Incumbents well ahead in Sebastopol council race

Voters in the city of Sebastopol returned three city council members to office on Tuesday, leaving challenger Jonathan Greenberg trailing well behind in the contest for three open seats.

Greenberg, a journalist and community activist, had 15.3 percent of the vote - about half the haul of front-runner Sarah Glade Gurney, when the count was done for the night.

Gurney, an attorney and mediator who first joined the council 10 years ago, held the lead with 30.2 percent of vote.

First-term incumbent and Patrick Slayter and Una Glass, who was appointed to the council last summer to complete the term of her late husband, Michael Kyes, finished about even with 26.9 percent and 27.3 percent, respectively.

“I do hope that however things turn out tonight, that we can move on,” Glass, executive director of Coastwalk California, said early in the day of a campaign that has turned increasingly tense in recent weeks.

Running as the only non-incumbent in the race, Greenberg has cast himself as a public interest candidate focused on transparency and budget oversight, and has become increasingly critical of the sitting council, particularly targeting Slayter.

Greenberg also has advocated publicly against Measure R, a utility user tax on Tuesday’s ballot that the five-member council supported unanimously as a means to avoid significant budget cuts in the coming years. Voters passed it resoundingly.

In return, Greenberg was the subject of an attack ad that landed in voters’ mailboxes last week. It was funded and backed by a broad spectrum of former city officials and politically active residents opposing his council run. They characterized him as a unqualified and uninformed.

Slayter said he was pleased by the election results.

“As I’ve said all along I was cautiously optimistic,” Slayter said. “But I just kept minding my own business and doing what I needed to do for myself. I can only control what I can control. That’s just the way it works.”

Greenberg did not return phone calls Tuesday night.