FERNANDEZ LOOKS AHEAD TO YEAR AS CITY’S MAYOR
After serving the Woodland community for nearly four decades as a teacher, Victoria Fernandez entered a new domain through her election as a councilwoman in 2020.
“I’ve been a teacher my entire career and have always been involved in politics,” Fernandez explained.
She noted that her family has always had open discussions about politics and often volunteered for campaigns. However, she never thought about running herself until her son, Enrique, encouraged her to.
“In 2016, when Enrique was in law school, he decided to run for city council,” Fernandez recounted. “We were walking throughout District 4, got to meet a lot of residents and had the opportunity to watch him serve our community for four years on the council.”
She noted that she was proud to see her son be able to express himself and voice his positions without having to compromise who he was.
In 2020, after Enrique’s term as councilman was up, he encouraged his mother to run, arguing that she should “practice what she preached” and represent her community as a councilwoman.
“I never saw myself as running for council, so it’s indicative of Enrique’s encouragement and belief that I was a person that could represent our community and the working families that I had served as a teacher,” Fernandez highlighted.
Now, two years after being elected District 4 Councilwoman, Fernandez has become the city’s Mayor thanks to Woodland’s mayoral rotation that requires mayorship to rotate amongst the council members once a year.
“I feel proud to be part of a city that has been able to elect three females this last term to represent the city,” Fernandez remarked. “It’s a positive direction for the city to have the council members that reflect the city residents.”
Fernandez replaced Mayor Mayra Vega, meaning that the city has elected two Latina mayors in a row, which Fernandez argued is important given that over 40% of the city’s population identify as Latino or Latina.
Additionally, Fernandez noted that Mayor Pro Tempore Tania Garcia-Cadena is next in line for mayorship, which means the city will continue its streak with a third Latina mayor next year.
“So we’ll have three female lead
ers who I think will hopefully inspire other community members to become involved,” she said regarding political involvement. “It’s good for our community and provides a different perspective for the council to examine and process things.”
As mayor, Fernandez hopes to focus on three main goals she argues are important to the Woodland community: education, diversity policies and affordable housing.
Education
Fernandez hopes to see continued collaboration between the city, the Woodland Joint Unified School District, the Yolo County Office of Education and Woodland Community College.
She listed several collaborations the city has done with each of these, including school resource officers and a childcare facility that will provide training for students looking to become childhood educators
that the office of education is developing.
“We have the Woodland Promise Program that the city has invested in, but I think the first year only 17 scholarships were given out of the possible $100,000 that was invested,” she stressed. “So I think that even though we are providing opportunities for our residents, they aren’t necessarily getting access to those resources.”
Fernandez hopes to improve existing and future education programs so that more residents are able to access them.
Diversity, equity and inclusionary policies
Additionally, Fernandez serves on the city council’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Subcommittee that is tasked with creating an equity action program for the city.
“I believe it’s important for us to have a city government that reflects the community that we serve,” Fernandez said. “How we accomplish that is important to me so that no matter who’s on the council, we
have a policy that will continue to promote a diverse workforce.”
The subcommittee was formed in June 2022 as a “jumping-off point” for a sustained effort to improve the city’s policies and practices while also meeting the council’s priority goals.
The city partnered with a group of five UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy graduate students who helped perform an assessment of the city’s policies, hiring and training practices, analyzed data and interviewed key individuals within and outside of the city.
“We’ve been reaching out to some of the community members that were interviewed by the students… following up with them and then extending ourselves out to get input from other community groups,” Fernandez explained. “To let us know what our vision looks like, how we can improve on it and what they believe is working.”
Affordable Housing
Fernandez is also concerned about the city’s efforts to create affordable
housing for residents who need it.
“Currently, we have 10% of any development to be included as affordable housing,” she emphasized. “So, if a development has 100 units, only 10 of them have to be affordable housing units.”
Fernandez hopes to see an improvement in how the city addresses affordable housing so that more units are available for those who would benefit from it most.
“I know that we have a lot of people who were impacted by COVID-19, people who lost their jobs,” she remarked. “So I think housing is a crucial area for many people.”
She hopes to work on creating changes that will give residents the resources they need to be able to pay for their homes or apartments.
“There are a lot of people that are struggling to find affordable rentals and are not even talking about being able to buy a home because of the price,” she continued. “I wish that, as a city, we could invest time into looking at improving that situation for our community members.”