Mountain View mayor pledges to leave no one behind during the pandemic

The annual transition in Mountain View’s leadership has been anything but normal this year.

Ellen Kamei was sworn in as the city’s new mayor last month over a virtual meeting with limited fanfare, and within weeks had a hand in approving emergency eviction protections and setting up a makeshift vaccination site that now immunizes thousands of patients each week.

Meanwhile, many city services have either been suspended or relegated to Zoom meetings, and the budget is expected to be riddled with deficit spending as the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the local economy and small businesses.

Despite the grim circumstances, Kamei said she is cautiously optimistic about 2021 and a slow return to normalcy, and encouraged city residents to have hope. Her goals as mayor this year take a heavy focus on getting the city out of the pandemic with a smooth recovery, including significant efforts to keep people housed and small businesses from shutting down.

“Obviously the top priority is navigating the city and community through the rest of the pandemic and talking about recovery efforts,” Kamei said.

Kamei joined the council in 2019, bringing with her a rare perspective to a city largely led by older homeowners. A renter at age 36, Kamei said she knows first-hand how hard it can be to find affordable and middle-income housing. When she moved back to Mountain View following graduate school in 2012, she said it was difficult finding a place to live even with a decent salary, and that many others are having the same problem.

Despite the hurdles, Kamei said it was worth staying in Mountain View. Her family has roots in the community going back to the late 1930s, and she fell in love with the city after returning to take care of her grandfather. It was around that time she began cutting her teeth on city politics, joining the planning commission and flexing her background in urban planning and land use policy.

Kamei said she is deeply troubled by the prospect of mass displacement and homelessness as a result of COVID-19, which has forced thousands of city residents out of work since the pandemic began in March last year. Though California enacted legislation to keep landlords from ousting tenants behind on rent due to the virus, those protections expire in June, and there are limited funds statewide to ameliorate the outstanding rent debt. If things still look bad this summer, Kamei said she would seek local protections.

“There needs to be a conversation about if it will need to be extended further as we work on this path towards recovery,” she said.

As for the city’s recreational programs and other in-person services, Kamei said the tentative plan is to bring them back in the fall — contingent on a low rate of community transmission of COVID-19 and a robust vaccine rollout.

But above all, Kamei said the city needs to tailor its public meetings, essential services and outreach to everyone, including Mountain View’s large immigrant communities and non-native English speakers. Public programs can be tough to navigate, and some residents are wary of trusting anything with a whiff of government assistance. During the ceremonial council meeting when Kamei was sworn in as mayor, translation services were available in both Mandarin and Spanish — a new feature and a sign of things to come.

“Now more than ever when people feel like they are hiding or cut off, we need to make sure we are providing information in their native language,” Kamei said. “I think it’s crucially important.”

The focus on equity has now been baked into the city’s budget as well. Last year, Mountain View began using a so-called “equity lens,” meaning all new budget items, cuts and reallocations must consider how it will benefit or burden low-income residents and communities of color.

Even before joining the council, Kamei took a regional approach to local politics. Rather than take a laser-like focus to Mountain View’s issues, Kamei has served on regional government boards that tackle housing, transportation and even mental health. More recently, she helped spearhead local efforts during the 2020 U.S. Census to ensure as many people participated as possible.

Partnerships with Santa Clara County and the state were particularly important during the Trump administration, Kamei said, when it was clear there wasn’t going to be a lot of federal support for local priorities. But forging that strong bond with the county will prove useful even after President Joe Biden was sworn in last month.

When Santa Clara County sought to create a North County mass vaccination center, Mountain View was quick to work with county officials to transform the city’s recreation center into a clinic in a matter of weeks. Kamei credits the city’s strong working relationship with Santa Clara County for being first in line to provide COVID-19 vaccinations in the area.

“We had both the existing relationships and the infrastructure to stand up something quickly,” she said. “When the idea came forward, we were able to answer the call.”