Quick Take
With final results now in, Gerry Jensen and Melinda Orbach have won the race for two open Capitola City Council seats, with 34% and 29% of the vote, respectively.
Tuesday, Dec. 3, 5:45 p.m. — Gerry Jensen and Melinda Orbach have won the race for two open Capitola City Council seats, with 34% and 29% of the vote, respectively. Incumbent Margaux Morgan ended in third place with 19%, more than 700 votes behind Orbach. Enrique Dolmo Jr. was in fourth place with around 18%.
County Clerk Tricia Webber’s office said Tuesday’s update was the last and the results are now official. All totaled 136,505 votes have been tallied countywide.
At a watch party Election Night, Nov. 5, at Britannia Arms in Capitola Village, Orbach, a political newcomer, said she was thrilled with the early returns: “It’s surreal. All day, I’ve tried to remain calm, knowing that I’ve done everything I possibly can to reach the community and tell them who I am.”
Four candidates were running for the two open seats on the five-member Capitola City Council. Former mayor Morgan was the race’s only incumbent seeking reelection. Her tenure as mayor coincided with the ruinous storms that crippled Capitola Village in the winter of 2022-23, which included the destruction of the Capitola Wharf.
Orbach, 40, is a nurse practitioner at Sutter Health. Jensen, the owner of a development company, currently serves on Capitola’s planning commission. He fell short of election to the council in 2022 by 24 votes. Dolmo, 49, works as campus supervisor and athletic director at New Brighton Middle School. He also lost out on election to the council in 2022, by 55 votes.
The newly elected Capitola City Council will be called on to face a crisis in growth as the city deals with a state mandate to build more than 1,330 housing units by 2031, a little more than half of them to be reserved for low-income tenants and homebuyers. The push to build more housing comes on top of learning the lessons of 2023 and implementing any plans to mitigate damage from future winter storms.
During the campaign, the debate over how to add new housing focused on ways to add more mixed-use projects in the city by redeveloping the 41st Avenue corridor and restarting stalled discussions over the Capitola Mall. The mall’s owner, San Francisco-based Merlone Geier Partners, most recently submitted a plan in 2019 for a redevelopment that included 637 homes, but withdrew it during the pandemic. The city and the mall’s owner have been unable to come to an agreement since then, though a consultant recently presented the Capitola City Council with a study on ways the city could help spur redevelopment of the mall.
After coming up short in his 2022 bid for city council, Jensen jumped into civic life in 2023, becoming chair of the Capitola Wharf Resiliency Project and helping to raise the $425,000 to put toward the wharf’s rebuild. He focused his campaign on increasing community participation in the city’s decision making, making progress on redeveloping the Capitola Mall to add to the city’s housing construction and how to protect the city’s coastal Cliff Drive from erosion and sea-level rise.
Married to Matthew Orbach, principal planner for the city of Watsonville, Orbach told Lookout during the campaign that she wanted to bring a 41st Avenue corridor voice to a council she saw as dominated by east side/Capitola Village interests. That could include more discussion around how to revamp the busy corridor to add more mixed-use development and transit.
The lone incumbent in the race, Morgan had served on city council since 2020. In an interview with the Aptos Times, the 37-year-old personal trainer called the state’s housing mandates “extremely daunting,” and said she was “very interested” in what a tax on vacant homes could do for the city.
Dolmo placed youth at the forefront of his campaign platform but also focused on the moving redevelopment of the Capitola Mall forward.
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