Sue Wilson has found herself in uncharted territory in the midst of her campaign for the Richmond City Council District 5 seat.
As a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) and a labor union organizer, she’s worked on countless campaigns for policies that have impacted Richmond in the last decade — such as the campaign for a soda tax in 2012 and one for rent control in 2016. Yet, she never planned to run for public office.
“I’m very much comfortable behind the scenes,” she said, referencing her time working for labor unions. “You learn the union belongs to the members. The members speak to the press. The members do the negotiation. I mean, you help them, but it’s the members that you’re training to sort of step into the leadership.”
But when she was approached by longtime RPA member and District 5 councilmember Gayle McLaughlin, who asked her to run as her successor in District 5, she realized that the community she has worked alongside is trusting her to step into a seat held by McLaughlin, who started the trend in Richmond of candidates running for office without corporate endorsements and championed environmental protection and preservations.
“I’m thinking of three or four things that the next city council has to do that are so important to me that I do trust myself to use good judgment on those, and I know a lot of other people trust me as well. So I’m going to do it,” she said, referencing, for example, spending the Chevron settlement, cleaning up the Zeneca toxic site, and the Green-Blue New Deal. “I was honored and sort of touched — not that I’m going to fill her shoes but that she trusts me enough to be someone who carries on the same values that she has on the council.”
Meet D5 Richmond City Council candidate Sue Wilson
WHO: Sue Wilson
PLATFORM HIGHLIGHTS: Traffic safety, putting Chevron funds in savings, environment.
WHAT SHE SAID: “I’m thinking of three or four things that the next city council has to do that are so important to me that I do trust myself to use good judgment on those, and I know a lot of other people trust me as well.”
WHO SHE IS RUNNING AGAINST: Read about Wilson’s opponent Ahmad Anderson.
This is among a series of profiles of the seven candidates running for seats in three Richmond City Council districts. Visit our local elections guide for more stories.
The Richmond City Council District 5 candidates are Ahmad Anderson (left) and Sue Wilson. They are pictured at a Richmondside co-hosted meet-the-candidates night held at Easter Hill Methodist Church. Credit: Kelly Sullivan
Wilson said she was hesitant at first because she’s always worked in the background but realized she has a flexible schedule as a labor union consultant and that she could dedicate the appropriate amount of time to the council if she is elected.
She said during her campaigning residents have told her they support changes that the RPA-supported city council members have implemented that benefit the district — which includes Marina Bay, the Richmond Annex, Eastshore, Cortez/Stege, the Panhandle Annex, Parkview, Laurel Park and Southwest Annex.
“Crime is going down, the neighborhood stability (regarding safety) is going up. The air is getting cleaner — it’s not clean enough but that sort of pride (in the city) is going back up,” she said, adding that her interactions with residents have given her strength even as certain negative narratives about the city prevail on social media sites such as NextDoor. “Everything’s not terrible, and the trend is in a positive direction — which is not to say we don’t have problems because we do.”
District 5 residents told Richmondside during interviews they think the city has a public relations problem and needs more pride. One resident mentioned that he would like to see the city invest more resources toward crime-prevention programs.
Wilson’s path from blue-collar Detroit life to Richmond
Wilson said she was born and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in Detroit. Her mother was a nurse, and her father worked for a local gas company.
Despite her dad not attending college, her parents really stressed the importance of education, and they were willing to pay for her and her brother to attend a prep school 45 minutes away from their home.
“They were both sort of autodidacts, very well-read and very interested in politics in the world,” she said. “They gave us a lot of things, but they gave the importance and sort of the transformative effects of education.”
She also said her parents instilled in her a very anti-racist mindset which, she said, was uncommon in the 1980s in her neighborhood.
“That was huge, and I look back at that with a lot of respect,” Wilson said. “Because I think they came to their diversity opinion because of their work lives. They always worked in really diverse workplaces so they didn’t have preconceived notions of folks of other races coming from generations of ignorance.”
After attending the University of Michigan where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1996, she came to California to get a doctorate in anthropology at UC Berkeley, eventually working with Laura Nader — the famous consumer activist Ralph Nader’s older sister. That relationship was her baptism into political organizing.
