What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Los Angeles is at a turning point. We are living in a defining moment. What happens next is up to us. Over the past few years, problems and challenges have shaken this city -- and tremendous opportunities for change have presented themselves. How do we rise to this moment and emerge a better place to live? What will it take to create a more just and a more equitable community? Working together, how are we going to create a stronger, forward-thinking Los Angeles? Mike Bonin, writer, teacher, progressive activist and former City Councilmember, looks at the issues and problems facing Los Angeles, examines ideas, and talks with the people who will lead us to a brighter future.
Produced in partnership with LA Forward.
What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
JOSE UGARTE: CD9 Candidate Spotlight
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He has served the 9th City Council District in Los Angeles for years as a council deputy. He has managed political campaigns. And he racked up a ton of endorsements from elected officials. Today I talk with candidate Jose Ugarte.
In this third installment of interviews with candidates to succeed retiring councilmember Curren Price, I speak with Jose Ugarte, A top aide to Price, Ugarte is a visible face at City Hall, in the district and in the media. He has served Price off and on since 2013, handling district projects and constituent services. Prior to that, he worked as a district deputy to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. He has taken several extended leaves of absence from government to work as a consultant for political campaigns, including those of Price, Rendon, Assemblymember Mike Fong and former Assembymember Miguel Santiago.
An immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, Ugarte says he will focus on serving the immigrant and low-income communities of the 9th District, and wants to be the "transportation councilmember” with a vision for more Metro rail lines in the 9th District.
Ugarte was recently the subject of an investigation form the city ethics commission, which found that he failed to disclose outside income from his consulting business. He and I discuss that, as well as his biography, and his vision for the city and distinct, in the interview.
Campaign website: https://ugarteforla.com/
What's Next, Los Angeles? is produced and hosted by Mike Bonin, in partnership with LA Forward.
He has served in 9th district for years as a council deputy. He has managed political campaigns, and he has racked up tons of endorsements from elected officials. Today I talk with City Council candidate Jose Ugarte, that's on What's Next, Los Angeles. Hi everybody and welcome. This is Mike Vaughn. Thank you for joining me. Today we offer the third installment of our series of interviews with candidates running to succeed Karen Price on the LA City Council. The ninth council district in Los Angeles stretches from the southern edge of downtown LA through South Central all the way toward Watts. The communities of Central Alameda, Vernon Central, South Park, Green Meadows, and Vermont Square all call District 9 home. The district is among the most diverse and youngest in the city, with over three-quarters of residents identifying as Latino. It also has a significant black community and many families with roots across Latin America and beyond. Nearly 40 percent of District 9 residents live below the federal poverty line. That makes it the city's poorest council district. And many households face challenges of housing insecurity, limited access to good jobs, and environmental burdens. With Price completing his third and final term, the seat is open for the first time since 2013. The primary election is going to take place in June of 2026, and the runoff, if needed, will be in November. This year, the field features community leaders, nonprofit executives, and policy advocates all vying for votes. Those candidates include Jose Ugarte, Estuar de Mazariegos, Elmer Roldan, and several others, each bringing their own vision for the future of South LA. Today's guest is Jose Ugarte. A top aid to Councilmember Price, Ugarte is a visible face at City Hall, in the district, and in the media. He has served Price off and on since 2013, handling district projects and constituent services. Prior to that, he worked as a district deputy to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. He has taken several extended leaves of absence from government to work as a consultant for political campaigns, including those of Price, Rendon, Assemblymember Mike Fong, and former Assemblymember Miguel Santiago. An immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, Ugarte says he will focus on serving the immigrant and low-income communities of the Ninth District, and says he wants to be the Transportation Council member with a vision for more metro rail lines in the Ninth District. Ugarte was recently the subject of an investigation from the City Ethics Commission, which found that he failed to disclose outside income from his consulting business. He and I discussed that as well as his biography and his vision for the city and the district in this interview.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, Councilman. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_01Very good to have you. Very good to have you. So, as I said before we started recording, I start all these interviews the same way with any candidate. Give me your pitch.
SPEAKER_03So I've been working for the local city councilman for about 13 years. I left for about three years, did my own thing, started my own consulting firm, did a bunch of campaigns. I focused on my family. And about three years ago, Councilman Price, who I worked for, asked me, Hey, are you interested in running for office? And I said no right away. I saw what's going on in the city, saw what's going on in the nation. I was not interested. My focus was my family. My wife was pregnant. I wanted to make sure we she had a good home to live in and we raised a family. That's the goal. And Donald Trump got elected. And as soon as he got elected, I started thinking to myself, I've been the type of, I've never been the type of person to run away from my problems. I, if something, if there's a fire in a building, I'm the first one to run in and try to save somebody. So I thought about it and I was thinking, I'm an immigrant. I was born in Mexico, I was undocumented until I was 17 years old. And Donald Trump is talking about me directly to me, saying, Oh, only immigrants that come here are criminals, and they just they put a burden on our welfare system, on everything, on social services. So I really thought about it. I said, look, if I am gonna make this decision, first of all, it has to be my community together. So first person I called my wife, I said, Hey, my man, really thinking about running. And she said, Well, come home, and I got some for you. I got home, smack across the head. She had a contract, and the contract said, I was not gonna miss any first days of schools, I was not gonna miss any graduations, I was not gonna miss any important doctor visits for our daughter. Wow. And uh she made me sign it unless I couldn't run. I signed it hesitantly. I signed it because of the candidate spouse bill of rights. Yeah, and I think every candidate should sign something like that just to be in par with their family, because family first, that was the first thing, right? Second thing called my mom and dad. My mom and dad, who who were both activists, raised me in the civil rights of immigrant civil rights, where we're marching against Prop Way 7, marching against Pete Wilson. I was eight years old, and I was undocumented back then, so I really didn't understand what I was marching for. But when I turned eight, 17, I realized everything, everything came together. So that was my my background on why I talked to my parents first, and they said, Look, you have fought and worked on a lot of progressive issues, and you're the type of person to lead on these issues. So as soon as they gave me the green light, the next was my colleagues in my community, and I talked to them, I said, Hey, you know, and and we knew what candidates were gonna run, and they're all good people. I thought that all the candidates were running, but my mine was a little different. I had worked there for 13 years, I had built a coalition of black and brown and youth and immigrant and a little bit of everything that came together. And I built a big team that I've had in that district for a long time, and I started having community meetings about it, hey, what are you looking to the next council member and and the number one thing stability? Stability is like someone who's stable, Jose. Like we know that the councilman is going through some tough times right now. Um, we wish it didn't happen, but we need someone who's stable and who can lead us out of this. And started thinking of my background. I was born in Mexico, born in Oaxaca, came when I was four years old. My first job out of college was working for the LA Federation of Labor. I was an organizer, I was registering union members to vote by mail because back then you're too young, councilman. But back then you had to actually sign a piece of paper that said, I receive a mail-in ballot. It was rare. Yeah, and it was hard to get a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01It was mainly older conservative people who voted by mail by then.
SPEAKER_03And that's how a lot of us out voters. So that was my job for about a year at the Fed. And then I worked, uh, there's a young, a young member from Illinois who's running for president, named Obama. I came to work on his race in Vegas, and then my background in labor chipped in when Scott Walker was being recalled in Wisconsin, and Labor sent me to Wisconsin for a whole year. So my background has always been working class people, and I thought about everything that I've done, and it came to the moment where okay, it's you're either gonna run for office or you're gonna stand on the sidelines and just see how it goes. And I thought about the other candidates. I said, look, we all have a line on different issues. I think we're pretty good. But I thought of myself that I have the experience by far. I have the experience working in council, I have the experience working in labor, I have the experience working in the community. I was a community organizer in Ace before Estuardo was even there. Actually, it was Acorn back then. Then it turned into ACE. And so I always tell Estorto, I was you before you were you, Estarto. So I've worked in nonprofits, worked in labor, worked in council, worked in the state assembly for Speaker Rendon. So I just put all my my bio together and I said, look, I can do this. And you know, I do political campaigns for a living, so I gotta make sure that it's even doable. And I started calling friends and and labor, and and a lot of them said, Hey, we're in. You're you're the epitome we want to see in council. And I announced, I announced in January because of everything came together, everything that came there. What I wanted to do in the city, I wanted to be a transportation councilman, I wanted to be an immigrant councilman, I want to do a lot of things. So that's how I decided to really run and jump in.
