‘We’re only here for a moment’: The urgency behind Monica Martinez’s bid for Santa Cruz County supervisor

On the Tuesday after Labor Day earlier this month, Monica Martinez’s morning fell neatly in order with what she considers her life’s priorities. 

At around 6:30 a.m., she rolled out of bed and into her primary role as mother. A quick breakfast of hash browns and eggs for her two children, followed by packing lunches and shuttling them from their Felton home over to San Lorenzo Valley Elementary School. Martinez, now a single mother whose two adopted children split time with her ex-wife, revels in the chaotic atmosphere of the elementary school drop-off and pickup, a phase her children will leave behind in a couple years as they head to middle school. 

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just become a crossing guard so I can stay a part of it,” she says, only half-joking.

From school drop-off, Martinez zips to Encinal Street in Santa Cruz for a relatively rare in-office work day at Encompass Community Services. The county’s largest health and human services nonprofit, Encompass is a $32 million, nearly 500-employee ship that Martinez, 42, has steered as chief executive officer for the past decade. On this day, she meets over Zoom with her executive team as they figure out how state dollars could help close a funding gap for an Encompass project in Watsonville. Within just the past two years, Encompass hired Linda Alves as chief operations officer, marking the first time Martinez has not been the youngest member of her own C-suite.

Martinez shuts her silver HP laptop, grabs her mug of black coffee and heads for the parking lot, exchanging a few hellos with employees, one of whom calls her “boss lady,” on the way out. As she opens the trunk of her white Toyota 4Runner, she transitions from  Monica the CEO into Monica the Candidate. She reaches past pamphlets plastered with her face and platform, a stack of yard signs that say “Monica Martinez for County Supervisor” and procures a pair of blue derby shoes, modest, but a bit more serious than the black Nikes she’s worn all morning. The shoes, she said, must match the meeting, and she’s off to sit down with Carlos Palacios, Santa Cruz County government’s chief executive. The meeting is part of an informal campaign circuit to talk with county executives and department heads to deepen her understanding of bureaucracy’s approach to issues she hears from constituents. “If I’m fortunate enough to get elected,” she says, “I can hit the ground running and have some ideas about what to do.” 

Martinez finds herself on the final leg of a head-to-head race to replace outgoing, three-term District 5 county supervisor Bruce McPherson and represent a large swath of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the communities along the Highway 9 corridor. She nearly won the seat outright in the March primary, which saw Martinez pick up many of the county’s major endorsements on her way to 46.4% of the vote in a field of four, just shy of exceeding a 50% mark that would have avoided a runoff. Her opponent, primary runner-up Christopher Bradford, is a Boulder Creek resident who lost his home in the 2020 CZU fire, and has turned his campaign into a call for community advocacy and crusade against county bureaucracy’s sins of sloth. The healthy margin between her and Bradford in March didn’t slow Martinez’s approach to campaigning throughout the summer, and won’t in the fall. 

“Elections are weird, and we’ve all been shocked by them so many times in the past, so I try to go in with very little expectation,” Martinez said. “I just know what my plan is, and I’m going to stick with that plan and go with that.” 

The road to politics

Martinez grew up as one of three children in a “very Catholic, conservative, Mexican American” family in Bakersfield, never questioning much about her classic Central Valley upbringing. Her father was a firefighter, her mother a teacher, and she knew her family to be motivated by community service.

“We help people, that’s who we were,” Martinez said. “I had the right core values. They were just conservative in politics.” 

As a student, Martinez showed drive, and even flashed an interest in politics. She joined Future Farmers of America (now known simply as FFA), which sharpened her debate team and public speaking skills; she rose to the seat of sectional president for all of Kern and Inyo counties, and even made a bid, albeit unsuccessful, for statewide office. Inspired by one of her high school teachers, Martinez applied and earned a spot in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s agricultural science program. 

To that point, Martinez had structured her life into the classic mold of an ambitious Bakersfield teenager. Then, during her senior year of high school, with her future all figured out, she fell in love with a girl. Everything began to unravel. 

“I didn’t even know the word homosexual, I had never met an out gay person, and I never knew what it was to be gay,” Martinez said. “I was so Catholic, and I had a lot of internalized homophobia. Like I thought I was going to hell.” 

Martinez left for San Luis Obispo her freshman year while in a secret relationship with her girlfriend, but her parents soon caught on, which led to a “really awful falling-out that lasted a few years. It caused a huge fracture in my family.” Martinez saw two paths ahead of her, “leave my girlfriend so I could stay with my family but possibly never find love again, or figure out how to be resourceful and survive on my own.” She chose the latter. 

