Both candidates running to represent District 5 on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors say they get one particular question a whole bunch when they’re out door-knocking.
Is it about public safety? No. Homelessness? Nuh-uh. The question is: What exactly does a supervisor do?
While the board typically receives less public attention than, say, our local city councils, this powerful body oversees some of the most critical social services and spending in our region, from healthcare to food assistance to the sheriffs’ office. Its five members handle a $4.6 billion budget. The board also represents residents who live in the unincorporated areas of the county, which don’t have their own city governments.
Longtime District 5 Supervisor Keith Carson is retiring this year. Oakland Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas and Emeryville Councilmember John Bauters are facing off this November to fill his seat. The county’s District 5 includes North, West, and downtown Oakland, Piedmont, Emeryville, Berkeley and Albany. Bas and Bauters emerged from the March primary as the top two vote-getters.
There is a lot the candidates agree on, both promoting successes around affordable housing in their cities and pledging to reup a county housing bond measure. They support oversight of the sheriff’s office and bringing tenant protections to the unincorporated area of the county. But they’ve debated over their respective records, and the race was one of the first in this local election to turn negative. And while each candidate is receiving significant financial support and endorsements, the contributions are coming from distinctly different groups.
We spoke with Bauters and Bas last month, and attended a candidate forum, to tease out the differences in their visions for the county and what they each have to offer.
Who are Nikki Bas and John Bauters?
The candidates each have a history of working in public service, advocacy and organizing.
Bas is mid-way through her second term representing District 2 on the Oakland City Council, where her colleagues elected her president. She is a Filipina-American, 27-year resident of Oakland, and noted that she would be the first woman in the D5 seat if elected.
In the 1990s, Bas organized Chinese immigrant garment workers and ran an anti-sweatshop organization. She was later executive director of advocacy nonprofits Partnership for Working Families and the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. Bas said her run for county office is a natural extension of her career-long focus on supporting underserved communities.
“The county is our public healthcare system and our social safety net,” Bas told The Oaklandside. “There’s a really critical role that the county plays in terms of supporting our most vulnerable residents.”
Bas’ campaign literature has focused on her support for women, abortion rights and victims of sexual violence, aligning with a top issue for Democrats in the national election. In a campaign ad, she tells her story of being sexually assaulted in college.
Bauters first moved west from Michigan to flee the hostility he faced as a young gay man in a rural, conservative town, he said. He experienced homelessness and housing insecurity along the way. Bauters, who has a law degree, later worked in outreach and legal defense for both homeless residents and public housing tenants in the Midwest. He also worked on housing policy in California. He said his professional path and his bid for a Board of Supervisors seat stem from his personal experience accessing the kinds of services the county provides.
Bauters worked at the Alliance for Safety and Justice, an advocacy organization for criminal justice reform and victim support, for nine years until leaving last month to campaign full-time. Public safety is the focus of his campaign, which comes as local conversation has coalesced around the issue this election, and the county district attorney is facing a recall.
“I have always led with the mantle of public safety,” Bauters told The Oaklandside. He denounced what he called “dichotomous discussions” around safety that define the concept as either law-and-order or “defund the police.” It’s a spectrum, Bauters said, including issues like bike and pedestrian safety.
Both Bas and Bauters vowed to engage actively with the community if elected, holding town halls and listening sessions. Both currently spend time on regional bodies beyond their cities, with Bas serving on the Association of Bay Area Governments executive board and Bauters on the Alameda County Transportation Commission.
Alameda County is way behind on housing
Alameda County has a long way to go before it’s built enough housing to ensure everyone can live affordably — or at all — in the region. The county’s long-range housing plan for its unincorporate-d areas — its Housing Element — was rejected by the state last year. And those areas have a designated need of 4,700 new housing units by 2031, and the county’s cities altogether of 89,000.
Bay Area voters were set to decide on a $20 billion bond for affordable housing across the region in November, which supporters heralded as a game-changer allowing cities and counties to meet more of their needs. But the bond was pulled from the ballot at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, supervisors have been deadlocked for years over whether to implement eviction protections in the unincorporated county. Both Bauters and Bas support the tenant protections, but so did Carson. With a current majority on the board that isn’t as receptive to tenant-friendly laws, the election won’t necessarily change the fate of the ordinance.
