A Career in Office : Anti-Incumbent Mood? Don’t Tell 30-Year Council Veteran

The wheels of Betty Wilson’s mammoth-gray Cadillac bounced over the rough railroad crossing as the councilwoman headed east through Santa Fe Springs.

“Oh, that’s one we have to fix,” Wilson said with a look of concern.

When Wilson first took her council seat, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and the first moonwalk was still more than a decade away. More than 30 years later, one of the area’s senior-most council members swears she has not lost a beat when it comes to tending to her city.

“I like being able to do things for people,” said Wilson, 69, who won her 10th term in last Tuesday’s election. “I like the progress we have made to bring more and more services to people.”

It was one of Wilson’s closer races. She finished third, capturing the last of three seats on the ballot by fewer than 200 votes. Some of her challengers said Wilson simply did not have the stamina for the job. They also said it was time to get some new blood on the City Council.

Wilson scoffs at the suggestion, although she has slowed down a bit physically. She broke her hip in a fall 12 years ago and now has an artificial hip that limits her walking. But she says that her experience and knowledge of local government are more than adequate compensation.

“I can remember a lot of the mistakes that have been made,” Wilson said.

Wilson was a leader of a homeowners group that teamed with local industry to create the city from unincorporated county territory in 1957. She was on Santa Fe Springs’ first City Council and was its first mayor. Except for a two-year absence, Wilson has served on the City Council ever since.

The councilwoman eats, breathes and sleeps Santa Fe Springs. She still lives in a tidy house that she and her late husband, Sterling, bought on Clarkman Street 38 years ago. Her roommates are her 25-year-old granddaughter, Carrie, and Candy, her cocker spaniel.

Wilson spends her days attending city meetings and civic functions. She boasts about the primarily industrial city as if it were her child, a very successful child.

On a recent afternoon, she welcomed about 200 residents and business leaders at a luncheon to benefit the city library. “We are very, very proud of our library,” Wilson said. “We think we have one of the best libraries for a city this size in the country.”

Friends and foes describe Wilson as a competent, strong-willed leader who has always been dedicated to the betterment of the city. She is usually soft-spoken, but has been known to get angry when backed into a corner.

Wilson grew up in Danville, Ill., in a land of corn, wheat and oats, where there were as many dirt roads as paved roads. Her father, Frank Harrold, owned a dry goods store and an automobile dealership. Wilson, one of four children, caught the bug for civic duty from her mother, Grace. When Wilson’s mother wasn’t working in the family store, she was active in the local PTA and other organizations.

“My mother always was active,” Wilson said. “And I always felt that if I lived in a community, I’d like to do what I could to better it.”

Wilson and her husband moved their family to Southern California in 1949. She was active in the PTA, the Cub Scouts and other organizations while raising her two children in the 1940s and 1950s. She had her first taste of city politics as a field deputy for the late Los Angeles City Councilmen L.E. Timberlake and Donald D. Lorenzen.

But Wilson got her first real shot at civic leadership shortly after the family moved to an area of bobbing oil pumps, refineries, new tract homes and aging wood-frame houses that was to become Santa Fe Springs.

Leaders of local industry wanted to form a city so they could get out from under the control of county planners, who had restricted some development. Wilson and many of the other residents saw an opportunity to create a city that would provide all the services residents could ever want.

“We wanted to develop the city with enough industry to develop a tax base to give citizens what they need,” Wilson said.

The city incorporated in May, 1957, and Wilson was elected to the City Council. She became the city’s first mayor but was defeated by a popular local lawyer, William Camil, in a reelection bid in April, 1958. She recaptured her seat two years later and has been on the council ever since. She now ranks second in seniority among active council members in the Southeast area.

Wilson notes with pride that she was the county’s first female mayor, but also recalls how she was subjected to a lot of verbal abuse from male colleagues.

There was the first luncheon with other mayors in the county. “They started telling dirty jokes to make sure I didn’t come again,” Wilson said. She never returned, but luncheons were soon discontinued anyway.

