Laura Hoffmeister, who was first elected to the Concord City Council in 1997, appears to have won another term on the council.
Hoffmeister is leading challenger Robert Ring by about 600 votes.
These are unofficial results. Several mail-in ballots still need to be counted.
39 comments
Amazing, after a DUI on Pine Hollow Rd, she is still re-elected by the Lemmings. She could have hit a minivan full of kids……
I totally agree. Evidently people didn’t think that this incident had anything to do with her character and integrity. Think she got re-elected by people who have supported her for years and years – the “old school” types in Concord.
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1000%. What kind of example is she setting? She should be disqualified. How is this even a question? Wake up Concord!! We absolutely need new leadership…
Sometimes people hold their noses and vote for the least bad candidate. Look at the people running against her and you can see why she won.
What’s wrong with Robert Ring?
Being a resident in Concord for 35 years, I’ve seen Concord gone down hill. Crime, robberies, the homeless situation, are roads are all tore up!! Maybe a new face to this city would be a great thing. Change is good!!
@ Marek – Don’t agree with Ring at all and glad he wasn’t elected but his two main problems were that he never attended council meetings so was not adept at keeping up with Hoffmeister who has been around forever and he had no plan or even a thought out statement of how to pay for all the things he said he supported increasing (which he would know is a problem for the council if he had actually attended even one budget meeting).
With all due respect, do you ever ask yourself why there is a budgeting problem?! Where is all our taxpayer $ going, because quite frankly I’m not seeing it being used efficiently. Keeping her in office is proving to perpetuate the problem. Need new leadership if we want to save this city!
That is absolutely false. I have a plan and it starts with getting federal funding for our roads through the tiger grant, and cleaning and auditing our budget which currently spends tens of millions of dollars on outside consultants.
@ Robert Ring
Not false. Specifics needed. What federal grants? Which congressional elected would help you apply for them? Details on how you would have Concord apply for a tiger grant – specifically how does Concord qualify? Thousands of applications come in and a few hundred are granted. How many of CA’s congressional electeds have tried this and failed? $25M of this recently went to CA’s failing high speed rail so this grant seems pretty questionable on being granted for Concord’s streets. And, most importantly, what is your plan if Concord doesn’t get a grant? Have you seen how tightly wound the city budget is? One small hiccup in the sales tax they expect to come in and more streets don’t get repaired or code enforcement positions stay unfilled.
Agree with you that the city uses too many outside consultants. Which ones are you familiar with that you think could be eliminated or reduced? What are they doing and who would take over that job? No need for an audit for you to know this – which you could answer if you had been sitting through the budget meetings.
@ Fellow American Citizen
Hoffmeister is part of the problem. I have been asking her for years where our taxpayer money is going. Offered suggestions. Asked it here on claycord recently when advocating for McGallian to lose his council seat ($14M down dealing with Lennar). However the answer is not going to be the candidate who thinks merely saying increasing the budget will actually increase the budget. If you don’t run a candidate against her in her district who is either very popular or can give very specific details on how they would be different like specifics on increasing revenue, she is likely to keep her seat.
A plan to NOT drink and drive seems pretty important. The person appearing to be re-elected obviously doesn’t possess that skill. I have heard about functioning alcoholics however I’ve never met one.
Remember to call Uber if you are drinking to celebrate your victory.
Well, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So…
The results are not in yet. According to the county there are still 100,000 uncounted ballots to be processed just today. From talks with folks at the election department, there was about a 60% voter turnout across the county. The results right now show roughly half of that. This could easily change in my favor before the end of the day. None of the results make sense based on our ground game, polling, and campaign activities. Too early for anyone to call this race.
No dude. You lost. There’s no way there was a 60% turnout in your district and anyone who’s been paying attention for a while isn’t surprised she won again, despite the DUI. This whole election was about Seeno and being backed by the building trades was a big tell for the people in Concord of whose pockets you’re in. We’re sick of the potted plants hand picked by the corrupt political scene screwing the city over. Good luck to you. ***By the way, stapling your campaign signs to utility poles is illegal due to safety concerns. Might want to update your ground game.***
You’re wrong. I talked to the election department. Ground game was strong. Always going to have haters.
