Ukiah citizens’ group Mendo Matters debate draws 3 of 8 city council candidates

UKIAH, CA., 9/24/26 — The citizens’ group Mendo Matters opened its Ukiah City Council debate Tuesday night by saying all eight candidates had been invited. But only three candidates took part: John Strangio and Robert Bazzani in the council chambers, and Matt Froneberger by Zoom. Mayor Susan Sher, council members Juan V. Orozco and Mari Rodin, plus challengers Sean K. White and Mia L. Uribe did not. Voters will pick three council members Nov. 3 from among the eight running

The moderator was Willits Mayor and former Mendocino County sheriff Tom Allman. Mendo Matters streamed the debate live on its YouTube channel. Its release announcing the debates didn’t mention a stream. Janelle Rau, the group’s interim executive director, did not respond to emails and phone calls about access to the stream.

The group’s release says Mendo Matters “does not endorse or oppose candidates through these events.” The same release lists Strangio on its board of directors.

The opening

John Buchanan, the Mendo Matters chair, opened with the group’s pitch: he said it advocates “reasonable, balanced public policies that allow private enterprise to flourish.”

Then came a roll call of candidates who did not attend. Orozco, the vice mayor, had an out-of-town commitment and has committed to the Oct. 8 debate, Buchanan said. According to Buchanan, White “vociferously declined to be at either debate.” Uribe “did not respond to many attempts and forms of communication.”

The absent incumbents, Buchanan said, “may have felt today might be detrimental to their being re-elected based on their voting records and performance over the past few years.”

“It is not a secret that Mendo Matters opposed every annexation plan for the past two years,” he continued, and it also opposes the “two basin idea” for Potter Valley Project water, which includes the dams coming down. “With that, I will stop politicking,” he said, and introduced Allman.

Where they agreed

Strangio opened with this: “For me, it isn’t about Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. This is about local government.”

Asked to rank police, fire, water and sewer, homelessness programs and street maintenance for the budget, Strangio and Froneberger gave the same order: police, fire, then water and sewer. Without an adequate collection and water system, Froneberger said, “this community will wither and die.”

All three said yes when Allman asked whether the consolidation of the Ukiah Valley and city fire services is working. Strangio, a retired fire captain, said earlier in the evening that he helped bring the two departments together.

All three want business permits to move faster. Strangio said Fort Bragg is waiving some city rules and fees for the first year of a small business, and he’d like Ukiah to look at that. Bazzani suggested property tax breaks for owners who fix up their buildings.

On homelessness, Bazzani and Froneberger want the city to measure what its programs produce. “We shouldn’t measure success in dollars spent. We should measure success in results achieved,” Bazzani said.

All three used the word accountability, often enough that Allman asked what they meant by it. Froneberger promised that he would read every page of every staff report and “take every dollar as if it’s the last dollar.” Bazzani said, “I believe our budget goes up every single year, and our city is going down every single year.”

Strangio listed recent city property purchases, including 1350 Hastings Road and the old Bank of America building at 501 S. State St., and asked whether they were the smartest way to spend money. Bazzani said the city paid about $7.5 million for 1 Carousel Lane. “I know that was about seven and a half million dollars because I was looking at building my indoor gun range in that building,” he said.

On the Potter Valley Project, Froneberger and Bazzani want more water storage. Froneberger wants to raise Lake Mendocino and Coyote Dam. Bazzani wants “to keep as many dams as possible.” Strangio called it more a county question than a city one and said, “I don’t have a good solution for what is going on out there.”

Where they split

Annexation drew the widest spread. The city ended its two-year annexation proposal Aug. 31, saying in a release that the plan lacked “the foundation of public support and shared understanding needed to proceed constructively.”

“Annexation is something that should not happen simply because growth is available,” Bazzani said. “The question isn’t whether we grow, the question is whether we grow responsibly.” He said a business license that costs $40 in the county becomes a share of gross income inside the city. “So your business license can go from $40, you get annexed and then it’s $5,000,” he said.

Strangio went the other way. “I am 100% for annexation,” providing it’s done in a smart way, he said. “I think the approach that we took was not the best of approaches, and I think the community spoke up loud and said that.” He mentioned the north end of town, where he said the city limit runs in and out from one business to the next. “I am for annexation when we can go clean those boundaries up,” he said.

