Berkeley City CouncilDistrict 1November 3, 2026
From Gilman to Fourth Street, from University Ave to Westbrae, this is the part of town that gets things done. It deserves a city government that does too — services that work, dollars spent wisely, and a Council that sticks to the job.
"Gets to work" means three things — and all three matter.
It's where Berkeley works — the Gilman maker district, Fourth Street, the University Avenue corridor up to Trader Joe's, the shops along MLK, and the tradespeople and small businesses that give District 1 its character. It's how Berkeley gets to work — North Berkeley BART, safe streets, a commute that functions. And it's a promise: in a city famous for decade-long studies, your councilmember should roll up their sleeves and deliver. Fewer meetings about the work. More of the work.
The whole district, sketched out — the shoreline and the marina, the Gilman and Fourth Street corridors, North Berkeley BART, and the neighborhoods in between.
Seven things to get done — in priority order, the way you'd sequence a job, not a wish list.
A council decision is argued three ways, and each carries real information. The job is reading which one the moment actually calls for — and noticing when one of them has crowded out the other two.
Marie Kondo was right about more than closets: a time and a place for everything, and keep what you love. A council calendar is a closet. So before anything below gets my vote, it answers two questions a wish list never does — and you’ll find both spelled out on all seven items.
The balance What is actually being traded here? Not which group wins — what scarce thing we are spending, and on whom.
The check What gets published, so you can tell whether it worked? If I can’t name the record, I don’t yet have a plan.
Smooth streets, working lights, clean sidewalks, trash picked up, potholes filled, calls returned. The everyday things residents pay for and too often don't get. That's the job, and it comes first.
The balance A fixed budget and finite staff hours — every dollar and hour that drifts to a new initiative comes out of streets, lights, and pickups.
The check Response times, published monthly: pothole fills, streetlight repairs, 311 closures.
Both tested in practice: Hopkins Street — the vote settled the design, not the tradeoffs →
Plain-language budgets, published results, and a hard line on what we pay for versus what we get. I've spent years tracking how Berkeley spends its money — I'll bring that scrutiny to the dais and root out waste. Start here: Berkeley Budget Basics — where every tax dollar actually goes. Then see the full department breakdown: six departments, four out of every five dollars.
The balance A plan you stick to against a plan you keep reopening — every priority added mid-cycle is paid for by something already promised, and what gets dropped is rarely something anyone voted to drop.
The check What we funded last cycle set next to what actually got finished — and published results beside every contract: what we paid, what we got. The Transparency Hub standard, applied from the dais.
Both tested in practice: Where’s the scorecard? → · The surveillance contract that never went out to bid →
Faster permits, real response times, and performance you can measure — a bureaucracy that works for residents instead of the other way around. The same goes for housing: the city's job is fast, predictable permits, then let the market build — not a decade of design review.
The balance Process buys certainty and costs time — every added week of review is paid by the applicant, the neighbor, and the housing that waits.
The check Published permit clocks: median days from application to decision, by permit type.
Both tested in practice: Upzoning the corridors — what Sacramento decided and what Berkeley still controls →
Competent public safety and well-kept parks — Ohlone, Cedar Rose, James Kenney, North Waterfront. The shared spaces that make District 1 livable, maintained like we mean it.
The balance Shared spaces have to be both safe and open to everyone — enough presence to keep a park usable, enough restraint to keep it public.
The check A published maintenance schedule and park condition reports, kept current.
Both tested in practice: Tear gas — one vote, three decisions →
Most of the money behind Berkeley's homeless services comes from outside the city — federal, state, and county. The council's job is to make those dollars work together and to say plainly what they bought: how many people got help, how many got indoors, and what each program delivers for what it costs. Publish the counts. Fix what the counts show isn't working.
The balance Help tonight against housing for good — shelter beds and permanent units draw on the same dollars, and most of those dollars answer to the state and county before they answer to Berkeley.
The check The counts, published: people helped, people indoors, cost per outcome, program by program.
Both tested in practice: Who controls the beds? → · The five dates ahead →
West Berkeley's working and industrial-arts economy is local jobs. What a maker needs from the city is simple: a safe place to work, a permit process they can trust, and land that stays zoned for making. First job: put that process on the record — every step, its cost, its wait, and who it protects. Then fix the steps the record can’t defend. The city should help makers survive, not zone them out.
The balance Rules that protect neighbors against rules that just cost small businesses time — the work is telling them apart, then cutting the second kind.
The check The permit record itself — steps, costs, waits — published; break-ins and response times in the maker blocks tracked like anywhere else in the city; and whether the makers are still here, year over year.
Berkeley has always cared about the wider world, and I share those values — that's not the question. The question is where a councilmember's hours actually change an outcome. Mine will go to streets, safety, parks, services, and a budget that adds up, because that's the part we control and the part that's been slipping.
The balance Council hours are the scarcest resource at City Hall — an evening spent on what Berkeley can’t control is an evening not spent on what it can.
The check The agenda itself: the share of council time spent on items the city has authority over, published. Keep what you love; schedule what you control.
Both tested in practice: Five dates between September and June →
A page per issue Berkeley is actually arguing about — a position, every factual claim sourced to a public document, and an explicit list of what I couldn't verify. First up: why the city never put its surveillance contract out to bid.
My work is measurement and verification — building confidence in results by managing how impact actually gets measured. At Counterfactual Designs I help organizations quantify what their energy and carbon projects really deliver, and I've written a book on the judgment that good M&V demands. I brought that same discipline home to Berkeley by building the Berkeley Transparency Hub, a public tracker that turns the city's council agendas and contracts into clear, categorized records of where our money goes.
I also put in the work on the ground. I serve on the board of Berkeley Partners for Parks, volunteer in District 1's parks, and was honored with the Chris Kindness Award for community service. Parks like Ohlone, Cedar Rose, and James Kenney are where neighbors actually meet — keeping them clean and usable is exactly the kind of unglamorous, get-it-done work I want more of at City Hall. I'm running because District 1 deserves a councilmember who's measured by results, not meetings.
This isn't a one-person show or a party machine. "We" is a practical, independent coalition across District 1 — renters and homeowners, shopkeepers and tradespeople, parents and longtime neighbors. Not left or right. Just people who'd rather focus on quality of life in our neighborhoods.
37 years in Berkeley. Ready for a new challenge.
Keeps every dollar accountable and on the public record.
Titles are for identification only and do not imply organizational endorsement. Want your name on the list? Join us.
Berkeley uses ranked-choice voting, so you get up to five picks and ranking someone second never hurts your first choice. This is a crowded field of people who care about this city, and I'd rather earn your second-place vote honestly than pretend the others have nothing to offer. If your top pick is someone else, rank them first — then rank me next, and I'll get to work on the streets, the budget, and the services either way.
A District 1 campaign is won at the door and at the drop box. Tell us how you can pitch in — knock, host, donate, or just take a sign.
Right now what matters is how many people are behind this, not how much any one of them gives. Ten dollars counts every bit as much as sixty — and at this stage it's exactly the help we need.
The most any supporter can give is $60. Not $60 from most people — $60 from every single one, with no bundlers and no exceptions. There is no one in this race we'll owe a favor to.
Contributions from Berkeley residents are eligible for the city's Fair Elections match. Every dollar, matched or not, gets reported on the data page.
Takes about two minutes. Berkeley requires a hand-drawn signature on the receipt, so have a finger or a mouse ready.
Accountability starts with showing the receipts. Here are the official, public sources behind what we say — and the tools to take part.