The victor will also preside over a county tasked with providing critical services to unhoused residents everywhere. While Alameda County’s overall homeless population has declined slightly, there are nearly 9,500 people living without permanent housing.
Both D5 candidates said they’d take the lead on introducing a new county bond measure for affordable housing. Money from the last measure, A1, has been spent. Bas was an author of Oakland’s Measure U, the successful 2022 infrastructure bond that included $350 million for affordable housing.
“I would note that Emeryville is one of two cities in the entire state whose Housing Element was approved as a first draft,” said Bauters. The city is known for being friendly to developers and Bauters touts his success on affordable housing plans for San Pablo Avenue. He said he wants Alameda to take more of a “pro-housing” and “pro-production” approach, making it easier for developers to get permits and get projects off the ground. “But those things are secondary to getting [affordable housing] financed,” Bauters said.
Bas said she’d work to bring a “housing first” approach to the county, referencing the widely lauded successes in Houston, where a collaborative of agencies moves homeless people directly into apartments, not shelters. In Oakland, Bas has adopted the motto “public land for public good.” She was elected on a vow to manifest community-supported affordable housing on a large city-owned lot by Lake Merritt. A mixed-use development project slated for the site languished for years as the developer failed to obtain financing. Bas was a leader in eventually squashing that project and pursuing two fully-affordable buildings in its stead.
Bas said she would explore turning vacant school district buildings and foreclosed property into affordable housing throughout Alameda County.
Mental health — in the ER, jail and court
Bauters considers mental health “the top issue” for county government, touching all other services it provides.
A high-profile class-action lawsuit settled in 2021 accused the county of providing inadequate and at times deadly mental health services at Santa Rita Jail, one of the primary places the county provides this care. Under the settlement, the county agreed to sweeping reforms, and the Board of Supervisors made a major financial investment in the jail’s mental healthcare facilities and staffing.
Bauters said he’d push to reconsider spending that money outside of Santa Rita.
“I would like to see that go into a diversion program,” Bauters said. “We have too many people who die in Santa Rita and get seriously injured because they are experiencing a mental health crisis.”
He also called for a break in the cycling of people through short-term stays at the psychiatric hospital, John George, and back onto the street — investing instead in longer-term care with access to therapy and medication, reducing the risk of mental health crises.
Bauters also supports better preventative care for youth, from regularly screening for childhood trauma early in schooling to exposing kids in the county to nature and environmental stewardship. Bauters said the county’s childhood welfare system, where some children wait ages for a foster care placement, deserves a “very serious look.” He pointed to his leadership in Emeryville’s 2020 Measure F, a sales tax to fund the city childcare center as well as hire more police.
Bas supports investing more in preventative mental health care and reducing the county’s heavy spending on short-term emergency treatment in public hospitals and the jail. She pointed to her leadership on Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020, which also aimed to move some safety measures and services outside the purview of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Several of the top recommendations from that task force have been implemented.
On the board, Bas would pursue a long-range mental healthcare action plan for the county. She noted that the county’s broad 10-year plan, Vision 2026, is sunsetting soon. Whoever is elected to D5 will participate in creating the next roadmap.
Bas said she’d take the torch from Keith Carson in his pursuit of creating an African American wellness center in Alameda County that can provide culturally relevant care. A disproportionate share of individuals treated for behavioral health issues in the county’s clinics and the jail are Black. She’d also work to attract and maintain healthcare workers, whether through offering training at high schools and community colleges, increasing wages or providing workforce housing, she said.
“One of the things that strikes me, especially as I’m endorsed by our nurses, our healthcare workers and our educators, is that part of our healthcare crisis is also a workforce shortage,” Bas said. “Part of the county’s next 10-year plan really has to be a comprehensive approach with other government agencies in the state around how we build that workforce pipeline.”
The next Board of Supervisors will be responsible for implementing Alameda County’s “CARE Court” program, a Newsom initiative allowing people to refer others for mental healthcare, which a judge can mandate.
