What it takes to run for city council, Part 2
Current and former councilmembers offer their advice for people thinking of running for the Sebastopol City Council this November
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on what it takes to run for city council.
For this second part of “What it takes to run for city council,” I talked to city council members, past and present, to find out what they learned from their time campaigning for public office in Sebastopol that might be of help to others considering that same path.
Their advice fit neatly into three stages:
The first stage is pre-campaign: learning about the demands of the job, educating yourself about the issues, asking yourself whether you really want to do this.
The second stage involves laying the foundation of your campaign: the mechanics of filing, setting up the foundation of your campaign and developing your platform.
The third stage is all about getting your name and your message out to voters—with signs, social media, candidate forums, and going door to door. This stage runs all the way up to election day.
This article will cover the first two stages. Next week we’ll finish up with stage three.
Stage 1: Before you start your campaign
Decide if you want to do this…
Sarah Gurney, who served on the Sebastopol City Council from 2004 to 2022, emailed us her response to the question: “What advice would you give someone running for city council?” Most of her advice related to figuring out whether you really want to run for city council in the first place:
First, test your interest and capacity. Read the council packet for three meetings. Figure out your questions and prepare your discussion points. Attend each meeting in person and pretend it was you on the dais. Could you follow what was going on? How would you respond to your colleagues? How did you feel listening to members of the public? How did you vote? How did you do? (Ideally, you’d practice for three months, for a more accurate measure of your interest and commitment. Unfortunately, it’s now too late in the campaign season to do that.)
If you didn’t enjoy it, don’t run. You’d be signing up for four years of unhappiness and frustration, and you’d likely embarrass yourself in public..
If you were jazzed, consider if you want to campaign. Are you able to ask for money? Do you have a committed group of knowledgeable locals to help you, as confidential advisors and/or volunteers (and will they stay and support you while you’re in office)? Do you have time: to draft your mailer and hand-out, to walk door to door, to participate in forums, to attend community events, and so on? Are you comfortable talking to people you don’t know?
There are plenty of mega-questions. Are you a leader? Do you like making decisions? How do you handle difficult conversations? How short is your fuse? How thick is your skin? Do you listen effectively? Are you a nimble thinker? Are you comfortable speaking in public?
Finding out about public office and your suitability to the responsibilities takes a lot of careful effort and demands honest self-assessment.
Assuming that you decide “Yes, I want to run,” Mayor Diana Rich (who will be leaving office this year) had some practical advice: “Look at your calendar. You’ll be campaigning pretty seriously, probably August, September, October, and then you’ve got the election in November, and then you’re seated in December. So to make sure that your summer and fall are clear and that that’s going to work for you and your family, because campaigning is a time-consuming (and rewarding and fun) activity.”
Educate yourself about the process and the issues
The next step in Stage 1 is to educate yourself about the mechanics of the election process, and everyone I spoke with agreed that that meant talking to City Clerk Mary Gourley, who is the city’s election official. (See the discussion of filing your paperwork for your candidacy in Part 1.)
“In terms of all of the foundational, institutional sort of pieces, Mary Gourley is the source of information,” Rich said. “For instance, she goes through all of the paperwork that needs to be submitted, the timelines that need to be met, all of those essential pieces. She’s very confidential about it all. So that’s the first step in informing yourself.”
Next, interview current and former council members.
“That would be existing city council members, former city council members, anyone who has been in elected office,” Rich said. “And I would include in that list of people, those who are in our community who perhaps have gone through the process but didn’t end up being elected or decided not to pursue it, because that’s a different perspective to obtain.”
Former city councilmember Una Glass served on the Sebastopol City Council from 2014 to 2022. Here’s her advice about preparing yourself to run for council:
“So the first thing I would say is—to get to know the issues of the town, read the Sebastopol Times every day,” Glass said. (Editor’s note: No, this is not a paid product placement. She actually said this.) “Then the second thing would be you need to go to city council meetings every other week. You should probably attend planning commission meetings for a while too. You need to do it, and it’s not like you just need to go a couple of times; you need to go a lot. Then you need to be talking to your friends and neighbors, and then you probably need to do informational interviews with existing members of the council.”
