More than 120 people packed the Antioch Community Center to hear from the candidates for Mayor and City Council at the Conservation and Community Forum.
Greenbelt Alliance co-hosted the event with Save Mount Diablo, Sierra Club, and the League of Conservation Voters of the East Bay.
Candidates squared off on big development issues facing the city and where the right place for development should be in the Contra Costa’s second largest city. The candidates had starkly different perspectives on what should happen with a 2,800-acre area of natural and agricultural lands in southern Antioch—an area larger than the entire city of nearby Clayton. Those lands are currently under threat of sprawl development, with a proposal for 4,000 new housing units currently before the city’s planning commission.
With eBART coming to Antioch in the next year, candidates weighed in on a variety of opportunities and challenges with the arrival of transit, including the necessity of smart growth, balancing jobs and housing, reducing traffic, and safety issues in a community concentrated on finding solutions to crime.
Questions from the audience touched a variety of hot issues, including how to revitalize the downtown, waterfront, and industrial job corridors; whether candidates take money from sprawl developers; and how to create more safe, neighborhood parks that could bring people to Antioch’s charming waterfront.
With all these electrifying issues, there was a lot to remember. Fortunately, the event got detailed press coverage in the East Bay Times.
