467: Berkeley Mayoral Candidate Shirley Dean, 1994

Published news story by Lurene Kathleen Helzer, June 6, 1994, The East Bay Journal, “Shirley Dean foresees real changes for Berkeley.” 

Lurene's email in 2014: lurenexyz@gmail.com

Dean was then a Berkeley mayoral candidate. She won that election:


Berkeley City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Shirley Dean shows a love of details during council meetings. She pulls numbers out of staff reports and grills city employees on how and why particular facts were chosen.

This tendency carries over into her other civic duties as well. A year ago Berkeley’s Planning Department made a claim which caught her attention.

“(They said) we were losing something like $6—$10 million annually because of rent control. I would really like to see those numbers documented and see where they got those numbers.”

The fiscally moderate Dean does not “particularly support rent control. I haven’t seen rent control work. But we have it, so we need to make it work,” she said.

Rent issues in Berkeley are handled by the rent board, but as Dean says with everything, either it works and needs slight improvement, or it doesn’t work and needs slight improvement.

“I like that ten-year approach to the budget, for example,” said Dean, expressing appreciation for the South Bay city of Sunnyvale. “I’ve suggested it for a year, and got rather laughed at by my colleagues, who said a ten-year budget horizon is good for a city like Sunnyvale where there’s lots of growth.”

“That’s silly. We really do have to look down the line. If we don’t, we’re going to continue to be in this state of crisis all the time.”

Dean attended Berkeley High School and UC Berkeley, where she graduated with honors in Social Welfare.

Dean is married to Dan Dean, a counselor at Berkeley High, and has two children, Dan and John. The candidate is a full-time budget officer at UC Berkeley.

She became involved in local politics when she was raising her children at a house on Benita and rose streets.

“My kids were little. It must have been the ‘60s, because there was a lot of tear-gassing going on in Berkeley. I lived in North Berkeley and it’s possible to live on one side of the town and not be much involved,” said Dean.

“One morning I woke up and the Army was in the street. They had set up the end point (near her house) of where a control point was, and they were there with their guns and everything, and I said, ‘Oh boy, now I gotta get involved.’”

After working on these immediate issues, she moved into routine community issues. “It was a big step from tear-gassing to zoning, but it was easy,” she said, laughing.

She ran for City Council in 1975, and again in 1979.

By 1982, she decided she was ready to run for Mayor of Berkeley, but lost to Gus Newport. She made a comeback to the City Council in 1986 as a District 5 councilmember. She has been on the council ever since.

Claiming a three to one public-approval advantage over her closest competitor for the mayoral post, Councilmember Fred Collignon, she is trying again for Berkeley’s top seat.

“I don’t want to be Mayor in just the ceremonial way,” said Dean. “I want to be mayor to make some real changes. The mayor’s just one vote on the council. It’s going to be more by the statements that the person makes, the leadership that they can offer around the issues. You can’t do that as a councilmember.”

Dean said the city has been over-spending trying to help all who have problems.

In 1994, proposals to control panhandling and aggressive street behavior have been contentious, and Dean has taken criticism along with other councilmembers for not opposing a proposed Problematic Street Behavior ordinance.

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