Lagunitas resident Alex Easton-Brown has signaled his intention to run for the Marin County Board of Supervisors District 4 seat, which includes all of West Marin. Mr. Kinsey has held the seat since 1996, but he recently announced that he will not seek re-election.
Mr. Easton-Brown has harshly criticized the amount of money that the current board has spent for projects that he deems unnecessary, such as the proposed construction of a new Health and Human Services building in downtown Point Reyes Station.
“Spending by the board is really out of line,” said Mr. Easton-Brown, who describes himself as a self-employed social scientist. “Property taxes bring in a lot of money for the county, but that doesn’t mean the board needs to spend it all.”
He pointed to unfunded pension liability as a major drain on the county’s taxpayer-funded purse. If elected, he has pledged to cap pensions for county employees at $80,000 a year across the board and to retroactively reduce larger pensions that are currently over $100,000.
Mr. Easton-Brown has also denounced Supervisor Kinsey’s “pro-development” stance, citing exacerbated traffic congestion and skyrocketing real estate prices as reasons to curb development across the county. He has, however, endorsed affordable housing for seniors. “Marin has exceeded its carrying capacity,” he said. “We just cannot handle more people. We cannot handle more development.”
Additionally, Mr. Easton-Brown has pledged to eliminate the county’s discretionary funds, increase the public’s involvement in salary negotiations and cut back on the number of consultants the county hires by assigning work to county staff instead of contractors. “This kind of causes a dumbing down of county staff,” he said. “I think it’s just lazy to not handle things in-house.”
Previously, Mr. Easton-Brown has run for and lost bids for county assessor in 1978 and State Assembly in 2012. His latest foray into local politics is the result of his conviction that decisions made on a statewide level may not be the best approach for dealing with West Marin issues.
“A lot of the issues now seem to be focused more locally,” he said. “Sometimes, trying to cure something in Sacramento is a heavy-handed way of dealing with things when it can be handled at the local level.”
When asked about Mr. Brown, Mr. Kinsey did not comment directly on his candidacy but said that he hoped to see someone win who “can bring us not what needs to be done, but also how to do it. Criticism doesn’t really solve problems; creativity does.”