Is Sacramento ‘going backwards’? Mayor candidates offer vision for new direction

A crowd gathered in a Fruitridge auditorium Saturday to hear Sacramento mayoral candidates lay out plans for addressing racial justice, police reform and health care in a forum hosted by the Sacramento NAACP.

All of the candidates onstage emphasized their commitment to pursuing evidence-based solutions to problems such as homelessness, incarceration and youth violence.

The candidates gestured at the serious problems affecting the state capital. “Sacramentans do not think things are going well,” said Flojaune “Flo” Cofer, “because they aren’t.”

Steve Hansen echoed the sentiment: “It feels like we’re just going backwards.”

The forum hosted three candidates: Cofer, senior director of policy at Public Health Advocates; Hansen, the former member of City Council who lost his seat to Katie Valenzuela in 2020; and Kevin McCarty, who represents much of the city of Sacramento as well as some neighboring unincorporated areas of Sacramento County in Assembly District 6.

Richard Pan, who represents District 6 in the state Senate, was not able to attend because of a work conflict. Pan sent in a recorded statement discussing his platform and explaining that he was at a meeting about reproductive health in the state.

Although homelessness and affordable housing were singled out as a priority by all three candidates on hand, only the final minutes of the forum directly focused on homelessness. Most of the questions were about other topics.

Homelessness is a top priority

Early in the forum, Cofer criticized political establishment.

“We often hear about everything that had been done, and yet anybody who’s been in elected leadership for the last 10 years has overseen the growth in homelessness from 2,500 people in 2013 to 10,000 people — the majority of whom are unsheltered — in 2023,” she said.

In 2013, nearly 70% of those 2,500 homeless people were sheltered; that percentage has now reversed, with 72% of the homeless population surviving — and sometimes dying — without shelter.

When the moderator, Sacramento NAACP Political Action Chair LaMills Garrett, asked about reducing systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system that have an outsize impact on Black people, Cofer again raised the issue of homelessness.

She described resources in the city and county being misused: “I’m concerned that we are shuffling all of our unhoused neighbors into our jail,” she said. “A disproportionate number of them are our Black neighbors.”

Cofer said that Sacramento officials need to set more quantifiable goals so that government could be held accountable.

Then, in the final minutes of the forum, Garrett gave the candidates a prompt: “Homelessness in Sacramento.” All three candidates said it was an urgent issue in the region. According to the most recent federal Point-in-Time count, at least 9,278 homeless people lived in Sacramento County, the majority of them in city limits.

“We’ve poured tens of millions of dollars and gotten worse and worse outcomes,” Hansen said. “We have to reset the table, get back to evidence-based solutions.” He said he was homeless himself for a time as a child: “There are things that work, but our system’s too fragmented.”

McCarty said that homelessness would be the literal first item on the agenda of every City Council meeting if he were elected.

“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” McCarty said. “We need to focus on emergency shelter sites... We gotta tell people where they can go, not where they can’t go.” He and Cofer both stated that permanent housing needs to be a bigger goal.

“We also,” Cofer said, “need a plan to keep people in their homes.” The county Department of Homeless Services and Housing reports that for every one person who gets off the streets in Sacramento County, three more people will become homeless.

Upstream intervention, evidence-based solutions

Hansen drew on his background on City Council. In response to a question about supporting youths in Sacramento, he talked about the need for sustained support rather than the uneven levels that many programs receive.

“Funding irregular programming through (community-based organizations) that are living hand-to-mouth is not sufficient to getting these opportunities,” he said. “We have to create systemic reforms so that we have ongoing funding.”

Hansen and Cofer both brought up Sacramento Ceasefire, a successful violence prevention program that operated under a state grant starting in 2011. Hansen brought up Advance Peace, another successful violence prevention program that began in January 2018 and was funded through the end of 2019.

Both programs were demonstrably successful at preventing violence. And both were scuttled.

For examples of how to fix the city’s problems, “We don’t have to look to some Nordic country or some other far-off place,” Cofer said. “We can just look right here in Sacramento. … I’m gonna take us back to what works.”

Over the course of the forum, McCarty hit on his bona fides from a nine-year career in the California Assembly as well as his time on City Council.

He described introducing a bill to create more oversight of fatal police shootings that failed five times before it was passed in 2020 as the Deadly Force Accountability Act; he talked about winning $25 million from the state to house people living on the American River Parkway, though the Board of Supervisors has not yet spent the money; he spoke about his successful bill to “ban the box” and prevent employers from inquiring about job candidates’ criminal justice history on initial job applications; and he recounted that when he served on Sacramento’s City Council, he championed youth programs.

But it was Cofer — an epidemiologist, a progressive organizer and a political newcomer known as Dr. Flo — who emerged to thunderous applause as the clear crowd favorite. Sacramento NAACP vice president Tijuana Barnes announced at the end that in a straw poll of audience members, Cofer won 72 out of 82 votes.

At one point, answering a question about how to best protect and uplift Black trans people, McCarty mentioned that in 2021, he chose California TRANScends executive director Ebony Harper as his district’s 2021 woman of the year, making her the first Black trans woman to receive that honor.

“Ebony,” he acknowledged with a smile, “she’s supporting Dr. Flo for mayor.”

When is the 2024 Sacramento mayor election?

The Sacramento mayoral election is set for March 5, 2024.

A candidate must top 50% of the vote to win outright.

If no candidate passes the 50% threshold, the two candidates with the most votes will run on the general election ballot on Nov. 5, 2024.

To register to vote or check your registration status, visit registertovote.ca.gov/.