San Gabriel’s New ‘Heroes’ Feel the Heat

The honeymoon lasted about half an hour.

First, the three newly elected slow-growth council members took their oaths of office in front of 200 supporters at a San Gabriel City Council meeting Tuesday. Then the three introduced a surprise “transition team,” including a lawyer and a consultant with links to Irwindale, one of the most development-minded cities in the county.

There were some thunderstruck stares in the audience. Then a succession of speakers trekked to the front of the room to assail their heroes--one of whom had just proclaimed a new era of “open and responsive government” in the city.

“It didn’t seem kosher,” said Mary Cammarano, a member of the citizens group that had campaigned for the three councilmen, of the way the transition plan had been sprung on the city. The plan seemed “very, very well orchestrated,” she noted.

By week’s end, a former mayor had resigned from the council in protest, the newcomers were heatedly denying that they had done an about-face on development and the west San Gabriel Valley community of 33,000 was abuzz with rumors of deals. You needed a score card to keep track of all the claims and counterclaims racing through the city, where the proliferation of condominiums and apartment buildings has brought the passionate slow-growth movement to the fore.

Big Misunderstanding?

It was all a big misunderstanding, insisted Councilman James Castaneda, one of the three swept into office in the April 12 election on a wave of slow-growth sentiment. “It was a combination of being new and nervous,” he said Friday.

The transition team has not been officially appointed, said Castaneda, who was elected along with John Tapp and Frank Blaszcak. “We haven’t seen a contract from them yet,” he said. “If it comes in, then we’ll determine what to do.”

Try telling that to the team members--Fullerton lawyer R. Zaiden Corrado and West Covina consultant Xavier Hermosillo, who has been a high-profile figure lately as one of the principal negotiators in Irwindale’s effort to lure pro football’s Raiders away from Los Angeles.

Corrado was appointed by a 3-2 vote of the council to replace former City Atty. Graham A. Ritchie, who resigned Tuesday after being threatened with dismissal by the new council majority. Although Corrado was designated as “interim” city attorney, he was seeking at Tuesday’s meeting to arrange luncheon appointments with some community leaders to discuss long-range plans.

Corrado, a former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who represented Irwindale City Manager Charles Martin in a conflict-of-interest case--Martin finally agreed last December to pay $400,000 in fines to avoid criminal charges--could not be reached for comment.

What about Hermosillo?

“This all falls under the purview of the city attorney,” said the consultant, who announced at Tuesday’s meeting that he would immediately begin an investigation of the San Gabriel Police Department. “The city attorney has the responsibility to address legal issues involving the city. Certainly some of the issues raised regarding the Police Department are legal issues.”

Did that mean Corrado had hired him? “That’s correct,” said Hermosillo, who will bill the city between $20 and $150 an hour, depending on how many of his staffers are employed in his investigations.

The San Gabriel Police Department has been rocked in recent months by a series of allegations and counter-allegations concerning its effectiveness. Rank-and-file police officers announced a unanimous vote of “no confidence” in Chief Don Tutich in February, complaining that the department was refusing to cooperate with interagency drug task forces or to apply for federal or state grants. Tutich and his supporters heatedly denied the allegations and accused the officers of engaging in political maneuvers as part of the city’s election campaign.

Probers Didn’t Show

Although Hermosillo had announced that a team of investigators would show up Wednesday morning at police headquarters to begin a probe, they had not shown up by Friday.

The investigation is proceeding, nevertheless, the consultant insisted. “We’re doing some examinations involving some outside resources first,” Hermosillo said.

Opponents of the three new slow-growth councilmen profess to see a plot in all of this. “It was a railroad job,” fumed Councilman Sabino Cici, one of two council holdovers from before the April 12 election, referring to the hiring of Hermosillo and Corrado. “As far as I’m concerned, these guys have been hired to do a meat-ax job on the city. These guys are here to chop heads.”

Hermosillo’s presence in particular rankles slow-growth leaders. “The idea of Xavier Hermosillo suddenly proclaiming himself a spokesman for the new City Council is abhorrent,” one of them said.

Even Castaneda acknowledged there was the danger that the consultant’s presence might link San Gabriel in people’s minds with Irwindale, which he described as “the redevelopment capital of California.”

Janis Cohen, who had been mayor until Tapp was selected to replace her, resigned from the council Thursday. She said she had begun penning her letter of resignation on the back of Tuesday’s agenda as events unfolded.

“I was outraged,” said Cohen, who has served five years on the council. “I knew at that meeting that that was it.”

The new council majority “violated the spirit of the Brown Act,” she said, referring to the state law that prohibits a quorum of an elected body from meeting in private. Corrado noted at the council meeting, however, that the law did not restrict the three men’s actions before they were sworn in.

Stunned by Criticism

Tapp, a soft-spoken, bearded man who was selected by the council Tuesday as the city’s new mayor, seemed stunned by all the criticism.

He and his colleagues had anticipated that the old city attorney would resign and were worried that they would not have legal counsel at their first meeting, Tapp said, and Corrado was the only attorney they could find to represent them on such short notice.

“We talked to three other attorneys who said they were not interested in working with us on an interim basis,” he said.

The betting around town, one slow-growth leader said, is that the transition team “won’t be around very long.”

Leaders of Citizens for Responsible Development, which ran the three new councilmen’s campaign, said they asked for a meeting late Thursday with Castaneda and Tapp (Blaszcak was out of town) and criticized the new officials. But the group finally accepted their explanations about first-night jitters, co-chairman Gary Meredith said.

“The appearance of what happened at City Council was very poor, I’d say,” Meredith said. “But the good news is that the people are not going to let anybody get away with anything.”