Alhambrans Have Spoken!

GUEST OPINION

An election sign at a lawn of a home in Alhambra (Photo – Melissa Michelson).

Historically, grassroots candidates for Alhambra City Council have not fared well in elections because their opponents have had limitless corporate money at their disposal.

By Melissa Michelson

In 2014, Eric Sunada came close to becoming city councilman. He’s a 25-year resident of Alhambra and NASA JPL employee with experience on the Planning, Parks and Recreation commission and the San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District board. He raised about $12,000 and contributed $5,000 of his own money, and got 4,886 votes. His corporate-backed opponent Stephen Sham acquired 5,255 votes with $190,000 spent on his campaign.

In 2016, corporate-backed candidates Jeff Maloney and David Mejia each received $5000 from out-of-area developer Arman Gabay. Both beat their non-corporate, grassroots challengers, Mark Nisall and Ken Toh, respectively. Four months after the election, a controversial Lowes development project headed by Gabay on Mission and Fremont was put to a vote by the city council. Maloney, Mejia, and the rest of the council voted for the development despite the lack of a comprehensive environmental and traffic study. This incensed many residents of Alhambra, prompting local activists to sue the city for lack of due diligence, and eventually Gabay backed out of the project. It has since been revealed that Gabay is currently awaiting trial for felony bribery relating to another development project.

A watershed moment

This year’s Alhambra city council elections seemed to be business as usual – on the surface at least. Candidates Suzi Dunkel-Soto and Laura Tellez-Gagliano represented the real estate industry, while Adele Andrade-Stadler, Katherine Lee and Andrea Lofthouse-Quesada stood for the corporate-free grass roots. Dunkel-Soto and Tellez-Gagliano together generated over $100,000 from real estate PAC’s and other corporate entities, while the latter three candidates disavowed developer and corporate PAC monies and generated donations collectively amounting to about $57,000. Many Alhambrans who had closely observed previous city council elections expected big money to carry the day, as it had invariably done in the past (2018 donations).

But this year proved to be a watershed moment. Alhambra’s grass roots took to the ballot box to denounce the status-quo and the power of monied interests in determining city policies. With the votes being certified, 9,462 votes have gone to Andrade-Stadler, the largest number in Alhambra history for a city council candidate, while her opponent, Dunkel-Soto, received 6,683 votes. Andrade-Stadler, who received 52.05% of votes cast, says, “We worked for every one of those votes.” In another area of Alhambra, Katherine Lee pulled in 7,421 votes.  Andrea Lofthouse-Quesada came in at 6,605, while the race’s sole corporate-backed candidate, Laura Tellez-Gagliano, netted just 4,940 votes. City council candidate Ross Maza won his race unopposed; like Dunkel-Soto and Tellez-Gagliano, he is supported by the real estate industry and the city council establishment.

An election sign at a Real Estate office building in Alhambra (Photo – Melissa Michelson).

Corporate-free candidates

In the past few years the fight to purge government of the devastating influence of corporate money has become the rallying cry of an increasing number of American voters. In the 2016 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders called for the cleansing of corporate money from American politics and refused to accept any corporate donations to his campaign. In a similar vein, Donald Trump made “draining the swamp” a cornerstone of his campaign, a promise which turned out to be completely rhetorical. The 2018 midterm elections have seen a raft of corporate-free candidates take office countrywide, the most famous of which has been Alexandria Ocacio Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to U.S. Congress. Alhambrans want this same kind of reform in their local government, demonstrated by the results of Alhambra’s latest city council elections.

Arguably a major contributor to the popularity of non-corporate candidates in this year’s election was the campaign to collect over 8,000 signatures by Alhambrans as part of a initiative to cap donations to city council candidates at $250 and establish by-district elections for the city council.  In the past few years, developers have deluged the Alhambra city council candidates with donations, and they have responded by approving the over-development on Main Street and the Midwick area, the 124 luxury townhouse project at Camelia Court which will require hundreds of mature trees to be felled, and the now-defunct Lowe’s development project.

Alhambrans have spoken: We expect a government that represents us, not Big Money.

Melissa Michelson is a resident of Alhambra.

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