Kristen Brown’s work ethic propelled her young political ascent. Can it carry her to the board of supervisors?

Kristen Brown will tell you she arrived to the world of politics late; that books and certain national events threw open her eyes to the influence of public policy after a few listless years in her early 20s. 

Yet, in retrospect, the 36-year-old now sees she had at least a tacit understanding as early as middle school of how and when to press against the binds of a power structure.  

“I staged a walkout in my gym class in eighth grade,” Brown said while driving down Highway 1 on a recent afternoon, seemingly surprised by the memory. Each Friday, her gym teacher separated the sexes and had the boys play basketball while the girls were left to the side, resigned to either watch or, as Brown remembers it, “play little Minnie Mouse games.” “We were so pissed. After the third Friday, we were like ‘F–k this!’ and I staged a walkout of just the girls. We told the vice principal what was up when we ran into her in the hallway. No detention, but we got a good lecturing.” 

As a sophomore in high school three years later, she and her friends grew frustrated with the lack of sex education in their curriculum. Brown led them in writing a series of letters to the editor to their local paper in Tracy, California, calling for the school to better prioritize sex ed. 

“It started this whole war in our town, and people started writing back and forth, asking, ‘Who is this kid and who is letting their daughter write about this thing?’” Brown said. 

At the time, Brown didn’t consider either act as remotely “political,” and she’s quick to emphasize that neither led to any meaningful change. But as she reflected, she began to recognize a thread between that rascally teenager with a firm sense of injustice to where she sits today: on the final leg of a more than yearlong campaign to become the next District 2 Santa Cruz County supervisor and help guide public policy for a region of more than 260,000 people.  

“I wasn’t telling my classmates that they needed to empower themselves and make their voices heard, I was more just like, ‘Screw this!’” Brown said. “My trajectory to where I am now probably would have started a lot earlier if someone had told me that, hey, what you’re doing is activism and there’s a history. The framing is important. I grew up being called bossy, and then in eighth grade someone told me I had ‘leadership skills.’”

Brown, the outgoing mayor of Capitola, faces Kim De Serpa, a health care professional and Pajaro Valley Unified School District trustee, on the November ballot. During a crowded primary election in March that drew five candidates, the women finished as the top two, with Brown receiving a 32.8% vote share, and De Serpa 25.3%. Whoever wins will replace retiring three-term Supervisor Zach Friend and break the county’s 16-year streak of not electing women to the board.

De Serpa, Brown’s senior by 20 years, has serious name recognition in the district, which stretches from Capitola south along the coast to Pajaro Dunes, and captures rural, inland communities such as Corralitos, Freedom and the Aptos hills. She first moved to the area in 1995. 

Brown has leaned on what she calls “the depth of my experience,” and her pitch that policy work is her life’s calling. 

“We’re about to enter really tough times, with the budget, with finances, and I love this work,” Brown said. “Tax breaks, where the community is going to get money, policy decisions: I lie awake at night staring at the ceiling having those conversations in my head, and I honestly love it. And I think we’re going to need someone who loves this work in the years ahead.” 

‘Move forward’

After a recent morning session knocking on doors in a neighborhood near Cabrillo College, Brown sat down at Loft Coffee with her campaign manager and fellow Capitola City Councilmember Yvette Brooks. The pair were putting the final touches on a mailer, and talking about how best to present Brown’s diverse set of endorsements, which range from labor unions and Santa Cruz for Bernie, to the county’s Deputy Sheriffs’ Association and Democratic Central Committee. 

Brooks, an experienced campaign manager, said this final leg of the general election is when the work begins to intensify for many candidates; however, Brown has kept her foot on the gas since the primary. 

“Normally, people take breaks over the summer, detach themselves, give themselves boundaries and stop working so hard,” Brooks said. “But that did not happen. Kristen Brown has not stopped working. It’s been insane.” 

Immediately after the primary, Brown began writing thank-you cards and newsletters to supporters, attending community events and staying on voters’ radar. She described the work as “letting people know.” Her drive to outwork everyone is not so much a philosophy as a requirement for her own peace of mind. 

“In anything I do, if it doesn’t go well, or doesn’t turn out in my favor, I can’t say, ‘Oh I should have done more,’” Brown said. “Like, I need to be able to say I did everything I could have possibly done. And even then, I probably can find something that I should have done more of. I also get bored easily and have stillness anxiety, so I need to be doing something.” 

On this morning, as most mornings, Brown’s uniform is black, from her thick mane of hair that falls below her shoulders, all the way down to her flats. A broad chest tattoo pokes out from the tank top underneath her black blazer. Among her several tattoos, which include the homage to her sister on the back of her neck, ladies Liberty and Justice on each forearm, and a Texas bluebonnet atop her foot, it’s the chest piece, which she said reads “Move Forward,” that holds the most meaning. 

“I got that when I was 23,” Brown said. “It’s something my mother always said: We’re not looking back, we’re moving forward.” 

For Brown, “move forward” is either the final phrase of a long-closed chapter, or the opening words to the one she is still writing. 

Brown’s family history in the county goes back three generations. Her maternal grandfather, Herb Ross, worked for the Capitola Police Department for three decades and ran the local DARE program, during which he would show up to schools on horseback. Her grandparents ran a coffee shop in Capitola Village, where My Thai Beach now stands. Parents Brian and Patricia Petersen grew up in Capitola and first met in elementary school, though they began their relationship much later.

Brown’s childhood experience in the county was mostly as a frequent visitor. The family bounced from naval housing in Vallejo, to Live Oak and a short stint in Austin, Texas, before settling in Tracy when she was 8. Brian Petersen worked in Silicon Valley as a semiconductor engineer, while Patricia played in an old country covers band with her own mother, touring a circuit of Santa Cruz County venues.

