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Rebecca Eisenberg discusses city issues with the Palo Alto Weekly on Sept. 16. Video by Palo Alto Online.
When the Palo Alto City Council voted in March to suspend its effort to place a business tax on the November ballot, members agreed that the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic makes this a uniquely bad time to impose a new tax.
Rebecca Eisenberg strongly disagreed.
A corporate attorney and frequent critic of council actions, Eisenberg believes the council’s decision effectively lets the city’s largest corporations off the hook and disproportionately burdens residents with the costs of paying for the recovery. She sees this as the latest example of council members kowtowing to the rich and the powerful at the community’s expense.
“I am furious. We all should be furious,” Eisenberg said in a recent interview with the Weekly. “When the City Council and when every single one of my opponents says we should wait until after the recovery to tax businesses, they are condemning all residents to the fate of paying for the recovery and watch as more and more of our small businesses, our retail and restaurants, are going out of business.”
Eisenberg believes the city should go full speed ahead with a new tax, one that exempts small businesses and retailers and targets corporations with more than 500 employees and $300 million in revenues. She also supports imposing a moratorium on new office development until commercial developers are contributing to the city’s bottom line, either through taxes or adequate housing-impact fees.
A resident of Old Palo Alto, Eisenberg attended Stanford University in the 1980s and then lived in San Francisco before moving to Palo Alto in 2013. She was drawn to the city by its strong public school system, she said, and she was put off by the council’s decision in June to revise its lease of Cubberley Community Center space with the Palo Alto Unified School District to reduce the city’s payments to the district.
She also took issue with the council’s recent approach to budget reductions, which included (among many other things) significant cuts to recreational services, art programs and libraries. The council should have shifted some funding from the Police Department budget to other community programs, as she noted in a recent questionnaire from Palo Alto Neighborhoods.
“As the City Council told Children’s Theatre it can achieve its goals with half its budget, we must tell the PAPD the same,” Eisenberg wrote.
Like most of the candidates in the race, Eisenberg believes the city needs to do far more to build housing, institute police reform and regulate campaign finance. Her solutions, however, tend to go well beyond those that are proffered by others. She strongly supports, for example, building housing at Cubberley Community Center, but she is the only candidate who believes the city should buy the 27 acres owned by the Palo Alto Unified School District to make that happen.
Eisenberg also wants the city to pursue what’s known as “Alternative M,” a proposal by a group of residents in which the city would buy the Ventura neighborhood site that includes Fry’s Electronics and add hundreds of units of affordable housing, as well park space and other community amenities.
While the proposal has gained supporters in recent months and has been endorsed by the umbrella group Palo Alto Neighborhoods, it’s far clear where the city would get the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to make the purchase, particularly at a time when the property owner has no interest in selling.
It’s also not clear whether the business tax Eisenberg proposes would really raise more than $100 million annually as she claims (the tax that the council had contemplated earlier this year was expected to bring in about $15 million) or how she would go about building and funding more than a thousand of units of transitional housing for people in the lowest income categories, as she had proposed to do at a Sept. 15 forum sponsored by the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce.
Eisenberg’s proposal for campaign finance reform also goes well beyond anything any other candidates have proposed, both in cost and ambition. She wants to see public financing for council campaigns, and she wants council terms to become full-time paid positions, moves that she believes would result in more diverse representation on the elected body, given that most people literally can’t afford to serve under the current system.
She rejects the “arms race” over cash that characterizes today’s campaigns.
“The amount of money a candidate raises on the way to being a council member has zero — zero — relationship with how good of a city councilperson they will be, how effective they may be in their job,” Eisenberg said in an interview.
Money, in fact, may have the opposite effect. Time after time, she said, “We see the City Council bend to the needs of the wealthiest few.” For examples, she points to the city’s recent approval of President Hotel’s conversion from an apartment building to a hotel, despite city staff earlier declaring that the project would violate various local laws (the council agreed in June to approve the project after the city was threatened with a lawsuit). She also cites the city’s failures to hold accountable Castilleja School, an all-girls school whose campus-reconstruction proposal is now under city review.
