JamesKuszmaul Mountain View City Council

Meet James

James is a Mountain View native who, after earning a degree in Robotics Engineering from WPI and returning home, has worked as a software engineer while dedicating his free time to mentoring high school robotics teams, serving on the Mountain View and VTA Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committees, and advocating for more affordable, higher-quality housing through Mountain View YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), a group of local housing advocates.

Why James is running

• Our children deserve safe streets. James grew up biking and walking to school every day in Mountain View, and believes every child should be able to get to school safely. His experience on Mountain View’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee gives him the insight required to speed up the projects that will make our streets safer for everyone.
• He’s lived the housing crunch. Like tens of thousands of Mountain View residents, James is a renter, and pays the cost of the housing crisis every month when he pays a high rent for an apartment in a building that, like too many in Mountain View, doesn’t meet modern earthquake safety regulations.
• He turns advocacy into action. Since February 2025, James has been on the organizing committee for “50501 San Jose,” which was one of the first resistance organizations to form against the current Trump administration, and which has run local No Kings protests against the Trump Administration. He will turn this energy into action in City Council, fighting to keep the Flock cameras in Mountain View turned off and ensuring that the MVPD maintains its policies of never cooperating with ICE.

James’ Story

James grew up in Mountain View, attending Slater Elementary until it closed in 2006, and then attending Castro, Crittenden, and Mountain View High School, where he participated in the marching band (with his sister Jane) and the robotics club. Throughout his high school years, he walked and biked to school, relying on the Stevens Creek Trail for trips to school during the week and to marching band practices and robotics meetings on weekends.

After graduating high school, he attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he majored in Robotics Engineering and Computer Science, while getting a MS in Robotics Engineering. While at WPI, he focused his humanities coursework on the history of transportation in the United States and did a project on mapping bicycle routes in Worcester. He also spent time contributing to open-source software and volunteering at events for FIRST Robotics (the high school robotics competition that he participated in as a student) until he graduated.

For work, he has previously worked at various vehicle automation companies, including working on systems to safely allow semi-trucks to save fuel by “drafting” behind each other on highways. His last 5 years have been spent working on camera systems to reduce herbicide use on self-propelled sprayers.

Since returning to Mountain View, he has remained an active volunteer in the high school FIRST Robotics Competition. He has mentored the MVHS team and the local all-girls Space Cookies team at NASA Ames, and regularly volunteers at competitions, where he is easily recognized by his bright orange hat as he hustles from pit to pit, helping teams troubleshoot problems they cannot solve on their own.

In 2019, James began to pay more attention to local politics and in 2020 that morphed into attending virtual meetings of local housing and bicycle advocacy groups. He joined the Mountain View Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee in 2021, and has served on it since. In 2025 he was appointed as Mountain View’s representative on the county-wide VTA Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee. On these committees, he has worked with other committee members to make our streets as safe and comfortable as possible for everyone. He has also fought to speed up urgently-needed improvements so that future projects do not take 13 years to complete, as the California St improvements did. This has included everything from pushing for improved policies on inclusion of safety improvements in regular repaving projects to providing detailed technical input on things like avoiding the use of paving patterns that are uncomfortable for wheelchair users. The death of Andre Retana, a Graham middle school student, while biking to school in 2022 looms particularly large in guiding James' advocacy, and serves as a constant reminder that plans for future safety improvements are only worth anything if they happen before more people get hurt.

On housing, James saw the evidence of our housing crisis first-hand while growing up and when returning from school. From the exorbitant rents and home prices, to families who live in RVs after being priced out of apartments, to those even less fortunate who become unsheltered and live on our streets, to the over-crowded homes and strained budgets created by those same high rents, the evidence of our housing crisis is all around us. In 2020, this led him to attending meetings of Mountain View YIMBY, a group of local housing advocates. Since then, he has become a volunteer lead with Mountain View YIMBY and has been deeply engaged in efforts to push the city to permit more affordable housing in unaffordable neighborhoods, to reduce arbitrary parking requirements that drive up the cost of housing, and to support individual projects, including the city’s Project Homekey interim housing to provide critical housing to those most in need.

James does not own a car—although his apartment does include a dedicated parking spot which he has no use for. He bikes, walks, and takes public transit for the vast majority of his trips and gets joy out of being able to experience the world more directly than he would by driving around the city.

In his remaining free time, James goes on long bike rides and hikes on the weekends, enjoying the more remote reaches of the Bay Area and experiencing the beauty of our open-space preserves. At other times, he can be found dropping by our city-run pools at Rengstorff or Eagle Park to go swimming.

A little more

Want to hear it from James directly? Get in touch — he’d genuinely like to meet you.