City Hall insider or nonprofit leader? This Sacramento neighborhood gets a choice this election
One is a City Hall insider. The other is the founder of a large youth nonprofit organization.
One of them will represent a redrawn Sacramento City Council district that for the first time will focus almost exclusively on traditionally underserved communities in South Natomas and Gardenland/Northgate neighborhoods.
Karina Talamantes, chief of staff for Councilwoman Angelique Ashby, and Michael Lynch, founder of Improve Your Tomorrow, are competing for the council seat that was most drastically altered during the city’s one-a-decade redistricting process.
District 3 previously included East Sacramento, River Park, the River District, and parts of north Sacramento. It is now comprised only of neighborhoods that are north of the American River — South Natomas, Gardenland/Northgate and part of North Natomas. Incumbent Councilman Jeff Harris does not live in the redrawn redistrict, and cannot seek reelection.
Both candidates in the June 7 election are people of color who grew up in low-income households and have big name endorsements.
Talamantes, president of the Sacramento County Board of Education, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She attended UC Davis, and got involved in politics in 2017 after the women’s marches that followed former President Donald Trump’s election. She then won the board election and joined Ashby’s staff.
Now 33, she and her partner bought a house in South Natomas last year. She is endorsed by Mayor Darrell Steinberg and all council members except Harris and Schenirer, who endorsed Lynch.
Lynch, 33, grew up in Stockton, and moved to south Sacramento’s Valley Hi neighborhood in ninth grade. He attended University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on a football scholarship.
Lynch pursued a career in politics after a campaign rally for former President Barack Obama inspired him in 2007. He worked in the Legislature for seven years. In 2013 he started the nonprofit Improve Your Tomorrow to help men of color get to college and graduate. The organization has grown to 130 employees, serving 3,000 men, mostly in Sacramento. He and his wife last year bought a house in South Natomas.
Homelessness strategies differ
The candidates have different ideas on how to alleviate the city’s worsening homelessness crisis.
Lynch said he is familiar with the crisis on a personal level. In eighth grade, his family slept in a garage after their eviction from a Stockton home. His mother and two younger siblings are homeless today, bouncing around from motels and their vehicles, even though his mother has a Housing Choice voucher, he said.
Lynch said he would support a variety of types of shelters — large shelters, Safe Ground sanctioned tent encampments, motels and tiny homes. He also wants the city itself to build permanent housing, not just shelters, he said — something cities do not typically do.
Talamantes is also personally familiar with housing insecurity. Her mother and younger sister were evicted when her dad died. They were fortunate in that they were able to move to a home their family had been renting out to a tenant.
Talamantes said she would focus mostly on opening smaller homeless housing units scattered across the city. She’d also emphasize motel conversions, like the one for homeless families in the district opening this spring under the state’s Project Homekey program.
Whoever is elected will have to decide how to handle a controversial site that is already planned in the district. Harris proposed the city open prefabricated three-bedroom homes at a vacant lot in front of Garden Valley Elementary School for 15 homeless hospice patients. The council included the project in its $100 million siting plan it approved in August and it’s set to open in June, Harris said.
Lynch supports the project, he said.
“Too many people have died homeless and cold on the street,” Lynch said in a statement. “Providing hospice for unhoused people is the compassionate, right thing to do and will ensure people have the end-of-life care they desperately need. This is not a walk-up facility. It will have 24/7 staffing and will be the kind of facility that will provide dignity to people in their final days without impacting the security and safety of the surrounding area.”
Talamantes said she needs more details before deciding if she would support the project.
“I want to see the funding and who’s providing services before deciding if I want to see a shelter there,” she said.
Police support Talamantes, developers support Lynch
In the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, some activists have been calling upon cities to reduce police budgets to redirect the money to homelessness, mental health and youth.
Sacramento Police Department funding hit an all-time-high $165.8 million in the budget that started July 1. City Councilwoman Valenzuela has tried to reduce the police budget, but has been outvoted.
Lynch said he is not opposed to reducing the police budget.
“Very rarely did I walk in my neighborhood and feel safe,” Lynch, who is Black, said. “The city has done a horrible job at prevention.”
Lynch said he wants the city to expand contracts with groups like Advance Peace, which sends in trusted community members after shootings to intervene and prevent additional shootings. He also wants to grow the city’s Department of Community Response, which the council created to provide a non-police response to homeless camps and certain non-criminal 911 calls.
Talamantes said she would be open to reducing the police budget in certain situations, such as moving body camera review from sworn officers to civilians, she said.
She wants the city to hire more officers so officers will not have to work as much overtime, she said.
“If someone doesn’t want to work on Fourth of July, they shouldn’t have to,” she said.
She said she accepted the police union donation because she is willing to have conversations with both sides the way Ashby does.
“To create change, you’ve got to have a conversation,” she said. “You need to have an open door to leadership.”
Lynch attended an interview with the police union, but the union decided to endorse Talamantes instead.
In addition to the police union donation, Talamantes received $6,000 from the Central Labor Council and $1,300 from Steinberg. Many of Lynch’s campaign donations have come from real estate developers. He received $1,800 from developer Mark Friedman, and $6,000 from the California Real Estate PAC.
“Just because I’m taking a developer’s dollars does not mean I’m going to vote the way they want,” Lynch said.
He wants the city to give private developers incentives to build, especially affordable housing and retail, on the many vacant lots along Northgate Boulevard, he said.
“(Residents) say, ‘all the development goes to North Natomas, why not here?’” Lynch said.
Talamantes said she wants to be realistic in her campaign promises because she knows the way the city works, she said. A recent city staff projection shows the budget could be in a deficit for the next five years, starting in the fiscal year that starts July 1.
“It’s the small things,” Talamantes said. “More trees, parks, road resurfacing, lights, crosswalk repainting ... I’ll be a fighter.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
