Fred Keeley’s swan song: One year in, Santa Cruz’s first directly elected mayor isn’t slowing down

On a crisp morning in early November, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley pulled up to the National Guard armory at the city overlook. The city had made much progress on homelessness during Keeley’s first year in office, and the active, publicly financed shelter played an important role in the city’s ability to clear encampments and connect people to services. An impromptu tour of the facility was due. 

As if it were planned, an armory resident on his way to town on a large chopper motorcycle pulled up and killed his roaring engine as he approached Keeley.  

“You’re the mayor!” 

“Well, somebody has to be,” Keeley joked. 

At age 73, Fred Keeley is wrapping up the first year of what will likely be the swan song in his nearly 30-year career in elected public office. Having served eight years on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, six years in the state Assembly and 10 years as county treasurer, Keeley agreed last fall to shepherd the city through its voter-directed transition into an entirely new system of political representation, one in which a full-time mayor plays a central role.

For decades, the city operated under a system of seven councilmembers elected through a citywide vote, known as an at-large model. Each year, councilmembers would then choose the mayor among themselves. 

Last year, residents overwhelmingly voted to restructure the city’s representation into something more direct and local. Santa Cruz now operates under a district-based model in which six city council districts elect their own representative. 

The big change: For the first time in Santa Cruz history, voters, not the city council, choose the mayor for a full four-year term.

Given the chance to choose, voters opted for a person whose name is as household as any other in Santa Cruz County politics: Fred Keeley. Last November, he won his election in a landslide.

Keeley readily admits he was recruited by “friends” to hit the campaign trail last summer. He is keenly aware that his résumé made him a desirable pick for the city’s established power structure. 

“When [former supervisor] Ryan Coonerty approached me, he said, hey, it might be useful for our first directly elected mayor to be someone who has experience in managing meetings and establishing customs and practices. Can you model the way we can conduct these meetings?” Keeley said. 

He said the people who approached him hoped he could help set the tone for what it means to be a four-year mayor. 

The mayor’s hard power resides in running council meetings, setting the agenda and forming subcommittees. The position is the only political seat elected to represent the interests of the entire city, which gives it the added soft power of the bully pulpit. However, the mayor’s vote weighs only as much as any other councilmember. This means Keeley is not the city’s first strong mayor, but he is the city’s first long mayor. 

So what does it mean to be the city’s first long mayor? 

For Keeley, the first step was reforming city council meetings, which, in his view, had turned into “salons that dragged on until 12 a.m.” Rethinking those meetings to run more efficiently was the simplest and most immediate way to leave his mark. 

“What it became is a little bit like, when you walk on the beach, you see a dog walk by a log and pee on it, then the second comes along and has to pee on the log, then the third dog, fourth dog, it doesn’t matter if they have to pee, they pee on the log,” Keeley said. “That’s what goes on in these things.” 

Keeley said he moved the meetings from a relatively shapeless dialogue among staff, council and the public to a gathering with a hard outline of when and how the public’s business happens. Staff presentations are shorter and councilmembers must take action after public comment instead of continuing to talk and ask questions. Councilmembers are free to voice their reasons for supporting or opposing an action before the roll-call vote begins, but once they begin voting, discussion ends. 

Since Keeley took office, it’s become increasingly rare for a council meeting to extend beyond 8 p.m.

This way of running meetings could set the tone for future mayors or it might be different — each personality brings their own flavor —  but it will at least remain familiar during Keeley’s remaining three years in office. For the first time, there will be an expectation of continuity, something everyone I spoke with agreed is the hallmark of what the long mayor should and would bring. 

Councilmember Sandy Brown said a dedicated, city-elected mayor better focuses the city council. Previously, she said, the council would have to operate each year under a new leader, a new preference for how meetings should be run, a new ego. 

“Having that kind of inconsistency every year makes it difficult to stay on track,” Brown said. “Having someone in office who can grow into the position institutionally, I think that’s a positive thing.” 

Keeley sees continuity in the mayorship, as well as in dedicated district representatives, as swinging the pendulum away from city staff and toward the elected officials. 

To illustrate this, he uses the ongoing litigation and negotiations between the city and UC Santa Cruz over the university’s long-range development plan — which guides the school’s future growth — and the city’s role in supplying water. These two issues have gone on for years. If UCSC wants to negotiate with the city over these, but a new mayor comes into the boardroom each year, then the city’s power in the room resides with the city representatives most consistently there — staff and the city attorney. 

“If you’re UCSC, you can’t pretend that something happened six months ago when I wasn’t here,” Keeley said. “That kind of continuity enhances the power of the elected official in the room. Continuity invokes what [former California governor] Pete Wilson used to call the Iron Butt Theory, which is, I can sit here longer than you can.” 

City Manager Matt Huffaker said the position has brought “stability and has allowed for longer-range planning.” Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson told me continuity allows the mayor to carry a vision even as the council changes, and work toward accomplishing an overarching agenda. 

Keeley’s résumé in statewide and county elected office gave him the appeal of someone who could structure and preside over a government in transition. However, he also knows his employment status as a retired public servant also made it more likely he could give the role a full-time focus although the position pays only $3,420.68 a month, according to a city HR document from November — or around $41,000 a year — an unlivable wage in Santa Cruz County. 

