A Westside elementary school principal and a UCSC student face off for Santa Cruz City Council’s District 6 seat

Elementary school principal Renee Golder, 48, and UC Santa Cruz senior Gabriella Noack, 24, are competing to win the Santa Cruz City Council District 6 seat, which covers part of Santa Cruz’s Westside and UC Santa Cruz. 

Incumbent Golder has been on the council for six years and assures voters that they “know what they’re gonna get” if she’s elected. She says she’s not a politician and unsuccessfully searched for the past two years for a replacement candidate to run this year. Despite her desire to not seek reelection, Golder feels called to do the job.  

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“I want to serve my community, and I consider myself to be a problem-solver more than a leader,” she said. “That’s why I want to do this work.” 

Newcomer Noack offers District 6 voters a young voice who holds several opposing viewpoints to Golder on substantive issues, such as Flock Safety cameras. Driven to run in part by her background of being raised by both her adopted parents of an upper-middle-class background, and by her biological family — who faced incarceration and lower incomes — Noack has firsthand experience of the disparate access to opportunities people have based on the household in which they were raised.  

“If we were born into a different family or into a different place that had different social systems, we wouldn’t ever get the opportunity to be that same person,” she said. “Taking care of our social systems and taking care of my community, it inherently feels like taking care of myself and taking care of my [biological] family.”

The next District 6 councilmember will serve a four-year term representing the district’s approximately 10,500 residents, who reside between the oceanfront homes on West Cliff Drive to the northern portions of UCSC student housing. Of that population, about 6,200 registered voters will be asked to select either Golder or Noack for the race, unlike the mayoral race, which all registered voters in the city will have on their ballots. 

Lookout sat down with the candidates to learn more about their views on development and Flock cameras, their backgrounds and why they’re running for the position. 

A problem-solver seeking reelection

Golder, a longtime teacher and now principal of about six years, has worked for 20 years at Bay View Elementary School. She has two adult children and her husband, Mike, is a firefighter. She says her priorities since her first days on the council have been public safety and homelessness. 

Golder leans more conservative than her counterparts. She has also been a supporter of greenlighting affordable housing construction and she was part of the majority vote to end a contract with controversial license-plate reader firm Flock. 

She said she’s open to approving a contract for a different vendor to replace Flock, saying she would first like to see what the options are and gauge whether her constituents support it.

“I feel like any decision I make, I have to go with the information that’s given to me at the time. It’s not about my personal opinion, when I’m up there on the dais,” she said. “I’m not going to say I would never do anything.” 

Golder said her feelings about city development are complicated. On the positive side, she is “so proud” of the city’s collaboration with Santa Cruz City Schools and UC Santa Cruz to get workforce housing up in her district. The school district broke ground on a workforce housing project earlier this year, and UCSC expects to open a workforce and student housing complex later this year. 

As for Golder’s concerns about development, she has been lobbying for more local control. California cities are under state mandates to develop thousands of new units by 2031 – including 3,736 for Santa Cruz. Because Santa Cruz is one of a handful of cities that are on track with building those units, Golder says, she and the city council have been lobbying the state to loosen its grip over development. For example, she said the city could have more control over parking and density bonuses. 

“We’d love to have a little more say in those things, and especially since we’re being proactive and good players,” she said. 

Golder said one of the issues that led her to seek a seat in the first place was the city’s response to homelessness. She said Santa Cruz is “cleaning up the mess” of what city leaders did decades ago: enabling large encampments. Golder says the poor health and safety and environmental damages in encampments make her angry, expressing dismay that anyone could be allowed to suffer like that. 

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The City of Santa Cruz, often with Santa Cruz police and nonprofit Housing Matters, carry out frequent encampment sweeps citing health and safety concerns. Critics have decried the sweeps, saying that the practice only exacerbates challenges for people experiencing homelessness. This year, advocates also have denounced the end of day services offered by Housing Matters. 

Golder said she understands the concerns and wants to provide care to people experiencing homelessness. But she thinks that should be addressed through a collaboration between nonprofits and county agencies. 