“I had the experience of what it’s like to be completely left out, I was terrified to be myself,” Martinez said. She got the female symbol, a circle above a cross, tattooed on her right wrist, an act of defiance and despair against what she now considered a severely limited future. “I thought, well, no one is going to hire me anyway. I didn’t know there would be a future for a queer person to have any kind of life.” 

During the spring quarter of her freshman year, she attended a U.S. Maritime Academy program, where she spent highly structured, militaristic days on a ship that brought her across the country and into international waters. While other shipmates socialized, Martinez said she spent time alone, in her notebook, working out the ancient question of “Who am I?” She said she came out of that program with a vivid picture of herself and values. Upon returning to San Luis Obispo, she switched majors to political science and resolved to spend her life helping people. 

Martinez’s falling out with her family and friends had left her spiritually and emotionally on the street. She said this, in part, drew her toward the homelessness crisis, and she eventually landed with a women-focused organization on Los Angeles’s Skid Row.

“Homelessness was, to me, the most stark image of people being excluded and forgotten,” Martinez said. “I had that experience, but it was a little more hidden. LGBTQ people are excluded all the time, but you don’t really see it. But seeing people sleeping on the street, I thought, wow, what an injustice, what a lack of dignity, how are we OK with this? I couldn’t think of anything more wrong in our society.” 

Between graduating from Cal Poly and embarking to the University of Southern California for a master’s degree in nonprofit management, Martinez and her parents sutured their relationship, which she says remains strong and supportive.

“I have a progressive cultural perspective and values, but I get along with people across the political spectrum because that’s my family,” Martinez said. “You’ll never see me engage on divisive political issues. People on the campaign trail always want to know what I think about [former president Donald] Trump, but really, I want to talk about local issues and how we can create a healthier community. I’m not just going to repeat what you saw on CNN last night, I don’t even watch that s–t! I just believe in what I can do to make a healthier community for my kids, your kids and your family.” 

‘We’re only here for a moment’

Following her meeting with Palacios on that Tuesday in early September, Martinez stepped back into her Nikes, and switched her mindset from supervisor candidate into parks commissioner. Appointed by McPherson, Martinez has represented District 5 on the county parks commission since 2022. She scheduled a lunch at Abbott Square in downtown Santa Cruz with newly appointed District 1 Commissioner Alexis Konevich. Konevich wanted to pick Martinez’s brain about the commission’s workings and where she might be most effective. 

The conversation moved from Martinez’s view of the commission’s influence, to what kind of bathrooms Japanese parks offer, eventually landing on a lament from Martinez over a perceived lack of urgency among some community decision-makers “who populate a seat just for the title of populating a seat,” and uphold the status quo. Could they not see privilege in having a seat at the table? 

“If you’re elected for four years, that’s only four budget votes to make a difference before you run for reelection,” Martinez told Konevich. “That’s not that many for something that could change the trajectory of the county. Time is too valuable and precious to just rubber-stamp and allow things to go the way they’ve always gone. We’re only here for a moment to try and make an impact. That’s how I view everything.”

Martinez’s sense of urgency shows up in her résumé. After earning her master’s, she did a short stint at Deloitte as a public sector consultant. What the gig offered in pay and bottomless expense accounts, it lacked in achieving Martinez’s flavor of meaningful change. Less than two years in, with the clink of her golden handcuffs growing louder, Martinez ran back to Skid Row and became program director at the Downtown Women’s Center Los Angeles. 

Martinez said she always had her eye on relocating to Northern California, a place she discovered in college as a summer camp counselor near Pescadero. After a couple years managing homeless services in Los Angeles, she heard Santa Cruz’s Homeless Services Center (now called Housing Matters) had just fired its executive director amid a scandal. Only 27 years old, Martinez said she called HSC before it ever posted the job. 

“I said hello, I’m Monica Martinez, I work on Skid Row and I know you’re about to be looking for an executive director, I just want to tell you that I’m going to apply,” Martinez said. “It was pretty bold, but I was also young and confident.” 

In April 2010, HSC’s board announced Martinez as the organization’s new chief executive, out of a national pool of 100 applicants. The late Rowlande Rebele, then-board chair for HSC, said at the time Martinez “has a real vision for ending homelessness. Even though that’s a pretty ambitious goal, it’s what we would all like to do, and she has a real desire.”

Marsha Shanle, who served on HSC’s board for more than two decades, called Martinez “one of the most dynamic young people I’ve encountered in a long time.” 

