Despite Placing Third, "My Candidacy Was a Victory," Says Steve Jordan

Published 10pm Monday

In the run-up to last Tuesday's election, council candidate and local business owner Steve Jordan did not get a single endorsement.

He raised under $1,000, barely enough to pay for campaign signs and a website.

And, perhaps most egregiously, he waited until the last possible moment to enter the race.

Despite that, Jordan, who owns Creekside Bakery and styled himself as a no-nonsense reformer throughout the campaign, received nearly 24 percent of the vote. And even though Mayor Pat Eklund and Councilwoman Denise Athas, received 36 percent and 28 percent of the vote respectively, Jordan is calling his candidacy a victory.

"I'm very pleased with the outcome," Jordan told Novato Patch Monday. "It would have been better if I'd won, but the votes showed that a lot of people are dissatisfied with the way the things are going on in Novato."

Jordan describes his first experience running in a local political campaign both "enlightening and frightening”-- enlightening because of the strong support he received from Novato residents, some of who volunteered to put his signs around town and distribute campaign literature, and frightening because the race was a crash course in the inner workings of small-town politics, he said.

Like all other candidates, Jordan was approached by the Marin Democratic Party, the Novato Chamber of Commerce and the Marin Women's Political Action Committee, seeking to determine who they would endorse. Jordan said he was asked about his views on topics both local and national, including many he would never vote on as a council candidate.

"You have to have to fit into a very narrow box in order to get an endorsement," Jordan said. "You basically have to agree with what they're asking or say that you do, which in my book is lying…I had this idealistic Mr. Smith goes to Washington view of how politics works and it was just frightening to see it behind the scenes."

Ultimately, the Novato Chamber of Commerce and the Marin Democratic Party endorsed Athas, an incumbent on the council and a former president of the chamber and the downtown Novato Business Association. Athas has been least critical of the city’s efforts to use Measure F money for a marketing campaign.

Jordan, Eklund and fellow candidate Eleanor Sluis all opposed the move and said the half-cent sales tax measure was approved for essential city services, not a promotional campaign to recruit bio-life sciences companies to Novato and bring shoppers to the downtown.

Jordan bristles at the "with us or against us" mindset he says is counter-productive.

"You should be able to sit down with people you don't agree with and break bread with them. That's how you break the gridlock of government."

As Jordan recovers from the campaign, he is already entertaining a run for council in 2014, when Eric Lucan's seat becomes available as he runs for the state assembly.

Jordan is hoping the visibility in this year’s race means more support in the future. And he says, he wants to focus on bringing more voters to the polls. An estimated 70 percent of Novato’s registered voters failed to vote last week.

“I want to reach those who didn't come out and tell them they could have changed the direction of the town just by voting when the opportunity presents itself," he said. “People say that I must be crazy to go into politics, that you can't get anything done. But I think there's a place for a person like me in government.”

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