Too Conservative for Alameda County Voters: Councilman Bauters Tries To Hide From His Record

 Supe Board Election Quandary:

Alameda County Voters Are More Progressive Than Councilman Bauters

His Anti-Labor, Pro-Corporate Record Vexes

News Analysis

Four days after announcing his re-election campaign for November’s Emeryville City Council election, John Bauters now says he will run for District Five of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, a position that would disallow him to serve on the City Council.  It was not something planned.  The Supervisor seat was suddenly made available in a surprise announcement from the veteran politician Keith Carson, who after 32 years, says he will retire from the post.  

City Councilman John Bauters
He is hoping Alameda County progressive voters
don't check out his record in Emeryville.

The swift pivot away from Emeryville by Bauters reveals where his priorities and loyalty lies.  Although the bigger-than-Emeryville ambitions of our current City Councilman may not be surprising to all, what is baffling is how Mr Bauters, a centrist corporate Democrat by most measures, sees himself fitting in at the seat of power in arguably the most progressive county in California.

The seat Mr Bauters seeks is taken by Mr Carson, a progressive Black man and Berkeley resident who has long time and loyal support from the progressive community in Oakland and Berkeley.  If they knew of his record in Emeryville, it’s unlikely Alameda County progressives would vote for John Bauters.  Indeed, it will be up to Mr Bauters to keep his corporatist, anti-labor record quiet as he accentuates his positives in his soon to be ubiquitous campaign literature. 

Outside of little Emeryville, few know his record:

— Council member Bauters led a drive to roll back the wages of the poorest workers by rewriting City Hall’s landmark minimum wage ordinance.  

— More recently, Mayor Bauters disallowed even a council discussion of a resolution in support of a ceasefire in Gaza brought by Councilman Kalimah Priforce.  

— On the housing front, Bauters has been such a steadfast supporter of the developer lobbying group YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), it earned him the title of the most YIMBY mayor in the most YIMBY city in California by the San Francisco Chronicle.  YIMBY California, headquartered in Sacramento, lauded Mayor Bauters with their highest praise when they presented him with the coveted “Developer Shill” award.  

— Even in his self congratulatory category of bicycling, Mr Bauters, doing the work of the business community, refused to implement our Bike Boulevard network, putting bikers at risk and disallowing the idea that Emeryville could have quiet streets for bikes (and pedestrians).  Not one of Emeryville’s five bike boulevards has been implemented during his time here on the Council.  His Emeryville record on bikes is pushed down hard enough that when speaking to outsiders, he feels comfortable enough to cast himself as “America’s Bike Mayor” in the Supervisor race. 

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In 2019, working on behalf of the Emeryville business community, Mr Bauters assembled a last minute majority coalition on the City Council to stop the impending implementation of Emeryville’s landmark minimum wage ordinance, depriving the working poor in town of a living wage.  Only by direct action leafleting and a door-to-door petition drive was the Alameda County Labor Council able to mobilize to stop Bauters’ wage roll back legislation.  Raising the minimum wage has proven to be very popular with Emeryville voters despite their pro-business Councilman.

Mr Bauters has also assembled an activist pro-housing developer majority on the Council that has closed off the things Emeryville citizens want, as expressed in their General Plan.  Things that developers could help pay for....like parks.  All must be set aside in order to enable developers to build more market rate rental housing as Mr Bauters himself says.  He states rents will eventually lower, they will trickle down, when we give developers dominion over our housing policy.  In this way, City Hall must never be allowed to constrain corporations that want to maximize profits by building more rental apartment towers he says.  We must sacrifice all to the “housing emergency”, even the building of parks and other things essential to livability, must be sacrificed, he announced.  

What Councilman Bauters fails to mention is that Emeryville has built more market rate housing than any other city in the East Bay.  In fact, every year, for more than twenty years, Emeryville has exceeded its housing requirements as delineated by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).  Mr Bauters lets the actual housing shortage outside of Emeryville’s borders and a little legerdemain serve as rational for not asking developers anything in trade for permission to continue the building boom, done at the citizen’s expense.

But perhaps the most disturbing quality of Bautersian politics is the undue attention he gives forwarding his political narrative, a level of control that he demands and he gets as a result of never being accountable to the people.  Mr Bauters will not answer questions from the public if the questions are tough or tend to put his Council work in a bad light.  He has brought to the Emeryville City Council a new hermetically sealed culture where the public is seen as undeserving of answers to their questions about public policy.  In this regard, Councilman Bauters will not talk to the local press, not by email, phone, text or in person.  He has never held a press conference and public meetings are structured by California’s Brown Act in such a way that questions can never be answered there.  

Unfortunately, this lack of accountability has been infectious: other City Council members are now also following the Bauters directive on silence in the face of public questions; namely members Courtney Welch and Sukhdeep Kaur.  But outside of Emeryville, citizens will likely take umbrage at the prospects of their pols being so cloistered.  Alameda County voters, famous for their insistance on government accountability, will not likely take to a lack answerability at their Board of Supervisors siting down, setting up a possible season of discontent at the Board were Bauters to win.  The idea that a corporatist, anti-labor Democrat taking the seat of Keith Carson may also rub Alameda County voters the wrong way.

The election is  March 5th with a runoff election in November if no candidates get more than 50% in the March vote.  If Mr Bauters were to win a seat on the Board of Supervisors, he would have to vacate his Emeryville City Council seat.

The Board of Supervisors District Five consists of Berkeley, large parts of Oakland, Piedmont, Emeryville and parts of Albany.

Council member Bauters did not return calls for this story.