City Council: May the best women win

Over the last decade, when I’ve been paying closer attention to local politics, I haven’t seen as strong a field of candidates for Santa Cruz City Council as in the current race. Eight out of the nine women running would, I think, make fine council members, bringing different philosophies and different skills and experience but a shared policy-nerdy strategic intelligence and desire to do what’s good for the community. We get to vote for at most four, and it’s a tough call, but after speaking with the candidates, reading their propaganda and observing their performances in forums, I’ve formed some impressions and have some preferences.

For me, the two standout contenders are Sandy Brown and Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson. Brown’s four years of seasoning and experiential understanding of how city government works, her nuanced sense of her sometimes conflicting responsibilities as a progressive organizer and elected official, her pragmatism tempering and informing her desire for change, her academic studiousness — all are major assets in a council member. She has worked with city staff respectfully while standing with the citizens who elected her. I don’t know if or when she’s likely to serve as mayor, but she seems a natural leader of a council more informed by community values than the bureaucratic logic of professional managers.

In our meeting, Kalantari-Johnson struck me as grounded, calm, confident and sharp, and also curious, a good listener, with the humility of someone secure in her own accomplishments. Having worked with numerous nonprofits as a consultant and grant writer, her business skills and liberal social values are an excellent combination to bring to the council, and her personality promises a dignified diplomacy in policy negotiations. She’s Iranian by birth, immigrated with her parents as a child and grew up in Sacramento. Her endorsements from the Democratic political establishment raise questions about her independence from that machine, but she appears to be her own person who can think for herself and is unlikely to be manipulated or intimidated by party big shots.

My next two choices, Kayla Kumar and Maria Cadenas, nosed out the rest of the competition (progressive activist Kelsey Hill, Downtown Association operations director Sonja Brunner, pro-growth Driscoll scientist Elizabeth Conlon and establishment incumbent Martine Watkins) as much for their backgrounds and strong personalities as for their ideologies or policy chops — though they too are fiscally experienced, Kumar through her work with youth advocacy and Cadenas for hers with nonprofit finance. Kumar is the child of Indian immigrants who has an aura of practical if progressive toughmindedness, perhaps in part from her personal history in the foster care system. Cadenas is a Mexican immigrant who would be sensitive to that underrepresented community, is bilingual and bicultural (meaning she can consider things from more than one perspective, like Kalantari-Johnson) and would be the first Latina to sit on the council.

Though Kalantari-Johnson and Cadenas are on the record as favoring the mixed-use library-garage-housing project that I have long opposed, I believe the unsustainable fiscal realities of that ill-conceived building may yet alter the calculus of rational, open-minded council members enough to reverse its carefully orchestrated approval.

I’ll be voting for these four — Brown, Kalantari-Johnson, Kumar and Cadenas — because they represent a range of diverse viewpoints and liberal-progressive politics that suggest a capacity to work toward consensus more than zero-sum 4-3 (or 5-2) power splits. They’re all younger than 50 and full of enthusiasm for the chance to help chart a path and set policy for the difficult years the city faces navigating and hopefully recovering from the economic and social crises that preexisted the pandemic and have been greatly exacerbated by it. Though they won’t be able to reform, in four years, the entrenched culture and power structure of city government, I believe their combined skills and aptitudes may begin to balance the scales with a city staff accustomed to calling the shots.