On the Nov. 5 ballot, Fairfax voters are fortunate to have to choose among three qualified and articulate candidates.
There are two seats up for election. One is Renee Goddard, who is seeking a second term. Cindy Swift, chairwoman of the town Planning Commission, is making her second run for a council seat and Stephanie Hellman, a political newcomer with a background in humanitarian and environmental causes, is making her first run for the council.
The IJ editorial board recommends Goddard and Swift, both of whom bring a lot of commonsense perspective and local civic experience to Town Hall.
Hellman, if she loses, should stay involved and volunteer for a town commission.
Goddard has lived in Fairfax for 24 years. She is the mother of two Sir Francis Drake High School graduates, so she knows the importance of local youth programs and opportunities. She also has served as the Town Council’s liaison to the Fairfax Chamber of Commerce, an important role in bringing an understanding of the issues facing the local economy to town decision-making.
“I know the people in the community,” Goddard told the IJ editorial board.
We believe her.
We also appreciate her commitment to providing and protecting affordable housing in Fairfax.
She has backed tenant protections, but also joined the council in voting for the Victory Village development, an affordable senior housing complex that she calls a “moral imperative.”
She’s right.
The IJ recommended Swift in the 2017 election, but she finished fourth in a hotly contested six-candidate race for three council seats.
She offers a local civic resume that is hard to match.
A retired technology manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she moved to Fairfax in the 1970s and has served on the town’s Parks and Recreation Commission, represented the Ross Valley on the county library commission and in recent years on the town Planning Commission.
In addition, she has worked on the county’s Community Emergency Response Team program. That experience, no doubt, would bolster the council’s important focus on building fire-safety preparedness in its wooded neighborhoods and hillsides, while bolstering awareness on safe evacuation planning.
She stressed that she wants to bring local schools into those planning efforts.
Among the candidates, she was the only one who favored a more liberal approach to allowing a recreational marijuana storefront in town, the longtime host of the only medical marijuana dispensary in Marin.
The Town Council approved a plan that allows sale of recreational marijuana, but only by delivery.
Hellman, a nonprofit coordinator, said she supports the council’s decision and worries about possibly turning Fairfax into a “destination” for recreational cannabis.
Better than 77% of Fairfax voters backed Proposition 64, the marijuana legalization initiative on the 2016 ballot.
Hellman, who was raised in Marin, spent 22 years working in the world of corporate finance before turning her career toward environmental and humanitarian causes, including work in India and the Dominican Republic.
She is running because she hears local residents express a “lack of trust” in the way Town Hall is run. In particular, she says people are concerned that the current council is too focused on growth — “in the wrong direction.” Her campaign platform includes holding two council meetings a month. Currently, the council is typically scheduled to hold monthly meetings. By holding twice-monthly meetings, she says, council meetings would be shorter, not stretching past midnight, as is often the case.
That’s not necessarily the result of holding more meetings, and Goddard is worried about increasing the workload for town staff having to preparing reports for more meetings.
Hellman says the council can address local affordable housing needs by allowing more second units. She says, if she had been on the council, she would not have voted to approve Victory Village and would have focused on increasing affordable housing “another way.”
She also reflects disappointment in the council’s failure to make binding the developer’s pledge to keep 18 acres adjacent to Victory Village as open space.
Goddard admits the council should have made the pledge part of a legally binding development agreement, but says it is likely the acreage is only suitable for a single homesite.
Fairfax voters have good candidates from whom to make their choice on the Nov. 5 ballot.
The IJ recommends re-electing Renee Goddard and adding Cindy Swift to the council.
