Name as it appears on the ballot: Javiera Caballero
Age: 43
Party affiliation: Non-partisan race, registered Democrat
Campaign website: www.javieraformayor.com
Occupation & employer: City Council member
Years lived in Durham: 11 years
1) Given the direction of Durham government, would you say things are on the right course? If not, for what specific changes will you advocate if elected?
I believe we are on the right track, although there is plenty of work to continue doing. We are in the beginning phases of implementing critical plans that address affordable housing and community safety. We need to continuously monitor the effectiveness of the policies we have adopted so that we can expand what works and make adjustments when outcomes aren’t as impactful or effective as we need.
2) Please identify the three most pressing issues you believe the city faces and how you believe the city should address them.
Durham has several challenges that I believe we must tackle simultaneously because our policy choices in any one of these areas affects outcomes in each of the other areas as well. The three areas I’m most focused on are affordable housing, community safety, and sustainability.
Durham’s housing affordability crisis continues to put pressure on longtime and working class residents, and during my time on Council the City has adopted a set of policies aimed at making it easier for people to afford to live in Durham. First, we must implement the 2019 housing bond in a way that maintains fidelity to the vision voters had when they gave overwhelming support to approve the bond. One key investment that ensures community transparency on housing affordability work is https://foreverhomedurham.com/ — an excellent resource in letting the community know what’s been accomplished and what to continue to expect. We also need to make changes in our land use policies. We made an important first step with the passage in Fall 2019 of expanded housing choices — EHC — which encourages the construction of accessory dwelling units and the ability to build on small lots. I believe we need to go further by moving towards more flexible zoning, which needs to include by-right development for triplexes and quads. Portland, Oregon recently passed impressive land use policy changes, and as Mayor I will work to identify leading examples around the nation that we can tailor to work in Durham.
Community Safety is another priority. I want well-trained, well-paid police officers to do the core work we need them to do — help solve violent crime. I also believe that some functions traditionally housed in the police department can be more efficiently and effectively handled in ways that reduce the often unreasonable expectations that we place on law enforcement. We need mental health professionals to respond to mental health calls. We can send unarmed city workers to respond to minor traffic incidents. Our new Community Safety Department is a huge step forward because it establishes an administrative apparatus to identify what the alternatives to a police response could be so that we can then allocate resources to that department as needed. Ensuring we are sending the right response to 911 calls and aligning the type of community safety our residents are expecting of us is the right thing to do. This approach both improves mental health and community safety outcomes and helps us be better stewards of public money, which is also very important to me.
The looming climate crisis places sustainability front and center as another priority. We have made really important progress, but this is a policy area where we need to do more. I want to be more aggressive in our updated transit plan to ensure we have both an excellent local bus system and an excellent regional transit system. We also need to ensure our infrastructure improvements are both equitable and sustainable, which requires continuing to increase our investment in our capital improvement plan. We need to improve our sidewalk and bike infrastructure especially in connecting to transit and near schools. We need to commit to having enough parks and open space. And we need to continue to preserve land near our water sources.
3) What in your record as a public official or other experience demonstrates your ability to be effective as a member of the city council and as an advocate for the issues that you believe are important?
I am a sitting Durham council member who was first appointed to my current seat in Jan. 2018. I ran and won in fall 2019. We are in an extremely challenging moment in Durham. The Covid pandemic will be a dangerous current in our everyday lives for the next several months. Our housing affordability crisis has deepened with the arrival of many new residents and not enough housing supply. And gun violence continues to cause damage and harm in so many neighborhoods across Durham.
While I have been on council I have worked diligently to ensure we pass the types of policies that best help our residents thrive. I have voted in support of the affordable housing bond, the creation of our new Community Safety Department, more funding for eviction diversion, and more funding for our Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) for green and equitable infrastructure in underserved neighborhoods — just to name a few policies.
In addition, since my very first day in office I have pushed our city government to be more responsive and inclusive of our immigrant and refugee residents. I have advocated for resources to be adjusted and expanded to incorporate residents who are not only ignored but whom many Durhamaites don’t even realize live in Durham. We have long had strong symbolic language welcoming new neighbors who have come from many different countries beyond the US. That language is important but adding public money to meet the needs of those communities is critical if we want Durham to be a city for all.
