It is hard to find a town more exclusive than Arun Bhumitra’s hometown of Rolling Hill Estates. The 2,000-home gated community is a place where the average price of a home starts at $2.5 million, and properties are one to two acres in size. The community’s top-of-mind quality of life issues focus on low density and rural ambiance in a region known to be terrain at risk of fires. The most inconvenient aspect of living in this city in the middle of the Los Angeles metropolis is bad cell phone coverage.

Bhumitra points out in the interview, economic problems at the county, state, and federal levels impose issues that the gated city must deal with, including zoning changes to accommodate state mandated housing inventory growth, and housing affordability policies.  He believes in cooperating with other smaller cities to form coalitions for solutions, that are able to deal with state and federal mandates in a rational fashion.

One of the more interesting aspects of the interview is Bhumitra’s report that many property owners in Rolling Hills are converting old horse barns into accessory dwelling units (ADU’s). There’s a community mandate that these building conversions look like a horse barn from the outside to preserve the character and aesthetic of the city, even after the use of the building shift to being human dwellings.  From an urban planning perspective, this actually means Rolling Hills Estates is one of the best adopters of federal and state initiatives to add these types of housing units to community inventories– even better than many other parts of the LA metro area.

His background as an engineer very much focuses his candidacy towards goals of getting issues he believes have been languishing too long in his neighborhood off the taxpayers’ dime, moving towards constructive solutions; whether it be beginning to make zoning changes to comply with state imposed mandates or find ways to solve the economics and logistics to make the investments needed to improve the mobile communications drop out problems of the city. The latter is something he notes is a difficult one for some utilities to justify making private investment, but can, by using other available incentive programs, become solvable.

And that’s what Bhumitra wants to do for this hometown–help to turn problems into solutions.

Arun’s campaign website it at, https://www.electarun.com/