Chris Rogers is running for Jim Wood's Assembly seat
The former Santa Rosa mayor sits down for a Q&A to discuss the issues most pertinent to his district
Editor’s note: We will be posting our interview of Rogers’ opponent, Mike Greer, next week.
As of last November, it seemed like California’s 2nd Assembly District would again be represented by Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg), as he had one two-year term of eligibility left. When Wood dropped out, a few local, Democrat politicians, including Healdsburg council member Ariel Kelly and Rusty Hicks, the chair of the California Democratic Party, ran to fill his seat.
While Mike Greer, a Republican from Del Norte County, came out on top in March’s primary, Chris Rogers rose above the crowded Democratic pack to come in second in the primary, enough to put him on the ballot in November. Rogers told me he was surprised by Wood’s decision to drop out, but immediately saw it as an opportunity to launch a winning campaign.
Rogers has been on the Santa Rosa city council for eight years, including a stint as the city’s youngest-ever mayor. He gets more into his background and his beliefs in the interview below.
Q: How did you get into politics in the first place? Was it always something in the back of your head you were going to get into politics?
My mom runs a non-profit in Sonoma County working with developmentally delayed kids under the age of five. And so for me, it’s always been purpose driven. You're trying to lift up folks who typically don't get the same attention and resources.
[Former congresswoman] Lynn Woolsey offered me an internship to see how government could be used to help people. We get plenty of examples of where government is sometimes in the way and bureaucracy is in the way of what we consider progress, but she was able to show me pretty effectively how you can lead and how you can be that representative that helps deliver for their district.
So I started as an intern when I was 18, and when I graduated from college, I got got hired onto the staff as her grants coordinator and staff assistant, and then ended up working in policy for a number of different members, including most recently Senator Mike McGuire, almost a decade ago now. I was his senior staff helping to get him elected and helping to represent him for two years in the district. But I've also worked on green energy legislation for a private business, I've been self-employed as a personal trainer, I worked at the Big 5 shoe wall, and I've been the executive director for Sonoma County Conservation Action, which does environmental policy here locally as well. So I really have a broad experience that includes government and business and nonprofits. I've been on the [Santa Rosa] city council for eight years. I’ve been through four wildfires, a pandemic, a drought and a flood with my community. I serve on the National League of Cities’ Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources Committee, again, looking at the federal level about how we can better represent our communities, but make sure that FEMA in particular is meeting its charge of providing for folks at a time of need. So I’ve been able to work on national, state and local issues.
What was behind the decision to go out on your own and run for the City Council in Santa Rosa?
I think the impetus for it was after having worked with McGuire in particular and seeing the impact that he had in representing his community, to take back the feedback that he was getting from neighbors, and take it up to Sacramento and get it translated into policy that was going to not just help the folks that he represented, but really folks across the entire state. And having that policy background and also hearing those those whispers from my mom about doing good things for people that you care about and for your community that's helped raise you, really was why I decided to run for city council, and it's a little bit different on the city council than it is on some of the other positions. You run into your neighbors at the grocery store, you get stopped while you're walking your dog, and you get to answer questions about what's happening, or hear feedback from folks on what they’d like to see as a priority.
I was the young guy who was struggling to live in Santa Rosa, right? I was priced out of my own community. It was hard to find housing. Cost of living was going up. I have student loans that I'm trying to pay off, and seeing so much of that reflected in the broader community, I felt like I’d be a really effective voice on the city council. I wanted to make sure that climate change was taken seriously, because now with my son, I want to make sure that his future is bright. It gave me a platform to be able to run, to talk about housing, to talk about climate change, talk about transportation. And once I got embedded in Santa Rosa, you do get a broader perspective as well. I ended up chairing the Summit County Transportation Authority and Regional Climate Protection Authority for two years, I’m on the Board of Directors for Sonoma Clean Power, I’m on the Board of Directors for the SMART train. All of these issues don't know jurisdictional boundaries, and so being able to build partnerships with other local elected officials and my own colleagues in Santa Rosa to advance meaningful policy for our community is something that I found a lot of purpose in.
So let's talk a little bit about that policy. You said you're on the board of Sonoma Clean Power. They're somewhat separate from PG&E in terms of where the source of their energy, but they do use PG&E’s distribution system. How can the California legislature support the CPUC to regulate PG&E more than they already have? What kind of things would you like to see the CPUC do in the future?
