John Bauters: Donations Reveal An Embrace Of His Conservative Side in Supervisor Race

John Bauters' Funding Machine Quietly Milks the Alameda County Right Wing

Corporate Lobbyists, PG&E, Developers, Police, Tech Entrepreneurs Tapped for Donations

Wareham Development Corporation Unloads $15,000 After Favors Granted

News Analysis

November’s Alameda County Board of Supervisor District 5 race has come down to Emeryville City Council member John Bauters, a white male lawyer with law enforcement and corporate backing, pitted against Oakland City Council member Nikki Bas, a woman of color with labor backing.  A conservative white man versus a liberal woman of color; it’s a dynamic that might be seen outside of Emeryville as so normal as to be considered not newsworthy.  But for Mr Bauters, his revelatory list of campaign donors recalls this political campaign stereotype he wants no part of, regardless of its inconvenient truth.  

The race for Supervisor this year is a race between corporate power and working people despite Mr Bauters’ denials against that framing.  Councilman John Bauters loudly says he's a true progressive.  But his actual record on the Emeryville City Council notwithstanding, consider who’s putting up the money in the hotly contested Supervisor race.  On Mr Bauters' side it’s virtually all corporations with a material interest in having a friendly voice on the Supervisors Board.  Them and right wing lobbying groups, tech entrepreneurs, police officer’s associations and the sheriff’s office, as well as corporate Democrats and Republicans.  Ms Bas has the backing of mostly regular Alameda County people (a few wealthy supporters) and labor unions.  With donor lists like those, not surprisingly, the backers of John Bauters have given their candidate more money (over $500,000 so far) than have supporters of Ms Bas.

Emeryville City Council Member
John Bauters

Despite his list of backers, Council member Bauters says he's a liberal.  But the campaign donors know better.  And they know a good investment when they see one.  That’s why Bauters has gotten major donations from PG&E and the pro-developer lobbying group YIMBY California as well as Sacramento’s corporate right wing California Real Estate PAC.  Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs also have given generously to Mr Bauters’ campaign (expecting nothing in return if you believe them) as well as East Bay politicians; the controversial former mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf and Emeryville’s current mayor Courtney Welch, a corporate Democrat who generously gave her Council colleague $1,100 (so far).  

Mr Bauters strongly endorsed and supported Ms Welch for Emeryville City Council despite her only having lived in town for one month when she filed papers to run for the Council in 2021.  Ms Welch is running for re-election to the Council in November and incidentally, some supporters report she is considering seeking higher political office like Mr Bauters is doing instead of a third term on the Council four years from now.

Trolling for law enforcement money, Bauters is framing himself as the law and order candidate in the race and to clinch the deal, he set up an independent expenditure committee called ‘Bauters for a Safer East Bay’ that is independent from his campaign cash and has net almost $60,000 so far.  Bauters has called to lock up criminals with more jail time, a perennial favorite in the law enforcement community.  He has not said how this would be considered progressive.

Oakland City Council President
Nikki Fortunato Bas

But perhaps the most illuminating campaign donation so far this season is the $15,000 given to candidate Bauters by Wareham Development’s CEO Rich Robbins who was granted a major political favor by Councilman Bauters recently.  Robbins applied for a permit to build a major new bio-tech facility on Overland Street in Emeryville but the City Council had earlier certified a General Plan overlay district called the 'transit center transportation hub zone' around the Amtrak station that restricted the number of parking spaces for proposed developments in the zone.  The idea is the City of Emeryville has an interest in getting people to use alternative transportation rather than everyone just driving.  

The Council vote to implement the transportation hub zone was unanimous but Mr Robbins of Wareham said didn’t want to be constrained by the law.  He wanted to maximize profit for his project and he said future tenants at the Overland bio-tech project would all want to be able drive to work and his new building would be worth more money with more parking available.  So overturning the vote of his own handpicked Planning Commission who thought the new law should be obeyed, Councilman Bauters led a drive to give permission to Rich Robbins to build all the extra  parking spaces.  Councilman Bauters never said why Emeryville's new law should be overturned to help a single developer and he refused requests from the Tattler about it.  

In responce (but not officially because that would be illegal), Mr Robbins gave Mr Bauters $15,000 for his County Supervisor race.  The money for Bauters and parking spaces for Robbins was a win-win for Bauters and Robbins but a loser for the people of Emeryville who have a reasonable expectation their city planning laws not be overturned so casually.

