Former Palo Alto mayor named director of community relations

BY BARBARA PALMER

Attorney Jean K. McCown, a former Palo Alto mayor who has consulted for the university on land use issues for five years, will succeed Andy Coe as director of community relations, Larry Horton, associate vice president for public affairs, has announced. McCown will join the Office of Government and Community Relations as an assistant vice president on May 17. Coe, who has held the post since 1993, will leave on May 14 and plans to return to the East Coast, where he and his wife have family, he said.

In addition to McCown, the office has added Ryan M. Adesnik, as federal relations director, and Heather Jo McLean, as assistant director of government relations, to its staff. Adesnik and McLean, who joined the office this spring, have filled positions that have long been vacant, Horton said.

McCown was a member of the Palo Alto City Council from 1990 to 1998 and served as mayor in 1993. She previously had served on the Palo Alto Planning Commission and on government transportation committees including the Santa Clara County Congestion Management Agency and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Since 1984, McCown has been a partner at the law firm of Ritchey Fisher Whitman & Klein, where she focused on land use, environmental and real estate matters. McCown is a past director of the Committee for Green Foothills and currently is on the board of directors of the Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated protecting open space in nine Bay Area counties, including Santa Clara County.

McCown has "vast experience at many different levels of responsibility and an excellent record and reputation," Horton said. Adding McCown to the staff will provide a new community perspective to our local relations, Horton said.

During Coe's tenure, he was a key member of the university team working on the General Use Permit with Santa Clara County and agreements for the widening of Sand Hill Road. Coe is widely popular in surrounding communities and on campus and has a reputation as being candid and trustworthy, Horton said. "We're very pleased with the job that Andy has done and sorry to see him go."

Adesnik came to Stanford last spring to launch a government relations office at the School of Medicine, where he designed and developed a program to further the school's research and public policy goals in public debate in Washington, D.C., and in the state. In his position as federal relations director, Adesnik will continue duties he managed for the School of Medicine in addition to addressing a full range of university issues, Horton said.

Adesnik formerly was a vice president at the Carmen Group Inc. of Washington, D.C., a federal lobbying and governmental relations firm representing corporations, teaching hospitals, private universities, nonprofit philanthropies and others. From 1993 to 1996, he served as senior legislative aide to Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.).

McLean, who will work on federal and state relations, has worked as a legislative aide to U.S. senators including Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). She is a co-founder of the Civic and Social Education Foundation in Washington, D.C., which was founded to help support the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school in southeast Washington, D.C.

The increase in staff will allow the office to take a more active approach to matters involving legislative and policy issues at the state and federal level, Horton said. In recent years the office has focused its most intense efforts on issues involving local government, he said.

New challenges face the university at all governmental levels, Horton noted. Federal policies enacted in the wake of 9/11 have created immigration and visa-related issues, as well as issues related to access of students to research. Large federal budget deficits and increased competition for discretionary federal funding for research also pose challenges, he said. And a fiscal crisis and the election of a new governor warrant increased attention at the state level, he added. Locally, land use issues continue to be highly controversial and difficult political issues, he said. "Each new project faces increased scrutiny."

The university and the surrounding community have many more issues in common than differences, McCown said. "There are so many ways in which the university's vision and goals are absolutely coincident with the community," she said. "We don't talk about that enough."