COUNCIL CANDIDATES TALK RACISM, HOUSING
Arcata City Council candidates are mostly in agreement about issues related to systemic racism and affordable housing, but had different approaches to some of those issues.
At a forum Friday night hosted by 17 community groups, 10 candidates — Mayor Michael Winkler, Vice Mayor Paul Pitino, Stacy Atkins-Salazar, Emily Grace Goldstein, Nick Matthews, Oryan Peterson-Jones, Sarah Schaefer, Kimberley White, Collin Yeo and Camilla Zapata — agreed systemic racism was an issue in policing though the expressed different approaches ranging from reform to creating a whole new system.
Many candidates, such as Matthews and Pitino, took a more reformative approach, saying the Arcata Police Department should hire more people of color, and Pitino adding hiring more women would help, too.
“We’re in a town that’s probably 60% women and we’ve only got two or three women PD,” Pitino said. “It should be 50-50 at least.”
Atkins-Salazar also agreed with reforming the police and said immediate solutions could be citizen oversight committees, which others like Pitino also recommended, as well as requiring body cameras on police officers and cameras on police cars.
“Just ways for the citizens to police our police,” she said.
With citizen oversight committees, Peterson-Jones said it was especially important to recruit people of color in order to ensure their voices were heard.
Others like Yeo argued that the system couldn’t be reformed because the institution of policing was built on a racist foundation.
Winkler pointed to some of the reforms the council has already put in place, such as forming a public safety committee and encouraging a wide variety of people to join, and said the council is continuing to work on those issues.
The candidates agreed the city needs more affordable housing alternatives, such as tiny home villages and safe camping and parking spaces, for those who cannot access traditional low-income housing. However, again, candidates expressed different approaches to remedying the issue.
Pitino said he agreed with housing alternatives, but the issue for the city was that there was no money to fund the operation or the improvements required for the city-owned land to have such a project.
“I feel like we should probably reach into our reserves, build the improvements to the property and then ask for somebody to run it who’s going to be a nonprofit and could oversee it,” Pitino said. “Similar to Opportunity Village.”
Zapata, Matthews, AtkinsSalazar and Goldstein pointed out even if the council members support a project, nearby residents of a potential project tend not to want affordable housing alternatives in their neighborhood.
“If we’re going to be successful in coming up with alternative housing solutions, we’re going to really need to engage with our community and get community support,” Atkins-Salazar said.
Yeo and Schaefer said it was important to increase access to affordable housing, including passing Measure B to increase the cap on affordable housing in the city, implementing rent control and curbing the power of predatory management companies.
Peterson-Jones said he supported a spectrum of services to prevent eviction and help people maintain their housing, special resources for the chronically homeless who might need multiple services.
“I believe that a full range of housing options are necessary and need to be explored with an emphasis on social services,” he said.
Peterson-Jones and Goldstein said decriminalizing homelessness was an important step because people were already setting up camping sites and that would decriminalize their attempt to survive.
“We need to stop raiding those communities, throwing their stuff and the trash and dislocating them,” Goldstein said.
White also agreed with having a tiny home village that had a variety of mental health and social services.
Winkler again pointed to his record and how he has professionally worked over 200 projects “that are virtually all solar and sustainable” over the past 10 years across the state.
“I support using the area south of Samoa, which the city owns now,” Winkler said. “We’re building a tiny house village.”
Homelessness is a countywide issue, Zapata said, so Arcata needs to start working with the other cities in the county to “move forward on a universal implementation.”
“Too many times cities individually don’t necessarily want to take it on,” she said.
“We have a limited amount of land in Arcata and all it takes is one business owner to speak up and capitalism wins.”
Systemic racism in policing
and affordable housing were just two of the many topics, such as traffic safety and the climate crisis, discussed by the candidates.
To see the full forum, visit bit.ly/2S5yoLa.