City Councilor Kendra Lara has been the District 6 City Councilor for about two months now, and the Gazette caught up with her to learn about what she’s been up to and what she’s working on.
“It’s been an incredible two months,” Lara said. “We’ve spent most of the time learning our way through City Hall” and has hired her staff.
Lara has also filed a hearing order to talk about the restoration of municipal voting rights for immigrants with legal status. Lara is also the chair of the Environmental Justice, Resiliency & Parks and the Housing & Community Development committees.
“We’ve started a community process to develop a collective strategy for those committees for the next two years, which we’ll be unveiling soon,” she said.
Lara also recently delivered her maiden speech at City Hall on March 2, entitled “Bringing the Margins to the Center: Expanding the Electorate and Deepening Democracy.”
Lara said of her speech, “I feel great. I think that a lot of my inclination is to redistribute power from City Hall back to our constituents, deepening democracy.”
Looking towards the future, Lara said her office is working on “finalizing the strategy for the housing and environmental justice committee” as well as several hearing ordinances and orders with other City Councilors. She said that in this process, she “wants to be deliberate” and include as many voices as possible.”
She said that “as we finalize our strategies for our committees, I’ll definitely have more to talk about. Right now, we want to make sure we’re in community talking to all the right people.”
Any residents with questions, comments, or concerns should reach out to Councilor Lara’s Director of Constituent Services, My’Kel McMillen, at [email protected].