Mountain View Mayor Defends Google

"[The article] was so unrepresentative of how the city feels," Macias tells WebProNews. "We love having them."

The LA Times article focused on good as well as bad, but negative commentary is often heavier. Local residents complained that Google had "displaced small companies to make room for its own troops."

Mayor Macias notes instead the positive effect the company has had on the town, especially around Castro Street. "There are lots of little startups percolating," she says, and many of them are inspired by Google’s presence, 110 of them biotech startups.

But that doesn’t mean another dotcom bust is eminent.

"Certainly we saw this at the end of the 90′s, but now I think people are smarter and there’s substance to their products."

Macias downplayed fears that Google was dominating the city too much, and noted that Google isn’t the only game in town. Microsoft has a large presence in Mountain View, as do HP, AOL, Symantec, and VeriSign.

As for the founders’ odd relationship with NASA and their use of Moffett Field for their personal runway, Macias relays that it’s not as sinister as it may sound to some.

"I’d say NASA has this responsibility since they took over Moffett Field from the Navy to have income. You have to have some revenue, and this allows them to have some revenue." 

She added also that Google has been good about meeting with the city and cooperating, and praises Google’s environmental efforts such as their "solar energy-generating parking covers."

Melanie Carroll of the Palo Alto Daily News reports, “Google, which already occupies 900,000 square feet on top of city-owned land, will use a portion of nearby office space to house research and development facilities, according to Mountain View’s newly-passed 2007-08 budget.”  So that’s a 34 percent increase – one has to wonder what Google plans to do with all that room.

Company reps weren’t able to talk about that, however (as a matter of policy), when Carroll contacted them, and WebProNews doesn’t expect to have better luck.

Still, “Mountain View resident and self-described gadfly Don Letcher” was more than willing to chat with the Daily News writer.  “Google is hiring 15 people a day and causing huge parking problems,” Letcher said – perhaps overestimating that number on the local scale, but actually underestimating it globally.  “It just ruins the city.  I’ve been here so long.  It changes the complexion of the city.”

I dunno.  As someone who’s visited the Googleplex, I can say that it didn’t seem too awful (on the contrary, it was quite nice).  And plenty of places, from Iowa to North Carolina, have virtually (and perhaps literally) rolled out the red carpet for Google installations.

In any event, the Googleplex is going to get much bigger in the coming months and years.  This may, in turn, lead to a number of other interesting developments.