Featured - page 122

When did early stop being early?

We are still days away from the opening of the filing period for candidates seeking a city council seat on the November ballot, and yet, many candidates have declared and already launched their campaigns.

And if that doesn’t meet your definition of early, then consider the level of activity surrounding the 2020 race for the state Senate seat Jerry Hill will vacate due to term limits.

Which is somehow appropriate, given that Hill was the candidate who set this tone, running so hard, so early for, first, the Board of Supervisors, then the Assembly and, finally, the Senate, that he foreclosed would-be opposition, having rounded up endorsements and money well ahead of anyone else.

One candidate very interested in running for supervisor in 2020 recently said, “Yes, it is late,” and then later recanted, realizing how that sounded.

It is still nearly two years until the primary election.

Why is this happening?

The answer may be that there is pent-up demand, or, perhaps more precisely, a backlog of ambition.

Of the five county supervisors, only David Canepa is in his first term, having won the seat in 2016.

Carole Groom and Don Horsley both were re-elected in June to their third and final terms, but it will be 2022 before their seats are open.

Warren Slocum and Dave Pine are up for re-election in 2020, and the speculation that Pine might run for Hill’s Senate seat has touched off an early behind-the-scenes scramble for a board seat without an incumbent.

That means there are a lot of younger would-be board candidates who have been waiting eight years or more for a seat to open up.

Of course, any one of them could have taken on the incumbents, but, apparently, ambition doesn’t always pair well with risk.

Pine hasn’t decided yet whether he will run for the Senate (Redwood City Councilwoman Shelly Masur has decided she will), but already names are in circulation about who might run for the Pine seat, including Burlingame Council colleagues Emily Beach and Ann Keighran, Millbrae Mayor Gina Papan and Hillsborough Mayor Marie Chuang.

DISTRICTS AND DOMINANCE: The race for Pine’s seat would be fascinating in that it is the only supervisorial district not dominated by a single city. In other districts, a city, such as Redwood City, San Mateo or Daly City, makes up such a large chunk of the electorate that it is hard for someone from another jurisdiction to make much headway.

Pine’s district is comprised of Burlingame, Millbrae, Hillsborough and portions of South San Francisco and San Bruno. While one town may be bigger than another, it doesn’t spell dominance.

On the other hand, there’s another issue looming on the horizon that also can affect the ability of candidates to jump from a city council to the board: District elections.

As cities move more to district elections, it will mean council members without a citywide mandate or base of support. Any candidate who campaigns outside of his or her district would be – well, the politest word I can think of is loser.

BUCKLE UP: Before the opening of filing, many of the council races are without challengers – three seats are up in Belmont and San Carlos and, right now, there are only three candidates running. … But there are some races lining up. The rumor is someone will challenge incumbent Kirsten Keith in the newly drawn Menlo Park council districts. … George Yang confirmed to the Country Almanac that he is running in Menlo Park’s District 1, which includes the Belle Haven neighborhood, where traffic from Facebook is the only issue. Yang is a Republican and self-described conservative, so we’ll see if traditional party labels matter in a nonpartisan, local race… In San Carlos, there’s a real rarity – three seats, no incumbents, which will mean an entirely new majority there. … The countywide transportation measure will be on the ballot, of course.…It appears San Mateo’s anti-growth forces have gathered sufficient petition signatures to have their measure to extend the city’s restrictive height limit put on the ballot (the issue Hill rode to a council seat). On Monday, San Mateo Councilman Joe Goethals and others are likely to propose a competing measure that preserves most of the height limit but allows greater heights in appropriate places, such as the downtown Caltrain station. That will mean a full-pitched battle between the two measures…Millbrae will put a bond measure on the ballot to rebuild the community center destroyed by fire, and early polling shows a close election for the required two-thirds approval.

Contact Mark Simon at mark.simon24@yahoo.com.

The San Mateo County Transit District is expected to vote Wednesday to put a 30-year half-cent sales tax proposal on the November ballot, which would generate $80 million in new and desperately needed funds.

The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors will follow up with a vote of their own before the early August ballot deadline, and, with that, the entirety of the county’s political establishment will be united behind a measure SamTrans officials say is critical for the future of the transit district.

Half the money, $1.2 billion over 30 years, will go to SamTrans to use for an expanded and new array of services that will put the district in the position to reinvent itself and provide transportation for a rapidly and dramatically changing region.

The money essentially gets SamTrans out of fiscal jail. The district is funded by a half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 1974. The San Mateo County of 1974 is virtually unrecognizable in comparison to the county that is wrestling today with 2 percent unemployment, dozens of major employers and traffic that would have been unimaginable 44 years ago.

Simply put, SamTrans needs money to do more and do better and it needs to have the flexibility to spend these new funds to use and deploy technologies that, in many cases, have not yet been rendered usable or even invented.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was an executive at SamTrans through 2017 and worked on the early efforts to develop the spending plan that will come before the voters in November.

I worked on this effort because I thought it was a good idea and essential for the future of our community. I still think so.

HOWARD’S IN: Five-term Redwood City Councilwoman Diane Howard on Sunday formally declared her candidacy for four more years in an office she has held for more than 20 years and in a community where she has been active for more than 35 years.

She was introduced by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, D-Menlo Park, who called Howard “the heartbeat of Redwood City … She holds all of the people of this community in her heart and in her hand.”

Howard held her announcement event at the well-appointed gardens of Gordon Manor, a long-established elder care facility with whom Howard has a long association.

In her own remarks, Howard promised to continue what she described as a record of addressing the toughest issues facing the city: Leading the “renaissance and revitalization of downtown Redwood City,” balancing a city budget facing severe challenges, maintaining and advancing the city’s economic and cultural diversity and championing community engagement and participation.

She specifically defended the changes to downtown Redwood City.

“Although these changes have appeared to come too quickly, the vison of what we enjoy today actually began about 20 years ago with a small group of us who saw Redwood City’s potential and moved this vision forward,” Howard said.

The result is “the wholesale change in how others view our city from … a sleepy place with not much to offer, to now, where we are the envy of the Peninsula.”

First elected in 1994, Howard served through 2009, took a break from the council, and was re-elected in 2013.

She sounded a cautionary note about the 2017 decision by the council to synch its election with this November’s statewide gubernatorial ballot.

In the early 1990s, the council moved to off-year, odd-year elections after a statewide ballot that featured 16 city council candidates. The top- vote-getters happened to be four of the five candidates listed first on the ballot, she said.

Since then, elections officials routinely alternate the order of the candidates on the ballot to avoid that kind of advantage, but Howard said the return to the statewide ballot means even harder work to avoid the same kind of outcome.

“I need your help in getting the word out to those voters who might otherwise cast their ballot by using their pen as a dart,” she said.

Between an early campaign walking piece and those in attendance, Howard is endorsed by a wide range of prominent community leaders, including Sheriff Carlos Bolanos, County Coroner Robert Foucrault, Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian, District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, council candidate Rick Hunter and former mayors Brent Britschgi, Dani Gasparini, Jeff Ira and Barbara Pierce, the latter also serving as Howard’s campaign manager.

Contact Mark Simon at mark.simon24@yahoo.com.

*The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Climate Online.

Photo: SamTrans