So first of all, I'd like to see the CPUC actually regulate PG&E. Many of the folks who have been appointed the CPUC are apologists for PG&E. What I would like to see is a continued expansion of the transmission network, where there's repeated investments—particularly in the North Coast—that allows us to meet our climate goals. There are whole communities on the North Coast who, at different times, have been told by PG&E to stop approving housing because we literally can't turn on the power. That's a failure on multiple levels. I'll give them some credit. Some of this is supply chain issues, but there's also a lack of planning and forethought that they have had for decades up on the North Coast. The number one threat to not meeting our climate goals is the inability to deliver energy at strategic times in this state, so we must continue to invest in our grid and make sure that PG&E invests in those resources before they pay out to shareholders the profit that they make.
Right now, PG&E is the most expensive utility per kilowatt hour in the entire nation. I think if you ask the average person who lives in this district whether they feel like they're getting enough from that investment, the answer would be a resounding no, whether it's because they've experienced wildfires, because they've been in on those housing conversations or because they see that PG&E is not accountable to the CPUC or the legislature. I would love to see the continued expansion of community choice aggregation like Sonoma Clean Power, which has given consumers a choice of where they procure their energy, to make sure that those dollars that we are paying for energy go towards supporting geothermal, wind, and other types of renewable resources that are going to allow California to meet its climate goals.
Wind and solar are things that sound good to people, but I think some are worried about the practicality of this. Folks on the North Coast express concern that a series of wind turbine developments may ruin some of the pristine North Coast. How do you go about balancing the desire of wanting the environment to stay beautiful and to be a habitat for wildlife, and then also using that land to procure sustainable energy?
I will say you do see a split in the environmental community, particularly among younger environmentalists who are really concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and older environmentalists who have been fighting conservation hikes for decades, and those two things aren't incongruent with one another. You do have to plan and make sure that you bring those stakeholders together when you're advancing these clean energy projects, but the reality is that we don't meet the need around climate change if we don't reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. That's going to have a far greater impact on our quality of life than perhaps ruining the view from the coastline.
We have to be honest about that and have a conversation about what is the impact of advancing these projects versus what's the impact of doing nothing. For a long time, we've done nothing, and I will say it's really easy to say no or to find reasons not to say yes, particularly on things that aren't familiar, but we know what science is telling us we need to achieve in order to address climate change, in order to protect our communities, to make sure that our local economies are not completely disrupted by a changing climate. And all of that needs to be discussed at the table, in partnership with one another. I would say, especially when you start to look at solar, we've done a great job in the state of expanding access to solar panels. If you look at the renewable energy output on a day to day basis, you see that during the day in California, we actually have a very clean portfolio because we have so much solar. So the conversation really needs to be, how do we invest in the infrastructure we need to provide reliable energy in the morning, early morning, before the sun is fully up, and in the evening, when the sun goes down right.
How do you suggest California raises the money to invest in that infrastructure? Even if it pays off in the long run, how will the up-front cost be addressed, both for the state’s infrastructure, but also for private businesses and homes?
So we call them first-cost barriers, and it's typically things that like solar panels that in their lifespan are going to pay for themselves, but not everybody has that lump sum that they need in the beginning to be able to get those solar panels on. Or if you're a renter, in particular, it's really hard to find a place that has solar panels. So there's huge equity issues in how we talk about the expansion of renewable energy, huge equity issues when we talk about the available land for renewable energies. That's why we need to take a systems level approach and not just put all of the pressure or put all of our aims about addressing climate on individuals, because we know that there are folks that are struggling to put food on the table for their kids. They're not going to be investing in an electric vehicle or solar panels unless the government intervenes and subsidizes it. That's why we need to talk about structures that are bigger than just one community in the state, whether it's some of the geothermal work that's taking place or offshore wind. It's because they know that won't just impact the local area but will have a profound impact on energy production across the state. And then the second aspect of this, the other thing we've gotten to is reliability, because getting people to switch to clean energy is only going to be effective if you can provide reliable energy. And when you see rolling blackouts in Texas because they don't have the infrastructure in place to support high demand when it's hot, that makes people really question whether they can make this transition. The answer is that we can, but you have to be smart about how you invest in the infrastructure to be able to handle that load.
Let's talk about an issue that's in the news a lot these days, and one which is definitely on the minds of both city officials in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, which is homelessness. A month ago, Governor Gavin Newsom issued a directive for state property, basically saying, ‘We're done with encampments.’ Is that the attitude you're in favor of?
I think we have a tendency in the state to treat homeless as though it's a monolith and that one size fits all—that approaches from Sacramento are going to work for our community. The reality is that it's not. You have people who are homeless for a number of different reasons. Some are victims of domestic violence, for instance, some are drug and alcohol addicted. Some people lost their job during the pandemic and didn't have the means to be able to pay their rent. Some people have a job and they just can't afford the down payment or the first and last month rent on an apartment. All of these are different examples where a different policy intervention would be more effective for getting that person off of the street. That doesn't mean that you tolerate encampments that are having a massive impact on your community.
