When a Bay Area city calls off an uncontested election this fall, residents get the same one-word justification: savings. But the price tags cities attach to that logic run from about $30,000 in Cotati to figures nearly ten times larger elsewhere for essentially the same maneuver — and not one council has published the arithmetic behind its number.

At least four Bay Area city councils voted this month to scrap November races for seats no one filed to challenge, appointing the unopposed candidates directly under a state law that permits it. Each cited money saved. But the estimates vary so widely — and rest on so little published detail — that the single reason voters are handed for losing a ballot is the hardest part of the decision to verify.

Start with the money, because it is the sole reason cities offer. Cotati, Sonoma County's smallest city, priced its canceled November election at about $30,000. That figure came from City Manager Damin O'Bid during a special meeting that ran all of 10 minutes before the council called off the Nov. 3 vote, the Press Democrat reported (external source, opens in a new tab), after only two people qualified for two open seats. Planning commissioners Kimberlyn Moffet and Ryan Long will be seated in December instead. Moffet accepted with visible ambivalence, saying she "would have been proud to earn the community's vote," and Councilmember Ben Ford backed the cancellation while calling a full election under the circumstances "not a good use of city funds."

The mechanism is California Elections Code Section 10229, which lets a council appoint the winners and skip the ballot whenever a race draws no more candidates than there are seats. Lafayette used it this month too: Patch reported (external source, opens in a new tab) the city moved to seat James Cervantes, Stella Wotherspoon and Mario DiPrisco after exactly three people filed for three council spots. Calistoga's council did the same in Napa County, installing a mayor and two members without a vote.

Then there is Livermore, which attached a far bigger number to the identical procedure and the least public backing for it. City Clerk Olivia Nashed's staff report projected $200,000 to $300,000 in savings from appointing Mayor John Marchand to a seventh two-year term and Councilmember Evan Branning to the District 1 seat, according to the Livermore Vine — the only outlet to report the estimate. The Dissent could not independently confirm it: the city's public agenda portal returned an access error, and no second source carries the figure. And on its face the number invites scrutiny, because Livermore is running a November election no matter what. Its lone contested race — District 2 incumbent Ben Barrientos against newcomer Narayan Tadimeti — keeps the city printing and tallying ballots regardless, so whatever it saves is the marginal cost of two uncontested lines, not a canceled election.

That is the hole under all of these decisions. The distance from Cotati's $30,000 to Livermore's quarter-million is partly just size — roughly 7,000 residents against 90,000, more ballots to print and count. But no council released the per-ballot breakdown that would let a resident trace how dropping two or three uncontested names yields a number ten times larger in one city than another. The savings are asserted, never itemized.

None of this is a one-off. Rohnert Park appointed three unopposed incumbents rather than hold a race in 2024, the Press Democrat noted (external source, opens in a new tab), and this month's cluster suggests appointment-in-lieu-of-election is hardening into the routine way many Bay Area residents acquire a city council — write-in challenges, already vanishingly rare, foreclosed along with the vote.

Skipping a contest no one entered can be defensible budgeting. But when the cited savings run from a documented $30,000 to a six-figure claim a city won't substantiate, and the same motion quietly ends any public say, residents are being asked to take both the price and the principle on trust.