Berkeley Elected Officials - Nov 2024

Here are my recommendations for Berkeley elected officials (city council, school board, rent board)

Berkeley Elected Officials:

Mayor: Adena Ishii

City Council District 2: Terry Taplin

City Council, District 3: Matthews #1, Bartlett #2

City Council, District 5: No endorsement

City Council, District 6: Andy Katz #1, Brent Blackaby #2

School Board: Corn, Vasudeo

Rent Stabilization Board: Kelley, Twu

See other posts for Berkeley ballot measures, other elected officials (from President to local districts + Alameda County), and the state propositions (coming soon!).

For details, read on...

Mayor: Adena Ishii 

I’m voting for Adena Ishii . Instead of writing my own explanation, I’m going to quote an endorsement by someone I respect deeply and who watches Berkeley city decision-making more closely than I do (and then add a few thoughts of my own at the bottom). Victoria Eisen wrote (back in early September):

I am excited to announce my endorsement of Adena Ishii for Mayor of Berkeley. I support Adena for several reasons:

- Relevant experience: Besides being another vote on the City Council, the Mayor's job is largely about looking ahead, effective facilitation and leading productive, civil meetings.  Although Adena has not held public office before, her experience as a community leader (she was the youngest President of the local League of Women Voters), her role as a Berkeley commissioner and her life history all mean that she is the candidate with the best chance to inspire our Council to treat each other with respect and pull together to make Berkeley better!

- Civility: Adena is a kind person, whose goal really is to just make Berkeley a great place to live for all types of residents.  She learned politics the nonpartisan way at the League of Women Voters and has proven this critical trait time and time again in all of the arenas in which she has participated and led.  The same cannot be said of her opponents.  I cannot say enough about how important this is to a functioning city government.

- Housing: I believe that finding ways to build new housing at all income levels throughout our town is Berkeley's most important challenge today.  Adena shares this sentiment (adding homelessness, public safety and infrastructure to the list).  The other candidates profess to support housing, but have managed to find ways to oppose specific projects at most every opportunity.

- Respect for staff: This might sound like a no-brainer, especially since Berkeley's form of government limits the Mayor's and Council members' contact with staff to the City Manager; however, the other candidates (one in particular) have repeatedly shown disdain for staff's advice, disrespect for their analyses and sufficient disregard for the City's decision-making process to have prompted several recent staff departures.  Each time this happens, Berkeley loses institutional knowledge and the ability to move projects forward, at a substantial financial cost to the City of having to repeat public processes, train new staff and lose grant opportunities.

- Stick-to-it-iveness: Adena is not a quitter.  Not in life (read her BIO) or in finding ways to reach productive compromise.  The idea of quitting an elected position because the process is not going the way she wants would not occur to Adena; however, that's exactly what one of her opponents did just this past January.

Through Berkeley's great campaign finance process, each voter (not each household) can donate up to $60, which is matched six times by public matching funds.  That means your $60 donation adds up to $420 for Adena's campaign!  If there are two voters in your household, your $120 means $840.  This is real money in a local campaign.  Please join David and me in supporting her by DONATING to her campaign. 

And one more plea: if you support Adena, rank her #1 when you vote. If, like me, you do not have a second choice do not enter any candidate for #2 or #3. 

Victoria might be a bit more polite than me, so let me elaborate on why I am *not* voting for the other two major candidates: 

I first heard about Sophie Hahn in 2008, when she promoted a “low-density, scaled-back” vision for downtown Berkeley. She now knows she has to say she supports affordable housing, but her actions are the opposite: “She has lobbied hard to obstruct and delay a Council vote to make missing middle housing easier. Hahn opposed numerous projects, one on the remarkable grounds that people couldn’t get intimate in small apartments (I’d have thought if anything, it would be the opposite).” (per Nathan Landau)

Hahn is also the councilmember Victoria refers to who has increased the vitriol on council, driven staff away, and who refused public financing so she could take lots of corporate donations. 

I can’t vote for Kate Harrison because she literally quit on the city. In the middle of a council meeting in January of this year, she just quit. That forced the city to run a special election (low turnout, high cost/vote, terrible for democracy). And then she had the audacity to stay in the mayoral race. Plus, as my friend Nathan Landau reports, in “a 2017 candidates’ forum Harrison said that she did not support tall buildings at BART stations and boasted about having been the only council member who didn’t support increasing the city’s housing capacity.” Like Hahn, she says she supports affordable housing, but she often finds ways to oppose it. 

Naomi Pete and Logan Bowie are not serious candidates. 

City Council District 2: Terry Taplin

I’m voting for incumbent Terry Taplin again. Terry was my #1 choice in 2020. He cites an impressive list of accomplishments in his first term as councilmember across a variety of topics, and I agree with his priorities for a second term. He has endorsements from a majority of the City Council (showing they believe they can work with him), the Alameda County Labor Council, Sierra Club, and more. Terry is particularly strong on promoting more places for people to live, particularly affordable housing, which I continue to feel is the most important issue facing Berkeley. 

