SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In the race for Sacramento Mayor, two candidates are asking for your vote.
They are current Assemblymember Kevin McCarty and public health professional Dr. Flojaune “Flo” Cofer.
McCarty, who is 52, has spent the past 10 years representing Sacramento in the state Assembly. Prior to that, this lifelong Sacramentan served a decade as a city councilmember.
He says he has “experience knowing how to work within the system and support. I have the majority of people who serve on the legislative bodies in Sacramento — the County Board of Supervisors, City Council — who have engaged in this race, endorsed our campaign.”
Cofer, who is 41, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa. and moved to Sacramento two decades ago for an epidemiology fellowship at the Department of Public Health.
“I was working professionally in public health and also serving on local committees: Active Transportation, the Mayor's Climate Commission and then our Measure U Tax Advisory Committee, and I realized that the plans we were putting together needed someone who had executive leadership experience to help us execute and implement them, and that's what really pushed me to run for mayor,” Cofer said.
HOMELESSNESS
COFER: “One of the ways that we need to improve is coordination. We have a lot of great people here who are doing important work, but we’re not connected and so we’re failing people. We have people going to our emergency rooms or our jails or calls for 911 but not getting connected into long-term services that exist here…So before we add any more money, I want us to look and see — how can we better use the dollars we have and partner with one another so we get to real solutions?”
McCARTY: “I think that we need to enforce the law: we can’t have encampments around the city of Sacramento. I want to audit our city funding to make sure we’re getting our biggest bang-for-our-buck, for every dollar we spend. We need to find appropriate places where we can find tiny homes, places people can camp… I think we need to focus on partnering more with the county. The county of Sacramento has 10 times more resources than the city on these issues. And lastly, look at behavioral health… I think certain individuals need to have treatment.”
McCarty has said in mayoral forums — and recently released a digital ad repeating the statement — that Cofer wants to put homeless encampments in Sacramento’s city parks. Cofer calls this a mischaracterization of her stance and deliberate twisting of her words.
Read about the controversy HERE.
CRIME / POLICE
“There are gun crimes that have increased, unfortunately, with young people in city of Sacramento,” McCarty said. “I think there's a sense that public safety is still a lingering issue with the feelings in our community.”
He said he would like to hire more police officers.
“I used to be a city council member, so I went back and looked 15 years ago,” McCarty said. “We had 67,000 fewer people in the city of Sacramento and 49 more sworn police officers. So we (now) have way more people here and fewer police officers, and I think that that doesn't make us more safe.”
Before hiring more officers, he said the city needs to take in more revenue.
“Right now, we're facing a $40 million city deficit, so to say that, ‘On day one, I'm going to hire 100 new police officers’ or 49 to get us where we were 15 years ago — is unrealistic,” McCarty said.
Cofer said she’d like to see alternative responders help supplement the current workload of the Sacramento police officers.
“Right now, over 30% of their time is being spent on activities that are not police activities, and so I'd like to see them be able to focus on the tasks that they were trained and were signed up to do, and I'd like to see us have other professionals being able to supplement their work and being able to support them and making sure that we're able to achieve safety in our region,” Cofer said. “Public safety has to include police and fire, but it's not exclusively police and fire.”
McCarty agrees that alternative responders, to some degree, would be helpful.
“I think we need to talk about how we can focus on our response — having some calls with alternative responses — but taking money from the from the police department, I think, is a bad idea that would make Sacramento more unsafe,” McCarty said.
He’s referring to Cofer’s plan to reallocate unfilled positions within the Sacramento Police Department that are currently sitting empty.
“Our police chief has been very clear that we don't have anybody in the academy to fill the 115 vacancies we have,” Cofer said. “What I've talked about is taking some of the vacant positions that our police chief has already said can't be filled and actually moving them over so that other professionals can help our police department, so we can have faster response rates and we can do the things necessary. I've also been very clear that I am not talking about cutting officers. What I'm talking about is shifting dollars around so we can get the best outcomes.”
She said the shift would happen over time.
“What I've talked about is wanting to get us back to the 2018-19 budget, because that was the budget that we set when we said ‘We're going to continue to fund the police budget but we're going to spend the new (voter-approved Measure U) money elsewhere,’” Cofer said. “Unfortunately, over the last four years, we have increased the police budget by $100 million without giving them the support to be able to improve their response times and the support that they need to be able to do their jobs well. And so I want us to have a functional public safety department, and that involves shifting around some of the dollars to other public safety tasks so that everybody can do their job at maximal efficiency and we can actually get the outcomes that every Sacramentan wants, which is to be able to feel safe moving around our community.”
