How a backyard barbecue made Burton Craig a three-time Monte Sereno mayor

Burton Craig can trace 16 years of serving Monte Sereno back to one backyard barbecue.

First came an outdoor kitchen. Then a crane, a visit from a city building official and a pool fence a quarter of an inch too high.

Those run-ins with the city’s building rules turned the Apple and Symantec software veteran into a politician. Today he is a three-time mayor of Santa Clara County’s smallest city, chairs the county library board, leads the board of the community TV station KCAT and is about to start a fourth council term. He said he is on the council “because of a backyard barbecue.”

Around 2003 or 2004, soon after he and his wife, Susan, bought a house in the tiny and tony hillside city, she found a Craigslist ad from a builder of custom outdoor kitchens. The deal sounded simple: a discount if the builder could show the kitchen at a trade show first. The installer said he had put kitchens in from Napa Valley to San Luis Obispo and never needed a permit.

Monte Sereno was different. The crew finished installing the outdoor kitchen around 9pm and the very next day, a Monte Sereno building official came to the door to inquire about work done after sundown. Craig told the story in a 2023 interview for KCAT TV’s Monte Sereno Living History Project: a building permit for the kitchen, then setbacks, then concrete bases, then a crane to lift the kitchen over a tree to a new spot, and then word that he should have gotten a permit for the crane. After that came a new pool fence that was, he was told, a quarter of an inch too high.

At a street party, he started telling neighbors about it. “Then the stories just came,” he said he was flooded by neighbor complaints about the City. One neighbor had to trench through a garage to replace a water heater. A friend building a house called 13 other cities and found no others had the strict rules Monte Sereno was enforcing. Two fellow Boy Scout leaders who owned construction companies told him they would not take jobs in Monte Sereno.

“This is a small city. We shouldn’t have that many problems,” Craig said, recalling what he told himself. “That’s when I first decided to run for office.”

He lost that first race in 2008. So he joined the city’s cultural commission instead, and, later, won a council seat in 2010 and has served most of the years since. In December he begins his fourth four-year term, which runs to 2030. Mr. Craig has been mayor three times, in 2014, 2018 and 2025.

A technologist extraordinaire

Craig is a technologist extraordinaire, and his résumé runs through some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names. He came to the Bay Area to work in software after school in Florida. From his first home in Scotts Valley, he commuted over Highway 17 and up Highway 9 to Symantec, the software company in Cupertino, next to Apple’s campus. He also worked at Ashton-Tate, maker of the dBase database software; at Apple; and at Silicon Graphics, the maker of 3D graphics workstations.

Highway 9 is how he first noticed the city he would later run. He kept passing a sign that said “Welcome to the City of Monte Sereno,” then, about moments later, one that said “Welcome to Saratoga.”

“Where in the heck is this city of Monte Sereno?” he remembers wondering, because it did not seem to clearly show up on the map. Later, on an Apple assignment, he traveled to Toledo to work with a developer, who, coincidentally, told him he lived in Monte Sereno.

Even after moving to Monte Sereno, the confusion never went away. At regional meetings he would introduce himself as a Monte Sereno councilmember and get blank looks, he said. “Dude, I’m right up the street from you,” he recalled telling a man from Santa Clara. At a trade show, a man told him he had grown up in Monte Sereno and never knew it was a city.

He still brings that tech know-how to city hall, helping guide the City in making tech decisions, such as for Monte Sereno to join the Government AI Coalition, a group of public agencies working on responsible use of artificial intelligence.

A city of 3,500 that wants to stay rural

Monte Sereno is the smallest of Santa Clara County’s 15 cities, with about 3,500 residents on 1.6 square miles and has no business district. Craig likes it that way. There are almost no streetlights; a neighborhood that wants one has to form a district and pay for it. There are few sidewalks.

He tells the city’s founding story with relish. To prevent the Town of Los Gatos from annexing the properties that would later form Monte Sereno, Admiral Thomas English, whom Craig credits with a role in breaking Japanese codes before the Battle of Midway, organized residents like a military campaign, with area captains and lieutenants, to incorporate in the 1950s. People still ask him why Monte Sereno does not just join Los Gatos. “We like our city,” he said on KCAT’s Coffee & Candidates in October.

Housing, from the dais

Housing has run through all of his years on the council. When he was picked as mayor for 2014, he called the state-mandated housing plan the council’s biggest challenge, “while maintaining the character of Monte Sereno,” he told Los Gatos Patch in December 2013.

