Politics & Government

The Issues: City Council Candidates' Visions for the Future

Candidates running in the Nov. 8 Benicia City Council and mayoral election answer questions posed by Benicia Patch with input from readers.

Everybody has an idea of what Benicia was like when the moved here or when the started school.  Our elected officials have an obligation to take the city into the future so the next generation of residents has the same or greater advantages of safety and security we enjoy in Benicia in 2011.  How each candidate views the future and how they intend to see that vision through is often what differentiates one candidate from another. 

The next article in this series will have the mayoral candidate's answers to this question.

Today’s question (from a reader): Please describe Benicia ten years hence and how will your services positively affect that vision?

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City Council candidates:


Ten years from now I’d like to see basically the same town I live in now. A small city that you can still walk down the streets and feel safe, where kids can grow up safe, get a good education, and be able to participate in sports, arts or whatever they want to. Our society seems to be losing the qualities that make a place a home. Ten years from now I’d like to still be able to say Benicia is a place you’d like to call your home.


Vision is the optimum word that will define where we as a City will be in 2021. Benicia has so much potential that we are finally realizing as a great place to live, work and play.  I look back to 2001 and how far we have come in attracting quality businesses to the Downtown, the Industrial Park and other business centers around town.  Yesterday's press conference for CODA and Amports could be a new beginning for economic development for Benicia.  Our proximity in the Bay Area to San Francisco and Sacramento, our deep water port, rail system, bridge accessibility and relatively low rents make us a player for the future.  We need to be creative with our vision and continue to provide a quality of life our residents expect and deserve.

Find out what's happening in Beniciawith free, real-time updates from Patch.


Benicia in 2021 is a more self-sufficient city in many ways because of the work I and others did at City Hall in the middle of the previous decade.  There is a range of jobs in town that better reflects the qualifications of the resident workforce, thanks to a continued insistence on the agreed plan for Benicia Business Park, which is now half-built. Work there has started on the city’s third fire station, which is part of a public safety building that also includes police holding cells to replace the substandard ones at the police station.   Thanks to the new Business Park and increased tourism, Valero now provides slightly less than half of the city tax revenue rather than the 60 percent the refinery provided in 2010.   The Army Corps has cleaned up the toxic plume in the Lower Arsenal and the state has backed off its threatened endangerment order after the city – at my and others’ insistence – removed dense housing from the area Specific Plan.   There is a gateway on Lake Herman Road into Solano County’s first ever regional park, which Bob Berman, Bob Webb and I will by that time have been working on for 30 years.  There is also a new Officers Row Historic Park on Jefferson Street, thanks to the efforts of the Arsenal Preservation Task Force and its successors, which I have worked hard to join and support.   And the Playground of Dreams is about to have a momentous birthday, 30 years after Sue Sumner-Moore and I led thousands of volunteers who planned and then built it in City Park the week of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.


First, we should have a sustainable government, meaning, we live within our means.  Employee compensation should not be more than 60% of our budget.  We need to write our Memorandums of Understanding (employee contracts) with city employee groups so that we don't continue to have compensation overrun revenues such as is currently happening.

Nov. 8, 2011, City Council and Mayor Election Handbook: Candidate Q&As, Bios and Voter Guides

Disclosure: Patch editor JB Davis was the campaign manager for Dan Smith in his successful campaign for City Council in 2001.  He has no involvement in Smith’s 2011 campaign.


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