Jackson City Council

Two of Jackson's City Council seats are up this cycle, and three candidates filed for them: incumbent Connie Gonsalves, appointed incumbent Sierra McLean, and non-incumbent Steve Oneto. With three candidates for two seats, this is a genuinely contested race that goes to the ballot -- not a case where the city could appoint winners and skip the election.

This person would hold one of Jackson's two open City Council seats for a 4-year term: city ordinances, the budget, and local land use in a General Law city of 5,019 people (2020 Census), incorporated December 5, 1905, in the Sierra foothills of Amador County. No separately elected 'Mayor of Jackson' exists -- the City's own official Council page states plainly that council members 'select a Mayor and Vice-Mayor from their membership on an annual basis,' and Amador County's own pre-filing election notice lists only '2 Councilmember seats (4-yr)' for Jackson, while the same document lists a separately elected City Clerk for Amador City and a separately elected City Treasurer for Sutter Creek -- so the document's silence specifically on a Jackson Mayor's race is a real structural signal, independently confirmed here rather than merely inferred. Chad Simmons currently holds the Mayor title and Steve McLean is Vice Mayor -- Steve McLean is a different person from candidate Sierra McLean, sharing only a surname with her; no source found this pass states or denies any family relationship between them, so none is claimed.

Candidate background here is genuinely thin but symmetric, not lopsided: beyond Connie Gonsalves's and Sierra McLean's confirmed status as sitting Council members (the county's own candidate list marks them 'incumbent' and 'appointed incumbent,' and the City's own Council page independently confirms both with terms expiring December 2026 -- exactly the two seats up this cycle), none of the three candidates has an independently verifiable occupation, platform, or civic record from any source reachable this pass. The City of Jackson's own site has no council-member biography pages or boards/commissions rosters naming any of the three; this session's web-search tool budget was already exhausted before this jurisdiction's research began; and search-engine HTML-scraping workarounds returned only a CAPTCHA challenge or empty results, not genuine organic search results. The Amador Ledger Dispatch, the county's paper of record, was reachable directly but its site-search endpoint returned an HTTP 429 rate-limit response, and its homepage carried no Jackson-council item at the time of this check. This reflects a real access gap in this pass's tooling, not anything being withheld about any candidate.

Sierra McLean's county-assigned 'appointed incumbent' designation means she is currently serving on the Council but was not elected to her current term -- consistent with having been appointed to fill a vacancy at some point rather than winning a prior election outright. No primary source reached this pass details when or why that appointment happened; the designation itself comes directly from Amador County's own certified candidate list, not from an inference.

Connie Gonsalves

Sierra McLean

Steve Oneto