Five things we learned from Lookout’s March primary candidate forums

In anticipation of the primary election March 5, Lookout hosted candidate forums for the seven open county and city of Santa Cruz seats on this year’s ballot. We learned a lot, but here are five key takeaways from the three nights of forums. 

1. (Some) clarity on where the Santa Cruz City Council candidates stand on Measure M 

As far as election topics go, Measure M has become the belle of the ball. 

The primary ballot initiative proposes calling an election before any project exceeds existing height limits, and requiring new multifamily projects with at least 30 units to reserve 25% of those units for low-income tenants. The measure has drawn fierce supporters and vocal opponents but, without polling, we won’t have a good sense of where the community stands until election day. However, on Thursday, we got a sense of how the city council candidates will vote. 

Susie O’Hara (District 5), incumbent councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson (District 3) and Gabriela Trigueiro (District 1) said they will vote against Measure M. The reason had less to do with height than the proposed 25% affordable housing requirement. Trigueiro said she was concerned that too high an affordability requirement could make new projects too expensive and slow development at a time when Santa Cruz needs more housing. O’Hara said the community has historically struggled to build enough housing in the past and Measure M would only place more restrictions on development. Kalantari-Johnson said she was unsure about her position until the city-commissioned impact report on Measure M was published in January. The report, authored by real estate consultancy firm Keyser Marston Associates, estimated that a 25% affordability requirement would severely restrict the pace of housing development in the current market. 

Hector Marin (District 2) and Joy Schendledecker (District 3) said they each support Measure M. Marin said the laws of supply and demand are “very real” but said simply building market-rate units without increasing the affordable housing requirement would only continue to push low-income and black and Indigenous Santa Cruzans out of the city. Schendledecker said she isn’t convinced that limiting some heights and increasing affordable housing would work to restrict the pace of housing development; however, she emphasized that Measure M’s fate would not mark the end of the world. 

“The sky is not going to fall, whichever way this goes,” Schendledecker said. “I happen to lean on one side because I believe participatory democracy is so important.” 

Dave Tannaci (District 1) declined to give a straight answer on how he would vote. After initially not answering the question, Tannaci said his vote is a “personal matter.” Given a third opportunity, he said he did not “want to be pigeonholed” by his stance on Measure M, and, finally, said he did not yet know how he would vote. Tannaci did later defend Measure M with some of the same arguments used by supporters, citing that the city had enough capacity without increasing existing heights to meet the state’s housing mandates. 

2. The District 1 county supervisor race is quite personal

Exactly where the candidates in the District 1 county supervisor race disagree on policy issues is less obvious than the fact that incumbent Manu Koenig and challenger Lani Faulkner clearly just don’t like one another. 

Faulkner, who has been endorsed by John Leopold, the three-term incumbent Koenig defeated in 2020, wasted no time in attacking her opponent during the Feb. 5 District 1 forum, explaining that she was asked to run by “senior leadership” in the community who disagreed with how Koenig handled his commission appointments, and school board and union members who told her “their voices have not been heard and their needs have not been met by the incumbent.” 

“I wouldn’t be running if I felt that our current supervisor was effective and meeting the needs of our community members,” Faulkner said. “There’s a lot of people throughout the district who really have felt left behind, and it’s those folks that I’m stepping up to run for.” Faulkner also accused Koenig of ignoring community members. 

Faulkner and Koenig do have history. Koenig was at one point the executive director Greenway, the organization which led the June 2022 Measure D campaign to abandon passenger rail. Faulkner, the founder of Equity Transit, took the mantle of the opposition against Measure D, which was defeated with more than 70% of the popular vote. 

3. The idea of managed retreat has varying degrees of buy-in among coastal city and county candidates 

In Santa Cruz County, the impacts of climate change have been felt in a variety of ways, from wildfires and river flooding, to landslides and coastal erosion. Sea level rise and the debate over how to adapt has become a more urgent issue over the past year. Should we armor the coastline with man-made infrastructure or surrender and manage toward an eventual retreat from the coast? 

Lookout asked the candidates in the District 2 county supervisor race (parts of Capitola, Aptos, Seacliff, Rio Del Mar, La Selva and Pajaro Dunes) and the District 3 Santa Cruz City Council race (Lighthouse Field and West Cliff Drive) where they land on that adaptation question. 

County candidates Kim De Serpa, Anthony Crane and David Schwartz said they did not support the managed retreat approach. Schwartz and Crane said the government should not be getting involved with whether private property owners along the coast protect their properties from coastal erosion; De Serpa said although climate change would “declare itself at some point,” she said the county should be supporting the preservation of coastline properties. Kristen Brown and Bruce Jaffe supported managed retreat in a broad sense, but said the county didn’t need to simply pull back all at once. Brown said she supports building natural buffers to coastal erosion, while Jaffe said he wants the county to draft a long-term coastal adaptation plan. 

In the Santa Cruz City Council race, the issue of coastal erosion focused on West Cliff Drive. Schendledecker said she supports making West Cliff Drive “temporarily” a one-way road or having “portions of it shut off.” Kalantari-Johnson cited a survey from the city that showed neighborhoods near West Cliff Drive as split on making it a one-way thoroughfare. She said she was still in an information-gathering phase and did not offer a firm opinion on the future of West Cliff Drive, but said the issue would come before the city council this spring. 

5. The CZU rebuild is the No. 1 issue in the District 5 supervisor race

The stagnant pace of rebuilding following the 2020 CZU wildfire is not a divisive issue in the District 5 county supervisor race. Each of the four candidates seeking to represent a large swath of the Santa Cruz Mountains said the county’s response to fire recovery has been unacceptable — only a fraction of 911 homes burned in the fire have been rebuilt and reoccupied. 

Each of the candidates — Theresa Bond, Christopher Bradford, Tom Decker and Monica Martinez — blame the county’s planning department for many of the issues residents have faced during the rebuilding process. Bradford referred to the department as embodying “a culture of no.” Now, nearly four years after the fire, none of the candidates believes every home will be rebuilt and reoccupied. However, they said minimizing red tape, overhauling the planning department and advocating for grant and loan opportunities would help many fire victims rebuild. 

5. Sticks and carrots galore

Candidates across the elections proposed a variety of new taxes, incentives and fee structures, seeking to create new revenue streams, cut red tape and spur economic growth. 

In the District 1 supervisor race, Koenig said he wants to pass a local carbon tax, eliminate application fees for rental units, and create a county-funded incentive program for workforce housing. Koenig also said he was “working on building a statewide coalition” to overhaul the property tax system so that the county can get more tax revenue in its general fund. Faulkner, the challenger, said she wanted to pass a tax on second homes and vacation rentals to help fund affordable housing initiatives. Both candidates said they wanted to create a rent-stabilization fund to help protect tenants facing eviction because of housing costs.

In the District 1 Santa Cruz City Council race, Trigueiro, similar to Koenig, said she wanted to eliminate rental application fees. She also wants to find a way to pool parent-teacher association funds to redistribute the money equitably across school districts instead of the districts in which the funds are raised. 

In the District 3 Santa Cruz City Council race, Kalantari-Johnson said she was already working on an incentive program to get small businesses into empty storefronts in the city’s commercial districts. Her opponent, Schendledecker, said city subsidies are a quicker way to spur more affordable housing development, and that she wanted to explore new, progressive tax models to help finance those subsidies.

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