My California Ballot, November 2024, Part 2
Local races
There are a lot of local races and I’ve been unexpectedly busy lately, so some of these will be getting a brief treatment.
Topline
State Senate, District 7 — Jesse Arreguín
State Assembly, District 18 — Mia Bonta
Alameda County District Attorney Recall — Yes
BART Board of Directors District 7 — Victor Flores
East Bay Municipal Utility District Board of Directors, Ward 5 — Jim Oddie
East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors, Ward 2 — Casey Farmer
Oakland Measure MM — Yes
Oakland Measure NN — Yes
Oakland Measure OO — Yes
Mayor of Oakland Recall — Yes
Oakland City Council At-large — Matoury > Danino > Wang > Brown > Tostado
Oakland City Attorney — Ryan Richardson
State Senate, District 7
Jesse Arreguín, currently the mayor of Berkeley, is running a mainstream Democratic campaign and is endorsed by Gavin Newsom, something called Equality California, and the evil dialysis people1. Jovanka Beckles is a progressive endorsed by Bernie Sanders and more unions than I can count. I’m sure you can imagine roughly the contours of the race from those descriptions.
For seats like this I’m a single issue voter on housing, and Arreguín says the right things about building more housing, with some half-hearted stuff about “common-sense rent control” at the end of the paragraph after he thinks I’ve stopped reading2. Beckles mostly says the wrong things, railing against corporate greed and praising rent control at the start of the paragraph, before I’ve gotten bored.
Vote Arreguín.
State Assembly, District 18
The mainstream media only wants you to know about Mia Bonta, who received 85% of the vote in the primary and whose husband is the Attorney General3. She seems fine.
Her opponent Andre Sandford claims to be “the first non-partisan or third-party candidate to ever win with opponents in the state of California,” and honestly I don’t have the heart to fact check him. Let’s print it on t-shirts.
This race deserves very little of my brainpower, but I do want to give Mr. Sanford a shoutout for being the only candidate I’ve ever seen whose platform includes both reparations and putting police in schools to protect against mass shootings.
Vote Bonta.
Alameda County DA Recall
Our DA is woke and soft-on-crime, so people want to recall her.
I won’t lie and say I’m a huge fan of progressive prosecutors qua progressive prosecutors, but in this case I think she merits being recalled regardless of your opinions on that. I can’t do any better than The Chronicle in laying out her numerous instances of corruption and incompetence; I’ll only add the numerous allegations that Price is racist against Asians4.
Vote YES.
BART Board of Directors, District 7
Two candidates, Victor Flores and Dana Lang, are running to replace Lateefah Simon, who’s going to be my next Congresswoman. They both seem fine and are cognizant of BART’s upcoming funding troubles. Flores has Simon’s endorsement and the Chronicle endorsed him too, good enough for me.
Vote Flores.
East Bay Utility District, Ward 5
The utility district deals with water and sewage; that sounds kind of important. There are three candidates.
John E. Lewis is a total unknown; I can barely find anything about him online5, though I can tell you that he’s allegedly endorsed by the Democratic Women's Club of Santa Cruz County6. Alex Spehr seems like a nice person with no particular expertise in utility district management, though she does have a nature-y vibe.
Jim Oddie says vaguely reasonable things about utilities and is endorsed by the guy whose retirement opened up this seat (and by the Attorney General [!!]7). I am willing to let endorsements guide me pretty strongly for nonpartisan, technical offices like this one.
Vote Oddie.
East Bay Regional Park District Board, Ward 2
The two big8 candidates are Casey Alyson Farmer and Lynda Deschambault. They tie on the crucial “unnecessary y in name” metric, but Farmer is endorsed by lots of impressive names and current Park District Board members. Deschambault is endorsed by the Green party and says stuff about Native land stewardship that make me think she’s a hippie (derogatory). My only hesitancy is that Farmer might convert our public parks into farmland, but upon review I don’t think it’s fair to hold her forefathers’ occupation against her.
Vote Farmer.
Oakland Measure MM
This raises the parcel tax9 to fight wildfires. I was planning to vote against this, but with hurricanes making national headlines I’ve decided now is a bad time to appear soft on natural disasters.
I don’t actually get to vote on this one, but to be nice to all of you10 I included it anyway.
Vote YES.
Oakland Measure NN
This raises the parcel tax to fund police and firefighters11; it also for some reason restructures our public safety commission, including cutting its size in half (from 9 people to 5). This is a citizen initiative and I’m not really sure where it came from but nobody seems to be opposed to it on the merits.
Vote YES.
Oakland Measure OO
This tightens some ethics rules and moderately increases funding/staffing for Oakland’s anti-corruption commission. We seem to be in a bull market for corruption, so that sounds like a good idea.
Vote YES.
Oakland Mayor Recall
Conservatives launched an effort to recall our mayor earlier this year. I didn’t really expect it to go anywhere, since it was based on some C-tier scandals I doubted anyone really cared about12. Through some combination of the scandals being more serious than I thought and a billionaire paying a lot of money to gather signatures, the recall did end up qualifying for the ballot.
Unrelatedly, a few days after the recall qualified for the ballot, the mayor’s house was raided by the FBI.
The first grievance on the recall website is that she missed the deadline to file for a bunch of free police money from the state. Her office also missed the deadline to file a statement saying why you shouldn’t recall her. I swear I’m not making this up.
