INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Delish Spring 2017
MAY 26, 2017 VOLUME 25, NO. 18
www.MountainViewOnline.com
650.964.6300
MOVIES | 21
New committee sets cap on rent increases dubbed the Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act. Speaker hen it comes to lay- after speaker described how their ing out the rules for livelihoods would be devastated. Mountain View’s new They pointed to rising permit rent control policies, everyone fees, property taxes, contractor seems to agree on only one thing wages, utility bills and even the cost of appliances — it is going be a to demonstrate that tremendously difficult and thank- At the meeting, they need flexibility on raising rents. less job. an audience “What exactly On Monday do I tell the bank night, the city’s dominated who collects my nascent Rental taxes Housing Commitby landlords property every month?” said tee got its first taste landlord David of the big stakes decried the Avny. “Do I tell and the dicey decisions that lie ahead. new rent cap. them from the rent rollback that I don’t The committee took its first action to cap the have the money? Do I ask them to rents increases on thousands of be supportive?” The questions were rhetorical, local apartments for the upcoming year. Starting in September, but they touched on what many committee members saw as the that limit will be 3.4 percent. At the meeting, an audience big problem they were being dominated by landlords decried asked to tackle. The city is instithe new rent cap as well as tuting a one-size-fits-all program the very existence of Mountain View’s new rent control program, See RENT INCREASES, page 10 By Mark Noack
W
No more hungry summers MV WHISMAN DISTRICT EXPANDS FREE MEAL PROGRAM WHILE SCHOOL’S OUT By Kevin Forestieri
T
oo many children go hungry in Mountain View during the summer, and it’s time to do something about it. That’s what Debbie Austin, the director of food services for the Mountain View Whisman School District, vowed when she saw that hundreds of kids were missing out on meals.
Austin headed the district’s food services department last summer, which provides breakfast and lunch to anyone age 18 and under, no questions asked. The food sites at Stevenson Elementary, Theuerkauf Elementary and Trinity Methodist Church, along with delivered meals, were largely a success in that they provided a total of 39,185 meals. But when she drove around the city,
MICHELLE LE
A BRUSH WITH COLONIAL LIFE Fifth-grader Ava gives Joshua a “shave” during the annual WilliamsBubb event. Each May, students at Bubb Elementary take a field trip back to America as it would have been in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1775. Assuming the roles of colonists on the eve of the Revolutionary War is a capstone event for the fifth grade’s study of colonial America.
she noticed hundreds of kids at Rengstorff Park, at the library and in apartment parking lots who weren’t participating in the food program. “We’ve got a large population of kids in our city who are hidden, who are homeless and who don’t have access to food during the summer,” Austin said. “I saw those kids playing in the park, but they weren’t eating.” Summer food programs play an important role in making sure kids — particularly from lower-income families — don’t go hungry between the last day of school in June and the beginning of the next school year in
INSIDE
August. Schools provide reliable meals at breakfast and lunch for all students, regardless of their family’s ability to pay, but that nutritional backstop vanishes during the summer months. The name “seamless” summer had a hint of irony last year, since the program only spanned six of the 10 weeks of summer vacation. On top of that, the number of places students could get a free meal plummeted once school let out for summer break: only Stevenson and Theuerkauf were designated as food sites, and those schools are located on the same campus. Things will be very different
this year, Austin said. Crittenden will be open to anyone seeking breakfast or lunch for an eight-week period during the summer, from June 12 through Aug. 4. On top of that, the district will be working with Second Harvest Food Bank to launch a mobile food truck that will regularly deliver lunches to Rengstorff Park, Klein Park and the Mountain View Public Library throughout the summer. Rengstorff and Klein parks are ideal locations because they tend to attract hundreds of kids every day, and they are both See MEAL PROGRAM, page 9
Off-menu WEEKEND | 18
VIEWPOINT 17 | GOINGS ON 22 | MARKETPLACE 23 | REAL ESTATE 25