For Kim De Serpa, District 2 supervisor run is next step in life’s work as a ‘community caretaker’

In moments of life-changing crisis, there are often strangers in the room. Mostly, they are professionals — first responders, medics, law enforcement officers, sometimes religious or community leaders — there to offer immediate aid or solace.

For countless people in Santa Cruz County and around the greater Monterey Bay Area, Kim De Serpa has been a face in that room, though not always a stranger.

In her three-decade career as a social worker, De Serpa has shepherded many through some of the most frightening and painful episodes of their lives. She has come face to face with an astonishingly diverse range of the kind of everyday heartbreaks and tragedies that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid — including instances of child abuse and/or neglect (working in child welfare services), medical issues (as a hospital social worker), maternity emergencies (working at the neonatal intensive care unit at Dominican Hosptial), and even death (as a manager and director at Hospice of Santa Cruz County). 

Longtime friend and coworker Maryanne Rehberg said that De Serpa has long nurtured an instinct to turn toward crisis, not step around it. “If you see a train wreck,” said Rehberg, “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, the traffic is going to be terrible. Let’s go left.’ But she’s like, ‘No, there’s going to be people who need help. Let’s go toward the train wreck.’”

In November, De Serpa is betting that a career in that kind of one-to-one attention to human services can scale up to serving a larger constituency. She’s running for one of five seats on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, to represent District 2, which covers a wide swath of Mid County, from Capitola to Aptos to Corralitos to parts of Watsonville. 

MONDAY: Lookout’s District 2 candidate forum with Kim De Serpa and Kristen Brown, 6:30 p.m. at Cabrillo College’s Horticulture Building. RSVP here.

She is not, however, making a leap directly from the bedside to the council chambers. She knows something about working within a deliberative body, having served for 14 years as a trustee in Pajaro Valley Unified School District. 

At 57, she is two decades older than her opponent in the race, Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown. De Serpa is hoping that District 2 voters interpret that age difference as a mark in her favor, as evidence of seasoning not only in the kitchen-table issues of the race, but in the shifting fortunes of life. De Serpa said that she has respect for Brown’s experience on the Capitola City Council and admits that Brown might have a closer sense of what the supervisor’s job entails because of that service in Capitola. “When she speaks,” she said, “she speaks from a place of experience with [a given] policy. But when I speak, I speak on behalf of understanding how that policy filters down to real people and what it actually means or doesn’t mean for them in terms of helping or hurting.”

De Serpa earned her place in the November runoff election, finishing second in the March primary among five candidates for the job. She finished about 1,200 votes, or about 7 percentage points, behind Brown. 

In the battle for endorsements, Brown’s supporters include most of the county’s most prominent elected public officials, inside and outside District 2. But De Serpa’s roster of endorsements is every bit as impressive, featuring many of the county’s most prominent public- and private-sector personalities, including Shadowbrook owner Ted Burke, Capitola restaurateur and political figure Gayle Ortiz, skateboarding entrepreneur Rich Novak, Temple Beth El rabbi emeritus Richard Litvak, and the most recent female member of the board of supervisors, former District 2 supervisor Ellen Pirie. 

De Serpa’s wide range of professional experience is reflected in a similar diversity in her own family life. She grew up in the Salinas Valley in a single-parent household. She is the mother of two, and stepmother of four. She and her husband, physician Ned McNamara, are the parents of a daughter with a disability. And she’s also been a foster mom. (She’s lived in the rural area of the Aptos Hills for about 20 years.)

In fact, her life was profoundly shaped by family tragedy from nearly its beginning. Her father was killed in a car accident when De Serpa was a toddler. His death not only robbed her of a father, it brought about a drastic change in the family’s economic circumstances. “It thrust my family immediately into poverty,” she said. 

Her mother, Nancy De Serpa, said, “There were times when her teachers didn’t know [about the death of her father], and they would make comments like, ‘Why doesn’t your father do that for you?’ And it just broke her heart.”

Kim De Serpa began working to bring in income at around 11, taking on babysitting and house-cleaning jobs. As she grew older, she worked in a day care center, at a produce broker, doing secretarial work. “I understand what it means to live on the edge [financially],” she said.

In her formative years, she was surrounded by women – her mother and her two grandmothers. When Kim was a bit older, Nancy De Serpa began working in the political realm as an aide to Barbara Shipnuck, the first woman ever elected to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors. Later, she worked as an aide to Monterey County Supervisor Simon Salinas and U.S. Representative Sam Farr.

“My friends were all politically involved with the League of Women Voters,” said Nancy De Serpa. “And I used to have meetings at our house. So Kim grew up surrounded by women who were politically active.”

She earned her undergraduate degree at Humboldt State University and a master’s degree in social work at Washington University in St. Louis. In between, she took off for an eye-opening trip in Central America, mainly to improve her Spanish skills. It was all groundwork for launching a career in social work in her home region, she said. Her social work efforts have mostly been in or adjacent to the health care industry. “I love medicine,” she said. “Every day, there’s something new to learn. It’s like brain candy.”

Early in her career, she worked at Child Protective Services. Maryanne Rehberg was her supervisor at the time. Even then, said Rehberg, she had to warn De Serpa about overstepping her prescribed role at CPS.

“[De Serpa was on] the hotline where people are calling in to make reports, or try to find information about resources or what to do — which is, by the way, good early training for [the] board of supervisors, because it’s a lot of putting out fires and problem-solving and knowing what’s available in the community,” Rehberg said “So she was the first line of response when a teacher, doctor or whoever called CPS to make a report. And I can remember early on having to talk to her about trying to help people that wasn’t necessarily in our purview at Child Protective Services. [A client] needed food or child care or something. And I sometimes had to rein her in to say, ‘OK, we just don’t have the time for you to be doing all that above-and-beyond kind of stuff.”

