Seven candidates have qualified to run in the special election to replace former Los Angeles City Council member Nury Martinez, according to the City Clerk. Martinez resigned in October amid outrage over her de ella racist, homophobic and anti-Indigenous remarks de ella during a secretly recorded conversation.
About the district
Council District 6 sits in the San Fernando Valley, stretching from Sun Valley west past the 405 Freeway to Lake Balboa. One of 15 council districts, it includes Arleta, North Hollywood, North Hills, Panorama City, Van Nuys, and Sun Valley.
Key dates
Mail-in ballots go out March 6. Election Day is April 4. If no candidate obtains a majority of votes, there will be a runoff between the top two finishers on June 27.
Here’s a first look at the candidates who qualified for the ballot, listed in alphabetical order:
Marisa Alcaraz
Maria Alcaraz is environmental policy director and deputy chief of staff to City Council member Curren Price. According to her LinkedIn bio about her, she has been in Price’s office since 2013. Prior to joining Price, Alcaraz developed policy on business, economic development, art / culture, health, and poverty for Richard Alarcón when he served on the city council from 2009-13. According to her campaign biography, Alcaraz spearheaded L.A.’s guaranteed basic income program, brought a homelessness prevention program to the city, secured millions of dollars in funding to repair and upgrade parks, and worked on initiatives to raise the minimum wage, create the city’s first green alley network and provide more healthy food options to neighborhoods. She has not yet set up a campaign website.
Rose Grigoryan
Rose Grigoryan says on her campaign website that she immigrated to the U.S. in 2012. She worked at US Armenia, a local TV station, and then for more than seven years at ARTN-Shant, a national Armenian TV network. “Meanwhile I established a marketing company that began to thrive,” she said. “Being able to support myself, I started to spend at least half of my day on educating my community on important issues,” including about assistance programs available during the pandemic.
Isaac Kim
Isaac Kim runs an online men’s grooming and skin care business. In the wake of the leaked audio scandal, he says he wants to “regain the trust of the community through transparency, accountability and accessibility.” Kim supports Mayor Bass’ initiative to address homelessness, he wants to plant more trees in the district, and he wants to address concerns about Van Nuys Airport. Kim says the airport is handling more plane traffic than was planned for, and is “spraying so much pollution and noise over Lake Balboa and Van Nuys.” He said iis website, isaacforthevalley.com, is scheduled to go live on Tuesday, Jan. 17.
Imelda Padilla
On her website de ella, Padilla says her work de ella as a community organizer has included a stint with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. She was a community outreach and engagement consultant for L.A. County’s Women and Girls Initiative. In 2016, Padilla unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the L.A. Unified board. She is president of the LA Valley College Foundation board. Along with calling for more action to house the unsheltered, Padilla said she would “address the unintended consequences of municipal code 85.02 [which regulates where people can live in their vehicles], which pushed RV’s into our industrial corridors causing a lack of parking for business owners, customers and workers.” On policing, she calls for “a preventive model rather than a reactive model that sends too many to prison,” and promises to work with police “to identify innovative community-centric models of policing.”
Marco Santana
Marco Santana is director of engagement at LA Family Housing, a nonprofit that provides housing and supportive services to unhoused people. He has been vice president of the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats and Controller for the San Fernando Valley Democratic Party, and served as a local staffer for U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas and State Sen. Bob Hertzberg. “In recent years it feels as if [the people in the SFV] have been forgotten at City Hall — I’m running to change that,” he says on his campaign website. “It’s the next generation’s time to step up,” he told NBC4 on Nov. 28. “And I am the next generation.”
Antoinette Scully
On her campaign website, Antoinette Scully says she is “a Queer Black feminist, activist, writer [and] community organizer.” She is a national organizer for the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. She is the founder of the Black & Bookish literary collective and the Valley Justice Collective, and is co-founder of More Than Sex-Ed, a nonprofit sexual health education for tweens, teens, and families. On homelessness, she calls for an increase in “outreach and access, while decriminalizing poverty [and] decreasing harmful enforcement.” She says the district “has long been used as a sacrifice zone (a part of town ignored because of who lives there) for pollution.” She calls for the closure of the Sun Valley Generating Station, as well as ways to decrease and cap the Sun Valley Landfill.
Douglas Sierra
Douglas Sierra said in an interview that in recent years he was a consultant at Deloitte Consulting, a business analyst at the nonprofit Child Care Resource Center, and educational services coordinator/facilities coordinator for the nonprofit A Place Called Home. On his campaign website, he says in the wake of the leaked audio recording, CD-6 is “left without representation — voiceless in City Hall. I believe it’s time for new leadership, new ideas, and new beginnings.”
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