SR council gets first black, gay members

For the first time in Santa Rosa's 136-year history, a black man and an openly gay man have been elected to the City Council.

"I think the city has made progress," Councilwoman Jane Bender said Wednesday, alluding to the most diverse group of City Council candidates ever elected in Santa Rosa.

Santa Rosa voters elected gem stone distributor Lee Pierce, who is black and lives on the west side of town, and news store owner John Sawyer, who is gay, to the council Tuesday. Voters also returned incumbents Mike Martini and Bender to office.

Sawyer came within 450 votes of being the top vote-getter to easily secure the third of four seats up for election.

Pierce, more than 4,000 votes behind the three front-runners, is expected to capture the fourth seat.

But Pierce may have to wait up to three weeks before he can be officially declared the winner. He held a 650-vote lead over mechanical engineer Veronica Jacobi at the end of Tuesday's vote count, with thousands of late-arriving absentee ballots left to be counted.

"Assuming the numbers hold up, we have written Santa Rosa political history. It will be a first," Bender said.

Tuesday's landmark decisions by voters ends a long-standing trend that found the city's political landscape dominated for more than a century by white men and their appointees, who mostly lived in the northeast quadrant.

That trend began to change in 1994 when women, for the first time in city history, comprised the majority of council members. Today, five of the council's seven members are women.

Neither Pierce nor Sawyer, focused on their diversity as part of their campaign strategy.