We can and Must do Better!
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Armando Vazquez. Courtesy photo.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
Since about 2000 until this year, 2020, a total of twenty years, the city of Oxnard has had a top level executive dysfunctional, wasteful, costly and head-spinning management turnover rate. This hair on fire musical chairs approach to local governance, of course, contributes to horrific and untimely fiscal, planning and programmatic waste, malfeasance and mismanagement.
In 20 years the Oxnard Police Department has had 5-7 Police Chiefs (depending if you are counting interim Chiefs). Let us count them, Hurtt, Lopez, Crombach, interim (Whitney, Benites), Williams, (the interim team of Benites, Sonstegard, Whitney), and finally Whitney as the current Police Chief.
In just over 20 years the City Manager’s office has had 5-10 City Managers (depending if we are counting interim City Managers). Let’s count Colston, an interim, Sotelo, interim Burnham; officially Burnham, interim Golden and Whitney (?); Nyhoff, interim Whitney; interim Nava and now Nguyen. The top administrative staff turnover looks more like an ICU or triage unit, representing a here today and inexplicably gone tomorrow mid-level management disaster, creating a major pandemic of brain drain, squandering of precious tax dollars, incompetent and self-serving mid-career professionals making a brief stop in Oxnard to fatten up their resumes before they move on to bigger and better things, or worse yet, getting hired and fired without the public knowing what just happened! … Poof gone!
During this same period there have been 4 or 5 City Council regime changes, with little to no leadership continuity. Oxnard, this is no way to run a prosperous, safe and caring city! We need new hearts, brains and minds on the Oxnard City Council. November 3, 2020 is just around the corner!
After the 2016 for the first time in our history we have in Oxnard a majority of Latina/o city council members. There are three Latinas for the first time in the 120 year history of Oxnard. At the time this electoral shift took place it appeared to be great news, it was long overdue! The will, the power and hard work of the people has been heard through the power of the ballot box.
In 2020 Latinos still represent 70 to 80 % of the population currently totalling approximately 250,000 residents in Oxnard (depending on who is conducting the census) and four Latina/o city council members we have had little to no power and some might argue that things have gotten much worse at city hall!
I wrote back in 2017, “Those days are over! We Latinos know better than most that power is never ceded voluntarily but must be taken. We voted and seized the local political power. So in the run-up to the transition to the new local government in Oxnard we the people must organize, mobilized and scrupulously plan so that we can present and be an influential part of a well research and consensus driven movement of aspirations, expectations and demand immediately present to the new city council. The Latino community can neither afford nor concede a token “honeymoon” period. We have waited 115 year for this period the “good old days” are dead we must bury with immediate progressive actions” This is 2020 I don’t think it happened!
Since that time in frequent conversations, convivios comunitarios, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has altered all “usual and normal” life as we knew it, the Black Lives Matter Movement, The Police Defunding and Reform Movement, the recent community defeat and abolishment of the Oxnard Civil “Gang” Injunction, the tyrannical rise Trump and his goons with the jack boots on our collective necks, our constant interaction and canvasing of our community here are some of the most important issues that resonate with our Oxnard Latino community. Not surprisingly, CORE, the Acuna Arts Collective, Oxnard Multicultural Health Coalition, the One Love & Salseras Poderosas Partners and other community organizations are still currently working with the community with very limited funding and resources on these hot button issues. The city council and the new city manager seem oblivious to our request for equitable community funding sharing and assistance. Here some of our continued finds
Community Health/Salud Comunitaria: The vast majority of the Latino population of Oxnard is low income and agricultural/factory working and just one job or major health issue(s) away from economic disaster and ruin. America’s medical model is currently a poorly designed obsolete reactive model that makes the medical-industrial complex filthy rich and treats many American patient, especially the poor with indifference, disdain and hostility. The COVID-19 pandemic has ravished the health and economic of already precarious lives of our frontline and blue collar workers. We continue to reach out to some of friends remotely and we can report that what we hear is dire and devastating. We have begun working with LULAC to set up remote exercise, nutrition, educational tutoring, and convivios programming that will begin in the Central Coast and hope to expand state-wide.
