Fifth District City Council Candidate Ian Patton Q & A

Our conversation with Patton spanned multiple hours, both in person and over the phone, and has been edited for clarity and length. It is our hope that the reader will receive a digestible dialogue concerning the policy, politics, and personal histories that are animating this race. Below are some excerpts from the interviews highlighting the candidate’s positions on major issues, as well as a link to the full Q & A.

In a recent forum you said, “I do not want to be the last grassroots candidate ever elected in this city.” Given your knowledge of Long Beach’s political history over the last 3 decades, what did you mean by this? What changed?

The machine system that we have, as I call it, is sort of directed from the mayor. This current mayor at the moment, but [it’s] not a creation of the mayor. He’s sort of built on it. It really began under the former mayor, to a large extent. But it’s become much worse in recent years, where the mayor can direct all the interest groups in the city towards the candidates that he identifies as compliant with the system. Who are going to make sure that everybody gets taken care of [with] the normal contracts and goodies and benefits and perks and tax abatements and approvals in this and that. The thing that keep the system chugging along [is] people who aren’t going to question any of those things.

And that’s why you see, in the case of my opponent: a total aggregation of those downtown special interests. Endorsements and money [are going] towards her because she has been ID’d as a willing party to this system. Somebody who is going to completely sublimate herself as an individual actor to the larger interests, and is going to be perfectly happy doing that.

But there’s another aspect to it that we’ve seen just explode in public view, which is the regional LA County interests coming into Long Beach, in the form [of] the LA County Federation of Labor, which has been sort of trying to take over Long Beach in a lot of ways. Putting a lot of money into races, obviously, favoring one candidate for mayor right now and a set of candidates. Paying enormous amounts of money to have paid people knock on doors, pretend to be people’s friendly neighbors, paying for phone calls, and mailers and everything.

What we’ve seen with the tape that came out in [the] LA scandal is that the folks who engage in that, in those LA politics (this tape was recorded at the headquarters of the Federation of Labor), these are political thugs. They are just out for their own political power and they’re really not looking after anyone but themselves. The veil was pulled back on that, as everyone can see now. The way they speak shows the kind of individuals we’re dealing with here. But what was kind of glossed over in the outrage over the racial remarks was that they were trying to corrupt the redistricting process in LA. So it’s just about power.

We’re at a crossroads in Long Beach, where we’re going to get back to being the sort of more prosaic, bedroom community where local politicians care about local residents, or we’re going to become just a smaller version of LA, which is so impersonal and controlled by these powerful interests. Elected officials are distant and callous, and not really concerned about the grassroots of democracy at all, it’s just this machine system. So there’s two aspects of the machine now. And I am up against both of them.

Should Megan Kerr, your opponent, renounce her endorsement from the LA Fed?

Of course, she should. Of course, she didn’t have the courage to call on the head of the Federation of Labor to resign when he was caught in the scandal, condoning these horrifying, racist and corrupt remarks and participating in corruption overtly. He, eventually, was forced out. But this was the real test of leadership, in my opinion. [Does] she [have] the courage to stand up to the money that’s backing her and say this is wrong? At least when it’s been publicly exposed, now that they’ve been caught, she still didn’t have the courage to stand up and call for him to resign before he ended up having to do it on his own.

When did you first become interested in politics?

I was interested in politics as a young kid. I remember watching the 1988 Democratic Convention, and Ann Richard’s famous speech where she said that George Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth and brought the house down. Since that’s my earliest memory of politics, I think that was probably when I kind of fell in love with politics.

The things I loved about politics was idealism, as a kid. My mother had a commemorative plate above the cabinet, with John and Jackie Kennedy… but I also loved politicians who were, like real earthy people. Who had senses of humor.

What were the values that your parents taught you about politics and public life?

