Mayor
Elected by the whole city. One vote of nine, and no veto.
Week of October 5–11, 2026 · Updated Friday, October 9, 2026 · Source: Berkeley's agenda listing (live)
Berkeley elects its Mayor directly, citywide, by ranked-choice vote. The office is not handed round the Council each January the way it is in most California cities this size.
mayor@berkeleyca.gov · council@berkeleyca.gov reaches the Mayor and all eight councilmembers at once, and enters the public record.
City biography and committee assignments · Meeting video archive · Council agendas
The Mayor’s biography, priorities, committee seats and staff list are maintained by the city at the link above. This site does not keep a copy, because a copy is a thing that quietly stops being true.
The Mayor presides over Council meetings, sets the order in which items are heard, signs what the Council has approved, appoints members to the standing policy committees, and represents Berkeley regionally and ceremonially. The Mayor also votes as one of nine.
Presiding is worth a sentence of its own, because it is the office’s quietest real power. Whoever runs the meeting decides the order items are heard in, and on a Tuesday that runs past eleven the difference between item four and item twenty-four is the difference between a full room and an empty one.
It is not an executive. There is no veto. The Mayor does not run city departments, does not hire or fire staff, and does not propose a budget alone.
Executive authority sits with the City Manager, a professional appointed by and accountable to the Council as a whole — a structure Berkeley has used since 1923. The Charter is blunt about the boundary: neither the Council nor any member of it, the Mayor included, may give orders to the Manager’s subordinates, publicly or privately. The Council deals with the administration solely through the Manager.
Internalise that before you write to the Mayor about a problem. A Mayor who agrees with you completely still needs four colleagues, and a Mayor who agrees with you about a pothole is not permitted to have it filled — that request belongs to a department.
Where the office does have executive leverage is collective and appointment-shaped: the Manager serves at the Council’s pleasure, and even a department-head appointment requires five affirmative votes. Five, again.
Because the Mayor is elected by the whole city while every councilmember is elected by one district, the Mayor is the only member of the body whose constituency is Berkeley entire. That gives the office a genuine claim to speak for the city as a whole, and it gives residents a second, citywide route to raise something their own district office has not taken up.
It also changes the arithmetic of building a majority. A district member needs four colleagues who each answer to a different neighbourhood; the Mayor needs four colleagues while being the only person in the room who was elected by all of their electorates at once. That is not a vote, but it is not nothing.
Mechanically, the mayoral race is a citywide ranked-choice contest, decided in the presidential-year cycle rather than the midterm — so the Mayor and half the Council are chosen on the same ballot as a national election, and the other half of the Council and the City Auditor two years later. See Vote.
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 →