Napa Valley Register endorsement: Mariam Aboudamous for Supervisor

Both of the candidates in this race — which is a rematch of the 2020 contest — mentioned traffic as one of the county’s main concerns. This is unsurprising, since the south county district includes some of the area’s most car-choked roads.

In the 2020 election, Belia Ramos got a bit more than 500 votes than Mariam Aboudamous, or 6.4% more than her rival. A win in March would give Ramos a third term — she was first elected in 2016 — and make her, by far, the most senior member of the Board of Supervisors.

Both women are attorneys, both have served on the American Canyon City Council — Aboudamous is in her second term — and both demonstrated to us a keen grasp of the minutiae of governance. Ramos, in particular, struck us as a skilled policy wonk, reveling in the way things work at a granular level.

Perhaps as an example of this, Ramos, when asked to point to her biggest achievement in her nearly eight years as a supervisor, touted her work in creating a fire services administrator. This person works as a liaison between county officials and CalFire, looking for ways to better coordinate services and resources, and helping to make the region more resilient toward wildfires. Ramos said it is modeled after a similar program in Placer County, adding she believes it was a huge step toward making the county as a whole safer.

For her part, Aboudamous said she is most proud of her part in the negotiations surrounding the Watson Ranch development, one of the biggest housing projects in the county in many years. The project includes more than 1,200 homes, with nearly 200 set aside as affordable units. The enormously complicated project took years of discussions and back-and-forth before coming to fruition.

Both Ramos and Aboudamous have advocated for an alternative route through American Canyon, a proposal we think has significant merit. An open question would be how much each would feel about building such a road through areas currently zoned for agricultural uses — an enormously touchy subject in Napa County.

Addressing this, Aboudamous said she felt such a use would be appropriate because it would provide a larger community benefit. She added that she would want to see a green belt and other environmental mitigations for such a project. Ramos noted that she has long been looking for a way to create such a road, stretching back to her first supervisorial election in 2016. She pointed to a 2021 vote that would help forward such a plan.

Regardless of the outcome, the winner of this race will be a fierce advocate for the needs of American Canyon — and for the county as a whole. But the board particularly liked Aboudamous’ — similar to Alessio’s — emphasis on building relationships between the Board of Supervisors and the governments of the county’s cities.

This is not to denigrate Ramos, who talked widely about her relationships with different regional and statewide agencies in our interview. That is clearly valuable as well, but we think Aboudamous is better positioned to build bridges locally, and having a fresh set of eyes on issues in the southern part of the county will benefit all of us.