Letter to the Editor:
Burbank’s City Council race is starting to look like many other American elections. By that I mean corporations and special interests are funneling large sums of money to their preferred candidates with deep institutional and corporate ties.
Burbank limits political donations to $500. Corporate landlords including a large branch of the Cusumano family tree have reached this limit and are resorting to PACs and independent expenditures to spend large sums of money supporting two candidates in particular: Judie Wilke and Chris Rizzotti. Over a half million dollars worth of donations from the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles (AAGLA), California Apartment Association, corporate landlords, and others provides these two candidates a significant advantage over their grassroots funded opponents.
Just imagine all the fear and propaganda laced flyers, emails, and text messages that corporate money will pay for. They are already mailing out flyers which appear to falsely imply endorsements by the Democratic Party, while their signs sit on yards beside far right candidates including Donald Trump.
The corporate real estate lobby is not funding these candidates out of the goodness of their heart. They spend their money strategically, and like their properties, seek to maximize the return on their investment.
City council and staff are diligently exploring tenant protections and a rent cap for Burbank’s 58.2% renter majority, 56.4% of whom are rent burdened and 31% of whom are severely rent burdened. Loopholes like family member move-ins and reno-victions allow easy evictions and mass displacement, often of entire buildings. While Burbank renters fight for safe and sustainable housing, the real estate industry pushes back against any solutions to the housing crisis. They insist the current 10% rent cap is sufficient and no new protections are needed. There’s no doubt in my mind these corporate backed candidates will work to kill or reverse any legislation that protects renters and threatens to cut into already massive corporate landlord profits.
These same landlords raise our rents 8%+ annually and use our rent money to fund these candidates. They blemish rental properties with lawn signs for candidates who will perpetuate this imbalanced system. Those same renters are disgusted by the politicking and electioneering forced upon them without their consent, for candidates they already distrust.
Wilke and Rizzotti will hurt renters as well as workers.
Burbank is a union city. From WGA to SAG-AFTRA and TAG, working class families can afford to live in Burbank because of hard fought wins against corporate giants who regularly use tax breaks and loopholes to underpay non-union workers and fail to pay their fair share to cities like Burbank. Corporations who chop down trees providing shade for picketing workers during the summer heat. These corporate media giants, just like the “rental empires,” seek only to extract from our community.
The Burbank City Council Candidate Forum hosted by the Burbank Chamber of Commerce on September 26 asked candidates about recent strikes in the film industry. Wilke and Rizzotti agreed–give tax breaks to the corporations and tell the underpaid overworked workers to get back to work. Other candidates had better ideas like stop appeasing these corporations who only take and instead work to attract independent and family businesses who actually care about our community.
Judie Wilke and Chris Rizzotti defend the disastrous status quo. They will enable the continued displacement of our neighbors and instability in our community as long as it continues to benefit their corporate donors. There’s some great candidates in this race with fresh ideas and dreams of growth and progress for this vibrant city—do your research and vote to protect yourself and your neighbors.
Dan Kleiman
Burbank
