https://portside.org/2024-10-19/richmond-progressive-alliances-lessons-organizers

On a Saturday evening last spring, Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) cochair Claudia Jimenez hosted a high-spirited rally and party with two hundred supporters of her reelection campaign for the Richmond City Council. Jimenez is a forty-six-year-old immigrant from Colombia, who worked as an architect and community organizer before seeking elected office four years ago in her diverse, blue-collar city of 114,000, which is 80 percent non-white.

On the seven-member council, which includes an RPA majority, she has immersed herself in municipal finance questions, public safety issues, and the long-standing challenge of making Chevron, the city’s largest employer, more responsive to community concerns about its environmental impact.

Along with Mayor Eduardo Martinez, a retired Richmond schoolteacher, Jimenez backed a 2024 ballot initiative — dubbed the “Make Polluters Pay Tax,” which pressured the giant oil refiner into making a financial settlement with the city, that will add $550 million to its treasury over the next decade.

However, at her campaign kickoff last spring, she ticked off a list of accomplishments less dramatic than jousting with Big Oil or passing one of the first city council resolutions in the nation opposing “all existing and any future military aid to Israel” because of its “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza.

Instead, Jimenez reminded her audience of city council work on traffic safety, youth job creation, main library renovation, parks and recreation program improvements, pay raises for city workers, and reallocation of police department funds to pay for other public safety programs, including the creation of a “mental health response team” that can respond to some 911 calls that don’t require armed officers.

“I am running once again,” she said, “because I believe local government can be a force for good in people’s everyday lives . . . that public resources must be protected and used to uplift the community.” As an immigrant, working woman, and mother, Jimenez stressed that she was “very practical and goal oriented,” while remaining a “progressive dreamer.” As a Richmond city councilor (and its current vice mayor), she pledged to “never stop dreaming about ways we can make this a better world.”

Part of Broader Movement

Jimenez is part of a growing “municipalist” movement filled with grassroots activists pursuing similar dreams and practical policy goals. They are waging reform campaigns for public office at the local level around the country, as part of electoral coalitions that are multiracial, multigenerational, and working-class oriented.

The RPA is a rare long-distance runner among these “independent political organizations” (IPOs). Twenty years ago, Green Party members in Richmond, dissident Latino Democrats, socialists of varying stripes, and other local activists united against Chevron’s longtime control of city hall. Since then, RPA candidates have appeared on the ballot more than twenty times and won twice as often as they have lost.

At a municipal auditorium event on September 21, the RPA celebrated its twentieth birthday by highlighting its current three-member “Team Richmond” slate for the city council and paying tribute to its founders. They include Gayle McLaughlin, a former two-term mayor of the city, who is stepping down from the council in January. McLaughlin has won five citywide or council races since her first RPA campaign in 2004.

Twenty years ago, the term “municipalism” — which refers to local organizing or electoral activity aimed at revitalizing cities — was not yet widely used. Only the Vermont Progressive Party (and its antecedents) had a continuous record of municipal election success, based on year-round political organizing, which dated back to Bernie Sanders’s four terms as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s.

Relevant lessons, drawn from the experience of more than 1,200 municipal officials elected as candidates of the Socialist Party (SP) during its early-twentieth-century heyday, are pretty much unknown or forgotten. Only recently have activists had invaluable historical guides like Shelton Stromquist’s, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, case studies on “radical municipalism” abroad in Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement, or organizing tool kits like Building Power in Place, just published by the Solidarity Research Center in Los Angeles.

Learning the Ropes

Two decades ago, with the exception of some Richmond natives like community organizer Andres Soto, RPA founders had little local political experience, despite being well-versed on national and international issues. Like their working-class predecessors profiled in Claiming the City, they had to familiarize themselves with the workings of a local government that was long the domain of political insiders, and not very welcoming to “outsiders.”

From a vocal minority on a city council long dominated by the business community, RPA standard-bearers eventually became the driving force behind left-liberal majorities that helped Richmond become nationally known for its innovative public policy initiatives.

Nationwide, about half of the two hundred elected officials affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are members of city councils or commissions. Seven are mayors, including Martinez in Richmond and Emma Mulvaney-Stanak in Burlington, a former Vermont Progressive Party leader who now presides over a city council on which Progressives have almost as many seats as Democrats.

How has the RPA managed to operate year-round for two decades as a multi-issue, membership-based organization and make steady electoral progress in the face of well-funded corporate opposition? For a longer answer to that question, see Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of An American City, which chronicled the RPA’s first twelve years. Based on subsequent reporting and interviews conducted lately, here’s ten organizational tips that may be helpful to others on the Left trying to create or sustain similar multi-issue, electoral formations.