SPEAKER_01Take me back. I want to sort of do a little bio journey here. You said you were born in Oaxaca, you came here when you were four, four years old, yeah. Uh, and where did your family settle?
SPEAKER_03South LA.
unknownSouth LA.
SPEAKER_03Vernon and Central, my first little apartment next to my aunt's house. My aunt, so the way immigrants come here is we don't just like go many many Minimo. We come where we know. Like if we have family here or if there's a local job. And I always saw South Central as like the LS Island of LA. The cheapest place to live was South Central. The local jobs were in South Central. The community was South Central. You knew people the Spanish was a majority language. So my parents moved in. I was four years old, moved in next to my aunt's house. We had an apartment next to her, and then within I think two years, my parents moved to South Almonte, and then we moved to Elko Park, and then we moved to Pico Union. Immigrants, we just go where my dad was a construction worker, mom's a seamstress. So we'd go, we went where the jobs were available. Earthquake happened, and my dad bought a house in Northridge. And we bought a little rinky dink house in Northridge, built it up, and I ended up going to junior high and high school there. I went to Monroe High School, long government magnet, with I was just telling you, with Zev Roski's son. Yeah, and then I'm going, I had my first job out of college working for the Fed, ended up living next to my aunt's house again in South LA, and that's my start. Where'd you go to college? Northridge. Okay. Another Cal State.
SPEAKER_01The other Cal State, as we call it around here. And you, your first job working for an elected official, was that for Speaker Rendon or for Cry Price?
SPEAKER_03Speaker Rendon. My first job with benefits and a pension. I was 24 years old working for Assemblymember Rendon at the time. I hadn't been his field director. So I had a team of 20 people knocking on doors, and we and we were successful. And he's like, Hey, you're really good at what you do. You want to join my team? So I joined his team for literally about six months because three months into the job, he was trying to be speaker. He was the smartest guy I know. He's one of the smartest guys in politics I know. And he said, Hey, um, I just called the chair of the Black Caucus. A guy's name is Kern Price. He's running for city council, and I need his support for my speakership. Are you interested in helping him? All he cares about is city council right now. I said, No, I'm not interested. I was living in South Del A. I did not want to work in South Del A. I was working for Anthony Rendon in Southgate, and I thought it was like Beverly Hills compared to South Delay. And I said, I said, hey, no disrespect, assembly member, but I like where I am. I'm at right now. Councilman got through, Kern Price got through the primary, and now he's in the general, and he tells Anthony, hey, I really need your guy now. It's getting serious. And Anthony's like, hey, I'm not asking anymore. You need to do this. I said, okay. So I went to South Delay, managed Kern's race 2012, actually. Well, you're successful. I fell in love with the guy. Kern is one of the most humble, not just politicians, just human beings that you can ever meet. And he I remember he told me this story. He said, um, he said, look, immigrants are immigrants to South Delai. Like my parents came here almost 100 years ago from the deep south, and we came to South Delai. The only place where we we can live was on Central Avenue. Go to a bar, go to a theater, go to a dance hall was on Central Avenue in South Delai. And then 50 years later, Latinos came. The only place they can come is South Delai, because it was this is my story, my parents' story. So you say we're both immigrants. Um and South Delai is is our home. So we got to treat each other with respect because we come from the same, we have the same immigrant story. So that story just blew me on mind. I've never really thought about it that way. But I fell in love with the councilman and we were successful in our race. And he hired me. He hired me to be his comms director. I spoke Spanish, fluent in Spanish and English, and he wanted to build a coalition because our we barely won that seat by 500 votes. 500 votes against Anacuba, who was We Zar's chief of staff. It was a very close race, but we understood one thing that Latinos wanted a seat at the table. They wanted to see a Latino council member, and they had different issues as African Americans. So that's my first start to working for real government because I worked for Anthony for a little bit and then current for the remainder.
SPEAKER_01And you worked for him for six years before you left?
SPEAKER_03On paper it says six years, but my pension only says three because every year I would leave. I would leave. I manage Miguel Santiago's race, I managed Mike Fong's race, I managed Anthony's race, all his other re-elections, uh MRT's race. So I take a bunch of leave of absence and manage all these races. So it was really three. But every time I came back, I did comms and I did a lot of field work. The councilman doesn't speak Spanish in our district, is 80% Latinos, a lot of monolingual Spanish speakers. So I was the face of councilman to the Latino community.
SPEAKER_01So and then you left for a few years, did some consulting. We'll get into that later. And then you came back to his office in 2021?
SPEAKER_03Late 2021, early 2022. And what was your position then? So COVID had just about to end. And uh councilman calls me. He says, Hey, we're trying to vaccinate a bunch of people. You're interested in coming back. And I said, What do you want me to do? He said, Well, I want you to lead a campaign on vaccinating, on masks, on on just living a healthy lifestyle without delay because we I think we had lost over 900 seniors, the most than anybody in the city out of the 15 districts. So it was serious for the councilman. And I said, Okay, I came back to work for the office as deputy chief of staff director of community outreach, and I started a vaccination drive where we opened up I think four clinics that got vaccines and we did outreach. We started going, we got we went door to door basically going to people's doors and make sure they're vaccinated or make sure they they had a I guess a plan to get vaccinated. And we gave out masks and we did that for about a year, and it was very successful because the then the governor noticed and said, Hey, how come your district has the highest percentage of vaccinations in the entire state? Um, the poorest district in LA, the highest minorities, and we told them, hey, we had this plan where we went door to door, didn't matter what your register role or not, we just talked to every single person in our district and we gave them a plan to get vaccinated, we gave them a mask and gave him like a hotline number to call in case we did that for about a year, and then the governor started his plan where he started his vaccination drives, and it was it was very successful as well. But I did that for about a year, and then I started doing a lot of community outreach stuff back to the back as deputy chief of staff for the council member. We um had um LAFC Stadium was about two, three years in. They had they had they wanted to expand a little bit. Lucas Museum wanted to build, so I took the lead on a lot of those issues, making sure they they all had project labor agreements, local hire, all that good stuff. Or I had very important meetings that the councilman would just send me to. That's how really started the last three years I've been doing.
SPEAKER_01And you're still with them?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, currently with him, deputy chief of staff, Director Kumi Outreach. I have a lot of his videos. I'm his spokesman. He uh doesn't speak Spanish, so I do all his bilingual. He does it in English, I do in Spanish.
SPEAKER_01So you've been with him for a few more years now. What would you say you're most proud of?
SPEAKER_03The biggest thing I'm proud of as being an immigrant, being undocumented, is that we opened the first center in South Del A for immigrant services, which is headed by Cheerla. It was an old city library, Sarah Library. We retrofitted it and fixed it up for Chirla to attend. It was about a three million dollar project, and it's been open for about three years. Out of the three years, they have renewed DACA for about 1,200 students.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_03They have got residencies for about 250 people and citizenship for about 500 people. And you know, if if you're in South Delay, the closest place you go to is MacArthur Park to the Chile offices. We don't have anything in South Delay. We have a couple offices in in Bo Heights that they're always busy, but we it was really proud to have something in South Delay. We focus on our on South Delay alone, and we had that office alone open more Docker renewals and anywhere in the city, just our district alone. That's something we're really proud of. Because I, you know, my my story is I was undocumented, so I see these kids that have the same story. I was lucky enough to get my residency because my parents became residents before I was 18. But a lot of these kids are not. And we have two of Kern's employees who are Docker recipients, and they're right now with this administration, they're in limbo. So for us to help them renew their their it's just it's just like you're saving the life that can stay here, right? And not just stay here, but just be unafraid of getting picked up one day and getting sent back to a country that they don't know. So that's something I'm really proud of. And then that comes also with it's a million-dollar grant to Cheerlock, Adessen, and other immigrant organizations. We're gonna do it again in the next couple months. We're gonna announce it soon, so you're the first one to know. But something really proud of. I always say that I can fight for better affordable housing, I can fight for public safety, I can fight for jobs. But if I if my people are not here to stay, if they got if they're getting kicked out, then what am I fighting for? That's the most important thing that I really care about. Is just keeping my people here in South Delay.
