Despite his electoral loss on the national stage as a candidate for US Congress District 30, Republican candidate Alex Balekian still realized some of the items on his local election agenda after the votes were counted.
“Since the election, we have been able to get our much-maligned North Brand Complete Streets Demonstration Project bike lanes reversed by the Glendale City Council by a four-to-one vote. I supported the signature-gathering efforts of a prominent Glendale business owner with headquarters on North Brand Boulevard, and we were victorious.”
Citing traffic congestion, emergency response delays, unused bike lanes and safety hazards, the vocal community presence at GCC meetings convinced the body politic to undo the bike lane project. Since its installation, the roadway diversion has been barraged with mostly negative community feedback. On December 10, the GCC voted to return the half-mile segment of North Brand to its original configuration.
The one City Council member who endorsed the bike lane was Daniel Brotman.
“He was the lone holdout,” says Balekian. “There’s already a conversation brewing about recalling Brotman for not having a finger on the pulse of the community and pursuing his own environmental agenda, much to the detriment of the City of Glendale.”
Balekian got some of his environmental agenda items through, notwithstanding Brotman’s Facebook page description calling him “a hateful, anti-environmental extremist.”
“Also on my agenda are the high electricity costs in Glendale, and the GCC just voted to increase the water rates,” continued Balekian. “Again, these issues lie squarely on the shoulders of someone like Brotman, who is shoving a climate agenda down people’s throats and to hell with their utility bills. It’s a very natural fit to recall him and roll back all of the hurtful environmental policies that he’s put in place and try to get people some respite from their high utility rates.”
Balekian, an ICU physician, went from being regularly featured on cable TV FOX News to returning to earning his living in hospitals. Unlike some candidates, Balekian always had a plan B in case he didn’t win.
“I’m doing Plan B right now,” says Balekian. “During the 30 days leading up to the election, I had not been working any ICU shifts, and in the 12 months leading up to the general election, I was not working my usual load of shifts. I’m catching up on lost time, but I haven’t abandoned the community efforts from my campaign.”
“I am working shifts at a rural hospital in Southern Illinois, two to three weeks a month,” he says, “and then I have one week per month in San Francisco. My ICU skill set is portable. A sick patient is a sick patient, no matter the location. If there’s a hospital that’s in need and they are hiring, I want to go because it is very difficult to recruit somebody to a small town in rural Illinois that has only 13,000 people.”
“These are poor areas,” he continues, “but they do benefit from federal funding because they’re safety net hospitals in low-access areas. I think a lot of these people are forgotten. There are Americans with an abundance of healthcare, almost an excess of healthcare. On the other hand, some people live in these underserved areas, and you have to drive 30 minutes to the nearest hospital. There are pros and cons to this type of work. The pros are, yes, it’s good work. The cons are that I’m without my husband for three or three and a half weeks of the month.”
Next on the agenda
Balekian says his supporters are asking him to continue the fight.
“People are asking me to run for Glendale City Council, to spearhead a recall effort of Dan Brotman, and to continue the momentum that we have. Do we wait until 2026 to make a play for Glendale City Council, or do we make a fast effort to get a recall done by June? There is so much interest that we would have no problems raising funds for a recall. There are people ready to go. We just have to execute it.”
Regarding one of his other pet electoral agenda items, the Glendale Unified School District: “I’m waiting until mid-summer when the March test scores for GUSD are released, and to learn how the school district deals with its financial difficulties. To save money, they have gotten rid of seventh period. Students are suffering because their curriculum is being removed. The next round of test results should show the effectiveness of this decision. And I’m waiting to see if they put out a bond measure to raise our property taxes to get more money, the same as Glendale College.”
“I’m also running for the Executive Board of the LA Republican Party,” he relates.
“My congressional office campaign made huge progress because, in my district, there are only 16 percent registered Republicans, but we got 32 percent of the votes, effectively doubling the Republican turnout,” he says.
“The Republican Party is lost in California,” Balekian continues, “because they keep harping on socially conservative issues, whereas my whole point is to allow the voters to define the problem and then identify as Republican because we want to craft a solution that doesn’t involve the government taking over our lives. It involves people in local control figuring out the solution. My platform is to tell the LA GOP, look, we ran a very non-traditional campaign with a non-traditional Republican candidate, and we doubled what was expected of us. We’re going to try to reform the Republican Party from within, to modernize it and adapt it to the current climate of what people want, which is public safety, lower taxes and government staying out of our personal lives.
“What we found is the more moderate people tend not to speak up for a variety of reasons,” he continues.
“If we look at the turnout data, a lot of the people who should have voted for me, like the Armenians, did not turn out.”
Of his unsuccessful campaign, Balekian states, “Our non-traditional platform was actually based on a traditional 1980s and 1990s California Deukmejian-style platform. Deukmejian would have been completely eye-to-eye with my platform of law and order, keeping the government out of my bank account and my personal life. But that mindset has drifted, and that is why the Republican Party is a shell of its former self in California because they did not adapt and evolve with the times.”
Balekian believes the Democratic Party has been lurching to the left, and California Republicans need to offer a viable alternative to what he calls “that hyper-progressive platform.”
His intention with the LA GOP position is to provide a modernized, evolved alternative to the “woke progressive California Democratic Party, and then woo over the more moderate, centrist Democrats.”
He also has a beef with the California Republican Assembly, which is “arguably more socially conservative and wanting to bring the party more toward the religious conservative side.”
“There’s an attempt to reinvigorate the Republican Party,” says Balekian, “by pulling it more to the right, whereas I want to pull it firmly towards the low tax, low government intrusion side.”
However, all his future efforts may have to be tempered in favor of self-preservation.
Of his former campaign, he states, “We worked too hard just to let it go by the wayside, but at this point, we are very wary of throwing more of ourselves into it without being a bit more efficient with our time and efforts.”
“My husband and I are absolutely exhausted,” he relates.
“I am no longer Alex, The Candidate. I am simply Alex. It was definitely a disruption to our home life, a large amount of energy and resources to invest, not just monetarily but health-wise. Immediately after the election, I got sick twice, very ill with bronchitis. That’s what happens when you burn the candle at both ends. We’ve learned a lot, especially not to shoulder the burden by ourselves but to nurture and recruit support from the community and assemble a tribe of people who share the cause.”
