What it takes to run for city council, Part 1
Some good ideas, a wad of cash, and the willingness to reach out to and listen to voters
This is a three-part article. Part 1 deals with the nuts and bolts of running for office—from filing papers to the mechanics of campaigning. Part 2 and Part 3 will feature the voices of current and former city council candidates looking back on what worked (or didn’t) in their past campaigns for city council.
In November, there will be two Sebastopol City Council seats up for election, and the date for filing papers to run is fast approaching. The nomination period runs from July 15 to August 9.
The two seats up for election are currently occupied by Councilmembers Diana Rich and Neysa Hinton. Hinton is running again—for her third term. Rich is not.
Right now, there’s a significant subterranean campaign going on to find people willing to run for city council. Maybe, you’ve considered running. Or maybe you know someone who’d make a good city council member.
Our goal with this article is, in Part 1, to give you an outline of what you need to know and, in Part 2, to provide advice from those who’ve been there before about what it takes to mount a successful campaign.
Filing basics
Who Can Run for City Council?
Before you buy the lawn signs and sign up for a League of Women Voters candidate forum, there are some basic qualifications you need to have before you can run for city council. City Clerk Mary Gourley sent over this list:
Be at least 18 years of age or older.
Be a citizen of the United States.
Be a resident of the State of California.
Be a registered voter for not less than 30 days preceding the date of filing candidate papers. Registration will be verified before issuance of nomination papers. The candidate shall be and remain a qualified voter in the City from which he/she seeks office from the time of filing nomination papers, as well as, throughout the full term of his/her office.
Have No Felony Convictions: A person is disqualified from holding an office upon conviction of designated crimes as specified in the Constitution and laws of the state.
If Elected, You Have to Serve: The Declaration of Candidacy, which each candidate must file, states that if elected the candidate will qualify for and accept the office. The affidavit also states that the candidate will not withdraw before the election.
Forms, forms, forms
Although candidate election packets can’t be given out until July 15, would-be candidates should be prepared to fill out a passel of forms, including:
Candidate Intention Statement (Form 501)
Code of Fair Campaign Practices (Optional)
Ballot Designation (Optional)
Candidate Statement of Qualifications (Optional)
Statement of Economic Interest (Form 700)
Deadline Acknowledgement and Public Info Worksheet
Declaration of Candidacy and Nomination Papers
You need to get 20 signatures from registered Sebastopol voters on your nomination papers, though most candidates shoot for 30 in case some get invalidated. After you turn in your nomination papers (with signatures) to the city, that form gets forwarded to the Sonoma County Elections Department, which compares the names, addresses and signatures on your nomination paper with voter registration records. At least 20 registered signers who reside within city limits must match the voter registration records for you to qualify as a candidate.
There is no cost to pull nomination papers, Gourley said. Candidates who choose to have a candidate statement printed in the voter pamphlet agree to pay $800. If a candidate chooses to not submit a candidate statement, their name will still appear on the ballot.
There are also strict financial protocols you’ll have to follow—and more forms to fill out—if you raise over $2,000, which Gourley said most candidates do.
Have a conversation with the city—in fact, have multiple conversations
Gourley invites people who are thinking about running to make an appointment to see her. She can’t hand out any election documents until July 15, but she’s happy to give people an overview of what the job entails.
“People can always reach out to me,” she said, “just to talk about what it takes, how much time is involved. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a couple people call so far. I always suggest people come in before they pull papers to understand what it is to run for office. I tell them how many hours council meetings take; how many hours it takes to read the [council meeting] packets, and then about all of the committees they can be on—if people want to be on committees, all that.”
“I also tell them in general what are some routine or non-routine things that involve council, like do you want to be out in public? Do you want to go to all the downtown events? What does it take to meet with staff? Do you want to meet with staff weekly? What I tell people is there’s different involvements and dedication. So it’s up to the council member how much they want to be involved. As you well know, we have very involved council members, and then we have some that just do the council meetings and that’s it.”
Gourley also suggests that all would-be candidates meet with all the department heads in the city to get a sense of what’s really happening in each area.
“Call and meet with the departments,” she said. “Sit down with them and understand what each of those departments do.”
If you are interested in running for the Sebastopol City Council, contact City Clerk Mary Gourley at mgourley@cityofsebastopol.gov or (707) 823-1153.
Running a campaign
Can you do the job?
Campaign consultant Dennis Rosatti ran Sonoma County Conservation Action before he began running campaigns for local candidates in Sonoma County. He worked on former Sebastopol City Council member Michael Keyes’ campaign, and then for Keyes’ wife, Una Glass, when she ran for council. He consulted on Everett Fernandez’s campaign for city council and for former councilmember Craig Litwin. He’s currently working for Neysa Hinton, who is running for election in November.
Rosatti said that before you even pick up papers, “I think there’s a major gut check that needs to happen. It’s like, why? Why am I doing this? Or what am I thinking about this? And what are the goals I hope to achieve? How can I help my city?”
“I think there’s also a family/home life check you need to do because running for public office and then serving in public office definitely changes things pretty dramatically at home, in terms of the demands on a person’s time that were not present before,” he said.