She wasted little time at HSC. Martinez launched evidence-based programming, nearly doubled the organization’s budget to $3.2 million, and implemented an initiative that housed 204 of the area’s most chronically homeless people in two years. Her success heading one of the county’s leading homeless services organizations made her the top candidate in 2014 when Encompass Community Services announced a national search for its next CEO. 

Almost four years to the day after HSC announced Martinez’s hiring, Encompass named the 32-year-old its next chief, responsible for steering its nearly $26 million budget and hundreds of health and human services employees. Martinez had a five-year plan to unify the organization and expand its services, particularly in Watsonville. However, five years turned into 10, and Martinez led the nonprofit through a challenging stretch marked primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced Encompass’s services onto the front lines of the community’s response. 

Dr. Catherine Forest served as Encompass’s board chair between 2018 and 2023, and had a front-row seat to Martinez’s leadership through crisis. Forest said she and Martinez would meet weekly, and in her she saw a rare capacity to handle competing, complex issues all at once. 

“Monica inherited a very disorganized organization, and it was her leadership and the team she built that created the resilient nonprofit that Encompass is today,” Forest said. “She was really seen as crucial in the nonprofit world of community services in our county. She is an extraordinary leader and a bright star. It’s rare that she decided to stay.” 

Despite her accomplishments at Encompass and the organization’s progress, Martinez admitted to feeling “almost embarrassed” by the length of her CEO tenure.

“I think a CEO should be like, a max 10-year term, but we have CEOs in this county who have been here for much longer, and it shows,” Martinez said, that sense of urgency creeping in. “I’ve seen people who’ve just retired in the seat of power and now they’re just going through the motions. We really only have so much time, time with our health, with our energy, fitness, whatever. I don’t feel like I have to cram it all in,  but it does frustrate me to see people who are just going through the motions, especially when it’s blocking progress.” 

Against the status quo

Just two years ago, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors was all male and all white — four out of five supervisors were serving either their second or third term. This has made identity a somewhat important part of Martinez’s pitch on the campaign trail. “Growing up as a queer, Latinx woman from Bakersfield” was a common lead-in during the primary candidate forums earlier this winter. 

In 2023, the board of supervisors welcomed Justin Cummings, a Black man, and Felipe Hernandez, a Latino from South County. If Martinez is elected, she will by all accounts be the first openly gay supervisor in Santa Cruz County history. She would also be one of two women shaking up the male dominance of the past 12 years (the District 2 election features two women). 

Martinez sees implementing a cultural shift — changing what community members come to expect from supervisors — as one of her central goals if elected. 

“I want to help people rebuild their homes after the CZU wildfire, I want to build more affordable housing, draw down more dollars from the state and federal government, and eliminate homelessness, but cultural change has always been huge in my two previous roles,” Martinez said. “Returning people’s phone calls, following up, showing basic human decency in customer service, and showing people that I’m a real human being in this community.” 

Martinez views herself as an outsider desperate to shake up the status quo. However, endorsements by the county political establishment, from outgoing and former supervisors McPherson, Zach Friend and Ryan Coonerty, to Sheriff Jim Hart and the Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee, have given her opponent fuel to paint her as a different side of the same stock that has continually failed the Santa Cruz Mountains communities. 

Some voters have picked up on this. A group of residents affected by the failure of Mountain Charlie Road told Lookout earlier this year that they planned to vote for Bradford after he immediately showed up to listen to their concerns and advocate for road fixes. Many victims of the 2020 CZU fire have also lined up behind Bradford, who lost his own home in the blaze and has been unrelenting in his criticism of the county during the recovery process. Many view the regulatory hurdles that have allowed only a fraction of homeowners in the CZU burn scar to rebuild as county government’s greatest failure.  

Martinez calls it ironic “that a queer, Latinx woman in her 40s is suddenly the political establishment.” Her endorsements include many of the powers that be, but also range from the Santa Cruz County Deputy Sheriffs’ Association to Santa Cruz for Bernie.  

“I’ve been pushing against systems since I became an adult, and I am going to continue to push against the status quo,” Martinez said. “I’ve worked tremendously hard to serve the community and get to this place. These seats aren’t just given to anybody. I grapple with the same challenges of the people of the Fifth District.” 

Martinez said she wants to win this race, but her compass is still tuned primarily to serving her community. 

“First of all, I just want to win. And if I do, and do four years in the seat, and feel like I can make change and be a leader, then yeah maybe I consider reelection, because I really want to serve my community, and I understand policy and budgets and politics, and I think I can do that job well,” Martinez said. “But, you talk to current electeds and you get a mixed perspective on how effective they feel like they can be. I’d like to try my best.”

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