Update: Katie Valenzuela still leading City Councilman Steve Hansen in Sacramento race
First-time candidate Katie Valenzuela maintained her lead against Sacramento City Councilman Steve Hansen in new election results released Friday.
As of Friday afternoon, with 10,236 votes counted, Valenzuela led Hansen by a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent. That’s the same margin from the last update at 2 a.m. Wednesday, when 7,450 votes had been counted.
The next round of results is scheduled for Tuesday. There could be 10,000 or more ballots left to process in the district.
“There are still a lot of ballots to be counted but this is pretty exciting,” Valenzuela posted to Twitter Friday.
Hansen has held the District 4 seat – which includes downtown, midtown and Land Park – since 2012.
Valenzuela, 34, is a state lobbyist for environmental causes and the policy and political director for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, which does endorsements and other work for environmental nonprofits across the state.
If elected, she would like to push the council farther to the left, she has said. A midtown renter, she supports a version of rent control that is more strict against landlords than the version the city adopted last year, led by Hansen. She also wants to open a “safe ground” area where homeless can lawfully camp, and open a homeless shelter at the former Sleep Train Arena in Natomas, she has said.
Hansen, 40, the city’s first openly-gay council member, led the city and Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency to open a shelter at the Capitol Park Hotel downtown in September. To date, 323 men and women have spent time in the shelter, and 76 have been moved into permanent housing. An additional 114 people are being sheltered there now, according to an SHRA report released Friday.
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 a council action to create a $100 million housing trust fund using Measure U sales tax revenue to spark the construction of many new affordable housing projects.
