Donald Hedrick
Candidate for Mayor of San Luis Obispo.
| Why are you running for office?: | I have a love of this town. When I came to college, it was when I fell in love with this town. Our hills are so close by that we could focus on them. After something it has stuck with me all along. I love how our town has such access to such visuals of the mountains nearby and we have quite a historic town. I think we need to keep our history. Our town has been assaulted by developers from far and wide. They come and are plucking the cherry out of our state and I would like to help preserve our town’s integrity as a health, as a history of a historic mission town. So our town has been eroded by all these high rising developments that have dwarfed out history and has made out town into a Gotham City of shadows. I would like to help keep this town on a course of honoring its history. |
| What makes you qualified for the job?: | I’ve been kind of active in town. I came to Cal Poly in the mid '60s and graduated from there. When I was there I was on the public relations commission on college union and I was also the president of the motorcycle club on campus. After college I hooked up with Grass Roots too as one of their board members. In the mid '70s I was the treasurer of the EOC, representing Grass Roots on their board. Then I settled down to business after that and got my business together. I was an artisan making metal sculptures but I did so much work with fixing people’s things that were broken and that it became a welding business for many years. I’ve been on the same block for many years as a welder. |
| What are your two main priorities if you win?: | I would like to, at least, be a kinder, gentler, hand on the tiller of this ship adrift that has been prolonged by the big money, special interest forces that want to take out town away from us. I would like to keep our town for the people that have been here all along, investing their life in our town, and they are being outvoted by the dollar of the corporation that are way too strongly taking our town away. |
| How will you interact with other governments?: | These are outside interests that have no place in our town. I think they have key words – The son of our mayor is up in Portland being an organizer of that mess that has been going for 100 days or more. These are outside interests funded by questionable sources that are turning our, portions of our people, it doesn’t take a small percentage, to create such chaos. I think the people, normal people in this country, do not want to see all these riots or things that are being forced by outside interests. If it depends on our own motivations, we would be fine but we got contamination of world forces that we need to respect our local- and not be so attached to these socialists and ideas and we need to also keep our sovereignty of this country. Sovereignty comes down to the city level, we don’t need to be an escape around- or all the people that want to come to this country, we need to have our door open but they have to use the door. We should have immigration-by-marriage instead of the cartels and….. People have no things to offer our country except to be invited by the wrong elements of our government that want to turn our cities into sanctuaries. Our cities need to be a sanctuary for the people that have been here and that have invested their lives in our cities. To take anybody from faraway that would cooperate with the socialist concept and erode our votes -- the power of our votes down -- we need to keep our sovereignty in this country. And voting is part of -- people from all over the world should not be invited in to vote here. |
| What are your plans to help overcome COVID-19?: | I don’t think [the city] has been very helpful. I think that some of our government leadership is more honoring of the ANTIFAs and the Black Lives Matter. These things that are financed even by as far away as the Communist party from China. We need to be very worried of any attachment to those organizations. They’re part of what wants to turn this country into a third-world country. And our cities have to take what comes rolling down the hill. We need to be keeping touch with our city’s history and not be trying to fulfill these mandates by state governments to build more houses here and there. There are so much. But other towns don’t have the constraints of such nice hills so close by. It limits the development that could even happen in this town without turning it into a stack and pack along the tracks that we seem to be getting. |
| Which two issues are most important to you?: | Parking and traffic. City and governments are so easy kicking the can down the road for parking. There are too many cans in the street and already we have gridlock. When we build all these high buildings to cram more people in the town, they ignore that people come with their cars. They wanted to turn us into a bicycle town and that’s another thing that’s turning over our traffic in this town. All the accommodating extra bicycles when you don’t really see bicycles in the bike paths -- but they’re there and they’re big. And downtown especially, three lanes are reduced to two lanes so the delivery truck park in the center of the street because they can’t park in the bike lane. We need to have our parking plan better ahead of time instead of nature reactions to catch up. And when our developing departments that are so easily giving exceptions to the parking laws and discounting how many parking spaces a developer needs to accommodate. As it is- maybe a car space per bedroom at best. But I’ve experienced seeing some places with seven units and it only has six parking spaces. Parking is very key to developing, except that an orphan is kicked down the road like a can, somebody else has to deal with. That’s not right. We need to be helpful of our own citizens. |
Extended Interview with Donald Hedrick
