#DearCD9Candidate: South LA Residents Share Questions for Their City Council Candidates
Citing contaminated streets, homelessness, and violence, many residents in South Los Angeles are looking to their next city council candidates to bring about change.
At a pop-up newsroom held on the corner of Vermont and Slauson streets earlier this month, residents shared what they believed were the biggest issues facing their community, and raised questions they’d like to ask their Council District 9 representatives ahead of the March 7 local elections.
For Ron L. Beard, the solution to violence and poverty in South LA is simple — address the young people in his community. Beard believes the candidates need to encourage young people to go back to school and participate on teams, in order to stay busy with “something that they can do with their time besides mischievousness.”
Beard emphasized that the members of his community need to come together and make a change. “We have now seen that violence ain’t working,” he said. “Gangbanging and drug selling, no, that’s not the way. South LA needs help, really.”
Beard is not the only one who sees violence as a major issue in South LA. Ana Maria Monroy, a resident living on the corner of 62nd and Western, dreams of more police and better emergency response times to improve the security of her area. “When there are gunshots, the only thing I do is throw myself to the ground because I don’t have other options. We need more police,” Monroy said.
For Elisa Zavala, a Latin-American immigrant, the largest issue facing South Los Angeles is garbage and street contamination.“There’s garbage everywhere. Not only in the places where people live, it’s wherever you go, in a restaurant, there’s garbage thrown there. The corners, everywhere,” she said.
Zavala wishes to ask her Council District candidate what he will do to improve the city’s cleanliness. “I want the candidate to be better than what we’ve had,” she said in hope of the candidates actually following through with their promises.
South LA Resident Noe Mesa is not a permanent resident and cannot vote but asks the people in his community with papers to “vote so we can move forward and keep surviving…so that we can all live in peace with our families and our children.”
Adreanna Hill also appreciates the importance of voting, in order to elect someone who will represent her city well. “If we let anyone get into office like Donald Trump, it will be worse than it is now,” she said.
As a 20-year-old mother, Hill wants her candidate to fix streets uprooted by trees and improve the education system. When Hill was a student in South LA, the teachers “were just doing their job and getting us out,” but “we need better schools, more textbooks — better resources for our students.”
For Beard, voting is the best way for residents to demonstrate their frustrations with these issues.
“Voting is representing how you feel, expressing your opinion,” he said. “If your candidate don’t win, at least you tried to help. You did your civic duty.”