Bauters said he thinks the program doesn’t include a large enough “stick” requiring compliance among participants.
“There’s a fine line to walk between providing for the independence and civil rights and dignity of people, and also not allowing for an inhumane and undignified existence of people who are in need of care but can’t receive it because they don’t voluntarily take it,” he said.
Bas said the rollout should include a “robust community engagement process” prioritizing families of people with mental illness.
Ensuring Oakland gets its fair share
While Oakland only makes up a portion of District 5, it’s the largest city in the county, with over half all homeless residents and significant poverty and public safety issues relative to other areas.
Oakland officials for years have complained that the city of 440,000 doesn’t get the attention or cooperation it deserves from the county. Bas is among the chorus. “We haven’t had the level of coordination and communication that we want in order to really tackle homelessness,” she said. Bas pointed to MACRO and Berkeley’s non-police emergency response program as services the county should offer or support.
Bas said she reached out to the Board of Supervisors a few years ago in hopes of beginning to collaborate on homelessness but nothing came of it. More recently, she said, Supervisor Nate Miley contacted Bas and the two agencies are “starting a process of more communication.” Bas believes she’s the candidate capable of continuing that conversation and connecting Oakland and Alameda County with the state and private sector.
“I think I’m well-poised, given the work I have been doing between Oakland and the county to break through those silos,” Bas said.
Bauters said he’d be a “champion” for Oakland on the board despite hailing from a different city. “I’m someone who doesn’t really believe in borders in terms of serving people,” he said.
Bauters noted that he worked closely with then-Mayor Libby Schaaf on moving homeless people living on the Oakland-Emeryville border into shelters. Emeryville gave $144,000 in state homelessness money to Oakland for a new cabin shelter. Emeryville also created a new homeless shelter for 25 families from Oakland that the city was struggling to house. (The shelter was later moved to Oakland.)
On the county’s transportation commission, Bauters led the development of a race and equity plan, which focuses on allocating more funding for traffic safety to the areas with the most collision injuries and deaths, rather than giving equal amounts to all areas, he said. In the county, more traffic violence occurs in communities of color, many in Oakland.
“It’s actually by design that that happens in brown and Black neighborhoods,” Bauters said, “where we bulldozed business districts in the 50s and 60s to put in wide streets and freeways. “The investments we make today should equitably be reinvested at a higher level in those same neighborhoods.”
Representing unincorporated Alameda County
District 5 doesn’t include any unincorporated areas, where the county is the only form of local government. But the D5 representative is involved in countless crucial decisions affecting residents of these areas, which include places like Castro Valley, Cherryland and Ashland.
Bauters said he’s been canvassing in unincorporated towns despite nobody there getting a chance to vote for him. He said the residents have a disproportionate amount of power over their own lives. Castro Valley residents have talked of incorporating, and Bauters thinks the county should help.
“If the people of Castro Valley do truly want to be independent and have self-determination as an incorporated city, I actually think that the county should finance assisting them through that process,” he said.
Bas said the unincorporated areas deserve the same level of essential services as the cities surrounding them receive, from healthcare to infrastructure maintenance.
“The county should be more responsive to road repair, transportation options, public facilities, and ensure that our unincorporated areas have equity,” she said.
The bitter and dragged-out fight over tenant protections has thrust the unincorporated areas into the spotlight over the past few years. In question are “just cause” eviction protections, a rental registry and a “fair chance” law banning criminal background checks of tenants. The board passed this package of laws in 2022, but when it came time for a second, final vote, it failed; the makeup of the board had changed. Miley, who’s been in charge of mediating between tenant organizers and landlords, later introduced a watered-down version of the proposal, but that hasn’t passed either.
Bas and Bauters both have a track record of getting tenant protections through. Bas was an author of Oakland’s COVID-19 eviction moratorium, considered among the strongest in the country, written to keep people housed during the public health and economic crises. She also created the legislation to end it three years later, though not before she’d drawn fury from a vocal group of landlords.