“It was very instructive because what it showed me was how much power ordinary people have if we organize, if we do the research and if we work,” she said.
One Nader lesson she recalled was understanding that campaigning for issues can be a lifelong struggle that has ups and downs, and one can’t get caught up in the peaks or valleys of individual wins or losses.
“If you expect your first campaign to be a rousing success that sets the world on fire in a good way, you’re not going to make it,” she said. “You’ll have moments of success and progress but you’re going to have a lot of hitting the wall too and that’s part of the game.”
While at UC Berkeley, she got involved with UAW Local 2865, which represents grad-student instructors, starting as an activist and eventually rising to become the union unit’s chairperson. She then became the organizer for the union, traveling up and down the state to talk to other grad-student employees about why they should unionize.
In the late-2000s she and her husband moved from Oakland to a home in the Richmond Annex and have lived in the city ever since. She first thought the home would be a starter home and that they would return to Oakland.
“Pretty quickly we realized that this was our finisher home because we really love our neighborhood, which suits us very well,” she said.
But when the housing market crash in the late-2000s slashed the house’s value by more than half — from $440,000 to around $200,000 — it was devastating.
“At the time, it just felt like we had ruined our lives,” she said. The experience led her to get involved in an effort by McLaughlin and other RPA-supported city council members to consider using eminent domain to save people’s homes, she started becoming civically involved.
Although the eminent domain idea (which refers to governments taking control of private property) never actualized because the market corrected itself, Wilson said that their efforts motivated her to join the RPA.
“I was so happy with these folks,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to volunteer on their campaigns. I’m going to get involved’ and they obviously wanted the help.”
Wilson’s vision for the $550 million Chevron settlement
After getting endorsed by the RPA and McLaughlin, Wilson believes she can continue championing environmental issues — especially in light of the more than half a billion dollars set to hit city coffers over the next 10 years.
Wilson believes the council should consider three spending categories for the funds: savings, environmental remediation and city services.
“Because this was money that was overwhelmingly organized by the environmental movement in Richmond it is extremely important that we do right on the environmental stuff,” she said, alluding to short-term and long-term cleanups around the city. “It’s preparing for the day Chevron leaves and we need to scrub that ground but it is also what we do about emissions right now.”
She credited the current city council for passing the Measure U Gross Receipts Tax in addition to securing the settlement funds and said that now the city’s budget is reaching levels of where it should be for a city of Richmond’s size.
Now, she said, the council can look at improving city services and its infrastructure as well as implementing traffic safety measures on Carlson Boulevard — something she said is the top issue affecting residents in District 5. When the council passed the city budget in June, $1.6 million was allocated for traffic safety — design elements such as speed bumps and crosswalks or other hardscaping meant to deter vehicle sideshows.
“I think the current city council is on the right track. They just created a new department of traffic safety,” she said. “I think there’s a strong motivation to put more and higher percentages of our budget in it (the traffic calming division) to address Carlson Avenue.”
She said during the District 5 candidate forum co-hosted by Richmondside that initially the Carlson issue was not on her radar but that she realized it was a high priority after she interacted with residents living along the street.
“It’s close to the top now and certainly in my top three (issues affecting District 5),” she said. “I’d be a fool not to when there are so many people in agreement that it’s very much negatively affecting their lives and the safety of our community. We need to do better.”
Wilson hopes the Chevron settlement fund spending is guided by a robust community input process that results in clear, transparent reporting of where the money is being spent in order to squash claims that the money is somehow going to be “lost” once it is added to the city’s General Fund budget.
“I was surprised how it was sort of the reaction immediately — though NextDoor is not everybody — it was like 15% excitement and 85% panic over how the money would be spent,” she said. “That’s informative. Whoever is in charge needs to do a good job, spend it well and make it clear that it’s being spent well.”
To better understand those needs, Wilson said that if elected she will host office hours where residents can come to express their concerns in person.
“I’m going to be physically present at this time every two weeks or month. People will come to you. Instead of it being some weird thing on NextDoor, it’ll actually be a productive conversation in person,” she said.
