Farce in Carson

A corrupt Los Angeles suburb tries for a comeback - and lands on YouTube

Comments (0) By Jorge Casuso Wednesday, Jan 16 2008

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DEWITT HAS SPENT $45,000 to recall Mayor Dear, the latest upheaval in a city wracked by scandals that have left its citizens disillusioned and deeply suspicious. Three years ago, Daryl Sweeney, Carson's colorful and popular mayor, was sentenced to 71 months in prison for acting as ringleader in a bribery scheme involving the city's biggest trash hauler.

Sweeney and other city leaders sold their votes for $600,000  which officials at Browning/Ferris Industries agreed to pay to land a 10-year, $60 million contract. Sweeney was the first of two mayors and two council members nabbed during a secret federal probe launched in 2000. Former council members Raunda Frank and Manuel Ontal pleaded guilty, along with former mayor Pete Fajardo.

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Their conversations, taped when a council member wore a wire, only confirmed what Carson residents suspected all along  something was rotten at City Hall. Residents had long complained that the City Council spent hours in meetings closed to the public, forcing residents to "wait hours to speak," recalls Sharon Gilpin, who has worked as a political consultant for DeWitt. When the council emerged from its closed-door meetings, its public votes were like "a dance" in which "the motions were passed in seconds."

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Gilpin says that with garbage rates climbing in Carson, DeWitt and other residents "thought there should be a bidding process to get competition. ...They thought it was a symptom of corruption."

And it turned out they were right. Literally a dumpsite for Los Angeles' garbage, Carson didn't become incorporated until 1968, when working-class black residents decided to form a new city. But while powerful industries now call Carson home, including the BP refinery that provides a third of the gasoline used in Southern California, the city is cash poor. Carson is considered the most ethnically and racially rich medium-sized city in California  its residents are evenly divided among black, Latino, white and Asian. But it has a $200 million annual budget dwarfed by such cities as Santa Monica, with a $435 million annual budget for a smaller population of 84,000.

With Carson's industrial air pollution and high rates of childhood asthma, Gilpin says "Vera's group asked for minimal levels of air cleaning, but the council gave short shrift to any concerns of the community. Industry has pretty much gotten a pass."

The city's voters were aching for change, and in 2004 Dear won a special election as a reform candidate replacing the corrupt Sweeney. In 2005, Dear was re-elected in a landslide with the highest vote total in the city's history. "I won despite the steamroller juggernaut of power," says Dear, who is white, and whose brother Donald was mayor of nearby Gardena for 19 years. "I also went cross-cultural. My message of prosperity and development resonated with the voters."

With a three-vote majority on a five-member City Council, Dear began making political appointments to various city commissions  an action typical of any mayor. But critics say Dear also began using a tactic not seen in normal city politics: hitting the "mute" button installed on the council dais to shut up Carson residents who attacked him.

"When a citizen comes up to speak and he doesn't like it, he mutes it," DeWitt says. "Now he's doing it to council members. ...He runs a dictatorship in this city."

THE TOUCHY MAYOR would rather focus on his ambitious plans than his dissent-unfriendly behavior. He likes to point to commendations on his wall that he says are a testament to his popularity. "Look here," Dear says, pointing to a stack behind a chair. "These are the ones I haven't put up on the walls. There's no room."

His office is also adorned with 5-foot-tall aerial depictions of Carson which show big, round shapes  oil-tank farms and refineries that stretch along Carson's thoroughfares. A vacant swath near the northwestern corner  "the biggest undeveloped parcel in urban Los Angeles adjacent to a freeway"  is where Dear hopes developers will erect one of the largest shopping centers in California. He hopes to annex 2,000 acres to the northeast known as Rancho Dominguez  and he just might prevail, since his brother Donald sits on the powerful regional commission that will recommend to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors whether Carson, Long Beach or Compton gets the nod to annex the area.

Says Dear, "You would drive by on the freeway and have no reason to get off. Now we're changing that."

Carson's transformation was under way before Dear took office, with the opening in 2003 of the 27,000-seat Home Depot Center, a soccer and world-class tennis stadium with North America's only velodrome for Olympic-class bicycle racing. The city was seen in 140 countries when it hosted two 2003 Women's World Cup Soccer matches after the SARS virus outbreak in China forced the games to move. "You remember the woman who took her blouse off (during the games)?" Dear asks. "She did that in Carson."

But Dear's vision  which also includes using new revenue to make Carson safer, could be in jeopardy. Last March, the mayor lost control of the council when council member Julie Ruiz-Raber, his ally, failed to get re-elected by just 300 votes. After that, Dear's council opponents began blocking his appointments to city commissions. "It's all about power," says Ruiz-Raber, who teaches belly dancing for a living. "They want to strip the mayor of all power. We were working with the majority of the city." Now, she says, "It is truly dysfunctional."