My parents paid a lot of attention to the news and always talked about what was going on. My dad was a lawyer working for Northrop before he retired, and my mother was an English teacher in high school. [They were] always getting the things that don’t exist anymore, like Newsweek and Life magazine. I was watching the news, PBS Newshour, and stuff like that. [They] always talked about stuff but they were not really political, in terms of having been directly involved in politics.

They always told the story that they volunteered for George McGovern, which I think, in 1972, [would have been] around the time when they first met. So they were like classic, young, idealistic campaign volunteers. And they were so crushed when [McGovern] got crushed by Nixon that they never did anything ever again. I don’t think they ever gave a political contribution, except my dad did to his best friend from high school when he ran for Congress in Washington state.

But I mean, their values were just like normal people’s values. Politicians tend to be not the most trustworthy, in general. You should do the right thing. Do right by working people even though they were both professional [and] salaried.

My mother was a career-long UTLA member and actually, when I was in high school, she was the chapter chair of UTLA over Southgate High School. And so she was doing representation in disputes with the administration of the school for other teachers, union repping. I remember her going to the union meetings and them singing songs like “Solidarity Forever”…

Your first big campaign was in ‘96, volunteering for Betty Karnette’s State Senate Campaign which flipped the seat for Democrats. What are your memories of that campaign?

It was a formative experience for me, I was a 15-year-old volunteer. I spent my summer working on the campaign.

The campaign was victorious, it was the beginning of the blue tide spreading across Long Beach never to be rolled back. Betty Karnette was somebody who presented herself as a total centrist. A total Clinton-era Democrat; and Bill Clinton was extremely popular in Long Beach. If you look at the votes he got here in the 90s, it was huge.

It was my first campaign. I saw a lot of the aspects of how campaigns work. I mean, I remember [Bill] Lockyer, [he] was President pro tempore of the State Senate at the time, I remember him being on the phone with her, kind of helping behind the scenes. A lot of the aspects [I remember]. When you’re the Democratic nominee for state office, you’ve got a lot of unions helping out and they send out people…

I guess the thing that made the biggest impression was just her. She was so folksy and colloquial and I kind of got spoiled being around somebody who was so genuine, and so much fun, and who [could] be very politically incorrect and let her hair down. And, of course, that was also a different era.

You were a lead organizer for the recall of then-councilmember Jeannine Pearce. Can you tell me what the recall effort highlighted for you about city hall?

Well, what it told me about City Hall is that there is a real circle-the-wagons mentality, no matter how egregious somebody’s conduct is. And it really seemed like what was exposed, the incident on the 710, etc., the hypocrisy of Pearce, in a normal political environment, there would have been an expectation that you resign immediately. And if the person wasn’t willing to do that, like we’ve seen in LA, the pressure would just be there. The calls on that person to resign would be immediate.

But in Long Beach, despite article after article coming out… It was broken by Steve Downing and the Beachcomber. But then there was a whole series of Press-Telegram articles. Not one elected official was willing to say anything. There’s just become such a sort of a clubby mentality in City Hall. That was really astonishing. I kept waiting for somebody to do something and I was kind of stunned. Okay, so we’re just gonna sweep this under the rug like other things have been swept under the rug in Long Beach?

The Pearce recall effort was eventually co-opted by the hotel lobby, eager to unseat a councilmember who helped secure increased wages and worker protections for hotel workers. How can voters be assured that you’re not gonna align with downtown money when it suits your needs politically?

Jeannine was in the middle of these two colliding forces in the city, between the union that she had worked for, Unite Here, the hotel workers union, and the hotels that were being attacked by her union.

