With or without city status, East Los Angeles residents want more transparency

This history Originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on August 8, 2024, this is the third installment in a series on efforts to explore the city of East Los Angeles. Read Part 1 here and the second here.

Kristie Hernandez remembers how excited she was when she was 18 years old and preparing to vote for the first time, especially after volunteering on the campaign to elect Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor in 2001.

But her enthusiasm quickly faded when she realized that as a resident of unincorporated East Los Angeles, she would not be able to vote in Los Angeles municipal elections. Hernandez assumed that members of the Los Angeles City Council were her representatives. To this day, she said, “a lot of people in this community don’t know that we’re not an incorporated area.”

That experience as a teenager led Hernandez to become an advocate for efforts to incorporate East Los Angeles into a city, both in 2012, when the most recent city plans failed, and today, when Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo is pushing a bill that seeks to explore whether incorporation is possible this time around.

Assembly Bill 2986, introduced in March by Carrillo, calls for a study to determine whether East LA has the tax base necessary to sustain itself as a city or special district. After a critical amendment in July, the bill now requires Los Angeles County to submit the feasibility study to the state. Carrillo has made it clear that the bill would not mandate it become a city, but would simply study the possibility of doing so.

For Hernandez and other residents, this bill isn’t just about cityhood. It’s a way to draw attention to what they say is a need for greater financial transparency, services and representation for East Los Angeles, a region of nearly 120,000 residents, mostly Latino.

District 1 County Supervisor Hilda Solis represents East Los Angeles and parts of 20 other cities, as well as dozens of unincorporated communities and neighborhoods across Los Angeles, encompassing nearly 2 million residents.

In East Los Angeles, services such as police, street maintenance, construction and development, libraries, and parks and recreation are transferred to the county.

Given the region’s population size and cultural significance, some residents would like to have more say in decision-making in the region. They want to know if East LA is receiving a fair share of county services and are asking the county to be more transparent about how it spends on services across the region.

For example, Hernandez wonders what happens to the money generated by parking fines in the region.

“Is that money going back to East Los Angeles? How will we know? There is no specific budget for unincorporated areas of East Los Angeles,” Hernandez said at a community meeting in April that Carrillo held to inform residents about the bill.

Lack of parking is a big problem as developers build more housing in the unincorporated region, Hernandez said.

“I know they call us NIMBYs, but if you live in a community where they keep building without parking… What are you going to want? Anyone who has a family wants at least a parking space,” he said during the meeting.

Having local representatives, who live and are from the region, can help better address these types of issues, Hernandez said, “because we all know the daily struggles and daily challenges we face every day that impact our quality of life.”

For Genesis Coronado, a 32-year-old community organizer whose family settled in East Los Angeles after immigrating from Mexico, living in an unincorporated area makes residents feel like they are being “taxed without representation.” She hopes the study’s findings will lead to change in her neighborhood.

“If the study comes back with results that say we don’t have a lot of money to sustain ourselves, then that’s fine,” Coronado said. “So how do we build? How do we make sure the county invests in more small businesses in our corridors? What are the next steps to help us be financially viable and financially sustainable?”

The latest version of Carrillo’s bill was amended to reflect language from two motions Solis spearheaded and the rest of the county supervisors unanimously approved in April and May.

The county said that in addition to conducting the feasibility study, it would submit annual reports detailing services and investments in unincorporated communities with populations of more than 10,000. It would also analyze the feasibility and costs associated with forming a city council or municipal advisory committee to better represent the needs of East Los Angeles, acting as a bridge between the county and the unincorporated community.

With these proposals, Solis, who opposes Carrillo’s bill, says the county can do this work without the state overstepping its bounds. However, Carrillo said he made these modifications as a way to hold county officials accountable.

Coronado used to work with former District 1 Supervisor Gloria Molina and said she understands the importance of Solis’ role in East Los Angeles, but added that a city council or city advisory committee could be the missing link between the community and the county.

He said the county should invest in forming a city council or city advisory committee that could better represent East Los Angeles.

“I think the question is, why isn’t the voice of our community worth a couple of dollars of investment?” Coronado said.

East Los Angeles residents can turn to the unincorporated community of Altadena, which is represented by Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger. The community of about 42,000 residents also has a volunteer city council of residents who connect other residents with county leaders and services.

Diane Marcussen, one of 16 elected members of the Altadena City Council, said the council’s connections to the county and law enforcement are beneficial to residents.

Marcussen praised that when a developer sought to build a five-story apartment complex in Altadena in 2021, the city council reached out to the supervisor’s office to voice community concerns about the building exceeding the zoning’s allowed height for a residential zone. Both the city council and the county were able to convince the developer to reduce it to four stories.

Since 1975, Altadena residents have been elected as volunteers to serve their neighbors. Other issues they have addressed have included whether a resident’s backyard chickens are up to code or whether pigs are allowed in someone’s front yard.

“We do big things and we do pork things,” Marcussen said.

William Preciado, a retired California Highway Patrol officer, grew up in City Terrace and remembers patrolling East Los Angeles for more than 30 years.

Being on patrol helped him understand the dynamics of neighborhoods in the region. He has seen a lack of stable sources of excise taxes from big box stores like Costco or Home Depot.
Preciado, 59, now a real estate agent, said the rugged topography of certain parts of the region makes it difficult for developers to build there. Property taxes for many residents, he said, can still be too low. These things hurt East Los Angeles’ tax revenue, he added.

“Let’s look at those sales tax figures that are being generated there. Let’s look at what the property taxes are,” Preciado said.

According to Solis’ timeline, the results of the county’s study of East Los Angeles tax revenues will be released in the fall. If AB 2986 passes the state legislature and is signed by the governor, the county will have to submit the results to the state by March 2025.

The seven-member Senate Appropriations Committee will review the bill next week.

Although Preciado now lives in Chino, her mother still lives in City Terrace and visits her several times a week. She doesn’t see the addition as realistic, but supports greater transparency for a neighborhood where she has deep roots.

Preciado is proud to be from East Los Angeles and lives by the motto, “Once an East Los Angeles, always an East Los Angeles.”

He thinks about his former neighbors and the families he saw grow up around him.

“We want what’s best for East Los Angeles. If the city is the way forward, great. Let’s make sure it’s done right,” Preciado said.