SGV Connect 130 – Curry, Linton, Newton on the 2024 election.

Damien Newton 0:00
Welcome to SGV Connect. Post election special. We're gonna dive right in after I do the quick intros. I'm here with Joe Linton, the editor of Streetsblog Los Angeles, and Melanie Currie, the editor of Streetsblog California. I'm Damien Newton. Chris is doing the audio today. I'm not sure if he's going to weigh in at all.

Christopher Greenspon 0:16
No, I just want to hear that ad copy.

Damien Newton 0:18
Oh, and that's good because I was just about to do the ad copy. SGV Connect is sponsored by Foothill Transit, offering car free travel throughout the San Gabriel Valley, with connections to downtown LA and all of the Gold Line stations. To plan your trip, visit Foothill Transit, at Foothilltransit.org, Foothill Transit: going good places. So in our pre show, we decided we would start big and then get down into the local elections towards the end. So I hear there was a national election last week?

Joe Linton 0:44
We're, we're all still kind of trying to get out of our sort of stupor of hope being dashed into everyday reality. So, but, yeah, Trump… Trump won. Harris lost everywhere. So we're seeing a transition at the federal level that that means a lot of big things for folks that use our streets, for folks that read Streetsblopg and a lot of resistance that's happening from California and from other places. But I think let's briefly look at, sort of the the California and the LA County, big picture under, under a Trump administration. What's going to be different? Melanie, why don't you start with sort of some of the the state battles. And I mean, let's talk about what did, what did Trump do in his first term, about high speed rail and and how did, how did California fight back?

Melanie Curry 1:49
That's the big danger of a Trump administration. He gave, he fought not to give any money to high speed rail, but they did allocate money to high speed rail, and then he fought to bring it back. So the big danger right now is that in the Biden administration, a lot of money went out around the country for public transportation, for building infrastructure, for public transportation and for operations. The likelihood is he will try to claw it back. So we got lots of fights on our hands. Funding for public transportation is a big one, and it will be a lot easier to fund highways because there's money, and the highway lobby likes that money. So we're kind of going to take a few steps back.

Joe Linton 2:35
A lot of the the discretionary grants go way back. Under Democratic administrations they have been more multi modal, and under the previous Trump administration, the funding was not quite exclusively, but almost exclusively highways. So if you're looking to what Metro does: widen highways throughout LA County. The Trump administration…it's going to be harder for blue states to get federal funding for anything; based on past experience, what's likely to be available is money for highway widening, and that has a lot of implications for Metro that's used the Federal Transit Administration funding to build a lot of rail projects. That money is never easy to come by, and not as plentiful as highway money, but what political pork will go to, if it's not zeroed out, it will go to Republican leaning States. California will really have to push to get to get projects funded, like Metro's Southeast Gateway Line. Other transit projects, big and small, are likely to face an uphill climb to get the federal money that Californians pay into the feds. And Melanie or Damien can touch on this, we're already seeing Gavin Newsom pushing back on sort of carving out California's relationship with the federal government. But what worries me a little is the 710 freeway cancelation in South LA County was largely a result of the EPA objecting to Metro plan. Metro and Caltrans plans massively widen a freeway through black and brown communities. The EPA was able to say, "this doesn't conform with the Clean Air Act." And I feel like that it there's no clear Biden hand in that happening. But I feel like that, that sort of enforcement of environmental regulations that that that generates some restraint on Highway builders ability to widen highways all over is unlikely to come from a Trump EPA the way it did from a Biden EPA. So we're, we're stuck with fighting some of these battles againstharmful, unhealthy projectsl. The Feds aren't going to be the cavalry that's going to come in and rescue us. We're going to have to fight those community by community where, where, you know, houses are proposed to be torn down.

Melanie Curry 6:02
We're definitely on our own. We are on our own as we go forward, and that includes high speed rail. I don't know what's going to happen,but it's bad timing for high speed rail, because they've kind of gotten the money that they can get, and they're looking to expand. They've already built a lot, but if there's no federal support, that's going to be a pause for four years at the very least.

