The Establishment Learns to Speak Activist

Pomona survived warehouses, consultant culture, infrastructure upgrades, privatization deals, and endless promises of revitalization. But somehow protected youth funding is where the city suddenly discovered fiscal panic.

Photography Julian Lucas ©2021

For years, Pomona’s political establishment treated young people the way cities often do, as symbolism. Scholarship photos. Ribbon cuttings. Nonprofit brochures. Election season speeches about “the future.” Everyone loves talking about youth investment as long as the investment remained flexible, manageable, and safely dependent on whichever city council happened to be in power at the time. Then Measure Y passed, and suddenly the same institutional culture that comfortably survived warehouses, mis-match hodgepodge development, privatization deals, consultant culture, and selective reinvestment discovered a deep existential fear about fiscal responsibility. And all of a sudden everyone in the establishment has become an activist.

The city has begun to speak the language of “community.” The Pomona Police Association is now speaking the language of “protecting youth.” The same political culture that spent years approving truck corridors, privatization agreements, endless consultant studies, and development patterns that somehow always seemed to benefit everybody except the people already living here now appears deeply worried that Pomona may financially collapse if young people receive protected investment. Apparently the city survived everything else just fine. Warehouses, giveaways, politically connected nonprofit ecosystems, selective reinvestment, and a municipal addiction to “revitalization” projects that rarely seem to revitalize the same neighborhoods twice, all manageable. But youth funding? That is where the adults draw the line.The performance would almost be impressive if it were not so transparent.

Because Measure Z is not being sold honestly as an attempt to weaken Measure Y. Nobody is standing at the podium saying, “Actually we preferred the old arrangement where youth investment depended entirely on whichever council happened to be in office that year.” Instead residents receive the modern municipal remix. Accountability, sustainability, flexibility, protecting services, responsible implementation. The establishment did not reject the language of reform after Measure Y passed. It learned it like a Hip Hop song, repeating the words confidently long before understanding where they came from. Now everyone suddenly cares deeply about transparency.

It’s rather comical Pomona’s leadership has discovered grassroots vocabulary the same way corporations discover social justice during Pride Month. Overnight. Professionally designed. Of course condescending and full of concern.

And yes, Pomona Police Officers Association is going hard for Measure Z. Which is almost beautiful in its irony. Pomona spent years hearing that grassroots organizers were too emotional, too disruptive, too unrealistic about the city’s finances. Now suddenly the establishment is out here running full campaign mode. Signs, videos, coordinated messaging, carefully rehearsed concern about the future of the city. At this point you half expect to see PPOA members and city council allies sweating on corners waving Measure Z signs like they just discovered activism three weeks ago, buying bacon wrapped hot dogs con todo and Funions con chile from somebody’s abuelita selling on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, the actual structural changes buried underneath the language of “responsibility” tell a much more interesting story. Public analyses comparing Measure Y and Measure Z argue that the newer measure would dramatically reduce the scale of the original Children and Youth Fund while weakening parts of the accountability framework voters originally approved. According to those analyses, Measure Z changes the funding source entirely, significantly reduces projected revenue, weakens the authority of the Accountability Board, softens participatory budgeting language, removes timelines, and shifts more control back toward traditional city administration.  

That is not a technical adjustment. That is the establishment trying to pull the steering wheel back after briefly losing control of the car.

And the funniest part is how carefully the entire thing is packaged. Nobody sounds angry. Nobody sounds defensive. Everything is delivered in the soothing language of adults trying to save the city from reckless idealism. The message is not “we oppose youth investment.” The message is “trust us to manage it properly.” Which in Pomona is particularly rich considering many of the people now warning residents about instability belong to the exact political ecosystem that helped produce the instability residents were organizing against in the first place.

That is what makes the geography of the campaign so revealing. Measure Z signs bloom comfortably through Lincoln Park Historic District, parts of Ganesha Hills, and likely sections of Phillips Ranch. Stable homeowner zones. Established civic territory. The old guard neighborhoods where “community concern” often arrives fastest once funding structures stop revolving around City Hall discretion. Political lawn signs rarely appear randomly. They map anxiety geographically.

