Quick Take
Seven local offices on the ballot in Santa Cruz County this fall drew zero interested candidates by the close of an extended filing deadline last week. Now, the districts and boards will begin public outreach campaigns to try to find someone to appoint to the seats, rather than be put before voters, before current terms expire.
How does a community choose its political representatives and decision-makers when no one steps up to run for office?
In Santa Cruz County, that question will need to be answered this election season for seven local seats no one appears to want. A vacant candidate pool is the ultimate anticlimax for a democratic process founded on voters directly selecting their representatives.
The positions include the Area 6 seat on the Santa Cruz City Schools board of trustees; one seat each on the Bonny Doon Union Elementary School District, Santa Cruz Port District, Pajaro Dunes Geologic Hazard Abatement District and La Selva Beach Recreation District; and two seats on the Mountain Elementary School District in Soquel.
Each is a volunteer role holding varying forms and degrees of political power. Yet, by the close of the extended filing deadline on Aug. 14, no one had tossed their hat in the ring.
Instead, the boards in question will recruit and choose a candidate to appoint to the seats rather than go before voters.
“It’s something we see happen from time to time,” Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber told Lookout last week. “This is not a one-off thing, but whether this is a trend we’re going to see start to rise, I don’t know.”
Mike Heffner, superintendent and principal of Bonny Doon Union Elementary School District, said it has been decades since the district has had a contested election.
“This is unfortunately a little too common for us,” Heffner said.
This year, the district has only one candidate, Heather Kelley, in a race for two open seats, also not uncommon for the small North County district. Heffner, who has led the district for the past seven years, said they have always been able to find a way to find someone for the role by the start of the term: “I haven’t been in a situation where we’ve been unable to fill a board seat.”
Many of the candidate-less seats hail from smaller districts. Then, there is the board of trustees for the Santa Cruz City Schools district, the governing body for a school district that includes the city of Santa Cruz and unincorporated areas from Davenport to Soquel. Sam Rolens, spokesperson for the district over the past nearly four years, said that while turnover is natural, this is the first time he’s seen zero candidates step up for an open board seat.
Webber said this could be because of a recent change in format for the district. This is only Santa Cruz City Schools’ second area-based election after having operated under an at-large system for years. In that system, each seat on the board of trustees had a school districtwide candidate pool (population nearly 122,000 as of 2022’s redistricting). Now the candidate pool for each seat is confined to one of seven areas, each with a population between 17,200 and 17,600 people.
Rolens said the district wasn’t concerned about finding a person to fill the seat.
“We know that even if the board has to pull in someone who isn’t necessarily so excited about serving, the onboarding process is going to be OK because we have a very good board right now with a lot of expertise,” Rolens said.
How it’s done
When an open seat has no candidates after the filing deadline, each governing district generally follows the same template, laid out by county election code.
In conversations with representatives from four of the six districts lacking candidates, most are in the process of launching a public notice campaign to alert voters that they are seeking someone to fill the position. At this point, the districts are not looking for multiple candidates to compete against one another at the ballot box. Instead, they are searching for the person they can appoint to be the sole, uncontested candidate to take over the seat for a full, four-year term.
As applications begin to come in, each board forms an appointment committee to verify the eligibility of the candidates. Once a pool is set, the board hosts a regular public meeting in which the sitting elected officials interview each of the candidates in an open session, almost like a game show panel.
“That part can be a little challenging in a small community, since it can put neighbors who are trying to do the right things up against one another,” Heffner said.
Everything happens in the open, from the interview to the discussion and the vote. The governing body’s choice is then presented to Webber’s office, who appoints the candidate as the sole name in an uncontested election.
Since uncontested elections do not appear on the ballot, each district has until Election Day, Nov. 5, to choose its candidate. If the district misses the deadline, or it does not have any candidates to appoint, its board begins the new term with a vacancy, and the process starts over again.
At the La Selva Beach Recreation District, where only two candidates are running for three seats, district manager Maddy Serrano said the district already has a third candidate, Kris Grantz, lined up. Serrano said the board plans to appoint Grantz during its September board meeting.
The Santa Cruz Port District, which oversees the operation of the Santa Cruz Harbor, is having its first district-based election after years under an at-large system. Port Director Holland MacLaurie said she is unsure still about the district’s ability to find a candidate for its Division 2 seat.
“Soliciting candidates when it was at large was much easier,” MacLaurie said. “Now, our focus is limited, and we’ll just be trying to target people. I hope we’re successful in finding someone who is interested.”
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