I hear oftentimes about needles in parks when people are in encampments there and where kids are playing on the playgrounds. Totally inappropriate. I think that's a place where those interventions matter. But we've done a really good job, I think, in Santa Rosa, since the pandemic, putting in place policies to intervene on encampments before they become a nuisance. And by intervene, I mean offer services, build those relationships. We have a known names list with folks who have been engaged by our homeless encampment team that goes out and actually talks to people. ‘What are your needs? What services are you willing to accept?’ If they're not willing to accept any services, then fine, they can't be impacting the local community.
I think that the reaction from the governor is knee-jerk, because people are tired. I think it's, quite frankly, I think it's compassion fatigue when you just are seeing the same issues over and over again. But I think giving local governments tools to be able to address it in a way that makes sense for their specific homeless population makes a lot more sense than just decreeing that we're not going to have homelessness and pretending like the issue doesn't exist anymore.
I’ve heard from many that a large factor in the homelessness problem, so to speak, is that mental health facilities aren't where they should be. People are being let out of care before they should be, people are being put in prison when the underlying issue is really mental health, etc. Are there any sort of policy initiatives that you'd like to see enacted with regards to that?
Yeah, I actually think that project Homekey is going to be one of the most impactful policies in addressing homelessness, and I think that we're not going to see the impact of that for a couple of years. It is just part of building the infrastructure to make up for a lack of investment from the state for a long time. You mentioned mental health. I think having a place for people to go that gets them stable will make wraparound services that much more effective. And I will also say the [Martin v. Boise] decision was entirely unworkable for many local jurisdictions, because we are talking about local communities figuring out what their relationship is with their their homeless community. I find that when I talk to my constituents about homelessness, an effective question to ask them is, ‘Do you care why somebody is poor?’ Because that is oftentimes what it comes down to in these discussions about homelessness. ‘Do you care that this person is homeless because they fled a domestic abuser and it was the only way that they and their kids could get away from a worse situation? Do you care that somebody became homeless because they were drug addicted?’ Some folks say, ‘Absolutely, go treat the addiction and try to get them off the street.’ Some people say they did it to themselves. ‘You shouldn't have to invest my tax dollars into helping them.’ I disagree. I think that we have an obligation to try to serve our community. And I also think from an economic perspective, it's a lot cheaper for us to address the root causes of homelessness and help get people off the streets than just to push them along and say, ‘That's not my problem.’
Talk to me about the increasing cost of rent and of buying a home in this state. What sort of things are you looking to do to lower the cost of rent and also lower, possibly interest rates and some other things related to buying homes?
I think if you look at who exactly is struggling to stay in our community, it's kind of bookended around age. It is people who have gone on a fixed income, who have retired, where social security isn't keeping up with the cost of living. It's also young folks who are trying to get rooted in the community and stay here. I bought a house in Sonoma County the old-fashioned way. I married somebody who had already bought a house, and the only reason that she was able to buy that house is because she had a really good union paying job as a nurse in our local community. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to afford to live here because wages haven't kept up with the cost of living for many. The rules and the tax policies that we have in place benefit people who are already established, who already have a house, already have a decent income. It's hard to stay rooted here long enough to get to that point.
Is there a specific policy that you could share with regards to this?
Absolutely. We have a number of parking lots in downtown Santa Rosa that are underutilized. We know that we have more than enough parking, and so we went out to developers, and we said, ‘If we literally give you this land, what would you build for the community?’ You'll see it in the next couple of years. It's going to be really transformative for downtown [Santa Rosa]. We did it without violating our values about environmental protection by saying we're going to build up in downtown and we're going to make it so that folks have access to places to live that are near jobs and near transportation. I oftentimes like to describe it to folks as your local government setting the table. They're not the ones that are cooking the meal. That's the developers and the investment that comes in, but you can set the table, and you can order off the menu what you want, and that's what we've really done. We’ve made it so that when developers come in, we say, ‘If you build this, we'll get out of your way and let you build. If you want to build something else, you have to do the whole long process. You have to talk with the community, you have to change the vision and get the buy in for it, but if you want to build what the community is asking you to build, there's no reason for us to throw arbitrary barriers.’
