What is the most ferocious election in the Sacramento region? You’ll never guess | Opinion
The most ferocious political fight in the Sacramento region this election cycle is in, of all places, the quiet Sacramento suburban hamlet of Fair Oaks. There, the water district is embroiled in the most suburban issue of them all — parking. And the village is ablaze with signs demanding a district takeover.
At the Fair Oaks Water District, with five board members, three incumbents are up for re-election and all face challengers, something that hasn’t happened in 20 years. And the other two directors not up for re-election face a signature-gathering effort to force a separate recall election.
The existing directors “want to have their fiefdom,” said the leader of the fast-emerging loyal opposition, long-time resident Leon Corcos. “The way to stop it is to get three votes on the board.”
Prosperity is tearing Fair Oaks apart.
For more than 100 years, the local water district has been an anchor of the community’s once quiet village district, previously dominated by antique stores and hair salons. But in recent years, the village has exploded into a popular dining destination partly due to a Corcos development, with more restaurants on the way. Suddenly for some residents and businesses, the water district’s corporation yard, with its backhoes and gravel, seems wildly out of place next to a tony dining scene.
For 20-year incumbent Misha Sarkovich, up for re-election, his political life has come full circle. He and two others successfully ran for office in 2004 to knock out the incumbents for failing to mind the proverbial store. Months before that election, I had written about how the general manager at the time, Richard Plecker, had used the district credit card to play golf at Pebble Beach. Then the Sacramento County Grand Jury started sniffing around.
Now it is Sarkovich who is in the political crosshairs for caring more about water than parking.
“Any time Leon comes to a meeting, he always talks about parking,” said Sarkovich, a retired project planner from the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District. “He never talks about water.”
Fair Oaks is part of Sacramento County’s vast expanse of unincorporated areas, which collectively is an Uncity with a greater population of that of the actual municipality of Sacramento. While Fair Oaks may not be a city, it has no shortage of local governments. It has a parks district, a cemetery district, and a water district with 14,000 residential accounts that serves approximately 40,000 people.
The Fair Oaks Water District is one of 14 such water agencies in Sacramento County that are north of the American River. They are all creatures of civic expansion. For fans of Sarkovich, who loathes centralization from his upbringing in communist Yugoslavia, Fair Oaks is a democratic utopia.
“I believe in small government,” Sarkovich said. Quietly, the professionally-trained economist has been doing his thing for two decades, ridding the district of debts and maintaining comparatively low water rates. Things in Fair Oaks have been so quiet, that a review of water district elections for the last 20 years could only find five contested races.
“Very few people are inclined to participate in the small local boards,” Sarkovich said. “There’s no glory. It’s just work. We have no opposition.”
The District rebuilt its village headquarters in 2010. And in 2018, it began plans to improve its corporation yard across the street. All was quiet for five years.
Enter Corcos. After a conversation last year with a local official he declined to disclose, it dawned on him that the water district could be part of a solution to the village’s worsening parking problems. So he organized fellow supporters to pack water district meetings that February and March in hopes of stopping the corporation yard project.
“They came with T-shirts and signs,” Sarkovich said. “Everyone spoke.” The board unanimously voted to stay the course and renovate the corporation yard. “I thought that was the end.”
But it was the beginning of the rebellion. Corcos, a campaign consultant during part of his eclectic career, helped to create Fair Oaks Ratepayers for Accountability to recall directors Chris Peterson and Mike McRae. And he helped to recruit candidates (regional sales manager Levi Newlin, businessman Darryl Cragun and attorney Leah Parrish-Pane) to challenge incumbents Randy Marx, Sarkovich and Mark Dolby this November.
Corcos and fellow critics of the district would have to gather more than 1,400 Fair Oaks voter signatures by November to force a future recall election of Peterson and McRae.
Missing entirely from this local debate is whether the Fair Oaks Water District has outlived its usefulness and should even exist at all.
Fair Oaks gets its American River water from the San Juan Water District, which is in merger discussions with the neighboring Sacramento Suburban Water District. Merging Fair Oaks into San Juan could eliminate the need for a corporation yard in Fair Oaks Village. And it would mark one more important step toward a regional approach of banking groundwater to deal with the worsening effects of climate change.
The neighboring Carmichael Water District should be looking to merge as well.
I suggested this 20 years ago. But water governments don’t like to go out of business and tend to hold grudges. Witness Sarkovich, who thinks little of all neighboring water districts. “San Juan has huge debt, huge salaries,” he said. “Carmichael and Sacramento Suburban, they are all mismanaged to some extent.”
Meanwhile, Fair Oaks is having a perfectly fine and feisty debate over its water and parking priorities. And if this was the only water matter, all would be well. But these little water districts are getting in the way of preparing for when a drought-stricken American River needs to be left alone. Fair Oaks, for now, remains part of our water problem.
This story was originally published October 4, 2024 at 5:00 AM.