Lowenthal: What’s going on in Cupertino?

I’m often asked “What’s going on in Cupertino?” That question is prompted by two phenomena — fierce political fighting and a general degradation of our businesses. As someone who has been here a long time, I have lived through it.

When I first ran for City Council in 1999, we didn’t have political parties or affiliations, we ran as individuals. I ran against Michael Chang and Orrin Mahoney and we are still good friends to this day. Now we have political groups with missions and it hasn’t been good for us.

The “Better Cupertino” (BC) group started about 20 years ago over resistance to growth of Vallco. The city council had been successful in bringing theaters to Cupertino at Vallco and BC fought hard against putting up a parking garage in support of the theaters. Since then, BC has become a powerful no-change group. They went on to call anyone that wanted improvements to the city “in the pocket of developers,” and they still do that.

No-change doesn’t work. A city will degrade if you don’t invest in it. We see that in Cupertino with school closures, the loss of Vallco and many of your favorite businesses and restaurants, a loss of business diversity, a loss of city revenue and a place where we have rampant city staff turnover.

Part of the “developer” labeling comes from the fact that in order to get good things for our city in the past, the councilmembers, commissioners and city staff negotiated with developers. That was so we could get things like Vallco, Main Street, parks, help for our schools and our infrastructure while keeping and improving the neighborhood character of Cupertino. Better Cupertino labeled that as working for developer interests when in fact we were getting developers to spend here while preserving our suburban character and great schools.

Back to the original question: What happened to Cupertino? Well, BC has been politically successful and it has hurt. Businesses have fled, schools have shut down and instead of city managers staying here for 20 years, they leave after a year. You can no longer find Italian food here, or an auto parts place or clothing stores. You see chaos at City Hall from staff churn. We have a City Hall building that is not seismically safe and we have political sign wars.

Finally after 20 years a group is forming to turn the tide. Individuals have had a hard time competing with an organized political group like Better Cupertino. The new group is called Cupertino Together, and their candidates in this year’s election are incumbent J.R. Fruen, Planning Commissioner Seema Lindskog and business executive John Tang. It is unfortunate that good people working for revitalization of our city had to band together in order to get our city back on track, but they had to in order to compete with the political machine that BC has become.

Back in my day on the council, our city got great things like new parks and trails, a new library, a community hall, the senior center, teen center, theaters, thriving new businesses, full excellent schools and staff that spent their entire careers here.

We can get back on track, but to do so we need to vote J.R., Seema and John into office.

Richard Lowenthal is a 43-year resident of Cupertino who with his wife raised his kids here. Lowenthal served on the City Council for eight years and as mayor twice. He also started ChargePoint in 2007, the largest electric vehicle charging company in the world. Richard can be reached at [email protected].