Community Experience and Priorities
The last time Kyle Isacksen says he ran for an elected position was for fifth grade class president and he came in third. He’s now running for Washoe County Commission District 3, a post held since 2007 by soon to be termed out Kitty Jung.
“Why am I running? I get asked that now every day and I think the easiest way to answer it is to say that I care really deeply about what happens to our community, what happens with our environment and how we are moving into the future. My entire adult life has been centered around service in one form or another being a teacher, a community organizer … and I see it as an extension of that work,” he explained during a recent interview in our podcast studio.
In terms of current issues if he were to eventually win the seat, number one, he says “is bringing some creativity around affordable housing. So that's something that we need. And the same thing with mass transit, as somebody who didn't drive a car, or didn't have a car, for about seven years, we biked and we took the bus and it was really hard to get around, especially with two kids, using the bus. And so again, we need people in leadership positions to say, ‘hey, what's going on with this system? Why does it take me an hour to get from point A to point B?’ You know asking these questions, looking at creative answers, saying, maybe we need to redo this whole system. What are we doing around climate and how are we contributing to solving that problem? These are all things that we can be working on smarter, better, harder.”
The timing for him also feels right with both his kids now teenagers. He’s bothered by all the conspiracy theories floating around. He says he’s healthy and energized to “put his hat in the ring.”
His mother-in-law Susan Chandler was a professor at UNR for 20 years and is also a well know activist locally. Isacksen, a native New Yorker, first arrived in Reno in 2004 as part of get out the vote efforts with his wife, for a group called America Coming Together.
With his wife he then started a middle school program in partnership with the High Desert Montessori charter school, before working with other schools, going on a green learning discovery trip across the United States, and then returning to Reno to put in practice some of their new knowledge with the local Be The Change project. This has included putting a house in a community land trust, building their own house which is an award winning off the grid homestead, testing the Truckee River for micro plastics pollution, organizing mural projects, the Reno Garlic Fest and the Reno Rot Riders bike-powered compost collection.
Why the County Commission for a first run? After talking to different people in the community, Isacksen said a former county commissioner told him that position has the largest impact on people’s daily lives. “The county is involved with parks, it's involved with the sheriff and the jail. It's involved with roads, it's involved with river health. It's involved with land use planning and development. It is mass transit, it's senior services, homeless care, it's all these things that directly affect people's lives. And so with my varied background and kind of all these different things that I've taken on and done over the years, I feel like I'm a really good fit for the job and that I can bring middle class values, creative problem solving to this position to bring us into the future,” he said.
District 3 is the smallest of the five districts in the county, which as he mostly rides his bike to and from meetings is practical. “It's the most compact,” he said. “Each district has about a hundred thousand people in it. Washoe County goes all the way up to the Oregon border. District 3 includes Sun Valley… It's incredibly diverse. UNR is right in the middle of the district. Downtown is in the middle of the district. It just feels extra good to be able to run for something with all these places that I know and care about.”
Isacksen has been making tours as part of his campaign, including to our podcast studio.
Running as a Democrat and an Incubator for Future Candidates
Isacksen is running as a Democrat in a district he says the primary on June 14th will probably determine the winner of the general election in November.
Nevada is also now an all mail-in state, which changes dynamics. “I think it's going to get more people to vote. If we can get participation up, especially in these non-presidential election years when participation is traditionally a lot lower, I think it's great to have more access to voting, to have easier ways to do it,” he said.
Isacksen says less than 5,000 votes are usually cast in the District 3 primary, which means he only needs 2,500 or so votes to win. He’s the first to have announced his candidacy for this district, and has been meeting with different stakeholders, organizers, leaders, developers, advocates and other residents, posting photos of his encounters on social media.
“I mean, it's just been nonstop and it's, you know, I said this to my wife this morning, I was like, ‘well, I hope I get elected because I'm learning so much and meeting so many people’ and she's like, ‘you know, it doesn't matter because you'll be able to use this knowledge for whatever we're going to do.’ And I was like, ‘oh, absolutely.’ I mean, it's, it's just been a blast. And it's kind of funny just by saying I'm running for something it's given me this little bit of access or to meet with all these people that are doing these cool things.”
