Disappointed he has no opponent; plans to run small campaign
Morgan Hill – It won’t be official until the ballots are cast, but Supervisor Don Gage will be re-elected to his fourth and final term in June.
Gage, who trounced Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy in 2002, is running unopposed, a testament, he said, to his performance and invincibility.
“It could be that people think they can’t beat me, which I believe is true,” Gage said. “But it means people think I’m doing a good job.”
Gage said he’s disappointed that he won’t have an opponent, but he intends to mount a small campaign, spending in the neighborhood of $70,000 to get his message out to voters.
“There are negatives. I like elections because they give me an opportunity to meet new people and hear their views and what people are thinking,” he said. “I don’t plan to abandon the voters. I will continue to communicate with them but I won’t raise a quarter of a million dollars like I did last time.”
Gage said the lack of an opponent didn’t make his decision to back a controversial county sales tax measure any easier because he had to cast his vote before the deadline for candidates to file to run against him. The vote by Gage, the county’s lone elected Republican, alienated some of his supporters.
“It made it worse,” he said. “All of those issues came up before the filing deadline. It would have been real easy to go the other way.”
Terry Christensen, a political science professor at San Jose State University, agreed that Gage’s popularity is a barrier to competition, but said term limits – county supervisors can serve three four-year terms – encourage would-be candidates to wait for a race without an incumbent. The well-regarded Kennedy, for instance, managed to win just one-third of the vote in his race against Gage.
“Even an unopposed election is a check on an elected official because if Supervisor Gage or another official was really doing a bad job, or was accused of corruption, someone would run against him,” Christensen said. “The frequency of unopposed elections has increased somewhat with term limits because people who want to run for office decide to wait four years when there’s an open seat and they have a better shot at it.”
And local politicians expect the 2010 race for Gage’s seat to be a free-for-all, with as many as a dozen candidates from every corner of Gage’s sprawling district, which covers 70 percent of the county, and virtually all of its unincorporated land, from Gilroy to Los Gatos, the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Mt. Hamilton Range.
Some in South County fear that Gage’s departure will hurt the area, especially if the next representative is from San Jose or one of it suburbs.
“I think that when they are from South County they do give a very different perspective,” said Rosemary Kamei, who represents the same district as a director with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. “What’s important to someone in Los Gatos may not be important to someone in San Martin.”
Kamei, who lives in Morgan Hill, lost a special election run-off to Gage in 1997, in a race to fill the seat vacated by U.S. Representative Mike Honda, D- San Jose. Seven people ran for the seat. Kamei said she’s considering going after the seat in 2010. Meanwhile, she faces re-election this year to the water district.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It comes to my attention, but that’s not my focus. A lot can change in the next four years.”
At the moment, there are no-high profile potential candidates from South County. Gage said locals need to start thinking about that race soon.
“There really isn’t any person who stands out. I think it’s very important that people from South County get that,” he said. “People need to start preparing themselves. Whoever I back is not going to be a loser so there better be someone who can win. I’m not going to back someone who says ‘I want to run because I don’t like the way the water runs in Uvas Creek.'”
Gage was elected to the Gilroy City Council in 1981 and was mayor from 1991 until he ascended to the county board of supervisors. He said his last term on the county board may be the final act of his political career, but reserved the right to change his mind.
“As far as I’m concerned this is my last race, unless something changes,” he said. “I will be 65 at the end of the term. If I feel good I might do something else. If I don’t feel good I’ll stay home.”
