How the Greens Got the Blues

Two years ago, a jubilant Green Party celebrated the election here of the nation’s first-ever Green majority on a city council. With three seats on the five-seat council, the Greens had their first chance to freely implement their eco-friendly, less-is-more philosophy in small-town America.

This liberal, North Coast college town seemed the perfect showcase for a party that has struggled for more than a decade to become a force in national, state and local politics.

But the Greens quickly learned that in municipal government, the path to glory is paved with potholes, garbage, recycling bins, panhandlers and all the other mundane facets of urban life that tend to obscure the big picture.

Two years after their victory gained global attention, the Greens have a handful of modest accomplishments to point to and a dearth of party activists willing to run in this November’s election, even though their council majority is at stake.

Ultimately, Arcata may come to illustrate the problems facing the Greens as they strive to establish credibility across California and the rest of the nation.

“The reality is that we are a political party of people who don’t want to do politics,” said Melanie Williams, one of the founders of the party here and a political science instructor at Humboldt State University.

Williams says she gives the Green council members just a B for creativity and civility, while granting them an A for hard work these last two years. She is dismayed, she says, that their work didn’t seem to inspire other Greens to run in the upcoming council race.

“We did a lot of arm-twisting,” she said, “but nobody wanted to do it.”

The party finally settled for Bradley Freeman, 52, a political unknown and former landscaper now between jobs.

Freeman is hardly campaigning, spending just $44 of his own money so far and refusing to take any donations. He is running, he says, “because someone has to make decisions. I would rather it be me than conservatives.”

The only other candidates are the current mayor, Democrat Jim Test, who is expected to easily win reelection, and Robert Noble, a Libertarian and political unknown. Two seats are at stake.

The biggest problem, Williams says, is that being inside City Hall is a lot less attractive to most Greens than being outside.

“The town hall stuff is pretty boring,” she said over morning coffee at Los Bagels, a bakery favored by Greens as much for its smoked-tofu bagel spread as for the fact that it is locally owned. “How do you stay in the streets and work in town hall without making that an either-or choice?”

Jennifer Hanan, one of the Greens elected to the council two years ago, agrees with her former instructor’s analysis. After her term ends in two years, Hanan said, she will never run for public office again.

“I’ve learned a lot about the difference between being a person on the outside, trying to make change, and being within government,” the 31-year-old Hanan said. “On the outside, I could organize things,” such as the fight she led before running for the council to block a housing development and industrial park. “I’m looking forward to getting out.”

Hanan says she was shocked at the political intrigues that exist even in a town the size of Arcata, which for two decades has been governed mostly by liberal Democrats. With 17,000 residents--7,500 of them students at Humboldt State--Arcata has fewer than 2,000 registered Republicans. It has long had a reputation for being the most liberal city in a county filled with dead and dying lumber towns.

Watching From the Sidelines

Mayor Test, who has been active in Arcata politics for more than a decade, likes to say the town’s Democrats were Green before there were Greens. Asked to name anything the council has done in the past two years that could be singled out as “Green,” he draws a blank.

Even those who most feared the coming of a Green majority now are hard-pressed to name specific things the Greens have done that they don’t like.

“When the Greens got elected, I called them the eco-groovy, granola-eating, renegade environmentalists,” said John Peterson, owner of Arcata Muffler and a conservative lifelong Arcatan. “Now, I don’t even keep up with what the council is doing. They do what they want to do. I try to go to work and go home.”

Carl Pellatz, a Republican and former mayor who was defeated when he ran for reelection two years ago, says Republicans aren’t fielding a candidate this year.

“We’re just going to sit back and let them do themselves in,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of despair. There is a lot of anger in this town. There is a good chunk of the population who absolutely feel they don’t have anyone on the council who will listen to them. Businesspeople, people who have lived here a number of years, feel shut out. So we’ve decided to stay on the sidelines for two years.”

Arcata is the kind of town where Councilman Jason Kirkpatrick--the first Green elected here--chose to live because it had six vegetarian restaurants and was named one of the 10 best American cities to live in by Vegetarian Times.

It is a place where nearly 50% of garbage is recycled, where human waste is composted and used to fertilize the municipal forest, where the Earth flag flies alongside the U.S. flag in the downtown plaza, and hundreds of young drifters congregate on warm summer days to sing, chant or panhandle passersby.

Many of the homes and businesses are restored Victorians built by lumber barons in the last century, and logging trucks carrying redwoods still rumble down U.S. 101, which bisects the town. But the annual parade is the All Species parade, featuring townsfolk dressed as salmon, spotted owls and other animals.

Such a place seemed fertile ground for testing Green social and political theories. But Green council members found it hard to see eye to eye on some key issues. They discovered that others had to be abandoned for lack of public support and still others were just not affordable in an era when cities must scramble to pay for basic services.

Hanan found herself at odds with her fellow Greens--Kirkpatrick and Robert Ornelas--shortly after the election. The city’s 20-year-old recycling program was operating at a loss, and the nonprofit agency running it asked for a monthly subsidy from the city to keep it going.

Hanan criticized the program as inefficient and demanded that the agency be forced to open its books. After weeks of bitter debate, the two Democrats and the two other Greens opted to subsidize the recycling center in a series of 4-1 votes, with Hanan dissenting.

Later, Ornelas voted against his fellow Greens and sided with the two Democrats to let the county put a temporary garbage transit station downtown.

Kirkpatrick, who counts as his greatest accomplishment on the council the building of a city-owned skateboard park, has found that safety rules imposed on skateboarders by the city’s insurer have put the Police Department, which tries to enforce those rules, at odds with park users and their parents.

But he says he still is proud of what the Greens have done, and is leaving the council only because the $277 a month the job pays is not enough to get by on--even for someone who lives communally and bicycles to Humboldt State, where he is studying globalization.

“Greens are about redefining the possible,” Kirkpatrick said. He says the Green council members have constantly generated ideas for the city’s staff to explore, but acknowledges frustration at how slowly things move, even in Arcata.

“We have doubled the amount of bike lanes in town,” he said.

Some Say Business Has Been Good

On the plaza, some merchants say life has been good under the Greens.

“Our sales are up 30% to 40% over last year,” said Anne Russell, manager of Rocking Horse, a children’s boutique that sells pricey, handmade outfits. “There are never any vacancies on this plaza. There’s no boarded-up storefronts. The council is not opening us up to the big box stores, and they are keeping this a viable economy. They are not letting anybody just build anything they want.”

Paul Rex, executive director of the Arcata Main Street program, says there has been no revolution during the two years of Green rule.

“Our councils in the past have been very Green-minded without the label of being Green, so everything has just moved right along under this Green majority,” he said. “We are a thriving community.”

Perhaps, Mayor Test says, the arrival of the Green majority on the council should be looked at more as a changing of the guard between one generation of progressives and another, and not so much the triumph of a radical environmental party with a mandate to make sweeping changes.

Running for the council for what he says will be the last time, Test says he portrays himself “as the last of the old guard. To me, this is a sort of handing-over of power to the next generation.”

Kirkpatrick, 31, agrees.

“From 1974 until 1996, Democrats had a majority on the council,” he said. “Somewhere along the way, the fresh ideas stopped coming from them. Hopefully, we’ll have new ideas for the next 20 years.”