Nail-Biter In Arcata Swings Against Machi

Two-term incumbent upset by Winkler, Brinton, Ornelas

Humboldt Sentinel
11/5/08
By Charles Douglas

ARCATA -- For the second election in a row, voters in this college town have tossed out the longest-serving incumbent on their City Council.

By the end of Election Day as defined by the calendar, councilmember and former mayor Michael Machi had an 8-point lead and was riding comfortably in second place. As the early morning hours came around and results from precincts dominated by Humboldt State University students trickled in, Machi suddenly found himself in fourth place and out of a job come December.

Instead, voters sided with three fresh faces to make up the majority of the City Council. As was indicated in a poll conducted last month by HSU faculty and students, planning commissioner Michael Winkler, who ran in 2005 and 2006, found his third time was the charm, easily winning first place with 4,281 votes in the preliminary final tally, or 28.62%.

A surprise second place was the 21-year-old Northern Humboldt Union High School trustee Shane Brinton, who managed to win second place despite opposition from the Times-Standard and a savage rebuke from his former employer, publisher Kevin Hoover of The Arcata Eye. Brinton wound up with 3,043 votes, or 20.35%. Both Winkler and Brinton received strong support from the local Democratic Party as well as the Eureka Reporter, Humboldt Sentinel and local environmental activists.

Rounding out the field just behind Brinton was local educator and sustainable agriculture advocate Susan Ornelas, finishing third place with 2,926 votes, or 19.56%. She has a familial connection to city politics as the wife of former mayor and three-term councilmember (1990-94, 96-2004), Bob Ornelas. Her husband was the first Green elected official in California, although he switched to Democrat after leaving office, while Susan subsequently left the Greens for the Republican Party. Ornelas will the first registered Republican on the City Council since 1996, while the Democrats have their first City Council majority since 1992. Arcata now has absolutely no independent or third party members serving in its elective offices for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Bringing up the rear along with Machi were firefighter and college student Jason Grow and homeless activist Geronimo Garcia. Machi garnered 2,587 votes or 17.3%, compared to Grow's 1,292 votes or 8.64% and Garcia's 728 votes or 4.87%. Although there were no valid write-in candidates in the race for three Council seats, 99 write-in votes were cast, totaling 0.66%.

New Councilmembers will be inaugurated at a special City Council meeting on Dec. 9 at Noon, when a new Mayor and Vice Mayor will be chosen from among the seated and incoming Councilmembers. The next municipal election will be in 2010, when current mayor Mark Wheetley and councilmember Alex Stillman will either run for re-election or surrender their seats to as-yet unknown challengers. Wheetley will be the councilmember with the longest continuous term in office, having won his seat in a special election in early 2005 with a successful re-election campaign the following year. Stillman, who was elected to her current term in 2006, can claim superior experience as she was previously mayor during much of her twelve years in office from 1974-86.

The new City Council will immediately be faced with the appointment of a new Planning Commissioner to fill Winkler's position, and the Northern Humboldt Union High School District board will consider the question of appointing a replacement for Brinton, whose term would have expired with the special district off-year elections set for November, 2009.

Charles Douglas is the publisher of the Humboldt Sentinel. He can be reached at his blog, Vagabond Journalist, at charlesdouglas.us.