If you’re thinking of running for office, there are probably some issues you already know and care a lot about—that’s likely why you’re running in the first place—but city government is multi-faceted, and there’s still a lot to learn.
Councilmember Sandra Maurer, who was elected to the city council in 2022, recommends meeting with city department heads to educate yourself more thoroughly about what’s going on in the city. Maurer said this really paid off later in her campaign, during a candidate forum: “I was really prepared because I had talked to all those people,” she said.
Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman, who was elected to the council in 2022, also recommended reaching out to groups outside of city government.
“I would encourage people to reach out to the NAACP and reach out to Latino Service Providers, and then there’s an Asian group. Reach out to Positive Images if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in the queer community, especially our youth. I would encourage people to at least reach out, offer to buy their executive director coffee and figure out, again, how you could be a better ally to that historically marginalized group.”
Councilmember Jill McLewis, who was elected to the council in 2022, suggested that candidates educate themselves about the needs of the local business community by talking to the merchants themselves.
“Being a business owner and a member of the Sebastopol Downtown Association (SDA) has afforded me the ability to better understand the challenges Sebastopol businesses face,” she wrote. “In addition to knocking on a couple thousand residential doors, I made it a priority during my campaign to visit as many Sebastopol businesses in town as possible. That sometimes resulted in a conversation with the owner or an employee, all of whom held unique perspectives that I’ve found valuable to this day. I’ve found one-on-one conversations to be the most beneficial as each Sebastopol business faces their own challenges. Without having such conversations, I think it would be difficult for any candidate to truly make an informed decision about policies impacting the economic engine of our city.”
“I would recommend candidates prioritize connecting with our very hard-working small business owners in any way possible,” McLewis continued. “When I campaigned, the SDA held a Q&A forum for Sebastopol business owners to attend and speak with the candidates. I hope we’ll see more business owners run for Sebastopol City Council.”
Stage 2: Creating a strong foundation for your campaign
Build your core team and supporter base
Like many other former candidates, Maurer had an enthusiastic group of supporters, who urged her to run and supported her throughout her campaign.
“I would say what worked really well for me is that I had a wonderful team, and these are people who wanted me to run, and they supported my run,” she said. “We met weekly to talk about next steps, what we were doing, what was happening, and how to keep it moving forward—and they helped make that happen. They were just fantastic. I could not have done it without them. Everything I did, I had my core group and I’d run it by them. They would help me wordsmith things, and they were so helpful in all that.”
Maurer said her core team consisted of five or six people, but she also had a wider group of supporters that helped her get the word out about her campaign. “In addition to my core group, there were about 20 more people who were putting on door hangers or walking or doing other things.”
Zollman echoed Maurer’s suggestion about having a small team of people to help you with your campaign. He said he was often buoyed up emotionally during “the ups and downs of running a campaign by the people who reached out to me, encouraging me to run to begin with,” he said. “I always took solace reconnecting with them and for them to just say, ‘Yes, you definitely have things that you wanted to accomplish, that you thought would benefit the community, and just keep carrying on.’ So it was those people that I just cycled back to, and they just kept providing the energy to keep moving through the campaign.”
Zollman had actually been setting himself up to run for public office for several years, by building a strong network of political connections among what he calls “ally groups.”
“To me it just goes back to creating the change that you want to see, right?” Zollman said. “So I already had my ally groups, and because I took the time to invest with those groups, to learn how to be a better ally, then they also showed up for me in the ways that they could—forwarding posts, having conversations. Those groups were important, and so I would encourage other people to find out who your ally groups are, knowing that they’re going to show up and they’re going to help get the word out for you.”
Some candidates decide to hire either a campaign manager or a campaign consultant as part of their core team. Rich ran her own campaign, but she gave a shout out to two local consultants, Dennis Rosatti and Craig Litwin, a former Sebastopol City Councilmember himself.
Councilmember Neysa Hinton, who is running for re-election in November, managed her own campaigns in the past, but this time around, she decided to hire Rosatti as her campaign consultant. Past council candidate Everett Fernandez is her treasurer.
