Yvonne Burke's Crumbling Kingdom
She was hailed as a black pioneer and hero. Did she sell out?
In its 18 years of operation, the 22-mile Blue Line has become the funeral train of Los Angeles County’s light-rail system, its 90 deaths and 800 accidents making it the nation’s deadliest railway.
Burke has done little on this count, despite her access to huge sums of money as a member of the Board of Supervisors and as a Metro board member overseeing the $3 billion-a-year transit system. Yet almost all of the mayhem has occurred in her own 2nd District — a reality that only italicizes the disclosure that she and her husband really live in light-rail-free Brentwood. (Burke describes the dustup over the L.A. Times revelation as “a tremendous inconvenience.”)
“When you live among the people, you have a better handle on how you deal with all the complexities of a district,” Congresswoman Watson notes dryly. “Kenny Hahn lived right on 85th and Crenshaw.”
When representatives from 17 community groups, under the umbrella of the Citizens’ Campaign to Fix the Expo Rail Line, raised the Expo Line’s death-risk potential with Burke at Metro hearings, she basically shrugged and told them the agency’s cash register was locked.
Goodmon and others have claimed that the building of far cheaper and riskier rail lines that run across the streets instead of above or below them is environmental racism. But Burke dismisses that charge, telling the Weekly that she was instrumental in winning construction of a bridge that raises the Expo Line over La Brea Avenue, and that she helped to get funding for a sound wall to help quiet the block where one of the Expo Line’s critics lives.
During their encounters with Burke, Goodmon and a colleague found her to be a woman at odds with the smiling visage on her Web page. According to Goodmon, Burke became angry in a private meeting with them once, making it clear to them that she took their criticism of the sprawling Metro system personally.
Burke denies Goodmon’s version of the incident, but some employees at the county administrative offices where she is headquartered describe her as patronizing, condescending — and sometimes mean. One county water-cooler rumor has her telling a powerful union leader, “I will slap you down like a little boy.”
When asked about it, Burke says, “I don’t recall saying that. I lose my temper, but I don’t get personal. You can only attack me so many times.”
And indeed, Burke’s supporters hail her more public abilities, especially her talent for being able “to smooth everything out.” They cite her calming influence during stormy crises and her knack for reconciling opposites — often in contrast to her sometime nemeses, fellow supervisor Gloria Molina and veteran Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
“She’s nonconfrontational and quiet,” compliments African-American political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “She’s not an initiator, and works behind the scenes cautiously — she does not like to make personal or political enemies.”
“Yvonne’s an extremely moderating influence — she’s not prone to hysterics,” adds former state assemblyman and senator Kevin Murray. “There are some people who like press conferences and rallies, and some who do their work in a more legislative manner. I would also say those people who are not elected aren’t representative of the 2nd District or of the African-American community. Pundits, political junkies, analysts — they don’t represent real people.”
{==PAGE_BREAK==}When asked if Burke has any faults, Murray can’t think of any. “She has no Achilles’ heel,” he replies. “She’s iconic.”
Like Murray, 10th District City Councilman Herb Wesson, who once served as Burke’s chief of staff, can detect no faults in the supervisor. “She has absolutely no flaws,” Wesson says. “I couldn’t see a flaw on her even if it were on her nose.”
BUT THE PERSISTENT CRITICISMS of Yvonne Burke keep coming back to the fact that she took up a seat on a powerful political body, then didn’t have the stomach for a fight — even when huge battles were unfolding on her watch.
“I don’t think she cares to deal with controversy,” says Larry Aubry, a veteran South L.A. activist and columnist for one of the area’s oldest black-owned newspapers, the Los Angeles Sentinel. “She wants to smooth everything out, and the district has suffered from that. I also don’t think she’s comfortable with poor folks — she’s part of a certain elite.”
In the long time that she has overseen the 2nd District, its chronic problems remain as deeply entrenched as ever. At the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which gets its funds from the Board of Supervisors, “murder maps” represent each 2007 homicide as a tiny red triangle. In most parts of the county, they form occasional markers like errant blood drops. In Burke’s district — only the county’s third most populous — they are so coagulated as to create one massive wound.
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