Froneberger landed between them. He said he’s “not above” annexation in the future, but first “there needs to be a fair and equitable tax-sharing agreement” between the city and the county. He said the plan the city proposed “could have eviscerated” one of the county’s largest tax bases.

The three also split on Flock license-plate cameras. An audience question said Ukiah is going from 14 to 31 of them.

Bazzani cited “1984” and government overwatch. “I believe we are living in that, where Big Brother is completely watching everything we do,” he said. “I don’t think that our little town needs to have this much government overwatch.”

Froneberger said he worries about a third-party company holding the data and would rather see cameras the city owns and runs itself.

Strangio told a story. He said a man who had met a girl through the game Roblox picked her up around 5 a.m. near one of his gyms. His parking-lot camera caught the car, he said, police put the description into Flock, and they found her safe within a few hours, three hours away. He said access to camera data should work “more like a search warrant,” with several layers of approval. “I think that it’s not governed well enough,” he said.

On downtown parking, Bazzani blamed the State Street redesign. He said the plan was to trade two travel lanes for diagonal parking. Instead, he said, a planner from out of town made the sidewalks too big, and the street ended up with parallel parking and bump-outs. “So the parking issue, that’s kind of our fault on the planning of State Street,” he said.

Two Mendo Matters

Two groups have gone by Mendo Matters in two years, with a lot of the same people in both.

In 2024, a “citizen-based group, Mendo Matters” wrote to the Board of Supervisors, the Ukiah City Council and other county and city officials asking them to adopt Fort Bragg’s Care Response Unit approach to homelessness. Its 11 signers included Kerri Vau, Julie Golden, Richard Selzer and Strangio.

In June 2025, the Employers Council of Mendocino County, a business group that operated from 1996 until 2018, announced it was back, doing business as Mendo Matters. Vau was its chair and Strangio its secretary-treasurer. Vau, Golden, Selzer and Strangio are all on the current board, according to the group’s website.

The five who weren’t there

Rodin wrote in an email Wednesday that she skipped the debate because she expected “a partisan platform masquerading as a community forum.” She said she met with Mendo Matters representatives about annexation several months ago and found no interest in discussion. She called it a “fake forum” and wrote that Mendo Matters means to promote “their own sponsored candidates [Froneberger, Bazzani, and Strangio] and disparage the remaining candidates.” In a follow up email, she said “I had scheduled my trip to Hawaii back in March, so I couldn’t have participated in the forum last night. But I wouldn’t have if I had been in Ukiah for the reasons I stated …  I don’t plan to participate in their second event either. I do not trust them.

She said she plans to take part in an Oct. 6 candidate forum put on by the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women and the Mendocino Women’s Political Coalition.

Uribe, 21, said she was invited. “I have multiple jobs and very little free time so the scheduling didn’t work out for me,” she wrote. Strangio’s seat on the board didn’t figure in: “I didn’t know John was on the board,” she wrote.

Candidate Sean K. White said in an email to the Voice, “Yes I was invited but declined. While the invitation used encouraging wording about the tone of the event, my observations of their behavior in other public meetings has been to the contrary and did not want to participate in that type of setting. Also it appears that Strangio, Bazzani, and Froenberger are running as a slate.  Did not seem like a reasonable atmosphere for an impartial discussion.” He will be at another future event. “I will be at the Oct. 6th debate.  This is run by a long-standing, impartial body and I look forward to participating.“
Mayor Susan Sher had similar thoughts, telling the Voice by email she felt “strongly that an organization sponsoring a candidates’ night have no hidden political agenda and be deserving of the public’s trust. I have had some exposure to the local activities of Mendo Matters, and there is no question they are a partisan political organization.”

At the close, Buchanan asked the audience to help get all eight candidates to the next debate. “I do not understand it, and I’ll just leave it there,” he said.

The second Mendo Matters debate is Oct. 8 at 5:30 p.m. in the council chambers, 300 Seminary Ave. Not every audience card got read Tuesday. Those, Allman said, “will be given to the organizers that will be read at the next debate.”