By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics
In a state where Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on the time of day, a professional mediator has decided he’s seen enough.
Sean Collinson, a Los Angeles-based family law mediator, arbitrator, and FBI-trained hostage negotiator who serves on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Crisis Negotiation Team, has qualified for the June 2 primary ballot running as a no-party-preference candidate for lieutenant governor. His pitch is simple: California doesn’t need another partisan fighter. It needs someone who knows how to close.
“I’m kind of the mediator Moses candidate that comes up the middle,” Collinson said in an interview. “I’m not beholden to either of you — but I’ll take your brilliant ideas and make them work for the people.”
The Brooklyn-born Collinson — a Flatbush kid, and 35-year California transplant — got into the race the way most things happen in his life: fast, unlikely, and with a story attached. After a late-night callout during the January fires led him to the Rose Bowl, where he personally tracked down blankets for freezing forest workers when no one else would, he took it as a sign. He launched a website in 72 hours. Then dropped out 72 hours later after friends told him he was nuts. Nearly a year on, a chance encounter at a Live Nation event with a gubernatorial candidate who told him she’d heard he was running sent him back in — with five days to file.
“Like a crazy person, I did it,” he said. “I felt that God put me in that room.”
On the issues, Collinson keeps it direct. Public safety tops his list — “wherever I go in California, folks say they don’t feel safe.” Second is accountability for what he calls $24 billion in homeless spending that went unaccounted for. Third is affordability across the board. And then there’s the bullet train, which he calls a particular outrage.
“We’ve been paying the highest registration for a bullet train that we never even saw the tracks get laid down,” he said. On taxing the wealthy, he’s less interested in headline-grabbing wealth levies than in closing the loopholes that make them toothless.
“Read the fine print,” he warned. “The loopholes will remain open.”
It’s a crowded field. Democrats Josh Fryday — Gov. Newsom’s chief service officer and former Novato mayor — state Treasurer Fiona Ma, and former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs are the top-polling contenders on the Democratic side, though early surveys show roughly 80 to 90 percent of voters have no opinion of any of them.
Republicans David Fennell and David Collenberg are also in the race. The wide-open dynamics, Collinson argues, create exactly the kind of opening a no-party candidate needs.
He’s also adamant about what the job actually is — and isn’t.
“The ego cannot be allowed to be involved,” he said. “I come in with a mission to GSD — get stuff done. The lieutenant governor’s role is perfect for that.”
