Candidate for
Council Member; City of Richmond; 4 Year Term

When elected my top priorities will be social, economic and environmental justice. Though they are intertwined, I will try to separate them for discussions sake.

Social Justice: Health care is a human right. We must continue our fight to attain universal health care; anything less is unacceptable. Access to health care for all is a necessity; we must insure that adequate health care facilities are available in West Contra Costa County. We must clean up the political process by keeping corporations from polluting the election with exorbitant amounts of funds to their preferred candidates. As an example, in the last election, Chevron spent $143,000 in a negative campaign against me specifically, while my entire budget was only $38,000. As a sanctuary city, Richmond has a responsibility to our immigrant families. We must insure that our police department does not assist ICE in breaking up families by deporting family members only for immigration status. We must promote lifelong learning. Libraries and adult classes are a necessity. We must work with schools to provide a wrap-around service for their students, creating community centers that welcome the families the school serves.

Economic Justice: The banking industry has created an economic injustice in the housing arena. The lives of many families have been disrupted by foreclosures; the banks are unwilling to be of assistance. The Richmond CARES program which assists families in homes with underwater mortgages is essential to counteract the callousness of the banking industry. Many foreclosed homes in Richmond are being bought with cash by investors who hope to have the mortgage paid by the renters while they wait for the value of the house to rise to a profitable level. Rent control is needed to prevent rent abuse from these investors. Jobs are needed and the job search needs to be stream lined. Just as the migrant workers have established a location where people can find them for jobs, we need to do the same for our unemployed residents. I propose using our community centers to serve as employment centers, so residents know where to find workers for local jobs. It would be a place where training could occur and where we could evaluate the state of unemployment by neighborhood. We should use this opportunity to evaluate the extent of homelessness and create a plan to deal with this issue.

Environmental Justice: We must insure that Chevron's modernization project results in a truly clean and safe refinery. It should include the entire plant and not only the Hydrogen Plant replacement and the Sulfur removal improvements. It should allow for more workers to inspect and monitor the safety of the facility. We should insure the pollution emissions are properly monitored. We expect lower emissions. The civil suit filed by the city must continue to compensate for the long term damages to the health of Richmond residents. We must stop the transport of Bakken crude and tar sands by rail through our communities. To protect our shoreline, we must force the cleanup of super fund sites at Zeneca and Hekathorn. Development should not impact the wetlands or marshes. Access to the shoreline should be a public right. As a planning commissioner, I have found that although the city has a city plan, we are not proactive in realizing the implementation of our plan. We wait for developers to approach us with projects which invariably are on the shoreline when our needs are on infilling our main thoroughfares. I propose the city do an evaluation of all the empty sites in town and reach out to entice the owners of those properties to create a new Richmond.