CZU convinced Christopher Bradford that county government needs fundamental change

Candidates running for public office like to deploy the term “fighter” to describe themselves. But for Christopher Bradford, now engaged in an underdog campaign for District 5 Santa Cruz County supervisor, that term strikes a deeper tone than with most. 

Bradford, 45, holds a black belt in karate. But he learned years ago as a young man that such an achievement is not the argument-ender it might sound like.

Back when he was in his mid-20s, Bradford was challenged in a karate sparring match by an unlikely opponent. The other guy, named John, was several years older and more than 100 pounds lighter. Bradford, with the heedless cockiness of youth, figured he’d quickly dominate the challenger without even breaking a sweat, and that’s exactly what happened.

But then John suggested the two men spar again, only this time they use grappling moves not part of the karate discipline. Bradford agreed, convinced he’d only continue the beating on this reckless masochist. Instead, John made a quick strike in the throat and, in an instant, had the bigger man pinned to the mat.

“Now, I’m bigger, stronger, faster,” said Bradford, “but suddenly, he had me down and there was nothing I could have done. Nothing. I had never been vulnerable like that, where a man who was much less powerful than I was could have killed me. I knew right then, I never wanted to be manhandled like that again.”

John was employing judo on his unsuspecting opponent, and Bradford was hit with a sudden insight — that karate is not enough, that overconfidence is the mark of a fool, that being prepared with what life throws at you is an endless task. Today, he called that experience with John “one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

So what did Bradford do? He went out and earned another black belt, in the art of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Of course, hand-to-hand combat is not, at least in the literal sense, a feature of a run for public office. But Bradford’s candidacy to replace retiring Supervisor Bruce McPherson in District 5 is the result of a similarly blindsiding shock in his life, though the stakes were much higher and the loss infinitely more painful.

In August of 2020, Bradford and his wife, Antonia, lost their Boulder Creek home in the devastating CZU fires. If CZU had never happened, Bradford readily admits, he would not be running for county supervisor.

By temperament and interest, Bradford is thoroughly a private sector guy. He’s a software engineer and systems administrator for Joby Aviation, and a small-business owner as a partner in the martial-arts training gym Kaijin MMA in Scotts Valley. He’s worked in web development, cyber security and information technology systems. He’s been a photographer, a musician and even a drone pilot. 

But, he said, CZU changed him. Like hundreds of others in Santa Cruz County, he lost his house and nearly all his material possessions (only about a third of homeowners who lost their homes in the fires have rebuilt). But he also lost a lot of naive assumptions about government, community and life in America. The trauma that he and his family experienced was, he said, compounded by the intransigence and indifference of Santa Cruz County government, the very same government apparatus that he hopes to lead as supervisor.

In Bradford’s case, he said, the county required a study of possible debris-flow potential on his property, which added a full year onto his rebuild schedule. “So I ended up taking an extra $300,000 loan to rebuild my home.” But there were other delays and obstacles for the Bradfords and their neighbors, and it was the emotional fallout of these bureaucratic requirements that drove him to seek office.

“What drove me was, there were a number of occasions when we would get news from the county specifically, or sometimes from our insurance company, that would grievously hurt my wife, and she would cry for hours and hours, that made it seem like we weren’t going to be able to rebuild – delays, refusals to give permits for something, refusals by the insurance company to fund something until another thing is done,” he said. “All these things are these little bombs that are in the way, right? And they go off, and you have that feeling of powerlessness, like, what can I do here?” 

On a personal level, Bradford responded to CZU in much the same way he responded to his momentous spar with John, with humbled self-reflection. “First, I had to deal with my own failures in understanding,” he said. “Why did it take losing everything for me to have any awareness of what was happening in my local government?”

The Bradfords have rebuilt, and have been settled in their new home for about a year now. But Christopher Bradford was not interested in merely getting his old life back and continuing on in his private-sector career. As a Silicon Valley tech worker, he readily admits that he has resources and privileges that many of his neighbors in the San Lorenzo Valley do not have. In his view, getting up off the mat means heeding the lessons inherent in having been pinned down in the first place.