By 2018, as mayor again, he was defending the city’s first multifamily homes, 15 units planned with 21 single-family houses on the site of the closed Hacienda Inn on Highway 9. “Housing is in such demand, and any little bit that we can do to help, it’s a good thing,” he told KTVU then. He also predicted that unhappy residents would look for ways to slow it down.

His view now is more blunt about Sacramento. When he joined the council in 2010, he said, a city could promise the state 300 homes, build 20 with little or no consequences for not meeting the state quota. “That’s not happening anymore,” he said. The state now uses “the stick along with the carrot to force cities to build housing.”

His answer back to state officials, he said, is that “we have plenty of housing that has been already permitted, but none of it’s getting built,” and the state should help get it built. He once asked a former Assembly member at a town hall what he saw for Monte Sereno’s future, Craig said. The answer was all two-story multifamily buildings. “I was kind of taken aback,” Craig said. He expects denser housing along the main corridors with bus service, such as Winchester, and an interior that stays rural.

Monte Sereno’s plan for its current state housing target leans on accessory dwelling units, or backyard cottages. More than 225 property owners signed up to say they would build one, Craig said.

Money, police and wildfire

Monte Sereno buys its police service from the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department. Its police parcel tax, set in 1983, brings in about $150,000 a year, Craig said, against a contract of about $1.45 million. The city has been drawing down its reserve to cover the gap and to pay for road work it started around 2015 and 2016. “We are technically in a structural budget deficit right now,” he said in October. He expects residents who “just love the police department” to back a higher parcel tax, though some oppose any new tax right now.

Fire is the other worry. After the Southern California fires early in 2025, Craig used his mayor’s letter in the spring city newsletter to urge residents to sign up for AlertSCC emergency alerts, clear defensible space and know their evacuation routes. Monte Sereno is working with Los Gatos on an evacuation simulation to show how fast residents could get out in an emergency, he said.

Many hats beyond the council

Craig’s public service reaches well beyond the council dais. He has been the council’s liaison and adviser to the Monte Sereno Youth Commission throughout his time on the council. The Youth Commission provides an opportunity for high school students to serve on a city commission and get hands-on experience working with government and government officials. Among other things, Monte Sereno’s Youth Commission runs a yearly coat and food drive for West Valley Community Services.

Craig chairs the governing board of the Santa Clara County Library District, a joint powers authority, or partnership of local governments, that runs the eight branch county library system.

Craig is president of the board of Los Gatos’ KCAT TV15, the nonprofit community TV station. The station broadcasts Los Gatos Town Council and Planning Commission meetings on Comcast channel 15, runs year-round TV and movie-making camps for students and produces shows such as Coffee & Candidates and the Monte Sereno Living History Project.

Termed out, and back again

Craig was termed out in 2018 after two terms, but rejoined the council after he was appointed in 2022 and was recently appointed to a fourth term in 2026, both uncontested elections.

Craig said two uncontested elections in a row worry him. He would like to think it means residents are happy with the council. But he said running costs about $3,500, mostly for the candidate’s statement in the voter guide, and the unpaid job takes about 100 hours a month. “$3,500 is $3,500,” he said. He has proposed the city should pay that fee for residents who want to serve.

The harder barrier, he said, is that a councilmember has to sit in front of neighbors and friends and make choices about their neighborhood. “At some point you’re going to have to point at somebody’s property and say, ‘I’m going to rezone that property,’” he said.

Asked why he is the right person for the seat, Craig pointed to the city’s architectural guidelines. They should be followed, he said, but there will be times to allow an exception. “It takes somebody with good judgment and compassion to be able to make those kind of calls,” he said, “and I hope and believe I am that person.”

At home

Craig and Susan Craig have four children. All of them went to Los Gatos schools, he said.

Asked in 2023 whether he would ever leave Monte Sereno, he said he probably would not. Once people move there, he said, they stay. “It’s like Hotel California,” he said, “you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave!”

And the outdoor kitchen that started it all is still in his backyard along with the slightly-too-short pool fence gate.

Source: Monte Sereno City Council; Aug. 18, 2026 council minutes, in the Sept. 1, 2026 agenda packet; Sept. 1, 2026 council minutes, in the Sept. 15, 2026 agenda packet; KCAT Coffee & Candidates 2026 interview; KCAT Monte Sereno Living History Project interview.