City and town council meetings in Saratoga and Los Gatos this year have been marked by ongoing heated debates about the future of housing, a hot-button issue pitting the state’s mandates for new homes against the challenges of greater density, including traffic and public safety concerns.
Agendas rife with contentious issues in an election year might be expected to draw a packed slate of candidates for local councils, but both communities had the opposite problem: uncontested seats in multiple races.
Their solution: cancel the elections.
In all, six seats on Saratoga, Los Gatos and neighboring Monte Sereno city and town councils will be filled by appointment, the races stricken from the November ballot. The canceled elections will save taxpayers $100,000, $95,000 and $10,000, respectively.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, the councils of Atherton, Oakley, Pleasant Hill and Moraga also voted to appoint city council candidates in lieu of an election, due to a lack of opposition candidates — a decision that has saved thousands of taxpayer dollars.
But other cities faced with the same situation have rejected the option to cancel the election, either because they had other measures that already required them to send out ballots, or their city council was in recess at the time a decision needed to be made.
Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus in San Jose State University’s Department of Political Science, said that the decision to cancel an election because only one candidate has filed is often a risk versus reward proposition — with the risks often being more obscure, like the possibility of disenfranchising write-in candidates.
“The risk is small, but the reward for the cities and counties can be substantial when they’ve got really tight budgets,” Gerston said.
Gerston said some people are dissuaded by term limits, feeling they can’t make much of an impact in a limited time, and that running requires too much time, effort and money.
“I don’t really see it getting any better in the near term,” Gerston said. “That really gets to this whole sense of skepticism and defeatism that a lot of people have, and I don’t think that’s good for democracy.”
Los Gatos Councilmember Maria Ristow, however, said she was not expecting a lack of turnout in the town’s elections.
“I was frankly surprised that nobody ran because the housing element has been so contentious,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of community engagement, and I actually had heard from a number of people that had thought about running — and I encouraged them to do so.”
Jill Hunter, a former council member and mayor of Saratoga, said that controversy over the housing element could be exactly what’s deterring people from running for office — because they may not want to be subject to the criticism that comes with making decisions on housing.
“When I ran for office, I ran because I wanted to beautify the community, and I wanted to have trees become more important, and [have] people plant trees and so forth,” Hunter said. “That was a nice thing — the housing element is very, very difficult. People get angry and upset at you.”
California election code states that if only one person is nominated for a position, or if the number of candidates matches the number of at-large seats, then the city council can vote to appoint the candidate to that office instead of holding an election. There are some exceptions, such as a citywide role or ballot initiative also being on the ballot as well, that require an election to be held.
One of the candidates in Monte Sereno who was appointed due to a canceled election said he wasn’t surprised to find he was the only one running.
“I believe that it’s becoming harder for people to make a time commitment to attend the meetings and to do the prep work for those meetings,” said Bryan Mekechuk, who was an incumbent in his Monte Sereno seat.
Though median income in the area clocks in around $200,000 a year, the limited compensation that council members receive coupled with the time commitment of serving on a city or town council could also be a deterrent, some say.
Saratoga and Los Gatos pay council members $3,000 and $6,000 a year, respectively, and Monte Sereno council members receive no compensation at all.
But some say the money would be well spent on an election despite the limited candidate pool.
Resident Mona Kaur said at a Saratoga City Council meeting that canceling elections disenfranchises her as a voter.
“The election final tally is a performance review, in my opinion, of the City Council members,” Kaur said. “Hypothetically speaking, a person might get 200 votes and another might get 20,000 votes — a very big difference in showing how the person is viewed by the citizens and what percentage of representation they have in the city.”
In some cities with only one candidate, including Sunnyvale and Dublin, an election will proceed as normal because of a California election code that does not allow a city to appoint a candidate if there is also an at-large election or ballot measure.
In Sunnyvale’s 2022 City Council election, only one candidate ran for the District 1 seat, allowing the council to vote to appoint the candidate and cancel the election. The choice saved the city an estimated $20,000.
But this year, the election will proceed as usual because the voters are also deciding on an at-large mayoral election and a ballot measure, said David Carnahan, city clerk of Sunnyvale.
“If you’re already going to mail a ballot to voters because you have an at-large seat or a ballot measure, there’s not real savings to just take something off the ballot,” Carnahan said. “There’s more significant savings to not send anything.”
In San Leandro, which is also proceeding with an election despite two uncontested City Council seats, the main barrier lies in the tight timeline the city had to vote on whether to cancel the election, City Clerk Kelly Clancy said. The election code outlines a span of only a few days in August to put out a notice of facts, notify the council and hold a vote — but the San Leandro City Council is on recess for the month of August and a vote would require a special meeting.
Gerston added that, anecdotally, unopposed races seem to have been increasing over the past 15 or 20 years. He feels that the value of civic participation is not emphasized enough in schools—and that lack of education could pave the way for a city council that doesn’t quite represent the community it serves.
“It is happening, and we are seeing communities lose their character, lose what’s important to them because we’ve got a tremendous amount of apathy, and feelings that the population just think that they have no power,” said Sandy Decker, a former council member and mayor of Los Gatos. “But you have no power until you take it.”
