July 16, 2002

Mathews to run for council; other liberals may follow

By DAN WHITE
Sentinel staff writer

Expect to see a City Council election contest between new progressives and what passes for "old guard" liberals in Santa Cruz.

Former council member Cynthia Mathews announced Monday she’d run again. Mike Rotkin hasn’t made it official, but his wife, Madelyn McCaul, was so confident that she showed up to Mathews’ press conference while wearing a "Mike Rotkin For City Council" button, recycled from 1996.

Rotkin and Mathews have both said the City Council needs more experience and a practical edge to match its members’ idealism. Rotkin, out of town Monday, has said he’d bring his budget-crunching experience to help the council out of financial doldrums, and questioned whether the council would be bold enough to make unpopular budget cuts.

As it turned out, the council made enough cuts to upset just about everyone. It slashed $2 million to draw down a looming deficit and gutted plans for a $93,000 peace park that had turned into a political hackey-sack.

It also slashed its own budget, eliminating all funding for a controversial line item that paid for council administrative aides — a position that did not exist in the mid-1990s when Rotkin and Mathews were on the council.

But the council, in some cases, bent to public pressure and restored previously slashed line items, most notably the funding for the Harvey West Pool.

During Mathews’ press conference, she steered clear of criticizing the present council. But Mathews — who founded the local Planned Parenthood office 30 years ago, was elected to two terms on the council in 1992 and 1996 and was mayor from 1996 to 1997 — said the city faces long-term issues that defy easy solutions: housing, transportation, water and strengthening the local economy.

She also said she’d work to support local creativity, youth and the economy. Mathews mentioned her connections to the Santa Cruz County Conference and Visitors’ Council and to the area Chamber of Commerce.

Some of the 40 supporters at the press conference took the present council to task. Michael Hall, a past Planned Parenthood executive director, said the current council "absolutely does not" have the practical edge and leadership it needs. He said council meetings get broken down into "endless listening" and not enough action on such issues as homelessness and the future of downtown.

In the left-conscious community of Santa Cruz, some perceive Rotkin and Mathews as "too conservative" to be progressives.

Neither had recent endorsements from the Santa Cruz Action Network that worked hard to promote the 1998 campaigns of three sitting council members — Keith Sugar, Mayor Christopher Krohn and Tim Fitzmaurice — whose seats are up for re-election in November. Of that group, only Krohn has said he’d probably run again, while Sugar said he won’t run and Fitzmaurice hasn’t announced.

Rotkin considers himself a strong progressive. He fought against the arrival of the chain bookstore Borders in Santa Cruz three years ago and once described himself as a socialist-feminist. Yet a new group called SCRAD — a self- described coalition of Santa Cruz Republicans and Democrats — has announced it would back him in the hopes of a "sensible, intelligent, responsible" government.

Contact Dan White at dwhite@santa-cruz.com.