Rule 1: Run “Corporate Free” — and on a Team!

Post Citizens United, all office seekers at every level of government in the United States try to convince their constituents of one thing: neither direct donations from wealthy donors or business interests nor unlimited spending on their behalf by corporate super PACs will have any impact on their behavior in office.

Here’s the context for that kind of magical thinking in Richmond. A voter population that’s overwhelmingly registered Democrats participates in “nonpartisan” elections for city council and mayor. Because candidates are identified on the ballot only by their listed occupation, rather than any party affiliation, there’s no familiar clue about who is running to the left, right, or in the middle.

From its inception, Richmond progressives broke with local “politics as usual” by only fielding candidates who belonged to the RPA and ran “corporate free.” Then and now, this makes rejection or acceptance of money from business interests, large or small, a much-needed litmus test.

No other players in Richmond politics have ever been willing to take “The Pledge” — even liberal Democrats like Tom Butt, a two-term mayor elected ten years ago. (His 2014 victory was aided by RPA candidate Mike Parker dropping out of a four-way race — in contemporary Nouveau Front Populaire fashion — to avoid splitting the vote and putting Chevron back in control of city hall.)

In California, office seekers who try to run in “corporate free” fashion above the local level, face far more business-backed “independent spending” than Big Oil and Big Soda has ever deployed against the RPA in Richmond. (Over two election cycles a decade ago, that amounted to $6 million.)

Despite such heavily funded opposition, RPA candidates have won consistently by fielding multicandidate slates, with a common program. And sharing resources, rather than competing for them as individual political entrepreneurs.

Rule 2: Make Creative Use of City Hall (and Its Farm Teams)

After McLaughlin was originally elected mayor of Richmond — in a stunning, upset victory — she helped strengthen grassroots organizing in the city by seeding an array of city commissions, boards, and committees with like-minded activists rarely considered for such roles in the past.

This enabled some of her appointees — including Beckles and Martinez — to develop a further track record of community service that enabled them to become successful city council or mayoral candidates.

During eight years as mayor, McLaughlin built lasting relationships with a wide range of community groups and strengthened ties between city hall and Richmond’s forty neighborhood councils, another point of entry into local politics for RPA members.

The RPA and its allies have conducted city hall training sessions to recruit younger and more diverse candidates for appointed positions on the Richmond planning and design review boards; a police oversight body that investigates citizen complaints; and other commissions dealing with arts and culture, parks and recreation, libraries, housing, and economic development.

As one such RPA recruit, I served for six years on Richmond’s Personnel Board, which OKs new city job descriptions, offers occasional advice to its HR Department, and holds hearings on worker complaints.

In one grievance appeal filed by the Richmond Police Officers Association (RPOA), we ruled against Richmond’s then police chief when the latter denied time off to attend union training. In another RPOA case, we sided with the city (and its taxpayers) by rejecting a multimillion-dollar claim, based on a fanciful interpretation of contract language about negotiated wage increase “parity” for city workers.

Rule 3: Help “Electeds” Do Their Job, While Holding Them Accountable

Getting elected to or holding public office as a working-class progressive is not easy, particularly if you have a demanding day job. Richmond’s current mayor is a retired teacher so he can devote full time to his duties — even though Richmond, like many cities, delegates day-to-day administration of municipal affairs to an appointed city manager.

Current mayor Martinez had made the most of a dynamic three-member staff, which includes former RPA cochair Shiva Mishek, a former Rent Board member; former RPA intern and community activist Tony Tamayo; and, former Chevron refinery worker and United Steelworkers (USW) Local 5 leader, B. K. White, who is in charge of “just transition” planning for Richmond.

But, if you’re a part-time city councilor in a smaller city like Richmond, you generally don’t have personal staff help. You must prepare for and attend long meetings on weekday evenings and be available to attend all kinds of community events on weekends. Twice a month, on Fridays, Richmond city councilors get packets that are 400 to 600 pages long.

These documents relate to the official business on their agenda the following Tuesday night. To cast informed votes — and be more than a rubber stamp for the full-time city bureaucracy or unwitting tool of business interests — they must wade through this pile of city contracts, budget materials, consultant reports, memos from city department heads and lawyers, and draft resolutions before the meeting starts.

That’s where the RPA’s Council Action Team and other task forces and committees come into play, as support groups for progressive councilmembers. These community volunteers — with expertise in areas including taxes, budgets, housing, education, economic development, and environmental action — help individual councilmembers prepare for upcoming meetings. RPA subcommittees also mobilize concerned citizens to attend city hall meetings and make ample use of “public comment” periods to support or oppose measures pending before the council.

