Running for City Council -on Pulling Papers, Getting Qualified and Being a Mother!

This election cycle I decided I need to learn and understand why more people don’t run for City Council or other elected offices. How can it be that Alicia Aguirre had fourteen to fifteen candidates vying for her appointment but then ran essentially unopposed for an election? What is it in the process that is so terrifying that people don’t do it?

Early Monday August 3rd in the morning, I called the City Clerk’s office and left her a message saying that I needed to schedule two appointments with her. She promptly called me back and asked me if I was running. I told her I was at least going to go through the process and write about it. Given the fact that I called five days before the end of the filing period there was no time to lose.

The City Clerk scheduled me in for later the same day to “pull papers.” As advanced as we are I would have thought that this packet would exist as an online packet and that it would not require an hour meeting not only with the City Clerk but with her assistant. As a policy I don’t like to meet government or any entity without the same number of people on my team as theirs; so I invited my campaign treasurer, Julie Pardini, along for the meeting.

The City Clerk went over each document carefully although the reality is that the level of detail for a first time applicant is not only confusing but simply not logical. For example on one form the occupation of the candidate was tightly controlled while in others it was completely flexible. For a lot of wealthy candidates the financial disclosure forms are the hardest to complete. In my case given my limited means, these were the least of my worries. Nonetheless it was interesting to learn that disclosures are in a lot of areas limited to the particular jurisdiction you are running in.

After about an hour the meeting was over and Julie and I agreed that given that the City Clerk would be sending out an email at end of day noting that I had “pulled papers” it was probably appropriate for Julie to announce on the Facebook page she administers: Redwood City Residents “Say What” that I was running.

I went home and started to work on completing the list of documents: Nomination Paper, Candidate Registration Form, Declaration of Candidacy Form, Candidate Statement Form, Ballot Designation Form, etc, etc, etc. Then a call from the City Clerk came in. When we had met in person we had discussed what my occupation would be. While I had thought I should keep it simple and just say Mother, Julie felt I should say Writer; so we left it with the City Clerk to do research about whether or not I could say both.

I took a break and starting collecting signatures for my Nomination Paper. It has enough spaces for thirty signatures but only twenty are required. The reason that you get an additional ten is that to get certified you need twenty Redwood City registered voters that sign and write their name and addresses properly or the county essentially voids the validity of their signature. Although I tried to be vigilant, while at a house signing party, one individual had signed below his spouse and instead of writing out his address put quotation marks. It was unclear whether that signature would count. Another individual totally forgot to write in their address. Nonetheless hopefully at least twenty of the thirty collected would be found to be valid.

Back to work completing the forms and writing my two hundred word Candidate Statement. The Candidate Statement is supposed to be a statement as to your education and credentials for the job. I read not only the samples in the Candidate Guide, that to my mind were basically puff pieces without any meat in them, and the ones I found online from the last local election. I put together what I thought might work. I sent it out to a couple of people for review and input as well as to the Clerk for her opinion.

The next day Tuesday, the City Clerk called me and informed that since I didn’t earn money for my writings and I didn’t have a supervisor that Writer as part of my occupation was probably not going to work. I said fine I will stay with Mother. Later in the process I was talking to another supporter and he mentioned that maybe given that I was more of a Blogger the more appropriate term was Blogger / Mother. I liked that idea and corrected my paperwork to reflect what I felt was a more true and appropriate designation. The clerk also didn’t really like my statement and suggested that I should change it to more talk about my qualifications instead of what I had done which was more talk about my platform.

Thursday, just three days after I decided to run and pulled papers; I had my thirty signatures, a committee bank account, a campaign treasurer, an assistant campaign treasurer, my first campaign donation to cover the cost of the Campaign Statement and all my various documents completed. This was now supposed to be a shorter meeting to just review the forms, sign in front of the clerk and take the pledge.

We had barely gotten to the second form where I had now put Blogger / Mother for the meeting to become quite tense. The City Clerk felt that after agreeing with her I had gone and become a troublesome candidate. I explained the thinking process. She was unconvinced. She had her assistant, Ms. Dora Wong, take the matter up to the City Attorney. Then an outside legal attorney was contacted. Ms. Wong came back in, we finished the rest of the packet and waited for a final determination. The City Clerk stepped out and then came back and said that she couldn’t take my application as Blogger was not a permitted occupation as it was more of an Avocation. I still am not being paid nor do I have a supervisor; however Mother is a vocation and so I can say that as an occupation and not be paid nor have a supervisor. To say I was feeling confused is an understatement.

Even more confusingly for a candidate, the form clearly has a Preferred Option, a 1st alternate and a 2nd alternate. I had listed Blogger/ Mother as the preferred, Blogger as 1st alternate and Mother as 2nd alternate. This to me meant that I was allowing whatever authority had to make this decision to use either one of those three designations. However what was explained to me was that all three options had to be county approved options from which they would then take the preferred option. Again it made no sense, essentially the City Clerk would not allow me to submit papers unless I either submitted the Preferred Option as the one she would approve or take the City to court - what Corrin Rankin, a candidate for City Council two years ago, had to do in the last election cycle only to win and be eviscerated by the council members for exercising and winning her legal rights.

So like a real Mother, I decided to pick my fights. This would not be one of them. I crossed out and initialed the cross out of the word Blogger.