Eventually [the hotel lobby] did get involved and they started their own PAC. I had no objection to that whatsoever, because I looked at the issue and I said, well, you know, who’s been victimized here? I don’t see hotels as an evil lobby. This is not big tobacco. Unite Here, which is a central part of the Federation of Labor, was basically trying to bully these hotels into unionizing through a process, which is called card check. Where it’s not a secret ballot. They knew they couldn’t win a secret ballot…

They tried to get these laws passed, that made it look like they were defending hotel workers [by] giving them a minimum wage, that they were giving them maximum square footage of rooms to clean per day, [and] various sets of worker protections. But they would write into the fine prints of all this legislation that their own workers were exempt from those very protections. And so the way the system works, they incentivized hotels to unionize. Basically, if you get with us, you’ll be able to pay your workers less and it’s only the non-union hotels that would have the higher worker costs [of] the minimum wage.

It’s the ultimate hardball, doesn’t serve the workers though. They’re championing all these worker protections, and then writing into the fine print, they don’t apply to their own workers.

Union leadership would say that unionized workers already have better work conditions than nonunionized workers…

If they [did], then they wouldn’t need to write that into the fine print, would they? That’s the whole reason it’s written in the fine print. Nothing happens by accident, okay? There’s a reason why they exempt themselves. Because that is a tool that they can use to incentivize [unionization]. If you do unionize, guess what? We can work out a deal with you. And maybe you don’t have to pay them so much. Maybe you don’t have to have these work standards. That is literally the only reason for that to be written in there. It takes a little [time] to understand how diabolical that is.

I’ve been completely politically incorrect in the Long Beach sense, where I just tell the truth about everything. Whether it’s the community hospital deal, or the civic center, or the Queen Mary, or the acquisition of the pot warehouse/homeless shelter, you know, that isn’t a homeless shelter. You’re not supposed to say stuff like this.

That signals to everybody in the special interest complex that you’re not a player. And so that’s why the Chamber of Commerce, which should be supporting me… In any rational environment, somebody who is looking out for taxpayers and is a small business person himself. [Someone who] is focused on supporting small business, is against rent control, should be the candidate supported by the Chamber of Commerce. But the Chamber of Commerce is basically being run by a lobbyist these days, who runs government affairs, and is just part of that special interest complex.

So yeah, I may sometimes side with [special interests]. No matter what you decide [in] City Hall, somebody’s going to have more of an economic benefit from it than somebody else. But, they know that I’m not going to be doing it because they tried to buy me with some big independent expenditure campaign. That’s not what they like, they like people who they can count on because they’re dependent on them. And I would be only dependent on the fact that I got myself elected as a people’s candidate. That doesn’t work for them.

In 2018 you formed the Long Beach Reform Coalition along with other community activist groups. The group has a candidate pledge which asks for support of various democratic reforms meant to increase transparency and limit the influence of monied special interests. One of the pledge’s planks calls for reforming and limiting the use of officeholder accounts. What is an officeholder account and why should your average Long Beach resident care?   

Officeholder account started out as sort of a very small, limited vehicle for elected officials to raise private funds to pay for certain expenses that were related to being in office but were not things that people felt should be paid for directly by taxpayers. But at the same time, were not campaign expenses.

You’re only allowed to have a campaign committee that’s actively raising money from January 1 of the preceding odd year, until the close of the even year of the election cycle. So if you have other expenses in between, like maybe you want to hold some community event, and it’s not something that you have any discretionary funds [for], because we don’t really have discretionary funds on an individual basis for council members, then you are allowed to raise up to $5,000 from private contributions for things like that.

Then changed several years ago, when the council made it so that officeholder accounts could be transferred to campaigns. You could [now] raise political campaign cash all the time, whether it was an election cycle, or not. At the same time they raised the cap on the amount that you could raise. That’s what Bill Pearl called the ‘political weaponization of officeholder accounts’ and its eroding campaign finance limits in Long Beach.

What changes would you make to officeholder accounts?

I would just put back the limits that we had for close to 20 years. We had limits where you could raise no more than $5,000 and they could not be used for campaigns [only] for community involvement type activities.

You would bar officeholder accounts from being used to donate to political campaigns, because that’s what they can do, right? You can use your officeholder account to donate to someone else’s campaign, not your own.

