Council Reverses Position in Face of Angry Throng

An angry and vocal crowd of about 1,200 property owners persuaded three members of the City Council to reverse their positions at a public hearing Monday night and vote against a proposed citywide assessment district, making the council’s opposition to the measure unanimous and leaving a $1.6-million shortfall in the 1985-86 city budget.

“I know it’s wrong,” Councilman Vernon Weigand said of the vote against the assessment district. “But even if they’re wrong, if the citizens want something to go a particular way, then I feel we have to go that way.”

Weigand, Mayor G. Stanton Selby and Councilman Jay Gaulding, all of whom had previously expressed support for the proposed assessment district, changed their stance after listening to protests Monday night. They joined council members Donna Smith and Mark Nymeyer in voting against the proposal.

Third Valley City

Pomona is the third San Gabriel Valley city in recent months to bow to public pressure against assessment districts. Pasadena’s board of city directors voted against a proposed street and curb repair district last month after a series of volatile public hearings. And the Claremont City Council promised angry residents in June that all four assessment districts currently in place in that city will be dismantled by the end of the coming fiscal year.

The meeting, which lasted until shortly before midnight, was frequently interrupted by catcalls from the audience and loud raps of Mayor Selby’s gavel as he called for order. Tempers flared in the hot, closely packed room.

Weigand said armed police officers, uniformed and in plainclothes, were scattered throughout the auditorium during the hearing as a safeguard against possible violence, although no fights were reported. Police patrol of neighborhoods surrounding the auditorium was heavy before and after the hearing to assist with parking and crowd control, Police Chief Don Burnett said.

Nearly 80 Pomona residents took turns at the microphones to register their complaints during the 4 1/2-hour meeting at the Pomona Unified School District auditorium. They protested almost every facet of the proposed assessment district, which would have changed the way the city pays for street lighting and tree trimming. The assessments, ranging from $8.39 to $52.88 for single-family homeowners, would have appeared on property tax bills.

Another 2,012 property owners filed written protests with the city clerk before or during the meeting, far short of the approximately 14,000 needed to overrule the City Council had it voted in favor of the assessment district.

$37-Million Budget

Last month, the council adopted a $37-million budget that was contingent on the passage of the new levy. Council members who supported the assessment warned last night’s gathering that to maintain a balanced budget, a 6% across-the-board budget cut or an increase in the city utility tax were the only alternatives if the assessment district proposal failed.

But the audience responded by threatening a recall election of any council member who voted in favor of the district.

“I think these people are mad enough to get you out of office,” Pomona resident Bertha Walker told the council. The audience cheered.

“I’m going to have to take this overwhelming situation into consideration,” Weigand told the audience a few minutes before the final council vote was taken. “But I don’t want you to think when the vote comes that if I changed my position it was because of any threat of recall. You can have my job.”

Gaulding, however, said Tuesday that the threat of a recall election was the primary reason for his change of heart.

“I’m not going to be hung out by myself on a recall election,” he said. “When you’re alone you don’t stand a chance.”

Selby told the audience before the hearing began that he had a “nagging doubt” about the proposal, and had agreed to support it earlier as a means of avoiding cuts in city services. But he said he had received no calls from residents or business owners in support of the assessment district and speculated that perhaps what the city needed was a “jolt of reality” in the form of a $1.6-million budget cut.

Complaints from residents ranged from lack of notice of the public meeting to what they called unfairness in projected assessments. Some, saying the assessment was an attempt by the council to circumvent Proposition 13, called it “taxation without representation.”

Several were angry that the city had hired a Long Beach consultant to work out the details of the proposed assessment district. The consultant, Ervin Spindel of Barryman & Stephenson Inc., signed an agreement with the city that allows his fee to run as high as $35,000.

The proposed assessments were based on the number of dwelling units on a given piece of property and the benefit to the property owner from nearby street lights, trees and landscaping. Proposed assessment fees would have ranged from $8.39 for a single-family home to thousands of dollars for some commercial properties.

But many property owners complained that assessments for parcels of the same approximate size and location in the city--in some cases, adjoining parcels--differed by several hundred dollars. Others who had surveyed their neighborhoods said they discovered that large numbers of residents had not received notice of the public hearing.

“You should look more at efficiency in government than passing the buck to the people,” said Pomona resident Lewis Jacobs. “You’ve proved your inefficiency by mailing out those notices.”

A number of residents gave humorous accounts of dead or dying city-owned trees and the absence of street lights in their neighborhoods, evoking loud cheers, laughter and wild applause from the audience. Others questioned the effectiveness of city tree-trimming services, now paid for out of the city’s general fund, that would have been covered under the new levy.

“I have never seen anyone trimming a tree on Grier,” said Gus Wilson Jr., who has lived on Grier Street in Pomona for 25 years. “The only service you could cut for me would be picking up my garbage.”

Phyllis Agrella, who has lived in Pomona for 19 years, told the council there are no street lights or trees on her street. She said that in her case, the assessment would be for services that did not exist.

“I rely on my two porch lights and the moon,” Agrella said to a laughing audience and council. “I’ve often wondered why politicians haven’t figured out a way to harness the taxpayers to pay for the energy from the sun and moon.”

The crowd, which began to gather outside the auditorium about 7 p.m., filled the room to its 750-seat capacity and spilled into the corridors of the building and outside into the street. Several organizers of the grass-roots protest campaign handed out written protest forms which had to be submitted before or during the public hearing. Later, consultant Spindel, who sat on stage with the council, said the 2,012 written protests represented roughly 6% of the affected property owners covering 10% of the property in the city.

Although written protests from 50% of the city’s 27,788 property owners would have been necessary to override a favorable vote on the assessment district by the council, Smith, Weigand and Nymeyer said that abandoning the assessment district appeared to be the will of the majority.

Gaulding and Selby disagreed, however. “We are now living under minority rule,” Gaulding said, bemoaning the failure of what he said may have been a silent majority of residents to voice their support for the assessment district.

But Gaulding said he voted with the other council members to avoid the “turmoil and disruption” of a recall election and to allow the city to get on with the business of cutting the budget.

He said the cuts would most likely come out of funds now budgeted for the library, parks and recreation and police and fire protection.

Al DePaola, a Pomona resident who was one of the principal organizers of the protest, said he has not completely abandoned the idea of a recall election, and may push for one if budget cutting is not done carefully.

“The big question now is what happens to the budget,” said DePaola, who rang doorbells in the weeks before the hearing to urge property owners to attend and to file written protests with City Hall. “Are they going to punish us?”