Candi CdeBaca
Prior offices
Denver City Council District 9
Elections and appointments
Personal
Contact
Candi CdeBaca was a member of the Denver City Council in Colorado, representing District 9. She assumed office on July 15, 2019. She left office on July 17, 2023.
CdeBaca ran for re-election to the Denver City Council to represent District 9 in Colorado. She lost in the general runoff election on June 6, 2023.
CdeBaca completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Candi CdeBaca was born in Denver, Colorado. She graduated from Manual High School and went on to earn a bachelor's degree and a graduate degree from the University of Denver. Her career experience includes working as a social worker.
[1]
Elections
2023
See also: City elections in Denver, Colorado (2023)
General runoff election
General election
Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for CdeBaca in this election.
2019
See also: City elections in Denver, Colorado (2019)
General runoff election
General election
2023
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Candi CdeBaca completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by CdeBaca's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Councilwoman Candi is a proud fifth-generation Denverite and a lifelong resident of her district and neighborhood. She is a social worker, community organizer, and policy expert. Raised by her single mom & grandparents in Swansea—a food desert & the most polluted zip code in America—Candi understands the importance of putting people & the planet at the center of city policy. Candi was valedictorian of her class at Manual High School & the first and youngest dual-degree graduate from the University of Denver's Graduate School of Social Work. She has founded and co-founded several critical D9-serving organizations, including: Project VOYCE, GES Coalition, Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust, Ditch the Ditch, Cross Community Coalition Registered Neighborhood Organization & the East Denver Food Sovereignty Initiative. Candi knows D9's history and values & fights hard for her long marginalized community. She always leads with solutions & the vision to build a better city that makes living affordable, protects neighborhoods & the environment, & ensures city policies & dollars are working for ALL Denverites. Her vision for her role is to center the voices of people who are typically silenced or ignored. She believes that housing should be a human right, food should be a utility, utilities should be municipalized and the entire economy needs to be re-imagined in a way that halts the exploitation of land, labor and resources for profit. Values co-governance, transparency, courage
- Real democracy is economic democracy. Wage and wealth inequality are not because of innate differences but rather a rigged system that give power to a few to decide what and who has value. In a world nearing automation, we need to decided together how to redistribute wealth and resources.
- Housing is a human right. It's insanity to keep relying on the market to fix problems that the market caused.
- ALL neighborhoods want the same things: clean air, water, and high quality food, shelter, work, resources, a sense of belonging, and decision-making power over the future of their neighborhoods.
Featured local question
Not really. I believe it highlighted many of the policies I had been fighting for prior and it created a renewed sense of possibility and demand for such changes.
Featured local question
It depends on what time periods the current rates are being compared to and whether or not population changes and proportionality are being considered. Obviously crime rates have increased since COVID, but compared to the 80s or 90s, not completely. And is it fair to call them increases given the drastic population increases? Not completely.
Data transparency is huge. I also think that some serious changes need to be made on the back end in what and how police are reporting their daily activities and what we consider success. One of the reasons it's so hard to know what is happening with safety is the lack of quality data being input on the police side.
Featured local question
No. I don't think it ever has been. It's always been a very transient place, a place primarily for people to conduct business and leave.
We have unhealthily centered downtown business in all planning including and especially transit planning. We've defined health of downtown at times by how much activity was occurring. That sort of definition of health is missing important things about people feeling connected to neighbors, people feeling connected to small businesses, people feeling stable and secure and like they are part of the culture of the city. There was never any "glue" holding downtown together. So expectedly, when hardship hit (COVID), in the absence of any meaningful "glue" it became a ghost town.
I personally have never understood the desire to concentrate and segregate business and housing types the way that we do with zoning. I believe everybody should be able to work, play, shop, exercise, relax, etc within their own neighborhoods. I think post-COVID19 this is what people want. We have all figured out that commercial space is unnecessary to some degree and spending time in our own homes and communities is better for our own health and the planet's health. Thus, in a context where people can work from anywhere, a healthy downtown will have to become an actual livable community. That requires adaptive reuse of buildings that become vertical neighborhoods, new traffic patterns, and new priorities and allowable land uses for businesses in every other neighborhood. Featured local question
It is the most critical part of democracy. The government is an extension of and belongs to The People. I plan to co-govern with my people and ensure that the voices of every day working people are finally elevated and given the opportunity to co-govern an self-govern where appropriate.
Featured local question
I think we need many more public facing and searchable free systems than we currently have. Nobody should have to pay a CORA fee for printed documents in 2023 when a cloud folder can be shared. I want to see a system like this for all city settlements and for status of projects. I also have been demanding that we have a system like this that shows public employees pay, years of service, etc. I also would like to see transparency in lobbying at the local level as we do not have that and three lobby firms basically run City Hall.
Featured local question
All communities want to be safe and unfortunately we have not set up structures designed to protect everyone equally. Modern policing is a legacy of slave patrols that by design were discriminatory and provided safety only for white people and protection of their private property. Little has changed in the core functions of police today. In fact, in our city charter, the core function of DPD is to prevent riots and protect private property. These rudimentary core functions prevent us from evolving policing to meet public safety demands. I propose re-imagining public safety in a way that takes a public health approach to protecting all life and understanding the root causes of violence in order to interrupt violence before it begins. Prioritizing life, mental health, restorative justice, alternative responses to police, community healing, cross-cultural communication, and social determinants of health and economic justice will undoubtedly reduce more crime than traditional policing methods.
Featured local question
See question response above (I think this is a duplicate).
Featured local question
I am deeply connected to my community and regularly find ways to engage them and activate their voices. I am known for shifting/increasing engagement in local government because of my history as an organizer and educator. I will continue to use popular education, community owned media, direct action, litigation and community capacity building to insert community values and goals into policy.