Joe Linton 6:29
The questions are going to be, "does the new money dry up, or does the old money tried to be clawed back?" There's the bad scenario and the worst scenario in terms of federal funding for things like transit. I mean, it's clearly going to be hard to progress. Is it going to be hard to even hold on to past appropriations? So we'll see.

Damien Newton 6:55
And I apologize here. I don't know if one of you will have a clear answer to this, but is there any federal money out for the next Gold Line extension that were that has been promised but not delivered yet.

Joe Linton 7:05
No, it's state money. The question on that project is that it's fully funded based on construction estimates. And there's some question of Trump, Trump has been talking about all these tariffs right that are going to drive prices up and and even Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric drives drives up the cost of labor in especially in southern California. . So there is a question of if the full funding from the state isn't enough to pay for the design, build, and construction for the for the Foothill Gold Line, who would come up with any remaining funds needed to finish that project. I mean, knock on wood, it should be okay, There's potentially an issue if costs go through the roof. There's some belt tightening, Value Engineering sort of stuff that that might be needed, or, shaking the couch and finding a little bit more funding somewhere that that could be needed. But in theory, if there aren't major hiccups, the the Foothill gold line should be okay. We'll see.

Damien Newton 8:44
So is it, is it time to move from the federal level down, specifically to the state level? We had a few ballot propositions. Is should we be, should we be moving into talking about those now?

Melanie Curry 8:56
There was a lot of stuff, really different kind of stuff on the ballot. And it's a little confusing, because the California voters approved some things and didn't approve other things. Specifically, the ones that we are really interested in at Streetsblog is: California voters said yes to the climate bond. So we're going to raise ten billion to fund things like parks, environmental protection, water infrastructure, energy and flood protection, stuff that's that's huge, and that's really great. But at the same time, voters turned down Prop 5, which would have been a constitutional amendment that would have lowered the voter threshold to make it easier to fund affordable housing and public infrastructure. So local measures are just going to be hard to pass. They're going to need a two thirds vote for the most part to pass. There were other things on the ballot that were weird. We decided not to prohibit slavery, but we did raise the minimum wage. And then, just briefly, there were, there were some interesting local sales tax measures that were interesting because of the way that they were affected by the voter threshold, which, for most anything that raises taxes, or parcel taxes, or whatever has to be two thirds vote. That's why we are interested in Prop 5. But even with that remaining, there's a way that we you could bring a citizens initiative forward, and that would only need 50% plus one. So it was interesting to see how that was playing out on local ballots for transportation measures, specifically like for example, Berkeley passed FF, which was a citizens measure. San Diego had a in the citizens initiative to fund transit. Measure G, that did not reach 50% or it hasn't yet. It's very close, but it hasn't so it that's just sort of interesting. There's other interesting local measures, but let's move to LA County.

Damien Newton 11:29
Really quickly, I want to highlight Measure K in Santa Monica, which was an effort to…which was a successfully passed… measure to raise the tax on private parking, private parking lot, and half the money going towards public public safety, which the definition of which is still being worked out by the city council, and half of which to go towards progressive transportation. That might be an interesting model that other communities might want to look at for funding transportation themselves, because you're taking a transportation tax and putting it directly into progressive transportation. And this one is funding Safe Routes to School, fully concrete protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, all the sort of stuff that we talk about all the time at Streetsblog as the gold standard sort of projects.

Joe Linton 12:14
As yucky as the picture is nationally the local results, both in the Bay Area and in in Los Angeles, including the Santa Monica results, are fairly encouraging. It's sort of a, "what did you think of the play Mrs. Lincoln?" It's hard to to even focus on the positives, given the big foreboding output, national outlook. But other just rounding out LA county transportation funding measures: Metro already did the mother of all, transportation, sales taxes. So we don't see a lot of those in LA County. But the city of Santa Fe springs in the in the Gateway Cities, passed a street repair measure that includes some sidewalk repair. There's no transit specific components of it, or the word bicycle doesn't appear in it, but the the streets should be smoother in Santa Fe springs, given that they passed that measure. So, let's talk about LA County. So, two measures are passing that are, that are of interest to Streetsblog listeners. Let's first talk about the measure. A the half cent sales tax to fund efforts to address homelessness.

