With Karen Mitchoff’s upcoming retirement after 12 years on the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors, 5 candidates, together with 4 elected officers, are vying to fill the Central County seat.
The checklist for the June 7 election contains two Harmony Metropolis Council members, a BART director and the chief of a nonprofit youngsters’s well being initiative. And Ken Carlson, a retired Harmony Police sergeant who served within the division for 29 years and was elected 10 years in the past as Nice Hill’s first brazenly homosexual council member.
Carlson brings a realistic drive for social and prison justice reforms. As a former beat cop, he understands the challenges police face that may require split-second, life-or-death choices and the frustrations once they’re requested to be psychological well being employees with out enough coaching. However as a former inner affairs investigator, he additionally understands the necessity to maintain cops accountable.
Then there’s his invaluable elected-office expertise. As a Metropolis Council member, he has helped lead a municipality that’s fiscally accountable and environmentally aware. A metropolis that has revitalized its roads and is scheduled to open a brand new library this summer time.
Carlson brings the appropriate expertise mixture. Voters in District 4, together with Harmony, Clayton, Walnut Creek and Nice Hill, ought to choose him as their county supervisor.
Oversight wanted
The change on the board comes because the county desperately wants regulation enforcement oversight. Sheriff David Livingston has resisted the state’s new transparency legal guidelines and continues defending a deputy sentenced to 6 years in state jail after a jury convicted him of felony assault with a firearm for killing an unarmed motorist.
County supervisors have needed to approve greater than $9 million in lawsuit settlements stemming from that and one other fatality involving the identical deputy. For the sake of taxpayers and security of residents, county supervisors should strengthen oversight of the Sheriff’s Workplace.
However, in contrast to in most cities the place the police chief is in the end accountable to the Metropolis Council, the sheriff is individually elected and politically impartial. Happily, supervisors management the purse strings, and a new state regulation provides them authority to nominate an oversight board or an inspector common, with subpoena energy, to assist them supervise the sheriff’s conduct. Carlson helps an inspector common.
On different points, he backs renewal of the county’s City Restrict Line, aimed toward limiting suburban sprawl and preserving open house. The expansion boundary will expire in 2026 until voters lengthen it earlier than then. And, trying again on two years of pandemic and forward to a different doable COVID surge, Carlson helps vaccination verification necessities when instances are quickly multiplying.
Different 4 candidates
Not one of the different candidates matches Carlson’s expertise combine. BART Director Debora Allen, together with her robust budget-analysis expertise and expertise coping with the transit company’s police points, comes closest. However she doesn’t carry Carlson’s expertise at bridging political divides.
Roxanne Garza, senior director on the Wholesome Richmond Initiative non-profit, has served on county and regional advisory boards, particularly associated to environmental and social justice points, however has no elected-office expertise.
As for Harmony Metropolis Council members Carlyn Obringer and Edi Birsan, they are going to be finest identified for bungling the developer choice for the large Harmony Naval Weapons Station, the place housing and industrial growth is deliberate for an space half the scale of Nice Hill.
The developer first chosen bailed after the Metropolis Council, together with Obringer and Birsan, refused to protect the corporate from commerce unions’ extreme calls for for labor concessions.
Obringer later claimed she had “protected the group imaginative and prescient for a world-class mission on the Harmony Naval Weapons Station.” Actually, what she was defending was her construction-union supporters.
The Metropolis Council ended up finally unanimously selecting a gaggle led by the controversial Seeno household growth corporations. The Seeno corporations have a historical past of environmental and different authorized violations.
In 2002, they have been fined $1 million for destroying endangered red-legged frog habitat in Pittsburg. In 2008, they reached a $3 million settlement referring to grading at an Antioch growth. In 2018, Yolo County District Lawyer Jeff Reisig filed a civil go well with alleging that they had bulldozed Native American human stays in West Sacramento. A trial is scheduled for August.
In the meantime, the Nevada Gaming Management Board fined the Seenos, who owned casinos there, $775,000 for not alerting the company of environmental violations and different points. And, in 2016, the gross sales arm of the Seeno homebuilding empire accepted a responsible plea involving a mortgage fraud scheme and was ordered to pay fines and restitution of $11 million.
Obringer and Birsan botched the choice course of however appeased native labor unions that have been backing the Seeno group. That’s hardly the kind of impartial management wanted on the county.
Voters can do significantly better than Obringer or Birsan. Any of the opposite three candidates could be far superior. And, amongst these, Carlson is the standout.