Right. And so people who are political allies: I raise money in my officeholder account and give to your campaign, you raise money in your officeholder account and give to my campaign. No, you can’t give it to your own campaign. But come on, it’s all wink and a-nod type stuff.

Another interesting plank: restore the right of the public to agendize city council items. Why? How?

Yeah, I love that, totally support that. Wouldn’t it be great if the people could actually have a process to put something on the agenda so that the officeholders were forced to deal with something they just didn’t want to deal with?

I don’t know exactly how the mechanics worked in the past. I don’t think [a] lone individual could fill up the council agenda with stuff, obviously, that would be unwieldy. But if there was [something] like, you get a certain number of signatures, you can put something on the agenda. That makes sense to me.

The first big push by the LBRC was to defeat Measure BBB, which changed rules regarding term limits. Why did you oppose this charter amendment, which was ultimately approved by voters?  

What we liked about the old system was it was not a strict two-term limit. It was two terms, but if you’re so popular that you can get elected to a third term as a write-in, [then] maybe you do deserve a third term. So it’s a higher bar to get the third term, but it’s achievable. And it was obviously achieved by Beverly O’Neill. And it was achieved by Patrick O’Donnell and Dee Andrews, they all got elected to third terms as write-ins.

In 2020 you fought for a recount of Measure A, a sales tax increase that passed by only 16 votes. Why did you oppose Measure A?

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I opposed Measure A both times it was on the ballot. I opposed [it] the first time in 2016.

I have always opposed sales taxes. Ever since college [when] I was taking poli sci classes. I had one professor named Bruce Cain, who was a big deal in this state. A lot of high-level discussions.

I was always against the concept of a regressive tax. And it was always a mystery to me how people in the Democratic Party, my own party, who consider themselves to be progressives, could favor something that is literally regressive. I mean, there’s progressive, and there’s regressive. These are two opposite things.

The progressive income tax was one of the big reforms in American history, during the Progressive Era, when we had to amend the United States Constitution to allow for the federal government to tax people in a way that was considered to be equitable so that everybody was taxed the same at the same bracket. But the portion of your income that is in excess of that bracket gets taxed at a higher level, because there is such a thing as discretionary and non-discretionary income. If you’re poor and every single dollar you earn has to go back into surviving, you have zero discretionary income. So to tax that individual at the same rate as somebody who’s a millionaire, where maybe 90% of their income is discretionary, is not fair.

You know, it was bad enough to have that tax. But if all that money really went to what it was intended for, maybe just maybe, you could justify it. But it just wasn’t. And then when Measure A came back again, to remove the sunset clause, so that it would be what we called the Infinity tax [and] go on forever, in 2020, we looked at the infrastructure side of it. And Corliss Lee, who was part of our reform coalition, she had a lot of back and forth with John Gross, the city financial manager at the time. Eventually, she was able to get the documents showing that there were years of very little spending on infrastructure, [no] net increase. There were years when it was a net decrease in the amount of spending on infrastructure. So it really didn’t go to infrastructure either.

You’ve called for putting Measure A back on the ballot and said that it’s bad for small business owners. But you’ve also called for increased police officer levels. How do you plan to fund increased police officer levels without Measure A funding?

I am proposing that we have an outside firm come into Long Beach, a nationally recognized city management consulting firm, to do a top to bottom audit and performance review of every aspect of City Hall, our budgeting and our staffing. And tell us where the waste is, all the waste, fraud and abuse. And where we’re not performing well, or we’re not doing things efficiently.

I witnessed a lot of inefficiencies, just directly when I did my ride-along with the police department. The officer was one of the greatest guys you could ever ask for to be a police officer but the system was very inefficient. Coming back to the substation after every call to file a report, [instead of] doing it in the car, losing a lot of time there.

I think we need to look at all our operations. It’s got to be a really top-notch national firm, where Long Beach is not particularly important to them, other than they just always have a reputation [of] doing a fair and accurate job when they look into things. And we have to be completely transparent with them.

