Early election surprise: Katie Valenzuela leads Councilman Steve Hansen in Sacramento council race
Katie Valenzuela could unseat City Councilman Steve Hansen for the high-profile seat representing downtown, midtown and Land Park.
As of a Wednesday morning update, with about 7,500 votes counted, Valenzuela led Hansen by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. Another update is scheduled for Friday.
But it’s far from over, said Hansen, who on Tuesday night said he expects another 20,000 ballots to be counted from the district’s 39,000 registered voters. Nobody who cast a vote Tuesday – the first Super Tuesday presidential primary for California voters – has been included in the results released so far, Hansen said.
“This is just a small fraction,” Hansen said. “We just have to let the votes be counted. There’s a huge turnout because of the presidential race and a lot of it came in late.”
It could be a few weeks before the result is determined, which was the case in 2012 when Hansen was first elected to the council, he said.
Hansen, 40, is a progressive and the council’s first openly gay council member.
Valenzuela, 34, a first-time candidate for elected office, wants to “push the council a little bit farther left,” she said. She is the policy and political director for the California Environmental Justice Alliance and serves on the board for the Sacramento Community Land Trust.
“We’re really excited to have a good first result but know we still have a lot of ballots to count,” Valenzuela said Tuesday night. “We think this shows that grassroots campaigns can be viable in Sacramento. Whether or not I win, the people power we’ve garnered in this race will hopefully inspire good candidates to run in the future. It makes a stronger democracy when more people run with ideas to improve their community.”
Valenzuela rents an apartment in midtown and ran on a platform that included support for a version of rent control that would add more limitations for landlords than the version the city adopted last year, which Hansen proposed. That version got enough signatures to qualify for the city November ballot, but it’s unclear if it will be voted on given the initiative passed by the city.
In Sacramento, rent for a typical apartment has soared 45 percent in the last seven years, adjusted for inflation. Valenzuela moved back to midtown after about two years in Oak Park, where she was the president of the neighborhood association, to find an unattainable rental market and a severe homelessness problem, she said.
“I was lucky to find an apartment for $1,500 when just five years prior, I had been renting a one-bedroom that was bigger for $800 a month,” Valenzuela said. “I found people were sleeping on the street...and I found that people in the neighborhood were frustrated and felt like they weren’t being heard.”
Valenzuela opposed the Measure U sales tax, which Sacramento voters passed in November 2018, because she considered it a regressive tax that overburdens working families.
Hansen in 2019 led the effort for the council to pass a ban on the sale of flavored tobacco and menthol cigarettes that took effect Jan. 1. He also led the charge to adopt the controversial local rent control ordinance that capped the amount that landlords are allowed to increase rent each year at 6 percent plus inflation and also prohibits landlords from evicting tenants without just cause.
“The city is moving forward and we need to keep moving forward,” Hansen told reporters Tuesday at a joint party with Mayor Darrell Steinberg at Mango’s nightclub in midtown. “The city has made a lot of progress on housing. We need to continue to make progress there. We really are diving head first into trying to tackle homelessness in ways that most cities wouldn’t even dream of. And I think we’ve got to make sure that we advance equality in the city, economically and otherwise.”
Seeing the city’s shortage of shelter beds, Hansen proposed the Capitol Park Hotel downtown to serve a site for a temporary homeless shelter before the historic building is renovated to become permanent affordable housing, which is set to happen in October. The shelter was criticized for its conditions, and continues to have issues with broken elevators and water leaks, but 112 homeless men and women are currently living there, according to a report released Friday by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. An additional 74 homeless people have moved into permanent housing they found while living in the shelter.
Hansen also proposed a major $100 million housing trust fund using Measure U sales tax revenue to spark the construction of many new affordable housing projects.
In the days leading up to the election, volunteers placed controversial door hangers on Sacramento homes that featured a darkened photo of Hansen’s face and a photo of President Trump.
Valenzuela said her campaign did not fund and she does not support the door hangers.
Bee photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 8:22 PM.
