Former mayor Tony Santos isn’t about to let his nearly two decades in local government fade into memory just because he’s no longer the city’s top dog.
But you won’t find him railing against a proposed policy during a City Council meeting. Nor is Santos following the path of San Leandro’s other super-involved former mayor, Shelia Young, by finding work in another local government agency. At least, not yet.
The 78-year-old, four-term City Council member and one-term mayor is taking another popular post-government path: consulting, both for and not for profit. He’s also pondering a potential memoir — from his barefoot Hawaiian youth to the highest post of an almost mid-sized city.
In his consulting work, Santos has a two-pronged agenda these days: beating down ranked choice voting wherever it threatens to take hold; and promoting renewable energy, in the neighborhood and abroad.
“People think I have something to offer,” Santos said about his consulting work during a recent interview at in the Washington Manor neighborhood. “I know more about the city than maybe anyone else right now.” (Don’t tell that to Mayor Emeritus Young.)
On the renewable energy front, Santos is working as a sort of middleman between several local companies and investors, and potential clients overseas.
He recently provided photo ops at the demonstration of a mobile, solar-powered , which San Leandro-based Renewables West and Santa Clara-based Forever Pure want to market to energy-poor developing countries.
Santos is trying to help broker a deal between Renewables West and some local Afghani investors, who hope to buy 100 of the mobile solar units for their country by leveraging federal development funding, according to Santos and Renewables West President Mike Adelson.
Santos and Adelson said Congressman Pete Stark’s office was also involved in trying to set up the deal.
“Basically what I’m trying to do is put all these various groups together,” Santos said.
In addition, the former mayor said, he’s been facilitating a potential renewable energy project in India for a Chinese investment group. Most recently, Santos said, he’s added to his potential client list a group of Portuguese firms interested in the renewables market.
“I’ve had meetings every week since I left my mayor’s job,” Santos said.
On ranked choice voting, the city’s fledgling electoral system that may have cost him the mayorship last November, Santos has been lending his name and story to opponents around the country — and gloating when the alternative voting system has been shot down, as it recently was in Ft. Collins, CO.
“This is a great victory for those of us who assisted on [the] campaign in Fort Collins getting the word out,” Santos wrote in an email after the initiative failed to muster enough public votes.
Santos was a proponent of ranked choice voting until his defeat under the system's first iteration in San Leandro. He now calls the system “discriminatory,” “confusing,” and “undemocratic.”
“The public doesn’t know what they’re getting into,” he said, vexed by the lack of civic uproar in his native state, Hawaii, after the state House of Representatives passed a bill to implement ranked choice voting there in March.
The Honolulu City Council has since asked the legislature to defer action on the bill, which elicited another victory email from Santos.
The former mayor doesn’t make any apologies for his conversion from supporter to spoiler of ranked choice voting. He figures his four years in the military — two and a half of them flying rescue missions in Europe for the 84th Air Guard— gives him the right to be “sour grapes,” as he puts it.
“I was in a dangerous occupation in the military and that allows me to be sour grapes if I choose,” Santos told me defiantly.
Speaking of the military, his mind seems to say, there was that time when….
Soon, grainy, black and white footage is running through my head, of brave, young soldiers saluting the cameras goofily and heading off to fight the enemy.
Santos likes to tell war stories. He said he recently submitted an article about one of his most harrowing military exploits to the webpage of Air Rescue Museum, a nonprofit group dedicated to collecting historical materials from the U.S. Armed Forces Air Rescue Service. If the organization ever gets an actual museum together, Santos said, “I’ll have to go visit and bring a truckload of stuff.
“My wife would not be pleased,” he added pensively. “She thinks my rescue days are behind me.”
Then, before I could get a question in: “Let me tell you a story about Sgt. Ramirez,” Santos said, launching into a tragic war tale. That story led seamlessly to recollections of his first stomach-flipping flight in the Austrian Alps.
From the Alps to Hawaii, and — reel change — home videos are again running through my head, this time of a young, barefoot Santos walking to school down a dirt road between pineapple fields.
Not all is in the past, though. Santos is still resentful of what he considers a nasty, negative political campaign waged by his opponents, particularly the man who now occupies his seat in City Hall.
