Get the facts on the California candidates running for election to the City Council, District 3 — City of Oakland
Find out their top 3 priorities, their experience, and who supports them.
The League of Women Voters of Oakland invites you to a Candidate Forum on October 2nd at 6-7:30 pm featuring Oakland City Council D3. The candidates are:
Carroll Fife
Lynette Gibson McElhaney
Seneca C. Scott
Meron Y. Semedar
Alexus D. Taylor
Faye E. Taylor
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Carroll Fife is running for Oakland City Council to represent the people of District 3. She is an executive director, a community leader, a mother and a fearless freedom fighter. As director of ACCE Oakland, she helped found Moms for Housing and passed legislation at the state and local level to build collective power for tenants. She has fought back against police terrorism and helped to build a network of Black organizations and individuals working together for community self-determination.
She has been involved in Oakland electoral politics for over a decade. She is an elected member of the Oakland NAACP’s Executive Committee and serves as the housing chair of the organization. Since 2014, she has managed several campaigns, including Oakland's first ever slate of all Black women candidates for City Council and the OUSD Board. She was a 2016 and 2020 Platform Committee delegate for Senator Bernie Sanders and drafted an amendment for the 2020 Democratic National Convention Platform to make housing a human right.
Carroll’s legislative and electoral accomplishments include the grassroots organizing energy behind Oakland’s Department of Race and Equity, pushing for the Cannabis Equity Permit program, protecting the Coliseum area from gentrification, passing Oakland’s emergency eviction moratoria and pandemic eviction ban, and most recently, pressuring the City Council to reopen the City budget in order to divest from Oakland’s police department to invest in community services. Carroll facilitates many grassroots coalitions, mentors youth organizations and candidates running for elected office and is a trusted advocate and servant of marginalized people everywhere.
With over 15 years of community-rooted experience, I have founded or led multiple organizations and understand how to build coalitions and work with the people to leverage their power to create the changes needed for equity and justice.
COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequities and further threatened basic human rights. I will lead the council in addressing head-on the challenges of providing for housing, a living wage, and a safe community for everyone.
Systemic racism, discrimination and the outcomes they create are self-perpetuating, and targeted disinvestment in marginalized communities exacerbates centuries of oppression. We must work to dismantle the prison-industrial complex by investing in communities on the front end versus expensive punitive measures down the road. The network of organizations I work with see the beauty and genius in populations that have been disregarded. We work with formerly incarcerated community members to co-create programs and policy ideas based on their lived experiences and needs. It is critical to have our systems-impacted family in leadership positions through appointments to boards and commissions and other organizational structures.
Housing is key to a sustainable life for everyone, especially those coming home. Through an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, Moms for Housing highlighted the crisis of limited housing access and unaffordability in Oakland. In addition, this action also surfaced that there are 4 vacant homes for each unhoused person in our city. With thoughtful planning, we can house the homeless and our community members navigating reentry. The release of people from CA prisons to reduce transmission. It demonstrates how unnecessary some of the sentences are emphasizes the problems with over-incarceration. If elected to District 3, I will work with my city council colleagues and county supervisors to create pilots and identify existing programs that increase access to housing and jobs, which tend to be huge hurdles for those recently released. Great programs exist such as Oakland Private Industry Council, Building Futures, St. Vincent DePaul. Often, it is lack of outreach, communication and information about what exists and delayed funding to existing organizations that make this a challenging system to navigate, so I see it as part of my job to ensure that residents in Oakland are aware of resources available and the nonprofits that serve them don’t experience unnecessary and destabilizing payment delays. I will also advocate for programs and policies to supplement where we are currently lacking.
Prior to COVID 19, council meetings were often difficult for the public to attend due to long agendas and late nights. Also agenda items are often placed at times where community members could not participate. Now public meetings are on zoom, they are still long, but they are held during the day, which has increased accessibility - but only for those who aren't working. As a council member, my top priority would be to make sure that public meetings are accessible and participation is prioritized for everyone who is able. I suggest the following:
I will also follow the lead of other CM's by communicating with my constituents about items on the agenda and asking for feedback and having open door policy for constituents to share their ideas/concerns,
Translations of materials into constituent languages is a MUST as well as the provision of professional interpreters (including ASL) available at every meeting. City council and committee meetings must be made accessible for disabled residents.
