What The Hell Is Going On In Brisbane?

Politics on the Peninsula Has Taken a Weird Turn

You don't care about Brisbane, California. Even if you know where Brisbane is, you don't care about it. Even if you live in Brisbane, chances are you still don't care about it that much. Yet this city of less than 5,000 has joined a rapidly expanding club of cities on the San Francisco Peninsula whose municipal politics have taken a turn toward fractious bickering and partisan backstabbing.

Brisbane's woes revolve around the latest vote on who was going to be mayor of the city. In contrast to large cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, or New York, Brisbane (and most peninsula cities) doesn't directly elect its mayor. Rather the elected city council chooses one of their own to serve as mayor for a short term, often a year. The mayor's role is mostly ceremonial and the title is mostly there for the purposes of padding councilors' resumes as they look towards running for office at the County, Sacramento, or D.C. This aspect is also part of why mayoral terms are so short and why they tend to rotate among members. Rather than fight over a coveted title whose only purpose is so you can call yourself Mayor Johnson in your inevitable run for higher office, why not just wait until your turn comes up in the customary order? Normally this process passes completely unnoticed by the public.

But that's not what happened last December in Brisbane. Mayor Pro Tempore Cliff Lentz was intended to be elected mayor by a customary process that was supposed to be preordained and perfunctory. Instead, the rest of the 5-member city council balked and appointed one of their own to the position. Supposedly this was due to a violation of the Brown Act so minor, petty, and distant at the time that it strains credulity to claim that this was the actual reason. Other explanations range from squabbles over Lentz endorsing challengers to sitting councilors, to issues with Bribane schools, to concerns that Lentz, who had vocally opposed the construction of housing in the past, was still not enough of a NIMBY for the rest of the city council. In truth, the real reasons for denying Lentz his mayoral position will probably remain a mystery, and frankly, they probably aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

But Brisbane does not exist in a vacuum. Many other Bay Area City Councils have seen similarly rancorous fights in recent months. Millbrae also has conflict over mayoral appointments, supposedly spurred by the previous denial of a councilor's expected mayoral appointment in 2020. Menlo Park saw a brief standoff between outgoing councilor Ray Mueller and the rest of the council over whether Mueller would be allowed to vote on who would fill the vacancy he would leave on his ascension to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. And in San Mateo, a combination of a council vacancy and a mayoral appointment lead to a standoff between YIMBY-aligned and NIMBY-aligned members, which included accusations of extortion and vote buying. The end result was that the position of mayor of San Mateo was vacant for the first time in 128 years, until a tenuous agreement was reached. San Mateo is not even out of their political quagmire as now-Mayor Amourence Lee is now facing a recall petition supported by former State Senator and NIMBY power broker Jerry Hill.

So why is this happening? The Peninsula would not seem to be a likely candidate for this sort of political knife fighting. Sitting in between the shadows of San Francisco and San Jose, they have had a long run of economic good fortune ever since the rise of Silicon Valley. Unlike the suburbs of other big cities like D.C. or New York, the Peninsula was never the site of big partisan swings. It has voted for Democrats in the Presidency, House, Senate, Governor's mansion, and state legislature since the 80s. Every person discussed so far is a Democrat.

One possible explanation lies in the realm of housing. Being suburbs of San Francisco and San Jose, most Peninsula cities have had a long history of NIMBY politics. Most elected city councilors supported each other in blocking the building of denser housing, both for ideological reasons and political ones. But with the ascent of the YIMBY movement, both at the state level and in some local offices, this consensus has been shattered. Similar to the way the Civil Rights Movement caused national politics to polarize around identity, YIMBYism may have similarly polarized Peninsula municipal politics around housing. When the consensus over Jim Crow broke, political actors who before could work together, safe in the knowledge that any disagreements they had could be papered over behind closed doors, began playing hardball in public. Such a dynamic may be replicating itself in Peninsular politics. The creation of pro- and anti-housing blocs within cities gives ambitious politicians appealing targets to snipe at for political benefit. Many of the previously mentioned showdowns have pitted opposing factions in the housing debate against each other. Combine this with an environment where state housing law has finally acquired teeth and an Attorney General who is actually willing to punish cities that flout their responsibility to permit the housing that state law obligates them to, and suddenly the outcomes of city politics matter in a way that they hadn't in the past.

What is to be done about this? Ultimately, rancorous politics in the Bay Area are a necessary consequence of housing politics shifting in a more YIMBY direction. Much as congressional civility suffered a slow and steady decline as national politics became about something significant (racial justice), perhaps the end of collegiality within the city council is an unfortunate side effect of the shift of Bay Area politics in a pro-housing direction.