“I’m still ticked off at Steve Cassidy,” Santos told me, his brow furrowed indignantly. “His comments on our budget situation were incorrect,” he said, launching into a recap of the unexpected tax windfall the city received from the county earlier this year.
Santos has vehemently contested Mayor Cassidy's suggestion that San Leandro may have been headed for bankruptcy.
He’s still hoping for an apology from the new mayor. The question is, will he really stay away from the public microphone in City Council Chambers until he gets one?
-- Back on topic, I thought some might be interested in my response to former mayor Tony Santos' letter in the Hawaii Reporter: As a resident of San Leandro, I would respectfully disagree with Mr. Santos opinion about RCV. It does appear to have some procedural complications, duly noted by our former Mayor who has served our city well. However, he fails to share the great advantages of RCV voting over “first past the post” voting. 1) It largely eliminates strategic voting and thus enables third party candidates to become viable options. In other words you can vote for the candidate you like the most, even if he is an alien with three heads, without your vote becoming a spoiler to your true principles. Thus a vote for Nader in Florida would not get George Bush elected by pulling Al Gore down. 2) Politics can be much more civil. You can’t take down all your opponents with negative ads, if you need their voters second/third choices to become elected. 3) It has the potential to get us past this democrat versus republican thing where only two establishment parties control all the shots. Incumbents such as our former mayor dis-like this probably for this reason. They have to be much more in touch with their constituents to get elected. Witness the vigorous and successful campaign of Jean Quan in Oakland versus the ineffective mass media approach of her opponent, the establishment Don Perata.
Thomas, would it be acceptable to state the real problem with, say, Oakland is that the same oppressive black socialist power structure is still in place? What's your problem with white people?
David, your point about the same oppressive power structure in Oakland is not really accurate, as only 2 members [Brooks and Reid] are Black. There is only one Hispanic [De La Fuente]. There is one Lesbian [Kaplan]. The majority is very progressive and elected by entrenched money in the neighborhoods. The 6 females [Brooks, Brunner, Kaplan, Kernighan, Nadel, Schaaf] are the result of money well spent in district elections. The entrenched elite of Oakland, back in the Knowland days is still a factor in Oakland and it is overwhelmingly White. The diversity of Oakland is not reflected in the Council. That is the same dysfunctional model that San Leandro has. Oakland's issues are the result of a progressive electorate without any ability to pay responsibly for their standards. The lagniappe and entitlement attitude of Oakland is in large part the issue. One has only to look at the tragedy of Dellums for validation. The real cause of the problem is not RCV but District Elections.
-- Living in this crazy world, so caught up in the confusion Nothing is-a making sense for me and you But maybe if we find a way, there is got to be the solution How to make a brighter day? What do we do? -- We've got to give a little love, have a little hope Let's make this world a little better Try a little more, harder than before Let's do what we can do together -- Only we can make it better... Only if we try... Only we can make it better... Only if we try... -- Give a little love...
By the way, this is precisely why government should be limited in scope. Those in government will again, always respond to those with money and power, by definition, because they have the ability to perpetuate those in government by getting them re-elected. There is NO way to stop this, period. It's human nature. The only way to reduce the influence of those with money and power in the government is to reduce the size and scope of the government. It doesn't matter what band of crooks is running the joint when the joint they're running has no power over you.
Let's say that I'm a voter who would have voted for candidates in this order: "Mestas, Filipovich, Palau, Starosciak, Santos, Cassidy". In a regular election, I would have voted for Mestas in the June election, and then for Santos in the run-off. My vote in each election is counted. But in an RCV election, I only get to rank 3 candidates. If I rank "Mestas, Filipovich, Palau", my vote is discarded after the 3rd round of the election. I don't have a chance to express a preference between the last two contenders in the race. Someone who ranked "Mestas, Filipovich, Cassidy", however, does have their vote counted. There is something intrinsically unfair about that.
-- Here's a link to a great article by Nate Silver walking us through the Academy Awards, which adopted IRV last year: http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/critics-love-the-social-network-will-the-academy-defriend-it/#more-17355