This sounds like a long process; re-evaluating the fiscal efficacy of city spending. Short term, you don’t have a solution for increasing police officer levels?

You don’t wave a magic wand. You don’t fix a city that is this deep in a hole overnight. But you start by getting somebody who’s gonna start working on it, telling the truth, and shining the light of day on it and alerting the public to what’s going on. Because that’s really what’s going to make the change happen.

What would you do to increase police accountability and transparency?

It’s been a big issue for me over the years, I participated in the meetings of the so-called performance consultant that was brought in to explicitly not reform the police department. Do not even think about it, and they made that clear to the public. We’re not allowed to even think about reforming the police department. We’re only allowed to think about reforming the [Citizens Police Complaint Commission], the CPCC. Those hearings were a joke.

[What] we got out of that [is] ballot Measure [E] that the City Council put forward, which is terrible. It does the opposite of what it’s being advertised as accomplishing, which is to increase oversight and accountability. It’s actually taking power away from the citizen commissioners and giving more power to the city manager, who has to authorize investigations by this new director of police oversight.

I favor adopting the LA model, which is an actual Police Commission [with] an actual, independent inspector general that works for the Police Commission that has real-time access to everything. The department can do its own investigations and interviews. That system is not a cure-all. But it’s much more robust than what we do here. And it’s obviously the perfect model just sitting there waiting for us to adopt. We don’t have to devise anything. So we do need stronger police oversight. We need higher hiring standards. Right now, [you] need more training in Long Beach to become a cosmetologist than a police officer, which is not a knock on our police officers, most of them are great, but we do need higher standards to weed out the bad apples.

Do you believe it is ‘bad apples’ or is it systemic corruption and racism? Because those are two different things.

One of the jobs of an inspector general [would be] to look into stuff like that. I don’t personally think that we have a systemically racist police department. I don’t think we have a systemically corrupt police department. I think we have a police department that is severely under-resourced, which has the result of converting police, against their intentions, into something like paramilitary units. When all you’re doing is adrenaline [fueled] 911 calls, you don’t have time to have a lower key community-oriented policing model where officers can get out of their cars and get to know the neighborhood, the business owners. Get to know the corridors and have a slower pace. We have, by default, pressurized our officers and made it more difficult for them to be a part of the community. That’s just a result of the budgeting model that we have for the PD.

You’ve argued for increased police officer levels but you’ve also said you’d like to see certain emergency responses handled by unarmed civilians. Which functions currently assigned to law enforcement do you think would be better handled by civilians like social workers, health care workers, or other unarmed city employees?

I think most people agree that the first point of contact with [a] homeless individual, where there’s no sign of them being violent or anything like that, should be with a social worker. That’s not the best use of a police officer’s time. Although police officers should always be available to get involved quickly for the safety of the social workers that are trying to help these people. I think we should have units that combine police, social workers, crisis specialists and drug specialists. So that they are available for situations that are difficult. We do have these [police department] quality of life teams that they’re starting to expand a little bit, but they’re extremely limited. For a long time, I think we just [had] two quality-of-life officers.

The LBPD Quality of Life team is armed police officers being the first point of contact for unhoused individuals. Should that be replaced by a team of unarmed civilians?

I think we need more of both. But for most unhoused people, the first point of contact does not need and should not be a police officer.

What we should do, as opposed to what we are doing, is have more social workers, employees of the Homelessness Bureau, who are going out in the field and making the first contact, and sometimes the second and third contact because there’s no need for a police officer. But where there is a need for a police officer, you need to have a police officer involved. It depends on the individual situation.

Isn’t there a contradiction here? If you want to increase emergency response by civilians, then why do you need to increase police officer levels? If you’re taking away functions from law enforcement?

We don’t have enough for anything. We need a lot more of everything.