SPEAKER_01What would you say is the angriest, the most pissed off you've ever been at city government, and what is the most satisfied or optimistic you've been about?
SPEAKER_03Well, I've been angry so many times. Um I say the biggest thing that I was angry of is just like the red tape. Like being a city worker, a city deputy, it's chief of staff. I'm the I'm in the highest levels of government right now in the city, and I can't fix the smallest things. I can't put a pothole, take me a week. I can't trim a trigger take me two weeks, I can't clear a homeless academy, it'd take me a month. That's something that really upsets me because my wife and we go to the local park, and um there's like needles hanging out, and you know, I as a grown-up, I was like, okay, I grew up in South Delhi, it's okay, it's normal. But now as a two having a two-year-old daughter, it's a little scary. And my wife tells me, like, don't you work here? Don't you aren't you guys in charge of cleaning up the streets? And and she's right, she's right. This is my wife. Imagine uh all the other residents are like, what the hell? What's going on? So that's really infuriating. This is simple things that that it's just and then if I explain it to people like we gotta get lost out here, we we gotta get sanitation, we gotta get hazmat, they don't care. Don't tell me this shit. Just clean it up, Jose. So it's just that's infuriating to me that we just can't get it cleaned up fast enough. That's something I really want to fix.
SPEAKER_01What's the most satisfied you been?
SPEAKER_03The most satisfying is regard well. I'll already hit on that on the immigration stuff, just seeing people get their residency. I know some residents that that are that like they're they're just grateful for an African-American councilman that got them their residency and their citizenship. That's amazing. Well, that's not just that, that's the easiest of but the coolest thing that I always say in my district now that or my district, the ninth district, is still the cheapest place to live. Lowest rents right now, you one bed, even though it's not low, one bedroom apartment you can get for about $1,500. That's you can't say that anywhere else in the city. So for the last 13 years, I think we did a good job to make sure we we pushed away developers that didn't want to work with us. And it's something I'm really proud of because we had we've had developers, we're right next to the 10th freeway. So you cross the 10th freeway, you see million-dollar condos and and high rises, but you go south of the 10th freeway, you don't see much. And it's not for a lack of trying because developers do want to develop south of the 10th freeway, or especially around USC. We don't let them unless they have affordable housing, unless they have a local hire component, unless they have community benefits. We don't let them. Most of them are like, ah, it's not worth it. So they leave. That's what I'm really proud of because I people keep saying gentrification happens. I look at we lived in Echo Park. I want to be able to afford to live in Echo Park. Even my salary that I have right now, I just couldn't. It's impossible. When I lived there, it was the poorest in the city. Like we we had gangs everywhere. That's where we can afford to live. But South Delay has kept low income base that stops gentrification, which is also the most important thing I really want to make sure I focus on. But she'll be really proud of that we push developers away that didn't wanna that didn't wanna pay an basically we're cutting their profits. So that's something.
SPEAKER_01You mentioned your wife, you mentioned your daughter. Tell me about your family.
SPEAKER_03My wife, we met in college, we both went to Northridge together. We've been together forever now. We she was from South Del A. She went to Fremont High, Bethune Middle School in the district that I work in now, and we moved close to each other. We bought a house on Brighton and King when we're 25 years old with our she's a teacher. I'm a government employee, so she she she's the smarter one. But we bought a house, we saved all our money, we bought a little house on Brighton and King. Then we bought another house on San Pedro 43rd when we're in our 30s, and then about five years ago, we bought a house in Hunter and Park, and we we were doing good. She's we were on we're on good salaries, but we never thought about running for office because this is not just me, it's us, right? That's how we moved out of the city. We wanted to raise our daughter in uh two blocks away from my district. Yep, but it's the only place we can afford to buy a home, a nice three-bedroom home because we're growing. But she is my backbone, my wife. She we've been together forever. She is a preschool teacher, and now she's taking some time off to take care of our daughter, our two-year-old daughter, her name is Loxley. I named her off after Robin Hood of Loxley because we we steal from the kings and give to the poor. Um, but she's at home taking care of my daughter. I think she has a tougher job than I do. I had an interview yesterday and they asked me, man, what's the toughest thing about running for office? And I really thought about it. I said, teaching my daughter how to be potty trained. They're like, What? I said, look, I can run and I can lose and I'll be okay, but if I can't teach my two-year-old daughter how to poop and pee in a potty, like I failed. So that's the stuff that really matters to us. So my dot my wife has has a tough job right now. A lot tougher than me. I'm just trying to raise a million dollars and win the uh city council seat with 300,000 people. But my wife has a two-year-old, we have a two-year-old at home that we're almost there. We're almost getting a bunch of potty train. But that's that's my family.
SPEAKER_01Um I got real lucky after I got re-elected in 2017. I took a week's vacation by myself and my husband stayed home with our son, and he potty trained him in a week while I was gone. I had nothing to do with it. God said you gotta marry well. You guys bought a house in Huntington. Park. Yeah. When did you move back into the ninth?
SPEAKER_03About two years ago. We had we kept our house on 43rd San Pedro where my aunt lives in. We were remodeling it. We built a nice back house. My ADU. It's a four-story ADU. I mean a four-bedroom ADU in the back. We have an old 1910 home and it was falling apart. So in the back, we started building. My dad's a contractor, so he was helping me build it. Took us about two years. Now it's a four-bedroom. We always plan on moving back there because it was close to a lot of our family that lives there. But we and San Pedro, we basically switched. I mean, in Hunter Park. My aunt will live in our house in Hunter Park, and we lived, we moved into our new construction, constructed home in on 43rd in San Pedro.
SPEAKER_01What neighborhood is that?
SPEAKER_03That's technically it's about the King neighborhood. So to me, it's like the center of our district. So South Del A is something I always wanted to change, but we have we broke it up into neighborhood councils. So we have South Central neighborhouncil, which is everything north of King, west of San Pedro. We have Central Almida, which is everything east of east of Central, east of San Pedro, all the way to Almida. The center part is where I live. It's called we call this a Pada King. It used to be called um it used to be called South Park, but people in South in downtown LA took our name. That's not South Park. The real South Park is on Avalon and 51st, which is historic. But we live a couple blocks away, and that area was called South Park. And then the neighborhood council came in in 2014. A new neighborhood council, we I uh ended up I helped form it, and we chose a name Zapata, which after Emiliano Zapata and Martin Luther King. So now we call it Zapata King. So I would like to say it's I live in the neighborhood in the neighborhood of Zapata King.
unknownNice.
SPEAKER_01Tell me about the ninth district. How would you describe it?
