Mayor Michael Tubbs: A Brief Summary of His Term

Stockton Mayor Michael D. Tubbs, elected in 2016, has endured a career among mixed public reception. Regarded as not only the first African-American mayor but also the youngest mayor of Stockton, attention and scrutiny have not only targeted many of Tubbs’s “reinvent Stockton” policies and programs, but have arisen around his actions in his overall political career as well.

One of his most controversial decisions was the launching of Advance Peace, a program created to target and reduce gun violence in the communities of Stockton. Though the mission is objectively good, the dissatisfaction lies not with the intent of the program, but rather around the program’s plans to tackle gun violence: by engaging and collaborating with those who’ve had a past of lethal firearm offenses to create strategies to combat the issue in the city. Because these people are also being paid, a lot of frustration and dislike arose against Tubbs as a result, from simple criticism to antagonizing comments like “He’s paying gangs to kill each other,” as shown in the HBO Original Documentary, Stockton On My Mind.

In addition to that criticism, many people also felt that the Advanced Peace program was a waste of their tax money. This concern was later reassured, however, by Daniel Lopez, the mayor’s public information officer, in the documentary, “So everybody’s upset and online, everybody’s like, ‘You’re not gonna use my tax dollars. Not my tax dollars.’ How many times—it’s not tax dollars. Jeez, it’s private funds paying for this.”

The Advance Peace program was not the only one to spur dispute, because as shown, Mayor Tubbs’s Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) program also received some backlash. Built on the statistic that over 40 percent of Americans cannot afford a 400 dollar emergency, the SEED program is designed to randomly choose 125 people from a low-income neighborhood and gift them 500 dollars with no regulations as to how the money is allowed to be spent.

Conflict and controversy already reside around the idea of universal basic income, but considering the amount of freedom SEED gave these recipients, many people are highly skeptical that the money will be spent in good faith, and some have even gone as far as to claim that the government is “paying people not to work,” as demonstrated in the documentary. These worries seem to be unwarranted, however, since monthly tracking reveals that less than one percent of the money was spent at tobacco and/or alcohol stores. Rather, 39 percent was spent on food, 24 percent was spent on merchandise, and the rest was spent on “utilities, auto care, medical and insurance services, recreation and transportation.”

Aside from his policies, one of the most memorable political actions Mayor Tubbs carried out amidst mixed reactions is endorsing Micheal Bloomberg in the 2020 democratic presidential candidate race. Known for claiming that Bloomberg is the candidate “with the resources, with the record, and with the relationships” to defeat Trump, the immediate negative public reaction that Bloomberg received extended to Tubbs. Nevertheless, most likely, the mayor’s endorsement is more-so motivated by his shared history with Bloomberg (i.e. graduating from the mayoral program sponsored by Bloomberg back in Tubbs’s college days, Bloomberg’s donations to a few Stockton projects, etc.) rather than by any of Bloomberg’s actual credentials.

Finally, one of the biggest reasons why there are many unfavorable opinions regarding Mayor Tubbs is just simply because nothing—in terms of crime—has changed under his term. While the most recent police report, August 2020, shows that crime is overall down compared to last year, this is obviously due to the COVID-19 lockdown. When taking into consideration the Stockton PD’s 2017 annual report and the 2018 annual report, crime rates have remained the same or have even increased slightly. Homicide has gone down slightly in 2018, but more information needs to be gathered in order to determine the effectiveness of Tubbs’s programs.

Overall, while Mayor Tubbs clearly has good intentions with many of his programs, the effectiveness of his policies and overall mayorship is up to the individual’s evaluations.