Marshall Ends Bid for McGlashan’s Supe Seat

Mill Valley City Councilwoman said Tuesday that she is withdrawing her name from the list of possible appointees to the District 3 Marin County Board of Supervisors seat vacated by the late Charles McGlashan, who .

Marshall, a close friend of McGlashan’s who was with him when he died of a heart attack at the end of a ski weekend in North Lake Tahoe, was considered the front-runner for the seat, as as his first choice in the event of an emergency.

Gov. Jerry Brown is set to appoint a replacement for McGlashan but hasn’t said anything publicly about when he will do so. Marshall said as the weeks went on, it became clearer to her that while she intends to run for a supervisor seat down the road, now wasn’t the time.

“I admit that I’m a little disappointed that I had to let this particular ship sail,” the 46-year-old Marshall said Tuesday. “But I also had to get real about all the things I have on my plate right now. It wasn’t fair for me to run those rails and potentially walk way from LEAN Energy. Because I couldn’t do both.”

LEAN Energy is the startup nonprofit Marshall launched in late March in an effort to help other local governments use community choice aggregation to become electricity retailers, much in the way that created , the first community choice public power agency in California to supply power to customers.

McGlashan was the driving force behind MEA and Marin Clean Energy, and Marshall serves as vice chair on the MEA board.

Marshall said LEAN has her traveling throughout the state and is as demanding on her as any startup venture would be. In making the decision, Marshall said it became clear to her that because the number of people who are well-versed on the technical aspects of community choice aggregation (CCA) is quite small, replacing her at LEAN might have been very difficult.

But while not wanting to abandon LEAN was a major factor in her decision, Marshall said there were other considerations. Her elderly father in Strawberry is of ill health and she has a number of “family obligations that need tending (to) before I can take on something as demanding as the supervisor’s position,” Marshall wrote in an email to friends late Monday night.

“It’s not any one thing,” she said. “It’s truly a whole combination.”

But Marshall was clear that her decision does not reflect a lack of interest in serving on the board in the future, maybe as soon as running for the District 3 supervisor seat in 2012. She said she simply wanted to earn the job based on her own qualifications for a full four-year term after being voted in, not by appointment.

“I very well may run in 2012 but I need to do a little more research on that,” she said. “I actually feel like I have the skill set and qualifications to be a fine supervisor and if I choose to run, I want to let people know what those are and to be elected on the merits of my own leadership.”

Marshall declined to say who among the remaining interested potential appointees has her support.

“It’s really important to me that whoever is appointed espouses the direction and values that Charles started and that he was leading,” she said. “And personally I wouldn’t mind having somebody who would hold the seat for the remainder of the term but not seek to run for election.”

Despite Marshall’s department, a number of candidates have expressed interest in an appointment to McGlashan’s seat, including former Mill Valley City Councilman Cliff Waldeck; Strawberry resident and public affairs management consultant Richard Rubin; Tiburon resident and county Planning Commissioner Mark Ginalski; former banking executive Teveia R. Barnes of Tiburon; and Kate Sears of Sausalito, a deputy state attorney general.

Several of those interested parties, including Barnes, Ginalski and Rubin, have said they would simply hold the seat as a caretaker and not run for election in 2012.

Marshall said she had spoken to at length before making her decision.

“Charles would have supported this decision because he cared really deeply about climate change and community choice aggregation,” Marshall said. “I’m really clear that he’s fine with this.”