Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
It was 1969, and Alberto Velez had just landed in Newark Airport with nothing but his suitcase and a toolbox.
Many people might rest after an 11-something hour flight, but Velez hit the pavement instead. He began approaching every business he could find in Union City, New Jersey, looking for work. He spoke little English, so he used sign language and whatever means he could to communicate with the business owners and managers.
Velez was from Argentina, and the country was under the military dictatorial rule of President General Juan Carlos Onganía. Velez knew the economic situation there wasn’t going to improve. He went to Union City first because he’d heard there were a lot of Spanish speakers. There were, but they didn’t own businesses, so finding a job would be difficult.
Back home, Velez’s wife and two daughters were waiting for him to send for them, but he had to build a life before they followed him. He wanted his daughters to have more opportunities than they would’ve had in Argentina and more opportunities for himself. He believed in the American dream, and he wasn’t going to let anything stop him.
It’s 2019, and I’m late to meet with Claudia Ortega. I rush into the coffee shop and see her already sitting. Once I have my coffee and sit down, she tells me to take a breather. Apparently, my hurry shows. Ortega immediately strikes me as more composed than I would expect someone who hasn’t run for office before would be.
Ortega made waves this summer with her work on a recall petition and then her run for vacant City Council seat No. 2. She won the election, and she’ll be seated Jan. 2.
What’s amazing is that not even a year ago she would have never expected to be where she is today.
“I wasn’t doing anything. I was just walking my dogs, living my life and working,” Ortega said. She still works as a Spanish interpreter for Federal Court.
But then she received mail, informing her that her property tax had shot up to almost $10,000.
“I was pissed off that the notifications were sent out, and we received them all on the last day of the appeal period,” Ortega said. The notifications were sent out 18 days late, but Ortega wasn’t initially worried because she assumed they’d extend the deadline.
Ortega wasn’t alone. This had happened all over Pocatello, and everyone wanted to file an appeal. There were over 3,000 appeals filed, and Bannock County Commissioners couldn’t physically listen to them all before the July 26 deadline, prompting them to grant a 10% blanket assessment reduction.
But there could’ve been even more appeals than that, because when Ortega arrived on July 8 to file an appeal, she was told, “Too late, they changed [the deadline] to July 5,” right in the middle of the holiday weekend.
Ortega immediately objected, only to hear, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
She responded, “Really? Well, watch this. There’s something I can do about it.” After that conversation, she walked across the street to the county elections office and got paperwork to file for a recall of the Bannock County Assessor and the Commissioners.
Ortega frequented the Farmer’s Market and Revive @ 5 concerts once the recall effort had begun. People often told her at these events that they felt like their voice didn’t matter. Ortega has felt that way before. She’s been to City Council meetings, and she’s been escorted out of them. But she didn’t care about that anymore, because she was angry.
“If you can’t handle your business correctly and do things in a timely manner, then you’re going to deprive people of their due process,” Ortega said. “That’s a problem, and it’s not okay with me.”
All while property taxes were shooting sky high and Ortega’s recall petition was circulating, Pocatello was in the midst of another controversy, involving the city’s budget for the 2020 fiscal year.
The month before property taxes rose, news broke that the city budget had allotted raises of 13% and 48.5% to the mayor and the City Council respectively. To put those numbers in perspective, the city had offered a 2.5% pay raise to police and 1.73% to firefighters.
Before this, Mayor Blad made $81,186 a year, and city councilors, which is a part-time job, made $10,649 a year each, plus full health benefits and a retirement package, for the mayor and councilors.
This was already hard for Pocatellans to swallow, but then July brought even more controversy to city leadership.
At the beginning of August, the city council voted to approve reduced pay raises for themselves. These reduced raises were still 7% for the mayor and 23% for council members.
Because of this controversy, many people asked Ortega where the recall petition was for the city councilors.
Ortega feels the pay raises to the council are “absolutely disgusting.”
“These are public servants. You ran to serve the people of your community,” Ortega tells me. She becomes much more animated when talking about the pay raises, and the property tax increases, but she maintains her composed demeanor throughout the interview. I can tell she cares about these issues, and I can see how angry she must have been in the summer, just like other Pocatellans who felt their voice didn’t matter.
“Well, are you just going to complain… or are you going to do something about it?” Ortega’s husband told her one day.
Ortega thought about it, and said, “If I want to see change, I need to be willing to be a part of that.”
That was when she decided to make a run for City Council.
