Shelly Masur Candidate Profile, Close of Filing Period and Begining of Review Period

Friday, August 7th was the last day for candidates to file nomination paperwork to qualify for the ballot. In Redwood City there are now six candidates for City Council in alphabetical order: Alicia Aguirre, Ian Bain, Janet Borgens, Rosanne Foust, Shelly Masur and me,Tania Sole. Now the public review period starts for ”any registered voter, eligible to vote on the contest in question, may seek a writ of mandate or injunction requiring any or all of the materials to be amended or deleted if found to be false, misleading, or inconsistent with the Elections Code. Documents subject to this review include resolutions, ordinances, declarations, and candidate statements.”

This Thursday, August 13th the Secretary of State and County Elections Officials will draw names to determine the order in which candidates names will appear on the ballot and letters that will be assigned to each ballot measure. Redwood City does not have any ballot measures so it will only be for the order of candidate names.

Shelly Masur

Shelly Masur was born in Massachusetts but primarily grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother was born and raised in Alaska. Her father is from Oregon. The oldest daughter of six daughters who live all over the United States: one in Oakland, one in Eugene, Oregon, one in Seattle, one in Chicago and one in New Jersey; Shelly went to kindergarten in Portland, Oregon but had moved schools eleven times by the time she graduated elementary school.

Things settled down when her mother remarried and they moved to St. Louis, Missouri where her step father was from. There she attended her local public school for junior high and high school. For college she moved to St. Paul, Minesotta and attended Macalester College where she studied sociology.

After college she moved around a bit and worked for an insurance company that specialized in disability insurance. Eventually Shelly moved to Los Angeles for two years, where she ended up working for the same insurance company. Then she moved to New York City where she began a career in the non-profit world working for a non-profit that served homeless women and their children. During the ten years she lived in New York City she also attended Hunter College and got her masters in public health.

She got married and had a daughter and twin sons. In 2004, her husband’s job as an intellectual property lawyer brought them to Mountain View. Shelly originally got involved with the school district in Mountain View where her daughter attended a Spanish Immersion school. In 2005 when they were looking for a new home one of their criteria was that a city had to have a Spanish Immersion program which is how she ended up moving to Redwood City and putting her daughter at Adelante.

Here in Redwood City her children attended Adelante, North Star, Kennedy and Sequoia. The twin boys will be incoming sophomores at Sequoia this fall and her daughter, just graduated from Sequoia, will attend the University of Puget Sound.

Shelly is currently the CEO of the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation an organization that among others collaborates with the California Department of Education. One of their current areas of focus is expanding STEM education. She also volunteers as a Trustee of the Redwood City Elementary School Board. She confirmed that as Alicia Aguirre had mentioned when Alicia Aguirre got appointed to the Redwood City City Council, she was appointed to the seat that Alicia had vacated. She has served on the board for ten years and helped change the culture of the board and the district by engaging the community more by creating a lot of advisory committees like the financial advisory committee.

During her tenure on the school board, the district has endured some of the worst financial times for public schools including budget cuts of over twenty percent. As she put it: “to stay solvent through the recession (we) made a lot of cuts that were bad for kids but we had to.” She is proud of the fact that to make up for some of these cuts what they did was expand community partnerships. For example some schools provide after school care and activities while at some other schools these services are provided through the Boys and Girls Club. In addition, the School Board also partnered with the Food Bank. The Food Bank program brings food from the Food Bank for school families in need to take home.

When I asked her what she wanted to accomplish by running for City Council, she responded that the community engagement process is huge as we need to determine “what kind of community we want to be.” She also felt that a lot of these things could be accomplished not just in person but also with technology and she gave the example of the conference calls that Jackier Spieir has with her constituents.

She also mentioned she wanted to focus on infrastructure. Shelly noted that given all the development going on simply “moving people around” is a challenge. She mentioned Full Streets and a focus on helping our community support pedestrians and bicycle riders. She admitted that in some areas the city will have to try some things and that they may not work out. In that case, she noted the city needs to come back and re-evaluate what it has tried.

To learn more about Shelly Masur visit her website at www.shellymasur.com