The pro-housing establishment lines up behind Combs’s challenger.

If Vamsi Velagapudi, who is running to unseat Drew Combs from the Menlo Park City Council, is trying to avoid taking a direct position on the downtown parking-plaza ballot issue up for a vote in November, the company he is keeping isn’t helping him keep a low profile on that.

Combs, you will recall, has taken a cautious approach to displacing parking with apartments and often found himself as swimming into the wake made by a four-member council majority spearheaded by Mayor Betsy Nash.

Meanwhile, Velagapudi’s recent campaign-finance report (FPPC Form 460, filed July 23) shows a striking pattern among sitting city commissioners — the Planning Commission’s chair and vice-chair among them.

First, the campaign site pushing to defeat the downtown parking-plaza ballot measure lists those commission members as endorsing its “Vote No” position and also now includes Velagapudi’s name as a supporter.

Further, Velagapudi’s July 23 Form 460 discloses that those same commissioners have written checks to his campaign.

The record

Velagapudi’s Form 460 reports about $7,000 raised through June 30, roughly $1,000 of it a contribution from the candidate himself, who separately loaned his campaign another $1,500. These contributors are current or former Menlo Park officials who also appear as endorsers on homesformenlopark.com — the “Vote No” campaign opposing the downtown parking-plaza ordinance:

Several named community-member endorsers of the same campaign also contributed: John Donald, Meredith Bailey, Lesley Feldman, and Kathy Switky ($1,000).

How the two connect. Menlo Park’s commissioners are appointed by the City Council as a body — the council on which Drew Combs sits. So the people now backing his challenger are, in several cases, commissioners seated by that council, alongside a former mayor who served with him. No individual councilmember appoints them; the appointment is the council’s.

A colleague among the donors. One name on Velagapudi’s list sits with Combs on the dais. Jeff Schmidt, the District 3 councilmember elected in 2024, gave $100 on June 21 — a sitting member of the five-person City Council helping to finance the campaign to unseat a colleague. Schmidt, who works in communications at Stanford, has served alongside Combs, who holds the District 2 seat, since taking office in January 2025.

A former colleague appears as well. Maria Doerr, who held the District 5 seat from January 2023 until December 2024, gave $40 — now from a Seattle address, having left the area after her term; her listed occupation, program officer, matches her current role with a climate-grants nonprofit.

Where the donors live

Velagapudi’s Form 460 itemizes 71 individual donors, setting aside the roughly $1,000 the candidate contributed and the $1,500 he loaned his own campaign. Twenty-eight of them — about 39% — list a Menlo Park address. That is the single largest bloc, but it is still a minority of the money’s sources: fewer than half of the people funding Velagapudi’s campaign live in the city he is running to represent.

Within that Menlo Park group, the concentration of insiders is hard to miss. Eight of the 28 local donors — roughly 29% — currently sit on a Menlo Park city commission: the Planning Commission’s chair and vice-chair, two more planning commissioners, a pair of housing commissioners, the library commissioner, and a complete-streets commissioner. Add a sitting councilmember, a former mayor, and a former fire-district director — also among the Menlo Park donors — plus a former councilmember now giving from a Seattle address, and the giving skews heavily toward people who already hold, or once held, a public seat.

The rest of the map runs both near and far. Beyond Menlo Park, checks came from around the Peninsula and the wider Bay Area — Palo Alto, Atherton, San Mateo, San Carlos, Belmont, Foster City, Mountain View, Los Altos, and both San Franciscos — and from a long out-of-state tail: 16 donors, just under a quarter of the total, gave from eleven states outside California, among them Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, Washington, Nevada, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas (with checks from Spring, Irving, and Brownsville).

Sources

• Vamsi Velagapudi for City Council 2026 — FPPC Form 460 (campaign statement), filed July 23, 2026 (Menlo Park NetFile e-filing portal).
• homesformenlopark.com/endorsements — the “Vote No on the Menlo Park anti-housing initiative” campaign endorsements page (retrieved July 31, 2026).

This analysis was AI-assisted from the public filings and pages cited above and reviewed by the site operator before publication; see our AI use disclosure.