By Eliza PARTIKA

Each week CV Weekly will examine the candidates running for a variety of offices. This week we present the remaining candidates running for Glendale City Council.

Andre Haghverdian

Andre Haghverdian was a civil and design engineer for a private engineering firm in Los Angeles before working for the City of Glendale. He told the CV Weekly he is ready to work for the community if elected to City Council.

“I don’t need to learn on the job. I’m ready to roll up the sleeves and work from day one,” he said.

Transparency

Haghverdian wants to make himself accessible to the community – a measure of transparency is whether a representative will call you back and will meet with you to discuss important issues.

“Transparency in city hall comes from the top. It comes from executives. City hall has the best staff you can hire, but transparency comes from executives and the city’s expectations for those executives,” he said. “When I was working, if we would get a call, whether we had a solution or not, we had to return the call. So people knew that they were heard, that we are working on this.”

He said that as a member of Council he would look to residents to determine the projects that needed to be done, not spend money on what he called “pet projects.”

“We need to reprioritize based on the money we have what is good for Glendale,” he said.

Housing and Utilities

“I would like to tackle [housing and utilities] by sitting down with the Planning Department to create incentives for developers of affordable housing so we can get affordable housing for those who need it,” he said.

He would resurrect the Glendale Redevelopment Agency to improve and revitalize housing. The agency was created in 1972 to rebuild areas of the city “blighted by disrepair and disuse,” according to the City of Glendale website. Haghverdian said he would create opportunities to bring small businesses and large corporations into the city.

“They would go to businesses, they would bring them to the city. They would deal with them, give them incentives, give them a startup, give them a lot of things to [bring them to the city] to generate revenue, the taxes and everything. That’s how Disney moved to the City of Glendale. That’s how DreamWorks moved to the City of Glendale. You know, those were the beginning how we were brought in but after the Redevelopment Agency was dissolved, there was nobody advocating for bringing business to the city,” he said.

He also wants to create incentives for city developers to build affordable housing units already being discussed by Council, similar to units that were recently built on Central Avenue.

“It is purely a negotiation with developers creating incentives and density bonuses to them to build more affordable housing [so] we are not creating the wheel again. It’s there. All we have to do is revamp it,” he said.

Haghverdian wants to tackle the cost of utilities first in order to lower rates for Glendale residents. He says that currently, GWP borrowed money to continue to operate. He said he would network with the manager of GWP in order to ensure the company can run on its own so rates don’t have to increase as much.

“All of my neighbors are in [their] 70s and 80s. [Where] I live these folks are all on pensions and a fixed budget. It is a betrayal to them of what we are doing with GWP right now – telling them choose between what you buy from grocery or pay your utility bill,” he said.

Transportation and Safety

To address safety issues, Haghverdian said he would first address vacancies in the police department. He said to do that, we need more outreach in the community.

“We need to attract the new generation to governmental work, we need to show them how this is because [that is] the generation that has to continue to grab this baton and run with it. So [we have to be] willing to give them the opportunity to come in and be a part of it and learn. We are not going to be having anybody doing this work in the future,” he said.

He supports Laura Friedman’s recent safety camera pilot but said to really understand the impact we will need to study [the impact to] roads, traffic and transportation.

Karen Kwak

Karen Kwak is a GUSD substitute teacher and a renter in South Glendale. She was inspired to run for City Council after regularly watching and participating in City Council meetings as an affordable housing and sustainable transportation advocate. She believes the role of someone on Council is to find ways to increase representation for those who have less of a voice in the community.

“They care a lot. They just have given up hope that anything is ever going to work in their favor,” she said. “They’ve been taught to believe by every corner of society that their voices don’t matter. And this [went on] actually a long time. But you can’t knock on the door once and expect to win them; it doesn’t work. These are long, entrenched beliefs and habits.”

Transparency

Kwak would plan to outreach differently than past Council members if elected, she told the CV Weekly. As an advocate, Kwak often knocked on doors to ask people in her neighborhood their thoughts on voting and other popular issues, with positive results, and when she and other advocates showed up to city hall and pushed for housing concerns of others in the community, she found representatives listened – but that often, City Council wasn’t sharing or encouraging the public to attend. In her experience, people care if they are given a clear opportunity to learn about, understand and speak about issues that affect their neighborhoods.

To that end, Kwak said she would want to change this pattern, first by creating clear directives to phone numbers, emails and offices where Glendale neighborhoods can go to address their concerns outside of public comment – similar to Pasadena’s City Council.

“When you actually want the people of your city to connect with city services, there are very easy ways to do it. And in contrast, you look at Glendale offices. It looks like the exact opposite. It looks like they’re trying to get out and go out of their way to say, ‘Don’t bother us. We don’t work for you, you work for us.’ There’s a very simple way to make sure people access city services,” she said.

She would also try to pay City Council full time living wages so they can dedicate more time to addressing issues constituents bring to them and so they have a greater say in how the city is run.

