VIOLENCE
to happen,” said Arleana Waller, a community activist who grew up in the Cottonwood area. “I hold this community responsible but I also hold our leaders responsible for not doing anything before this pandemic.”
Christina Romo, a staffer for Kern County 5th District Supervisor Leticia Perez, acknowledged that southeast Bakersfield has suffered from neglect but said Perez and the area’s newly-elected city councilman, Eric Arias, are committed to improvements.
“For decades nothing has ever happened for that community,” Romo said.
One recent investment in the community is the Bakersfield City School District’s new Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, immediately west of Belle Terrace Park, which has a focus on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It has been touted as an investment in the area’s future. In partnership with that project, Perez dedicated $650,000 in Community Development Block Grant funding to improve Belle Terrace Park and its surroundings with new curbs, gutters and lighting, as well as new playground equipment.
Plans eventually call for the annexation of some of Cottonwood’s multiple county pockets into the city, Romo said.
Arias recently told The Californian he is pushing for more of the city’s Measure N sales tax money to go to improvements in the southeast.
It’s a start but Waller is calling for more partnerships between community groups and local government, and more money to support the grassroots groups doing the on-theground work in communities, as well as to fix up parks, improve lighting and add security cameras.
She also heads up the MLK CommUNITY Initiative, which aims to revitalize southeast Bakersfield. As part of that work, she is trying to convince the city to spend $325,000 in Measure N funding to spruce up Martin Luther King Jr. Park. Meanwhile, she said, facilities in newer parts of the city have been funded to the tune of millions of dollars. She pointed to the Kaiser Permanente Sports Village, a southwest recreation complex with dozens of soccer fields, four youth football fields, and other amenities, which has received $1.5 million in Measure N funds and $3 million in outside grant funding in recent years.
“These mothers and fathers are just like the mothers and fathers in the southwest,” Waller said. “They want a better life for their children.”
Davis said the consistent neglect is a fact of life for many Black organizations in Bakersfield. He said he’s devoted to improving his community no matter what but the situation reminds him of something once said by Martin Luther King Jr.
“MLK said this: How can you ask a bootless man to pull himself up by the bootstraps? This is what we’re asking those poverty-stricken neighborhoods to do. Not only asking them to do it but asking the minority workers working with that population to do it,” he said. “We’re told, ‘don’t ask for boots but pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’”