And the anxiety here is not really about children. It is about power. Measure Y mattered because it attempted to create protected youth investment outside the city’s normal rhythm of speeches, nonprofit galas, ribbon cuttings, and selective urgency. Young people in Pomona have always photographed beautifully for campaigns. Scholarship students. Honor roll kids. Carefully curated success stories standing beside elected officials holding oversized checks. But Measure Y threatened to move youth investment from symbolic performance into structural obligation. Suddenly future councils could not simply praise young people publicly while redirecting priorities elsewhere privately. That changes relationships inside a city.

Especially a city like Pomona where institutional networks, nonprofits, political figures, commissions, consultants, and civic influence circles often overlap so tightly they begin to resemble one long continuous luncheon.

And so the response arrives wrapped in the language of moderation. Calm voices warning about fiscal collapse. Police associations presenting themselves as guardians of youth investment. Old political structures suddenly play activist grassroots organizing because the actual grassroots organizing worked once and scared the fuck out of them.

Pomona residents should pay attention to that panic.

Because institutions rarely reveal themselves more honestly than when they begin losing control of the narrative.

---

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.

The Municipal Romance of Trash, Trucks, and Campaign Cash

A campaign contribution from Athens Services is reopening old questions about privatization, infrastructure, political alliances, and who Pomona believes City Hall ultimately serves.

Editorial illustration by The Pomonan

There are only a few things less glamorous than garbage. It sits outside quietly in black and blue containers, rolled toward the curb once a week with the expectation that it disappears before the next morning. Most residents do not think about sanitation contracts, transfer stations, hauling agreements, or municipal privatization until something changes. But when the bill jumps. A service changes. A truck appears more often than it used to. Then suddenly, garbage becomes political.

And of course, in Pomona, where politics increasingly feels trendier than the restaurants, galleries, and art itself, trash had already become a political issue long before campaign season arrived. 

For years, residents, business owners, and city observers have argued over the city’s relationship with Athens Services, the private company tied to Pomona’s controversial waste collection transition. Some defended the move as modernization. Others viewed it as another example of a city steadily outsourcing pieces of itself while residents were left absorbing the consequences in real time.

Now there's an issue that has entered the campaign season directly. Public campaign finance filings for Victor Preciado’s 2026 reelection campaign show a $499 contribution from Athens Services dated January 30, 2026. Preciado is not a neutral observer in Pomona’s trash debate. As an incumbent councilmember, he sits inside the same governing structure that defended and normalized the city’s relationship with Athens while residents and businesses continued raising concerns about cost, accountability, and transparency. 

The amount itself is not a 5 million dollar lottery ticket. In California politics, $499 barely qualifies as eyebrow raising. But local politics operates differently than Sacramento or Washington. In municipal elections, symbolism often matters more than scale. Residents do not experience city government through million dollar lobbying campaigns. They experience it through potholes, homicides (unless the cops are not reporting) warehouse fires, zoning decisions, abandoned buildings, police response times, parks, and trash bills. That is why the contribution matters.

Not because it proves corruption. It doesn’t. Campaign donations are legal and happen all the time. But when a company tied to one of the city’s most controversial contracts starts donating to elected officials during election season, people are naturally going to question how close City Hall has become with the same companies doing business with the city. 

The Athens debate never really ended in Pomona because it was never just about trash pickup. It has always been about control.

Residents watched the city transition away from a municipal service structure toward privatization while being told efficiency and improvement would follow. Instead, many businesses complained about increased costs. Residents questioned accountability. Illegal dumping remained visible in  parts of the city. And politically, the issue lingered in the background like the smell residents insist they notice even when officials pretend not to.

Meanwhile, parts of Pomona continue carrying the physical burden of the region’s infrastructure economy. District 3 remains surrounded by warehouses, truck routes, industrial land use, and the waste transfer station itself, where the movement of garbage becomes part of the neighborhood landscape rather than an invisible municipal function hidden safely elsewhere.

