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February, 1998
Green Party Meets in Santa Monica
By Mary Moore, The Outlook. Santa Monica.
February 22nd, 1997
You’ve heard it can be lonely at the top?
Well, politically, it can be even lonelier if you’re not.
Just ask the more than 20 Green Party members who hold elected or appointed offices meeting at Santa
Monica College this weekend; a momentum-building conference that
coincides with the launch of the party’s upcoming run for California
governor and lieutenant governor.
From environmentally sound development projects to making city
budgets more understandable for the public, from recycling to
socially responsible investing, these like-minded politicos from
the United States and Mexico gathered to exchange ideas about
specific programs and policies they have helped implement that
further the party’s environmental and social justice agenda on
the local level.
They come from different cities and hold different offices, but
they seem to share one lament: being a political minority can
be tough.
“When you’re making social change like this, it gets lonely,”
said Fran Gallegos, an elected municipal court judge from Santa
Fe, N.M. “It’s not easy being Green. One of the biggest problems
we have is being taken seriously.”
Green Party leaders expect credibility to grow as their candidates
shore up more elected and appointed seats on the city, county
and regional levels. The weekend gathering in Santa Monica, they
say, is intended to energize those who already hold local offices.
Among them is a judge, a parks and recreation official, a state
education appointee, several city and town council members, and
a Mexican federal lawmaker. Nationally, Green Party members hold 47, mostly local, elected offices in
11 states. Three are mayors and two of those are from California.
In Arcata, the Green Party has won three seats on the City Council,
its only city council majority in the nation.
“We’re celebrating,” said Michael Feinstein, a member of the Santa Monica City Council and one of the founders of the Green Party of California, who
helped organize the conference. “This is a mile post for the organization.”
Hurdles, not mile posts, are what some political strategists see
and they scoff at the notion that Greens have a real future. About
90,000 voters are registered with the Green Party in California,
down from the approximately 100,000 voters who registered Green
when the state party was formed in 1992.
Ross Mirkarimi, one of the founders of the Green Party in California
and an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, said the
party has not aggressively pursued voter registration in recent
years.
Bob Mulholland, a spokesman for the Democratic Party in California,
said voters simply do not see the Green Party as a real choice.
“They’re organizing for the ‘60s as we’re approaching the next
century,” Mulholland said. “Their focus is not the voters’ needs
and thereby voters are paying no attention to them.”
He said consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s run as the Green Party’s
candidate for president in 1996 highlighted the Greens’ political
inexperience and underlined the party’s inability to pique voter
interest.
“In the spring of ‘96, the Greens saw Nader as a lifeboat. ‘He’ll
bring us to the forefront,’” Mulholland said. “But Ralph didn’t
want to campaign, he didn’t want to raise money. He turned out
to be just like them.”
The issues being discussed at the Santa Monica conference, however,
are nothing if not real life and relevant.
The council members from Arcata, for example, talked about the
sting of Proposition 218, a 1996 ballot initiative that made it
more difficult for municipalities to impose taxes and that has
taken a bite out of the city’s efforts to recycle.
Arcata’s recycling program was funded by an assessment that was
cut when proposition 218 passed. The result: less funding, less
effective recycling.
“It ruined everything,” said Bob Ornelas, a member of the Arcata City Council. The city had been considered progressive in its recycling program,
Ornelas said, “and then we had to go back and start from new.”
With incarceration costs nearing $1 million a year in Santa Fe,
Gallegos implemented a rehabilitation strategy in her courtroom
focusing on treatment and community service rather than jail time
for some offenders.
“This is part of the Green philosophy,” she said. “We deal with
the imbalance of social injustice; who’s in jail and who’s not.
It’s often people who don’t know how to use the system or have
a lot of money.”
The gathering of elected Green Party officials gives a boost of
starting-line energy to the party as it prepares to launch candidacies
for governor and lieutenant governor in California: a longshot
race where the credibility of the party is sure to emerge as an
issue.
Dan Hamburg, a former U.S. congressman from Mendocino County who authored
the federal Headwaters Forest Act, will be running as the party’s
candidate for governor and Sara Amir, who performs environmental cleanup work for the state of California
and who fled Iran years ago to live in the United States, is running
for lieutenant governor.