Rehberg said that De Serpa demonstrated bringing order to chaos in high-stress emotional situations: “She is exceptionally calm under pressure. A lot of times with that job you would [have] five, six people on hold waiting, and, just like that doctor that, even though they have another patient in the waiting room and they’re worried that they don’t get too far off schedule, they still made you feel heard and listened to. That’s Kim. She was really good at that. And it’s such a rare talent.”

Later, she became a manager and director at Hospice of Santa Cruz County. She said the hospice doubled its caseload over the course of about 18 months as a way to “make sure that anybody who was entitled to hospice care got the best hospice care possible.”

Her strategy at Hospice, De Serpa said, was “to always [be] saying yes. So anytime any source called with a referral, I would say yes, even if it was a super complex or very risky patient. And I would do all the social work so that it would be safer for the more downstream teams to take that patient and make sure they had a good death.”

After that, she worked with a team of doctors at Dignity Health and Dominican Hospital in a program to extend medical health care to particularly tough cases in neonatal intensive care, maternity health and emergency services. Physician Robert Keet was the director of the program during her time at Dominican. “She was so completely committed to helping people get better,” he said.

Keet shared a couple of stories about De Serpa’s work ethic. In one case, the program was assisting a man who regularly slept under bridges and who was on about 10 medications, many of which were critical to keep him out of the emergency room. The patient was consistently losing his medications, so Keet and De Serpa designed a program for him to pick up his medication daily. Several years ago, late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, they noticed that the patient had not picked up his daily medication. 

“So,” said Keet, “Kim went and picked up the medication. But she didn’t know where he lived, because he didn’t live anywhere, only that he was under a bridge somewhere. So she spent Christmas Eve going to all the homeless encampments under the bridges until she found him. And that was a very typical story with her.”

Keet related other instances in which De Serpa would spend money from her own pocket, or travel great distances to help patients: “She would work whatever hours it took to get whatever she had to have. And she’d sink her teeth into it to get people housed, or get them better, or figure out what they needed to do.”

“She’s one of the most determined, indefatigable people I’ve ever met,” said friend Maryanne Rehberg.

De Serpa’s 14-year tenure on the board of trustees at Pajaro Valley Unified School District marks her as one of the longest-serving educational board members in the county’s history. Her experience on the board, she said, has given her direct experience with the often confrontational hurly-burly of local politics. Many elements of serving on that board, from union negotiations to disruptive political protests, have forced her to develop a thick skin. Even so, she admits to occasionally feeling the pain of being in a high-profile political position. This summer’s ethnic studies controversy at PVUSD brought her face to face, she said, with overt antisemitism. (De Serpa is Jewish.)

“My background is in social justice,” she said. “My whole life’s work is advocating for people who are oppressed or otherwise vulnerable. Jewish people in general have always stood up for social justice and civil rights. So to have people come up and say antisemitic things to me, it’s just very painful.”

De Serpa first considered running for the board of supervisors 12 years ago when Zach Friend (the retiring incumbent in District 2) was first running for the seat. She said that many in the community approached her to run against Friend, but “I was in the second year of my term [on the PVUSD board], and I was in mid-stride. Although I was flattered by people thinking that I could be a county supervisor, I just didn’t feel like I could leave the school board seat that soon after taking it.”

This year, however, with Friend’s retirement, it seemed like an ideal moment. 

“She’s always been a caretaker,” said Nancy De Serpa of her daughter. “And when she said she was going to run [for supervisor], it was just a completion of her desire to be a community caretaker.”

As for her priorities as a supervisor, De Serpa draws from her own experience as a rural resident in the hilly parts of the district. “The No. 1 thing that people talk to me about are the roads,” she said. “And the truth is, if we had the money to fix the roads, they would have already been fixed. I know that. So I’m under no illusion that this issue is going to be easy. But we’ve got to reprioritize some of the budget.”

She offered to drive me up Eureka Canyon north of Corralitos to assess the state of the roads. “It’s disgraceful,” she said of the road conditions there. “I met with a group of neighbors on the Rio Del Mar side, and their road has not been resurfaced in 50 years. We need to get back to basic infrastructure improvements.”

Telecommunications connectivity is another infrastructure issue she consistently brings up. “I have asked public officials multiple times, ‘Please remember us in the rural areas. We need connectivity,’” she said. “Basically, every [rural] area just feels completely ignored on these types of issues.”

When it comes to infrastructure improvements, she did admit, however, “I’m not exactly sure how to make that happen yet, but when I get in there, I’m going to figure it out, because it has to happen.”

In her race for District 2 supervisor, De Serpa believes that her resumé in the social services has convinced many voters that she is a compassionate and humane candidate. But she’s less sure that some of her other qualities are translating in the heat of the campaign.

“I don’t think people know exactly how tough I am,” she said. “I don’t give up on things. I believe in them. I don’t think that comes across. People seem to think I’m kind and compassionate because I’m a social worker, but what they don’t know is that I’m super tenacious.”

Nancy De Serpa, the single mom who worked closely in the realm of local politics, is reluctant to heap praise on her daughter, just because it sounds like the ultimate in home-team cheerleading. But, she said, Kim De Serpa has been working to make other people’s lives better since her youngest years.

“She has an ability to accomplish things that most people would give up on,” said Nancy. “She believes in the goodwill of people, and brings that out in most people she deals with. But she’s also tenacious. I’m just so proud of her and especially her ability to never take no for an answer, but to continue down a path where she finds those answers.”

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