Challenger Jenny Guarino is a graduate student at UC Berkeley’s policy school, where she’s a steward in the student employees’ union. Good for her -- I was part of that effort as a graduate student too, and I applaud her for the work there. Berkeleyside says she tried to run for the Rent Board slate but wasn’t selected. Looking through Guarino’s campaign website, she seems like a nice-enough person, and lists issues that I mostly agree with. 

But as the challenger, she has to make a case for why she’s better, and I just don’t think she has. I watched all of a candidate forum hosted by Walk-Bike Berkeley and Berkeley Neighbors for Housing & Climate Action. On most questions, there wasn’t much daylight between Guarino’s answers and Taplin’s; in one, she specifically said she thought Taplin had the right approach. Taplin spoke more knowledgeably about details of existing policy, including the "missing middle housing" that pretty much everyone agrees we should do more of. Guarino sounded like she'd done her homework and on those topics I didn't hear anything objectionable to my values. But I also didn’t hear anything to convince me she'd do a better job. 

Her relatively thin list of endorsements among elected officials suggest that others aren’t impressed enough by her either. She’s got support from several progressive organizations and a few Rent Board Commissioners, but no other elected officials. I don’t want to be represented by a candidate who can’t win the support of any of her prospective colleagues. 

City Council, District 3: Matthews #1, Bartlett #2

This is an interesting race. I’m intrigued by all three candidates. 

From my position outside the district, I’m loyal to the person I’ve worked with directly: Deborah Matthews, who I met in 2019 through the conversations about redeveloping the Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations. I saw her be an effective advocate for affordable housing in South Berkeley, where she’s been involved for over 20 years. I saw the benefits of her long  experience within city decision-making processes (Planning Commission, Zoning Adjustments Board, Housing Advisory Commission), on several nonprofit boards (YMCA, Cooperative Federal Credit Union, EAH Housing). She co-founded South Berkeley Now!, an organization advocating for housing affordability and a more accessible BART plan. And she has helped shepherd a bunch of good developments in south and west Berkeley. Her priorities are public safety, affordable housing, and safe streets. Despite being a challenger, she’s won endorsements from two existing and three former councilmembers. 

But there’s the rub -- she’s challenging two-term incumbent Ben Bartlett. So in some ways this looks like a re-run of the 2020 race, where I endorsed Matthews but then-incumbent Bartlett won easily. In the meantime, Bartlett ran for county supervisor this past March, where he came in 3rd and probably increased his name recognition along the way. My housing friends say Bartlett hasn't done as much as he coulda/shoulda in eight years on the council, and he's taking credit for everything that has happened in the city during his terms, regardless of what role he played in it. As in 2020, Bartlett again has endorsements from every sitting councilmember plus a bunch of other groups. 

The other challenger is John “Chip” Moore, chair of the Police Accountability Board and member of the Planning Commission. He lists his priorities as police accountability and affordable housing. His endorsements include one councilmember (Lunaparra), Friends of Adeline, and a bunch of rent board commissioners. 

Bartlett will probably win again, but it’ll be interesting to see how the vote comes out. 

City Council, District 5: No endorsement

Shoshana O’Keefe will win this race. I’m hopeful that she’ll be a friendlier and more reasonable D5 councilmember than the incumbent over the past eight years (Hahn). O’Keefe says her top issue is housing and expresses support for more housing along commercial corridors. She shows a good understanding of how land assembly works, earned through 11 years on the Zoning Adjustments Board. That’s good. But she also says fire risk trumps the need for people to have places to live, so she won’t support more density in the hills. At least she acknowledged the cognitive dissonance and seemed to be a little embarrassed to take that position in the BNHCA/WBB forum I saw. 

Similarly, she says she wants to support pedestrian and bicycle safety, but she says she only wants to support the bike boulevards while withdrawing support for bike infrastructure on major streets. She supports the paving-focused Measure EE over the street safety-focused Measure FF. In a candidate forum that asked about why Berkeley is driving away its transportation staff, she talked about the importance of good carpeting and IT while failing to acknowledge or criticize the destructive ways some councilmembers have driven out qualified staff. Here’s the link for the BNHCA/WBB forum (D5 conversation starts at 34:29). 

Her endorsements include 7 of the 9 councilmembers, plus a bunch of groups. So she’s highly likely to win. She gets bonus points for being a high school math and computer science teacher (we 💜 math teachers in the Seashore-Hobson household). I hope she’ll at least be a friendlier and more reasonable voice on housing, homelessness, and transportation safety than Hahn has been. And maybe she’ll evolve on the council, as Arreguin did. 

I’d like to be able to support her opponent Todd Andrew, running for the second time for this seat. I agree with him much more on the issues. He supports FF and speaks well (as a father and cyclist who lives near the corner of Hopkins & Monterey) to the needs for transportation safety. He recognizes the need to increase density in appropriate ways within fire risk areas, recognizing that it also needs to be subject to the evacuation study underway. He recognizes that councilmembers need to set policy and let the city manager and staff implement, rather than driving competent staff away through micro-management. But he has few endorsements: one former councilmember, two planning commissioners, and a few individuals. If I lived in D5, I’d probably vote for him, but he doesn’t really seem to have a competitive campaign. 