Asked about splits at the local and national levels among Democrats, he says he’s been in different parties during his life, but “I’m a Democrat because in general, I agree with the platform. I agree that we need to have a living wage. I agree that we have to have a strong social safety net. I believe unions are essential to a well-functioning democracy and kind of balancing power structures. I believe in equal rights. I believe in equity. I like to say I'm pro smart development.”
How can we make our own region greener? “We can ensure that solar panels are on houses and commercial buildings,” Isacksen said. “Making pedestrian friendly developments. So not putting parking garages on the first floors, for example, to have commercial and retail spaces on the first floor. So when you're walking downtown in Reno or Sparks, you're not walking for blocks that are just dead because they're parking garages, having multimodal effective mass transit which incorporates safe bike lanes and has bus routes that are more effective. I was talking to a guy the other day, and this is my favorite quote from the week in all my conversations, he said, ‘people aren't going to bike if they think they're going to die.’ And I was like, yeah, that's exactly right.”
Learning about Washoe County, Campaigning and District 3
He’s also learning more about how Washoe County operates. “It's really blown my mind, reading the county budget, you know, where money is being allocated, looking at transportation, what's going on with the bus system? What about bikes and public land stuff? There was a little bit of a snafu recently with a public lands bill being drafted by the county and then kind of taken away from the county, because there was so much disagreement about what was included. I wanted to get in early to really dedicate, be able to dedicate the time, that it requires to be a good candidate, to be able to serve in a way that respects the people of the district and of the county,” he said.
One scary fact he points out is that Reno is the second fastest warming city in the country, second fastest after Las Vegas. “So that's a result of climate change and changing weather patterns and things like that. It's also a direct result of how we develop, of how much concrete we're putting on the ground and what kind of roads are we doing and how much tree cover we have, and those decisions lead to decreases in quality of life. And so if we are, if we're losing our cooler high desert nights, if we're having to run the AC more during the day, because it's getting hotter earlier and all that kind of stuff, we need to reconsider in a big way, how we're doing things. If we can assume that we're going to be having a wildfire season, from now on, which is just very disheartening, we need to be looking at air quality more holistically and doing all we can the rest of the year to make sure the environment is in better shape.”
He’s been told to raise about $40,000 for the race. He understands the concerns voters have when too much campaign money is coming from developers. “Reno, for example, underwent the master plan effort a couple years ago with a lot of input. And so if a developer comes to the planning board and says, I want do this, and the planning board says, well, no, you can't do X, Y, and Z because it doesn't fit, in some cases, the developer can then say, ‘well, I'm gonna appeal that.’ And then it goes up to the city councils and then it becomes a political decision. And I think that's where those donations really could pay off for a developer. So if you've given five grand to a candidate or whatever, and they're now a council member, you know, this is how things work. They're gonna say, ‘well, it's a pretty good plan.’ Even if it doesn't, you know, it doesn't meet everything we want, let's just go ahead with it.”
He’s not sure who his competitors will be and who they might be backed by, with many more established politicians circling around county commission positions.
We also asked him if this was the right time for a white male candidate to seek a leadership office, given the drive for more diversity.
“I’ll be the first to admit that I was born on third base,” he said. “I’m a white male born to a loving middle class family. My life has been easier than most. I was able to go to school. I was able to graduate college. It's been a pretty straightforward process for me, which in large part is why I have dedicated my life to service. I have a safety net. I can fall when I leap like what we've done with our lives, our activism, our community service. And so, jumping into politics is part of that. “
He says he didn’t see anyone else running yet, and could see himself as an incubator for future possible candidates.
“If my running can inspire other people and can have somebody else say, ‘Hey, I think I could win a city council or commission seat,’ that would be the ultimate victory. We need more people who want to truly serve as elected officials who will take a stand for the environment… Who will take a stand for affordable housing, for example. If more of those folks are getting into politics and more diverse views and experiences are represented, then ultimately we'll have a better society,” he concluded.