Stockton Mayor Christina Fugazi emphasized the city’s revitalization efforts as she opened the 2025 California Economic Summit on Wednesday.
The two-day summit is hosted by California Forward and the California Stewardship Network at the Adventist Health Arena, and drew leaders from across sectors to discuss shared prosperity amid a shifting national landscape.
The opening keynote address with Anne Rogan, the CEO of EDGE Collaborative and Felicia Wong Principal of the Roosevelt Institute, tackled different perspectives on economic inequality and workforce development.
Mayor Fugazi set an optimistic tone in her opening remarks, illustrating the city as “on the rise” despite past struggles. She spotlighted local initiatives aimed at boosting sustainability, transportation and education.
“We just entered into a (Community Choice Aggregation) where our residents are not only getting a discount on their energy, but it’s also clean renewable energy that they are receiving,” Fugazi said. “We’re rising when it comes to economics. Right across the channel, we have South Pointe which is going to be an infill residential, commercial medical center. Just over from that, we’re going to have the USS Lucid and the Maritime Museum.”
Fugazi also praised the Green Economy Lab, a partnership for industry, workforce and policy, and Code Stack Academy at the San Joaquin County Office of Education, where she worked for 20 years.
“That’s where we’re creating the next generation of engineers that are also software, computer and creatives,” she said. “We want to create a home-grown workforce that will one day rival anybody that is over the hill.”
After the opening remarks, Fugazi said she is excited the city is hosting the summit for the first time so attendees from across the state can see the progress of Stockton.
“We are going to work collaboratively with our county to push our region forward,” Fugazi said. “When the Central Valley Thrives, the state of California thrives.”
The opening keynote featured a conversation between Felicia Wong and Anne Rogan. They explored California’s “confusing” economic moment, discussing growth and anxiety over inequality and job quality.
Wong described living “between paradigms,” contrasting Reagan-era deregulation with recent pushes for public investment under leaders like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. She praised Biden’s green industrial policy but noted its political setbacks.
“We kind of took a swing and missed,” Wong said, “The old world is dying. What (philosopher Antonio) Gramsci said about living in times like this is, many monsters appear in times of real confusion. So I think nationally, we’re confused. I think in California, the radical inequalities that we are seeing, the growth and the struggle that that is very real, and it’s a microcosm of what we’re seeing at the national level.”
Rogan tied this to “civic infrastructure,” suggesting community-driven assets like libraries, parks, urban farms and development corporations can unlock capital in underserved areas.
Wong agreed, adding schools to the mix and recalling California’s mid-20th-century master plan for education. She shared an anecdote about her parents’ affordable path to Berkeley.
“This was all made possible by a kind of civic infrastructure that was enabled by public investment, by state investment,” Wong said. “So I think the kind of public/private that we are moving to now is very different from the kind of public/private we thought about in the 1990s, in industrial policy.”
The summit concludes on Thursday, with the forum with five of the 2026 candidates for California governor will be the last featured session of the event.
The forum aims to provide an opportunity for community members to hear from some of the candidates for Governor and learn about their priorities for California’s economy. The forum participants will include former California State Controller Betty T. Yee, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former State Assembly Leader Ian Calderon.