On a practical level, from Bradford’s point of view, that means rebuilding infrastructure — water, roads, communications. Indeed, close to two thirds of roads in unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County are in “poor to failed” condition, said a June grand jury report. And despite tax measures designed to help fund road repairs, persistent budget shortfalls mean, for instance, the county is expected to have completed repairs on just 5 miles of county roads this year. 

Bradford’s critique — and the rationale that drives him to seek the supervisor job — is both specific and generalized. In the first case, he said that the county government is less interested in solving problems than it is in avoiding litigation and other conflicts. In a more general way, he holds to a common conservative view that careerism and professionalism in elected office is not to be trusted.

“We’ve gotten to a point where there’s a kind of culture of lethargy, where we’ve accepted things that shouldn’t be acceptable. It shouldn’t be acceptable that folks can’t call out and get emergency services when their lives are at risk,” he said. “We’re in civilization, right? We’re not somewhere in the middle of Montana, 300 miles from the nearest town. One of the biggest cities on the planet is 35 minutes away over Bear Creek Road!”

November’s District 5 election is a runoff between the top two vote-getters of March’s primary election. Bradford finished second in March to Monica Martinez, the CEO of Encompass Community Services, the county’s largest social-services nonprofit. It was, however, a distant second. Martinez garnered more than twice as many votes as Bradford, 7,849 to 3,619. But, in his November head-to-head battle with Martinez, Bradford expects to make up that ground largely through the endorsement of the candidate who finished third in the March vote, Ben Lomond real-estate broker Tom Decker, who came within a few hundred votes of superceding Bradford as Martinez’s general-election opponent.

Decker said that he didn’t know Bradford before the campaign, but he was struck by one moment in a debate of a tax measure in which Decker and Martinez were on opposite sides. At one point, Bradford admitted that even though he had once supported the measure, he had reexamined the issue and changed his mind and now opposed it. “I found that extraordinary,” said Decker. “You never hear that in a campaign. So I thought, now there’s a man of integrity. His fight is my fight.”

Felton voter Virginia Wright was a Martinez supporter early on, citing her familiarity with county government and her ability to raise money. But a mountain-bike pump track controversy at Felton’s Covered Bridge County Park gave Wright the impression that Martinez was not listening to her concerns. As for Bradford, she said, “When I invited him to come to the neighborhood, he said, ‘Sure,’ and he came twice.” With that, she changed sides.

“He’s very warm and welcoming and smart. But he also listens,” said Wright, who has worked in nonprofits and doesn’t overlook Martinez’s experience in government programs. “Yeah, [Bradford] has never done this kind of work before. And, it’s going to be a hard lift, on one hand. On the other, it’s his values, his centeredness in the valley that attracted me.”

Bradford has done some nonprofit work — currently he serves as treasurer for the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County. Still, he insists that much of his experience in the private sector will come in handy at the county. And he tends to characterize the gulf of public-sector experience between him and Martinez as a dynamic of status quo versus change. (Martinez’s endorsements reads as a kind of who’s-who of Santa Cruz public service, while Bradford’s are more rank-and-file.) 

Martinez, said Bradford, is the “establishment candidate.”

“And establishments don’t want change. They want things to move the way they want them to move. And the longer they’re in place, the more ossified they become, right? They want things to change in a way that they’re very comfortable with, which is very little.”

Bradford talks a lot about infrastructure, and the on-the-ground frustrations that many in the Santa Cruz Mountains have to deal with daily. (The Fifth District contains not only the San Lorenzo Valley, but the city of Scotts Valley and even a good portion of the city of Santa Cruz.) But he also, like many underdogs do, talks about the benefits of being free from pleasing establishment constituencies. For example, he criticized Martinez for listing women’s reproductive rights as one of her top priorities at a candidates forum.

“I said what was important was infrastructure, disaster preparedness, housing. And my opponent listed some of those things too, but then she added things from the much broader national debate, like women’s reproductive rights,” Bradford said. “Now, no one here is remotely worried [that women’s reproductive rights are threatened locally]. It’s not relevant at all. But when you’re thinking nationally, instead of locally, you’re going to import national ideas. Now, if we’re in Kansas or Florida, then that’s a big problem and I’d be fighting for it. But we’re in California. The entire time I’ve been campaigning in the Fifth District, no one has mentioned that a single time as a major concern.”

