UPDATE 6/10/08: As of 7 a.m., Abram’s lead dropped by one more vote to 134 on the Secretary of State’s web page. But one of my readers added up the totals on each of the four counties in Assembly District 15 and found that Abram had a bigger lead. Hmm. I’ll have to check that out. Lisa

As of 10 a.m., San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson’s lead over Livermore retired businessman Robert Rao in the sharply contested Assembly District 15 GOP primary race had narrowed to 135 votes. (Wilson is pictured to the right, Rao on bottom right.)

On Friday, it was about 450 votes.

Click here to read the latest results on the Secretary of State’s web site.

Could Rao win this thing?

It’s happened elsewhere. Close races can flip in the final days as the clerks add the provisional and mail-in ballots to the tally, although the 450-vote gap was viewed by almost everyone as too large for Rao to overcome.

Rao has closed his campaign office and Wilson is planning his general election strategy against Democratic nominee Joan Buchanan.

But if the numbers remain really close or they flip, either Rao or Wilson could ask for a recount although it’s not free. The candidate has to pay for the cost.

We won’t know the final outcome for a few days yet. All four counties in this district still have provisional and mail-in ballots to count although the stacks are dwindling. The counties have 30 days to issue their final election results.

He didn’t have a web site. He didn’t raise as much money or campaign nearly as long.

But San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson (pictured on the right with Danville Councilwoman Karen Stepper) appears to have bested his three Republican challengers in the hard-fought Assembly District 15 primary race.

With all the precincts counted, Wilson had 31 percent of the vote and a 546-vote lead over his nearest competitor, Robert Rao of Livermore. Judy Lloyd of Danville followed with 23 percent and Scott Kamena came in fourth with 17 percent. (Click here to see the results.)

While there are mail-in and provisional ballots left to count, if the lead holds, it will be a surprising finish.

Rao put more than $500,000 of his own money into the race. Kamena has been campaigning and raising money to win this seat for more than two years. And Lloyd sold her house in order to run, moving to Danville after redistricting in 2001 left her Pleasanton home outside the district’s boundaries.

Wilson, on the other hand, got into the race late after vacillating for weeks. His father died shortly before the filing deadline and the San Ramon mayor almost didn’t run. Political leaders who really like Wilson have been grousing for weeks that he wasn’t living up to his potential or working hard enough to win.

In yet another testimony to the unreliability of conventional wisdom, most thought (including me) that he would post a poor performance tonight.

Wilson’s victory won’t offer much comfort to Democratic primary winner, Joan Buchanan, a San Ramon Valley Unified School District trustee.

Democrats would have preferred to run against Rao, a former automobile dealership owner who campaigned heavily on a conservative, anti-tax platform.

Wilson is a polished, articulate and moderate politician who may appeal to independent-minded voters of both parties. This district recently flipped to a small Democratic Party registration advantage but it remains very competitive. Unlike tonight’s dismally low turnout, the November election with its presidential ticket is expected to draw record numbers of voters.

A manual tally of mail-in results from Alameda and Contra Costa counties plus a few votes posted from Sacramento and San Joaquin counties puts San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson and Robert Rao nearly tied with roughly 30 percent each of the 18,549 votes cast.

Rao of Livermore had 5,644 votes compared to 5,693 for Wilson.

Judy Biviano Lloyd of Danville is in second place with 22. percent of 4,104 votes followed by Scott Kamena of Livermore with 17 percent or 3,108 votes.

This surprised me. I expected the early results race to be between Rao and Kamena. Each man put out quite a bit of early mail. Rao spent a lot of his own money. And Wilson’s campaign fell far short of what most expected.

We’ll see how the results track through the evening.

Headline corrected on 6/4/08. I mistakenly listed Lloyd rather than Wilson as being tied for the lead. Lisa v.

The eight state Assembly candidates in two sharply contested East Bay primaries raised nearly $625,000 between March 18 and May 17, the dates of the most recent campaign finance reporting period.

In the Republican Assembly District 15 primary, where four candidates are battling it out for the chance to go up against the Democratic nominee in November, retired entrepreneur Robert Rao of Livermore has proven he is a man of his word.

Rao said at the start of his race that he would write as many checks as necessary to run a competitive operation. To date, he has given or loaned his campaign $$479,069. He reported $82,683 in the bank as of May 17 and $136,670 in unpaid bills.

