Earlier this month Culver City voters elected a progressive new face to their City Council: sustainability advocate and L.A. County transportation deputy, Bubba Fish.
In recent years, Culver City has been contested ground in Southern California struggles for greener transportation. The city abolished parking minimums, facilitated transit-oriented development, and built several worthwhile bike and walk projects. In 2021, Culver City made an ambitious move, with Move Culver City reallocating core downtown roadway space to bus lanes, bike lanes, and sidewalk extensions. In 2022 the council swung rightward, and now many Move Culver City features are being dismantled.
Councilmember-elect Fish, alongside re-elected incumbent Yasmine-Imani McMorrin and Freddy Puza, will restore a narrow 3:2 progressive majority on the council.
Streetsblog interviewed Fish over email this week.
SBLA: Tell readers a bit about your background - perhaps including where you grew up, what led you to becoming who you are today.
Bubba Fish: I grew up in a small suburb outside Houston, Texas, less than a mile from the Katy Freeway, one of the widest freeways in the world. For many years, my two sisters and I each went to separate schools in different parts of town. Our area did not have good transit, so my mom had to drop off and pick up each of us individually, spending hours in the car each day. She put her career on hold to make sure she could do that, and only when I grew up did I realize what a sacrifice that was.
As a queer Jewish kid growing up in a conservative area and attending conservative Christian schools, I remember feeling like I didn't quite fit the mold. I remember craving a sense of belonging and community. So when my husband and I made Culver City our home just a few years after college, I was excited to find that community right away.
I got to know my neighbors and quickly found a group of advocates who spent their nights and weekends working toward a better future for their city. I began volunteering for housing and transportation groups like Bike Culver City, Culver City for More Homes, and was appointed to serve as Vice Chair of the Advisory Committee on Housing & Homelessness.
In 2021, our current Mayor (then Councilmember) Yasmine-Imani McMorrin asked now Councilmember Freddy Puza and I to help create the city’s first official Pride celebration. The annual event, Culver City Pride Ride & Rally, is the largest Pride ride in the region and attracts hundreds of people on bikes, skates, scooters in a Pride parade on wheels ending in a block party for a more inclusive city. To see hundreds of kids and families celebrating their uniqueness as they ride through the streets of Culver City fills me with hope each year and is the highlight of my service to the city so far.
You have serious green transportation cred, having worked for Streets for All, LADOT, and currently working for County Supervisor and Metro Board Chair Janice Hahn. Tell readers about your work experience. Please include some accomplishments you're especially proud of.
Thank you! It's true, I'm a transpo nerd at heart.
Ten years ago, I was in a bad car accident, and the experience made me look for other ways of getting around. It also opened my eyes to the ways our cities often leave us vulnerable, or in some cases, actively put us in harm's way.
When Governor Newsom vetoed Scott Wiener's complete streets bill S.B. 127 in 2019, I tweeted my frustration into the void. Josh Vdervoogd and Michael Schneider saw it and invited me to be a founding member of their new advocacy group, Streets for All (SFA).
At SFA, I volunteered for years before I led the State Policy team there with Marc Vukcevich. We helped pass legislation that is already making streets safer and cities more sustainable including mandatory daylighting at intersections, decriminalizing jaywalking, abolishing parking minimums near transit, and stopping apartments from banning e-bikes and bundling parking into the cost of rent.
I moved from advocacy to public service with a Government Affairs position at the Los Angeles Department of Transportationwhile I finished my Master in Public Policy at UCLA. After earning my degree, I moved to the County as a Transportation Aide for Supervisor Janice Hahn who currently serves as the Chair of Metro. My work at Metro runs the gamut from securing funding for safe streets projects to supporting our new Ambassador program to preparing for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Helping to create a more mobile city is at the top of my list of priorities for my term on the City Council. Climate change, traffic violence, and congestion are all at a crisis point. We have the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country, we lose nearly a week each year stuck in traffic, and car crashes are the number one cause of death for kids across the county. The status quo simply doesn't cut it anymore. We must make bold progress toward our mobility and climate goals.
How do you typically get around?
I am as multi-modal as they get!
I confess that I own three bikes (a road bike, a single-speed, and a Rad Power e-bike that has become my go-to). But I just as often hop on Metro and our award-winning Culver CityBus. I love to walk, grab an e-scooter, and I do occasionally enjoy driving the electric car my husband and I lease.
The opposition tried to paint our campaign as radically anti-car, but like most people, I tend to use the mode that makes the most sense for the trip I'm taking. And for many of my trips, the most efficient mode is often not a car, which is a testament to policy choices that gave me access to high quality transit and bike infrastructure. Imagine that!
You've made housing one of your main issues. What's your housing platform? What housing initiatives do you think can move forward in the near term in Culver City?
We knocked 20,000 doors in this campaign and found that our housing crisis is still, unsurprisingly, the number one issue in Culver City. Nearly everyone in our communities are impacted in some way by this crisis. Young people who grew up in Culver City cannot afford to move out of their parents' homes. People are not able to live near their aging parents to take care of them. The city is slowly losing its diversity and its young people, and seniors are the fastest group falling into homelessness in the County.
