One on One with Sebastopol Mayor Stephen Zollman, Part 2

Zollman on what he's learned being on the city council, how he deals with disagreements, and what he'd like to do next.

This is part 2 of a two-part interview with Sebastopol Mayor Stephen Zollman. See Part 1 here.

What are you enjoying most about your job as a council person and now as mayor?

What I enjoy is learning more about the community. I think people have the perception that I’m sort of a carpetbagger—like I just arrived and what do I know?

But I've been kicking around West County for many, many years. My prior partner and I bought a house out on the river in 2006. That was supposed to be a second home, but I met Jim [now Zollman’s husband]…and that turned out to be our primary residence.

Sebastopol was always our date night. If you want to go to a movie, a restaurant, be able to be affectionate and hold hands, that was here. And so I was quickly like, ‘Yeah, how do we move here?’

This is our eighth year living in Sebastopol, and once I arrived, I thought, ‘Well, what can I do to give back?’ I went right to the city website, and it was like, “Hi, do you want to be the Sebastopol appointee to the Library Commission?” I thought, ‘Yeah, I really do.’ When I was a public defender and all my clients didn’t have money, I’d send them to the library because no one would kick them out, and if they didn't have papers, no one would be crawling up into their business, going, ‘You might be undocumented.’ No one would make them feel uncomfortable or make them feel threatened. So I have been a big proponent of the library.

That was my first real foray into what’s happening in Sebastopol. And then I let it be known, I have my own virtual law practice, so I joined the Chamber of Commerce and they're like, ‘Hey, how about you being a board member?’ So I was a board member there for a couple of years. I was also a board member of LANTERN, which was a nonprofit trying to expand the library, and I was a board member of Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

And now, being on the council and being mayor, I feel like I get to learn even more about the town and try to figure out, again, how to meet the needs of people in the community.

The city did a survey of where people are, and where people are now is about safety. I don’t have a problem with that at all. I mean, we are an older community. But my definition of safety is not just physical. We want to make sure that the EMTs are going to show up, fire is going to come out if you have a fire, but also emotionally and mental health-wise.

Can you tell me more about that?

What I’ve heard from the community is ‘You need to be more responsive about people feeling safe.’ And I hear that. What we’ve done to say we’re listening is to get more 24-hour fire coverage. At our last city council meeting, we set up a stipend program to allow there to be more coverage and set up captain positions.

And, of course, then there’s law enforcement. I think law enforcement always has a role when dealing with serious felony-type behavior, but I’m glad that, for lesser things, our local law enforcement takes a holistic view of, like, ‘Why are you running down the street naked at three o'clock in the morning?’ You know, there’s probably something going on there. And then we cover the mental health stuff and the re-triggering of past traumas.

So one of the things I try to do is to figure out ways to get more mental health services. I met with [our State Senator] Mike McGuire—it took a while to have that one-on-one with him—and the conversation was, ‘Stephen, you’re not going to get a steady funding stream for mental health, but what I will promise you is to set up pilot programs throughout the state, and I’m fine with doing one for west of the 101.” I’m a big believer that we don’t operate in a silo here. What happens in West County affects us and vice versa. So I have this commitment, and the staffers are trying to pull it together, about how we’re going to have a pilot program similar to Ceres.

Wait, the food delivery thing? I’m confused.

Ceres started out just delivering food, but then they wrapped other services around that and now they have Medi-Cal, a steady funding stream. So that’s my goal, with a lot of marginalized, vulnerable people, is to shore up the federal funding.

I’m not sure that’s so secure these days.

Yes. I try not to get too wildly political, but the next years, moving forward, we’ve already heard there will be cuts, like ‘We’re going to slash Department of Education, we’re going to slash this, we’re going to slash that.’ So my goal is to work with other marginalized electives to figure out how we can protect the funding streams that we have. And if we don’t, then how are we going to get more? And if it’s not going to come from the feds, the states, or the county, then it’s going to be us. And what are we going to do? Are we going to figure out a better, strategic way for fundraising for mental health services? I mean, what are we going to do if we’re left to our own devices?

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Let’s go back to your work with the council. Tell me about your approach toward working with your different colleagues on the council.

I learned early on that when there is conflict, the good thing is to lean into the conflict and really understand why the person is as intense as they are. It’s also important for me to recognize that internally. If we’re not seeing eye to eye, it’s usually time for me to pause and just try to understand where the emotion is coming from. If you get lost in emotion, chances are you’re in fight-or-flight—and then just breathe and try to encourage the other person to breathe and try to work through the emotion. Then, when you’re out of your fight or flight, try to get into cognitive levels and figure out cognitively, ‘Where are we? How can we have a meeting of the minds?’

When I encounter that with anyone—my fellow council members or just in life—that’s my goal because I just think that everyone on the council is incredibly bright. We’re older… we’ve had various different experiences, but we are very bright, and I think it would behoove all of us to just take a beat and recognize the fact that we’ve all contributed a lot. There’s a lot we can continue to contribute, but getting locked into a heat usually doesn’t help. It’s a missed opportunity because if you have a big dust-up, then you both walk away and then there’s no potential to think logically through scenarios.

What don’t you like about being on the council?

I have to breathe when things get really, really, really technical. I mean I like to learn, but I can’t learn everything for every subject matter that the city staff and electeds are responsible for—like engineering and planning. That’s all really complicated.

