Candidate for
Mayor; City of Oakland

Nancy Nadel is in her third term as an Oakland City Councilmember. She has been a West Oakland resident for 25 years.

Nancy chairs the Public Works Committee on the City Council. She is a member of the Association of Bay Area Governments Executive Committee, Regional Planning Committee, and chairs the Earthquake Hazards Outreach Review Committee. Nancy represents the city of Oakland on the National League of Cities. She chairs the Project Choice Steering Committee, a project funded to help re-integrate ex-offenders into the community upon release from prison. She also co-chairs the Oakland Base Reuse Authority. She is an Executive Board member of the Oakland Community Action Agency whose charge is to help lift Oaklanders out of poverty, a program that is pitifully underfunded through the federal government. Nancy serves on the advisory committee for Dreamcatcher, a program to house and counsel homeless youth under 18 and is a founding member of the new ABAG regional committee on homelessness.

Nancy works extensively on violence prevention and obstacles to employment. She spearheaded the effort to get a measure on the ballot to fund violence prevention and enforcement programs, Measure R, which lost by only 600 votes in March and she supported the revised version, Measure Y, which won by 70% on the November 2004 ballot. You can read about her work on other issues important to her constituents, including environment and environmental justice, arts, housing and economic development by visiting her website. Across District 3 you will see evidence of her work on all these issues.

Nancy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University, a Bachelor of Science in Geology from SF State University and an MS from UC Berkeley in Engineering Geoscience where she was a full fellowship student. Prior to joining the council she worked as a teacher, an artist, a geophysicist, a small business owner and an environmental engineer with the US EPA. Nancy was the first woman chair of the Bay Area Geophysical Society. She began her political career as an elected director of the East Bay Municipal Utility District Board where she served two terms and was their first woman Board President. During that period, she was a founding director of a water policy non-profit that is still in existence called POWER. Nancy has also taught at many grade levels from elementary school to university. She has been published in several journals with articles about water policy, affirmative action, environmental justice and sustainable development.

She is an avid gardener, needlework artist, tricyclist, and kayaker. Nancy, a widow, has one daughter, 24, who recently completed her Master's at UC Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy.