Described by the Sacramento Bee as "one of the most intelligent, talented and hard-working elected officials in the region," Christopher Cabaldon is a recognized local, regional, and statewide leader in educational opportunity and reform, environmental protection and enhancement, neighborhood quality of life, civil rights, and transportation and technology.

First elected in 1996, Christopher Cabaldon is serving his third term as Mayor and as a member of the West Sacramento City Council. Mayor Cabaldon’s work to bring professional baseball to a new first-class ballpark on the West Sacramento waterfront and enhance the city’s regional reputation and quality of life has been profiled by several major news organizations.

Cabaldon has served for five years as Vice Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the largest system of higher education in the United States. Cabaldon was a top policy expert with the State Legislature for nearly a decade, serving as the staff director of the Assembly Higher Education Committee and chief of staff to the chair of the powerful Assembly Appropriations Committee. He wrote legislation to expand student financial aid, crack down on diploma mills and abusive trade schools, recruit new science and math schoolteachers, and substantially increase funding for college facilities and safety improvements, and led a state investigation into fraud at a university fertility clinic.

Shortly after assuming his seat on the City Council, Cabaldon led a successful effort to expand education and training opportunities in West Sacramento by working with Sacramento City College to invest in a new educational center offering the full range of collegiate and workforce preparation courses—the center is now one of the state’s most popular. As Mayor, he convened a Blue-Ribbon Commission on School Excellence to strengthen the public schools and ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.

Mayor Cabaldon is an active advocate for environmental quality. A board member for the Yolo-Solano Air Quality Management District, he helped craft and then implement an innovative regional program to replace high-polluting heavy duty truck engines, and fought to preserve the urban forest in his city. He has served as a member of the American Lung Association's blue ribbon panel for the annual clean air awards. He fights for clean water, habitat enhancement, recreation, farmland preservation, and economic sustainability in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as a member of the state’s Delta Protection Commission. As Mayor, he sponsored a city ordinance to remove gross polluting vessels from the Sacramento River. In 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Interior appointed Cabaldon to the Bay-Delta Committee guiding implementation of the CALFED water and environmental restoration program. In 2000, he was appointed by the Governor to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Mayor Cabaldon is a board member and past chair of the Yolo County Transportation District, where he worked to win approval of Yolobus transit service to the Sacramento Airport and expansion of bus service to seniors and transit-dependent residents. As a member of the Capitol Corridor Rail Service Board, he has fought to expand rail service along the I-80 corridor.

Cabaldon is Vice Chair of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, the metropolitan planning organization. He chairs the region’s Transportation Roundtable, a groundbreaking panel of 55 regional leaders that developed the innovative Metropolitan Transportation Plan for 2025 through collaboration among environmental, business, neighborhood, government, and education groups.

Appointed by the Speaker of the Assembly to the Commission on Regionalism, Cabaldon has been a creative statewide leader in developing governance and fiscal reforms to solve such challenges as traffic, housing, social equity, open space preservation, and economic development. He is a member of the board of directors for the California Center for Regional Leadership.

In 2002, Mayor Cabaldon was elected as an at-large member of the Board of Directors for the League of California Cities. He is also a fellow with the American Leadership Forum.

Cabaldon joined community leaders in the region as a founding member of the Capital Unity Council, formed to eradicate hate violence. As chair of its program committee, he is a leader in the effort to build a statewide center for intergroup understanding. A former treasurer of the National Filipino American Youth Association, Cabaldon is the youngest person to be honored for outstanding historical contribution by the valley chapters of the Filipino American National Historical Society. He has also been recognized as Executive of the Year by the Filipino American Chamber of Commerce.

Prior to his election to the City Council, Cabaldon was President of the Yolo County Health Council, where he worked as an advocate for access to quality community health care, particularly children and seniors.

An advocate for historic preservation and the arts in the city, Cabaldon is a board member and patron of the West Sacramento Community Orchestra.

Born in 1965, Cabaldon grew up in Los Angeles, attending California’s first public magnet school. He earned a bachelor of science degree in environmental economics at UC Berkeley, where he was student body vice president, before settling in the Capital region in 1987 and earning a master’s degree in public policy at CSU Sacramento, where he was honored in 2002 with the Distinguished Alumni Service Award.