Among the other three challengers in order of fund-raising prowess in the last period:

– Judy Biviano Lloyd, businessowner and Danville resident: $77,254 in contributions, $177,350 in the bank and $88,650 in unpaid bills. (Total contributions since January other than loans: $114,723)

– Abram Wilson, mayor of San Ramon (no web site): $42,313 in contributions, $46,620 in the bank and $101,065 in debts. (Total contributions since January other than loans: $52,938)

– Scott Kamena, optometrist from Livermore: $28,276 in contributions, $54,375 in the bank and $67,761 in debts. (Total contributions since January: $78,958)

The four Assembly District 14 Democratic candidates are furiously racing to next week’s finish line, too. Read the rest of this entry »

A business and labor coalition that includes the Contra Costa Deputy Sheriffs Association dropped a five-page campaign mailer and unveiled a web site today that outlines details of a civil lawsuit filed by elderly investors against county supervisor candidate and Assemblyman Guy Houston, R-San Ramon.

The Sheriffs Association, which supports incumbent Supervisor Mary Piepho of Discovery Bay, contributed to a PAC that paid for the mailer and its web site, www.TruthAboutGuyHouston.com, called the East Bay Business Coalition. The other top four contributers to the PAC listed on the mailer include Cetrus Software, Danville Associates, Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West PAC and the Black American PAC of Contra Costa County. (The PAC formed in 2006 to promote two sets of city council candidates in Concord and Brentwood.)

The anti-Houston mailer, titled “The Houston File: What Guy Houston Doesn’t Want You Know Before Election Day,” went to 30,000 high propensity voters in sprawling supervisor District 3, which includes portions of Walnut Creek, the San Ramon Valley and far eastern Contra Costa County.

Four elderly investors alleged that Houston defrauded them of more than $300,000 in a complex series of deals gone sour. Houston has denied any wrong-doing but he reached an out-of-court settlement agreement in 2007 with the investors. The legislator has declined to reveal its terms.

“There are too many unanswered questions about Guy Houston’s lawsuit,” said Deputy Sheriffs Association President Jim Bickert. “I think it says a lot of about Houston’s character that he wouldn’t reveal the terms of the settlement.”

It’s unclear whether this last-minute mailer will have an impact on Houston’s political career. He terms out of the Assembly this year but decided to run for county supervisor after rejecting a bid to run for Congress against Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton.

Here’s the rest of the mailer:

The tempest over Assemblyman Guy Houston’s use of taxpayer dollars to send mailers into his legislative district at the same time he’s running for a Contra Costa County supervisor race generated a couple of interesting questions. (Houston is running on the June 3 primary ballot against incumbent Supervisor Mary Nejedly Piepho.)

Did Houston depart from his past mailing practices in his state-funded office? And did he send the mailers to all of his constituents or just those that live in both his Assembly district and county supervisoral District 3?

On the first question, the answer is no. People insisting they have suddenly started seeing flyers from Houston in their mailboxes probably weren’t paying close attention.

I asked the Assembly Rules Committee how much many pieces Houston sent out in each of his six years in the Legislature and the results show a decline in the use of mailings since he took office.

In 2002-2003, his first year in office, Houston sent an average of 96,121 pieces a month. That number dropped to averages in the 70,000-range in the next several years. In the nine months of this fiscal year, Houston averaged half that rate at 40,572 pieces a month.

But as to the second query, Houston sent two different mailers mostly to constituents in cities also in District 3 including Discovery Bay, Byron, Danville, Alamo, Brentwood, Diablo and San Ramon. (I say “mostly” because he sent the pieces to several zip codes in Walnut Creek. The city is split into three supervisoral districts so it’s possible that some people received this mailer who do not live in District 3.).

On one of the mailers, the target audience makes sense. It specifically mentions Contra Costa County and how his bill, AB 2872, would increase the local share of property taxes coming back to the county budget for services.

But the second mailer focuses on the state water crisis, a subject that’s undeniably of interest to his constituents in Sacramento, San Joaquin and Alameda counties.

Read more for an annual breakdown of Houston’s mail pieces, postage and average pieces mailed per month:

Read the rest of this entry »

In a bipartisan move, Democratic state Sen. Tom Torlakson of Antioch endorsed today the re-election bid of Republican and Contra Costa County Supervisor Mary Nejedly Piepho.

Piepho is running against soon-to-be-termed-out GOP Assemblyman Guy Houston, her former boss and mentor.

“Mary and I don’t see eye-to-eye on all fiscal policies but I see her reaching out,” Torlakson said. “I’ve worked well with her on a number of things and I think she’s focused on getting things done and not staying in an ideological box.”

As examples, Torlakson cited Piepho’s support for his bills that would have levied a small fee on divorce and other official filings to help pay for domestic violence prevention programs. She supported his proposal to raise the real estate transaction fee to pay for a housing trust fund. And she endorsed his successful bill to double fines on Vasco Road, a stretch of highway riddled with accidents.

