Los Angeles' Ninth Council District is where Black exclusion from L.A. city politics met its end in 1963, when Gilbert Lindsay, a former City Hall janitor, was appointed to fill a City Council vacancy.
Since then, only Black officials have represented the district on the council, a streak that is likely to end this year.
Six candidates — none of them Black and all of them Latino (more than half are themselves immigrants to the U.S.) — are vying to fill the seat that three-term incumbent Curren Price is slated to leave in December.
The district follows the Harbor Freeway from the south end of downtown Los Angeles through Historic South Central, South Park, Florence, University Park, Exposition Park and Vermont-Slauson. It includes revenue-generating tourist attractions and sports venues like the Coliseum, Galen Center, Crypto.com Arena, L.A. Live and Exposition Park. Yet it remains the city’s poorest council district and suffers from widespread illegal dumping and neglect.
What’s at stake in the City Council races
Voters will choose who will be their chief steward of city services in each of eight odd-numbered council districts (look up your district here) for the next four years and will determine the ideological makeup and effectiveness of the 15-member City Council.
Challenges include federal immigration enforcement, homelessness, the city’s readiness for the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Summer Olympics and continuing city budget shortfalls.
What does a City Council member do?
Council members have three distinct roles:
- Each member curates their district by identifying local problems and opportunities and working with more than 40 city departments to steer needed services to residents and businesses. They may work to bring in non-city resources in the form of county, state, federal or philanthropic grants. They serve as intermediaries between their constituents and City Hall. Members play a vital role in shaping development in their districts.
- As part of the full-time, 15-member council, they set citywide policy, adopt ordinances, commission studies and provide a counterweight and oversight to the mayor and city departments and bureaus. They adopt an annual city budget ($14 billion in 2025-26) based on a proposal provided by the mayor, divvying up money among the Los Angeles Police Department, homeless services, libraries, parks, sidewalk repair and tree-trimming, among other services. They approve or reject the mayor’s appointments to city commissions and to lead most city departments. They focus on areas such as policing and public safety by leading or serving as members of council committees.
- Council members often work outside their formal roles through appointment to other governmental boards such as Metro and the Metropolitan Water District and by providing leadership in their communities through assisting charities, schools and civic institutions.
Fast facts about the City Council
- Each City Council member represents about 260,000 Angelenos.
- Annual salary is $244,727.
- A term lasts four years. Members may serve a maximum of three terms.
- City elections are non-partisan.
- Voters may have a chance to enlarge the council from the current 15 members to 25 members under a charter reform proposal that supporters say will provide better representation. (As a point of comparison, several other major cities have far larger councils. New York has a 51-member City Council. Chicago has a 50-member council.) It’s up to the current council whether to put the question on the Nov. 3 ballot.
What it takes to win
Candidates who win more than 50% of the vote June 2 will be sworn into office in December. If no candidate wins more than 50%, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held Nov. 3.
The candidates for City Council District 9
Estuardo Mazariegos, community organization director
Estuardo Mazariegos came to the U.S. from Guatemala with his family at age 3. His family lived in several parts of the city, including East Hollywood and West Adams, and for a few years in Inglewood. He attended several schools and ultimately earned degrees from Cal State Dominguez Hills in labor studies and Cal State L.A. in public administration. His family members worked at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in union jobs, which made an impression on Mazariegos.
“The quality of life for immigrants is tied to how well they organize at the workplace,” he said.
Mazariegos is co-director of the Los Angeles office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which promotes social, economic and racial justice in California for communities of color. He has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. If all City Council candidates backed by the organization are elected and two DSA-backed members remain seated, Mazariegos would be part of a six-member DSA contingent.
On housing, Mazariegos said his district has done its share in creating density and now it is up to other parts of the city to make room for more housing, although he does support construction of mixed-income social housing in the district.
He does not support increasing the size of the LAPD.
“Safety for me means access to safe streets,” he said. “It means good services, like the lights come on. Folks in this district don’t feel served by the LAPD.”
He proposes a surcharge on tickets to sporting and entertainment events in the district to pay for amenities in neglected nearby neighborhoods.
In 2009, Mazariegos was sentenced to probation and a day in jail after being arrested for gun possession. Mazariegos has said the gun was not his.
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Jorge Nuño, social entrepreneur
Jorge Nuño was born and raised in South Los Angeles and studied graphic design. He ran various art projects for advertising agencies and designed movie posters, then built several companies, which he runs out of (or near) his 10-bedroom home known on social media as The Big House. He has turned the restored Craftsman into a business incubator and community center and recently added a skate park to the driveway.
He previously ran for the 9th District seat in 2007 and ran for the county Board of Supervisors in 2020.
“I kind of suck at organizing, but I do bring people together,” he said. “I’m an independent voice from everybody else who’s running. I have no ties to any political machine. I’m in the service business. That’s my strength.”
His agenda includes improving streets by making them clean and walkable, creating a rapid response team to address problems as they occur and creating a dump zone, which would be emptied regularly by the city, to dissuade the epidemic of dumpers who leave trash in the district’s streets and on its sidewalks. He wants to redevelop the district’s three industrial tracts and enhance the Central Avenue Arts and Cultural Corridor, where many years ago the nation’s leading jazz and sometimes pop musicians would perform.
Nuño wants to preserve the district’s single-family housing stock to encourage residents to build inter-generational wealth.
He does not want to increase LAPD staffing.
“No one in the community tells me they want more police officers,” Nuño said. “Instead of investing money in police, invest in these young folks. We should tell people, maybe you should be a coach instead of a police officer.”