This is where Pomona’s politics become revealing. 

The city often speaks about growth abstractly, but growth always lands somewhere physically. Warehouses land somewhere. Heavy truck traffic lands somewhere. Waste infrastructure lands somewhere. Rarely are those burdens distributed evenly across the map. Some neighborhoods become corridors. Others become destinations.

And once residents begin seeing those patterns, every campaign contribution starts carrying a little more meaning than it otherwise might.

The current election cycle is already exposing tensions inside Pomona’s political culture. Challengers are openly discussing council voting blocs, predictable alliances, and decisions that residents increasingly believe are settled before meetings even begin. Questions about transparency, consent agendas, and political alignment are surfacing more publicly than they have in years.

The Athens contribution enters that atmosphere at precisely the wrong time for incumbents hoping the trash debate had faded quietly into administrative history. Because residents remember.

They remember the transition. They remember the arguments. They remember who defended the contract and who questioned it. More importantly, they remember that one of the most basic services in city life became a symbol for something larger. The feeling that decisions affecting everyday people are often negotiated far above them, then delivered back down as inevitabilities.

The problem for incumbents like Victor Preciado is not simply that residents noticed the contribution. It is that many residents already believe City Hall has grown too comfortable operating within a small political orbit where contractors, council alliances, and major city decisions increasingly overlap.

And that is the danger for Pomona’s political establishment heading into 2026. Not the contribution itself. The timing.

Because once infrastructure, campaign finance, district frustration, and public distrust begin entering the same conversation, local politics stops feeling procedural. It starts feeling personal.

Garbage has a way of doing that.

District 2 Isn’t Just a Voting Bloc

Why Pomona’s political imagination may be smaller than the community it claims to represent.

Julian Lucas ©2021

District 2 is often talked about during election season as if the demographic is treated as a simple category: “the immigrant district” or “the working-class district.” Labels make politics easier. Pomona politicians flatten the people who live in this district into statistics.

But if you actually walk the streets of District 2, you quickly realize it’s something else entirely, a dense web of families, languages, small businesses, and households that hold stories stretching far wider than Pomona.

Pomona itself reflects this complexity. Roughly 72 percent of the city identifies as Hispanic or Latino (I’ve never been fond of the term Hispanic), and about one-third of residents were born outside the United States.

District 2 sits squarely inside that reality.

Many residents here are first-generation Americans. Many are immigrants. Some households include parents who have lived in the United States for decades and children who were born here. Others are newer arrivals still navigating paperwork, language barriers, and the daily uncertainties that come with starting over in a new country.

That makes District 2 different from the way it’s often portrayed in political conversations. It isn’t simply a “community of voters.” District 2 is a community of families who live with a particular kind of vulnerability.

And recently, that vulnerability became visible again.

District 2 is not unique in this regard, but in recent months residents reported ICE activity in the neighborhood, the kind of presence that sends a quiet ripple through a community. Doors close earlier. Comadres, compadres, primos, primas, tias, tios, and vecinos text each other warnings. Kids hear conversations they’re not supposed to hear yet and school absences increase.

Whether someone supports immigration enforcement or not, the emotional effect in immigrant neighborhoods is unmistakable. People feel monitored. People feel exposed.

Many people in District 2 know this feeling well.

It’s also a district where many people work jobs that rarely show up in political conversations: warehouse jobs, retail work, service work, construction, caregiving. The kinds of jobs that keep the region functioning but rarely translate into political influence.

Which raises a simple question during an election year. What does representation actually look like for a district like this?

Not representation as a campaign catchphrase, but representation as something lived day to day. Someone who understands why ICE enforcement agents are parked on a corner can change the mood of entire neighborhoods. Someone who understands that for many families here, politics isn’t an abstract debate. It’s something that touches housing, safety, schools, food insecurities, and the basic feeling of belonging.

