PREVIOUSLY

• ‘Can Wednesday Just Get Here Already?’; The Two Arcata City Council Candidates Effectively Tied for a Seat Are Ready for the Results

###

On Tuesday, down by 11 votes, Genevieve Serna predicted that the election results released the next day would probably be definitive. If she was right, she can rest easy — she’s now up by 70, and the newest member of the Arcata City Council.

Granted, Serna could be wrong, but her closest competitor for an open seat on the council, Planning Commissioner Abigail Strickland, would have to buck the trend. It’s unlikely; although the elections office still has around 4,000 votes left to tally, those came from all around the county, not just Arcata. Some may be invalid. 

They’re competing for one of two open seats. Both Serna and Strickland are about 800 votes behind the incumbent, Mayor Kimberley White.

Reached by phone earlier today, Serna said she was excited to sit on the council, provided her lead holds. Friends began texting her last night when the results hit the web — she’d been too busy working to fixate on their release. She joined a Humboldt Democratic Central Committee meeting immediately after that. “We didn’t really discuss the results too much in that meeting,” Serna said. “But I did get some extra congratulations. But, you know, back to more business.” 

She’s proud of her campaign, and of her last attempt at office in 2024. That one failed by a few hundred votes, but she thinks it boosted her recognizability, and she learned what people were worried about, what they wanted the city to focus on fixing. The council has goals it’s been working towards for years; Serna thinks it could be hard to get her priorities on the agenda, but if she can, she’d like to attempt to mellow the housing crisis by “loosening” certain zoning and building restrictions.

She thanked the voters and congratulated the other candidates. “They should be proud of the job that they’ve done and thank you for putting yourself out there. It can be tough, but yeah, it’s good to see the end of this process. They should be proud of their campaigns.”

Strickland had led by less than a dozen votes until last night, but she hadn’t been enjoying it. 

“The entire time I thought that there was going to be a massive swing, just because the last count there was so few votes counted,” she told the Outpost. “So I never actually took the last results to mean, like, ‘Oh, wow, I have really good odds.’ If you ask anyone in my circle, they’ll tell you I’ve been saying, ‘Don’t celebrate yet. There’s going to be a huge swing. I can feel it.’” She stumbled over her words for a moment. “I may have manifested that.”

Strickland’s not disappointed by slipping into third, she said. (The upside of humility.) She’s not writing off her shot at a seat — there are still those 4,000 votes left to count — but she’ll continue working in local government regardless. 

“There are a lot of people in Arcata who had faith in me and scribbled the box next to my name,” she said. “And I really appreciate that, and I love Arcata, and am looking forward to continuing to try and make Arcata a better place for everybody to live in.”

Mayor White didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.