You have very clear numbers as to how many more officers we need. What is an adequate staffing level for unarmed emergency responders?

That would need to be studied. I don’t have the figure for you on that. But I can tell you our per capita police level is abysmal compared to [Los Angeles].

Your opponent has received the endorsement and financial backing of the police officers association. Talk about the influence of the POA in this city.

The irony is that I’m clearly the more pro-police candidate in the race. The POA seems to be focused on supporting Suzie Price for mayor, that is where it seems they’re putting their resources. Which is something I agree with, and it’s understandable why they would do that with her being a prosecutor, and someone who is vocally pro-law enforcement.

All these downtown power players, they have a lot of trouble endorsing grassroots candidates, even one who’s totally pro-police as I am, because I’m not transactional. I’m looking at the budget, I’m looking at the allocation of resources, I’m looking at a lot more than just backroom deals. I understand the discomfort they have with endorsing [me], but at the same time, I think I am not only the most pro-police candidate in this race, I’m probably the most pro-police candidate in the city when you get down to it. That’s all I do is talk about how we need to increase the size of our police force. And nobody talks about it in terms of the scale that I do, where we need to get actually over what we had before, so that would mean adding at least 300 to 400 officers.

Long Beach must build over 26,000 units by 2030 to meet state RHNA goals, or else risk losing state funding and land-use control. How do you plan to meet state-imposed housing goals while also opposing increased multifamily housing zoning?

The most obvious place is where we’re already doing it, Long Beach Boulevard, along the blue line. If we’re gonna do that, we need to be serious about it. We need to add mass transit, we need to have a better bus system. And we need to add open space, we need to add public safety resources, we need to add emergency resources, sometimes you even have to deal with the size of the sewer line that wasn’t planned for that number of people. So if we’re not taking all those things into consideration, we’re not talking about density in a serious way.

It’s funny how Manhattan is the most expensive place to live, the idea that adding density somehow magically makes things cheaper… but anyways, I digress. The only way a Manhattan works is because it has the infrastructure to work. It has a subway. It has a central park. It has police officers, practically on every block. The per capita number of police officers in New York City, compared to Long Beach, it’s got to be like ten to one.

Density is a choice but it has to be a seriously planned choice. And you have to have the attendant infrastructure for it to work in Long Beach. If we’re going to add density, you don’t tear up people’s neighborhoods that they’ve invested their whole lives in and been paying mortgages. One day they wake up and they find out that somebody is building something that’s going to cast a shadow over their house and take their parking away and privacy. You put density in a corridor that can accommodate it. And then you still need to do things like the River Park, where you’re adding a regional park to a park-poor side of town.

The Fifth District is suburban. Downtown is a downtown, it’s more suited for density.

I’m hearing increased density for Downtown, but no increased density for the 5th District. That’s NIMByism.

You could call it NIMByism. I’m a big fan of nimbyism. NIMByism is saying, you know, I’ve worked all my life for something and no, you shouldn’t take it away. You shouldn’t just hand it to some land speculator. That’s what NIMByism is.

You’ve criticized the city’s current regime of increased affordable housing, saying it does more to enrich developers than it does to actually create affordable units. So I understand from your perspective, how not to create affordable housing. What I’d like to know is how do you create affordable housing?

Fundamentally, housing is determined by market forces. However, I think that we have a lot of resources that we squander on this affordable housing industrial complex where, much like with what I call the homelessness industrial complex, there’s a lot of people being enriched off of our grant dollars in the most obscene way for things that are supposed to be helping people. When you’re spending $900,000 a unit on “affordable housing,” somebody’s making an insane amount of money and hardly anybody is being helped.

Instead of wasting money, I would take that money and put it into a section-eight-style rental assistance. I would prioritize seniors and the people most in need. But I would spread that money out as broadly as possible, instead of having a very tiny number of winners of the affordable housing lottery, on rental housing. Direct rental assistance.

