Hyattsville’s 2021 election season is here, and with 20 candidates running for five ward seats and the mayor’s office, it may be the biggest election the city has ever seen. All week long, Route 1 Reporter will be introducing you to as many of the candidates as possible in a series of video interviews. Over the past week, Route1Reporter has interviewed 15 of the 20 candidates running.
Today, we unveil the interviews with the city’s Ward One candidates, or at least as many of them as we could get. Route 1 Reporter was unable to complete an interview with candidate Michael Brown, who cut-short a scheduled interview this past Sunday with Route 1 Reporter. Brown was out door-to-door campaigning at the time. During a pre-interview candidate-information collection process in which all other interviewed candidates provided responses, Brown cut short the interview after Route 1 Reporter inquired about any businesses he owned, saying the questions were getting “personal” and noting he had a top-secret security clearance. He also added he needed to visit his mother, who was ill. Attempts to re-schedule an interview with Brown before these articles published were unsuccessful.
Still, Route 1 Reporter was able to secure interviews with candidates Sam Denes, Mai Abdul Rahman, and Daniel Vallejos-Avila.
Route 1 Reporter’s interview with Vallejos-Avila is below. Due to technical difficulties, a video recording is not available. However, you can still listen to the interview in audio form.
In these interviews, each candidate was asked the same six questions. The questions were not shared with the candidates beforehand. The questions are also fairly broad, providing candidates an opportunity to introduce themselves and describe their approach to local government policymaking.
Hyattsville’s election season concludes May 11, 2021.
Theis:
Hello. My name is Michael Theis, editor and publisher of Route1Reporter.com. I’m here today with Daniel Vallejos-Avila, one of four candidates running for ward one. In all, Hyattsville has 20 candidates running for five ward seats and the mayor’s office. This interview and others are intended to be a broad introduction to the candidates and their approach to local government policy and policymaking. Let’s begin. Uh, Daniel how are you doing today?
Vallejos-Avila:
Oh, I’m doing fine, thank you.
Theis:
Excellent. First question. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do and how did you come to live in Hyattsville?
Vallejos-Avila:
All right. Thank you. I had been coming here for visits since about 2012 because of having a little bit of family here. Then I moved here this past September, September 20th to Hyattsville. I moved, I moved here because of two grandchildren that are here being raised by their father and their mother. My daughter died in December of 2019. She was all the way 41 years old. And so it was a consensus of family. I have, I have two other offspring, fully adult offspring and that you know, the best place for me to be to be of some service to those two grandchildren and their father and and maybe some public service to Hyattsville itself.
Theis:
Okay. And you know, not to bury the lead, but I’m aware of the fact that one of the family members you’re referring to is current City Councilman Daniel Schaible. [editor’s note: emphasis added by Route 1 Reporter]
Vallejos-Avila:
That’s correct. Yes.
Theis:
He’s your, he’s your son-in-law as I understand.
Vallejos-Avila:
Yes.
Theis:
Excellent. Second question. Why are you running for Hyattsville city council?
Vallejos-Avila:
Why?
Theis:
Yes.
Vallejos-Avila:
Okay, why: A couple of reasons. One of them is that I think I could probably make a contribution now, given my life experience. I haven’t talked about that thus far today. But a second reason is that I support there being more of a Latino presence in the main institutions within Hyattsville and the County, but particularly since I’m focused on Hyattsville. And so the existence of my campaign and also, frankly, even my last name, because I’m a Mexican American. And so we use the hyphenated names, surnames. For example, Avila is my mother’s surname. And Vallejos is my father’s. His whole family, my father was born in 1900 and my sister in 2007. And I was born and raised in a coal mining region of Southern Colorado. There was two of those, one North of Denver, and one down near the New Mexico border where I was born. And and the mines themselves and the steel industry was owned by the Rockefeller family. And so there was a connection. So it was kind of the backward kind of area, but it was a lot of Latinos in that area.
Theis:
Okay. Third question. What is the most pressing issue facing Hyattsville right now? And what policies would you pursue to address it?
