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Woodside Council member Ned Fluet was the only incumbent to not seek reelection in the November election. Fluet, who has been on the council since 2018, will be stepping away from local government as he pursues a master’s degree in liberal arts at Stanford University.
Fluet has been a Woodside resident since 2014 and served as the former chair of the Environment and Open Space Committee. After nearly six years on the council, Fluet shares the challenges he faced, how his goals as a council member have changed and how he feels about the town’s state-mandated housing element (every eight years, jurisdictions across California are required to update their plan under the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation program).
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
The Almanac: How do you feel about the last six years you’ve served on the council?
Ned Fluet: I feel very proud of the work that I’ve done, proud of the work that the whole Town Council and all the staff has done. The town, like a lot of towns in this area, has gone through a lot over the last six years, so to have been part of the team that carried the town through a lot of challenges is really gratifying.
Q: What were some of your goals coming onto the council? Do you feel you’ve achieved them?
A: The goals from when I was elected in 2018 have changed. When I came on, the most common thing I heard from residents was that we needed to improve our building and planning department regulations to make it easier for people to remodel homes and improve streets — so things that were rather simple and things that we actually were able to fix.
I did not know that come 2020, we would have COVID. That same year, we had wildfires, all the issues with the housing element. The goals and ideas that brought me into 2018 have kind of gone by the wayside and things kind of got more complicated, more difficult and more interesting as the years went on.
Q: What were some of the challenges that you faced that you weren’t expecting when you came onto the council?
A: I was the mayor of Woodside in 2020, so that was when COVID initially hit. In no world that I expected that I would be working with county and state health officials and deciding when to close and open our town and really being involved in really large major public health decisions.
The same year as mayor, we also had the CZU (Lightning Complex) fires which was another massive incident for this area. Although only a few residents of Woodside were evacuated, it affected our community deeply. These were definitely unforeseen challenges when I was elected.
Most recently, in my area (District 5), Highway 84 collapsed, which cut off most of the residents’ ability to come in and out of their neighborhoods effectively. Unfortunately a lot of the stuff I’ve done has been marked by disaster, not in my making but that was unexpected that we’d have that kind of major infrastructure.
Q: What thoughts went into your decision to not seek reelection?
A: I’m starting graduate school in the fall and it was kind of a matter of balancing all the different things going on in my life. I knew with graduate school, a fulltime job, spouse and kids that I could not give my best attention to all those things.
Over the next two to four years, I knew if I wanted to do something, I wanted to do it very well and I want to be able to give my attention to my family, to school and work. In order to be the best elected representative, I knew I needed to step down this year. I’m definitely looking forward to having more time with my family and kids.
Also the other thing is even if I was running for reelection I knew the next term I’d be done. I just really do believe in term limits and we don’t have term limits in Woodside. This is my self-imposed way of having them. I know that with a new person comes new energy, comes new ideas and I think it’d be disingenuous to say that I would be the right man for this job for the next two decades.
Q: How do you feel about how the council has worked through the housing element?
A: I think as a council, we’ve worked extremely cooperatively. We’ve had our disagreements and we’ve had arguments but I think for this council, we always knew that we had to get this job done and our goal was always to do it in a way that kept Woodside’s character as much as possible.
This process has not been perfect, but I know we did our absolute best to honor our obligations to the state, while at the same time trying to limit the impact on Woodside residents as much as possible.
Unfortunately residents are going to be impacted and specific neighborhoods are being impacted. … But again, as a Town Council, our goal was always to limit that impact as much as we could. I think the plan that we voted on does that. We still have a second reading, so it’s not done yet, but I do think we found the least harmful way to honor our obligations to the state.
Q: There was a lot of community lashback on the council’s decisions for the housing element. Is there anything you’d like to say in response to the residents comments?
A: Sometimes it’s hard to say this in meetings. We did not take any of the decisions lightly. We’re talking about choosing the areas for housing and it was a very long multi-year decision-making process. There’s nothing we can do to make a resident feel better other than to say that we heard those concerns and this was the best way to honor our obligations while inflicting the least amount of harm on Woodside.
I know that is not the most comfort I can give for residents whose neighborhoods are affected but as I’ve said in public meetings, this is also not the end of the process.
One of my ideas was to have a community committee made up of residents as well as elected officials that look at and decide who’s going to be our development partners and what the developments are going to look like.
I would say to those residents, we are not done and getting through the housing element was the best way to get some local control over this process. If we didn’t approve this housing element, the state could come in and essentially take over our Planning Department and we could have builder’s remedy (a state provision that allows developers to streamline building application processes and bypass local land-use regulations if a city does not have a compliant housing element) projects come up.Â
Q: As a District 5 representative living farther up in the hills of Woodside, was there anything that you felt was important to have represented on the council?
A: I think my district has very unique needs because we are up in the hills. Like a lot of the town, we’re on septic, but unlike a lot of the town, we have propane tanks and have unique problems with ingress and egress.
What the council has done over the last few years is be very wildfire-focused. We’ve expanded the defensible space program considerably since I was elected by increasing the funding of what people can get from the town to create defensible spaces around their house. We have a robust system for alerting people if there is a wildfire.
I applaud the other Town Council members who don’t live in this area, for how seriously they took the wildfire issue. I don’t think we have ever had an argument or voted down any initiatives that concerned improving our wildfire safety in town.
Q: Do you have plans to be involved in town government in other ways?
A: I hope to. I haven’t figured out what that means for me. Unfortunately, for the next Town Council, I will probably be someone who continues to come to the microphone as a member of the public. I’m looking forward to a bit of time off in the immediate future but do hope to get back into a volunteer committee in the next year or two.Â
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