In the News

A town hall event Tuesday afternoon at Hammon Senior Center gave community members a chance to ask their federal and state elected officials questions.

U.S. Congressman John Duarte, R-Modesto, and State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil, District 4, both of whom represent Patterson, participated in the event. State Assembly member Juan Alanis, District 22, was also expected to attend, but was unable to make it due to travel delays at the airport. His field representative Justin Farkas did a brief introduction and updated the crowd on what Alanis has championed while in office.

Farkas said Alanis has been one of the most effective members of the state legislature since being elected.

“(Alanis) passed 16 bills in his first term. That’s first among all republican members and that’s fourth in terms of all first-year members of the assembly,” Farkas said, adding that there has been a lot of turnover and a lot of freshman assembly members in Sacramento.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Duarte talked about the importance of investing in infrastructure to improve the quality of life for those in his district. He is working on advocating for $1 million in funding to support the Sperry Road interchange project, an initiative that would widen roads, rebuild onramps and offramps, improve intersections with traffic lights and make the Sperry Avenue bridge wider.

“I’m disgusted by the brake lights,” Duarte said, referring to the never-ending stream of lights as commuters take to the roadways to get to the Bay area for work. “We’ve got to build the infrastructure that facilitates (building Patterson into a bedroom community) and not have our commuters, our families, our fathers, our mothers, our teachers, our firefighters, our policemen, stuck in soul-crushing traffic every day because of some idiot philosophy on the part of California.”

Duarte said he was infuriated with the $3.1 billion allocated for a high-speed railway on the other side of the valley that does nothing to assist communities here. It’s money, he said, that should be put into infrastructure projects like the Sperry Road interchange. Part of the problem, Duarte said is California policy of no new highway capacity.

“If Patterson is expected to be a major growth area in the county and for commuter traffic out of the Bay area, then we’ve got to build the infrastructure that goes with that growth. Otherwise it’s just not going to be sustainable,” he said.

He later went on to say that if the bullet train was shut down and the money was instead put into infrastructure, it could actually lower the cost of housing and development fees.

DRINKING WATER

Drinking water was another big emphasis Duarte discussed.

“There is a huge drinking water problem here in Patterson and we need to fix it,” he said.

There are communities up and down the Highway 5 corridor that are on groundwater and the quality is continuing to worsen.

“It was never good enough to begin with to provide drinking water to families here in the west side of the valley, so one of my big goals, and it’s a longer term goal, is to get clean treated surface water into all of our westside communities,” Duarte said.

There needs to be a centralized water treatment plant to get healthy, clean, treated surface water to these communities, he added.

“I’m very happy being a very boring Congressman,” Duarte said, adding he likes delivering sewer pipes, sidewalks, streets, water treatment projects and delivering water to farms.

MANDATES & REGULATIONS

Alvarado-Gil stressed the importance of needing more money for education and how more and more mandates are directly impacting consumers, making them pay a higher cost. She said when she goes up to Sacramento, she is there to be the voice of regular, everyday people.

“How do I vote?” she said, adding that she is pro-family, pro-local control, pro-agriculture, and pro-law enforcement.

Both Duarte and Alvarado-Gil strongly encouraged getting people to get involved with their local school board—an issue Patterson is all-too-familiar with as they struggle to get applicants for trustees.

Alvarado-Gil said a lot of people want to get into debates about who is running for President or Senate, but there needs to be support and focus on those further down the ballot, as well.

Patterson Lissete Frausto asked the elected officials what their plans are for families to have access to childcare.

Duarte said with a higher cost of living and high cost of not only housing, but also utility rates that continue to increase, regulations on childcare facilities need to be re-analyzed.

“All of these requirements sound really nice,” Duarte said. “All these things would be nice if we had angels and fairies and unicorns and rainbows to deliver them without having the cost on the parents that need childcare and keep it profitable for parents to go to work.”

“Are all these regulations really serving our residents and our communities here in California?”

Alvarado-Gil said access to childcare is a personal issue for her. She said she strongly supports universal T-K or Pre-K and has built a platform to work directly with legislators to have equity in schools.

She added that they have also been working so that businesses can get seed money for a myriad of things like training or equipment, in order to start their own business for childcare.

Alvarado-Gil also touched on how mandates are affecting community hospitals. As hospitals struggle to financially sustain in the wake of an economically devastating pandemic, they cannot meet state earthquake retrofitting mandates, causing shutdowns.

The senator said legislators worked to get extensions for the hospital to meet the mandates, but the governor vetoed the bill.

“I don’t know if in my lifetime we’ll see a hospital in Patterson,” Alvarado-Gil said.

Town Hall event showcases elected officials | Patterson Irrigator | ttownmedia.com