Claudia Jimenez says she wants to continue to build upon the foundation she’s helped lay since she was first elected to the Richmond City Council in 2020.
In that race, Jimenez was one of three Richmond Progressive Alliance-backed candidates who won in their respective districts. Also elected were council members Melvin Willis, District 1, and Gayle McLaughlin, District 5, who is not seeking re-election.
Her proudest accomplishment is helping to improve the city’s financial picture at the time. For example, the city’s financial reserves were increased from 12% of its overall operating budget to 21%. She also said the council’s leadership helped turn a $90 million deficit into a surplus of $15.9 million, $8.8 million of which was allocated toward the city’s Capital Program.
However, the city’s budget of approximately $503 million is split nearly evenly between the General Fund ($249 million) for basic operating costs and other funds ($254 million) for capital expenses and non-general programs – something she acknowledged needs improvement in an interview with Richmondside.
“We are not all there. We need more money, but the fact that I passed policies to get rid of our predatory loans (loans offered through deceptive, unfair, or fraudulent practices that benefit the lender at the expense of the borrower, usually with high interest rates and fees) and save over $84 million,” she said. “We have also begun making steady payments on our (pension) liability.”
Meet D6 Richmond City Council candidate Claudia Jimenez
WHO: Claudia Jimenez
PLATFORM HIGHLIGHTS: Healthy city budget, green jobs, street safety
WHAT SHE SAID: “Now we have the means to really envision a new Richmond that is going to be a better Richmond and all of that is due to a progressive city council.”
WHO IS CHALLENGING HER: Read about Shawn Dunning.
This is among a series of profiles of the seven candidates running for seats in three Richmond City Council districts. Visit our local elections hub for more stories.
The Richmond City Council District 6 candidates are incumbent and Vice Mayor Claudia Jimenez (left) and Shawn Dunning. They are pictured at a Richmondside meet-the-candidates night held at Memorial Auditorium earlier this month. Credit: Kelly Sullivan
Other achievements she’s proud of include: The allocation of $20 million for Main Library renovations;$7.7 million in citywide park renovations; $1.6 million annually for a traffic safety program to address traffic problems; and the creation of the Community Crisis Response Program (CCRP).
However, many financial questions abound in Richmond as Jimenez seeks to defend her seat from challenger Shawn Dunning. The Chevron settlement ad-hoc committee she was a part of — along with Mayor Eduardo Martinez and District 3 councilmember Doria Robinson — secured a 10-year, $550 million settlement with the refinery in return for removing the Make Polluters Pay Tax from the November ballot. The new council will play a pivotal role in working with the community to determine how to budget these funds.
Jimenez points out that the city wouldn’t have the Chevron settlement had it not been for that trio of RPA-supported council members at the negotiation table.
“I feel like we were able to increase salaries for every single staff and have been able to bring more money in,” she said. “Now we have the means to really envision a new Richmond that is going to be a better Richmond and all of that is due to a progressive city council.”
‘Making corporations pay’ a common thread in her career
One theme that has transcended her career as a community organizer and politician, Jimenez said, has been her efforts to get large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes on environmental issues.
And those roots of activism can be traced to her life in Cali, Colombia — the country’s third largest city – where she was born and raised.
In 1999 as a 19-year-old student at Universidad San Buenaventura Cali, she joined a movement of local architects and social workers hoping to advocate for local farmers who had been affected by flooding.
Eventually, the group secured funding for a sweat equity program where 50 families who agreed to help build housing each received 2.5 acres of land per family for permanent housing.
She said she also advocated for smaller farmers in a Colombian valley who were affected by corporate sugar cane companies who were not sustainably maintaining the area’s watershed. The two interests reached a pact, she said, and more environmental regulations were implemented at a local level.
“That idea, for me, of making corporations pay their fair share, is something that’s run throughout my career,” she said. “Really being on the side of those whose voices haven’t been heard.”