In my term, I hope to help Culver City earn the pro-housing designation by HCD which requires us to prove that we are affirmatively furthering fair housing. Cities now have several tools at our disposal to allow us to increase our housing capacity and expedite affordable housing production in the city. I also ran on expanding tenant protections where feasible to stop the flow into homelessness. I firmly believe housing is a human right, and that is a north star I will bring into this role.
For readers who haven't followed it closely, can you briefly recap the recent swings of the Culver City City Council?
In 2018, Culver City voted in its first progressive majority. The Council passed rent control, joined the clean power alliance, and passed a plan to shut down our oil field among many other accomplishments.
The 4:1 supermajority reduced to 3:2 majority in 2020, but progress continued with Alex Fisch, Yasmine-Imani McMorrin, and Daniel Lee on the Council. We abolished parking minimums, created the region's very first complete street, converted two motels to permanent and interim housing for unhoused families, and re-opened a major gateway to the Ballona Creek bike path.
In 2022, the Council shifted again to a 3:2 conservative majority which removed one of only two protected bike lanes in the city, made it illegal to be homeless, blocked infill housing, and reduced the minimum wage for healthcare workers.
I was inspired to run in part to help restore a forward-thinking majority to the Council, and I'm grateful that voters trusted me with a seat on the Council in this last election. Working with my four colleagues, I am confident we will be able to accomplish big things again for our city.
Culver City had shown a lot of leadership in improving transit, walkability, and bicycling. But then the council shifted, and Move Culver City bus/bike/walk improvements are being pared back.
What's your sense on the future of Move Culver City? Can the new council put back what was taken out?
The city just spent over $1 million on a new quick-build version of Move Culver City and was just asked by Metro to give back $435,000 in committed grant money because of the decision to remove the protected bike lane. I do think we need to evaluate the effectiveness of this new version of the project using the data collected by our fantastic staff. It is very rare to have a protected bike lane in place for three years be removed for added car infrastructure, so this is a unique opportunity to understand the impact on traffic, safety, and the use of alternatives like buses, bikes, and scooters. At some point, we will need to make a permanent version of this project. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to having robust data from two distinct phases of this pilot.
What transit initiatives are you eager to enact in Culver City?
Our city has one bus rapid transit (BRT) lane (Move Culver City), but frequency maxes out at every 15 minutes. For these bus lanes to be effective, I believe we need to increase frequency on this line to make the use of our streets for BRT as effective and usable for as many community members as possible.
How about your walkability intiatives?
Parking maximums, or regulating the amount of parking a developer can build, might be boring and wonky for most, but they can make a tremendous impact on the walkability and overall sustainability of a city. Over the past several years TikTok, Warner, Amazon, and Apple all opened large offices with thousands of parking spaces in our community, and as a result, we have seen traffic explode. Parking maximums can prevent large corporations with infinite resources from drowning our city in traffic and smog.
What initiatives do you support for bikeability?
The city just removed one of only two protected bike lanes in the city, the only city in the region in recent history to do so. Instead, we need to meet the future and dramatically expand our network of protected bike lanes, create a safe north-south route through the city, and connect the existing infrastructure with other nearby safe streets projects like on Venice Blvd and Adams Blvd. As we expand our network, we also need to consider ways to keep bike lanes free of trash and debris. Santa Monica uses a bike lane sweeper which could be helpful here as well.
What roles do you see yourself and Culver City playing in the larger regional transportation/livability picture - for the Westside, or L.A. County?
We saw progressive wins across the Westside in this election, which gives us a unique opportunity to collaborate with one another across the entire region.
I'm an advocate at heart who has been entrusted with the honor of a lifetime to represent my city on City Council. I also know I’m just one person on a Council of five with the privilege of providing direction for a small city of 40,000 people for four years. My time with this impactful role is small, but I am eager to use it to help us create a safe, sustainable, and affordable Culver City together.
This is the question Streetsblog generally ends our interviews with: If you had a magic wand and could change one thing overnight - regarding your city, streets, transportation, equity, livability - what would you change?
This might not be the sexiest answer, but I would make local government way more accessible to people.
We need significantly more participation in city issues to affect the change we know we need. Our budget is a reflection of our values-- and right now, it underfunds things that make our lives better every day like parks, playgrounds, schools, mental health services, childcare, and safe streets. To change that dynamic, we need to hear from new voices that haven’t been plugged into civic life yet. I’m hoping that we can engage folks who are looking to get more involved in the wake of a federal government that looks more regressive each day. Because there is so much progress we can make together in community, even in this difficult and scary moment in history.
Anything else you'd like to share?
I'm so grateful to all the mobility and housing advocates who supported our campaign. Now, the real work begins!
As we face real threats from this incoming administration in Washington D.C., we still have so much progress we can make here at home. I hope you'll join us, because we cannot do it alone. Join community groups that speak to you like Bike Culver City, Streets for All, Culver City for More Homes, Our Culver, and so many more. Get plugged in, and let's work towards a brighter future for all of us.
