Since 1990, La Mesa has had only two mayors. The city is about to elect a third.
Dozens, many clad in brown and gold, piled into La Mesa First United Methodist Church on Tuesday to hear from candidates, while slyly checking the Padres score.
The mayoral candidates — council members Patricia Dillard and Laura Lothian, former treasurer Jim Stieringer and businessman Quinn Reese — fielded questions at the forum, alongside council candidates Moana Alo and Amanda-Dawn Natalia.
The four running for mayor all opposed SB 79’s state-mandated transit-oriented development as an overreach from Sacramento. But sharp divisions arose over how the city responds to homelessness.
Lothian, La Mesa’s only Republican council member, stated that she wanted to end the Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement (HOME) program, in which social workers rather than police respond to most homeless calls for service when no crime is being committed.
The HOME team has housed 380 people since it began in late 2020. In the latest point-in-time count, the number of unsheltered people counted dropped by a quarter to 39 people. But Lothian noted that the number of HOME team clinicians has doubled from two to four, as has the number of homeless clients they interact with per month.
“Our outreach is actually acting as a magnet,” Lothian said. “At some point, a city has to say there has to be accountability… the person has to accept the assistance or help, or be compelled to.”
The forum did not allow for rebuttals or directly responding to people, but candidates made an exception to disagree with Lothian on this point. Dillard said it was a lack of affordability, not the HOME team, that increased homelessness in the city.
“You can’t just blame it on a solution,” Dillard said. “There are people who are being helped and saved, but it’s against the law to make them. So we’ll never be able to do that as long as we have democracy. We cannot force someone to get help, but we can help the ones who are willing to get help.”
The four mayoral candidates were joined by Moana Alo and Amanda-Dawn Natalia, the two candidates for two seats on city council.
While their race is not competitive, the forum allowed them to share how they will lead once on the council.
Attorney Natalia said green efforts, from preserving parks to protecting the environment, are her focus. Natalia says she plans to push for expanding cool zones during extreme heat waves and offer a program to provide portable air conditioning units to lower-income residents and a moratorium on city staff working outside during extreme heat.
“Green spaces and nature are my passion,” Natalia said. “They’re not my profession, but I have had the opportunity to learn about how to preserve them, how to care for them, and I want to bring that to the dais.”
City Council candidate Alo advocated for more affordable housing options in La Mesa while focusing on her background as a renter and single mother.
“In this time and space, we don’t often see a lot of those voices in the decisions that are being made,” Alo said. “I hope to be a voice for those folks.”
More than partisanship, renting versus homeownership proved a division between candidates.
Alo and the only other renter, Reese, were more favorable to new housing that could drive down rents than other candidates. Reese said it was affordability issues that led him to enter the race.
“(Affordability is) essentially the lens I use for which to see everything,” Reese said.
The final mayoral candidate, Stieringer, has served on the Grossmont Healthcare Board and as La Mesa treasurer has run several unsuccessful campaigns for other posts, but declared that the city is effectively run.
“I have kind of minor goals as mayor,” Stieringer said. Among them are improving the aesthetics of a Vietnam War memorial and blocking new bike lanes.
Dillard, who sits on the Metropolitan Transit System, touted micro-transit projects and pledged to move plans to expand the library forward.
Currently, all city departments have been asked to cut their budgets by 10%. Lothian said she would focus on increasing the city’s revenue, to fully fund maintenance staff for parks and fixing streets.
La Mesa First pastor Christian DeMent moderated the forum. He implored the audience not just to look to those seated on the stage to improve La Mesa, but also to find that in each other.
“We share something really important with one another,” DeMent said. “We all have a stake in the future of La Mesa, and that future depends not only on the people we elect, but on all of us: neighbors who care about our neighborhood, the businesses, the schools, the streets, the parks and the people who call this city home.”
