Laura Nakamura appears to have won her first term on the Concord City Council.
Nakamura is beating former Mayor and incumbent Tim McGallian, who’s been on the council since 2017, by about 600 votes.
These are unofficial results. Several mail-in ballots still need to be counted.
17 comments
YES! This is what voting for a corrupt company to develop the NWS will do to you, Tim.
Tim McGallian has been one of the best Council members I have seen in Concord in the 40 years I have lived here. I was proud to vote for him.
Most voters don’t pay attention to local politics and are inclined to vote for the incumbent when things are going ok or vote them out when things are not going well. Neither council incumbent got a majority vote in this election, which reflects a high level of discontent with the way things are going in Concord. Laura Hoffmeister was fortunate to have two anti-incumbent candidates in her district to split the vote. Tim had just one very savvy challenger who was able to leverage anger over his pro-Seeno vote with a generic “Change” message that resonated.
As I have mentioned before, Laura Nakamura is a good, compassionate person but some of her past statements (eg: defund the Concord police, recommending city-sponsored homeless encampments in our neighborhood parks) are troubling.
Hopefully Laura will be a quick study and adapt her progressive idealism to the reality of a city with long term problems with crime, homelessness, deteriorating housing and public infrastructure, and a per-capita city budget much smaller than the more affluent cities in the Bay Area.
Mike McDermott,
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You also have a personal relationship with Tim McGallian, so your judgment of his performance on the Concord City Council might be clouded. Maybe Concord voters saw something in him they didn’t like, after all he lost to Edi Birsan in 2012 while his campaign was being funded by the “Concord Political Machine,” he was appointed to the Council in 2017, and ran unopposed in 2018. He is the first Concord City Councilmember to be voted out of office since Lloyd Mashore, Nancy Gore, and Byron Campbell in 1993. Yes, technically Ron Leone was voted out of office in 2018, but that was because he was running for Contra Costa County
Superintendent of Schools, when he lost during the primary he decided to jump back into the Concord City Council race, but because we were forced into gerrymandered districts either Ron Leone or Laura Hoffmeister were always going to be voted out of office. If we hadn’t been forced into districts then both Ron Leone and Laura Hoffmeister would both have been reelected.
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Now you say “Laura Hoffmeister was fortunate to have two anti-incumbent candidates in her district to split the vote” but before the election you believed Laura Hoffmeister and Robert Ring were going to split the vote and that would result in Quinne Anderson winning in District 1.
Congratulations to Laura Nakamura!
Of interest in this District 5 race is that McGallian has been on the council all those years without ever winning an election. He was appointed to multiple positions and then was on the ballot once with no opponent.
On word: Seeno. If you dance with the devil, prepare to get burned.
Odd, never even got a ballot for these local elections. Did I miss something I was supposed to do?
JEFF (THE OTHER ONE),
Do you live in Concord City Council District 5?
Thanks Black Knight, for providing a path for me to gain clarity, no, I am in District 4. Again, thanks
And just wait until Nakamura tries to further defund the police, and allows the homeless to camp in any public area.
The NWS won’t materialize for another 20 years. You can hate on Tim all you like, but Nakamura and her pro-hobo agenda wasn’t the correct choice.
So who is allowing the camping in public areas now?
Nakamura is in favor of moving the homeless who can’t be housed to some *specified* public areas, as opposed to the long-standing and current plan of periodically circulating them among random and self-chosen public areas. If you prefer that current plan, then of course it would make sense to oppose her election.
So how will you force homeless into a specific area? I think that is called kidnapping, or maybe false imprisonment.
Tag the camps and make life miserable for the criminal homeless drug addicts. We aren’t talking about families being displaced. We are talking about meth addicted criminals. Chase them out. Don’t give them anything. Kenji, how many hobos live on your property? I’m sure you have a spare room….
The idea is not forcing homeless people to refrain from ever exiting a specific area, but to allow them to sleep and store some possessions there while preventing them from sleeping or storing possessions on other public property. In other words, it would create an actual and specific “somewhere else”, instead of the current imaginary “somewhere else” which they never move to because it does not exist. Instead they move to a place of their own choosing, unmanaged and unsupervised, because it is literally impossible to do anything else except die.
If you want to challenge my seriousness, a challenge that would actually follow from what I said would be to urge me to advocate that homeless people be allowed to stay on public property right next to my home. Some of them actually do stay there pretty frequently for several days until the police or other public agency staff come and remove them, about 80-90 feet from my bedroom window. I have told those agency staff on several occasions that I think they should be allowed to stay there.
I see you are expressing the view that homeless people should be allowed to stay not on public property but on private property, and are volunteering mine for your idea. If you are in favor of that, you may offer your own private property. I have not seen that you’re making such an offer, but maybe I missed it.
Until then, public property is the only physical possibility and they will continue deciding for themselves which public property it is to be, until the authorities who move them along start specifying it for them by not sweeping them from it to make their own choice again.
TWO WHEELER,
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Laura Nakamura hasn’t defunded the Concord Police Department and she doesn’t have the power to “further defund” the Concord Police Department. She also doesn’t have the power to allow “the homeless to camp in any public area,” even though they already camp in public areas. She may have been the “wrong choice” for you, but you don’t get to decide what the correct or incorrect choice is for other Concord voters, they get to decide what choice is in their best interest.
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Correct. I get to vote for whomever I choose to vote for. No one said I only have that choice and that no one else does. Perhaps a reading comprehension class is available for you at the adult ed center.
Hopefully Birsan is next pro-Seeno council member to go! Time for new representation of district 4!
Congratulations to Laura Nakamura and we in our district are looking forward to a productive future in Concord.!!!
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