In the final Richmondside election forum before the city’s first June primary, the trio of District 4 city council candidates gave their takes on a number of the city’s most pressing issues.
The third forum, which took place at De Anza High before an intimate group of about 15 in-person attendees plus those watching the livestreamed video online, featured incumbent Soheila Bana and challengers Keycha Gallon and Jamin Pursell discussing how to address topics such as public safety, including preventing wildfires, how to ensure the district’s needs are heard, how to spend the Chevron settlement and what distinguishes them from their competition.
District 4, which sits in the northeastern part of the city, consists of the neighborhoods of Hilltop Village, Hilltop Green, Fairmede Hilltop, Quail Hill, Greenridge Heights, May Valley, El Sobrante Hills, Greenbriar, Castro Heights and the Carriage Hills North and South neighborhoods.
The first question that the candidates were asked was how they planned to build relationships with fellow council members and staff to address District 4 needs, given that the neighborhoods are cut off from the other voting districts by a freeway and face their own unique challenges.
Gallon said that she would do an analysis of what is working in the district and try to bring a collaborative approach.
“You have to assess everything. I think a lot of times we don’t include the community,” Gallon said. “A lot of the time we have the answers, we just have to engage with the community and bring the city council on board to make the necessary changes.”
Pursell noted the diversity of the different neighborhoods around District 4 and said that he would utilize the neighborhood councils to interact with the community.
“Neighborhood councils are the ones who are able to bring people together so that they know what their issues are on a localized level,” Pursell said, adding that he believes elected leaders should be knocking on doors to engage their constituents throughout their term. “I would like to have town halls where we are able to have more open dialogue with the constituency as well as bringing about a state of the district yearly presentation so that people know what’s going on and how we’ve been investing our time within the district.”
Bana pointed to endorsements and work citywide, specifically naming the support of the 23rd Street Merchants Association, as reasons why voters should reelect her so she can continue her collaborative efforts. She also pointed to criticisms of her working with Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) affiliated council members such as Claudia Jimenez, who recently co-sponsored a resolution with her to add La Moine “Cheese” Park to the capital improvement projects list.
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Watch richmondside’s three city council forums
Bana has received some scrutiny on social media from critics who question her prior advocacy for RPA-endorsed candidates, including Jovanka Beckles in the latter part of the 2010s.
She has since said publicly that she is not a member of the RPA and has been fairly critical of the group. During her first term, Bana engaged in a number of tense spats on the dais with RPA-affiliated council members around topics such as Chevron spending priorities and her requests to increase funding for community events that had already been included in the budget.
“When I reached out across the aisle to ask Mayor (Eduardo) Martinez and council member Jimenez to support my item for Cheese Park, I was attacked instead of encouraged to work with other council members to bring resources to the community,” Bana told the forum audience.
Candidates outline how they’d improve public safety
One of the more persistent topics of this primary season has been what candidates think of the city’s current approach to public safety amid a number of city initiatives like the launching of the crisis response team Reach Out with Compassion and Kindness (ROCK) and a civil grand jury report that detailed the need for hiring more police officers.
Pursell said he believes the first thing that needs to be addressed is hostility between the council and the police department.
“It (the council) needs to be one that is not going to be continuously trying to make examples from across the country apply to our police force because Richmond PD is actually incredible,” Pursell said, adding that he would consider trying to re-draw the police department’s beat maps, which he said haven’t been updated in 20 years.
Bana said that although she believes in having multiple approaches to public safety, she believes that the city needs to hire more officers.
“We have two studies that said that we need nearly 200 police officers and our cap right now is 147 and practically we have less than 130 on the ground,” Bana said. “This is not sufficient and this is not enough. Police are not just for crime safety. They are for quality of life.”
Gallon criticized ROCK, calling it a “half-baked idea” and questioned its effectiveness given that ROCK employees can’t intervene in certain types of calls. She said she would focus on engaging with gun-violence reduction nonprofits who are “boots on the ground.”
“(I would be) working with people who actually advocate against gun violence and put more mentorships in place so that these kids can have a healthy outlet,” Gallon said.
Gallon is the director of nonprofit Keyz2thefuture, which focuses on mentorship with Black and Brown youths who have been impacted by gun violence. She has pointed to her own experience taking care of her brother’s children after he died due to gun violence in Richmond as having prompted her work.
Wednesday night’s forum saw a number of tense moments between Gallon and Bana, with Gallon saying she decided to run after feeling that she, as well as other gun violence reduction community organizers, were not being heard, seemingly referencing a fallout between herself and Bana over $50,000 the city set aside for a gun violence reduction initiative in 2024.
Although Bana pointed out Wednesday that she honored Gallon at the first gun violence remembrance day that year, emails obtained by Richmondside in a public records request show that there were issues with the procurement process for the funds, and the effort to launch violence reduction initiative with the city and the nonprofits went by the wayside. Ultimately, Gallon, her nonprofit and their partners held a separate event from the city’s in June 2025.
“I acknowledge the great work of Miss Gallon at the city council. I initiated the first remembrance day of victims of gun violence and I’ll continue my bridge building and collaboration across all sectors of the society,” Bana said at the forum after an attendee asked how the candidates would address division in the community.
“She actually did not collaborate,” Gallon interjected after Bana spoke.
Audience member asks: ‘Do you support La Moine “Cheese” Park renovations?’
One of the more polarizing District 4 topics has been where the candidates stand on park infrastructure improvements, and an audience member brought up the question of Cheese Park at the forum.
The recent move to add La Moine “Cheese” park to the city’s capital projects list has been criticized by Bana’s opponents as circumventing the city’s ranking process for projects — a method Bana herself criticized last year as prioritizing “underserved communities” and “unfair.”
Bringing public restrooms and other infrastructure updates to La Moine has been a constant theme Bana has advocated for during her tenure.
Alan Odon, a May Valley resident who wore a T-shirt supporting Bana, asked if candidates supported the move to have the park added to the projects list.s
Gallon said that she believes that all parks in the district, not just La Moine, should receive proper attention from the city.
“I think they all need to be upgraded, not just Cheese Park. We have Hilltop Green Park that needs to be redone. We have Hilltop Park that needs to be redone,” Gallon said, adding that some improvements, like a dog park, can be handled by city council and community residents with streamlined permits. “We have to go out there and we can get volunteers and get the permit to go there and do it by ourselves. Everything doesn’t cost a lot of money, we just have to take the initiative to do it.”
Pursell criticized the way that Bana handled the process of adding La Moine to the city’s project list.
“We have a budget process. We have ways that we can move things through to the capital improvement plan and that process is something that we should be honoring and should be part of the understanding of how a city council member works,” Pursell said. “The issue that was with that item was that it was being done out-of-process and also misclassifying that park as a community park and not a neighborhood park. It was also not looking at it holistically with the rest of the parks within our district and within the rest of the city.”
Bana defended her work, saying that, in addition to La Moine, she was able to get landscaping and vegetation maintenance for Hilltop Green Park. She also said that she would have liked to establish a dog park in the Hilltop Park but didn’t have the support of the Fairmede-Hilltop Neighborhood Council.
“I have received requests to improve lighting there (at Hilltop Park) and put up fitness equipment so I’m going for that,” Bana said. “That’s one item I have and I am following it and will provide results as soon as possible.”
Key 2026 election dates
Mail-in voting began: May 4
Deadline to register to vote in the primary: Mon., May 18
Primary election: June 2
For more info.: Visit Richmondside’s 2026 primary election voters guide
