end of the year, I came back and said, ‘Look, I’m spending my week up in Sacramento meeting with lobbyists and interest group advocates, and that’s all part of the process, but I’m not getting to connect with my constituency the way I feel like I would like to and that I should.’ And so I said I’d like to find a way to invite welcome community comment and input. As we brainstormed, I said that we should have a contest and call it, ‘There ought to be a law,’ and everybody in my office just cringed, like you could literally hear the groan. I said that I’ll make the commitment that I will review each one of them personally, so that people know this is serious. And, you know, I didn’t know when I said that that we get more than 100 applications in the first year, more than 400 by the time we finished after my 12th year in the Legislature. It turned out to be a remarkably popular and effective way. I passed 118 pieces of substantive legislation, and 21 of them were ‘There ought to be a law’ contest entries.
PAW: Do any of these 21 laws proposed by constituents stand out for you?
JS: Every every year in the Senate, I would hold an ice cream social in my Santa Cruz office and people would show up with their three ring binders and their file folders. One day in 2009 a woman walks up to me, smiles, puts out her hand, says, ‘Hi, I’m Amy. Do you remember me?’ Amy had grown up here in Palo Alto on Churchill Avenue. And she said, “I’m a nurse … and I knew when I hit 40 I should get a mammogram every year and do a self-exam.” And she said that she did all that, and things went along just fine. … Then one day, she said she got a call from my doctor’s office and was told, ‘You got to come in. We have to operate immediately, you have an advanced case of breast cancer.’ And after she got through that ordeal, she had the presence of mind to say, “Hey, wait a minute. We did a mammogram year after year, and the readings always came back clean. How on earth was this missed?” And one of the doctors says, “Well, you have something called dense breast tissue. And dense breast tissue is a condition that not only elevates your risk for breast cancer, but it shows up white on a conventional mammogram, and that means it obscures cancer in many instances, because the cancer shows up white.” And she said, “Well, how did we not know this?” And the doctor candidly said, “Well, we did know. Your radiologist assesses that and reports it to your primary care physician. And it’s actually on the form that is shared with the primary care physician.” And Amy, very smartly, said, “Wait a minute. Let me see if I got this right. There were three people in this conversation: my primary care physician, the radiologist, and me, the patient. And the only person who doesn’t know I have something called dense breast tissue, which can make it hard to spot a cancer, is me.” And then kind of sheepishly the assistant said, “Yeah, that’s right” So she did some homework, discovered that one state, Connecticut, already had a bill on the books that required notice when you take a mammogram and discover dense breast tissue. It didn’t require any additional work, because they already do an assessment of dense breast tissue. They just require you to share that information with the patient. She put it in through “There ought to be a law.” I introduced the bill, and it became law after two tries.
PAW: We’ve heard many speakers at the recent Sunday event talk about your legislative accomplishments, including the bill to ban hands-free cell phone use (while driving) and the creation of transitional kindergarten. But one question I have about your time in the state Senate is: What was it like to get banned from Azerbaijan?
JS: What happened was I had led a delegation from the California State Senate to Turkey, Iraq and Azerbaijan, and the politics of that trip were somewhat fraught by virtue of the fact that I’m Armenian-American, and there’s a history there. There were some particularly difficult moments on the trip to Azerbaijan, but we managed to navigate those successfully. After the delegation came home, I went on to travel in Armenia on my own. While I was traveling in Armenia, I had the opportunity to visit a place called Nagorno Karabakh. The Caucasus are a small place, and so, believe it or not, it was newsworthy that a California state Senator was there and I met with, you know, the president of Karabakh and head of the legislative body and their foreign minister. And word of this made its way into the press so when I got back to Armenia and hopped online, I got a Google alert telling me that I had just been blacklisted and banned and declared persona non grata from Azerbaijan, and the reason being that, in their view, I had done so without the permission of the Azerbaijan. In my view, since the region had been self-governing for 20 years at that point, and I had a visa stamp from Azerbaijan, I thought I was within bounds. I later discovered that this is what happens. U.S. Senator, John McCain, for example, was PNG (persona non grata) for Russia. A number of other state legislators who traveled to Karabakh were later blacklisted, declared persona non grata. I think actually there’s a Wikipedia entry now, somebody pointed it out to me called, you know, you know, people declared blacklisted from Azerbaijan.
PAW: Do you see it as a point of pride as an Armenian, or do you lament the fact that you can’t spend your summer vacations in Baku?
JS: It’s funny that you asked that question. I came back that fall and the Legislature wasn’t in session and the Capitol press corps didn’t have much to write about. So this little blip became a footnote of history. And I got a call from the Sacramento Bee and the guy said, “How do you feel about this?” And I thought at that moment that I needed to choose my words carefully and so I said, ‘Well, let me put you this way. It’s a disappointment I can live with.”
