Quick Take
Ami Chen Mills, an educator, writer and activist, aims to bring more community involvement to city government should she become Santa Cruz's next mayor. She aspires to be an educator in office, too, with the hope of getting more people excited about and engaged in politics.
Ami Chen Mills has been busy. Many Santa Cruz County residents might know her because of her community activism, which has recently been focused on keeping automated license plate readers (ALPRs) out of the community through her work with Get The Flock Out, which opposes the cameras and their vendor, Flock Safety. But she’s also a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches a class on resiliency; a writer; and host of the podcast “Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills,” although that program is currently on hiatus.
Chen Mills, having run for District 3 county supervisor in 2022, ultimately losing to current Santa Cruz City Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson and current District 3 County Supervisor Justin Cummings, said she returned to electoral politics to run for Santa Cruz mayor because she felt that opponent Ryan Coonerty had been essentially appointed by the local political establishment. She said she isn’t pleased with his approval of ALPRs, nor with his adviser role for San Jose mayor and gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan, who has received hefty donations from tech moguls.
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“I understand the connection between the feds [and ALPRs] and what they’re trying to do,” Chen Mills said. “We don’t need to be helping the feds right now, and in general, there are constitutional issues under any administration with this kind of technology.”
While Chen Mills has worked as an activist within the community, she said she doesn’t see herself solely as that. She’s also an elected member of the Democratic Central Committee and a nonprofit director, having co-founded the Center for Sustainable Change. For her, roles are temporary, and can be changed.
“If we had people elected who were already connecting the dots, and were more progressive than what most of these councilmembers appear to be, I think we wouldn’t have to have so much activism. We do have some councilmembers who are just phoning it in,” she said. “I’m not attached to roles and I’m not attached to ideologies. I think that ideologies can get in our way.”
That point is perhaps the overarching theme of Chen Mills’ bid for mayor – trying to get more people engaged in local politics. She envisions more town halls, and opportunities for the public to meet face-to-face with her and ask questions about the city council’s agenda on the Monday prior to meetings. She said that’s where her experience in journalism can come in handy, as she feels confident that she can explain complicated concepts to the public. She wants to make those Monday gatherings fun, too, perhaps including music and an “optional jam” for anyone interested. Chen Mills plays the ukulele, after all.
“I want to have a jam, and the reason is I want us to be able to come together as a community, regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum, and have some rapport,” she said, adding she’d also want to introduce town halls in each city council district as often as every month.
Chen Mills acknowledged the area’s housing crisis and said the city does need to build more, but thinks the conversation about housing could use more nuance.
She believes YIMBY (yes in my backyard) is too much of a single-issue movement, while the NIMBY (not in my backyard) perspective comes off as “unkind” when opposing development in general, even though she does believe people should have a say in construction proposed in their neighborhoods. She said Santa Cruz has to balance growth with available resources, such as water, and suggests an effort to study how many more people the city and university can bring in while maintaining that balance. She said if she had to cut housing out of the plans, the cuts would come from market-rate units.
“We cannot ignore the environment, the water issue and what the community wants just to build market-rate housing for people who don’t actually live here,” she said.
Chen Mills also wants to explore paths to homeownership. That could involve converting old buildings to condominiums, something City Councilmember Renee Golder floated during a Democratic Central Committee candidate forum in March. Chen Mills says she would also look for ways to incentivize subdividing parcels, allowing more building on those subdivided lots.
A vocal opponent of Flock Safety and the use of automated license plate readers, Chen Mills envisions going further than the city already has with the cancellation of its contract with Flock. She said she would support something like a data-broker ban or other restrictions to keep residents’ private information safe. She also expressed interest in an ordinance requiring local businesses to accept cash as well as cards, both to serve people without card payment options and to allow for more private purchases, particularly in places like parking lots, where personal and vehicle information can be exposed.
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Chen Mills said that to address the issue of homelessness, she would want to have more conversations and collaboration with members of the unhoused community. The dearth of services for unhoused people following the closures of the Mental Health Client Action Network, the Downtown Streets Team and Housing Matters’ day services concerns her, she said. She believes the programs need to return in some capacity. She said she’d like to see the services somewhere near downtown, but acknowledges that finding the right site would be a big hurdle.
“What downtown business owners need to understand is you can’t just lock people up for no reason. If they’re going to commit crimes, then we can put them into the justice system, but they need rehab in there, too,” she said. “We need to come up with a solution together and take some risks. If we don’t want people to hang out on the streets downtown, we need a place for them to hang out.”
Chen Mills wants to be a devoted official, with a focus on community-building and transparency with her constituents. That won’t make her any less busy, but should she win the Santa Cruz mayoral seat, she still wants to keep writing and teaching her UCSC class, which is one quarter each year.
“One of the big things that people say is that before authoritarianism came to their country, they wished they had built community,” she said.
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