Featured local question
We spend entirely too much of our city budget on a department that yields very little desired outcomes, refuses to be held accountable, discriminates in employment, and refuses to adapt to the changing demands of the time. We need to sophisticate what our Safety department does and how they do it including integrating the work better with Human Services, Dept of Public Health and Environment and Dept. of Transportation and Infrastructure. We cant continue to rely on police counts of fatalities and injuries to take a request for a stop sign or light seriously. Everyday people know what makes them safe and unsafe and we need less bureaucratic ways for providing that safety.
Featured local question
Air quality has been declining over the last few years and we are not taking it very seriously at the local level. I was part of a coalition that passed the first air monitoring legislation at the capitol last session. I was exploring pollution trespass ordinances at the local level and ran into pre-emption barriers but also a lack of interest in the excecutive branch to set higher standards for the environment than the Colorado Dept of Public Health. I hope our transitions in leadership will allow us to be the leader in setting higher standards for environmental health than what is required at the state level.
Featured local question
Implementation/administration is a function of the Executive branch of our local government so while I don't have much authority as a member of the Legislative branch, I plan to advocate for the necessary improvements, challenge inequities in priorities, and challenge contracts that do not meet our stated equity goals.
Featured local question
The department has recently been found to be deficient in data driven practices, meaningful outcomes, and they are unable to recruit and retain employees. We have virtually no accountability for the millions of dollars in settlements we pay out for bad police behavior and we have a demand from the people to course correct. I think that starts with changing internal structures for investigations, discipline, hiring, firing and discipline. This is not in Council's scope but I use my platform to elevate these issues when possible and I think this should all be discussed in open public collective bargaining negotiations.
Featured local question
I think we took too long to quarantine people and then we brought them out of quarantine too soon. We are barely learning the long term impacts of long COVID and we are paying a price for rushing to put people in harm's way while we knew better. I think we made several missteps in our data collection, contact tracing and public health analysis of the spread of the virus locally and who was most at risk. We sacrificed too many lives of low wage workers and now the economy is struggling as a consequence.
Housing & New Economy
-Housing for all & responsible growth
-Stability in the cost of living
-Public ownership of utilities
-Employee & consumer-owned business
SAFE & HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
-Public health approach to safety
-Holding polluters accountable
-Protect & expand green spaces
-Safe streets for people, not just cars
GOVERNMENT WE CAN TRUST
-Community voices first
-Trust lived expertise
-Transparency
-Expand public participation We are a home rule city in a local control state, so Denver can legislate above and beyond and free from many state pre-emption issues. That makes our Mayor one of the most powerful elected offices in the state. There are very few checks and balances in local government. The mayor appoints all the heads of all the agencies and City Council only makes/changes ordinances and passes the Mayor's budget. City Council is thus very weak in comparison but we have the power of the purse strings. So with a majority of council members willing to use our power as a check and balance, there could be major transformation of how and what we spend our money on as a city.
I look up to to a lot of revolutionaries and writers throughout history. I have always been drawn to people who understand the past, how it has shaped the present and can use their talent to articulate sovereign futures.
Specific people who have influenced my life include: Vicente Guerrero, Frida, Che Guevara, Howard Zinn, Assata Shakur, Haunani Kay Trask, Buck Franklin, Jonathan Kozol, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Selena, Jacque Fresco and Don Miguel Ruiz.
Films: Requiem for the American Dream, 13th, and any videos of Naom Chomsky.
Books: The Color of Law, How to Kill a City, A People's History of the US, Savage Inequalities, Women Without Class
Integrity, compassion, empathy, courage, selflessness and justice.
I am honest, thoughtful, justice-oriented, transparent, value driven and willing to be held accountable.
Know and engage with your constituents, especially those who are not paying someone to influence you. Make decisions based on data and real life expertise of people in your community. Engage constituents in participatory action research to inform the policies you champion.
I would like to move us a bit closer to racial, economic, and social justice.
Columbine High School Shooting, I was in middle school getting ready to finish 7th grade.
My first job was at 10 years old sweeping and cleaning the corner stored called Jerry's Corner at 43rd & Clayton in Swansea. I held it until I was about 14 when I got my next real job as Youth Staff President at Cole Beacons, a program of the Denver Metro Urban League.
A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy's perseverance and life experience resonated and moved me deeply to know anything could be accomplished in life.
Growing up in poverty was a struggle but gave me all the perspective I need to serve people well as a social worker.
We can initiate a Charter Convention to change the power balance in the Charter and almost anything council refers to the ballot gets passed by the voters.
Not at all. In fact, the opposite. The more someone plays politics, the less likely it is there will be positive outcomes for the people of the city. Playing politics rather than focusing on policy is why most people don't trust government. Playing politics is about personal gain, ego, and power rather than doing simply what is right and necessary based on data and observations.
I believe people who understand social inequality, systems of oppression, structural inequality, history and psychology are all positioned well to serve the greater good. Someone who is an educator at heart is also very critical in this role because they will be able to translate complex issues to everyday people in a way that helps them step into their own power.
Working Families Party, Denver Democratic Socialists, SEIU, Run for Something, LPAC, Southwest Carpenters, Joe Salazar, Elisabeth Epps, Rhonda Fields, Brother Jeff Fard, Rev. Timothy Tyler, Rep. Lorena Garcia, Rep. Javier Mabrey
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Note: Community Questions were submitted by the public and chosen for inclusion by a volunteer advisory board. The chosen questions were modified by staff to adhere to Ballotpedia’s neutrality standards. To learn more about Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection Expansion Project, click here.
2019
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Candi CdeBaca did not complete Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey.
See also
External links
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on February 7, 2023
