Page 6 May 22, 2014 TORRANCE TRIBUNE Election 2014 City Council Candidates from page 5 any candidate that says we are in trouble is lying. Our current administration has failed and will lead the city into bankruptcy. You can look at the budget yourself. The Arts are important, but getting Torrance back on track is my personal priority. Remember, No Political Ties, No Political Favors Owed. Vote Aurelio Mattucci, a truly Independent Candidate. Omar Navarro: The arts are very important in our schools. My wife Torey is currently teaching ballet in dance studios in Torrance and in the city. She has a Bachelor’s of Arts from UCI and I have appreciated participating ly appreciated watching her perform and learned an understanding about the beauty and how important the arts are in Torrance. I think we need to support the arts and work with businesses and non-profits to support the arts. Clint Andrew Paulson: The arts are critical. I think it is a sad commentary on our society that our schools have virtually eliminated all programs for the arts due to lack of funding. Yes, I would like to invest in the Cultural Arts Center and provide more opportunities for our kids to explore the arts. Unfortunately, we will never be able to do so until we get our spending problems under control. We should be making the arts a priority. Geoffrey Rizzo: The short answer to this question is yes - I would invest in the maintenance and up-keep of the facility. I do consider the programs important in that the arts help bring people together. They bridge social, cultural, racial, educational, and economic barriers to enhance individual awareness and appreciation of the diversity of our society. Alex M. See: I will strongly advocate for the City to invest in the Cultural Arts Center. We need a state-of-the-art facility that provides a world-class, multi-disciplinary cultural venue and community gathering place for the City. The Center can play a key role in the economic and cultural development of the area. I do not agree that arts are becoming less important, but that art programs are frequently the target of budget cuts. As a member of the Torrance Arts Council and board member of the Torrance Symphony, I know the pivotal role that Art and Culture plays in contributing to a well-balanced and tolerant community. As budget cuts force the school district to limit funding to arts and extracurricular activities, the City and School District need to find partnerships with community groups and businesses to safeguard Art programs that continue to serve and actively enrich our student’s lives. Norm “Opa” Segal: Our current investment in Cultural Arts is a very small percentage of our General Fund expenditures. I would like to see this percentage stay at its current level if at all possible. This type of activity should be funded by contributions from our residents. I would also imagine that there are grants available from different organizations. I am new to city government and admittedly know very little about the Cultural Arts Center or the City’s funding of this area. I would imagine that there are very few residents (percentage) that avail themselves of the benefits of this funding Charlotte Ann Svolos: I would invest in the Cultural Arts Center. This resource for the city, not only provides for cultural experiences for our residents, but is also a tangible asset. We are able to rent the facility and if it does not meet the needs of the renters, people will stop using it. The scope of economic benefit though goes beyond the specific income from the event. People will “make a night of it” meaning they are using our surrounding restaurants providing further financial benefit. The exposure to the arts is good, not only financially, but to our hearts and minds as well. I had an opportunity to borrow an instrument at school to learn music with no additional cost to my family. I was legally adopted by my retired grandparents, which meant that we were not able to afford this opportunity otherwise. This love took root and grew. It’s shameful that we have cut arts programs because of financial need. For a struggling student, that may be the one class that gets them into our classrooms and through the day. We once considered classical education needed to include music, painting, sculpture, theatre and dance. What a loss to the next generation absent this foundation. John Paul Tabakian: We must invest in the Torrance Cultural Arts Center. Arts are a means of educating and entertaining people. We also use art to record our history. Back in the days when the majority of America was illiterate, national paper currency used pictures to teach the history of our nation. Art fits between two classifications of instruction: academic and vocational. It is academic in the sense if we use the study of art to interpret a piece. Art is vocational in the sense that someone is actually performing or creating a piece. For example, painting is vocational and interpreting the painting is academic. Art as a means of performing or creating falls right into the classification of the vocational trades. In my eyes, an artist is a painter, sculptor, author, electrician, plumber, mason, ballerina, etc. People who actively create something of value are artists. The first step to investing in the Torrance Cultural Arts Center is to educate the public about its value. We have a problem when voters elect politicians who defund and eliminate art programs. Runaway pension costs are eating away at our cultural budget. Do not allow union blessed empty suits to destroy the arts! Kurt Weideman: Yes, I would invest in the Torrance Cultural Arts Center. TCAC is a sparkling jewel, a community resource – and it is much more that a collection of buildings, it is a place where creativity comes alive and magic happens. I love the arts and I love our community, and this Center combines both passions. I served two terms as President of the Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation – an organization that presents over two dozen shows per year at the Armstrong and Nakano Theaters. In this time of diminishing education funding in the Arts, this investment comes with paramount importance because our “sparkling gem” is beginning to lose its luster. We need to invest in new, state-of-the art lighting and sound. We need to invest in new stage and dance flooring at the Armstrong. We need to provide restrooms in the Nakano Theater. We need a shade canopy for the Torino Plaza. We need to eliminate the $2.50 box office surcharge assessed to each ticket purchased. We need to reduce the rental rate for these theaters for “off peak” hours. These are but a few of the investments that city can make on behalf of creating and enhancing enrichment and diversity in our community. Thank you Candidates!