Council Candidates’ Views

El Cerrito voters will elect two City Council members on Nov. 3.

Five of the six candidates for El Cerrito City Council were interviewed Sunday at a joint forum of the El Cerrito Democratic Club and the Democratic Party of Contra Costa County.

The videotaped interviews were posted today and can be viewed here.

On Tuesday, Nov. 3, voters will elect two City Council members.

The six candidates for City Council include two incumbents who are up for re-election and four who are running for the first time.

The incumbents are council member Caroline Wysinger and Mayor Gabe Quinto. The three challengers who attended are Wally Nowinski, Kimberly White, and Mary Ann Jawili.

A sixth candidate, Forrest Lanning, did not participate. He explained that he is a federal employee and the Hatch Act strictly limits his participation in partisan political activities. Lanning said he plans to participate in future nonpartisan forums for City Council candidates.

Quinto is the current mayor of El Cerrito and is seeking a fourth term on the City Council.

Wysinger was first elected to the City Council in 2022 and is seeking a second term.

Nowinski and White worked together on the successful ‘No on C’ campaign against the library tax. The measure was rejected by voters by a margin of 70% to 30%.

Nowinski, who bought his home in 2023, has worked in politics and business. He is the father of a 3-month-old and currently works for a clean energy company in San Francisco.

White, who has lived in El Cerrito for 23 years, is retired from BART, where she worked in both finance and operations. She is on the city’s Financial Advisory Board and runs her own company.

Jawili, who moved to El Cerrito for a job in 2008, said she bought her home then and has lived in El Cerrito ever since. She works as an accessibility product manager for ServiceNow.

Their remarks are listed in the order in which they spoke.

Questions included:

·         What city services are working well and which are not?

·         What is your vision for El Cerrito in the next five years, and what makes you qualified to achieve that?

·         Many El Cerritans feel that the Measure C library initiative campaign was a divisive issue for the city. Do you agree? And do you think that anything can or should be done to create greater unity within the city? And if so, what?

What Works Well

Carolyn Wysinger: Public safety – our police and fire departments

Wally Nowinski: The swim center and police officers, who recovered and returned a stolen e-bike.

Gabe Quinto: “We celebrated the 50^th anniversary of our recycling center. And this is part of the green circular economy that El Cerrito has been supporting from the beginning.”

Kimberly White: Affordable housing

Mary Ann Jawili: “Being an environmentally sustainable city”

What Needs Improvement

Wysinger: “One thing we could do better is how we are communicating with the public.”

Nowinski: “We need to listen to residents before making decisions. We need to do an honest, rigorous, no-thumbs-on-the-scale survey of residents on capital improvements.”

Quinto: “We need to do a study on which buildings we can build in the future. I heard the voters loud and clear on the library, I'm good with that. That is democracy.”

White: “We need to be more accountable, more transparent. Where we have dedicated funding, we need demonstrate that we use the money in the way that we promised.”

Jawili: “Improve communication between the City Council, city leaders, and residents. It should also be two-way conversation, two-way communication.”

Visions for El Cerrito

Wysinger: “My vision is similar to what I had when I came into office (in 2022).” She said she wants a city that’s home to people of color and young people, including young families with children. As a member of the current council, she said she has worked to strengthen city finances, addressed our housing needs, and supported a more walkable city, local businesses, investing in public safety, and reaffirming that El Cerrito is a sanctuary city. She said her experience on the council, including one year as mayor, has given her “institutional knowledge and the ability to build partnerships” through the League of California Cities and the Democratic Party, among others. “I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Wysinger said.

Nowinski: “I would like to see us come together more as a city and have alignment around our priorities…I am temperamentally someone who will always ask hard questions, be skeptical…People will not always agree with me, but I will always try to be candid about what I'm thinking, why, and my reasoning for it. And I will always try to be respectful of other opinions and I'm happy to work with anyone on anything. Listening to people and prioritizing what the community wants is focusing some of my attention on ‘How do we unblock developments on San Pablo Avenue?’ We've planned and zoned for all of this new housing. And what we have right now is really quite a lot of vacant storefronts and quite a lot of empty lots…We need to figure out how to be the place to do business, the place to build new housing, the place to open a new restaurant that, you know, our neighbors like and want to go to. And I think that could really improve quality of life, for new families and long-time residents alike.

Quinto: “My vision for the next five years is to make sure my idea of adding housing at both BART stations will continue and be completed. I'm just very proud to see BART take my idea which I gave to Nick Giusefowitz and Scott Wiener when they headed up ABAG and the BART board. So working collaboratively as president of the League of California Cities, I made sure that we worked with our partners on the state and federal levels to make sure that we provided the housing. And it is happening right now. We're going to have our grand opening soon for our affordable housing project next to the Mayfair building… Truly, this is housing for all, and you look at some of the people that are running against me, they did not like the Mayfair building that was being built…They were concerned that they were going to park on their streets. Look, we need to change what is going on here. We need to provide housing for the neediest of our residents, and we truly are doing that. I'm very, very proud of that.”

White: "The direction for the city for me would be to have more accountability, more transparency and improve the quality of life. It also means a city that listens to residents before decisions are made. It means funding those things that are basic to the community before funding the wish list…We want to have a city that attracts people, a city that people want to invest in. What I mean is, we have a neighboring city that has a bustling downtown…We need to make our city more attractive than our neighboring cities. so that people want to come here, people want to invest here, and people want to be here. Not just any one demographic. I think that that serves the community better than any other thing that we could do… My work in BART operations and in advising public agencies across California taught me that service only works when people delivering the services have clear direction, the right tools, and the leaders who ask hard questions before small problems become expensive ones.”

