On Jan. 6, in Palo Alto’s City Hall, Ed Lauing and Vicki Veenker took their seats as mayor and vice mayor, respectively, after being elected by their fellow City Council members — an annual practice determining who will steer the city’s priorities for the upcoming year.

Lauing, who has spent over a decade in city government and Veenker, a longtime policy advocate, now face the challenge of tackling Palo Alto’s most pressing issues, from housing development to climate action.

Mayor Lauing

Mayor Lauing had been involved in city government for 13 years before getting elected to City Council in 2023. In 2010, Lauing first served on the Parks and Recreation Commission for seven years. Then, in 2017, he served on the Planning & Transportation Commission for six years.

“My colleagues were able to get a lot done for the city,” Lauing said. “It was very rewarding to see what we could get done to make this great place [Palo Alto] even better.”

Lauing’s background in software as CEO of multiple companies, managing groups and budgets, allowed him to learn how systems of people worked. This ultimately led him to run for city council, where he got elected by his colleagues to become mayor this year.

“I bring a lot of expertise and youthful enthusiasm,” Lauing said. “I know how the system works, and it’s just really satisfying for me … I can see that we’re making progress to improve on problems and to keep the good things and not go in the wrong direction.”

This year, Lauing and the other six members of the City Council want to work on four “big picture” priorities for the city: affordable housing, climate action, integrating electric appliances and economic resilience.

First, Lauing wants to focus on bringing housing development in Palo Alto to the maximum capacity possible. This means providing lower-income housing designed to be more affordable.

“We want that [housing] to be lower income housing than just all market-rate housing,” Lauing said. “That way, folks in five or eight or 10 years can come back here and be able to afford it. That’s the commission I’ve had all the way back to the Planning Commission.”

Lauing says working on housing development is especially important in promoting diversity in our community. While fixing housing issues is challenging, due to the high costs involved,  Lauing said that these challenges make him want to work even harder on the problem.

“I just have such a mission to try to get younger people to live here, people of color to live here and lower-income people that we want as our neighbors, but they just can’t afford the rent, let alone ever buying,” Lauing said. “We have to solve that problem. Our town is not going to be diverse, and I don’t like that. … It’s good to be growing up in a diverse community, and that’s the only way we can get there.”

A second priority Lauing would like to work towards is continuing the city’s climate action goal, 80 by 30 — cutting Palo Alto’s carbon emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2030. This ties into the third priority of integrating electric appliances into all Palo Alto homes, Lauing said.

“This continues in spite of the new administration,” Lauing said. “We’re investing a lot of money in getting the [electrical power] grid ready to be able to handle that much extra capacity, not just for EVs, but for potentially turning all of our homes into full electric appliances.”

City Council’s fourth priority is economic resilience: restoring local shopping centers to their pre-pandemic status. This includes opening up stores in empty shopping center spaces and improving the disheveled areas of downtown.

Lastly, Lauing would like to add something to the City Council that’s never been done before: a public press conference.

“We will be notifying journalists, paper journalists and the public that a press conference is happening. I’m a little bit worried about the public, but that’s the point. We need to let them at us.”

Vice Mayor Veenker

Veenker’s journey to becoming vice mayor of Palo Alto began with her 35-year law career. She opened her own law office in Palo Alto, Veenker Law Offices, specializing in all stages of patent and intellectual property disputes.

Veenker is involved in lots of local volunteer work, which includes founding a nonprofit, Sibling Cities USA, that aims to help bridge regional divides among American cities. The signs outside of Palo Alto City Hall represent the different sister cities Veenker has established.

“We, so far, just have our pilot pair, which is Palo Alto and Bloomington, Ind., which has been just an amazing connection … that’s helped me look at cities and how local groups are similar in different areas, and what roles they play in our daily lives.”

Veenker said that the volunteer work and community projects she’s worked on led her to be more active in policy making. In 2022, Veenker was elected to a four-year term on the Palo Alto City Council. Her current position as vice mayor for the next year is a one-year appointment, serving as her third year of the City Council term.

For her term as vice mayor, Veenker is interested in teacher housing, community health and safety, but most of all climate action.

“My background is in chemistry, so when a lot of climate action revolves around implementing Climate Technology, [they] are things I’m used to learning about,” Veenker said. “Palo Alto is really at the forefront of climate action relative to many other cities, and I’ve held other regional positions outside of the city that drove Palo Alto with the climate action work.”

Some of these climate action plans Veenker works to improve include the City’s Sustainability and Action Plan or S/CAP, a comprehensive outline laying out the City’s strategy to achieve ambitious carbon reduction goals. Veenker is in charge of making sure goals are met to achieve the overall S/CAP objectives, which also include the 80 by 30 goals, as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

According to Veenker, communication with other communities is imperative for successful climate action to occur.

“Climate action will take more than just Palo Alto to succeed,” Veenker said. “We all have to succeed. So communicating to others, learning from them, showing them our successes and challenges is something that I personally really want to promote.”

In addition to her plans for climate action, Veenker hopes to complete housing projects, including a home electrification project scheduled for this year and development for transitional housing, the teacher housing project, housing for intellectually and developmentally disabled adults and the grid modernization program.

One thing Veenker said she likes about her job and being on City Council is the endless possibility of learning new things about the city.

“It is extraordinary what we have just as a city,” Veenker said. “In addition to all the normal city stuff that every city has, we [Palo Alto] own and run a golf course, we have an airport, we own and run all of our own utilities … I’ve lived here since 1992, and I thought I knew what there is to know about Palo Alto, but every day I learn something more. It’s a wonderful city, it’s a privilege to serve, and I will do my best to do a good job.”