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Famous Like Me > Actor > G > Matt Gonzalez

Profile of Matt Gonzalez on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Matt Gonzalez  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 5th June 1965
   
Place of Birth: McAllen, Texas, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Image:Gonzalezlg.jpg

Matt Gonzalez (born June 1965) is the former president of the San Francisco, California Board of Supervisors, and a member of the Green Party. From January 2001 until January 2005, he represented city District 5, which covers the Haight-Ashbury, Western Addition and the Inner Sunset neighborhoods. Gonzalez lost the 2003 mayoral election to Democrat Gavin Newsom.

Gonzalez, the son of a tobacco company executive who later operated an export-import business, came from a Mexican-American family (his uncle was the mayor of Reynosa, Mexico). He was raised in the border town of McAllen, Texas as well as Puerto Rico, New Orleans, and Maryland. He was an Eagle Scout and played high school football. In 1987, he earned a B.A. from Columbia University, where he studied literature and politics. In 1990, he earned a law degree from Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review.

In December of 2000, Gonzalez became the first Green Party member to win elective office in San Francisco when, switching from the Democratic Party to the Green Party between the general election and the runoff, he won election to the Board of Supervisors (municipal positions in San Francisco are officially nonpartison). Two years later, his colleagues on the Board elected him President of the Board of Supervisors. Gonzalez was the sole member of the Green Party on the Board.

During his tenure as board president, Gonzalez lead the effort to raise the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 an hour, the highest in the United States; he was the chief sponsor of a measure approved by the voters to implement instant run-off voting in all municipal elections; he was the chief proponent of a measure to keep chain stores out of neighborhood commercial districts; he lead efforts to prohibit the sale of naming rights to the publically owned stadium Candlestick Park and to prohibit the keeping of elephants at the San Francisco Zoo. Gonzalez also authored measures to create a grading system for city-operated homeless shelters, a resolution authorizing a 10-megawatt tidal energy pilot program, and Propostion J, which made the supervisorial position a full-time one with the salary set by the Civil Service Commission at $112,000 annually.

In some quarters, he had a reputation for being a contentious idealogue. Gonzalez walked out of Mayor Willie Brown's State of the City address in 2002; he refused to meet with Brown during his first two years on the Board of Supervisors. When the Board of Supervisors put forth a resolution praising Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a San Franciscan, for becoming the first woman in history to lead the Democratic Party in Congress, Gonzalez was the only board member who voted against it. The supervisor hosted an art show at his city hall office in which graffiti artist Barry McGee spray-painted "Smash the State" on the wall.

Gonzalez was unsuccessful in his efforts to municipalize electricity by creating a municipal utility district and his ballot measure which would have given non-citizens the right to vote in local school board elections failed narrowly.

The 2003 San Francisco mayoral race drew significant media attention because if Gonzalez had won, he would have been the only Green Party mayor of a major U.S. city. Gonzalez finished with over 47 percent of the vote in a city in which only 3 percent of the voters were registered with the Green Party (San Francisco municipal elections are officially nonpartisan).

Gonzalez once played bass in a rock band and has always had strong ties to the literary community. He published (under the imprint FMSBW) a collection of poetry by Beat poet Jack Micheline entitled "Sixty-seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints" in 1997 and he served on the Board of Directors for Intersection for the Arts, an independent nonprofit organization in San Francisco. In 2004, Gonzalez taught "Art & Politics" at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Gonzalez has received numerous awards including the 2000 “Lawyer of the Year” award from the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association, the 2003 In Defense of Animals “Guardian Award”, and the 2004 “Bert Corona Award” from California’s Mexican American Political Association.

Gonzalez announced in early 2004 that he would not seek re-election and would instead return to practicing law which he had engaged in as a deputy public defender before his entry into politics. He currently heads the law firm Gonzalez and Leigh, based in San Francisco.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Matt Gonzalez