Third candidate Nilang Gor isn’t a realistic candidate either. Cute, and I appreciate that he names Cory Booker and Mahatma Gandhi as influences, but … he’s just a protest vote. 

City Council, District 6: Andy Katz #1, Brent Blackaby #2

This is a tough call for me, as there are two good candidates (I wish one of them lived in District 5!). 

I’ve known and respected Andy Katz for 20+ years. He was a very responsible chair of Sierra Club California, a long-serving EBMUD Director, and he has worked as a workers’ rights attorney and as an advocate for a statewide clean air group. He has impeccable credentials, starting when he was 21 and got himself appointed to Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board. He’d be a great councilmember. When I heard he was running, I donated to his campaign immediately. He's endorsed by Arreguin, Hahn, Tregub, Bartlett + Taplin, plus many higher-level electeds and community groups. 

I don’t know Brent Blackaby, but people I respect are very impressed by him as well. Nathan Landau (who endorses Katz) says Blackaby’s “positions are stronger on housing and transportation.” He's endorsed by my favorite councilmember (Kesarwani), plus Wengraf, Humbert, Bartlett + Taplin, as well as others I respect (Droste), plus housing-focused East Bay for Everyone. 

If I lived in D6, I think I’d vote Katz #1, Blackaby #2. But either one will be a good councilmember. If you live in D6, I really encourage you to at least look through their websites:

• Andy Katz
• Brent Blackaby

School Board: Corn, Vasudeo

Two seats are up for election. Two incumbents are running, but I’m voting for the only serious challenger, Jen Corn. 

Jen Corn knows Berkeley schools well: she worked in them for 13 years (as teacher + principal), had children in them for longer, and she now works as Director of School Improvement in Oakland’s schools. She has impeccable -- beyond impeccable -- credentials as an educator. She’s also the only educator in this year’s School Board race. Kim (my spouse, math professor at SFSU who trains MANY future teachers) has known and been impressed by Jen professionally for over 20 years. She cites three priorities: closing achievement gaps, ensuring schools are inclusive, and recruiting/retaining high-quality teachers and staff. 

She’s endorsed by the teachers’ + classified employees’ unions, 3 School Board directors (Chang, Shanoski, and fellow candidate Vasudeo!), 8 councilmembers, and many others. If you’re on my email list, you probably saw that Kim and I threw a house party for Jen; Kim also went canvassing for her. If you cast only one vote for School Board, please make sure it is for Corn. 

Ana Vasudeo is the incumbent School Board President (meaning she’s respected by her peers). She’s a city planner by training, and she helps run San Francisco’s Safe Routes to Schools program. She prioritizes fiscal transparency and accountability, maintaining safe schools, closing the achievement gap, and safe/sustainable transportation for students and educators. Vasudeo is also endorsed by the teachers’ + classified employees’ unions, two School Board members (Chang & Shanoski), 4 councilmembers, and many others. I recommend you cast a second vote for Vasudeo. 

The third major candidate is incumbent Laura Babitt. It is very unusual for an incumbent director to not be endorsed by the teachers’ union, but Babitt isn’t. That might be just because Corn is such a terrific candidate, but it might be because Babitt pushed to re-open schools before there was a COVID vaccine, something that would’ve put educators, children, and families at risk. Babitt is endorsed by one School Board member (Brown), 8 councilmembers, and the Jewish Coalition of Berkeley, which sees her as the Boardmember who responded best to last year’s incidents of antisemitism in Berkeley schools. 

I don’t know how many times Norma Harrison has run for school board, but she always says the same things. Abdur Sikder is a more recent perennial candidate; he ran in 2018 and for Congress against Barbara Lee in 2022. 

Rent Stabilization Board: Kelley & Twu

Four seats are up for election, and this time there are only 6 candidates.  

I appreciate Berkeley's strong rent control laws and tenant protections, managed by the Rent Stablization Board (RSB). In my 25+ years here, I began by voting for the pro-tenant slate, developed every two years in a tenants' convention. In 2012, our local League of Women Voters was concerned about improprieties and unprofessional administration and urged reforms. Now I look for candidates who take the governance role seriously and who have experience navigating Berkeley's city structure. Sometimes that includes some or all of the tenant's slate (this year called the “Right to Housing” slate). 

This year, there are 6 candidates, and you can vote for up to 4. I know I'll vote for two folks, and I'm not sure if I'll use my other two votes:

1. Andy Kelley, an incumbent I endorsed in 2020 when he ran as part of the tenants' slate, is Chair of the Rent Board’s Policy Committee (so he’s respected by his colleagues). He also co-Chaired Berkeley’s Measure O+P campaigns to raise more funds for affordable housing, has done lots in the city. This year, he's not part of the tenants’ slate but he remains someone who supports tenants' rights. Plus he’s endorsed by 6 councilmembers, more than anyone else running for RSB.
2. Alfred Twu, who I met and learned to respect through the North Berkeley BART planning process. They get the nuance, promotes production as well as protection and preservation. They're endorsed by 4 councilmembers and several others I respect.

For more info, including a decent description of what the Rent Board does, see this Berkeleyside article.