SPEAKER_03I always say it's so the census says it's about 270,000 people. I say it's over 300,000 people. Because I did the census. I had a contract to do the census, and uh a lot of my friends knocked on doors, and you know, we we have a single-family home in the front, we have ADUs in the back, and we have three to four families living in both. And the census did not capture them, but our community is very well, well, it's very resourceful, resourceful, I always say. So we didn't capture a bunch of people. So I would say we have over 300,000 people. Out of 300,000 people, 80% Latino, 20% African American. We have about 5% that are Caucasian and Asian, but they're mostly USC students. They leave in June, they live in November, and they they don't really register. Well, they're here, but they don't register here. So my district is the youngest also. I saw that the majority, a third are under 18. So that means that we are we have huge potential and we got to focus on youth programs and education. But I always say my district is is where it's an immigrant community. We have a lot of Belizeans, we have a lot of Africans. You can tell by the churches that they're changing, a lot of Central Americans, so you can tell like old back in the day. So this is uh for an example, like it used to be a church of chicken, closed down, turned into a King Taco, closed down, turned into uh Sonsonate, which is a Salvadorian restaurant. So that's the demographics have changed over time, which is amazing. You can just tell just by a simple restaurant. It was also built by our churches. South Del A has a lot of historic churches. We have Second Baptist Church, who just who actually 130 years of uninterrupted service, it just did about a month ago. That's amazing stuff. I and what happens is these churches came in 130 years ago, and then community folks started moving around the churches because they wanted to live close to the church, and that's how a lot of neighborho neighborhoods were built. And you see the oldest building and the whole block is a church, and then you have all these houses around and they're built 10 to 15 years after that. And it's still the story because I I see a lot of now Catholic churches, Christian churches, and a lot of neighbors start moving around them. So it's very, it's still very, it's well-oriented to each other, but I think that we're broken. Like we we don't really like we don't have neighborhood watches. That's something that bugs me all the time. Our neighborhood councils are very poorly attended. Half of them don't even meet quorum. And the biggest issue is it's it's a working class city, it's a working class district. People that that work from like 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or even later, they don't have time to be civically engaged. So I always say it's it's just working class people that come and come home and they want they eat with their families and they wake up the next day to go back to work. That's the big majority of our district. Then the historic African-American district, which is a little west of the 10th freeway, the 110th freeway. They've been there for 120 years now. They are getting older, very old. I um the councilman went to Norman Street Elementary School, which is on Vernon and Normandy, and he's 75 years old. He said, I came here 70 years ago to this school, and it and now like the school was 100% oh, Jewish, Japanese, and African American. Now it's like 100% Latino. So the younger population is now Latino. So, and that's the West side of our district. So it's very diverse. I I and when I say diverse, it's black and brown, immigrant, low income, but working class. Working class. I think the majority I always see people, you know, when the raids happen, a lot of jobs were cut, but right away within the week, people started getting other jobs, started getting very resourceful, they started selling stuff on the streets. Like we can't afford to not have a job. So our community's been very resourceful about making sure that they get paid the rent, making sure they pay the food, put food on the table, that kind of stuff. So it's a resilient kind of community, something that that I am.
SPEAKER_01Where do you like to spend the most time in your district?
SPEAKER_03My I my favorite part to spend in my district is South Park. We have a local park 13 years ago. It was, it still is the biggest park in our district, most underutilized park 13 years ago. It's like a division between African Americans and Latinos. It's kind of in the middle, closer to Slossen, which divides our district in half. There's a Latino gang north of the park, African-American gangs out of the park. And the community folks just never use that park. It was ugly. And my job was to do community outreach, see what they wanted. So we didn't have any soccer fields at that park. We didn't have any basketball courts at the park. We had tennis courts, we had a volleyball court, which nobody it's kind of well, even baseball wasn't even played anymore. So we redid the park, $25 million. Thanks to the city. I think you voted on this. Appreciate you. Put new soccer fields in, new basketball courts in, a new football field in, and workout equipment for seniors, everything that you can think of. You see at every other park, didn't have an art park. So now we had this, and people still didn't use the park. Like, Jose, I it's kind of dangerous. There's gangs or stuff. So we put together a CSP program, community safety partnership program, where we hired 10 police officers. We interviewed them first. We ended up getting five African-American officers, five Latino officers. And the five Latino officers, majority were women, African-American two were women, and it was like amazing stuff. Like you saw women police officers were on bikes, were on horses, and they've been there about seven years, haven't had one complaint. And that's a kind of that's like perfect policing. They and they don't arrest people. They just, if someone's smoking or drinking, hey, put that out, go walk along. And their job is not to arrest anybody, their job is to build community trust. That's the epitome of what I want to see in public safety. So that park is now changed. It's we just had a festival there about a month ago, the first Latino carnival there. 50,000 people showed up to that park. It was just amazing stuff. And the people that all live around there, like I we can think, we thought ice was gonna come, we thought fights, we got, we thought people were gonna raid the local shops, and it was three arrests, and it was mostly alcohol that we didn't sell, but community folks brought their own alcohol out of 50,000 people. That was super successful, and we brought it to South Park, the park that we renovated that nobody wanted to use. 50,000 people showed up from all throughout the county. Yeah, but amazing stuff. That's my favorite place because I play basketball a lot. I'm in adult leagues. There's a park there that has everything, has basketball courts, has indoor basketball courts, has a swimming pool. I just come play, take my daughter around, has a little walk. Yeah, I have a dog, I have a Australian shepherd that I also take around. So that's probably my favorite. Probably I live a couple blocks away. Right. So I can say it's probably spend most of the time there.
SPEAKER_01Let's start to hit some issues facing the city. We've talked uh a little bit about immigration, your history as an immigrant, some of the work you've done as an immigrant. The city has taken a really prominent role in the national fight over immigration. What do you think the city has been doing right? And if you get elected, what more do you want the city to do? The city's been doing as much as it can.
SPEAKER_03I agree with the mayor's been doing a great job, the council's been doing a great job on it. I think some things are a little outdated. Special order, was it 40 where officers can't ask for documents? That seems needs to be updated. That's about 30 years ago we put that in.
SPEAKER_01Oh, even longer. It was Daryl Gates. Oh.
SPEAKER_03Needs to be updated because what I see now is that all the raids are happening in my district. It happened again about a week ago. Some guy that we I personally know, Richard LA, was shot because he was undocumented. But we really need to update that order to give officers just clarity on what they can and can't do. What I get all the time is when there's a raid going on, officers, LEPD officers show up, right, for traffic control, whatever it is, and community members call me right away. What's going on, Jose? Why is LEPD working with them? And when I call the captains, like, I don't know what you're talking about. And I and I could show up, officers are directing traffic or making sure people are not fighting each other. But I always tell them, I was like, hey, you should keep a certain amount of feet away. Like, Jose, we don't know. So I really want that to be specific. Like, I if there's any kind of federal agents around, I think officers need to be a certain amount of feet away from a thousand to two thousand to make sure that there's a separation between them. I I really hate when I see an LEPD officer in uniform and a federal agent officer right next to each other. That's like the worst thing can happen because LEPD officers are supposed to support help us and protect us. And just the visuals about that is just it's just horrible. The average, and it's Obama, I mean, Trump's gonna come and go, but our community is always gonna be here, and that trust for police is either gonna be here or not. And we need to really look at that special order. We need really to put guidelines of what they can and can't do, and we haven't. So I would really want to put guidelines say, hey, you can't be within a thousand feet from any federal agent. Like, yes, if there's a traffic accident because caused by it, you can address a calf, but we gotta tell people it can't be within a thousand feet. That's something or more. I gotta do research on that. And we gotta people who wear masks, that's just ridiculous. We we really gotta enforce that. I know other cities have taken a stance on it. We gotta be the first one to say you can't be wearing a mask. And I know even LPD officers shouldn't be wearing masks. I don't think anybody should be wearing a mask. They're public servants, they're taxpayer funded. We need to make sure that they're unmasked. We need to make sure we know who these people are. And this is it's just a public safety thing. People want to see if they really are who they are. You can have Joe Schmo just put on a mask and buy something on Amazon and abduct you. That stuff should not happen. LAPD is here to protect us, they need to be the first ones to to to get guidelines and to do it. So that's something that's really important. I you know, I'm planning on getting elected. I'm gonna plan on being here for 12 years, and the thing that I'm gonna have to solve is the relations between LAPD and our community. And I don't want this issue with immigration raids and stuff to affect us because there are gonna be consequences. People are gonna remember, hey, that officer like stopped me from running away from an immigration raid. I don't know. I don't know, and there's gonna be stories, and that's something that's gonna be scary, and we're gonna have to deal with for years to come, even after this administration is gone. It's gonna be our job to bring that trust back.
SPEAKER_01When I talk to candidates about public safety, a question I like to ask them is when was the last time you personally felt unsafe?
SPEAKER_03Unsafe. That's tough for me. I don't know, I'm 6'3, I'm a black belt in Taekwondo. I uh I took boxing in 10th planet, jujitsu for a while. I I don't really get scared much. I get scared for my family, actually. I take that back.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03I get scared when I have my daughter and my wife with me, and we're walking by a homeless encampment, and I grab my daughter to put her closer to me. And that's just natural instinct as a human being, like you want to protect your daughter. My first thought is like someone's gonna jump out and with the needle, and you hear stories, right? Someone's gonna jump out with needle and stab us and things like that. But it's it's um I'm trying to be mindful of a homeless encampment. Like, hey, 90% of homeless encampments are safe, and the people the homeless people have don't have priors and they're safe. It's at 10% that scares me. It's a 10% that I'm afraid of as a dad that I get we have to address. Right. That's a time that that I've been afraid that doesn't happen much, but because we've been doing pretty good on encampments and cleanups and housing people, but that's the time where I see the camp and I'm like, oh shoot. Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned homelessness. What does homelessness look like in the 9th district? Because it's different in different parts of the city.
