Los Gatos Weekly-Times Photograph by George Sakkestad Carol Musser and Joanne Benjamin are a familiar sight jogging through town. When Benjamin leaves the council Dec. 7, she might have more time for running. Terms of Endearment After serving four times on the Los Gatos Town Council, Joanne Benjamin wins praise as 'the community's best friend' By Dale Bryant When politicians threaten to "clean house," they usually mean heads are going to roll. Now, long-time Los Gatos politico Joanne Benjamin says she's going to clean house. And she means exactly what she says. After 16 years on the Los Gatos Town Council, Benjamin is leaving the world of Monday night meetings, budget hearings, site visits and staff reports. She's going to go home, roll up her sleeves and clean her house. What's more, she's going to dive into those boxes crammed with photographs taken over the past 16 years and file them neatly away in photo albums. Although house-cleaning and photo albums may have received short shrift during Benjamin's years on the council, she hasn't exactly had her life on hold while running campaigns and serving as an elected official. Somehow, she managed to raise three children, teach economics and government classes at Los Gatos High School, and serve for a number of years as a home teacher for students too ill to attend class, while serving for 16 years on the Town Council--four of them as mayor. And she wasn't just any public figure. Town manager David Knapp echoes the many elected officials and town staff who have worked with her over the years when he says, "She's easily the community's most visible, most accessible public figure. She's the community's best friend, most ardent advocate and most committed worker." When Benjamin first ran for the Town Council in 1982, Carrie, the youngest of her three children hadn't yet hit the terrible twos, and she often accompanied her mom to meetings in the manager's office or the conference room. Brent Ventura, who was on the council in the '80s, says, "It might seem like it would be distracting to have a toddler at a meeting, but Joanne was seamlessly able to go from caring for her child to expressing herself on issues. " That toddler is now a student at the University of Oregon at Eugene. Her older brother, Jeff, who married last year, is doing graduate work there, and Julie, the oldest, who was 8 when her mother first went into politics, is now 25 and a teacher at Blossom Hill School. When Benjamin first decided to enter the race for the Town Council, she had no intention of devoting the next 16 years of her life to local government. "It just seemed like there was always some pressing reason to run again," she says. "When I ran for re-election the first time, I was worried about money being funneled to Sacramento and then mandates coming down." When it came time to decide about a third term, there were good reasons not to run. "I had teenagers by that time," she recalls, "and I was juggling so many things, I knew I had rocks in my head." But the town was in the midst of rebuilding after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. What's more the town's manager and assistant manager had left. The timing was wrong. So she kept on juggling family life, career and public office. Then in 1994, she says, "People had approached me to express concern that not enough people were getting involved in local government. I decided if I ran again, I would make sure to get people involved." That vision took shape in the form of the General Plan Task Force. With the creation of that body of some 30 citizens, Benjamin decided the time was right for her to move on. She had, after all, come full circle, since it was her participation on just such a committee that had whetted her appetite for local politics in the first place. Joanne Benjamin grew up in Whittier and attended UC-Santa Barbara where she met Jim Benjamin. The two married and went off to graduate school at Berkeley--he to study electrical engineering, she to get a teaching credential with a double major in social science and history. The Benjamins soon moved to Los Gatos, and Jim went to work for IBM while Joanne began teaching, first at a middle school and then at Los Gatos High School. In 1978, they moved to their present home off Los Gatos Boulevard, and Joanne was soon drawn into neighborhood politics. "There was a very nice, woodsy park in the neighborhood," she says. "But the town had decided they wanted to change it into a manicured park with lawns and a parking lot, and the neighbors objected. They started having meetings, and somehow, I became the spokesman." That's where Benjamin learned how the process works. "It forced me to learn how to get things done." The visibility she gained heading up that neighborhood coalition gave her recognition in the community, and led to an invitation to become a part of the general plan review. By all accounts, it was a time of deep polarization in the community. Eric Carlson, who was on the council in the 1980s, says he encouraged Joanne to run. "We were like-minded," he recalls. "The council had become very divisive, and with some people, it had gotten personal. Joanne and I agreed that it shouldn't be personal, that the town should always come first." Benjamin's first campaign was a quintessential grassroots effort, with friends designing brochures, and her husband taking publicity photographs. "We printed brochures," Benjamin recalls, "but I didn't have money to mail them, so I had 60 friends distribute them." With a broad network of friends developed through volunteer efforts at her children's schools, her own teaching and in Junior League, Benjamin had no problem putting together an ample supply of doorbell ringers. The incredible demands of public life actually took the Benjamins by surprise. "To show you how naive she was," her husband, Jim, says, "Joanne thought she was taking office in January. In November, we had gone on a trip to Seattle. When we got home, there was a three-inch thick council packet on the front porch." It's been a whirlwind ever since. With that first Monday night council meeting, Jim began the ritual of taking the Benjamin children to dinner on council nights. For the man who's been introduced for the past 16 years as "Joanne's husband," it's been an interesting life. During her first eight years on the council, Jim says, meetings frequently ran very long. "She'd come home at 1:30 in the morning and she'd have to unwind, so she'd wake me up to tell me what went on." In the days before answering machines, the children of the most accessible councilmember in town had to learn at an early age to take very detailed messages. "One of the benefits to the family," Jim says, "was that Joanne wanted to be as available to people as possible, so she bought a lot of gadgets--computers, answering machines, cell phones, a palm pilot." One of the few times the