Oxnard we can be a proactive, knowledgeable, holistic, and preventative health leader. In Oxnard we can actively and aggressively support, promote, and create (and fine tune as needed) a universal preventive proactive community directed health movement that relies heavily on free healthy living exercise, nutrition, mental health, art/culture, convivios familiars y comunitarios and other culturally and ethnically congruent that are highly effective, universally mobile, and most important economically feasible and accessible to all. In 2017 before we lost our lease at the Café on A our healthy living program, the One Love/Salerasas Poderoseas were providing approximately 30,000 individual hours (yearly) of healthy lives classes in dance movement, bienestar nutrition and community service convivios that also addresses mental health and other intimate cultural and ethnically congruent issues unique to Latina events to mostly farm and factory working women and their children in Oxnard. This simple healthy living program and mental health convivios for farm and factory working women and their children was available to everyone, and proved to be highly transformative and liberating at no cost to the participant. We have many incredible testimonial from our participant that attest to magical transformation that has taken place in individual woman that participate in this health living program.
Our youth and family: Family strengthening and support services, quality education, social justice and mental ( art and cultural programs expanded) and physical (youth jobs, community improvement projects, healthy living programs, job training “educational ,energy and environmental apprenticeship programs for all ages) prosperity on a level playing field is all the Latino community expects and demands; nothing more, nothing less.
To that end we will continue to lobby our majority Latino city council members to look beyond the unimaginative and heavy handed policing community safety strategies currently deployed in Oxnard that disproportionately profile, victimize and criminalize our Latino youth. We have defeated the OCGI, and now we must demand reparation and demand that the approximately 70 million dollars that is traditional allocated to the police and the fire department for obsolete “community safety” and be shared so that some of the millions of dollars are share with community based organization that he have been doing redemptive, restorative and social justice work and helping transform troubled and down on their luck youth and adults.
We will lobby the city council and work for the immediate realignment of the approximately 70 million 2020-2021 “community safety budget” so that it redirects one (1) million dollar line item for social justice, restorative justices and other culturally and ethnically congruent community based programs that help remediate, enhance and restore all of our youth to maximize their innate core to be productive community members.
Community Safety: Our Latino community is incredibly law abiding, respectful of authority, adaptive and resilient; we have had to be, as we are predominately immigrants, blue collar, low income, politically (up to now) impotent and acutely underrepresented. Historically we have learned to protect and “police” ourselves within our families and our communities. Many of us Chicano/Latinos fear law enforcement, the police, immigration authorities,(such as the OPD, the Ventura County Sheriffs, la migra, (ICE), and Homeland Security), the courts, the lawyers, the laws, all seemed so often to be working in perfect conspiracy to harasses and subjugates us to servitude and second class citizenry.
With the November 3, 2020 election right around the corner we will work to elect progressive Latino city council members. We will work with our officials to change the prevailing perception and realties in our Latino Oxnard communities that “la jura y la migra” are out to get us. We will attempt to work with the OPD and our many community partners to develop and implement 21st century community preventative restorative community safety programs, intervention and protocols that address underlying aberrant and delinquent behavior, especially among our youth, newly released pintos, immigrants and the recovery community.
We will lobby and work hard with our newly elected, 2020, city council to assure that there are sufficient funds to augment and support local community based programs and organization that have a history of success in helping mitigate youth on youth delinquency and domestic violence, restorative justice, city wide enhancement projects through, apprenticeship and job training programs, employment opportunities, community service, educational remediation, civic involvement, as well as other culturally and ethnically congruent programs in a new bold holistic proactive community driven safety and prosperity movements that involves and empowers every resident of Oxnard.
We have a lot of work to do Oxnard, with a smile on our face and love in our heart let’s get started!
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the Founding Member of Chiques Organizing for Rights and Equality (CORE), Executive Director of Oxnard Multicultural Mental Health Coalition (OMMH) and Executive Director, of the Acuna Art Collective (formerly the Café on A).