SPEAKER_03Right. Homelessness is is our community, our community that couldn't pay their bills, down on their luck, and ended up on the street. And that's the first part. The second part, addictions. Addictions. I have family members who started with alcohol, ended up with other things, and that's a big percentage of my district that they fell into a rabbit hole and it's hard for them to get out of. That's homeless systemy. I don't think that you know, people say like, oh, a person wants to sleep on the street and do whatever they want. I don't think it's a case. I think they need help. I know these people are family, people are friends, and I see I drive by where they live and I see them get worse and worse. And it comes a time where yes, they get help for a month or two and they're right back on there. That's sad. It's just it's just a sad story. I think that homelessness needs to be addressed with mental health, first of all. That's I think that's the biggest issue. Mental health issues, and it has to do with a lot of with safety too. I think 10% of people that are aggressive and have a mental health issue. We need to make sure that they receive the care that they need. I was on this housing first thing, but obviously we're in a billion-dollar budget deficit and it's not gonna work anymore. So we gotta change the way that we address it. I wish we had all the money in the world and we could just house everybody, but we don't. So we gotta change it to more of a mental health. We need to open more mental health clinics. We need to make sure people are off the streets that are have have that aggression that you know officers tell me all the time, hey, that guy's aggressive, don't go around there. That guy needs to receive help ASAP because it's it's uh it's dangerous to society, danger to him. Like we need to do good by that person to make sure that we keep him from hurting himself because I have my cousin who started with alcohol and ended up with worse things, that he's a good person. He's a good person, but he also gets aggressive sometimes, and I don't want him doing any harm to anybody. But I'll be the first one to tell him, hey, you need to go into a treatment, ASAP, a mandatory treatment. And when he gets out of that treatment, he's gonna thank me for saving his life. That's a that's why I see homelessness. It's just a variety.
SPEAKER_01So I want to follow up on the the comment about housing first, because you said you're on board with it, but we need to do th some things differently. Housing first, people hear the term, and I think it means different things to different people. Generally, it was originally a philosophy that said the most important thing you can do is house somebody. And once they're housed, that's then when you can help them with addiction, help them with any other coexisting conditions. But you got to get a roof over people's head to stabilize them versus means testing of you have to be sober first or you have to be on meds first or whatever. For other people, it's become synonymous with permanent supportive housing. So when you're talking about housing first and needing to do things differently, what are you talking about?
SPEAKER_03It's permanent supportive housing. I don't know. I worked in a city for so long. When you talk to someone who's homeless, they want a place to put their belongings. Like they'll move along, but they want a place permanent to put their belongings and they want the help. Some people need help getting IDs, the smallest things you can think of. An ID, a shower, hot food. And we don't have that. We tried, but we we just can't afford it anymore. So I was always purpose-prousing is a way to solve homelessness. Like if someone just had a place, like nobody wants to live on the street, that doesn't exist. If you gave them a place to live, they'd live, they live there. But as long as they can keep all their belongings, as long as they have a place that's quiet and they can do their thing, that's the that's how to solve homelessness. But it's costs us billions and billions of dollars.
SPEAKER_01So Mayor Bass's approach has been let's get people off the streets as quickly as possible. Her Inside Safe program has been giving people temporary housing until there's longer-term stuff available, and that's been predominantly hotels, motels. I think it's included some master leasing. That's also really expensive, and it doesn't get people where they need to go, and people are sort of stuck in there because there isn't the permanent supportive housing. So, what's the solution? You've got really so expensive permanent, you've got a really expensive interim. How do we get out of the quagmire?
SPEAKER_03We gotta just change it 100%. We I saw how much money we spent, billions, it just wasn't enough. I'm not even gonna get into the spending the Lhasa has or Inside Safe has. I don't want to get into that. But I what I realized is that we've been doing it wrong. We really gotta focus on mental health now. Like I said, like we it's kind of an emergency right now. We we spend all this money on housing, it didn't work. So what do we do? We can't just spend more money on housing doing the same thing. It's just stupid. We have to spend money on mental health. I want to open more mental health clinics. I I saw the county just open one Hilda Solise. I went to her grand opening, she endorsed me and went to her grand opening, and she's like, we're gonna start housing people that have mental health issues here, and it's gonna cover South LA too, but that's in like East LA. It's around here, actually. It's just too far. So we need to build them around this entire city, these mental health facilities, ASAP, and start putting some of the housing money goes into them. Start having doctors come in there and start getting people clean. The money needs to be spent on different things. I just felt that we spend a lot of money on things. I you just look at you if you're not in government and you see how much money we spend on how on housing one person, you're gonna be like, what is wrong? What is wrong with our city? What is wrong with our government? So we got to change it up. It's and you know, I was the type of person, if you do something, it doesn't work, fix it. At least admit that you did something wrong, admit it, and we admit it as a city employee. I admit it we did something wrong and it didn't work. So now we gotta change it up.
SPEAKER_01So is the type of mental health housing you're talking about that supervisor opened up, is that less expensive?
SPEAKER_03No, but I think I saw it's super expensive, but I think it's another, it's like a solution. Who knows if it's a solution, but it's a it's an alternate solution that we've had to, you know, our most of our money, I think it was like 80% of our housing money, money of our money for homelessness goes to housing. 20% goes to mental health. If we tell that to the voter, we're like, well, why don't you flip it over? If it's not working, why don't you do 80% to mental health, 20% to housing, and see if that works? But that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to just change it up a little bit to see if it works. I don't think anybody can solve it. We I was just in in the Philippines, they have a lot of homeless issues. And I it's not just a United States thing, it's not a California thing, it's not just an LA thing, it's a worldwide thing. But nobody's gonna solve it. It's not solvable. It's always gonna happen, but we can do things to take steps to diminish it.
SPEAKER_01Let me ask about housing more generally, right? Because it's generally agreed upon that we've got a uh a housing crisis in California. Some people would say we have an affordable housing crisis, some people would say we have a housing crisis, period. As council member, you'll have you know, you'll be the judge, jury, executioner on land use in your district, unless charter reform changes things. So what is your approach gonna be towards housing, particularly given that there's always pressure to build in lower income communities, but that has the impact of then gentrifying and displacing people in those communities.
SPEAKER_03100%. To me, housing and transportation comes hand in hand. I am a big transportation guy. I want to make sure that so if you look at our district, we have the Expo line, that's it, that's for USC students to go to the west side, and then we have the Long Beach line, which goes on the east, far east side of our district, and then we have the Crenshaw line, which is two council districts west of our district. The Crenshaw line is beautiful, but it's nobody uses it, it's empty. I used it the other day, we took a tour, and it's empty. The Long Beach Line is used, but our district doesn't have anything, anything else. If you look at our the from Long Beach to Normandy, which is our district, from the 10 freeway to the 105 freeway, we have nothing. And um, it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. If we have the highest workforce in the city of LA, we need some sort of transportation line. So we just opened on Slossen with Metro, a new Slossen quarter. We call it the rail to rail, and it's beautiful. People use it to walk or bike, so hopefully some people use it to go to work. But I want to build a metro station on that. It's not going to displace anybody, it'll be a higher, it's a 20 feet in the air metro, high-rise metro station, metro line that will cross from LA River, which is the city of Maywood, all the way to LX. It'll cut my district in half.
SPEAKER_01A rail line.
