The Plan

Nine things I want to bring to the South Gate City Council, and what each one actually takes. Every number here has a source behind it. Where a proposal has limits, I say so.

The Truth About the Deficit

South Gate doesn't have a debt problem. It has a paycheck problem. Debt is money you owe from the past, and you can pay it off. A deficit is when the bills keep growing and the paycheck doesn't. That's us. By the city's own numbers, it takes in about 71 million dollars a year and it costs about 80 million to keep running the way it has, pushed up by pension, health, and insurance costs that are mostly set outside city hall. That's the nine million dollar gap. For years, one time federal money helped cover it, and that money is nearly all spent. So the city started cutting. This year's budget cuts 7.3 million on top of about 2 million cut last year, and it still spends 6.7 million more than it brings in. That comes out of the savings the council can freely spend, which will be down to about 3 million by next summer. And nothing here gets paid off. Until the math changes, a gap comes back every single year.

City hall saw this coming and waited. These costs didn't appear overnight. They climbed year after year in the city's own budgets, while one time federal relief made everything look fine on the surface. There was time to act when smaller fixes were still possible. Instead, the cuts landed first: the school crossing guards, the police forensic unit, the crime prevention officer, more than 30 positions citywide. And now the ask lands on your ballot all at once, when families are already stretched. Every year of waiting burned a year when this could have been solved gently, and it left you with the hardest version of the choice.

There's no easy fix, and anyone who promises one is selling something. We've already seen what cutting looks like: school crossing guards cut at the start of the school year, the police forensic unit gone, the crime prevention officer who ran Neighborhood Watch and National Night Out gone, and one clerk left to cut every check the city writes. Cut deeper and you lose the things that make this a city. And we can't keep coming back to residents with a new tax every time the budget comes up short. So grow South Gate's economy until that stops being the only option: fill Tweedy's storefronts, back licensed home restaurants, and keep city spending local, so more money is earned here, spent here, and comes back to the city on its own. Growth takes years, and I won't pretend it fixes this November. But level with people about the money, track every public dollar, and build an economy that carries us, and the gap stops being a surprise and starts being a plan.

See Every Dollar, Every Vote

The city budget as charts you can read in five minutes. Right now the budget is a thick packet of tables. I want one page on the city website that turns it into simple charts and graphs: a pie chart of where the money comes from, a bar chart of where it goes, department by department, and a line showing how each one has changed over the last few years. In plain English and Spanish, and you can tap any chart to see the detail behind it.

Every payment the city makes, posted every month. The city already produces this list. It's inside the council meeting packet, which ran 289 pages on September 8. Put it on its own page. It costs almost nothing, and it's the easiest one to do first.

I'm going to be honest, this wasn't some huge project, but it wasn't easy either, and that's the point. The city already has all of these numbers. It posts them as scanned pictures of printed pages. I had to turn those pictures back into numbers and check every one. The city could just post the real file every meeting. They have the staff, they have the budget. So why haven't they? See it for yourself at alang4sg.com/taxdollars.

See the next deficit coming. San Jose and Oakland let residents search city spending by department or vendor and watch the trends in simple charts. South Gate needs the same, because a deficit you can see coming is one you can fix early. This one costs money, a yearly software fee, and I'll tell you the number before I ask anyone to vote on it.

Big contracts get a real conversation. At a typical council meeting, hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts and payments get approved in one bundled vote, in a matter of seconds, often with little or no discussion. It's called the consent calendar. Everything in it is disclosed. Almost none of it is discussed. Any council member can pull an item to talk it through in public, and it rarely happens. I'll propose that contracts above a set amount get discussed one by one, in public, every time.

Know who funds the people voting on your contracts. State law already bars council members from voting on contracts involving their recent campaign donors. Let's make that check public: every contract that reaches the council should say, right in the paperwork, whether anyone involved gave to a council member's campaign. The city already has a disclosure form for this. It should be part of every contract's paperwork, not a separate download. And every council member's financial disclosure is already filed online. Put it on the same page as the budget, where people will actually see it.

Know who's paid to work the vote. Right now, anyone can be paid to push the council or city staff on a contract, a permit, or a rezoning, and nobody has to write it down. South Gate has no lobbying rule at all. El Monte, a city our size a few miles away, fixed this in 2023: paid lobbyists register with the city clerk, report twice a year who is paying them and what they worked on, and pay a fine if they're late. I'll bring South Gate the same rule with one upgrade: the list goes on the city website, on the same page as the budget charts, and every contract that reaches the council names the lobbyists who worked it. Council members say on the record, before they vote, who they met with about it. And when a council member or department head leaves city hall, they wait a year before they can come back as a paid lobbyist. None of this stops anyone from making their case. It just means we all get to see who's making it, and who's paying them.

Every vote on the record. Every open seat where you'll actually see it. A simple public record of how each of the five voted on every major item, so you don't have to read minutes to find out. Open seats on city boards posted on the front of the website and on social media, not in a notice that goes up once a year. And since the Go South Gate app already collects your service requests, publish the report card: how many potholes were reported, and how fast they got fixed.