Housing and Utility Rates

Unlike other candidates, Kwak believes that instead of building more housing, co-ops should be established based on the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, an LA County proposal that allows tenants to purchase their building from their landlord. She said this model would still create enough affordable units with the added bonus of giving back to the community.

In co-op housing, the renters share a portion of the equity in the apartment building they live in. Kwak said money collected goes back into repair and quality of life costs for the entire building, instead of into the landlord’s pockets.

Kwak’s short term goal for the co-op project is to garner community and Council support, and to require landlords to notify tenants if their building has been sold and make it easier for people to purchase their unit or building from management if it has been put on the market. Her long term goal is to implement the co-op model for all rental units in Glendale.

As far as utility hikes, Kwak would propose a yearly discussion of increases where increases would be capped at 1%-2% each year instead of raising costs all at once. She would also discuss taking out bonds to help supplement income that they are trying to make up by increasing rates.

Kwak would also advocate for a public bank in Glendale. Public banks, by definition, put any money back into the community that was earned or invested instead of giving profits to shareholders. According to state law, banks would create a board of community members to vote on how investments are spent. Kwak told the Glendale News Press that implementing a public bank could fix some of the budgeting shortfalls the city is facing, thereby putting more money back into the Council and community for housing and other projects.

“That’s why it’s such a powerful idea. We aren’t banking the way you and I bank – at a corporate bank with high interest rates. We would be able to fund more projects that help the community at lower interest rates and be able to fund a lot more projects because of the leverage we would have as a bank in the community,” she said.

Transportation

Kwak said she would take steps to ensure the bus schedule is readily available and easily accessible to people all over Glendale. She would also ensure a pedestrian plan or bike plan would immediately be discussed and offered to the community.

She would advocate for more protected bike lanes and for colorful sidewalks that are easier to see at night.

“This is not just an environmental issue. It’s not a transition. It’s also an equity issue because of people like me who don’t drive, or lower income people. It’s our children who haven’t learned how to drive. It’s our seniors who may have failing eyesight and they can’t [drive] – it’s not safe for them to drive. People in wheelchairs; we need to make the city safe for everyone. And these are our most vulnerable people,” she said.

Ardashes “Ardy” Kassakhian

Ardashes “Ardy” Kassakhian is running for his second term on the Glendale City Council. Prior to his current position he served as Glendale’s city clerk.

Although born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kassakhian considers himself a Glendale hometown guy. He attended RD White and John Marshall elementary schools, Wilson Middle School and Glendale High School, graduating in 1994. He went on to the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelors of Arts in history, received his Master of Arts in public policy and administration from Northwestern University and attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He completed the certificate program for senior executives in state and local government. He is an alumnus of the Coro Public Affairs Fellowship.

He said the purpose of the City Council has remained the same throughout the years.

 “In a general way, it’s to help make Glendale a livable city with quality services that serve all,” he said. “But more specifically, how you do that is where the rubber meets the road. How do you spend the tax dollars that we collect in the ways that provides the greatest benefit to all?”

Housing

For his second term, he wants to see the policies that were implemented over the last four years come to completion, he said.

“Such as building more affordable housing through these public/private non-profit partnerships,” he said. “We have about 570 units of housing coming online in the next year to two years, which will be the most that any city in this region has been able to do in that time period.”

Kassakhian has been a strong supporter of the housing ad hoc committee where individuals who represent both the landlords and renters discuss, and debate, housing conditions in the city.

“I want to know what the real problems are,” he said.

He wants more information on how many landlords are using the “renovictions” ploy to get residents out of their homes. Renovictions are when landlords justify evicting tenants from their property because they want to renovate that property. But some landlords who removed tenants for this reason reportedly did little-to-no work on the property but was able to raise rents for the next tenant.

“The laws we have on the books make sure that the people who are renovating those buildings are doing it for legitimate reasons and not for cosmetic reasons that do not require a person’s eviction,” he said. “So before passing any new law, I want to make sure that the laws we do have are being followed.”

He would like to have more information and make a decision in accordance to that information. He would like to address the issues of renovictions without doing anything that overly disrupts the real estate market. To achieve that, information from Glendale residential renters and landlords would be invaluable.

Transportation

Kassakhian describes mobility as including pedestrians, bicyclists and automobiles.

“Our issues with mobility are that we have an infrastructure that was made for an era when the automobile [was] king,” he said.

Cars are bigger, faster and heavier than when Glendale’s infrastructure was formed. And students used to be taught driving as part of the school’s curriculum, he added.

“What we need to do is, and this may not be an answer that appeals to everyone, but we need to slow down traffic,” he said. “Our habits need to change. So let’s not think about it in terms of bicycle lanes; let’s think about it in slowing down the speed of drivers to make the city safer for all of us.”

There are a variety of ways this can be done, he said, including adding speed bumps to certain streets, adding stop signs and hiring more motor officers.

