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In the Oakland City Council race, Tuesday’s general election runoff ended with the two candidates in almost the identical position they finished in last June: AC Transit At-Large Board member Rebecca Kaplan at 61.95 percent (61,431) and Oakland School Board member Kerry Hamill at 37.16 percent (36,845).  

In June, Kaplan and Hamill came in one-two in a five-person race, with Kaplan at 40 percent and Hamill at 22 percent. 

Kaplan will replace the retiring Henry Chang on the City Council, who flirted briefly with running for re-election but dropped out after State Senator Don Perata, one of his longtime backers, switched his support to Hamill. 

Chang had been a council ally of Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, but Kaplan is not. In fact, De La Fuente’s presidency itself may be in jeopardy, with rumors of possible challenges to his seat when councilmembers choose the leader for the new term next January. Asked last September who she might support for council president, Kaplan said at the time she had not made a commitment one way or the other. 

Kaplan could not be reached for comment following the release of the at- large election results. 

By telephone Wednesday morning, Hamill praised Kaplan for being a “tremendous campaigner. Her affiliation with the Democratic Party was very powerful and she did a lot of work on the inside game, getting endorsements from organizations and putting together associations. That’s critical in a city election.” 

Hamill, the outgoing North Oakland representative on the school board, said the most difficult part about running a citywide campaign was fundraising.  

“You can only do so in small amounts from each donor, which is good, but it’s so exhausting,” she said. “It devours so much of your time, instead of leaving you the time to work on policy positions or campaigning with voters. You need to spend about $200,000 for a citywide race, and I probably raised about half of that. I thought it would be comfortable for me, because I’ve done a lot of fundraising for educational foundations since I’ve been on the school board. But it wasn’t.” 

Asked if she had any further political ambitions, Hamill laughed and said, emphatically, “not today.” 

Instead, she was already back to work at her job as BART manager of local, government and community relations and looking forward to getting back to what she says is “really my passion”—education. She will return to volunteering at her children’s schools and will be asking to join the foundation board of Oakland educational pioneer Oral Lee Brown.  

“She’s doing such fine work,” Hamill said. “I want to help her raise money and do outreach.”