More than a year ago, Corte Madera took a big step forward on fighting climate change, the only existential threat our community faces: we created a Climate Action Committee, tasked with implementing our town's Climate Action Plan and reducing the community's carbon footprint. As a temporary committee created after the annual workplan and budgeting processes had already concluded, the committee was under-resourced from the beginning, with no budget and no dedicated staffing.

Last night marked the end of my term as Mayor of Corte Madera. Serving as the mayor of my hometown has been the highest honor of a lifetime, despite all that our town has been through over this past year and eight months. We’ve dealt with a viral pandemic, a global economic collapse, a tense national discussion about social justice and racism, a contentious Homekey project located in our community, and a drumbeat of legislature from Sacramento with the potential to radically

As a general, informal policy, we traditionally try to keep the pay for Corte Madera's Town staff at or near the median in Marin and the larger North Bay region. This is an important balancing act: it's important to recognize staff for their performance (generally exceptional) and not lose talented and well-trained staff to other agencies, while conserving taxpayer funds. In light of these considerations, I voted to make the following adjustments to the salaries of three depa

This is an obvious staple of transparent government that's required under CalPERS regulations. I voted to post an updated pay schedule of the Town's staff on our website, which you can view here.

Before COVID, our Parks & Recreation department had a number of part-time staff whose jobs, in addition to many other duties, included serving as facility attendants. They played an important role in helping residents enjoy our public amenities, but with staffing attrition caused by COVID, we lost that critical function (picture, for example, asking older or disabled residents wanting to use the Community Center to set out the heavy tables and chairs themselves, or expecting

As many residents are aware, a slew of recent state laws has sharply reduced local communities' control over whether or not to approve many types of new multifamily housing developments. While these laws largely remove cities' ability to approve or deny developments, they do provide an important caveat: cities may (in fact, must) adopt a set of "objective design guidelines" that developers must follow, with the goal of letting communities continue exercise some say over the a