Where Do They Stand?: SD 33 Candidates Answer Questions From FORTHE and Community Groups

28 minute read

This upcoming Tuesday is election day in Long Beach—well, for roughly 80 percent of it anyways.

Along with Long Beach, Senate District 33 (SD 33) includes many of Southeast LA’s “Gateway Cities.” The vote is to replace Ricardo Lara, who vacated the seat after being elected State Insurance Commissioner last November. SD 33 includes the communities of Cudahy, Bell, Bell Gardens, Lynwood, Maywood, Signal Hill, Paramount, South Gate, Vernon, Walnut Park, Huntington Park, as well as portions of Lakewood and Los Angeles. It’s home to over 925,000 folks and is one of the most residentially dense districts in the state. It runs along the LA River, stretching from Huntington Park in the north to the Port of Long Beach in the south.

The 710 and other transportation corridors in the district have contributed to poor air quality which has plagued many communities in SD 33. A report by the South Coast Air Quality Management District found high levels of air toxins along the 710 that are associated with respiratory and cardiovascular problems, including asthma, allergies, and lung cancer.

The district’s heavy industrial activity has also produced other health risks. The Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon was found to be contaminating surrounding neighborhoods with lead at levels up to 100 percent higher than California’s health standard.

Along with pollution, civic corruption has also been a major issue for SD 33 cities. Of the seven candidates who are currently in office, six were elected following high-profile corruption cases in their respective cities (Lynwood, South Gate, Cudahy, and Bell).

Ali Saleh, a Lebanese-American small businessman, and Ana Maria Quintana, whose parents immigrated from Mexico and is an alum of Yale and Columbia, were both elected to the City Council as reformers following the Bell scandal. Lynwood Mayor Jose Luis Solache, who (like Lara) is an openly gay Latinx man, was first elected to the council the year after a former mayor and a councilmember were sentenced to state prison for illegally boosting their salaries and using city credit cards for personal vacations.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood), whose Assembly district overlaps with SD 33, has referred to the region as a “corridor of corruption.”

Add to that many residents’ growing anxiety over housing costs and you have a district with very serious issues at hand.

SD 33 is solidly Democrat, electing Lara in 2016 by over 78 percent. Six out of the nine candidates are elected Democrats. Long Beach Councilmember Lena Gonzalez, oft reported as the frontrunner, has secured the endorsement of both Lara and other Democrat leaders like Congressperson Alan Lowenthal and LA County Democratic Party Chair Mark Gonzalez (though the state party came back with a no-endorsement for this race). Like Gonzalez, candidates Denise Diaz, Leticia Vasquez-Wilson, and Quintana are also all Democrat Latinx women who currently hold elected office.

Tomisin Oluwole
Ode to Pink II, 2020
Acrylic and marker on paper
14 x 22 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

Other candidates include Democrat Tom Cares, a millenial father of four, who talked about Universal Basic Income and investing in cryptocurrency. Cesar Flores, a Paramount resident, is running as the Green Party candidate and wants to roll rents back to rates paid 12 years ago.

Cudahy Councilmember Jack Guerrero holds the rare distinction of being a Republican elected official in Southeast LA (local elections, unlike the state level, are nonpartisan). He’s joined on the ballot by fellow Republican Martha Flores Gibson who has run unsuccessfully for office three times before.

The race has not been without a few spicy moments. One candidate sent a letter to members of the Long Beach City Council threatening a defamation lawsuit if false statements were made about them. It was also revealed that another had had a DUI conviction back in 2012.

Councilmember Gonzalez is running as a progressive, with strong bonafides evidenced by her support for a labor protections/anti-harassment law for hotel workers and a ban on styrofoam products, but has received criticism from opponents and activists for her coziness with the oil industry. Her candidacy is being supported by an independent expenditure committee that received over a million dollars from Chevron, Valero, and Tesoro. She denied soliciting the contributions but did brag recently about outraising her opponents.  

If no single candidate is able to receive 51 percent or higher of the vote, the race goes into run-off which will take place June 4.  

FORTHE members compiled a candidate questionnaire and asked various district-based community and advocacy groups to also submit questions for the candidates. The Long Beach Tenants Union and the Gray Panthers both submitted questions regarding housing. The Long Beach Taxpayers Association weighed in on High Speed Rail. East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice asked about expansion plans for the 710. Friends of the Los Angeles River asked about community engagement and the LGBTQ Center Long Beach asked candidates how they plan to reduce hate crimes against LGBTQ folks.  

Their questions are clearly marked below. For the four candidates that did not reply to usGonzalez, Solache, Quintana, and Vasquez-Wilsonanswers were sourced, when possible, from similar questions asked at public forums. Major claims made by the candidates, and any figures they cited, have been fact-checked and those that could not be independently verified have been marked as such.

Special thanks to those that participated.

Click on “Read Full Answers” to see all of the candidate’s answers in one place. Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Finally, a fair warning: One of the candidates used some colorful language.

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

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