As a council member I have expanded the work of language access including running an immigrant and refugee roundtable that met through the pandemic. The roundtable hosted meetings and town halls to hear from immigrants and refugees on the impacts of Covid in their communities. The city purchased equipment to allow streaming in 3 languages simultaneously to allow for easier communication and language access. I attended Latin-19 meetings (a group of public health officials that began meeting in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic) for over a year as the Covid pandemic ravaged Latinx communities. I pushed for the city to develop a vaccine equity plan, which the county funded as well, even though traditionally City government has no role in public health; it is a county department and responsibility. I worked with city staff to ensure immigration status would not be considered with rental assistance with our CARES funding. I encouraged city staff to ensure there was adequate support for residents applying for rental assistance when the city received additional rental assistance funding with federal ARPA dollars. The department of Community Development, the city department tasked with managing our federal rental assistance funds, contracted with five non-profits to act as application navigators. These are all examples of how I govern now as a council member and will govern as a mayor if elected.
4) What’s the best or most important thing the city council has done in the past year? Alternatively, name a decision you believe the council got wrong or an issue you believe the city should have handled differently. Please explain your answer.
We passed a unanimous budget in the middle of a global pandemic that advances a clear progressive policy agenda (and one that I wouldn’t have thought was possible in June of 2020).
Some of the highlights include:
- Creation of the new Community Safety Department
- Funding for the affordable housing bond
- An increase of $6 million annually for green and equitable infrastructure in our CIP
- Funding for eviction diversion
- Funding for the DEAR program
- Funding for a language access coordinator
- Funding for joint city/county immigrant and refugee rights coordinator
- Funding for an immigrant legal defense fund
- Funding for free bus fare through June of 2022
- Staff to ensure enforcement of the non-discrimination policy council passed in January 2021
We made some important key decisions such as funding an expansion of the county’s violence interrupter program and adding 6 police officers to our gang unit. I have spoken about community safety in some of my previous answers. One area that we need to improve on is police officer and firefighter pay. We are behind in comparison to other municipalities and we need to ensure we can retain the best first responders. City staff has already begun working on this issue and while it will not get solved in our current fiscal year we must address it in our next fiscal year.
5) The city has seen an uptick in gun homicides since 2018, including recent tragic deaths of children. Gun violence is obviously a multifaceted problem with no simple solution. But, in your view, what can or should the city be doing to stem the tide of violence that it isn’t doing now?
Perhaps the hardest but also most important thing we are doing is actively handling community safely differently than the city has in the past. Gun violence in particular causes so much harm and trauma in neighborhoods across Durham. We have a clear need for well trained and compensated law enforcement officers that can investigate violent crime, yet we also must do so much more to invest in human services and mental health supports. 911 calls require a rapid and skilled response, and we need to do a better job of making sure we are dispatching first responders best suited to the situation at hand — sometimes that is an officer with a badge and gun, and sometimes it is a mental health professional. This is critically important work and we must do it methodically and with a lot of care for our community.
6) Do you support transferring 15 positions from the Durham Police Department to the newly created Community Safety Department for its new pilot programs? How should the city further grow the Community Safety Department if the pilot programs are successful?
Yes — as we learn more from our pilots we will be able to understand how to effectively reallocate resources to that department. Some of those resources will come from the police department as we better enable police to focus on core policing responsibilities while shifting other responsibilities to the Community Safety Department.
7) Given the influx of people and money Durham has seen in recent years, and recent plans for Google and Apple to open offices in the area, gentrification has become a major concern in East Durham but also in other neighborhoods close to downtown. In what ways can or should the city intervene?
Where we can intervene, we should — our ability to do so is limited to projects where a re-zoning is requested or needed. The Bragtown neighborhood provides a good example of what can happen when the city has leverage against a proposed development. Development agreements are an important tool that we should utilize where possible. They are voluntary agreements between the city and developers in which developers agree to go beyond the unified development ordinance (UDO) requirement to require community benefits like affordable housing and green space. Since it is a legally binding document developers must deliver on the commitments promised to the community, I think working with developers to enter into development agreements is an important solution, but it will not solve many of the issues with gentrification. The nature of our housing market and limitations in state law make it difficult to enact some of the bolder policy approaches we see working elsewhere, such as inclusionary zoning. If someone is following our ordinances and they do not need an accommodation from the city, they will be able to build their units or housing.
