BY AMELIA BISCARDI
Daily Post Staff Writer
Nine candidates are seeking three seats on the East Palo Alto City Council, which will be grappling with issues like running the newly-acquired sanitary district and responding to the loss of Target.
With Mayor Antonio Lopez and Councilwoman Lisa Gauthier running for a San Mateo County Supervisor seat, there will be at least two new council members elected.
Incumbent Carlos Romero is looking to defend his seat against new and familiar candidates. Running for a seat are Public Works and Transportation Commissioner Mark Dinan, teacher Maria Rocha, recent college grad Ravneel Chaudhary, Public Works and Transportation Commissioner Deborah Lewis-Virges, biotech executive Webster Lincoln, Public Works and Transportation alternate Gail Wilkerson and former Santitary District board president Dennis Scherzer.
Former Planning Commissioner and Sanitary District member Ofelia Bello told the Post she is no longer campaigning, but still wants a council seat. Bello works at YUCA, Youth United for Community Action.
Rev. Deborah Lewis-Virges, 68, is a senior pastor of St. Mark AME Zion Church and the founder of the LV Marketing Group, which serves non-profits and small businesses.
“I feel that the city is at a pivotal stage and the decisions that we make now will impact us for years to come,” Lewis-Virges said.
Lewis-Virges says she sees a lot of areas for improvement. She wants to improve the city’s tax base. She wants to add street signs, roundabouts and other simple things like adding more trash cans. One of the things that Lewis-Virges wants to do if elected is find a way to make parking easier and perhaps to try permit parking.
“We can’t just say every house can have two parking spaces, that’s not realistic for the way that we live in East Palo Alto,” Lewis-Virges said. “So we have to talk about what we can do to make it more equitable for all families.”
Lewis-Virges says the city put all its eggs in one basket with Target, which has closed. She wants to take the old Office Depot building and turn it into a marketplace with many small businesses.
She wants to work with and ensure that the council is able to work together to help the city grow. However, she believes that the current council lacks vision.
“East Palo Alto is not a museum and some folks on there are more concerned about maintaining the status quo and providing services for a limited segment of the population, our community consists of more.”
Incumbent Carlos Romero, 67, has been working with the city of East Palo Alto since before it became a city. Romero wants to get funding for a new library and a new police station.
Romero served on council from 2008-2012 and was appointed in 2015. Romero said he thinks with continued need for street safety, additional lighting, that the city may need a bond measure in the near future.
Romero also wants to try permit parking. He says trying it for a year and adjusting afterwards would be a good starting point.
He wants to help small businesses, specifically making sure food trucks and similar vendors are legitimate and finding ways for them to get small business loans.
Romero sees a lot of areas that could benefit from multi-use, which the city only allows conditionally. He wants to see new businesses such as gyms and rock climbing.
“We really have to think about how low-income, working class people of color and just working class folks in East Palo Alto can remain in a job rich area,” Romero said. “If they lose a foothold in an affordable community like East Palo Alto they may be banished from the valley.”
Romero said that whenever there are homeless encampment sweeps, there should be places for those people to live.
Romero is glad that the city’s takeover of the troubled sanitary district was successful and hopes that it will help the city to continue to move forward.
Webster Lincoln did not want to be interviewed by the Post. Lincoln, 37, according to his web- site, is running to support affordable housing, local businesses and protecting jobs.
Lincoln ran for council in 2020 and 2022 and has filed two lawsuits after losing in 2020, one against Mayor Antonio Lopez for unfair campaigning on Election Day and another against a man who posted negative comments about him and his family on social media.
Gail Wilkerson 75, did not respond to the Post’s invitation for an interview. Wilkerson ran for city council in 2022. She’s served on the city’s Senior Advisory Board and has a background in real estate and owned a real estate and tax office. She said on social media she is running because the city needs a positive change.
Born and raised in East Palo Alto, Ravneel Chaudhary, 25, wants to give back to his community. Chaudhary graduated from UC-Merced with a degree in psychology and wants to especially focus on finding ways to supply more job training for residents and overall economic development.
Chaudhary said he believes there needs to be more affordable housing because “long term residents are being displaced.” He said having affordable housing and more job training paired together is vital because residents need well paying jobs to stay in the community.
If elected, Chaudhary said that given Target’s closure, he would reach out to other businesses to understand why they are suffering.
One of the things that Chaudhary also wants to focus on is ensuring and finalizing cleanup at sites such as Romic Environmental Technologies Corporation on 2801 Bay Road, which was a wastewater and hazardous waste storage site until 2007.
As well he wants to find ways locally to keep water levels clean. He knows people buy bottled water because of the low quality drinking water in some parts of town.
He tentatively supports the East Palo Alto Sanitary District city takeover as he has heard that it slowed some development projects.
Another thing he wants to focus on is challenging the view those living in East Palo Alto have of the city.
“People would be shocked if I was in the geometry class in my freshman year,” Chaudhary said. “I wanted to take advanced placement courses, my counselor wouldn’t allow me to take those courses and I would have to advocate twice as hard so I could take those courses.”
