CM Jerry Davis
Mayoral reports
Controller reports
Four Council members are term limited this year. Two, CMs Stephen Costello and Oliver Pennington, are running for Mayor. The other two, CMs CO Bradford and Ed Gonzales, do not have any announced plans at this time, though both were on the list of Mayoral possibilities at one time or another. While there are some known candidates for these offices, there are many more to come. No one who isn’t or wasn’t a candidate before this year has a finance report, and no one has any contributions to report, so the data we have is somewhat limited.
Brenda Stardig (SPAC)
Jerry Davis
Ellen Cohen
Dwight Boykins
Dave Martin
Richard Nguyen
Robert Gallegos
Mike Laster
Larry Green
Name Raised Spent Loans On Hand
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Stardig 0 21,191 0 59,517
Davis 0 6,091 0 97,563
Cohen 0 23,304 0 63,769
Boykins 0 5,845 0 1,129
Martin 0 20,345 0 34,339
Nguyen 0 20,120 0 15,020
Gallegos 0 7,326 0 45,021
Laster 0 5,791 0 78,216
Green 0 45,671 0 55,983
Gonzales 0 35,987 0 29,603
Brown 0 3,858 0 34,900
Robinson 0 1,565 0 48,334
Kubosh 0 17,403 10,000 0
Bradford 0 12,282 0 20,088
I’ve included the totals for Helena Brown above, since rumor has it that she’s aiming for a rubber match against Brenda Stardig in A. Beyond that, the two numbers that stand out to me are Boykins’ and Nguyen’s. Boykins was the big dog in 2013, nearly winning a first round majority in a very crowded field. I presume he emptied his coffers in the runoff, I haven’t gone back to look at his last reports from 2013 and his January 2014 report to confirm that. He burned some bridges with his vote against the HERO last year, so it will be interesting to see how things develop from here. As for Nguyen, he came out of nowhere to knock off Al Hoang in F. He then made a courageous vote for the HERO and announced that he was a Democrat. All of these things would put a target on his back even if he had a big cash on hand balance. As for Kubosh, he did a lot of self-funding in 2013, and I’d expect at least some more of the same. It will be interesting to see how much of the usual suspect PAC money he gets. We’ll have to wait till July to find out.
Helena Brown told me personally and recently that she intends to seek an at large seat on council. There is a lot of logic in this, as she starts with some name ID, a committed base, and might be likely to get into a runoff just from those advantages. And who knows what might happen in a runoff. In fractured multi-candidate contests, the results are unpredictable. (Kubosh-Morales, and Robinson-Burks in 2013 come to mind, and Joe Trevino v. Jolanda Jones 2007) If Brown were to be in a December runoff with Lane Lewis, for example, I would vote for her, and think she might win.
It’s scary to think there are people who still regard Helena Brown as anything other than the loon she is.
In 3 of 4 races (two elections, 2 runoffs), Brown defeated Stardig by double digits, only to come up a a little over a hundred votes short in the last low turnout runoff. Brown represents the conservative base, which is a major voting block, while also having won kudos from neighborhood leaders for her constituent service. She has proven to be an effective fundraiser and campaigner, and this cycle has several options on the table. Will be interesting to see what she does.