Darcy Paul
Member, Cupertino City Council
Darcy Paul recently completed eight years of service on the Cupertino City Council, where he served two terms as a Councilmember. Prior to that, he served seven years as a Parks and Recreation Commissioner. While on the City Council, Darcy was selected by his fellow Councilmembers as Mayor three times, serving in that role in 2018, 2021 and 2022. On Council, Darcy focused his efforts on delivering equity in a functional manner for the City of Cupertino, with notable accomplishments including prioritizing community space such as the Cupertino Library expansion, containing significant community meeting space, equitable park distribution for areas of the City that are historically park deficient, environmental measures such as Cupertino’s first and second Climate Action Plans, and a number of community discussions and events geared towards promoting effective and interesting public engagement, such as a publicly-accessible augmented reality workshop and conversations about such topics as the Chinese Exclusion Act and its legacy.
In private-sector life, Darcy is an attorney. He attended Harvard College as a pre-med and returned to Harvard for law school. Following graduation, he became a patent attorney, although his area of specialty was patent litigation, a field where he worked in both New York and locally. In 2009, following an unsuccessful run for City Council in Cupertino, he opened up his own law practice in Cupertino, which he subsequently moved to Santa Clara, where it has been located since 2012. Darcy’s areas of focus are litigation- and transaction-oriented matters for small to mid-sized businesses.
From 2010 to 2014, Darcy served as a board member on the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce, where he served as their board president in 2014. In 2014, Darcy ran for the Cupertino City Council a second time, and was elected to office. In 2018, Darcy was re-elected with a then-record number of votes. During his time in office, Darcy dealt with a broad range of issues, including voter engagement, the pressures of development, and a number of issues of great concern to the constituency, including, for instance, the presence of a cement factory within the sphere of influence of the City and directly adjoining a residential area. Overall, his focus became centered upon the question of how best to balance out the various competing factors in a democratic society. He believes that our system has the potential to work well, but he also strongly believes that certain basic principles are critically necessary to adhere to in order for the system to be functional, let alone optimal. He looks forward to our conversation over lunch.
Fiona Ma