She referred to Castilleja in an interview as an example of where the council has “failed to enforce its own law and its own conditional use permit with a party that’s extremely wealthy and carries a lot of political weight.” During the Planning and Transportation Commission’s public hearing on the Castilleja project on Aug. 26, Eisenberg rejected the notion that supporting the project amounts to supporting girls’ education. She said she was “offended and appalled by irrationality and duplicity of Castilleja’s official position (that) requiring it to comply with the law like the rest of us is somehow an attack on women in STEM.”
Though she frequently criticizes corporate giants like Palantir and Tesla for not paying their fair share, Eisenberg’s tendency to think big is rooted to some extent in her decades of experience in dealing with tech companies. She helped take PayPal public in 2002 and she worked to spin off Reddit from its corporate parent and launch it as an independent startup, as she noted in her Palo Alto Neighborhoods questionnaire.
“I was told some of my plans are pie-in-the-sky, but I am a person who convinced the SEC that PayPal has a business model that allowed the SEC to take PayPal public,” she told the Weekly in an interview.
‘I believe the best agreements help everyone at the table.’
Rebecca Eisenberg, City Council candidate
Eisenberg strongly believes in the power of negotiation and in taking giant steps that seem impossible, until they don’t. One such idea, which she pitched during a recent interview, was partnering with Tesla to launch a fleet of electric shuttles for the community.
“I’m a negotiator,” Eisenberg said. “I believe the best agreements help everyone at the table.”
Read profiles of the nine other candidates:
• Lydia Kou: Playing zone defense
• Steven Lee: Proudly progressive
• Raven Malone: Seeking social justice
• Greer Stone: Keeping it local
• Greg Tanaka: Following the money
• Cari Templeton: Ready to listen
More election coverage:
• VIDEOS: Watch our debate and interviews with the 10 City Council candidates in Palo Alto
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Rebecca Eisenberg as saying, “I am the person who convinced the SEC that PayPal has a business model that allowed the SEC to take PayPal public” and attributed it to her PAN questionnaire. In fact, she said, “I am A person who…” and the statement was made during an interview with the Weekly. The Weekly regrets the errors.
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Rebecca Eisenberg as saying, “I am the person who convinced the SEC that PayPal has a business model that allowed the SEC to take PayPal public” and attributed it to her PAN questionnaire. In fact, she said, “I am A person who…” and the statement was made during an interview with the Weekly. The Weekly regrets the errors.
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Rebecca Eisenberg as saying, “I am the person who convinced the SEC that PayPal has a business model that allowed the SEC to take PayPal public” and attributed it to her PAN questionnaire. In fact, she said, “I am A person who…” and the statement was made during an interview with the Weekly. The Weekly regrets the errors.
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Rebecca Eisenberg as saying, “I am the person who convinced the SEC that PayPal has a business model that allowed the SEC to take PayPal public” and attributed it to her PAN questionnaire. In fact, she said, “I am A person who…” and the statement was made during an interview with the Weekly. The Weekly regrets the errors.
Go Rebecca! A well-informed, effective negotiator with a clear vision for an equitable Palo Alto. I’ll be voting for you in November for sure!
This article by Gennady Sheyner who has been covering local politics at least six election cycles Reads like how I would describe Rebecca as someone enthusiastic that change is going to come. So why does the editorial meanwhile by Bill Johnson dismiss her and opt for two more years of status quo kowtowing to the same rich and powerful?
For me I think we the people should be deliberating simultaneously what to do with Castilleja, which is zoned for 50 R1 homes and would generate according to Rebecca $2 million in property taxes per year as compared to the zero the tax exempt conditional user pays these days, Ventura which is 40 acres and I differ with her because I support a large park there in honor of Black Lives Matter and Cubberly 32 acres borrowing from Peter to buy out Paul.
What mix of housing parks and neighborhood amenities versus special interest and realtor profit?
Compared to the founders of Percolata, Acteron RandomSoft and even Earthwise, Rebecca helped found VERY successful companies and plausibly can bring that know how and track record, for the benefit of you, me and Jenny Down the Block.
What’s not to love?
Give em heck, Bec!
