AFTER 32 YEARS, Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors will have a new District 5 representative as two experienced politicians are running to replace Supervisor Keith Carson, who is retiring.
Nikki Fortunato Bas, an Oakland City Council member, and John Bauters, an Emeryville City Council member, came out on top of a nine-candidate primary election in March, with Bas picking up just over 34 percent of the vote and Bauters clocking in with 20.7 percent.
Nikki Fortunato Bas
Bas has so far raised $672,995, with large contributions from several unions including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 595 and the Peralta Federation of Teachers Local 1603, with an independent expenditure committee controlled by Service Employees International Union Local 1021 spending additional money to support her. (By law, independent expenditure committees are not controlled by or communicate with the candidates they support.)
Along with those and other labor unions, including the California Nurses Association and the Alameda County Labor Council, Bas lists several state and local political leaders as supporters, including Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín, state senators Nancy Skinner and Aisha Wahab, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, among others.
“I’ve been on the council for six years and I’ve been governing during the hardest time in our history — the pandemic and then the fallout from the pandemic — and I’ve seen first-hand that we can only do so much at the city level of government and we really need to make sure that each of our cities has a strong partner at the county,” Bas said. “I want to be able to represent all of the five cities in District 5, which has been my home for 27 years.”
The district includes Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont, North Oakland and parts of West Oakland and the Oakland hills.
Bas says she wants to ensure that the county has an action plan with each city to address homelessness, public safety, affordable housing and access to health care — including mental health services.
As a councilmember, Bas said she led the effort to get Oakland’s Measure U passed to raise $350 million in bond funds to create affordable housing and that the county plays a huge role in providing services to people who are coming out of homelessness so they stay successfully housed.
“That partnership between the city and the county is so important. It’s something I’ve been working on as an Oakland council member with Supervisor (Nate) Miley, who’s the president of the board and my counterpart, as well as with our staff, to really ensure we stop duplicating services and really coordinate and that will help our public taxpayer dollars go further,” Bas said.
Bas said the county can do a lot more to prevent mental health crises, including partnering with the Alameda County Office of Education and local school districts to intervene with services as early as possible.
“This is where I think the county has a real opportunity to create more crisis stabilization programs like Amber House in West Oakland so that we are not putting people into our jail system when what they really need is a short-term intervention or sometimes a longer-term intervention,” she said.
Bas said that about 60 percent of Oakland’s 911 calls are nonviolent and noncriminal and a number of them are for mental health issues that really don’t require a trained police officer.
“… I think the county has a real opportunity to create more crisis stabilization programs like Amber House in West Oakland so that we are not putting people into our jail system when what they really need is a short-term intervention or sometimes a longer-term intervention.” Nikki Fortunato Bas
With that in mind, she helped create the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland (MACRO) program run out of the fire department that deploys teams of emergency medical technicians, crisis intervention specialists and social workers, which helps free up officers for other calls.
That, along with other efforts like the city’s Ceasefire program addressing gun violence, has helped Oakland’s overall crime rate drop by 37 percent from a year ago, Bas said.
She said she supports the county’s newly approved civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Office and that it should include crime victims and formerly incarcerated people, particularly given the number of deaths reported at Santa Rita Jail.
“I think it is really important in terms of making sure that we are preventing the types of experiences that too many — over 70 — families have had in terms of having people die in custody,” Bas said.
She said the oversight committee can play a vital role in reviewing the jail’s intake process to ensure that people’s physical and mental health care requirements are identified and addressed.
John Bauters
Her opponent, Bauters, also supports civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Office and said it shouldn’t be seen as an indictment of the sheriff or her deputies but as an opportunity to improve overall transparency and mental health services at the jail.
“I don’t believe that most of the people we send to Santa Rita Jail who have either diagnosed mental illness or undiagnosed and are untreated for mental illness belong there in the first place,” said Bauters, who was first elected to the Emeryville City Council in 2016 and served three terms as mayor.
“I look forward to oversight identifying ways in which we can structure and build mental health diversion programs that identify people prior to admittance to Santa Rita and actually divert them into care and services and also reduce some of the concerns that have necessitated the need for the oversight board in the first place,” he said.
So far, Bauters has raised more than $760,000, with large contributions from the International Association of Firefighters Local 55 and a committee called Families for a Vibrant Oakland, which gets significant funding from the Northern California Carpenters Union and the Oakland Police Officers Association, among others.
There is also an independent expenditure committee supporting Bauters, which he doesn’t control or communicate with, that has received significant money from the California Apartment Association and the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of Alameda County.
Bauters’ supporters also include several state and local elected officials, including the departing supervisor Carson whose seat is the one up for grabs, as well as supervisors Elisa Márquez and Lena Tam, along with Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell and state Assemblymembers Mia Bonta and Buffy Wicks.
He also lists 11 of the county’s 14 mayors among his supporters, as well as a majority of the district’s city council members, the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood.
Bauters says in some areas the county is doing a good job providing health care and mental health services, but said gaps exist, particularly in delivering services to women of color.
“They have a growing need for maternal care and there’s been efforts by the county to create the African American Health and Wellness Center and other places in the county that reach people in the communities they live in but I think we really need to fund those things and bring them up to speed so that people have equitable access to physical, maternal and mental health care where they live,” he said.
“… There’s been efforts by the county to create the African American Health and Wellness Center and other places in the county that reach people in the communities they live in but I think we really need to fund those things and bring them up to speed so that people have equitable access to physical, maternal and mental health care where they live.” John Bauters
Bauters said addressing homelessness is also one of his key priorities and that currently there’s not effective coordination between the county and cities when developing programs and delivering services.
“One of the things that surprised me when I moved to the Bay Area over 14 years ago is the battle between cities and the county over responsibility with this problem,” he said.
He said the county needs to have a long-term plan for funding housing that features supportive services and includes a partnership plan with the cities.
“We need to actually do the work to create a platform to bring people indoors where services are better received and the dollars that we’re spending get better health and justice outcomes,” he said.
He also said if the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority doesn’t revive plans for its withdrawn $20 billion, Bay Area-wide affordable housing bond measure, then Alameda County needs to find its own solutions, including revisiting Measure A1, which county voters passed in 2016 and which raised $580 million to create and preserve affordable housing.
“We need to actually prioritize money to complete projects that are partially funded sitting in the production pipeline,” Bauters said.