Our Culver 2024 Voter Guide
City Council: Yasmine-Imani McMorrin, Nancy Barba, Bryan “Bubba” Fish
School Board: Sameen Ahmadnia, Andrew Lachman
YES on Measure O
City Council
In local elections, it’s not easy to be an informed voter. Every candidate for City Council is a Democrat who says they want a safer Culver City with more affordable housing. They claim they’ll expand access to public transit, humanely address homelessness, and protect renters. Are there any differences between the candidates?
The loudest local groups only add to this confusion. You may hear from Protect Culver City and Culver City Coalition, local groups that were founded by Republicans and happily take money from developer PACs to fund their efforts. The leader of Protect Culver City has proclaimed in his newsletter that, “Culver City now has party politics” — also bragging on Twitter that in Culver City there are Republicans secretly running as Democrats: “For the record, that’s what we’re doing locally.” This kind of division has been so damaging to our community.
Our Culver takes a progressive perspective, but we don’t want a Culver City that’s only for progressives. No matter how this election goes, we’re all still going to be neighbors on November 6. So while this is a progressive voter guide and we freely admit our perspective, our aim is to present an accurate view of each candidate’s record on the civic issues that most impact Culver City residents.
City Council (VOTE FOR 3!):
Mayor Yasmine-Imani McMorrin
Nancy Barba
Bryan “Bubba” Fish
Our Culver is excited to endorse the three candidates who understand the complex challenges Culver City faces, and who also have the courage and determination to effectively address those challenges, in a manner consistent with the shared values of Culver City residents.
Mayor Yasmine-Imani McMorrin is the first Black woman to serve as Mayor of Culver City and for the last four years she’s been a leader, fighting for renters, workers, people of color, and anyone else whose voice is not typically heard at a City Council meeting, all while making sure we have a city that is well-run and works for everyone.
While some other council members use their time on the dais to give speeches, Mayor McMorrin is asking insightful and probing questions, often lifting up concerns raised by the public and holding city leaders accountable.
Her persistence pays off. After years without progress on the city’s Mobile Crisis Team, Mayor McMorrin’s public questioning on the matter pushed the city to hire and train the mental health crisis response team that started serving the city earlier this year — six months ahead of schedule.
And her drive to dig deep on important details materially improves city policies and programs. Mayor McMorrin brought attention to the fact that some unhoused residents in city-leased motels were going hungry, resulting in the creation of the city’s Nutrition Program to provide them with three meals a day. She also pushed the city to provide more frequent reporting and data on homelessness, which led to the city’s new Homeless Reporting Dashboard.
She guided development of the city’s homelessness programs on the Homelessness Subcommittee, including successful application for $26.6 million in state grant funds from Project Homekey in early 2022. She saved the Sustainable Business program from being cut in the 2023 budget meetings, and she put Measure BL on the ballot, bringing in essential revenue by making big corporations like Amazon pay their fair share in taxes.
At every opportunity she’s pushing for a more progressive approach to local issues: a higher minimum wage, more parks funding, safe and reliable transportation options, police oversight, and building more affordable housing.
Nancy Barba and Bryan “Bubba” Fish align with Mayor McMorrin’s values but also will bring a diversity of experience and expertise to the City Council.
Nancy Barba served as a Culver City Planning Commissioner for four years, including a term as Chair. In our city, we’ve seen Planning Commissioners who are real estate investors or lobbyists representing developers, the Chamber of Commerce, or downtown businesses. But there are other commissioners who bring a different kind of expertise: architects or civil engineers, for example. Nancy Barba is a clean energy professional.
While an architect’s input might improve the aesthetics of a project, Barba’s guidance resulted in buildings that are more sustainable, better integrated into communities, and with less pollution — growth that reduces climate impact instead of worsening it. This is exactly the experience we need to tap as a city set for significant growth in the next decade.
