Election'26
Richmond City Councilmember Soheila Bana is seeking a second term representing District 4, pointing to her work on wildfire preparedness and public safety while drawing on a personal history shaped by political repression in Iran.
Bana came of age during the 1979 Iranian revolution, part of a generation that found the experience deeply empowering.
“I was a child of the revolution,” she said. “We threw the Shah away. We stood up to American imperialism. That was very empowering.”
What came next was not what she had imagined. She was denied admission to universities, despite her ranking in the single digits nationally in academic competitions for three years in a row. Her husband, Reza Yazdi, a leftist student activist, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
She left for Turkey, spent three months there waiting for a student visa, and arrived in the United States in 1985. She worked as an au pair and nanny, enrolled at a community college, earned a Regents Scholarship to UC Berkeley, and eventually finished a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science.
Now she sits on the Richmond City Council, representing District 4. She is running for a second term, facing a rematch against Jamin Pursell, who challenged her in 2022.
Who she is
Bana’s path to public office runs through decades of loss and activism on two continents.
When Bana left Iran, Yazdi was still on death row. She says he was held in a single metal cell in heat that reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for months. He endured mock executions and watched friends and fellow prisoners be taken out and shot. His original sentence was death, later commuted to 20 years after what Bana described as sustained public pressure and complex negotiations. He ultimately served six years, including long stretches in solitary confinement.
After his release, he eventually risked his life to escape the country, traveling on foot through the mountains of Kurdistan into Turkey. Bana helped him obtain the documents to come to the United States.
She described sitting on the steps outside a dungeon beneath a courthouse where Yazdi was held during his brief trial.
“I felt so helpless and voiceless and cut off from the rest of the world,” she said. “I thought no one deserves to be in such a situation. So I became a human rights defender for the rest of my life.”
Starting in the late 1990s, Bana wrote extensively in Farsi about women’s rights, children’s rights, and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in Iran. She was a co-founder and international coordinator of the Stop Stoning Forever campaign, which she says saved the lives of nine women, two men, and a young Kurdish woman facing a death sentence.
At UC Berkeley in the 1990s, she was active in organizing among graduate students and helped push for what she said became one of the first parental leave policies for students, later adopted more broadly across the university system.
Bana spent nearly 20 years as a transportation engineer at Caltrans, where she also rose to lead the union representing professional engineers and advocated in Sacramento on labor issues.
After her children left home and she retired, she said she began looking more closely at conditions in her community and decided to get involved.
The political landscape
Once a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, Bana said she hosted a fundraiser for an RPA-backed candidate at her home years before running for office. But by the time the 2022 campaign came around, she had broken with the organization over its support for defunding the police.
“When they moved in that direction, they lost a lot of support, especially in my community,” she said. “Living in a wildfire area, obviously, you want law enforcement. That was a major flaw.”
Bana said the RPA approached her prior to the 2022 race and asked her to run as their candidate, but she declined.
“I told them no, I can do it on my own,” she said. “If I’m good enough to be their candidate, why bring an opponent against me?”
She won the race with nearly 65 percent of the vote.
Since taking office, Bana said she has built relationships across a wide range of community organizations, from neighborhood emergency response groups to street merchant associations and business groups. She said she includes her personal cell phone number in emails and tries to respond within a day.
“I’m approachable, I’m responsive, accountable,” she said. “So many people reach out to me.”
The fire that started it
District 4 sits in wildfire terrain. When Bana began paying attention to what the city was and was not doing about that risk, she said she found little coordinated effort.
“Nobody was saying anything, nobody was doing anything,” she said. “So I started getting attention from the neighbors about the issue.”
In May 2022, she helped establish the West Contra Costa Fire Safe Council, which she now chairs. That work contributed to the formation of the East Bay Wildfire Coalition, a regional partnership that includes cities from Hercules to Oakland as well as Contra Costa and Alameda counties.
The coalition focuses on vegetation management, evacuation route clearing, and coordination across jurisdictions.
Since taking office, Bana said the city has hired four arborists and ordered three remote-controlled lawn mowers for vegetation management. She also pushed for defensible space clearing around structures in steep terrain that had gone unmanaged for decades.
She has also raised concerns about the county’s Community Warning System, which was submitted to the Contra Costa County Civil Grand Jury and led to recommendations for improvements now being implemented.
“There’s no big splash about the hard work that you’re doing,” she said. “But this is the type of work that needs persistence and follow-up.”
On public safety
For Bana, public safety is the organizing framework for much of her work.
“Public safety is the number one reason you and I pay taxes,” she said. “We want the government to protect us, against terrorism, against crime, against public disaster, against gun violence, and against personal violence.”
She defines it broadly, including wildfire risk, traffic safety, and gender-based violence.
On police staffing, Bana said she believes the department can reach 160 officers by the end of the next fiscal year, compared to current levels. A staffing study places the ideal number at 244, she said, and she plans to bring forward a proposal to increase the budgeted headcount.
She is also working to identify locations for community resiliency centers, places where residents could gather during disasters to access water, electricity, and basic services.
“The City of Richmond, or Contra Costa County, has one community resiliency center,” she said. “One.”
On housing
Bana said the city’s housing conversation overlooks homeownership.
“There is not a word about home ownership in our housing element, which is shocking,” she said. “It builds generational wealth. It stabilizes the community.”
She has proposed exploring shared-equity housing models similar to those used by some universities, as well as issuing bonds to support housing for teachers and public safety workers.
She supports mixed-use development but is cautious about increasing density in wildfire-prone areas, noting that evacuation modeling shows it could take more than 10 hours to clear parts of her district.
On homelessness, Bana said she has studied models in Texas and is working with local organizations to expand shelter capacity and develop a navigation center approach.
“It just cannot go on like this,” she said, referring to encampments near businesses. “Some business owners told me they pay half a million dollars a year for security because the encampments around them sometimes cause fires in their properties.”
On air quality and infrastructure
Drawing on her experience at Caltrans, Bana said she has pushed for more accountability from state agencies.
She now holds regular meetings with Caltrans staff on issues such as vegetation management and encampments, but said broader advocacy is needed at higher levels of government.
On air quality, she said the city has received approximately $36 million from the regional air district. She said more scrutiny is needed around pollution data and long-term exposure impacts, particularly in communities near industrial facilities.
Looking ahead
Bana said she hopes to use a second term to complete projects already underway, including resiliency centers, wildfire preparedness efforts, and housing initiatives.
She also wants the city to strengthen its approach to economic development, including hiring staff focused on business growth and events, and to invest in public spaces like the Richmond Auditorium.
She said her experiences in Iran shaped her approach to public service.
“To declare your humanity, you have to stand up and go against the grain,” she said. “Don’t be ashamed of who you are or what you say, and don’t worry about who’s going to oppose you. That was the best training.”
Grandview Independent will publish interviews with candidates running for Richmond City Council and mayor in the coming weeks.
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