Santa Cruz resident Chris Krohn posted a photo of a protest surrounding the Downtown Santa Cruz clock tower on Feb. 3, 2025. His caption described the crowd as a dragon rising in response to the Trump administration’s agenda. 

“Trump-musk is poking the dragon, and could the dragon be rising?” he wrote. 

About a year later, on March 10, 2026 Krohn announced his campaign for mayor of Santa Cruz county. 

“I’m running for mayor because Santa Cruz is currently being sold off to the highest bidders,” he said. “My campaign theme is, ‘Santa Cruz is not for sale.’ We need to get some balance back.” 

Primary Election Day for Santa Cruz County is June 2, and the candidates are Krohn, Ami Chen Mills, Ryan Coonerty, Joy Schendledecker and Gillian Greensite. If none of the candidates garner more than 50 percent of the popular vote, the top two will face-off in the November general election. 

Background and Experience

As a 1987 UC Santa Cruz alumnus and former environmental studies advisor, Krohn has previously served two terms on the Santa Cruz City Council, from 1998 to 2002 and from 2016 to 2020. Krohn also served as mayor of Santa Cruz for one year in 2002. 

Krohn was removed from his role as a council member in 2020 as the result of a recall campaign initiated by then-mayor of Santa Cruz, Martine Watkins. This was followed by a petition criticizing Krohn’s disapproval on breaking up an unhoused encampment. Accusations from Watkins circulated against Krohn and fellow council member Drew Glover, regarding six instances of gender-motivated bullying. While five of the six incidents were proved unsubstantial by a San Jose judge, the petition garnered 11,000 signatures requesting a ballot initiative to remove him.

Krohn believes his opposition to overpriced housing developments played a major role in his recall, which he claims was part of a larger move to eventually replace progressives such as himself with pro-business, centrist politicians.

“After that recall, the realtors and the developers got their people on the council, and it’s been like that for six or seven years now,” he said. 

Key Campaign Points for UCSC Voters

Chris Krohn relates many of his larger campaign goals, including housing affordability and transparency, to the fast-growing population of UCSC. He holds a decades-long stance against out-of-area developing companies who fund the construction of luxury apartments in Santa Cruz, some costing upwards of $7,000 per month. Compared to the off-campus options he had as a student, he believes UCSC students are “getting a bad deal,” and intends to encourage the university to house more of its students on campus. 

“We need another council that’s going to be able to stand up to the developers, stand up to UCSC,” he said. “Cynthia Larive [UCSC’s Chancellor] is just trying to get housing built in Santa Cruz because she can’t do it on campus.”

Krohn also fears that UCSC has become a “faceless” campus, letting in more students each year while cracking down on expressions of campus culture, specifically protesting. Krohn recalled the police presence he witnessed at the 2020 Wildcat Strikes, a graduate student protest demanding that UCSC administrators meet to discuss cost of living adjustments. 

“I personally saw cops dragging graduate students by the hair across the street into the ‘paddy wagon,’” he said. “I mean, just unbelievable. There’s a lot of rifts between the students and the bureaucracy.” 

To bridge some of these gaps, Krohn intends to “slow down the process and invite people in” to local politics, including students. He envisions this beginning with limiting closed session dialogue — initial discussion among local elected officials before the public is let into City Council meetings. 

Theoretically meant to discuss personal grievances and the hiring or firing of city employees, Krohn stated that “a lot of things end up in closed session that shouldn’t.”

“Why don’t you do that in public?” he asked of agenda-setting meetings, which are also closed session. “Why not just have everyone come and the public sit in if they want? They don’t have to come, maybe no one will come, but it’s still in public and they’re seeing how you put together [an] agenda for the city.”

Off campus, Krohn’s campaign centers on the unhoused population of Santa Cruz and the larger environment in which the city exists. He opposes the shutdown of daytime operations of unhoused services provider, Housing Matters, and promotes ecological health in the form of electric city buses and marsh land maintenance. 

Santa Cruz in the World

According to Krohn, the city of Santa Cruz has been a pioneer of advocacy on an international level. As mayor in 2002, Krohn refused to settle for just local politics, making Santa Cruz the first city to sign onto a resolution condemning President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. 

Since then, the council has removed itself from national and international issues despite its progressive electorate. This includes a five-to-two vote against advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

“A lot of people came to that meeting, over 400, I would say maybe 50 or 60 were against the ceasefire, and the city council still voted no,” Krohn said. “Totally not representative of the city.” 

Krohn also emphasized his desire to advocate for all members of the Santa Cruz community, including their global interests. For example, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was residing in England in 1998, the city council sent a letter to Britain’s Prime Minister demanding Pinochet return to Chile and stand trial. 

“The British ambassador called me and said, ‘Why is Santa Cruz interested in Augusto Pinochet going back to Chile to stand trial?’ I said, ‘Because a bunch of Chilean people live here and they brought it to us,’” Krohn recalled. “Santa Cruz has always punched above its weight class.”