A one-term incumbent and an academic labor leader are facing off to represent District 2, which includes all of Southwest Berkeley as far north as University Avenue and as far east as Sacramento Street.
Terry Taplin was first elected to represent District 2 in 2020, defeating one-term incumbent Cheryl Davila in a four-way race that also saw bids from solar energy scientist Alex Sharenko and insurance agent Timothy Carter. He is now facing a challenge from Jenny Guarino, who says she will advocate for city workers and that elected officials should be more responsive.
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The two candidates converge somewhat on several key issues, both naming housing and safety issues as their top three campaign priorities, with Guarino adding labor issues as her third and Taplin naming climate and infrastructure as his.
Taplin has lived all of his 36 years in Berkeley; Guarino, who is 29, grew up in the South Bay and moved to Berkeley in 2023.
Both incumbent and challenger have backgrounds in academia and advocacy, though in very different directions.
Taplin, a poet and transportation activist, sat on Berkeley’s transportation and civic arts commissions and is Berkeley’s current representative on the Alameda County Transportation Commission. He spent nearly five years working as an instructional assistant in the Peralta Community College District, worked professionally as a writer and poet and chaired the council’s Public Safety Policy and Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Stability subcommittees.
Guarino is a master’s student specializing in affordable housing and urban policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and was elected to be head steward of UAW 4811, which represents academic student employees at the university. Guarino has also worked as a paralegal for nearly four years and performed research in a number of scientific and medical fields.
The district is home to Bayer HealthCare’s 46-acre campus and Aquatic, San Pablo and Strawberry Creek parks, among others, to say nothing of a broad spectrum of residential, commercial and industrial neighborhoods.
Along with District 1 to the north and District 3 to the east, District 2 sees an outsized portion of Berkeley’s gun violence. Ashby Avenue carries a section of State Route 13 from west to east, and San Pablo Avenue brings State Route 123 from south to north. A section of Sixth Street — a popular north-south route through town — between Dwight and Allston ways was voted worst in the city by Berkeleyside readers before it was repaved in 2019, but now frequently plays host to traffic collisions, such as the two-car crash Oct. 4 that ended with one car smashed through the porch of a house.
Seven current and former Berkeley rent commissioners have gone to bat for Guarino, including the board’s chair and vice chair, Leah Simon-Weisberg and Soli Alpert. So have the Berkeley Tenants Union and four local and regional Democratic clubs.
Taplin has gotten endorsements from area Democratic clubs as well, including the Alameda County party, as well as the Sierra Club, Equality California, the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, Latine Young Democrats of the East Bay, six of the seven other sitting council members, Mayor Jesse Arreguín, two rent commissioners, three state assembly members, two state senators and state Treasurer Fiona Ma.
Despite Guarino’s labor background and advocacy, Taplin has pulled ahead in labor endorsements, according to the candidates’ websites. While Guarino has secured UAW’s backing, Taplin has been endorsed by the city firefighters’ union and SEIU 1021, which represents roughly a third of Berkeley’s city workers, as well as a pair of regional trade organizations and the Alameda Labor Council.
Housing
Both Taplin and Guarino said Berkeley was, largely speaking, moving in the right direction on housing production.
Taplin cited budget referrals he had either authored or co-sponsored for an affordable housing zoning overlay, a social housing pilot study and a first-time homebuyers’ assistance program as steps already made to prevent displacement. “I think one thing that gets left out of the entire displacement-gentrification conversation is the need for economic opportunity for people who grew up here, whether they’re children and students or whether they’re lifelong learners, because jobs and housing have to go hand in hand.” To that end, Taplin has authored a recommendation to develop a city workforce development board, suggesting it be baked into the city’s larger work for environmental justice.
Asked if there were any new large-scale professional campuses on the scale of Bayer eyeing Berkeley, Taplin said something that size was unlikely, but that “it’s definitely a goal of mine to attract large innovators to bring jobs to West Berkeley. … I’m really proud of our manufacturing history, so to speak.” And while parcels used in the past for manufacturing may need environmental remediation now, and that is underway in places, Taplin hoped for new jobs in building robotics parts, adapting vehicles for accessibility and working on cell therapy.
Guarino has advocated for tougher tenant protections, including leading UAW 4811’s work on the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act, a renter-focused ballot measure facing an opposing one from city landlords in November. The renters’ act began as an initiative petition from several rent commissioners but failed to garner enough signatures to be placed on the ballot; the council voted to put a successor measure on November’s ballot, albeit one that eliminated several elements of the original proposal.
“We have a critical shortage of housing in Berkeley, and I obviously support increasing density in Berkeley, especially along transit and business corridors to increase housing affordability, to reduce emissions from transportation,” Guarino said. “That private, market-rate development, it’ll help affordability for the upper middle class, but low-income and working-class people need real, urgent help with subsidized affordable housing now.” She said she supports affordable and social housing “and compassionate approaches to homelessness that lead with housing and services.”