I ruled out Eisenberg early on…she doesn’t seem to have any understanding of the limitations on Council’s legal power (and she’s a lawyer?). It is clearly evident in every debate and forum that she has not done her homework on the fundamentals of governance.
@RDGI-
Let me put it this way, as someone who studied public policy at Dartmouth with Vincent Starzinger and Robert Sullivan —my classmates included Tim Geithner, Kirsten Gillibrand and Nelson Rockefeller- I’ve noticed in the last 30 or so seats filled Palo Alto elects people who create and enforce policy especially re land use the way the Washington Generals play basketball, just well enough to lose amusingly. Rebecca Eisenberg, Stanford not Dartmouth plus Harvard JD not Govy 60, plays, it would appear like the Milwaukee Bucks. Mind the antlers.
Or where did you study, @RDGI?
Taxing Tesla would result in no Tesla to tax. They would move to Mars which will not welcome Ms E!
As “Doesn’t Get it” pointed out, the things Ms Eisenberg says for someone who is supposedly an experienced attorney often make little sense. She seems to have little idea of the role of the council, the size of the city budget, or the any sense of nuance. “Swings for the Fences’ is particularly apt metaphor – with both positive and negative connotations. She is extreme and unsteady – not suited to the every day blocking and tackling (to mix metaphors) needed. Anyone who has witnessed her outbursts knows this. She shares with Tanaka a penchant for making populist statements without consideration for how to actually accomplish anything
I was re-watching your video interview with Rebecca Eisenberg the Harvard trained lawyer who went to Stanford, and I noticed that at 27:33 of the 30 minute or so video she said “I am a person who…” not “I am the person who” as your writer states. She actually repeats the statement or versions of it three times in succession citing three work experiences that could be relevant to leadership here with We the People or in the public sector. In other places in the same video she discusses her teammates and collaborators.
Let’s give Rebecca a shot and give the boot to people who are incumbents or retreads or advanced in the system by sitting on their hands and nodding along to the crowd.
So the two previous people who posted about Ms. Eisenberg being wrong are simply espousing the idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is incorrect. This is not the case. She is an experienced lawyer who was on Harvard Law Review. The City is terribly managed. The current leadership is in bed with developers, i.e. the Chicago based developers who evicted low income residents from the President’s hotel; refuse to disclose conflicts, Tom DuBois stating he is fine with dark money because corporations have a right to free speech; cutting funding to the Children’s theatre, libraries and other public programs; and refusing to tax the multinational corporations that pay no tax and get all their workers from outside Palo Alto, to name a few blunders. Those people who want to get along to go along and the rest of the sheeple with them. Just remember, if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.
There are a few errors amongst the snarky opinions in this article. Things that the Weekly knows are erroneous, like the fact that I said I was “a” person who took PayPal public, and not “the” person, and that the sentence that the Weekly claims to be quoting from the Palo Alto Neighborhoods Questionnaire is not there, but rather is from (with its changes) the interview that can be viewed on this site).
There are other things, too, that are omissions that change the meaning. For example, the reason that I am the “only” candidate that “goes as far as to say” that the City should acquire Cubberley from the school district is, I suppose, due to the fact that I am the only candidate that understands that the School District neither can raise funding for housing, nor can it legally build the housing that almost everyone else seeks at Cubberley. How that should have been written is, “Eisenberg is the only candidate with direct experience with municipal land transactions of the size of Cubberley, so she recognizes that the community’s goals cannot be accomplished without the District transferring the land to the City. Fortunately,” she continues, “this transaction can be completed while also ensuring that the District has a school for future use built to its specs, and providing the School District with badly needed liquidity, to help the PAUSD recover from this crisis.”
Several times in the article, Gennady expresses his own ignorance, and rather than doing some journalistic research (speak with an economist, ask a School Board member), he assumes that the answers don’t exist. Sometimes that research could be accomplished merely by reading a publicly available document – such as the brief 4-page description of Alternative M, which does clarify where the funding comes from.
