ALAMEDA COUNTY — Pamela Price and Terry Wiley are leading in the wide open, hotly contested race to succeed longtime District Attorney Nancy O’Malley and may be forced to run off against each other in November if early election results hold up.
Meanwhile, the outcome in the race for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors seat long held by the late Wilma Chan also may be decided this fall, with early tallies from Tuesday’s primary election showing Rebecca Kaplan and Lena Tam leading the pack.
Sheriff’s deputy Yesenia Sanchez was holding a lead against Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern, who is trying to fend off his first serious contenders since 2006. If either Sanchez or the other contender, San Francisco police officer JoAnn Walker, ultimately ends up upsetting him, the winner would become the first woman to head the county sheriff’s department.
To win outright in those races and avoid a runoff, a candidate must collect more than 50% of the vote.
In her 12 years in office before deciding to retire O’Malley has been challenged only once, in 2018 by Price, a longtime civil rights attorney. This time, Price faces Seth Steward, the chief of staff for Oakland Councilmember Dan Kalb and a former San Francisco prosecutor, and two prosecutors in the District Attorney’s office — Terry Wiley, a chief deputy district attorney who’s worked in the office 30 years, and Jimmie Wilson, who has spent 17 years as a prosecutor and is currently part of a team that investigates police shootings.
Price was leading the field after 10 p.m. Tuesday, after the county’s Registrar of Voters had tallied a total of 91,484 mail-in ballots and 6,630 election-day ballots, which is almost 11% of all registered voters. She was followed by Wiley, then Wilson and Steward.
In the District 3 race to succeed Chan, who had served on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors since 2011 until she was killed by a motorist in November while walking her dog in Alameda, four challenges are fighting for the job. The winner will take over from Chan’s longtime chief of staff, Dave Brown, who was appointed by the board to serve the rest of her term.
Besides Kaplan and Tam, the other candidates are former Oakland Unified school board member and youth nonprofit director David Kakishiba and former San Leandro Councilmember Surlene Grant.
Kaplan, who has served as an at-large member of the City Council since 2009, is a progressive who has received strong support from tenants’ rights advocates and labor unions over the years.
Kakishiba wants to see a more coordinated strategy for reducing homelessness across the county and believes schools can help connect families with wraparound social services.
During her campaign, Tam said she wants to identify ways to allocate more money to community organizations that provide wraparound services to people who struggle with homelessness and lack access to health care.
Grant, who was the first African American member of the San Leandro City Council, says she wants to find ways to help people navigate through the bureaucracy of social services, including housing and healthcare.
Kaplan was leading the race in the early returns, followed by Tam, Kakishiba and Grant.
District 3 includes portions of Oakland — Jack London Square, Chinatown and parts of downtown and East Oakland — as well as Alameda, San Leandro and San Lorenzo.
In the contest for sheriff, four-term incumbent Ahern faces a stiff challenge from Sanchez, a sheriff’s deputy who currently runs Santa Rita Jail and is calling for an oversight committee to independently investigate the sheriff’s office, and Walker, who is also running on a platform of improving oversight of the office and building trust within the community.
The race comes with the county under a consent order to make significant changes to jail conditions and inmates’ health care over the next two years. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a report last year that found the jail “fails to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care.”
Ahern has pushed back on criticism by maintaining that he is “innovative” and a reformer, having equipped deputies at the jail with body-worn cameras and expanded education programs.
Sanchez was leading over Ahern in the first batch of ballots counted, and Walker was in third place.
A ballot measure to extend an annual parcel tax 30 more years to fund public libraries was taking a wide lead in early returns Tuesday evening.
If Measure C passes, land owners would continue to pay current rates but the City Council would be allowed to raise them up to 5% a year in the future, depending on inflation.
It was unclear in the early returns whether a bond measure estimated to raise $298 million for facility upgrades for Alameda Unified School District would pass, with just over 54% of the votes in early results Tuesday.
The measure needs 55% voter approval to pass. If it does, property owners in the school district would be taxed $45 for every $100,000 of their parcel’s assessed value for the next 35 years.
Source: www.mercurynews.com