Ahead of the June primary election, the Southern California News Group compiled a list of questions to pose to the candidates who wish to represent you. You can find the full questionnaire below. Questionnaires may have been edited for spelling, grammar, length and, in some instances, to remove hate speech and offensive language.
Name: Tomás Sidenfaden
Current job title: Software Engineer
Age: 45
Incumbent: No
Other political positions held: None
City where you reside: Los Angeles
Campaign website or social media: tomasforla.com
Rate the job the current Board of Supervisors is doing. (Please answer in 200 words or less.)
The Board of Supervisors is failing to deliver results commensurate with its enormous budget and authority. The county spends over $40 billion annually, and yet our most visible crises, like homelessness, public safety and housing, continue to worsen.
The Board declared a “local emergency” on homelessness in 2023, and its impact has been essentially negligible. We’re still building $750,000-per-unit permanent housing that takes a decade to deliver while 45,000 unsheltered homeless citizens suffer on our streets. That’s not governance, it’s paralysis dressed up as compassion.
Much of the dysfunction stems from the Board’s over-reliance on consultants to explain how our own systems don’t work and outsourcing program delivery to non-profits rather than building internal competency. Employing consultants to diagnose failures you’re unwilling to fix is a textbook management failure.
The Board also lacks the technical fluency to modernize basic government operations. Full financial transparency — every RFP, bid, and transaction published in real-time — is achievable today for a fraction of what the county spends on studies about why it’s underperforming.
The current Board is largely composed of career politicians and political dynasties without experience operating large systems under real-world constraints, and the results reflect exactly that.
Due to impacts from federal government cuts to Medi-Cal, the Board of Supervisors put a measure on the June 2 ballot, a half-cent sales tax to raise about $1 billion to stop-gap financial losses and keep hospitals and clinics functioning. How do you stand on this ballot measure? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)
This measure is a symptom of a Board that has no tools left except asking taxpayers to pay more. I understand the urgency … hospital closures and hundreds of thousands losing coverage are a genuine emergency, so I won’t oppose residents having their say on this. But I refuse to accept that a sales tax hike on an already overtaxed county is the only option.
Independent journalists have uncovered staggering levels of health care fraud in Los Angeles. Before asking working families to shoulder another half-cent on every dollar, the county should be aggressively partnering with federal authorities to recover those stolen funds. That’s money that already belongs to our health care system.
The Board’s reflex is always to tax first and never to innovate, investigate or reform. A competent Board would have come to voters with a comprehensive plan: Here’s what we’ve cut, here’s the fraud we’re recovering, here’s how we’ve restructured and here’s the remaining gap we need your help to fill. Instead, we got a rush to the ballot with no accountability beyond a nine-member oversight committee.
I’ll support the measure if it passes, but voters deserve leaders who exhaust every option before reaching into their pockets.
The County is in a fight with LAHSA regarding homeless services and has formed its own Department of Homeless Services & Housing. What are your thoughts on that plan and the break from LAHSA? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)
Changing the reporting structure from LAHSA to a county department is meaningless if the underlying approach remains the same. As I understand it, the new Department of Homeless Services & Housing will still outsource implementation to consultants and non-profits — which is the core problem, not which entity sits at the top of the org chart.
The county needs to make three fundamental changes, and none of them require a new department to accomplish. First, stop outsourcing homelessness management to third parties. Employing consultants to explain why our systems don’t work and relying on non-profits to deliver our most critical services is a management failure. If we can’t build internal competency to address our most urgent crisis, we have no business governing.
Second, redirect spending from permanent supportive housing, which costs $750,000 per unit and takes a decade to build, to emergency congregation shelters on unused and underused government land. This is a public health emergency, and we need to treat it like one.
Third, enforce public camping bans when shelter beds are available. You can’t build toward durable, long-term solutions until the unsheltered population is actually off the streets.
HSH, under a different name with the same playbook, is just rearranging deck chairs.
