Ted Stroll

I have had a long legal career in the appellate courts and am well acquainted with issues that are likely to come before the Legislature. From 1989 to 2014, I worked as a judicial staff attorney for the California appellate courts. I was at the Supreme Court of California from 1989 to 2007 and the Sixth District Court of Appeal in San José from 2007 to 2014.

I’m the president of the Sustainable Trails Coalition, a nonprofit organization that seeks fairer rules governing human-powered bicycling on federal lands. I testified at a congressional hearing in 2017 regarding the reform legislation we seek. I published an op-ed article on this subject in The New York Times in 2010. I volunteer for the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority’s bicycle trail safety patrol.

I’m proficient in Portuguese, Spanish, and French and have some knowledge of Italian and a bit of German. I love studying languages because it helps me build a bigger perspective on life and our needs as a multicultural community.

• Compassion for the unhoused mentally ill and drug-addicted requires in-patient treatment for those who can’t live elsewhere. It will have to be through a conservatorship in some cases, with the conservatee’s due process rights protected.
• Housing costs too much for everyone and is built too slowly. Your children shouldn’t have to move out of state to afford an apartment or house.
• Crime and social disorder are at intolerable levels. Oakland has become essentially lawless. San José isn't at that level, but the amount and effects of crime must be reduced. Some people discern that there's too much incarceration, but the right way to reduce prison crowding is provide job training, post-release employment help, and treatment for psychological and addiction issues, so inmates don’t go back.

1. The homeless situation involves people unable to afford housing because of cost (about 1/4 of them) and the mentally ill and drug-addicted (the other 3/4). The 1/4 who need economic help can be helped in traditional ways. For the 3/4, we must restore treatment in various types of facilities. Some are too incapacitated to consent and must be treated involuntarily if necessary, subject to legal safeguards. Per a recent study, 95% of drug- and alcohol-impaired people feel they have no problem and need no treatment. (WSJ, 1/4/24) If that's mirrored among the homeless, cajoling them will produce few results. A San Diego news report (channel 5) said that of 183 people offered shelter, only 7 accepted it. Open-air drug use is unacceptable. We have laws to address the problem but need the will to use them.

2. Fixing the state's Penal Code, in which most but not all of the criminal law is set out. The Penal Code is antiquated; important components of it date back to 1872.

3. Homelessness and housing affordability are separate problems. An important way to bring down exorbitant housing prices is to change zoning and permitting laws that make it difficult to develop it, while at the same time preserve neighborhood character (to be sure, this is difficult) and reform CEQA, a statutory scheme that plants unwarranted obstacles in the way of housing development.

(Whom, not who!) I have a high regard for Tom Campbell, a prominent California politician.

"How the World Really Works," by Vaclav Smil.

"Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy," by Andrew Yang.

"Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal," by George Packer.

"Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care," by Miller and Hanson.

Anything by Albert Camus.

"Uranus," by Marcel Aymé.

1. The highest standard of ethics. One should leave office hardly any wealthier than when one entered it.

2. Trying one's best to evaluate issues on the merits and not based on some sort of ideological filter.

1. Getting legislation passed.

2. Holding oversight hearings.

3. Providing constituents with problem resolutions when they have a difficulty with the state government.

The state's criminal law was comprehensively revised to meet the needs of the 21st century, not the 19th.

The California Environmental Quality Act was returned to its original mission of protecting the environment. Right now, it's used by busybody neighbors to block people from building a deck or a second story on their houses. It also raises the cost of new housing for reasons having nothing to do with the environment.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963; I was 7.

Stock clerk, liquor store in La Jolla, Calif., circa 1971.

"The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," by José Saramago.

In California, it's important that the Governor curb the Legislature's excesses. Govs. Brown and, to a lesser extent, Newsom have done this, though much bad legislation still has been enacted.

1. Homelessness.

2. Climate change and related natural disasters.

3. Energy reliability and affordability.

4. Housing affordability.

5. Crime and related forms of social disorder, like vehicular road rage, excessive urban noise, and blight.

Yes.

Naturally. Anyone who does not, including with members of other parties, is doomed to do little more than grandstand. I like to think I can get along with a wide variety of people.

I mentioned Tom Campbell earlier and will reiterate that.

Maybe, but not one at a higher level.

Too many to recite here, frankly. While some involve being victims of crime, I think particularly of the barber in my neighborhood, a young immigrant with a wife and child, who was forced to close his business for weeks or months at a time because of Santa Clara County's absurdly overbearing Covid restrictions. The county also closed soccer fields, forbade people to sit at outdoor picnic tables, and spied on churches to see who specifically was attending indoor services. One particularly poignant episode involved a frail, elderly man who was trying to consume a drink outside of a Costco, but within 50 feet of the premises. A worker came out and shooed him away, apparently because Costco would be fined if the county found anyone consuming food or drink anywhere near the front door. He shuffled off in a halting manner. Then there were the Oakland mom-and-pop landlords whose insane and/or drug-addicted tenants were destroying the premises on which they relied for income, but they had to spend more than $100,000 to get them removed and it took more than a year, with the responsibility for this partly because of court closures during Covid.

