Under the specter of housing growth and coastal resilience, four candidates face off for Capitola City Council

Over the next seven years, the state of California will force Capitola to accomplish something it has long struggled with: growth.

Since the turn of the century, Capitola’s population has declined by about 170 people, to 9,838 in 2020. Today, a typical home in this densely built beach town runs around $1.2 million. Over the past nine years, the city has permitted only seven low-income housing units. 

The state says this will need to change, and has mandated Capitola add more than 1,330 new housing units by 2031. Since 712 of those units will need to be reserved for low-income tenants and home buyers, subsidized housing production in the city will need to increase by a factor of 100. 

Yet, housing is but one patch in the quilt of Capitola’s pressing needs. The city recently celebrated the unveiling of its reconstructed wharf, torn asunder by the barrage of storms that hit the region in the winter of 2023. Low-lying Capitola Village, the city’s center of tourism and commerce, remains vulnerable to floods and rising sea levels, as do its crumbling coastal cliffs. As far as the existential risks of climate change go, Capitola sits on the front lines. 

The specter of growth and change have motivated four candidates to step up and run for two open Capitola City Council seats this fall. Incumbent Margaux Morgan (formerly Margaux Keiser) is seeking re-election to a second term. Outgoing Mayor Kristen Brown will term out at the end of this year, and is locked in a runoff campaign for county’s District 2 supervisor seat.  Other candidates include construction manager Gerry Jensen and local school supervisor Enrique Dolmo Jr., who lost narrowly in the 2022 city council race, and political newcomer Melinda Orbach, a nurse practitioner. 

Enrique Dolmo Jr.

Dolmo, 49, lost his bid for Capitola City Council by 55 votes in 2022. The athletic director and campus supervisor at New Brighton Middle School also serves as chapter president of the California School Employees Association union Chapter 388. 

“I try to never have anything negative to say about anybody,” Dolmo said. “The current city council needs a breath of fresh air. I don’t have big donors, I don’t have big endorsements. I’m not being told what to say by anybody.” 

Dolmo has placed youth at the forefront of his campaign platform. Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in San Jose by a single, working mother, Dolmo said ensuring the next generation is taken care of is a paramount responsibility of people in power. A former banker for JPMorganChase, he said he quit his job and a considerably higher salary to come work at NBMS 10 years ago so he could be closer to his family of five. 

“Not all of these students fit in the box of, ‘Oh, my parents are picking me up after school, my parents are taking me to soccer practice,’” Dolmo said. “Not every family is like that, and that’s where someone like me comes in, to help kids that don’t fit in and give them confidence.” 

However, Dolmo is also serious about moving redevelopment of the Capitola Mall forward. He said it offers the city the best opportunity to boost its housing supply without redeveloping neighborhoods. 

“We’ve been talking about the mall forever,” Dolmo said. “On my first day in office, I would contact the owners of the mall. We need to start communicating. I know the current city council has tried, kudos to them for trying, but it’s just sitting there. I would set up meetings, and we need to figure out what we need to do. The mall has taken a back-burner space.” 

Dolmo also brought up the Coastal Rail Trail project, which would use the rail tracks across the Capitola Trestle, which he called “one of the jewels” of the community. However, he said the trestle, as it stands today, is increasingly unsafe. He wants to see a temporary solution to reinforce the structure and make it accessible to pedestrians while the rail project is figured out. 

“Before a [tragedy] happens, why don’t we fix it up and make it safe?” Dolmo said. “Let’s put something temporary over the tracks. Instead of taking the tracks out, fix the sides up and give it a pop of color.” 

Gerry Jensen

After falling short in his 2022 city council bid by 24 votes, Jensen soon found himself involved in local policy anyway. Newly minted City Councilmember Joe Clarke appointed Jensen, owner of development company Premiere Solutions Group, to the city’s planning commission. Then, the 2023 winter storms hit. 

“Some people retreat after a loss,” Jensen said. “Suddenly Capitola needs a community organizer to come forward and spearhead the cleanups and put a wharf enhancement team together.” Jensen stepped up and became chair of the Capitola Wharf Resiliency Project and helped to raise the $425,000 the city used on rebuilding one of its crown jewels.  

Less than two years later, he said his “love for the community” is motivating for him to take the support he has and try again at a city council seat. He’s been endorsed by the Capitola Business Improvement Association, District 2 Supervisor Zach Friend and outgoing Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown. He said he views the job not as politics but “as a civic duty.” 

Jensen sees community organizing as the first step toward progress. “The first thing I’m going to do,” Jensen said regarding the city’s housing mandates, “is make sure the community is 100% involved.” Only 1% of the residents participated in the planning process for those 1,336 state-mandated housing units, and Jensen said he’d want to reengage community members to better understand what they want. 