8) How should the city address housing for people who currently make less than the $15/hour minimum wage? How can the city ensure more people make the current living wage?
The only way to truly ensure that new housing development serves the Durham community equitably is for the city, county, and mission-driven nonprofit institutions to build that new housing ourselves. There are many reasons for this, but there are two that are most relevant to our situation here in Durham.
First, as long as profit is the primary motivation for housing development, the housing that is built will be that which creates the largest profit for developers, not the housing that best meets our community’s current and future needs. While we have some power to regulate what developers can and cannot build through our zoning authority, we do not have the power to regulate the prices that they can charge for homes. As prices across Durham continue to rise, there is absolutely no motivation for profit-driven entities to lower the cost of their products.
Second, North Carolina law does not give us the power we truly need to regulate housing development in the public interest. Tools like inclusionary zoning have been used in other cities to provide hundreds and thousands of affordable units, but we are unable to require developers in Durham to provide a single unit of affordable housing. While we can ask developers to make donations to our Affordable Housing Fund, and many do, we cannot require them to do so. We are entirely dependent on their good will, which unfortunately has not created the kind of investment we need to provide the affordable housing options our community needs and deserves.
Recognizing the need for more public investment, the City Council voted 6-1 to put the 2019 Affordable Housing Bond Referendum on the ballot. I was glad to see our community express their commitment to this investment by voting overwhelmingly in favor of the bond. This funding will be used to help residents who are most in need of affordable housing, including households making less than a living wage of $15/hour.
9) What are the city’s most pressing transit needs? How should the city expand bus services to reach more riders?
As I shared in a previous response, we need both an excellent local bus system and an excellent regional transit system. We did expand bus service on several routes in October 2020, due to some bus operator shortages we had to temporarily reduce service on some routes in the summer of 2021. Additionally in spring of 2021 the city launched the GoDurham Better Bus Project. It’s an 18-month project that will look at bus access including improving safety and better connection to bus stops. It will also look at ways to improve key bus routes with a special emphasis on bus routes 3 & 5.
Finally, our Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is in the middle of drafting its long range transit plan. This plan overlaps with Durham & Orange County transit plans and other municipalities’ plans that are part of the DCHC MPO (Durham-Chapel Hill- Carrboro MP) The MPO long range transit plan must also work with Raleigh and Wake’s MPO since an effective transit plan doesn’t stop at our county line.
Our most pressing need is to ensure our long-range plans meet our local and regional needs and that funding at the state and federal level are available. We do not have enough local dollars to get the kind of transit we need to combat climate change and the growth not only Durham is experiencing but the entire Triangle region.
10) How should the council improve transit infrastructure for cyclists, who aren’t protected from traffic by physical barriers and don’t always have options for coordinated bike lanes?
One successful pilot program we implemented recently is our Shared Streets project. 7 streets were identified for the first phase to help provide safer outdoor play and safer bike and pedestrian use. These streets were closed to all vehicular traffic except to the residents who lived on the street and emergency, trash, and delivery vehicles.
These Shared Streets routes were already identified as Neighborhood bike routes. These are streets that are city streets meaning the city owns and maintains them, have low speed limits and limited traffic. The goal is to create a network of “bike boulevards” to allow for safe bicycle commuting especially when the opportunity to create coordinated bike lanes, especially ones with physical barriers is very limited. As Mayor, I want to continue advocating for the expansion of this pilot and expand the network of routes to make Durham a more pedestrian- and bike-friendly city. We also need our updated transit plan and the city’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) to fund bike and pedestrian projects and ensure we have equitable and safe connectivity between bike and pedestrian infrastructure and our transit.
11) How do you think the city’s policy of Expanding Housing Choices will work to increase density in Durham’s urban core? Will the policy work to create more mixed-income communities? Should it work this way? What more could be done to add density or relieve pressures on home values?
In general, Expanding Housing Choices was an important first step. I think we need to do more. I would like the city to investigate how we can encourage developers to create the kind of housing we need, especially what is called “missing middle housing”. Missing middle housing is smaller than the larger apartment buildings we are seeing get built downtown. It’s several units with triplexes and quads (four units) being popular options. There are some zoning challenges as these units are categorized under the NC commercial building code, which increases building costs due to fire separation requirements. But we need to really investigate what our options are. How do we get more multi-unit buildings closer to our city core? It’s expensive to build here, which is why we have seen so much development in the eastern part of the county and so many requests for annexation into city limits.