Benjamins made a calculated decision to pull the plug on the telephone was when drivers decided to protest neighborhood speed bumps by honking their horns each time they drove over one. "The neighbors got the idea they'd let Joanne know how disruptive this was by calling her and reporting every time they heard a horn honk--and it was going on at all hours," Jim recalls. Over the years, Benjamin has earned a reputation as the councilmember who attends the most social functions, never fails to visit sites, and talks to everyone involved in matters coming before the council. She's particularly known for her mediative style. Town Manager David Knapp says "If there's a group of 10 people, she'll work until she has everyone happy. She'll work through issues until she has the staff going crazy." Knapp says Benjamin is always on the lookout for community issues. "She's tireless," he says. "I frequently get voice mails that come in after midnight or before 6 a.m." Councilmember Linda Lubeck has a theory about how Benjamin can accomplish so much. "Joanne never sleeps--and she never eats either. You can call her at 11 o'clock at night and she'll pick up the phone and talk till midnight. And running? It's an obsession; she even runs in the rain," Lubeck says. There's some truth to Lubeck's analysis. Jim Benjamin says of his wife's seemingly boundless energy: "She crashes on weekends. Sometimes, though, she really wears out and just hits the wall. It embarrasses her when that happens, but mostly, she's able to keep going because she stays physically fit." Although her running is key to her physical fitness, the six or seven miles she covers on a typical run through town have become integral to her style as a public servant. Alone or with her friend, Carol Musser, Benjamin is a familiar sight in her running shorts jogging all over town. Knapp says, "When Joanne runs, she takes note of what she sees; if there's someone standing at their fence, she stops and talks to them." Musser says Benjamin works while she runs. "We've planned campaigns on our runs, stopped and talked to people, taken detours to see projects. Sometimes Joanne just vents," Musser says. Benjamin in her running shorts may be a familiar sight to most Los Gatans, but her appearance "out of uniform" has caught some off guard--much to her pleasure. She once stopped to look at a house under construction. The builder came out and invited her to come in and take a look. If he'd realized he was talking to a member of the Town Council, he probably wouldn't have pointed out the stairs leading to an attic that he proudly announced could be made into an additional room--and no one in the town would be the wiser. When the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake struck at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, Benjamin was mayor of Los Gatos. And it was her leadership after the earthquake that will likely become her greatest legacy. According to Councilman Randy Attaway, "Joanne was at the helm; she was largely responsible for holding the vision of the community. The decisions that were made then will be with us forever." The earthquake occurred on a Tuesday. By Sunday, Benjamin was leading a community-wide meeting with an overflow audience in the Town Council chambers. "It was at that first emergency meeting," Benjamin says, "that the community agreed to the importance of preserving the historic nature of the town." "In Santa Cruz," planning director Lee Bowman recalls, "they appointed a 36-member committee to figure out what the community wanted to do, and it took forever." He credits the entire council with instinctively knowing what the town would want to restore, but he singles out Benjamin. "The thing about Joanne is when you have to respond quickly, you know you're doing the right thing because she's so well-connected and so good at listening." As an incentive to restore the town to its pre-earthquake status, the town waived building and permit fees for anyone who wanted to restore a building to the way it was the day before the earthquake--or even the way it was when it was originally built. The process was accelerated for those who opted for one of these "historic" options. In crises large and small, Benjamin's style is to ask questions. "I never take a position," she says. "I try to find out what everyone wants." Lubeck, like others who have watched Benjamin in action, says: "She's an absolute master at the art of compromise; she always looks for an absolute win-win--even when it's completely impossible." Lubeck says Benjamin is always the diplomat. "In a very non-threatening way, she's able to stand up and say 'no.' But this is how she does it: She says. 'Just a minute. I think there's been some miscommunication.' She never suggests that someone didn't hear right; it's always: 'we didn't communicate well enough.'" Although Benjamin may be the picture of diplomacy in public, some of her council colleagues have seen her lose her cool. Randy Attaway says, "I've seen her so mad at the council that you could hardly keep her in her chair--if she thought the council was going in the wrong direction." He adds, "She has a strong-willed side that most people don't see." Brent Ventura knows that side. He remembers when the guys on the council decided it would be just dandy to reschedule a council meeting so they wouldn't miss a particularly important Monday night football game. "Joanne wouldn't tolerate changing the date, and she got her way. She was like the teacher making sure we kept our priorities straight," he says. When Benjamin leaves the council on Dec. 7 she also leaves behind her participation in a number of county and regional organizations, including the West Valley Sanitation District and the Policy Advisory Committee for the Transportation Agency, which she chaired last year. She's also chairwoman of KCAT, the public access station, and president of the Santa Clara County Cities Association. As for the lure of higher office, Benjamin says she's learned never to close any doors. But she says, her heart is in Los Gatos, and she's not thinking of higher office at the moment. She's currently on a leave of absence from LGHS, writing curriculum content for textbooks that will be put on the Internet. She says she's going to busy herself with travel, photo albums and house-cleaning, but those who've worked with her expect many Los Gatans will still turn to her with their concerns. Knapp expects his answering machine will continue to record her midnight messages warning him of situations that are brewing in the community. And Lubeck says, "Even when I was mayor, Joanne got more phone calls than I did; I'm sure she gets more calls than anyone on the council. And I'll bet she'll continue getting calls for a couple of years." [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, December 2, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.