About Brian
Veteran. Builder. Husband & Dad. Running for Larkspur City Council because this town is special, and I want to keep it that way.
My wife Katy and I are raising three young kids in Larkspur. Katy, a former public school teacher, is a physician who specializes in cancer care. Our three kids, aged two through seven, keep us busy. They also sharpen our resolve about what really matters. Larkspur is where we want them to grow up, and, if they choose, come back to settle. It's on us to make sure the Larkspur they inherit is as wonderful as the one we call home today.
I didn't arrive in local politics by accident, because service has always been central to my story. After graduating college, I served five years as a U.S. Navy officer, qualified as a nuclear propulsion engineer and a surface warfare officer, and completed two sea tours aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald and the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Navy taught me too many lessons to list here, but the most critical was probably a bias for action. Problems do not solve themselves, and a “no” can almost always be overcome with creative thinking and perseverance. I want to bring this can-do, pragmatic, collaborative attitude to City Hall.
After the Navy, I worked in tech at both very small and very large companies, but before too long I struck out on my own to build VOCA, a civic-engagement technology platform that made it easy for California residents to weigh in on local policy issues via text message. VOCA was the start of a decade of thinking about and working to improve how regular people and their governments actually talk to each other to achieve their goals.
Today I run two Bay Area businesses. California Cottage Company builds small, naturally affordable infill homes in the North and East Bay (the kind of low-rise, neighborhood-compatible housing that California's cities actually need). My second company, California Abundance, is a policy consultancy advancing pro-housing and pro-clean-energy legislation in Sacramento.
I have served on the boards of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the affordable housing nonprofit HIP Housing, and most recently, CalMatters, the nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom whose reporting I believe is essential to California's democracy.
That’s my résumé, and here’s my “why”:
I care deeply about housing, not as a political talking point, but because I see, every single week, in Larkspur and around the Bay Area, how displacement and super-commuting betray our equity and climate goals, as well as how decades-old ordinances make it so difficult to build the homes Californians desperately need.
I care deeply about wildfire readiness because I live next door to some of the most beautiful hillsides in the state, and also some of the most flammable. I’ve driven through burn zones in Sonoma County and met wildfire survivors who fled their homes in the middle of the night and returned to a neighborhood of ash and freestanding chimneys. I want to protect my community from that fate.
I care deeply about civic engagement because without it democracy crumbles and society regresses. We lose faith in each other, and ultimately ourselves. And because I've learned that most residents aren't apathetic, they're simply exhausted by being ignored or having their preferences drowned out by the five angriest people on an internet thread or in a public meeting.
Larkspur is a small town with a big story. The SMART train, the ferry, the creek, the Lark Theater, Bon Air and Marin Country Mart, the schools that knit neighborhoods together, the trail systems that make Marin feel like Marin. I want my kids to inherit it at least as good as we found it. That is going to take real work: diligent, collaborative, deeply important work, and that's what I want to do on your behalf.