PAW: Your last run for office in 2024 was, as far as I know, the only one that didn’t end in your election.
JS: Actually, I ran for the school board when I was 22 years old and was unsuccessful. It was in 1976 and then in 2024, so I have those bookends. But when people have been kind enough to elect you 12 times in a row, at five different levels, I can say it was a good run, it was a long run. More importantly, it was, I think, a productive run, but it was also, you know, a series of votes of confidence that meant a lot to me along the way.
PAW: After last year’s primary election, I feel like there’s been quite a few of our readers who have criticized the the two Palo Alto council members, Julie Lythcott-Haims and Greg Tanaka, who also ran in the primary and who they believe had cost you a chance to advance to the general election. I’m just curious if you feel any kind of bitterness about the fact that they received Palo Alto votes that could have been yours.
JS: I would never fault anyone who stepped up to run. That’s the first thing I want to say. And the other thing I want to say is, look, in an 11-way race, votes are going to splinter and fragment in any number of ways. The long and the short of it is, I ran and it didn’t go my way. I was actually a little surprised that people thought … that fact was somehow out of the ordinary. I mean, that’s why we have elections. And you know, after the voters said yes 12 times in a row over the course of more than 40 years, all I can do is be grateful.
PAW: Do you have any ambitions to run for any other offices in the future?
JS: I have not given it any thought, is the first thing I’ll say. My wife, Mary, actually has the best description. She says, “Our plan is we have no plan.” And that’s kind of where we are right now. I am taking care of too many things on my to-do list that have been deferred for too long: home repair, car repair, doctor’s visits, dentist visits, books to read, you know, friends and family to reconnect with, hopefully some travel plans as well. But I have no, I have no immediate plans for the future.
PAW: Do you have any advice for any aspiring politicians who are getting into local, state or federal politics at this moment?
JS: Do the right thing. Try to pull people together, listen to others and find common ground where you can and where you can’t. Stand up, speak out and push back. After the 2016 election, I and many other folks were startled by the election results. On the national level, 46% of the American voting public had voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. In California, that level was just 32%; in Santa Clara County it was just 21%; in Palo Alto it was just 12%. So I pretty quickly concluded that the rest of the nation saw things a different way than the folks I represented in Palo Alto and Santa Clara County, or here in California. And so I scheduled myself for three trips as quickly as I could after the election, in February, April and May, to counties in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan that had previously voted Democratic in presidential elections, including for Barack Obama, and I met with folks there and I probably had 100 conversations. Initially, they were a little perplexed as to why I was visiting, and I said, ‘I came here to listen. You used to go this way. Now you went that way. Help me understand why.’ What I found was people who were actually hungry to be heard, who were desperate to be listened to and were happy to give me some understanding of the reasons they had gone from being counties that had voted for Barack Obama to being counties that have voted for Donald Trump. There’s a much longer article there about the plight of the American working class and the two-thirds of the country that does not have a college diploma, but it was an exercise in listening that stood me in good stead. I really found it a very hopeful assessment. So as you can tell from the length of this conversation, I’m a talker, and I get into that, but listening is essential. It’s the ultimate act of respect, and there isn’t enough of it in the system these days, and so I think I would encourage others to listen as fully and as well as they possibly can, even in the time of division and polarization.
PAW: Is there anything else that you would like to share with our readers and your constituents?
JS: You know, as an elected official, your job is to get up every day and make the world a better place for the people you represent. If you’re not doing that, I don’t know what the hell you’re getting out of bed for. That’s the job. The job is to improve the lives of the people you represent. And you know, it’s not about what offices you’ve held. It’s about whether you’ve had an impact. And sometimes that impact will be one person like Rick Walker, who got some justice finally, at 3:30 in the morning (when the vote was held). Sometimes, you know, the impact will be for hundreds of thousands and, eventually, millions of TK students who get the opportunity to make themselves ready to be successful at school because they have that extra year now, and to breathe clean air and at least slow the pace of climate change with renewable energy. I struggled with the hands-free bill. But when we finally got the results, the first year that bill became law, as predicted it saved 700 lives. The number of fatalities on California highways dropped by 20%, which was 700 fewer fatalities the first year. What I did was to try and make it more tangible for people. To say, ‘Look, that means that every day, somewhere in the state, a couple people get to sit down to dinner with their families who otherwise wouldn’t have made it through the day.’ I think that first, last and always the question has to be: Have you improved the lives of the people you represented? That’s the job, and that’s the way I strived to approach the work.