Jawili: “My vision for El Cerrito in five years is a thriving, inclusive city, where people really feel like they belong in El Cerrito, that they can live the life that they want in El Cerrito. I have a lot of experience listening to people, understanding what matters to them, understanding what their challenges are, taking them seriously, and working with many people, many experts, to come up with a solution. And not just, like, coming up with a solution and throwing it there, but also trying to see, is it working? …My idea is focusing on building community through better community space. I want to create more opportunities for residents to connect in person. I’m for building out third spaces like community centers and green spaces, which we have plenty of. We also have clubhouses that aren’t used a lot of the times… We have all of these places that we say are bike-friendly, but we don’t have any bike-repair stations. I do want to make these spaces actually usable and enjoyable. I want to partner with local businesses and see what they can do to become third spaces for people as well.

Measure C Campaign and Future Unity

Wysinger was the first candidate interviewed and was not asked about Measure C because time ran out. ECDC President Neil Tsutsui explained, “We realized after her interview that we should move up the library and Flock questions because we didn't have time to get to those... So that produced an unfortunate inconsistency across the candidates.”

Nowinski: “That's an interesting question because the mood of it…people feel very strongly about it. Electorally, it was not actually divisive, 70/30 is basically as close as you get to unanimous. But that being said, it's important to take the mood part of that seriously…I think there's quite a lot of persistent frustration about this…I think that people are going to continue feeling upset about Measure C until there is some sort of acknowledgement from the city about what happened. The city has just sort of been continuing…they certified the election, obviously, but there wasn't really any discussion of like, why did this fail? The city has the Library Commission. (Editor’s Note: A Library Task Force has been appointed by the City Council.) I would hope it will take seriously the question of ‘Why did this fail so spectacularly?’ and not just operate the same way they would have had it passed. The main frustration in El Cerrito is people are mad about Measure C. They're mad about Richmond Street. They're mad about Flock cameras. And there is very, very, very little acknowledgement from the city that that those concerns are being heard, even when those concerns are dramatically demonstrated at the ballot box. We're not going to address the lack of trust in city council, the lack of trust with the city administration until we start acknowledging people's concerns and taking action to reasonably address them.”

Quinto: “There has been so much misinformation and lies and half-truths that I have personally seen on Nextdoor.com and the bloggers. The bloggers had a head start on the citizens initiative and they continued with the lies and half-truths, and someone even compared me and showed a Hitler movie, and called me and my colleagues compared us to Hitler. That is not acceptable. This is what we get with the people that are running against us. And I put that person on the FAB committee, not for her to mudsling and to attack what we do. She is there to…recommend. That's all. Not to give a political perspective and to attack us time and time again. You're getting folks that are part of these blogs that (are) working with William, who's on this committee. William owns one of the blogs. How dare you to do this lying through their teeth and telling people that you don't own this blog? And, so I blame the misinformation. El Cerrito, we used to have a beat reporter, we don't have it now. So I've been telling residents, don't read those blogs, don't read Nextdoor.com. I spoke to the CEO of Nextdoor.com at the NLC convention. And I told him, you know, I appreciate Nextdoor when you lose your dog or you have something that you want to give to kids or a used stroller you want to give to the next mom. It's good for that, but it also adds divisiveness. And this is what we see because you see Trump doing this, you see this in California. No, I want to make sure that we continue with telling the truth. The truth is coming from the city, and I will continue to back up my city and city manager, who is a former president of the International City Managers Association. She and I trained the new mayors and council members in Sacramento and down south. Number one thing I said, stay out of politics, stay out of ideology…We need to stick to our El Cerrito values of listening and being respectful but not stabbing each other in the back time and time again.”

(Quinto was apparently referring to council member William Ktsanes. In a subsequent email, Ktsanes said that Quinto may be angry with him for not endorsing any candidate for City Council. Ktsanes added that he has never owned or moderated a blog.)

White: The vote says that it wasn't very divisive. It says that a large number of people disagreed with some portions of the tax measure. The way that we move forward, in my opinion, is to understand why so many people disagreed with the tax measure and take that into consideration... The only way that we can move forward together is everybody focuses on what we agree on and building on that. That, in my opinion, would bring the community together, but it would also help us find a viable solution. The measure has already failed twice, and doubling or tripling down on that is going to be very difficult without understanding why so many people took issue with that. Once we find that out, then we can work on common ground and build on those things that people want. I do believe that many people who voted ‘no’ on the on the measure actually do want a library. They just felt differently about how the measure was written. So, as long as we don't assume that people who voted ‘no’ don't want a library and look forward… look toward a commonality and build on that commonality, I think the community comes together and we build a better platform for finding a library that the community can be proud of.”

Jawili: Yes, that is why — that's a big reason why I'm running. It was incredibly divisive. And I don't know if it's just Nextdoor, but — and some people will discredit the Nextdoor stuff because that's just Nextdoor. But the results, I think, speak for themselves with 70% of people voting ‘no’ and 80% of City Council voting ‘yes.’  There's a big disconnect there. So I think I do agree. It was divisive. I think that we should definitely do something to create greater unity. That is why I'm running. I think what that looks like is getting people involved and being specific about who you want to involve. So, I think, a lot of what I heard about, from residents was that they were suspicious about how these ideas came about, and who was part of the decision-making process. So, making sure that you involve people who are at least for the library, but also maybe against or suspicious about the library. So you get a whole range of voices part of that decision-making process, and I think that lends a lot of credibility to whatever final decision you make. You're not always going to satisfy everyone, that is impossible, but at least if we can be deliberate about the decision-making process and include everyone and communicate the updates on the decisions … and the options that you considered when you were figuring out the decisions…being clear about that and providing that information up front, I think would be really helpful.”