See our primer on the 5th District candidates here and voter guides for the other Long Beach races at LBPost.com/elections.
The two candidates vying for Long Beach’s 5th Council District — incumbent Megan Kerr and challenger Tara Riggi — will share a stage Thursday evening at the Long Beach City College Liberal Arts Campus.
Riggi, a real estate agent and president of the California Heights Neighborhood Association, is part of a coalition of newcomers trying to unseat established Long Beach politicians.
Kerr, a former Long Beach Unified School Board member, is running for reelection with backing from the Long Beach firefighters union, the mayor and other prominent local politicians.
The two-hour forum, organized by the Lakewood Village Neighborhood Association, will be held in room W-201, next to the college’s aquatic center, starting at 6:30 p.m. There’s parking available for $2 at Parking Structure J or the Veterans Stadium parking lot.
Organizers say the event will start with three-minute opening remarks by each candidate. Afterwards, the two will take turns offering two-minute responses to a dozen questions prepared by the moderators. They will not take questions from the audience.
Questions will include issues general to the city and some specific to the district. They will cover street repairs, speeding traffic, homelessness, public safety and multifamily housing protected by state housing density laws.
Candidates will have limited chances to go over their time, though they will have an opportunity to offer a rebuttal after each question. Each candidate will end with a closing statement.
Stretching west and east from Long Beach Airport, the city’s 5th District is its largest, with more than 10 square miles of roadway — far more than any other district. It’s home to historic neighborhoods, dozens of public schools and wide and speedy thoroughfares — in a city struggling to lower its number of pedestrian deaths.
It’s also a district grappling with its identity amid rapid growth, from the pressures to build more multi-family complexes near single-family homes to the proliferation of aerospace, defense and tech companies that form the “Space Beach” district.
For more information on the race, you can check out our voter guide. Find out everything you need to know about the June primary at LBPost.com/elections.