Eight candidates are competing to get onto the San Luis Obispo City Council in a Nov. 8 election that those running say is a litmus test for how the city’s doing on issues like homelessness, transportation, equity, and downtown vitality.
Mayor Erica Stewart and Councilmember Michelle Shoresman are seeking full terms for the seats they were appointed to last year, while Councilmember Carlyn Christianson is terming out of office—leaving her seat open to a newcomer.
Three people are running against Stewart for mayor, and Shoresman and three others are running for two spots on the City Council.
Mayor musical chairs
Elected in 2018 as the first Black council member in SLO’s history, Stewart unexpectedly found herself in the mayor’s seat after Heidi Harmon resigned in 2021.
“I’ve definitely enjoyed it,” said Stewart, who works in human resources at the Cal Poly Health Center. “I’m looking forward to seeing everything we’ve talked about, that we’ve already put votes on, watching these things come to fruition.”
Stewart said the city already has quality, ambitious plans in place to address SLO’s biggest issues. But she said residents have to understand that it’s a long game; nothing is solved overnight.
“Housing and homelessness; diversity, equity, and inclusion; sustainability and climate change,” Stewart said. “These are issues that are not going away, and that’s the part that’s really challenging.”
Carrying a reputation as one of the more centrist members of a politically progressive council, Stewart rejected the criticism that the council always agrees.
She cited lone “no” votes on policies like the city’s revamped affordable housing program and an early version of a ban on natural gas in new buildings (she later supported that policy).
“For me, I look at are we actually involving the people who will be affected by the decisions we make? And when I vote against it, it’s usually because I don’t feel we have,” Stewart said.
She added that council members often discuss and debate policies with city staff individually well ahead of meetings. By the time an item comes into open session, it often incorporates that feedback.
Challenging Stewart for mayor is retired firefighter Richard Orcutt, outspoken city critic Jeff Specht, and perennial candidate Don Hendrick.
Orcutt told New Times that his interest in local politics “ignited because of the way this town has gone since I retired 10 years ago.”
“The quality of living has gone thoroughly downhill,” Orcutt said. “I’d chalk that up to street crime and homelessness being unaddressed by our City Council and employees.”
If elected, Orcutt said he would overhaul the city’s strategy on homelessness—calling current efforts ineffective—and make downtown parking free. He opposes the new parking garage planned at Palm and Nipomo streets, which is estimated to cost $50 million. SLO recently increased parking rates to help pay for the structure.
“Free parking is the key to downtown revitalization, ending street crime, stopping runaway spending, making this town the gem it once was,” he said.
In 2019, Orcutt faced criminal charges for allegedly sending threatening and racist cards to neighbors, while possessing dozens of guns. The SLO County District Attorney’s Office eventually dropped the case after an FBI handwriting expert didn’t find a link between Orcutt and the letters.
Specht, whose candidate statement reads that SLO has “a severe case of staff infection,” is a returning candidate and regular speaker at council meetings. He wants to amend the city charter to reduce the power of the city manager, who he believes is “up to [his] eyeballs in corruption.”
Hendrick, who in his own words may be “the biggest loser in town” when it comes to running for office—having done so unsuccessfully seven times—told New Times that he continues to campaign because he believes the city only represents the interests of developers and the wealthy.
“My community loves that I speak up for them,” Hendrick said. “All of us old-time locals have suffered.”
Four candidates, two council seats
Shoresman’s first experience in the public spotlight came not as an appointed council member—but as the public information officer for the SLO County Public Health Department during the pandemic. She’s mulled a run for council for years.
“The timing just wasn’t right. In 2020, I was in the middle of a full-scale response to the pandemic,” Shoresman said. “Before that, my son was too young to make a commitment. In 2022, I was starting to think it’d be an OK time to dip my toe in the pool of public office.”
After spending a year on the council, Shoresman is confident the city is moving in the right direction on major issues. Like Stewart, she’s looking forward to the continued implementation of established plans, especially the buildout of bike and pedestrian infrastructure. She’s also focused on issues of equity.
“The pandemic really peeled back the layers on a lot of inequities we see in our community and across the state,” Shoresman said. “In terms of access to health care, access to child care, underserved populations, access to broadband, I want to see us work toward resolving some of those inequities.”
Child care struggles are what propelled candidate Emily Francis to run for council. A high school social studies teacher, Francis said she wants to bring the perspective of a young mom to the council. When she first moved to SLO a few years ago, Francis said she waited a year and half for child care.
“This is a huge equity issue, for women, for low-income, for people of color who are disproportionately kind of left out,” Francis said. “It’s not like there’s a fundamental failure at the city level. There’s just so much more we could be doing to really help working families.”
With experience as a union leader, Francis said she wants to help SLO establish policies requiring city projects to use local labor. Francis supports where the city is headed on the big issues, overall, and thinks most residents agree.
“In general, people are actually super excited about the direction the city’s taking. It’s the things around the edges that people want to get addressed—frustration about separated bike lanes, wanting more of those, traffic issues, lack of child care,” she said.
Joe Benson, a local attorney, is running as a political moderate with experience on civic boards like the SLO Chamber of Commerce. He listed his top five priority issues as infrastructure, “missing middle” housing, downtown vitality, homelessness, and diversity.
“Homelessness is a tough one,” Benson said. “The county has the social services dollars … but the city is filling the vacuum right now. I hope the county follows through on their [new five-year homelessness] plan. On the other side of that, we can’t surrender our public places.”
Citing statistics that City Council voted unanimously more than 80 percent of time in 2022, Benson said the city could benefit from more diversity of thought.
“I think it’s really important for our city to let council members challenge each other. Creative tension is a good thing. It results in higher quality decision making,” Benson said. “I have a lot of respect for everyone up here, but I worry about some homogeny of thinking.”
Homogeny of thinking is at the core of candidate James Papp’s beef with the city. The architectural historian, who also ran in 2020 after getting booted from the city’s Cultural Heritage Committee for incivility, believes the council is abdicating its responsibility to rigorously oversee the city governance.
“Who I am running against? … I’m running against [City Manager] Derek Johnson,” Papp said. “We have a weak-mayor form of government. The city manager runs it, and the City Council is supposed to do oversight. The City Council is not doing the oversight.”
Papp thinks the city is wasting money on a new parking garage while he said it spends less of its budget on parks services than other similar cities do. Papp believes that the lack of political diversity on the council has resulted in leadership that’s stagnant and unaccountable.
“The Democrats always win and they all pat each other on the pat and say how wonderful they are,” he said. “I have a 12-step program for SLO. Step one is real budget oversight, and Step 12 is real dissent. Let people dissent.” Δ
Assistant Editor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sep 15-25, 2022.