After the Palisades and Eaton fires, the County Fire and Sheriff have moved to develop a new CAD communications system to better notify residents in case of fire or other disaster. Have the Board of Supervisors and County departments done enough to prevent another such disaster? What else would you like to see implemented if you are elected? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)
No, the Board has not done enough. A new CAD system is a necessary upgrade — the Sheriff’s dispatch system is nearly 40 years old — but it doesn’t address the core failure. People died in Altadena because the process for issuing evacuation alerts passed through too many hands across too many departments before reaching residents. A faster dispatch system doesn’t fix a broken chain of command.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Other major cities have solved interagency emergency communication. We should identify the best models, adopt what works and implement it, not spend years studying the problem while our systems remain dangerously fragmented.
Beyond communication, the county has been too slow and uncoordinated in helping communities rebuild. We need to clear the red tape, take the lead on reconstruction and stop letting jurisdictional confusion slow recovery for families who’ve lost everything.
I’d prioritize a unified real-time communication platform across Fire, Sheriff, and OEM, clear codified authority so alerts don’t require a game of telephone between departments, and a comprehensive after-action plan so the county has a proven playbook ready before the next catastrophe — not after.
More specifically, what would you do to get LA County residents more prepared for a fire or other major disaster, such as a major earthquake? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
Preparedness starts with the basics we’ve neglected. We need aggressive brush clearance, including deploying goats for grazing in high-risk areas and we need to fill our reservoirs so firefighters aren’t battling blazes without water.
For our built environment, the county should require fire hardening for new construction in high-risk zones and offer fee waivers for existing homeowners upgrading their properties. We should push utilities to underground power lines in fire-prone areas. Downed lines are a leading ignition source, and Edison’s recurring shutoffs during wind events leave residents in the dark when they need information most.
We also need to invest in improved ingress and egress in hillside and canyon communities. People died because they couldn’t get out. That’s an infrastructure failure we can address before the next disaster.
Operationally, we should pre-position firefighting equipment, personnel and evacuation assets in high-risk areas during red flag events rather than scrambling after fires break out. And we should expand Community Emergency Response Team programs so that trained residents can support their neighbors during disasters when professional responders are overwhelmed.
The common thread is straightforward: prepare before disaster strikes, don’t just react after.
The county’s voters approved Measure G, bringing the number of supervisors up to nine. Other changes include requirements for the county CEO to be elected and for department heads to present budgets periodically to the Board of Supervisors as an act of transparency in budgeting. Give your thoughts on Measure G, its changes and future changes to county governance. (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
Measure G’s core principle is right: separating executive and legislative powers makes sense, if only because the Board of Supervisors has proven itself incapable of executing policy. A dedicated executive running county operations while the Board focuses on legislation and oversight is the correct structure.
But the draftsmanship is sloppy, which is fitting for a Board that struggles with governance. The measure accidentally erased Measure J from the charter through a clerical error. It didn’t account for the fact that all five supervisors sit on Metro’s board. Nobody addressed whether nine supervisors means Metro balloons to 17 members or only some get seats. That’s now being figured out after the fact. There’s no clarity on who has authority to create, merge or restructure departments. And the County Executive has no term limits, a gap Supervisor Horvath seems comfortable with, given she architected this position with herself in mind.
I support the separation of powers, the ethics commission, the expanded Board, and public budget hearings. But voters deserved a more carefully constructed amendment for the most significant governance reform in over a century. The Task Force must close these gaps before 2028, particularly term limits and executive versus legislative authority.
People who comment on a board item or a general comment are limited to one minute. Some say that is way too short for them to fully express their opinion. The County says they often have hundreds who request to speak on the same item, dragging out meetings until evening. Do you agree with the one-minute rule? Why or why not? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
The one-minute rule is a practical necessity given the volume of speakers, but the real problem is that live public comment, whether in person or via WebEx, is still the primary channel for public input in 2026. Hundreds of people waiting to deliver 60 seconds of unstructured testimony is inefficient for residents and unhelpful for policymakers.
The county should build a public input portal where residents can submit written and video comments on any agenda item asynchronously. With today’s technology, we can categorize and aggregate those submissions so the Board sees not just individual opinions but patterns, e.g., how many people share a specific concern, which neighborhoods are most affected and what themes are emerging. That’s far more useful than a marathon of repetitive one-minute testimonials, and far more accessible to the working families who can’t block out hours for a Board meeting, even from home.