“There was discrimination in the city too. They’d say ‘She’s a woman and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,’ until they knew me.”

But she persevered to become one of the area’s most enduring politicians.

Wilson says her part in founding the city, 80% of which is zoned for industrial use, is one of her proudest accomplishments.

The sales tax and other revenue from industry pays for a myriad of free services for the city’s 15,500 residents. In addition to the library, the city pays for day care and a nursery school, sports parks at local schools, two public swimming pools and a gymnasium that features a squeaky-clean weight room equipped with televisions and video recorders.

Air pollution and occasional industrial mishaps, including chemical spills, are the downside. But the city has a high-tech Fire Department to deal with industrial accidents. Wilson’s son, Robert, is the city’s fire chief.

Emergency supplies, including helmets, blankets and generators, are stored at all schools in the city, Wilson noted.

“There’s always a danger,” Wilson said. “The potential is there, but we’re well equipped to take care of it.”

And the air pollution? That’s life in L.A.

“Once in a while you get a whiff,” Wilson said. “But it’s no worse here than anywhere else. Once you get in this basin there are no boundaries.”

Wilson also lists her role in establishing the city’s first redevelopment zone as one of her most significant--albeit most controversial--contributions.

City officials, led by Wilson and the late Councilman William J. McCann, butted heads for years in the 1960s with the residents of a 65-acre area in north Santa Fe Springs, known as Flood Ranch. Residents feared that their homes and businesses would be bulldozed and they would not be fairly compensated.

“I came out of one meeting and there was a guy with a rifle pointed at me,” Wilson said. “He was just trying to scare me.”

After heated negotiations with residents, city officials agreed to let more of the homes remain and to increase relocation payments to homeowners and renters who were forced to move. In the end, dozens of aging wood-frame homes in the area were torn down and replaced, and others were remodeled with government grants and loans after the redevelopment area was formed in 1964.

One of Wilson’s archenemies at the time, Manuel Magana, says he still respects Wilson despite the redevelopment. At the time, Magana was a local pastor and president of the homeowners group fighting redevelopment.

Magana, who was forced to move his home and church, says that in the end, the people of Flood Ranch benefited from redevelopment. Magana heads a nonprofit corporation that owns a string of churches, and is a member of the South Whittier School District Board of Education.

“Betty Wilson was looking out for the good of the city, and the good of the city was urban renewal,” Magana said. “I respect her because she stood for what she believed in even though I disagreed with her.”

In recent years, the city’s financial health has been one of Wilson’s focal points. She said increasing the city’s sales tax base is one of the most important tasks she faces during the next four years.

The recession has caused sales tax revenues in Santa Fe Springs to slip dramatically. The city has dipped into its reserve for $4 million to maintain spending levels during the past two years, leaving a reserve of about $5 million, said Finance Director Don Nuttall. When budget deliberations begin later this year, the council is scheduled to consider cuts in spending.

Wilson, who describes herself as a “middle-of-the-roader,” once had ambitions for higher office. In 1976, she was the Democratic candidate for state Senate in the 33rd District, but narrowly lost to a better-financed, better-known opponent, Republican Assemblyman William Campbell of Whittier.

She never sought higher office again.

“When I failed I thought, ‘Well, I’m happy where I am.’ I thought I could do more good here in Santa Fe Springs than I could in a higher office anyway.”

Southeast Area’s Longest-Serving City Council Members

Years in Name City Office Jay Price Bell 34 Betty Wilson** Santa Fe Springs 33 Thomas Clark Long Beach 26 Thomas E. Jackson** Huntington Park 24 Robert E. White* Norwalk 24 Robert Jamison** Artesia 20 Garth G. Gardner** Pico Rivera 20 James A. Van Horn Jr. Artesia 18 Ronald H. Oliver** Artesia 18 James B. Dimas Sr. Commerce 18

* Retiring this year

** Elected last week to another four-year term