Two new faces in the race for Sebastopol City Council
There are two council seats up for election in November and three candidates: longtime Councilmember Neysa Hinton and two newcomers to Sebastopol politics, Phill Carter and Kee Nethery
This last Wednesday, August 14, was the deadline for candidates for city council to turn in their papers to City Clerk Mary Gourley. Although four people pulled papers, only three turned them in: longtime Councilmember Neysa Hinton and two newcomers to Sebastopol politics, Phill Carter and Kee Nethery.
This article aims to provide a brief introduction to the two newcomers. We’ll catch up with Hinton at a later date. (UPDATE: See that interview here.)
Phill Carter
Phill Carter has been an environmentalist from a young age. He majored in environmental policy planning and business at Appalachian State in North Carolina. His first job was working on an oil pipeline, but reading Amory Lovin’s Natural Capitalism turned his head around.
“I got an MBA and realized you could do well and do good at the same time,” he said.
He considered being an environmental lawyer, but decided to go into business. “It's more fun and it’s invigorating and exciting,” he said. “I started a biodiesel trucking company in Boulder, Colorado, and I set up a network of biodiesel filling places across the country, usually at college campuses.”
When that business ran its course, he helped start a bicycle gear company made out of upcycled gear. “I was one of the first, I think, to do life-cycle analysis, where I put the carbon impact of our product on the label.”
He and his wife, who worked in the safari industry, moved to South Africa for several years, but they moved back to the states with their young children during COVID, landing in Sebastopol in 2020, where Carter created and runs a website called environment.wiki.
Carter is an active member of the city’s Climate Action Committee, Bike Sebastopol, and Westco Soccer, for whom he’s currently doing fundraising to redo the fields at Ragle.
Carter said he was urged to run by two sitting city council members, but he also has his own reasons running.
“I want to see nature proliferate rather than become shrunken by human development,” he said. “So I’m interested in infill.”
He supports the Canopy project, a large condominium project at the north end of town, and the construction of new hotels in downtown. He knows there’ll be a cost in traffic, and that’s why he’s thrown himself into traffic planning.
He’s particularly interested in seeing Sebastopol become a more bikeable city. “That led to some conversations about the traffic flows here, and led to my involvement in three traffic studies and bike-ability studies,” including the Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan Study, the Sonoma County Active Transportation Study, and the Caltrans Downtown Sustainability Grant.
He’s interested in helping downtown business thrive—and, in his eyes, this means dealing with the traffic problem downtown, which he knows is a hot topic.
“There are very divergent opinions about how this could happen, but everybody wants the same thing, and one of the things that helps you contribute is finding the synergy and finding the happy medium,” he said. “Because I don’t think things have to be A or B, you know? I feel like there’s more than C out there, and then we can make a plan, right?”
“This is one of the things that I learned about in business. It’s like you start out with your head and shoulders going straight this way, but your customers tell you something different. You just gotta adjust, right? And if you’re stubborn and don’t adjust, you’re not gonna have a business. But if you totally do what the customer wants, you get flopped around in the wind. So you have to have some strength of vision, but you have to come toward your client base.”
He hopes to apply this same logic in his work on the council.
“We can’t just be a bedroom community, right? We can’t just live here. We have to pay for things,” he said, which is why he supports infill developments that shore up the city’s bottom line.
He’s also sensitive to the fact that the city of Sebastopol provides services—the senior center, Ives Pool, the community center—to people from broader west county who don’t pay city taxes to support those services.
“We need to be the squeaky wheel so that the county understands that we shouldn’t be the one to bear the whole economic burden of providing services to the western part of the county,” he said.
Find out more at phillcarter.com.
Kee Nethery
Stanton ‘Kee’ Nethery III, who goes by Kee, moved here with his family from Berkeley in 2011. He and his wife had been looking for a place to call home in Oregon or California, moving from college town to college town from Ashland to San Diego, but none of them felt like home. They were living in Berkeley when a friend suggested they investigate Healdsburg. They did, but that didn’t feel right either. (“It was ‘Would you like fries with that’ or ‘I own five wineries,’ with not a lot in between,” Nethery said.) Then, just by happenstance, they came to Sebastopol to see a movie at the Rialto.
“So we come here, and we’re like they have Whole Foods, they’ve got a town square and a farmers market and a movie theater, maybe we should check this out.”
And with that, they’d found their place to call home.
Nethery, who grew up in Texas, has a degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M. He worked as a process control engineer for Chevron before starting his own business, a digital shareware company called Kagi, which ran from 1994 to 2016. Now he has rental properties in Sebastopol and Berkeley, which he’s looking to shed as he moves toward retirement.
Over the years several people suggested he run for city council, including former Councilmember Michael Carnacchi, Sebastopol Tomorrow member Kevin Dwan and Councilmember Stephen Zollman, “But I always told them, ‘No,’” Nethery said.
Then earlier this week he ran into Councilmember Stephen Zollman at Retrograde. Nethery said that Zollman, with whom he’d worked on the Library Advisory Board, encouraged him to run again.
“He was, like, ‘We need one more person to run. We really need you to run,’” Nethery remembers Zollman saying. “So I decided to give it a go.”
He had one day to pick up his candidacy papers and get the required signatures in time to turn them in by the deadline the next day.
“The main reason why I was willing to run is we want to live here for the rest of our lives,” he said. “We don’t want this town to go bankrupt, right? And, you know, looking at the financial situation that the city got itself into, I’m thinking how…I mean, like, I can read a spreadsheet, can’t they? You know, like, what the hell happened? I can read balance sheets and profit and loss statements, and ask questions and do back of the envelope. I figure it’s gonna be hard to figure out how to navigate through this time, and I can help.”
In addition to bringing his business skills to bear on Sebastopol’s financial troubles, he’s also interested in Sebastopol’s water system. “I’d like to make sure that we don't use it up,” he said. “You know, I’d like to not end up like some of the towns in the Central Valley where they have no water.”
The water system, he said, “appeals to my engineering nerdiness.”
He hopes to apply that same nerdiness to the processes of government.
Before deciding to major in electrical engineering, Nethery thought he’d be a mechanical engineer.
“I was going to be a mechanical engineer because I wanted to design gadgets. And back in the day, mechanical engineering was the way to do gadgets, but, but in ’76 when I started, I could see that gadgets were going to become electrical,” he said.
“Process control is like a huge gadget,” he mused. And so perhaps are the wheels of government.
In terms of his community involvement, Nethery has been involved at the library for several years. He was the chair of the Sebastopol Library Advisory Board, and he’s currently vice chair.
“I’m probably at the library several times a week, dropping off books. We live over near the Safeway so I can walk everywhere. And so the library is one of the places I stop off, and so I thought I can volunteer to be on the advisory board.”
He’s been watching city councils on Zoom, and his wife has attended in person a few times. “I’ve heard the complaints,” he said, “so I know what I’m in for.”
Find out more at keenethery.com, which is still under construction.
You can also find out more about these candidates at the League of Women Voters of Sonoma County’s virtual Sebastopol City Council candidate forum on Wednesday, Sept. 11, at 6:30 p.m. via Zoom. We will provide more information on this event—the zoom link, for example—as it becomes available.