Vallejos-Avila:
The one that’s got the most notoriety is police reform and the other one is the growth, the growth until we see. We’ve seen some of the old development that I hadn’t seen prior to 2017, and it continues to occur. I live right on the edge of the historical district homes and so-on. It’s really enjoyable to be in this area and as to the police reform. I’m not in favor of, like, the percentage cut across the board cut in this police department, or generally any other police department, because it’s not possible to make a, you know, go to the essence of where it could possibly weather a cut in salary, not salary, but I mean, in the total budget at the police department. Other elements of police behavior, I’ve been for many years supportive of police reform as to their behavior, the election – their arrest proceedings and the booking and so on and so forth.
Vallejos-Avila:
I happened to have been a lawyer before retiring, a lawyer. And my career was split between lawyering about 30 years and 11 years of secondary school teaching. I think the reason that I was in secondary school teaching was not a tremendous passion for teaching, but because I had began way back in 1962, attending a wall-to-wall teacher’s college, we called it. It then grew to university status over the decades. And, and so, you know, I was involved in that. I ran for school board in Seattle, Washington, some years ago, and I was on a it was a task force for, It was sort of forward, forward directed. For example, things that was dealing with was a how to install technology at school academies for racial minorities underperforming, particularly Seattle. It happened to be a at that time, the black population. Zero tolerance for gay bashing of youngsters. Those were some of the things that were on it on my platform.
Theis:
I guess if I may go on fourth question, what is a unique skill or perspective you would bring to the job? You kind of touched on this a little bit in your last answer.
Vallejos-Avila:
Okay. I’m fluently bilingual. In fact, I did not learn English until I think about midway through the first grade. So kindergarten was like a blur, an auditory blur for me. But, it worked out fine. It’s I wasn’t I’m actually about fifth or sixth generation, but it just so happens at that region of the, of the country was so heavily Latinos, as you probably well know. And I was being raised by a grandmother who was a monolingual Spanish speaking. I was not aware of that, but I continued to, to learn other types of Spanish, particularly different kinds of regionalisms and colonialisms. Like, say the way Cuban Americans speak, the way Dominicanos speak and so on – Salvadorans, not so much. Think about it. El Salvador: I used to contribute money, you know, in my high income years to revolutionaries in El Salvador. That was the José Martí Fund. And I’ve been very involved in politics in the sense of a participant. Once I got a license at age 16 my parents through the Democrat party would send me to the polls – I mean, to drive people to the polls, voters to the polls. And I also ran for back in the war on poverty days. There were, there were County commissions commissions. They were called. I ran for that while I was in law school.
Theis:
I do need to interject and move on to the next question. I’ve got another interview coming up after this. Fifth question, almost all of the city council races this year are competitive. Why should people vote for you?
Vallejos-Avila:
I think it will be a maturity factor and, you know, everybody running is certainly mature adults and so on. But I think a perspective – from a prospective standpoint – I have experienced a lot in my lifetime. And it gives a certain kind of wisdom to that in the ability to, you know – it goes toward being able to analyze things with a more sort of a more centered, more perception or perceptive kind of approach.
Theis:
And my last question today, many hot button issues in our national political discourse are, at their heart, local issues. And I’m talking about such topics as policing education policy or debates over renaming landmarks and parks. The question, how do you identify politically in a national context, such as progressive or conservative Democratic or Republican or any other term, and how do those political values inform the policies you would pursue here in Hyattsville?
Vallejos-Avila:
Yes. Up until the last year or two, I should like to say that I’m too progressive to be a Democrat. And, although I found out one time I was at a state convention of the Democrat party and, I asked somebody – again it just occurred to me – where are all the socialists? And they said, Daniel, they’re in the Democratic party. And now we’re really seeing the blooming of that, the manifestation of that. But I became an independent in 1990 when, within the Democratic party in the state of Washington, I saw certain kinds of corruption that didn’t sit well with me. So I decided to become an independent, so say from 92 forward. I have never, I’ve never voted for a Republican. However, in all these years. And I don’t expect I ever will. But, the years I was living in California, I did direct some contributions at the request of contributors to a couple of Republicans – California has had had a tradition of moderate, moderate, Republican wing. They’d been – some say they’d been wiped out by now, but they’re still there and directing some, you know, helping the people that vote Republican to get there. But never voted for a Republican.
Theis:
Okay. Well, Daniel, at this point, I don’t have any further questions. Uh, I would like to thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. To everyone who’s listening along on Route1Reporter.com. I’d like to thank you very much, for doing that. Pardon the technical difficulties that you may be hearing. But yeah, if you live in Hyattsville, get out there and vote.