the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Short Attention Span

(March 13, 2008) A couple of weeks ago former Arcata City Councilmember Elizabeth Conner told us that she was “seriously considering” a run for supervisor in the wake of long-time Third District incumbent John Woolley’s surprising decision to take his name out of the running for this year’s election. We assumed that Conner was speaking euphemistically. Political language has been so debased over the years that automatically we took “seriously considering” to mean “definitely going to run, but can’t yet say so for strategic political reasons.”

Well, shame on us. Conner may be a savvy player in all sorts of policy matters, but her soul (and her language) have survived her intense exposure to the machinery of democracy. We should have known that Conner would say what she means and mean what she says. And so, on Tuesday, just before a Board of Supervisors’ meeting focusing on low-income housing — her signature issue — she told us that she would not be running after all.

Conner said that she finally decided that she’d rather stay focused on core policy issues rather than spread out over a variety of them, as a supervisor must. “It’s not where I want to be, and hopefully I can be a lot more effective on the issues I care about — affordable housing and planning — on the outside,” Conner said. “I’ll probably try to be working with all the candidates to strengthen their position and bring attention to the affordable housing issue.”

But look out, because two brand new candidates are jumping into what’s becoming a very swampy Third District race. They are Lee Ulansey of Kneeland and Christopher Lehman of Arcata. Both paid their money to the county elections office and pulled papers earlier this week, just ahead of the Wednesday (March 12) deadline. We can offer you a short and no doubt incomplete pr√©cis of their credentials.

Ulansey was thrust into the political limelight late last year. He emerged as a leader of the coalition that sprang up to oppose the county’s moves to restrict building on lands zoned for timber production. He is the head of HumCPR, the organization that was born of that movement. He looks to be the sole conservative in the race. He couldn’t be reached by deadline.

Lehman is a relative newcomer to the local political scene, but not to Humboldt County or to politics in general. He’s a 30-year-old native of the county who moved away to go to school at UC Davis, then ended up working as a legislative aide and a fundraiser for State SenatorDon “The Don” Perata, the Democratic party boss out of the East Bay. Though he’s still working in state politics, he moved back to Arcata a couple of years ago.

“I just really feel like Humboldt County is at an important moment in its history,” Lehman said when asked why he decided to throw in. “We’ve really been a resource economy for the last hundred years or so, and we’re really starting to change over.”

Meanwhile, as of Tuesday afternoon Arcata City Councilmember Paul Pitino, activist Mark Lovelace and Humboldt Bay District Commissioner Mike Wilsonwere all still in the running.

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