Imelda Padilla Leads Field in LA’s District 6 Election

Candidates Imelda Padilla and Marisa Alcaraz will go head-to-head in a June runoff for the Los Angeles City Council seat vacated by former Council President Nury Martinez.

Padilla, backed by the city’s largest landlord group, led the special election race with 25.7 percent of the vote, followed by Alcaraz with 21.1 percent, the Los Angeles Daily News reported, citing results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder.

The election on April 7 is slated to be certified on April 14. The runoff is set for June 27.

Padilla led with 3,424 votes, followed by Alcaraz with 2,819 and Marco Santana with 2,523, according to the Registrar-Recorder’s office. With only 88 ballots uncounted, Santana could not make up Alcaraz’s lead of nearly 300 votes.

Martinez resigned from her City Council seat after a leaked racist audio recording in October, which led to the special election to fill her empty seat.

District 6 includes the east San Fernando Valley neighborhoods of Arleta, Lake Balboa, North Hollywood, North Hills, Panorama City, Van Nuys and Sun Valley.

Padilla, a community organizer born in Van Nuys and raised in Sun Valley, has two decades of professional ties to the Valley, having served on the Sun Valley Neighborhood Council, the L.A. Valley College Foundation Board, where she serves as president, and Pacoima Beautiful.

She also worked as a field deputy for the City of L.A. and as an organizer for Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

She has a wide range of endorsements, including from multiple labor unions, L.A. Unified School Board members, the East Area Progressive Democrats, U.S. Rep. Tony Cardenas and L.A. Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez.

Support also includes endorsements from\ the Central City Association of Los Angeles and the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, the high-profile landlord group, which called her “the strongest candidate in the race supporting our members’ views.”

Alcaraz has worked within City Hall for 15 years and is now deputy chief of staff and environmental policy director for Councilman Curren Price, who represents District 9, which includes South Los Angeles and the western part of Downtown.

Before joining Price’s staff in 2012, she served under former Councilman Richard Alarcón, who represented District 7 in the northeast Valley, where she helped develop policies on business, economic development, arts and culture, health, and poverty.

She is backed by Price, Councilwoman Heather Hutt, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters and Unite HERE Local 11.

— Dana Bartholomew