Progress on Rainier is key for mayoral candidate Harris

After a narrow defeat in Petaluma’s 2014 election, the ex-councilman is seeking more advancement on key infrastructure projects.|

Mike Harris didn’t spend much time licking his wounds after a bruising campaign for Petaluma mayor in 2014. Instead, the three-term city councilman purged politics from his system and dove into local nonprofit causes.

But, four years removed from one of the closest Petaluma elections in recent memory, Harris is back, running again for the city’s mayoral seat.

“As the campaign approached, I thought about it more,” he said. “You get used to the nonprofit stuff. I decided I was going to give it another shot.”

Harris in 2014 lost to Mayor David Glass by 84 votes in an election that wasn’t called until nearly Thanksgiving. He said he identified at least 400 supporters who, if they hadn’t stayed home on election day, could have made him the current mayor.

Instead, Harris, 47, spent the past four years serving on the Friends of the SRJC Petaluma campus, the Petaluma Area Chamber of Commerce and the Petaluma Educational Foundation. That’s in addition to his day job as an executive for a local financial services company.

Harris, who graduated from Sonoma State University with a degree in management, lists his key issues as street repairs, affordable housing and making Petaluma an attractive destination for tourists. During his time on the council, from 2002 to 2014, he said he is most proud of revitalizing the downtown core, attracting two large shopping centers to town and advancing the Rainier crosstown connector project.

“I’ve always been a supporter of Rainier,” he said. “People can say they are for it but do things behind the scenes that shows they are not for it.”

He said, if elected, he will continue to push to get the project built, including prioritizing money from the city’s traffic mitigation developer fees for construction.

Harris considers himself an independent politician. A former conservative who campaigned for John McCain in 2008, Harris left the Republican Party after the 2014 election.

“Over time, I realized I don’t lean that way,” he said. “You learn from it. It was part of my development.”

Harris said he would like to explore an agreement with the Sonoma-Marin Fair that allows the fair to stay at the city-owned fairgrounds property when the current lease expires, but also frees up some of the land for other uses such as a convention center or a city service center.

On affordable housing, he supports the recent effort to raise developer fees to encourage residential builders to make at least 15 percent of their units affordable.

During his time on the council, Harris voted against allowing cannabis dispensaries in Petaluma. But he said he would be willing to revisit that policy, in consultation with the police department, especially if there is financial gain for the city.

“It’s going to be a balance,” he said. “We need to be prudent through the process.”

Harris, who announced last August his intention to run for the seat being vacated by the retiring Glass, is endorsed by State Senator Bill Dodd, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, the Petaluma Peace Officers Association and the Sonoma County Alliance.

Besides his time on the city council, Harris touts his experience serving on a number of other municipal boards and commissions, including the planning commission, parks and recreation commission, transit committee and the Sonoma County Transportation Authority.

“I am ready to take the experience I have accumulated on the city council, in the nonprofit world and as an executive for a local financial service company to run for mayor of Petaluma,” he said in a statement.

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

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