Your guide to the L.A. City Council District 9 race: Ugarte vs. Mazariegos

For the first time since 1963, a politician who is not Black will represent a large swath of South Los Angeles on the City Council.

Curren Price, who has held the District 9 seat for 13 years, is terming out. Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos, who are vying to replace him in the November election, are Latino immigrants who arrived in the U.S. undocumented as children.

The 9th District, which stretches from the Convention Center in downtown to 95th Street in South L.A., has undergone a massive demographic shift over the decades. Once predominantly Black, it is now nearly 80% Latino.

Price is leaving with a criminal prosecution against him, alleging embezzlement and conflict of interest, still ongoing. He has endorsed Ugarte, his former deputy chief of staff, whose platform includes protecting city residents from federal immigration enforcement and the Trump administration.

Mazariegos is backed by the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s worked as a community organizer for decades and said he’s running to improve quality of life in the city, including by making housing more affordable and spending money on basic services other than policing.

Both candidates said they are committed to representing all their constituents equally, including Black residents who have expressed concerns about the transition to a Latino council member.

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Ugarte, 40, was born in Oaxaca and is Mazateco — an Indigenous group native to the Mexican state. If elected, he would become the first Indigenous Oaxacan council member.

The South Park resident was a community organizer for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, helping union members register to vote, before joining Price’s 2013 election campaign and later his council staff.

Ugarte won the June primary against five other candidates with nearly 40% of the vote. Mazariegos came in second with about 26%.

Ugarte this year was assessed a $25,000 fine by the city’s ethics commission, which found that he failed to disclose his income from a political consulting business. He blamed a “clerical reporting error” and said he is paying the fine in $1,000 monthly installments.

In addition to Price, Ugarte has been endorsed by the L.A. County Democratic Party, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles Action Fund and the Central City Assn. of Los Angeles, among others.

Mazariegos, who lives in Vermont Square, was born in Guatemala and came to the U.S. three years later.

In his 20s, Mazariegos pleaded guilty to a gun possession charge. Now, at 40, he said the experience helps him relate to community members who have had run-ins with the law.

He has worked for several labor organizations and helped found the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, where he is on leave from his position as co-director of the group’s L.A. branch.

His endorsements include Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and several labor unions.

Fundraising data will be updated regularly until the election.

The 9th District stretches from the western edge of downtown L.A. to the Convention Center, USC and neighborhoods along the Harbor Freeway, including Vermont Square, South Park and Florence-Graham.

In the district with the highest poverty rate in the city, residents are concerned about issues including illegal dumping, public safety, a dearth of grocery stores and a sense of being neglected by City Hall.

Ugarte is running to protect undocumented Angelenos from the Trump administration. He wants to update Special Order 40, which prohibits the Los Angeles Police Department from questioning people to determine their immigration status. Adding a provision requiring officers to stay about 100 to 200 feet from federal agents would reassure residents that the LAPD is not involved in immigration enforcement, he said.

“South L.A. is kind of the hub of undocumented immigrants right now, and I want to be a champion for them,” Ugarte said.

Ugarte supports Mayor Karen Bass’ goal of eventually bringing the LAPD back to 9,500 officers from its April total of 8,677 sworn personnel. More officers should patrol on horseback, bicycle and foot, he said.

Mazariegos wants to reduce the LAPD’s budget and instead invest in street services, parks and sanitation. Mental health calls should be handled by unarmed crisis response teams instead of armed officers, he said.

“The lights aren’t coming on in my block. The lights have been off for almost about a year at this point, with no relief in sight,” he said. “So there’s a lot of other services that we should be looking at that would make our city safer.”

Mazariegos said he would have opposed the 2023 police union contract, which included significant raises that proponents said would keep starting pay competitive with that of police departments in nearby cities. He said the raises were too costly and that the department should reduce police overtime.

He also has called for more police accountability by taking liability payouts out of the LAPD budget rather than the city budget.

“That’s one way that you’ll see a lot more accountability for overuse of force,” Mazariegos said.

Ugarte supports using a municipal ordinance, 41.18, which prohibits camps near schools, daycare centers and other “sensitive” areas, to clear homeless encampments.

He agrees with critics who say the zones are “Band-aids” that merely move encampments from one side of a street to another. But he said they’re still useful tools to address homelessness.

Mazariegos disagrees, saying that antiencampment zones are “proven to fail.” He said he has seen people return to an encampment on the same day it was cleared. Removing encampments criminalizes people who already are marginalized by society, when the focus should be on addressing addiction and mental health issues, he said.

Both candidates criticized the mayor’s Inside Safe program, which offers interim housing, mostly at hotels and motels, for being too slow to get people off the streets.

Ugarte said the city should focus first on mental health recovery and detox facilities, then providing homeless people with training through city jobs like clearing graffiti and street sweeping, before offering them a place to live.

“Once they feel like they’re giving back to society, then they can go inside some sort of housing program,” he said.

Mazariegos said Inside Safe is a start, but it doesn’t replace permanent housing and should be coupled with additional resources.

Ugarte, who once collected signatures for Measure ULA, also known as the “mansion tax,” says it’s not working as intended and is keeping developers away from the city. The measure levies a tax on property sales above $5.3 million and funnels the money to affordable housing programs and homeless prevention.

“If developers are running away from the city of L.A., we gotta know why. We gotta go back to the drawing board. We gotta accept when we make mistakes, including myself,” Ugarte said.

He supports amending the measure to exempt affordable housing developers. He also wants to raise the threshold for properties subject to the tax to $10 million, to account for the increasing costs of construction.

Ugarte supports State Bill 79, a law mandating that cities increase housing density around public transportation hubs. But more transportation, Ugarte said, needs to come before more housing.

Making L.A. more transit-friendly will lower costs for housing, insurance and parking, Ugarte said, giving residents relief from the city’s high cost of living.

Mazariegos said homeless prevention starts with enforcing a “huge list” of the city’s tenant rights laws, including rent control and prohibitions against landlords harassing tenants.

Building affordable housing, along with enforcing those laws, will keep more people housed, he said.

Mazariegos wants to use public land to build social housing, which is publicly subsidized housing separate from the rental market.

He also would push to extend the travel industry’s upcoming $30 minimum wage to all workers and to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index.

“A combination of those things will reduce and stop the bleeding of folks going into the street, going homeless, and will start giving us a chance as a city to work our way out of this crisis,” Mazariegos said.

Ugarte supports the $2.6-billion Convention Center expansion passed by the City Council last year, arguing that the nation’s second-biggest city should have at least the second-best convention center.

Mazariegos said the expansion is a massive gamble and wishes more thought had been put into the decision. But now that it’s proceeding, the construction needs to be done quickly, in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics, to avoid fines, he said.

He also wants the Convention Center used for the community, opening it up for local cultural festivals and other events.