He said that kind of concern is pandering to outside influences and potential donors. “I’m gonna call a duck a duck,” he said. “We can’t fix the thing if we can’t be real about whatever it is.”

It’s a campaign trope to talk about “tough choices,” but does Bradford have an idea of a tough choice he’d make? “Well, let’s talk about mental health services. Now, some people wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, right? But it’s a fact: Roads are important. Yes, mental health services are also very important, but if you don’t have roads, people can die. People can’t get to work. We have to be practical. Mental health might have a constituency that’s very loud, maybe a very powerful and engaged constituency, but at the end of the day, you might have to tangle with them. I will. I’m unconcerned about the fight. All those people who support my opponent financially and otherwise? I don’t owe them anything.”

When it comes to mental health, Christopher Bradford is anything but flippant. The loss of his family’s home to the CZU fires in 2020 was not the most painful trauma he has faced in his life. In fact, it doesn’t even rank second.

More than a decade ago, Bradford lost a son, Micah, who died at the age of 4 of a congenital neurological condition. In his biographical material, he says that he is father of six children. He still includes Micah in that calculation.

“He was a twin, and his sister is, of course, still around,” Bradford said. “So, [on their shared birthday], we celebrate Sophia. And because I don’t want to leave Micah behind, but don’t want to remind her that her brother’s dead every year, after everyone goes to bed, I always set a little light for him and sing a song.”

About three years later, partially because of their son’s death, his first wife also died, of suicide.

“She felt that it was her fault that he came out the way he did. She didn’t have the same upbringing I did. She came up with, I mean, just tortuous abuse. Some of the things she endured … I tell people she really died when she was 13, I was just lucky to keep her around a bit longer after that.” She was always engaged in a struggle with her mental health, he said. “Sometimes, when you’re standing on the cliff, the wind will take you.”

Bradford felt that he didn’t have the luxury to be immobilized by the loss of his son and then his wife in such a short time. He had several other children to look out for.

“It was hard for me because I’m not an emoter generally. But I had to show the children that, well, ‘This is terrible, but we have to love each other. We have to work through this thing.’ You know, there’s no avoiding loss. The longer you live, the more loved ones you’re gonna see pass away. And I think about that, sometimes with the older folks you see, the one in their 80s or 90s, almost every friend they ever had, every family member that they knew well, is gone. But you have to get out of bed in the morning.”

In his campaign for supervisor, Bradford has covered as much of the Fifth District as he could get to, from the more urbanized areas of Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz to remote corners like Mountain Charlie Road. He has learned much of the geography of the region through one of his businesses, flying drones for real-estate companies. “I’ve been threatened with shotguns, and I’ve been given sweet tea and pleasant words. All that has happened in these mountains,” he said. 

His focus on infrastructure, he insists, isn’t to relive the traumas of CZU, but rather to look to a future where everything from natural disasters to the spread of A.I. might have be mitigated by solid, rational, well-supported preparedness. 

Though he has lived in the Fifth District for just over a decade, Bradford said he feels connected there more deeply than just about anywhere he’s ever lived. That’s due mostly to a constantly in motion childhood. He was born in Alabama. But his father was a nuclear engineer for the U.S. Navy, which meant his family was always relocating. As a kid, Bradford lived in a wide variety of locales, including the Bay Area, San Diego, New York City, Washington state and Hawaii, where he spent most of his teen years. 

Having suffered several traumatic personal losses, Bradford said he is not likely to be defeated by whatever problems come his way as supervisor. His personal story and his long history in the martial arts have taught him a lesson that adversity and struggle can be healthy. In conversation, he’ll talk a lot about “suffering,” by which he often means, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, taking on some tasks because they are difficult, not because they are easy.

“You have to be willing to not just fight for what’s important, but to not to lay down and take the loss,” he said. “You know, you only lose if you stop. So I teach resilience shifts at [my gym] in Scotts Valley. And one of the lessons — it’s a superpower really —  is that you have to embrace suffering. If you can embrace suffering as a tool for your own evolution, there’s nothing that you can’t accomplish.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.