The City of Oceanside is divided into four separate districts for council member seats, and the Mayor will remain “At Large”. North County Daily Star is continuing to interview the Mayoral candidates. Below are the Video interviews for Candidates Esther Sanchez and Ruben Major.
Council Member Esther Sanchez was born and raised in Oceanside, part of a 5 generation Oceanside family. Daughter of an immigrant, she won a scholarship to Brown University where she received her BA in Urban Studies. After college, she completed graduate work in Urban Planning at SDSU and UCSD. Esther then attended UC Hastings College of Law, earning her JD and passing the bar in 1986. Esther worked as an attorney for San Diego County for 20 years, first as a Deputy County Counsel, then as Deputy Public Defender.
Dissatisfied with her city’s participation within the community, Esther ran for Oceanside City Council in 2000. Her first years were committed to building a second senior center at El Corazon, transitioning OPD into a community-policing model; addressing at risk youth with after school programming; economic development of the city and within depressed neighborhoods; affordable housing and homelessness; creating additional parks and playing fields; and public participation in government, especially with respect to creating liaisons with communities of color and the city’s LGBTQ community.
Throughout her life, she was involved in community organizing and activism. She has served on the board of the Eastside Neighborhood Association for 21 years, President of the Oceanside Noche Mexicana Planning Committee for 15 years, and actively attends neighborhood meetings throughout Oceanside.
Esther has successfully run for re-election since her first race. She is running to lead the city as Oceanside Mayor to address those issues that the council majority has ignored or been slow to address – affordable housing and sheltering our unsheltered; transitioning from a bedroom community to a vibrant economy with new businesses and livable wage jobs; and addressing climate change and preservation of environmental resources, including parks and open space. She is also committed to addressing concerns regarding lack of recreational facilities and playing fields and to addressing concerns regarding public safety and systemic racism.
Please visit her website at Esther4Mayor.com
COVID-19 has dramatically impacted our community. In order to get us through this crisis and back on track as quickly as possible, we need someone with disaster management and emergency preparedness leadership to guide the way forward into what would otherwise be an uncertain future. Ruben has been a Paramedic for nearly 20 years and is an EMT/Paramedic trainer of the largest emergency medical services recertification training program worldwide.
Ruben was homeless as a kid, but worked his way out through education and now works to resolve the homeless crisis in Oceanside in a way that keeps our community safe as an advocate for affordable housing. Ruben has experience as an incident commander of large scale, mass casualty incidents, in the healthcare field working in the hospital, on the ambulance, and as an EMS Supervisor/EMS Battalion Chief. Ruben has been serving the community and public safety his entire adult life. Ruben has a law degree and master’s in military history.
Ruben has experience as an educator creating protocols for Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) response, as well as working to ensure thousands of EMS agencies and fire departments across the country are providing their responders with the appropriate protective equipment to protect their first responders. Ruben will not be corrupted by special interest PACs or backdoor political deals, but rather will work to ensure the residents of the city of Oceanside are properly represented to the fullest possible capacity. For more information go to:
https://www.rubenmajor.com/