Rule 4: Develop Labor, Community, and National Allies

The RPA has benefitted from its longtime synergy with advocacy organizations that regularly rally their local constituencies in a similar fashion. These non-electoral groups include Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and Reimagine Richmond, which recruits young people of color to become more involved in civic affairs and wants to reduce crime “through community-centered, non-law enforcement solutions.”

Unions representing Richmond city workers, local teachers, or nurses, doctors, and therapists at Kaiser Richmond Medical Center have been solid supporters of the RPA and its electoral work. Their backing, plus picket-line alliances with Chevron refinery workers represented by USW Local 5, has been a much-needed counterweight to anti-RPA campaigning by RPOA and building trades unions always on the side of Chevron and local developers.

Since 2014, when Senator Bernie Sanders keynoted the largest preelection rally in RPA history, he has been a continuing personal endorser of RPA candidates for city and state office. Our Revolution, created after Sanders’s first presidential campaign, has also been a consistent supporter and valued helper with RPA campaigns.

The RPA is also affiliated with the California Progressive Alliance, a loose network of like-minded groups throughout the state. A proposal to become part of the national Workings Families Party in order to gain additional outside resources was considered and rejected by the group six years ago (with this author arguing, as a rank-and-file RPA member, in favor of that affiliation).

Rule 5: Reimagine Public Safety

Four years ago, progressives around the country hoped that Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killing of George Floyd would lead to meaningful police reform. That didn’t happen in many places. Worse yet, calls for “defunding the police” led to major blowback at the polls in Minneapolis and other places.

In Richmond, the city council tried to build on a widely acclaimed “community policing” experiment launched in 2005 by voting in favor of what local organizers hailed as “one of the most important police budget reallocations in the country.” Critics of spending 40 percent of the city’s general fund revenue on policing originally sought a 15 percent cut in the RPD budget.

Instead, in 2021, the council approved cuts of 5 percent a year for the next two years, which freed up more money for the Office of Neighborhood Safety, a seventeen-year-old program to reduce gun violence. Other funds were reallocated to a new civilian-staffed Community Crisis Response Program, and expanded services for Richmond youth and unhoused people.

In 2023, Richmond — once one of the most violent cities in the country — had its lowest homicide rate in fifty years, although halfway through this year, that same death toll (eight) has already been matched. For the time being at least, such tangible improvements make it harder for RPA critics to exploit public safety concerns for their own political advantage.

Rule 6: Push Popular Ballot Measures

If your municipality allows local referendums on public policy issues, get measures on the ballot during election years that will boost turnout for progressive candidates — if you’ve picked the right issue.

The RPA had its worst year ever at the polls in 2012 when its candidates backed a soda tax championed by one of its members on the city council (a Kaiser doctor not running for r-election that year). This proved to be racially divisive and drew heavy outside spending by the beverage industry, which defeated the measure and helped tank the candidacies of two RPA candidates.

Four years later, a successful grassroots campaign for the adoption of rent control in Richmond led to a much better electoral outcome for two younger RPA members. One was twenty-six-year-old Melvin Willis, a local high school graduate and skilled organizer, who worked for ACCE, the tenant rights group that got rent regulation on the ballot.

This year, Willis is seeking a third term on the city council. Both he and his two RPA running mates have campaigned not just for election to office but for ballot measures designed to improve municipal election procedures (via adoption of ranked-choice voting) and make Chevron pay its fair share of local taxes. As noted above, the RPA and its allies (APEN and CBE) used a proposed 2024 ballot measure calling for a new tax on locally refined oil to trigger negotiations with Chevron over a financial settlement. Those talks led in August to an agreement requiring the company to pay Richmond $550 million over ten years, in return for the city withdrawing the initiative to avoid further litigation over it.

Rule 7: Link Local Problems to Global Ones (but Don’t Overdo It!)

On behalf of the people of Richmond — or at the behest of advocacy groups among them — progressives on the city council have a long history of passing resolutions on controversial “big picture” issues, seemingly unrelated to local governance.

Even when overly wordy and unnecessarily inflammatory, such statements generally offer good advice to less progressive policymakers at the federal level. For example, anything war-related usually mentions the need for “new national priorities” — i.e., spending less money on the Pentagon and more federal tax dollars on housing, health care, education, and environmental protection in places like Richmond.

Nevertheless, with great election-year regularity, RPA foes lambast its resolution passers on the council for triggering long and contentious meetings about problems that can’t be solved locally, or even at the county or state level.

