Gayle McLaughlin says ‘foundation’ strong as RPA gets mixed results in election

Though the candidate endorsed by outgoing Richmond City Council member Gayle McLaughlin appears to have won her seat, according to unofficial election results, the Richmond Progressive Alliance that McLaughlin was instrumental in founding 20 years ago didn’t get all of its candidates elected, according to the most recent election results released by the county Wednesday.

District 5 newcomer Sue Wilson was leading Ahmad Anderson for longtime politician McLaughlin’s District 5 seat, and Anderson has conceded to Wilson, but in District 1 RPA-backed Melvin Willis may have lost his bid for a third term to political newcomer Jamelia Brown, who was ahead by just 305 votes as of the latest ballot count.

RPA-endorsed Claudia Jimenez won handily over Shawn Dunning in District 6, but RPA-endorsed Jovanka Beckles, a former Richmond City Council member, appears to have lost her bid for state Senate District 7 to Jesse Arreguín. WCCUSD school board member Otheree Christian, also endorsed by the RPA, appears to have lost his Area 2 seat to a political newcomer, Guadalupe Enllana. In addition, Measure L, which the RPA backed, an effort to switch the city to ranked-choice voting, also appears to have lost.

Given the results it appears that the RPA’s influence is at a crossroads. During an interview with Richmonside at her office in September and a phone call after the election, McLaughlin reminisced about her career and discussed how the city has changed, what she thinks of the current state of the RPA — progressives versus liberals — and what the future holds for the Richmond political landscape.

Richmond Progressive Alliance: 20 years of shaping city policy

McLaughlin has long been a prominent public face of the RPA  — a group that has fought to implement “holistic” city policies such as creating alternative emergency responses to police, imposing higher taxes for corporations such as Chevron, establishing rent control and seeking greater environmental protections of the city’s shoreline.

In winning her inaugural campaign in 2004, she set a precedent by refusing corporate endorsements and donations —  one that RPA-backed candidates say they still abide by.

The RPA, which celebrated its 20-year anniversary during a September gala at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium, grew from local kitchen conversations into a local political force that now influences public policy decision-making.

Other iterations of the city council — such as in 2014 — saw progressive candidates in Richmond win crucial races against Chevron-funded opponents though the group was able to consolidate a voting majority in the 2022 election.

McLaughlin announced her departure early last summer and told Richmondside she believes it is the right time to transition into other life passions.

“It was time for me to pass the torch,” McLaughlin said, explaining that she is taking courses in anthropology at San Jose State University. “I’m taking on new things in my life with this graduate program.”

First Green Party mayor nationally

Before the creation of the RPA, McLaughlin, now 72, never had any inclination that she would eventually be elected to office — much less for 20 years.

After spending some years in Massachusetts, she came to the West Coast because her sister lived in Concord. She eventually met the man who would become her husband, Paul Kilkenny, of Richmond. She then began political organizing locally, though she was an activist as a teen in Chicago, where she’s originally from.

“I never thought about running for office. I’ve always been an activist my whole life since I was in high school,” she said. 

The RPA was founded, McLaughlin said, by local activists whose causes intersected.

“We started talking and saying, ‘You know, what if we form a coalition or an alliance and we ignore the fact that we have different party registrations? What if we run people for office without any corporate money?’ “ she said. “So we could just focus on the community and all the issues we have in common.” 

McLaughlin, a Green Party member, was involved in vigils supporting unhoused people and protested environmental issues regarding Chevron while other activists, such as Andres Soto, who identified himself as a progressive Democrat, was working with the local Spanish-speaking community on issues such as police brutality and accountability after an incident where he and his sons were arrested by Richmond police at the 2002 Cinco De Mayo parade.

In 2004, she recounted, there were five open seats on the Richmond City Council which the RPA ambitiously hoped to fill — yet finding candidates willing to run was a different story. It wasn’t until she was approached by another RPA founder, Juan Reardon, that she decided to run.

“I thought about it, talked to my husband, and we never thought we’d win but felt we would put out the progressive voice. That was my mission in my mind,” she said.

Soto and McLaughlin became the first two RPA-backed candidates, but after Soto was fiercely attacked by his opponents, only McLaughlin was elected.

