He was first elected to the city council in 1996.
Two years later, at age 33, the council chose him to be the city’s mayor.
In November 2004, Cabaldon became the first mayor directly elected by West Sacramento voters.
The blueprint is an award-winning, nationally recognized model for appropriate growth, infill development and regional collaboration.
West Sacramento joined the AARP online grid of Age-Friendly Communities in June of this year.
For instance, we were building super wide streets and neighborhoods with lots of cul-de-sacs.
One of the newest building sites that has gone up in the riverfront area is affordable housing.
Was that a conscious choice?
In most places, affordable housing is an afterthought.
So let’s start with theaffordable housing.
Actually, our downtown was started with an affordable senior project.
It was the very first project that launched the revitalization of the core of our city.
None of it was considered age-friendliness before.
But people began to realize, “Hey, this is really a great way to live.
The coffeehouse is right down the block.
Everything I need, I can easily get to.
I don’t have to worry about traffic and parking all the time.
I might still have a car, but I don’t have to use it every second.”
Some of the most popular places in our region have been exactly those kinds of places.
Seniors want quiet, isolated places.
The AARP age-friendly communities' agenda has been so powerful in flipping that whole argument on its head.
As we’re aging, what we want are more opportunities for engagement.
We want to spend less time in our cars.
We don’t want to be isolated.
It doesn’t mean that I want to live on top of a dance club.
It doesn’t mean everything about urban life is everything you want as a senior either.
Yes, it’s about the environment.
What about West Sacramento isn’t yet age-friendly?
Our transportation system and web connection.
A major priority is mobility as we age.
It means doing a better job on basic things like street design.
The street we’re on right now, West Capitol Avenue, used to be a freeway.
How do we achieve those kinds of places given the restrictions?
We need a community where it’s possible to stay.
It is about being able to stay in the same community.
One of our big hopes out of this process is to make real that promise.
How does West Sacramento encourage the creation of affordable age-friendly housing and transportation?
Some developers know how to do this already.
We’ve got a couple in the region that are as advanced and progressive at it as we are.
Others need to be educated, trained and supervised.
We have to reinvent affordable housing completely in California.
We have an opportunity to do it in a way that’s inspired and framed by the age-friendly agenda.
You’ve been on the city council or mayor of West Sacramento for nearly 20 years.
One piece of advice is to avoid the rear-view mirror.
It’s very easy to plan based on what you and your constituentsthinkthey already know.
So we all agree to maintain the anachronism.
That’s the path of least resistance, because nobody ever questions you if you do that.
But you’re free to’t innovate if you’re obsessed with what peopleused tothink.
We should also be asking the big questions, like, “What’s going to make you happy?
What are the main things you’re looking for?”
What you want to do as a leader is expand people’s horizons, expand the sense of possibility.
The best way to do that is to focus on the outcomes and the results.
Instead, we essentially say to people, “We’re going to make some cookies.
How many eggs should we use?”
What weshouldbe asking them is, “Do you want chocolate chip, peanut butter or oatmeal cookies?”
The leader is the one who needs to take responsibility for the mechanics, the recipe.
But we often don’t do that.
Stop bothering them with the details of the recipe.
That’s my job and the job of the traffic engineer and the housing person and the finance person.
It’s our job to put it all together so people can enjoy their cookies.
All this can be hard to achieve because so many of our government processes are oriented around the mechanics.
Its entire focus was on the senior center.
We need more places to live."
But that’s about it.
They weren’t engaged in much of the planning work.
you’re gonna wanna be looking at our street width requirements.
you should probably be looking at our transit plans.
it’s crucial that you look at our housing plans."
So we eliminated the Commission on Aging and put aging in with parks and recreation.
We did the same thing with the Youth Commission.
The community service staffisaccountable to the new commission.
The more fundamental change is that we wrote age-friendly work into every other commission’s job descriptions.
People can no longer say, “The Commission on Aging is responsible for that.”
The response from the Commission on Aging was, “Alleluia.”
There’s now a real deep sense of buy-in that will be animating our partnership in the web link.
Christina Clem is the associate state director of AARP California in Sacramento.