Transparency only works if we use it. A city hall that isn't transparent and a public that isn't watching is exactly how officials drift from their promises without consequence. That is city hall's half. The next one is ours.

Hold Us To It

Don't hope you elected the right person. Check. If I had a dollar for every candidate who promised transparency and accountability, I could fund this campaign twice. So here's what those words mean to me. You shouldn't have to hope you elected the right person and find out later. You should be able to check. The section above is city hall's half of that deal. This section is yours: making it as easy as possible for South Gate to show up and hold its government accountable, starting with me.

Every idea on this website lives or dies on a Tuesday night. The rent protections, the home restaurants, the readable budget, all of it gets decided at a council meeting, by three votes out of five. And here's the part nobody says out loud: when residents aren't watching and aren't voting, those decisions still get made. Just without you. Participation isn't a civic duty speech. It's the difference between a South Gate that happens to you and a South Gate you had a hand in building.

Every student leaves high school registered to vote. I want South Gate known as the city where that just happens. Working with the school district, the county, and the state's existing high school voter programs, every eligible senior gets the chance to register before graduation, and 16 and 17 year olds can pre register on the spot, so their registration turns on the day they turn 18. Will that guarantee they all show up to the polls? No, and I won't pretend otherwise.

Register wherever the city already meets you. A voter registration form at every city counter and at every event South Gate already runs, and a registration QR code on every piece of paper the city sends you, from the utility bill to a business license. It costs almost nothing. It just means the city stops waiting.

More voters make my job harder. Good. Every voter this adds can vote against me too. That's the deal, and I'll take it, because a council that answers to more of South Gate is a better council, whoever sits on it.

Keep South Gate Affordable

South Gate has no local rent protections. None. According to the Census Bureau, 54.7% of households in this city rent, and all of them rely entirely on the state's default rule. California sets a ceiling on how much rent can go up each year. Any city is allowed to set a lower number. South Gate never has.

What that has cost us. For the last five years, the state's ceiling was the only limit here, and it ran between 8% and 10% every year: 8.6% in 2021, 10% in 2022, 8.8% in 2023, 8.9% in 2024, and 8% in 2025. This year it's 8.7%. Put those years together and a $1,500 apartment in 2021 can legally rent for $2,290 today. That's a 53% increase in five years, and none of it broke a rule. Those are legal maximums, not what every landlord charged. The point is that the law allowed every one of them.

We don't have to invent anything. Bell Gardens already built the model. In 2022 its council passed a rent stabilization ordinance: increases capped at half of inflation and never more than 4% a year, which works out to 1.5% in Bell Gardens this year. Apply that same rule to the same five years and that $1,500 apartment would be about $1,670 today instead of $2,290, roughly $600 a month less than South Gate currently allows. The ordinance also protects renters from eviction without a stated reason, and it includes safety valves, a fair return petition and a capital improvement pass through, so a responsible landlord still earns a fair return. That last part isn't a concession, it's what keeps an ordinance like this standing up in court. No ballot measure was required. It took three council votes.

We are the outlier, not the experiment. Bell Gardens is not alone. Huntington Park adopted rent stabilization in December 2024, capped at 3% or inflation, whichever is lower. Cudahy, Maywood and Commerce all have local ordinances of their own. South Gate, Bell and Downey have nothing. When people say this is untested, they are describing a rule that already governs the cities on three sides of us.

Who it would cover, plainly. State law limits what any city can do here: a city can only cap rent in apartments built before February 1995, and not in single family homes or condos at all. A Bell Gardens style ordinance in South Gate would cover thousands of families in our apartment buildings, and it would not cover every renter. Our own estimate is somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 renter households, roughly a third to just under half of South Gate renters, and city staff would need to replace that estimate with a parcel by parcel count before anything was drafted. I would rather you hear the limit from me than find it later.

Affordable rent is economic development. For a family the ordinance does cover, $600 a month is over $7,000 a year that can be spent at South Gate businesses instead of on rent. When families can afford to stay, the businesses on Tweedy keep their customers. This isn't only a renter issue.

What it actually takes. Three votes on a five member council, and renters who show up. Bell Gardens' ordinance followed about three years of residents organizing and packing council meetings before the vote happened. Winning a seat gets you one vote and a place to organize from. It does not by itself deliver the other two. I will bring the ordinance forward and say so publicly before I am asked. The rest is a room full of people, and that part is up to us.

Keep Our Money in South Gate

Keep our money circulating in South Gate. Every dollar the city spends should get a chance to stay here. When city hall caters an event or needs supplies, that order should go to a South Gate coffee shop or restaurant first, not to a vendor from out of town. Our own city budget should be a customer of our own businesses.

Local businesses get a fair edge on city contracts. Right now South Gate has no local preference at all in its contracting rules. Cities like LA and Long Beach already give local and small businesses a scoring edge when they bid, and I'll bring the same policy here. It costs nothing but the vote to pass it.

