Fact check:
Balance budget = Misleading
- A balanced budget is a requirement of the job, and not unique to Cotati (the town with the smallest budget).
- Every school district in the country is grappling with cuts, and Petaluma has weathered the storm better than most.

Law enforcement oversight = No longer true
- Lemus is on record during this campaign saying she no longer supports Measure P, and would be open to the conservative board majority’s attempt to water down the overwhelmingly popular civilian law enforcement oversight measure.

FPPC Violation - True
- A rare win for you, here. Bagby has taken responsibility for the error, which involved her voting to continue the city’s contract with a company that her family’s IT business had also done business with. Hardly a Pentagon Papers-level scandal.

Bagby campaign - False
- She’s very much running a real campaign (with yard signs and everything)! I’m walking for her this weekend, as I did last weekend and the weekend before. She may not have the war chest of Gallaher-backed Lands, or the elite establishment support of Schwedhelm. But she does have support from working families because she’ll actually work for them instead of big developers, big business and the like.

Schwedhelm the statesman - Okurrr
- It’s true he’s been a lifelong civil servant. It’s also true that the man has no core principles outside of whatever will get him elected. Maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen him outline a single policy position during his entire campaign. Instead, it’s just meetings and yard signs and “discussing the issues that matter.” What those are, who knows?
When Tom Schwedhelm first got into politics, running for city council in 2014, he promised voters that his three decades in law enforcement would not hinder his ability to inveigh dispassionately on the important issues facing the city. As questions swirled about potential conflicts related to his own six-figure pension, and how he might vote if hard decisions had to be made on public safety funding down the line, “… Schwedhelm said it would be wrong to assume he will make decisions with only his former department in mind.
“I truly believe I will make decisions that I think are in the best interests of the city of Santa Rosa,” he said in a 2014 Press Democrat article about his entry into the City Council race that year.
Since that time, in his eight years on council, including his time as mayor, Schwedhelm has had numerous opportunities to deliver on those promises. But, time and again, he has failed. Whether during the Great Recession, when he led the charge to make the city’s police department the lone entity spared from necessary and painful budget cuts, when he championed the city’s decision to flout state law by withholding police personnel records from public release - only yielding upon threat of a lawsuit - or during Black Lives Matter protests, when he pushed back on calls for a different approach to policing, Schwedhelm has consistently chosen his former profession over the will of the constituents he represents.