Quick Take
With Tuesday afternoon’s round of vote tallies, Donna Lind, Steve Clark and Krista Jett won three seats on the Scotts Valley City Council. Corky Roberson, Mercedes Molloy, John Lewis and Dustin Lopez were unsuccessful.
Tuesday, Dec. 3, 4:50 p.m. — With Tuesday afternoon’s round of vote tallies, Donna Lind, Steve Clark and Krista Jett won three seats on the Scotts Valley City Council. Candidates Corky Roberson, Mercedes Molloy, John Lewis and Dustin Lopez were unsuccessful.
Lind had received 22.3% of the votes, Clark received 18.8% and Jett had received 18.1% with the latest update.
County Clerk Tricia Webber’s office said Tuesday’s update was the last and the results are now official. All totaled countywide,136,505 votes have been counted.
Behind them, Roberson received 11.9% of the votes, Molloy received 10.4%, Lewis received 9.9%, and Lopez received 8.2%.
Lind was the only incumbent in the race while Jett, Lopez, Lewis, Molloy, Roberson and Clark are newcomers.
The next iteration of the city council will be tasked with moving forward on plans for the city’s long-discussed Town Center project and for building 1,220 housing units over the next seven years, as required by a state mandate.
Lopez, 24, is a UC Santa Cruz student and former Scotts Valley city intern; Jett, 37, is a mother, and nurse practitioner at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford; and Molloy, 24, is a nonprofit director and founder of a personal safety mobile app.
Lind, 74, is a retired Scotts Valley police officer who is seeking her fifth term and Clark, 60, is a retired deputy chief of the Santa Cruz Police Department.
Roberson, 53, is a food-service delivery professional with a long history of volunteerism in the community, and John Lewis, 45, is an information technology professional and relative newcomer to Scotts Valley.
Lind is aiming to be elected to her fifth term on city council. She hadn’t planned on running in this election but said she felt the council needed continuity and a leader with her breadth of knowledge about its history after Mayor Randy Johnson and two-term Councilmember Jack Dilles both announced they were stepping down.
Jett said her campaign’s central motivation was to bring the perspective of someone with a young family to the city council, something she doesn’t see. “I want to see young families, more young, midcareer professionals represented,” Jett told Lookout.
Clark said “a number of elected officials” approached him about running for office and that he was concerned about ensuring the city retained its charm in the face of development pressures.
Endorsed by pro-housing development organization Santa Cruz YIMBY, Lewis focused his campaign on getting started on the long-discussed Town Center project. “I think a lot of people are trying to turn Scotts Valley into a museum where nothing is going to change,” he told Lookout.
Lopez was inspired to run in part because of his experience interning for the city of Scotts Valley through Cabrillo College’s Local Government Fellows Program. During the campaign, he said wanted to help figure out a solution to the city’s budget crisis.
Molloy told Lookout that topics such as housing and the Town Center would receive attention from other candidates, so she focused her platform on issues she felt wouldn’t get any attention: trauma-informed policing, climate resilience, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Roberson, whose grandfather, C.R. Roberson, was on Scotts Valley’s inaugural city council in 1966, has said improving the city’s parks, reinforcing its roads and completing the Town Center are his priorities.
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