McCarty disagrees with her approach.
“I'm concerned about the policy suggestion from my opponent, to take 30% of the budget from the police department,” McCarty said. “I don't think that's going to make Sacramento safer. I think that's going to have us more at risk.”
LOCAL ECONOMY
McCARTY: “How can we utilize our state buildings downtown that are vacant right now to build more housing on those sites?” McCarty said. “Right now, they pay zero property taxes. To put them in the private sector hands, to get more money in the city coffers and bring life and housing to downtown… How can we streamline the development department to bring in more business to the city of Sacramento? So I'm looking at opportunities: how we can make our city thrive more but also, more importantly, bring in more revenues so we can do things like expand our police department?”
Both he and Cofer talked about bringing more students to the Downtown area.
“(One thing) I'm already working on with the University of California and CSU Sac State is have more college activity downtown,“ McCarty said. “We have programs already. What can we do to bring student housing downtown to expand the CSU campus? They already have a site over in the Southside Park area. They want to go downtown because Sac State is bursting at the seams, so I think that's a great idea for our core.”
COFER: “We need to be thinking of new opportunities,” Cofer said. “One of the great ones is that Sac State is interested in bringing a residential campus right downtown…We also know that people especially want to come downtown for entertainment. Downtown Partnership have shared those data. And so really making downtown a destination point for entertainment and a place where young people who are majoring in political science and criminal justice are right there at the heart of the capital of California - is a great opportunity academically and professionally for them. It's a great opportunity for our businesses, and it's a great opportunity for the region.”
McCARTY: “Overall though, we need to diversify our economy away from too much of an abundance and focus on state jobs,” McCarty said. “So I really like this idea over here in the Stockton Boulevard area and Aggie Square. I've worked on that for a number of years to bring in more research and tech and medical jobs to the core of Sacramento. If you look at teaching hospitals throughout the nation, it's a huge economic engine, and so that just has a tremendous opportunity to further grow our economy in non-state jobs.”
HOUSING
COFER: “One of the things we need to do to bring more housing to Sacramento is really create an environment where we can efficiently begin to take advantage of the vacant buildings that we have, to take advantage of the vacant parcels that we have and allow people to really be able to build and expand,” Cofer said. “I'm excited about the ways that we're going to be looking at deed restrictions and we're going to looking at traditional affordable housing and we're going to be looking at housing at all levels — but with a priority on affordability and attainability — and really getting to a place where we are going to be matching up with our climate goals and doing infill development in places where we already have transit infrastructure and where people already are, so that we can get people housing that they can afford and also be able to move about our city in ways that are healthy and productive and support their well-being.”
McCARTY: “One thing I want to do - and I have been doing - is looking at our state buildings and recycling them into housing,” McCarty said. “One: we turn a building that's vacant into something positive – housing, which we need way more in the city of Sacramento. And you're bringing tax dollars, because right now, those buildings pay zero property taxes because they're state-owned.”
He said the issue of housing is inextricably linked with the city’s homelessness crisis and economy.
“We have a $40 million deficit to zero-in and make sure that we're spending monies on the appropriate priorities for the residents of City of Sacramento,” McCarty said. “I don't think we can go back to the voters and tax them. They've said ‘no’ as recently as the last March election. So what can we do to a grow our economy? So I have ideas to streamline our building department, to make it easier for people to open restaurants and create more housing and businesses downtown and throughout the city of Sacramento.”
MEANINGFUL ENDORSEMENTS
COFER: “I am proud to be endorsed by our city's teachers, our city's nurses, and by nine Democratic organizations…I have Latino Dems and Latinx Young Dems. That I have all of the women's organizations — the political organizations — that makes me really, really proud, because it speaks to our desire for new leadership in Sacramento.”
McCARTY: “I have dozens of endorsements from elected leaders — from city council members to current and former mayors, from a district attorney to legislative leaders to local leaders in Congress — but the ones that I'm most excited about are the ones that people probably haven't heard of before: neighborhood association presidents… business leaders throughout some of the regional business districts… youth programs…because, you know, they know I'm about results and making a difference for Sacramento.”
FUNDRAISING
According to the latest campaign statement, which tracks spending through Oct. 19, McCarty has received slightly more than $1 million in contributions this calendar year, with $240,668 cash-on-hand. Cofer has received close to $525,000, with nearly $100,000 cash-on-hand.
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