Rossmoyne Homeowners Assn. holds City Council candidate forum
The Rossmoyne Homeowners Assn. held a forum last Wednesday that included all eight candidates running for Glendale City Council and covered a range of topics beyond the frequently discussed issues of housing and increased traffic.
Incumbents Paula Devine and Vartan Gharpetian joined challengers Greg Astorian, Dan Brotman, Ardy Kassakhian, William Keshishyan, Leonard Manoukian and Susan Wolfson at the forum, during which candidates were asked what challenges face the city and how the candidates would address them.
Wolfson, who has a lengthy background in finance, said the city’s financial stability concerns her.
“I’m not sure what the solution is exactly right now, but I want to get to the bottom of the numbers. And I feel like that only way I can get to the bottom of the numbers is by being on City Council,” she said.
“Because then I can get that information from staff. I can ask for as much information as I need. And the information isn’t easy to get when you’re just a regular citizen,” she added.
She also said environmental sustainability is equally important, “if not even more important,” adding that she has had concerns about the Scholl Canyon Landfill for several years.
Last year, Glendale officials abandoned plans to expand operations at the Scholl Canyon in southeast Glendale after at least four years of consideration.
After internal discussions, city officials notified the Los Angeles County sanitation districts in May 2018 that Glendale was no longer looking to increase the size of the 535-acre facility.
Astorian also referred to Scholl Canyon and said he helped lead a “movement” years ago that led Glendale to purchase the site below market price using conservation credits, turning the area into a green open space.
“As a result of which, you have 1,000 homes that were not built, where they shouldn’t have been,” he said, adding that one aspect was out of respect for the local hillsides.
“You didn’t have the 1,000 cars or the 2,000 cars creating greenhouse gases going up and down the canyon. So, that’s the kind of environmental issues that I’ve been involved with way before when that was not a sexy subject to talk about,” he added.
This past July, City Council members voted unanimously for a plan to rebuild an aging Grayson Power Plant with some new gas infrastructure — in addition to clean and renewable sources — while also vowing to look for alternatives to gas by the time construction begins on the plant in a few years.
Devine agreed the environment is a significant issue facing the city and the country.
“I have added a condition to the Grayson repowering that we should make every effort to reach 100% renewable energy by 2030, prior to the 2045 mandated by the state,” she said.
She also said she’s asked for a ban on plastic utensils at city eateries and a food-recovery program for unused food at local restaurants that can be sent to help the needy and homeless.
She’s also asked city officials to look at eliminating gas-powered blowers.
Kassakhian pointed out that the nation’s economy has been heavily reliant on retail and that reliability is changing.
“This last quarter, even though the economy of the country is booming, some of the top retailers — Macy’s, JCPenney, Kohl’s — have had their worst sales quarters ever,” he said.
He added that Sears in Glendale is going out of business, with many of those employees being local residents.
He said looking at alternatives is necessary, such as when Nestlé announced in 2017 it would leave the city, he suggested looking at tech companies, which have the jobs of the future and can be filled by local residents and graduates, to occupy space in the building where the global company had maintained its headquarters.
Keshishyan, who is 23 years old, said efforts should be made to keep local young people living and involved in Glendale.
“I think that it is very important to keep our youth and talent that Glendale schools breed to keep them in Glendale, and again, that’s very simple. It’s to be done by incentivising tech companies, modern companies and new businesses that want to come and start in Glendale, where they can hire entry-level employees, which are basically Glendale’s youth,” he said.
Manoukian said the City Council should do a better job of listening to its residents, such as candidate Brotman, who suggested ways to reduce the natural gas emitted from the Grayson Power Plant and the Glendale Coalition for a Better Government, which filed litigation to fight the city’s transfer of funds from Glendale Water & Power into its General Fund.
He argued the city’s boards and commission needs more diversity, and they are lacking in members who are female or renters.
“Inclusion — we ought to have [their] perspectives and viewpoints and life experiences and expertise — is one of the things that has been missing,” he said.
“There are a lot of problems, but none of them that we can’t solve as a community,” he added.
Brotman talked about the climate crisis, which he said is the “issue of our time.”
He said he doesn’t think the City Council is serious about the climate crisis.
“It’s not just about dealing with carbon emissions. It’s about dealing with the hotter world that’s coming,” he said.
He cited wildfires, such as the ones in Australia, as an example and said communities need to do more to to deal with disaster preparedness and recovery.
“We have to harden our electric grid, which means micro-grids around critical infrastructures so that when power lines go down because of high winds, we can still power the city. We can still have the hospitals and the schools and other things that are critical to our lives,” he said.
Gharpetin said, “Safety and security, the foremost,” adding that the local police and fire departments have a lot of pressure on them.
He also said infrastructure is also important, but strides are being made. After the drought that hit the state recently, local residents are continuing to conserve water, and the city continues to recycle it, he added.
