Council

The nine

Eight districts and a Mayor. Five votes carry.

Week of October 5–11, 2026 · Updated Friday, October 9, 2026 · Source: Berkeley's agenda listing (live)

Nine elected officials: eight district councilmembers and a Mayor elected by the whole city. Five votes carry a motion.

Seat	Member	Next on the ballot
Mayor	Adena Ishii	November 2028
District 1	Rashi Kesarwani	November 2026
District 2	Terry Taplin	November 2028
District 3	Ben Bartlett	November 2028
District 4	Igor Tregub	November 2026
District 5	Shoshana O’Keefe	November 2028
District 6	Brent Blackaby	November 2028
District 7	Cecilia Lunaparra	November 2026
District 8	Mark Humbert	November 2026

Terms end at the end of November in the year shown, so a seat is filled at that November’s election.

What having a district changes

In an at-large city there is no shortcut: you have to persuade a majority of a body that all answers to the same electorate. Berkeley stopped being that city in 1986, when Council seats moved from citywide to district elections. One councilmember is now specifically yours, is accountable to a few thousand households rather than to a hundred thousand people, and is the normal route by which a neighbourhood-scale issue reaches an agenda at all.

The corollary is worth saying plainly: a district councilmember is one vote of nine and cannot deliver anything alone. Getting your member to carry an item is the first step, not the last. Five is the number that matters, and the Mayor is one of the nine, not a tiebreaker above them.

If you do not know which district you are in, use the city’s Council District Lookup, or take the boundaries from the open dataset — see Data. This site does not print district boundaries as prose, because a boundary described in words is wrong at exactly the addresses where the answer matters. The current eight-district map was drawn by the Independent Redistricting Commission and took effect in 2022; boundaries are reviewed once a decade against the census.

The staggered cycle

All nine seats are four-year terms, but they are not all filled at once. Districts 2, 3, 5 and 6, and the Mayor, are elected in presidential years. Districts 1, 4, 7 and 8, and the City Auditor, are elected in the midterms. So roughly half the council turns over at each municipal election, and no election can replace the whole body.

All of these offices are elected by ranked-choice voting. See Vote for how that actually works on the ballot.

Act now — comment deadlines

To weigh in: speak at the meeting in the School District Board Room at 1231 Addison St, on Zoom, or by phone (*9 to raise your hand) -- or email council@berkeleyca.gov. Send it by noon the day before and it reaches councilmembers in the last packet before the vote; later than that and it is distributed after the meeting.

Comment by Monday, October 12 for City Council, Tuesday, October 13, 6:00 PM.

berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas →

Where the work actually happens

A Tuesday night is the end of a process, not the whole of it. Councilmembers spend most of their time in committees, and committees are far easier to be heard at.

Six standing policy committees

Each has three members and meets in daylight, with its own agenda and its own public comment. An item routed to a committee is worked over there before it reaches the full Council with a recommendation attached.

Agenda & Rules — Sets the agenda and referral rules. Small, procedural, and disproportionately powerful over what gets heard.
Budget & Finance — The budget, before it is a budget.
Public Safety — Police, fire, emergency services and accountability.
Land Use, Housing & Economic Development — Where most zoning and housing policy is shaped before Council sees it.
Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community — Public health, homelessness services, parks and community programmes.
Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Sustainability — Streets, paving, transit, climate and the physical city.

Joint bodies with other governments

Berkeley’s awkward relationship with the other governments inside its own boundaries is formalised in a set of standing joint committees, named after how many people each side sends.

2x2 — Council and the Berkeley Unified School District board.
3x3 — Council and the Berkeley Housing Authority.
4x4 Joint Task Force on Housing — Council and the elected Rent Stabilization Board — the only standing table where those two bodies meet.
City / UC / Student Relations — Council and the university, with undergraduate and graduate student representatives. Its council seats are fixed by district: 4, 6, 7 and 8.
Joint Powers Financing Authority — Issues financing for capital projects. The members of the City Council are its governing body, sitting under a different name.

Membership changes with each reorganisation, so it is not copied here. Current assignments are on each member’s roster page, and the committees themselves are at Council Committees.

Regional bodies — and one thing people get wrong

Your councilmember does not sit on the BART or AC Transit board. Both are separately elected: BART by nine BART districts, AC Transit by ward plus at-large seats. If your issue is a bus route or a station, the person with a vote on it was elected on a different ballot line and is not on the Council. Councilmembers do sit on liaison committees with those agencies, which is real but much weaker.

Where councilmembers genuinely do carry Berkeley’s vote regionally is through associations of local governments — ABAG and MTC most consequentially, because ABAG sets the regional housing need allocation that drives Berkeley’s housing element and therefore a great deal of the local argument about building.

Contacting them

Email the whole body at council@berkeleyca.gov — that address reaches all nine offices and becomes part of the public record. Individual addresses are on each district page above.

For anything operational — a pothole, a permit, a streetlight — the Council is the wrong door, and not merely by convention: the City Charter forbids councilmembers from giving orders to city staff at all. That is the City Manager’s side of the house. Start with the relevant department, or with the City Clerk at clerk@berkeleyca.gov. See Guide.