Ariel Kelley, former mayor of Healdsburg, brings her Assembly campaign to Sebastopol
Join her at Crooked Goat for a Q&A on Monday afternoon at 5 pm
Ariel Kelley’s first gathering in Sebastopol was small enough to fit on a single picnic bench in front of Taylor Lane, and that’s a pity because Kelley, a councilperson and former mayor of Healdsburg, stands a decent chance of becoming Sebastopol’s next Assembly representative from District 2, a vast district that stretches from Sonoma County to the Oregon border. Sebastopudlians will have a second chance to meet with her and ask questions at a meeting at Crooked Goat Brewing, 120 Morris St., this Monday, Feb. 12, at 5 pm.
The Sebastopol Times caught up with Kelley at Little Saint, a posh cafe two blocks north of the square in Healdsburg. Kelley has been a big noise in Healdsburg since she first moved there 10 years ago from Oregon. With an MBA and law degree from Golden Gate University, Kelley has led two local non-profits: the Latino-focused Corazon Healdsburg (Kelley is not Latino) and Pillar, a short-lived, COVID-era small business grants organization, which she founded during the pandemic. She served on a variety of city and county committees before she was elected to the Healdsburg City Council in 2020, serving as mayor in 2023.
Kelley also touts her experience as the mother of two young children as good preparation for political work.
“So I think probably being a mom of two kids and having the innate skills of knowing how to put up with difficult situations, how to multitask, how to deal with people who are throwing temper tantrums and not getting their way. It is exactly like politics,” she said. “I am not kidding.”
Kelley has been endorsed by Sebastopol Mayor Diana Rich and by Supervisors Lynda Hopkins, David Rabbitt, and James Gore, as well as a long list of assembly members. (Rich, Hopkins and Gore have also dual-endorsed her competitor Chris Rogers.) See Kelley’s full list of endorsements here.
On the issues
Kelley said the hottest issues in District 2—the ones she’s heard the most about while campaigning—are homelessness/housing and healthcare access—including access to reproductive healthcare.
Homelessness/housing
Homelessness is top-of-mind in places like Santa Rosa and high on the list of concerns even in smaller communities, Kelley said.
“In Santa Rosa, homelessness and crime are the biggest issues that people talk to me about,” she said. “But the issue of homelessness has also come up as well in Ukiah and Eureka. It’s a matter of scale.”
“I feel like the key issues that are important to this region are issues that I have championed, as mayor and on the council, like reducing homelessness in Healdsburg by over 60%,” she said.
This 60% figure is based on the 2023 point-in-time count that saw the number of homeless individuals in Healdsburg drop from 97 to 33. (Numbers dropped for the county overall and north county in particular, while Sebastopol’s homeless population increased slightly. Homeless activists have argued that this particular point-in-time count radically undercounted the number of homeless individuals, but these are the numbers that we have to work with.) In terms of what specifically Healdsburg might have done to reduce homelessness, Kelley pointed to the conversion of the old L&M Motel into transitional housing for the homeless.
Kelley is also proud of Healdsburg’s progress in building more homes, including affordable housing.
“At a time when people said that would be impossible to do in Healdsburg, we are building more homes in the last three years and having more homes in the pipeline in than at any time in the last 20 years,” she said. “It’s knowing how to go from a community that couldn't figure out how to build housing or couldn't build consensus around housing to being one of the newest cities in the state designated by the Governor as a “pro-housing city”—and the access to resources that that will mean for our community.”
“I feel like I've been able to make a very strong shift in a city and in a culture where it didn't feel like that was going to be possible, and we did it in partnership with our community and with our local voices at the table driving that change. And I'm really proud of that work,” she said.
Moreover, she said, “I feel like that work is transportable to Ukiah to Willits to Garberville to Crescent City. I mean, there are places in this region that really need that kind of support. And it comes at multiple levels of government. It comes with state resources. It comes with county support. It comes with local government at the table and community at the table. And I think that's the vision I have for why I've been successful here and what I want to take to the State Assembly.”
Access to healthcare/reproductive care
In her discussion of healthcare access, Kelley dove deep into the problem of rural hospitals — like the one in Fort Bragg, facing $20 million in retrofitting costs, mandated but not funded by the state.
“There’s an impending cliff there with the looming deadline of needing to have the retrofit done, and the community just feeling really like no one in Sacramento is looking out for their local interest,” she said. “I think that the feeling of hopelessness around this big issue is definitely keeping people up at night.”
When asked later in a follow-up question, what she would do about this issue. She wrote the following.
The Hospital safety Act in California was adopted in 1994 and established requirements for seismic building code upgrades for hospitals built after 1973. This applied to about 50% of California's hospitals.
Rural hospitals in this district, like the ones in Garberville and Fort Bragg are having to come up with a plan to retrofit their single-story hospitals and under the new standards it will cost about $50 million for Garberville and $20 million for Fort Bragg. Two-thirds of California hospitals have yet to meet the 2030 seismic deadline.
As Assemblymember, I would propose: 1) Take on extensions on a case by case basis and allow rural single-story wood frame hospitals to have extensions since they are less of a seismic risk. 2) Provide state funding to help the independent small public hospitals meet seismic standards. 3) No matter what we have to increase reimbursement rates for hospitals and clinics so that all healthcare providers are able to provide high quality care and right size their budget shortfalls.
This last point also applies to women’s health clinics, she said. Surprisingly in this pro-choice state where the right to an abortion is enshrined in the state constitution, Kelley said that access to women’s reproductive health is still at risk.
