The players

Be forewarned: This is not a story about the mayor’s race, as such. That is, it’s not a horse race story. It’s not about who crossed which picket line, or who supported right-wingers for the school board. And it’s not about the whole laundry list of things Sacramentans want from their new mayor. It’s not about homelessness, or junk guns, or putting more cops in the street, or the opera or major-league sports. At least, it’s not directly about these things.

Instead, it’s about a vision of Sacramento, a beautiful and widely shared vision of a livable city, a green city with all different kinds of people in it.

To an extent, that city exists now. This is not Los Angeles; it’s not even San Jose. Visit either of those metropolitan nightmares, and when you get home you’ll be struck by how much hope remains for Sacramento. You may find yourself thinking, “It’s not too late.”

People who are paying attention—some urban planners and politicians, various shades of environmental and social activists—often repeat a variation of an old bromide: “Land use is destiny.” Trite perhaps, but all too often overlooked.

We make decisions about how our city is to be put together, or we don’t make them, and everything flows from there: the health of the schools and the health of the air; whether downtown is a thriving center with a lively arts scene or a disaster zone surrounded by a pre-fabbed ring of gallerias and golf courses; whether Sacramento is a green city with all kinds of different people in it, where teachers and janitors and cappuccino slingers can find a home, or one broken into bleak ghettos of the poor and gated enclaves of the rich.

All of which brings us back to the mayor’s race.

Rob Kerth or Heather Fargo will have a chance to influence how and how much the Sacramento region grows. And grow it will—by about 1 million people in the next two decades. In order to preserve what’s left of the open space and farm land in the region, as many of those people as possible will need to find homes in the already developed areas. That means shoehorning perhaps a quarter of a million people into the city of Sacramento itself.

The flight of business from Silicon Valley and the ever-expanding state government bureaucracy will continue to demand more office space. Already, 20 million square feet of new office has been approved within the city of Sacramento. That’s enough for nearly 100,000 new workers downtown, and nearly as many new cars, and a demand for dozens of new highway lanes to get people in and out.

Outside downtown and in the county, the numbers are equally daunting. In two decades, we will spend $1 billion on new sewer lines alone, to serve development in areas that currently aren’t even approved for development. Whole new cities, like Elk Grove and Rancho Cordova, will grow up and glom onto the metro area. In Sacramento, vast undeveloped tracts like North Natomas and perhaps the far northern territories up to the Sutter county line will absorb much of the new population, becoming cities in themselves.

The candidates, both current members of the Sacramento City Council, are acutely aware of the stakes.

“We’re growing faster than many third-world countries,” said Rob Kerth. “It’s a huge opportunity for us. But it comes with a lot of risk. In 10 years we could look back and say, ‘Gee, that was a great 10 years. We fixed a lot of old problems.’ Or we could say, ‘My God, look what we’ve done by letting the region grow willy-nilly.'”

Fargo agrees: “The question is, what kind of growth are we going to have out there? Will we have communities that are sustainable and places where people want to live?”

As can be seen, both candidates have their anti-sprawl rhetoric down. But is one of them a better bet? And can either, as mayor, really do anything about the area’s growth?

Let’s take a look at their backgrounds. Fargo is a card-carrying environmentalist with a degree in environmental planning from UC Davis. She was once director of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, and she helped to found the Sacramento Tree Foundation. She works at the Department of Parks and Recreation, and she’s a member of the Sierra Club.

Rob Kerth is an engineer; he likes to build stuff. During his career on the council he has voted often with the more pro-business bloc, led by the late Mayor Joe Serna. He has built his career on promoting economic development in the depressed North Sacramento area that is the heart of his district.

One could try to pick the smart-growth candidate by looking at their endorsements. Enviros and central city neighborhood groups are solidly in Fargo’s camp. Kerth has a substantial edge, although by no means a lock, on contributions from major developers. And he enjoys the support, and money, of the building trades unions.

Do some simple math, and you come up with a winner. Heather Fargo is obviously the better choice if you want a mayor who can control growth and preserve Sacramento’s quality of life. Right? Well, maybe.

“What were going to get is a light-green mayor, “ explained Robert Waste, a CSUS professor who heads up the university’s Public Policy Department.

His take is reminiscent of the time, before the primaries, when Kerth, Fargo and fellow Councilmember Steven Cohn were popularly referred to as “three peas in a pod.” Cohn of course didn’t make the run-off. But neither did any of the strongly conservative, pro-business candidates, most surprisingly former Sheriff Robbie Waters.

By “light green,” Waste means a mayor who won’t do anything radical, who won’t put the brakes on development, but who at the same time won’t give the city away to developers.

On one side, he says, you have a rank-and-file environmentalist with a strong past record of fighting developers. On the other side is a sort of Rockerfeller Republican (though recently turned Democrat) with a good systems-level critique of how sprawl happens and what its social and environmental impacts are.

