Rami: The City of Riverside has open council positions in Ward 2 and Ward 4. Each race has two candidates running on issues ranging from transparency, to city infrastructure, to affordability. Daniel Hernandez with the Riverside Record has been doing sweeping coverage on these contentious races and he’s here to share a little bit about what we should know. Welcome Daniel, thanks for being here.
Daniel: Thanks for having me
Rami: Invite me into these wards. For Ward 2, the easternmost part of the region, we have Aram Ayra and Gracie Torres running against each other. Who are these two candidates?
Daniel: Ward 2, in general, has this really interesting cross section where it has a lot of students, it has a lot of long-time residents and it has a really growing commercial and industrial sector in the region. And Aram and Gracie are both running to take over Clarissa Cervantes’ seat, who is, moving on, attempting to gain a state house assembly seat. Both of them are running on affordability, infrastructure and homelessness. And that last part, homelessness, is what they really diverge the most in.
Aram is really pushing to uplift supportive housing communities and he wants to create more affordable housing to help people who are experiencing homelessness exit homelessness while Gracie would prefer to audit the city's spending on homelessness.
Rami: Similarly, for Ward 4, bordering Ward 2 in the southernmost part of the city, Rich Vandenberg is running against Incumbent Chuck Condor. What is that race looking like?
Daniel: Condor has been in office for quite a while now. He's a political powerhouse versus Vandenberg, who is very much a newcomer to this race. And they are looking to represent an area that has and tends to be filled with more affluent communities. These two candidates are somewhat similar in a lot of their viewpoints, but from my reporting, they really differ on the warehouse debate aspect of it all. Vandenberg has made it clear that he opposes any new warehouses whatsoever versus Condor, where although he does agree that we don't need any more logistics industries, he thinks that the city and the region as a whole would benefit from having large facilities constructed for the manufacturing industry or other high paying sectors to come in.
Rami: And similarly, he’s said that he’s pro-data center as well. I mean that's a wildly unpopular opinion in this race. How has he defended it?
Daniel: Yeah, he believes that much of the data center opposition is being funded by foreign countries. This is something that NPR has investigated and they found that the evidence is very thin and polls in general show that 71% of Americans oppose the tech being built in their neighborhoods. But he believes that these foreign countries are funding this opposition so that they can bring in these data centers and have this kind of information storage technology stored within their countries instead and that they can have control of that information especially with this new rising tech.
Rami: Affordability has been on everyone’s minds and Riverside is kind of behind in the state’s requirement for housing for low-income residents. What have candidates said about expanding affordable housing in the city?
Daniel: There are two camps from my reporting between the four candidates. Aram and Rich Vandenberg, they want to tackle this issue by helping projects that are almost off the ground but just need a little bit more funding. They want to push some local, state and federal grants to help them get off the ground and get toward the final product. And Torres and Condor, on the other hand, they believe that the city needs to be more builder-friendly and help these developers fill out all of the paperwork they need to be able to get past the bureaucracy of it all.
Rami: Well thank you for your time Daniel, I appreciate you being on.
Daniel: Thank you so much.
For more Riverside election coverage check out Daniel Hernandez’s work at the Riverside Record and visit KVCR.org/voterguide to check out more of Rami’s election coverage.