BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — In a crowded race to represent Bakersfield City Council’s third ward, candidate Kathryn Halling is feeling bullheaded that she’ll win.
But maybe that’s just the ginger in her, she said.
Halling, a longtime bookkeeper, has many priorities she would bring to the role, but the biggest pillar she is running on? The city shows their books.
Halling is fierce about the finances, saying she’s running for City Council’s Ward 3 seat to help clean up the city’s finances.
The city “is not out of money; we just have misaligned priorities,” she said in a one-on-one interview with 17 News. “And that’s a beautiful thing, that we have money, let’s just tighten the belt and get ourselves on track.”
A big part of that, she said, is making the city’s finances and funding obligations more transparent and available to the public.
“There is no transparency,” Halling, a mother of six, said. “We have to be able to get in and see the books to know exactly where, but we have a lot of deferred maintenance that we can’t see.”
Although she’s a fan of digging into the numbers, Halling said the current lack of transparency only allows her to see some city’s financial reports, and even the ones she can view, are often two or three years old.
But even with what she has seen, she’s described the budgets and financial reports as having many “leaks” and “leaky buckets.” Halling said she fears those financial leaks are “everywhere.”
“What we want to do is we want a ‘zero base,’ which means that we’re building out a budget not based on the previous year’s budgets and start fresh,” Halling said. “This is how much money we have. What can you do with that amount of money? It’s a complete mind shift and perspective shift and orientation shift that I believe is absolutely necessary to get our city back on track.”
Halling said she wants to give Bakersfield City Manager Christian Clegg financial “back up,” saying when he assumed the city manager role several years ago, he inherited a city that was poorly managed.
“I’m hopeful that he’s the one who can help us get out of this. I think he needs backup. I think he needs people who are very competent,” she said. “And right now, the area that’s missing, the area where we don’t have someone watching, is the finances. And so, this is our time. This is our time to fix it because I do believe that we can fix it.”
Building up the community
Outside of being the city’s fiscal watchdog, if elected, Halling said she would create a “neighborhood network” to advocate for their individual neighborhoods in the third Ward.
She said it would involve one neighborhood member to take ownership over the neighborhood and serve as the community’s “stakeholder.”
“These people are who you trust because they’re your neighbors,” Halling said. “The goal is that we can meet on a quarterly basis once I make it into City Council, and I can disseminate this information directly to the neighborhoods because I have built this network of stakeholders that are just regular people.”
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Although she is building the network by creating neighborhood representative groups, Halling said it’s important to her that constituents always have a clear line of communication with her.
“Anyone can get my personal phone number that I will answer. If I am unwilling to do that, I don’t know what the point is,” she said. “If my constituents can’t get ahold of me, I don’t know what the point is because then I have misaligned priorities. Then is this about me or is this about you?”
As she’s been canvassing for the last several months, Halling said she’s been leaving her personal cell phone number on flyers left at doors and on community hand-outs.
Halling — who also spent time in Chicago helping big companies balance their books — said she does that because she’s seen “a communication hang-up,” not only in Ward 3 but throughout the city in general.
“As I go out into the community and walk, literally every household in this gigantic ward, and I am so close to making it. You know, people said it couldn’t be done. Okay, but I’ve gotten a couple pairs of shoes. It can be done. So, what I’m doing is I’m having these neighborhood meet and greets.”
She said her boots-on-the-ground approach through her walks in Ward 3 have boosted her name recognition, also with the help of social media.
Between the two campaign tactics, Halling said she’s seen more of her city council signs popping up both in and outside of her Ward.
“I’m driving off Stockdale Highway, Rio Bravo area, and I pull into a neighborhood, and I see one of my signs. I don’t know who put it there,” Halling, who describes herself as a conservative, said. “There’s another one of my signs. I don’t know whose house that is. I drove and saw a third sign.”
A new face on the local government scene
After her time with the City Council is over — if elected — Halling said she doesn’t mind if people don’t know her name or remember her face.
“If all you see from me and all you remember is like not even my name, you don’t even remember me for four years. That’s fine,” Halling said. “But we have our finances in order, and then like let’s go play, let’s go build parks, let’s go do all these fun things. We just gotta buckle up real quick.”
In fact, if she is elected to a four-year term sitting on the city council, she won’t run for re-election.
“I don’t want to do any more (than four years),” she said. “I really mean it. I just want to see us on track and then (be) done. Disappear into the night. Nobody will even remember me. That is fine. I will crochet again for the first time in a year.”
Halling has not run for public office before, and the bookkeeper and former math teacher said her candidacy is a big sacrifice for her family.
“I have my own business, but the idea that this isn’t going to take money out of our pocket to go dive headlong into this thing — some people say, ‘Well, you can do this even though you’re working full-time.’ Yeah, you probably can, but that’s not what I’m doing. I want to fix this,” she said. “I’m willing to sacrifice four years of a total change in income to make this happen. I really believe in this, and I really believe that I made a commitment, until the doors slam in my face.”
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