Damien Newton 14:17
It passed. And that's certainly good news, but it was good news in the way that it's going to prevent things from getting worse, more than it's going to fix things. LA County voters have a couple times past various measures to raise more funds for homelessness solutions, or solutions to homelessness and housed residents of Santa Monica. There's my habit since I've been writing the Santa Monica Next website. Housed residents of LA County don't suddenly see no homeless people on the street, and so they're they've been questioning what all this money goes towards. But if you talk to people that are on the front lines, passing Measure A was critical, or else people would have been returning to the streets. So I don't think anyone's breaking out the confetti for this one. Everything's not going to get magically better, overnight sort of thing. That's not a promise that was made on this; but it was important to pass so that we had a way forward, so to speak. I don't have the current numbers. I said this in our pre show, in 2019 I did a series for Streetsblog LA looking at various types of supportive housing, homeless housing, short and long term as sort of a series we were doing on demystification. And so many people I talked to kept repeating a version of the stat that every day, 200 people that were in LA County that were experiencing homelessness found a way out, but over 216 were falling into homelessness. I should say I don't know that those numbers have how much they've changed, but I'm told that it's still more people falling in than climbing out.

Joe Linton 15:57
I'm really glad that Streetsblog endorsed this measure. I'm really glad it got passed. Lots of activists working in this, in the housing, homelessness sphere, were making really dire predictions if it failed to pass. I'm very glad measure a passed in an election that that doesn't have lots of silver linings. This is, this is one that was that we needed to do, and we, Angelenos, stepped up and did it. So let's look at the other, the other big LA County election issue, which was also previewed on an earlier podcast Measure G, which is a reform measure to expand the County Board of Supervisors and create a sort of "county mayor." although they don't call it the county what do they call it? county executive? Yeah, and so this was a tighter race than I expected. There was a real consensus among blue Los Angeles, that that we need to expand these County Board of Supervisors, five supervisors to to be more democratic and more representative of kings and queens. There was also a sort of criticism that this, this measure, didn't do certain things and did others, and wasn't, you know, may not have been the exact reform that that many progressives were looking for, but I think it is encouraging.

Damien Newton 18:00
New supervisor districts aren't going to be drawn until after the next census. So it won't be till after the 2030 census that the new districts are even drawn. And I have no idea what the how long it'll take before they then draw maps after they after the census is done. I know it's an independent district. We're not going to see the city of Los Angeles corruption issue that we had with our redistricting, which stole national headlines. And we'll actually touch on that again in a couple minutes. It's not going to be like that. It's an independent commission. I think the objection to the measure, the biggest one was the county executive position. Right now, LA County's CEO, chief executive is not an elected position, it's a appointed position. And people were concerned that that would make it too political. Other people didn't care as much. I voted for the measure personally, soany concerns I might have had about county executive being too political were overwhelmed by my desire to see the board broadened. The system that LA County is moving towards is very similar to the one that I experienced when I lived in Maryland, which had Baltimore County and Baltimore City. Very similar, almost geographically, it's a microcosm of of what happens of the LA like, percentage wise. And sometimes you just end up with with very different politics. And it actually strengthens the LA County position and those smaller cities to have a little less LA City influence in their in their county politics.

Joe Linton 19:40
One of the this is technical, more than a political. one of the things it may shake up is the metro board. So the the county super, the five supervisors have a lot of power on the metro board, and a board of seven, I'm sorry, of nine supervisors will reshape Metro. I think it's a step in a good direction. I don't know all the implications that are going to come down the road in the future. I do think it shakes up a status quo that that invested a whole lot of power in very few people. We've got an awesome board of supervisors now, in my opinion. And for a long time, we didn't have as progressive a board. I think it should make the county more representative, more responsible to the voters of LA County, and we'll see how that all plays out over time.