Last year’s expression of solidarity with Palestinians — still under US-funded military attack a year later — immediately drew social media accusations that local progressives are pro-Hamas. Other critics accused the council majority of insensitivity to Jewish residents, some of whom now feel “unsafe” because Richmond called for a cease-fire in Gaza. Opposition candidates this fall are already blaming any local problem — from potholes to trash dumping to dangerous driving (aka “sideshows”), and illegal fire-works displays — on council incumbents too preoccupied with seeking peace in the Middle East.

To narrow the basis for such criticism, it’s best to stay away from performative anti-imperialist politics and related sloganeering. Focus instead on concrete demands like cutting the military budget and redirecting those savings to cities in need or taking steps at the city level, like ending any municipal investment in weapons manufacturers (which Richmond did in May to follow up on its Gaza cease-fire call last October).

Rule 8: Survive Defeats and Defections

Since its founding, four RPA activists sought city council seats but did not win. Several others, including current mayor Martinez, had to run more than once to succeed. Over the past twelve years, three RPA members, who served one city council term or less, ended up losing the confidence of fellow progressives because they cast controversial votes on unpopular development projects.

Two of these RPA candidates decided not to run again. The other, a promising young Latina activist, lost a reelection bid, in a crowded field of other candidates, because she had been, in effect, “deselected” by too many original supporters.

In a contentious but democratic vote at a membership meeting not long after, a founding father of the RPA was then removed from its elected steering committee because his organizational behavior, according to some critics, had become hostile and disruptive. One long-serving city councilor quietly resigned from the RPA in solidarity with him, while remaining a stalwart of the council’s now progressive supermajority.

This whole process would have been a lot messier without an official structure, which the group lacked during the first decade of its existence, as an informal political club. In 2015, members finally approved bylaws. This simple, five-page document creates a twelve-person steering committee, headed by two cochairs, a treasurer, and secretary — all elected every two years by dues-paying members. Prior to that, critics of the group often criticized its campaigns for democratization of city government as “hypocritical” because its own internal decision-making involved only a few people, operating in not very transparent fashion.

Rule 9: Rely on Membership Dues, Not Just Philanthropy

Like any organization, the RPA still has its weaknesses. One, at the moment, is fewer dues-paying members — down to less than 100 from a peak of nearly 280 after a big election win over Chevron-backed candidates ten years ago. That struggle required building an overlapping “key list” of 450 “supporters” and a friendly voter database of 3,400.

A dues hike a few years ago — from $12 a year to $60 — made annual membership drives more challenging, unless credit card payments were already authorized and automatically renewed. Today, the RPA’s annual income from membership dues is one-third of what it was pre-COVID. A large private bequest from a recently deceased RPA leader, plus a multiyear grant from a progressive foundation, is more than compensating for that. A group run mainly by volunteers in the past is now lucky enough to have three part-time or full-time staffers.

Yet every two years, the Alliance still faces the additional challenge of helping its candidates raise enough money to win office or get reelected while still having a big enough annual operating budget to pay non-campaign expenses like $35,000 for the rental of a year-round office and meeting space.

In some election cycles, key community allies try to tap the same local donors on the RPA’s list to get rent control passed or, this year, a “polluters tax” enacted. These non-electoral groups have always relied on the usual funding sources for progressive nonprofits: grants from social change foundations and wealthy donors, while counting anyone on their mailing list as a “member.” (I recently rejoined the Working Families Party; all it took was pushing a button — and, even there, no dues or donation was required.)

Older labor activists in the RPA have long stressed the importance of paying dues to the group. In unions, this personal financial commitment is a prerequisite for attending meetings, running for union office, and participating in any other forms of rank-and-file decision-making, like contract ratification votes. However, when Reimagining Richmond leader Marisol Cantú, conducted a “Listening Project” for the RPA two years ago to get helpful community feedback on its work, she found that “paying membership dues was a turnoff.”

More familiar with online networks and the organizational culture of local nonprofits funded by foundation grants, some younger respondents wanted a “diversity of options” to qualify for RPA membership, like doing a certain amount of volunteer work. To mark its twentieth anniversary and attract more younger dues payers, annual membership, with voting rights included, now costs only $20. Another Listening Project finding, according to Cantú, was that “new members won’t join if they don’t feel represented.” That’s where passing the torch comes in.

Rule 10: Pass the Torch

The RPA has tried to be cross-generational, as well as multiracial. It now includes “elders” who were part of the founding generation of the group or joined after that but are now retirees in their late sixties or seventies. There’s also a middle layer of activists in their forties or early fifties, often with families, younger kids, and full-time jobs. Finally, there are newer recruits drawn from local high schools and community colleges, Richmond-based youth organizations, and a talented pool of college graduates who returned home to serve their community.