Ballots are out now for the June 3 election, and members of the fearsome foursome, as some have called the four individuals vying for the supervisor position in Sonoma County District 1, are feeling the heat.
With a large percentage of voters returning their ballots in the mail well before the actual election day, the candidates should have gotten their full messages out by now. We’ve watched those efforts with interest and recognize their sound bites:
Wiesner: I’m Republican
Pier: I’m Green
Brown: I’m the incumbent
Reber: I’m not
Fleshing these out with what we think we know about the people running, and about the power of the position they seek, has led us to a voting recommendation, though not an entirely unequivocal one.
Lawrence Wiesner seems not to be running a serious campaign, and we don’t really consider him to be a serious candidate. His Web site is sparse, at best, and he has not articulated how or why he cares about Sonoma Valley.
Will Pier is a serious candidate, but we worry about his inexperience. He is perhaps the most political of the candidates, in the sense that he toes a party line on issues ranging from health care to the environment to a living wage. Yet he has not proven his grasp of how those issues impact local politics, or vice versa. That’s not to say he isn’t developing that understanding. In fact, we have long championed the benefits of competitive elections for this very reason, as it forces candidates to consider, adopt, and champion positions on the issues presumably of most importance to the voters.
Valerie Brown, a Democrat, is the incumbent, and she is a masterful politician. Having made politics her career, she knows how to win elections at several levels and she knows how to schmooze and fundraise. We are always a bit wary of career politicians because at some level their decisions have to be colored by their personal interest in preserving and furthering their careers. Even if unconscious, it is a factor of political life, and it is part of the reason that we opposed paying salaries to the Sonoma City Council members. Brown has been criticized for her inaccessibility, for her lobbying work elsewhere in the state and for her work outside the state on behalf of the National Association of Counties – these buttress our concerns about her commitment to Sonoma Valley, and so it is that we think a change might be a very good idea.
David Reber, a Republican, has positioned himself to be the agent of that change, and he does present a clear contrast with Brown. Direct, succinct and opinionated, he points out issues in the district that could be improved and offers specific proposals to do so. While he has developed property and built homes, that appears not to be a policy priority for him. Obviously, he has put a lot of effort into preparing himself to perform as a supervisor, and we think he could do a decent job. Yes, he’s a little smug, and yes, he could show a bit more of the common touch he extols. But he is offering himself as a private individual willing to serve the community full-time and then return to private life. He understands the truism that “One can’t serve two masters,” and we’d like to see him have the chance to show us what he can deliver.
