As stated at the Downey City Council Forum on Oct. 1, Carmela “Carrie” Uva is running for the city council to represent District 5 having been born and raised in the City of Downey. Besides working as an attorney and real estate broker, she has also served her community as president of the chamber of commerce as well as other organizations, and she prides herself in being endorsed by four current council members and all school board members.

On the issue of housing, Uva supports rent forgiveness, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic since not only tenants but also landlords and homeowners are struggling to make ends meet. However, Uva explained at the forum that she wants landowners and tenants to work together to develop a plan to address the issue given that tenants and landlords rely on each other since the tenants paying rent supplies income to landlords. She also plans on ending forgiveness by the end of 2020 if the economic circumstances improve.

Speaking of Covid-19, Uva supports aiding small businesses that are recovering from the aftermath of the pandemic as she believes that they play a vital role in the success of the City of Downey. As the president of the Chamber of Commerce, she oversaw efforts to promote and advertise local businesses once they reopened. Nonetheless, she argued that there should have been better communication regarding PPP loans to businesses since a lot of businesses were unaware of their availability.

On the issue of defunding the police, Carrie Uva wholeheartedly opposes this effort since she believes Downey is fortunate enough to have its own city dedicated police force that does top-notch work, unlike other cities. However, she does believe certain issues, such as homelessness, should not be handled by police since they deal with other issues. Instead, she proposes that more social workers should be assigned to answer these calls to reduce the stresses of the issues the Downey Police Department already deals with.

The city council elections are on Nov. 3. All information was obtained from the City Council Candidates Forum. Uva did not respond to a request for an interview.