I don’t oppose the one-minute rule. I oppose the assumption that live comment — in person or remote — is the only meaningful way to be heard by your government.
All the Board of Supervisors are also placed on the LA Metro board, a powerful board in itself. Do you believe all nine members should serve on the board? And, should the LA Metro board, at the request of Fourth District Supervisor Janice Hahn, add actual transit riders to the Metro board, in addition or instead of nine supervisors? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
Yes, all nine supervisors should serve on the Metro board. Mass transit inherently defies city boundaries. Routes, funding and ridership are county-wide concerns, and the county is the right jurisdictional level for oversight. This is exactly the kind of domain where the Board of Supervisors should consolidate its authority rather than fragment it.
That said, Measure G’s failure to address Metro board composition is another example of a hastily drafted charter amendment that didn’t account for obvious downstream consequences. This should have been resolved before voters went to the polls, not scrambled together after the fact.
On adding transit riders to the board, I appreciate the instinct. The people who actually use the system daily understand its problems better than most elected officials. But the details matter: Who selects these riders? How do you ensure they’re genuinely representative and not just another set of political appointments? If we’re serious about incorporating rider perspectives, a structured rider advisory council with real authority to surface issues to the board may be more effective than a handful of appointed seats that risk becoming symbolic.
The goal should be a board that’s both operationally competent and genuinely accountable to the people it serves.
Recently, the Board of Supervisors has been using public health and emergency powers, meaning it can pass laws (i.e., for rent stabilization, price-gouging, eviction restrictions, etc.) countywide, affecting not just unincorporated areas of L.A. County, but all 88 cities as well. Do you believe this is justified or too much power? Does this help with these issues? Please explain your thinking. (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
Emergency powers exist for emergencies, and they should be used precisely — not as a shortcut to bypass 88 city governments on policy matters the Board lacks the votes or jurisdiction to pass otherwise. Rent stabilization, price gouging protections and eviction restrictions are legitimate policy debates, but they don’t constitute public health emergencies. Using that framework to impose them countywide erodes the credibility of emergency powers when we actually need them.
And we do need them. Unsheltered homelessness is a genuine public health emergency. People living on our streets face dramatically higher rates of mental illness, addiction, violent crime and preventable death. That’s not a policy disagreement; it’s a crisis with direct, measurable public health consequences. Moving our unsheltered homeless off the streets is the single most important thing we can do for public health in Los Angeles County, and it would be my No. 1 priority as Supervisor.
What frustrates me is that the Board has invoked emergency powers for rent policy while failing to declare an actual public health emergency for unsheltered homelessness — the one domain where the legal, moral, and practical case is overwhelming. We have the tool. We’re just using it on the wrong problems.
Responding to a surge in jail deaths over the past year, the Board of Supervisors has called on the Sheriff’s Department and other agencies to implement a series of wide-ranging reforms. Supervisors demanded more thorough security screenings and safety checks at the jails, consistent monitoring of surveillance cameras and better access to drug treatment and drug reversal medications. What do you think of this approach to the problem? What else, in your opinion, needs to be done? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)
Security screenings, surveillance monitoring and drug treatment access are basic operational requirements, not reforms. The fact that the Board had to demand these measures tells you everything about how dysfunctional county governance has become.
But let’s be honest about why conditions in Men’s Central Jail are this bad. The current Board — and my opponent, in particular — has spent years trying to close this facility with no replacement plan. You cannot simultaneously defund, depopulate and neglect a jail while expressing outrage that people are dying inside it. That’s not progressive governance, it’s negligence rebranded as compassion.
My opponent wants to reinstate Measure J, which mandates that 10% of county revenue go to anti-incarceration programs and explicitly prohibits spending on law enforcement or detention. She attempted a mass depopulation plan so reckless it was opposed by law enforcement, prosecutors and the ACLU alike. This agenda uses vulnerable LA communities as a testing ground for radical restorative justice experiments so the county can avoid liability for its own security and governance failures.
Men’s Central Jail needs to be replaced with a modern, constitutionally compliant facility that provides real mental health and substance abuse treatment, not abandoned and forgotten while people die inside.