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On Friday, County Elections reported results from several hundred more Menlo Park ballots.  Every one of the challenger candidates (Combs, Duriseti, and myself) narrowed the gap with the incumbents, and every one of the City Council incumbents lost ground (though its too early to know if this is a trend).   Newly-counted votes for Measure M were about evenly split for & against Yes on M, much closer than in early voting. 

 

There are several thousand more ballots to be counted in the coming days, so please stay tuned.

 

The news here is how close the challengers came.  Everyone knows it is very difficult to unseat an incumbent.  That the challengers came within a very few percentage points is remarkable, and I congratulate my fellow challenger candidates and the Yes on M volunteers on this impressive achievement. I am personally so very grateful for the outpouring of volunteer and financial support my candidacy received from so many of you.

Yes on M volunteers at 10pm on Election Night

Yes on M faced a nearly impossible task from the beginning.  How do you educate 17,500 voters about the need to fix the flaws in the Specific Plan?  And that to start fixing the Plan, the voter must vote YES rather than the natural inclination to vote no?  Plus Yes on M faced the gargantuan spending by big developers on a "No" campaign explicitly designed to deceive and confuse residents.

 

Yes on M may not ultimately have received the most votes, but we achieved a lot.  Tell me, in what other town are "Floor Area Ratio", "Fiscal Impact Analysis", and "By-right public benefits trigger" now a common part of local neighborhood lexicon?  Seriously, so many more people are engaged and paying attention to what is going on down at City Hall, especially now with the revelations that the City may have illegally used our taxpayer dollars to run a Public Relations campaign against the Yes on M citizens' initiative. 

 

Yes on M / SaveMenlo volunteers have vowed to continue the fight to fix the Specific Plan so that the projects it allows match the residents' 12-point Vision Plan, and that the projects coming up for approval by Planning Commission and City Council indeed match the Vision.  The residents want to see that they are getting something for the nearly billion dollars in upzoning the incumbents (Ohtaki, Cline, Keith) granted the developers other than the spectres of worsening the rushhour traffic nightmare, and sterile office buildings that will be with us for the next 100 years or more. 

 

That's why we were cheering on election night.  Because Yes on M / SaveMenlo is over 250 volunteers strong, we're powerful, we're gaining momentum, and we're not going away.  

KF Signature  

 

Paid for by Kelly Fergusson for City Council 2014, FPPC # 1265917