And as to the $100 million that could be created by a large business tax, that number is easy to reach by looking at the 10-Ks for the largest employers located in Palo Alto: Tesla, Google (eg Nest), Facebook (eg Oculus), Amazon (eg Web Services) and the S-1 for Palantir. I know how to read these filings because I have taken part in writing them, including while handling an IPO ($1.2 billion) and 2 public company mergers ($3 billion). But even without that expertise, one can look to similar cities that have enacted similar measures. San Francisco recently enacted a much smaller tech-only large business tax and commercial developer tax, and those two taxes alone derive $500 million a year for San Francisco, while taxing just a handful of companies. A journalist is supposed to research the facts rather than assume they don’t exist.
[Palo Alto’s proposed headcount tax never would have raised that much, plus it is a broken tax due to its regressive nature, so I oppose that tax. In my interview, I point out the advantages of payroll taxes over headcount taxes, and receipts taxes over square footage taxes. I have written and spoken about tax policy alternatives in publications ranging from the Harvard Law Review to Japanese business magazines, to industry conferences. All that is on google. Here on the Weekly’s pages, the writers conflate all types of taxes, so no wonder voters may be confused.]
I am proud of my accomplishments, and I believe that my record is one of the things that makes me stand out as a candidate. This of course is why I was surprised at the Weekly’s headline that I “swing at the fences.” Even if my son were not a highly competitive baseball player, I would know to view that description as it was intended. Yet even Gennady in this article and others cannot come up with one example of one time that I swung at the fence where I did not place the ball exactly where the coach told me to hit it. My CV makes this clear.
Contrast that with the batting averages of the Weekly’s endorsed candidates: 4 years on the planning commission, and no very low income housing was built or approved. (Palo Alto has built only units of very low income housing in the past 8 years, while our legal requirement is 700 with the deadline in a year). Experience only sitting on commissions or committee. Voting for things but failing to build a coalition on those issues. Or – most bafflingly – 16 years of service on the planning commission and city council with zero accomplishments that were not “undone” by others in 2 years’ time. In that case, it doesn’t matter where those candidates swung. They failed to produce.
So I’ll take the fences, I guess — with the clarification that when I have swung for the fences, I always scored for the team.
When the Weekly erases this comment without fixing the erroneous word “the,” it cannot complain that a growing number of people are losing trust in its journalism. Go ahead and delete this, guys. But while you are here, why not fix the one-word error that changes the connotation of that sentence, as well? Thanks so much.
Or as Willie Mays said: They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.
The above assertion is that EVERYONE wants housing at Cubberley. WRONG. The majority of the residents want Cubberley to remain a school and Community Center. It is a valuable resource for this community. A charter school can be placed on that property for a portion of the classrooms. If we keep increasing housing in PA then we will have more children and need that site for additional school services. Gunn and PAHS are already overloaded with students. We cannot keep adding more students to those high schools when we have a high school in our center city. That will be a legal issue. The FRY’s site is the logical location for additional housing for teachers, city workers, etc. The current owner has a ridiculously low property tax.
Business Tax – Palantir has left the city for Colorado. Tesla has only a skeleton crew in PA. Their major location is in Hawthorne and Fremont. If the Business tax is specific to facility space then the companies listed above have their major office space and personnel in other cities.
FHP – previous comments incorrectly assert the constitution is the reason we are REQUIRED to open Foothill Park. WRONG – we own the property and pay for the maintenance and personnel. That is the same relationship that various parks have with their owners. Property ownership is key to the issue.
Low cost housing – the numbers we are “legally” required to work to are in error and need to be challenged as to how derived and by who. And if companies on SU property are included in those goals. SU derives the benefit of those companies so they are responsible for the housing relative to those companies. That goal number is politically derived with no basis in actual fact. We need to poke at that bear.
Resident 1-Adobe Meadows is incorrect, the 14th amendment requires opening Foothill Park, Everyone does want Cubberly to be used for SOMETHING, Palantir has actually NOT left Palo Alto for Colorado, only some of it has, and the state is going to come in and take over the low income housing issue based on Resident 1-Adobe Meadows’s analysis. Wake up sheeple, it’s over unless you do something.
Cubberley can be used for the category of students that are disabled or educationally handicapped. Special Needs Students. There is a specific need for those students and in the educational budget for the year coming up funds have been carved out for that category of students.