Kalantari-Johnson, who spends about 20 hours per week on council work on average, said the job of mayor involves a full-time workload. The city, she said, is lucky Keeley is in the seat, but she said the workload and meager pay could be a barrier for people seeking the role in the future. 

“Maybe there is a precedent and expectation being set that this person would give all their time to the position and that’s not realistic,” said Kalantari-Johnson. “It may be limiting for who will run for mayor in the future.”  

In reporting this story, I met Keeley twice, once at 10 a.m. on a Thursday inside the mayor’s office (the only seat on the city council that gets an office) and again at 11 a.m. on a Monday for an hourlong interview in the field. These were squeezed between other meetings related to city business on his calendar. His availability was appreciated, but could a mother or father with a full-time job enjoy the same luxury of focus? 

Coming from Sacramento, and even during his time as a supervisor, Keeley was used to working with his own staff by his side. Inside city hall, not only does the mayor’s job not offer a livable salary, but Keeley has no one working directly with him to analyze policy, engage with the community and perform clerical work. He said by the time his term is up in 2026, he wants to institutionalize more support for whoever succeeds him as mayor, and for city councilmembers. 

“I’m interested in how many barriers I can knock down in front of people even considering a run for city council. Every one of my colleagues on the dais except for me has a full-time job — one of them is a damn school principal for god’s sake,” Keeley said, referencing Vice Mayor Renée Golder, who heads Bay View Elementary. “Is that the way it should be? You have to have a full-time job, or maybe more than a full-time job? You don’t even have a city office, you’ve got no staff.” 

He said he’s undertaking a study on California cities of between 50,000 and 100,000 people to see how city councils are compensated and what kind of support they get. So far, the results are all over the place, but Keeley said he doesn’t want Santa Cruz to be an outlier. Over the next three years, he wants to move toward better compensating elected officials and getting each councilmember a staffer who can work 10 hours per week. 

However, he emphasized none of what he is pursuing would impact him personally. He has said repeatedly that he will be a one-term mayor.

Looking back on his first year, Keeley points to movement on increasing affordable housing and progress in battling homelessness as the major successes. The issues were most often the top two that residents told him about during his campaign last year. 

On affordable housing, Keeley has run into some issues around the proposed Measure M, which seeks to prohibit exceptionally tall buildings in the city without a citywide vote on the project. If voters on March 5 decide that’s a policy they support, it could hinder the city’s downtown expansion plans, which envision 12-story residential buildings surrounding a new, permanent Santa Cruz Warriors arena.  

Keeley did help start up a community process in developing a housing bond measure to create a dedicated affordable housing fund — an ambition that marked a cornerstone of his mayoral campaign. 

After hosting three meetings, Keeley handed off the work to develop the bond to a group of community housing leaders that include people from Housing Santa Cruz County, Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action, Santa Cruz Together, and Our Downtown Our Future. Keeley said the bond is still being developed, but is trending toward proposing a real estate transfer tax to finance the affordable housing fund, which would add a percentage fee on each home sale in the city. 

When it comes to homelessness, Keeley is proud to say there are no longer any unsanctioned homeless encampments in the city. Under a canopy of lush Douglas firs, oak and eucalyptus trees, Keeley tours a completely empty Sycamore Grove wildland. 

Only months ago, the area existed as a sprawling and unsanctioned homeless encampment. Concerned about wildfire risk as the summer rolled in, the city set off on a phased clearing of Sycamore Grove and Pogonip across the street — the second major homeless encampment eviction in a year after the emptying of the Benchlands in fall 2022. Through its phased approach, the city worked to relocate as many houseless people as it had available shelter beds. In the rough annual count of the houseless population in February 2023, while Sycamore Grove and Pogonip were still active, the city of Santa Cruz saw a 29% decrease year over year. 

“I consider this to be one of the better visuals of progress this year,” Keeley said as he traversed the grove’s uneven hiking trail, passing by tiny reminders of a once-large encampment, pieces of glass here, flattened dirt beds and graffiti over there. “The parks department is now hosting guided hikes through these areas,” something that would have been unthinkable earlier this year. 

Some of the people cleared from Sycamore Grove and Pogonip relocated to the armory. Situated near the top of DeLaveaga Golf Course, the armory is the only roofed shelter financed with public money (the city contracts with the Salvation Army to operate the shelter). 

The active shelter represents a success of 2023 and a major problem ahead. State funds that kept the armory up and running over the past two years will run out in 2024. Earlier this month, the city council approved putting a half-cent sales tax increase on the March 5 primary ballot that could raise an additional $8 million per year. A chunk of that would go toward keeping the armory open.

During the recent visit to the armory, Keeley was popular among the residents. After the man on the motorcycle roared off, Keeley took barely 10 steps before he was greeted by another resident happy to run into him. 

Salvation Army employees, however, were less enthused about this random visit from the mayor. As we prepared to head inside, a Salvation Army employee cut us off. 

“My boss really wants to show you around, but you have to coordinate with them, it’s literally what the city manager told me to do,” the employee told Keeley. 

“I don’t need to do any coordinating,” the mayor shot back. “I’m not here to do anything except walk around and say ‘hi.’” 

“Fred, I can’t have you go in there. It’s the same rules for everyone else,” the employee insisted. “You’re a citizen just like the rest of us.”

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