Also – not pro-seeno, and not in anyones pockets. I was the largest funder of my own campaign. $1,000 from a union doesn’t buy me. I put 16K into my campaign.
Robert Ring — When I watched the Chamber of Commerce Candidate Forum on TV I was hopeful
that you may be the person to replace Laura Hoffmeister and I appreciated that you were the only candidate at the forum that was supportive of term limits on the council. I fully agree with other posters here in saying that Laura Hoffmeister needs to go away, she has been and is a part of the problem, but I’ve come to question if you’re the right person to replace her? I met you at the DENA meeting in early October. You got up from your seat, walked across the room and stood by the door, when it was your turn to speak you announced that you were running for a seat on the Concord City Council and said “If elected it’s my job to work with SEENO” and then you left. You didn’t say “Concord First Partners,” you said “SEENO”! The attendees of the meeting were 95% anti-SEENO, you had the opportunity to say you didn’t support SEENO being Master Developer, but you didn’t. You didn’t say anything about Concord First Partners, you only said “if elected it’s my job to work with SEENO.” From that point on I’ve been uncomfortable with you and your candidacy. Has the CPOA or MDRR supported your candidacy directly or indirectly through their members or employees, or through independent expenditures from their PAC’s?
Ken, if openly expressed that I am anti-seeno, and then get elected, I could be forced to recuse myself from voting on CNWS issues because of expressed pre-decisional bias. If elected, I will have to work with CFP (Seeno) because they were given an exclusive negotiating agreement that can’t be broken unless they don’t come to terms. I said time and time again that I’m not pro-seeno, and I didn’t take any money from developers. I put 16K into my own campaign.
Robert Ring — This is the problem, did you see what you posted in your response to me? You said “Ken, if openly expressed that I am anti-Seeno, and then get elected, I could be forced to recuse myself from voting on CNWS issues because of expressed pre-decisional bias” and then you said “I said time and time again that I’m not pro-Seeno”, so which is it? You say you’ve stated “time and time again” that you’re not “pro-Seeno” but that you can’t say you’re “anti-Seeno,” but when you were in a room full of anti-Seeno people you said “I have to work with Seeno” and not “I’m not pro-Seeno.” You’re contradicting yourself and that brings up more questions.
I also didn’t ask if you took money from developers, I asked if you have accepted donations from the Concord Police (Officers) Association (CPA/CPOA) PAC and/or their members and/or Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery (MDRR) PAC and/or their executive employees and/or Garaventa family members. I look forward to your response.
There are 16,108 registered voters in City Council D1 for this election, and 4,981 City Council D1 votes counted so far, which is about 30.9% of registered voters.
Assuming Quinn Anderson’s % of the vote total remains the same (20.76%) in the ballots still to be counted, and assuming a record high City Council vote turnout (not just ballots cast, but the City Council question marked on them) of 60%, in order to defeat Hoffmeister you would need to get about 46.5% of the hypothetical total of remaining ballots to be cast, compared to your 33.27% in the ballots counted so far.
Assuming a more typical (i.e. lower) City Council vote turnout, you would need to get substantially higher than that.
That would be an extremely unusually – even suspiciously – large swing in percentages from at least half of the votes having already been counted, to the final totals.
It’s incredible to me that you think Quinne going to stay at 20% of the votes. She’s that high because we’re mostly seeing democrat votes in these first set of
Results and Quinne was endorsed by the dem party. A swing could easily put me in the lead, and we will know later today around 5.
You appear not be very familiar with the normal patterns of election numbers over the usual updates on and after election night, in order to be able to assess what is within plausible bounds.
If you think Quinne’s percentage of the votes is going to decline, that will actually make a turnaround for you even harder. A higher percentage for Quinne makes that possibility a little easier for you, because that brings down Hoffmeister’s percentage, which is the one you have to exceed to win.
Today’s update has now come in and you stand at 33.36% of the votes now counted.
Let’s assume 60% final turnout as before.
Assuming that Quinne’s percentage of votes to be counted ends up being the same as her percentage of votes now counted (21.91%), you will need 49.35% of votes to be counted in order to get your final percentage above Hoffmeister’s and win. So about 16 percentage points more in the votes to be counted than you have gotten of the votes counted so far. This would be an incredible shift, unheard of for an election of this size.