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Elmer Roldan, education nonprofit director
Elmer Roldan is executive director of Communities in Schools (currently on leave as he campaigns), an organization that supports students in selected schools and channels community services to decrease the number of dropouts and increase opportunities for college and success.
He was born in Guatemala where, he said, his father was a violent alcoholic, and he was raised by his grandparents while his mother worked in the U.S. to save enough money to send for him and his sisters. He arrived at age 9. At 13, he joined the Community Coalition and became a mentor and organizer for peers and worked on campaigns to provide aging school buildings with air conditioning and safe drinking water.
“I made it my mission to improve the quality of education for students,” he said.
He worked at the Los Angeles Unified School District in community affairs for the school board president and community engagement for the superintendent. He was director of education programs at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
Roldan refers to the Ninth District as the “perfect intersection of all the deserts: food, banking, health.” He noted that Curren Price came from outside the district and said that it’s time for someone who grew up there to represent its people.
“As someone who lives in the district and lives with the consequences,” he said, “there’s more motivation to improve the quality of life.”
He called for $100 million of Olympics revenue to be set aside for “mom-and-pop shops.”
He said he would protect single-family housing, supplemented by “granny flats,” and called for a cautious but steady increase in police presence and careful use of Sec. 41.18 to clear homeless encampments. He said he has seen too many fires spewing toxic fumes at encampments right next to schools.
“We cannot risk the community’s health while we wait for our unhoused neighbors to get better,” he said.
He is endorsed by Mayor Karen Bass and council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who know him from his work at the coalition and, later, his work with schools.
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Jorge Hernandez Rosas, educator/therapist
Like the other five candidates for the seat, Hernandez Rosas qualified for the ballot by filing a sufficient number of valid signatures of voters registered in the district. Alone of the candidates, he has rejected matching funds — public money that is awarded to candidates who follow fundraising and spending rules. Records on the City Ethics Commission website show no campaign contributions and no expenditures.
Hernandez Rosas participated in a candidate forum in March at Zion Temple Community Church in South Los Angeles.
He has not responded to several requests for an interview with LAist.
In his campaign materials, he identifies himself as an ESL teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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Martha Sanchez, professor/therapist
Sánchez is a marriage and family therapist, mental health clinician and instructor at Los Angeles Mission College. She refers to herself as “an activist committed to social justice.” She was raised in Mexico, came to South Los Angeles at age 23 and taught herself English.
In 2015, Sánchez participated in a hunger strike in front of City Hall as part of a campaign to raise the minimum wage.
Sánchez said that as a council member, she would fight against the unfairness that she said Black and immigrant communities suffer in Los Angeles.
“They condemn us to disappear,” she said. “They bus homeless people into a community where we don’t have resources and condemn us to failure. They place the homeless population into warehouses without adequate services.”
She said she would use Sec. 41.18 to clear homeless encampments only if necessary and only for the small number of people who have lost their ability to survive due to poor nutrition from living on the street and drug use in an effort to stay awake at night to protect themselves. “But even if their minds are out of their bodies,” she said, “they’re still human.”
She argued for increased police patrols in neighborhoods in the heart of the district to match the level of service given to the Figueroa corridor and L.A. Live. She said that in most of the district, there are insufficient resources to send officers in a timely manner. And when they show up, she said, “they just come and shoot.”
Sánchez said she did not mind being an underdog in the race.
“Even if I don’t have the same political support from the machine that other candidates do,” she said, “I’m running for the people. We have to be the city that can set the example for the United States.”
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Jose Ugarte, community outreach director
Jose Ugarte’s family came to the U.S. from Oaxaca when he was 4 and settled in South Los Angeles. The labor movement was his path into politics. As a community organizer, he registered voters, then organized for Gov. Jerry Brown on immigration reform and labor and health issues. He also worked on the unsuccessful recall of Scott Walker in Wisconsin and campaigned for Democrats in Orange County.
He got his “first real job” working for Assemblymember Anthony Rendon in his South Gate field office, then worked for Curren Price, who was in the Assembly at the time. When Price (a former Inglewood City Council member) was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, Ugarte joined his staff and eventually became his chief deputy.
Ugarte left in 2019 and ran a lobbying business with his sister. After he returned to Price’s office in 2021, he failed to report his outside lobbying income and faced charges from the City Ethics Commission. He recently admitted to what he called a clerical error and agreed to pay a $25,000 fine.
Ugarte enjoys the endorsements of a host of labor organizations and the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. Given Ugarte’s positions in Price’s office, the other candidates often try to depict him as the quasi-incumbent.
Ugarte wants the city to have its own public health department for the first time since the early 1960s, when it outsourced that work to the county.
“We need to take drastic measures on mental health and homelessness,” he said. “Instead of putting all the money in housing, we need to allocate a lot more to mental health. Homelessness is a mental health, drug abuse and alcohol abuse problem.”
He advocates mandatory treatment and job training for unhoused people. He wants to keep rents in his district relatively affordable by encouraging construction of lower-priced housing and discouraging luxury housing. He supports hiring more police officers while requiring a certain percentage — he hasn’t yet landed on a number — to live in the city. Ugarte also wants to hire an athletic director for the district to fight what he said is the city’s highest obesity problem.
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The incumbent faces a primary challenge from his upstairs neighbor, as well as two others, in District 13, which includes Echo Park, Atwater Village and much of Hollywood.
Four candidates are trying to unseat the incumbent in L.A. City Council District 1, which includes the neighborhoods of Highland Park and Westlake, among others.