City Council and city workers
Both Taplin and Guarino gave the current City Council average marks for its work in recent years.
“The failure of Measure L reflects the loss of confidence in our Council by the community. We’ve had high staff turnover and significant labor conflicts,” Guarino wrote in a candidate questionnaire, referring to the unsuccessful $650 million measure in 2022 that would have covered a broad range of things from street repairs to building affordable housing. “I don’t think the council has done enough to invest in affordable housing, and has left progressive legislation to die.”
In his questionnaire Taplin said the council has improved since January, when two members, Rigel Robinson and Kate Harrison, announced they were resigning their seats.
“Now we must refocus on key priorities, modernize and streamline our systems, manage our finances, rehabilitate our infrastructure, revitalize our local economy, bring our policies and ideals into touch with the reality and lived experience of everyday residents,” Taplin said.
Several key departments, including Public Works and the Berkeley Police Department, have seen persistent staffing issues, with a consultant’s report indicating that overtime and extra tasks are burning out city police. Two top public works leaders left Berkeley in rapid succession, as did two top officials in the Health, Housing and Community Services Department.
“We have a culture that seems to encourage public mistreatment of city employees. You have people presenting to council getting ridiculed by the public, getting spoken down to by council members, you have people drumming up people to harass particular employees, you have them maligned publicly,” Taplin said. “So I think that there’s a bit of internal work we have to do as council members to discontinue those behaviors. And I think as a community, we need to sort of rethink the relationship between the public and city staff.”
“I think that there have been efforts to limit the public process, there’s been bullying by staff and all of this really decreases trust that the public has for the City Council,” Guarino said when asked about the council’s recent resignations and animosity between council and administration.
Guarino criticized the current council’s work in labor relations and former City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley’s handling of recruitment and retention, referencing a recent strike by recreation employees and predicting another more wide-reaching one by city workers. “In order to attract and retain staff to serve the public, we need to be competitive with pay,” and “rectify” a recent history of “hostile management practices,” she said.
“We have strong labor laws but weak enforcement,” Guarino said in her questionnaire. “I want to invest in education, outreach and enforcement, and I support the formation of worker cooperatives.”
Public safety
Guarino said she favored violence interruption programs, job training opportunities and social services as tools for public safety. “Unarmed ambassadors might be effective. Youth engagement, definitely. And also a large amount of police time is taken up with things that would be better done by civilian staff, homelessness and mental health responses, noise complaints, low-level traffic and parking issues,” she said.
Both Guarino and Taplin supported changing the work of the Specialized Care Unit, currently done on contract by Bonita House, into an in-house affair.
“I think this work would be best done by a city department. Oakland, for example, it’s done by the fire department, and I think that would be an interesting model to look into,” Guarino said.
(The Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland, or MACRO, handles some nonviolent 911 and crisis calls from a separate dispatch than that city’s 911 center, similar to the work of the SCU. It is housed in the Oakland Fire Department but operates as a separate unit.)
“I would want there to be accountability and metrics around who’s providing the service. And this is not a knock against any of our contractors, or anything like that,” Taplin said. “As a council member, I feel like we should be the ones to account for the successes and shortcomings of our programs if we’re using taxpayer money, and if we have a professional staff and you have labor partners that bargain with the city, opportunities should be given to them first.”
Both are also proponents of gun violence prevention programs. Guarino mentioned Ceasefire-style programs in particular. Taplin said he has “high hopes” for the program the city announced this summer, for which his office sponsored budget referrals in 2021 for a study and 2022 to fund actual staffing.
Both the incumbent and challenger also advocated for new safety features to keep city streets safer.
“Street safety is public safety,” Guarino said in her candidate questionnaire. “I support pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure to protect our community.”
Taplin also spoke in favor of new safety elements and, following the crash on Sixth on Oct. 4, tweeted that “I will be organizing with the community this fall to advocate for whatever additional revenues the city identifies in the mid-year budget update to be allocated toward addressing our backlog of critical capital projects.”
Editors’ note: This article was updated after publication with additional information.
Berkeley election 2024 resources
The deadline to preregister to vote online or by mail in Alameda County is Oct. 21 (though you can register the day you vote if you miss that deadline). The election is Tuesday, Nov. 5. We put together a guide to the essentials of how to register and vote, what’s on the ballot and more.
Here are some other helpful election resources:
- The city of Berkeley’selection portalandcandidate statements
- Don’t know your Berkeley City Council district? The city website has ahandy tool for that.
- Voter’s Edge: View a personalized ballot by entering your address.
- Voter guides fromCalMattersandKQED.
- Check yourvoter registration status(and sign up to get election materials online).
- Find your voter profile(Alameda County registrar of voters).
See complete 2024 election coverage on Berkeleyside.
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