An early look at At Large #3

A little while back, Campos listed all of the people who had filed designations of treasurer for city office, which is the step you need to take before you can raise any money for a campaign. As expected, the field for City Council At Large #3, the only open At Large seat, is already crowded. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the six candidates who have already expressed their intent to run for this seat. Here they are:

Chris Carmona

Chris Carmona – Facebook – Twitter

Carmona is making his second run for At Large #3. He was one of two opponents to CM Melissa Noriega in 2011, receiving 26.20% of the vote. Carmona is a Republican, was involved in the petition drive to overturn the homeless feeding ordinance, and would undoubtedly be an antagonist of Mayor Parker if both were to win this November. He’s also not a fan of Metro, as the entry on his blog-like campaign website would indicate. I wanted to note that particular entry, in which he grouses about the city not being prepared for the NBA All-Star Game this past February, since subsequent events and post-weekend reviews proved him to be quite spectacularly wrong. Predicting the future is hard, y’all.

Roland Chavez

Roland Chavez – Facebook – Twitter

Chavez is a first-time candidate, who announced his retirement from the Houston Fire Department after 34 years at the same time as he announced his candidacy. His treasurer is the former chief of staff for the late Sen. Mario Gallegos, which will undoubtedly be a good connection for him to have for his campaign. He does not yet have a campaign website or Twitter account that I could find. Chavez is a Democrat but as we know the firefighters and the Mayor do not have a good relationship, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

UPDATE: The Chavez campaign has informed me that he does have a Twitter account, which is now listed above. My thanks to Priscilla for the feedback.

Michael Kubosh

Michael Kubosh – Facebook

One of the Fighting Kubosh Brothers, Michael Kubosh ran as a Democrat against Sen. Dan Patrick in 2006, but is more readily identified as a Republican. He does not yet have a campaign webpage, and in what may just be an oddity there is a – Twitter account in his name, but it has had no activity. I noted Kubosh’s announcement here. He’s best known for being a leader in the effort to ban red light cameras in Houston, and his brother Paul was the plaintiff in the now-dropped lawsuit against the city over the homeless feeding ordinance. Kubosh was at Ben Hall’s campaign announcement event, not that there was any question about what his relationship with Mayor Parker would be like.

Roy Morales

Roy Morales

It’s like old times having Roy run for city office again, isn’t it? He ran for At Large #3 in the special election in May, 2007, losing to CM Noriega in the June runoff, then again in a November rematch. He ran for Mayor in 2009, coming in fourth, and ran for CD29 in 2010. He finished serving a six-year term as HCDE Trustee at the end of last year. He doesn’t have a campaign Facebook page or a Twitter account that I could find, but he has used his personal Facebook page to make campaign announcements. He is a Republican, having run for HCDE and CD29 on the GOP ticket. While Morales has been an actual opponent of Mayor Parker from the 2009 campaign, it’s not quite clear what his relationship with her would be if he were elected to Council, since he’s largely been quiet about city issues since then. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Rogene Calvert

Rogene Calvert

Campos notes that Calvert did not list what office she was running for on her form, but I know this is the office she has in mind. She is a first time candidate, is on the UH Center for Public Policy Advisory Board and is a past President of the Asian Chamber of Commerce for Houston. She is a Democrat. I don’t know for sure but I would expect that she would be mostly an ally of Mayor Parker. If elected, she would be the first Asian-American to serve At Large since Gordon Quan.

Jenifer Pool

Jenifer Rene Pool – Facebook – Twitter

Pool ran for At Large #2 in 2011, finishing 7th in the field of nine with 7.06% of the vote. You can listen to the interview I did with her for that race here. She is a Democrat and a past President of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, and is an ally of Mayor Parker. She was as far as I can tell the first entrant in this race.

That’s what I know right now. I expect there will be more entrants into this race – seems like the magic number has been nine candidates for open seat At Large races recently. Nancy Sims notes this KUHF story on At Large #3 that says there are eight candidates so far. I emailed Nancy to ask who else she knew about, and she replied by saying Laurie Robinson, who ran against Jolanda Jones in At Large #5 last year, has sent out an announcement of her intent to run; Nancy also mentioned that former State Rep. Al Edwards has been rumored to be looking at the race. Robinson’s Facebook page has no mention of her running for anything – for what it’s worth, the rumor I’d heard was that she’s looking at At Large #2 – and her campaign webpage is currently inactive. I’m going to file her as tentative and Edwards (Lord help us) as speculative for now.

For the other six candidates, all have a plausible case for making it to the runoff, though if we’ve learned anything from recent elections it’s that no one should overestimate their name ID, and in the absence of clear information voters can and will make random selections. Having said that, if there is one candidate in this race who can claim some name ID, it’s Roy Morales, and if this election were to be held tomorrow I’d put my chips on him making it to the runoff. Kubosh is probably the runnerup in the name ID department, but he and Carmona will be fishing from basically the same pool of voters as Morales, and I have a hard time seeing more than one of them emerge from the pack as a finalist. Kubosh has some inroads into the African American community from his anti-red light camera advocacy, but I don’t know how much that might add up to if someone like Robinson or Edwards gets into this race. In many open At Large races there has been a single dominant Democratic candidate – Peter Brown, Melissa Noriega, Jolanda Jones, Brad Bradford – but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. As always it will be interesting to see where the money and the institutional endorsements go. Finally, after all the recent concern about the lack of Latino representation on City Council, it’s good to see three viable Latino candidates running, even if two of them are not to my taste. No guarantees any of them will win, of course, but as they say about the lottery, you can’t win it if you’re not in it.

UPDATE: Laurie Robinson posted the letter she sent to supporters on my Facebook wall, in which she said she will not be a candidate in 2013, though she may run for something in the future. So take her off the list for this year.

Related Posts:

• July finance reports for At Large candidates
• Chron overview of At Large #3
• Election results: Houston