Transparency and Safety

Kassakhian said to include residents, like those in the ad hoc community, into the equation when making decisions that directly affect that specific community.

He has spoken many times from the Council panel on the importance of outreach, and requesting more outreach. He established Coffee with the Mayor when he served as mayor, and continued the program until recently when scheduling became a problem. He plans on starting that outreach again, which allows him to hear directly from residents.

Many law enforcement and fire departments, including those in Glendale, have had a difficult time not only recruiting employees but also keeping them. Kassakhian said he was concerned about this issue in Glendale.

“Since COVID, since a lot of the civil unrest ­– protests and even riots that happened ­– there was a declining interest in public safety and first responder-type work. It has accelerated now to a point where all cities are struggling to find people to go into law enforcement and public safety,” he said.

The city recently approved the Glendale Police Dept. to offer incentives for hiring and for referrals of new officers.

“I’d like to also look into bonuses to help individuals who work in Glendale to live within a five-mile radius of the city … giving them a one-time signing bonus that encourages them to not only come to work in Glendale but to live close to Glendale,” he said.

He added this is valuable because if or when a major disaster occurs those who live in or near Glendale could get to the city quickly.

“I don’t want all of our public safety personnel to be driving in from the Inland Empire or from Santa Clarita with freeways [possibly being destroyed] like what happened with the Northridge Earthquake,” he said.

Kassakhian does not sugarcoat issues in Glendale and knows the city very well. He sees the problems of the city but also sees the positive aspects of it. He and his family live in south Glendale; his parents live in the Crescenta Valley area, his brother attended CV High School and his mom taught at Clark Magnet High School, so his roots are deep.

He does have an overall positive view of Glendale and often shares this philosophy.

“There’s nothing wrong with Glendale that can’t be fixed with what’s right with Glendale,” he said.

Vrej Agajanian

Vrej Agajanian was born in Tehran, Iran and moved permanently to the U.S. in 1980. He is a graduate of Aryamehr University of Tehran, and achieved the California state certification of professional engineer.

He was first voted onto the Glendale City Council in 2017 and served the city until 2022 when he lost in a very close race his bid to maintain his seat. There were three open seats in the 2022 election ­– Ara Najarian was the third place candidate, winning 146 more votes than Agajanian.

Agajanian owns two television stations, AABC TV and High Vision, and acts as host and provides commentary on both.

Glendale City Council seats are non-partisan, which Agajanian said he likes. He said that way members work together.

“[The Council] went so far to the left and so much to the right that to be in the middle is hard,” he said.

And the middle of most issues is where he sees himself.

“I would like to stay in the middle. We are all working for the residents of Glendale,” he added.

He is running again because he has a need to serve the residents of Glendale, which is his home. He does not have plans to go on to a higher office; he just wants to serve the city.

“This is where I want to serve my community and people who are residing in Glendale,” he said.

Housing

“I brought the issue of having [about] 507 affordable housing [units] to be built in Glendale,” he said.

He added that housing is close to being built and that the city will be ready to help the elderly.

“And help those who are working in Glendale but can’t afford to live in Glendale,” he said.

He added it was very important that people who work in Glendale be able to live in the city.

“But they need some help,” he said. He said the units that will be built will help working families.

Another housing concern he has is the homeless population.

“When I was [on Council] the number of homeless in Glendale was 169,” he said. “Now it’s more about 190 homeless people.”

During COVID, Glendale participated in Project Room Key and Agajanian said they were able to help many, but not all, of those on the street. He would like to work on that type of project to help more of the unhoused in Glendale.

Transportation and Infrastructure

“Glendale is an old city with infrastructure that needs replacement and upgraded with new development,” he said. He added if Glendale wants to grow the Council needs to make certain the infrastructure has enough capacity to do so and is in good working condition.

“From old fire stations to sewer and water systems to overhead and [underground] power lines,” he said, “we need to generate enough funding by way of the issuance of bonds and do some changes to our system.”

He has concerns about the power infrastructure and being able to continue to get power that is already needed – and needed in the future – to residents.

Transparency and Safety

Agajanian has a concern about public safety, especially seeing law enforcement making arrests only to find those suspects immediately released. He said that when he served as Glendale mayor he was approached with a proposal to reduce funding for law enforcement.

“I was against it,” he said.

He said he was in favor of increasing the law enforcement budget to stay competitive. He understands that the job of law enforcement is more difficult because of the practice of releasing suspects. He said what he has seen is that these individuals have become professional thieves who understand the law as well as the police and district attorneys.

While he served as major in 2020, Agajanian released a statement that spoke to transparency after the murder of George Floyd and the following protests: “This past week, our nation has witnessed a momentous reaction to racism, discrimination and lack of inclusion of all members within American’s communities,” he stated.

He went on to say that Glendale has worked hard to build relationships between “citizens, law enforcement and community leaders” and added that maintaining this was an ongoing effort.

He has stated he is an advocate for financial transparency and an open government.