“They are really environmentalists of two different stripes. For my money, [either way] the city will get a very environment-friendly mayor,” Waste says.We met Fargo at a café right around the corner from her campaign headquarters. Before the interview, she was chatty, holding up a menu. “Are you sure you don’t want anything. The food is really good.”

She’d brought a campaign poster, a sort of tour-guide map of her accomplishments around the city. In one corner was a photo of Fargo herself, in a bright-red sweater and wide-brimmed straw hat, hamming it up for the camera. But the bubbly soccer-mom image belied how serious she was once the talk turned to her campaign.

“The bottom line is, who is going to make the developers do the right thing? I have a track record of doing that,” Fargo insisted.

That she does. She won her council seat in 1989 after years as president of the Natomas Community Association, fighting haphazard development in south Natomas and struggling to preserve habitat-rich sections of north Natomas from development altogether, because there was no flood protection for the area.

“I just thought it was foolish to develop in a floodplain,” she explains. Before she was finished, the Natomas basin had two-hundred year flood protection, rather than the forty-four year protection it had before her election.

The NCA ultimately brought a lawsuit against the city, forcing a major revision of the area’s community plan. And that plan, although deeply flawed in the eyes of some developers and environmentalists alike, is generally considered the best model in Sacramento and a watershed for the local environmental movement.

“I worked hard on that plan, with the environmentalists and property owners alike, to make sure that Natomas was a set of neighborhoods and not just a set of subdivisions,” Fargo explained.

It was in the crucible of the Natomas basin that the seed of Fargo the politician began to sprout within Fargo the activist. Perhaps it was inevitable that she and her fellow activists would mellow. But they’ve learned to work the system, and she has a built-in base of support that springs from her status as an alumna of the Natomas fights.

As a council member, Fargo continued to fight the developers. Along the way she won the respect of many neighborhood associations, both in and out of her district.

For example, there was the battle over Newton Booth, a proposed expansion of Jones & Stokes environmental consultants on the site of what was once the old Newton Booth elementary school at 27th and V streets.

Neighbors banded together to stop construction of the 20,000 additional feet of office space, saying it represented the worst kind of land speculation, was out of line with the area community plan, and that the new offices would destroy much-needed affordable housing in the central city.

The council approved the project 5-4. Fargo backed the neighbors. Kerth voted with the majority, a business-friendly bloc led by Serna, saying that Jones & Stokes was a good employer that the city should try to keep. But Jones & Stokes backed out of the deal, after realizing that the fight was going to give the company a serious black eye in the public-relations department.

Subsequently the developer, Bell Properties, went ahead and tore down five of the houses on the property anyway. Since then the site has been nothing but an empty field littered with beer bottles—textbook blight.

“We won the battle but we lost the war,” lamented Karen Jacques, with the Winn Park Neighborhood Association.

Jacques thinks that one fight speaks volumes about the mayoral candidates. “I thought what Rob Kerth did was an appalling betrayal of the community,” she charged. “To me it was a watershed moment, a litmus test.”

Another case was the R. Street Corridor fight with Angelo Tsakopolous. In 199X, Tsakopoulous tried to get the council to go along with a plan to convert 400,000 square feet of old warehouse property into two shiny new office buildings, a project that was directly opposed to a hard-won plan for the area requiring that the parcel be reserved for housing or mixed-use residential—a plan Fargo helped to craft.

Neighborhood groups, including the Sacramento Old City Association, howled and put up a very effective fight. The council ultimately rejected the plan 7-2. Kerth voted with the majority, but it was Fargo who led the council to its decision, and who worked with the neighborhood to make the case. The campaign against Tsakopolous was a remarkable alliance of enviros, neighborhood activists and housing advocates, and the vote was considered a major victory—some called it “the day Angelo was told no.”

“But it was Heather Fargo who really worked with us. She spent night after night in meetings with us,” said Brooks Truitt, activist and editor of the Old City Guardian.

Then there was Hansen Lakes, a development that Fargo opposed not just because it was in the flood plain, but because it was in the actual floodway. Eventually she won here too, and again Kerth sided with the developers.

The distinction that keeps popping up among Fargo partisans, and one of the things that Fargo herself seems most proud of, is her work on the board of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, where she worked to oppose the infamous and divisive Auburn Dam proposal.

Kerth was also on the SAFCA board then, and it was he who cast the swing vote in support of the dam, earning him the long-enduring resentment of the environmental community. Kerth now says that the yes vote was the only way to get the dam before Congress—that he knew Congress would kill the dam plan, so Sacramento could get on with a better proposal.

Not that Fargo has won every battle. “There is probably more growth than people wanted in the Natomas Basin,” she said. “Certainly there’s more than I wanted.”

