Want more information on CD9 candidates? Read our CD9 Voter Guide and watch our break down of each candidate (in English and Spanish) on Instagram.
The differences between the two candidates for LA City Council District 9 became crystal clear for South LA residents during an energetic community forum in South Central on Saturday.
Attendees, who braved the extreme heat, told The LA Local they were happy to hear candidates Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos discuss transportation, housing and making the community safer.
“It was exciting,” said Sandy Ramos, a local attending her first ever forum. Ramos said Mazariegos focused on building housing and community aid, while Ugarte was oriented toward neighborhood safety and cleanups.
Gio Garcia, chair of the local Voices Neighborhood Council, said Ugarte’s platform is built around leveraging existing systems, while Mazariegos wants to make deeper changes to those systems.
Garcia helped organize the forum along with the rest of the collection of community groups called the CD9 Coalition. LA Local reporter LaMonica Peters and youth journalist Charli Padilla moderated the CD9 candidate forum. Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, District 4 Councilmember Nithya Raman, also spoke during the event.
Whoever of the two candidates comes out on top after polls close on Nov. 3 will replace departing Councilmember Curren Price, Ugarte’s old boss, who is terming out after 12 years representing the district stretching from downtown LA through South Central.
Ugarte and Mazariegos are both Latino immigrants who each said they came to the US as undocumented children. Either would be the first non-Black councilmember for District 9 since 1963.
The two candidates reflect a larger demographic shift in the district, which historically was the center of Black political power in LA, but today is nearly 80% Latino. Both candidates have stressed the importance of Black-brown solidarity during their campaigns.
Residents of the district have pushed for the city to do more to make a safer community, address homelessness and deliver basic services from street repairs to trash pickup. At times, community members have taken the issues into their own hands with neighborhood patrols and street cleanups.
Ugarte, a former aide to Price, wants to ban RVs in neighborhoods, build a rail line down Slauson and hire more police officers. Community organizer Mazariegos wants to build more housing, hire young people to clean streets and bring social workers into some traditional police domains.
Locals have also worried if the Olympics in two years will actually bring dollars to local businesses and workers, or if the international attention will gloss over the neighborhood while driving more intense policing. The district is home to LA’s cornerstone Olympic venues, including the Crypto.com Arena, Exposition Park and LA Memorial Coliseum.
County election officials have already begun mailing ballots out to voters, and voting will continue until Nov. 3. Voters can mail their ballots, drop them in dropboxes, or vote in person once vote centers open on Oct. 24.
LA County residents need to register to vote by Oct. 19 in order to cast a ballot for this election.
Mazariegos wants to bring social workers into policing, Ugarte wants more community police officers
Mazariegos said the district is over-policed, and that too much funding goes to paying for officers instead of other services. As an alternative, the candidate proposed bringing social workers into situations historically in the domain of police.
“We need to ensure that when there is a mental health crisis, it’s a social worker showing up. When we have a family crisis, it’s a social worker showing up,” Mazariegos said.
Ugarte, by contrast, said the city doesn’t have enough officers and that police response times have grown too long. He wants more women officers and more officers with college degrees, more officers on foot, horseback and bicycles and a greater focus on community policing.
“I want an officer to just walk by and patrol to make sure that our community feels safe and secure,” Ugarte said.
Ugarte would ban RVs, Mazariegos would audit homelessness spending
Ugarte wants to ban RVs, campers and trailers from residential neighborhoods.
The candidate said he wants unhoused people to get mental health, detox and job training resources before the city provides housing. Many California homelessness service providers currently use a “housing first” approach, based on the logic that services are less effective if a person doesn’t have housing.
“The last seven years haven’t worked, so I’m taking a different approach,” Ugarte said.
Mazariegos countered that homelessness in LA has increased because public dollars are being misused.
“The first step is holding accountability at the top by auditing and making sure that every homeless service, every dollar is being spent the right way,” Mazariegos said. “Enough of the corruption.”
Mazariegos said he wants to solve homelessness by increasing wages and lowering rents in order to stop people from losing their homes.
Mazariegos wants to hire locals for cleanups, Ugarte wants to start business improvement districts
Mazariegos wants to increase the city’s budget for services like cleanups and to hire young locals to do the community cleanups around the clock, seven days a week.
“We could feed two birds with one hand,” Mazariegos said. He swiped at Ugarte for the lack of local services while Ugarte was working under Price.
Ugarte agreed that South Central hasn’t been getting the services it needs due to past funding cuts.
He wants city services to be fully funded, and to bolster city efforts with with business improvement districts, a type of self-funded organization that pays for services like maintenance and security with taxes on property owners.
“You see the trash everywhere,” Ugarte said. He said with the Olympics coming, cleanup crews should be working all the way down Figueroa Street and Vermont Avenue to Slauson Avenue.
Ugarte wants to keep pushing developers for local hiring, Mazariegos wants to tap into major event revenue
Ugarte touted his work in Price’s office to get developers to commit to local hiring when they build major projects. He referenced his plan to bar RVs from residential neighborhoods, saying that the LA Chamber of Commerce told him all they want is clean and safe areas to do business.
“I have a plan to clean up the district,” Ugarte said. “If the government and politicians have not done that for small business, we failed it.”
Mazariegos said he wants to make it easier for local small businesses to afford brick-and-mortar spaces.
He said he wants to tap into the flow of money into the district’s entertainment venues by putting a surcharge on tickets to events — like Laker games, concerts and the Olympics — then divert that money back into local businesses and parks.
“We need to make sure that money isn’t being extracted and that it’s coming back to the neighborhood,” he said.
You can read more about both candidates in The LA Local’s voter guide for District 9.
