“Iacta alea est.” That’s what Julius Caesar is supposed to have said when he led his army across the Rubicon river in his bid to take over Rome.
“The die is cast.” We’ve gone over and we can’t go back. The deadline for becoming a candidate for the Berkeley City Council was last Friday, August 12, and now not only have the dice been thrown, the hats are in the ring, Well, District 8 candidates got an extension to August 17 since incumbent Lori Droste isn’t running, but now their time is up too. And it turns out that hats in Berkeley are in short supply this time around.
You can see the spreadsheet listing those who filed the required paperwork here:
Lucky you. Finding it cost me three phone calls to city staff plus seven clicks guided by a pleasant fellow in the City Clerk’s office, the last of which produced a chart obscurely entitled “Roster of Candidate Activity.” Yes, the COB’s new web interface is as bad as they say it is, but when you get there this is an informative document.
What can we learn from it? Well, we already knew that four council seats will be on the November ballot. It seems that no one has the nerve to challenge Kate Harrison, the darling of the progressive planning wonks who care about District 4, the downtown center of the city. That’s the one which has been most adversely impacted by the BUB Boom, aka the Big Ugly Box Boom, even though Councilmember Harrison has valiantly tried to control it.
Next, we have the other heavily BUB impacted district, District 7. That’s the one that was set up by former councilmember Kriss Worthington and now-mayor Jesse Arreguin as a sinecure for ASUC leftovers who want to move slowly into the adult world.
It’s the “student district”. What that means is that it has the lowest registration rate as compared to population, and the smallest turnout among registered voters in any council district. Apportionment is based on population, not numbers of actual voters. It turns out that most students don’t care much about voting in Berkeley.
If you believe that, short of malfeasance in office, incumbency provides a massive advantage in any election, and I do, Rigel Robinson (former or perhaps current Association of Students of the University of California External Affairs Vice President) looks like a shoo-in, though his undergraduate days are behind him. He admits to liking tall buildings, and gets support, financial and otherwise, accordingly.
Nobody is running against him either. Few students want to commit to staying in Berkeley for a four-year term as a councilmember, and there are few non-students in District 7, so Robinson attracted only one potential opponent, recent UCB graduate Aidan Hill.
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