Alejandro Barrientos, business executive and independent Democrat, running for Spokane City Council

Alejandro Barrientos, chief operations officer for the SCAFCO Steel Stud Company, is making a bid for the Spokane City Council.

Barrientos is running for a seat occupied by Councilwoman Lili Navarrete, who recently announced she is not running for a new term. If elected, he would be one of two council members representing District 2, which includes most of the city south of the Spokane River. Councilman Paul Dillon is the district’s other representative and is serving a term through 2027.

He is running in the Nov. 4 election against Kate Telis, a former prosecutor who has more recently worked on the campaigns of several Spokane-area candidates, including Dillon’s.

Barrientos is a self-described Democrat, but likely one of the defining pitches of his campaign will be his independence from the progressive cohort that has taken a supermajority on the Spokane City Council and works closely with Mayor Lisa Brown.

He opposed most of the recent package of homelessness laws Brown proposed , which were meant in large part to replace the 2023 voter-approved anti-camping law struck down earlier this year by the state Supreme Court. He argues that they failed to deliver the immediate response voters had asked for and would have left people on the streets to die.

While city council positions are ostensibly nonpartisan, party politics still animate the positions, and the South Hill is one of the city’s most reliably Democratic voting blocs. This may explain why it has been years since a self-described Republican has made a serious run for one of District 2’s seats; Dillon’s opponent in 2023 was Katey Treloar, who ran as a self-described moderate unaffiliated with any party and tried, not always successfully, to avoid being associated with more right-leaning candidates and politicians.

Whether Barrientos’ explicit alignment with the Democratic Party will spare him the same characterization remains to be seen. He was unable to secure the county Democratic Party’s endorsement, which eluded Treloar in 2023 and which Telis has received. Many of his donors are reminiscent of Republican-affiliated candidates of years past: RenCorp Realty owner Chris Batten, Alvin and Jeanie Wolff of the Wolff real estate empire, and unsuccessful county commission and city council president candidate Kim Plese. Treloar has donated $100.

Barrientos acknowledges that some have pointed to his employer, developer and SCAFCO owner Larry Stone, a well-funded opponent of Spokane progressives for years, to question his Democratic bona fides.

But he believes that when voters meet him, they will know that he is a sincere believer in Democratic values. For instance, with family ties to Colombia, he says supporting immigrants amid the current campaign of mass deportation is important to him . He attended the June 11 protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detainment of 21-year-old Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez, who is seeking asylum from Venezuela, and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, a Colombian national also in his 20s.

“I am a Democrat because those are the values that align more with who I am and how I grew up,” he said in an interview. “I had a conversation with (former Democratic Senate Majority Leader) Andy Billig about that specifically, because he’s somebody that works for (Spokane Indians and Spokane Chiefs teams owner) Bobby Brett.”

“He said, ‘You know what? Sometimes you just have to prove it over time.’ And so I just need to build that trust with people.”

Billig has endorsed Telis.

Barrientos has lived in Spokane off and on for the past 17 years, and with his two children, the oldest of whom is 8, he said he has planted roots here for the long haul, prompting him to consider getting politically involved.

It was on the Big Red Wagon last year, after his young daughter grabbed a piece of foil and Barrientos was gripped by fear that she may have come into contact with fentanyl, that he decided to run for Spokane City Council.

He was born in Miami, where his grandfather and parents moved when his grandfather, a prominent attorney in Colombia, fled from a cartel he had been prosecuting.

He moved to Medellín, Colombia – the country’s second-largest city – at a young age.

He attended Gonzaga University, drawn by a smaller university with a Jesuit tradition familiar from growing up in Colombia. He studied abroad in Italy for a stint, then moved to Mexico City to work in an international relations liaison position with Rocky Mountain Construction, a roller coaster designer and manufacturer, where he was promoted into various executive roles. Through that job, he had also lived in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, each for short periods.

Throughout this jetsetting career, Barrientos said he regularly returned to Spokane, but returned for good after being offered a job by CWallA, another business in Stone’s Stone Group of Companies.

“I’ve lived in a lot of places, and a lot of big cities as well,” Barrientos said. “And big cities, you know, at a young age, really attracted me for the different pace of doing things, but when you’re raising kids and having a family, for me, there was no better place than Spokane.”

But Barrientos also believes that things have changed in the city in the past 17 years, some positives, but also some challenges that he has “seen and witnessed here in Spokane that I never saw growing up in Medellín.”

He believes that current leadership has struggled, or failed to try, to collaborate successfully with right-leaning governments in the county and surrounding jurisdictions.

“We know that our county commissioners hold most of the mental health resources, and our city holds the housing resources, and I think it’s crucial that we get our city and county working together,” he said. “And sometimes party and politics gets in the way of that.

“I can be that bridge to come to the table and connect people and work together.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that the Spokane County Democrats have already voted to endorse Telis and not Barrientos.