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Elizabeth Lasensky stood in front of Eileen Donahoe's Portola Valley residence on a chilly night in February 2007, waiting for Barack Obama to show up for a fundraiser. Ms. Lasensky was not one of the people who had forked over $1,000 or more to hear Mr. Obama speak; she doesn't have that kind of money. Instead, she was volunteering to help out at the event with several other people.

When Mr. Obama finally arrived in an SUV, he got out and walked right up to the diminutive Ms. Lasensky.

"He took both my hands and said, 'Oh, my gosh, your hands are cold,'" she related over coffee at Cafe Borrone two weeks ago. "I said, 'Well, yeah. We've been waiting, you're a little late.'"

She went on to urge Mr. Obama to hold an event for low-money donors on his next California trip, to give people like her a chance to see him speak. Later, she said, she regretted not "giving him a few more pieces of my mind." Her views on health care, for instance.

"As we know, I have a lot to say," Ms. Lasensky said.

That fact has earned her a few staunch allies and a raft of detractors over the years, though perhaps her chiding of Mr. Obama lends a little more perspective to her outspoken nature. She is not one to hide behind pleasantries when she has a bone to pick.

While she has been very involved in several key causes, such as preserving open space, promoting local businesses, and fighting for below-market-rate housing, Ms. Lasensky is perhaps better known as a council watcher, and a critic of people of every political stripe, chastising decision-makers on both sides of the aisle. Nobody, it seems, including The Almanac news staff, has been immune from her blunt rebukes.

"Elizabeth answers to no one," former council member Steve Schmidt wrote in a letter to The Almanac in August, defending Ms. Lasensky after she came under fire for one of her many letters to this paper. "She calls it as she sees it, and her calls are based on her strong core values: transparency, fairness and knowing the facts before she speaks." He praised her for her "continuous watchful eye on the council."

To the dismay of Mr. Schmidt, and perhaps the relief of some of Ms. Lasensky's more frequent targets, Menlo Park is losing her watchful eye. After spending 19 years in an apartment on Fremont Street, she's being forced out by a 62 percent rent increase instituted by a new landlord.


Affordable housing
To Ms. Lasensky, who works as an assistant to Stanford's dean of research, her situation underscores the need for affordable rental housing in Menlo Park. It's a cause she has advocated for frequently before the council, and in two partial terms on the city's Housing Commission.

"I have given countless hours to the community, but with the stroke of a pen and 60 days' notice, look at the upheaval," she said. "And this is not an uncommon story."

She spoke to what she sees as a prejudice in some quarters against people who can't afford to buy a house in Menlo Park at the going rate.

"There are people who need affordable housing, and I'm one," she said. "There's an assumption by far too many people that we're shiftless, or we're robbers. ... That's just not the case. We're working people whose incomes aren't keeping pace with the price of housing.

"People who need affordable housing should be treated with dignity, and some of that's missing," she continued.

"Elizabeth moving is a great loss to the city," Brielle Johnck, a former city commissioner, wrote in an e-mail. "It seems she threatened some of the old guard in the city who are fearful of change, growth and certainly fearful of new housing for working, middle-class people. ... I believe Elizabeth represented perfectly the kind of person the city would want as a resident."


Unfinished business
During the interview, Ms. Lasensky revisited her accomplishments, and recounted sores from some of the old Menlo Park battles. In addition to her advocacy for affordable housing, she is proud of leading the campaign to preserve Bedwell Bayfront Park as open space, her involvement with the local merchant group Hometown Peninsula, her role on a city budget workshop committee in 2005, and her support of Democratic candidates and causes.

Mostly, though, she talked about important issues that are yet to be decided.

"I'm sad to leave," she said. "I have not finished a lot of things I would like to have finished."

She reserved her most pointed criticism for former council member Paul Collacchi and resident Morris Brown, who led a referendum drive to repeal the council's approval of the Derry commercial/residential project in 2006.

She criticized the way the referendum was handled at the time. Had the project gone ahead as proposed, along an adjoining development project, the city's stock of below-market-rate housing would have increased by about 70 percent, according to Ms. Lasensky. She will be taken off the city's below-market-rate wait list when she moves to San Carlos.

She's still stung by a scuttled bid for a council seat in 2006, when she was one of several people who participated in meetings to determine which three candidates the city's liberal bloc would support. In informal surveys, people said they would not vote for Ms. Lasensky because she was a renter, she was told, though she alleged that Mr. Collacchi and other leaders of the group had already made up their minds.

Mr. Collacchi, a Redwood City resident at the time, said he was simply reporting the results of the survey to Ms. Lasensky, and that he didn't tell any candidate whether or not to run.

"There are times when I look at the council and think, I really regret not running," she said. "But sometimes, I think, I'm glad to be on this side, because I can really let 'em have it."

Ms. Lasensky lamented the bipolar state of Menlo Park politics, and the uneven influence wielded by what she referred to as the "anti-growth" contingent.

"The 'Morris Browns' are very organized," she said. "The other side, the people with a different opinion, they don't necessarily have a voice. I tried to be the voice for the other side, or for some other side."

As of our interview, Ms. Lasensky was still debating whether to write a final letter to the editor: not a fond farewell, but rather a missive in support of the "emerging plan" for downtown, which would provide for about 680 new housing units.

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