Emphatically yes! In the face of increasing corporate influence on elected officials, we must have checks and balances to ensure our electeds engage the democratic process. Far too often, we see a lack of accountability and transparency from the people we elect to represent us and end up with a largely apathetic constituency whose needs go unmet.
in addition to all of those suggestions, I would:
As people across the nation rise up to demand an end to racist police violence, and as our unfunded liabilities put the City of Oakland on a trajectory toward insolvency, it is time to relocate our public resources to preventing violence and avoiding bankruptcy, instead of reacting to it with more violence and throwing our tax dollars away. By reallocating part of the public funding we spend on policing in Oakland into programs that are actually proven to prevent violence, we can build a safer community for everyone.
As councilmember in D3, I will divest from militarized policing to invest in community-based violence prevention programs. Oakland could save hundreds of millions in public dollars by:
Those cost savings would be reinvested in violence intervention programs like the recently launched MH First community response network, as well as investments in housing, early childhood education, and other services proven to prevent violence before it happens.
I support innovative and community-driven ideas for generating revenue that will not only help the city bring in money, but would promote equity and inclusiveness. To do this I would
I am currently advocating support of Proposition 15 - Schools and Communities First. Pending the outcome, I would also work to make our property tax structure more progressive - focusing on luxury housing or owners with multiple single-family properties. In addition, I would also work with state legislators to ensure that Oakland can capitalize on grants or budget allocations to benefit the city.
Lynette Gibson McElhaney is serving a second term representing Oakland's Council District 3 – the area that includes West Oakland, Downtown/Uptown, Jack London, Pill Hill/KONO, the Lake, and the Port of Oakland. A 20-year leader in affordable housing with experience as an executive director for a housing nonprofit, she is known as a bridge builder and advocate that balances neighborhood needs with the need of the local economy to create jobs, expand opportunities, and increase access to retail and services for local residents. In 2015, She was named one of San Francisco Business Times’ “most influential women in Bay Area business.”
I strongly believe that those with the most lived experience must be centered in policy making that concerns them. This is why I routinely meet with community leaders who are formerly incarcerated to be sure that their wisdom informs my policy making process.
We allocated a large portion of Oakland’s CARES act funding to housing resources. Ensuring that formerly incarcerated individuals have reliable housing where they can safely isolate as needed is one of the most vital ways that we can prevent the spread of COVID-19 to these individuals.
Additionally, I’m currently working to establish a program in our Fire Department to employ previously incarcerated Oaklanders with fire suppression training.
As with the rest of our programs, the COVID crisis upended our normal operating procedures for the noticing and conduct of public meetings. I supported the resumption of Rules Committee and our sunshine ordinance. Since COVID-19, the city has used online tools to broadcast meetings, and we have seen a huge increase in participation overall and marginalized groups. It will be important that we continue, post-COVID-19, to make our meetings as accessible as possible and take advantage of what we have learned during this crisis. I also believe that our online document management system is far too complicated and should be made much easier for people to access.
I was proud to sponsor the legislation crafted in partnership with the Oakland LWV to create just such a process. It is a common sense reform to a system that serves no one well. I was tremendously disappointed by several of my colleagues who were not receptive to it and I am committed to continuing to educate them and the public about the need for this reform.
I was proud to lead the budget team that recommended and ultimately won authorization of the Task Force on Reimagining Public Safety. I was also the champion for creating the Department of Violence Prevention several years ago to expand and improve investments in non-police interventions to reduce violence in our community. I am a strong proponent of the cease-fire model that proved to be so successful in Richmond, CA where we provide strong wrap-around services to those most likely to be involved in serious violent crime. Similarly, I believe we need to transition funds away from enforcement activities around sex trafficking which have completely failed in our City. Instead, we need a dramatic increase in the investment we make in survivors of intimate partner violence and sex trafficking. Our runaway children need access to emergency shelters and safe havens, survivors of domestic violence need immediate access to shelter and strong advocacy, and witnesses of violent crime need immediate access to mental health services. As these issues disproportionately impact people of color and the LGBTQ community, addressing them and providing the services that people need will make our City a more equitable place.
I support many efforts to increase revenue for the City of Oakland but am mindful of the inequitable harm that regressive tax systems have on poor communities. I support modernizing Oakland’s business tax rules but want to be sure that the end result is that more companies relocate to Oakland. I believe that we need to reauthorize the wildfire assessment prevention district so that the low-income flatlands no longer need to subsidize residents in the hills for wildfire services. Additionally, I am interested in exploring demand responsive parking rates, continuing to invest in the health and safety of downtown to draw more businesses and residents to the area, and implementing the new types of tax increment financing created by the state in recent years to pay for infrastructure improvements.
