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Oct 7, 2024

An Epidemiologist Is On Track to Becoming Sacramento’s First Black Female Mayor

Why voters may decide to go with the Flo (Cofer)

By Ed Goldman

DDr. Flo Cofer really wants a ginger cookie to top off the overdue lunch she’s ordering at Tower Cafe, a stalwart bistro in Sacramento’s redevelopment-ready Broadway corridor. Told that the new owners took it off the menu some time ago, Cofer warmly shakes the waitress’s hand and says, “Hi, my name’s Flo Cofer and I’m running for mayor. If you tell your bosses I think they should bring back the ginger cookie, maybe it’ll help make it happen.” 

Just as the waitress is deciding how to react—and managing to say, “Yes, I think I recognized you”—Cofer unleashes a thousand-kilowatt smile and says, “Thank you so much.”

Edgy Cartoon

Dr. Flo Cofer at Tower Cafe.  Photo by Edgy.

It’s been a playful introduction for me to the 41-year-old epidemiologist and community advocate—almost like the parody of a protection racketeer saying, “Hey, nice little place you got here. It’d be a real shame if somethin’ happened to it because you stopped makin’ ginger cookies, know what I’m sayin’?”   

But Cofer has much more on her mind than cookies. Lots more. She stunned this town’s seemingly stun-proof political establishment a few months ago by emerging as the top vote-getter in a primary studded with local- and state-government A-listers.

They included former City Councilman Steve Hansen, a midtown/gay-community fave who’d nonetheless lost his city council seat a few years earlier to an urban progressive, Katie Valenzuela; Dr. Richard Pan, a respected, serious-minded pediatrician and state senator; and Kevin McCarty, current state assemblyman and former city councilman who always manages to be on the wrong side of metropolitan issues. He was against the downtown-saving construction of the Golden 1 Center, an internationally recognized green-tech marvel and home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, which opened in 2016 with a Paul McCartney concert. Kind of a big deal for the town.

Hansen has since thrown his lukewarm support to McCarty and Pan has said he’s not endorsing anyone.

For readers of this column who aren’t in the Sacramento region, I acknowledge the self-indulgence of my writing about a very local election. But I find that Cofer’s surprising rise says something about other elections happening across the country, which is mainly: Don’t count out your liberals before they hatch.

“Yeah, Sacramento County is somewhat conservative,” Cofer tells me as she tucks into a Thai steak salad taller than a pancake stack. “But the city is far more center-left than people may realize, even in certain districts believed to be conservative pockets.” She names one (District 3, East Sacramento) and I’m not sure the number would mean anything to most of you. But it’s where I lived from 1978-2015, and where my neighbor across the street, the late and beloved Burnett Miller, who served as a councilman and mayor, was unabashedly a liberal Democrat.

Flojuane Cofer is the youngest of three siblings. If successful next month, she’ll neither be Sacramento’s first female mayor nor its first Black mayor. But she’ll most definitely be the capital’s first female Black mayor. As such, she’s routinely compared to New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC to fans and detractors alike) and the current Democratic candidate for U.S. President, Vice President Kamala Harris. Though both of those leaders, like Cofer, are also proud “progressives,” the comparisons are generally made privately since they smack of both racial and gender stereotyping (Ocasio-Cortez’s family hails from Puerto Rico , while Harris is famously Black and Asian). 

Cofer is determinedly oblivious to that—though not for being characterized as a proponent of the short-lived “Defund the Police” movement that followed cases in which the cops, here and elsewhere, violently overstepped the boundaries both of their oaths and moral law in beating and killing Black crime suspects.

“I don’t run from having advocated for defunding the police,” she says, “but it wasn’t anywhere near as sweeping as that. I wanted some budgetary accountability. I don’t want to simply hand the police a hundred-million-dollar gift every so often when so much of that money should be invested in crime prevention.” She says the city of Sacramento recently missed an opportunity to add a $10 million grant to its community policing activities, which involve training law enforcement and social-services people to show up to help in instances where there’s no need to draw a gun or wrestle “perps” to the ground to provide body-cam footage that somehow always gets leaked to local TV news stations. 

“To get the grant, all the city needed to do was come up with a 10 percent match—one million dollars to get 10 million,”  she says. “I think we could have easily found the money. But instead of political will, this city has political won’t.” She puts down a forkful of lettuce and says, emphatically, “I have political will.”

Cofer likes to point out she’s “the daughter of two public school teachers and three generations of union workers.” She graduated from the highly respected Spelman College in Atlanta and the University of Michigan’s School of Public health, where she earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology. To run for mayor, she resigned from her job as executive director of Public Health Advocates, a lobbying firm that does exactly what its title implies.

One of her many intriguing ideas to combat the desertion of a number of office buildings in the city’s core, a trend that began with the COVID era, is to relocate some of the dorms from the University of California, Davis, a little over 15 miles across the Sacramento River, to downtown. “This would work especially well for government majors,” she says. “Instead of just hearing what happens in state, county and city government, all of which are within a few blocks of each other, they could actually watch it all.”

I hope that if they do, the students will catch the lawmakers on one of their political will days. If you’d like info on Dr. Cofer’s campaign or stances, visit her website, https://www.floformayor.com—provided you won’t miss the cookies.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).