SAN DIEGO — Dozens of San Diegans who live and vote in the county's supervisory District Four attended a candidate forum in Bankers Hill Thursday, July 20.
This comes as the special election to decide who will replace former County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher is already underway.
While candidate Paul McQuigg was a no-show, the other three candidates vying for Fletcher's seat came to St. Paul's Cathedral. fielding a number of questions, from housing and homelessness to climate change and the fentanyl crisis.
One of the most pressing questions posed to the District 4 supervisory candidate was addressing the severe shortage of affordable housing in San Diego County.
Candidate Amy Reichert, a licensed private investigator, said that large-scale corporate real estate investors are a huge part of the problem.
"What they've been doing is systematically evicting people from their apartment complexes, and that's absolutely wrong," she said. "We have to protect tenant rights."
"We have to build, and there are many things that we have to build," said candidate Monica Montgomery Steppe, who is currently a San Diego city council member. "We have to streamline that process to make it quicker, but on the other side, we have to be proactive, and protect the people who are two, three, four hundred dollars away from making their rent."
"As much as we need to invest in more housing at every income level in places where it makes sense to do that," said candidate Janessa Goldbeck, who runs a veterans advocacy non-profit, "we also need to take care of the emergency that is at our hands and on our doorstep right now, and that is the thousands of people who are unsheltered."
Another critical issue: preventing the rising number of in-custody deaths in the county's jail system.
"What we absolutely want to stop, is making the county jails our region's largest mental health provider, which is the absurd reality that we have now," Goldbeck said. "In the meantime, if we are sending people to jail, a sentence to jail should not be a sentence to death. We need to provide them with the appropriate care."
"Anything that promotes transparency and accountability is very, very important," Montgomery Steppe said, "because if you have a job where you can carry a gun and you have immunity, if you hurt or kill someone, then the accountability level needs to be high"
"We're seeing historic highs of people who are being put in situations where they are committing suicide, or they are overdosing, or horrifically being murdered in our jails, and so we need accountability," Reichert said.
Voters have until August 15 to drop off their ballots in the mail or at one of the county's 29 ballot drop boxes.
Starting August fifth, voters can cast their ballots in person at a number of vote centers.