Fargo’s strategy seems to be that the best way to keep the developers from running amok is to keep the community involved—environmental management through small “d” democracy, you might say.

So perhaps its not surprising that she trusts the voters of Sacramento to decide what to do with the vast tract of land north of the city to the Sutter county line that the city wants to annex. For nearly a year the city and county have been squabbling over who will be the better steward of these 25,000 acres of farmland and wetlands. Fargo and Kerth both believe the city will do a better job. And both say the objective is to save as much farmland, open space and habitat as possible.

But Fargo has made the unusual proposal that any annexation plan be put to a city vote. “I think a vote is important because of the sheer size and impact it will have on the city of Sacramento,” she explained.

“We’re looking at 25,000 acres, some 12,000 of which might be developed. That’s bigger than East Sac, Curtis Park, Land Park and Greenhaven put together. I think people need to think about just what that means,” she continued.

Although Fargo concedes her plan would still allow the council to return and change uses or densities where it deemed changes necessary, she argues that council would find it more difficult to accommodate development by sort of nibbling around the edges. The overall magnitude of development and the limits of development versus open space would be set in stone, unless voters approved any amendments.

Fargo’s plan for a vote on annexation was harshly criticized by City Manager Bob Thomas and Mayor Jimmy Yee—and by Kerth.

“Ballot box land use planning creates sprawl. People who really care about stopping sprawl need to wake up and smell the trap,” said Kerth.If Fargo’s approach is somewhat inward looking and ad hoc, responding project by project and strongly influenced by small local groups, Kerth has modeled himself as a regional leader, someone who always has his eye on the big picture.

During the research for this story, both campaigns were asked to produce any material they had handy that would go to the question of what the candidate had in mind in the area of growth and development. The Fargo material is typically brief and general. The Kerth campaign sent over a stack of papers as thick as a phone book, including one white paper on infill development, one of the key tenets of the smart-growth philosophy. The Urban Infill Development and Redevelopment Framework, complete with a helpful glossary at the end, runs 56 pages long—and that’s just the executive summary. The whole document is 500 pages long.

It’s not clear whether many people have actually read Kerth’s policy on infill, but nonetheless there it is—a far cry from saying “I think infill is a good idea.”

Likewise included were numerous (blessedly shorter) position papers on regional tax sharing schemes, an affordable-home-ownership initiative, sanitation fee structures—all very wonky stuff, and Kerth talks about them with the zeal of an engineer.

“There are two philosophies. You can try to prevent sprawl, or you can try to out-compete it. The prevention approach has been tried in other jurisdictions, but it usually fails after a while,” said Kerth.

Out-competing sprawl is difficult. It’s easy to throw up tract houses out in the middle of nowhere, says Kerth. It’s much harder, for a host of reasons, to get smaller-scale projects built on vacant lots in the already built areas. Permits are harder to get. There are more lot size and other physical constraints. Neighbors often resist, as they did recently on the now-defunct Post Properties project near downtown. For these and other reasons, many developers tend to avoid infill projects. Because of that, projects built in the central city tend to be more expensive—thus gentrifying the urban core.

This can be at least partially offset by another Kerth initiative, an affordable-home-ownership policy. By eliminating certain fees, by having a set of “off-the-shelf” plans that are pre-approved, and by streamlining the loan process, Kerth says he thinks we could see houses built in the central city that are affordable by families making $40,000 a year. “I actually think we can produce a four-bedroom, two-bath house for $80,000,” Kerth said, grinning.

There’s something about that grin; it’s as big as the city. It’s easy to be charmed by Kerth’s affable nature. In his checkered oxford, with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he looks like your next-door neighbor, puttering around in the garage. That smile: “Hey neighbor! How’d you like an four-bedroom house for cheap?”

Fargo said she’s glad Kerth is talking about infill but maintains that she’s the real deal. “I haven’t written a master’s thesis on it, but I am proven on the issue of infill development, and I’m a very strong believer in it,” she said, noting her history of fighting to promote housing in the central city.

Kerth has also started to make a lot of noise about how the region builds its infrastructure and how that process tends to promote sprawl. As a member of the regional sanitation board, he has proposed fixing the sanitation fee structure—currently a postage stamp approach in which sewer hook-ups cost just as much for older houses on established lines as new houses in new growth areas where large costly interceptors have been built.

Kerth has also criticized the regional sanitation district for planning new interceptors in areas that are not even approved for development, saying that serves as a sort of sprawl-inducing, self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It may sound like a roundabout way to go about fighting sprawl. But you can’t build anything without a sewer,” said Kerth.