“We have to figure out the mall, it can really help us with housing,” Jensen said. “It’s an opportunity to provide neighbors a lot of opportunity and housing. We need to market ourselves, but also need to make sure the mall’s owners feel supported and that project is viable.” 

Jensen also brought up Cliff Drive, the city’s scenic, coastal stretch of road increasingly threatened by erosion and sea-level rise. He said there are “big decisions” ahead with that road, including whether to keep it two lanes or shrink it to one. However, he said the community will ultimately decide how it is handled. 

“A community-centered voice is what’s missing on the city council right now,” Jensen said. “Some councilmembers are advocates at the state level, some have a law enforcement perspective. I hope to enhance the voice of the community. People are shocked about where we are.” 

Melinda Orbach 

Orbach, 40, who has spent the past eight years as a nurse practitioner with Sutter Health, sees city leadership as having an east side/Capitola Village geography bias, and wants to inject a west side/41st Avenue view into the council’s decisions. 

“The west side is going to be very impacted by the new housing and we need to be represented,” Orbach said. “The city has prioritized the Capitola Village over the 41st Avenue corridor. The issues on this side of town are unique and people have different lived experiences over here.” 

Melinda is married to Matthew Orbach, principal planner for the city of Watsonville, which she said has given her an expert’s view into urban planning and zoning. She doesn’t buy the concerns of some residents that Capitola is “already built out” and cannot fit the state mandated 1,336 housing units. 

“There is space to build,” Orbach said. “Capitola needs to have a 41st Avenue-specific plan. All along the 41st Avenue corridor, I see potential for mixed-use buildings. We can couple that with a new Metro station, like in downtown Santa Cruz and downtown Watsonville, and we can have reliable transportation. The city needs to be proactive about filling vacancies along the corridor as a way to boost revenue. We can’t keep passing a new tax measure every few years to pay our staff.” 

Orbach also brought up the city’s debate over coastal resiliency. She said the winter storms “were a missed opportunity” for the city to update its zoning code and allow businesses in Capitola Village to raise their first floors to above flood-zone levels.

“We should have explored changes to zoning so we could rebuild in a more resilient way,” Orbach said. “We need to reimagine what we can do so we can sustain future storms.”

However, she said a managed-retreat strategy would not be publicly acceptable, and she wants to respect “the vote of the people.” 

“Mother Nature always wins in the end, but I don’t know how many years reinforcing the coastline will give us. I can’t predict the intensity of future storms,” Orbach said. 

Margaux Morgan 

Morgan, the former mayor of Capitola and lone incumbent in the race, is the only candidate who did not return Lookout’s multiple requests for an interview. As of Tuesday, she had still not yet filed her campaign finance forms, either, which were due last Thursday, Sept. 26. So, we had to lean on our own reporting over the past few years, other media, and her campaign website.

Morgan’s tenure on the city council began with a milestone: Her 2020 election secured a three-woman majority on the five-member council, the first in Capitola’s 71-year history. One month after the city council voted to hand her the mayor’s gavel on Dec. 8, 2022, she was issuing mandatory evacuation warnings for Capitola as a series of atmospheric rivers bore down on the region. The start of her one-year stint as mayor put her next to President Joe Biden, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other political dignitaries who visited Capitola following the winter 2023 disasters. 

The rest of her tenure dealt largely with storm recovery and moving forward with a reconstruction of the Capitola Wharf. Toward the end, she was tested again when the Capitola City Council was hit with an organized disruption by anonymous “Zoom bombers” who called in to spew racial and homophobic epithets. After a brief recess, the mayor and city council returned to the city council dais. 

“We here in Capitola are made up of a wide array of people, all walks of life, male, female, queer, Black, white, Hispanic,” Morgan said then. “Some of these comments that have been said tonight are not indicative of our beliefs here.” 

On her campaign website, the 37-year-old personal trainer lists “putting the community first, the Capitola Mall re-build [sic] and health and environment” as the pillars of her 2024 campaign. Morgan said she wants to ensure that there is room in Capitola “for those here that can benefit our community and society.” 

In a recent Q&A with the Aptos Times, Morgan called the state’s housing mandates “extremely daunting,” saying “if development ever does arise, the city and our planning commission would be working closely with those developers to ensure proper implementation of such development.” Morgan also said it was “unfortunate” that the city and the Capitola Mall’s owner, San Francisco-based Merlone Geier Partners, have been unable to agree on a plan for the mall’s redevelopment.   

Morgan said the city should also look toward its existing, vacant homes and make them work for the city, telling the Aptos Times she was “very interested to see what [a second homes tax] could do for our city.” 

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