“What I would continue to do moving forward is continued collaboration with the county like we’ve been doing in order to most effectively spend the money that we have,” she said. “We’re a city, we don’t have a health and human services department. Any money that we’re putting out there for the homeless is coming straight from the general fund. It’s money that’s not being used to build a pool. It’s money that’s not being used for raises for SEIU.” 

Among her proudest accomplishments are her work on the council to repair West Cliff Drive after the 2023 storms, as well as her work to better align the city’s recreational offerings with interests at Santa Cruz schools at no cost to families. 

For example, previously some school-parent organizations fundraised to have a skateboard club to bring skateboards and ramps to the schools, but it wasn’t accessible to all kids. Now, through the city’s Parks & Recreation department, any child can, regardless of their income. 

Golder has endorsements from former and current city councilmembers including Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Ryan Coonerty and Cynthia Mathews. 

A hopeful youth 

What Noack lacks in years, she makes up for in life experience. Born in Baltimore, Noack was later raised in Sacramento by her adoptive parents. Growing up and taking trips along the coast, she fell in love with Santa Cruz’s culture and made it her goal to move here, study here and to raise a family here. 

After high school, she worked manual labor jobs — including stonemason, cook and ski lift operator — for two years to save money for college, which she started in 2022 at Cabrillo College. At Cabrillo, she was a volunteer peer tutor, and also a volunteer teacher in the Watsonville jail. 

She later transferred to UC Santa Cruz, where she’s double-majoring in philosophy and sociology and is planning to graduate this spring. Through a UCSC program, she’s co-facilitating a technology program at local nonprofit Barrios Unidos that aims to teach vocational technology skills to people who were previously incarcerated. 

In addition to Noack’s drive to ensure fair access to opportunities to all Santa Cruzans, Noack has another idea motivating her to run for city council. Since late last year, she has seen peers transformed by hope following the victories of young leaders – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Olympic gold medalist Alyssa Liu. 

For a long time, Noack saw peers express “disillusionment with politics,” but she said Mamdani changed that. Liu transformed ice skating, a sport with rigid standards, into something she enjoyed. 

“That’s really how I feel about politics,” she said. “We’ve seen corruption, and it’s made a lot of people, especially in my generation, ignore politics. But I think my generation can be the change, and I want to be a part of that.”

Noack’s positions on the city’s response to homelessness and Flock cameras diverge from Golder’s. Noack said she would not accept another vendor to replace Flock. 

“I think that privately contracting out highly sensitive information to private companies that make a living off of mass surveillance isn’t prioritizing community safety,” said Noack. “No, I would not support another private contract with a different private [automated license-plate reader] system.” 

Last month, Housing Matters ended its day services program, such as showers and mailboxes, leading dozens of people to scramble for other providers. Addressing the area’s dwindling options for people experiencing homelessness, Noack said the city should provide more services and continue collaborating with local nonprofits. 

“I think we need to take this as a lesson, as saying we need government-provided services that can’t just go away without an explanation at the blink of an eye,” she said. “I think that more progressive taxing initiatives are a good way to create this wealth.” 

She’s also against encampment sweeps: “You’re just taking sleeping bags away from people who desperately need them.”

Noack says expanding affordable housing in Santa Cruz is her No. 1 priority. She wants to add more workforce housing and thinks the city should focus on hiring local construction companies, to put dollars back into the pockets of local workers so they can afford to live here. 

“When we’re building in Santa Cruz, if we’re prioritizing local labor, if we’re prioritizing local companies,” she said. “That means that we’re incentivizing our local economy that naturally is going to funnel back into Santa Cruz better.” 

Another priority is for the city council to revisit the city’s district maps. For example, she said that the District 6 map splits up UC Santa Cruz, which means that the university students, who make up a large portion of the city’s population, don’t have a single district that represents them. 

“It’s a huge problem,” she said. “It’s really important that we think about accurate voter representation.” 

Outside of school and volunteering, Noack works two jobs: at Companion Bakeshop farmers market stand and modeling for portrait drawings. She said she has a waitressing job lined up starting this summer, after graduation.

Noack has endorsements from Santa Cruz for Bernie, Get The Flock Out and SEIU Local 521. 

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