“I think as we talk about access, whether women's reproductive health care or access to abortion care, that is becoming more and more of an issue because of the Catholic health care system and Adventist Health, owning all the hospitals in our region,” she said. “We used to have public hospitals and that model is no longer financially feasible. So most of those hospitals are no longer providing abortion care. In addition, a lot of the federally qualified health centers or community health centers are—there's a lot of pressure from the federal government to ensure that no federal funds are used for abortion care…So there's this huge fight to ensure that those clinics can remain open and financially sustainable.”
Because of the byzantine bookkeeping required to prove to the federal government that no federal money is being used to support abortions, clinics are dependent on state funds to keep the doors open, Kelley said.
“The problem is that the state is not willing or they have been very slow to respond to the requests of those clinics to increase their reimbursement rates,” she said. “The state of California has clinics waiting three to five years for a response to those requests. And so we have clinics in our community who have submitted requests back in 2017, but are still waiting for the State Department of Health to respond.”
“So it's really a problem that the state and our state assembly member needs to have more oversight and there needs to be more transparency around why it's taking three to five years for our state's health department to respond to these reimbursement requests,” she said. “Because in the meantime, our communities are really suffering.”
Family issues in the foreground: Paid Family Leave and Universal Pre-K
As a new assembly member, Kelley said she would work with the Democratic Legislative Women's Caucus to help move forward legislation on paid family leave.
“For the Democratic Legislative Women's Caucus, which has endorsed me in this race, there are key priority issues that they are focused on getting out of committee and through to adoption,” she said. “One is paid family leave. They know that where California goes, so goes the nation. We are one of the only countries in the industrialized world that does not have paid family leave in a meaningful way. And so for the women in the legislature, this is their number one issue, in addition to gender parity in pay, and so those are two issues that I will eat, sleep and breathe until we get it done.”
She also wants to keep tabs on how the statewide transitional kindergarten program, which was signed into law in 2021, is faring.
“I want to ensure that we are fully funding that program and that it is implemented in a smart and robust way so that it is going to be as successful as possible,” she said. “We talked about it, it got adopted, but now with the implementation, I think that we need to have really a strong feedback loop so we're not just pushing policy out and throwing it on the school districts to implement. We want to hear how it's going and if we need to tweak any of the legislation or the financial supports to make it more successful.”
Show me the money
There are six candidates in this fiercely contested Assembly race: Ariel Kelley; Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks; former Mayor of Santa Rosa Chris Rogers (see our profile of Rogers here). These three are generally considered the front runners.
Other candidates in the race include Vice-chairman of the Yurok Tribe Frankie Myers (D); Mendocino County Supervisor Ted Williams (D); and Michael Greer (R), a Del Norte Unified School District trustee.
Being a wealthy person from a wealthy family, Kelley has a leg up on much of her competition financially. She has contributed $150,000 of her own money to her campaign. Her sister, Shoshana Ungerleider, donated $200,000 to the political action committee, North Coast Neighbors Supporting Ariel Kelley. The Press Democrat reported that controversial developer Bill Gallaher donated $50,000 to that same PAC. (You can read about Gallaher in this recent Sebastopol Times article.)
Kelley has racked up the largest number of contributions of any candidate—though not the largest monetary total (that belongs to Hicks). As of today, the California Secretary of State’s website lists 556 donations, totaling $466,165. (This includes her own $150,000.) More than 66% of Kelley’s contributors donated $250 or less. Monetarily, these small donations add up to 13.4% of her total haul. (This figure and those below are based on the California Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance website. They actually undercount the number of contributors below $250 because candidates aren’t required to list donations under $100, though some do.) To Kelley’s credit, 72% of her donations come from within District 2.
The same cannot be said of Hicks, a labor leader from Southern California and Chair of the California Democratic Party. Hicks, who moved to Arcata in 2021, has built up a huge war chest for this campaign, amassing $590,757 in contributions, primarily from out-of-district sources, mostly from Southern California and Sacramento. If you subtract the $11,000 donation from his wife, only 6.5% of his contributions have come from within District 2.
Undoubtedly the best connected candidate in the race, Hicks has racked up a big list of endorsements, particularly from statewide labor organizations. He also has the endorsement of outgoing District 2 Assembly member Jim Wood. Hicks has recently come under fire from some in the Democratic party for the alleged conflict of interest between his position as Chair of the California Democratic Party and his candidacy for Assembly. (See a recent Bohemian article on this issue here.)
Former Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers has raised $222,081. Similarly to Kelley, 65% of his contributions consist of donations of $250 or less — that’s 14.4% of his total haul. Seventy percent of his total donations come from inside District 2.
Kelley declined to criticize any of her opponents.
“I think we have a great group of bright individuals who are all interested in making a difference in our community,” she said. “I think we're lucky that we have quality candidates running for this seat.”
When asked how she would differentiate herself, she put it this way: “I would say that I am both a policy wonk and intellectually capable of writing and executing strong progressive policy while also having the operational leadership and operational skill set to ensure that the policy that we're writing is going to be implemented in a way to minimize unintended consequences. I've led large organizations. I've been a practicing attorney. I've worked in the private sector. I've worked in the nonprofit sector. I think I have a broader set of professional experiences to bring to bear that allows me to be able to look at an issue or look at a policy from a variety of lenses and angles and have a better sense of what may or may not work.”
Find out more about Ariel Kelley at arielkelley.com.
Thanks for the detailed breakdown of financing in this race.