“What you’re signing up for is not to be understated: you’re signing up for a half-time or full-time job that pays very, very little,” he said. “I’ll just say, it’s a volunteer job basically, right?” (Well, that’s mostly right, but the city pays for council members’ health insurance, plus a $300 a month stipend.)
Rosatti said that the volunteer nature of the job limits the pool of potential candidates.
“There are a couple different kinds of people that can do it,” Rosatti said. “Someone who has financial resources where they don’t need to work; seniors who are retired that have income coming in; or the occasional working person, who can just figure out a way to fit it in. But they’ve got to be willing to take a significant portion of their free time to dedicate to the city to do a good job.”
They’ve also got to be willing to do the work it takes to actually campaign and win the office.
“Someone has to have the time to put into it, to put a good effort in, because those doors don’t get knocked on by themselves. It takes someone to go out there and do it,” Rosatti said.
In addition, he says, candidates should be well-versed on city issues—which is often why incumbents have a leg up. “One of the benefits of incumbency to the voter is that the folks are now trained for the job, and they’ve got an idea of the issues.”
Non-incumbents can make up for this disadvantage by going to council meetings regularly to catch up on what’s going on and, as Gourley suggested, by meeting directly with local city department heads.
While it’s important for candidates to have their own ideas about what they’d like to accomplish on the council, Rosatti said it’s also important to listen to what your constituents have to say.
“You’ve also got to be willing to listen,” he said. “In our world, listening is perhaps underrated. I think it’s very important for someone to have good listening skills and the ability to kind of take in feedback and hear what the citizens, the constituents, the voters want, what they’re looking for.”
Finally, he said, “I think it helps to have some level of prior service,” whether on a local board or commission. “It’s not necessarily a deal breaker if you haven’t though. You know, someone can come in who’s fairly new and do a great job because sometimes fresh eyes are helpful, right?”
Signs to social media—and the importance of money
In part because of Sebastopol’s older demographic, Rosatti said tried and true methods of small town campaigning still work in Sebastopol—lawn signs, endorsements, door-to-door campaigning and showing up for candidate forums.
Signs are expensive—they have to be designed, printed, and distributed. (Though he said nice handmade signs can also work.)
Rosatti thought a candidate could get away with a few hundred signs in Sebastopol.
Sometimes the kind of sign a candidate uses says a lot about their political positions: Rich used recyclable signs when she ran four years ago—a more expensive, but greener option; Hinton recycles her signs, saving them in storage for her next campaign. Councilmember Stephen Zollman made a splash during the last campaign with his handsome handmade signs.
I asked Rosatti how signs bearing only a person’s name worked. Like what does it really communicate?
“It promotes name identification,” he said. “Is it providing information from a democratic, good government standpoint? It’s absolutely not, but voters are busy,” and according to Rosatti, local races are often the last thing on their mind. People pay more attention to top-of-ballot races: president, senator, governor. “By the time they get to local, well, there’s only so much time a person has or can create in their life.”
That’s where lawn signs, endorsements and interest-group voter guides come in. They’re useful short cuts, Rosatti said.
“Organizations that put out endorsement slates or cards can be helpful in the same way that endorsements are helpful—busy voters are looking for guidance on where to place their votes,” he said. “Some groups do more to promote their candidate endorsements to their members—Sonoma County Democratic Party, Sonoma County Conservation Action, Sierra Club, North Bay Labor Council, and a few others tend to send more robust communications informing their members of their endorsements.”
“These endorsements are hard earned in general, involving an extensive process often with written questionnaires and interviews—especially for new candidates that don’t have public voting records,” Rosatti said. “They hold weight with their various segments of voters that they represent because there is trust that has been built up between the organizations and their members.”
In terms of social media, Rosatti said “It’s just another channel to get your message out there, but I don’t know that I’ve seen it really change the game.”
He said it’s probably more important in bigger cities like Santa Rosa where people have less access to the candidates. That said, he still advises candidates to use social media.
“It does make a difference even in a smaller town, because it can help create buzz, it can help get the word out quick. But it’s not perfect, and you’ve still got to pay for it if you really want it to get anywhere. It’s very difficult to get small-scale grassroots political messages to go anywhere without paying for them.”
This, of course, brings up the issue of money: the life-blood of politics.
“It’s gotta come from somewhere,” Rosatti said, “whether you self-finance or raise it from friends and supporters.”
A full-out campaign for city council is no small thing financially. It can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 or more depending on how much money you’re willing to throw at it.
“I’ll say this, if you’re going to spend no money, you’ve got to really have a strong local network and a massive grassroots enterprise,” Rosatti said. “You gotta go out and earn it. You gotta use shoe leather; you know, knock on the doors, meet all the people. And even then you want to leave something behind for people that looks good, so you need something designed and well-crafted.”
You can hire a designer for this or, if you’re lucky, one of your supporters might offer their design services. That’s what happened in Councilmember Sandra Maurer’s case. Someone on her campaign team was a graphic designer and donated those skills to Maurer’s campaign.
Even with that and without a paid campaign manager, Maurer said she spent $6,966.96 in her campaign—and most of that went to signs, campaign literature, and door hangers.
This is so valuable! Not just for Sebastopol. Thank you!