Roseland voters to select City Council representative for the first time

After years of waiting, voters in the largely Latino neighborhood of Roseland in southwest Santa Rosa will be able to cast ballots for a City Council representative from their area for the first time this fall.

Three candidates are actively campaigning for the seat taking in the neighborhood annexed by the city in 2017, along with outlying areas of southwestern and southern Santa Rosa: businessman Eddie Alvarez, neighborhood advocate Duane De Witt and electrical engineer Jorge Inocencio.

The race is one of four City Council seats to be filled in the Nov. 3 election ― the second for Santa Rosa in its transition from at-large citywide contests for council to district-based elections.

When the four newly elected members are sworn in later this year, each of the council’s seven members will have been elected from a different geographic district taking in about 25,000 people, spreading out representation across the city.

The election comes as the city continues to confront its status as the epicenter of the local homelessness crisis and tries to revamp its vision for its downtown, including the goal of adding thousands of new homes in dense complexes. Santa Rosa also will explore ways to aid the local economy amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic while propelling the yearslong recovery from wildfire and working to prevent future catastrophes.

The pandemic alone has had a disproportionately large impact on local Latino residents, the largest concentration of whom live in southwest Santa Rosa. Stretching back decades and perhaps to the city’s founding, no member of the council has come from that part of the city.

But the onset of district elections has created a “wonderfully diverse” 2020 council field in Santa Rosa, said Brian Sobel, a Petaluma-based political analyst, and that’ll be particularly important in Roseland.

“It’s very important,” Sobel said, “because heretofore, one could argue that all council members represented Roseland and its constituents. But actually having somebody who lives there — it’s represented at City Hall in a much different, more pointed way, and that was the whole idea behind these district elections, to force a city to work very, very hard to recognize its demographic makeup.”

So the contest for District 1 is one of the most closely watched, with a particular focus on Latino households ― about 35% of district residents are Latino as are two of the three active candidates.

A fourth candidate, Elizabeth Valente, will appear on the ballot but is not campaigning. In a statement, Valente said she decided to withdraw after realizing she "would not be able to devote the time the position deserves while maintaining my career.“ Valente is executive director for the development firm Gallaher Homes.

In addition to Roseland, District 1 also includes the South Park neighborhood and stretches down Santa Rosa Avenue to Bellevue Avenue. It is bounded to the west by Stony Point Road and the Southwest Community Park.

Eddie Alvarez

Alvarez owns The Hook cannabis dispensary and manages the Joyeria Maria jewelry store in Santa Rosa. He ran for county supervisor in 2008 but dropped out before the primary election to avoid splitting votes with eventual winner, Efren Carrillo. His first bid for City Council that same year was unsuccessful.

The onset of district elections presents Alvarez, 44, a better shot at a council seat, and he said he hopes to bring dignity and recognition to his often-overlooked community.

“I see the pain. I’ve lived the pain,” Alvarez said, speaking of Roseland’s deficit of representation in local government, leading to shortfalls in funding and services. “I’m over it, and I want my people to know there’s something better than being ignored.”

To Alvarez, listening would be a key part of serving on the City Council. He suggested holding some council meetings in District 1 and encouraged city officials to continue seeking ways to improve outreach in the wake of the protests over racial injustice and police brutality following George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.

His focus on listening also extends to homelessness. While he said it was important that District 1 not be treated as “the dumping ground of Sonoma County” ― it saw the county’s largest ever unsanctioned homeless camp, numbering more than 200 people at its peak, disbanded in January on the Joe Rodota Trail ― he also advocated for treating people experiencing homelessness as if they were customers.

“And you don’t tell a customer what they need,” he said. “You listen to them.”

He said he supported the city’s efforts to research and implement an alternative to policing in which social workers are sent to some lower-priority calls instead of armed officers.

Alvarez’s campaign platform also calls out the “desperate” need for a permanent library in Roseland, where advocates are continuing to raise funds, coalescing into one of the most consistent interest groups at City Council meetings. He’s also calling for better Wi-Fi and street repairs to improve connectivity in Roseland along multiple tracks.

Alvarez noted that he was proud to have been endorsed by the Sonoma County Democratic Party.

“For them to have the confidence that I can promote the Democratic platform, it’s very empowering,” he said.

