After moving to the Bay Area in 2007, Meghann Adams bounced around: Oakland for a few months, the Mission for a year.
Before the 42-year-old found her current home, she said, lowering her voice: “I lived in Noe Valley for a year… It’s not me.”
So, four years ago, she moved back to the grittier, working-class Tenderloin, where she’d felt more at home. Last week, she announced an even bigger move: her candidacy for California controller, the elected officer responsible for auditing the state’s finances and spending.
Adams, a school bus driver with graying hair and a gentle demeanor, doesn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a controller. Her arms are covered in tattoos, and on her wrists she wears two thick black leather cuffs, one adorned with a metal bird, the other fitted with an Apple Watch.
At her campaign launch before a small gathering of supporters at City Hall last week, Adams sported a hot pink jumpsuit.
“Politicians on both sides of the aisle would have us believe that we’re not educated enough to understand budgets, laws, or tough decisions. … They tell us, ‘you couldn’t possibly understand,’” Adams said, referring to herself and her fellow blue-collar workers.
“I’m here to tell you that’s a lie. You are enough. We are enough,” she said.
Adams is one of a slate of socialist candidates in San Francisco neighborhoods running for state office who are hoping to shake up California politics. They say Democrats who have held power for years have not served the people.
Ramsey Robinson, another Tenderloin resident and social worker at a Bayview school, is running for governor, and Mission District public school teacher and teachers union vice president Frank Lara is running for state superintendent.
Their chances may be slim, judging by the candidates’ name recognition and political experience, but candidates like Adams are putting in the effort: At her press conference, a dozen cameras were on her at all times, and her campaign announcement on TikTok got nearly 45,000 views.
Adams, for her part, says she’s ready to take the wheel from incumbent Malia Cohen, who was previously president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and that she understands the job of a controller well.
For much of her 10 years driving a school bus in and around San Francisco, Adams has also been heavily involved in union leadership. She remembers starting at SMART 1741 as a trustee and auditing finances alongside the union treasurer.
“He was like, ‘Man, you have a lot of questions,’” Adams chuckled. “And it just kind of went up from there.”
In 2020, she became her union’s president. As her colleagues lost their healthcare insurance and saw their salaries cut due to the pandemic, Adams, working remotely, helped negotiate contracts.
She helped Zum, the company that now operates San Francisco school buses, get set up — and walked the company through its first union contract.
Adams sees the role of the state controller as an extension of that work. Through audits of corporate tax incentives and a housing affordability audit, she wants to expose corporations that fall short on promises or buy up properties and hike rental prices.
She plans for a public utility feasibility study to show the effect of a PG&E monopoly on energy services in California.
Another major piece of her campaign is disclosing the state pension fund’s investments in companies that support the Israeli war on Gaza.
Adams wants to investigate how federal or state cuts impact rural hospital services, city schools, and buses, to name a few.
“State controllers can’t just go and impose a new policy,” she notes, but they can audit and ramp up pressure.
Uplifting put-upon communities like the Tenderloin is another focus for Adams — and for her fellow candidates.
Robinson, the socialist gubernatorial candidate, recently moved to the area when he found himself priced out of his apartment in Japantown, just 10 minutes away. For years, though, he has been doing mental-health work with children whose families live in the Tenderloin.
Since his move, he said, he’s realized that Democrats have made a “political choice” not to adequately address the neighborhood’s issues, like poverty and substance abuse.
California is “the fourth largest economy in the world, and yet we can’t use that money to make sure that the people in the Tenderloin have housing, have an essential human need?” he said in an interview.
Robinson, like Adams, said it’s time for an independent party to step in. He wants to impose a small tax on the ultra-wealthy that he says will change lives across the state.
“The conditions are really ripe right now,” Robinson said, noting that capitalism is increasingly falling out of favor as interest in socialism is rising.
“When working people, oppressed people like us, people like in the Tenderloin, when we have that economic and political power … this is what’s going to solve our problems,” he said.
Or, as Adams’ campaign message at her City Hall press conference put it, “Pull up! Beep, beep! Put a worker in the driver’s seat!”
For Adams, the message was literal as well as political: Her next shift was driving the girls’ field hockey team from St. Ignatius College Preparatory School to their game.
After her rally, she hopped in her pale green Honda Fit and headed back to work.
“Another major piece of her campaign is disclosing the state pension fund’s investments in companies that support the Israeli war on Gaza.”
That is not the job of the Controller at all.
Thankfully she doesn’t have a chance of being elected.
Just who we need!! She’s got my vote!
Oh my.