Council candidates set
Seven candidates will run for three open seats on the Hermosa Beach City Council in elections this November. Last Wednesday afternoon marked the filing deadline for interested candidates, and the seven that returned filing forms to the City Clerk are: incumbent Stacey Armato; Mary Campbell, a board member for the Hermosa Beach City School District; Realtor Christopher Cenci; incumbent Hany Fangary; Trent Larson, a previous candidate; Matt McCool, an Emergency Preparedness Advisory commissioner; and former Councilmember Peter Tucker.
Notable among those not running is Carolyn Petty, who declined to seek a second term. Petty said that it was a difficult decision, but that she chose not to run out of a desire to devote more time to her family and to her career.
Petty often brought up issues buried deep inside hefty agenda packets and was regularly the first council member to compliment staff on a well-done report. She and others have compared the time commitment to that of a full-time job.
“I really do want to work more. And to do this job right, it’s very time consuming,” Petty said. “It’s really hard to be productive on a Wednesday morning if you’ve been up till 1 a.m. the night before. I don’t want to deter anyone from running, but this job takes time. It takes a lot of time.”
Petty pointed to the recent decision to extend the upcoming terms as another factor in her decision. Under California’s SB 415, cities whose voting participation falls far enough below turnout levels for general elections must realign their local races to even years. The Hermosa council voted last fall to comply by extending the terms of council members elected in 2017 and 2019 to 2022 and 2024, respectively. Petty was among the minority of council members to favor shortening terms by a year, arguing that lengthening them would discourage people from running.
Faced with the decision of whether to run, Petty worried about missing out on time with her daughters before they head off to college.
“I only have a few more years with my kids, I want to enjoy that time. I was worried I would wake up in five years and realize my kids were gone,” she said.
Since the election of Justin Massey and Jeff Duclos in November 2015, Petty has frequently been on the losing end of 4-1 votes, particularly on environmental issues. At one meeting earlier this year, a Facebook post-Petty authored about how other council members were likely to vote on the city’s General Plan updates produced bitter disagreement and claims by the other council members that Petty had violated the Brown Act.
Asked if she worried about the council becoming an ideological echo chamber in her absence, Petty said, “Yes.”
