No more Mr. Nice Guy: Darrell Steinberg leaves Sacramento changed for the better | Opinion (2025)

In Sacramento, where the mayor has little official authority, power is created through persuasion and relationships.

In this city, style can truly create substance.

Outgoing Mayor Darrell Steinberg, ending 32 years of service to his city in various capacities, has perfected a leadership style unlike any before him: He suffocated Sacramento with sheer earnestness. It’s almost impossible not to like the guy.

Opinion

While Steinberg is more than happy to share his (rather long) list of achievements over the last eight years, he is quick to overlook the importance of how he led — a diplomacy-first model that is quickly becoming a lost art in our capital city.

Style… and self-interest, too

Whether or not you agree with his politics, you have to admit: Mayor Steinberg is a genuinely nice human being. A real mensch, if we may borrow the Yiddish term. At some point, he got bitten by that addictive public policy bug, and the symptoms never wore off.

If anything, it got worse: Whether it was improving mental health services throughout California or temporarily representing Del Paso Heights when it was without a councilman, Steinberg has seemed to relish every opportunity to bring good governance to the people.

Perhaps though, he has been nice to a fault: How this incessantly good-natured mayor ended up with such a self-absorbed city manager in Howard Chan is at least partially explained by Steinberg’s own good nature to find the best in his City Hall staff, yet he’s also a canny politician with experience playing the game.

Steinberg knew that he could get his pet projects done easier and faster with Chan still in place, even if the oft-acquisitive city manager caused him an occasional headache. Steinberg’s ability to work with Chan, and also with one of the worst city council members the city’s ever seen in Sean Loloee, was nothing short of miraculous.

But if being too positive is someone’s worst weakness, that’s not exactly the worst thing in the world.

From his arrival on the Sacramento City Council in 1992 to his departure on Dec. 10 as the outgoing mayor, Steinberg has been a constant in the local political universe. But soon, he will be a fixture that will be conspicuously missing. He is surely not to vanish from California’s public policy scene, with talk of him running for Attorney General or seizing another opportunity — but he will not be representing Sacramento.

His departure begs the question: What about Steinberg’s presence will we miss the most?

Success in substance

Back in 2016, Steinberg ran for mayor on promises of alleviating homelessness and providing for the economic development of the city. His determination to not quit on these important initiatives has been a key aspect of his leadership.

It is undeniable that, at least when it comes to sheer numbers, the city’s response to homelessness has been far greater than that of the county. When Steinberg took office, Sacramento boasted just 100 nightly shelter beds; it now offers more than 1,300.

Granted, it’s still not enough to curb the city’s ever-increasing homeless population (currently around 6,600, according to the latest Point In Time Count) but that’s an extra 1,200 people every night who could reasonably thank Steinberg directly for the pillow under their head.

As for the economic development of the city, Steinberg only recently announced the long-awaited development of the city’s waterfront, a plan that has been on hold since the pandemic plummeted the city’s tax revenues. The mayor sought — and found — $40 million in hotel tax revenues to repair docks and make other improvements that will hopefully incentivize private sector investment. The funding will be divided into two phases: $25 million for riverfront projects, and $15 million in public matching funds for private sector projects.

Steinberg also successfully elevated professional soccer in Sacramento. In November, Steinberg announced plans for a state-of-the-art soccer stadium in the once-blighted Railyards district. Thanks to the indomitable work of Steinberg and other local leaders, the Wilton Rancheria, a Native American tribe in the Sacramento area, is the new majority owner of the Sacramento Republic FC team. With the tribe’s financial backing, the new state-of-the-art soccer stadium is planned to open as soon as 2027.

The man simply never gives up.

‘Still painful’ lessons

If you ask Steinberg himself, he is a peacemaker, a natural arbiter between warring factions. That innate character trait was perhaps never better revealed than in March of this year, when the mayor, who is Jewish, sought to pass a bilateral ceasefire resolution concerning the war in Gaza.

The mere suggestion was anathema to some in the Jewish community as well as some in the city’s Muslim-American and Palestinian immigrant communities. Yet Steinberg soldiered on through political and personal hostilities — because he knew such a statement was the only thing that would help the disjointed city move forward.

“The events in the Middle East have deeply divided our community and fractured our proud history of interfaith solidarity,” Steinberg wrote then in an op-ed to The Bee. “Considering and passing a fair resolution acknowledging pain and anguish on all sides would, at the very least, demonstrate that everyone has been heard by their elected representatives.”

Ultimately, the resolution passed, but not without a last-minute abandonment by signatories on both sides and a City Hall protest that descended into chaos and prompted Steinberg to seal off the council chambers for hours. Ultimately, six protesters were arrested, but not charged.

“That’s still painful to me,” Steinberg said. “There are still people in the Jewish community that are angry with me. There are still people in the Muslim-American community who are mad at me, and yet I know I did the right thing.”

With rare exceptions, the mayor said, he never “ducks” a hard issue. He did not in the aftermath of the 2018 fatal shooting by Sacramento police of Stephon Clark in his Meadowview backyard, triggering a release of public outrage at city council meetings that Steinberg instinctively knew was part of a raw but necessary civic response process.

“If it’s gnarly, I kind of try to lean into it,” he said. “It isn’t (about making) a deal for the sake of making a deal. Sometimes, you just have to bring peace to something.”

Kindness and heart

This mayor’s successor, former Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, will have quite the inheritance waiting for him on Dec. 10. Steinberg did a lot, but how he did it was truly his signature on the city, that sincere, Steinberg suffocation. His upbeat persona somehow managed to stay intact, even in moments of severe civic despair, through a pandemic, ever-looming economic depression and civil unrest.

Steinberg’s legacy will be one of collaboration and coalition building, but most importantly, his legacy is that of kindness, even in the face of offense.

Mayor Steinberg has set the highest of bars on how to comport oneself as a public servant, and there are many lessons to be learned from his tenure. His intellect and command of virtually any subject area are mighty, but they were not sufficient qualities on their own to succeed as Sacramento’s mayor; it also took kindness and heart.

That took Darrell Steinberg — and Sacramento — a long, long way.