Outside the Planning Commission, Nancy Barba has dedicated significant time and effort as a community advocate for affordable housing, tenant protections, permanent supportive housing, and public transit, including not just speaking before the City Council, but also organizing with her neighbors to get more people involved in the process of deciding how the city government approaches these important issues.
Despite her accomplishments, Nancy Barba was denied reappointment to the Planning Commission this year by her opponent in this election, Albert Vera. It’s not lost on us that, in 2020, Vera took campaign money from a fossil fuel company and the biggest lobbyist for commercial real estate in the nation, and then he acted accordingly: Vera replaced a clean energy professional on the Planning Commission with a commercial real estate investor.
Bryan “Bubba” Fish would be only the third renter to serve on the City Council in Culver City, and his platform on tenant protections is the most comprehensive we’ve seen at a local level, including eviction protections for those owing less than one month’s rent, proactively contacting tenants who are served eviction notices to connect them to services that can keep them housed, and providing legal representation for renters facing eviction.
Policies like these are essential to addressing homelessness, because hundreds of people become homeless every day in Los Angeles County.
Bubba served on the city’s Advisory Committee on Housing & Homelessness for four years. While this committee is an important touchpoint for public input on city policy, if you look at the meetings since Bubba’s term ended in 2023, you’ll see that half the meetings have been canceled and the committee doesn’t produce much output otherwise. Bubba’s tenure was a different story. He pushed the committee to pass resolutions recommending policies to City Council, to highlight state housing bills that the city could support, and to tour facilities that provide services to unhoused people.
Professionally, Bubba is a transportation policy professional with experience at the LA Department of Transportation and the LA County Board of Supervisors. More than anyone else running, he understands that our city is rapidly growing and we just don’t have room for more lanes of car traffic, so we need alternative forms of transportation. For many in our community, Culver City simply doesn’t offer a safe, affordable, and convenient way to get from one place to another. This must be addressed, and Bubba brings the necessary expertise to tackle it.
Let’s take a look at the other candidates.
Simply put, Council Member Albert Vera is too conservative for Culver City.
That’s not to say he’s a conservative on every issue. To be sure, most City Council votes are unanimous and align with the values of Culver City residents. But focusing on the votes where there is disagreement paints a clearer picture of the differences between the candidates.
Rent Control/Tenant Protections: Vera voted against the rental registration fees that fund the housing department’s enforcement of rent control and tenant protections. Then, when the city’s rental registry came back to the City Council for review, Vera recused himself from the vote because he had broken the law requiring him to register all the rental properties he owns in the city — the initial deadline was July 2021, it was extended to March 2022, but Vera still hadn’t registered his properties when he recused himself in July 2023.
Transit: Vera voted against participating in LA’s fareless transit program during COVID. Fareless transit was a lifeline for many during COVID, but Vera didn’t think the expense was worth helping the low income folks who make up the majority of Culver CityBus riders. In contrast, Vera had plenty of sympathy for the big businesses who would pay higher taxes under Measure BL starting in 2024 — he argued those businesses would still be hurting 4 years into the pandemic, and they shouldn’t have to pay their fair share.
Affordable Housing: Vera voted against applying for grant money that would help complete funding for a project with 95 units of affordable housing, simply because it included a bike lane. Staff emphasized that no traffic lanes would be eliminated but Vera still voted against it.
Workers: Vera voted against Mayor McMorrin’s minimum wage proposal, opting instead to spend $145,000 on a study before considering any increase — and a year later, our minimum wage still lags behind LA’s. Vera’s first act as mayor was to roll back the minimum wage increase for healthcare workers, and he also voted against hero pay for grocery workers during COVID (note that one of Vera's businesses is a grocery).
Mental Health: Vera takes credit for creating the city's mobile crisis response team and he appeared at the team's kickoff event, but he voted against creating the unarmed team when it was proposed by Mayor McMorrin, saying he believes in a “co-responder model” where police are always involved in interactions with someone experiencing a mental health crisis.
