Council’s youngest, Kearney adds to Petaluma’s diversity

For Gabe Kearney, the most eventful thing that happened at Burning Man this year was that nothing eventful happened. And that’s just how he likes it.

Kearney is the safety officer for the art festival in the Nevada desert, overseeing a team of 25 emergency responders tasked with keeping the 70,000 festival goers safe during the week-long bacchanal.

“It went very smoothly,” Kearney said of the late August event. “We didn’t have any issues, which is good.”

Now that he’s washed the Black Rock Desert dust out of his hair, Kearney, 34, has turned his focus to the fall city council campaign, where the incumbent is seeking a second full term. He was appointed to the council in 2011 to fill a vacant seat, and won his first election in 2012.

Kearney is on the Nov. 8 ballot with incumbents Kathy Miller and Mike Healy, and challenger Bill Wolpert, vying for three open seats.

The youngest council member on the dais, Kearney has been politically active for the past two decades. As a 16-year-old student at Casa Grande High School, Kearney spoke to the city council in favor of a plan to offer benefits to employees’ domestic partners. This was before gay marriage was legal in California, and before Kearney had come out as a gay man.

“People were saying very bigoted things against the LGBT community,” he said. “I just got in my car and drove to the council meeting to speak my mind.”

Kearney first ran for city council in 2000 at the age of 18. He lost, but was appointed to serve on several city and county boards and stayed active. Though he considers as role models LGBT activist/politicians Harvey Milk and Mark Leno, Kearney said that all of the issues facing Petaluma is what keeps him politically active.

In the past four years on the council, he is proud of opening new city parks, restoring staffing levels at the police department and completing the federally-funded Payran flood protection project, which he lobbied for in Washington, D.C. If given another term, he said he would like to work on building affordable housing in Petaluma and finding a solution to fix the city’s crumbling streets.

He said his experience in public safety - he worked for 11 years in emergency management with Kaiser Permanente and for a year with the city of Sonoma fire department - has given him insight into how best to manage certain aspects of the city. Before voting to approve the purchase of new police vehicles, for example, Kearney said he rode along with police officers to find out their needs.

“I get involved as much as I can,” he said. “It’s not just about reading a packet (for a council meeting). You have to get your hands dirty.”

A moderate politician who is running on a slate with Miller and Healy, Kearney said is in favor of walkable, bikeable developments, the kind that Wolpert, a progressive planning commissioner, has been advocating.

“You can’t name a project that (the council has) approved that isn’t walkable,” he said.

A graduate of University of San Francisco with a degree in health care administration, Kearney lives with his dog, volunteers with the Old Adobe School District and is a Sonoma County law enforcement chaplain. But his main focus is continuing to improve the city, which he hopes to do if voters give him another four-year term.

“There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” he said. “I believe I’m the right person to do it.”

(Contact Matt Brown at matt.brown@arguscourier.com.)