One of the things that is hard for folks, particularly in this district, is the lack of affordable health care. So I'm a big proponent of universal health care. I've seen the impact even in my own family. My mother-in-law retired at 72 and moved back to Scotland, where she was from, because in large part, they have the National Health System. We need to be able to advance things like universal health care, not just from an equity perspective, but also to bring down the cost of living for folks.
The issue of immigration is more of a national issue in terms of policy at the border, but what happens to undocumented immigrants once they become invested in our communities is a question oftentimes addressed at the state or more local level. Are you in favor of a path to citizenship for those who are residing in this state without documentation? How would you like to see that play out?
Absolutely. My wife is an immigrant from Scotland. She was around 10 or 11 when her mom came to the United States. She had a path to citizenship. I also have friends that are undocumented, who were brought here when they were babies, no fault of their own, who now have their own families, they have their own lives here, but they have not had that same path to citizenship for one reason or another. And some of these people are community members who are invested, who want to just build a better life for themselves and their kids, and they just don't see any possible path there, because we can't have an honest conversation about immigration at the federal level. The way that it impacts our local communities is that it's our workforce, it's our community leaders, it's the folks who are walking down the street. When we talk about particularly law enforcement and immigrant communities, our law enforcement wants to have a relationship with everybody to be able to address issues. They don't want to have to worry about people not willing to cooperate when they see something or when they hear something because they're worried that they're going to be turned over to the federal government. We need to continue to provide a path to citizenship for folks who are here, who are productive members of society, who have family members here.
With the recent fires locals are having a hard time buying insurance that's affordable, or they are having a hard time getting insurance at all. How would you go about maintaining that sort of safety net for people in the case of a natural disaster?
I just had a neighbor in downtown Santa Rosa get canceled. And if you're getting your policy canceled in downtown Santa Rosa, then the rest of the North Coast is also going to be having challenges. And I hear this every day when I talk to folks. It's moved from being a concern to a crisis very quickly in the state. But the reality is, you had insurers that had been leaving for a number of years, and the insurance commissioner did not do enough to address the issue before it became a crisis. Now you look at it, and most of the reform has been on how to bolster the FAIR plan, to make sure that you have that safety net, and that's good. We need to do that, but we also need to talk about things like catastrophic modeling, things that the industry has been asking for for a while to be able to do a better job of assessing risk and damage, particularly around wildfires. And also, I think we need to have a broader discussion about how to better prepare our communities. If you're doing vegetation management or if you're doing home hardening, all of the things that we're asking you to do, you can't get dropped by your insurance. But it's becoming unaffordable, and, in fact, the confluence of energy and insurance is now basically a second mortgage for folks who own their homes in the community. You need to bring down the cost of it, but we need to have some thoughtful reforms and understand that the problems are not going to be solved in a year or two. We need to put in place things now that over the next five years are going to pay dividends.
I want to ask you about roads, as, especially in the Fifth District and up the coast, there's people who are impatient about their roads getting fixed. How do you decide which projects to take on and how do you come communicate with the members of the community?
You talk to them about prioritization. I mean, you have certain parts of the community, particularly in this district, that sees their road wash out every single year, and they just see band-aid after band-aid after band-aid being put on it. You need to have that forethought and make sure that you're not just doing band-aids and are actually solving the problems. And we also know things like sea level rise are going to greatly impact our transportation networks as well, whether it's Highway 37 or Highway 1, making sure that the state is already looking at that and implementing those strategies through CalTrans. A lot of what people want to talk about with roads is your local roads where you have a funding formula that's 50% based on population, 50% based on road miles to maintain in a community. That naturally disadvantages the north, particularly because we don't have the population of places like San Diego and L.A. I know our local members of the Board of Supervisors and our city council members are scratching and clawing for every penny that they can get to invest in our roads. Sonoma County is a self-help County. We have a tax measure that voters have approved to be able to invest more, and we need to take every opportunity to leverage dollars from the state and the federal government to make those dollars go further in our local community. That means that when I'm looking at legislation in Sacramento that's going to have additional funding for roads, I’m fighting like hell for every dollar you can find.
Two major industries in your district are logging and fishing. I'm sure there might be a couple others that have been somewhat frustrated with recent environmental regulations that have hurt their ability to make a living. Do you have thoughts on how to keep the fishermen and the loggers happy and prosperous, all while protecting the environment?
