Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin Announces State Senate Application

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Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin announced Wednesday that he is resigning his mayoral seat to run for the California State Senate.

The announcement came more than a year before the March 2024 primary. If he wins, Arregine will replace Senator Nancy Skinner, who is retired.

Arreguin is Berkeley’s first Hispanic mayor and has served in office since 2016. He has been a city council member since 2008. He is also currently President of the Association of Gulf Governments, a regional governing body representing 101 cities and nine counties.

“I know what we need to do,” Arreguin said by phone on Wednesday.

He said he will bring to the Senate a wealth of experience gained from 20 years of public service at Berkeley and as president of ABAG since 2019. Prior to serving on the city council, Arregine served on the city’s rental council.

Arreguin will publicly launch his campaign from an event on March 22.

Arregin comes from a family of agricultural workers. At 10, he performed with Dolores Huerta.

His family lived in San Francisco and was evicted several times. Despite the difficulties, Arregine graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and was the first in his family to graduate from college.

Through his work on the ABAG plan, more than 440,000 new housing units could be added to the Bay Area over the next eight years. In particular, he wants more affordable housing to be built. Like others, Arregine considers housing a human right.

As a state senator, Arregen plans to increase housing construction, make the state more accessible to working families, take additional steps to combat homelessness, and make California a bolder leader on climate change, among other things.

He also wants to provide universal health care for the people of California. Like housing, he believes that healthcare is a basic human right.

He currently opposes the closure of Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley. He wants the neighborhoods not to turn into hospital deserts.

In Berkeley, Arregen wrote a bill that raised the city’s minimum wage. Arreguin was a prolific law writer, writing over 300 articles.

As mayor, he helped end single-family zoning in his city. Over the past three years, the number of homeless people has decreased by 5 percent, and increased by 22 percent in the county.

Arregine helped write Plan Bay Area 2050, a $1.4 trillion long-term strategy to improve the region’s public transportation, increase affordable housing construction, and tackle climate change, among other things.

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc.

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