Thank You Foster City

By the time you read this, my replacement will have been selected by the voters and I will have just a few days left in what has been nine years of service as a member of our City Council.  I therefore wanted to take this last opportunity to thank the residents, businesses and guests of Foster City for giving me the opportunity to serve what I have always called “Paradise on Earth.”

Our City has come a long way from the day nine years ago that I started.  Then we were at the beginning of what is today known as the Great Recession.  We were facing a $5 million structural budget deficit and with difficult decisions to make.  Ultimately, through our efforts, we were able to restore ourselves to a balanced budget in three years, without having to materially reduce services, without having to lay off a single employee, and without having to cut salaries.  We were among the few able to accomplish this and it took a lot of work by a lot of people, but we came out of those times ready for the future, re-established as a leader among cities.

During the nine years we have reinvented ourselves around the concept of sustainability.  We were leaders in providing opportunities for solar power, we installed solar power at our library and gave residents the opportunity to obtain solar power for themselves at significantly reduced rates.  We innovated in reduction of water consumption and long before anyone else was addressing the issue, we reduced our water consumption throughout our City by twenty percent.  We offered and still offer rebates to our residents to help them continue to take steps to make themselves, and through them us, more environmentally sustainable.

We pushed forward on economic sustainability, looking at diversifying our sources of income, coming up with new and innovative ways to bring in and retain businesses while striving to meet with commercial and service needs of our residents.  We worked on increasing social sustainability through ever increasing cultural events, exposing all of our diverse community to the joys and celebrations of the myriad cultures that make up our population.  We also made it a healthier place to live, banning smoking and reducing the ills that second-hand smoke brings to us and our children.

We made it so that our senior residents, who love Foster City, did not have to move out to find independent living spaces or assisted living spaces.  We created places for our seniors of modest means to have an independent place to live.  We pushed policies of twenty percent affordable housing so that Foster City continued to be diverse and continued to have opportunities for all, regardless of income.  We pushed policies of local hiring and prevailing wage for City related projects so that local people, out of work with the start of the Great Recession, would have opportunity and could earn a wage that would allow them not only to work here, but to live here.

I could go on and on, but what I want to say is that I take no individual credit for this.  I was one of five on the Council and one of many from our staff, residents, businesses and broader community that together made this happen.  I know there are some decisions that we made and that I made that not everyone agrees with, but I know in my heart, for me, every decision was made because I believed it was in the best interest of Foster City as a whole.

So thank you.  Thank you to those I served with: Rick Wykoff, Pam Frisella, Linda Koelling, Art Kiesel, Herb Perez, Steve Okamoto, Gary Pollard, Sam Hindi and Catherine Mahanpour.  Thank you to our City Managers Jim Hardy, Kevin Miller and Jeff Moneda, and to their amazing staff of people working for Foster City. You made me look much better than I should have. But mostly, thank you to the Foster City residents, businesses and guests. You are a remarkable group of people dedicated, as much as anyone, to our life here and to helping maintain it and grow it. 

It has, for me, been like most things in life, both a blessing and a curse, but I would not trade a minute of the opportunity you gave me to serve and to give back. I will miss you and I hope that at least some of you will miss me.

Thank you!