SPEAKER_03A rail line, yeah. And then a light rail line. And then I want to build one on the along the 110 freeway. We have a bus there, but I heard I saw buses are 95% of the time a bus is on time. If you tell that to your employer, you're gonna be here 95% of the time, he's gonna fire you. I buses, I mean, trains are 100, what was it, 99.99, like seven nines on time. That's what we want to see. We want to see a world-class transportation system in my district first. I think that's I'm gonna push that as much as I can. So I basically want a train line down the 110 freeway and across Lawson. And what's it gonna do is cut my district in four. So anywhere you live in my district, you can walk over, take a train to go to work, to go anywhere. And then what that's gonna do is gonna open us to housing. I'm a big supporter of SB 79. And my first when people were beating me up about it, I said, look, our district doesn't really have that many transit corridors, so we're not we're not really gonna get gentrified as much as other districts. But once we do have a transit corridor, I do really want to build a lot of housing. Number one issue in my district is parking. I've had now I'm at 38 community meetings where I just invite neighbors and friends to different parts of the neighborhood. Number one thing always comes up is parking park. Jose, there's no parking in the parking park. And people need a car to go to work, a car to go to school, car to come. A lot of kids go to Casa de la L and need a car to get here. And there's no real line to take them anywhere they want to be. They have to drive at least 15 minutes to go to the nearest line, park their car. Why don't they just drive to where they're going? So that's a big issue for me. So These train lines are gonna help us with the parking issue. People don't need cars to go to work. Like I lived in Highland Park for a little bit during college. And back in my days, we didn't have a was it the gold line? I don't know what line that is, but we didn't have it. And everybody had a car. Now nobody uses cars in Highland Park. And it's beautiful. That's the kind of community I want to live in. That's where we don't have cars. We don't have to depend on cars anymore.
SPEAKER_01You're sitting here talking with someone who was on the Metro board for 10 years, dealt with a lot of transportation policy. So I gotta push back on your answer a little bit on the buses and the trains. You are right that there's a problem with buses not being on time. But buses are the majority of the system in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_04By far.
SPEAKER_01Much like permanent supportive housing is a really expensive solution for homelessness. Trains is a really expensive solution to mobility. Why not invest more in the existing bus system, do bus-only lanes, bus rapid transit to get people from a variety of places to a variety of places more quickly rather than investing in more trains?
SPEAKER_03We have one on Vermont, which is Vermont's the highest used street in the entire city of LA, and it's going down right our district, right down our district. But it's not enough. When that was proposed a couple years ago, the people were like, hey, we got something. And some people were like, Jose, why do I always get seconds? Like we sell, we see the credential line. It's beautiful. Took them seven years to build, and it's beautiful. They did a good job. That community came together, and it's a little wealthier community, wealthier, wealthier African-American community. And our first thought, you're right. You're right. Why do we get the second, the sloppy seconds? I say it. So you're right. We want to invest in buses. That's my whole thing. Because it's something we can do now. It's something that we are doing down Vermont. I've been doing Kumi outreach on that. But the high the main goal is to get trains. That's just the main goal. The main goal, it's gonna take me, yeah, seven, eight years to to build them, but I want to be like if I was to die seven years from now, and I could say, look, I helped bring this train station in. Right. That's like a that's something that you can die a happy man.
SPEAKER_01So how are you gonna pay for new trains? We've got like 30 years worth of projects in in the queue from from Measure M.
SPEAKER_03I want to put another bond on there. I'm okay with putting our bond. My background is campaigns. I do this for a living. I know you gotta pay for stuff. I passed uh, I helped pass uh water bond, the biggest water bond the state of California ever did. But I think if you tell people, hey, we want to build LA to have a world-class transit system, we gotta pay for it somehow, some way. And uh if the bond has to say we have a little bit more to bring a train station to Satala, I think people can agree to it. And I want to be a champion on that. So, hey, look, we have 300,000 people in my district. It's the workforce of LA. I love what Swart always says, we have the hardest working people in the city of LA home in my district. He's right, we really do. But if we don't have a world-class transportation system in my district, then how we're putting ourselves to waste. We had to drive everywhere.
SPEAKER_01The Olympics. What do you think about them?
SPEAKER_03They're exciting. The I'm super excited. I'm I always tell people, I growing up, I wanted to be an Olympian. So for them to come in to my district, it's it's uh it's amazing stuff. The Olympic, the Coliseum's gonna be the opening three times ever. The history of the world. In my district, history of the world, we're gonna have the opening of Olympics in the Coliseum. But we also got to be careful. We gotta be careful. I I heard stories that they're gonna come in and just wipe out all the homeless encampments and get it pretty for a couple months, and then they're gonna come right back. That's horrible. I don't want to see that. That's first it's uh disservice to the people that are living there, which are real people, real human beings, and to the people and to the residents that are living there that have homes and apartments. It's embarrassing that that if they talk about this and it happens, yeah, that's embarrassing. Right. What are we doing? But the Olympics is I helped bring them in. I had when we with Garcetti and in our office, we did a whole video on we had a bunch of kids from our district. We went to the Coliseum and proposed this, proposed that. I was in a couple little videos teaching the kids how to do archery. It's cool, cool little thing. So that's a big thing. Also, it's personal to me because there's a swimming pool in our district because at Expo Park. That swimming pool top, my wife had to swim. We don't have a swimming pool in South Del A. My wife learned how to swim at that swimming pool at Expo Park, and now what she said she was eight years old. So now, 30 years later, she's teaching my daughter how to swim. Because of that, that swimming pool is now teaching my daughter because my wife learned how to swim and she was.
SPEAKER_01What was the first Olympics? 32, yeah.
SPEAKER_0332 Olympics, and then it got remodeled for the 84 Olympics.
SPEAKER_01Getting remodeled again out of this Olympics?
SPEAKER_03Getting remodeled again, exactly. It is from the 2020s that my my wife took classes there, how to swim, and she learned how to swim, and now she's teaching my daughter how to swim. That's like, how amazing story can he be? And that's what I want to see. I want to see them build more pools, more uh fields for people to play. And the kid, maybe 15 years from now, he becomes an Olympian because or he teaches his kids how to be how to work because Olympians.
SPEAKER_01You satisfied with what the 2028 is promising to deliver to residents of LA?
SPEAKER_03Um, no, no, never will be. We never will be, and I don't think anybody on the city council will be. We need to ask for more, 100% more. We like the pool. That's something we fought for.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03They said we can't do it at the pool. We're gonna take it to SoFi and do all the swimming stuff at SoFi. And we're like, what the hell? That's a pool that's been there for almost 100 years.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_03How are you gonna take this away? And they said, no, look, we're not gonna get enough cameras there. People can't fill up the stadium, it's too small, it's too compact because we're so close to Coliseum. So they said, we're not doing it. And we said, okay, we're gonna do a motion to stop you guys from taking it away and we get the whole city. So we we got the whole city council on board, we did a motion, and the Olympics came back to us. The committee came back to us, okay. What do you guys want? I said, Well, what do you if we we want you guys to remodel the pool, first of all? We want you guys to rent out local pools at local high schools to make sure that they get some funding. And we went back and forth on it, and they agreed. They agreed. If we didn't push back on it, they would have just they would have taken it to Inglewood, things like that. They were never gonna be satisfied. We have to really push back on everything. You know, I agree, them them paying for housing. That's something cool. I doubt they will, but I agree. I agree. We can ask for the world and see what we get. That's something that, but I would never do anything to stop anything from happening here, right? Like my district needs the Olympics. Right. It's if any district in the city of LA, my district's gonna be the one that's benefiting them. So I don't want to do anything to affect them, but also want to make sure that we hold their feet to the fire to make sure they pay their fair share.
SPEAKER_01What is an environmental agenda for the 9th district look like?
SPEAKER_03Starting transportation, second thing, I plan on planting, I think I said 1,800 trees within my first year in office. We I partnered up with some nonprofits already that they have given proposals, so I'm ready to go. I, as a deputy chief of staff and counseling for the last 13 years, we planted almost 10,000 trees, mostly at our parks. We build about four new parks. But we've got to build more. We've got to build more. We have the highest rates of asthma, highest rates of heart failure. That's the worst thing you can think of. And it has to also do with our food. I always talk about banning some of these dyes, yellow five, yellow four, high fructose cone syrup. I don't want that to see that in my school, my community. A lot of street vendors have that stuff, and I'm trying to build a healthy lifestyle for our community. We have the highest obesity rates in the entire city by a lot, too. Way bigger percentage. And it's it's because it's the cheapest thing to buy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Right.