Meron Semedar brings 15 years of community organizing, social justice, human rights and refugee plight advocacy influencing local and international policy makers. Here is his story.
Born to freedom fighter parents in the middle of the active war for Eritrean independence, I grew up among soldiers who were ready to give their lives for the freedom of their people and country. As a child I had to run and hide from Russian-backed Ethiopian fighter jets and their bombs to save my life. We gained independence from Ethiopia by a hard-fought war in 1991. Luckily both my parents had survived and I was able to meet my father for the first time since my birth. Our happy family moved toKeren, the second largest city in Eritrea.
My two brothers and I started school in Keren. We were diligent students as we knew from early on the important role that education would play in our future. Unfortunately, war broke out again between Eritrea and Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000. This had a direct impact in my family as I lost my father to a senseless border war that continues to drag the two countries backward. Not long after that, my hopes and dreams of becoming somebody were cut short as the only university in the country was closed, and remains closed to this day.
The regime in Eritrea became an absolute dictatorship, with records of gross human rights violations. I was forced to flee the country that my father had fought and died for. Leading a group of five men while escaping our home country overnight, we made it to safety after twenty hours of harrowing hardship and danger - and we became refugees in Sudan. I was the first one in my immediate and non- immediate family to become a refugee. This decision was hard to make but necessary for my survival and that of my family.
After seven months in Sudan, with the help of smugglers I was able to reach to South Africa. In South Africa, as a refugee, I worked as a waiter and finished my Engineering degree. It was here in South Africa I first witnessed the effect of colonialism and the impact of systemic racial injustice. As an African, I was also not welcome by black South Africans for the fear of taking their jobs. I witnessed South Africans killing other African people in the most horrific xenophobic attacks. In this environment I became an overnight activist to make the voice of follow refugees heard and gain the necessary respect.
My work as an activist, giving voice to the plight of refugees in South Africa and around the world, and upholding human rights and democracy in Eritrea, brought me to the United States in October 2012 to speak at the One Young World international summit along with former President Bill Clinton, the 7th UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and many other world leaders and international activists.
Here in America, I saw firsthand a life worth pursuing and a place where I might one day be able to really contribute in a significant way. Soon I had to battle with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) regarding my status. After a yearlong battle, I was finally granted asylum at the end of 2013 and made Oakland my home.
To this date Oakland remains my home and I will never trade it for any other city. When I first arrived in Oakland, the city was welcoming, and life was less difficult, even for someone like me who came with nothing but my soul. Having lived for seven years in District 3, today the city and especially District 3 has become difficult to recognize and life in Oakland has become so very expensive. Also, we are facing great trauma during this COVID-19 pandemic as well as very few leaders that truly want to address the pressing issues that we have here in District 3 and around the country.
I am running for office in City Council District 3 to have our voices better heard regarding affordable housing and good policing and helping find housing for our homeless population. I promise to bring new and fresh ideas to improve the quality of life in District 3 and in our city. I will listen to you, your concerns and your dreams.
Locally I have become a member of many organizations and platforms such as the East Bay Refugee and Immigrant Forum (EBRIF), Student Outreach for Refugees, Asylees and Immigrants (SORAI) at the University of San Francisco and continue to address and organize events to educate and empower disenfranchised communities. Such events have often been held in collaboration with local and international organizations and universities. I have been very involved in advocacy both at a local level and on the international platform to influence policy makers on refugee plights and the upholding of human rights, such as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), African Studies Association, One Young World and the United Nations Youth Assembly.
After 15 years of life as a refugee, stateless person and asylee, in November 2019 I became a proud US citizen which I see as a second chance in my life. Since my arrival in this great nation in October 2012, I continue to give back by educating and empowering communities through hosting events on issues such as immigration, resettlement, mental health, volunteering to feed our homeless community and supporting local organizations. I strive to be a role model for youth by trying to motivate and uplift them. I have travelled to several places around the world to address issues of racial injustice, human rights, refugee plights, youth empowerment, poverty alleviation and the role of education.
My work in collaboration with local and international organizations has shaped the approach to many policies. I have led many organizations, created clubs at institutions and stood at the forefront of numerous protests to better the lives of many. I am inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela: “What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived; it is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”
Running for public office is my way of giving back to the community and country that welcomed me with open arms. As a refugee, immigrant and now a proud US citizen, I bring unique abilities, lifelong rich experiences and problem-solving skills to uplift our community in District 3 and in the greater Oakland area.
https://meronsemedar.org/
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