I have been to the Heritage Theatre in Santa Clara and that whole facility, park and charter school are in a previously closed high school. It is outstanding. We need to fix up the theatre and use it for popular ticketed events. The gym is used by a senior group. Other groups re using the spaces for dance schools and other special interests groups.
Yes – it is the same old thing because the city cannot get resolution on closure.
1. The school system has a defined need for Special Education Students. Put them there.
2. The FRY’s site is sitting there with no one poking at it. The owner is not paying anything in property taxes. We can take by eminent domain with the blessings of the state government. No one has poked at this because they want to set up a default to use Cubberley. That is what is the same old thing – lets play monopoly with PA property.
Resident 1-Adobe Meadows so you admit everything else you said is incorrect. Okay. Now we can discuss Cubberly.
What’s incorrect? The city is gaming the topics – game on. The state is gaming the low-cost housing numbers and everyone just rolls over and accepts those numbers. The city has a comprehensive plan with numbers that do not take into consideration all of the recent housing and apartment builds. A lot on Park.
Do you read a newspaper? The real estate section is continually reporting on large land acquisitions in this city. The SSL site for one. – Big BUY
The papers reported the new facility for Palantir in Colorado. That is where their corporate office is NOW. Everything in this city is a moving target and a person has to keep on top of what is changing. What is incorrect about that?
The SF City has Camp Mather for residents – How does the City of SF get away with that? There has to be a legal basis for that to continue.
So what is incorrect?
And what is YOUR interest in Cubberley? Are you the prospective homebuilder just waiting for a go ahead? Why don’t you talk about your financial interest in any one of the floating crap game in process? What are you betting on?
Resident 1-Adobe Meadows, you’ve shown your. big business (prb you) gaming everyone. No interest in Cubberly, interest in not being taken by people on a mission which it seems you are. You want us all to think there is not a problem. There is a problem, special interests trying to keep us down.
People of Palo Alto you’ve been took! You’ve been hoodwinked!
Bamboozled!
Led astray!
Run amok!
This is what people do.
You need to look inside and ask yourselves is this who I am? Is this who I want to be? Not about the money, not about lies, about who you want to be known as for your life. No one here thinks about the fact that this virus has made us remember not who we are, but what we want to be remember for.
Yes = we all have a problem. Part of that is how to frame the problem correctly and provide a solution. I did make an error above – the Heritage Theatre is in the city of Campbell. They are putting on great shows there. Check them out on Google.
Is this competing with the Oshman Center Theatre? If we fix up the theatre we can make it a center piece for events both inside and outside. Oshman is limited in the type of shows it supports. And that money does not go to the city.
Is this competing with Lucie Stern? Hard to park there these days with the construction going on. CHS has a large parking lot which can accommodate all event participants without parking in the residential areas.
Who are the Special Interests? Sounds like you have a goal here – is the school system a special interest? I am sure that the school system has some interest in what happens to their property. I know that the AYSO that uses those fields have a special interest. I know that the library has a special interest – fund raising for books. The dance school is a special interest. The adult exercise class is a special interest.
Topic: Cubberely. “Same old thing” shows the city location as “Old Palo Alto”. Did you all get your new Neighborhood magazine? Old Palo Alto is the location between Embarcadero and Oregon Expressway. That is the Palo Alto High School designated zone. A high school in South PA is not in your area.
I know that there are disabled students at PAHS because I have seen them wheeled down the street. I know there are disabled students at Gunn.
I have a sister-in-law and niece who are teachers specific to disabled students. Also called Special Need Students. If all of those students are located in one place they can hire teachers who are accredited in that skill set. That is a saving to the school system and takes advantage of new budget assigned to that specialty assigned by the Gov. If we have a specific program and location we can access those funds.
If that property is left to developers then we will have a major traffic jam on San Antonio which is already jammed. New construction on San Antonio is going to exacerbate the congestion in that area.
But Hey – that is not in the traffic pattern for “Old Palo Alto” who probably never ventures south of Oregon. So someone can benefit by upping our numbers but has no actual impact.
Back to the fRY’s site. that is next to Oregon – is that in your way for traffic?