Los Gatos council votes to appoint incumbents, cancel election

The Los Gatos Town Council voted on Tuesday to appoint the two councilmembers running unopposed for re-election to their seats for a second term.

Councilmember Maria Ristow and Vice Mayor Matthew Hudes, who both announced plans to run for re-election earlier this summer, were the only two candidates who filed the correct paperwork to do so. The council voted 4-0, with Hudes abstaining, to cancel the election for their two seats, which saved the town the roughly $95,000 in election costs.

“When you have an election, it’s kind of an interview process for the residents of the town to interview the candidates: Are they up to the job?” Mayor Mary Badame said. “Well, the vice mayor and councilmember Ristow, they already went through that interview process. They went through it in 2020, and they got voted in, and they’re still here. So to me, they passed the job interview.”

Brent Ventura, who according to his Linkedin profile was mayor of Los Gatos from 1983 to 1991, had also filed some of the paperwork to run by the Aug. 9 deadline. But town manager Laurel Prevetti told this publication that Ventura did not submit the completed nomination papers and as such was not included in the list of candidates.

According to a report presented at Tuesday’s council meeting by town clerk Wendy Wood, the last time the number of candidates did not exceed the number of open seats on the town council was in 2012, and the council at the time voted to move forward with an election to allow for the possibility of a write-in candidate, which didn’t happen.

Ristow expressed an interest in continuing to meet with members of the public this fall to get one-on-one input from Los Gatos residents as she would have if she were campaigning, and Hudes similarly discussed plans to host Zoom town hall meetings to engage with residents.

“What I don’t want to do is miss the opportunity to engage with residents across the entire town and hear from people that I don’t always get to hear from,” Ristow said at the meeting.

Badame noted that Los Gatos joins its neighbors Monte Sereno and Saratoga in facing a council election season in which only the incumbents have joined the race for their open seats.