Two more people have announced they intend to run for Contra Costa County Supervisor Karen Mitchoff’s open District 4 seat next June, bringing to five the number of candidates who want to represent a largely suburban region with the county’s major business centers.
District 4 encompasses much of Concord and Walnut Creek, as well as Pleasant Hill, Clayton and some of the area around Mount Diablo
After area city council members Carlyn Obringer, Ken Carlson and Edi Birsan earlier filed statements of their intention to succeed Mitchoff, who is known for her candid and often confrontational approach at supervisors meetings
The two new candidates are Debora Allen, who represents the central county on the BART Board of Directors, and Roxanne Garza, a Pleasant Hill resident with years of experience at Healthy Richmond and Contra Costa Health Services.
Here’s a rundown of the new additions to a growing field of candidates:
Roxanne Garza
While she is the only candidate so far to never have held public office, Garza said her work as senior director at Healthy Richmond — a nonprofit focused on health equity and racial justice — has provided on-the-ground know-how and helped her foster relationships with west county community leaders.
Prior to her tenure there, she worked as a public health program manager at the county health department, where she also volunteered to boost testing and vaccine distribution among the county’s uninsured frontline workers during the pandemic.
When UC Berkeley proposed a since-abandoned plan for a new research facility in Richmond, Garza was among those pushing it to offer generous community benefits in exchange for approval. She has also focused some of her nonprofit work on tenant assistance: “I want people who grew up here to be able to stay here,” she said.
Garza contends every inequity in the county is related, a belief that stems from her work in public health, whose shortcomings she said were laid bare by the pandemic.
“The issue is not just about lifting the voices of residents,” Garza said. “It’s about, how do you set the table where residents are meeting with decision-makers?”
Garza’s advocacy recently led to her appointment by Supervisor John Gioia to a committee that makes recommendations to the Board of Supervisors on how to spend sales tax revenue.
The board recently gave $2.5 million in tax revenue to the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, enraging some committee members, including Gioia’s appointees, who had opposed that move. Mitchoff strongly defended the allocation and accused opponents of harboring a “personal animus” toward Sheriff David Livingston.
Garza, who was appointed to the advisory committee after that meeting, said she would’ve pushed for other spending priorities besides sheriff funding, and believes District 4 voters agree with her.
“I think the central county is looking for different solutions to some of these issues as well,” Garza said. “It’s not about progressive versus conservative when it comes to community safety. It’s about, how do we transform these systems and look at the root causes of (crime)?”
Debora Allen
As a BART board director, Allen has consistently managed to stand out for her views, which some of her colleagues often find polarizing. Six of the nine board directors endorsed her challenger in last year’s election, although Allen won anyway.
She pushed for job cuts and more conservative spending policies during the pandemic and vigorously defended funding for BART police amid last year’s movement for public safety alternatives. Her BART district includes Walnut Creek, Concord, Martinez, San Ramon, Danville and Pleasant Hill.
A resident of unincorporated Clayton, Allen initially filed with the elections office to challenge Gus Kramer for county assessor. She switched races recently after her community was split off from Supervisor Diane Burgis’ district, allowing her to vie for Mitchoff’s open seat.
Prior to her time on the BART board, Allen unsuccessfully pursued the Republican nomination for a state Assembly seat. But the small-business consultant doesn’t bill herself as a conservative — just a data-driven official committed to making the county’s transportation, housing and local economy more efficient.
“If we want to focus on the quality of life for the average residents of Contra Costa County, one of the things we can help them with is providing good jobs inside of our county, so their commute times are reduced,” Allen said. “We need to look for ways to… keep people from needing to travel outside of the county for work.”
Despite the federal stimulus money that poured into BART in the past year, Allen maintains her stance on cutting jobs, saying the agency cannot sustainably limp along on federal subsidies. She attributes her fellow directors’ lack of support to what she described as the “labor unions’ control over BART.”
If train ridership does not return on its own after the pandemic, then the county needs to focus on boosting transportation into the future, she said. That includes automated vehicle testing at GoMentum Station in Concord, as well as the transit-adjacent Naval Weapons Station development that promises 13,000 new homes in the city.
Allen has built a political alliance with law enforcement — receiving a $1,000 campaign contribution last year from the union that represents BART police officers, which additionally spent more than $10,000 in advertising to support her re-election.
In 2019, she published an op-ed for this news organization arguing for more security enforcement in the train systems and calling the agency’s community safety program “toothless” for its reliance on unarmed civilians.
Allen says she supports more mental health services and crisis response in the county, but wants law enforcement to remain a core part of the equation.
“I don’t believe in throwing out police and putting some replacement in that has no police training,” she said. “It’s easy to look back after someone gets hurt (by police) and say they should have done this or that. But you don’t know which person in crisis is a danger, until they’re a danger — there’s no way to predict that.”