“That’s an area where I’ve been a leader,” Bas said of tenants’ rights. She said her successes have come from “also working with property owners, and I would bring a similar approach to the county.”
Bauters was involved in the creation of Emeryville’s just cause ordinance. And prior to his career in politics, he worked in tenant legal defense.
But Alameda County is not Oakland or Emeryville, and the Board of Supervisors, including representatives from more conservative corners of the county, is not your local City Council. The split over tenant protections reveals a broader rift on many issues. While nobody has been able to broker an agreement on that ordinance, Bas and Bauters both claim they’d have a shot at forging unity. Bas pointed to her work on the progressive business tax as an example of facilitating compromise.
“I’m a pragmatist,” Bauters said. “I would go into governing as a person who’s open to working with everybody…The board has mired itself in some stagnation for the past couple years.”
Big money and big accusations
In mid-September the “Truth About Bauters” website went live. Headed by a grainy image of the candidate, it proceeds to lay out in dense text accusations that Bauters is anti-labor, ineffective on safety and housing, and supported by powerful interests. The attack ad was paid for by Bas’ campaign.
“Voters need to know the real stakes in the race,” Bas told The Oaklandside about the ad. She said the information is meant to empower voters to make “informed decisions.”
“I don’t really like to highlight negative things that are completely false,” Bauters responded when asked about the ad, saying he’s “committed to being positive” in the race. “But I understand that when candidates feel threatened or desperate, they sometimes do this. It tells us who she is.”
One thing the site hones in on is an Emeryville minimum wage decision that Bauters has acknowledged he wishes he’d approached differently. In 2019, when Emeryville’s minimum wage — the highest in the nation — was set to rise, Bauters successfully proposed keeping it lower for workers in smaller restaurants, saying those businesses would struggle to stay open. Unions protested, and the council repealed the decision.
Bauters told The Oaklandside that he’d been concerned, based on information he was hearing, about undocumented workers losing their jobs if the wages increased in all settings. He said it was a “little naive” to try to address multiple problems at once in the short period of time the council had, and that he “wasn’t trying to roll back” the raise but understands why people perceive it that way.
Bauters himself has a page on his campaign website comparing his and Bas’ records on council, also alleging that his opponent has failed to advance affordable housing and public safety, and help small businesses.
He may be refraining from going more negative than that, but his supporters certainly aren’t. The National Association of Realtors, for example, put out an ad with an altered photo of Bas in front of a crime scene, calling her “Crime Spree Nikki.”
And those Bauters supporters have plenty of money to work with. In addition to the Realtors group, the Oakland police and county sheriff unions, and a landlord interest group have poured tens of thousands of dollars into independent committees supporting Bauters. A cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Jesse Pollak, contributed $200,000 to a committee supporting Bauters and opposing Bas. Pollak runs a new group called Abundant Oakland, which says it’s focused on cutting government red tape and creating structural change around housing and transportation.
Asked about the contributions, Bauters emphasized that independent committees do not operate in coordination with candidates.
“I’ve had some of the same questions other people have had about some of those” expenditures, like the law enforcement contributions, said Bauters, who emphasized he has never taken direct money from police unions. “But the feedback I’ve received is that it’s less to do with me, and more to do with my opponent.”
Regarding Pollak, who’s contributed to multiple committees and candidates this election, Bauters said he knows the entrepreneur and they’ve spoken about housing affordability and government transparency.
Bas has meanwhile received hefty support from a number of labor unions. Her campaign materials refer to her as “labor’s choice.” Unions have strong political influence in local elections, and the candidates who ultimately get elected have the final say on policies affecting workers, like wages and whether businesses or contractors are required to hire locally. Bas said labor unions typically share her vision for a sustainable, affordable region.
“I think unions represent the interests and the values of working families,” she said. “I view myself as someone who will be independent and still rooted in my community and progressive values. My vote won’t be for sale.”
Both candidates have received high-profile endorsements, such as outgoing Supervisor Keith Carson’s support for Bauters and favored Congressional candidate Lateefah Simon’s for Bas.
With one month left until Election Day and money flowing in freely, the race is likely to heat up even more.
