Bell Gardens Shake-Up Begins Day After New Council Is Seated

One day after taking office in Bell Gardens, the new City Council majority began its long-promised shake-up at City Hall, delighting hundreds of onlookers, but sparking another controversy in the city’s ongoing power struggle.

Emerging from a long closed-door session Wednesday night, the council announced that veteran City Manager Claude Booker had been fired, City Atty. Peter Wallin’s resignation had been accepted, and City Clerk Leanna Keltner had been suspended indefinitely.

After the meeting, the council members would not discuss their actions. Keltner said she was given no explanation for her suspension, but pointed out that she has been instrumental in persuading the district attorney’s office to investigate allegations of voting irregularities in two recent city elections.

“We have sent to the district attorney eight sworn statements from voters who claim intimidation tactics were used to get them to vote the winning slate,” Keltner said Wednesday night, minutes after learning that she had been suspended, with pay.

She said four newly elected council members have accused her of “setting up roadblocks” to their campaign. “They wanted me out of the way for the next election,” she said. Three new members must seek reelection April 14.

Roger Gunson, who heads the district attorney’s Special Investigations Division, said the inquiry will focus on allegations of criminal misconduct stemming from last December’s bitter recall election in which four Anglo City Council members were ousted, and in last week’s special election to replace them.

Voters last week elected four candidates who led the successful recall drive, giving the council a Latino majority for the first time in this predominantly Latino community.

Booker, who has been city manager off and on for 27 years, was the lightning rod for complaints that the city administration had been insensitive to residents. The terms of his departure must still be worked out. Booker, who is paid $112,000 per year, has a contract that runs two more years. He said the council offered him six months severance, but he rejected it.

“No way are they going to stiff me on my contract,” Booker said. “I expect to get what I have coming to me.”

Interim City Atty. Alan Gross had no comment about Booker’s contract, but Councilman George T. Deitch said: “It’s in the hands of the lawyers now.”

Former City Atty. Wallin, who had been with the city 15 years, and Keltner, the city clerk, were considered longtime allies of the city manager. Wallin submitted his resignation Tuesday night as the four new members were sworn in.

In the special election last week, city officials said, absentee voting patterns varied significantly from voting patterns at the polls. They said three newly elected council members--Deitch, Frank B. Duran and Rodolfo (Rudy) Garcia--would not have won without an unprecedented number of absentee ballots being cast.

Only new Mayor Josefina (Josie) Macias, who strongly denies that her group took part in vote tampering, would have been victorious without the absentee ballots. She dismissed the allegations as “typical sour grapes you find in every election.”

But Councilwoman Rosa Hernandez, the only member of the former council not targeted in the recall campaign, said she has fielded several complaints from voters claiming that they were pressured in their homes by workers campaigning for candidates backed by the recall movement.

“If a person didn’t have an absentee ballot, they would give them one and punch the holes (for Macias, Duran, Deitch and Garcia) and say sign it,” Hernandez said. “A lot of people didn’t want to sign and they would say: ‘We are not leaving until you do.’ ”

Hernandez said one woman who filed a complaint said that when she refused to vote for the four, the absentee ballot was yanked from her hands.

Booker echoed Keltner’s concerns about possible voting irregularities against the new council.

But Claremont-McKenna College government professor John Pitney said that what happened in Bell Gardens is not uncommon.

“There have been a number of cases where the absentee ballot vote has gone in a different direction from that at the polls,” he said, pointing out a similar trend in the Nov. 6, 1990, election in which state Atty. Gen. Dan Lundgren lost to Arlo Smith at the polls, but won the seat on the strength of the absentee ballot vote.