Yes. Gov. Newsom arrogated powers to himself during Covid that he didn't lawfully have IMO. For example, he caused the suspension of, or altered the efficacy of, provisions of the Civil Code that provide for removal of dangerous tenants who are destroying the premises of a rental property or endangering other tenants.

Absolutely. Indeed, since I would take office as a Republican and the Democratic Party is likely to continue to have a majority, it is essential.

This is very technical, but the courts have mangled the elements of the crime of implied-malice murder. Implied-malice murder occurs when one does not intend to kill, but commits an act so dangerous that death is highly likely. Court decisions have resulted in vague language about the nature of the required act that is likely to confuse juries. This is a fix that should appeal to both Democrats and Republicans, because it is a criminal-justice reform measure, not one that makes punishment for crime either unduly lax or unduly severe.

Please see the list on my website, tedstroll.com. It is updated as necessary.

1. Public safety.

I live in downtown San José in a modest neighborhood. My background is in criminal law. I’m moderate and pragmatic. No one knows the whole truth about everything, but plenty think they do, and the resulting polarization is wrecking politics. I’m running as a Republican, but when the Legislature does something right I will vote for it, whether the sponsors have an R or a D after their names.

• To solve homelessness, we must reactivate in-patient care for street dwellers’ mental illnesses and drug addictions. Currently, unhoused people brain-damaged by drugs or otherwise seriously mentally ill can only be asked to accept treatment, and if they refuse, as many do, they’re not treated, because state law makes it almost impossible. This must change.
• Incumbents in Sacramento proposed legislation that would have reduced the penalty for certain injury-causing muggings to the minor crime of petty theft. I will oppose such mistakes. We need to address serious traffic violations like street racing with the same innovations that other places are using.
• California universities take tax dollars from parents whose last names are Chen, Christensen, Kumar, Nguyen, Núñez, Pereira, and Smith. They should not grant or deny admission to your children on the basis of them.

1. California's housing crisis is solvable. We have it because of decades of governmental distortion of the state's housing markets. It's like a hose that delivers only a trickle of water because it's kinked in multiple places. Those kinks didn't occur naturally; they are the result of many policy mistakes. Unkinking that hose requires changes to state and local law.

2. The state's and this county's responses to the Covid pandemic gave public health directors too much authority over the economy. Various mistakes harmed many small businesses. State lawmakers must reconsider county health directors’ ability to govern single-handedly.

3. The real political divide isn't so much between left and right; it's more between a society that aims toward openness or doesn't. Government must always aim toward improving human flourishing, which means knowing when to help and when to stand back and let people make their own decisions.

Currently, Elon Musk comes to mind. Just through Tesla, he may have done more for humanity and the environment than any number of large organizations.

I would like to follow the example of any elected official who ran for office in a desire to improve things, rather than for self-promotion or self-enrichment, and stuck to that goal.

"A Man for All Seasons," by Sir Robert Bolt, which was made into a movie of the same name. It won Best Picture in 1967.

Honesty; intelligence; caring; life experience.

To improve the quality of life in the state through lawmaking.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. I was in second grade. We were sent home from school.

Sweeping floors in the service department at La Jolla Chevrolet during high school. I think it paid the then-minimum wage of $1.60 an hour.

That the legislature is both productive and principled in enacting or repealing laws and the governor executes the remaining laws efficiently and in a principled manner.

1. The housing crisis, which is a governmentally caused problem and can be corrected by governments.

2. The chaotic presence of tens of thousands of seriously disturbed people who inhabit our sidewalks, parks, creek banks, road and bridge infrastructure, who desperately need treatment but who don't get it because state law makes it difficult—until, that is, they commit a serious crime and then are housed in our de facto mental institutions of last resort, namely jails and prisons.

3. The disorderly behavior we saw during the Covid epidemic, which continues after it. In my area, going through red lights after stopping and looking around has become almost routine. Stop signs have become, pardon the play on words, stoptional. (That's called a portmanteau word, for grammar fans.) If people cannot exert internal discipline, they will have to be subject to external discipline in the form of law enforcement, or we will descend further into the kind of society we couldn't have imagined even 20 years ago.

Yes, but state legislators without such experience can still be extremely valuable.

Naturally. In the Assembly, I would be one of 80 legislators and, at this writing, in a minority party. Lone wolves will accomplish nothing.

The current one that California is fortunate to have: an independent commission that draws boundaries to preserve communities of interest.

Public safety and judiciary.

No.

A number of people have told me about family members who became addicted to brain-damaging drugs, are living on the streets, and go untreated. The family can't afford private in-patient psychiatric or detoxification care, and the state doesn't provide it in any way close to the need, which is why we see people yelling at imaginary demons while trundling their shopping carts.

That is essential. California law gives the governor enormous powers in an emergency. They need some sort of oversight, lest we have one-person rule by decree.

Absolutely.