Monday Morning Bullpen: Church Property and Elections

The City Council is dark for two weeks and comes back on July 11. Still there are things going on.

At that point, the City Council is scheduled to discuss a zoning code amendment that will allow housing on church property.

I’ve gone over this before.

The projects would all get a by-right designation that allows them to skip important parts of the city’s process and move to design review.

I’ll say it again, all city projects should be required to go through the entire process.

It’s called oversight.

The local elections are over.

Voters decided to send John J. Kennedy and Jess Rivas back to the City Council along with first time candidate Jason Lyon.

Rivas won voter approval for the first time. She was appointed after Mayor Victor Gordo resigned his District 5 seat to yield the gavel.

Lyon managed to avoid a runoff in District 7 maintaining more than 50% of the vote of Ciran Hadjian and Allen Shay.

That race has me wondering if we’ve entered a new era in local politics.

Used to be a race without an incumbent would almost always lead to four or five candidates and a runoff to get to the big dance.

But in the last two elections, crowded fields have not been an issue in those races.

Like Felicia Williams two years ago, Lyon had no problem beating out a handful of other candidates and winning the race in the primary.

Kennedy didn’t have a problem two years back when he faced two other candidates for the District 3 seat after Chris Holden gave up the seat to move on the assembly.

In some cases incumbents ran for years and never faced an opponent, but now more people are running.

Either way, it’s still hard as hell to beat an incumbent on the City Council.

Over at PCC, the story is different. The incumbents were massacred by a group of challengers that successfully attached the incumbents to issues with the Superintendent / President.

But winning is not the hard part.

Now Lyon and soon to be PCC Trustees Steve Gibson, Kristine Kwong and Alton Wang will have to build consensus and govern.

Trust me that ain’t easy around these parts.

Right about now, people will start emailing and calling to meet the victors in efforts to sway the candidates to their interests. In some cases the people asking for lunch won’t even live in the candidate’s district.

The emails from conspiracy constituents have probably already started coming in.

Even after that, it gets harder after the candidates are sworn in. That’s when they will be accused of being on the take and lambasted for doing the city and the college’s business.

Good luck to you all.