page_title: Gayle McLaughlin
section_title: Mayor of Richmond
hierarchical_section_title: Gayle McLaughlin / Career / Mayor of Richmond
caption_attribution_description: keep it =p
context_page_description: Gayle McLaughlin is an American politician from Richmond, California. She was first elected to the Richmond City Council in 2004 when she was a member of the Green Party of California. She won two consecutive four-year terms as the city's mayor in 2006 and 2010. After reaching the mayoral term limit, she was reelected to the City Council in 2014. In June 2017, she announced her candidacy for lieutenant governor of California in the 2018 election.
  McLaughlin's election in 2006 made Richmond the largest U.S. city led by a Green Party member. She has espoused a minimum wage increase and a plan to forcibly appropriate foreclosed home mortgages from banks. She has led an ongoing effort to restrict the municipal influence of Richmond's largest employer, the Chevron Corporation, and to refashion its environmental obligations.
context_section_description: In 2006, McLaughlin decided to challenge Richmond's incumbent mayor Irma Anderson. She was elected on November 7, 2006 by a 242-vote margin over Anderson. At the time, her victory made Richmond the largest city in the country with a Green Party mayor. McLaughlin won a second term in office in the 2010 municipal election. She overcame a well-funded offensive to unseat her during the re-election campaign.
  Under McLaughlin's mayoralty, the "small, blue-collar city best known for its Chevron refinery has become the unlikely vanguard for anticorporate, left-wing activism". From early in her career, McLaughlin gave tangible governmental support to workers' cooperatives as a means of fighting unemployment. She was a strong proponent of Measure N, a proposed municipal soda tax that was met by determined, well-funded resistance from the American Beverage Association and other business interests. She also spearheaded a 2014 effort to raise Richmond's local minimum wage to US$12.30 per hour. The raise provided impetus to the broader statewide minimum wage movement. McLaughlin was a member of the nationwide advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition.
  McLaughlin was criticized for attending an Occupy rally on Veterans Day of 2011 instead of a symbolic ship-launching portrayal at the former Richmond Shipyards. McLaughlin stated she was a supporter of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War.
caption: Campaign sign, 2006
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