And none of this touches a single city job. This is about which outside company wins work that's already going outside. City services stay city services, done by city workers. No outsourcing, period. Local and fair, or not at all.

From Home Kitchen to Tweedy Storefront

LA County will permit you to cook and sell from your own home. Our city's rulebook just hasn't caught up. LA County already has a program called Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations that lets residents run mini restaurants from their own kitchens. Those permits are available to South Gate residents right now, but our city's rulebook was written before home restaurants existed and hasn't caught up, so people get turned away or scared off. In my first year, I'll bring the simple code update that fixes that.

You shouldn't need a hundred thousand dollars to find out if your food can sell. Starting a home kitchen operation costs about $1,500 in fees and permits. Opening a restaurant costs six figures before you sell your first plate. That's the difference between a dream that waits and a business that starts this year.

The fastest way to rebuild our local economy is to grow our own. South Gate is full of talented cooks already feeding their neighbors. Let's give them a real, low risk path to build something of their own, with a pipeline that runs from home kitchen to Tweedy storefront. When our residents win, their money stays here, and South Gate wins with them.

Safety Without Surveillance

A camera error should never put an innocent neighbor in handcuffs. AI license plate readers sold by companies like Flock and Axon misread plates and flag the wrong cars, and police act on those alerts as if they're facts. Across the country, dozens of innocent drivers have been pulled over, held at gunpoint, or jailed over a camera's mistake. That's not public safety. That's being treated as a suspect first and a person second, and I don't want that system pointed at South Gate.

In a city of immigrants, this isn't abstract. California law prohibits sharing license plate data with federal immigration authorities. It's happened anyway, in city after city, because these cameras feed a nationwide network that local rules can't actually contain. Nearly half of South Gate was born outside this country. I will not support handing any system a minute by minute map of where our neighbors drive, park, pray, and drop off their kids, on a promise the technology has already broken elsewhere.

Real safety is people, not subscriptions. These systems cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, every year, while our city faces a deficit and has already cut police positions. If we have public safety dollars to spend, I want them on the things that verifiably work: officers, streetlights, and response times, not on renting cameras that watch every resident to maybe catch a few.

A City That Protects Its Own

A statement isn't protection. A law is. When the raids came in the summer of 2025, families were afraid to leave home and the city canceled its own Fourth of July celebration. A resident stood in front of the council and asked for a law. What she got was a resolution, approved in a bundle with the routine contracts, without discussion. The difference is simple. A resolution is a letter saying how the council feels. An ordinance is a rule city employees have to follow, and it stays on the books after the vote. South Gate's own rulebook still has not one line about immigration.

I'll bring South Gate the ordinance. Huntington Park already put its protections in law. Ours will say: no city staff, no city money, no city buildings, and no city data used for immigration enforcement, and no federal agents in the back offices of city buildings without a warrant signed by a judge. And I'll be honest the way I am on every page: no city can stop the federal government, and anyone who promises that is lying to scared people. What we control is us. Your own city government will never be a tool of your deportation.

The modern raid doesn't start with a knock. It starts with data. In city after city, immigration agents have found people through local license plate cameras and shared databases, even where state law says they can't. That's why my position on surveillance cameras isn't a separate issue. It's this one. South Gate will not feed the networks that track where our neighbors drive, park, work, and pray, and I'll push for a public audit of every piece of resident data the city collects and who can see it.

South Gate Is Not For Sale

A data center should never be able to slip into South Gate on one official's signature. Data centers aren't a listed use in our zoning code, but the code lets a single administrator approve an unlisted use by declaring it substantially similar to something else, and our code already lists data processing services as an office use. That's the loophole. I'll bring the ordinance that closes it: data centers named, in writing, as a prohibited use in South Gate, so this decision can never be made without you. And my own position goes on the record today: I will never vote to approve one, and I will actively oppose any attempt.

Data centers take from a community and give almost nothing back. They employ a handful of people, but where they cluster, families' electricity bills have gone up, because everyone shares the cost of their enormous demand. In South Gate, with a utility tax on the table, every rate increase would hit you twice: once on the bill, and again on the tax calculated from it. Add the constant hum of industrial cooling that neighbors in other states are suing over, millions of gallons of water for cooling, and banks of diesel backup generators in a region that already breathes some of the worst air in LA County.

Southeast LA has been the region's dumping ground for a century. Not again, not here. Our neighborhoods already live next to the freeways, the rail yards, and the industry that other cities refused. The next wave of industrial development is data centers, and the cities that couldn't say no fast enough are regretting it. South Gate's land should go to what serves the people who live here: housing, parks, and the local businesses this whole plan is built around, not windowless warehouses full of servers working for someone else.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026. If you are not registered, you can do it in about two minutes at registertovote.ca.gov.

If you have a question about any of this, or you think I have something wrong, email me. I would rather hear it now than after.