In addition to that and more blatantly showing his anti-labor conservative side, Council member Bauters led a drive to roll back the wages of the poorest workers in Emeryville when he attempted to amend Emeryville’s hard fought Minimum Wage Ordinance in 2019.  The Alameda Labor Council successfully pushed back against Bauters' pushing down the minimum wage by rushing a signature drive of Emeryville citizens just in time to stop the Bauters juggernaut.  

That was back when and now, it appears labor groups across the Bay Area have not forgotten John Bauters and they’re actively supporting the candidacy of Nikki Bas in the Supervisor's race.  

Workers don’t have the financial resources of tech billionaires and giant corporate lobbying groups of course and not surprisingly Bauters has raised more money than Bas.  But Ms Bas has the backing of average people and the race is very tight according to polls.

This campaign season, Mr Bauters is attempting to run as a conservative but also not as a conservative and it's been tough for him to clearly message himself, trying to be everything to everybody.  He is trying for the entire Republican voter base, centrist Democrats and if he can pick up some progressive Democrats, so much the better.  

Clearly Councilman Bauters has some liberal ideas on social issues and before this campaign season, he would blanch at the prospects of outright being called 'conservative' or a 'corporate Democrat' but given his list of donors in the Supervisors race, Mr Bauters appears to have finally made peace with the epithets.  Thus the race for Board of Supervisors in left wing Alameda County has taken on the trappings of every other race in America; right versus left, conservative versus progressive.  And that’s a substantial change from the traditional election ruse around here where everybody's a "progressive" and the elections are 'progressive versus progressive'.  Though the conservative title is not something he has been advertising across the county, the voters' choice has been made more clear this election thanks to John Bauters' striking donor list.  

Imagine Democracy in Emeryville

 Emeryville Residents: 

Step Up and Run For Elected Office

Opinion

Time is running out and people are not registering to run in our November elections in Emeryville, threatening the election process itself.  Every election cycle it has tended to get worse as far as active citizen participation goes and this year might be the worst yet.  

Emeryville is not known for its engaged citizenry.  In fact our town usually ranks last in the East Bay in terms of voter participation at election time.  That’s most likely attributable to the lack of families in our town, revealed by our super low 1.8 persons per housing unit demographic and even more, to the fact we have become a ‘renter’ city revealed by the highest renter to homeowner ratio of any city in the East Bay.  It wasn’t always this way but like it or not, these numbers reflect our current demographics.  These numbers may help us to understand our lack of civic mindedness at the moment, and they are disturbing, but they do not necessarily reflect our destiny.

While we are not so oblivious as to think a little opinion piece in the Tattler would deliver an insurgency for the upcoming November election, we do have a duty to point out the urgent need for candidates to rise up and challenge the status quo.  Because as of right now, there won’t be elections for Emeryville elected office this fall; not for School Board and not for City Council.  It’s August and nobody is stepping up to do their civic duty to run for elected office.  We want you to consider helping your community.

The School Board has two seats that can be challenged and the City Council has three this year.  If no candidates for the School Board throw their hat in the ring, the two incumbents will simply be coronated and there will not even be an election.  If no challengers rise up for the City Council seats, the two incumbents Courtney Welch and Sukdeep Kaur will stroll right in for another four years.  The other Council seat, now taken by John Bauters, is up for contention because Mr Bauters is running for Alameda County Supervisor and the law forbids him from also running for his Council seat.  That leaves a vacancy, and so far, only one candidate has registered to run.  So if no one else rises up to challenge this, effectively, there will be three coronations and no City Council election in November as well.

It is common there are no elections for School Board in Emeryville because of the stultifying effect of the incumbent advantage.  What happens is School Board members commonly resign and new members are appointed by the other School Board members.  The appointees are friends of one or more of the existing Board members and then the appointee gets to run in the next election as an incumbent.  The result is a calcified polity, an unchanging status quo that’s reflected in the school district’s perpetually abysmal academic ranking.

But this election is looking to be different with the School Board AND the City Council both falling into indifference and apathy because no one will challenge the status quo. 

Given Emeryville’s demographic shift over the years, it is understandable democracy would suffer.  Understandable, but unacceptable.  To have a democracy, you must at least have elections.  We cannot expect our government to work for us if we don’t challenge it. Our nonchalance at election time both in terms of voting and running for office, will be rewarded with a polity that does not serve us.  It becomes a vicious circle at some point, an exigency we must push back against or we suffer the consequences.  What looms is corruption.

To Emeryville residents: please consider running for the School Board or the City Council.  Less than two weeks remain before registration is cut off for these five positions in these two offices.  Register to run, let us hear your ideas on governing and if we like them, we’ll vote for you.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.  Let’s show the statisticians that our demographic is not our destiny. Let's imagine democracy in Emeryville.