You oppose caps on annual rent increases beyond the 10% cap imposed by the state. You’ve made the point that it offers short-term gain for existing tenants, which is a talking point used by apartment associations. But for a low-income renter, the difference between a 4% and 10% annual rent increase could be the difference between staying housed or becoming unhoused. What do you say to that person?

One of the most important things I can do for working people in this city is fight for affordable housing. And the only way to achieve that it is by defending the people who are actually providing the city [with affordable housing]. Not the fake affordable housing projects that are just ribbon-cutting photo-ops, and provide a few units, but the actual Mom and Pop landlords that are providing that housing.

So I support policies that support Mom and Pop landlords. I consider their interest completely aligned with their tenants, because their interests are both not to be displaced by gentrification. That’s what these policies do, rent control and ‘just cause’ eviction, added regulations, and burdens on the mom-and-pop landlords. The best way to make housing less affordable in the city is to impose more burdens on them, to make it so that they have ‘use it or lose it’ rent control increases so they feel that they have to increase rents. Whereas when they have good tenants, they’re not inclined to raise the rent.

And then to have a market where you have an increasing number of below market[-rate] units for older tenancies that have to be subsidized by newer tenancies. In other words, younger renters shopping around for higher market-rate units, [that] balance the lower market-rate units. [It] is a phenomenon we see in rent control cities throughout the country, they’re always the least affordable: San Francisco, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, LA, New York.

The pattern is everywhere. So if we don’t want to have a city [of] just the rich and the poor, we don’t want these kinds of policies. The Long Beach we have right now has worked really well, for a long time, in terms of housing affordability for working-class people. It is the most affordable coastal city in California. Period. So the idea that, that you’re going to come in and make some demagogic type pitch to renters? That happens all the time. I’m not going to do that.

Do your rental property investments affect your judgment on renter protections?

I’ve seen both sides of it where you know, I’ve been a tenant for a lot of years in my life. I had lots of apartments starting in college. As a tenant, I think the number of times I complained to my landlord, even though I had some pretty cheap apartments, was very low. But I’ve also seen the side where tenants can be abusive sometimes, and most tenants in the building look to you for help and there’s nothing you can do because of these excessive regulations. So I see both sides of it. And I think I have a pretty balanced appreciation. Mostly my issue on rental housing, though, is that I’ve seen how rent control can have perverse effects. And it’s just not the panacea that demagogic politicians try to sell it to renters as being.

You’ve been very critical of the current council, even insulting at times. If elected, will you try to build consensus or will you simply try to be a check on their power?

I think there’s potential for ad hoc coalitions on different issues. But I would say my main function in City Hall… When I use the word corrupt, I want to be clear, I’m talking about things that are pay to play, not necessarily illegal. Most of the corruption that goes on is legal corruption. It’s openly throwing cash at candidates to get them elected and then getting that money back in terms of contracts and various things. I see my main function as rooting out those sorts of corrupting practices and exposing bad deals, exposing the waste of taxpayers money, exposing, whether it’s housing affordability, or homelessness, or air quality, lack of park space, lack of public safety, lack of 911 emergency resources… People’s lives are being affected every day by the rot in City Hall. And you need somebody to start exposing [corruption].

I would hope that if you present something to city council, like the need to do capital investment in park space, like building the River Park, and you actually bring that out to an open vote, it would be very hard for people to vote against it and just keep going along with developers exploiting the city. I would hope that if you focus attention on the lack of investment on electrification of goods movement at the port, and how that directly affects the number of cancers along what the LA Times calls the Diesel Death Zone, that it would be hard for people to just go along with policies that kill people. I would hope that if you expose the raft of smash-ins of small businesses that have been going on along the Atlantic and Wardlow corridors, that it will be hard for people to resist a proposal. I think that if you force people to vote on something like campaign finance reforms, more transparency, it would be hard for them to go along with a special interest when you shine light on these issues.