Who's on the Ballot: Wendy Aragon, Dan Choi, Brigitte Daviia, Anita Grier, John Rizzo, Thea Selby, and engineer Rodrigo Santos will vie for three four-year seats; William Walker, Amy Bachrach, and Thomas Moyer will vie for one two-year seat.
Believe in yourself. The oft-repeated mantra is perhaps taken too seriously by Rodrigo Santos, a candidate for City College of San Francisco's now-defunct Board of Trustees. Though the former Republican (as of 2008) received an endorsement from the local Democratic Party this election, Santos is competing with six other candidates for three open seats. City College is on life support, and may soon depend on these candidates to help revive it.
Historically, San Francisco mayors haven't cared about City College, which is odd, given that it trains nearly 100,000 students every year (many of whom are San Franciscans).
But the college is funded by the state, meaning mayors can focus on more urgent problems. That is, until City College entered full-blown crisis mode when an independent entity flirted with threats to shutter the school in 2012. This forced Lee to pay attention to CCSF at last, or at least get Santos to: The mayor appointed him to an open seat on the college board.
Santos did not return our calls, but if we were cynical, we could ruminate on one possible motivation for the engineer to run for the board. Community colleges are build-happy, often constructing superfluous new campuses. Santos would have had voting power over any number of future construction projects that would almost certainly benefit colleagues in his field.
As the head of the Building Inspection Commission from 2001 to 2005, Santos (and others) regularly oversaw projects he had a financial stake in, per a city audit. FBI investigations ensued. It's not an incredible logical leap to think he'd enjoy the same privileges at City College.
His donors then and now included architects, market-rate housing developers, and other folks who build flashy, expensive structures. On the other end of the political spectrum, candidate John Rizzo raised money from former progressive former Mayor Art Agnos. But the developers believe in Santos, and he sallies forth.
Santos flipped to the Democratic party in 2012, and with the aid of Lee raised more than $100,000 for his first actual election for college board. He outspent some of his opponents 10 to 1, turning him into the Donald Trump of down-ballot political races few people care about.
War chest and incumbency be damned, he lost his 2012 race. This was no slim contest either, as an opponent had nearly twice his votes. Now Santos is at it again, running for a college board that hasn't met in more than a year (it was disbanded by the state, and now a "Special Trustee with Extraordinary Powers," Bob Agrella, calls the shots. Rumor has it the state will reinstate the board soon).
But this time Santos is even assigning names to those who believe in him. According to his endorsements mailer, he's backed by the "SEIU 1012 (CCSF chapter)." The local is actually the SEIU 1021, a typo that's even worse than it looks, as the SEIU's sole community college board endorsement was of Santos' rival, candidate Aragon.
But despite his netting a few major endorsements, including Lee's (again), no one believes in college board candidate Rodrigo Santos more than Structural Engineer Rodrigo Santos. A look at his campaign filings show that of the nearly $90,000 he raised for his new college board campaign, $70,000 was from his own pockets.
Somebody has to believe in him, right?
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