Damien Newton 20:59
In more, let's say, "innocent times," than 2024-2025 we would probably already be discussing who's going to run for and get that county executive spot in 2026. When I look at at SGV politicians: Anthony Portantino doesn't have a job. Hilda Solis has already said, "Oh God no," when I sort of half joked about it in our podcast a couple weeks ago. But whenever new seats open up, you have an opportunity to really see some fun young candidates pop in. But there's also a chance for some people that you might not have expected to see run for office again. It could be be fun to see what happens with that, with that spot. I mean, 11 million voters, the county executive is going to be a big, expensive seat to run for, and I think it's going to be in two years.

Joe Linton 21:56
Well, we'll, we'll keep an eye on that. We're going to look briefly at the the city of LA, and then, oh, actually, there is one other county race, which is the district attorney. So the voters took out the incumbent Gascon, who was very much a progressive, not a heavily punishment oriented DA and replaced him with with a more law and order, more conservative candidate in Hochman. This represents a disappointment for me, frankly. There has been a conservative push to recall Gascon and blame different sorts of crime issues on him and whatnot coming from sort of conservative and reactionary folks throughout LA County. I was hoping that he might be able to weather those and continue but, but when I think along with Prop 36 when we're seeing fairly low levels of crime were,… Angelinos and frankly, Californians have in this election voted to embrace a more conservative, more tough on crime, law and order, sort of candidate. Folks like police unions have have weighed heavily on those decisions, but I don't know.

Damien Newton 24:24
When we were talking about the statewide ballot propositions a couple minutes ago, Melanie was talking about how there's no clear theme running through it. And I'd be interested to go back to her in a second and see if, looking at statewide races, if she sees a clear theme on law and order. But over the last six years, the four elections in the last six years and a week that we've had in LA County, we elected a conservative, tough on crime sheriff in Alex Villanueva, six years ago, we elected DA George Gascon four years ago. We got rid of Villanueva just two years ago, and now we got rid of Gascon a week ago. So I don't know that LA County voters are saying. And media can't say there is a clear message as far as what the voters want from law enforcement, other than they want something that's fair and they don't want to see a crime on their nightly news show every week. And I don't know that electorally, we've seen a clear message on what that actually means. When it comes to the ballot box. It almost seems like if you're an incumbent, we're going to throw you out, and we'll see if that holds true two years from now?

Joe Linton 25:44
It feels to me somewhat more perception based than reality based. Like, crime is down. Lobbying forces that push for these sort of, you know, I keep calling it same thing, law and order, candidates that their message resonates with enough folks that that their their candidates often win, but we'll see. Let's, I mean, I think the antidote is, is the city council election that we'll talk about in just a sec, the LA City Council. But did, Melanie, why don't you jump in on that?

Melanie Curry 26:32
Well, I don't really have anything to add. I'm just thinking, "Who can you blame?" We can blame the media for making crime sound worse than it is. I don't really know. I do think that people are sort of confused about crime and undecided. From my own personal experience, I find like articles about crime on BART, for example, which is the Bay Area Rapid Transit train. It doesn't seem to be coming from lived experience, but that's just me. That's just how I experience everything.

Joe Linton 27:05
LA coverage is similar, in my opinion.

Damien Newton 27:08
If I remember correctly, there was actually a report on LA County within the past year that showed that the less you rode transit, the more likely you were to think it was dangerous. Do you remember that? I remember…I remember syndicating it, but I don't remember reading the report.

Melanie Curry 27:23
That fits with my personal experience exactly, that people have this idea that transit is really dirty and terrible and awful, but the people saying that don't seem to be the people using it.

