The first rounds of vote counting in the general election showed that the San Luis Obispo City Council is on the cusp of ending its all-women era.
There are two City Council seats up for grabs. City Councilmember Andy Pease’s term ends in December, leaving her position vacant. Incumbent City Councilmember Jan Marx ran for reelection and is leading the roost of four candidates with 39.4 percent of initial votes.
Newcomer and Cal Poly city and regional planning professor Mike Boswell stands to occupy the second open City Council seat. With 11,919 votes counted as of Nov. 6, he’d won 34 percent of the share of preliminary tallies.
Boswell told New Times during the Nov. 5 election watch party at Benny’s Pizza Palace & Social Club that he’s very happy with the early totals and is waiting for more votes to be counted. He’s planned out a list of priority areas to tackle if he secures the City Council position for the next four years.
“Open space protection and expansion, safer streets, and continuing our hard work on addressing housing and homelessness,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for our current council, and I’ll just be happy to win and be on the council.”
Not every candidate was joyous. Twenty-four-year-old Cal Poly graduate John Drake was concerned about the results of the presidential election.
“It feels like 2016 all over again, I’m not gonna lie,” Drake said prior to Donald Trump claiming victory after Fox News projected he had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency. “Harris kept talking about the blue wall, and now it’s kind of showing like there were cracks in the blue wall all over again. It’s sort of like Trump is exceeding the expectations that we had for him in terms of not winning the presidency again. It’s disconcerting, it’s disheartening.”
In his own bid to win a SLO City Council seat, Drake placed third in the early tally, earning 2,453 votes or 16.6 percent of the count. Cheng Park restoration participant and community beautification advocate Felicia Lewis held 9.9 percent.
“I think it’s positive, because it means I definitely didn’t fall off after that Assembly bid,” Drake said. “I am excited because it’s not the last time I’m going to run in a local election, but it definitely shows that there’s still, like, a support base out here.”
Drake ran for the 30th District State Assembly seat in 2022 that’s currently held by Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay). The district spans parts of Santa Cruz, Monterey, and SLO counties. With 3.6 percent of the total SLO County vote, Drake trailed behind the other four candidates and got knocked out of the race in the June primary.
Now, Drake wants City Council to pursue inclusive zoning laws and ordinances that make it easier to build affordable housing, mobile outreach units, interacting one-on-one with the unhoused people, and increasing the presence of community service patrols as an alternative to law enforcement. A new partner and investor in Antonio’s Pizza downtown, he wants to revitalize the city core, too.
SLO Mayor Erica Stewart defended her two-year term seat, according to the initial counts. She won 84.8 percent of the vote while her opponent, welder Don Hedrick, got 15 percent.
Beyond City Council, SLO is poised to receive new blood in its school district too. San Luis Coastal Unified School District’s Area 6 trustee Eve Hinton is currently losing to attorney and school district parent Erica Baltodano.
The conservative Hinton, a two-decade-long bilingual certificate classroom teacher who came under fire for sharing misinformation about the Black Lives Matter protests and the LGBTQ-plus community on social media in 2020, received 28.1 percent of counted votes.
As of Nov. 6, the SLO County Clerk-Recorder’s Office tabulated 45.5 percent of the potential Area 6 votes, or 4,460 people out of the registered 9,798 voters. Baltodano won 71.8 percent of the share.
Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano told New Times that her office will resume counting the remaining vote-by-mail ballots on Nov. 8.
“We have a lot to do,” County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano told New Times on Nov. 6. “We didn’t leave until 3 a.m. We finished counting all the poll votes last night and those results are up. We finished counting a little after midnight.” Δ
This article appears in Nov 7-17, 2024.