But there’s another dynamic that often surfaces during election seasons in Pomona.

A familiar line appears in speeches at commission, committee, and council meetings, delivered with the seriousness of a credential.

“I’m from Pomona.”

The Chest-Thumping Politics of Being “From Pomona”

In Pomona politics there is a credential that gets repeated with the seriousness of a law degree.

Sometimes the curriculum vitaé gets expanded.

“I’m from Pomona.” Or “I’m a lifelong resident of Pomona.”

“I’m a homeowner.”

You’ll hear it at council meetings, campaign announcements, and the occasional moment when a politician decides to pound their chest like a hometown King Kong guarding the city limits while planting trees.

From Pomona. Not studied elsewhere. Not exposed to different ways cities function. Not particularly curious about how other communities solve problems.

Just… from Pomona.

Now don’t get me wrong. Loving the place you grew up is admirable. Loyalty to a city is a good thing. I can even say Pomona could be a gem. But it has been just that for the last couple of decades.

Being from Pomona is not the issue. Some of the most thoughtful, caring, and understanding people in this city grew up here. Others arrived later and built lives here just the same. Cities are shaped by both. The problem begins when birthplace itself becomes a substitute for ideas.

However, in Pomona politics the phrase sometimes works less like biography and more like gatekeeping.

Because once someone declares themselves the authentic voice of Pomona, something subtle happens next: everyone else starts getting sorted into categories.

You’re either a “real Pomonan” or you’re not. Then comes the classist logic: homeowner or tenant. In many political spaces, tenants are treated as if they couldn’t possibly have a voice.

Question something? You must not understand Pomona politics.

Offer a different idea?

That won’t work, you must not be from Pomona. The idea will quietly reappear later with someone else’s name on it. And whatever they produce will come with their own Pomona-ass spin on it. It’s as if the Pomonans who end up claiming the ideas live behind an imaginary wall, with little lived experience beyond the city limits. That kind of insularity is never sustainable.

Or those not from Pomona but have money to invest will build something that isn’t aligned with the present culture, opening businesses as if the city were still living in the 1990s. It doesn’t last. It closes, reopens under another name, and the cycle repeats.

Suggest the city could learn something from somewhere else?

Then you become suspicious and they’ll think you’re running for office.

It’s a clever rhetorical trick. Declare yourself the hometown authority and suddenly disagreement becomes disloyalty.

But here’s the irony.

Pomona itself is one of the most globally shaped cities in Southern California. Immigrant families, first generation Americans, people whose lives stretch across multiple cultures and countries.

Many residents here carry more international experience in their family histories than the politicians lecturing them about what “real Pomona” is supposed to look like.

So when leaders beat their chest about being “from Pomona,” the question worth asking isn’t where they were born.

The real question is how much of the world they’ve allowed into their thinking since then.

Because cities don’t grow through insularity.

They grow through exposure, curiosity, and the willingness to imagine something bigger than the street you grew up on. Key word curiosity.

Otherwise politics becomes strangely performative. Leaders loudly celebrate their hometown while quietly shrinking the possibilities of what that hometown could become.

And that’s really not civic pride. It’s just a very small box with Pomona written on the outside.

District 2 doesn’t live inside that small box. The district is shaped by families whose lives stretch across borders, languages, and cultures. In many ways, the people politicians claim to represent already understand the world in ways far larger than the narrow version of Pomona politics sometimes presented at City Hall.

Which makes the real question for voters this year a simple one. Who actually understands the district as it exists today, not as the city imagined it thirty years ago?

From what I see, the council is mostly Latino, including the mayor, and the commissions include a mix of Latinos and whites. Yet there seems to be an assumption that because many residents are working-class, they only want certain kinds of businesses. When Burlington arrives and it’s framed as a big win, it suggests leaders believe this is what the working class wants. That kind of thinking can slip into stereotyping the very community they claim to represent.

At some point the question becomes whether this is really what the working class wants, or simply the limit of what local leadership imagines the city can be.

---

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.