She met the man who would become her husband while he was visiting Colombia from the United States to write his thesis on the program she had established with the local farmers. After the two lived on the East Coast for awhile, they moved to Berkeley where Jimenez enrolled in English as a second language classes with hopes of one day attending UC Berkeley. She met her goal and earned her master’s degree in environmental planning there in 2011.
After they had a son in 2008, the family bought a home in Richmond in 2009. There she got involved with a local group of mothers organizing to revitalize the Solano Playlot in the North and East neighborhood.
From there, she began working for Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organizations (CCISCO) with both the Spanish-speaking community and Richmond’s Black community.
“It was like we were able to connect the black and brown struggles, and we also saw that there is a lot of tension between them,” she said. “So we organized this really tough conversation to talk about, what are the things that you have to say about the immigrants that come here, and the Black community, what are your fears, and it was beautiful. There were many new relations created.”
During her time working for CCISCO, she connected with the RPA, which was across the street from her office, and eventually became a member.
After an unsuccessful run for a vacant city council seat in 2016, she returned to Colombia to give her children a chance to connect with their Colombian culture for a few years before returning with them in 2019. At that point, she decided to run for office again, this time in the newly formed city council District 6.
“We ran a campaign during COVID, and we developed a way of canvassing during the pandemic that was really cool,” she said. “It was, actually, really sweet to be able to talk to neighbors at their doors, because people were kind of lonely.”
She won more than 50% of the vote in District 6 against Vinay Pimple and La’Tanya Dandie in a three-person race, attributing her win to being able to go outside of her community to create coalitions.
“I felt like I was really having conversations with those who were empowered to line up (our) goals,” she said, adding that she learned to present herself in a way that made those at city hall take her more seriously. “I just kind of didn’t do a lot of work on presenting myself to the council in a way that they were inspired to feel like I was more than that (a community organizer).”
From ‘streets of the future’ to the ‘Green-Blue Deal’
Jimenez now sits on a council positioned to potentially drastically improve the services offered to Richmond residents — for example, improved road safety and city infrastructure and resources such as community centers and parks.
“I think the future in Richmond is that we have a vibrant community. That we start implementing some of these ideas of the street of the future for safer walking and biking,” she said.
She said that she envisions that the city’s public works department will be working in collaboration with the traffic calming division to improve areas that need repaving or other maintenance.
“So we don’t do things separately, and this is how other countries have been doing it — like they have been able to change the way of the streets,” she said. “We do it all at once. Having a plan will help us to seek more (grant) money in a way that we have not been able to do because there has not been a cohesive vision.”
She hopes the $550 million Chevron settlement can help the city realize its “Green-Blue New Deal,” boosting the local economy with hundreds of environmentally friendly jobs.
She pushed back on the idea that the city doesn’t know what the community needs, reiterating that the city has done plenty of resident outreach and that certain council members, including herself, have engaged community members for many years.
“We have been hearing from the community that we need more spaces for recreation, we have been hearing from the parents that there is a need for more programming for youth,” she said. “There is a need for unhoused intervention. There is a need for affordable housing. There is a need for improving the infrastructure because the city hasn’t had the means to do that. So there is a lot of deferred maintenance that we need to address in order for us to build the future that we want.”
She believes that she is the best candidate to continue representing District 6 because she has the receipts.
“My engagement with the community started before I decided to run for city council,” she told Richmondside. “I can show the receipts of what I have done, and I want to continue to do that and bring the services to my community so we can continue to improve Richmond.”
She said that endorsements of her from environmental groups such as Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), which initially proposed putting an oil refinery tax on the November ballot, to political groups such as the Young Democrats and labor groups such as SEIU Local 1021, Richmond Firefighters Local 188 and IFPTE Local 21, show local groups trust her leadership.
“I feel like it’s such a responsibility to continue this path forward of a brighter future in the region,” she said. “I am not pretending to be the voice of people in Richmond. What I am is a person who listens, who works with everybody and makes sure that there is a space for these voices that haven’t been heard to be heard louder and clearer.”