He wants to continue Councilwoman Gauthier’s youth council and find more ways to get young people involved in politics.
Former East Palo Alto Sanitary District President Dennis Scherzer wants to continue his work for the city by running for council.
Scherzer says that he wants to redesign some parts of the city and increase the tax base. He wants to take 1675 Bay Road, where the Nairobi Shopping Center used to be into a senior village because the problem he says with the project is a large amount of traffic and seniors have few cars.
Scherzer says that as the population continues to grow in East Palo Alto that he wants to make sure that the tax base increases as well so that the quality of services don’t decrease.
From his work on the sanitary district board, he knows that he can work well with a variety of people and that if elected he would meet with department heads and support them as he can.
“I don’t have any grandiose plans, we can keep the city running, keep the lights on,” Scherzer said.
While he misses Target and their larger cups of coffee at the Starbucks there, he agrees with Lewis-Virges that a better option could be a small business marketplace.
Scherzer believes that the sanitary district’s takeover should have been on the ballot and worries that sewer rates will go up for residents. He believes the city’s takeover of the district was “hostile” and that the county was biased against the sanitary district.
Scherzer says he wants to rename the city, enforce parking and doesn’t like that city employees are paid the same whether or not they do a good job.
Mark Dinan, 51, wants to help create a council that the community can trust and that is transparent with better streets. He is a member of the Public Works and Transportation Commission and has a Facebook page devoted to East Palo Alto happenings.
“If I’m elected residents of East Palo Alto can go to sleep on a Tuesday night (…) because they know that there’s leaders in place who are gonna do the right thing for the community and all members of the community, not a particular group,” Dinan said.
Dinan, as a small business owner says that it can be challenging to get started and he thinks the city needs to make it easier for small businesses to flourish. He also says that the current council is lacking someone who can read a financial document or spreadsheet.
He said he’s concerned that parents sometimes lack for things their kids can do. He says council members don’t realize that a lot of the city is made up of parents just trying to taxi their kids around from school to extracurriculars.
Dinan says that he worries about the loss of Target for parents, saying that it can make it a struggle to get diapers or cold medicine late at night. He says that part of it is that the Ravenswood Business Center needs to be cleaned and managed better.
“I think the city needs to get a grip on shoplifting,” Dinan said. “We can’t have stores open and then close due to shoplifting.”
Dinan describes himself as a canary in the coal mine when it came to the sanitary district. Specifically he said when developers wanted to build a primary school, he reached out to them and they told him the sanitary district wanted $4 million.
In 2020, he ran unsuccessfully for the sanitary district, in 2022 he unsuccessfully ran for council. He’s been endorsed by councilman Antonio Lopez, former mayor Bill Vines and Menlo Park Fire Board members Robert Jones and Virginia Chang Kiraly.
Dinan says the city needs to invest in its water infrastructure. But, said he would be interested in exploring what options the city would have to take over Palo Alto Park Mutual Water and make Hetch Hetchy water available to everyone in town. He also said the town needs to encourage the rebuilding of the city’s aging housing stock to make sure everyone has modern plumbing that meets current health and safety standards.
Maria Rocha, 49, didn’t respond to the Post’s interview request. Rocha grew up in East Palo Alto and as a teacher, has seen many residents come through her kindergarten class, including current Mayor Antonio Lopez, she says on her website. Rocha says on her website that her priorities include emergency preparedness, afforable child care, supporting small businesses and health care access.
Nearly half of the candidates didn’t respond to the Palo Alto Daily Post, likely because they recognize it as a biased, and arguably, a fake news organization. The Post has shown clear favoritism towards Mark Dinan while slandering or misrepresenting other candidates. This kind of skewed reporting undermines the credibility of the outlet and prevents voters from receiving the balanced information they deserve. When a news organization fails to uphold journalistic integrity, it not only damages the democratic process but also discredits itself as a reliable source of information.
Webster, you accuse the Post of bias and slander. Care to offer an example?
I’m really curious to see examples of the Post’s favoritism for me – last time I checked, it had been 4 years since an article was written about me in the Post.
Webster, of the nine, three wouldn’t comment. That’s 33%, not one half.
Why would you refuse to take questions? Is there anything you’re hiding?
Wonder why Webster Lincoln wouldn’t want to answer questions from a reporter? It wouldn’t have anything to do with his role in his family’s Palo Alto Mutual Water Co. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about his lawsuit he filed against Antonio Lopez in the last election? Challenging election results? That sounds too Trump-like to me. Lopez won the lawsuit.
Lincoln won’t answer any questions and he won’t get elected. The Palo Alto Mutual Water Company’s customers certainly won’t vote for him. All they have to do is turn on their faucets and ask themselves ‘do I want the guy responsible for this running the City?”
Thanks for the write up. It makes a huge difference having press coverage of our local elections in East Palo Alto.
When Webster Lincoln loses, who will he sue this time?