Houston did not support either the housing trust fund or the domestic violence funding bills, Torlakson said.

The senator also disapproves of Houston’s decision to run against a woman who not only worked for the Assemblyman but was also recruited by Houston to run for county supervisor and state Assembly.

“Mary is there, doing the job and she deserves to be re-elected,” Torlakson said. “Some people may have gripes about this or that, but I was a (Contra Costa County) supervisor for 16 years and you can’t please people all the time. ”

The senator has prepared an endorsement letter that Piepho will use in her campaign materials.

Torlakson’s endorsement will no doubt further alienate fiscal hawks who argue that Piepho is not fiscally conservative enough for their tastes and have thrown their support behind Houston.

But she was unlikely to win their votes anyway, and Torlakson is a very popular lawmaker in Contra Costa County. His support could help bring moderates of both parties into her camp.
Torlakson also terms out this year. He is running for a third term in the state Assembly prior to a run at statewide office in 2010, the state superintendent of public instruction. (Prior to serving eight years in the state Senate, he served only two of the three maximum terms in the Assembly allowed under term limits.)

The only Bay Area Assembly seat with a Republican party registration advantage has turned blue.

Sometime between Jan. 22 and April 4 — the dates of the two most recent registration reports issued by the California Secretary of State — the numbers of Democrats in Assembly District 15 overtook Republicans.

As of April 4, there were 110,577 Democrats, a lead of 2,664 voters over Republicans at 107,913.

On Jan. 22, Republicans had a slim, 272-voter margin with 106,983 members compared with 106,711 for Democrats.

Interestingly, registration in both parties rose in Assembly District 15 in the same time period while Republicans lost members statewide. (Click here to see the statewide figures.)

In October 2006, prior the re-election of Assemblyman Guy Houston, R-San Ramon, Republicans had a 2 percentage point registration advantage. (Click here to see a map of the district, which includes the San Ramon Valley and portions of far eastern Contra Costa County.)

Houston is the last remaining Republican left in a Bay Area partisan elected seat and he will term out this year (He’s running for Contra Costa County supervisor against incumbent Supervisor Mary Nejedly Piepho.)

Why has this happened?

Until I do further reporting, I can’t say with total certainty but a couple of things immediately come to mind.

Obviously, Democrats are charged up about the presidential election and the chance to take the White House.

And second, the local Democratic clubs of the area have displayed extraordinary stamina when it comes to putting volunteers out at local farmer’s markets and post offices to register voters.

Anyone have any other ideas? I’m curious why GOP registration rose in AD15 while it went down statewide.

A bipartisan bill to equalize California county shares of property taxes passed unanimously today out of the Assembly Local Government Committee.

A.B. 2872 is co-authored by Assemblymen Guy Houston, R-San Ramon, and Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord. It would phase in a reform of the 1979 formula used to return a portion of property taxes to county government operations.

Contra Costa County government receives 11 percent of the property taxes its residents pay compared to the state average of 17 percent. If the bill passes, it would bring an estimated additional $80 million to Contra Costa County.

It’s unclear if this bill will survive further legislative scrutiny. Counties that receive a higher than average share of the property taxes have little incentive to alter a system that favors them, especially at a time when the state revenues are plummeting.

Read on for Houston’s press release on the bill:
Read the rest of this entry »

Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, has been named chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee.

Under DeSaulnier, the Transportation Committee may never be the same. The panel’s vice chairman also sports a name with French origins, Assemblyman Mike Duvall, R-Brea.

As the unofficial Assembly “French Caucus,” DeSaulnier says the pair will institute immediate changes. The committee will now serve wine and baguettes, take two-hour lunches and have afternoon naps. Members will also receive an eight-week, paid vacation every summer.

(He’s kidding.)

And this is different from what they do now in what way?

(I’m kidding. French bread has way too many carbs.)

Seriously, though, it’s a prestigious if short gig.

DeSaulnier is leaving the Assembly at the end of the year. He’s running unopposed for the state Senate in the upcoming Democratic primary election on June 3.

He will have a Republican opponent in November, political unknown businessman Christian Amsberry of Walnut Creek. But barring a massive political misstep, DeSaulnier is highly likely to prevail in November the heavily Democratic Senate District 7.

DeSaulnier landed the Assembly post as part of a leadership cascade that started when outgoing Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez stripped two members of their chairmanships after they conspired against him in the fight to name Assemblywoman Karen Bass as the new speaker.

As a result, the former Transportation Committee Chairman and Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, is moving to chair the banking committee.