Meet The Danville Candidate: Robert Storer

DANVILLE, CA — Patch reached out to all three at-large candidates for Danville Town Council with questions we feel San Ramon voters want to know. Three candidates are running for two seats: one belonging to incumbent Robert Storer, and the other to Karen Stepper, who chose not to run for re-election.

We reprinted their answers verbatim.

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Below, read the responses of Robert Storer, the current vice mayor and a construction project manager.

What is your educational background?

I graduated from Chabot College with an AA in Business Administration, attended San Diego State for 2 years, (business Admin), I have a construction management certification from Cal State Hayward, now East Bay. Ive been self-employed for 42 years in the building Industry, property management field, we employ Architects, Engineers and building professionals.

What is your professional background?

I have been self-employed for 42 years in the Design build Industry and have a vast knowledge of land use, we employ Architects, Engineers and building professionals in the Bay Area. I run a property management company, Storer Properties for 42 years, I was a Captain in the Sheriff's Office Recovery Dive team for 22 years. 25 years with The Town of Danville, 17 years on the council and the balance on the Planning Commission and various commissions

Have you ever held public office, whether appointive or elective?

My involvement includes Town of Danville for 25 years; I have been on the council since 2009, I have participated for 9 years on the Planning Commission, 7 years on transportation committees through CCTA. 7 years on the Heritage Resource Commission and Design Review board, 17 years on the All Wars Memorial Board and County Connection, our bus services. I have spent 25 years learning about the Town of Danville and how it works. I have worked my way up the ladder to earn a place on the dais

What are the top three issues facing Danville right now?

We are working on a number of issues

1) We need to drive people downtown and it's important that we create a synergy downtown between our restaurants and businesses.

2) We have an aging infrastructure that will eventually need to be repaired, after the partial collapse of a 12' culvert on Diablo Road we established a survey of our entire drainage and infrastructure system and realized we may need to spend $12-18m at some point in the near future, we need to find a way to pay for that.

3) On a regular basis we look at our 10 years forecasts to see where our finances are relative to today. We are watching our sales tax numbers which may start to drop in we don't try to revitalize our downtown businesses. This leads back to driving people downtown

What is one specific action you would prioritize during your first year in office?

Public safety, will always be my top priority, and remain the "Safest City in California"

I want to continue to be the best Financially Run City in California

Infrastructure management and we need to figure out how to pay for it

We will always maintain our fiscal health by balancing our budget, I promise we wont spend more than we make and we will always put money away for a rainy day.

We will look at improvements at our north end of town south of the high school

How should Danville meet its state-mandated housing obligations while addressing affordability and preserving the qualities residents value about the town?

We will continue to ensure projects that are proposed are of the highest quality standards.

We need to meet our Regional Housing Needs Assessment RHNA numbers of 2241 units before 2031. There are serious consequences if these numbers are not met.

I believe we were doing a great job of affordable housing before the state mandates became effective. I believe we should have housing stock for a variation of incomes. We need to be an option to live in Danville if you just graduated from College making $78K a year to teachers and those individuals working in the area.

How can Danville best support its downtown and small businesses?

I believe we need to continue to create ideas and events that drive people downtown,

we are exploring "Meet me in Danville" where we use our charming and historic downtown

as an incredible backdrop for mini retreats, corporate retreats, wedding venues, giving corporations the venues downtown for meetings and opportunities to explore our downtown spas, services, restaurants for a day, a weekend or a week

We will always create events that will bring people downtown, this year alone we will have 27 downtown events, we will continue our partnership with our chamber and downtown businesses.

I would also encourage our businesses to stay open later and capture our restaurant customers looking for something to do after dinner

We will continue to bring Music venues downtown after hours and encourage our downtown to stay open

Danville and many other Tri-Valley communities have recently seen a rash of commercial burglaries. How can we better prevent this from happening?

Even as we celebrate our safest city designation, we understand that crime of opportunity will always exist, we are trying to educate our businesses of the importance of alarms, glass breakage alarms and monitoring systems. We have always use our beat cops at night closer to the core of the downtown.

We will continue to use our license plate readers and Flock camera systems to protect our community as well.

we need to continue working with our surrounding communities to collaborate with information so the bad guys can be put in Jail, As of this writing we have arrested two of the individuals that were part of the group that burglarized our downtown .

Why do you feel you're a better candidate than your opponents?

In this campaign season and in this economy, the most experienced council members are the ones that have the shortest learning curve, bring results to the table immediately and use a great deal of institutional knowledge to problem solve as we did during the COVID years 2020-24 and the great depression of 2008-2013 and the current economic climate today. I have the Passion, desire and knowledge to make a difference as I have for 17 years on the council. I am someone you have counted on for many years, and I will always be someone you can count on

ONE of my opponents comes to the table with absolutely zero experience and would better serve the community if were part of a committee, commission, HOA board, PTA affiliation, not just randomly decide to run for council when they haven't done their homework, Learn how a community is run before you jump into a race. It doesn't serve the residents of Danville whenyou come to the table completely unprepared