“It was scary at the time,” she said. “Because I was the only one going into these closed (city council) sessions with people who I knew had a different vision than me. But I weathered the storms. I stood by my values, I kept my integrity, and we said, in future elections, we were going to get more progressives elected.”

Prior to being elected, McLaughlin said the city council was dominated by members whose campaigns were financed by Chevron, which she said had “cozy” relationships with council members.

“(Chevron) had a desk (at City Hall), and there were workshops about how to run City Hall that Chevron facilitated,” she said. “We had people that were, you know, really bound to Chevron.”

She said that non-RPA candidates were very much thinking that the group was too idealistic for not accepting corporate campaign donations.

“We were saying this is a general situation that has to change in our society,” she said. “Corporations should not be running city governments, running electoral campaigns, or, you know, placing such undue influence in their hometown.”

Not long after being elected, McLaughlin said that she began thinking of running against then-Mayor Irma Anderson for her seat, thinking it would give her a more visible platform for sharing her thoughts during meetings. (The candidate who lost to RPA-backed Wilson, Ahmad Anderson, is the late Irma Anderson’s son.)

“I don’t always have the votes if I’m the sole corporate-free progressive, but at least I could put it out there,” she said of her aspirations to become mayor.

McLaughlin defeated Anderson in 2006, serving two consecutive, four-year terms as the nation’s only Green Party mayor in a city of Richmond’s size. Highlights of that term included: Overseeing the implementation of the Office of Neighborhood Safety as a response to the burgeoning gun violence in the community; a $114 million settlement with Chevron over Measure T, which she voted to place on the ballot in 2008; and navigating the recession’s impact on housing in the city — a time during which she proposed using eminent domain to help financially underwater residents in the 2013 housing crisis.

After McLaughlin’s success two other RPA-backed candidates won: Jeff Ritterman, a cardiologist at Kaiser, in 2008, and Jovanka Beckles in 2010.

During her 2010 reelection and subsequent 2014 City Council campaign, McLaughlin said the RPA experienced backlash, with Chevron spending millions backing their opponents.

“That was a big campaign where Chevron, you know, was really putting $3.5 million into it, but all of us progressives won,” she said.

Recalling the racially tinged soda tax ‘disaster’

However, not all of the group’s attempts at changing Richmond were successful.

In 2012, McLaughlin and the RPA-backed council members supported Measure N — a would-be “business license fee” of 1 cent per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages sold within city limits. The measure was defeated after opponents used race as a key talking point. The fallout caused both RPA-endorsed candidates that year, Marilyn Langlois and Eduardo Martinez, to lose.

“They really tried to put it out there in racial terms which was unfortunate,” McLaughlin said of the anti-soda tax campaign’s tactics in the Black and Brown communities. “They were successful in splitting the community by saying, ‘Hey, you know they’re going to put a tax because they don’t want you to drink what you want. They’re telling you what to do.’ ”

Steve Early, RPA member, journalist and author of “Refinery Town,” which chronicles the rise of the RPA, came to Richmond prior to the 2014 campaign and recalled the aftermath of the soda tax “disaster” and anti-RPA efforts by Bates and councilmember Corky Boozé to galvanize the tax opposition in the city’s Black community.

“What I wrote about in the book was so striking to play the race card the way Corky did against (RPA-supported) Jovanka (Beckles) — it was like Trump talking about Harris,” he told Richmondside. “‘You’re from a Central American country, you’re not one of us.’ It was pretty scuzzy stuff, a kind of reactionary form of identity politics.”

After the defeats, the RPA went back to the drawing board in 2014 to see what could be learned.

“We immediately started thinking about how we could do better,” McLaughlin said. “When you lose in a campaign you learn the lessons. There were ups and downs.”

The group leaned on new recruitment and forming alliances with liberal Democrats, such as former mayor Tom Butt, on issues regarding Chevron and the preservation of historic buildings such as the Hotel Mac. Butt eventually won the 2014 mayoral election, going on to serve two consecutive terms while Martinez won his first council seat.

“He (Butt) welcomed Gayle and others as allies, and they were allies through the 2014 election,” Early said. “They formed a ‘Popular Front’ between the liberal Democrats and the ‘Lefties’ that year.”

It was that year, Early said, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders visited Richmond, joining Butt, McLaughlin, Beckles and Martinez on stage and endorsing them against their Chevron-backed opponents.

