Replanting Bell Gardens : New Council Members Now Must Prove Themselves

Among the more than 500 frightened, angry and curious people who gathered in the Bell Gardens auditorium a year ago were four who could not quite believe what they were seeing:

The red-faced mayor of Bell Gardens furiously ordering the shouting audience to shut up. Police evicting those who refused. Residents and property owners accusing the Anglo City Council of using zoning laws to run Latinos out of town. Exasperated city officials explaining that there were simply too many people in Bell Gardens and the zoning would control growth.

The four people did not know each other well, and they had never held any office higher than PTA or Little League presidencies. But that night, while the City Council debate raged, the tax man, the school employee, the businessman and the activist came to the same conclusion: “Anybody could do a better job than these guys.”

They now have a chance to prove it. Last week, after leading the successful recall of four City Council members, Frank Duran, Josefina Macias, George Deitch and Rodolfo Garcia were sworn in as the new majority on the Bell Gardens council. Although three of the four must run for reelection in one month, for now they have control of a city bitterly divided by ethnic rhetoric and opposing views of what the future will bring.

“This is a turning point, a turning point for Bell Gardens and for all of the Southeast (Los Angeles County),” a jubilant Macias said after voters handed her a decisive victory in the March 10 special election to replace the recalled council members.

In what direction the city turns may well depend on the skill of these four people--all strong, stubborn, pugnacious individuals who have their own ideas about how a city should be run but who have never held public office.

They are not, however, letting their inexperience hold them back. Twenty-four hours after state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) swore them into office in a ceremony of much pomp and circumstance, they fired the city manager, accepted the resignation of the city attorney, sent the city clerk home in tears on indefinite administrative leave and ordered studies on everything from on-street parking to rent control and the zoning map that sparked the recall.

“We did what was necessary,” Duran said. “These are important decisions that had to be made for the betterment of the community.”

The four say that no matter what happens in the next month--when Duran, Garcia and Deitch must run in the regular municipal election--what they have already accomplished in the town of 43,000 nine miles southeast of Los Angeles is nothing less than historic.

For the first time, Latinos have been elected to the council--nearly 20 years after they became the majority population. The four and their supporters have registered hundreds of voters, helped others through the citizenship process and spurred on nearly 2,000 residents who recalled the four Anglo City Council members who they said were arrogant and insensitive to a community that is 88% Latino.

“A new, grass-roots era for Latino politics is blossoming and Bell Gardens is leading the way,” Torres proclaimed in a recent statement.

To their critics, however, the four are political loose cannons, motivated by greed, power and lust for the limelight. Their critics--including the four ousted City Council members and Rosa Hernandez, the only council member who was not recalled--accuse the four and their supporters of everything from lying to pressuring residents into casting absentee ballots. The district attorney’s office is investigating allegations of voting irregularities in the two recent city elections.

“They have done what they falsely accused us of doing, exploited the Latino people to serve their own purposes,” said ousted City Manager Claude Booker. “That’s all this has been, an exploitation of the Latino people.”

Macias, Duran, Garcia and Deitch vigorously disagree. Brought together by a mutual friend, the four say they would have dropped the recall drive had the council listened to the community. “We begged the old council to listen to us and rethink the zoning and they did not,” Garcia said. “They made a big mistake and paid for it.”

For much of the last two decades, Garcia, who is director of the League of United Latin American Citizens in the neighboring city of Bell, has been a familiar, somewhat controversial figure to city officials in Southeast Los Angeles County. Excitable, with rapid-fire speech, Garcia said he has been an activist since he was a young man living in Texas, where he stumbled across a restaurant with a sign that read “No dogs or Mexicans.”

“That stuff stays with you,” he said. “I have seen things that would discourage the devil himself. . . . We have hundreds of thousands of Hispanics in the Southeast (area) and we have no leadership. Our kids are getting shoved in and out of schools, doomed for failure. You want my work, but you don’t want me. You want my money, but you don’t want me. Well, we are not the minority any longer so we can do something about it.”

Garcia, 56, a former South Gate steel worker, said he fought for the recall drive because he believed that if the zoning laws passed in Bell Gardens, surrounding cities would be sure to follow, driving thousands of poor Latinos from the area.

Like Garcia, Macias, 40, said she worried about the lack of representation and opportunity for the city’s Latinos. The perennial volunteer, Macias became involved in city politics through the neighborhood watch program. She made an unsuccessful bid for a council seat in 1990, running on a platform of better representation, rent control and more services for the young and old of the city. Those who did not know Macias before the recall quickly came to identify her as the smiling woman with the hair-trigger temper.

“When I see injustice, it angers me,” explained Macias, who keeps track of student attendance for the Montebello Unified School District. “You know people criticize us, they say what we did was wrong, but we motivated a lot of people to become citizens, to vote, and that is not a thing to be criticized. That is not a crime.”

Not all four winning candidates were demanding change.

Indeed, Duran, a soft-spoken, modest grandfather who works days as a purchasing manager for a Long Beach welding company and runs an income tax service at night, readily admits that when several leaders of the recall asked him to run for office, he backed away.

But he said he was shaken by the council’s decision to down-zone hundreds of properties in an attempt to control the city’s increasing density.

“I had never seen anything like that,” Duran recalled. “They laughed at us. We asked them to think things over and they ignored us as though we were nothing but fools.”

All four winning candidates have received their share of criticism, but perhaps Deitch has borne the worst of it. A wealthy Anglo property owner with a no-nonsense manner, Deitch, 45, has been attacked for jumping on the recall bandwagon to keep density limits out and his pocketbook fat. Deitch spent at least $40,000 on the recall and his election campaign--an unheard-of sum in a city where council candidates running $3,000 campaigns are considered big spenders.

“A lot of people question me and my motives,” Deitch said. “Yes, of course it helped me financially, but it helped the entire community. . . . The thing that amazes me is that if I would have taken the money and given it to a some other cause that benefited people, I would have been a hero. But here I do something, I am the villain.”

All four prefer to characterize what happened in Bell Gardens as a “good government” movement rather than a Latino movement, saying the council members were recalled not because they were Anglo but because they refused to bend to the will of the people.

Macias, Duran, Deitch and Garcia acknowledge that, now that they have turned the city upside down, their challenge lies in righting it without succumbing to infighting. At the same time they must share the council dais with council member Hernandez, whom they have blasted repeatedly.

Times staff writer Jill Gottesman contributed to this story.