News

Meet Katie Hawley running for District 5 Chico City Council

North State Public Radio | By Ava Norgrove

Published October 28, 2024 at 3:25 PM PDT

Katie Hawley for District 5 Chico City Council

Voters have until Tuesday, Nov. 5 to make their decisions for the general election. NSPR has been interviewing candidates vying for seats on the Chico City Council. In District 5, Katie Hawley is challenging Melissa Lopez-Mora. She spoke with NSPR’s Ken Devol about her background and how she would address some of the issues facing the city if elected.

*Editor's note: NSPR made multiple requests for an interview with District 5 candidate Melissa Lopez-Mora through email, social media and phone and received no response.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Why do you want to run?

I didn't anticipate running for this position. My true love has always been international politics, but once Addison Winslow started running for city council two years ago. I got really excited to see that someone who shared the same values and wanted to face the same issues as I did head on and was around my age was getting involved in local politics.

After speaking with him about it, he encouraged me to attend city council meetings. I've been going to the meetings for the last two years and have been pretty frustrated by some of the issues that haven't been tackled necessarily or given a lot of attention.

I have a background in political science and just finished my coursework for my master's degree in political science. I applied a lot of what I learned in school to the issues that Chico, like many other cities in the U.S., is facing.

I've also been working at an environmental nonprofit in town for the last year as an educator. I go to schools and elementary schools and teach kids about composting and recycling, which has given me a little bit of insight about what our future generation gets excited about.

What do you see as the most pressing issues facing Chico?

Chico, as a whole, the most common thing I hear going door to door is homelessness. There are a few factors that go into that. It's oversimplified right now by the city council. We have to look at homelessness from the prevention stance. We have some of the highest adolescent childhood traumatic events in the entire state, and that was pre-Camp Fire rates. We also have a higher-than-average number of climate refugees due to our wildfires. The largest growing population of the homeless community is the elderly. I don't know if you heard about the Pleasant Valley Mobile Home situation, but they had their mobile home estate bought out by an out-of-state company and their rent was raised by 30%. They went to the city council and said ‘If we don't get rent stabilization soon, we will be homeless in the next couple of years.’

It's prevention. That's the one part. The second part is having a managed campground that is just that, managed by the city, ensuring that everyone living there is getting ready for the next step of transitional housing or entering into the workforce if they can. Ensuring that they can live with dignity.

If you win a seat in your district, how are you planning to address the issues?

My main pillar of focus has been around climate resilience. That has so many different factors to it. Still, one example I like to talk about is the 2020 fuels mitigation plan that was curated by a bunch of experts and fire mitigation and forestry management who created this plan, handed it off to the city council, and in that plan was a direct recommendation to do a prescribed burn in the exact area that the Park Fire ignited. On top of that, when the Park Fire did ignite, it was a severe risk fire day, and on severe risk fire days, Upper Park should not have cars, in general, allowed onto the Upper Park trail. It says it on the city's website, but the car was allowed in there anyway.

Although that was due to negligence, and everybody loves to point fingers at the one guy who ignited the fire — yeah, I hate that guy too — there are other preventative factors that went into that.

I am a forward thinker as someone in their mid 20s who wants to live here for the rest of my life. I would like to look at climate resilience and local resilience across the board. What are we doing for affordable housing when we have extreme heat days over 118? How are we protecting our trees when they're not just trees? It's a giant savings account for our stormwater capture, to cool our city, to save our residents energy bills. Every single policy that is on the agenda for the city council, I would love to look at what this policy is going to do 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line. That's something I'm used to doing because of my master's in political science.

What are the most critical issues in your district?

I don't know how often you drive through District 5. It is very clear that we have not had an elected official in decades because we were at large in the voting process. No candidates emerged from the poorest parts of the neighborhood, which is largely District 5. Because the lines were redrawn, the current District 5 representative doesn't even live in the district anymore.

All the resources that we're seeing going to new developments out north and new builds, not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's very clear that the roads and the bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in District 5 has been neglected for decades. None of the new resources being built in Chico are going to District 5, and that's apparent from the people who live there.

I've lived there for six years now and three years on West Second Avenue. It wasn't uncommon for me to see a mother pushing a stroller in the middle of the road because there was no sidewalk. There are so many examples of places in District 5 that create dangerous situations for both pedestrians and cars and have cheap solutions that we can implement now.

What sets you apart from the other candidates?

To be quite honest, I don't know much about the other candidate. I do know that she is endorsed by both Sean Morgan and [Andrew] Coolidge. I do know that a lot of the language in her campaign was co-opted to look like mine, words like smart growth. I've been working with the smart growth advocates in Chico for two years now, ever since measures O & P were on the ballot and they, the smart growth advocates in Chico, had never heard of her before.

Anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Despite my youth, I have taken advantage of my time here in Chico and every single year I've been here I've been very deeply involved in the community. I've spent a lot of time getting to know the local nonprofit and local organization's issues and hurdles because of my involvement in the Butte Resilience Collaborative. I also got to know the residents through my last year working at the Oakway Community Garden, distributing locally grown food and free food. I love this community very much, and I am very responsive over email. If you would like to ask me any questions, my email is info@katiehawley.org.
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Read/ listen to NSPR’s other Chico City Council candidate interviews

Editor’s note: District 3 candidate Dale Bennett, District 5 candidate Melissa Lopez-Mora, and District 7 candidate Deepika Tandon did not respond to multiple requests from NSPR for an interview.

Further media coverage of the candidates

District 7 - (Deepika Tandon/ Bryce Goldstein)