Ami Chen Mills - An Interview with Candidate for Santa Cruz Mayor

Audio interview with Ami Chen Mills, candidate for Santa Cruz, California mayor in Nov. 3, 2026 runoff election. Five candidates ran for mayor in the June primary election. Because no candidate secured more than 50% of the vote in June, the top two vote-getters - Ami Chen Mills and Ryan Coonerty - face off in a runoff in November.

Ami Chen Mills is a journalist, educator and activist and was one of the first staff writers for Metro Santa Cruz and later wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner and was managing editor for Entrepreneur of the Year magazine. She is author of the 1991 book CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research, which includes a foreword by ex-CIA agent Philip Agee.

Ami Chen Mills co-founded a non-profit with her father called The Center for Sustainable Change and for two years she taught weekly classes at the drop-in center in midtown Santa Cruz called Mental Health Client Action Network (MHCAN). She and her husband have raised two daughters in Santa Cruz. Ami Chen Mills is a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and she currently hosts a talk radio program on KSQD called Moment of Truth.

Recently Ami was founder of the local Get The Flock Out campaign to persuade the Santa Cruz City Council to end their contract with surveillance company FLOCK, pausing the use of automatic license plate readers locally.

This interview was originally broadcast on October 23, 2026 on Transformation Highway with John Malkin on KZSC 88.1 FM / kzsc.org, broadcasting from the University of California Santa Cruz. Transformation Highway is broadcast weekly on KZSC on Thursdays at noon PST. The other candidate for mayor, Ryan Coonerty, did not respond to multiple invitations to be a guest on this program.