He has also been meeting with other elected officials and talking about ways to solve the regional problem of the fiscalization of land use. This the latter-day range war in which jurisdictions compete with each other for sales tax revenue and make poor land use decisions in an effort to lure auto malls and big-box retail stores.

“People are tired of land-use bingo. It’s got to stop,” said Kerth.

Some have proposed that the state approve some sort of per-capita sales tax, as opposed to the current system that awards the sales tax to the jurisdiction at the point of sale. Barring such radical reform at the state level, Kerth said he would pursue a countywide tax compact that would spread sales tax revenue around more equally and lessen the competition between cities and between the city and the county.

Fargo, for her part, is skeptical of this sort of regional approach.

“I’m looking at the sales tax issue. But frankly my priority if I’m elected is to the city of Sacramento. If a sales tax shift doesn’t benefit the city of Sacramento, it’s going to be hard for me to get behind,” she said.

Those who think regionalism is the key to managing growth say that’s just the attitude that makes cross-jurisdictional planning so difficult.

Regionalism, the idea that planning for things like affordable housing, transportation and land use should be done in terms of whole regions instead of individual cities and towns, has been gaining currency around the state for some time now. But it has been slow to catch on in Sacramento, perhaps because until recently there weren’t that many local governments around. But with the incorporation of Citrus Heights and then Elk Grove this year, and the almost certain incorporation of Rancho Cordova sometimes soon, and possibly more towns, the overall competition between cities in Sacramento County is likely to grow enormously if regional agreements aren’t made.

“There is a striking difference between the two candidates,” said Bill Kennedy, director of the advocacy group Legal Services of Northern California. “Rob Kerth is at least speaking the language of regionalism. Heather Fargo is not only not speaking the language, she seems hostile to it,” he added.

Many city officials like Fargo acknowledge how destructive the current system can be but are reluctant to change things for fear their cities will be left behind.

But Kennedy and others say it is the older, established cities that have the most to lose in the era of mall wars and leapfrog development. Who’s your buddy?Both candidates get money from developers, and Fargo’s developer support is not insubstantial and has increased over time. But Kerth’s campaign treasure chest boasts a good deal of money from that most dreaded of names in the environmental community, Angelo Tsakopulous—the open-space-sucking sprawlmeister himself.

Kerth also received large contributions from the Central Labor Council, which because of the prominence of building trade unions often aligns itself with the major developers.

Kerth denies that these contributions will influence his decisions. “If someone comes to me with a project that is in the public’s best interests, I’m happy to do it,” he insisted. “If it’s not in the public’s best interest, they don’t get my support. It’s a simple relationship.”

Is there a reason to fear the influence of big donors on our elected officials? You bet. Can we have a mayoral race free of such contributions? Nope, not without serious contribution limits, which this council has not done much about.

“There are two groups of people that pay for campaigns: labor unions and developers. It’s hard not to get some of each. I’ve got some of each,” said Fargo, adding that she has developed good relationships with developers she’s worked with over the years.

“If you look at where buildings permits are going in the city, chances are it’s in my district. That’s just the way it is.”

Fargo herself has enjoyed heavy support from major downtown and Natomas players such as David Taylor and Joe Benvenuti. She even gets money from developers she tussled with in the early battles over Natomas development.

“Those that just want someone to say yes, well, they’re not supporting me,” said Fargo.

When asked why Tsakopolous is backing Kerth, daughter Eleni Tsakopolous said her family sees Kerth as a continuation of the Serna tradition, a sort of ambassador for the Sacramento business community.

“The new mayor will set the tone,” Tsakopolous, herself a developer, said. “Who will bring the corporations here? Who will bring the high-level jobs?”

The developers themselves object to any notion that officials who receive contributions will stray from the public’s best interest.

“The mayor is one vote on the City Council. There are such conspiracy theories about developers. I find it sad that the general public thinks that government is somehow corrupt,” said Tsakopolous.

There are those who think the mayor can do little to influence the way Sacramento grows, let alone fight haphazard development in the greater region. Even those who talk about regionalism concede that the real goal is reform on the state level. Besides, Sacramento has a weak-mayor form of government. Only a mayor with great charisma, such as Serna, can exercise much power beyond his or her influence on the City Council.

Some say that’s as it should be. The mayor should set the tone without trying to be ram through his or her own agenda.

“That’s just not what we need right now. I prefer someone like Heather, whose approach is to involve all the parties,” said housing advocate Kay Knepprath.

Still others, Kerth among them, say the mayor must be a regional leader, that Sacramento’s fate is ultimately dependent on the health of the county and the other cities.

“I think Rob has a little broader field of vision. And he’s in a little better position to be more creative. Heather has depended so strongly on the neighborhood groups," said county Supervisor Roger Dickinson, a Kerth supporter. "Ultimately, what we’re struggling with is to find a balance between local control versus thinking in broader strokes," he added.