Member of State College Transportation Commission announces candidacy for borough council seat
Matt Herndon, a member of the State College Transportation Commission, announced Wednesday that he intends to run for an open seat with a four-year term on State College Borough Council.
He moved to the borough in 2018 and is a member of Central PA United, a progressive group whose three backed borough council candidates in 2021 — Gopal Balachandran, Richard Biever and Divine Lipscomb — were all elected. (Biever resigned within months of taking office due to a family move to Kansas, and Nalini Krishnankutty was appointed his replacement in June 2022.)
“I’m running for this seat so that I can help State College become a great city that is ready for the future,” Herndon said in a written statement. “We need to build enough affordable housing to bring prices back to reasonable levels so that those who work in the Borough can afford to live here.”
Herndon said his foray into local politics started after attending a borough council meeting following an accident on Allen Street that involved a seriously injured cyclist and an “inattentive” driver. He believed a “fault in the design of the road itself” compounded issues, which led to his appointment on the transportation commission.
He boasts a bachelor’s in computer science from Cornell and currently works for Voltus, a provider of renewable energy generation services. He also has two young children and a wife who works at Penn State as an engineering professor.
In a news release, he touched on issues such as affordable housing, transportation safety challenges, a zoning rewrite and sustainability/energy efficiency.
“We need to make State College a truly green city of the future, and not a source of sprawl that converts precious farmland and wild areas into far-flung housing developments,” he added. “Safely building more dense housing here can make our town a truly world-class city with lower taxes and better government services.”
He is the fourth candidate so far to publicly announce his intentions to run for an open seat on borough council. Three candidates — Herndon, Evan Myers and Josh Portney — are running for one of the four open seats with four-year terms. One candidate, Krishnankutty, is running for the unexpired/open seat with a two-year term that came about because of Biever’s departure. (The borough’s home-rule charter does not allow an appointment to finish out a full term if the departure comes so shortly after taking office.)
Of the four four-year term seats, incumbents Jesse Barlow and Janet Engeman cannot run for reelection because the borough’s charter prevents council members from serving for three consecutive terms. (They’ve served from 2016-2023.) The others — Deanna Behring and Peter Marshall — have yet to publicly declare their intentions.