“I’m using a campaign consultant because I feel like I don't have as much time as I used to,” said Hinton, who unlike many councilmembers, works full time. “Also, I kind of just want to change a few things, and after eight years, kind of freshen things up.”
The mechanics of setting up a campaign and accepting donations
We discussed pulling papers as a candidate in Part 1 of this series. But that’s just the beginning.
Councilmember Maurer said you’ll have to open up a business bank account for your donations and keep detailed records on your donations if you are going to raise more than $2,000.
Looking at her donations notebook, she said, “I have a spreadsheet with the first name, last name, the date of their donation, their email, their phone, their address, city, state, zip code, the type of donation (say, check or cash), the donation amount, the occupation, the employer, and whether or not I thanked them—which I always did.”
If you raise over $2,000, each donation of $25 or more must be recorded with the date received, amount of the contribution, and full name and street address, including zip code, of the contributor. If a donation is over $100, you also have to list the donor’s occupation and employer. Maurer said that when she was first taking donations, she didn’t know this latter point, and she had to call back a lot of her larger donors to fill in the missing information.
Using a website as a launching pad to define what you stand for
Mayor Rich found that the process of setting up her website helped her define and shape her campaign message.
“In that second phase, which involves setting up the foundational pieces of being an elected, that also included identifying who you are and how you’re going to communicate that to the public,” she said. “The easiest vehicle for doing that is a website, because it forces you to set up your narrative: Who are you? What are the pieces about you that would be interesting to the public? What are the issues that you care about, and if elected, what will you bring to an elected position?”
“For me, it was my commitment to the community and to collaboration and to enrichment—all of those pieces—and putting them on the website help me formulate them,” she said.
“That then becomes the basis for any further mailers or other outreach that you want to do in print or orally—and also can be the basis for later on, when people are invited to interview for endorsements by all of these organizations that endorse candidates.”
Both Rich and Hinton use the political website company Campaign Partners, which Hinton described as “easy to use,” noting that it also has great tech support.
Lining up endorsements
As campaign consultant Dennis Rosatti pointed out in Part 1 of this series, endorsements can be seen as a kind of mental short-cut for voters—as in “If people I trust, trust you, I can trust you too.”
It helps to get endorsements lined up early so you can include them in your campaign literature.
“Endorsements were very helpful,” Maurer said. “I met with Sarah Gurney, and I asked her, if I ran, would she endorse me? And she said yes. And so on my first door hanger, I was able to say that Sarah Gurney had endorsed me, and I think it was hugely helpful.”
“Also on my website for the campaign, I did list endorsements. I applied for the endorsement of the North Bay Labor Council, the Sierra Club and the Sonoma County Democrats, and I received all those,” she said. “I also was endorsed by Sebastopol Tomorrow, and they created a flyer and walked that flyer around. It was for both Steven Zollman and myself. I was very honored that they would do that.”
Former Councilmember Una Glass had a more practical political take on endorsements.
“Endorsements are usually pretty important,” she said. “If you don't have an endorsement from a single other elected official, I think people start to think, well, Who are you? You know? Do you actually know the right people to get stuff done? Are you in the know about who to call at the board of supervisors when you have a problem, right? Those endorsements tend to lend credibility and attest to your understanding of how government works and how to rally resources for your city.”
“The other thing, I think is there are certain names of people locally who are kind of like litmus-test names for what’s your general philosophical point of view? Like, if so-and-so endorses you, you must care about the laguna or bike trails or whatever.”
Filling out the pages-long questionnaires some organizations use to determine who’s getting their endorsement can be time-consuming and tedious. More than one candidate I spoke to complained about this, and one candidate said it was her least favorite part of campaigning.
Pick up a list of registered voters
Once you officially declare your candidacy, you can apply to purchase a list of registered voters from the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters. This list, which includes voters’ names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, party affiliation and more, is an essential part of campaigning—for both sending out mailers and door-to-door canvassing, which will be central to the third stage, “Getting the word out,” which we’ll explore in the final article in this series.
Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this series.