Alvarez, who studied business computing administration at Heald College, also has been endorsed by several labor groups, including the local Teamsters and SEIU unions.

Alvarez has loaned his campaign $12,000 and had raised $2,250 more through Thursday, and he’d spent about $15,128 including $3,700 in unpaid bills. He had about $2,900 remaining in his campaign account as of Thursday, campaign finance records showed.

Duane De Witt

De Witt, a community volunteer and retired respiratory therapist, is running after making himself a fixture at city meetings over the years. He ran unsuccessfully for council multiple times in the 1990s and threw his hat in the ring last year after former Councilwoman Julie Combs resigned.

De Witt is running in 2020 because, in all that time, he said, local government has not improved in Roseland. He spoke up unsuccessfully last year to try to save several city-owned Roseland houses from demolition, arguing that the city should have invested more in the properties and suggesting they could have been used to house veterans.

“They have deliberately disadvantaged Roseland on purpose for decades,” De Witt said. To fix this, he suggested placing Roseland residents “on every board and commission that we can.”

De Witt, 65, who has long made land-use planning and environmental justice personal political causes, noted that he has secured the endorsement of the local Sierra Club chapter. A vocal advocate for parkland in the area, he has called for setting aside 100 additional acres of parks and open space in the Roseland and South Park areas, which have among the fewest acres of public open space of any part of the city.

He supports Santa Rosa’s Open Government task force, which has met to find ways to increase transparency from City Hall, though he questioned the city’s commitment to access, noting the decision last year to replace a speaking podium in front of the council chamber at City Hall with a carpeted open area.

“Some would say that new carpet in front of the dais is so they could sweep things under it,” De Witt said.

De Witt, who overcame homelessness himself and graduated from UC Berkeley, has singled out homelessness as another of his campaign concerns and proposes the city work with Sonoma County to house people at the county fairgrounds.

De Witt, who calls himself a “full-service citizen,” said he’d be able to get along with city staff and council members if elected despite his comments and criticism of Santa Rosa’s policies over the yeas .

“They see that I’m persistent and serious, and I’m not just a one-trick pony,” De Witt said. "I’m basically a guy that can be as helpful as possible.“

De Witt had not reported any significant campaign fundraising as of Thursday.

Jorge Inocencio

Inocencio, an electrical engineer at Keysight Technologies, lives in Roseland and is running for office for the first time. He said he decided to run after realizing that issues from his childhood in the area — crumbling roads and having to go downtown to get to the library — are still problems for his neighborhood. He thinks that government representation is a big part of that.

“There’s nobody who is young or from this side of town” on the council, he said.

Inocencio, 27, who graduated from Elsie Allen High School and Sonoma State University, said he would bring a new focus on equity to city government by “not being shy about moving resources into neighborhoods that need it the most.”

That approach could help fix dilapidated roads and increase access to parks not just in Roseland but anywhere in Santa Rosa that has been overlooked, he said.

“It’s not just me fighting for Roseland or South Park,” Inocencio said. “It’s about setting up a system that would get resources into disadvantaged communities.”

Housing sticks out to him as a pressing issue. Though the city has been devoting increasing resources to its affordable housing crisis, Inocencio said he would support adjusting the city’s zoning policies to expand the “informal housing market” of spaces for people who rent — especially units that include smaller floor plans for residents who don’t need as much space as larger families.

“I want to see more development that’s affordable by design,” he said. “I think right now for young people, young families and senior citizens, there are very few options.”

Citywide, Inocencio emphasized that District 1 is not alone in struggling with a lack of equity and he is campaigning on the need to fight against “systemic barriers to economic mobility” in the form of inequality in education, infrastructure and business opportunities.

Inocencio said he was proud to have secured endorsements from several influential community leaders and politicians including Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, Los Cien founder Herman G. Hernandez and Alegria De La Cruz, the new director of Sonoma County’s Office of Equity.

Inocencio loaned his campaign at least $2,825 and has raised more than $10,500 more, spending more than $10,400 so far.

Valente, the Gallaher Homes executive who is on the ballot but is not campaigning, said she would be supporting Inocencio in the District 1 race.

“After getting to know Jorge, I believe that he and I are closely aligned in our goals for District 1 and in our vision for the city of Santa Rosa,” Valente said.

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.