How I'll decide
What people were really upset about was never one policy. It was being talked at.
44%
Voted to remove the council in November 2025. The stated grounds led with hostility towards constituents.
Where things actually stand
The recall failed, 55.71 to 44.29 on one seat and 55.08 to 44.92 on the other. Nearly half of us voted for it.
Look at what else we have already told the council.
Measure J passed at 63.71 percent against funded, organized, litigating opposition, so the overtaxed Fairfax argument has been tested and it lost. Measure C passed at 70.8 percent, so we will pay for things we believe in. The anti housing absolutist position was tested in the recall and it lost twice.
And in November 2024 Fairfax repealed the rent control its own council had adopted unanimously two years earlier, by roughly 68 percent to 32.
That last one is the one I would sit with. It isn't a story about anybody being a villain. It's a story about a decision that went through with no votes against it, and a town that turned out to see it very differently. The distance between those two things is the entire job.
What has never been answered is how the town gets governed day to day.
The complaint behind the recall wasn't really about a vote. It was that ordinary town business had turned into something that put neighbors on opposite sides, and that people were being talked down to at their own council meetings. That isn't a problem you fix by winning the argument harder.
One thing I want to say plainly
Our town staff are good at their jobs. They work hard, and everything I have read in those packets says they are doing their best to deliver what we are owed and what we expect of them.
They are also not the decision makers. The council is. When something here goes wrong, it is almost always a decision, not the people carrying it out. I would rather aim at the right target.
Who actually gets heard here
Here is the part nobody says out loud.
In most towns, and certainly in ours, something like nine in ten of us are checked out of local government. Not lazy and not apathetic. Working, raising kids, dealing with our own lives. Meanwhile a small, loud group on either side of whatever is in front of the council turns up every time, and the volume in that room gets mistaken for what the town thinks.
Council responds to who is in the seats on a Wednesday evening. I understand why. Those are the people in front of them. But most of us cannot give up an evening, sit for three hours, and be ready with a compelling three minutes at the end of it. That is a real cost, and it falls hardest on people working shifts and people with kids at home.
An email should not count for less than that. Neither should a phone call.
So here is one thing I would push for, and it is not complicated. A way for residents to send comment by email or phone, have it verified as genuinely coming from a Fairfax resident, and have it entered into the public record for that item with the same weight as three minutes at a microphone. Read into the record, counted, and visible.
It is a small piece of plumbing. It is also the difference between a council that hears from the ten percent who can show up and a council that hears from the town.
Here's my method.
What I would do
Read the staff reports before the meeting. Not during it, and not just the summary. This part of the job is plain work, and it's the part that shows.
Ask before deciding, early enough that it matters. On anything contested the question goes up publicly with time to answer it, and then I report back what people actually said, including the parts that went against me.
Explain the close votes in plain language. After a contested vote, a short written explanation of why, put somewhere you can find it rather than buried in the minutes.
Hold office hours at an hour that works. Same day, same place, at a time someone coming off a shift can make. Not two o'clock on a Tuesday.
Go with the town when the town disagrees with me, and say so out loud rather than quietly.
Explanations and corrections go here on the corrections page.
What that looks like in practice
Take the pesticide ordinance.
On August 20 the council granted a whole building exception to the pesticide ordinance for the temporary fire station, unanimously, after a flea infestation. The council then said it intends to revisit the ordinance. No candidate in this race has said what the revision ought to be.
Three weeks earlier the same town solved the same problem at Peri Park by tarping the sand and cooking the fleas out with heat, because it didn't want to spray. Same insect, same month, two different answers, and no written rule to explain the difference. Both are set out here on the pesticide ordinance.
Here's mine. A standing, narrow, written public health exemption: licensed applicator, advance notice to the neighbors, and a written report back to the council after each use. Not a case by case emergency vote every time an infestation turns up.
The current arrangement isn't a chemicals problem. It's a process problem, and the answer to a process problem is a written process that everybody can read in advance.
Read the thing. Say what you would do. Put it in writing before the vote, instead of explaining yourself afterwards.
What I don't know yet
The Town has posted no minutes and no video of that August 20 meeting. What I have is a single news account.
More broadly: I don't know how much of that 44 percent was genuinely about process and how much was policy wearing a process costume.
Am I missing anything?
If you know something about how I would decide that I do not, or you would go a different way on it, I would like to hear it.
Your name and neighborhood help if you are happy to give them. Nothing you send will ever be shared without your permission, and I would never sell your information.
Last updated . Corrections