SACRAMENTO – Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) and City Councilmember Kevin McCarty will be co-hosting a town hall meeting on Wednesday night to ask residents who live in southeast Sacramento, what they believe the community’s priorities should be.  Over 200 residents are expected to attend the meeting at the Charles A. Jones Skills Center.

Jones, who organized the successful campaign against the arena tax last November (A measure that was defeated by 80% of voters), believes that the lesson learned from that campaign is that the community has other priorities for how public funds should be spent.  By organizing a series of town hall meetings, he hopes to engage the public and other community leaders to identify and begin working on the process of identifying what those priorities are. 

The first town hall meeting was held in East Sacramento last February and was co-hosted by Councilmember Steve Cohn.  Wednesday night’s town hall will be targeted at residents living in the southeast portion of the City and a small portion of the unincorporated County.  Jones and McCarty have launched an extensive outreach campaign and expect a high turnout among Southeast Asian residents, a group that is often overlooked in these types of meetings.  The meeting has been promoted on a number of local Southeast Asian radio stations and on Sunday, a group of volunteers went door to door in the neighborhoods surrounding the Center with flyers announcing the town hall.  The flyers were printed in English on the front, with translations in Spanish, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese on the back.  Interpreters will be volunteering at the meeting to accommodate those who need language assistance.