One of the things I admire is the fact that the city council has a lot of ad hocs, whose job it is to delve into these more complicated topics. Some say it’s not great to have as many ad hocs, but I really rely on them for things like choosing a garbage hauler. It’s a specialized area, and it takes time to know it. I’m appreciative of our ad hocs and council members who dig deep on all that stuff. I’m going to read and try to absorb the best I can, but I’m relying on what they’ve learned.

And it's the same with planning. I love the ideas of how we're gonna build a more walkable city, infill, all this and that, but as other council members have said, we really rely on the experts on the planning commission, because you can't really mess around. Architecture is a specialized area, so I rely on experts with the schooling and experience to kind of guide me in the right direction.

So I guess, to answer your question, I feel like I should have a better handle on the really technical stuff, and I feel bad when I don't. That's challenging at times…It’s just that there’s just so many things that come before the city council, and the staff reports are, as you know, very, very intense, and it does take a lot to absorb it all and feel relatively confident.

You are on an astounding number of boards and committees—both on your own and as part of your role as mayor. Why so many?

Well, I don’t know a lot, and so I want to hang with people who are, on a regional level, doing statewide policy work through Cal Cities. That’s where you learn things, and you learn the particular funding streams. And if you can shake the tree, you best shake the tree—especially if you’re in a city that’s struggling financially (and we’re not alone in that). The bright leaders that I see are, like, ‘Great, we need a lot of things, and we can’t afford things. So where are we looking for the money?”

Regionally, it’s the library. Sonoma County Library had a lot of money, and they continue to have a lot of money because Measure W passed, and Sebastopol has a library…So if we can get at, like, where are they going to send money to us and how fast are they going to send money—that is one of my goals.

I also sit on the board of Sonoma Clean Power. They also have a lot of money. But when I talk about that, people are like, ‘How does that affect my life?’ So I’ve had many conversations with the executive director of, like, ‘What are you demonstrating that we as citizens of Sebastopol get because we pay into Evergreen, the higher green energy tier?’ And I'm like, ‘I want to be able to talk about how our elders are saving on their bills.’

I also participate in regional boards—I’m the alternate to ABAG (the Association of Bay Area Governments)—and the question there too is ‘Where is the money, and how can we draw it down?’

You also work with a lot of nonprofits.

I’ve always been drawn to nonprofits that do the work that needs to be done to provide a social safety net. That’s the reason why I felt bad when the city could not continue to fund our local nonprofits…but I was like, ‘Well, if you can’t give money, you could give time.’

Sarah Gurney, when she was mayor, got all the different nonprofits together on a list serve, and they met monthly on Zoom. That had kind of petered out. So I just sent emails to all of them, and we’ve started meeting again on a monthly basis. On January 7, the city council will decide whether they’re going to bless a council member to formally sit as a facilitator for these monthly meetings.

But working to help children is my real passion. That’s the reason why, through the Mayors and Council Members Association, I put my name in for the Child Care Planning Council, and now I’m the co-chair. I’m also on the board of the Nurse-Family Partnership. Those are nurses who go into the houses of moms who are struggling for a lot of different reasons so that someone has eyes on the situation. They don't wait for trauma; they try to figure out what the problem is and get services.

I’ve also been trying my hardest to get connections to all of our schools, elementary school, as well as junior high, and now I have an ongoing, very good relationship with the principal at Analy, Chuck Wade, and we touch base. I really want to start more at the preventative level, like, if they're coming through elementary school, middle school, they're all feeders to the high school.

I learned early on that if you're a city elected, you’re in this jurisdiction. School is over here, and you should stay in your lanes. I don’t subscribe to that at all. When kids start having things attributed to them, like at Safeway, there are things in those youths’ lives that would drive them to want to do certain things and to self-medicate. So I'm like, let me just get busy with the principal and figure out what I can do to help. And one of those things is to figure out ways to get more mental health services.

If you could do anything else other than what you're doing now, what could it be?

I would—and this is still a goal—figure out how to do philanthropic work through a foundation (or create one by myself) that would be staffed by everyone who could help children going through whatever they were going through: so there would be a lawyer, there would be a psychiatrist, there would be social workers, there would be play therapists, there would be all of that. And I would figure out how to get money for that. That’s what I’d do

So it would also play up my legal experience and my psychological interests, but it would have to be child-focused. If it wasn’t child-focused and prevention-focused, I would not be interested in doing it.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I am pretty much a recluse. I am very much an introvert, and it takes a lot of energy to figure out what I want to commit to. And then when I get in that mindset, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve showed up, and other people here seem like they want to get things done.’ And that’s where I think, ‘Okay, we’re gonna think big, figure it out, and continue talking until we have a path forward.’

But yeah, internally I’m not what people perceive all the time. I’m very self-reflective. I go through my own feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism—that’s all still very real.

You know the famous Anne Frank quote: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.” True or not true?

Absolutely true. I mean, I think that we are all one. I get that from the whole Buddhist thing. We are all one, and there are reasons why we are who we think we are, and how we manifest ourselves in dealing with other people.

I always try to understand ‘Why is that other person engaging the way that they're engaging?’ And I always strive to take a deep breath and kind of settle and observe and be more curious. You know, it's like ‘I’m hearing you say this. I’m interested to learn more about that.’ To kind of, again, settle in our bodies and engage the normal, logical part of our brain—assuming the fact that everyone is bright and everybody has something to contribute.

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