Faces of EBCE: Lily Mei, Fremont’s Tech Mayor

Lily Mei brings a background in high tech to Fremont and the EBCE board

Meet Lily Mei, the high-tech mayor of Fremont, and member of the EBCE board.

For the last six years, Mei has been guiding Fremont through a period of rapid growth and prosperity, as the city of 234,000 on the south side of the East Bay has emerged as a hotspot of high tech jobs and manufacturing.

“Fremont is going through a period of change,” she says. “We always have to pay attention to short term things, but for a long term vision it requires a focus on your goal. It’s like throwing the football down the field, even as people are trying to tackle you.”

Tech city

Fremont is a tech city. Known as Silicon Valley East, it provides more building space and industrial capacity than the Silicon Valley communities on the west side of the Bay. It’s often the spillover space for successful Silicon Valley startups who expand or relocate to Fremont to access the real estate and skilled workforce they need to grow.

It’s especially known as the “Hardware side of the Bay,” hosting over 900 advanced manufacturing companies that account for one in every four jobs in the city.

This can include big stars, like Tesla’s electric vehicle manufacturing plant and the 1.5 million square feet of office space that Facebook leases for 1,500 workers. But it can also include many lesser known names in energy, semiconductors, and biomedical equipment.

For example, Fremont is becoming a hub for battery manufacturing, as Tesla has been joined by Enovix, Amprius, Gotion, and others. There are over 100 companies in the medical device space, while computer hardware companies include Lam Research, Western Digital, and Seagate.

The city government has been busy promoting this kind of activity, building the Warm Springs Innovation District, an 850 acre parcel nestled between Tesla, ThermoFisher Scientific, and other high-tech companies. When fully built out, the neighborhood will house more than 20,000 new jobs, state-of-the-art educational facilities, community parks, 4,000 new housing units, and more.

Tech Mayor

Mei is a perfect fit for Fremont’s tech focus. Before entering public service on the Fremont School Board, she was the Executive Director of the Alliance for Gray Market & Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA), a trade group that worked to protect intellectual property (IP) in the high-tech industry.

That job involved frequent global travel for five years, so much so that “the workers at Heathrow Airport recognized me when I came through,” she recalls.

“All that traveling gave me a perspective on city design, and the idea that smart cities can have multi-function infrastructure,” she says. She points to the microgrids at three Fremont fire stations that use solar and batteries to provide backup power during grid outages, so emergency responders are never interrupted.

Under Mayor Mei’s leadership the City attracted research funding from the state Energy Commission and tapped local companies Gridscape and Delta Electronics for the design and hardware. “So we not only improved public safety, but proved a new energy concept and built the capacity of local businesses who could then sell their expertise around the world,” she says.

When the previous federal administration withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, Fremont “doubled down” on its focus on resiliency and sustainability, Mei says. The City hit its 2020 carbon reduction goals three years ahead of schedule and is now working on version 2.0 of its climate action plan. The new plan proposes cutting emissions 55 percent by 2030 and becoming a “post-carbon community” by 2045.

The City was selected as a 2021 Beacon Vanguard Platinum Award winner by the Institute for Local Government (ILG) for achieving greenhouse gas reductions, saving electricity and natural gas, and sustainability best practices. Fremont was the largest of only five cities in California to win this highest-level award.

(Fremont has also, by the way, garnered an absurd number of “best places” rankings, including the Least Stressed City in the Nation, the Best Place to Raise a Family, and even the Happiest Place to Live in the US.)

Fremont also has the most electric vehicles (EV) per zip code in CA and one of the most robust EV charging networks. The City started a pilot in 2020 with Fremont startup Pony.ai to use an autonomous electric taxi to provide last-mile connections to train stations. The Pony vehicle was even used to deliver food to shelters during the pandemic.

“The City of Fremont is acting as a test bed for a transportation solution that has the potential to alleviate congestion, reduce carbon emissions, decrease the number of traffic accidents, and optimize vehicle and land usage,” Mei said at the launch. “Together, we are laying the groundwork for a safer and smarter city.”

Mei brings this tech experience to the EBCE board, and previously as a co-chair of the National League of Cities working group on transport and technology. She also serves on the board of the US Conference of Mayors. She is the first mayor of Asian heritage in Fremont, even though 60 percent of the population has Asian heritage, making it the sixth largest Asian city in America. She is only the third elected Asian woman mayor in US history.

Building bridges

Born in Chicago as the daughter of immigrants, Mei moved with her family from Chicago to Philadelphia when she was three. In the Philly suburbs, she was the only Chinese kid in her elementary school. Both of Mei’s parents were born in China and left for Taiwan during the Communist revolution, before moving to Canada, where her father earned a PhD in chemistry, and ultimately to the U.S.

“I tell people that I feel like a bridge — which was the theme of my college application essay,” she says. “I grew up at the end of the Vietnam era, when there was lots of anti-Asian hate. As a bridge, I’m trying to connect the best of both US and China cultures.”

Mei attended Drexel University in Philadelphia where she earned a B.S. in 1992 in business administration, majoring in marketing and international business. She and her husband, a patent attorney, relocated to Fremont in 1994 and have two adult children, who are both engineers.

Raising her kids got her active in the Fremont Schools. She was twice elected to the school board, serving from 2008 to 2014.

“Like many people, I got involved in public service for an issue important to me and my children,” she says. “It’s easy to complain about things, but harder to do something about the issues.”

“I don’t run away from anything, I just run for office.”