I contacted many members of the City Council and the Commissioners to try and set up interviews for this story, but they either ignored me or denied an interview. That may be because they didn’t want to talk to me, but it also could be the exhaustion of this topic, as most of them have done interviews before.
The advocates for the pay raises to the City Council argued that our council is falling behind other communities in pay and that poses a barrier to people who may want to run for office but don’t have the financial power.
“We are a democratic society. Everybody who wants to serve on the council should be able to,” said Councilwoman Linda Leeuwrik to the Idaho State Journal. “The way it is now, most people cannot afford to serve.”
However, that’s not what Bray found in his research. He said that Pocatello’s mayor and council earn the fourth-best compensation among Idaho’s top 10 cities.
As for the Commissioners and the Assessor, they claimed a number of things were at fault for the notices being sent out so late, one being the implementation of new computer software. Talking to the Idaho State Journal, Davies claimed this software was frozen for two weeks, during which they rearranged the office.
However, that’s not what George Brown, property tax administrator with the Idaho State Tax Commission, told the Journal. He said that the software was only frozen for about two hours.
Whatever it was that caused this controversy, Bannock County was the only county in Idaho to sent out their notices so late.
Ortega has many goals for her term as a City Councilwoman, but I only have room to write about three of them.
Ortega wants to increase public input with the city and in doing so, rebuild the public’s trust. She feels that trust is deteriorated and the public’s involvement needs to be increased to make that happen.
“I want to really change how the business of the city is conducted with relation to how much the public is involved,” Ortega said, telling me she’s committed to regular town halls.
Ortega wants to listen to people all over Pocatello. Not just people from the Benches or other parts, everyone.
“We all have to live here, and we need to take care of everything. Not just one specific spot or one specific group,” Ortega said.
She also wants to increase the city’s partnership with Idaho State University. To her understanding, Satterlee is a completely different animal than the last ISU president, and he’s trying to rebuild the reputation of the University.
“We need to include the University so that when [students] graduate, you’re invested in this community and you’re excited about staying here, because things are growing, and they are changing.”
Her first concern she wants to address is to take a closer look at the budget and find where we stand. As far as she knows, we haven’t done a deep analysis of our budget or benchmarked it against other cities.
One part of the budget she can’t work to overturn now is the reduced pay raises voted in by the council. However, that won’t stop her and her allies from donating their pay raises.
Roger Bray, incumbent on the council, and Christine Stevens, who won seat No. 1 have agreed to donate their raises to charity. Ortega will donate her raise to a memorial fund for her son.
Bray, Stevens, and Ortega tried something unusual in this election. They allied together under the banner of Candidates United for a better Pocatello and ran together. The strategy paid off, as all three of them one their desired seats.
Ortega tells me that Roger Bray was the only city councilor who was consistently opposed to the pay raises, but that strikes me as inaccurate.
While Bray was a strong opponent to the raises, he wasn’t in attendance at the first meeting where they discussed the budget, and the only one in that meeting who spoke out in opposition was Rick Cheatum.
She then tells me that Cheatum and Bray were the only two on the council who voted in opposition to the pay raises. While Jim Johnston, who sat on City Council seat No. 1, initially supported the raises for the City Council members, and voted in favor of giving the mayor a raise, he voted against the council pay raises along with Bray and Cheatum.
Ortega is entering the council with two strong allies in Stevens and Bray. Once they all take their seats, they’ll sit next to each other in the farthest right seats.
But however many allies Ortega has now, she’s sure to have just as many enemies.
Velez had been walking and covered every business within 102 blocks on his first day in America.
“I can sweep, I have tools,” Velez told many of the business owners. All of them had sent him away.
Finally, he came to a service station and approached the owner. There was a car set on blocks near them and a Puerto Rican child sweeping up the station. Velez tried to communicate with the man.
“Come here,” the service station owner said to the child. “What does this guy want? He speaks English like a cow.” The boy translated to Velez.
“That’s okay. Tell him this cow can get that car running in an hour, and if I can get it running I get a job.”
“Go ahead,” the station owner responded. Velez did it, and he got a job.
Six months later, Ortega, then named Claudia Velez, arrived in the United States with her sister and mother. Velez already had a fully furnished apartment and car.
Velez and his family would go on to gain citizenship in 1974. He worked as a Diesel Mechanic, owned his own business at one point, and watched Ortega’s sister go on to medical school.
“He really believed in the American dream, and he lived it,” Ortega said.
Her father fixed a car in 1969 and America became his home. Ortega’s now trying to fix her local government in 2019 to protect her home.
And like her father, she doesn’t want to let anything stop her.