McLaughlin said it was the slate of candidates of “Team Richmond,” including herself, Beckles and Martinez, not the RPA as an organization, who felt it necessary to endorse Butt during that race.

“We chose strategically to endorse him,” she said. “We were clear on that.”

Growing divide between the political left

These days, however, an increasing divide exists between the RPA and the more moderate, traditional liberal Democrats — such as Butt — in Richmond.

Butt, who has used his long-running e-forum as a newsletter critical of the RPA, told Richmondside in an email that he believes the group has “set Richmond back years” due to policies he says have a “disdain for business, housing development, police, and economic  development.”

Looking at those initial days with McLaughlin on the city council, Butt said he sided with McLaughlin while she was a relative newcomer.

“Gayle and I shared many common interests, including removing Chevron’s control of the City Council, environmental stewardship and climate change. She had few friends on the City Council, and I was one of them,” Butt wrote, adding that as the RPA’s influence grew so did McLaughlin’s unwillingness to compromise on certain issues.

“For her, it was all or nothing.”

When asked about what caused the divide between the two sides, McLaughlin pointed to an alleged reneged agreement by Butt to place an RPA-backed candidate on the council seat that he was vacating.

“That was a condition of our endorsement, and we think that the progressive endorsement of Tom made a difference in him getting elected because we had that strong hold in the community,” she said.

In response to Butt’s comment on her unwillingness to compromise, McLaughlin said it has always been important to her to remain open to working with others only if the specific issue was shared and not part of concessions to make political gains. It’s that independence that she hopes future RPA leaders continue.

“Independence is really important for any movement, but it’s also important for those who get elected to not be co-opted,” she said. “Because there’s others on the council that want you to move a little closer on the issues before they support you. It’s just game playing, and I never liked that.”

McLaughlin said that the philosophical differences on capitalism and the role of government became core differences between herself and Butt.

“The only conclusion I could draw is that we do have strong values — different values — on a host of issues and on our fundamental philosophy,” she said. “He believes that this society is going to fix itself and we just need to continue the status quo capitalistic society without putting more regulations.”

In recent years, moderate liberal Democrats, including Butt, who differ on issues such as local affordable housing, disagree on the city’s new approach to public safety, the environment and development have become more vocal on social media — sites such as NextDoor and the often combative “Everybody Loves Richmond” Facebook page.

The divide, McLaughlin says, is more pronounced now that it has been, though she said there have always been differences.

“I think there was probably always a divide between the liberal point of view and the progressive point of view — though progressives come in different shapes, sizes and variations,” she said. “There’s still a contingent of the community, as you know, that’s going to try and say bad things about us, misinformation and downright lies. But I think there’s a strong enough percentage in the community who get it.”

‘Pass the torch to a new generation’

After the RPA’s win in 2014, McLaughlin said that she believes in the last 10 years the RPA has helped shift the public consciousness about RPA-style progressive policies.

“Things have continued to snowball in the direction of the progressive vision,” she said. “It wasn’t only that we were running these candidates but, in non-election years, the public was still having this new understanding (of the RPA). It wasn’t hard to shift (the culture) because people want to believe that their interests count and will be heard. So we made it clear that we were listening to them and wanted to shift the direction of City Hall in the direction of people’s needs.”

During this term, she saw the passage of Richmond’s Rent Control Measure L in 2016 and the amendment to the city’s minimum wage ordinance in 2017, increasing it to $12.30 an hour.

McLaughlin was also on the council during a watershed moment in Richmond history — the death of Pedie Perez at the hands of Richmond police officer Wallace Jensen, an event that became a catalyst for more changes in police oversight.

“We had to do something,” she said. “We saw the video and the family started coming (to council meetings). They didn’t even know that the police commission existed. So we wanted to improve the ordinance and make some changes.”

Those changes included requiring automatic investigations by the Community Police Review Commision (CPRC) if a person is killed or seriously injured by police.

McLaughlin eventually left her seat mid-term, launching a campaign for California lieutenant governor in 2017. This effort spread RPA-style organizing to other progressive organizations throughout the state, she said.

“I think it was something like 15 new progressive alliances were formed, and some of them are still active. Some have turned into coalition efforts that are more issue oriented than bringing people into office,” she said, though noting she received only 4% of the vote during the primary.

