Armstrong, Spring Reelected
To Berkeley Council
By Kyoko Takita
Jeff Gove
and Abagail Kaplan

Polly Armstrong, incumbent Berkeley City Council member for District 8, easily won a rematch against Chris Kavanagh in Tuesday night's election.

Armstrong was ahead of Chris Kavanagh, a middle school teacher, by 57.4 percent to 42.5 percent, with 100 percent of the vote counted.

Waiting for the final result with around 30 supporters at a friend's house in the Berkeley hills, Armstrong expressed her wishes for the next term.

“I want Berkeley to run in a sensible way,” she said. “At the same time I appreciate the eccentricity, intelligence, the diversity of its people.”

District 8 in the southeastern part of the city is heavily populated by University of California, Berkeley students, and both candidates competed heavily for the student vote.

Armstrong pointed to her achievements as a council member the last four years. She helped student co-op managers establish a Lesbian, Gay and Transgender theme house, a low-cost student residence.

She emphasized that her concerns about the safety of the community also prompted her to vote in support of more police and streetlights.

She sponsored street safety workshops for students, too.

Concerning to the university, Armstrong said she wants the campus to understand it needs to help the city in areas like recycling and maintaining cleanliness in the south campus area.

Armstrong has campaigned with present Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean on a moderate platform. The Berkeley Police and Berkeley Firefighters and the Berkeley Democratic Club endorsed her.

Kavanagh, a UC graduate, committed himself to appointing students to at least half of Berkeleyís 36 city commissions. He criticized Armstrong for making only two student appointees.

Kavanagh has worked as a neighborhood activist. When a new traffic light to be installed in front of the Claremont Hotel this summer sparked opposition from local residents, Kavanagh organized a petition drive and succeeded in freezing the project. Residents felt the light might increase congestion and pollution in the heavily traveled area.

Kavanagh is considered part of the city's leftist political movement, although he has had differences with mayoral candidate Don Jelinek, a leader of the progressive block. He was endorsed by the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste and City of Albany Mayor Bruce Mast.

In 1996 when there was a special election in district 8, Kavanagh also ran against Armstrong and lost by 91 votes - a margin of about 1 percent of the votes cast in that election.

Meanwhile in Council District 4, incumbent Councilmember Dona Spring was winning after her opponent dropped out of the race.

Spring was ahead of Dan Craig, whose name remained on the ballot even though he stopped campaigning, by 80.5 percent to 19.4 percent, with all the vote counted.

Concerning her downtown district., Spring said that while Mayor Dean get a lot of credit for revitalizing downtown Berkeley, “I've also been working on that along with my fellow progressives on the council.”

Spring is one of the most liberal members of the City Council and supported Jelinek's progressive campaign for mayor.

Craig is executive director of the Downtown Berkeley Association, which is sponsored by the city. Because of that connection, Craig probably would have been forced to resign from his association job if elected to the council.

Instead he announced he was dropping out of the race and moving out of Berkeley.