I believe having a collaborative, consensus driven process and relationship with builders and developers will help us achieve some of the kinds of outcomes we need. It will not solve the problem entirely though. I say this often — the biggest problem is that our housing system is a market-based system meaning the motivation is not to ensure housing for people but profit for those producing the housing. Access to good housing should be treated as a fundamental human right, but that’s not how the American economy is designed. We can help mitigate and alleviate some of the problem, but as a city we cannot solve all the pressure we are seeing in increased home values.
12) New census data shows that 19 percent of Durham’s Black residents live under the poverty line, while about 7 percent of whites and a third of Hispanic residents do. A 2020 Racial Equity Task Force report found growing wealth disparities between Black and white residents that were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. How (if it all) do you think the city should use the report’s findings to make the city a more equitable one for all residents?
We are already utilizing the report in our work as a city. We have approved a resolution supporting several federal advocacy items suggested by the RETF, including federal reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, universal basic income, and a jobs guarantee. The Department of Equity and Inclusion launched a racial equity tool for evaluating budget requests earlier this year. We also created a joint city/county race equity commission. I am committed to engaging with my colleagues on the county commission and school board regarding the RETF recommendations that affect their operations.
We also have an important opportunity with all the federal funding we are receiving for Covid relief. Between rental assistance funding and our American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) the City and County are receiving many millions of dollars. We need to ensure that relief is being provided and administered to create the biggest impact in communities most affected by Covid. We must also ensure that relief is reaching into communities such as our undocumented immigrant communities that did not receive stimulus money as individuals or households or where workers did not qualify for expanded unemployment benefits.
13) The city council established a Durham Workers’ Rights Commission in 2019. What do you feel it has achieved so far? What should its role and focus be, and how should it achieve its goals? Has the city supported it adequately?
Council approved a Worker Bill of Rights drafted by the Workers’ Rights Commission earlier in 2020. In that document, it created a set of goals to benefit all those who work and live in the City of Durham, such as paid family leave, fair and livable wages, and harassment- and discrimination-free workplaces, goals I wholeheartedly support. We need to continue to ensure the commission is supported in their work by the Council.
In addition, I see plenty of room for growth in the role of the Workers’ Rights Commission in Durham. For one, further outreach of what the commission does and the role it plays is needed. By widening the reach of the Commission, more will be able to benefit from the important advocacy role that it plays benefiting workers in Durham. Another way is promoting equitable ways to include those who stand to gain the most from the Commission; the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed for a more critical look at how we govern. Online tools have made it possible for us to find new ways to include others into the decision-making process at the local level. As Mayor, I would seek to make some of the temporary adaptations to how we govern Durham permanent.
14) What is the city doing currently to ensure environmental sustainability in new construction? What more could it be doing?
As a city we have made progress on our own construction on city buildings. Fire Station 17 and EMS station has a solar array, the Water Management Facility Complex (Mist Lake) will use a geo-thermal heating system. We have two more buildings slated for solar arrays one at the Sign and Signal Shop and at the General Services Building. Additionally, if we are approved for the Green Source Advantage program with the county it will allow Durham’s government to power itself mostly through renewable energy sources. Since the incorporation of the city’s Sustainability Roadmap and City Council’s approval of a resolution with a goal to reduce energy consumption in city buildings, have 80% of the energy used in city operations be renewable by 2030, and reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 we have made clear commitments to reducing our carbon footprint. As Mayor, I will ensure we are making clear progress towards meeting our goals and aggressively advocating at both the state and federal level because Durham’s commitment to sustainability cannot be fully accomplished at the local level alone.
15) If there are other issues you would like to discuss, please do so here.
I am running to ensure the ambitious visionary progressive policies we have launched are implemented effectively. And that we continue to amplify what we can do at the local level. We have done a tremendous amount of work to make sure those policies are successful and provide the support our community deserves and expects from its city government. I am proud of the work we have accomplished. I also know we must continue to improve. I believe in Durham, and I believe we will continue being a bold, progressive beacon in the US. I’m not from Durham but I’m raising my kids here. As an immigrant, to find a place to plant roots matters. It’s a leap of faith and a commitment to a future I often thought unimaginable.
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