Green Activist Runs for State Controller

Years ago, when a friend told Laura Wells of Oakland, California, that she would be in politics, Wells responded that she hates politics.

But in 1992, she joined the fledgling Green Party of California. Since then Wells, fifty-nine, has run for California state controller two times, traveled to Venezuela to observe the birth of a grassroots democracy, and put a Green label on her way of life.

“My whole life is Green,” she told me. “I’m totally by nature frugal, always have a balanced budget, and I love not having a car.”

So how did someone who hated politics get to this point?

She started out in finance, and worked for Bank of America for many years. She was also among the first wave of women to have children later in life—her daughter was born when she was thirty-six.

And it was then, she says, when “I pulled my head out of the sand. I wanted to relate to normal people.”

In 1993, with her husband’s support, she started applying her financial know-how to activist jobs, first with the Pesticide Action Network North America, then the Women’s Economic Agenda Project in Oakland, and finally the Service Employees International Union.

It was in 2002 that she first ran for controller. Greg Jan, a long-time Alameda County Green Party stalwart, was putting together a slate of Green candidates for state office and asked her to run for controller.

While some call running for office with little chance of winning an expensive hobby, Wells considers it a democratic responsibility. The controller does not just write checks and disperse funds, she notes. The controller is also responsible for conducting audits. And she believes Green Party members are uniquely suited for auditing.

“We’re totally not sold out because we don’t take corporate contributions,” she says. She thinks the controller should be auditing the state prisons and the lottery, which, since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, is supposed to supplement public school funding. “The controller should be a true fiscal watchdog. As a Green Party member, I could have been a true fiscal watchdog because I would have owed nobody.”

During her first run, she got 417,000 votes. During her second run, in 2006, she got fewer votes due to the presence of a Peace and Freedom Party candidate on the ballot, but she remains upbeat and committed to working toward a multi-party system. At the same time that she was working on her 2006 campaign, she was also working for electoral reform in Oakland. Her efforts helped make Oakland the fourth Bay Area community to pass ranked-choice voting (also known as instant run-off voting), which eliminates the “spoiler”—or “Ralph Nader”—effect in local elections.

Now that the election is behind her, she is organizing the Pelosi Lobby Project, an ad hoc coalition of people and groups that will lobby House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take the lead in getting American troops out of the Middle East.

While the group includes Democrats and politically unaffiliated people, the majority are Greens. “The Green Party,” she says, “is the only party that’s electing people to office that are unequivocally opposed to the war. And it’s the largest political party in the world!”