I mean, what we're talking about is sustainability, right? And you saw this with cannabis as well if I can throw another one in there. You've got an entire economy that's built on extraction. In fact, it’s we call the extraction economy, whether it's timber, whether it's salmon, whether it's cannabis. And we know that long term, if you don't have sustainability built into your practices, then you also are not going to be successful economically. If you overfish a stream for a couple of years, you're going to see that impact, because you'll get less return the following years. It's not just good environmental health practice, it's good economic practice. And also, we know, particularly when it comes to fish, you've seen the damage that's been done, and you see projects that are now starting to restore that. So use that as a cautionary tale. I met with folks in the environmental community just yesterday who are helping to support a $50 billion grant for a project all the way up the north coast with multiple stops and investing in salmon and steelhead. But I’ve also met with the loggers as well to ask them what are your constraints? ‘Where are the areas that you can reach sustainability, where you can work together?’ They oftentimes, I think, are thought of by the average person as being at odds, but they work together on a lot of the same restoration projects. In fact, I was able to tour with some of the largest timber industry folks in the state a couple of weeks ago on a salmon restoration project that they were doing on their land that they were funding. So it's not incompatible with one another. You just have to make sure that you're having those conversations.
There's been a plethora of issues over the last few years with the implementation of cannabis legalization, whether it is in equity of opportunity or increased theft. Your district includes the most famous cannabis-growing region in the country. Do you have any thoughts about how to make cannabis legalization work for everybody?
Yeah, the biggest problem that I see is that when we legalized in California, you only had five years of protection for small farmers. And what that meant is that a lot of the mom and pops who were driving the local economies in the North Coast have been completely put out of business by the big guys coming in, or they've been completely pushed into the black market because the cost for compliance is so much higher that the little guys can't compete. That's a broken system to me. When you look at how long it's taken people, how much money that they had to outlay to get their permits, and then they're still having to walk through this process, and it's taking years. That's money that the local folks who have been doing this and have bolstered these communities—they can't afford to do that. It's going to be your other giant brands that are looking at it. At its core you needed to have economic and environmental resilience. There's things that the state can do to try to help but the reality is, if you talk to people on the North Coast, the black market is still rampant, and that's making it difficult for folks.
I don’t know how familiar you are with the consolidation of El Molino into Analy High School. Many El Molino parents felt like they were sort of blindsided by this decision to consolidate, and they're now building momentum to reopen El Molino as part of a move that would also consolidate the elementary and middle school districts with the high school districts so that there would be two unified districts in West County. Would you be in favor of consolidating the districts?
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's ridiculous how many school districts California has, especially Sonoma County. We do need to consolidate. We do need to take some of the money that's going to overhead and instead provide it for classrooms and teachers and access for students. I mentioned that my wife and her family came to the United States from Scotland when she was young. They lived in Casper and her brother in particular, had a really hard time getting to and from school. That was over an hour bus ride, both directions for him to get there. The ability to do homework and to focus on being educated was impacted. And so I understand those issues. Is there more that the state should be doing absolutely but it is going to take locals forcing consolidation of school districts to be able to get that reinvestment into our own system.
California has great research institutions like UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis, but of course it is not feasible for everyone to go to a school like that, especially people who live in the rural parts of the north coast who want to stay close to family. Do you have a broader vision for higher education in the state?
Yes. To kind of answer a broader question about this district in the assembly, and that's access, right? Like the number one thing that this district struggles with is access: access to healthcare, access to education, access to transportation, access to jobs. It just is different in a place like the North Coast than it is in a place like San Francisco. And when we talk about educational opportunity, you already mentioned it before. When you're talking about West County, can you afford it? Can you get to it? Is it close enough? Does it attract the teachers and the professional staff that it needs to be successful? How are you providing access to folks, and how are you moving people into the middle class. How are we making sure that it's accessible to people who traditionally felt left behind by the state? That's the big question around education. So, yes, expand access to education by creating new universities. I know that the UCs are potentially looking at moving a new campus up north, if they can find somewhere to do it, maybe Chico.
Are you in favor of investing in trade school programs?
Absolutely. When I was Mayor [of Santa Rosa], one of the things that we did with ARPA funds is we created a baby bonds program where every low-income baby in our community has a child savings amount started for them that they can use for a two year, four year or technical training education program. And that was an acknowledgement from us that maybe a four-year university isn't the path that everybody needs to go. Many of those trade jobs pay better than the four-year degree jobs that people traditionally think of. So it’s investing in people that really matters. We did a project labor agreement in Santa Rosa to make sure that when we provide public dollars into a project, that those jobs pay enough for people to live and work in the community that they serve. Those are the trade jobs that we're talking about—creating those jobs and keeping them local. So I'm a big supporter of that.
Editor’s note: Read the article on Rogers’ opponent, Mike Greer, here.
Thank you for this interview! Coverage of these local races is a really valuable service and I appreciate it very much!
I agree, good interview, and thoughtful answers. Chris has my vote!