Joe Linton 27:42
I think we could speak about this for a while, and we probably don't need to. But the the sort of media narrative around public safety often doesn't match the public safety that transit riders, and I think Angelinos and Californiansm largely count on. That's not to say that there aren't some problems that that need to be addressed, but I think, I think you brought up BART…Metro. There's a lot of pressure on Metro to sort of do something about crime levels that have increased slightly, but remain very minimal. Metro is doing things, some of which are good ambassadors, and then some things like, "tap to exit" that are sort of security theater.

Damien Newton 28:51
How am I going to possibly get over this turnstile? I better take a train somewhere else?

Joe Linton 28:55
Yeah.

Melanie Curry 28:56
Oh, you should see the new gates that they put up at BART to prevent fare jumping. I have seen so many people jump those fare gates, the new ones that they paid a lot of money for.

Damien Newton 29:09
It's almost like a challenge the way they built those.

Joe Linton 29:15
Trust me, Metro is studying those and planning to do those at "problem stations."

Melanie Curry 29:22
Well, good luck. Maybe they'll work better for you. No, they won't. By talking about the media we blame ourselves. But what I was going to say was that that also fed into a situation in the Bay area where we had a couple of recalls, including our DA in Alameda County, there was a big campaign to recall her. She's a progressive. How much do people actually know about what they do and how their job is being performed? And there was a big campaign paid for by a billionaire. So they won. So she got recalled. That's like another up and down for Bay Area. We voted in a progressive DA, and now she's gone.

Joe Linton 30:06
So it wasn't a very good year for progressive da, as was it. So, let's jump down. Let's ratchet it down one level more to talk about LA City, and then we're going to talk about a few developments specific to San Gabriel Valley. But the LA City Council had three seats up for grabs, and three seats contested. Two of them were replicated. The incumbent. Heather Hutt retained her seat. She's the head of the Transportation Committee, and I think, fairly good on transportation without being great.

Damien Newton 30:59
She's fine.

Joe Linton 31:00
She supported, sort of, Ballona Creek Bike Path stuff. She got in the way of the, the La Brea bus lanes. She supported Measure HLA. She listens to these issues, and she listens to her constituents and doesn't, get in the way of safer streets and more transit and whatnot. I think advocates will need to push her. She's a little bit more centrist than perhaps even her district is. She's going to lead the charge for livable transportation, but I think she's going to continue to create space for for that to take place where communities are pushing for it.

Damien Newton 32:04
Why don't you talk about the other one? Though? Because I think most people that looked at the LA City election were wondering, "how in the world, is Kevin de Leon still in office?" And the answer is, he won't be in a couple weeks.

Joe Linton 32:19
First, Krekorians, chief of staff got his Valley seat. The race you're talking about Council District 14 from on the east side, including Eagle Rock and Boyle Heights. The the progressive Isabel Juardo. Won the primary against Kevin de Leon, who our colleague Sahra has written a lot about his being caught on the Fed tapes with making all kinds of gnarly anti-black statements. And the surprise, perhaps, is that he's lasted as long as he has. But I think it, it does the Juardo victory really does grow the grow the progressive block. It shifts that seat to the left, as in De Leon gave lip service to livability and and equity while not, you know, supporting projects in his district, even the regional connector bikeways and stuff. She had a lot of the same forces that targeted Gascon target her and managed to run a excellent sort of populist, progressive campaign and is saying and doing all the right things. She joins the nucleus of, you know, Raman, Soto, Martinez, Hernandez and and Marquis Harris-Dawson, this contingent of progressives on the council. So to see that grow and those folks work, work together, hopefully and be more effective. So I think it, think it bodes well for for LA City. It wasn't a big shift on the council, but it, but it was, it was one, one seat took a good, big step in the right direction.

