Kari Birdseye, the chair of Benicia’s Planning Commission, will run for a City Council seat in November. (Courtesy photo)

The race for Benicia’s City Council is getting into shape, with Planning Commission Chair Kari Birdseye the latest candidate to throw her hat into the growing ring. She announced her bid Wednesday.

“The Benicia City Council is the natural next step in my service to the city of Benicia,” Birdseye wrote in a news release. “I plan to make continuing, sustainable economic development a key priority while protecting its clean air and water and its historic small-town charm.”

Birdseye has lived in Benicia for nearly 20 years. Her husband James is a producer for KRON News, daughter Julia is a freshman at San Francisco State University and son Joseph is a sophomore at Benicia High School. During her time in Benicia, Birdseye has been president of the Parent Teacher Association at Matthew Turner Elementary School, president of the Benicia Stingrays swim team, member of the Human Resources Board and is currently on the board of directors for the Solano County Fair Association. She also has served on the Planning Commission since 2015, where she took the role of chair in 2017 following the retirement of Donald Dean. Birdseye’s proudest accomplishment was voting with the rest of the Commission in 2016 to deny Valero’s proposed Crude-By-Rail Project, which would have extended Union Pacific Railroad tracks to have barrels of crude oil delivered to the refinery by train.

“Along with my fellow commissioners, I placed the health and safety of the people of Benicia first, by denying the dangerous crude by rail proposal,” Birdseye wrote.

Birdseye is currently the strategic communications manager for the international environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. She was also a national press secretary for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, spent four years as communications director for the Wine Institute in San Francisco and was an executive producer at CNN in the ‘90s, where she led a team that won an Emmy for their coverage of the bombing at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.

Birdseye is looking forward to her campaign.

“Benicia has a wonderful feeling of being a community of neighbors, and I look forward to being your neighbor at City Hall,” she wrote.

Birdseye is the third candidate to announce her bid for City Council, the other two being former Councilmember Christina Strawbridge and Economic Development Board Chair Lionel Largaespada.

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