It has been confirmed. Santa Ana Housing & Redevelopment Commissioner Lynette Verino has pulled papers to run for the Rancho Santiago Community College District Board of Education seat that current Trustee Al Amezcua is vacating in November.
And that’s not all. It looks like folks are coming together behind Ana Rebecca Valencia-Verdin, the progressive candidate and Floral Park resident who is taking on the despised Clowncilman Carlos Bustamante in Ward 3.
Santa Ana Housing & Redevelopment Commission Chair Deborah Vasquez is hosting a meeting with Valencia-Verdin on August 5, at Dr. Art Lomeli’s office, at 6 p.m. His office is located at 415 N. Sycamore, in downtown Santa Ana. The meeting will be held in the basement of Dr. Lomeli’s building. If you are interested in meeting Valencia-Verdin and helping her campaign you may send an email to Vasquez at this link.
The ballots in Santa Ana this November will be dominated by female candidates. With the exception of right wing nut Rosie Avila, who is running against incumbent Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez in the 47th Congressional District, all of the female candidates in Santa Ana are Democrats. I would venture to say that most of them are progressive, except for Avila and Santa Ana Clowncilwoman Claudia Alvarez.
Santa Ana Councilwoman Michele Martinez is taking on Mayor Miguel Pulido in November as well (the Red County video above depicts Martinez speaking at an immigration rally). And there are several announced female candidates for the Santa Ana Unified School District, including businesswoman Irene Ibarra; SAUSD employee Cecilia Aguinaga, who ran and lost two years ago; EPIC Commissioner Valerie Amezcua; and community activist Gloria Alvarado.
Speaking of Alvarado, she is featured in a post written in Spanish by Carlos Lopez Dzur, over at his new blog “La Naranja.” I have asked Dzur to translate the post, but have not heard back from him. You can read Google’s English language translation of his post at this link. A word of warning, Google’s translation leaves much to be desired.
Could this be the year of the woman in Santa Ana? I think they will benefit from having Barack Obama atop the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket. Duds like Pulido and Bustamante won’t get a push from the Obama ticket. But progressive women should do well. Will these candidates rise to the occasion? Perhaps. But not without a lot of help.
Martinez will get the most press. But she needs to distance herself from her longtime patron, Al Amezcua. I hear they had a public spat on Saturday night so perhaps that process has already begun. Or she might be fooling with us yet again.
Martinez may want to give my co-blogger Thomas Gordon a call. He is now leaning against running for Mayor again. That is bad news for Martinez as Gordon would hurt Pulido by stealing a few white votes from him. Now it looks like the only other mayoral candidate will the Czech who shall not be named. And he won’t do much in this race.
The bottom line for all of these women will be fundraising. With Martinez sucking the air out of the room, the rest of these women will be hard-pressed to raise money. Some of them, such as Ibarra, have already proven that they can raise money. Most of them will have a heck of a time. I suspect Verino will do well and she may not be challenged. Amezcua will lean hard on Martinez and her dad to raise money. Aguinaga will have to sink her own money into her school board race. I don’t see that happening. Alvarado will try to use her labor connections to her advantage. Big labor likes Ibarra too.
As for Valencia-Verdin, I suggest you try to meet her on August 5 and form your own opinions. I am glad she is in the race and I hope she takes out Bustamante. That would be a boon to us all!
Ana Rebecca who?
Thought I remembered Art saying Michele don’t speak Spanish. Her Spanish sounds pretty good in this video.
To All:
With the current fiscal condition of the state having continued to deteriorate over the last 20 years, we as a state have reached the tipping point. The next problem area will be municipalities. The major municipalities are already in the news (LA/SD/SF/Oakland). Several of the major central valley cities will be next. The third level will include cities such as Santa Ana. Anaheim is the 4th largest city in the State. It will whether the storm, in large part because of its management. In OC, Placentia, my home town, faces this same situation right now in its situation with CalTrans and the debacle of burying the train tracks that have been there for the better part of 100 years (its the major train line from Southern California to the central and southern areas of the US).
With respect to Santa Ana, I am at a loss for words. The SACC can best be described as ignorant and ineffectual without any leadership now or in the future. What will occur is a deepening of the morass of lack of leadership and an absence of focus on building a city that we all can be proud of. What the citizens of Santa Ana suffer with is a City Council without any vision for where the city should be in 10 years or 20 years. The mayor is reelected in large part because the citizens of Santa Ana fall into the ASSUMPTION TRAP. They assume that Pulido, as Mayor, must know what he is doing since he has been on the council and in the mayors position lo these many years. Latino voters presume that the City Council members, as Latinos, have their best interests at heart when in fact we see ignorant and poor decision making on an on going basis. There is not much hope for the future of Santa Ana. As a Latino, I have to say that the vision of years ago of a bright and articulate Latino political leadership in California did not take into account those situations where municipalities faced absence of intelligence and integrity:that best describes the current Mayor and the City Council of Santa Ana. The losers: ALL the residents of Santa Ana.