• El Segundo Mayor Fuentes Adds Politics to Impressive Resume By Laura Sorensen It’s her day off, but Suzanne Fuentes still likes to talk about her job. Anyone else would be relaxing at the coffee shop where we meet, trying to get far away from work; but she’d rather give me a personal tour. She works at Northrup Grumman, in a large white windowless building overlooking a huge bay where satellite construction is ongoing. She smiles when she uses all her satellite and engineering acronyms, exuding an enthusiasm for her work that I don’t see all the time in people who have been at their jobs for decades. Generously she invites me to see where she works, and so I ride with her into the white-and-green campus, where she signs me in through security and shows me all around. It looks like . . . well, like a big building where people work. “I have an office with a door,” she laughs, as we pass rows and rows of cubicles, one stuffed with black balloons and decorated with streamers for a 50th birthday party. Fuentes’s love of engineering began when she was just a girl. Her mother, Suzanne Weston, had been a yeoman in the Navy before settling down in California as a business manager at Hughes Aircraft. “She was a single parent and had four kids … she went back to work when I was 13 or 14,” and Fuentes watched her younger siblings while her mother worked, sometimes biking over to her mother’s office to eat lunch with her. Many of Weston’s friends worked at Hughes, and Fuentes met them regularly, which exposed her to the idea of becoming an engineer. Her mother’s encouragement was pivotal in her own decision to go into sciencebased career, first with a BS in biology, and then as a new hire herself at Hughes Aircraft. Even though she grew up in El Segundo, went to college at LMU, and then settled down in a house across the street from where she grew up, Fuentes has traveled quite a bit because of her expertise. She has been many times to Cape Canaveral, spent time at the University of Hawaii, shivered through a very cold winter in Connecticut, and lived in Taiwan for two years. She indulged all my talk about LA’s amazing weather, noting that after her stay in Connecticut she brought back with her “an impressive collection of windshield scrapers.” I bet they would make a great wall display. Fuentes’s dedication to her career has put her in the right place to be the first female Quality Engineer in the Integration, Test, and Launch (ITL) department at Northrup Grumman’s Space Park; the first female Quality Assurance Manager (QAM) in the same department; and sometimes the only woman in a “high bay full of 60 men.” Her personal philosophy is to be open to experience: to say yes to offers, even if they seem scary. When she was sent to Connecticut she had two days’ notice to pack for a four-month stay, and she had to decide right then whether or not to go. Even though it was the dead of winter there, snowing like crazy, and she worked night shifts, she had a fulfilling experience. “I’ve just had so many opportunities, so I tell young people, ‘Don’t limit yourself! Say yes to everything!’” Even what seems like a bad moment can turn out well, as when she was passed over for a big job at NASA and assigned instead to the construction of ROCSAT, a satellite built for Taiwan’s National Space Program Office. “ROC is the acronym for Republic of China, which is the official name of Taiwan, but people called it ‘RoxanneSAT’, because . . . almost all the managers were women.” At first she was disappointed not to manage the seemingly more important NASA job, but the ROCSAT experience turned out to be one of the best of her life, and she is still in contact with friends she made during her time in Taiwan. Fuentes is positive about her experience as a woman in the aerospace business, noting that her employers have been overwhelmingly fair to her. She is glad to see the increase in STEM (science, technology, and math) programs aimed at children in middle and elementary school, because these programs present STEM careers as simply another option, both for boys and girls, and encourage children to think about a future as an engineer. These classes, she notes, might nudge a child toward engineering, and who knows, a former student might apply to her department. Be determined, she tells the kids; be dependable, and be kind, and you’ll be the kind of person that everyone wants to hire. Fuentes’s philosophy and her passion have spilled over into her second life as an elected official. At first she had no thought of being an official: she only wanted to be involved in the community somehow, and spent time volunteering on many committees, hearings, and planning coalitions to benefit South Bay cities. “I just stepped up, and paid attention, and thought that I should get involved. … Don’t put limits on yourself, because enough people will do it for you, that you can’t … just do it anyway. Don’t put limits on yourself.” Then she got hooked on city council meetings, and began just attending them because she found them so interesting. Her joke about city council meetings is, “There’s reality TV, and then there’s reality,” and there’s no question about which she finds more fascinating. She simply enjoyed herself, while becoming more and more interested in what El Segundo residents feel like they require for our city. Because so many residents have grown up here and their parents and children live here as well, they are invested in city policies, and Fuentes understands that and sympathizes. She told me stories about her own childhood here and how the city felt like a safe place to live in because people were watching out for one another, and she feels like that hasn’t changed, and no one wants it to. “I was lucky enough to grow up here and . . . I know so many people from my childhood, the kids and the parents, and now the kids are the parents . . . there’s that continuity, and that love of El Segundo.” Her tenure as mayor is another way for her to be hands-on involved in the city she loves and meet her constituency in person. She even convinced me that I needed to go to a city council meeting: “The people who show up [at city council meetings], I’m really grateful for them, that they come share their opinions with us . . . some people don’t like what we did, and some people do, and they’re both important. And sometimes it’s more important to hear people that don’t like what you did, to get another perspective.” It’s no use living in a bubble, she continued, where she might only hear agreement, so she appreciates hearing from everyone, even those people who don’t agree with her. “So when are you going?” she asked me at the end of the interview, and it struck me: she is simply practicing what she preaches. What if we were all a little more dependable, reliable, and kind? What would our town be like? I can’t answer that: but the Mayor would see many more of us at the city council, ready to get involved, and I think it would make her very happy. • It’s Time. Equal Pay for Equal Work. This is the personal opinion of Heidi Maerker Follow Us on Twitter @heraldpub
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