But I see that you expect Quinne’s percentage will go down, not stay constant. Let’s assume that expectation is fulfilled to the maximum extent possible: Quinne Anderson gets zero of the remaining votes. Then you would need 60.31% of the remaining votes in order to win, almost 27 percentage points more in the votes to be counted than you have gotten of the votes counted so far.
Quinne is pulling votes away from Laura. You’re saying “an incredible swing” but I got 47% of the 2nd updated on election night, which represented everyone in our district who filled out a ballot in person. Laura only got 37% of those, and Quinne 21% if I have another update close to that, then I win.
I didn’t save the election night numbers, so I can’t check your 47% figure. But I did save the Nov 9 report numbers and we now have the Nov 10 report numbers (latest as of this writing). So I can tell you the following for sure:
1. As of the Nov 9 report, you had 1657 votes, 33.27%.
2. As of the Nov 10 report, you have 2078 votes, 33.36%. This is a gain of 0.09 percentage points.
3. Of the votes counted between the Nov 9 and Nov 10 reports, you got 421 votes, 33.73%. This was 0.46 pct points more in *newly counted* votes than your previous *cumulative* %, to gain you the abovementioned 0.09 pct points in your new cumulative.
4. At an assumption of 60% final turnout (same as in this district in 2018), in order to win you will need 49.35% of the votes remaining to be counted. This would be 15.99 pct points more than your current cumulative %. As mentioned in #3, the corresponding number you got in the Nov 10 update was 0.46 pct points. So in order for you to rise to the top in the next update, it needs to be about 34.7 times better for you than the last one was.
If you sincerely belive that’s in the realm of plausibility, then your powers of self-delusion are much stronger than your grasp of arithmetic.
Robert, I ran myself in 2018 in D3, and lost to Dominic Aliano. I did calculations similar to the ones I’ve shown for your election, and waited until the further ballots to be counted could not plausibly change the outcome. That was well before the last ballot was counted. At that point I conceded publicly and acknowledged my opponent’s victory – not happily, but frankly. It was painful. I had worked very hard to win that election, cared a lot about the issues I was running on, and did not believe my opponent would do a good enough job on them. But conceding at that point was the right thing to do to respect the process and the voters. And at this point, it ought to happen in both D1 and D5.
My wife and I dropped out ballots at the boxes near the Concord library, yet we haven’t received confirmation that they were counted.
Those are all being counted now.
I mailed mine in 2 weeks ago. Haven’t heard a peep. Not surprised.
You people write as though you expect Hoffmeister to vote sober !
I’ll take DUI Laura over Hope Johnson and her “legalize prostitution” election promises.
The smart vote was for Robert Ring.
Get rid of the corrupt city manager.
Robert Ring , Thank you for commenting on Claycord with your real name. I don’t see Laura Hoffmeister comments unless she is using the synonym of Hope Johnson. That takes courage.
We need more truthfull people like you running for office.
Hope Johnson is not anybody’s pseudonym. She’s a real person, is well known to anybody who has been to a lot of Concord City Council meetings, and was on the ballot in D2 two years ago.
What an intelligent observation. Fully agree with you. It is so blatantly clear that Robert is here to actually implement change and be a voice for all of us… unlike those greedy politicians only looking out for themselves (and their pockets). He has some major courage to speak to the people, hear them out, and offer his point of view. This is what we need. This is what a TRUE democracy should look like.
how is this even possible🙄
Hope is realy for Concord belive me. her own words speek for themself. Quote For 10 years, I lived in San Francisco and was involved in local politics – including covering government meetings and political campaigns via an opinion column for a well-read news blog. I was chair of San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. I am very familiar with the workings of local government and the responsibilities of elected officials.
She is a complete waste. She has been unproductive for years, she is so delusional. There needs to be term limits on council seats.
I am sorry to hear that Hoffmeister was reelected.
I look at a situation like this as rewarding failure.
Laura’s character values have been exposed ahd found to be wanting.
I feel more sorry for those who voted for her.
She hasn’t been re-elected yet. Still thousands of votes not counted.
Robert Ring,
.
How about giving us updated numbers.
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