Every Friday “for pretty much eight years,” Brown said, Patricia would pick her two daughters up from school and make the two-plus-hour drive down to Santa Cruz for gigs. Brown and her sister would saddle up at the bar, Shirley Temple sodas in hand, and watch the matriarchs perform. 

“There is a lot of special history here from my childhood that it feels almost nostalgic even though I’m still here,” Brown said. 

Brown felt like an outsider in Tracy, particularly in high school. It was a role she didn’t love, so she did something about it. After her sophomore year at age 16, she took the state’s proficiency exam, tested out of high school, enrolled in San Joaquin Delta College, and began participating in beauty pageants as a way to earn scholarship money. By age 18, she held two associate degrees, in early childhood education and family consumer economics, and began teaching preschool. By 23, now back in Santa Cruz County, she had been married and divorced, and was unsure about her place in the world. 

Around that time, in 2011, Brown was working at a local private-investigations firm when she noticed rhetoric around defunding Planned Parenthood beginning to intensify. Although she had, to this point, danced on only the periphery of “capital P” politics, Brown wanted to get involved with the organization. She volunteered to clear plates at a local dinner event that featured two keynote speakers: Fred Keeley and then-U.S. Rep. Sam Farr. Brown remembers this as a turning point. The pair’s speeches on freedom of choice moved her in a new way. She suddenly saw promise in politics and public policy. 

“I started looking at all the ways you can make a difference and found there’s a lot of ways. You can be an activist, or an advocate, but in those situations you’re trying to make a difference by appealing to elected officials,” Brown said. “I didn’t realize I wanted to be an elected official, but I had a sense that I wanted to be in government.” 

She soon enrolled at Cal State Monterey Bay to pursue a degree and career in politics. Brown landed an internship and, eventually, a job as an aide in Farr’s congressional office, working alongside none other than De Serpa’s mother, Nancy. Brown spent the next four years working as a bridge between regular people and the federal government. 

“I have no idea what attracted her to our office, but she won in a competitive hiring process, and ran our office very smoothly,” Farr said. “It was a lot of casework. But that’s how you learn about the functions of government.” 

Then in 2016, only five years after her first foray into politics, Brown launched a campaign for Capitola City Council. In an election where four people ran for two seats, Brown came in first place, with 44% of the vote. At 29, she was, and still is, the youngest woman to serve on the city council in Capitola’s 75-year history, and was the lone female voice on the dais. She’d go on to win reelection in 2020, again coming in first place with roughly 40% of the vote. 

Light begins to show

Farr, an elder statesman of Monterey Bay politics, maintains significant political sway. Yet, since Brown worked with De Serpa’s mother in his congressional office, Farr likened the District 2 race to a battle between “two of my children” and has declined to endorse either candidate. He did, however, offer a perspective. 

“[Brown] has certainly earned her position, and from the outside, she seems to be running a stronger campaign,” Farr said. 

During the March primary election, Brown and De Serpa were widely viewed as favorites to advance to a runoff in the five-way race. Each was seen as accomplished, intelligent and hard-working, with a deep understanding of the county’s thorniest issues and well-prepared to immediately affect change in office. Whatever policy differences they held at the time were not glaringly obvious. The general election cycle has been a different story. 

Brown recently picked up the endorsement of the Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee. Chair Andrew Goldenkranz, who is listed on both candidates’ endorsement list, said the choice between Brown and De Serpa was close, but certain policy positions swayed the vote, particularly around the county’s Coastal Rail Trail project. 

“Kristen said the will of the people has spoken, and she wouldn’t support pulling up any existing rail line tracks under any circumstances,” Goldenkranz said. During that same meeting, De Serpa has said she’s taking a wait-and-see approach, and will hold off until the county’s Regional Transportation Commission receives the project feasibility report, expected in early 2025.

Some distance between the candidates has also shown on the issue of a coastal walkway on Beach Drive in Rio Del Mar, where a homeowners association has been in a tense legal battle over their claim that the path is private. Brown has come out unequivocally on the side of public coastal access in this case, while De Serpa has shown sympathy to the homeowners.

“They have different strengths, and my personal take is that we will be well-served in that district by either candidate,” Goldenkranz said. “But one of the top challenges for this board to deal with is housing development, and I think [Brown] has a leg up on that. Part of what she brings to the table is not just municipal experience, but an understanding of how cities, county, state and federal governments have to work together. She gets the different layers of government.” 

Yet, for Brown’s perceived advantages in policy expertise, she may lack in name recognition when compared to De Serpa. Talk to people on the campaign trail, and many have a story of De Serpa, in her role as a social worker over the last three decades, helping them through their darkest moments. Brown’s impact has come quickly, but mainly within the city of Capitola. 

At a recent Aptos Chamber of Commerce luncheon that featured presentations from Brown and De Serpa, one voter said she attended to learn more about the candidates, mainly Brown. 

“Everyone in this area knows who [De Serpa] is,” she said, before saying how impressed she was with Brown’s endorsement list. 

The race has remained cordial between the candidates. Last summer, after Brown learned De Serpa was going to run, they ran into one another at a picnic. 

“I told her, I hope we can both focus on endorsing and promoting ourselves, rather than demeaning and cutting down each other, because there’s enough of pitting women against each other, and I don’t want to do that,” Brown said. “She agreed, and I think that she’s lived up to that, and I hope I have too.”

Brown said she’s not interested in state politics and that supervisor is as high as she wants to climb in electoral politics. If she falls short in November, she said her mission will remain unchanged. 

“I just want to leave things better than I found them, whether that is casework through a government agency, or if that just means they’re upset about something and need someone to listen,” Brown said. “I just want to be a decent person that cares about other people and does what I can to make their lives better. I like the challenge, but, you know, the challenge never goes away, there’s always a new challenge.”

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