SPEAKER_03Our community can't afford to buy anything more, so they buy chips and they buy soda and it's cheap and they fill them by McDonald's. But I really want to focus on healthy eating, healthy living, more parks, keeping our parks open for safe so people can use them, use sports. I'm really big on. I plan to make sure my daughter plays just like her dad did, as many sports as she can. It kept me out of crime, kept me out of drugs, kept me out of gangs. So I really want to focus on kind of a healthy lifestyle. Um, we've opened up five new parks in our district. We connected them all through a transit corridor on King, King to Avalon to Slossen, and Slossen connects about four of our parks. And Avalon collects about five of our parks. It's just amazing stuff that you can literally go around my district and go to different parks and do different activities, and that's kind of what I build on as well.
SPEAKER_01So you get elected, you'll be one of 15 members on a city council that is has a bigger variety of political viewpoints than the council has in in in a long time. Who on the council do you feel most politically aligned with?
SPEAKER_03My initial answer is always Hugo, because I have uh my background in labor, working for labor for so many years. Unite here being one of my biggest allies, everything we've done with them and for them. Hugo's probably my first one. But I'm also a father. I have a two-year-old, so I always like to look at the fathers on the council because they have different perspectives on different things. So Adrine, Adrine is also someone that I look at and he's like, hey, this guy has a different perspective on different things. So Hugo and Adrine is probably the ones that I look at most.
SPEAKER_01You didn't mention Kern Price.
SPEAKER_03Oh, well, let me tell you about Kern. I uh I well, I can just I wish and hope that I can legislate like Kern. Uh-huh. I he's besides him being like a father figure to me, a mentor, he's really, he's really a caring man. Like he does the right thing. He always has been, he always will. He's going through his legal issues right now, which is you should, you know, you're a councilman, you know that the votes that he took were all unanimous. And for him to be going through that is just heartbreaking. For me, him being such a good man, he told me, and you know, when he got served and we went to I went with him to go do his fingerprints and everything, he was telling me, he said, look, as a black man, this is a thing that you fight to never be in trouble with the law. And I've done that for 75 years of my life. And for me to be 75 and doing it now, is is heartbreaking. Now it's just heartbroken. Yeah. I'm not black, so I don't know what black men go through. But I can just imagine them all the stuff that they have going against them, for them being staying away from from doing any any activities to all of a sudden you're 75 years old, you have to go get processed. That stuff is heartbreaking. And you know, the I completely think he's innocent. I think that when he has his court case, they're gonna find him not guilty, and he's gonna be exonerator of everything. He's because my wife, one of the many reasons why my wife wanted me to run too, because she said that Curran has done more for that community than most Latinos ever would. He put he like he brought the first Latino festival in South Delai, he put over two million dollars to immigration nonprofits. Nobody on the city council did that, and that's true. And now I have to do the same thing for African Americans. Right. And what Curran did for Latinos, I gotta do the same thing to African Americans. So I committed to making sure the jazz festival's going on for at least 12 years that I'm in office. The King Parade is there. We honor our black churches that are dunning down little by little, make sure that black jobs are inserted in our project labor agreements, things like that that they have to I committed to and I will. So Curran is by far more than anybody on the city council.
SPEAKER_01Right. So you mentioned the problems that Curran is dealing with now. So let that be the segue to talk about the issue you're dealing with, the ethics commission. So you you have been you're about to be fined, I guess. Yeah. Uh $19,500 by the Ethics Commission for I I guess it's a two-tier thing, failing to disclose some business interests on some forms, and then not detailing outside outside income.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03Is that correct? Yeah, same thing. Yeah. We knew about this. We when we when you run for office, you do a background check on yourself. And I had three things. I had one, that I've been arrested. I was arrested free night here at the airports five, six years ago. Second, that I worked for Curran, all the stuff that he's going through. And third, that I didn't report my Form 700 in 2021 when I came back to work for the city. So when you come back to work, you have to do an assuming of office Form 700, which I had no idea. Nobody even told me. And my my thoughts always that I only worked on political campaigns, and I always knew, and ethics always had told me that I never had to report political campaigns because they had no conflict with the city. Form 700s are to make sure you don't have a conflict with the city. Political campaigns can't have a conflict with the city, it's illegal. So I just always omitted them. I filled out my Form 700s, but I never put my political camp campaigns on there because I always took time off. Never worked for the city. I did ethics every time I took time off, and they say you can't use any study services. It can't be on city time when you work on campaigns, which I always I signed a document and I always agreed on. Come my election, I get a letter saying, Hey, you're being fined for failing to do your Form 700 in 2021 and on all your all the money you made. And I was like, shoot, I made a lot of money, not income that I made, but I work on political campaigns and I had to do field programs. And after talking to Ethics, they said, Look, this is your first time you've ever been in trouble with ethics. You we saw that you've never had any issues, but since you're a Canada now, people are looking at this stuff, and we got complaints about it, and we got to look into it. So I started working with them. I showed them all my income, my taxes, and they saw that it was about half a million dollars. And they're like, You're supposed to get a percentage fined of that, which is huge. And this is not income, $500. This is uh a $200,000 fuel program for Karen Bass on behalf of Labor's $300. This is a $100,000 fuel program for Mitchell Farrell on behalf of SCE 721, the quality of California. This is the numbers might be off, but basically equals a half a million dollars. And my first thought was I think the fine was supposed to be like $50,000. I don't have that kind of money. What's going on? And they said, well, you could ask for a hearing. You can ask for a hearing, and then the hearing they'll probably take it down to lunch. And people ask for hearings, they have to go on the docket every month in front of the ethics commission and plead their case. And you could have I could have taken it all off, but I'm a candidate. I didn't want to go through hearing because that would have been an article every month. So I I settled with them about half, which was 17,500, and I agreed to pay for it instead of instead of fighting them on it. And which is funny that on the same docket, I was with one of your former staffers, and she actually, I think she got a job and she was making after working with you, she made she had um she had business dealings with her business and city services, like DWP and city council, which you're not allowed to, it's a super conflict venture. You're making money off your job that you shouldn't have. And mine was I was making money off, I just didn't report it, which is no conflict. Like if you look at all the stuff, that's why ethics are like there's no conflict. If it would have been a conflict, that would have been a really big trouble. So there's no conflict. That's why so I agree to pay the fine. Ethics comes up to ethics. Two of the commissioners say it's too little, and two of them say it's too much. So, like, how could this guy pay for just they were proposing $17,000 or $17,500? They were proposing $2,000 more, so $19,500. My initial pro agreement was.
SPEAKER_01The initial was $17,500, and two said too high, two said too big.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So one of the ladies said, well, if he pays $2,000 more, I'm okay with it. So now we're at $19,500. It still has to go to the exit commission again. Right. But if three of them, there's only five now, so three of them say they're good with it, then it should get passed. But that's when you run for candidate for office, you got to make sure you cross your T's, you dot your I's. And I knew about this coming in. And we also did background checks on two of my opponents. One has an assault case, and one has child support issues. So my paperwork issues wasn't a big deal. But I'm taking care of it, and I'm the first one to get hit. Um you want to say who has which? No, I'm not gonna say I I've been working in politics as long. First of all, like the everybody's gonna find out what it's gonna come out. There's so much stuff out there, but this is the worst part of politics, is when you go out there and say, Oh, my opponent has this, my opponent has that. Like at the end of the day, you're human beings, right? You someone's gonna win and lose, you're gonna have to work with them. It's embarrassing stuff as it comes out. But I you know, one of my opponents did uh a video on me in Spanish and English hitting me, which is kind of funny, but it's okay. I get along with all my opponents. The reality is that I've done so many campaigns that you go after people and you go against them and you go after, but at the end of the day, like win or lose, you should be okay with everybody. It's the ugly part of politics that I apologize to voters because that's the ones that are looking at us and like, what's wrong with you guys? Why don't you guys get your shit together?
