Who Will Replace Nury Martinez? Meet The 2 Candidates Facing Off For The Council District 6 Seat

Imelda Padilla and Marisa Alcaraz are the final two candidates running to replace former LA Councilmember Nury Martinez, who stepped down last October amid a scandal that rocked Los Angeles.

Padilla and Alcaraz, both born and raised in Council District 6 in the San Fernando Valley, joined host Larry Mantle on the LAist 89.3 public affairs show AirTalk on Monday for a live debate on issues like homelessness and policing, and to make their case to CD6 voters for why they should be elected as the district's next representative on the Los Angeles City Council.

Padilla won the most votes, and Alcaraz finished second, in the first round of voting on April 4, when seven candidates were on the ballot. The top two finishers moved on to a June 27 runoff. Ballots have been mailed out, so voting is already underway.

District 6

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Courtesy City of L.A.

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Listen to the debate

Excerpts from the conversation:

What do you bring to the table?

Marisa Alcaraz: I've worked in government for a decade now, so I know how to write policies. I worked to do the $15 minimum wage to ban the box on job applications, asking about people's criminal history, doing hero pay during the pandemic for our frontline workers. I've worked on budgets, I've built a lot of housing at all levels, especially for our homeless neighbors. I can hit the ground running on day one. And I've been a big proponent for our working class families. That's why I think I have a lot of backing from labor and all of the hotel workers, grocery workers, electricians, all of the people who really represent the valley.

Imelda Padilla: What I bring to this seat is someone who can potentially get to City Council and from day one, be able to list and get started on the important issues that this district is prioritizing. This is a good opportunity to mention that this is precisely why I was able to earn the endorsement of both the editorial boards of La Opinión as well as the L.A. Times where they specifically mentioned that for a city councilmember there's more need than just policy expertise, but also the ability to rally up the community and get the community engaged in things that are important to them.

Imelda Padilla at her campaign headquarters.

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Frank Stoltze/LAist

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Homelessness

Alcaraz: Homelessness is the number one humanitarian crisis facing our city right now. I believe that we shouldn't have encampments near sensitive use sites where our kids are going to school, playing in the park, daycare centers, et cetera. Same with the RVs. We've allowed policy around RVs to expire and there's been just been this piecemeal approach by the council declaring oversized vehicle areas restricted and there's no comprehensive solution there. We need to bring back code sections to deal with the issue. But it's more than that. We need to have the outreach teams talking to people living there. We need to be offering them vouchers to move into housing and to relinquish those vehicles, and we need storage space to for them.

Padilla: I think we need to do way more work creating the opportunities to move RVs both out of residential but also industrial. I live in a community where we have a lot of industrial zoning and those job creators are equally frustrated as much as residents. It's created a situation where some of those spaces are no longer useful. You can't back up an 18-wheeler into the lot and get business done. So this is going to be a priority for me. I wanna know are who are these individuals? I wanna work with the county to find out and their related departments — are they veterans? Are they victims of domestic violence? Do they have mental health needs or substance abuse support? What I wanna do is, as we build, we make sure that community individuals don't feel like they're left out in conversations of design and services and how we can live together.

Policing

Alcaraz: I support getting our police force back up to the 9,500 officers as well as investing in these alternative models. The city has CIRCLE, where they send out the officers with the mental health workers and street medicine teams in partnership with USC, where they have doctors and nurses actually out on the streets with medical assistance for our homeless individuals. So these are the types of programs that we're seeing positive results with and we need to expand on and make sure it's expanding to the whole city and not just as pilots anymore. But part of it is also just a whole re-imagining of our public safety system, and I think it starts with the dispatch and how the calls go out and how we can be more efficient. Not just sending officers, but sending the mental healthcare providers or maybe if community intervention workers in cases of gang issues.

Marisa Alcaraz

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Courtesy of the Alcaraz campaign

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Padilla: I've been in the conversation related to how we re-envision and reimagine public safety for a very long time. I've specifically been working from the perspective of supporting youth and prevent preventing crime in the first place. I'm running to represent a community where young people's parents are working all the time. It's part of my own personal story. My father worked from 9 to 5. My mother worked from 3 to midnight. There was a good amount of time where me and my siblings were raising each other and the effects of the criminal justice system and the school-to-prison pipeline did touch my family. So this is very personal to me and important to me. I believe that change happens incrementally. We are, in my opinion, just at the very beginning of what the future of policing is going to look like for the next generation.

Working with neighborhood councils

Alcaraz: I would meet with them every meeting that they had. I would either be there or have a team member assigned to go to those meetings. For the last six months I've been meeting with the neighborhood councils. We both took part in a neighborhood council debate as well, so listening to them is vital to having that input from the community and I look forward to working with them.

Padilla: I've been working with [neighborhood councils] for over a decade when I first got involved in 2009. I've continued to work with them in partnership to host things for youth, to host resource fairs and multiple things. I do think we could do a lot together in partnership as it pertains to neighborhood purpose grants, which they give out. Then there's also the community impact statement that I think a lot of the neighborhood councils within District 6 are not empowered to use as often as they should.

Important Voting Dates

• The first day to vote-by-mail was May 30.
• June 12 is the last day to register to vote-by-mail.
• The runoff election will be decided on June 27.
• You can do same-day registration and vote in person up to and on June 27 as well.

For more on important election dates and other information on this special election, click here or visit the Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder website at lavote.gov.