Huntington Beach City Council candidates share vision of city’s economic future at chamber forum
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Candidates competing for three Huntington Beach City Council seats as well as the office of city clerk in this year’s election tackled questions regarding the city’s business climate at a candidates forum Thursday hosted by the local chamber of commerce.
About 50 people turned out for the event hosted at the Senior Center and moderated by Sheik Sattaur, a Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce board member. They listened to eight candidates share their vision of the city’s economic future for about two hours.
They were, in alphabetical order, Rhonda Bolton, Amory Hanson, Marissa Jackson, Dan Kalmick, Don Kennedy, Natalie Moser, Butch Twining and Chad Williams. Votes for Huntington Beach City Council seats are not broken up by district, so the top three vote-getters overall will claim victory.
Bolton, Kalmick and Moser are incumbents who represent liberal leaning voices on a seven-person body that currently has a conservative majority. They’re defending their seats against Jackson, a self-described “mama bear” advocating for religious and family values; Huntington Beach Historic Resources board member Hanson; combat veteran Williams as well as Kennedy and Twining, who are both planning commissioners. The latter three have described each other as running mates and, like Jackson, espouse many positions similar to those held by the current council’s four currently uncontested members.
Bolton, Jackson and Hanson said rising rents are making it harder for companies to stay in Huntington Beach, and described the issue as one of the biggest challenges facing local businesses. Bolton, Kalmick and Moser noted that the high cost of housing has also pushed talented workers out of the area, making it more difficult for companies to recruit skilled employees.
Most candidates listed public safety as one of the top three issues challenging businesses in Huntington Beach and said more can be done to deter retail crime. Jackson, Kennedy, Twining and Williams repeatedly associated homelessness with public intoxication and disturbances with local business owners, and said they’d work to reduce the number of homeless people, especially in prominent tourist areas like the beach.
Moser pointed out that the city’s police department has been struggling to fill 27 vacant positions. The city has 107 open jobs overall, including 30 in public works and four in the city manager’s office. She, Bolton and Kalmick claimed those were largely the result of what Moser described as “chaos” wrought by a preoccupation with reactionary social policies among the City Council’s current conservative members that have distracted the city from performing some of its core duties.
“I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be what the city can control, which is a lack of stability in the whole [city] government, lack of functional government [and] the chaos that’s been created here with recent culture wars,” Moser said. “We’ve lost our workforce in City Hall.”
Kennedy, Twining and Williams occasionally jabbed at Bolton, Kalmick and Moser, referring to them as the “Newsom Threesome,” alluding to the state’s governor, a Democrat. The conservative candidates blamed disruptions on the current dais on the incumbents and said replacing them would result in a unified City Council.
Later, in response to a question regarding businesses that have left Huntington Beach, Williams mentioned Ruby’s Diner, which left its location at the end of the Huntington Beach Pier in 2021, during the pandemic. He blamed incumbents who were on the dais at that time for the restaurant’s departure, and said he would have supported a “no mask no vaccine” policy.
Kalmick rebutted Williams’ assertion about the cause of the diner’s closing, pointing out that business had actually filed for bankruptcy in 2018, well before the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic.
“Public safety is important. So is public health,” Moser said in response to Williams’ comments.
There was one topic pretty much every candidate agreed on: what the city should do to support businesses that don’t benefit from Huntington Beach’s marquee events like the U.S. Open of Surfing and the Pacific Air Show. Most said more events need to be planned and promoted beyond the downtown beach area. The sports complex and golf courses were floated as potential venues for future shows, festivals and athletic tournaments.
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