Alejandro Barrientos is one of two candidates vying to represent District 2 on Spokane City Council, which encompasses the areas of the city south of the Spokane River, apart from Peaceful Valley and much downtown.
The chief operations officer for the SCAFCO Steel Stud Company is competing with local organizer and former prosecutor Kate Telis for the Council seat left vacant by Councilmember Lili Navarrete's early departure.
Barrientos also works as purchasing director for the Stone Group of Companies, owned by developer and business leader Larry Stone.
He sat down with SPR's Owen Henderson to talk about what prompted him to enter the race and some of his ideas for the city.
This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
ALEJANDRO BARRIENTOS: My name is Alejandro Barrientos. I'm running for City Council in District 2. I'm currently the COO of a manufacturing company here locally in Spokane. I oversee a plant here in Spokane, Washington and one in Stockton, California. I currently lead around 125 people in both plants.
OWEN HENDERSON: That's a little bit about what you do right now.
AB: Yeah.
OH: But why did you decide to run for City Council?
AB: That's a great question. So, I grew up in Medellín, Colombia. I was raised in Medellín, Colombia. I moved to Spokane, Washington around 17 years ago to attend Gonzaga University, kind of fell in love with the city, the community, the people. And I stayed.
I stayed to build a life, to raise my two kids. And from my perspective, I've seen some really positive change in Spokane in the last 17 years. But we're also facing some big challenges.
And so, you know, I want to continue to raise my kids here in Spokane. And they're a big inspiration on why I want to do this. And so, I threw my name in the hat because from a professional and non-politician perspective, I want to be able to help our city kind of achieve some of those or solve some of the challenges that we're facing today.
OH: Well, let's talk a little bit about, broadly speaking, the approach to the office. City Council members obviously all have their own opinions. They're in lots of different places on the ideological spectrum. But this office is technically non-partisan. Talk to me about how you understand the nature of serving on a body like Spokane City Council.
AB: I think that's how local politics should be. I think it needs to be non-partisan because I think when we talk about the local issues that we're facing, it doesn't just affect one party. It affects both. And so, I think it's important that it continues to be non-partisan.
And as—like I said before, I'm not a career politician. I'm more of an outsider. And I think that sometimes we put party and politics before people in progress.
And I think we're making mistakes there. We want to find unity. We want to find ways to work together.
As an outsider, it looks like we're pretty divided right now, whether it's the city and the county not working together or even within our City Council members. What I want to bring to the table is that bridging the gap.
You know, things that I've done in my professional career, working with vendors, suppliers, competitors, just kind of bringing people to the table and finding the right solution for Spokane.
OH: Talk to me a little bit about your experience with city government itself. Are you someone, you know, you talk about watching as an outsider. Are you someone who regularly attends council or committee meetings?
AB: This has been very new. I mean, I've been focused on my professional career and focused on raising my two kids here in Spokane. So I've been not very involved in the politics, especially in the local politics here in Spokane. But since I decided to run, I really wanted to learn.
I didn't want to come in here saying ‘I have the solutions; I have the ideas that we need to implement.’
I really wanted to learn firsthand the issues, whether it was meeting in neighborhood council meetings, going to city council hearings. And so that's what I've been doing.
And so just educating myself so I can build the right platform that encompasses my district, but also serves Spokane as a whole.
OH: You've talked a lot about transparency, about building consensus. I'm curious more specifically, if elected, what would be some of your areas of focus when it comes to policy?
AB: Yeah, I think that the reasons why I decided to run were three that kind of touched me specifically. One was public safety, homelessness, and affordable housing. Those are kind of the three that are very interconnected issues that we're facing in today's Spokane.
And so those are going to be like my top interests as far as top priorities that I would work towards. And I think, like I said before, I don't want to come into this position saying ‘I have all of the solutions and all of the ideas to make this work.’ It would be naive for me to think that only one person can solve this.
But what I do understand is that it takes all of us and it takes a group effort and we need to form a coalition, treat this for what it is, which is a citywide crisis. And it's something that demands a sense of urgency, attention, and the right policy.
And I think that it's time for us to look ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘OK, we've tried something’ —which is fine.
We do this in business all the time, but we have to have metrics, goals, forecasts. We have to have all of these things that we can see in real time, whether it's successful or it's failing. And as an outsider looking in, we have failed.
We have showed that some of the metrics where we're losing people every day in the streets. I think the last data that I saw is we lost 325 lives last year on overdose and we're projected to lose 500 lives this year. So we're not headed in the right direction.
And so my point was we need to look ourselves in the mirror, say, ‘OK, we tried something. It didn't work. Let's all work together. Let's go on the table. Let's meet either daily because meeting once a month doesn't necessarily bring the result that we need. We need to all come to the table and chip at it because it's something that can be solved.’
I think that it's not all gloom and doom. I think Spokane has the right opportunity to kind of handle these issues. I think we've seen it in cities like Seattle and Spokane that have changed their trajectory.
So there's data, there's models out there that shows that we can do this. But it takes a group effort and it takes a sense of urgency on kind of tackling these issues.
OH: One of the things that your campaign website mentions is specifically public safety and particularly in the downtown core and public drug use encampments, things like that. I'm curious if you could drill down a little bit more for me on what does success actually look like to you on this, like you said, very complex, interconnected set of issues.
AB: Yeah, so, you know, grew up in Medellín, Colombia. And, you know, I say this when I talk to people—growing up in Colombia, which is a third world country in Medellín, I didn't experience certain things that I've seen here in Spokane as far as the open air drug use.
And, I mean, homelessness is something that isn't going to go away. I mean, there is going to be homelessness. It's not something that's going to be completely solved.
But we need to be compassionate. I think allowing people to stay on the streets is not a compassionate approach. We need to expand our affordable housing.
We need to expand shelter. We need to expand treatment. And we need to get them off the street and into these treatments and shelters that would help them get their life back in shape.
And when it comes to open drug use, I think that, you know, our city shouldn't be allowing that. We should be enforcing. And, you know, in the same regard, taking those people into the treatment, the right treatment that they need.
I think that the homelessness in Spokane has shifted from fentanyl in the last four or five years. I think it used to be a city that was struggling with homelessness, but now it's a city that's struggling with the crisis of fentanyl. And so there's the chronic homelessness that we're losing.
People were losing every day. And I think that the future would be for people to feel safe in Spokane, right? Because I think there's reports that show that people do not feel safe downtown at night.
People are on the streets. They're dying. So we need to find them the right treatment or center or shelter that they need. And affordable housing is—we also need to find ways to partner with the public private sector to grow, to expand.
I think one of the things that I've witnessed in Florida is they've been able to build housing. And I think when government gets out of the way and we eliminate some of the red tape that we've put in place, it allows for the public and private sector to partner and build housing for all. And so I think my vision is for Spokane, which is–-this is going to be a long project.
But what I envision is Spokane where people feel safe in the streets, where people are getting the right treatment that they need, whether it's mental health treatment, detox, and where people have shelter and have housing and where we're growing. And that's what I want to see, especially our downtown core and some of our low income neighborhoods that are getting hit the hardest with all of this.
OH: Well, Alejandro Barrientos, thank you so much for your time.
AB: Muchas gracias.
