A working dialogue on Sebastopol's city council
By Sam Spooner
Green Party of California, city councilmember, Sebastopol, Calif. 2000-2004

Five years ago I had no involvement in local politics. I was busy raising a family, and I thought little about the nexus between local politics and the issues of social justice and environmental stewardship that I had always held as part of my core values. When my neighbor Jonny suggested that I run for city council, the connections occurred to me instantly. I knew that doing the work of a council member would be the sort of modeling I wanted for my children. Julia Butterfly Hill had just published her book, Legacy of Luna, and during her speaking tour she implored people to step up and do whatever they could, however small.

I took the next step and interviewed Larry Robinson, a current city council member and a Green Party member. He was the sole progressive on our city council, which was surprising since Sebastopol's population is particularly progressive. In 1987 Sebastopol's citizens had supported a measure proclaiming it a nuclear-free zone with better than 80 percent of the vote.

Larry encouraged me and began making introductions to the local political helpers I would need in order to get elected. After attending a half-dozen council meetings, I made my decision to run. The council was often hostile to public input and to each other. Condescension was palpable during the meetings, and the community I was part of had no connection to this process.

Soon after my decision to run, Craig Litwin, another Green Party member, also received Larry's endorsement. Litwin had run two years earlier at the age of 21 and done very well, but was defeated. He finalized his decision to run again in reaction to one sitting council member's particularly chafing remarks during a council debate on pesticide use. It was not our plan, but if it worked out we would become the only Green Party majority council in the country.

Craig and I collaborated and ran a very on-the-street campaign-knocking on every door, speaking to every service group, and gardening. We used Craig's special skills in landscaping as a campaign tool to demonstrate that our city landscape could be maintained without pesticides. We organized a dozen neighborhood cleanup projects, and in a short time had made a very visible impact. We won by a large margin, displacing two incumbents.

The Green Party successfully publicized our victory, and for a time we enjoyed some national celebrity. ABC, CBS, and AP all ran stories. We were on the front-page top fold of the national section of the New York Times. The interviews came for weeks. But national celebrity came at a cost. The two local papers quickly decided to play our majority as a Green conspiracy and a threat to the status quo. If we proclaimed apple pie a good thing, the press would report that the council supported only Green apple pie. The editor of the locally owned paper was eventually won over. His concern had been that environmentalism would override important issues of affordable housing, but we showed that you can have both, so now we are left with only one hostile paper. Building the success of the party is important to me, and learning to manage this press hostility will be important to other Greens elected to office. Without press support, we have to expend extra effort to accurately inform the community about our policies.

Sebastopol's biggest challenge is accommodating population growth without destroying our greenbelt and over-tapping our limited water resource. The answers are density and conservation, and we are fortunate to have a community willing to embrace these solutions. Developers are now required to build 20 percent of their projects as affordable housing. We bought housing sites and are proactively developing them, rather than waiting for developers with less civic interest. And we enacted a workforce housing ordinance requiring new commercial development to pay into a fund to help create and maintain affordable housing. We passed a green building ordinance. We committed to reduce municipal greenhouse gas emission by 30 percent in two years, and with efficient pumping, lighting, hybrid vehicles, and alternative energy sources, we will make that goal.

We also took seriously our responsibility to bring our community's feelings about war, the PATRIOT act, and capital punishment to our national elected officials. Expressing views on national issues is controversial among many city councils, but the cost of national policies on local economies and freedoms has outweighed that argument.

My term on the council is now over. I chose not to run for re-election for personal reasons. The personal cost of council service is high, but the rewards for me were great. Another Green, Sam Pierce, replaced me in the Dec. election. Sebastopol city council meetings are now a place where everyone is heard and the dialogue is respectful.

Back to Spring 2005