This year’s Concord City Council race features the mayor and vice mayor fighting off four challengers in two districts.
Mayor Edi Birsan contends with three challengers in District 4: community activist and government relations professional Pablo Benavente and small business owners Matthew Dashner and Myles Burks.
In District 2, Vice Mayor Carlyn Obringer is up against telecom project manager Eric Antonick.
The mayor and vice mayor positions on the council are appointed among their fellow councilmembers and rotate annually.
District 4 candidates
Birsan was first elected in 2012. The New York City native has lived in the same home in Concord since 1983.
On his campaign site, Birsan touts his record in helping reduce Concord homelessness. He said he’ll continue to work with community partners and veterans groups to provide services and transition the unhoused into housing.
He said crime has decreased by 10% on his watch and that he’ll continue advocating for increased police patrols and supports the dispatch of mental health professionals for mental health crisis police calls and reopening neighborhood police substations.
On housing, Birsan said during his time, the council has created a greater mix of housing and broken ground on housing affordable to all income levels. He said the council has also invested $120 million over five years to repair Concord streets, including repairs for thoroughfares like Treat Boulevard and Oak Grove Road already are underway.
Birsan also said he led the movement to bring MCE renewable energy sources to Concord. He said he served on the MCE board before expanding his involvement to serve on its executive committee and the special bond group to support the expansion of services in Northern California. Birsan said three times he’s advocated on the council to move the city government’s electric plan to 100% renewable sustainable sources.
One of the challengers, Benavente, has lived in Concord since he was 13, later graduating from Clayton Valley High School and California State University East Bay.
Benavente’s campaign site says he has worked with the Economic Opportunity Council of Contra Costa and served as chair of the board of Monument Impact, a community-based nonprofit focused on immigrant, refugee, and low-income communities in Concord.
Benavente is a member of the Concord Parks and Open Space Commission and has chaired the city’s Measure V Committee for a one-cent use and transaction tax that passed in 2020.
Benavente has worked in leadership positions in two unions: Service Employees International Union and IFPTE Local 21. He’s currently a government relations professional in the tech industry.
On his campaign page, Benavente said his commitment to “social justice and equity is evident” in his professional endeavors, where he has “worked tirelessly to represent the interests of workers and marginalized communities.”
Burks is a 24-year-old Concord native who said on his campaign site he took over his family business, Concord Tap House, when his father died two years ago.
Burks said on his site he’s running because “Concord had developed a bad reputation with many homeless wandering the streets, increasing petty theft, shoplifting, robbery, and auto break-ins with smash and grabs on the rise. I realized then how bad things were getting in Concord, the city my father loved and taught me to love!”
I decided the best thing I could do to honor my father’s memory and follow his example was to try and make a difference.”
Burks, who promises transparency, said there’s not enough police on the streets, too many potholes the city hasn’t fixed, and there’s not enough new housing.
He said there’s too many homeless people in Concord and Birsan “bungled” the former Concord Naval Weapons Station redevelopment project. He said on his Facebook page he’s against local rent control, saying the state already has rent control laws in place, that evidence proves rent control doesn’t work, and rent control gives landlords no incentive to improve properties.
Dashner owns a construction business and doesn’t have a campaign site. He didn’t respond to messages asking him for his stance on various issues.
Matthew Brown is listed as a candidate on the city website, which has no information on his candidacy. He also doesn’t have a campaign website.
District 2 candidates
In District 2, the incumbent Obringer was first elected to the council in 2016 and served as mayor in 2019. Obringer has also served on the city’s Design Review Board and Planning Commission, which she chaired.
Regionally, Obringer chaired the East Bay Regional Park District Park Advisory Committee, is a founding member of the Diablo Valley Tech Initiative to advance the local tech industry and serves on the Contra Costa Airport Land Use Commission. Obringer also chaired TRANSPAC (a central county regional transportation planning body).
Obringer said on her campaign site she helped stabilize police officer recruitment and retention, prioritized student safety by funding two school resource officers at Concord high schools, and “worked hard to get the unsheltered off the streets and into housing.”
She also touted her work she said made it easier for people to pay rent and buy their first home by helping to approve “over 1,000 units of new housing in Concord, at all affordability levels, including approximately 500 new residences, affordable to those making between $33,000 to $84,000 annually.”
Obringer said she supported pandemic recovery for 400 small businesses by creating the Concord Small Business Grant Program. She also said she helped create 100 new living wage jobs in North Concord off state Highway 4, by establishing the Concord Industrial Center and co-founded the Diablo Valley Tech Initiative.
Antonick, the lone challenger, goes right at Obringer on his campaign site, saying “It is unconscionable that, after nearly eight years, the incumbent is only beginning to fashion a plan on homelessness. That needed to be year one.”
He also criticized Obringer’s participation in the “fiasco” of Concord selecting, then not coming to terms with, two potential developers for the Concord Naval Weapons Station.
“The incumbent has been in office for eight years and wants 12 but has not instilled the needed transparency and accountability in city government,” Antonick said on his site.
Antonick — who has worked in the telecom industry for 17 years building, upgrading, repairing, maintaining, integrating, and optimizing cell sites — supports audits and data analysis of council decisions. He promises transparency and outreach.
Antonick is against the city giving any one corporation development rights to the former naval station instead of it being a publicly owned and developed project, perhaps paying a project managing company but with the city retaining ownership.
Antonick says the city should focus on creating housing by giving people more opportunities to own rather than rent. He wants to increase supply by creating a new category of housing unit permitted for development that would be relatively inexpensive — something the size of a dorm room or a small RV.
“The city should work with other government agencies and private equity/insurance companies to create a fund that can finance new developments in ways that foster ownership by the residents of Concord,” he said on his site. The deadline to register to vote in California is Oct. 21. People can register here. Election Day is Nov. 5.