Vera claimed, “We go with a different model and things can turn ugly real quick.” In fact, the opposite was shown to be true: police continued to respond to mental health crises while the city’s mobile crisis response team was being put together, and in December 2022, a CCPD officer shot in the back an unarmed man who was experiencing a mental health crisis. The city paid out $4.5 million to the victim’s family.
Environment: Vera’s campaign says that, as mayor, he signed the order to close the Inglewood Oil Field. But this leaves out the fact that he actually voted against the final ordinance that closed the oil field, claiming that “it creates a hostile environment between us and the operator [of the oil field].” In fact, the operator was being uncooperative, having refused for a year to negotiate with the city. Vera also took campaign money from a fossil fuel company.
Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin has spoken publicly on many of the same contentious local issues the above candidates have grappled with. In general, her approach to these issues appears to be very much like that of Council Member Vera. At City Council meetings, she spoke against raising the minimum wage and against an affordable housing ballot measure. She also opposed the adjustment to the business license tax, which passed with 60% of the vote, and without which Culver City’s annual deficit would be nearly $9 million higher.
The remaining candidates, Denice Renteria and Adrian Gross, have less of a public record to consider. Although Renteria served on the city’s General Plan Advisory Committee and the Equity and Human Relations Advisory Committee, her work on those bodies, while substantial, doesn’t demonstrate how she might approach city issues differently than the other candidates. Some evidence suggests Denice Renteria would be closer to Vera and Wisnosky Stehlin: she spoke out against the business license tax and in favor of authorizing CCPD’s stockpile of military weapons that Vera voted to approve.
School Board
Our Culver is delighted to endorse two candidates for Culver City School Board: Sameen Ahmadnia and Andrew Lachman. Together they’ll bring a diversity of perspectives and experience to the school board. We don’t expect to always agree with either candidate, and we don’t expect them to always agree with each other. Many of us are CCUSD parents ourselves, and we’ve seen that there is a current of disagreement and division among parents in the district right now.
But throughout this campaign, we’ve seen that both Sameen and Andrew understand how to listen with humility and how to work respectfully with those they disagree with. Our kids, their teachers, and all the CCUSD staff deserve a school board that can actually collaborate to build a district that works.
Sameen Ahmadnia is an immigration attorney and a CCUSD mom. An Iranian-American, born and raised in California, her household speaks three languages. In her professional life, Sameen often helps low income clients handle immigration matters on a pro bono basis, and in the district she’s been an advocate for a more equitable and inclusive CCUSD.
We’re inspired by Sameen’s candidacy because she speaks up in the face of injustice, whether she’s fighting to save the job of a Spanish-speaking senior administrator at La Ballona or pushing to fix long standing ADA issues on campus. She’s a champion for students with disabilities, English learners, mental health resources, and the environment, and she’s also pragmatic and highly motivated to access grants, tapping into state and federal grant money to sustainably move our district into the future.
Sameen has been endorsed by all five seated school board members, and is the only candidate endorsed by the Culver City Democratic Club.
Andrew Lachman is the lead attorney at a technology company, a CCUSD dad, chair of the Culver City Finance Advisory Committee, and a member of the CCUSD Equity Advisory Board. Andrew is also a leader of the LA chapter of Jewish Democratic Council of America and a member of the Democratic National Committee, among other volunteer positions.
We want to see Andrew on the school board because he has the potential to be a bridge-builder – a unifying voice who echoes valid criticisms of the district, while still recognizing that the most vulnerable students suffer when the district only focuses on the most well off. Andrew wants to increase classroom spending and employee morale, expand district-wide grant funding and oversee responsible bond spending. He is sensitive to the needs of students who are English-language learners, and he’s an advocate for students who have lived in foster care or experienced homelessness. He was also part of the push to get funding for more crossing guards – even before getting elected he’s making safer routes to school.
Andrew is endorsed by two current CCUSD school board members, the Sierra Club, Los Angeles County Democratic Party and Stonewall Democrats among others.