Ken Wachtel Gets Mayoral

Ken Wachtel has been mayor of Mill Valley for eight days, 14 hours and 30 minutes...and counting.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Wachtel, who was elected to the City Council in 2007, spent the past few months reminding his fellow councilmembers how soon he would assume mayoral duties in the council's annual rotation at the helm, often pulling out his iPhone Countdown app for good measure.

"What we love about working with Ken is that the man is wickedly smart and wickedly funny all of the time," Councilwoman Shawn Marshall said at the Dec. 6 council meeting, just before she to mark the official beginning of his tenure.

A week after we  about her expectations coming into her term as mayor and how they matched up how the year went, we sat down with Wachtel to find out his expectations and priorities.

Mill Valley Patch: What are your expectations going into your year as mayor?

Ken Wachtel: A good politician doesn't set expectations too high, so that way you come out looking pretty good at the end of the year (laughs).

MVP: Right.

KW: So I expect to attend City Council meetings.

MVP: That's a good starting point (laughs). What are your priorities for the year?

KW: We want to get to the engineering and final design phase if the Miller Avenue Streetscape Plan. That will come to the council in March. I hope that we can keep that moving so that we get that road designed and fixed.

We are supposed to start with the updating with the city's General Plan. One of the reasons why I want to successfully complete the Miller project is that our city staff will start on the General Plan once they're not working as much on Miller. Revising the General Plan, and I want to get to the housing element, is a multi-year task, but you have to take a first step.

We need to stay and put on the forefront a work plan to maintain the effectiveness of our police and fire services. And the big thing is that we have to watch our finances.

MVP: Property taxes, which account for the 56 percent of the city's General Fund revenue budgeted for the 2010-2011 fiscal year, have gone up consistently for years, but dropped by 1.18 percent this year, according to the county's finance department.

KW: We're very dependent upon property taxes for our finances and not so much on sales tax. Fluctuating real estate values and a drop in property taxes could be a big hit on our bottom line. Last year, we had a budget that didn't reduce any city services, but we always have to look at ways to makes ourselves more efficient and more productive.

I would hate to eat into our surplus (the city's Contingency Reserve is currently $3.4 million, while it also maintains an unrestricted General Fund balance of about 10 percent of the operating budget, in this year's case approximately $2.3 million) in order to maintain our level of services. If there is a reduction in property taxes, that's a lot of money to us.

MVP: I know that webcasting City Council meetings has long been a priority for you, and that .

KW: It did. I also want to continue our initiative to enhance our interaction with the community. Webcasting is a good first step. But there is more we can do with it, particularly allowing people watching the webcast live to submit email comments that the council would receive during the meeting.

And there are still too many empty storefronts in our downtown. We've got to find what role the city has in fixing that. I'm not exactly sure what role the city has in doing that, but we need to figure that out.

MVP: What role does the (BAB) have in helping on that front? They rolled out a number of campaigns over the past year, including the , the campaign during the and the for the . But the BAB was only funded for a limited time.

KW: We have to sit down with the BAB and get their view and see how they think these things have worked and find out if they think they were effective. From my point of view, all ideas are good. Let's try the ideas and see if they work. RSVP is a fantastic program.

MVP: You mentioned the housing element. The city has had a hard time meeting its Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) requirements for affordable housing development.

KW: I don't know that we're ever going to be able to meet the ABAG requirements. There are certain elements to the ABAG calculation that are very problematic for us. They don't count second units or apartment conversions to the total numbers. There is just not a lot of empty space for housing here, and a lot of the structures out there that could more easily be converted to affordable housing don't count as a unit, so it's a difficult thing.

The entire council is aware of the need for affordable housing, but the question is how do we get the most bang for our buck in terms of outing in housing that will be used for affordable purposes.

MVP: You're a former Mill Valley Soccer Club president and you're on the Little League board. Are you confident that the city's two major spots programs can weather the with Alto Field becoming home to a temporary campus?

KW: The Soccer Club told us that they didn't think that they would need to use any more of because of the loss of Alto. They will end up using field space outside Mill Valley, probably in Corte Madera. We haven't talked to baseball yet. They might just do the same.

We're just hoping to be able to build a .