SPEAKER_01Let me try to clarify for listeners because say Form 700s disclosure. When you work for the city, you have to do an annual economic interest or potential conflicts report. At certain levels of council staff, there's a what they call a high filer status that the chief of staff, the council member, and some senior folks have to file additional forms. One of the forms, which is actually a state form. Uh, form 700 is is is a state form. The state this requires about economic interest. So if you have a business or real estate, stuff like that, that's where you declare that. So you left the city in 2019. Yeah. And you had formed a consulting company. Yeah. Ugatan associates. Yeah. And what did that firm do? Consulting political campaigns.
SPEAKER_03Right. Not a lobbyist. So when I formed it, I put you have to fill out your form and it says, what are you going to do? So I put lobbying, because I was stupid, and consulting, but never lobbied. And uh you just write that because you have to write down what it's gonna do. And and so I worked on political campaigns for two years, but the company was it says on my LLC, it says lobbying and consulting. So it wasn't a lobbying firm or anything, it was a consulting firm. And I did political consultant.
SPEAKER_01I was and you did feral, you did independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, right?
SPEAKER_03So yeah, directly the one I did work directly with Jimmy Gomez for Congress. That was only direct. The other one was independent expenditure for Labor Fed, for Equality California, seven SCE 721, and uh Labor's 300.
SPEAKER_01And they paid you to do field campaigns for various candidates. Right.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01And so you came back and there's this form you got to file for assuming office where it's supposed to say, Do you have any business interests? And that's what you that's what they're dinging you for not filling out.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I did not file, I did not, I agree. I didn't file it.
SPEAKER_01And you said it was a clerical error. What does that mean?
SPEAKER_03It's paperwork. It's um it's not criminal, right? That's that's the key. People, some of my friends are calling me like, oh, you're a criminal now, you're in the LA Times. No, not a criminal because that city ethics is um, which current prices issues should be, city ethics issues and paperwork issues. Like you said, it's a form that everybody should fill out. And I agree with that. I think that we need stronger forms. I think my issue, when I used to work for the state, I used to get a call from FBC and say, Jose, you got to fill out your Form 700, or we walk you through it. The city you don't. The city you gotta do it yourself. Yeah, and I think that it needs to be stronger because I agree, people need to know what kind of money you're making. Yeah, and if people look at the money I made, look, it's it was field programs, it was a consulting fee, I think $2,000 a month, because only for about a month or two. That was my that's really the money I really made. Right. And it should be public. I agree. So that's why I didn't want to fight ethics. I think they're doing a tough job right now, everything that's going on. But I think that people should know where the money's coming from, how much a city employees make, how much a candidate's making. So I agree with them. I I effed up and it won't happen again.
SPEAKER_01And the firm still exists, right? Your sister owns it. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_03As soon as I started running for office, it was gone. Okay. Because I first I'm not taking any more clients because I gotta do my my own race. Yeah. So it doesn't exist anymore.
SPEAKER_01Right. You mentioned doing an independent expenditure. I guess it was Labor's 300 for Mayor Bass.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01I wanted to ask about Mayor Bass, so I'm asking candidates, what do you think of Mayor Bass and how she's doing?
SPEAKER_03I think she's doing the best she can. I think she had a little blunder coming back from Africa and the fires, but she was in another country. Nobody would have thought that the place would have burned. But I think she's doing the best she can. I um I it's tough being in city government right now for anybody. I don't care if Crusoe would have won, he would have been the same shit that we're all in. Doesn't matter, you're not Superman, but I think she's doing the best she can. I we work together on a bunch of South LA issues in our district, but I think that people are tough on her. Also because she's a woman and she's an African-American woman. I think that's like we talked about it earlier, it's it's it's an extra kind of weight on you because people are gonna hit you for diff different reasons.
SPEAKER_01But I think she's doing the best she can. And as you go through this campaign, which endorsements are you most proud of?
SPEAKER_03Kern Price. Kern Price, I his name's come up. I people tell me, Oh, are you gonna take his endorsement? Of course. Like I I first I believe the guy's innocent. He's gonna find out when we go to court.
SPEAKER_01And and I will say, as someone who was there on the stuff against Kern Price, and nobody's asked me to say anything about this, I think the charges uh against Kern are bogus. The charges against Kern Councilman Price are that he shouldn't have voted on a couple different projects that his wife was allegedly I mean, she was involved, but she was a like a deep subcontractor on a on to a developer. One of them was in my district, right? One of them was uh uh affordable housing for seniors and and homeless people on a former animal shelter in West LA done by Tom Staffer. And this was the only non-controversial homeless housing project in my district. It selled for unanimously. Karen Price did never mention it to me, never said a word to me. His staff never said a word to me. I really do think that the charges are are trumped up and unfair and potentially racist.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. That means a lot. Besides Kern, I Dolos Huerta is very significant to me. I've gone back to my college days. I organized students to go to the Central Valley to register voters for her organization to turn it a little bit bluer, even though she's like it's still red, Jose. Help me out. She's an inspiration to South LA. We have a local school named after her. We just named uh some affordable housing after her. But a lot of immigrant kids growing up, the first, besides being Cesar Chavez, the first um hero that's still alive is Delismo. worth it to immigrants, so it means a lot for her to endorse me. And then the last thing is my family. My family. I go to my wife almost every day and I ask her, even after this article came out about me, I said, Did you read the article? She said, Yeah. I said, can I still run? She said, yeah. I always got to ask her, making sure she's okay with me running, because like I said, win or lose, all you got left is your family. And you got to make sure that that you stay grounded. That's going to affect me as a council member that I got to stay grounded.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's going to make my decisions a little better.
SPEAKER_01Right. During this campaign, are there any organizations or businesses that you are not taking money from?
SPEAKER_03A bunch. I returned some checks. Not taking money from any oil and gas. Not taking money from public safety. Not taking money from any interest in my city, in my district. So no developers who do business in the city. I think ethics already covers a lot of it. Not taking money from where else there's like one weird one that I just don't want to take money. I forgot. But the main the public safety stuff, even though I consider myself like a public safety guy, I just don't think it's fair to take money from someone who's taking that much from the budget. I think it's just puts more pressure on a person. Some I've worked in that district 13 years. A lot of officers that that I grew up with that I went to high school one of them now he's an officer in my district and they try to give me a check I wouldn't take it. I say hey no offense like you're a dear friend of mine but I just can't first I don't want it to show that he's a public safety officer because he's a city employee. Right. And second I don't want that to hinder my votes when I have to make those types of decisions.
SPEAKER_01Uh you accepting uh public matching funds?
SPEAKER_03Yes absolutely I already reached 300 donors from my district that they gave me five dollars or more.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Winding things up I gotta ask are you a Dodgers fan?
SPEAKER_03Huge Dodgers fan. I am a season ticket holder. Oh for about five years I wrote a scolding letter to them when they were not supporting our immigrant communities and as soon as they won the championship I posted the immigrants make America great again because the winning pitcher the MVP of the entire world series Yamamoto is an immigrant. I love Kike Hernandez Bazooka and one more that refused to go to the White House or we were talking crap about going to the White House. But people ask me about the Dodgers stuff it's it's a little like growing I grew up a Dodgers fan my entire life I'm an LA kid. Yeah so the ownership comes and goes yeah I don't even know who the owner is right now. I know who he is now because all the stuff that he's done.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But I'm a Dodger fan. I care about the players I care about Tani, Yamamoto and Sasaki my three favorite players they're all born Japan all won us a World Series. These are all immigrants that normally Trump would be like get out of my country for him to win it for not just for the Dodgers. They brought it for the United States of America because we beat Canada it's like a it's an FU to to this administration. So I'm a proud Dodger fan.
SPEAKER_01Final question. Yeah. Three words to describe Los Angeles home beautiful in the future or future. Count on the all right thanks for joining me on What's Next Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, councilman.
SPEAKER_01And that's it for this episode of What's Next Los Angeles. Thanks to you for listening and thanks to Tonyel Luistias for editing and producing this podcast. My thanks of course to LA Forward for sponsoring this podcast. Check out thinkforward.la which is LA Forward's website that houses this podcast, LA podcast, and a lot of really smart think pieces about the issues facing Los Angeles in California. We're going to be off next week for Thanksgiving and unless something big happens we won't see it until December. Thanks so much for being with me. Until next time, take good care peace and happy Thanksgiving