Despite scandal, the race for Kevin de León's seat has been lacking in fireworks
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Nearly 15 months ago, the Los Angeles City Council chamber was a turbulent place to conduct business, a byproduct of a scandal centering heavily on Councilmember Kevin de León.
Demonstrators regularly disrupted council meetings, demanding that De León step down over his participation in a secretly recorded conversation that featured racist remarks. They went to his home, spending several days camped out in his neighborhood.
But an odd thing happened in the run-up to the March 5 election. With De León running for a second four-year term, the highly competitive race to represent his Eastside district has been a mostly polite affair.
Over the past three months, the candidates have dutifully staked out positions on homelessness, police raises, public transit and other issues. Much of the campaign mail has been positive, and interactions at candidate forums have been congenial, by and large.
At a recent Eagle Rock youth forum, seven of the eight candidates fielded questions about such issues as bus lanes, the 2028 Olympic Games and what band they would want for their election night victory party.
Read more: Your guide to the L.A. City Council District 14 race: Kevin de León vs. 7 challengers
Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) said she wished she could have Aerosmith, or at least an Aerosmith cover band. Tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado spoke in favor of the Linda Lindas. De León rattled off several names, including Bad Bunny, Arcade Fire and Grupo Firme.
Michael Trujillo, a campaign strategist for Carrillo, said he's not surprised there have been so few fireworks. In an eight-way contest, he said, a campaign that goes negative runs the risk of alienating voters, pushing them into the arms of a rival.
"If you attack in a multiple-candidate primary, there's no guarantee that those voters are going to go to you," he said.
Naomi Villagomez Roochnik, campaign manager for Jurado, struck a similar note, saying her candidate has been focused on presenting a positive vision for the district, not "tearing people down."
"We don't want to be the candidate who says, 'At least we're better than Kevin,'" she said. "We want Ysabel to be elected because she's the best candidate for the district."
De León, a resident of Eagle Rock, has spent the past 15 months attempting to mount a comeback in the 14th District, which takes in such neighborhoods as Boyle Heights, El Sereno and much of downtown, including Little Tokyo, the Arts District and Skid Row.
During the campaign, he has highlighted his work building interim housing facilities for the district's homeless population, including tiny home villages in Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock and Highland Park. He said his district was one of the few to report a decrease in homelessness last year, when compared with 2022.
"A lot of the encampments have disappeared in our neighborhoods in CD 14, and I'm most proud of that, because that was the No. 1 issue when I campaigned" four years ago, De León said in an interview. "I said what I was going to do, and I did it."
De León has also issued multiple apologies, one of them in a letter directly to district voters, over his participation in a conversation with former Council President Nury Martinez, former Councilmember Gil Cedillo and a high-level labor leader that featured racist and derogatory remarks about Black people, Oaxacans and others.
That scandal prompted President Biden to call on him to step down in 2022. De León, in his letter, said he had been working to make amends for his "hurtful words."
Those efforts have only taken him so far.
Many of the labor unions that coalesced around De León in prior campaigns are now backing Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, one of his opponents. Santiago has scooped up endorsements from construction trade workers, school employees, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and many other union organizations.
By Monday, labor groups, the American Beverage Assn. and others had spent a combined $629,000 on mailers and other efforts to elect Santiago, a onetime De León ally who appeared with him regularly at political events before the audio scandal.
In recent days, Santiago has thrown some of the sharpest elbows in the race, sending mailers to voters filled with excerpts from a Los Angeles Times editorial saying De León should be voted out of of office.
“We need a councilmember with the integrity and experience to move our district forward — a leader who will increase transparency and stand up to corruption and racism,” Santiago's campaign said in the mailer.
(The Times' editorial board, which issues endorsements, operates separately from the newsroom.)
Despite those broadsides, De León, Santiago and Carrillo — the three elected officials in the race — agree on a number of local issues. All three favor Mayor Karen Bass' efforts to increase staffing at the Los Angeles Police Department, as well as her recent package of pay increases for officers.
De León, Santiago and Carrillo also support the use of Municipal Code 41.18, which allows council members to create no-encampment zones at libraries, senior centers and other "sensitive" locations.
"No child, no family member, no abuelita, no one should be having to walk through an encampment to get to school, to get to a supermarket, to get to a bus stop and not feel safe," Carrillo said during the Eagle Rock event.
Carrillo, who lives in El Sereno, has criticized De León and Santiago for missing several of the contest's candidate forums. At the same time, she has had her own recent brush with controversy — an arrest in November for DUI, following a late-night collision in which she drove into two parked vehicles.
Carrillo pleaded no contest last month, agreeing to participate in a three-month driving-under-the-influence program.
Jurado, the tenant rights attorney, has staked out positions that run counter to many of those espoused by the three politicians in the race. She said she would have voted against Bass' budget, which sought to increase the size of the LAPD, and against the mayor's recent package of police raises. She opposes 41.18, saying it criminalizes homelessness.
A resident of Highland Park, Jurado has been relying on help from the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as several civic leaders who occupy the leftmost end of the spectrum in L.A. politics: City Controller Kenneth Mejia, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and Gina Viola, who waged an unsuccessful race for mayor in 2022.
Jurado has portrayed herself as the strongest and most capable advocate for renters in the race. She criticized De León for voting for rent hikes of at least 4% in rent-stabilized apartments — those that were built before October 1978 and have two or more units.
"Our current councilmember voted for a rent increase even though we knew the eviction tsunami was coming," she said.
Schoolteacher and tenant advocate Eduardo "Lalo" Vargas has sided with Jurado on police hiring, police raises and 41.18. A resident of Lincoln Heights, he has been urging voters to embrace his socialist platform, saying the city should seize vacant residential properties so they can be turned into affordable housing.
Among his first targets is a complex of vacant, graffiti-covered skyscrapers near the downtown Convention Center.
"Every election cycle the corporations and the developers get to pick a candidate to represent their own interests," he said. "It's time the working class have their own candidate who is going to fight for their own interests."
De León, for his part, has defended his record on tenant issues, saying he voted for expanded renter relocation payments and a delay in repayment of COVID-19 renter debt. He has pushed for new planning rules to protect tenants from being displaced by new development in downtown and Boyle Heights.
Asked about rent hikes in rent-stabilized apartments, a De León aide said the council member voted last year to reduce the size of the rent increases that were initially proposed, limiting them to 4%, or 6% in locations where a landlord pays for utilities. The previous plan called for 7% to 9%.
The race also features social worker Nadine Diaz, a Boyle Heights resident waging her second campaign for the seat. Diaz has promised to fight corruption and push back against expensive real estate development, but she has had limited resources to spread those messages. So far, she has raised only $7,500, according to a recent filing.
Also in the mix are nonprofit consultant Genny Guerrero and attorney Teresa Y. Hillery. A resident of El Sereno, Guerrero has argued for increased LAPD foot patrols and talked up her volunteer work.
Both Guerrero and Hillery support the mayor's push to expand the size of the LAPD. Hillery, who lives downtown, wants to move traffic enforcement out of the police department, freeing up money for other programs.
Like several of her rivals, Hillery has called for an increase in mental health services for the city's unhoused residents. After volunteering in Skid Row for several years, she said she understands the complexities around the issue.
"I've been meeting the needs of the unhoused well before running for office. It's my destiny, purpose and calling," she said.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