Damien Newton 34:59
And. If you don't care about city of Los Angeles politics, but you have, you know, "planned your trip to use Foothill Transit to the heart of downtown Los Angeles on the Silver Streak," if you've done that, or if you take the "Foothill Gold Line extension into the heart of downtown LA," you might see improvements around Downtown LA. You might see improvements, not in the next, like six months or anything, but as we talk about this, you might see more progressive transportation planning around Union Station, because that is part of CD 14. Now CD14 hasnew, more progressive council member. So there could be a material impact on your your life and your commute. If you're one of those commuters that that travels into Los Angeles. I know there's a lot of you, especially that listen to this podcast, because very often I'm told that you listen to it on the bus or the train, if you've come up to me about it at any point in your lives. So, you know, fingers crossed. Union Station is a lot more accessible than it was when Streetsblog LA started in 2008, but I don't quite think that it's like one of the most accessible train stations in the country. Maybe we can see some of those other improvements that we've talked about.

Joe Linton 36:11
Past Council District 14 representation relative to Union Station was both under Huizar and under de Leon was sort of absent, so hopefully Jurado can can be a positive presence there.

Damien Newton 36:33
I can never remember the exact number, because it depends whether it's geographic or political. But there's a lot of cities in the San Gabriel Valley, and we're not going to go into all of the local elections. Iencourage you, if there's something that you're curious about, please feel free to let us know, and maybe we can give some more coverage of that going forward. But there are, there were two elections that the SGV Connect podcast covered and we talked to candidates at some point. One was the State Senate race for SD 25 to replace Senator Portantino, who is been term limited out and Portentino lost in his attempt to become a member of Congress to eventual winner, Laura Friedman, who chaired the Assembly Transportation Committee for years. And the other race was the Alhambra City Council, where we interviewed one of the candidates, Nick Jay show Yang. No two candidates, Nick Koch and Jay show Yang. Nick and Jay-Show Yang is what was in my head, and I just smooshed them into one person. The winner was Nan Wong, though she goes by Noya which is how it appeared on the ballot. She had 42.8% of the vote. Katie Chan and Jay-Show were both co endorsed by Streets for All the 501 c4 nonprofit that is allowed to endorse candidates, and they finished second and third respectively. If you added their votes together, they might have won by just like a percentage point or two, but it was a pretty large victory for the winner there, and our congratulations to her. And of course, in SD 25 Sasha Renée Pérez, who has been one of our favorite interviewees going back to even before she was on the council and a winner of Active SGV awards, I think twice already was the winner there. And a big congratulations to her. We enjoyed talking to her very much. And the link to the interviews with Sasha Renée Pérez will appear the text that accompanies this podcast.

Joe Linton 38:39
Sasha Renée Pérez is the youngest mayor of Alhambra, and really pushed for bike and walkability. She is a real livability supporter, real progressive who's, who's a politician who's climbing. We're expecting, I expect, really good things from her to to continue. So it's exciting to see sort of as these, some of these musical chairs, seats being vacated and seats being filled, that that that's helped her move up from from the city council to the State Senate. So I'm looking forward to great I'm really encouraged by her going Sacramento and and also, Friedman is, is a has been a livability champion with a few asterisks anyways, that we won't go into, going to Washington, DC. So as awful as the national picture looks, we are seeing some important leaders going. In fact, a few other city councils, Santa Monica and West Hollywood and Culver City all swung either largely or slightly to a progressive side, to with with Safe Streets, livability supporters getting elected. So there, there are a few silver linings in this big gray cloud of election we just got through.

Damien Newton 40:23
I was looking to see if Melanie had wanted to say anything to wrap up, but she is not indicating that that is something she wants to do, so I will do it. Thank you very much for joining us for this podcast. We went a little longer than usual, but it is a "post election extravaganza episode," Thank you all for sticking with us. We will return to our regular coverage a little later this month. And as always, thank you to our sponsors, SGV Connect. Thank you for Chris, who has been holding a microphone for the last 45 minutes while we've been doing this, getting his getting his reps in, I guess. And of course, thanks to Joe and Melanie for joining us for today's podcast. I'm Damien Newton. Thank you for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai