Nine hopefuls vie for open Assembly District 25 seat

Housing, education, traffic, among top issues

When three-term District 25 Assemblyman Kansen Chu broke the news he’d seek a Santa Clara County Supervisor position at the end of his current term, it caused a rush on his seat as a flood of nine candidates poured in.

The 25th Assembly District covers portions of North San Jose, Milpitas, Santa Clara, Fremont and Newark. Only two of the nine will make it past the primary March 3 to the general election.

Many of the candidates — most of them Democrats from the South Bay — cited the region’s biggest issues, from housing to traffic, as key issues they would like to tackle head-on.

Here’s a look at the candidates and what they say they’ll do if elected to Assembly District 25.

Bob Brunton, R, Fremont

Brunton, the lone Republican in the field, said he’s tired of being counted out early because of his party. “I don’t kiss up to people,” said Brunton, 62, who works in electronic sales, manufacturing and financial management. “What happened to voting for quality of ideas?”

Brunton wants to make school funding models across the state uniform and standardize the size of school districts so that very large districts would be broken up and very small ones would be combined with others.

He also wants kids to be able to attend schools near where parents work. Brunton, who served 12 years as an Ohlone College board member, said he’d make school administrator salaries partially tied to student outcomes and improvement. Finally, he would like to switch the state from a gas tax to a mileage tax.

Jim Canova, D, San Jose

Canova, 60, has served 27 years on the Santa Clara Unified School District board and 17 as an appointed member on the board of MetroEd, a career technical education program for six South Bay school districts.

He said programs like MetroEd, or Mission Valley Regional Occupation Program in Southern Alameda County, and others around the state are in a “funding crisis,” and he wants to restore direct funding from the state to the programs.

Canova said those state-of-theart learning centers keep kids excited about education and skillbuilding and are important for helping them grow into adults with earning power so they can live where they work.

“Do we expect these people to live in Lathrop and travel into Silicon Valley?” Canova, who works in the car detailing business, said.

Natasha Gupta, D, San Jose

Gupta, a political newcomer, said her priorities will be to get homeless people housed. She said she would create a tax system to ensure large companies with over $50 million in annual revenue chip in to a state pot as a funding source for housing people.

Gupta, 28, a technology manager at ServiceNow, also wants to leverage the knowledge of Google and other Silicon Valley companies that helped create the information networks used everywhere today to improve outreach to people who need services and support from the state.

She also wants to curb online hate speech by instilling rules on what kind of content companies based in the state can host on their servers as a way to legislate tech companies like Facebook and Twitter into more effectively banning hate speech and extremist views.

Anne Kepner, D, Santa Clara

Kepner, 51, is in her sixth

year serving on the West Valley-Mission Community College board, and education is her key platform focus. She wants to increase funding to school districts and put an emphasis on lowering class sizes, so “teachers can meet their students where they are,” and improve their educational experience.

Kepner, who attended community college, also wants to expand subsidies for students attending community college beyond tuition assistance to help cover the cost of living expenses such as rent.

“The cost of education is going to make it harder for working families to send their kids to school,” said Kepner, a consumer attorney and private mediator.

Alex Lee, D, San Jose

Lee, a former staffer for both state Sen. Henry Stern and Assembly member Evan Low, wants to require all new housing developments to include 25% affordable units at a minimum, and he wants to repeal the longstanding Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act to allow for greater expansion of rent control laws in cities.

Lee, 24, also wants to repeal Article 34 of the state Constitution to remove barriers to creating public affordable housing, which he wants the state to build to help provide homes for workforce members like teachers and firefighters.

Lee said “private development, run amok, has not provided the housing” numbers nor affordability the state needs to date. He said he’s young but not naive, and as a former staffer in both houses of state government, “I understand how the sausage is made” and will be an effective legislator.

Carmen Montano, D, Milpitas

Montano is in the middle of her second go-round as a councilwoman, having held a seat from 2012 to 2016 before running unsuccessfully for mayor in 2016. She was elected again to the council in November 2018 and is a former teacher and school board member.

She wants to reenact a bill similar to The MillerUnruh Basic Reading Act of the mid-1960s to ensure the state provides reading specialists to every student who needs assistance, to help all kids achieve gradelevel reading requirements by third grade and to improve learning outcomes.

Montano also wants high school students to be taught how to manage their money and early childhood development so they’ll be responsible parents.

She also wants to create some sort of tax break for people who consistently use public transit for commuting to and from work, as an incentive to get people out of their cars.

“I don’t know the specifics of how it would work, but I’d like to do the research. I would have the staff to help research that when I’m elected,” she said, noting the money likely would have to come from some transportation-related fund, like the state’s gas tax.

Anthony Phan, D, Milpitas

Phan, in the last year of his first term as a city councilman in Milpitas, wants to address the state’s housing crisis by repealing the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which he said is often used as a cudgel to kill housing developments. Phan said he’d want to replace the act with a more modern document based on climate change research.

Phan, 26, said his other priorities include improving sunshine laws around water infrastructure contracts at the state level.

“Of all industries that the government is required to work with, water is one of the areas that is the shadiest,” he said.

He wants to beef up conflict-of-interest reporting and public oversight when the state makes water pacts.

He also wants to increase spending on wildfire prevention and education.

Roman Reed, D, Fremont

Reed, 45, is a former 11year planning commissioner, eight-year parks and recreation commissioner in Fremont and a prominent proponent of stem cell research. He helped pass the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Act in 2000, which resulted in some paralyzed people regaining movement in parts of their bodies, he said.

His biggest priority is securing more funding for stem cell research, as the roughly $3 billion the state allocated through voter-approved Proposition 71 in 2004 since has dried up.

He also wants to help the state to encourage gas station owners to convert their facilities to rapid electric-vehicle charging banks and use recycled tires for road paving instead of asphalt.

Anna Song, D, Santa Clara

Song, an insurance agent, is the longest-serving current member of the Santa Clara County Office of Education board, currently in her 20th year. She believes education is “the great equalizer,” and she wants to be a legislator who champions increased funding for school districts.

Song, 51, wants to rewrite the state property tax laws that currently send “excess” tax money from county offices of education to help offset state trial court costs and instead ensure more of that money stays in the county where it was collected.

She said that her long tenure as a county school board member means she can be an effective legislator and bridge among the needs of teachers unions, administrators, charter school proponents and parents to promote the best education for kids in the state.