Montague City Council

Two of Montague's City Council seats are up this cycle, and three candidates filed for them: incumbent Patrick Vela, plus non-incumbents Gregory E. Johnson and Linda Avila. 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 Montague's two Full-Term City Council seats for a 4-year term running Dec. 4, 2026 - Dec. 6, 2030: city ordinances, the budget, and land use in a small Shasta Valley city (incorporated Jan. 28, 1909; population about 1,226 as of the 2020 Census). No separately elected 'Mayor of Montague' appears anywhere in Siskiyou County's own election documents -- Montague has only 'City Council' seats up, matching the pattern already confirmed elsewhere in this county (Dorris, Dunsmuir, Etna).

Montague is governed by a five-person City Council, and the Mayor isn't a separately elected office: per the City's own ordinance 2.20.040, the Council votes to appoint one of its own members as Mayor. That comes directly from the Siskiyou County Civil Grand Jury's own June 2026 report on the City's government structure, which states it plainly in its Background section. The City's own live Council roster currently lists Takeshi Murakami as Mayor, with Michelle Jackson, Jen Dooley, and Pat Vela as the other named Councilmembers -- one seat short of the full five, which lines up with this ballot's separate Short-Term Council race for the long-vacant fifth seat.

Incumbent Jennifer Dooley held the other of the two Full-Term seats up this cycle but did not refile -- she doesn't appear anywhere on the county's certified candidate roster for this race, replaced in the field by non-incumbents Johnson and Avila. That leaves Vela as the only sitting officeholder seeking reelection here.

A word on a name that surfaces in local coverage but isn't part of this contest: Siskiyou News has separately reported on a 'Jasen Patrick Vela,' a Mt. Shasta Fire Department captain arrested in March 2026 on embezzlement charges tied to an earlier stint as the City of Montague's Fire Chief, and the same outlet's June 2026 Civil Grand Jury coverage of Montague describes (without naming) a sitting Mayor/Council Member who also held that Fire Chief post. Given the shared surname in a small county, this dataset checked whether that individual is the same person as this race's Patrick Vela. No source states so directly, and the available evidence points the other way -- the City's own live roster lists Mayor Takeshi Murakami as a separate person from Councilmember Pat Vela, and county documents tie Vela's own seat to a 2022 election rather than the 2020 election the Grand Jury report associates with the Mayor/Fire Chief individual. Absent a source that settles it either way, this dataset draws no connection between the two.

Patrick Vela

Gregory E. Johnson

Linda Avila

Candidate background for this contest is genuinely thin across all three names, not lopsided: beyond Vela's confirmed Council seat, none of the three has an independently verifiable occupation, platform, or civic record in this pass. Montague is a city of about 1,226 people with no dedicated local newspaper of its own; Siskiyou News's own site search returned no dedicated 2026 candidacy coverage for any of the three, and this session's separate WebSearch tool budget was already exhausted before this jurisdiction's research began. This reflects the genuinely small scale of local press attention this race draws, not anything being withheld.