Sheng Thao seems generally below replacement level, and the part where she’s probably going to get charged with a federal crime before her term is up just doesn’t sit right with me.
There is going to be a chaotic succession process if she does get recalled; the head of the city council would become acting mayor, but she’s running for another office and likely to win. The next head of the city council is unknown since most of the council seats are up for election. And then we’d ultimately have a special election to pick a permanent interim mayor until the term is up. Still, what can you do?
Vote YES.
Oakland City Council, At-Large
There are ten candidates for this race. Let’s start with the easy ones:
Fabian Robinson, despite his LinkedIn profile declaring him a frontrunner13, is not obviously actually running for this seat.
Mindy Pechenuk is a perennial candidate, both vertically (across many past elections) and horizontally (she narrowly lost in the primary for my State Assembly District). She’s a Republican and a LaRouche-ist, God help us.
Nancy Sidebotham is another perennial candidate who’s “lost track of how many times she’s run for office”. She seems occasionally coherent.
Selika Thomas is a hairstylist and crime victim whose only real-ish policy proposal is that she is very strongly in favor of Shotspotter.
That leaves us with six moderately serious candidates, of whom we can vote for five14. To avoid decision paralysis, for local races like this I am a single-issue voter of “build more market-rate housing” and then my tiebreakers are whatever I feel like. Let’s do a lightning round!
Christina “Tina” “Tina from the Town” Tostado is a fairly generic Democrat.
Charlene Wang is a fairly generic Democrat with some impressive policy chops, having previously worked at the EPA and Department of Transportation. I don’t think her policy positions are anything revolutionary but she does seem vastly overqualified for a City Council position and maybe we’d be lucky to have her. She’s also responsible for 90% of the spam texts I get about this race, which probably demonstrates conscientiousness.
Rowena Brown is endorsed by the Democratic Party and by Rebecca Kaplan, the current holder of this seat. She also seems fairly generic.
Leronne Armstrong was Oakland’s police commissioner until Sheng Thao fired him last year; an independent investigator apparently cleared him of any wrongdoing. I’m not really sure what his angle is, but I’m guessing he wanted to troll the mayor. He’s running as a fairly generic Democrat; the drama with the city predated my moving here and I haven’t kept up with it, but my local subreddit dislikes him.
Shawn Danino has the leftist lane all to himself in this race; he’s a union member and loves various kinds of justice and zero-displacement housing as long as it’s free-range LGBTQIA-inclusive yadda yadda etc.15 I wanted to dislike him, but I clicked the see more link of his policy page and he’s actually based and YIMBYpilled. Is he a progressive that doesn’t fit into the box I’d assigned for him? Is the main page pandering to people who aren’t me, and then secretly he actually wants to pander to me? I’m confused, but intrigued.
Kanitha Matoury is also based and YIMBYpilled and talks about streamlining new housing development, yay.
I like Matoury more than Danino of the explicitly YIMBY candidates, and after them I like Wang the most of the others. I’m a bit suspicious of Armstrong, and Brown has a lot of endorsements, so I’ll use that as a tiebreaker for her over Tostado.
Vote Matoury > Danino > Wang > Brown > Tostado.
Oakland City Attorney
The city attorney is the city’s attorney16.
There’s some medium spicy drama here. The two contenders are the boring careerist Ryan Richardson, who’s served under the retiring city attorney, and the bold outsider Brenda Harbin-Forte, a retired judge who led the Thao recall effort. This is nominally a nonpartisan race, though I think you can guess which one is a Democrat and which one is a Republican.
This is a pretty wonky position that I don’t have strong feelings about coming in, but I get the sense that Harbin-Forte’s previous antagonism towards the city might make it tough for her to do the job. Mercury News tentatively endorses Richardson too.
Vote Richardson.
There’s a lot of deep lore in the California Ballot Cinematic Universe; don’t worry if you miss some of the references.
If he’s the mayor of Berkeley and so good on housing, why is housing still expensive? Idunno, but he claims to have “led the city through its largest housing construction boom in decades”, so maybe housing is cheap now and I just haven’t noticed.
Wait a minute, why doesn’t she just win the whole thing if she gets 51% in the primary? I hate this.
There seem to be a lot of accusers, and I’m predisposed to believe this kind of claim when launched against progressives. I don’t claim to be unbiased though and YMMV.
Having the same name as a civil rights icon probably doesn’t help.
The closest point in Santa Cruz County to Oakland is about 100 miles away, and you have to go through the Bay.
Less impressive than it sounds; the AG used to represent Oakland in the state legislature and Oddie was at some point a staffer for him. Still, though!
Can you call a candidate for East Bay Regional Park District Director “big”?
Like a property tax, but different and stupider because property taxes are illegal in California.
I researched Measure MM before I got my ballot and discovered I don’t get to vote on it.
Isn’t Measure MM about fighting wildfires? Are the firefighters just for regular fires?
You can see for yourself what her opponents view as her most serious shortcomings.
Yes, seriously.
Everyone else seems to be recommending a ranking of three candidates, but I’m looking at my ballot as I type this and it says I can vote for up to five, so I’m going to rank five.
Maybe this is all sincere, but I react very negatively to this kind of posturing. My experience is people who talk like this about housing affordability don’t really believe in building new housing, so they just toss out lots of ways the new housing has to be totally perfect as a smokescreen (and then never build any).
I’m not going to provide a citation for this, but it is true.