She returned to the Richmond City Council in 2020, winning her current seat as the District 5 representative and advocating for the Measure U Gross Receipts Tax.

Though McLaughlin is stepping away at a crucial time when it comes to the RPA maintaining its council majority voting block, she feels confident that the current candidates and Martinez, who won his current seat in 2022, are standing on a strong foundation the RPA has laid.

“I think it (the foundation) has maintained itself and will continue to the future in terms of my not being involved at this point,” she said.

The current council most recently brokered a $550 million settlement with Chevron, reallocated $3 million of the Richmond police’s budget to programs addressing gun violence, homelessness and mental health response and has seemingly resolved the decades-long debate on what should happen with Point Molate by turning it over to the East Bay Regional Park District.

“The reason I decided not to run is because it was time for me to pass the torch to a younger generation,” she said. “So the thing that I see is that the candidates stand for the same things, have the same vision, have the same commitment and principles.”

The group has also continued to look at the aftermath of its campaigns through a critical lens.

According to Jamin Pursell, an RPA leader who sits on the group’s steering committee that sets organizational priorities, they examine each campaign to learn what worked and what didn’t — something the group is currently doing in the aftermath of Willis’ apparent loss in District 1.

“They look at campaigns as learning opportunities,” Pursell said.

Conversations have already started, Pursell said, about how to make the topic of city politics more engaging with residents and younger voters.

“We’ve been having these discussions on how to make it interesting to people. How to make it engaging,” Pursell said. “How do we get them to have skin in the game? We’ve already been talking about how we need to do more social media — like videos and short form information — because we have to reach them where they are at.”

Early said that, as an RPA member, he hopes the group can make inroads with younger activists and voters and said the group is reducing membership fees to $20 a year from what was as high as $60 a year at one point.

“Young people are just not used to it,” he said. “They have a looser conception of membership.”

During the RPA anniversary gala, Kyndelle Johnson, who joined the group as an intern in 2021, spoke to members before introducing McLaughlin, saying that she is working with other young RPA members to do community outreach on political issues such as housing and the environment — a grassroots organizing method the group has relied upon since its inception.

“We decided to bring young folks in Richmond together to do political education and leadership development to ensure that there is a progressive future here in Richmond,” Johnson said. “Some of our goals are unifying racial, economic and environmental justice movements…We hope to build youth political power.”

Pursell said the group has historically had various waves of young people work on campaigns in the last 20 years. A handful of younger RPA members — mostly in their 20s — worked on the RPA-backed candidates’ campaigns — like Carmen Martinez who served as the point person for Jimenez.

He said it provides younger members wanting to enter political organizing an opportunity to get involved with local politics.

The group, Pursell added, will now try to find that next batch of young people needed to continue the organization into the future.

“We’re going to be looking at how to connect with them specifically in a non-campaign context so that we can find our next round of people who we can give the opportunity to bring into the process. Have them learn but as well help shape us,” he said.

The biggest challenge, McLaughlin said, is combating what she characterizes as misinformation circulated by those seeking to halt the RPA’s forward movement.

One recent example, she said, is claims that the Richmond City Council “defunded” the police when in 2021 it reallocated funds that would have been spent hiring 12 officers. The money has been used creating preventative programs: YouthWORKS; the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), which works to reduce gun violence, unhoused intervention services through SOS Richmond; and the Community Crisis Response Program (CCRP, now known as “ROCK”). 

“The whole idea of growing a movement is not just having this core group but to grow it and to grow people to be activists so they help shape the future of the city,” she said. “I really feel that was something we did over the course of time when I was mayor.”

McLaughlin said she will continue to support the RPA’s efforts but will be dedicating her time to earning her applied anthropology graduate degree, a degree that looks at implementing solutions to societal problems.

“I definitely will stay engaged on the issues, and I may find myself doing a project for graduate school that connects with some of the issues of Richmond,” she said. “I’m already thinking there’s so many projects I could connect with, but it will be as an activist — not as a council member.”

Residents, however, may very well see her at council meetings even after she leaves office in January.

“I might be up in front of the public podium talking about an issue or giving a presentation,” she said. “Maybe one of the council members would sponsor something I’m involved in. Who knows?”